The Shell Collector by Anthony Doerr
Unfortunately for her, Mrs. Drown never stopped believing that the gossip lived just one breath beyond earshot. She shouted at us when we strolled past the bungalow on our way into the hills. Stop blabbing, she’d yell from a window. Rumormongers! She moved into Griselda’s room, slept in Griselda’s bed. Her skin went sallow, yellow. She didn’t go out, even for the mail. Dust mounded up. The yard went brown. The gutters clogged with mulch. The house looked as if it were about to sink into the earth.
All this time Griselda sent letters home. Rosemary found them in the mail, one every month, lying between bills, envelopes addressed with tiny printing beneath a wild series of stamps and postmarks. The letters were short, misspelled things:
Dear Mom and Sis—this city we’re in has an acre reserved for dead people. They are kept in tall stacks of things like white cupboards with drawers inside. There are grass aisles to walk between. It is lovely. Our show is going well. The riots are on the other side of the island. Like you, we hardly know they are there.
They never explained, never betrayed a guilty twitch or regretful pause. Rosemary sat on her bed mouthing the names on the stamps and postmarks: Molokai, Belo Horizonte, Kinabalu, Damascus, Samara, Florence. They were names from anywhere and everywhere, each envelope stamped with some euphony like Sicilia, Mazatlán, Nairobi, Fiji or Malta, names that invoked for her imagination the great unknown tracts of land and ocean that lay beyond Boise. She would sit on her bed, holding a letter for hours, imagining the hands that had moved it along its path, all the hands between her sister and Boise, between herself and the cloud-pink alpen-glow of Nepal, the millennial gardens of Kyoto, the black tide of the Caspian Sea. There was a world glimmering beyond Boise Linen, Shaver’s Supermarket, outside the cracked and sinking bungalow in the North End. It was another world altogether. Here was the proof. Her sister was out in it.
Rosemary never showed the letters to her mother. She decided it was best for her mother if Griselda was gone permanently, gone for good.
Life for Rosemary yawned around the letters, her mother and work: dull, heavy-footed, tasteless. At Boise Linen she supervised dyed cloth as it rolled onto bobbins, back stinging daylong, sitting behind safety goggles and listening to the grind and groan of spooling machines. She gained weight; her feet wore down the soles of shoes. She took meticulous grocery lists to Shaver’s, balanced her checkbook with a nubbed pencil, fed soup to her crumbling mother. She did not bother to clean the house or buy makeup. The curtains went gray; Twinkie wrappers sprouted from couch cushions; ants roved in the metal mouths of soda cans stuck to windowsills.
Eventually she gave her virginity and ring finger to Duck Winters, the timid and overweight butcher at Shaver’s who smelled permanently of ground beef. He moved into the sinking bungalow. He helped in a sheepish kind of way, tinkering around the yard, beer can in one hand, flushing out the lopsided gutters, replacing the screen door and the cracked sections of the front walk. He tolerated Mrs. Drown—her inane mutterings about gossipmongers, her insistence on sleeping in Griselda’s room and forgetting to flush the toilet—by keeping himself half-drunk on watery beer. He was sincere and big and fell asleep while Rosemary did the Find-A-Word beside him. Occasionally they grappled together at awkward sex. It never took.
And still the letters from Griselda came, each month, missives from all over the world, mishandled prose tucked inside envelopes stamped with heart-pulling names, Katmandu, Auckland, Reykjavík.
Ten years after Griselda ran off with the metal eater, Duck Winters found his mother-in-law dead in the bathroom. Natural causes. Rosemary sprinkled her mother’s ashes in the backyard. It was raining and the ashes clumped together undramatically; what was left of Mrs. Drown pooled on the leaves of the pachysandra or ran in mucky trickles under the fence into the neighbor’s yard.
