At exactly five o'clock the front bell rang in our house.
"Big Eddie, how the hell are you?" Johnny asked, standing on the porch in a checkered shirt that reminded me of the tablecloths in old-fashioned Italian restaurants . He had a thick beard and his face had turned rough and leathery. "Just fine," I told him. "Just fine." I held the door open and he stepped in cautiously, as if he still wasn't sure he was at the right place even though I'd been the one to answer the door.
Ruthie came over and introduced herself and politely shook his hand. "I can tell when Ed's talking to an old friend," she said. "Not too many people call him Big Eddie anymore."
"People might not call him Big Eddie anymore," he said, "but I bet I know what they're thinking."
"Johnny," I said, "I've lost a good five pounds since the last time you saw me." I had actually gained about twenty since high school.
"I keep on putting him on a diet," said Ruthie, "and he keeps taking himself off of it."
We laughed, a little self-consciously. Johnny handed Ruthie the box of sangria he was carrying. "Here's a house warming gift for yall," he told us
"Thank you, Johnny. That sure is kind. I haven't had box wine in awhile."
Johnny grinned wide and said, "If I remember right this fat bastard can go through a box in a couple of minutes. He's like a pig at the trough."
"You remember right," I said, "but I can't do that anymore. I'm all out of practice. I don't drink the way I used to. I can still pack away the food, but I can't quite drink the drink."
Johnny nodded and seemed disappointed. He was expecting the Bid Ed he used to know. But in college I'd calmed down. I no longer drank until I passed out in someone's yard, and I didn't speed on the highways around the city, weaving between the big trucks. There had been philosophy and music classes that had gotten me to consider things in slower terms. And one snowy morning, in a near-empty diner by campus, I had seen Ruthie.
To cheer Johnny up I told my wife, "I can't wait to have you see this guy eat. You'd think he was a fucking cannibal."
"Maybe I should get the tape recorder out so we can record it," Ruthie suggested.
"No need for that," he said. "I did learn a few manners out west. I even worked on a few movie crews."
"Really? And here I was thinking you were probably eating rattlesnakes all this time."
"I'm not an animal, Eddie. Goddamn."
Ruthie raised up the box of sangria and said, "Guess I'll go break open this spigot," and she went off toward the kitchen door.
Johnny leaned his head to my ear. "She's really pretty, man," he whispered. "She's way too good for you."
"That's a horrible thing to say," I told him.
"I mean it as a compliment."
"It sure doesn't sound like one."
He was right though. When she sang along with whatever I was playing on the piano, her voice would sound like little pieces of light hovering in the air. Pieces of light I sometimes felt I could almost touch.

We drank some sangria and talked about how shitty it was, growing older, even though none of us had quite reached thirty. Then, Ruthie started getting out the silverware her mother had given to us as a wedding gift, and I lit the candelabrum in the center of the table and brought out the pot of spaghetti puttanesca and the plate of fried catfish and the salad. We gathered around the table and began eating. In the street outside we could hear the neighborhood kids play football even though the windows were closed and the airconditioners were on. They were probably the same kids who'd broken into my truck the week before and stolen some of my tapes. We did not live in a safe neighborhood.
"I tell you, living in the desert does some funny things to you," Johnny said, swirling some pasta around his fork. "I had a place way off from town. It'd been a trailer, but the owner before me had put a wood porch on it and taken off the wheels. The nearest other house was a forty minute walk and you couldn't see it from my place - not even when it was bright outside. So at night, it'd really start to feel like you were the last person on earth. I think if I'd been living alone out there the entire time, I'd have gone crazy. The loneliness of it would've torn me to shreds."
"You weren't alone?" I asked. I couldn't imagine a woman taking up with him.
"I had a girlfriend and a son. Not at first, but later on."
"How'd you lure them in?" I asked.
"Ed, I might be ugly, but I'm not hopeless."
"I shouldn't be talking. I'm about as thin as you are handsome."
"Don't talk like that to a guest," Ruthie said.
"This is how we talk," I said.
"This is how we talk when there's a lady around," Johnny said. "When we're alone, the gloves really come off."
We laughed. Ruthie didn't.
Johnny went on. "Anyway, my girlfriend - I met her one day in Phoenix. She worked at this dirty little hippie cafe. We started hanging out, and before you know there were three of us."
"Where is she now?" Ruthie asked. Somehow she made the question sound accusatory, as if Johnny might have killed mother and child and stuffed them under the floorboards.
"I don't know where she is. I woke up one night, around the time Simon was a year old, and she was gone. She left a note saying she was going, but it didn't say where."
"What about the kid?" I asked.
"Ed, you know what a fuckup I am. No way could a guy like me could be a decent father. I hated to do it, but I gave him over to some friends of mine in San Antonio who really wanted a kid. I did make an effort to raise him. I had him for about two years. But it was too much. You might not believe this, but the child couldn't stand me. It was like the way some dogs don't take to each other. He cried when I was around, and when he wasn't crying he was always doing shit like hitting me in the back of the head. What kind of child hits its father in the back of the head? Repeatedly?"
"With you as a father, a smart one."
"Ed, you aren't being funny," Ruthie snapped.
Johnny didn't glance her way. He stared at the half-eaten catfish on his plate. He looked like he wished he hadn't told us as much as he had. He said, "It was soon after handing the kid over that I sold my trailer and went off to live in L.A. That's where I started working in the movies. It's behind the scenes work - holding microphones and shit like that - but it's fun."
"Anything we would've heard of?" Ruthie asked.
"The most recent one was called Disobedience. And the one right before that was Money Shot 3000. That was sort of a sci-fi thing."
Ruthie titled her head slightly. "They're porn movies?"
"In a sense. I mean, they have storylines and all. They're not like some of the low class crap you see out there."
I chewed and looked at Johnny. It would not have been bad, getting paid to stand around with a microphone as beautiful women had sex in front of you. I would've paid money from my own pocket to do something like that for a day. And it was certainly better than staying around the house, waiting for a phone call with a possible job offer after having gone out on this or that job interview. A call I'd been waiting for since the later part of winter.
"You keep in touch with the kid?" I asked Johnny. I needed to change the subject.
"You won't believe how much I keep in touch with him. He still doesn't like me much, but I visit a good three or four times a year. I'm going win him over one of these days."
"We don't have kids ourselves," I said. "We've thought about it. We've thought about it a lot. But that's about all we've done so far."
The room turned quiet. Those kids were really playing hard outside. Ruthie poured some more wine for herself. She gave me a bold, forceful look over, as if I were a dirty glass she was trying to stare through, and told Johnny, "Ed just wants to have kids soon because he has it in his head that I'm itching to run away. He thinks if we have a kid, I'll feel more stuck with him. Now to me, that's a completely wrong reason to bring a child into this world. I don't know about your parents, Johnny, but mine loved each other when they had me. They didn't have me to throw up a bunch of prison bars around themselves."
I said to Johnny, "Ruthie has an amazing voice. You should hear her sing sometime."
Ruthie continued, "Once he followed me over to West Memphis when I went there to see an aunt of mine. He called in sick to work that day and followed me."
"I called in sick all the time. The school was used to it."
"Sometimes I'm tempted to cheat on him just to prove him right."
"Johnny doesn't want to hear all this, do you Johnny?"
He dabbed his lips with the napkin. "I don't know. It's kind of interesting."
I raised my hands and gestured to them in a way that said I'm-done-for-now. I took my wine glass and went from the table over to the piano in the corner - our place was small, and the dinning-room and living-room were really the same room - and started playing an old jazz piece. Though I was playing loud, I would hear them talking real low behind my back. So I started playing louder, faster. The song started to melt apart in my fingers.
Johnny came over and sat on the couch. Ruthie lit a cigarette and stared out the window.
I played slower. I turned that song into a dirge. Then into a few steps struggling in quicksand. Soon, I wasn't playing at all. There was nothing to do but turn around and try to act casual again. I shifted around on the piano bench. "I sure am glad to see you," I told Johnny.
"I sure am glad to see you too again, man. I really missed my old friends out there."
"You certainly left in a cloak of mystery though. You and that stolen car."
"It wasn't even all that stolen. Just borrowed for a long time." He looked at Ruthie. "My dad wasn't a very generous man."
"Really?" she said. She could not have looked less interested. She took another drag from her cigarette and turned her eyes on me. She gave me a questioning look. It felt like she was wondering how I had become the man sitting on that bench, full of mean speculations and uncertainty. She held that look for only a moment, but it would be the image I would remember most about those weeks before I moved out, away from her and Memphis and everyone I had known. Then she looked back out the window.

