Gertrude’s Favourite Pfeffernüsse by Melanie McGee Bianchi

As a man of thirty-seven, growth plates in his head long fused, Vark couldn’t be prevented from walking around in pearl-button shirts with roses on the lapels and corduroy pants worn threadbare into the second dimension. It was striped tube socks and filthy Chucks: the same old uniform.
Vark wore heavy black glasses, Buddy Holly-style. His hair was gelled up in the enduring way, not quite desperate but only because the passion had vanished.
When it came to fingerpicking a 1937 Martin archtop, lightly, laboriously, in the proper pre-war style, no one had ever disputed him. His real name was Vaughn, Vaughn Rutherford Dandridge, but in his heyday ‒ a decade and more gone ‒ his loving fans had sucked all the dignity out of that situation.
Back then, before the young people began to assume they would travel, travel far away to interesting places, there was an aardvark on view only two hours away, living at the city zoo. And, too, their one-storey small-town library had a set of illustrated encyclopedias, known to many of them since early childhood, and aardvark was right there at the start of it all.
That was the time before flip phones, just. You didn’t have to do a lot. You only had to appear perpetually sleepy, and thus perpetually prone to surprise, with a foolish, bony nose ‒ and be taller than everyone else; that is, stretched out longer in repose ‒ to be called Vark.
In the mountain south, the elevation protected them. Even so, August and September were steamy. But Vark never lowered himself to appear in shorts. During the very hottest days he might roll up his sleeves a little further than normal, exposing pale, bony arms that appeared just as long as his neck ‒ just as bulgy with the river of veins. He was what homeowners might picture as a heroin addict, but his only serious hurdle was a quantity of cheap watery beer.
At the beginning of the end of Vark’s too-early prime, when cigarettes were still all right, the queen of the scene, an educated outsider shimmying her hips inside a calico dress and wielding an embarrassing, classically trained vibrato, had turned upon him a harrowing focus. She got on stage and opened her mouth to sing, and then she opened her bed, actually peeling it apart in layers, a rite that materialized, he thought, just for him ‒ white-painted iron, a score from an antiques shop, covered with a quilt she had stitched together out of scavenged T-shirts. She got herself a baby as quick as she could; she aimed to add young motherhood to her list of competencies.
His own dreams were old-fashioned, coated with a patina out of time, even out of style. The years had carried them off so quietly and cruelly he could only blink in their wake, like a buffoon in a silent movie, always falling. Always getting up again ‒ that was the other misfortune.
Now Omie had reached her middle-school years and Vark had charge of her one weekend a month. He put together strange sweet sandwiches, as though her mother wasn’t already teaching her to cook fresh, complicated meals from scratch. Omie accepted them kindly: cream cheese and honey, a combination she was still young enough to believe he had invented. No strawberry jam: her mother always insisted Omie had a problem with strawberries. Not an allergy, exactly, but a sensitivity ‒ an intolerance. As her accepted father of origin, Vark was duty-bound to know the difference.
He took her places, places close to home, and tried to make the day trips interesting. He was bound to keep her out of his current apartment as much as possible. It was a basement unit with no suitable place for Omie to sleep during her visits. For himself, Vark made a pallet on the tiled concrete floor, a sleeping bag and camping pillow over a mouldy pool float, and gave up, gladly, the use of his single bed under the dim horizontal window.
That was what life spiralled down to, after all: where you were sleeping, or rather the how and why of it. Child Services warned him that such a situation could only be temporary. They gave him a deadline to get a better apartment if he expected to maintain regular visitation rights.
They said he needed a place with two proper bedrooms. He asked if a sleeper sofa in a one-bedroom apartment would do: his bed would be the lesser, pulled-out one. But it would not do. And why should he be surprised?
Vark sighed. Softly, inventively, he swore. His cigarettes were not all right any more ‒ he smoked them outside, out of sight of Omie and anyone else, down the dead-end street where the old four-unit building sat, at the edge of a wooded ravine. He smoked and blew a ring at the sweat bee twitching its wings on his smartphone. He scrolled through a posted list of rental properties. Maybe he’d see about a trailer in the real countryside, keep it broom-swept for the social worker: here was an old doublewide with three bedrooms. But the further he got from his bartending job in town, the less likely his truck would hold out.
At home, her good home, Omie had a wooden sleigh bed with built-in drawers underneath. She had told Vark about it, how it was just what she wanted except her thicker sweaters didn’t fit. Omie’s stepfather, who called himself a carpenter ‒ really he was a contractor, an outdoorsy type with aspirational green eyes ‒ had made it himself. The child’s mother had gotten her latest certification, this one in residential design.
‘That means she’s not a real architect,’ Vark’s friend Celia, his co-worker at the bar, his sometime lover ‒ informed him. ‘You could use that.’ ‘How?’ said Vark. ‘How could I use that?’
