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A b r a m s - M o r l e y
HERITAGE TRAILS
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P Service: Dateline: Milan, Ohio
A break-in during cherry festival last week at the birthplace of Thomas Alva Edison left the sleepy town of Milan, Ohio perplexed. “Nothing appears to have been stolen,” George Conklin, chief of detectives said yesterday. “In fact, we seem to be dealing with some kind of vigilante maid service.” According to docents familiar with the historic site, papers placed on Edison’s desk had been straightened, and one mirror appears to have been wiped clean of fingerprints and dust.
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I’d been working the bar at Coltrane’s, in Ft. Myers, Florida for maybe two months before Alva and I talked. Alva was Coltrane’s, had been working there since the place opened, and no one—not the bartenders, not the big, slow-witted busboys, not even the owner, Mr. Harvey Synell himself with all his money, ever messed with Alva. I was the new girl at Coltrane’s. I’d come down from Jersey for my grandfather’s stupid-ass wedding and couldn’t figure a reason to go back—Mom gone, my brothers all married and cheating, just like every guy I’d been involved with. I got sick of angry, big-haired wives coming by whatever CVS I worked in that week and getting me fired. I think I could have put up with the guys with the bad toupees and the smoker’s breath sliding their rings in their pockets before asking me out for coffee, but after Mom died, I couldn’t take the way there was never a woman to cry to. New Jersey’s a small state if you’re past thirty-five and you find yourself in bed with other people’s husbands. The manager at Coltrane’s didn’t ask for references, only if I was strong enough to carry trays of drinks without
The Silent Body Melody by Orna Ben-Shoshan © 2009 spilling. I said sure I was. I have never been afraid to work up a sweat, I said. But I was thinking, just don’t ask me to deal with people or vermin. “Well, will you look at the tail on that one?” Alva said to me the night a rat moved right out from behind the twelveburner stove in Coltrane’s kitchen. I glanced at what looked to me like a line of thick electrical cord, bundled and
bound with gray electrician’s tape circled tight around and around until it came to one nasty little point what looked like yards from that nasty rat’s ass. That was my view from my vantage point up on a counter. I didn’t have a clue how I got up that high, one leap; the only time in my life I ever vaulted anything. “Jesus. You scared of a little fourlegged creature of God that I could smash with a broom handle?” Alva
