Three of Marissa's tales of triction from Dust Off The Neurons (c)NotePoet Publishing.
Mary Pattisti's Finger
Close to my Grandmother’s photograph hangs a colorized picture of my Grandfather in his Sunday best black suit and derby hat. It was taken in my family’s hometown of Duluth, Minnesota, perhaps in the 1930s. He’s standing behind a park bench in a public rose garden on the shores of the Great Lake Superior. In the photograph sits a young boy, my Grandfather's hand rests on the boy's shoulder. This boy isn't my father, but a family friend named Bobby Pattisti.
Bobby's parents were also full-blooded Italians. His mother's name was Mary. She was a petite woman with a thin voice and no pointer finger from the joint up on her right hand. This both frightened and fascinated me as a child. I could not keep my eyes off of her missing pointer finger and my thoughts would run wild imagining what grisly accident had occurred to sever it.
What made the impact of this haunting even worse was that every time we'd give her a ride to church (which my father dreaded because he said she "talked too much"), she'd bring us a loaf of home-made bread. I would look in every loaf of bread, every single slice, for that damned finger. I'm sure it was good bread, but I had a hard time getting it down. I deliberately chewed and chewed again, sifting and straining the pasty mush through my teeth, wincing at each and every bite. I even imagined that the bread would somehow reform in my stomach as the finger and it would find its way up my throat or through my body, become its own entity, suffocate me in my sleep, then continue on it’s violent rampage murdering everyone in its path. OK, too much Poe as a child, “Tell-tale Finger?” But how little it takes to plant a seed that produces night-mares and phantasmagoria in a young, impressionable mind. It would only take a finger, or lack thereof.
One Sunday during the family spaghetti dinner that we'd usually have after church, I finally got up the nerve to asked the blazing question, "What happened to Mary Pattisti's finger?" There was an inhaled silence. Then my father, mouth half full, gave me the answer that I'd both desired and dreaded hearing; "Her and Mr. Pattisti were having an argument, she pointed it and shook it at him and he bit it off." My God, I was blown away! Of all the things that my little mind had imagined, that wasn’t even close to one of them.
It was then that I began to obsess over the truth behind the finger rather than the mysterious event behind the finger. Where did the finger end up? Did Mr. Pattisti spit it out on the ground somewhere? Did he spit it back at her? Did he hurl it at her? Did they try to sew it back on? Did they bury it in a small matchbox in a simple ceremony in a tiny grave in the garden? What in the hell happened to that bloody finger? What on earth were they arguing about? Was this the kind of madness love and marriage brings? What kind of a bastard bites off his wife’s finger? And what kind of revenge would that wife plan for that particular kind of bastard? Is pride or passion the answer, the emotion, behind all of these questions? How the hell do I know.
Growing up Catholic I’d heard the stories about saint’s finger bones being placed in altars, strange custom - as so many Catholic rituals are, but since Mary Pattisti was Catholic and must’ve met at least some of the criterion for sainthood (especially co-existing with the mister), couldn’t there be some little church somewhere where a little Italian lady’s pointer finger could find its final resting place in an altar until the world ends? If that little church existed, where would one find it? This is just one of the fantasies I’d come to invent for the finger. I continued to imagine elaborate journeys and much better ends for that innocent, orphaned digit.
It’s been more than thirty years now and I'm still mesmerized by Mary Pattisti's finger. Everyone I've mentioned here is dead and gone. I know no more than I did on the day that I first heard the truth. Mrs. Pattisti lived a long life in spite of her digital misfortune. Mr. Pattisti was not as fortunate. He died many years before her, I'm not sure how, but I've fantasized that she murdered him in some slow and torturous way. Maybe ground up glass in his oatmeal, or a poisonous home-grown herb that she'd hid in his weekly moustacelli. Did she dig up and re-bury her finger next to his body? Perhaps she saved and hid the finger, preserved it for years, then secretly inserted it in one of Mr. Pattisti's orifices before they interned the body? Or even worse, did she forgive him? That would be even more unthinkable.
