ONECENTER

She knows now that Hake Corse lives at the bottom of a long hill in Eureka, California. That when he laces his shoes, his fingernails scrape the canvas to make a sound like someone buried alive trying to get out. And he screams when he’s putting one over on you. His fists rise to keep the howls back in his jaw after telling every woman she is the second prettiest he’s seen.

He will say right up front he’s an atheist, that there are people who share the same fingerprints and none of us are special. The same goes for snowflakes, so don’t fool yourself.

Magic is his love because it resists him, but he can pull pennies easy out of ears like hers. As if he makes them from the copper in her blood, in which case they would
have always come from her first and she never really asked for pennies.

Hake clues her in on other natural phenomena, that deer eat all sorts of things as he can only grow leafless stalks of marijuana on the hillsides. He eats the deer right back. She doesn’t know if they get high, Hake or the deer, if there are high deer running around all the time, if they do it on purpose. But she knows where Hake keeps the venison, and that if you think about it, you can only make venison out of deer but not deer out of venison even if it’s fresh dead because the language only works one way forward.

Hake shoots the deer with one of the three guns he owns. The other two are for neighbors that want to rape his mother who combs out her shiny red hair at seven thirty post meridian before bedding down like a good little girl to play secretary almost every next morning. And Mama Ardiss Corse let the last name linger after the divorce from Toader. And Toader, Hake’s father, also lingers, staying where the name is, the name a call for like to like, and Ardiss is probably more Corse than anything else now.

Not about the divorce, but about other things, Hake rubs his eyes a lot. He wrists the sockets with the ends of his palms. Corses always connect hard with themselves, as Hake illustrates for her, that grandfather Corse used to beat grandmother Corse. Then the old woman passed on first and never got to be a widow.

So one day when Hake tells her that his grandfather died she says “good.”

And Hake says she’s too hard on people, and she says they are hard on her first.

He says tell him what that means. she never talks about herself.

Well, it’s rude to talk about “one’s self.”

He tells her if that’s the case so be it but she has one more person she has to meet and not talk about herself with, his boxer friend Vi Neznik, the featherweight who stuffs himself with sawdust and cotton. Besides, he’s shown her around everywhere else, and they’ve all gotten used to the idea.

But she never shows Hake around, and forgets who her own family is, and where she sleeps at night. This is especially true after she meets Vi, who whispers in her ear when Hake’s not looking that Now that he’s met her, he decides he isn’t Friends with Hake anymore.

Vi never shows her around anywhere but sneaks her in through back doors. They hide and he looks at her with eyes that are bad but pretty, because so many pretty eyes cannot see very well and are useful only for other people to enjoy. He speaks to her in Romanian through punched enormous lips then says in English how what he said was dirty.

She doesn’t know for sure but still likes the idea.

She never wants to know but rather guess it for herself.

In plain English he also says Come on, beautiful, come on, come on.

But when he says come on like this she also sees him swinging giant kettle bells from each hand in a front yard as she comes home to a luncheon of wood shavings and gauze, pipettes full of grapefruit juice. She leaves his hot water bottle out too long after her own aches, and he makes a point by putting it to his lips and blowing, red rubber expanding to pink until it explodes. And she says Damn it, I can’t keep anything around you and he says You can keep tidy.

She didn’t know until she said to Vi and Hake that she’d be moving on soon, that she would, even before they do.

Or as a farewell that Hake would show her the trick he knows, the one he never explained before, the one with the penny, or that when he flipped the coin between his fingers in such a way she’d watch two scabbed warts on the back of his hand instead because somehow she already knew about the trick. But she said she wished he hadn’t shown her, and he said it was kind of him to fool her that long, to let her think there was something magical there that wasn’t, and what a burden it is to know something like that all alone. After all, he had to learn by himself first, pulling pennies out of his own ears in front of a mirror.

And she thanked him for knowing this by himself.

He said she’s Welcome and now she can pull it on others.

And this is what she does now, only showing everyone the trick before she does it and how the penny is always there behind a knuckle. The talent is distraction. She says this outright.

But again, everyone insists, Again.

And all right then, she starts.

Here is the penny.