The evening wore on. The street turned quiet except for a few firecrackers that would go off every one in awhile. Ruthie got out the hookah pipe and I brought in the coffee canister where we kept our bags of pot. We all relaxed and started making dumb jokes and me and Johnny talked about our high school days and me and Ruthie told Johnny how we met and got married. Sun Ra played from the massive speakers flanking the bay windows. A layer of shifting yellowish smoke hung around the Japanese lantern hanging from the ceiling. I took off one of my sandals. Johnny asked, "So when we going wrestle?"
"No wrestling," said Ruthie.
I nodded to her. "No wrestling, Johnny. Not anymore. A few years ago we were at Steve Lamberts place and some of us started wrestling around in the backyard. I wound up breaking my goddamn arm. I couldn't believe it. I didn't even fall that hard. But it was the way I fell. That did it."
"That's a real sad story," said Johnny.
"Sad isn't the word," Ruthie chided. She was smiling though. At some point during the night - probably when Johnny had started talking about missing his son - Ruthie decided she didn't hate my old friend. I'd noticed her voice had turned softer when speaking to him. But we were also all thoroughly stoned. She might have been smiling just because she was high.
"Did Ed ever tell you we used to have our own wrestling team?" Johnny asked Ruthie. "It wasn't through the school or nothing. It was just a bunch of us who decided to form teams and wrestle in our parent's backyards. We even had uniforms. Ed here was glorious."
"I was the biggest, craziest virgin in the world," I said.
"I've seen the photos," Ruthie said. "I don't know if T-shirts and overalls qualify as costumes."
Johnny took a hit from the bong and blew the smoke out toward the ceiling. He looked much older than his twenty-nine years. There were white streaks in his beard. "It was a hell of a lot of fun though," he told her. "Nobody ever got hurt, and I guess it was pretty good exercise, all things considered."
Ruthie took the bong next. She inhaled, exhaled, and sat there thinking for a moment. Then she said, "Maybe you should wrestle, Ed," Ruthie said. "Far be it from me to keep you from glory. And what are the chances of you breaking your arm again?"
But I didn't feel like wrestling. The pain I'd felt at the BBQ was like a ghost that sometimes gently rose up in my arm and reminded me how awful it had been. I felt that ghost in my arm now, and said, "Even if it's one in a million I still wouldn't want to do it."
I took the bong from her. "This son you've got, he look like you?" I asked.
"Yeah. He does unfortunately."
"Ugly children grow up okay sometimes," Ruthie said. "I was homely as they come, but I turned out all right."
Which was less than true. Her black eyes could mess you up. In a room of all right, she was the knife with the diamond handle.
"Ruthie," Johnny said, his eyes going soft, "that child could've looked like a goat, and he could've hit me in the back of the head every day until he was full grown, but I still wouldn't have loved him any less. It's a dangerous thing when you realize you can love like that. It makes you want to puke, knowing you can let yourself get that weak."
"Don't get all mushy," I said, handing him the bong.
"Them sound like fighting words to me."
"Johnny, what good is a piano player with a broken arm?"
Ruthie was staring at the smoke floating over our heads. "You could arm wrestle," she suggested. "That wouldn't be that dangerous. You could have a taste of your former glory."
"Now that's a good idea there," said Johnny.
I was getting tired of the whole night. I'd eaten too much and the pot had given me a dry throat and I didn't want to think about days of yore anymore. Beating Johnny would be a good way to bring things to a close. I said, "All right. What the hell. Let's arm wrestle. Outside though."
Johnny did a sort of whooping war call, raising his fist in the air, and I put back on my sandal.
The three of us went out on to the back porch. There was a small, bright moon out, and the light from a nearby streetlamp threw the shadow of the chainlink fence down across the grass around it. And there was no wind at all. The leaves on our backyard dogwood did not rustle. I said, "There's going be one round and that's it. I won't be able to stand another."
"Hell, when I'm done with you, I know you won't," Johnny warned. He gave the air in front of him a playful punch.
We walked out into the yard. Ruthie sat on the stool we kept on the porch. "Johnny, you can do it!" she yelled out, clapping. "He's big, but he's weak."
We both swiveled our shoulders and stretched and rolled our heads on our necks. The night was so quiet I could hear the cat next door drinking its milk on the patio. Johnny took a step toward me and asked, "Ready, Big Ed?"
"Good to go, motherfucker."
We brought our hands together, placed our feet side by side. In high school, Johnny had been scrawny but relentless. I'd win, but I'd be quiet and exhausted afterwards.
With the count of three, which we did together, it started.
I imagined his arm as a steel lever attached to a machine. It was my job to pull down that lever to turn off that machine. I pushed and squeezed my jaw tight and pushed harder. Johnny was working too.
A solid minute passed. The pain started ebbing in and I didn't like it. I started talking the shit we would talk in high school. "Bet that child's not even yours," I said through my clenched teeth. "Bet she got laid by some greasy sweaty truck driver... decided to give it away... to the dumbest guy she could think of."
He grunted. He swore. He asked, "You remember... Sonya?"
I didn't answer. In high school she'd been the head cheerleader and later on she moved to New York to become a model.
"I gave her head all afternoon once... I had a reputation...This long tongue of mine... She wanted me to try it out on her to see...what it was like."
"Lying bullshiter."
He flicked his tongue out and did another war cry.
I felt his arm harden and start to move forward. He picked up some extra strength, or maybe I had just lost mine. Slowly my arm started to bend. But I tried to hold myself down, and I stiffened my legs and placed all my weight into my shoulder. There was a sudden shudder in my body, though, as if a crack had broken out right through the middle of my torso, and my entire balance tilted. The earth slid out from under my feet. Grass rose up to my cheek, weeds pressed against my ear. Then a pain grabbed hold of my leg like a gnarled talon from the night sky. I was in too much shock to scream. I clenched handfuls of grass and tore them out from the roots.
Ruthie ran over from the back porch. She asked, "What the hell happened? Where does it hurt?"
I pointed to my ankle. Ruthie crouched down and examined it. Johnny was standing with his hands to his sides, a shy boy all the sudden. "I didn't mean to hurt him," he said. "I had no idea he'd fall like that."
"Johnny, it's all right," I said, huffing with the pain. "It's the big dumb guy's fault for agreeing to this to begin with." Then to Ruthie I said, "Just help me inside. My ankle is going kill me if I don't get ice on it."
"Want me to call a doctor?" Ruthie asked.
"Let's get inside and have a look first. I don't want to call a doctor if I can help it."
I hobbled up. I wrapped one arm around my wife and the other around Johnny. I took jumpy little steps on the good foot. Once I was inside, on the couch, I lifted my leg with my hand and placed it on the arm. Ruthie raised the pant leg. "It's swollen," she said.
"I figured that, dear. What I need is some ice."
She shot her middle finger at me and went off to the kitchen. As I heard her twisting the ice tray I turned to Johnny and saw that he looked stricken with a severe pain of his own. He was staring at my ankle as if he were mesmerized. "What's wrong with you?" I asked. "You got a twisted ankle also?"
"No, no. It was just - I was remembering when something real bad that happened to me. When I twisted my ankle out in the desert one night."
Ruthie came in holding a towel and a bowl of ice. "Hold this," she told Johnny, and she gave him the bowl. She took some ice cubes from it, placed them in the towel, and held the towel to my ankle. It smarted, but she held my leg still.
I said to Johnny, "So what happen to your ankle?"
Johnny looked away from where the swelling was. "It was right after I gave Simon to my parents. That March. I was trying to go to sleep when I heard this crying. It sounded like a baby. Or maybe a little older than a baby. But still, a real young child."
Ruthie placed another ice cube into the bunched towel. "Was it a nightmare?" she asked.
"I thought it must've been. But I kept listening and hearing it. I even pinched myself on the neck, to make sure I was awake."
Ruthie moved my foot without warning me. I called out, "Hey," but the pain wasn't all that bad. No worse than the sharp ache of my ankle just lying still. She placed the ice on it from a different angle. "Go on," she told Johnny.
He went on. "I finally couldn't take it anymore. I was too curious. I got my gun - you never know what you'll find out there - and went out. I started walking in the direction where it'd been coming from."
"Were you drunk?" I asked.
"I wasn't even high, Ed. And the further out I walked, the further that crying sound seemed to get."
He nodded as if he disgusted himself.
"Eventually I stepped the wrong way on a stone. I twisted my ankle and tumbled down the side of this rocky hill. My ankle, it swelled just like your ankle is now. I couldn't get up and walk on it. It was cold too. I didn't have my coat on. So pretty soon, once I wasn't walking anymore, I started shivering."
"My foot look too white to you?" I asked Ruthie.
"It's the ice making it cold," she said. She pressed the ice harder. To Johnny she said, "Go on. What happened next?" For the first time all evening she sounded intrigued by what he had to say.
"I tried to get on my knees and crawl, but every time I moved that one leg my ankle would hurt so bad I'd start gagging. So I sat still for awhile and tried to think. And of course I'm freezing at this point, and it's so dark that after awhile you don't know where you end and everything else begins. And I'm getting closer and closer to giving up. Going to sleep and hoping I'd wake up again. Well, that was when I heard this wild barking."
It was getting on my nerves, how interested Ruthie looked. Her eyes were too wide and alert. She no longer looked stoned in the least. "This isn't going to be some I-killed-a-wild-beast-and-ate-it story is it?" I asked. "I sure am tired of those."
"Nothing like that. The dog was my neighbor's. He had a trailer and a whole bunch of crazy dogs on the property."
"The neighbor found you?" Ruthie asked.
"Eventually he did. When he heard me shoot my gun." Johnny looked at my foot. He said in a hoarse murmur, "You guys want to see something kind of gruesome?"
"Who wouldn't?" I said.
"How gruesome?" Ruthie asked. She loved going to horror movies, but wound up watching them through her fingers.
"I wouldn't offer to show it if we hadn't eaten a long time ago," he told us.
Ruthie looked him up and down. She seemed to take a quick inventory of possible missing parts. "You mean to say you let that dog attack you before you shot it?" she asked.
"I hate killing things," he said. "Especially dogs. It's just their nature, telling them things. They can't help what they do." He bent down, placed the bowl on the floor, and raised the leg of his jeans to the knee. The sight of the scar was worse than gruesome. I had seen meat rotting in the summer sun which looked better.
Ruthie turned her head away after looking for a few seconds. "Put it back down," she said, and he did. She looked strangely moved by the sight of the chewed-on leg.
"That's an incredibly stupid thing to do," I said. "Hell, I'd shoot my own grandmother if I thought she was going to start gnawing on my leg. I really would. I'd even shoot Ruthie here if she did the same. Swear to God I would."
Ruthie looked up at me, surprised. Then she didn't look surprised at all. She glanced at my foot. It had turned white as bone. If you held it up against a bank of snow, it would've vanished altogether.
She looked at that foot. Then she looked at me again.
That was when I lost her.

