The Visitors

By Penelope Gristelfink

A tornado whips the dry plains of New Mexico. It is the early 80s, and the ghastly boogeyman of nuclear war has long threatened America's nuclear families. An aging priest scared of death takes acid in the hopes that it will quell haunting visions brought on by war trauma. A mesmerizing, drug-addled waif confronts her own lack of identity and purpose. A conflicted mother wonders if her daughter's addiction to methamphetamines is her own fault.

 

Two Baby Boomer misfits seek shelter with an older couple after their car breaks down not far from Los Alamos, where the first atomic bomb was built. Unwanted by their families, runaways from Christian fundamentalism, they bring with them a bag full of drugs and their own marital turmoil. As the tornado approaches the couple's house, their hosts share their memories of growing up and falling in love at "Lamy," where both their fathers were scientists recruited by the Manhattan Project. Tempers flare and intergenerational rifts erupt after it becomes apparent that the guests are anything but upstanding citizens.

 

The Visitors is a riveting and poignant sketch of vagabonds, veterans, rebels, housewives and antiheroes. This book is like a highly entertaining Rorschach test. You will either cheer for everyone or no one, but you will not fail to find in The Visitors a very moving and entertaining tale about what keeps us moving forward and trying to relate to one another even when the world appears dark, chaotic and absurd.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Scarlet Leaf Publishing House
• Release date: Jan 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201616120

Book preview

THE VISITORS

PENELOPE GRISTELFINK

SCARLET LEAF

2017

© 2017 by PENELOPE GRISTELFINK

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publishers, with the exception of a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed in a newspaper, magazine or journal.

All characters in this book are fictive, and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

Scarlet Leaf Publishing House has allowed this work to remain exactly as the author intended.

ISBN: 978-1-988397-92-4

PUBLISHED BY SCARLET LEAF

Toronto, Canada

In loving memory of Patsy O'Neal Roberts

GILA MONSTER

The gila monster had likely been in the house for days, possibly weeks, the animal control officer said. Slinking demonic in corners, closets and under furniture, its first priority was to hide, and it had only emerged in an effort to find water. It died of dehydration, its body curled around the shower drain like pooled lava, ancient and pitiful. Iguanas and other exotic pets often died this way, when they slipped away from their owners. A sort of death by instinct, the officer said.

When Doris discovered the monster, she was wearing a translucent nightgown. Her nipples were the color of bruised lips and floated beneath the cheap cotton like the mouths of the drowning. Doris did not care. For all the suppleness lost to her in the years since menopause, she still only wished that she could sweat. She found the desert strange and alienating without the ability to perspire. She had more respect and admiration for the cacti—waxy, serene, resolute against the atmosphere, holding out their blossoms of needles like tuxedoed waiters with trays of hors d'oeuvres at a poolside gala. Parts of her had the same prickly resolve. Her chin and the space over her upper lip sprouted bright gold hairs in spite of her pre-gray legacy of being a dark brunette.

The monster did startle her, but only for a moment. She was used to such violations of living space as occurred on the mesa. Mice copulated in her walls. She could not hear them, but she knew it was going on and that it was virtually impossible to stop the seething rodent reproduction. She once watched an exterminator reach into a crawl space and pull out a handful of just-born vermin so red and hairless, they seemed like a cluster of raw, squirming berries. Squirrels had tribal disputes in the attic, tell-tale scratches and thumps. Driving late at night, Van had twice killed a rattlesnake. In the winter, they stretched themselves like speed bumps across the still warm asphalt of the turnoff to the dirt road and left dribbles of venom on the tires as they recoiled and launched final, reflexive strikes. Sometimes the rubber broke their fangs on impact. One summer a retired heart surgeon who had sunk a small fortune into emus in the hopes that their oil would be the next big miracle commodity lost his flock and tried to collect the insurance money when the plan failed. The giant, stupid birds expired a few miles from Doris and Van's A-frame and brought several coyotes who could be heard howling over their carcasses and later sicking themselves on stray dogs, cats and jackrabbits. Doris heard them when she sat on the porch at dusk eating fruit cocktail. In the desert, sounds seemed elongated. There was nothing between them and the far-off squeals of the dying. No trees, hills or houses. Flat scrub and tinderbox-dry air. Doris appreciated the directness. Sometimes the cats returned with blood on their paws and fluffy, dandelion-thin feathers trailing from their sticky mouths and noses. They licked themselves clean while she ran her fingers around the sides and bottom of the little plastic cup and sucked away the last of the sweet, yellow syrup.

