“Carmella,” he said to my mother, “I think I killed Babe Ruth.”

  What happened next happened very quickly.

  My mother decided that we had to do something. So, we neither waited for the papers the next day (which said that Babe Ruth was still alive), nor went to the police station (which was already filling with the casualties of Bat Day). Instead, we panicked. We packed our things and got on a train the next morning. We came to Canada.

  After that, my father stopped doing impossible things. He became a quiet, ordinary carpenter who earned his living building porches and installing kitchen cabinets. People no longer called him Sampson and he never told anyone about August 7, 1921. He died when he was sixty-two-years old, of prostate cancer. They sent him home after the treatment had failed. His hair had fallen out and he was completely blind.

  The last picture of him was taken just before he died, at my daughter’s fifth birthday party. He had already been sent home by the hospital. In the picture he is singing “Happy Birthday,” but looking the wrong way as my daughter blows out the candles on her cake. On the table in front of him there are some walnuts that he had cracked open. The nuts are still in them. My father never liked eating walnuts, but loved cracking them open. He would pick up a nut and squeeze it until the shell cracked. He was the only one I ever knew who could do that with only one hand. I’ve tried it more times than I can count. I suppose that this is the picture that would have to go at the end of his story. Or maybe just a close-up of the walnuts.

  August 7, 1921, was the first and last Bat Day in the history of baseball. One hundred eighty-seven people, including Babe Ruth, were injured that day. According to the article in the New York Reflector, the Labrows divorced and Jackie Hubbs had reconstructive surgery on her face. In the paper she was quoted as saying that she liked her new nose “better.” I have no idea what happened to John Seidl and Norman Flax. The last time I saw them, they were lying with their eyes closed, in each other’s arms at the end of our aisle. We stepped over them as we exited the stadium. Perhaps they lived happily ever after.

  I still have the complimentary bat that my father got that day. Today it is a rotted piece of wood, and the Yankees logo on its side has faded during the years it was kept in the damp basement of my house. The truth is that if I could show it to you, you would be unimpressed. It does not look at all like a bat that might have changed the course of history.

  But I still have it. I am an old man now, with grandchildren of my own, but there are days when I go into the basement just to touch it. The feel of the wood never fails to bring back that day, the day my father became afraid. I close my eyes and I can see myself standing beside him in Yankee Stadium. The game is about to begin and both of us are singing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” His real name was Giovanni, but everyone – even my mother – called him Sampson. I smell the grass and hear the roar of the crowd, the final note dissolving into sunshine.

  WHEN MONSTERS SMOKED

  JOE ROSENBLATT

  There was a trick you could do with an empty package of Camel cigarettes. You folded the package into several parts, squeezed out the central image of the camel itself and then rolled the parts out until the beast seemed to move across the dunes: the mind drugged by cigarette smoke, drifting. We were blowing smoke behind my house on Major Street. Turning on with the weed, a soaring feeling of confidence, buoyed above the crowd. It took a number of cigarettes to get the habit going. It sizzled sometimes as the smoke shot up the wrong flue, but after a few practice bouts, my soul descended on a spiral. It had a calming effect, although when it went bad for me I would choke, gasp and throw up spots of parakeet blood. I was determined to get the drift of it. I wanted to be like other paranormal people. In those days, everybody wore a cigarette butt in the corner of the mouth. Smokers were the toughest, the meanest, the truest romantics, and if they weren’t killing they were loving. They loved and killed before or after the act. Sex seemed an excuse to have a smoke. They sometimes made love without fondling but only staring into each other’s button eyes and blowing smoke into each other’s faces. This was legal sex. Everybody smoked: detectives, poetroons, cowboys, buffoons, rich dudes, poor Okie folk…it didn’t matter, they had one thing in common: they smoked every damned chance they had: brains, manhood, courage, villainy, what did it matter; facing the last mile on Death Row you smoked, or stepping into the vortex of a cow town you smoked before you smoked your shooting iron.

