"dropping in on paradise," by jim walke
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Dropping in on
Paradise J i m W a l k e
From The Ampersand
Review, Vol. 3
T h e A m p e r s a n d R e v i e w V o l . 2
Dropping in on Paradise Jim Walke
Madge looked out over scum-green Strom
Thurmond Lake to the gated community across the way,
where her husband of thirty-nine years had shacked up
with that widow harlot. A band of red clay ran around the
shoreline like a bathtub ring fifty yards wide—former
lakebed, sheltered and cool for years, now shocked to find
itself exposed and cracking in the relentless sun. The lake
retreated every day during the worst drought on record, as
Atlanta sucked it out through pipes a hundred miles long.
The finger of bay that separated The Pines, where she
stood, from the harlot’s Paradise Lawns community grew
skinnier each week, and soon Madge would be able to
walk right across, if she wanted to, and follow Gil. He’d
make some stupid joke about parting the wed sea, and
she’d claw his face off.
Her gaze dropped from the lake to the window
ledge in front of her where a row of painted plates stood,
slathered with a pastel glop of perfect little houses and
villages. The wall next to the window dripped with antique
tools, haphazardly stapled in place like on those restaurant
walls. Americana. Americrappa. Forget about world peace
or AIDS or those starving children with the bulbous
stomachs on the television program, or marriage. The real
problem was knick-knacks. If people would clear the junk
and trash out of their lives, they could see clearly enough
to fix all those other things.
Eleanor Tatterlin had covered every surface in her
T h e A m p e r s a n d R e v i e w V o l . 2
great room with garbage: collectibles from the vile home
shopping networks, seashells, projects from the craft
classes at the activity center and postcards and every type
of tourist trap nonsense from the places she and Walt had
visited in their years on the road. Eleanor and Walt were
RV people, or at least they had been until they settled here
at The Pines, three lots down and across the street from
the house that Madge and Gil had built.
Eleanor’s baby dolls were the worst. With their real
hair and tiny hands, they lined up like miniature convicts in
glass cages along one wall. Eleanor had the entire
collection trapped in those breathless cabinets: colored
babies and Mexican babies and Indian and Chinese and
blond and Swedish and Madge didn’t know what-all else.
Two dozen sets of glass eyes watched her every move in
that stuffy, cluttered room and it made Madge want to
scream.
Eleanor floated into the room with a tea tray. A
sugar bowl shaped like a donkey rode dead center.
“Is your air conditioning out?” Madge asked.
“Oh no,” Eleanor said, “not at all.”
“But it’s roasting in here.”
“Is it? I hadn’t noticed. Walt says I must have the
coldest feet in Georgia.”
Madge took the teacup Eleanor handed her. It
matched the sugar bowl.
Eleanor perked up. “Did you hear about the
alligator?”
“Which one?” Madge asked. The clay around the lake held
scars from the occasional tail-drag or claw marks of a
small alligator.
Eleanor fluttered to her feet and over to her desk. “I have
it here. You’ve got to see—a-ha!” She produced a sheet of
T h e A m p e r s a n d R e v i e w V o l . 2
printer paper and waved it like a pompom as she hopped
back to the couch. A spry old bird, Eleanor, despite her
age. Sugar high, Madge decided, taking the paper from
her neighbor.
“What am I looking at?” she asked.
“An email from my grandson, Trevor,” Eleanor
answered.
What kind of name was Trevor? It sounded like
something you would buy to clean grout. She scanned the
tiny lines of font. In the center of the page was a picture,
like a Polaroid but printed right on the paper. It showed a
swimming alligator from above, taken from an airplane or
helicopter, Madge supposed. She looked closer.
“Is that—“
“An entire deer,” Eleanor said.
A slack brown mass clutched in the gator’s jaws
resolved itself into the shape of a doe, the head bobbing
on one side and the hindquarters trailing limp on the
other.
“That means the gator must be at least fourteen feet long,
it says.” Eleanor said.
The deer down here didn’t get as big as back in
Ohio, Madge thought.
Eleanor plucked the paper from her hands and
turned it over. Another picture on the back showed the
gator from farther away, a second shot with a bit of
shoreline visible.
“See?” she asked.
“Yes, it’s a big alligator,” Madge said, “very
interesting.”
“No,” Eleanor shook the paper in front of Madge’s
eyes, “that’s not why Trev sent it to me. Look in the
background.”
