Wrong, Part 1

Nora grew up on a sunny boulevard called Sunny Boulevard, with hopscotchy sidewalks and runny gutters from all the fire hydrant “wet fests” they had in the summer.  She remembered those days like a sweet taste.  Ustchevek, the Russian butcher who looked just as his name sounded, came out in the middle of the day with a wrench in his hand and a rare wimple in the corner of his mouth, a mouth clamped hard as iron on most days, though Nora thought it was because he had teeth as tiny and sharp as an eel’s. 
         He struck the knobby fire hydrant, strained till his bald head seemed it would burst.  He grunted in time to the twists, heaving like a mule.  A blunt, anvil-heavy Russian curse scraped off his lip every now and then and landed with such a clattering smash it made the kids jump.  Moms in sunhats, big ridiculous things, and sunglasses, big ridiculous things, with bangles around their forearms, would munch on half-sliced baked potatoes squeezed in tinfoil, incising the yellow butter, gulping the creamy whiteness.  In their fingernails they dangled the brown leftover potato skins, translucent peels; they glowed tawny in the sun, darkly where the eyes had been.  Holding the floppy skins above their wide open mouths, they dropped them in – feeding time for baby birds.  Then they clapped their hands, circulated their jaws and stuck out their chins to swallow.  Good to the last drop.
         The moms watched their kids play in the “wet fest” and nattered with other moms, leaning on stoops or standing by mailboxes, working on their tans at the same time – always multitasking.  One would occasionally shout to her kid, something angry.  Eyes hidden by Coke-black lenses, lips brighter than cherries, orange freckles spangling her cleavage and her hands perched on her behind:  The moms couldn’t be taken seriously in this heat.  But the kids knew, it could be raining grape soda and there’d still be some curly-haired Mistress craning her head out the window and yelling at her son to put on a hat.  It was a matter of having fun anyway.
         And they were having fun.  Especially Nora.
         The day was hers.  Everyone knew it. 
         Waving her cute hands in the air, showing off her pink swimming suit, she clapped the pavement with eager feet, ran amuck.  It was so hot and steamy.  When the chunky red fire hydrant first sprayed, the tarry boulevard yelled its alarm, then hissed its dislike.  Steam billowed off the street like it did in the wintertime, only now it was warm, like curling wisps from chicken soup, and up it came, in piles instead of ghostly wafts.
         Nora ran through that steam, a fairy in the mist.  Then she got herself soaked, exposed herself spread-eagle before the full-freshet fount and gasped and giggled at the heart-pounding cold.  It splashed up in her mouth, made her swimsuit droop in the back. 
Nora was a girl boys could tumble with.  She was a girl girls could mumble with.  She tossed footballs and wrote poetry:  She was a girl bees could bumble with, thunder could rumble with, puzzles could jumble with.  She was easy, inside out, and though her teachers praised her and her parents adored her, it made Nora, in addition to and as a result of all her perks, a girl men could fumble with. 
As she reveled in the ice-cold drench of the hydrant, Ustchevek eyed her and thought about the meat in his freezer.  Stiff cow limbs that weren’t supple like the elastic belly, the taut, tanned legs, the smooth, shapely back that he watched flitting about in the street.  They bent and stretched in the sun like caramel candy, melty and malleable in the hands of humid weather.  He breathed hard.  He soaked the bristly hair on his forearm with the sweat of his brow.  He had an expansive brow; it was essentially his scalp.
“That Nora is a natural dancer, June,” said one of the moms, a sardonic voice.
“She is, she is,” said another, a wry whine.
“You have her taking ballet classes, right June?” said one more, an acerbic drawl.
“I do, indeedy,” said June, a sarcastic chirrup.
“Good for you,” said wry.  “My Abigail won’t do none of that.”
June slurped a potato.
“Yep.  Nora just loves her dancing.”
Ustchevek listened in with conscious desperation, focusing so much on what they were saying about Nora that he forgot to focus on what they were saying about Nora.  His English still wasn’t, how do you say?, very good.