Omie’s mother and her husband aimed to open a business together, building mountain homes for Atlantans and Floridians. They made Vark sick, but it was hard to prove they were evil or special. Just too energetic. Their calling card would be compact villas for the middling wealthy, not the ugly mansions cantilevered off peaks. Theirs would be green and sustainable.
To compete, as usual, Vark had to dip underground. Today he was taking Omie to see a horse. If they had time, before his ‘70s Dodge decided to overheat, he would drive by the doublewide for rent. Just a casual look. She wouldn’t need to know he had to move until the crisis arrived.
She sat lap-buckled into the truck’s old bench seat, in clean blue jeans and a yellow National Park T-shirt bought somewhere out west. Some distant desert. Her hair was shorter this year, shaggy and pink at the tips. Glasses. She had Vark’s eyes and maybe his poky nose. She had a shade or two of her mother’s brash ease. Or was it his own nonchalance? She shrugged a lot. She had her own phone now, for safety, to check in ‒ but, like him, she could still forget to look at it.
‘Are we driving on the Parkway?’ ‘Nope,’ said Vark. ‘Just out to the county line. It’s a pretty place, though. Little horse farm.’ The Blue Ridge Parkway curled like a treasured benign serpent among the ridges. ‘It makes me carsick. I have to have the window down, even if it’s cold out, or I’ll puke,’ said Omie, who was named after an Appalachian murder ballad. At the time of her birth, Vark had agreed to the concept but had favoured the tragic heroine of ‘Pretty Polly’.
The baby girl came two weeks late, robust as a seal. Even by then the old-time swing revival was fading, and no one wanted to give him a recording deal any more. And then recording itself stopped.
The Dodge bounced and barked, a true complaint of its age. Their eyes followed the original ram hood ornament like a figurehead. To fill the air, Vark and his daughter puzzled out the intriguing fact that important horses were named much differently to important dogs. Omie had a little mixed breed with dachshund high in its bloodline ‒ a creature Vark had never met. The dog was called Trudy, but after watching the Westminster Dog Show on television, Omie and her mother, who was quick and indulgent, had decided to pretend Trudy was a purebred dachshund: a show dog with a show dog’s absurd name.
‘So now she is officially ‘Gertrude’s Favourite Pfeffernüsse,’’ announced Omie, and Vark laughed for real.
‘Awesome name,’ he said. ‘With a spelling-bee word.’
‘I know, right? Mom said it’s a German cookie?’
Omie didn’t have a trace of his drawl. After all, her mother had been raised in New England ‒ Vermont, was it? Or Connecticut, mostly, but a little bit in New Hampshire: the woman liked to change her story.
But Vark knew a thing or two, too. He told his daughter that racehorses could only have eighteen letters in their names. ‘No exceptions,’ he said. ‘Spaces count as letters. Spaces and exclamation marks.’
‘Exclamation marks?’ said Omie. ‘What?’
‘Yes! In their names ‒ some of them.’
Vark had never raced a horse, but back in the middle of the last century, someone in his father’s family, an obscure great-uncle, had headed to the urban northeast for a jazzier lifestyle, eventually opening a stable with several partners who were surely shady.
He was, briefly, a king, a real honcho who owned harness horses, a handful of pacers and trotters that ran the New York State tracks ‒ Tioga and Batavia and Monticello ‒ bearing the family name. They were Standardbreds, muscled and sturdy, a lot of chestnuts with darker-looking manes and tails, according to blurry old photos: ‘Juke Dandridge and Buzz Dandridge of Dandridge Stables, Township of Sniderville in the Upstate,’ read the caption. Plus the star: ‘the stable’s unstoppable four-legged female, HollyAnn Dandridge.’
There was no breaking out of the circle. Not for good. Growing up, Vark saw his own father even less than he now saw Omie (she had called him ‘Daddy’ until the rest of her words came in). But now Vark’s father was back again ‒ a stooped, looming rounder who lived nearby in a Section 8 block for disabled seniors. His father had unfolded the horse stories for him from a collection of brittle newspaper clippings he kept in a shoebox, and they intrigued Vark enough to push.
He imagined deals gone down, thick Yankee guns and bookies with mafia ties. A sleazy, ebullient fortune. No one could ever tell him where the money went.
He dropped by more frequently to see the old man, always waiting for him out on the sitting porch, his back turned towards the entrance. His father didn’t care for visitors catching him gimpy.
Vark brought him a gift: a carefully uncovered YouTube clip. A deep dive. Thoughtfully, he pushed his phone close to his father’s face, shading it from the sun. He thumbed the volume all the way up. It was a few grainy minutes from Yonkers Raceway, 1962. The alarming rattle of the sulkies was finally obscured by the announcer’s flat, brutal accent, which announced the victory of HollyAnn Dandridge with a purse of $300,000 ‒ unprecedented for a mare.