T h e A m p e r s a n d R e v i e w V o l . 2
Madge glanced at the peninsula visible alongside
the swimming animal.
“The seventh hole,” Eleanor said. She pointed to
the feature as if Madge couldn’t see it very well herself.
“Walt says there’s always a stiff breeze on that one!”
Madge snatched up her cup and drank lukewarm
tea from the donkey’s tail.
The designer of the golf course at Paradise Lawns
had a perverted sense of humor, like the boys she had
dealt with for thirty years as a junior high school principal.
He’d put one hole at the very end of a narrow promontory
that jutted out into the lake, and wittily added a pair of
round bunkers along the shore. Hilarious. Still, it had to be
the Paradise Lawns’ course. What did they name it? The
Gloaming . . . sounded like a foot disease.
“It’s frightening, is what it is,” Eleanor breathlessly
continued. “The grandbabies are coming in two weeks,
and I don’t dare let them near the water.”
A silence fell, one of those pauses when Madge
knew she was expected to commiserate.
“They’re such dears,” she said, too late, and rose
from the couch.
“No more tea? Would you like to take some cookies
with you?”
Madge avoided looking around the room. The dolls
would be staring. “No, thank you. I can’t take anything
else.”
Madge walked the empty streets of their
neighborhood under a painful sun. She clutched the
Christmas gift from Eleanor, the excuse for today’s ordeal,
not daring to guess what tackiness lurked inside the box.
It looked as if it had been gift-wrapped by a machine.
T h e A m p e r s a n d R e v i e w V o l . 2
The name of the place—The Pines—still reminded her of a
mental institution. “Not a retirement home,” the slick ads
had cooed, “but a gated waterfront community. Geriatric
nurse on site!” After they had built on their lot and moved
in, she and Gil had learned that there were gated
waterfront communities, and then there were gated
waterfront communities. The Pines squatted on the south
side of the bay, and when the Army Corps of Engineers
adjusted the water level (because it wasn’t really a lake at
all, Madge thought, but a reservoir) the churning of the
release sent all sorts of flotsam onto their shore:
waterlogged trees, tires, bottles, and once, memorably,
the body of a dead dog. Maybe gators didn’t like dog food.
With the recent drought the releases came every week,
and the bowels of Strom Thurmond churned up remnants
of the drowned valley below: a tractor seat and a windmill
head, a baby doll—not a clean and perfect one like
Eleanor’s small prisoners, but a beloved toy that a little girl
had dressed and kissed and dragged in the dirt—even
barbed wire. The locals whose land ended up underwater
apparently had not been thrilled with the idea of eminent
domain, and rifles had echoed in these low hills. Madge
had heard the stories from the people in town. The army
had had to come out on maneuvers to give the locals
something to think about. All forty years ago, but, after all,
these people still clung to a war that had been over a lot
longer than that.
Along with living in the lake’s backwash, the
inhabitants of The Pines also had to use the municipal golf
course up the shore and swim in a plain Olympic pool. On
the other side of the bay, Paradise Lawns had their
smirking, dirty-mind private course and waterfalls in the
pool and a sand beach, of course, and mansions sprawled
T h e A m p e r s a n d R e v i e w V o l . 2
under mature trees. They had Gil, too, although a retired
machinist might not raise the property values as much as
the rest. They had their nativity scene with the light-up
Jesus. Paradise had to prove how modern they were, so
the Savior lay in his manger alongside Kwanzaa banners
and a menorah and flags for the University of Georgia
Bulldogs.
More than the houses and the location set them
apart from P. Lawns. Working people lived at the Pines.
They’d held honest jobs all their lives: factory workers and
drafters and machinists like Gil, even a plumber—blue-
collar workers who’d paid off their mortgages and voted
for union contracts and taken stock options at whatever
price they were offered. Then, at the end of it all, some
scrubbed young man in a suit showed how the stock had
grown into ridiculous numbers. Everyone said if it was
their money they would move down south where the snow
never fell, so that’s what Madge and Gil did. The Pines was
a slice of the Midwest in the historic south, the brochures
had said, but they had failed to mention the dazed
expressions that lasted for the first year, as people found
themselves far from home with nothing to do.