The next day I made an appointment with the locksmith, and I got most of my hair lopped off. “Short and spiky,” I told the hairdresser. “You know, Pat Benatar style.” Rick always had a thing for long flowing lock for some reason. Damn fetishes these guys get. Then I drove over to the mall and bought myself all the slacks and sweaters I could carry. My natural inclination is for jeans and a leather jacket, but that had to go, at least in the short term. Though I always hated the idea of slipping plastic in my eyes, I even purchased prescription contact lenses for the first time in my life.
Once the locksmith was done, I got my new phone number. Then I drove my Ford pickup to the dealer and traded it in for a tiny Toyota, the kind Rick mocked.
And it was green. To Rick, cars should only be either black or red. Anything else was pansy to him. The dealer cocked his head and asked if I was sure. He seemed surprised at how quickly I made up my mind, and I guess I was too. I was surprised how easy it was to change your whole vibe, become a new person. One day I was me and the next I was a new somebody.
When I got home from work the next day, I opened the mailbox and found a folded piece of graph paper, the kind you used in geometry class in high school. It read: “Dear Janie: Nice fucking haircut. Now you look like a true bitch dyke cunt. Fuck you.” I was tempted to call Charlie right then and there, but for some reason I decided not to. Rick had to get it out of his system, I thought. He just had to figure out that we were done in his own head, that I wasn’t going to put up with him anymore, that he wasn’t part of my plan. I thought for sure he would move on.
But over the next two weeks it just got worse. I’d get more notes and things, then Rick started following me to work. The meatpacking plant wasn’t too far from the vet’s where I worked as a secretary at the time. He’d get right on my bumper for the five miles down Route 28, honking and beeping, then he’d swerve off abruptly onto the access road to the industrial park.
The thing was if I looked back at Rick, he’s smile and wave sarcastically like I was leading him to somebody’s birthday party. Mostly I tried to ignore him like he was a hornet buzzing around my hamburger at a picnic. But that glint got me. Made me start thinking Rick still actually believed we were together, not just wanted to believe—really believed. He had that old flash and shine in his eyes.
This is when I called Charlie.

For starters, my romantic history at that point was not worth a damn. Rick was just the latest in a string of idiots, really. Dan and Steve were losers but when I told them it was over they acted like gentlemen and bowed out gracefully. But Tom and Paul and Willy were not one bit happy being dumped, and they let it be known. I don’t know if it was something about men those days or what, but like Rick, these guys just couldn’t handle rejection. Paul, for instance, actually told me that he’d pay me a thousand dollars for just two more weeks. “Are you kidding? What kind of whore do you think I am?” I said. Tom tried to make up a plus and minus chart. Said he wanted to convince me that I should at least give him more time. He said he had it all figured out and all I had to do was listen to his logic.
But it was Steve who really gave me a glimpse into a dark side of things. He shook hands with me when I broke it off, and I didn’t hear from him for a while. I thought he swallowed it fine. Then he started e-mailing detailed descriptions of encounters with women he supposedly slept with (he called them “romantic encounters”). He would call me late and hang up. Steve kept it up even after I told him never to contact me again. A month later it finally petered out.
I guess I’ve always been a bit boy-crazy. God gave me a pretty face and a nice rack. I know that. Guys like looking at me and I don’t mind it. Never have. Even when I was fourteen I would just love swaying across the school cafeteria. I would feel their eyes following me. I would feel the weight of my own body through the air. I could tell they would fight each other just to talk to me, that they had to rush home and ram their hands down their pants. I realized I had clout, and I liked this. I liked being able to change a boy’s entire mood by just moving across his line of vision. If other girls hated me why should I care?
Even when I found a man I loved I had a hard time settling down. I couldn’t stop thinking about the others, all those eyes that desired me. At twenty-two I was engaged to Eddie, my boyfriend from the community college. It was so sweet: we both got our associate’s and he said he wanted me in his life forever. He was a solid kind. But I would go out to bars with my girlfriends and watch the eyes follow me, slobbering eyes. It felt…good. Something new. I just couldn’t help it; I had to go home with a few of them at least.
Then I met Daryl. My first real job was at a store that sold Persian rugs. I would set up appointments with clients, sell rugs on occasion, design ads for the locals, that sort of thing. Daryl was one of the guys out on the sales floor. Handsome and smart. I just couldn’t say no. Over and over. When Eddie found out, he split for Portland. I don’t blame him one bit.
With Rick I thought it was different. At work Michelle said she could vouch for him. Sensitive. Funny. Good job, his head square on his shoulders. Dina said he was “a real grab.” Carla said he was a “swell guy.”
For the first two months I thought so too. He would take me out to whatever restaurant I wanted. We would catch a movie or go out to the diner for pie and coffee. When he’d drive me home, Rick would pat my knee to the beat of a Rolling Stones tune, then massage my shoulders, clutching my thighs with splayed fingers. I liked that. Inside he would lean into me, clasping my face in between his hands. The roughness set a fire off within me. I could feel his breath on my neck. I always thought Rick had a baked smell, like Thanksgiving stuffing. He would grind into me and tell me I’m “one special lady.” Rick could do some talking.
“You’re something else,” I’d say, unsure how to respond. I didn’t think of myself as special, or a lady but it was nice to hear. I was just a secretary down at Parkland Veterinary Clinic, the woman who phoned dog owners reminding them of their Thursday appointment. The only thing I had going for me was a decent appearance and a split-level on the edge of town that I got for a steal on auction. I had a simple kind of life.
Rick would sit on my loveseat, hand under his chin, and listen to me talk about my dysfunctional family like I was speaking of the divine rapture or something. He was a good listener, or pretended to be. He made me feel like everything I did or said was important, and for a while Rick did make me feel poles apart from the rest. He would rub my arms and tell me I’m a “strong person,” and that my parents were lucky to have me. He would tell me I have “a good heart.” The thought of this still sends shivers up my arms. Rick seemed like a real sensitive guy.
Then something switched in our relationship, and it never switched back.
What happened was we went out one Saturday to the county fair. Every August I had to go see the pigs and sheep and ride the Ferris wheel. It was my way of staying in touch with my childhood, I guess. I just liked it. From the beginning I could tell Rick didn’t want to go, even in the car. He referred to the fair as “that thing,” and he didn’t touch me at all on the drive down. It was weird.
“Man, it smells like shit out here,” he said once we entered the gates.
“Well, that’s just the farm animals,” I said. “It’s always like that.” I slipped my arm around my waist, trying to lighten his mood.
“Yeah, they stink like shit,” he said. “Dumb ass animals.”
It was strange: Rick was always moody, but that day he was acting like a spoiled child. I was surprised. I just didn’t get why he was in such knots.
Finally, we went to one of those things where you try to toss the rings onto the clown’s pointy nose. On three tries he didn’t even get close. I didn’t want to say anything, but he was so damn serious about it. Like I could care less whether he won me a purple stuffed monkey, or some other waste of space. But after his third miss, I just burst out laughing. Tried to cover my mouth and everything, but I just let it come.
“You think that’s fucking funny?” he said. “My failure’s amusing to you?”
“I think your over-reaction to this stupid game is funny,” I said. “Come on Rick. Relax would ya?”
Instead he snapped his head, and made a beeline for his Jeep. He didn’t say a word to me. I followed him, but I wasn’t about to hurry on his account. Just by looking at the back of his neck I could tell he was furious. Bristled. The whole thing was idiotic, laughable really.
Now Rick could’ve just left me there in the lurch, but instead he sat in his car, engine running, hands gripping the wheel. As soon as I got in he lit out of there, tearing up the sod, speeding down old rural Route Two back home. By this point the sun was low on the horizon, a blare right into our eyes on the windy road.
Then he let me have it.
“I was nice enough to go along for your hick-ass bullshit,” he said. “But I’m not about to be mocked while I fucking do it.” His eye was twitching and he kneaded the wheel. We pretty much had it out for a good half hour. At one point he even had to pull over. I thought then that he might punch me, and I was ready to make a run for it through the cornfields if I had to.
His people were drunks or in prison, and the last thing he wanted was a life like them, he said. Rick thought he was better than them. “I want to keep it clean,” he said. That was one of his favorite expressions. “I want to keep it clean as a whistle.”
Rick was just another self-loathing redneck.
So I asked him, “Am I a hick then because I like to go to the county fair? Is that what you think?”
He blinked and swallowed. Looked off. I saw his hesitation. That’s what I remembered when I decided we would part ways. The blinking. The swallowing. For about ten seconds Rick stared out over the burnished road, the sun highlighting every pore. I saw exactly who he was.
“No,” he said. “I don’t think that.”
This was the beginning of the end for us. We kept trying for a few more months, but after that fight in the car I knew it was over. After the fair I was just some redneck pussy he could take out his aggression upon. Someone he could look down upon. Those last few months we fought every day. I’d tell Charlie and my sister Diane that Rick was just confused, that he tried too hard, that he wanted to be somebody he wasn’t. But when I told Rick I had enough of him he pounded his fists into the wall of my kitchen, and teared-up. He grabbed me by the scruff of my blouse and said we were meant for each other, and that I just didn’t see it yet. He shoved the dishes off the kitchen table and said he was going to make me see it.
“I’m not going anywhere,” he said. “Watch me.”
When he stomped out of my house, I looked at the two holes in the drywall set in there like the eyes of some deep-sea creature.

