Fiction from The Literary Review

Contributor's Note

Michael Martone

Michael Martone was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and was educated in the public schools there. While in fourth grade during recess at Francis Price Elementary, Martone bit through the right half of his tongue. He had fallen while he ran across the playground. Then, he always clenched his tongue between his teeth when he played or concentrated on his schoolwork. While reading, he bit his tongue. That day, he was being chased by Ann Jones in a game where they pretended they were airplanes in an aerial dogfight. He tripped on an exposed tree root of the flowering crab near the four-square court. His mouth filled with blood, and he spit out a chunk of tongue into his hand. The tongue couldn't be stitched, of course, but healed quickly forming a ragged scar, a tiny flap of which he finds he can still rub against his back teeth. That same year he was whittling a stick in his back yard with the folding pocket knife his Grandpa Shaker gave him when he taught Martone to whittle when, in one long stoke, the blade slid through the sliver of bark on the stick and sliced into the skin of his left index finger. Today there is still a half-moon scar on that knuckle. A few months later, Martone put his right hand through a kitchen window while pounding on it in response to Stevie Leon outside messing around with his, Martone's, bike (a red, 24-inch Schwinn Typhoon). That scar runs in a zigzag line from the base of the little finger along the heel of the hand almost to the wrist. In high school, Martone developed Osgood Schlatter Syndrome that left bumps beneath both his knee caps, indications of the calcium building up to keep the slower growing tendons attached to the spurting growth of underlying bone. Playing football, Martone broke his right thumb in two places when cutting through the line. He was a full back and the accident happened during the high school football jamboree. As he sidestepped a tackle, his hand flew into the face-guard on the helmet of the pursuing linebacker. After that injury, Martone wore a plaster cast that allowed him to continue practicing but prevented him from playing in any more games—the regulations stating that the heavy cast would give a player unfair advantage, the dressing used as a club on the soft tissue of his opponents. Along with the autographs and the inspirational sayings his friends and family affixed to the cast, Martone wrote several poems and beginnings of stories including one that was a list of his injuries and the resulting scars. Martone taught himself to write with his unencumbered left hand. He used cheap Bic pens and became adept at matching his new shaky script with the contours of the cast. It took months to heal and the cast, completely inscribed with messages, would disintegrate over time, battered by the rough contact into crumbs of plaster adhering to the grungy gauze netting. He went back to the doctor's several times to have a new cast made, the old one sawn off and thrown away. When the bone finally healed, the knitting at the breaks left the knuckles there thicker than those on the other thumb while the rest of the hand, atrophied, had shriveled, the skin pale and pasty. Martone continues to use his left hand when he writes with a pen or pencil while with all other activities requiring handedness, such as brushing his teeth or combing his hair, his right one regained its dominance. Martone has a reoccurring plantar wart on the ball of his left foot that has created a cavity the width of a few centimeters, a result of repeated procedures to remove it. He has four prominent moles or beauty marks on his face, two staggered on either side of his nose. The lower one on the left side produces one thin but very black hair Martone shaves or plucks periodically because, if left untended, he will worry it with the index finger of his left hand, inflaming it to the point of redness or staining it with residue from the pencil lead or pen ink retained from writing by the same finger. He has an erratic strawberry birthmark at the base of his spine. A gibbous moon shaped vaccine scar affixed to his left shoulder. The sebaceous cyst, the size of a dime, just above the hairline behind Martone's left ear is not visible but can be felt, a hard nodule, in the scruff of the neck. It has been infected twice and both times lanced and drained, the wound requiring daily packing as it healed. Martone has no intentional or professional tattoos or piercings, though the back and palm of his right hand will often be scribbled with words and numbers, the result of the habit acquired when he wore a cast in high school. There are few instances where the ink or pencil lead has gotten under the skin, resisting all his attempts at removal, leaving behind fragments of initials, icons, one half of a heart, and something that might well be an exclamation mark, a semicolon, or a simple smeared period.