The Lawners still came over for cards and coffee, driving
their personalized golf carts around the lake path where
they weren’t supposed to and acting like they weren’t
putting on airs, or at least they used to come until a few
weeks ago. After a few golf carts had been vandalized and
one bridge game ended in a punch-throwing fight, the
visits had tapered off. Madge still had stains on her best
blouse from the cranberry punch.
The phone shrilled from inside the house. Madge pulled
the door open and slid into the air conditioning like a seal
into water, shivering at the points of cold where beads of
T h e A m p e r s a n d R e v i e w V o l . 2
sweat lay between her breasts and trickled down her
ribcage. The phone kept on, and she snatched at it.
“What.”
The bank president sounded like a funeral home director,
with that tone as slick as casket satin. Gil had tried to
withdraw money from the accounts she’d frozen on the
day he’d left.
“Well, I don’t know who could do such a cruel thing,” she
said. Madge examined the cord as she wrapped it around
her hand, one curl over each knuckle. “My husband has
been dead for two weeks, and someone is trying to
impersonate him already.” She opened the refrigerator and
looked at the empty shelves. Swung it shut.
The oozy voice faltered and hitched at the news. When
she’d frozen the accounts she’d said Gil was missing, but
she liked the way the story had progressed. “And I don’t
even have a body to bury,” she said. Madge wondered if
she sounded authentic. She imagined what Eleanor would
sound like if Walt died. Probably like a car alarm. “No, the
body hasn’t been found,” she said. “They haven’t caught
the gator.”
Oily surprise.
“Oh yes, fifteen feet if it was an inch. A scaly old monster
took my husband right off the shore and back to her lair.
Her. That’s right. The females are always the ones you
have to watch. Vicious. Oh, I feel faint from talking about
it. Thank you for calling, and if that man comes in again
please arrest the S.O.B. Use one of those shock-prods on
him.”
Madge felt better after she got off the phone, but still not
hungry. She hadn’t shopped since he left. Everything she
did have left was healthy. For the first year, health had
been all there was to talk about with the neighbors.
T h e A m p e r s a n d R e v i e w V o l . 2
Cancer, gout, sugar diabetes, blood pressure, cholesterol:
the usual Pines topics of conversation, along with the
cures. Red wine, which Madge certainly saw some of them
embrace, and pomegranate juice and salmon oil, and
coffee enemas for the men’s troubles. If they ate right and
walked the same marked three-mile path every day they
would all live thirty more years in this place, playing
canasta with Eleanor and Walt and staring out over the
water.
“Let it go, Madge,” Gil had urged her, “Relax.” He loved
his Twinkies, and kept a box in the shop to tweak her.
She wandered into the living room and stood at the bay
window. It overlooked three houses across the street: two
Sundowner models and a Sea Breeze. Reservoir breeze,
maybe, eau de expired hound. Madge’s was a Southern
Retreat.
Between two of the houses she could see a slice of the
lakebed. A stick figure of a man walked out there,
stumbling over ridges and hardened lumps and the gator
tracks like fossil records. Henry Barnum, the fool, with his
metal detector, trying to earn himself a heat-stroke, even
in that ridiculous hat. The drought uncovered new
territory for him, an inch at a time.
For the first few days after Gil left, his cronies had
continued to come to the house in the afternoon. The men
showed up at the door like little boys running home when
the streetlights came on. They hung around the basement
looking lost, four other Midwestern men retired from blue-
collar jobs, scared stiff at the idea that one of their few
scheduled activities, namely drinking beer in her
basement, had disappeared with her husband. No one else
at The Pines had a basement. Gil had had to sweet-talk
the county commissioner into letting him dig this one
T h e A m p e r s a n d R e v i e w V o l . 2
before their model home had gone up, and he’d slipped
him a wad of cash along with his line of bull. He’d gone on
and on about the miracle waterproofing they would use to
seal it so the high water table wouldn’t be a problem, but
the mold had begun to grow inside of six months, and if
not for the drought, the walls would be weeping.
Madge felt dry herself, desiccated and empty, but only at
night. During the day she kept busy. The house sparkled,
every item in its place, nothing decorative remaining but
whatever crap hid in the box from Eleanor. No Christmas
tree. Gil’s clothes had hit the Salvation Army dumpster by
two p.m. on the day he ran. She was working her way
through the last of his books: shop textbooks and old army
manuals from his time in Korea, stacks of metal-working
magazines. No fiction. Gil had hated fiction, until they
moved here. The harlot got him started on that, too, like
the sports.