Charlie took me for a walk around my neighborhood. He has always been good at calming me down. I’m sure this is why he wanted me to get outside, to see a broader view of things. We didn’t talk about Rick at all. Instead I asked him about his girls and work, things like that. We spoke slowly and breathed the air deeply and watched the tree limbs sway in the breeze. This was March: the weather was starting to turn.
When we walked by Charlie’s car, he unlocked the trunk and pulled out a sleeping bag and a suitcase. I shook my head and said that wasn’t necessary.
“I hope not,” he said. “But this has got to stop.”
What could I say to that? It had been two months since Rick and I broke up, and Rick was gaining momentum, if anything. Charlie said that short of moving and finding a new job I’d done all I could.
“Time to draw a line in the sand,” Charlie said. “Tomorrow you and I call to see about a restraining order on this guy. Enough.”
“Okay,” I said. “All right.”
As much as I wanted to think of myself as independent, I was comforted by Charlie’s presence, by his car in my driveway. The Colt 45 sat on my bureau. But the downside was I also felt trapped in my own house.
Charlie and I both called in sick the next morning, and went to see about a restraining order. This was easier than it sounds. On television it always seemed so simple, but when we tried this avenue it was a long-ass wait for nothing. After all the paper work I filled out the police told me the case didn’t seem to warrant any restraining order.
“This man is following me around on a daily basis. How is that not grounds for a restraining order?” Charlie’s eyes narrowed into dagger points.
“Now that could just be coincidence,” the cop said. “In the end it’s his word against hers.”
“It could be a coincidence if it was one day,” Charlie said. “But this is a series of days we’re talking about.”
“Then it could be a series of coincidences,” the cop said.
“Jesus Christ,” Charlie said. If it weren’t for quitting booze entirely I would have loved a beer or two at that point.
“He punched her out. How about that?”
Well, the policeman took that more seriously. But because we didn’t report it at the time, they said there was little they could do about it now long after the fact. Charlie could file a report, but if I didn’t have bodily evidence, we could forget it. Ultimately the cop said it was still my word against Rick’s.

It felt good having Charlie sleeping in the room next to me, like old times. When I was in elementary school my mother told my father to never set foot in the house again. As far as my sister and I knew that didn’t seem to upset him. He got an apartment in town, and would pick Diane and me up from school—sometimes drop us off at home—
his engine grumbling. In the car he would smoke his cigarettes, and ask us how Mom is doing. I don’t know if my mother owned a gun, but she did get the two German Shepherds. Then my father got a job as a long-distance mover. I was nine and Diane was seven. That was about the last time either one of us saw our father. Two years later he stopped sending checks. I guess he thought we were all grown up by then.
For three years my mother really struggled. She hired a baby-sitter for us during the week, this old lady in the neighborhood we called Big Betty. Don’t know where that came from since she wasn’t big, and her name wasn’t Betty. She did have a huge nest of hair though, which she kept up in a beehive most of the time. After work Mom would bring home fast food and collapse on the sofa, or just go straight to bed with a glass of rum. Sometimes Big Betty would stay with us even then, telling us stories about her grandchildren, or things she read in the newspaper, or calling her relatives on the phone and having us talk to them. Big Betty kept us busy with talk.
Meeting Raymond was an accident. During the day my mother was selling mattresses down on the strip, and she took up a part-time job as a grocery store clerk on the weekends. One day Raymond walked into the mattress store. He had just moved to town with his son Charlie after a long divorce down in Florida. He was trying to start over. New mattresses were part of that. My mother and Raymond hit it off from the get-go.
I’ll never forget the first time Mom brought Charlie and Raymond over for dinner. Mom had told us that she found a special man, and she had been dating him for nearly three months at that point. It was time for the families to meet, she said. Mom made a fancy pork dish with a sauce of some kind and mashed potatoes and side dishes all over the table. When they came in I thought they must have the wrong house. Raymond was so kind and handsome, with this way of cocking his head slightly that made him seem like a movie star or a politician. He would just listen. I’d never seen a man do that before.
And Charlie. Charlie had the same ways his dad had. The only difference was Charlie was only one year older than me. He hardly said a word the whole night, but I couldn’t take my eyes off him. His face seemed carved out of marble somehow. He just seemed more solid than most, but calm and friendly at the same time. I watched the candles flicker on his face; I watched his eyes glow in the circles of light.
A year later Raymond proposed to my mother, and he and Charlie moved into our house. All of us were on top of the world. Charlie and I became best friends, which Diane came to resent. He looked out for me, gave me a boy’s perspective on life. Diane and I shared one room, and Charlie slept in the room next to ours. There was an energy back in the house. I would palm the wall as if it was his head, or chest, or back, as if I could feel him inhale and exhale through the wall.
I always loved mowing the lawn for some reason. Maybe it was because it gave me a chance to make something shabby look new. Then there was the lush scent of grass clippings. I would recline on the lawn afterward, and I didn’t care if the clippings stuck all over me or not. But when Charlie came I gave the job to him. We argued about it first, but then I was glad to turn it over, only to him. I would watch him mow the lawn, his shirt off, the clippings gusting up onto his chest and sweaty back, his muscles knotting and flexing with each turn of the mower.
All I wanted was to settle down with somebody. I am easy-going, laid-back, easy to be with. I never wanted to be one of those people who were so rigid they drove you nuts. With Charlie there I felt secure. This was all I wanted. This was everything.

Charlie didn’t spend the night every day of the week, but three days out of seven was enough to throw a wrench in Rick’s stalking. As far as I knew he stopped driving by the house, and he didn’t follow me in his car anymore. But Rick would still leave profane notes for me, and send me threatening e-mails. These were enough to keep Charlie around.
“It’s important to keep your head up,” Charlie told me. “Don’t let him beat you down.”
Charlie and me were at his favorite pizza place, “Sweet Home Alabama” blaring on the jukebox. He was saying how just varying my routine is important, just in case. Then I asked Charlie if he ever had a woman act this way to him. “Not that I know of,” he said. “But women don’t seem to get this way as much,” he said. “You know? And not with me.”
“Yeah, right,” I said. “What are you talking about?”
He dashed oregano and pepper and garlic powder on the pizza and we dove in.
That night he watched a movie while I talked to Diane on the phone. I hadn’t spoken to her in months. In the fall doctors removed a third of her tongue—cancer. I flew out to Indianapolis to see her, which I think she appreciated. She was jittery from the lack of nicotine—the doctors made her quit cold turkey.
“Hey, Shirley,” she said. This was a warm greeting for her. In some ways, Diane had a much tougher time in life than I did. Sometimes I felt guilty about it, or pitied her. That night I told her about Rick and all, about what was happening. Having heard some of my previous stories, she wasn’t surprised. Then I made a mistake: I mentioned that Charlie was helping out. She slipped into one of her rants about how Charlie stole me from her, literally snatched me from her, and how before he came along we were tight like sister should be. “What the hell happened?” she asked. Then she kept on asking it. I apologized for even mentioning him.
“Just forget the whole thing,” she said. “I have enough problems out here as is.”
She slipped through my fingers. Ultimately Diane just sees herself as alone in life, sees herself as driven by loss. Bum luck. I remembered how once she told me she found out where our father lived. She drove out there and followed him around. She even bought a gun. She told me she fantasized about putting one through his skull then driving over the body. She told me she liked imagining her car wheels rolling over his chest and neck.
When Charlie was finished with his move he gave me a hug and said he should go home that night, that Charlotte was starting to feel neglected.
“It looks like everything here is under control for now,” he said.
For a moment I fantasized that Charlotte and the girls died in a plane crash, that Charlie was racked with need. I thought if the worst were ever to happen, I would be the first person he would call upon. Or I could be. I imagined Charlie nursing his pain with beer and shots of vodka. I imagined laying him back on the sofa and pressing my body into his, holding his face in my hands, hearing him whimper my name. It was wrong. I felt immediately guilty at this thought. It sent a shiver up my arm anyway.
Charlie shook his coat on and kissed my forehead.
“I’ll talk to you tomorrow,” he said. “Be sure to look up.”
I nodded. Watched him slip into darkness.