If only Vark had been born in a decent era, he would have been there in the owner’s box, felt hat pushed low, using a burning cigar as his pointer and making dark, incredible demands. Living in black and white, in the land of good smoke. Directing fates as it suited him. When he was alone, he watched the video over and over.
‘I think it’s cool as hell I found this,’ he said. ‘The family horse, man. Technology at its finest.’
But his father was too jealous for fresh history. He waved away his son’s smoke. He said there were the Have Dandridges and the Have-Not Dandridges, and that they, father and son, had their own category: the Haven’t-a-Clue Dandridges.
Vark laughed politely at the repeated joke. ‘It’s a nice garden you all have here,’ he said, gesturing with his cigarette to a plot of staked gladiolas and tomato plants already showing their little yellow flowers. Smoking inside was not allowed; too many residents were on oxygen.
‘They don’t want me in that garden,’ said his father. ‘I know too much.’ He asked Vark if he’d done a paternity test yet, concerning the baby girl who was now twelve. ‘Never too late, you know.’ He made sure that Vark was still hanging on to his ‘37 Martin; he hooted with disgusted glory before he even got the answer. ‘Good Lord, son! They’ll bury you with it yet. And the money it would fetch!’
Vark played his part ‒ he shrugged once, twice. His father tilted his long, heavy face up to the sun and closed his eyes to catch a doze. He smiled, warming his pain in the pool of foolishness.
***
The mountains were only blue at a distance. Close in, it was breathing green. Small talk stopped on a dime.
Vark turned the truck onto a private dirt road named after the family who owned the horse farm. The smallholding had two barns: a sagging, disused tobacco barn and a modern barn with metal siding. The barns held down the opposite sides of a fenced-in field with the road cutting through them. At the distant end, a white farmhouse stood under a giant old sycamore, its branches bending past the roof in an attempt to reach the creek behind it.
He parked between the barns. Omie would surely grow up tall, but today she still had to jump out to reach the ground ‒ she made a flying little performance. SLAM. It took effort to close the truck’s heavy old doors; she had to use both hands for hers. The clamour of antiquity made her skip. Indeed, the creek was tumbling so loud it might be deciding their course, too.
The owners were a sweet old couple and never minded him stopping by. But today their own truck, a newer-model GMC, was not there.
He told Omie the truth his father had given him the first time, right after their reunion. The old man’s shaky, handwritten set of driving directions was still in the truck’s glove compartment.
He explained to his daughter that these pretty horses were the descendants of a one-time line of champions. Winning Standardbreds from up north got to retire in warm, nice places like North Carolina. ‘They’re not ours any more, not legally,’ he said. ‘But you could consider them, like, your animal cousins. Part of your ancestry.’
He showed her the part of the fence that was electric and how to not touch it. Two horses were in the righthand field today, and the gelding called Eugene was ambling up to investigate them. They rubbed his long, beautiful nose through the safe wire and cooed some unanimous nonsense. Vark pulled an apple out of the pocket of his cords and gave it to his daughter.
Omie fed Eugene and stroked his forelock to one side, as gentle as only a girl for whom everyone truly wanted the best could be. She held her breath, audibly, and the tens of quadrillions of leaves on the mountain behind her briefly united to turn over their silver backs. It was only June ‒ still apt to be breezy.
Vark was making plans. He would ask his friend Celia to rent the doublewide with him, to share expenses and work up some kind of life. She wasn’t averse to a hike; maybe she would take to rural living and that would deepen their relationship. It was a frail reversal of the old courtship plot, starting lukewarm and hoping for love ‒ but maybe not as bleak as it seemed, after all. In the old ballads, passions that started high ended up a collection of cold bones at the riverbottom.
‘I’m going to sell my guitar for your college fund,’ he said abruptly. ‘The last time I looked it was worth about $10,000. Can you even imagine?’
‘Oh. Wow.’
‘Do they teach you about the Great Depression at school?’
Omie’s thick glasses, pink-rimmed like her hair, glinted in the bright light. It was hard to gauge the expression in her eyes. But Vark knew he must appear to her the same way. A crazed, early astigmatism was their true legacy.
‘I guess so?’ she said, looking back to the horses. ‘Can you get that spotted-looking one to come over?’ Vark whistled, and the mare named Lou looked up from across the field and commenced bobbing her head at them, like a nod. They laughed together. Omie tried whistling herself.
‘Do you have another apple?’ she said. And then, distractedly, ‘My main dad, he used to study abroad. He backpacked through Switzerland.’
Vark was zapped out of the world for a second ‒ a shock like brushing against the electric fence ‒ and then he regretted his ‘oh’ coming out too much like a groan.
Always before, she had referred to her stepfather by his first name. He knew he had heard her correctly when he saw Omie begin to turn red. ‘I only meant I see him more,’ she said. Enduring a minute of her own misery, she kicked at the dirt with one of her sneakers: pretty foam Skechers, brand-new, in a unicorn print.