The first day the men had shown up, she’d served them
flat diet pop, and party mix, but the second day she’d just
let them sit down there in the dark oil-smell that reminded
them of back home. One by one they’d drifted away, back
to their own wives, except Henry.
Henry had no wife waiting for him, only a tropical fish tank
and a shortwave radio set. Henry had stayed on after the
other men left that day, and clumped up the stairs to find
Madge in the kitchen. He’d stood there behind her, getting
grease on her tile floor as she washed clean dishes straight
out of the cupboard, him twisting his ridiculous hat in
hands like bags of gristle.
“Your slab is solid but it’s got divots, Madge.”
“I beg your pardon?”
He’d indicated the basement with a duck of his
chin. “Your concrete,” he said, “it’s got grooves in the
T h e A m p e r s a n d R e v i e w V o l . 2
surface. Too hot the day they poured it, maybe.”
Henry’s years of construction labor meant that he
knew his concrete, but Madge had toyed with the idea of
telling him the real reason for the scars in the floor.
“Madge, I was sorry to hear,” the man went on.
“Gil’s a fool.”
“I can agree with that.”
“If there’s anything—” he’d said.
“Thank you, Henry,” Madge had said. “Now leave.”
He had mumbled a goodbye and backed out the kitchen
door.
After Gil left, when he had flown the coop and run off to
Paradise Lawns to be with that tramp, leaving Madge only
a note that said as little as his vows all those years ago,
his metal-working machines in the basement had begun to
move by themselves. Madge knew they did. She could feel
it—the slope-domed head of the drill press sliding through
the dark beneath their bedroom and the squat width of the
milling machine and the lathe circling, circling. Like
dinosaurs, relics of another age unevolved and slow, the
machines wandered the musty confines of the basement
and left their sliding tracks on the concrete.
Gil had always said he could fix anything with those
machines: old cars, boilers, or the huge stamping
machines at the Jeep plant. If a metal part broke or wore
out, Gil could take measurements down to the size of a
gnat’s eyebrow, choose the right kind of steel for the job
and make a new one. She’d watched him in the basement
back home in Ohio, trimming stock to size with the end
cutter, milling slots and shaping it with the lathe, revealing
curves and arcs where there used to be only sharp edges.
But those skills weren’t needed any more, so the machines
and Gil had both retired. He refused to send them to the
T h e A m p e r s a n d R e v i e w V o l . 2
scrap yard or donate them to the high school shop, so a
good chunk of their money went into shipping the half-ton
monsters down here and renting the crane to set them in
place on the slab, along with all of his metal stock: tool
steel, high-carbon alloy for milling, pipes and blocks of pig
iron and long, slender rods of aluminum. The machines
had gone in first, arranged the same way as they’d been
back home in Ohio, then the house had been built over
them, like a mausoleum, so Gil could be buried with his
friends.
Now that he was gone, they moved. The machines
returned to their places by the time morning came, but
she could still tell. When Madge passed among them with
her broom and dustpan, the light from the one high
window sat on them at the wrong angle.
To tell the truth, Gil had lost interest in the
machines before he’d gone. While Madge had stayed home
and read every book in the house waiting for him, Gil had
joined a sailing club and had taken up golf and tennis. He
had no idea how ridiculous he looked out there—his thick
Polish frame like a rectangle in short pants. He’d talk with
Henry and the other lost boys in the basement, in-between
jaunts with the fools from Paradise, but he’d barely touch
his tools. When he did fire up the machines, the things he
made weren’t useful: candlesticks shaped like sparkplugs,
and amorphous shapes in angles and cuts that wound
around and didn’t seem to end. It felt like she had saved
for decades to buy something no longer made. The loss
made her hot and tired and dry.
In the two weeks since he’d been gone, Madge had
found the only way to get some sleep was to appease the
machines. She would get up and switch them on and let
them run, and then engage the lathe to watch it spin. An
T h e A m p e r s a n d R e v i e w V o l . 2
hour satisfied them, and they would let her rest. After a
few nights of running them empty, she had picked up a
piece of stock and put it in the milling machine, locking it
down with the t-bolts the way Gil had done a hundred
thousand times. Madge felt a shiver when the cutting head
came in contact with the metal for the first time, and
watched, rapt, as it made neat grooves across the oiled
surface, the shavings spiraling away and down to pile
around her slippers. She could feel the start of something
being built. Not from the parts she made—they were
haphazard, and, she knew, a bit crazy—but inside her.