The last time I saw Mary Pattisti was over 30 years ago. I was a teenager, with all of the same unanswered Mary Pattisti finger questions poking around in my head from childhood. My Mom and I had dropped her off at her house after church and she insisted that we take the grand tour of her garden. She had a green thumb...umm…she was a master gardener. She invited us into her house, the same house where she'd lived most of her married life. It took all I had not to blurt out my questions about what had happened the day she lost her finger. I wondered on which floor, in which room the finger had fallen. Was I standing on the spot where the blood dripped? Did she pick it up off the floor and wrap it in her hankie so it could be reattached? Did they even go to the hospital? Or did her husband kick it under the couch or the refrigerator? Did the family cat find it and mistake it for a snack? Then when it was too late and she couldn’t be stitched together again, how did she hold a pen? Count to ten? Mrs. Pattisti prattled on (she did talk a lot), but I was lost in macabre deduction and wasn't hearing a word she was saying until I heard the word "bread." BREAD… She pulled a foil-wrapped loaf out of the pantry and handed the bread to my mother. We followed her to the front door, we said our farewells and silently walked to the car. As we were pulling away Mary was standing at her garden gate smiling, frantically waving good-bye like Granny on the Beverly Hillbillies with - you guessed it - her right hand. I glanced out the back window and saw her tiny figure - no, I didn’t say finger - framed in the window, and I could’ve sworn I saw her wink and wag her half a pointer finger as if to say, “You be good now!” “Yes Mary, I’ll make a point of it.”
To Skin A Squirrel
Call it karma, come uppence, or just desserts, I like “poetic justice” the best - and poetic it is; there’s an internal rhyme to this art that seems to create, reinvent and resolve itself. It doesn’t happen often or often enough, so when it does I remember it clearly and for a long time, it’s really the only way I can line up and connect the original occurrences with the final outcomes. The following is one that’s always stood out in my mind, and I’ve thought of it many times over the years.
I was 13 and it was the autumn of my first year of Junior High School. My friend Gail had a crush on an older boy - a 9th grader named Brad. She wasn’t the only one who had a crush on him, there were other girls that thought he was cute, I wasn’t one of them.
Brad was a popular kid, a jock, a jerk, a loudmouth; he was outgoing in that aggressive, bullying kind of way. He never took off his blue and gold letter jacket, and he had what I call “Burt Reynolds hair.” He combed that hair a lot; he had one of those black ACE unbreakable plastic combs in his back pocket, and he’d whip it out and graze it through his side-parted mane every few minutes even when there wasn’t a hair out of place. At first I thought it was just a nervous habit, but then I realized that he merely admired his hair and wanted to attract as much attention to it as he could.
One day in October Gail begged me to go with her and a couple of Brad’s friends that next Saturday to his family cabin. I didn’t really want to go, but I went for Gail’s sake and I didn’t know it at the time, but it would be the last thing that I’d ever do for her.
Saturday came; it was as gray and grainy as an old TV show. I wasn’t quite awake but I walked uphill through the drizzle and lake wind to Gail’s house with my hood wrapped tight around my head. A car was parked in front of Gail’s steps, Brad’s older brother was in the driver’s seat and a couple of kids that I recognized from school were already in the car. I got in the back so Gail could sit in front next to Brad. He sat in the middle right in front of the rearview mirror in which he checked his hair so many times I lost count.
It was a long drive out to the country before we ended up at what was supposed to be the family cabin. Brad led us out to a slap board hunting shack at the end of a winding, picker-laden deer trail through the woods. I rolled my eyes and shook my head at Gail; we were already wet and cold and I still didn’t know what we were going to do out there in the woods all day - being the naïve 13 year old that I was - and I would’ve much rather been in my warm bedroom doing my own Saturday things.
We all sat on the splintered porch of the shack while Gail made flirty small talk with Brad, he dominated most of the conversation and though Gail took in his every word, nothing he said caught my ear. I didn’t say much out loud, but I must’ve asked myself thirty times or more why I was wasting my time there in the middle of the woods. During a lull in the already dull conversation, Brad went into the shack and brought out a shotgun. I hoped that he wasn’t really going to shoot it - guns and idiots are such a dangerous pairing. I figured that he was just going to show it to us because he thought it would impress us, and at the most maybe shoot a few rounds to show off, I was wrong.
