The Man with Eight Pairs of Legs

INTRODUCTION

Smack in the middle of our chic contemporary postmodern fog, Leslie Kirk Campbell commits the greatest sin possible: she refuses to place intellect over emotion. In doing so she seeks depth instead of dazzle, sentiment in place of cynicism. Without sacrificing the intelligence and writerly skills it takes to do justice to her compelling material, time and again Campbell leads us out of the murk of mere innovation—the fetish of the new—and into the light of true feeling. As a result, these stories owned me, body and soul. This is the sort of fiction I look for to take me into the long night.

I read The Man with Eight Pairs of Legs anonymously. I had no biographical details. Despite this, as I read, it became clear to me that the author was a woman, one with a mature voice and vision. There is an admirable authorial patience, allowing her stories as well as her characters to layer, or unfold—depending on the need of each story. This gives the work the complexities of actual human beings, caught as we all are in temperament and time. In fact, time itself could be a character in these stories, as the past (or the life unlived, or an impossible future) stalks her people just as such ghosts stalk us, out here in the nonfictional world.

Campbell’s people feel genuine throughout this debut collection. Their situations (even when fraught) engage, frustrate, and amuse. Their predicaments just seem to arrive, as a natural part of lived life. Her stories often feature tough topics, yes, but they are authentic, organically introduced, and full of surprise. If, for example, you’d told me I’d be reading a story that includes Heidegger, homelessness, drug addiction, and a middle-aged man living quietly in a residential neighborhood with his wife and child, and that I would be smiling at every turn, I’d have been doubtful at the very least. If you told me that, despite the heaviness of topics, I would be underlining and starring bright bits of language to savor later, I would have thought, Highly unlikely. But then, I had yet to read Nightlight. I had yet to read any of the stories in this book, which out of a growing feeling of intimacy and affection I have come to nickname Eight Legs.

The fiction I love is not written to educate. I prefer to travel along with the characters, like cherished companions. If I learn, discover, or ponder ideas I might not have encountered prior to reading an author—great. But these eight short stories were earned, in a way that only comes over time. It is character, language, and feeling that count in Campbell’s work. I wouldn’t want it any other way.

ALICE SEBOLD, The Lovely Bones

Judge, Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction

June 2020

THE MAN WITH EIGHT PAIRS OF LEGS

Cañon City was not a city. It was a small, gossiping, high-security town in Colorado’s high desert, bordered to the west by the Sawatch Range. A home-rule municipality boasting thirteen prisons and fifty churches, its ten thousand people—one-fifth of them locked up—governed themselves as they saw fit and thrived on the stories, true or false, they told themselves.

Everyone in Cañon knew that thirty-four-year-old Harriet Rogers, the reclusive, six-foot-tall history teacher at Coolidge High, was not a drinker. Nor did she hang out in bars. But on this clear, wintry night, heading down Main Street toward the interstate, her Buick, like a stubborn horse, bucked and halted in front of Lola’s Saloon of its own accord. Or at least that’s how the town later came to explain it.

Harriet worked her lanky frame into a dark back booth and shrugged off her winter coat. The ceaseless swill of pandering speeches at the Christmas faculty dinner had driven her to near madness, her nerve endings lighting up randomly like rollovers, spinners, and kickers in pinball machines just below the skin. She had fled the cavernous gym, inadvertently releasing two green helium balloons into the night. She could still taste the sugary punch.

Anything that burns, she called out to the bartender as she pulled a stack of midterms from her satchel. But the bartender, a middle-aged man coiffed in a slick, pink toupee, couldn’t hear her over the half dozen regulars jostling at his trough—prison guards, farmers, and merchants—each one attempting to one-up the other with accounts of Cañon’s breaking news. A rabid sheepdog up and chased down Litton’s prize Appaloosa! You heard Old Dumbarton’s cow got its head stuck in the homestead fence? Bet she was gunning for greener pastures …

Get a load of this one, someone said. Harriet looked up to see an unfamiliar man in a motorcycle jacket position himself at the bar. Giant fireball came out of nowhere, he said, taking off his jacket and mimicking the thrust of the thing with his arm. Pure methane.

The locals fell silent. The bartender set down the collins glass he’d been wiping with a towel.

Happened over at Buckhorn Mine in Gunnison a few years back, the young man said. I saw the whole thing. Sucked out the oxygen so fast, sixteen men died in an instant before it exploded at a boy’s feet.

Harriet leaned in. Fatalities soothed her the way frightening fairy tales soothe children because it’s not happening to them. She lit a cigarette, deeply inhaling the pleasure, then exhaled uneasily when the young man noticed her from across the bar and headed to her table. He wasn’t a big man, but he walked like one.