Madge felt her parts being replaced and remade from the
inside, into something cold and tight and heavy. The last
three nights it had been all she could do to climb the stairs
before dawn, and they had creaked under her weight.
Metal has a grain to it. Not like wood, those long
fibers reaching for the sky. Metal remembers when it used
to be liquid, arcing white hot into molds, the grain spinning
and curling back on itself like ice. Hot-rolled metal is
rough, scaly to the touch but fast and cheap to make. It
has hard spots, though, whorls of grain that will dull a cut
or even leave a hole in the work or fracture completely.
Quality metal is rolled out cold, like revenge.
A shy knock fell on the door, soft as feathers, but she still
almost jumped straight out of her stockings. How long had
she been standing at the front window? The clock showed
five. She crossed to the door and pulled the curtain aside
to find a floppy hat. Oh dear. Madge rested her head
against the cool frame of the door before opening it.
“What?”
Henry fumbled with the metal detector slung under
one arm and still tried to tip that ridiculous hat.
“Madge,” he said by way of greeting, “I wonder if I
T h e A m p e r s a n d R e v i e w V o l . 2
might borrow your hose.”
“You don’t have a hose, Henry?”
He shrugged, and the sunburn getting a hold on his
wattled neck darkened to crimson.
Madge nodded her head at the green coils next to
the stoop and came out a few steps to watch. He set the
metal detector carefully out of the way.
On the edge of the lawn, Henry had spread his
loot: a cooking pot, bits of webbing with hooks attached, a
helmet and a small shovel blade, and a box the size of a
toaster with a handle on top, all of it coated in muck.
“Found these a hundred feet out from shore,” he
said as he wrangled the hot vinyl hose. “Must have been
under ten, twelve feet of water. Likely they thought it
would never be found.”
“They?” Madge asked. “The farmers?”
“Could be,” he said, turning the weak stream of
water on the pile, “if they was in the army.”
Drab green paint began to show through on the
box, and yellow stenciled lettering. Henry nodded.
“Ammo box,” he said. “Fifty caliber. Third one that
turned up, so far this week.”
“They left bullets in the lake?” Madge asked. The
tight knots in her chest were getting hot. How dare they?
People lived here.
“We used to keep all sorts of things in these,” Henry said.
“One I found was empty, and the other had some mush
that looked like it used to be paper. Some GI’s love
letters, maybe.”
He dropped the hose to pry at one of the lids with a
jackknife. The seals yielded to his work, and Henry opened
it. The knots in Madge’s chest released when she saw the
six round noses poking out, like a half-dozen huge eggs
T h e A m p e r s a n d R e v i e w V o l . 2
packed in jelly. They looked the same as they did in Gil’s
army manual. Madge felt a thrill. She knew now what she
was building, and the new parts inside her clicked to
attention, fell into place and began to move.
“Give them to me,” she said.
“Madge, I got to . . .” He twisted as he looked from
the ammo box to her. “These’re—“
“Dummies,” Madge said, “test rounds.” Her mind
raced. “Harmless. They’re for training. You know Gil led a
mortar-team in Korea. He has some just like that. Leave
them with me and go home, Henry.”
He stuttered and bobbed, the hose at his feet still
spewing precious water over her step. Madge stepped in
close, put her hand on the loose, spotted skin of his wrist,
and repeated herself.
“Go home.”
He hesitated once more. Madge felt like she was
going to scream if she couldn’t get them inside and safe.
She knew why Henry hung around. Junior high boys, all of
them. She screwed up her courage and leaned forward to
lay a smack directly on his leathery lips. The harlot wasn’t
the only one who could do it. His breath smelled like his
cheap cigars made of rope.
Henry looked faint, but he still tried. “Madge, you
got to let it—“
She put a finger on his lips to shush him, hard, and
felt his dentures move.
“Home. Now.” This time she used her school
principal voice. Combined with the kiss he didn’t stand a
chance. She watched Henry’s figure shrink as he trudged
down the street toward his Shiloh, and then she shut off
the hose and took the ammo box across the threshold and
down the stairs, holding it as carefully as a newborn.