In a matter of seconds Brad shot a squirrel out of tree and when it fell to the ground he snatched it up, pulled his hunting knife out of the leather case on his belt, and impaled its convulsing body on the tree that it had fallen from. My mind took a lasting snapshot of that scene and I can still see it as clearly as the moment it happened some 30 years ago. I was stunned and all my words got caught in my chest like a cough drop swallowed too soon. Though Gail looked away, I continued to stare; I’d seen a lot of things in my 13 years, but I’d never seen such raw, sadistic, cruelty performed so automatically - so emotionlessly - right before my eyes. He yanked the squirrel off of the tree, stepped on it and ripped the tale off of it with his bare hands. He turned around and dangled the bloody end on the back of his head, “Look, Davey Crockett!” he laughed. I was thoroughly disgusted, sickened, and then angry. All I could do was shake my head.
The setting had changed to something resembling a cheap horror flick; the rain, the run down shack, the weapon, the surprise killer, the innocent victim. I was in the company of people I didn’t understand. I was the odd one out - a civilized human amongst a clan of backward “Deliverance inbreds.” An uneventful autumn afternoon had turned into a miniature primeval scene that I couldn’t fit into my mind - I didn’t want to. All I wanted was to get as far away from there as I could be.
I grabbed Gail’s arm and pulled her aside, “I’m leaving!” I said through clenched teeth. “If I have to walk all the way home I’m getting the hell out of here, with or without you.” I started walking toward the deer path, Gail didn’t follow. I heard Brad holler, “Hey, wait a minute, what’s the big deal, it’s just a stupid fucken squirrel!” I kept walking but turned in his direction and yelled, “Whenever anything bad happens to you, remember what you did to that poor squirrel, you sick bastard!”
I heard bursts of forced laughter as I pushed through the trees, I pulled my hood around my head as tight as I could to try and block out the echo of their voices. The woods blurred to a hazy gray from my tears and my clouds of breath hitting the brittle air. I got to the dirt road where the car was parked, walked right by it and toward a far off gas station I’d seen on the main road. I knew I could call my Dad to come and get me, he’d be pissed, but I didn’t care. What I really needed was to be around something - anything familiar, just one thing that made sense to me. As I predicted, my Dad wasn’t overjoyed about driving all the way out there, but he must’ve sensed that I was upset. The first thing he asked when he pulled up and I opened the car door, was “Did somebody do something to you?“ I answered, “No, he killed a squirrel.“ It was a long and silent ride home.
Something in me changed that day. Gail and I didn’t talk much after that, then not at all. Brad remained a bruising bully and Gail was just another girl for him to tease and mistreat. She must’ve figured out that 9th grade boys weren’t really interested in 7th grade girls. Maybe that’s one of the reasons that she started to skip class, smoke, and wear heavy blue eye make-up and thick, black “raccoon eyes” mascara. She started to hang out with what were known as the “B. A’s” or “Bad Asses.” Most of them weren’t really that “bad,” though they did prove to be “asses” much of the time. Not any worse than the “rah-rah’s” which is what we called the cheerleaders, jocks, and popular kids with a little to much “school spirit.” I was neither one nor the other. Even then, I wanted to be singular.
The school year continued, winter came and faded, and soon the summer vacation restlessness of May stirred the big white window shades and seeped through the half opened windows. It was around that time that a rumor began to spread; the story was that Brad had been staying home from school because he’d started to lose his hair. Though it was odd and funny, I didn’t believe it because I was under the impression that teenagers couldn’t possibly go prematurely bald - perhaps premature in other areas, but not the big head.
Then one day I got a hall pass from study hall and as I walked toward the bathrooms I saw Brad by the boy’s locker room with a few other boys. Unnoticed, I leaned against the wall to watch and listen. There were the usual overstated guffaws and exaggerated gestures, then their voices started to get louder, they poked and pointed at Brad and it seemed like they were making fun of him. It was like a volcano erupted when Brad yelled, “Yeah, it’s fucken true alright - I lost my goddam hair, whuddaya gonna’ do about it! See?!’’ Suddenly he pulled off his baseball cap and all I saw was a blur of white scalp skin with only a few strands of remaining hair on the side of his head, I couldn’t believe it. He turned and saw me then and in that instant I believe that we both knew what the other was thinking. The scene of that Saturday in the woods and that butchered squirrel flashed through my mind, just as it must’ve flashed through his. That skinning of an animal and Brad’s baldness were forever fused in time, two different skinnings - one perfect circle.