The gila monster had to be removed with a dolly and a hand truck. It took two men. They brought with them a spatula the size of a sidewalk square which they explained was used for scraping away compressed roadkill. They had hoped to use it as a wedge to get under the creature and flip it, but the monster was already so stiff that it could be flipped manually.

Had it been alive when she had pulled back the shower door? She tried to remember if there were a flicker of life in those glassy, bald eyes? With reptiles, one could not tell. She remembered the creature moving but then decided she was recalling her own tremor of surprise.

She did not call animal control immediately. She went downstairs and made toast and tea and sat in her robe. Neither Van nor the girls were up yet. This time of the morning, when mercury gray shot up into brutal, breathtaking Inca-gold daylight, was hers alone. She sat for hours every morning, a child of post-War Manchester transplanted into the American Southwest, a robber baron of light. Potted catnip and a bonsai tree grew in the window, watered, mossed and misted. She went about her morning chores with a calm, smug glee.

Then the twins came down the stairs, crying and pinching each other and dragging a stuffed-animal parrot they called Blacky by the ankles. Sandy-eyed savages. Tow-headed terrorists. Doris watched them paw and claw and shriek and bang into each other and scrape themselves and their pretend hostage down the walls. Playing and fighting were simply indistinguishable to the outsider. At all times, they contained a prodigious energy equal to the desert light. Van said that to come between them during one of their rowdy spells was to tempt fate, like splitting atoms. Doris had watched them square off from opposite ends of the living room and dash like rams toward each other. They clashed with locked-arm, gladiatorial precision. The couple had become inured to the sight of two blond heads careering in space and to the hard tussle of little bone on bone. At the last instant, necks snapped up and forearms hit. One took a tumble, and the other ducked and rolled over her twin. This could go on for hours until they were all balled up together, panting into each other's eyes and nostrils, exhausted, content and blissfully entwined as they had been in the womb. They woke, they fought, they ate, they napped, they wrestled toe to toe, they ate dinner, they bathed, they slept again. Above all, they destroyed: moments, quietness, the fabled golden years of their grandparents and reluctant guardians.

Of course, Doris loved them so much that to look at them made her whole body ache like a tooth with a cavity in it and her eyes tear up uncontrollably. Such love-wounds she did not imagine she could sustain for anyone after Mavis was born and refrained from having any more children because of it. She had felt vulnerable, almost porous, emotions like a constant inner sunburn. Sometimes Mavis did not come home at all nights in her teenage years. Doris knew, those dawns without her in the house, when she realized her daughter's room was empty, and the sheets whipped and rumpled but not slept in, as if in a frenzy of restless legs or of packing, that death was nothing compared to the terror of motherhood.

Still, the twins were a test of her allegiance to life altogether, of her vital energy. With Mavis born, the role was inevitable, and she never once contemplated life without it. Now, raising Mavis' daughters, she sometimes wished for a suspension of this and all relationships. It didn't seem fair. It wasn't her sex that had made them. Her hands, when she touched the children's cheeks, were cold and papery.

She poured the twins bowls of cereal - blue, sugary pebbles that stained the milk a gruesome shade - and went upstairs to revisit the monster. Van was asleep on his side, breathing heavily through slack, merry old-man's cheeks.

Beyond the bathroom door, the monster could be seen like a black pit dug into white tile. She shook Van's foot.

There's a gila monster in the shower, she whispered.

Van blinked and coughed with the blunt agony of waking up.

Then kill it, he said, having caught only the gist of what she was saying. Something somewhere it's not supposed to be.

It's dead, she was still whispering.

Then clean it up, he said, rolling over and throwing his leg over her pillow.

I can't. It's too big, she said.

A what is it? He sat up.

A gila monster.

In the shower?

Yes.

Don't go near it. Are you sure it's dead?

He put on his glasses and dropped them with a swivel of his head half-way down his nose. He peered over them at her in sweet, protective alarm. He batted the air.

Shut the door. Those things are poisonous, Doris.

I know that, but it's dead. Look, she pointed to the creature.

Van stood at the edge of the bed beside her and looked into the bathroom. He gripped her forearm and, as if entering a patch of quicksand, lunged with one foot toward the door to pull it shut.

Van, really.

Doris opened the door and marched to the edge of the shower.