T h e A m p e r s a n d R e v i e w V o l . 2
The grease had the same smell as the machines in
the basement, like a factory asleep. Cosmoline, the M2
mortar manual called it, good for years and not water-
soluble. Cancerous as hell, of course. She could blow
herself to kingdom come this afternoon, or get the Big C in
twenty years. Madge dipped one hand into the thick
grease and took hold of a shell. It came out with a sucking
sound, the coating oozing through her fingers and dripping
off the fins at the base of the round. They stabilized it in
flight. Maybe Madge could make herself a set. She set it
on the bench and admired it, the body like a little rocket or
one of those hand-held bombs dropped from bi-planes in
World War I.
Gil had never talked much about Korea, except to
curse the cold and any Asian he thought had cheated him,
including every foreign automaker, but while he’d played in
the sun and she’d sat alone indoors, reading for days on
end, his army manuals had spoken volumes. Mortars are
the simplest, most elegant weapons on the battlefield. The
shells have explosives at both ends, a small one on the
bottom to launch it and a larger warhead on top. They
drop down a tight tube, sixty millimeters wide, until they
reach the bottom where all hell breaks loose. A firing pin
at the bottom of the tube detonates the propellant and the
expanding gases hurtle the shell back up the cylinder,
flinging it into the air in a long arc to drop on the head of
the enemy, where the main charge detonates. Indirect
fire.
All six of them were HE, according to the shape
and color: high explosive. Not dummies. Not dumb at all.
She wiped the glistening film from them with a shop towel,
and curled them protectively into her arms. Her eggs,
dormant for forty years and now dug up, lost and now
T h e A m p e r s a n d R e v i e w V o l . 2
found. The machines watched, and held their breaths.
“Not moving now, are you?” Madge asked.
The metal stock was slick under her hands. It
clanked in the racks as she browsed, stroking each piece in
turn until she found what she needed. Steel alloy pipe,
cold-rolled for a uniform grain and greater strength, two
and a half inches in diameter—too wide by a few
millimeters but the closest she had. Good enough for
government work, as Gil liked to say.
The end-cutter spun to life when she triggered the
power, the carbide blade spinning into a blur. Madge
slipped safety goggles on, checked her measurements for
the third time—twenty-seven inches just like the M2—and
smoothly eased the carriage along its tracks so the blade
bit into the surface of the pipe. It sang under her fingers,
the high-quality metal vibrating as Madge circumcised one
end. She adjusted the carriage and finished her cut, then
killed the power with the big red slap-switch. The blade
spun down and stopped right on the line she’d marked.
Journeyman work, Gil would have called it, his highest
praise for a novice.
The shining pipe in her hands would be a home for
the thick shells, a place for them to slide in, and, if they
were still alive, a place for them to be born. The thought
stirred her, and Madge took off her shop apron and
goggles in a daze and went upstairs to take a hot shower
with no worries about being disturbed. No machines
moving tonight. They were in on it. Those machines were
workers as much as any one of the people put out to
pasture at the The Pines, and like any good worker all they
wanted was to be useful.
The firing pin would the hard part, Madge thought, as she
soaped her body. It required a raised nipple on the inside
T h e A m p e r s a n d R e v i e w V o l . 2
of the end cap, to penetrate the fuse and launch the shell.
A threaded post in the center of the cap with a counter-
sunk nut over the top would work; she’d seen something
like it in an article in Tool & Die. The steam covered the
mirror and when she got out to dry she saw only a
shapeless mass in the fog. Some would wipe it off, but
Madge didn’t want to see herself. Or put streaks on the
mirror.
Dark had fallen while she showered, time drawing
down like the lake, a finite resource.
The end-cap formed under her chapped, dry hands
as she dressed the metal and tapped it on the milling
machine and threaded it solidly to one end of the tube. It
felt like she had piped into a pool of years that were not
hers, the collective skill of all the people sitting around The
Pines this evening watching sitcoms, all that useful
knowledge atrophying in the southern heat. Madge felt
herself unfolding, expanding along with the metal.
Now she needed a frame. The manual showed a heavy
baseplate and bipod with a complicated traverse and
elevation aiming system that was far out of the reach of
her skills, but she could TIG weld the pipe to the bag cart
Gil had bought her to play golf, as if she would take up his
stupid game along with him. The aiming would have to be
done on the fly. A little trigonometry goes a long way—
over a mile if the propellant hadn’t deteriorated; so said
the manual.