         He recoiled at the approach of a blue volts wagon.  It came cruising down the hill, silhouetted for a moment at the top between a pair of sidewalk-cleaving trees.  It looked masterful – a kingly shadow.  Then it dipped, down, into the pitch black street, streaking smooth as a glacier and curling into the driveway a few feet from the “wet fest.”  A man got out.  He was balding, but in a distinguished way, and wore black-rimmed glasses.  His jaw was a muscle, his chin a fist, and he smiled at his girl Nora running through the prismatic spray, getting her blonde hair dark, squinting and rubbing the water into her skin.  She hid her face behind her hands, wrists at chin, fingertips at forehead, and then wiped away all the little ladybug-sized droplets.  She flattened her nose, pressed in her cheeks.  Then she clenched her nose between her thumb and forefinger, gave it a wring, sniffed, and cast herself back into the tickling freeze with a leap, toes first.
         The sight of children gamboling and wives munching.  After a day of hard work, it was a clean sigh.  Not that he needed a sigh, Mr. Albertross.  Manager of sales at the local Ford dealership, his day was spent around beauties – sleek reds and blues, candy-colored caravans with crisp teal windshields and hot black tires.  The smell on the lot.  The ogling customers.  The pennants, at high mast, wind-frisked, startling the birds.  There was always plenty of sunshine, and the paperwork didn’t mind him one bit.
         Nora Albertross ran over to him, drippy and darling.  He gave her a squeeze and she soaked him right through.  What a perfect girl he had in Nora.
         Ustchevek quivered with jealousy.  He stomach hurt at the sight; he could imagine that soak, that absorption, through his own shirt, against his own chest.  He snorted and coughed, then heaved.  Prickles ran up and down his spine for a while, and he couldn’t take his eyes away.  The way her bottom stuck out as she leaned into her father, to nestle her nubby chin in the small of his neck, to press her smiling cheek against his, to reach around his shoulders and close her eyes in sweet repose, to cajole him, gently, lovingly, so he might scoop her some vanilla ice cream – it all enraged him, enflamed him.
         A thick pressure built up in his throat. 
         At once, he itched – itched so bad to scream, to cry, to jump up and down and run about and thrash and flail and grab Nora, abscond with her, take her in the woods somewhere, a happy glade, and treat his queen to all she deserved. 
         But instead he watched on, the butchery looming behind him, where a bright pink calf’s thigh lay sopping on a table, waiting for a blade.
         Oh, this lust.  This lust, this lust.  This lust, this lust, this lust, this lust.
         When it finally happened, it was night out.  But the sky was still a little hot.  The sun’s last rays yet tinted the air a fuzzy electric blue, and Utschevek could see well enough to notice Nora walking down the sidewalk, alone, to where the “wet fest” had been the day before.  He was closing up the shop, and his heart leapt.  There was her ghost.  Nora’s wraith, drifting down a tight brick corridor.  She was sighing.  He was gasping.
         He stared hard at the counter he was wiping, not seeing it.  He gave it swift, wide strokes with a fishy rag, angry at the counter for taking up so much time, ignoring the pink blotch that had crusted over on one side, for he had to move on, quickly, to sweeping the sidewalk, he needed to.
         His heart was out of its cage, a throbbing tumor on his chest.
         Walking outside, grainy broomstick in his grasp, he felt the kiss of warm night.
         “Out late,” he said.  He could barely say it.
         She was startled.  She had been standing there, arms folded, staring at the gargantuan bruise that stained the cold dry pavement – the remnant of a riotous day.  It was oblong, fatly lopsided, and stretched all the way to the other side of the boulevard.  Darker pavement.  She had been remembering the various feet that pattered on that bruise, when it was yet a sparkling welt, splattered and spilled on, victim to the exploits of her and her friends, and she wondered especially about the feet of a boy she liked.  Dan.  Oh, Dan, Dan, Dan.
         Now she met eyes with the butcher, afraid.       
         “Yeah,” she replied, at last.
         Utschevek set his broom aside.  He clung to the top jamb of the butchery doorway, then didn’t, then did again, then didn’t.
         “Your parents are to be, uh … not happy, hm?”  He smiled.
         “Oh, they know where I am,” she said.  “They think I’m taking a walk.”  She caught herself.  “Which I am.”
         Nora didn’t smile.  She didn’t even turn all the way around.  She kept her back to Utschevek.  Her arms were folded.  Her shoulders were hunched.
         “Not good to be walking out late, hm?” he asked.
         “What’s your name?” Nora said.
         “Eh, my name is Utschevek.”
         “Oots-shev-ick?”
         It sent heat into his ears.
         “Yes, yes, Utschevek.  Your name is?”
         “Nora.”