  I smoked Camel, others smoked Black Cat…which I think was a cigarette for sissies… You smoked through your nostrils, your mouth, or simultaneously. I loved Frankenstein because he could smoke through his ears. He didn’t smoke Old Gold…he only smoked when he was being wired down and shot through with bolts of electricity…the straps snapped …his huge chest swelled…

  I was jumping up and down in my seat…the monster’s lips twisted and turned, and then his eyeballs (which weren’t his) popped back into their sockets. Frankenstein, it seemed, was an electrical junkie…somebody you could never trust in an electrical storm, who attracted bolts of lightning as a packinghouse attracts sewer rats, and there he was, the monster with a spike running through the flat on the forehead of his skull… He gurgled words, or rather, he ate sound…the same sound the mummy made when a deluded scientist unrolled his linen, a regurgitated, half-wormy sound…urgg ghh murrrrr-RRRRRrrr.

  I stared into the gape of his mouth…did he have natural teeth though made of spare parts? Who looked at his teeth?…they were stubs…they reeked of decay… The monster jerked against the straps, his huge cement shoes jerked up with the zaps of electricity…and finally the monster passed out, having climaxed with the last burn, and smoke poured out of his ears…out of his skin… His cheap trousers seemed to singe with every electrical fuck in the ear…and the hands, they were huge… The good doctor wiped the sweat from his creation’s brow…and the rag steamed…

  Yes…yes…my son…yes…assured the doctor. You will live…and URRRRRG…gurgled the monster…urgggh…and then the monster flaked out. A thought crossed through my mind: Supposing I wired the wrong doorknocker and the monster came to the door…they would use parts of me to keep the creep together… Nobody screwed around at Dr. Frankenstein’s door, only the police captain with one arm who had heard a rumour that the doctor was rejuvenating the beast who had ripped his arm off before in a vicious encounter. With his steel fist he pounded on the thick oak door. The captain didn’t believe in knocking…

  I knew the monster was lurking around the coal bin down in my basement. My mother told me to go down and get potatoes. I was too frightened. The war was still on and there were blackout drills and by some freak coincidence, as soon as I mustered my nerves and went down, the lights suddenly went out. Half my body was steaming in fear. Lights flashed outside the basement window; it seemed my life was flashing away, and goosebumps rashed all over my skin: warm piss, goosebumps and a handful of potatoes, dirt still fresh as the grave…earth apples…musty…Frankenstein’s boneyard…

  I was crying and cringing and had anybody said BOO I would have jumped out of my mouth. I dashed blindly up the stairs, stopping at the top to puff out my fear. I had gone through dungeons, my imagination yeasting with images of dismemberment…ripping…tearing…choking…clawing… but never biting: neither the mummy nor Frankenstein’s creation ever bit anybody: they tore off their hands, applied a choking hold, but certainly never bit anybody…that was for the squeaky vampire who darted around in the early hours of the morning and materialized in a dusty coat, a nocturnal evening dress, a starched white shirt, as though the wearer had been sleeping in a crypt where only moths cleaned up after him. From that day on it was hellish to go down into the basement and sidle past the furnace room, past the hidden presence of the square-headed Frankenstein monster. I was sure he was concealed under the coal. Each shovelful brought me closer to the shuffler. I saw his outline in the flames, his grinding mouth and twisted face. Even monsters love to eat potatoes. He could have been hiding in a burlap bag. I kept away from the spuds and handled the coal shovel gingerly, selecting clumps of coal but not digging deeply into the earth lumps piled to the basement window. I dreaded the coal men lumbering up to the window at the side of the house, dumping sacks of coal onto a chute which ran up to the open window. Hands reached out from the grave, Franky’s calloused hands.