When he came home from Shaver’s that evening, Duck drudged into the bedroom and found Rosemary splayed on the bed, her thick legs stuck out straight, tears shining on her checks, a tidily tied bundle of envelopes on her knee, a ragged stuffed panda in her lap. Duck lay down beside her and put a hand on her neck. Rosemary looked at him from tear-rimmed eyes. You should know, she blubbered, my sister has been sending letters all this time. I didn’t want Mom to find out. I know, whispered Duck. She’s been everywhere, all over the world. All these places with the same man. Duck pulled her to him, held her head against his belly and rocked her. She told Duck the story—Griselda’s story— while he shushed her and kissed the teardrops sliding over her cheeks. I know, he whispered. Everyone knows.
Rosemary sobbed, buried herself into him. They held on, Duck kissing the top of her head, the smell of her hair in his nose. They began to move together in a salty, careful sweetness, moving patiently and tenderly. He kissed her all over. After, Rosemary lay in Duck’s big arms and whispered, Those are my sister’s stories. Those are for her. We have our own stories now. Right, Duck? He said nothing. He might have been asleep.
In the morning Duck woke late and when he came into the kitchen Rosemary was burning the last envelope from her carefully preserved bundle. Together they watched it burn black and then flake apart in the sink. Duck took her by the wrist and walked her out under a gleaming sky, the trees and grass greened from rain the day before. They climbed past the neighborhood into a nameless gulch, huffing and wheezing through the sagebrush in their weight-tortured Reeboks, wading through prairie star, peppergrass, sunflower, the gossamery spores of plants kicked free and floating. They stopped on a high ridge, panting, the town stretched out below them, the capitol dome, the arbor-lined streets, the slim neighborhoods of the North End in rows and, far off, the glittering Owyhee Mountains. Duck took off his flannel shirt, laid it down over the wildflowers, and they made love, among the moaning crickets, the drifting schools of spores, under the sky, in the foothills above the town of Boise.
From then on they lived with a measure of contentment, learning each other finally, imperceptibly. Duck whitewashed the bungalow; Rosemary planted a backyard stone for her mother. They shined up the doors and windows, carted out boxes and bags of old clothes, volleyball trophies, high school notebooks. They tried diets; we’d even see them out walking, hand-holding in a lazy lap around Camel’s Back Park. Griselda’s monthly letters went into the kitchen trash without so much as a glance at the postmark.
Then, one day, years later, the ad appeared. It was in the funnies section of the Sunday Idaho Statesman, an ad for the Metal Eater’s World Tour, a kind of cultish extravaganza, selling out all over the globe, coming to the gym at Boise High in January. It was extravagant, a full newspaper page, featuring ludicrous fonts dripping into one another, a barely dressed cartoon girl proclaiming outrageous things, that the metal eater never consumed the same thing twice, that he had eaten a Ford Ranger just two weeks before at his tour stop in Philadelphia.
Rosemary, Duck said over bran cereal and doughnuts, you’re not going to believe this.
Everybody wanted tickets. We wouldn’t miss it. It sold out in four hours, the telephones blitzed over at the high school, people clamoring for a bigger venue. But Rosemary wouldn’t go. She wouldn’t hear of it, wouldn’t dream of it. Twenty-five dollars a person, she moaned. You’ve got to be kidding me. Can’t we move on, Duck? Can’t we forget? A letter from Griselda arrived a week later, a Tampa postmark. Rosemary shredded it and dropped the pieces into the trash.
On the afternoon before the metal eater was to appear in the gym, the management at Shaver’s declared that the supermarket would close its doors on the last of the month. It had been losing money for years, they said. Everyone shopped at the Albertson’s on State. They would be letting people go immediately.
Duck slogged out to the loading dock in his bloodied apron and sat on a milk crate. It was snowing. Clumps of flakes were melting in the alley. The produce manager tapped Duck on the back and held up a case of beer. They drank and talked a little about where they could find work. They peed in the snow. The produce manager got a call from his wife
My wife, mumbled Duck. She wouldn’t let me go. She says it’s a waste of money. Duck, groaned the produce manager, we just lost our jobs! You think we don’t deserve a night to ourselves? Duck shrugged. Look, the produce manager said, tonight this guy is going to eat metal. I heard he might eat a snowmobile.
Besides, he went on, Griselda Drown might be there.