The next day I got three phone calls at work from Rick. The first time he hung up. The second time he called me a “stinking slut,” and hung up. The third time he screamed, “I’m going to bash your fucking head in,” then hung up. I thought about calling Charlie, but decided it could wait. It wasn’t an emergency situation. I didn’t want to annoy Charlie by running to him at the first sign of trouble. I didn’t want him to think I was that frail. Rick had acted this way before. This was just more of the same, I told myself.
After work I went to the grocery store. I wanted to buy some food for the next time Charlie came over: popcorn, apples, cereal, French roast (his favorite), ginger snaps. As I placed the grocery bags in my car I noticed the sky had an odd tint to it—
blurred or smoky.
I pulled into the driveway and stepped out of the car. I opened the trunk and lifted the bags. Then it hit me, a thudding triangle of pain tearing into my head. I could feel my body slump against the bumper. Then another rending blow. I could feel the warm stickiness on my hair, on my face. I felt my body slip down, slip under. I felt cold, as if the cool air was seeping in and the warmth was seeping out.

The skin of Charlie’s nose flickered in and out. Mr. Cort’s hat. My mother’s eyelashes. Charlie’s brow, beaded with sweat. The back of his hand smearing it.
Nausea burned up my throat. Two women peered over me and touched my shoulder. One woman winked a green eye.
I could hear inner workings. Sounds of machinery echoed from below. In the darkness the blankets were heavy. I tried to lift myself but my head seethed with pain. A dozen winged hands clamped me down.
Charlie’s eyes and mouth. My mother’s cheeks and hair. Diane’s neck. The pale freckles on Charlie’s chin. Raymond’s eyebrows. Charlie’s teeth and smile.

When the drugs lifted, the pain remained, like silt at the bottom of a dried creek bed. They told me I had sixty stitches in my head divided between two places. A concussion. Lucky I didn’t have a coma. When I could raise my body to a sitting position I still wasn’t hungry, as if the medication carried that away.
My mother told me that Frank Cort found me slumped in my driveway. Nobody knew how long I was there. Groceries were strewn all over the driveway, and blood was leaking from my head. She patted my cheek and massaged my neck and arms. She said that nobody knew what happened. I watched Charlie. He said he called the police, but they hadn’t any luck. Diane embraced me. Charlie stood on the other side of the room, his jaw clenching and unclenching. He couldn’t stand still.
I had a severe concussion and that the doctors said I was very lucky. My mother said they didn’t know exactly what struck me, but that whoever did this to me hit with full force. For the first time I could remember I wanted to hide.
Somehow I felt this was my punishment for thinking those thoughts about Charlotte, about Charlie’s girls. Still, Rick seemed to be some kind of vengeance sent for an expressed purpose. Rick is my regret come to surface, I thought. This is my own fault, I told myself. I told Diane and my mother that I’d like to speak to Charlie for a moment. Even though my mother couldn’t understand, I was never interested in religion or fate or God. This was different.
The door clicked behind them. The grains in the particleboard reminded me of the doors they had at Lubbock High. Charlie stayed where he was, leaning against the far wall. His teeth gleaned in the light when he opened his mouth to talk. He stammered, stuttered, looked away.
“I don’t even know what to say,” he said.
“Neither do I,” I said. I didn’t even want to hear the name Rick, I told Charlie. He nodded.
“Just give me the address,” he said.
I told him and he closed his eyes for a moment. I could hear a nurse in the hallway teasing a patient. “Henry, chocolate pudding again? You going on a diet now?”
“That’s it,” Charlie said. “No more chances.”
I knew what he meant. He told me he was going that night or the night after. He would call my answering machine. If it was successful he would just let the machine pick up, press a button, and hang up. If he wasn’t, he would tell me in person.

When they released me a couple days later Diane drove her rental car and my mother sat in back. My mother gently rubbed my neck and told me that she called my boss and he told me to take several weeks off. Diane drove us to Mom’s house and Mom helped me upstairs to my old room. My mother sat me on the bed and kneeled next to me.
“What would you like? We can get some of that Mexican food you love. Pancho’s? We can get movies. Sodas? Ice cream?”
I nodded. Normally I would have hated so much blatant attention, but this time I didn’t care. It felt good to be coddled. All I wanted to do was recline in my childhood bed and let life unfold. I could feel the stitches in my head and my scalp throbbing. I felt like the bride of Frankenstein, without the husband.
That evening I let Diane bring the television and VCR from downstairs into my room, as I always wanted to do when I was a teenager. This seemed ironic—when I finally got my wish I was an adult who faced a near-death attack. My mother brought me chicken chimichangas. I doused them with hot sauce and my appetite returned. I watched NASCAR. Something about the cars circling around and around hypnotized me, relieved the tension. Mom and Diane just let me be. That night I just wanted to be with my own thoughts.
I turned the television on mute. Still watching the cars circulate, I thought about Charlie. I remembered watching him play football. I loved watching him the other boys. He would lower his shoulders, and plow right into the opponent, and the other boy would flail backwards, arms limp, head snapping back. It was exhilarating. Terrifying. Maybe if I weren’t related to him I would have thought he was too rough. But when he pounded some poor defenseless kid into the grass, my heart leapt, and that tingly feeling wound through me.
The television station cut from the race itself to one of the crew. Without the sound the guys in the pit looked like idiotic robots, and the race seemed absurd. Charlie used to mock television when we were kids: “Why would I waste my time drooling like an idiot over a bunch of flickering images,” he’d say. Charlie would rather interact; in this way he was almost more feminine than masculine. At Fieldstone’s, the grocery store where he worked as a teenager, Charlie would chat up just about every customer. He could remember the minutest details from the lives of each regular customer. The customers would line up just for his friendly checkout service. It made perfect sense to me that Charlie would get a business degree from college, come back and start up the best tree removal service in the area. Everything Charlie touched turned to gold.
Laying in my childhood bed I remembered walking to Fieldstone’s to buy sugar or milk for Mom, but also to visit Charlie. I would stand in the magazine aisle and simply watch Charlie work the crowd. I would feel an onrush of pride, pride that I knew him, that he was my stepbrother. One day he brought me a charm bracelet from the store. It was summer and I was a camp counselor at the art camp that year. Charlie handed me the bracelet and said, “I was thinking of you today, for some reason.” I never told him how much that bracelet meant to me. It was and still is, by far, my most prized possession.

The next morning I awoke in a cold sweat. I don’t know if it was the medication wearing off or the fact that I just remembered to check my messages. Either way, I lurched out of bed and lifted the receiver.
I knew if I did actually sleep with Charlie I would probably lose respect for him. He was the closest I knew to the perfect person. He always seemed to do the right thing, to be in the right place at the right time. As I dialed my voice mail I realized that in making my romantic decisions I wanted to prove something to myself. For some reason I chose trash. This is why I loved Charlie. He was the shining example of “The Good Guy,” the moral man, a rarity, a knight in shining armor.
As I pressed star, then my phone number and pass code, I thought of a conversation I had with Charlie a few months after his father and he moved in to our house. We were in the back yard, helping my mother rake leaves. I held the plastic bags open while Charlie bent over and scooped the dry leaves into the gap.
“Don’t you ever worry about your mother?” I asked. I looked up into a curtain of leaves. A thick cloud of maple and elm and oak fluttered behind Charlie’s head. The rustle sounded almost like water. I could smell one of our neighbors burning leaves a few blocks away.
“Yes,” he said, looking away. “But she had mental problems. She wasn’t good for any of us so something had to happen.”
He told me he just wasn’t interested in maintaining a relationship with her. She would write him once a month, but Charlie would never respond. It seemed like an un-Charlie-like thing to do, cold and callous.
“You have one new message, and eight saved messages,” the automated voice said. “To listen to your messages, press one.” I did.
Now I understood.
When I listened to the message I heard a faint hissing at first, for about two seconds. Then a single beep, more hissing, then the phone clicked dead. I dropped the phone immediately, as if it was hot to the touch. I inhaled and exhaled. I ran my thumb along my right wrist, where I usually keep my charm bracelet. It was inside my home, on the bureau in my bedroom. Safe. Protected. My pulse throbbed, and it felt good.