There are other perfect poetic connections that I’ve discovered since then, it’s become sort of a hobby of mine, putting all these stray pieces and strands together. But this, what I call “the squirrel’s revenge,” is one of the most absolute cycles of poetic justice that I’ve seen so far, and it only took a few months, whereas many cycles I’ve tried to keep track of take years to complete.
Since then I’ve noticed the disturbing correlation between cruelty to animals in kids and teenagers and the link to them growing up to be serial killers, rapists, some kind of predator. It’s such a consistent red flag for future criminals that I wonder why it isn’t used as a key question for kids with severely violent tendencies. Think of all the pain, suffering, and loss that could be prevented, all of the children left unmolested and all of the women and men left intact - physically, emotionally, and psychologically.
I don’t know what end Brad came to - violent or otherwise - or what damage he did or didn’t do to others that might’ve been vulnerable or appeared to be weaker than he was. Maybe that event affected him as much as it did me, I doubt it, but it might be better to imagine the sympathetic, enlightened person he could’ve become rather than the heinous monster he might very well be, and all the more angry and vengeful due to his premature skinning.
A silly childhood chant repeats in my mind, “Skin a squirrel and you’ll pay, you might lose your hair someday.”
Show & Tell - A Southern Story ~
I'm not here to win any prizes, I'm just here to set the record straight. It was my first year of Jr. High. and Miss Honeycutt’s class sat before me. I held up a Ziploc bag containing a cat turd in one hand, and in the other hand I shook a black rubber snake. I heard a short gasp come from the first few rows before they realized it wasn't a real snake, but that was the last sound anyone made until the end of my story. I began, "What I did on summer vacation, seven years ago."
Now ol' Uncle Jeb liked his Jackie D. and he liked to kiss all the girls in the family right on the mouth - long and wet. There were other things that took place, which I'd rather not say, but those things haven’t happened for a long time. Needless to say all of us kids didn't much care for any of Uncle Jeb's ungodly habits, and the consensus among us was that we wished Uncle Jeb would expire like a jug of Dollar Store milk. But the ones you wish would croak always seem to last the longest, so we second best decided to torture him with pranks as long as he stank up the earth. Hence the cat turd.
The said turd, much like this one, came from Skidmark, Uncle Jeb's old barn cat. The cat’s real name was Shadrach, but Skidmark seemed to fit him better. Jeb’s favorite candy was Tootsie Rolls and the plan was to wrap up several of Skidmark's offerings in some old Tootsie Roll wrappers that I'd picked out of the garbage pail, and wait until nightfall when we knew Uncle Jeb would be good and juiced. We were red-faced laughing about our dirty deed to be all day, and the anticipation nearly killed us. At last there he was on the porch swing, half conscious, drooling and muttering to himself just like he always did. "Uncle Jeb!" I yelled right next to his ear. A scratchy "HUMPH!" came from his grease trap mouth as he shook off his JD coma. "We brought you some Tootsie Rolls Uncle Jeb." His jowls vibrated as he spit slurred words out, "Mebbe you little squirrelly bastards ain't as rotten as ya’ seem - but y’all watch yourselves, some folks just ain't no good and need to be put down like chicken killin' dogs." He smiled that Jack-O-Lantern, rot-toothed smile of his, then unwrapped the first orange and brown roll. We stood in wonder as his lips smacked and he chewed it slow and thorough-like, we nearly peed our pants blue when he said, "These here are good 'n fresh." He ate the whole bag full, washed them down with the bottom swig of JD, and passed right out again. We got endless laughs out of this most supreme prank and found it hard to top. But one day it would be topped, and topped good. Hence the rubber snake.
It was a gritty Jue-ly day and Uncle Jeb's much pitied, but virtuous wife, our dear Auntie Oral was hauling an armload of her prize-winning canned peaches down to the storm cellar. As she yanked open the door, a big black Cottonmouth fell like a limb at her feet. We heard the scream and the crash of the Mason jars in the house and we ran out to the yard to find a winded and panic-stricken Auntie Oral. Uncle Jeb had his rifle loaded before she even finished her story. I noticed that Uncle Jeb's hands were shaking and I wasn’t sure if it was the D.T.'s or could be he had a fear of snakes? I gradually backed away from the comforting circle around Auntie Oral and followed Uncle Jeb back to the storm cellar to see what was going to be. That snake was long gone and had probably headed for the creek as soon as it hit the ground. Uncle Jeb looked in the direction of the creek, set the rifle down, ripped his flask from his overall's pocket and took a long gulp. "Goddam’ snakes, Lord you know they goddam’ scare me to death," he muttered to no one in particular. He shot a few rounds into the trees, stomped back to the house and yelled through the open kitchen window, "I got it good Oral, no need to fret. That Moccasin won’t be botherin’ ya’ no more, yep I got it." But I knew he got nothin'. The only thing that ol’ stink bait ever got was drunk.