I told you it was dead, she said and flinching inwardly stuck her bare foot between the creature's dead but open eyes. Its knobby forehead felt like cool asphalt. She shivered, for a second beforehand she had not been satisfied that it was in fact dead.

Do you think we could lift it and carry it? she asked.

Van said no, that it was jammed too tightly in the shower.

Doris was relieved. She recoiled at the thought of touching it with her hands. She did not understand why. She also did not know where they would carry it or what, once there, they would do with the thing.

She pictured herself carrying the monster's corpse around the mesa. She saw her crone self, under the beating sun, alone, with the creature stacked over her extended arms. She was looking for a soft place to bury it in the endless, hard, indignant caliche. This vision flooded her with sadness. She felt, inexplicably, that she had disappointed her ancestors, people who were unknown to her and had rarely, if ever, seriously entered her mind.

Van thumbed the white pages. He wore a blue, crepey robe and cordovan colored, fuzz-lined slippers. White-ribbed undershirt. Plain cotton boxers. Here and there a varicose vein thinly marbled the pale flesh of his thick thighs like the shit at the center of a stretched earthworm. Doris suddenly moved toward him and knelt and put her head on his knees.

There's always something, she murmured, and he stroked her hair knowingly in response.

They'll have to bill us, he said.

Her hand drifted up his thigh and into his. Her grip was openly sexual. He rubbed her knuckles lovingly. He needed coffee.

He brushed her off and got up slowly and stood looking perplexed around the room again. She noticed his slowness and ignored it as she had been doing for months. Her inquiries angered him. She was both amused and alarmed at how, in old age, when their sex life had trickled to a standstill, the anger she encountered was based directly on some mistaken notion of virility. Everything was an affront: to help open a jar, to insist that he be fully hard before entering her, to say it was okay when he was not, to slip the hemorrhoid cream into his medicine cabinet, to bathe him with the same old longing looks in the late evening, after the girls were down.

She feared dementia the most. The slow withdrawal of personhood. The smothering and vanquishing of the ties between them. She'd had an aunt who tended to a demented uncle for ten years before his death. It was like watching a person row a boat backward into a squall with ten foot, black-gray, skull-like waves, the aunt had said. In the end, there were periods of near catatonia and intermittent wandering rages. Certain there was a holographic flicker of the man her husband had been in the deteriorating stranger, Aunt Selma had endured strange ambushes. She remembered Selma fleeing to her house when she had been a teenager. Her uncle, Saul was his name, had woken his wife up by scraping an opened pair of hair cutting shears down the back of her bare calf. When the three of them returned to the house, Saul had let their canary out of its cage and was chasing the bird around the room. The bird plastered itself against the curtains and was nearly caught when its talons stuck in the lace eyelets. Panicked, it flapped its wings hard and rapidly against the fabric. Then it started biting its own feet. The women had the idea to spread a sheet against the doorway and to wait for Saul to run into the kitchen. When he did, he ran into the sheet, and they tripped him. They had to pull the sheet taut to prevent him from falling face forward. They wound the sheet tightly around him so that he couldn't move his arms. The biggest concern had been that he would cut himself with the shears while he struggled to get out of the homemade straitjacket. But after a brief spasm, Saul grew calm and limp. They could not see his face. He was completely shrouded in white bedsheet. Then he began to cry, a gasping, hiccupping, sorrowful sound. Doris had never been so embarrassed for another human being in all her young life. The sudden sense of wanting it to stop, of wanting to crawl away fast, to be anywhere else but there, witnessing that, never left her. It shocked her how much she blamed and hated Saul for making her feel that way. Her aunt crouched over him on the kitchen floor. Her voice was clinical and stern, a pewter fishing weight. When Saul was still enough and Selma felt it was okay to unroll him, they realized that he had managed to catch the canary and had crushed it to his chest in the struggle. Selma only sniffled a bit when she unrolled his hand and saw where the strangled bird had been visibly dented by his grip. She took the bird and tossed it into the trash can like any common drumstick, then wiped her hand on her skirt.

Sometimes Van would stand up and look at doorways in the house as though he did not know where they led. He forgot his purpose on entering more often, and he moved slower and reached for things more cautiously, as if he were always deciding what was the best route, the most time-efficient move.

So it appeared to his wife.

FALL OF JERICHO

VAN WAS HAVING TROUBLED vision. Floaters obscured random parts of his view. Bright, blurry bulbs skated mothlike through his looking at ordinary things. Sometimes cascading pinpoints