The phone rings an hour later. “The arts and crafts project with the ladies is such a hit that we’re starting a second round,” Maud says. “So sorry, sweetie. I guess it will be a lunch instead of a brunch.” Angie stays on the phone for a few moments more as Maud describes the craft project. It has something to do with naked dolls becoming clothed and makeup-ed. But Angie isn’t listening anymore--the front door just rattled.
Angie stands in the doorway between the kitchen and living room, staring at the front door. Tuning out Maud’s loud voice, Angie listens for the noise again. It might be her neighbor Joyce, stopping by for an actual visit. She’s been over twice before but always refuses to come in. First, she dropped off cookies in a hurry after insulting Angie for being single. Joyce was a bit softer the next time, asking for her plate back and commenting about the last heat wave.
The door rattles again. The doorknob is actually twisting and creaking.
“I’ve got to go now,” Angie says quietly, interrupting Maud. “I’ll see you at noon.”
Angie sets the phone down on the floor. It’s probably one of the neighborhood kids pulling some prank like she’s Boo Radley. She dismisses the idea then forces herself to walk the few feet to the front door. The doorknob is no longer moving. Maybe the person has given up. Angie peeks out the door’s small window.
An old woman stands on the stoop. At first, Angie think it’s Joyce with a new perm. But this woman is shorter, maybe five-feet, and wears a bright yellow pullover and light blue pants. Around her permed white hair is a green scarf, and reading glasses dangle from her neck on a beaded chain. She looks like spring. She must be one of Joyce’s friends, accidentally at the wrong house.
Angie turns the lock and opens the door.
The woman jerks her head up and peers at Angie. “Thank you for opening the door. I seem to have misplaced my key.”
“Excuse me?”
“I’ll just get to work in the garden now.” The woman makes a move forward, like she’s actually going to walk into the house, but Angie blocks her.
“I’m sorry, but you must be confused. This is my house and my garden. You must be looking for someone else.”
“Look, young lady,” she says with sudden authority, “I don’t know who you think you are, but I am Mrs. Evelyn Wheatley and I own this house and that garden. So you best let me by.” And without another word, she pushes past Angie and marches straight through the living room to the kitchen.
Angie scrambles after Evelyn, almost forgetting to shut the front door. “How did you get here?” she asks after reaching Evelyn who stands at the open backdoor, surveying the garden.
“By taxi, of course. I’ve never driven a car a day in my life.” She clears her throat. “I woke up this morning and realized I hadn’t worked in the garden all last week. So I called a taxi and a nice gentleman in a tweed jacket picked me up and brought me home.”
Evelyn clearly doesn’t know what day or month it is. And now Angie remembers. She must be the former tenant, the widow who was moved to the nursing home. How did she get out?
“Did anyone see you leave?”
“Of course not. It’s none of their business. I leave every morning to work in the garden. But for some reason the taxi wasn’t waiting this morning, so I had to call one.” Evelyn steps down into the thick grass and thrusts her hands on her hips. “This garden is disgraceful.” She walks to the nearest flowerbed and digs her fingers into the dirt. “The daffodils and tulips should’ve been dug up by now and stored in the cooler.” She pulls out a bulb and knocks away the dirt. “And the young red oaks should’ve been pruned.” Sticking the bulb in her pants pocket, Evelyn begins to walk around the yard, touching each plant and tree, explaining what pruning, weeding, and planting needs to be done.
Angie simply stands at the backdoor, watching Evelyn’s careful movements. She must be at least eighty, yet her steps are sure. Her voice is clear and distinct, not at all like she imagined the voice of a person with dementia to be. Evelyn speaks with authority to the plants, to the small lives she’s cared for for who knows how many years. Evelyn returns to the flowerbed where she pulled up the daffodil bulb. She bends and slowly sits on her knees then rolls up the sleeves of her pullover.
“I need a trowel, wheelbarrow, pruning shears, the water hose, and a pair of gloves—the flowered ones.”
Angie stands still, transfixed. Shouldn’t she call the nursing home and let them know where Evelyn is? But before Angie can retreat into the kitchen for the phone, Evelyn turns and says, “Well, are you going to get them, or not?”
Angie drops her gaze and begins the walk around the house to the garage. Inside she gathers all of what Evelyn has requested, except for the flowered gloves. The only ones she can find are the same brown and black ones she touched when she first dug through this pile some two months ago. When she brings over all of the gardening tools in the wheelbarrow, Evelyn says, “These aren’t the gloves I asked for. I need the flowered ones.”
“I couldn’t find them. I’m sorry.”
Evelyn looks from the gloves to Angie. “Fine. These will have to do.” She turns back to the flowerbed and away she goes—pruning, cutting, and digging.
There is nothing else for Angie to do but watch. So she sits down at the threshold of the backdoor and folds her arms across her knees. Evelyn’s hands move swiftly but with a gentleness Angie can’t quite comprehend. It’s like this woman knows each of these plants intimately and so even though she has to pull up some and prune back others, it’s all done with love. More than that, Evelyn is enjoying herself. In fact, she’s humming.
Maud hadn’t looked this way when she tended her garden, but then, she’d chosen a garden for different reasons. The day Angie left for college, Maud appeared in her husband’s carpentry workshop to inform him that he would have to stop acting like his job was his life and spend more time with her. Maud had grown jealous of the wood, which was ridiculous. Of course he loved the wood more than her, as he should have. She hadn’t deserved him. After her monologue ended, he had smiled, waited for her to stalk out, and then installed a lock on the workshop door.
And so Maud churned up the back corner of their backyard and started a garden. At first, there were only strawberries and cucumbers. Each month whole sections of grass succumbed to tomatoes, string beans, garlic, oregano, lavender, parsley, carrots, cabbage, broccoli, and kale. She began spending whole mornings in the dirt, on her hands and knees, each week adding a new row. During those last six months, Angie’s father spent his early mornings in a lawn chair watching his wife work the earth.
This went on for a good two years. Until one summer evening Maud left the supper dishes in the sink and marched out the backdoor to the shed for the hoe and pitchfork. Earlier that week the doctor had ordered Angie’s father to bed, indefinitely. The Hospice nurse was coming over twice a day to see that he was comfortable. It was difficult to ignore the steady beeping from the heart monitor and the periodic drip of the IV. Angie was still sitting at the kitchen table when Maud shoved open the backdoor. And two hours later, the backyard was a heap of compost. The next day, she turned the ripped, juicy plants back under the soil and laid out slabs of new sod.
Angie smiles at Evelyn even though her back is turned. If only Maud had felt this way about gardening, maybe things would be different. If only she hadn’t preferred it to being with Angie while her father wilted away. Even if her husband had been dying, why did Maud have to ruin other pieces of life just because she was losing the only one she had never been able to control?
Angie sighs. Evelyn shouldn’t be here. She needs to go back to the nursing home. What if she’s missed her morning’s medication? What if she has a heart condition? What if she dies right here in the garden? How would she explain it? But Evelyn won’t die. She’s obviously healthy. Angie is sure of at least that.
She watches Evelyn work along the east flowerbed for what feels like half an hour. Angie really should call and at least let people know that Evelyn is here, safe and happy. But it’s because Evelyn is so happy that Angie doesn’t want to call anyone. Shouldn’t this poor woman be allowed a few hours of pleasure in the garden she was forced to give up? Maud will be coming over soon, so Evelyn will have to be gone by then. If Maud finds her here, she’ll start a phone calling campaign to the police, the fire department, and every nursing home in town. She would set the situation right and be the heroine of this poor old woman’s confused life.
Angie reaches down to scratch her ankle and realizes her legs have fallen asleep and are now tingling wildly. She stands and shakes out each leg. Her stomach aches. She glances into the kitchen and sees that it’s almost eleven o’clock.
“Mrs. Wheatley?” Angie says, and Evelyn turns to look at her. “I’m going inside for some tea. Would you like something?”
“I’d love tea, thank you.” She smiles broadly and for a moment, stops digging. “Henry and I used to drink tea every morning and evening. We would go through a box of teabags a week.”
A few minutes later, Angie returns with two mugs. She sets hers down on a small concrete stepping stone then carefully carries the other to Evelyn, who removes her gloves to take the cup in her hands.
“Thank you so much.” Evelyn sips at the tea. Angie turns to go back to her seat by the door when Evelyn says, “Now, who are you again?”
Angie stops and looks down at the seated Evelyn. She asked the question with such a patient tone that Angie almost doesn’t know what to tell her.
“I’m Angie Sampson.”
“And do you have a husband?” That seems to be the golden question. Every woman over forty wants to see Angie married off. Life’s starting to feel like a Jane Austen novel.
“No, just a mother.”
Evelyn nods. “So what are you doing in the neighborhood?”
“Well, I live here now.”
Evelyn meets Angie’s gaze and takes another sip. “So I hired you to watch the house while I’m away?”
“Something like that.”
Evelyn looks back at the flowerbed. “But where’s Henry? He was here when I left last. Is he at a doctor’s appointment? Oh no,” she sets the cup down in the flowerbed, “was I supposed to take him? Is he waiting in bed?”
She is pushing herself up when Angie steps forward and helps her back down. “No, no. Henry isn’t waiting. You haven’t forgotten anything.” She pats Evelyn softly and hands her the cup.
“Are you sure? Because sometimes I forget the most important things. I once forgot his birthday. Isn’t that terrible?” She turns to Angie with a desperate look.
“No, not at all. My mother has forgotten mine plenty of times. But each time, it was still my birthday.”
Evelyn smiles and takes a drink. “I like tea. Henry and I always did. I once tried to grow tea plants, right over there in that back corner, but they wouldn’t take. Not enough rain, the books said, even for Houston.”
“I can imagine.” Angie drops to her knees beside Evelyn. “So you planted this garden?”
“Why, of course I did! Henry doesn’t know the first thing about planting anything. But he helps me, mostly with the lifting. He always was a strong man.”
Angie smiles. She wants to hug her. “So do you have any children?”
Evelyn shakes her head. She sets the now-empty cup in the grass then slips back on her gloves. “I always loved children though, especially girls with their pigtails and lacy dresses, like postcards. Henry would’ve loved a little girl.”
Angie almost can’t stand it anymore. She wants Evelyn to stay, not in the kitchen or the living room, but in the garden, her garden. Evelyn belongs here on her knees with the brown gloves and the green scarf drooping from the side of her head, surrounded by clumps of dirt and small piles of fresh weeds. The garden looks right again, just like it had when Angie first moved in, when fertilizer and mulch were still in the grass and under the bushes. Evelyn can’t go.
“What’s the name of the bush you’re pruning right now?” Angie asks, squatting down next to her.
“It’s a lantana and these are the blueberry bushes,” she says, nodding to the right. “We planted those so we could make blueberry pies and jams. I canned eight jars one year, but mostly we just sprinkled them over toast.” She pauses and Angie can see her smiling. “Joyce still comes and picks the blueberries for jams, so at least they’re not all going to the jays and mockingbirds.”
“Joyce, next-door?”
She frown, but keeps digging. “She’s such a wonderful lady. But I haven’t seen her in a few days, which worries me.”
Angie considers telling her about Joyce, that she’s just fine and still comes by. But then Evelyn might want to go see Joyce, and then she would leave, and then Joyce would make her go back to the nursing home. But Angie wants Evelyn to stay. Maybe she can even convince Maud to let her join them for lunch.
Evelyn drops the trowel and turns to Angie who is still sitting next to her. Evelyn’s whole face seems to droop, and her mouth hangs slack. Her eyes search Angie’s face as she touches her cheeks with the dirty gloves still on.
“Who are you?” she says, her voice fading into a frail moan.
“I’m Angie. I take care of the garden while you’re away.”
“Where is Nurse Mabel? Why isn’t Henry here?” Before Angie can stop her, Evelyn is standing and pulling off the gloves. “Where is Henry? I need to go home.”
Angie stands and takes both of Evelyn’s shaking hands. “You’re already home. Right here. This is your home. This is your garden. You are fine. Everything’s fine.”
“Everything’s not fine,” she says, shaking her head. “Where is Henry? Why isn’t he here?” She tugs at the green scarf and twists it fiercely. Her eyes dart around the yard. “Why am I here? I need to go home.”
“Listen to me, Mrs. Wheatley. You are home. This is where you need to be.”
Evelyn stares wildly back at Angie then pulls her hands from Angie’s grip. “I need to go home. I need to go home. You have to take me.”
Evelyn stumbles toward the backdoor, but Angie reaches out and holds her by the shoulders. “Henry will be here soon. You were right. He is at the doctor. But he’ll be home.”
“He will?”
“Yes, he wants to see you.”
Evelyn’s shoulders relax under Angie’s hands, and she smiles. “Oh, I’m so glad,” she says then pulls at her green scarf. “I miss him, very much.”
Angie steps forward and hugs Evelyn, who stands limp and quiet. If Angie can only convince Evelyn to return to the flowerbed, to slip back on her gloves and stay for just a little while longer, then everything will be fine. Angie will drive her back to the nursing home before Maud comes over. She will explain that Evelyn just wandered down the street and into her yard, no harm done. No one will ever have to know that for one morning, Evelyn returned home and restored her garden. And that Angie kept her there while she waited for her mother.