She packed the shells back into the ammo can,
clean now as the day they were made and wrapped in her
best white tablecloth wound round their bodies. The tube
stood firm in its rolling frame as she bumped it up the
stairs, to stand next to the door like a portable umbrella
stand.
T h e A m p e r s a n d R e v i e w V o l . 2
Eleanor’s gift caught her eye, still sitting on the kitchen
counter by the phone. Madge hesitated. A kitchen knife,
a wedding present from all those years ago, sharpened so
many times that the blade curved in rather than out from
the handle, helped her slit the paper and tape without
tearing it. She opened the box just enough to catch a
glimpse of the hair before slapping it shut. Golden blonde,
silky like hers had been once. Eleanor had given her one
of her dolls. Madge left the box on the table, the doll still
and quiet in the safe, dark confines.
She struggled outdoors with her load. Spring
peepers filled the air with plaintive noise. Frogs on
Christmas Eve, if nothing else, told Madge she was in the
wrong place. She wrangled her cart around to roll
properly, closed and locked her door and picked up the
ammo can. The handle dug into her fingers, the shells
heavier than they’d been on the trip up from the
basement, as if they didn’t want to go.
Down the center of the street she went, a war
widow, the wheels of the cart clicking as they spun. The
air hung as damp as the inside of a lung. She swerved off
onto the walking trail that led down to the lake. When she
reached the end of the path, Madge aimed herself straight
at the glimmer of the Kwanza-tivity display at Paradise
Lawns, and stepped out onto the former lake, army base,
farm.
She fished her flashlight out of a pocket, one of the dozens
Gil had given her over the years, and twisted the switch.
The circle of light, so bright inside the house, was
swallowed by the night. She aimed it at the ground in
front of her feet, hand wrapped around the lens to hide
the light from any nosy neighbors. The clay reached up to
trip her, and she focused on keeping the cart upright as its
T h e A m p e r s a n d R e v i e w V o l . 2
rubber wheels bounced and lunged over the uneven
surface. Sixty paces out the lap of water began, a
susurration at the edge of her hearing. Madge stumbled
over a trench dug into the surface. The light revealed a
channel in the clay three feet wide with claw scars at the
sides. Water shone at the bottom of the fresh drag marks.
A monster roamed the lakebed in the dark.
Madge’s heart pounded as she cast her light along the trail
of the beast. Its eyes would shine in the flashlight’s beam,
she knew. Her eyes, she was sure it was a female. Who
but an older woman would flaunt herself so shamelessly?
Green or yellow eyes? She couldn’t remember, but saw
nothing glowing, regardless.
The softer clay churned up by the passage of the animal
would make a perfect base for the mortar. She set down
the ammo box, pressing it into place so it stayed upright.
When she turned to look back toward shore, the lamppost
at the end of the path seemed miles away.
Once more, Madge probed the darkness with her little
light. Alligators hissed, she remembered, like steam
escaping, when they were angry. Scorn, maybe, Madge
thought, or fear. What would it be like to be the largest
predator remaining, knowing that you were doomed,
watching familiar surroundings be replaced with driveways
and golf courses while the water drained away?
If she could only make it through tonight. Tomorrow she
would be locked up. Or blown up. Possibly eaten.
The gator might be waiting for her to get close enough.
Her feet came down on the ridged surface of the clay as
she moved around to set up the mortar, and each step felt
like it had landed on the hide of the gator. She had a good
idea what would happen if she stepped on it: her leg torn
off, or she’d be dragged whole into the water like that doe.
T h e A m p e r s a n d R e v i e w V o l . 2
Red, that’s it, gator eyes shine red.
The fear was still there, so cold and clammy that she
forgot about the shells for a moment, but there was
something else she felt now. Pity, or at least empathy. She
was the last big one left. Madge turned her back and got
to work setting up her mortar. The wheels sank an inch or
two into the clay as she leaned her weight on the cart and
settled it into place. The tube’s snout rested in the crotch
of the cart, aimed skyward.
She had pre-measured the angle, and marked the tube
with a notch for each degree of elevation. No way around
it, the aiming was going to be rough. Madge would have to
let fly with the first of her precious shells, then adjust
based on where it fell.
Most of her idle minutes had been filled with images of
geysering explosions. She had seen, in her mind’s eye, the
harlot’s house leveled to a heap of faux marble, the lake
path destroyed and the blasphemous nativity blown to
hell, all but baby Jesus, of course, smiling amidst the
smoking wreckage, but late in the evening the perfect
target had come to her.