  The coal navvy pushed me aside as he swung another bag of coal down the chute, his face covered with grime, and as the man sweated he smeared the dirt across his brow as though he meant to convey how his life was a smear of coal darkness containing the gift of fire. To the householder it was different: it seemed the dirtier he was the more acceptable he seemed; the householder wanted his money’s worth and felt elevated viewing a human being who worked with grime ground into his pores. The coalman was doubled over, one hand gripping the nape of the bag, the other supporting his hip and the small of his back, and he gripped the rear end of the bag and hoisted it above his waist, rolling the coal over his back. The coal roared down the chute. The coalman smiled, or at least, he always seemed to smile, and his features were made all hideous by the few blotches of white skin… advanced leprosy…and his teeth appeared ominous, and his peep-hole eyes. The coalman seemed to love his job, dumping coal without a sign of being disgruntled. A few of the labourers requested a glass of water, lapping the water like sick cats. What disturbed me most about their vocation was their lunch hour…they munched on a sandwich…ingested, dust and all, and to top off their meal, they sucked on a cigarette, the quick flow of digestive juices blending with dust and the tar from a Camel or Sweet Cap. Still, none of these actual creatures came close to Frankenstein, whose face – although it appeared clean – had its veneer of sickly light: the filth was on the inside. Frost chilled away at a coalman’s face but the dirt acted as a protective layer. It was eerie to see a man with a blackened face not only sweating but exhaling a draft of warm bodily air against the savage nip of winter. They sweated, smearing lines of dirt across their face, and gurgled sounds like the monster, their lungs past repair, dust eating away the linings of their precious lungs…and then sneezing, dust flying up their nostrils…and then they laughed.

  It was an honest living, more productive than attaching new parts to a monster who had a pair of size twenty shoes and whose head had apparently been flattened by a concrete ironing board. He walked through his dungeons with his hands stiff as wood, his shoulders broad enough to carry two bags of coal. He was at least five ax handles across the back and had bolts on his shoulders and tufts of black hair, transplants as well. The poor dumb bastard tried to form sounds but the only real sound was MASTER…master…master… and it made the good doctor’s day when his fear of fire singed his very soul, if he had one: Master, master cried the monster, globs of tears and glue flowing along his jutting jaw.

  What a poor dumb clot. He proved to be nothing more than the doctor’s evil alter ego, uglier than a toad blowing marsh gas. The coalman had a set of shoes which went crunch crunch crunch melting the snow in their path, but even Frankenstein’s shoes belonged to somebody else. Who? Master, master…the mouth formed a harsh sound… The doctor smiled at his creation. Yes, yes…my son…yes…soon you will have a brain…yes, yes… Glue oozed and gurgled out of the monster’s mouth at the very mention of a transplanted brain. The monster rammed a finger at the side of his head above his prominent ears: Brrr ain…? Demented, a smile formed around his drooling mouth: the thought of a brain, the delicious watering of the monster’s hole of a mouth…

  Another zigzag of electricity. The operating room was crammed with electrical devices and tubings, electrical panels and giant switches, motors with huge rubber bands and auxiliary engines. The monster, strapped against the table, which was itself on gears and pulleys, strained against his straps. Even the transplanted mat of hair on his flattened head appeared to smoke… The doctor’s assistant, usually a dwarf, tried to restrain the monster, fearing the beast would blow the spark plugs in his cranium. The fury of shattering electricity had brought on psychic orgasm, the monster’s eyes blackened, jolts jamming through his body, smoking as well… and then he lay back, passive…all he needed was a cigarette…as the dwarf turned up his bubbly eyes to the doctor, who calmed his twitchy assistant, stroking the poor soul’s crooked hump, running his hand over the dwarf’s heavy-set eyebrows. EEeeegor…all is ready…soon I will prove that the fools were wrong…I…Doctor Frankenstein…they laughed at me…I’ll show them…I’ll…who are you staring at…you fool… you lump…dirt…away with you…away…hahahahahaha… “Yes master, yes…” Eeeegor squealed, waddling away with his painful hump (at least two sofa cushions high). The hunchback appeared to move sideways, past the coal bin, and he waddled up a flight of concrete stairs. He squealed again, a fiendish cry…something resembling a laugh, its frostiness melting into the shard of a twitter… The monster clumps toward the doctor, his hands raised like one in a dream state, those eyes open, those peepers that don’t belong to the creature…planted as seeds of vision, fitted in, played around with, the pulps of eyes…

  There was a huge rabbit-like brain in a jar. Igor fondled the jar, staring like a child at its content…brain…brain…he was transfixed. “Give me that, you oaf,” snarled the doctor, seizing the jar from the hunchback who raised his hands to ward off blows. “No, master…no…” The child in Igor had not yet fathomed the gravity of his act: to hold, to fondle, to fabricate, to flush another’s brain…that was to put the hunch on the back of life. That was power. The doctor set the jar on the marble table and connected the circuits. A jag of white thunder illumed the contents of the jar. The monster, supine and sedate, rolled his eyes and suddenly a knowing smile formed on his pale lips.