Way out in the desert east of El Paso the light can’t bleed in. You can see the stars, but not your hand. The light can’t span the gap. The sand in the wind tears it up. The desert’s had enough light. Plenty by sunset.

In the darkness of the desert there are trailers. I’m speaking of one. The trailer is like a giant shoebox. It has sun bleached siding, like most. It has a short set of rough-grained wooden steps leading to a small landing of the same kind of wood. The steps and the landing are the same as most trailers’ steps and landings. The trailer has a screen door with a plasti-glass window turned the color of burnt sugar. The trailer also has a satellite dish. It’s a gray matte-plastic satellite dish bolted to a metal plate on a corner of the roof of the trailer. A thing of relative beauty and seeming purpose, as if the trailer was dropped there to hold it. The satellite dish, and its relative beauty, are common trailer sorts of things.

To get to this trailer, you’ll have to go way out. Take Montana Avenue east past where the trailers come in clusters around convenience stores and carnicerías and dollar stores and adult theaters and strip clubs. The skeleton frames of suburbs yet to be will loom black behind you, unlit but promising change.

Keep going.

Go past the clusters and the trailers spread out, as if one of those clusters exploded and scattered itself across the desert. The road will still be paved, but your neighbor’s house will look like an actual, normal-sized shoebox and you’ll have to drive awhile before you get to a convenience store or carnicería or adult theatre or strip club. It will be hard to find a pizza place that delivers.

Keep going.

Out farther, where your neighbor’s trailers are little more than pixels. Go until you sweat it because you forgot to fill your gas tank and you might not make it back. Drive where pizza delivery drivers will not go. Go until the amber streetlights along Montana Avenue disappear and you’re left floating in the dark with your glowing dash gauges and the pillars of your headlights. You’ll find company on your trip. Balloon bodies of dead dogs will greet you with their stiff-twig legs pointing the way. They’ll flare up in your high-beams then disappear. Sometimes they won’t be balloons. Sometimes you’ll find one spread out like a busted sack of beans. Dry beans, because you won’t see the slick gloss of gore you’d expect. Blood dries quick out here.

Keep going.

There’s a dirt road you’ll have to take marked on either side by metal stakes with round, red reflectors like cherries on top. The dirt road is named Calcott, but there’s no street sign to gleam green and bare the name. The mail man knows, the Calcott dwellers, too. No one else knows. No one needs to.

Keep going.

Follow Calcott. Kick up dirt like silt on the bottom of an ocean trench. Go until you see a trailer with sun bleached siding and a rough-grained set of wooden steps with a rough-grained wooden landing that leads to a screen door with a plasti-glass window turned the color of burnt sugar. If the trailer appears to be a giant shoebox pedestal for a gray matte-plastic satellite dish, you’re at the right place. There should be a man inside. His name is Ian. He’s taking a shower. It’s going to be a very long shower, and you’ve just missed the story.

Ian is in a carnicería.

He strains his flat hand into his back pocket for his billfold and works it out from the tight lip and takes a five. Ian breathes hard through his nose and sweat trickles from his scalp and curls around his eyebrows to sting his eyes raw pink in the whites. He wipes with his forearm. More sweat. Ian takes the hem of his shirt in hand. He bares his belly and wipes his face and waits.

The carnicería gasps burnt pork and Pine-Sol and Ian curls his nostrils and waits behind a guy in Dickies with paint splatter like bird shit behind the knees. A faded Che Guevara on the olive-drab back of the guy’s shirt stares at the Coke in Ian’s hand. The guy thumps his Bush quart on the counter and asks for lottery tickets. He asks for the ones with the boots.

The clerk nods and hunches over the roller full of tickets of all sorts and tears off the ticket with the boots.

Ian hates Texasy things: toothpicks, ten gallon hats, snuff can circles in the back pockets of Wranglers, big belt buckles, and especially cowboy boots. Ostrich, snake, alligator—he hates them all. Ian hates Texasy things and he hates guys that waste his time on a day hot as hell for a lottery ticket with the boots that won’t win anyways, and waste his time in the heat and the burnt pork and Pine-Sol vapor with his eyes sweat-stung when he could have what he needs and be on his way.

He wonders how he’d draw this guy in his Dickies and his Che shirt, waiting slack-jawed for his lottery ticket: mouth stuffed with tickets and all of them the ones with boots and none of them winners and stuffed until his jaw is unhinged and his eyes bulge and maybe a quart of Bush shoved up his ass for good measure. Maybe two, because Ian can draw whatever he wants. Ian is an artist. He has fingers that can make what forms in the dim place between thought and sight where Ian reforms the world in the spiral-bound notebooks he keeps in his closet. Years of notebooks, piled in the dark, where he can boil you in acid or make you spontaneously combust. If you’re a man he can draw you with tits and a pussy. If you’re a woman he can draw you with a dick and a beard. He can sodomize you with a beer bottle or make you fuck a pig. He can make you gay if you’re straight and straight if you’re gay. He can bare your innards to open flame and split your dick like a hotdog. He can make you a pedophile, a necrophiliac, or a talking tube of feces. Ian can do whatever he wants on paper.