Forty years underwater had destroyed the hinges holding
the lid of the ammo box, and when she swung it back this
time the lid came off in her hands. There they were: her
babies, six little soldiers ready to fight. She selected the
first one carefully—the scout—the bravest-looking shell as
her opening salvo. A glance back over her shoulder with
the light showed no eyes. It could still be close. What she
wouldn’t give to be in that wide, flat head for a moment,
watching the soft prey kneel and jabber and arrange the
device that smelled like death.
The sky began to lighten around the edges, which meant
dawn in less than an hour. Now was the time, before the
T h e A m p e r s a n d R e v i e w V o l . 2
earliest duffers hit the course to avoid the heat of the day.
Madge’s fingers trembled as she slid the base of the tube
around to aim at where she thought the seventh hole
stuck out into the water. There might not be charges
potent enough in these shells to blow up the little
peninsula completely, but it would be wonderful to try. She
reached into the base of the shell, between its little fins,
and took hold of the fuse. It resisted her, and cold drops
of fear sweat broke out along her neck and upper lip.
What if they were corroded in place, so that she couldn’t
arm them? As fast as the thought appeared, it fled with
the click as the fuse gave a quarter-turn under her grip.
Armed. It was armed. She, Madge, was armed. It felt
wonderful, like lifting off in a plane or pulling away from
the dock in a powerful motorboat. Armed and dangerous.
“Here we go,” she told the gator hiding in the dark.
Hiss.
Madge slid the shell half-way into the mouth of the tube
and held it there. Pull your hands away quick, the manual
said, because the shell would be coming out at three
hundred miles an hour. Drop it, Madge, she thought,
willing her fingers to release. Let it slide down, feel the
charge go off and see the blur as it flies out the mouth of
the tube.
See the shell’s eye view: the dark shores of The Pines
dropping away, Madge left kneeling in the clay next to a
mortar as homemade as a batch of cookies, the dinosaur-
outline of the gator watching her from a few yards away.
Then the top of the arc at six hundred feet, wind
screaming by and the fins holding it straight and steady,
and the shell would tip over and begin to fall toward the
houses of Paradise Lawns. Over the nativity, past the
clubhouse and the front fairway, angling down onto its
T h e A m p e r s a n d R e v i e w V o l . 2
target: the seventh hole. Boom.
Madge thought that she heard movement behind her, a
thousand-pound reptile sliding off to her left. Her arm
began to tremble with the effort of holding the shell
suspended at the mouth of the tube. The noise passed her
by, and she heard a splash as the gator slipped into the
water.
“Leave, then,” she said. In a flash, she knew that the
alligator was going to look after her own nest, her own
responsibilities.
Madge saw, in her imagination, the first shell hit right at
the base of the prick. She would drop the others in rapid
succession, the third round in the air before the second
hit. The blasts would cut the hole off from the shore, set it
free and leave only a little round island with the green and
the flag. Maybe it would break off and float away. She
could swim out to it. Madge had a vision of living out her
days on a floating island in Strom Thurmond lake, just she
and the other unevolved creatures: the gators, the lathe
and the drill press, all sunning themselves on the green.
Maybe her baby doll, too, out in the healthy sunshine.
A drop of rain touched the back of her hand. The first rain
in months. It pattered on the clay around her, soaking her
blouse. “Let it go, Madge,” she murmured.
Let it go. What Gil always said to her, in teasing and
exasperation. Let it go. She could see his face when he
said it.
Cramps crawled up and down her forearms and
sweat dripped into her eyes. Let it go. How many times
had she heard that in thirty-nine years of marriage. A
thousand? Ten thousand? He even put it on the note when
he left. Three words: Let it go. Not “let me go,” but it. The
marriage. Just let it fall to pieces. Forget all those years.
T h e A m p e r s a n d R e v i e w V o l . 2
Let it go, Madge.
Let it go.
So she did.
T h e A m p e r s a n d R e v i e w V o l . 2
Jim Walke is a writer, actor and cubicle monkey in the
mountains of Virginia. He's in the low-residency MFA
program at Queens University of Charlotte with a fine and
talented group of misfits. In his spare time he enjoys lying
in his hammock, and lying.
Read more at:
www.ampersand-books.com
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