Someone had built a stage in the high school gym, blocked it off with a maroon curtain and surrounded it with fold-up chairs. Twenty-five dollars a head and the place was packed. A half hour late, the curtain groaned upwards and there was the metal eater, seated behind a table. He was little, a well-kept fifty-something in a black suit, white shirt, black necktie. He sat at the table, prim, a halo of gray hair beneath a pink shiny head like a half egg. His eyes were gray, drawn back and too big. He sat complacently, wrists crossed in his lap. Behind him, a sequined blue curtain shifted briefly, then hung still.
We waited, shuffled our snow boots at this plain spectacle, this unimpressive man seated before a bare table in the plain glow of gymnasium lights. We whispered, shifted, sweated. Upon us sat the great steam of a congregated people in parkas.
The snow fell outside, onto minivans and wagons in the school lot, and the air had taken on the smell of slush and impatience. A baby began to howl. The rubber-capped legs of the fold-up chairs creaked on the hardwood. Snow boots squeaked on the three-point line.
We studied our handbills, the drastic fonts, letters bleeding and spilling into one another, claiming impossible and remarkable things: See the Metal Eater who eats scrapped tin, an entire outboard motor, never the same act twice. It was difficult to believe that the little man at the table was going to do anything. Duck came in with the produce manager and found seats near the back, their big thighs sagging over the edges of their chairs.
Then the sequined back curtain floated aside and out came a woman who could only have been Griselda Drown. She was all thighs and calves in a shiny slit-legged dress, heels ridiculously high, tapering down to minuscule points—how did she walk on those shoes, how could she even stand in them?—those long calves scissoring and her dress sparkling madly. A few men whistled. She moved like a giraffe, tall but appropriately graceful, unimpeded by her body. Her hair was yarded back in rows like someone had clamped it in a vise, eyes like whirlpools, long-fingered hands wheeling a cart over the uneven boards of the stage toward the table where the little man sat.
She dwarfed the metal eater, her breasts strapped into that glittering dress, the line between them soft and dark. She took a white napkin from her cart, held it above the metal eater’s bald and shining head, snapped it, lowered it, and knotted it behind his neck. In turn she took a butter knife, a fork, and a tin plate from her cart, dinging the knife and fork—to prove they were made of metal—and then dinging them against the plate—that’s metal, too. She laid them down, setting the table. Fork, knife, plate.
The metal eater sat, implacable, in front of his table setting. Griselda turned, a flourish of sparkle, and rolled her cart back the way she came. Her thighs flashed under the slit gown, long and thick and suntanned. Her cart rattled, stopped. She disappeared behind the sequined back curtain. The metal eater sat alone at the table under the raw light of humming gym bulbs.
What would he eat? Was Griselda going to wheel out some awful metal repast, a chainsaw or an office chair? The papers claimed that the metal eater had eaten a lawnmower, swallowed down the wing of a Cessna. How could something like that be possible? What would she put on his plate? A nail? A razor blade? A measly thumbtack? We had not paid twenty-five bucks to sit hip to hip and watch a tiny man swallow a thumbtack. The produce manager announced he would ask for his money back if they didn’t bring back Duck’s sister-in-law in the next ten minutes.
The metal eater sat smugly, napkin around his neck. He took the knife and fork in his little pink fists. He held them against the table, upright, ends down, like a petulant child awaiting supper. Then, with a certainty and casualness that was almost appalling, he took the knife and slid it down his throat and closed his mouth behind it. He sat, natty, unruffled, staring at the crowd, some of whom missed the feat entirely and were only now swinging their heads around as brothers or uncles tugged their sleeves. The metal eater had a fraction of a smile on his lips. His Adam’s apple was the only part of him that moved. It jerked freakishly up and down and side to side, like a muscled and angry monkey chained by one ankle.
He followed the knife with the fork, nudging it down. While he swallowed the fork, he folded the plate into quarters, his throat straining wildly, his shoulders perfectly still, and put that into his mouth, and poked it down with one finger. His Adam’s apple jerked, seized, thrashed. After a half minute or so, it slowed, then restored itself to its original, sedated state. The little metal eater unknotted the napkin, dabbed at the corners of his mouth, stood up from the table, and bowed. He tossed the napkin into the first rows of the crowd.