  Unfortunately, there’s always a rat’s hair in the mills: the brain’s former owner was an absolute degenerate, a sociopath, a destructive low-life. After all the soft hum of ozone sucking in a nitrogenous vapor…glup glup…and the gases liquefying…with Igor silently watching in the background, full of hate, assuming that the brain was meant for him (a perverse love triangle here) – the vast bully grunted his approval, popped his eyes and pulled against the straps. Igor screamed, but it was too late, the monster had seized the doctor’s wrist…but it was only a gentle tug, playful…and Igor, after a touching moment of reconciliation, served as a guide, a procurer for the monster, who huffed and puffed, emitting obscene noises at Igor…kill kill kill…

  The village folk complained to the one-armed captain, the eyes and ears of the judicial system. Enough was enough. The village inhabitants mobilized for a torch-lit deputation to the castle, a lynching…there was safety in numbers…they carried pitchforks, shovels…knives…and only the one-armed power-tripping captain was in possession of a long piece of hardware, a revolver. It was curtains for the deadly trio: a frightened Igor hoisted above the heads of the mob…the doctor stomped to death by the peasants…and the monster chased into quicksand near the castle… Master, he cried out before he sank into the muck of the subconscious. The castle was torched and everybody but the dead was as happy as vampire bats strung out on a jugular vein. I charged up the basement stairs, my heart thumping. I knew he was down there, that he had pulled himself out of the quicksand. There was a butt (a Camel) in his mouth. He was smoking out of his ears, he was moving across the dunes of my mind leaving huge footprints, and who…who had worn those huge cement shoes before…?

  Drawing by Margaret Atwood

  SALOME WAS A DANCER

  MARGARET ATWOOD

  Salome went after the Religious Studies teacher. It was really mean of her, he wasn’t up to her at all, no more sense of self-protection than a zucchini, always droning on about morality and so forth, but he’d finger the grapefruits in the supermarket in this creepy way, a grapefruit in each hand, he’d stand there practically drooling, one of those gaunt-looking men who’d fall on his knees if a woman ever looked at him seriously, but so far none of them had. As I say it was really mean of her, but he’d failed her on her mid-term and she was under pressure at home, they wanted her to perform as they put it, so I guess she thought this would be a shortcut.

  Anyway, with a mother like hers what could you expect? Divorced, remarried, bracelets all up her arms and fake eyelashes out to here, and pushy as hell. Started entering Salome in those frilly-panty beauty contests when she was five, tap-dance lessons, the lot, they’d slather the makeup on those poor tots and teach them to wiggle their little behinds, what a display. And then her stepdad ran the biggest bank in town so I guess she thought she could get away with anything. I wouldn’t be surprised if there wasn’t some hanky-panky going on in that direction too, the way she’d bat her baby blues at him and wheedle, sickening to watch her rubbing up against him and cooing, he’d promised her a Porsche when she turned sixteen.

  She was Tinker Bell in the school play when she was twelve, I certainly remember that. Seven layers of cheesecloth was all she wore. There was supposed to be a body stocking underneath but whether there was or not, your guess is as good as mine. And all those middle-aged dads sitting with their legs crossed. Oh, she knew what she was doing!

  Anyway, when she got the rotten mark in Religious Studies she went to work on the guy, who knows how it started but when they were caught together in the stockroom she had her shirt off. The teacher was growling away at her bra, having trouble with the hooks, or so the story goes, you have to laugh. If you want what’s in the package you should at least know how to get the string off, is what I say. Anyway, big scandal, and then he started badmouthing her, said she was a little slut and she’d led him on, did some innuendo on the mother just for good measure. Everyone believed him, of course, but you always knew with Salome that if anyone’s head was going to roll it wouldn’t be hers. She accused the poor jerk of sexual assault, and since she was technically a minor – and, of course, her banker stepdad threw his weight around – she made it stick. Last seen, the guy was panhandling in the subway stations, down there in Toronto; growing a beard, looks like Jesus, crazy as a bedbug. Lost his head completely.