Acts of a Dubious Nature: A Collection of Short Stories

By Tony Canino

"Canino's stories examine what happens when terrible people make terrible plans."  —(em)Kirkus Reviews

 

In Acts of a Dubious Nature, Tony Canino casts a fresh voice and a baleful eye on the many affronts and trespasses that human beings both suffer and inflict. An abused elder who'll protect his dead son's memory at any cost, an honest fighter forced to throw a fight, a man recalling his many sins as his parachute fails, a sailboat full of reprobates burying a German admiral at sea, and a rancher with the darkest of secrets. Axel, Lickety, "Don" Carmine, Aunt Mavis, Bee Boy, Lucky the Space Alien - all part of a cast unlike any you've ever met.

 

Acts of a Dubious Nature: funny, heartbreaking, honest, utterly unpredictable – the perfect read for anybody who prefers the literary road less traveled.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stone Cold Press
• Release date: Nov 29, 2022
• ISBN: 9798985804218

Book preview

Holy Sacred Icons

HE’D NEVER NOTICED IT BEFORE, the old man hadn’t, but he did now, in the glare of the bare hallway light: a small liver spot on his right hand, in the notch between thumb and forefinger. He could see, too, that if he changed his grip on the doorknob—tighter, looser, left, right—the spot would morph into uniquely different shapes, like a glass chip in a kaleidoscope. It was a small thing but interesting and novel, and for this he appreciated it.

Axel noted many such trifles now, as his movement through the end of days slowed inexorably to a crawl. This pantry door, for instance, rich with the scrapes and dings of a family come and gone; his son had once nailed a hardware store calendar to it, and Axel was happy that he’d never patched the hole. It was a fine alder door that deserved better than the washed-out yellow Mince had insisted on painting it. Never did have much of an eye, Mince; lifted most of her decorating ideas out of this or that women’s magazine.

Axel had married her young, beguiled by a Kewpie-doll face and a doe-eyed gaze he’d mistaken for sweetness. Why she’d married him, he couldn’t say anymore. Doubted she ever really knew herself, except that that was what people did then: finished high school or just about, found somebody you loved or just about, got hitched and had a passel of kids. Except that there’d be no passel for Mince, who’d snapped her legs shut for good and all after just one, having found motherhood every bit as dull and limiting as she’d come to find both Axel and life in a sawmill town. She’d laid down the law one night in response to a beseeching hand on her thigh. Nope. I’m done with all that connubial-bliss horseshit and got the stretch marks to prove it. You want another heir to the fortune, go knock up someone else. Not that she’d have tolerated anybody else getting a piece of what was hers. Just don’t bother coming home if you do.

But it had, in fact, been Mince who hadn’t come home one day, having taken up with the owner of a discount tire store a couple of towns over. She’d stopped by not long after for the rest of her things, in the red drop-top Buick she now drove, but Axel had already hauled it all off to the thrift store: dresses, shoes, sweaters, even her bras, everything but two old hats his son had liked to play with as a toddler. Axel had cut her off in the front yard, told her to get on back to the tire store. She’d tried to cut around him but tripped and fell on her face. Dazed, she’d rolled over, caught her breath, then hightailed it back to the car, a dozen dead oak leaves stuck to the back of her dress, butt cheeks to shoulder blades.

* * *

Axel stood in the pantry amid a dusty jumble of bottles and cans and mason jars, having forgotten that he’d come for a box of saltines. He’d picked up a tin of anchovies, as if to examine it for clues, when he heard the back door slam. He waited, then winced at Dot’s call, a piercing keen that made him wish he’d lost all his hearing in the sawmill and not just most of it.

Axel? You here?

Axel pulled the door almost shut and peeped out to see her unloading a bag of groceries. You hear me? Answer me now, you hairless old son of a bitch. She waited, then shrugged. Or don’t answer. I don’t give a rat’s ass. But Axel knew she did, that she gave a great big rat’s ass. He stayed as quiet as the box of saltines he never did remember, happy to get her blood up a little.

Dorothy Jean. Dot. Not real big, but muscular. Powerful. Axel had never been overly quick to judge people, but he’d disliked Dot almost from the day she was born: a whiny baby, a selfish child, a loud, put-upon adult who didn’t like to work too hard or walk too far for what she wanted, the sole progeny of his older brother Elmore and his sickly wife Franceen, who died of pneumonia during the mildest winter in fifty years, followed not long after by Elmore himself, when the electric fan he’d perched on the side of the bathtub fell in with him. He’d left behind little but garage sale bait and a handful of debts that Dot had seen no reason to make good on. With Elmore’s passing, Axel had outlived just about every friend or family member he’d ever known, so many funerals he’d simply quit going.

Which left Dot, the family tortoise: hale, hardy, and possessed of a tough, insensitive shell. Which she may have come by honestly, Axel had to admit. He never thought Elmore abused her sexually but was convinced he’d beat her pretty good and pretty often. Still, if Axel could have called on anyone else after his mini strokes he most certainly would have, but it had been Dot or nobody.

Her response had been predictable. Wet nurse an old butt-boil like you? Like I don’t have enough problems? She’d hung up on him. But the fact was that she had a landlord breathing down her neck again. She gave it a few days, then called him back.

That offer still stand? Living there and all that?

Axel had half-hoped she wouldn’t call, but the strokes had left him weak and sometimes wobbly, at the expense of much of his independence and most of his pride. Though never a tall or brawny specimen, he’d been wiry and tough and had managed to work for fifty-four years in a sawmill without losing anything more than his left ring finger down to the first knuckle and his right pinkie down to the second.