Callahan, he said, by way of introduction. His dark hair was greased, rolled back from his brow like a scroll. Harriet felt the heat on her legs from the clicking wall radiator beneath her table. Like a fool, she relit her lit cigarette. He slid the stack of exams to the side and bought her two shots of exactly what she’d ached for. She must have winced.

I take it you’re not a regular, he said, joining her in the booth. Me neither.

She glanced at him, then, from behind the curtain of her hair, surprised by the genuine tenderness in his voice. He was younger than her, and shorter, his broad shoulders pushing against blue flannel. It was the nineties, not the seventies, but he punched in John Denver, Rocky Mountain High, and led her to the small, straw-strewn square beneath sagging Christmas lights, where, even hunched, she towered over him, his head resting against her mannish chest. After last call, she expected him to vanish, but he followed her on his motorcycle, eerie in her taillights, past the soaring pylons of Royal Gorge Bridge—its multistrand cables edged with snow—and out into the prairie.

No man had kissed Harriet since a male colleague at Coolidge cornered her in the locker room five years before. But Callahan did. He craned his neck and they kissed in the narrow hallway in front of Grandma Lily’s crucifixes, and sepia portraits of Lily’s mother and sisters, buttoned-up and bodiced like Gold Rush pioneers. Callahan laid her down on her bed and undressed her—first her coat, then her wrinkle-free pantsuit jacket and blouse, carefully lifting out her arms. With a single finger he traced her collarbones, along the borders of her no-nonsense bra before unbuttoning her slacks. His chapped hands, warm on her skin, held the ravages of winter. The sensation alarmed her—her body, the nicked mannequin she washed, dressed, put to bed, and sometimes forgot to feed, suddenly surging with blood. In the quiet of her grandmother’s farmhouse, she could hear it, like creeks beneath the snow, a muted rushing sound.

Callahan, half naked, smelled like tree bark after rain. Harriet breathed him in as he molded her hips and legs with his hands, granting her a shapeliness she knew for a fact she didn’t have. In her groin, a small muscle beat like a baby bird. With his fingers he entered her, a wet hollowing, as if he craved what she held there. She should have warned him: there was nothing. Yet suddenly there it was—an excruciating pleasure, a pleasure he knew just how to sustain.

Callahan moaned, or perhaps it had been she who had moaned, as she shimmied his jeans and boxers over his hips and broad upper thighs. She was about to tug them further, when they instead slid to the floor of their own accord and pooled around the ankles of his cowboy boots. She cried out—she didn’t mean to, but Callahan had no legs. Black plastic cups screwed into what looked like majorette batons. She closed the curtains without thinking—no houses for miles in any direction.

Keeping his eyes on her, he pulled off the snug socket that attached to his left thigh. A tiny sucking sound escaped as the seal broke and released the stump, swaddled in its nylon sock. She grabbed a sweatshirt off a hook. He did the same thing with his right, then grimaced as he slowly rolled off each sock, exposing what remained of his thighs, drawn in at the stub, the stumps round and smooth as peeled potatoes. She could barely look at him as he swiveled his torso farther back onto her bed, leaving his metal legs crosshatched on the floor, boots still attached.

I was sixteen, he said.

That was you? But she could see the anguish now in his eyes, behind the gentleness, darker than the collapsed mine itself, too painful to look at.

The diamond-bit drill that could have saved my legs came too late.

From her seat in the booth at the bar, Harriet had heard the gruesome details. Hours after the explosion, rescuers had found the wounded boy bleeding in the tunnel, both his legs mangled, one foot tossed off to the side still in its boot. She had pitied the dutiful kid shearing coal so he could buy a fishing pole or, perhaps, a bracelet for his sweetheart, upset that he had not been in school, certain he was dead.

Why didn’t you say something? she asked, confounded by dueling images: the thrilling raconteur at the bar who’d just seduced her and this contrite, disabled man. She had never known an amputee, had certainly never seen one without clothes.

I wouldn’t be here with you now, he said. He pulled Lily’s quilt over his thighs.

You don’t have to do that, she said. You really don’t. But she was careful not to touch him when she joined him on her bed. Neither spoke. Like a pantomime, they navigated their bodies into the sheets. Lying down, it was the dull weight of her own long-limbed body she felt pressing down like stone into the mattress.

The summer before fourth grade, Harriet had shot up like prairie grass. For years, she became the butt of every child’s joke. Is it cold up there? they would ask. In high school, her classmates ridiculed her—the girls as much as the boys—for her awkward walk, for being flatter than a baking sheet. She still carried that hurt, a stillborn wedged inside her. Back then, she’d tried starving it, cutting into it with razors, scarring her thighs and wrists.

