In the Blind. Eugene Marten

don’t take no shit from no one,” the man with the newspaper said, “except women.”

      “It’s out of spite,” Wanda said. “Out of revenge.” She raised the palm of her hand. “But I swear, it wasn’t till after they were separated. That ain’t me.”

      I didn’t want her to say any more. I liked her and I was no longer curious. It was more interesting when you didn’t know the whole story. I said something about marriage, just to fill the gap. Then I wished I hadn’t.

      “You’re not married, are you?” Wanda asked.

      A big station wagon cruised slowly past the storefront. The windows were tinted so you only saw shadows inside. More than one.

      “Look who’s driving,” she said.

      “Who’s that?”

      “Not who, what. . . . I can’t even say his name.” She crossed herself. “You know I grew up Catholic.”

      “First I’ve heard of it,” the man with the newspaper said.

      I told Mrs. Ivy the bugs were getting to be a problem. She told me they sprayed once a month. She was filling out some kind of form. I asked her when the next time would be.

      “Two weeks,” the maintenance guy said. Mrs. Ivy said nothing.

      “It’s bad,” I said. “I don’t know if I can wait that long.”

      She looked up at me, squinting, took a long pull off the plastic tube as if it were still a cigarette. “Two weeks.”

      “What am I supposed to do in the meantime?”

      Mrs. Ivy looked back down at the piece of paper she was writing on. “I don’t know what to tell you. If I have to call the exterminator in for one suite, I’ll have to charge you. It costs.”

      I told her I could always go to court. “You could do that,” she said without looking up again. “Give your rent to a trustee and they send me a court order. They’ll give me thirty days to take care of the problem—thirty days because you couldn’t wait two weeks.”

      I didn’t say anything. I looked the maintenance guy in the eyes and he didn’t, either.

      “Or,” Mrs. Ivy said, “you could go to the drugstore, go to the hardware store. There are products. Don’t spend more than ten dollars and I’ll reimburse you.” She stopped writing. “Or you can find someplace else to live. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go throw somebody out on their ass.”

      The oxygen tank rode on a small handcart and the maintenance main helped her trundle it into the elevator. He looked back over his shoulder and winked. “Had a strawberry up in his room,” he said. “Mrs. Ivy don’t play that.” I saw she was wearing slippers and the door closed.

      The next day on my lunch break I found a drugstore and stood in an aisle. There were products. One was an ominous metal canister that looked intended for industrial use. The last one. Even the clerk at the checkout seemed puzzled, as if they’d stocked it by mistake.

      After work I went straight up to my room and read the instructions. Cracked open the lid. There were holes in the top of the can stuffed with some kind of wadding. Fill a cup with half an inch of warm water and place can in upside-down. Then run like hell and don’t come back for at least an hour.

      I left my receipt at the desk.

      Summer wasn’t half over but today it was cooler, the air drier. I could kill an hour just walking around if I had to—I couldn’t afford to eat anywhere and bars were out of the question. It was better not having too many choices. It was hard enough deciding left or right, and I wasn’t exactly looking to expand my social circle. Three of us had been enough. I wanted to keep moving.

      I experimented with eye contact, random hellos. Women looked past me. I went into a place consisting of a long hall with doors on each side. A man at one end of the hall made change. Another man with a mop and bucket and a large crucifix hanging from his neck showed you a booth where your shoes wouldn’t stick to the floor. The door locked. Dollar bill disappearing into the slot like a reptilian tongue. You flipped through a hundred and seven channels with one hand while the doorknob rattled behind you, some queer going booth to booth till somebody let him in. When you left nobody was there.

      After the video I walked to Ninth Street, turned north and headed for the edge. Rush hour. A car horn blared and I retreated to the corner. I was called a name, still didn’t have this street-crossing thing down. But it was better to walk than to drive. The world showed itself to you, it took as long as you wanted it to take. Like when you stopped drinking and noticed after a while how much cleaner the light had become.

      Going downhill now, the blue-green rising up at the end of it till the street became a pier and I was there. The restaurant was gone. The pier had been repaved and landscaped and there were benches and three trees. The crumbling steps that for some reason had disappeared into the water had been removed, the edges chained off, the chains connected by dock bollards that were now purely decorative—ships didn’t stop here anymore. It was a park.

      I sat on a bench and looked. It wasn’t as big as the ocean but showed you as much of infinity. You could see to the curve of the earth. The clouds were big and white, their shadows whole. Seagulls sat on the water. The lake rolled under them, lifted them up and down and kept coming at you. The motion stirred the bottom so that when the waves rose in the light they seemed to be filled with smoke. A ship in the distance, a freighter—you could tell by the long flat deck in its middle. The super-structure in the stern was white, but pink in the late sun.

      She could look at the ships for hours, especially at night, and I would watch them with her.

      Friday or Saturday night we would go to the seafood restaurant at the end of the pier on Ninth Street. Besides work we didn’t get downtown much. She started with oysters and then she would have mussels in a red broth. I liked a little salmon with my beer, and then something stronger before we left. Something for the road. I would start that way.

      They gave him the children’s menu but he ate grown-up portions with a knife and fork. He could swim but I couldn’t. He just knew how.

      Even then you could tell the place was declining, the service and the kitchen, like they knew what was coming and had stopped trying. But we enjoyed it while we still had it and pretended not to notice, though it was hard pretending not to notice what sometimes scurried across the cracks and craters in the pier as we were leaving. He’d get excited at them and we held his hand. There were no benches, no chains, just a battered low guardrail and nothing to block off the steps that for some reason led down into the water at the end of the pier. We would sometimes sit in the car before we left, waiting for the ships to pass through far off in the dark. The lights. I didn’t mind thinking about that part of it now. I didn’t even mind thinking about the rats.

      In Reception they called the new ones fish.

      Nearby a girl was counting. She stood with her family near the edge, looking in where the sun was headed.

      “Five, six, seven,” she counted.

      A car pulled up and someone threw bread out the window. A flock of gulls imploding around it, applause of white wings.

      “Eleven,” the girl said. “I see eleven colors.”

      I wanted to drown in all of them. I got up instead. The haze that was there the first time, when I’d gotten back into town, was gone, but something was still in the way.

      When I got back the place was littered with corpses. There was a smell and I opened the window. I’d expected to see some survivors, crawling sluggishly or on their backs with their legs waving feebly, but there were no wounded, only dead. Even the ones nearly as big as your thumb. I’d wondered about driving them into neighboring apartments but you had the impression nobody had made it out alive.

      I cleaned them up. I wiped down all my flat surfaces and washed everything I ate from—which took