A Thing of Beauty

FICTION

by Joseph Voth

          The sign above the bar’s entrance read, “SPIN IN & STAGGER OUT.”
          Labiche entered and, with three sober years of shooting Germans behind him, ordered a drink. After six highballs, he felt as if he were wearing God’s sweater. After eight, he felt a darkness picking at its wool.
          “I guess that’ll be all,” said the bartender.
          “If you say so.”
          “The sign above the door’s a joke, not a challenge.”
          “Okay, okay.”
          “No, no!” said a customer neighbored at a corner stool. “This man’s fought a war. One more. On me.”
          Labiche ignored his neighbor’s offer. He paid the bartender and found the door.
          In the overbright world outside the bar, people were going about their business. The lapels on men’s jackets seemed skinnier than he remembered. Women’s shoulders seemed square to him and unreasonable.
          He’d have to get used to things fast. 
          He found a small apartment in this unfamiliar part of town where people seemed unlikely to ask him what it was like. “It,” Labiche had come to understand, was a pronoun for both killing and dying.
          He wasn’t sure whether he had killed anyone during the war. He did not want to know in any case and had even forced himself to think about the White Sox or the holes in his boots when he shot his rifle across the open fields between forests or held his breath in a gulch as enemy troops marched by.
          Still, people liked to ask him: how many times had he done it?
          It.
          Had it happened to any of his buddies?
          It.
          He hated the war, but he missed the clarity of mouths sewn shut by terror.
          Autumn came and went. The pipes in his building moaned. The doors inside his apartment yawned and pretended to outgrow their frames. By mid-December, the windows in his apartment squinted with frost and the cars below slipped into each other’s arms like lovers.
          The neighbor above him was hard of hearing. His radio scratched at the air with lonely-heart sermons and anemic symphonies. He had a small dog that squealed at odd hours of the night. Sometimes Labiche tapped the ceiling with a yardstick he found in the closet when he moved in. The dog’s owner either slept through the Morse code of annoyance or didn’t care.
          “He won’t bother you no more,” said his landlord as he met Labiche on the stairs one day.
          “Who?”
          “Tenant above you.” The landlord rotated the end of his tie above his head and stuck his tongue out as he pulled on the tie.
          “No kidding? What about the dog?”
          “You got some twine, I’ll make a little noose for him, too.”
          “No, no!” said Labiche and before he knew it, he had offered to take care of the dead man’s only friend.
          He bought two bowls from the five-and-dime and a bag of soup bones from the butcher. “Better than I had it most of my time overseas,” he said to himself as he made a bed out of towels on the kitchen floor.
          And for the first time in three years Labiche was happy.
          The next morning was Saturday. He waited until eight-thirty to knock on the landlord’s door. What was his name? He had forgotten it a few times, but he managed to recover it this time just as the door opened. 
          “I’m here about that dog, Mr. Ikeman.”
          Ikeman looked like he’d had a rough night. A corner of his robe was tucked into his undershorts.
          “You were serious? I didn’t think you meant it. I got rid of that dog only yesterday.”
          “Got rid of it?”
          The landlord hesitated. “A nice couple from Oak Park took him.” He began to close the door gently as he repeated, “Nice folks.” Then Labiche heard the polite click of the door’s lock.
          “You’re back,” the bartender said. “I thought maybe we lost you to the good side of town.”
          Labiche found a stool near the register. Chains of green and red construction paper hung in uniform dips from the counter.
          When he ordered his fifth drink (and every drink thereafter), he made the face his buddy Dale had made the day he lost it during the war and shot a farmer’s cow. This was during their long march to rain death on a German unit near the Hürtgen Forest.
          (You going to drag us all the way over here to maybe lose a leg or get torched in a ravine? Squint both eyes. Bare some teeth. Then no fresh milk at your kitchen table, Kraut.)
          And in this way, Labiche was able to drink long into the night without the bartender sticking his nose into his business. Thank you, Dale.
          A department store Santa sat at a small table twenty feet from Labiche, within arm’s reach of the jukebox. Was it so close to Christmas? Labiche studied him for a few minutes. The fat bastard didn’t even have the courtesy to pull his beard down, he thought. He just sits there straining hooch through that dirty cotton.
          He ordered another drink.
          Who did Ikeman think he was kidding? He didn’t know anyone from Oak Park, much less a “nice couple.” Labiche rarely saw him leave the building. He knew what he’d done with that dog because he knew what men like Ikeman and a hundred other men who were better than Ikeman were capable of.
          It.
          The landlord had killed that dog as sure as Labiche sat on the stool beneath him.
          He imagined the many methods a landlord had at his disposal for such a job: wrenches and loose bricks, electric cords and rat poison, utility sinks and burlap sacks, or maybe just a key to the roof where he kept that garden—from which he could throw a helpless dog over the edge and let gravity do the work. 
          He paid his bill. He left the bar and walked home through the chill. The snow salted his shoes with each step. His mouth tasted of copper and an unexpected warmth spread out over his chest. Ikeman wouldn’t soon forget what good old Labiche had in store for him. Kill a sweet little dog, will you?
          By late morning, the sun cut through the clouds and into Labiche’s apartment. Shoes scuffled and clicked along the outer hallway. The electric icebox hummed dutifully, and distant church bells sang out. A clock joined the orchestral machine of Labiche’s hangover, and he felt a strange shame at the coursing blood pressure in his fingertips. 
          But he also felt—shirtless and curled up among the towels bedded on the kitchen floor, the bruise at his ribcage as mysterious to him as his one shoe was, sitting on top of the stove—that he deserved his shame, his unending embarrassment at having seen and survived too much sadness.
          The farmer had cried when Dale shot the cow. He had fallen to his knees and honest-to-God cried as he stroked dumbly at one of the cow’s hooves. Why, he had possibly said or perhaps it was the cow’s name that had fallen with leaded grief from the farmer’s mouth. Dale had just laughed at the farmer, but a few days later Labiche found Dale’s head not far from his body, just short of the tree line to the east.
          Having lost his body, Dale had taken on a serene attitude in death, as if the mere act of dying were enough to impose on him a mature appreciation of the very life he had recently exited.
          There was a lesson in all of this, but Labiche would have to wait until he felt better to say just what it was.
          It was some time before he could work up the memory, then the courage, to feel angry at Ikeman again. When he did, he could still not quite remember the plan he’d made as he walked through the snow-covered streets the night before, though he knew in his gut it had been a thing of beauty, like a strange painting before which a man stopped in order to consider the hand of fate at the rudder of his painful life.