Callahan, she heard herself say out loud, just to confirm he was really there.

I still feel the pain in them, he confided.

He called them his phantoms, which made perfect sense. She’d searched, but had repeatedly failed to find the locus of her own indelible suffering, an ache that seemed to reach far beyond the bitterness still lingering from a childhood of mockery. And yet, if she paid attention to it, the pain seemed to spread everywhere, like miniature firing squads beneath her clothes. She started to tell him, but stopped herself.

They fell asleep without touching, but in the middle of the night, Harriet woke to the odd sensation of his thigh against hers, warmer than she expected. Frightened, she moved away but still felt something over there, pulsing and bloody, as if the legs blown off in Gunnison were in her sheets. She slid her hand to where they should have been, but there was nothing there.

______

The next morning, Harriet watched Callahan transfer himself to the floor in one swift motion and zip down the hall to the bathroom, pushing his naked torso forward with his hands, his stumps extended in front of him, before reappearing bedside, shameless and smooth like some mythic creature. His ungreased hair fell into his eyes, making him look even younger than he was.

I’d like it if you let me stay, he said, rubbing his shoulders against the cold. But not out of pity.

Nimble as a skier, he reattached his limbs. Molded feet that would never blister—permanently ensconced in cowboy boots—were secured to silver pipes that connected, just above the metal knee joints, to thigh sockets pale as a mannequin’s, each one fitting snugly over its stump like a thimble on a thumb. His legs, destined until the end of time to be free of varicose veins, were effortlessly fastened to his torso in seconds, at which point, crouching on all fours, his hands close to his chest, he pushed himself up with his arms so that his body took the shape of a V, then he walked his prosthetic legs to his hands and stood up, assembled and strong in front of her. He brushed his hair back with both hands, his transformation nothing short of miraculous.

It wasn’t pity Harriet felt, nor the confusion she’d felt the night before. It was envy.

I’d like you to stay, she said.

He looked at her, and she at him, like mule deer on the prairie once the hunters are gone. She opened the curtains, forgetting that her own pilloried body, along with its latticework of scars, would be exposed to the salt-light of day. Outside, Mount Elbert rose up over fourteen thousand feet, majestic above stratus clouds; below, the wide, white prairie unblemished by footprints.

Callahan relaxed against the headboard of her bed.

Tell me about yourself, he said, a solicitation she hadn’t heard since Grandma Lily died. He waited, looking at her as if his life might depend on what she was about to say.

My mom lives in town. I miss her. We rarely talk. Harriet’s words poured out.

She and Fay had always been close, she told him. But when her mother married Rick Paden, the salacious town barber, twenty years ago, and gave birth to two insolent boys, she had escaped here to her grandmother’s farm where Lily, in her modest way, had done her best to assuage her bouts of torment by simply listening to her, her small hand on Harriet’s arm.

Now Lily, too, was gone. At the wake last year, Harriet had reached into the coffin to loosen the tight straps on her grandmother’s Sunday pumps. She’d rubbed off rouge, messed up the dead woman’s lacquered hair. Look what they’ve done to her! she’d said. Let her rest, Harriet, Fay had pleaded, her own hair—Rick’s hobby in his afterhours—dyed platinum and sprayed into a helmet as if crafted by Lily’s mortician. Please, she had said. Let us all rest.

The woman in the coffin wasn’t Lily, Harriet told Callahan. How could I say goodbye?

Harriet thought she should stop there. She had already said too much. But Callahan, having responded to her every word with a raised eyebrow or a sympathetic tilt of the head, gestured for her to continue—as if she, Harriet Rogers, were the most interesting person.

Without her students, she told him, she might not have survived in Cañon City. She fell in love with them each year, the curious no more than the recalcitrant. In a school where evolution was folklore, she refused to use state-sanctioned textbooks, instead plastering her classroom with copies of original documents she’d tracked down and old letters written by ordinary people. At graduation, sitting in the back of the auditorium, listening to her seniors read the hopeful, honest speeches she’d encouraged them to write, her heart would break each time, as if they were already gone. Then, each September, the chairs would fill up again with brashness and innocence, cotton-candy lip gloss and acne.

She told him how much she treasured the high prairie, how she couldn’t bear not to wake every day to the Sawatch Range out her windows, that some of her best moments had been spent on their slopes, veering off Forest Service trails, listening to the hum of time.

Callahan nodded, hmmming and mmming little sounds of recognition and pleasure, as if he actually understood.

My mom died young, he told her when she finished talking. After that, my dad moved to Billings.

Callahan had no siblings. Before the mining accident, he’d been a runner. Since coming to Cañon City, he’d been squatting in an abandoned trailer in Temple Park. Last week, he’d been hired as a day cook