Contributor's Note

Michael Martone was born and grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana. He has worked in a variety of jobs, including night auditor at a hotel and stock clerk in a bookstore. One Christmas he helped kill cattle in Michigan because he was in love. The woman Martone was in love with was named Karen K. Potts who was born and grew up in Detroit and was then a veterinary student at Michigan State. It was the Bicentennial year and some months before the gas crisis. Martone drove up to East Lansing from Fort Wayne, borrowing the huge green Pontiac Bonneville from his parents who were disappointed he would miss Christmas, the first, with them in order to kill cattle in Michigan. In Michigan, a few years before this Christmas, a fire retardant chemical had been, inadvertently, mixed into feed dairy farmers then fed to their herds. The chemical residue called PBB contaminated the milk supply. Milk had to be dumped. Whole herds were destroyed. A television movie was made starring Ron Howard whose character in the film ended up slaughtering his cows and calves. Martone remembers the scene where Howard uses a bulldozer to dig a big trench to bury the carcasses. PBB was thought to be persistent. That Christmas, it was being said that the chemical would be in the milk supply for years. Martone imagines it might still be in the milk supply. Once, while kissing Martone, Karen K. Potts stopped, looked into his eyes and said, “I love cows.” Martone believed her. She had worked her way through vet school rendering anatomical drawings for the large animal surgeries and dissections. She contributed some of these drawings to textbooks her professors were writing. She had a meticulous style of stippling with pen and India ink, patiently pixeling the porous bones and shading the creases of the vital organs. She gave Martone a life size drawing in three colors of a bovine heart that he still has framed above his desk. As it was Christmas, the campus was deserted, almost all of the students going home to be with their families. Karen K. Potts had volunteered to stay and tend a barn where the school was conducting an experiment on the long-term effects of PBB in dairy cattle. There were some thirty head in all, weaned calves mostly, heifers and steers, but some milking cows. Martone helped to muck the stalls and stanchions. The calves were still young enough to kick and prance in the fresh straw Martone forked in for bedding, but they were clearly sick, many with a rheumy barking cough. The PBB was in the feed that was kept in big garbage cans. When Martone removed the lid, the sound it made alerted the friskier calves that trotted from the loafing parlor over to where he worked shoveling the laced grain into the manger. While the cattle ate, Martone helped Karen K. Potts pitch the fouled bedding and manure into the gutters and then slide it all to a spreader parked outside in a paddock. It was a cold night and had already started snowing. The muck at their feet steamed. Somewhere else on the campus was a control barn filled with cattle not being poisoned. Other students took care of those animals. Karen K. Potts was a good quarter foot taller than Martone and wore a real Irish cable knit sweater with the lanolin still in the wool, designer jeans, and Frye boots she fit into rubber Wellies when she worked. Before she went to the barn, Martone watched her put on eye make-up, a dab of rouge, and some colorless lip gloss. She changed her earrings to another set of dangling silver hoops she bought on trips she made over to Ann Arbor. Martone stayed a week, Christmas day not that much different from the other ones before and after it. They visited other barns on the university farm, driving around campus in Karen K. Potts's red VW Beetle. He saw the bulls kept in tight pens where they were milked for their semen, sows that were farrowing, and the elaborate charts kept on the university's milking herd noting the pounds of milk each produced, their calves' birth weight and gain, and an estimate on when they were due to freshen. At the turkey coops, she told him a funny story about the birds who would gobble in waves as she talked. It isn't the case, Karen K. Potts told him, that domesticated turkeys are too stupid to mate. Artificial insemination has to be used because the toms are bred too big to mount the hens. Poultry scientists at Michigan State thought they solved the problem when they developed a kind of saddle to fit the hens and better distribute the tom's crushing weight. But then the turkey's stupidity was demonstrated. With all the hens wearing the special saddles, the toms no longer recognized them as turkeys and didn't even try to mate. It snowed most of the time Martone was in East Lansing that Christmas, and it turned very cold. He had left the lights on when he parked the Pontiac a week ago, and the battery was dead when he tried to start the car to return home. His parents, already angry with him for leaving at Christmas, would now be even more furious that it would cost money for the repair of the car. He had to call them to tell them he would be delayed another day in order to replace the battery then drive back to Indiana in time for New Year's. While he was on the phone, Karen K. Potts, whose skin, Martone remembers, was like milk, stood by the sink and drank a big glass of milk as she looked out the window at the snow. She then gathered her things to drive him to the service station where his parents' car had been towed.