Applause started slowly, just the produce manager and some others in the back bringing their hands together, and then others joined in, and it mounted and soon we were beside ourselves, hooting and hollering and pounding the floor with our boot heels. How about that? the produce manager was shouting. How about that?
When the ovation began to subside, three large men in utility belts hustled out, lifted the table and hefted it offstage. The applause faded. The great overhead dome lights in the gym went out, one by one, ticking as they cooled in the growing silence. Over the doors, red exit signs cast the only light.
Finally one blue spotlight switched on, a single shaft of light falling from the ceiling to illuminate the center of the stage where a tall figure had appeared in a suit of plated armor, complete with visored helmet, an ostrich plume canting off the peak. Another spotlight came on, yellow, and shone on the metal eater, stationed like a tiny well-dressed peasant beside the armored figure. He held a stool, which he set down and squatted on, facing the crowd. He withdrew a ball-peen hammer from his suit pocket and twirled it in his palm. Then he removed the shin legging from one foot of the armored figure and folded it and banged it flat against the floor of the stage. He folded it again and banged it flat again. Then he pushed it down his throat, swallowing contentedly on his stool, his Adam’s apple flailing madly. Beneath the removed armor, in the ray of blue, we could see one long calf, a bare foot.
It took the metal eater less than a minute to swallow down the legging. He promptly moved to the other. How about that, whispered the produce manager. Is that for real? He was shaking Duck’s shoulder. The crowd began to get into it, clapping as the metal eater removed each subsequent piece of armor, the thigh pieces next, and when it was clear that the thick, suntanned legs belonged to Griselda, we stood and pounded the floor and chanted and cheered and everyone was grinning and enjoying the show. The metal eater swallowed on, his frenetic Adam’s apple riveting each swallow home.
Within twenty minutes the metal eater had done most of his work. He was standing beside the stool and tenderly sliding off the second gauntlet. All that remained to eat were the helmet and massive chest piece. Griselda held her arms out from her body, palms to the sky, had in fact held them there during the entire spectacle. We stomped the floor to match the rhythm of the metal eater’s swallowing.
When he had choked down the last gauntlet, the metal eater slid his stool behind Griselda and climbed onto it. The boots pounded the floor. The metal eater brought his arms above both his head and hers and gently tugged the ostrich plume free, letting it float to the stage in front of them. Then, with a flourish of wrists and fingers, he removed her helmet. Her hair, orange and long, slipped free, and we were rapturous, screaming and cheering and whistling. The metal eater climbed off his stool, took the helmet and flattened it under one dazzling wing tip. He folded it and banged it flat again. Then he lit into it with his teeth. It took him over two minutes to eat it and we were
The metal eater climbed back on the stool, stretched as widely as he could and ran his hands along both of Griselda’s arms, over her biceps and onto her shoulders and under the chestpiece. He dislodged it, held it in front of her for an unbearably long moment, and finally raised it high over their heads into the trembling blue spotlight, and we beheld Griselda, her broad and flat belly, her navel, her breasts and her outstretched arms—a masterpiece of a woman, a marble column fixed in a blade of light, a golden-blue monument. Amid salvos of ovations, the metal eater folded and flattened the final piece until he could fit his mouth around it. He gulped it down. The big men in utility belts appeared and wrapped Griselda in a red kimono and carried her offstage.
In the aftermath—the pandemonium subsided, bows demanded and demanded again, the gymnasium lights burning once more at full, lacerating power, the men in utility belts already dismantling the stage—Duck sat shaken and sweat-damped. He gathered himself into his big puffy coat, stood, and tottered into the headlight-swept parking lot, shuffling through the new snow, over the slushy curbs.
Rumbling at the back of the parking lot was an eighteen-wheeler, its wipers sliding slowly over the windshield, running lights glowing yellow across the top of the cab and down the lines of the trailer. From bumper to bumper the truck was painted an extravagant green, the metal eater’s logo laid lustily across it and before Duck knew what he was doing he walked past his car, to the end of the lot, and rapped on the window of the cab.