Glad News Of The Natural World

Chapter One: Graveyard of the Atlantic I am distinguished by my penmanship. By the hang and hue of my suit coat. The sophistication of my haircut. The silken luster of my tie. Instead of cumin or clove, bright-leaf tobacco, essence of jasmine car freshener, I smell judiciously of Kiehl's cucumber talc, Italian shoe leather, pilfered motel soap.My colleagues slouch against the railing that corrals us while I stand apart with my Lucite sign held level at sternum height. They grouse and carp in Pushtu and Slovak, Arabic, Mandarin, Hebrew, Yoruba. They've made their signs with pen and pencil on whatever has come to hand. With a grease marker, I've written "Shapiro" in, effectively, Baskerville.She's due from Paris in the company of a Pomeranian, Mrs. Gloria Shapiro of York at Eighty-ninth. And though I've tried to imagine the woman as some manner of savory heiress, a handsome creature in her middle years with a haberdashery fortune and an appetite for slim discriminating gentlemen like me, there is a practical limit to my baseless optimism. Mrs. Gloria Shapiro is flying, after all, into Newark with her dog instead of into Kennedy with retainers. I spot her coming out of customs long before she has noticed me.She is bone thin, knobby, a haute couture refugee who'd rather be dead than lack the upper-arm tone to go sleeveless. She has conscripted a hapless skycap into Pomeranian duty, a lanky black kid in an oversize hat with his trouser cuffs dragging the floor, who dangles the dog before him at arm's length. The creature is rheumy-eyed and grizzled, with nails like talons and amber teeth. He looks conspicuously unhappy and nearly old enough to vote.Mrs. Gloria Shapiro spies her name on my square of milky Lucite. She snaps her fingers at me and says by way of greeting, "You."As I take her dog, the skycap favors me with information. "He bites," he says and shows me a punctured finger. "Leaks some too."I hold the dog beneath his forelegs, and every time he squirms and growls, he looses a freshet of urine onto the grimy terminal floor, onto the sidewalk, generously onto each of the three arrival lanes, onto the cement rental-bus island, onto the short-term parking lot, onto the leather upholstery of my Crown Victoria passenger seat. I've been told his name is Ashton and he'll reliably spew kibble if not permitted to be an irrigating menace in the front.Even on the short trip back to the terminal to collect Mrs. Gloria Shapiro's luggage, Ashton snarls and snaps and urinates with such animosity as to prompt me to wonder what life might be like with arms that end at the elbows.Mrs. Gloria Shapiro has been led, she informs me, to expect a limousine. I don't have a limousine. I don't even have a Town Car. I have the Crown Victoria I'm driving, and it's not even black but more the shade of grayish brown you might find in a septic system. I apologize to Mrs. Gloria Shapiro and tell her the limo is in the shop."Where are you from?" she asks me. It comes out in the form of an accusation."North Carolina," I say which, for Mrs. Gloria Shapiro's purposes, might as well be Alpha Centauri. I stand revealed as the cracker import she's condemned to depend upon to haul her clear from greater New Jersey to York at Eighty-ninth which, for all she knows, I might attempt by way of Philadelphia. And, worse still, not in a limousine but in a sludge-brown Ford.She presses her lips together and grimaces. Mrs. Gloria Shapiro snorts with articulate force enough to insinuate the bitter anguish of disembarking from Premier Class into the care of the likes of me. I take occasion to picture Ashton winging westward in the cockpit, showing his grim teeth to the flight crew while moistening the controls.We are hardly out of the airport proper before Mrs. Gloria Shapiro is abusing me over her cell phone to some Upper East Side friend. Her name is Enid, and she and Mrs. Gloria Shapiro forgo the splenPearson, T. R. is the author of 'Glad News Of The Natural World', published 2005 under ISBN 9780743264631 and ISBN 0743264630.