D. H. Tracy

he is harmless, camera’d in a muffled parliament of cantaloupe-motions. For every doubt a speech. He plans to quarter it and quarter the quarters. The knife first rehearses a meridian, then the equator, then mid-cut tilts and leaves a tatter on one half’s rim. You can tell he thinks about what thought is bad at. You can see that by comparison a chimp would appear, within its limitations, deft, while the man with no limitations with respect to principles of melon-slicing does not. You can tell he withholds himself from cantaloupe, as if frightened they will go extinct and take costs sunk in the skill of slicing them, and further tell it will be the same next time, him approaching the fruit as though newly, wondering if it had a stone in it, or pith and segments, or required coring, or stank when punctured, or would show pleasing shapes in section. He switches grip, placing his palm over the fat edge of the blade because a sock puppet has squeaked, Safety first. The rinds parted from the sixteenths are more or less a waste of flesh, according as thrift argued with intemperance. You can tell the impending chunks will be publicly homely, not those of the cruise ship buffet where the night-shift Neopolitan surpasses himself with flutes and scallops. You can tell right off a mind unquiet and at once absent, now remembering J. at seventeen, something out of a Kenyan Vermeer, smiling elfinly as she sliced the cantaloupe. You could tell by the way she sliced the cantaloupe the way one slices a cantaloupe would tell a lot. He draws the knife along each inside edge to shave the pulp and seedmatter, varying pressure, speed, and angle of attack like a deaf man bowing a cello. Stutters mark the inner faces. He slices the slices radially into chunks, and varies the spacing between the cuts from equal angles, which makes the pieces too big at the center, to equal volumes, which makes them too long at the poles. You can tell, as he squeezes a lime-half over the pile and steps back to admire his freehanded benighted by-committee cantaloupe-justice, he cannot be the children’s hockey coach or run for office, the erratic hexes him, he circulates sometimes fogged and twitching in his house, not wishing you could not tell, exactly, but wanting out.

1 The nineish summer-skinny imp-boy veers the bicycle he has no notion yet of trusting off the sidewalk, where the squashed mulberries form many contusions. Riding as though and as though on an animal (maybe his bike should have gazelle eyes) he is hatching plans somehow angelically pristine of doubt between them and fruition. He dumps the bike on this side of the jungle gyms, while cottonwood foam blows up from the branch, and wind imparts the grass two sibling greens, and parents show their callow half-formed centers cajoling children. He is alone, and sets himself to picking clover; whole minutes pass when all he does is increase one bouquet of grass-high nondescript white clover blossoms. There must be a million in the field not in his hand. He lays the fistful down and takes a roofing nail out of his pocket, and with it and his eldritch patience awls through-holes in his foam-grips. He twists the stems into a stalk he tapers, pinches off, and jams into the handlebars, only to watch the blossoms fall apart and over. He tries and fails again, incredulous now the ornament he planned as though designing a contraption, some trebuchet or hovercraft half-specified and magic, will not work on mere enthusiasm. His tantrum comes on suddenly, a spastic little stomping dance across the grass, and ends without his having made a sound. He is off the way he came. They are not brutal, the feebly dreamt surrounding houses, crops striving in the dirt, child-rearing habits lapsed and current, like childhood diseases. The bric-a-brac on his bedroom floor that damns him to time. But neither are they tender of that thing his paltry ruined posy, the fanning homely crumbs of perfect whim, is evidence of. 2 The hangdog rookie lifeguard shuffles in already delegated an action item involving a stepladder, a spray bottle, and a biohazard bag. The dim guttering aura of his authority tries to fill the locker room, as does the smell of sock, and calms imperfectly the preteens disobeying rule eleven regarding horseplay. The kid attains the utmost, handicapable shower stall, yanks the curtain and deploys his ladder, ascending three rungs of his portable Golgotha and staring as though straining to make out St. Paycheck in a stained glass window. The bottle and empty plastic sack slump at his sides, props whose ritual has slipped his mind, or tools of tradesman or physician agape at a humdinger, for damned if not nine feet up the cinder blocks, improbably massive, glistening, and cantilevered, there does not jut a load of crap. He says, almost quietly, already showing awareness of those situations where resort to melodrama will not help, but still somehow reluctant to let go of being someone singled out by fate, “You have got to be motherfucking kidding me.” No poo-flinger or projectile buttor titters from the bench. The sun, supremely supercilious in the skylights, mums; the ceiling fans the shit perhaps was aimed at spin an rpm too fast for one to follow. The dented cubby rows and columns retain the continence of safe-deposit boxes. If he does not punch out and not come back, the lifeguard shall be our savior in ways we scarcely dreamt or paid him for, thinking all he had to do was watch our children. As for the mystery of whether one is being kidded, it is his to bear. No ceo of pooldom makes that much. 3 The corner drugstore lends the cause a spigot; the cause runs hoses to the parking lot, and proto-nubile junior-high girls lure out of the intersection, by sign and banner, ten perverts an hour. Shucked garden-snail of an errand-runner, five dollars gets you a sort of car wash, and gets the wrestling team closer to their travel fund objective. Small talk with the game and patient coach will pleasantly derail you, as the squad swarms with half-grasped purpose in your service. One is dutiful and has a bucket. One is cheery with a rag. The rowdy buck for the nozzle, the second-rowdiest fleeing when one prevails: rinser-off of quarter panels and future quarterbacks, broad-shouldered as though tapped for it, as though for violin or chess. Can he see, from where he is, the rainbow that he issues, the laughter-stippled day convened for him and his? Days to come he is hawking two-dollar Jujubes out of a knapsack in the alley by the multiplex; there fall to him the odd, ambivalent vagina-samplings behind the Sonic Burger, and on his cast the day he tries to ollie the planters at the bank, a turquoise heart to dot the i in Brandi. We are going to be all right; good supervisors abound; our grab-ass shall be moderated, and those who tskare bound to say I knew you when. We need be lots of things, but never lonely.