         He didn’t bother to listen.  He was still enjoying Nora’s snarling pronunciation – her cranking lip, crinkling eyelids, scrunching brow.  It flashed on her face for a second, but he drank it up, and now he relished its weight, its heaviness in his gut, its sloshing presence – a tickling tide that moved when he did.  Oots-shev-ick.  What splendor.       
         “You want out from cold?” he asked.
         It wasn’t that cold.  The summer was in its lukewarm denouement; in just weeks Nora would be back at school, fingers sore from pencil-holding, forehead sore from desk naps.  There would never be another “wet fest.”  But now and again, now and again, now and again, there would be little reminders.
         “Come, come.  I give you, eh, free brisket.”
         He knew what Mrs. Albertross liked.
         “You don’t hafta.”
         “No, no.”  He flourished his hand.  “No, no.  Come in, come in, get the meat, get the meat.”
         And Nora walked in.  She had never been in the butchery.  In fact, her mother had always risen a finger whenever she picked up the brisket, telling Nora to wait outside, it’s not sanitary in there, and you could get sick with all that red meat in one place.  So Nora waited.  She looked through the butchery window, because there was one, past the hanged mutton at her imperious mother as she vultured on the choosiest slap of brisket.  She nailed it with her fingernail before Utschevek could wrap it up.  The sound of her cubicle striking the counter always jolted him.  He muttered something Russian and blinked.  Sweet little Nora was out there, curious face between two lamb legs.
         And now she was in the butchery.  His dream – his aching, angry, anguishing dream – seeped through reality. 
         All his knives suddenly glistened, coruscating brilliance.  The hum of the freezer was of stirring excitement – a wide-eyed, pursed-lipped eagerness – rather than the drone of another day.  His whole shop buzzed.  His tools, the walls, the counters, knew what was happening.  Even the pig’s carcass in the back, which he had a devil of a time hauling inside, was exultant.  She’s here!  She’s here!  At last, she’s here!
         Utschevek cut the meat quick.  He didn’t mean to, but he did.  He wanted to waste as much time as possible, but he couldn’t still his hands, and he flayed the drippy brisket with such alacrity he about lost the tip of his ring finger.  He moved it, just in the nick.
         “That’s really nice of you.  What’s your name?”
         “Eh, it’s, eh, Oots-chev-ick.” 
         He beamed.  She curled her upper lip.
         “Brisket enjoys you?”
         She sniggered. 
         “Er, uh – you enjoys brisket?”
         She laughed.
         “Yeah, I like your brisket fine.  You really didn’t hafta, though.  It’s real late.  In fact, I don’t – I don’t think I should take any, thanks.”
         She was getting nervous.
         “I, eh, I….”
         He couldn’t think of the word “insist.”
         “You take the brisket, yeah?”  He looked at her sweetly, in his most blandishing way.
         “No, thank you.  In fact, I think I’d better go home.”           
         In a moment of panic Utschevek struck the cutting board with the edge of his knife.  It stuck.  Nora jumped.
         “No, no!  You take the brisket.  Is free, yeah?  I am in… I’m – I inter – I – ”
         He started to sweat.  He wiped his head.  Inside, his brain was twitching, twisting, churning for words.
         Nora started to walked away.  Before Utschevek had realized he was around the counter, accosting the girl, her wrist was in his hand.
         “Let go!”
         “Is free brisket!”
         “Let go of me!”
         She rattled in his grip, a hummingbird on a string.
         “No extra charge!”
         Nora looked out the window, pleading through no one was there.  Sunny Boulevard was empty.  There was just the black stain of a spill, the tight corridor of brick.
         Utschevek brought her closer, eagerly.  Images of Mr. Albertross started piling up in his mind and set him into a rage.  He strained with little Nora, twisted her, tightened her, wrenched her left and right till her feet were kicking his stomach, her hands constricting his forearms. 
         Then, and he didn’t know how, he had her in the freezer.  He threw open the door – oh, what welcome frigidity! – and tossed her in.  She squeaked.  Moments later, she was squealing.
         After a rapacious grab, twist and snatch, he flung her maroon panties over his shoulder.  The sight of her scrambling bottom thrilled him.  It was the way her sweatshirt hid her dimpled rear, then revealed it, then hid it, then revealed it, as she shot across the long freezer, took a left, and screamed.  She stared into the human eyes of a pig.  Its hairy lip hung oink in mid bray. 
         And then he had her cornered, and the pig watched.