Yes, he said. Offer’s still good.

Okay, then. But here’s the thing. If I’m supposed to help take care of you all the time—except I ain’t helping you go to the shitter, no matter what—it’s gonna take a little bit more than free rent.

And food, too, don’t forget.

Right. I seen your place, bunch of canned soup and crackers. I could eat better down at the Beacon of Hope, which I do on Tuesdays—meat loaf day. No, the thing is, I want a letter, signed and notarized and all, says I get to live there long as I want. Even after you kick the bucket.

This caught Axel off guard. He stayed quiet and chewed a knuckle, his usual fallback when he didn’t know what to say. He’d built the house himself more than fifty years before, nail by nail, with the kind of good, dense wood you can’t find anymore, a house so reliable he’d never felt the need to insure it. It was here that he’d made love to the only wife he would ever have and conceived his only child, William. It was here that he’d marveled as the boy learned to toddle and walk and run around the living room in a dime-store fireman’s hat, woo-wooing. There, near the fireplace, he’d coached the Little League shortstop through a thousand practice swings when the weather kept them in, and it was out the black front door that the ten-year-old had run that Saturday morning, gone forever with a quick wave and a see-ya-later. The driver of the pickup had been as sorry as he could be, but Axel never blamed the man, only himself for failing to see his son to manhood, failing in the worst way a father can fail. Blamed himself, too, for his inability to satisfy Mince, whose departure had left a hole in William’s life that Axel had never known how to fill.

He’d visited the grave every week for over a year, until it came to hurt too much, the boy so close but so beyond reach, and not just dead but badly broken. More and more, he would make silent pilgrimages to William’s room, never turning on the light, perching lightly on the edge of a bed strewn with baseball cards and a jackknife and a wooden top he’d never had the heart to put away because William had placed them there himself, with the small, beautiful hands he’d clap together whenever he laughed, which had been often. There were days when Axel would sit and weep and reach for those hands, grasping as a drowning man at a straw, but never once did he feel the redemptive touch that would have drawn him up and out of the cold, black water of that which cannot be changed, but which itself changes everything.

He listened to Dot breathe on the other end of the line until he felt compelled to give her an answer. Well, I guess that’s all right. You can have that back room. But you got to help me when I go to the bathroom sometimes, if I really need it.

She sighed. Fine, fine. Long as you promise to be quick about it. I got a weak stomach.

* * *

Axel stayed in the pantry until after she called him again. You think I’m gonna fix dinner twice, you wrong as hell. She took a Sole Mio thin crust out of the oven with greasy mitts and cut it into ragged eighths with a butter knife, shoveled four pieces onto one plate, four onto another. She’d have begrudged him the even divvy had she not planned to eat what he couldn’t finish; his appetite had fallen well off, for her a positive sign that he might finally be getting ready to keel over.

Which he might as well, she figured, for all the money he put in the mason jar these days, her slice of whatever he made off the doodads he sold to the holy rollers. She hadn’t known he did this until she’d moved in with him. Possessed of a scavenger’s eye for low-hanging fruit, she’d quickly muscled in on the action.

Half? For what? Axel had been indignant, if not altogether surprised. What do you do? You don’t help me carve or sand or anything. I let you live here for free, don’t I? He summoned what affection he could. You help me, and I help you, like family ought to. Ain’t that right?

Dot smiled. That’s right, dear uncle. And families share everything, last I heard. Her smile cooled. You don’t like it, tough titty. Besides, I earn my share and then some every time I help pull your underwear back up, which I swear to God is enough to gag a maggot. So, I get half, period, and if I even think you’re holding out, I’ll be all over you like a duck on a June bug. And she had been, once, though he hadn’t deserved it, cut his lip and puffed it up and she hadn’t even hit him all that hard. He’d told the ladies down at the bank that he’d slipped in the shower, and they'd told him that maybe he ought to buy a new bath mat, and that the dollar store next to the Western Auto has some real nice ones.

* * *

Axel let himself out of the pantry and sidled over to the kitchen table. Why didn’t you call me? You think I’m deaf? I ain’t, you know. I can hear like a dog.

Dot bit off some pizza and talked around it, spraying crust. Dog, huh? Then maybe next time you’re sick I’ll just take you to the vet. Except you better hope I don’t. They’d take one look and put your mangy butt to sleep.

Axel poked at a pepperoni. I need to go to the bank Monday, deposit the pension check. And the social security.

Dot shrugged. I can do that. I’m going downtown anyways.

She’d tried this before. No. The ladies are real friendly. I like to say hi and everything.

You like to pretend you can still get it up, is what you like.

Axel kept his eyes on his pizza. At least I had sex with somebody once.

Dot wiped her mouth with the edge of the tablecloth. "So, what say I put my boot up your ass and we’ll call that sex? And don’t sass me, you apple-headed old bastard. Slap you so cross-eyed you can stand on the front porch and count chickens in the backyard."

Axel put his fork down and used the table to pull himself up. Dot reached across the table in mid-chew, grabbed his plate and dumped the three-and-a-half slices he couldn’t manage onto the two she still had left.

* * *

The air the next morning was as cold and hard as a wood file. Axel sat at a concrete picnic table in the small park next to St. Anthony’s, watching the Sunday-morning traffic with eyes whose lower lids had begun to droop and turn outward, exposing the soft, red lining. He turned his face one way, then the other, looking for changes on a street, in a town, where nothing much had changed for years. Coulter was, to its core, an unremarkable place, quiet and unaffected. In this, Axel and the town had much in common.

On the table, he had spread an old vinyl tablecloth, and atop