Come with me to the field of dreams
To the field of dreams bring your gold
Bury it there, along with all care
And all your trouble if you dare
Then hang yourself in the cold
It’s twenty-two past ten on a snow-filled Sunday night, and Steve Kowalski is lying near butt-naked in the upper quarters of the Doll House Café.
Beside him on the threadbare pea-green sofa rests the no longer young woman in a pair of no longer new Kyiv Commix underpants with a huge handmade scarf wrapped around the rest of her like some great snake.
The American English teacher now believes that he’s a Kyiv-based detective hot on the trail of The Ferret, who must be found, apprehended and caged at all costs for the sake and safety of the city’s expatriate community.
Kowalski’s consumed at least six full cups of Robusto Nicaraguan coffee at the hands of the woman and seems incapable of shutting his mouth.
“First I’m going to Ferret him out, catch him flat-footed, unawares so he doesn’t even know that I’m coming.”
The woman scratches her bent bare knee and then fixes Kowalski’s fedora so that it tilts down tight over one eye.
“Then I’m going to ambush him, lie in wait, jump him at the entrance to his favorite basement bar,” says Kowalski, his torso tense, his arms animated, his t-shirt soiled and flimsy.
After jerking a cold blue revolver from under the armpit of his suit jacket, the detective would order the visibly frightened but predictably shifty-eyed miscreant to reach for the sky, not move an inch and certainly not try and pull anything dodgy. Then he’d shove him into the wall, stick the pistol into the small of his back and kick the baggy blue-jeaned legs apart to make sure he wasn’t armed.
The woman removes herself soundlessly from the sofa and slips into the upper floor’s only other room, serving as both an antechamber and water closet.
No one would guess there’d been a blood-splashed dust-up with a giant clown in the room just below. The vial of extra-strength Rooster Pills for sexually active older men was in its place below the bathroom mirror; The Half Guinea’s black fine-toothed comb still lying along the sink’s wet ceramic surface.
The woman releases the latch on the small window looking out onto the dark empty courtyard below, picks up the can of air freshener from the window sill and releases a few shots of lavender-scented mist into the toilet area.
It’s a crescent moon over Podil tonight, and the sky is a clear dark purple – too cold for a witch to wend her way across the night. The frosted rooftops distort all shadow, lighting up the night like a winter fairyland, icicles hanging from the eaves like the teeth of a ferocious sleeping giant.
The woman closes the small window, lowers the latch back into place and dims the light over the pea-green sofa to near full darkness from a circular switch near the doorframe before reentering the room.
A frightened expression gleams across Kowalski’s face. His chatter slows to an almost unintelligible slur.
“I’m going to tell you a story that I was told as a girl, not so long ago,” says the woman, pulling her legs close together in front of her on the couch.
“By your mother, your father or a friend?” asks Kowalski stupidly, as if unable to speak simply like an adult.
“By an uncle… who adopted me here in Kyiv,” replies the woman like a girl, but one well beyond her years in maturity.
“There once lived a little boy who wasn’t a boy at all, but a toy, a wooden toy, or so it seemed.”
Kowalski is now sitting up, bare-assed on the sofa, with his knees tucked up under his soiled and flimsy t-shirt.
“The toymaker offers to be the boy’s father if the boy will only obey his every wish.
“The boy agrees and begins to go to school as he’s told.
“One day along the way, he meets a wall-eyed ice cream vendor who offers to be his friend. ‘If your father really loved you he’d make you tadpole legs so you could swim like a frog,’ the vendor tells him.
“So the boy asks his father for tadpole legs and the next morning when he awakes he’s got them.
“Then the vendor tells the boy to ask for a turtle-shell back to protect him from robbers, and the boy does so, waking up the next day with it installed.
“Finally the ice cream man suggests that the boy get monkey wings to fly away from the old toymaker once and for all to be his own man.
”But the toymaker guesses the boy’s intentions and fetches an axe to fulfill an earlier threat.
“‘How much wood would a woodsman cut if a woodsman had a son,’ says the toymaker, approaching the boy with the axe.
“But the boy is nimble, dashes between the toymaker’s legs and leaps out an open window to safety. He and the ice cream man begin travelling the world deceiving all and any they encounter along the way.”
“And the toymaker?” asks Kowalski.
“He created more toys, dozens, some say hundreds, in an attempt to recreate his original success with the boy. He even gave some of them monkey wings and taught them all manner of nasty tricks and behavior. But none matched the genius of his original creation.
“Yes, they were all faithful, doing exactly as they were told by the toymaker. But none could so convincingly deceive, artfully manipulate or boldly lie as the boy, whom the toymaker vowed he would one day track down and chop to splinters, along with the ice cream-selling oaf who’d led him astray.”
After a brief moment of silence, Kowalski’s mouth swings back open and he begins to prattle with even greater intensity than before – of monkey wings, murder, motherless children and depraved old men, of one-eyed uncles, fat-assed nephews and pseudo sophisticates in yellow turbans missing an ear.
The woman fetches another cup of piping hot coffee and the two keep each other company deep into the night.
Filed by 42M filling in for 47L over the weekend, January 25, 2016