A week or so later on a trip in to town I saw this black rubber snake with a cherry red mouth and tongue, in Kmart. I snuck out ahead of the rest of the family, bought the snake, and hid it under the car seat. I didn't say one word, and poker-faced it all the way home. The next day while Auntie Oral was at her church meeting, I tiptoed past a head-bobbing Uncle Jeb in the porch swing. I timed my footsteps with each exhaled snore, I knew the screen door squeaked like a vulture so I opened it in slow motion, then I padded up the stairs in stocking feet and skipped over the four stairs that I knew creaked. I got to the bathroom, opened the lid and coiled that black rubber snake in the bowl; I propped it up just right so the head and its thin red tongue would graze ass cheeks upon lowering. I knew Uncle Jeb would take his clockwork dump that always skanked up the whole house, as soon as he woke up, and for once I couldn't wait.
Without a word, I gathered up all my cousins, brothers and sisters, and we hid in the bedroom down the hall from the bathroom. From there we had a bird’s eye view of the toilet and Uncle Jeb never closed the door. We huddled at the crack in the bedroom door and waited with hilarious anticipation until we heard Uncle Jeb stir. Listening as he dragged his feet across the front hall and up the steps made us tremble with choked-back laughter. We watched as he unbuckled his baggy, yellow-stitched Dickies before he reached the bathroom, and as his pee stained skivvies fell to his ankles, he pulled up the lid, and without looking, sat down so hard we could feel the vibrations in the floor all the way down the hall.
The next scene always plays like a stop time movie in my head, and I’ve seen it a thousand times by now; Uncle Jeb let out a thunderous explosion of gas and that fart must've had so much air behind it that it moved that rubber snakes head just enough to make Uncle Jeb notice. He jumped up off that seat faster than we thought he could ever move, and stumbled back with a half-turd dangling from his ass. It was both shocking and funny to see him stumbling around with his pants around his feet, and to see that turd hit the floor with a thud, but our laughter stopped when he let out a noise that I'd never heard the likes of before, and have never heard the likes of since. With an unearthly, demonic squeal he reeled back, spun around, and fell head first into the toilet bowl. We heard a loud crack and figured he broke the bowl with that hard ugly head of his, but that crack must've been Uncle Jeb's skull, because as it turned out later the toilet bowl was unharmed - Uncle Jeb sure wasn’t. We all looked at each other with mouths hung wide and still couldn't believe what we’d just seen. We slowly opened the door and baby-stepped down the hall in a clump, like cows in a windstorm, and the rest of the kids raced down the stairs and out the front door.
I stopped at the top of the stairs and slowly turned toward the bathroom. All I saw was a small puddle of maroon blood and the blur of dark blue overalls as I reached sideways into the bowl to grab that black rubber snake and yank it out from under Uncle Jeb's anvil of a head. I ran out to the woods and buried it, and to this day I remembered the spot, I dug it up just this morning so I could bring it to show and tell.
The coroner said that Uncle Jed died of a massive heart attack, which a lot of people do - like Elvis - when they're taking a dukey. But I knew the truth and I felt pretty proud about it - like I'd slayed a big horrible dragon. I never told any of the other kids, but they must've known somehow that we weren't just hiding in Auntie Oral’s bedroom to watch Uncle Jeb's daily ritual. I read up on the statute of limitations and all, and decided to wait seven years until I set things straight. They say the truth will set you free, but I was set free, along with the rest of us, on that day in Jue-ly when I killed my Uncle Jeb, not really on purpose, but even if it wasn't that way, I'd do it all over again ‘cause well…some folks just ain't no good.
More in store, come back for new stories soon...
All content (c) Marissa Dodge. All rights reserved