Che-guy pays for his beer and his ticket, and Ian takes his place.

The clerk says que paso and calls him Mr. Ian.

“Nada, Mr. M,” Ian says.

The clerk is a husk of a man in an oil-smeared jump-suit. On the breast, embroidered in tight, white stitch: Mickey. Mickey has one finger bent at the smallest joint like a hook. Arthritis and redundant use. Mops and hand-trucks. Deep, dirt bearing parenthesis of wrinkles spread from the smile set side-cocked in Mickey’s face. Ian puts his Coke down on the counter and doesn’t say anything about the Marlboros. Mickey has them scanned and ready and he recites the price they both know like a joke they never finish.

Ian puts down the five and Mickey pinches two dimes between his thumb and bent finger and makes to hand them across the counter. Ian waves the change away. Mickey drops the change back in the register and tells Ian adios.

“Later,” Ian says.

Ian walks out of burnt pork and Pine-Sol into gasoline, dust, and distant road kill. His eyes wither in the light before they pull tight and adjust as he walks across the bone-bleach gravel to his pick-up. It was a maroon pick-up, in some place apart from time and the sun. It’s pink as a wound with rust spots and mud along the wheel wells. A man’s truck despite the pink. Loud and deep and no AC with the suspension broken in and given to complain like a mattress under hard fucking.

Ian hops in the cab. The suspension creaks. He turns the ignition and pulses the gas as it catches so the engine won’t sputter out. It roars into a grumbling idle and shakes Ian’s guts until he’s numb. It’s a good enough pick-up. Old and familiar. Good enough, but it’s not really Ian’s. It’s his brother’s.

Ian’s brother George wears Wranglers with snuff circles in the back pocket and a big belt buckle with two pewter cowboys roping a pewter steer in the middle of the flat leather face framed in coiling pewter. George owns alligator, snake, and ostrich skin cowboy boots and is Ian’s older brother.

Put them side-by-side and you’d think George had leached all of Ian’s potential for height and strength through his hand placed on their mother’s swollen belly in some obscene blood rite while Ian was still in the womb.

It’s not that George is huge; it’s that Ian is small. George eats steak and Ian eats Cocoa-Puffs.

Sometimes George calls Ian ‘Peein’ Ian, Art-fag Extraordinaire’. Flip through one of Ian’s notebooks to find headless-George, transvestite-George, sheep-fucking George, dog-shit-eating George, and rotting-husk-being-devoured-by-vultures George.

Not that Ian doesn’t love George. He does. George lends Ian the pick-up. George bought Ian’s cigarettes until he turned 18. George is Ian’s brother, and that counts for something. Ian’s mother told him that George used to feed him strained squash from a rubber-coated spoon. Ian would fall asleep on George’s chest watching the Disney Channel through an illegal descrambler late on Saturday nights. George stuck his fingers in Ian’s mouth and pulled his first loose tooth like a thorn from Ian’s gums. George wore baggy pants with the bottoms stuffed in his shoes into a 7-11 and walked out with Ian’s first beer jutting against the denim like a broken ankle. George built a bonfire of dried mesquite and yucca husks to keep Ian warm while he drank it.

Ian grinds the gears and gives the truck gas. The rear wheels snake on the gravel before the pick-up lurches and limps onto Montana’s smooth asphalt. Ian squints out across the cracked dash and into the fading road to where the distance between his eyes and the end of sight is condensed and drawn thin as a razor’s edge. The edge wavers in the heat.

Ian tears the shrink-wrap from his Marlboros and flips it out the window. He pulls off the silver tab that covers the cigarettes and flips it out, too. Ian pinches a cigarette and steadies the wheel with his palm and digs his flat hand into his front pocket and gropes for matches. No matches. He forgot the matches. The pick-up’s push-in lighter doesn’t work.

“Fuck me,” Ian says.

Ian tries to put the cigarette back in the pack, but it doesn’t want to fit. He sticks the cigarette behind his ear instead. There’s a lighter in the trailer and if not there’s the stove with its circles of ash from Ian lighting cigarettes on the spiral coils.

Ian’s nic-fit tweaks his jaw and nibbles at his stomach while he drives the five minutes to Calcott. Ian opens his Coke and puts the mouth to his lips and fills his cheeks with the Coke and pumps it down his throat. He slows to forty-five on the 400 yards of pebble-dirt that leads to the trailer and the truck jolts hard on the furrows and bottoms out from time to time with a hollow metal thump. Pebbles ping in the wheel wells and ping sharp in Ian’s ears and through his jaw to tap in his teeth. He drinks his coke and the creosote on either side of Calcott blurs and seethes as he passes. The wind comes hot and stale from the window and Ian’s shirt sticks to his skin under his arms and stifles him so he raises his elbows to dry them out.

The truck slides and grinds gravel before it stops outside Ian’s trailer. The engine shudders before it dies. Ian is a short walk and a screen door away from fire. Ian hops down from the cab and the suspension creaks and the cigarette behind his ear weighs heavy like a whisper and the sun’s light murmurs but the stove’s red coil will be there and so will Leanne.

Leanne spent the night, and most days when Ian gets off of work after she’s spent the night she is up and dressed and waiting to go home.

Ian is off early and so Leanne will be asleep and he can lift his blanket and feel Leanne’s warm air and he can get under the blanket and be in her warm air and he can put his nose in her hair and smell it and it will smell like candy, sweat, and cigarettes. He can feel the thin hairs on the nape of her neck against his lips and if he wants to kiss her all he’ll have to do is pucker and her neck will not be warm like her air. Her neck will be cool because Leanne’s skin burns cool. And maybe today she’ll let him inside her, past the cool burning skin into the warm inside. She gave him her hand, once, when he kept kissing her shoulder and pulling her towards him in the dark. She gave him that, but Ian wanted more. Maybe today. And when they get up, slicked in mutual sweat, he can make pancakes while she’s in the shower. Maybe he’ll watch her in the shower, the shadow of her figure through the plastic shower curtain, the ghosts of her hands on her shapes in the shower while she thinks he’s cooking pancakes in the kitchen.

Ian bites his lip. He closes his eyes against the murmuring sun to see her in the space between where he can see her shapes. He has drawn her. Bent her arms and legs on paper, stretched them long and sinuous. Ian has made her anew in his dim space and even when she sat there and posed in plain sight he made her there instead, where she belongs to him. Where everything is his.

Ian met Leanne through Dave. Dave takes over security at the Longhorn Petroleum Pipeline when Ian’s shift is done. He’s Leanne’s older brother. Nothing much happens at the Longhorn. Ian drives back and forth. Sometimes he sees the shining eyes of a stray dog in his headlights. It’s not important, and neither is Dave. Dave likes to talk about work. Nothing happens at work. Dave, mostly, has nothing to say. But Leanne’s not like her brother. Leanne’s important– Leanne’s something.

When Ian first saw Leanne she was dirty and she walked across the dim hallway of Dave’s trailer and the bottoms of her feet were black and her skin was dull as if it was covered in a second skin of dried sweat. Her hair was flat on one side and slept in. Her eyes were rings of smudgy eyeliner and Ian saw smudgy bruises on her thin calves, little girl’s calves. He saw three-day stubble.

Leanne is Ian’s girlfriend, sorta. She says she is ‘seeing’ Ian. Leanne lives with her older brother and her younger sister, Neli. Leanne told Ian that their father lives in New Mexico and sends them a check for two hundred dollars a month, sometimes. Leanne told Ian these things, but there are things she doesn’t have to tell.

Leanne is thin and pale, except for her shoulders which are bronze knobs. If she gets sun anywhere else she just turns red. Leanne has a scar just above her pubic hair. It’s about three inches long. Ian touched it, once, and she turned her hips away from his hand. The scar was hard and thin, like a piece of wire just beneath her skin. Leanne told him it was ectopic.

Leanne wears black satin nightgowns under her kid sister’s shirts. It makes her long and narrow. Leanne wears surplus army boots, lots of eyeliner, and scowls. She dyes her hair black and she wears lots of pewter rings with skulls and spiders and shit like that. Leanne looks as if she’s mourning her own death. It makes her seem desperate and lonely, the kind of girl who will hop into pick-up with Ian so that they can run away from El Paso forever.

Ian is close to the coil. The rough-grain steps up to the trailer’s landing creak and bow beneath Ian’s weight. Ian tilts the Coke up and closes his eyes and waits for the dregs. He swallows and throws the bottle out into the sand and opens the trailer’s plasti-glass door and leaves the white-bright light behind. It’s dim inside. Ian pauses and closes his eyes to adjust before he goes to the stove and turns it on high. He hears a thump. Ian waits for the coil to glow. No good pressing his cigarette till it’s red hot. He hears a thump from the back of the trailer. Ian turns toward the thump. The trailer thumps again, and Ian follows the noise.

The first door he gets to is his. He sees his bed unmade and empty. Sees the towel from the morning’s shower. Leanne’s not there, in his bed, under his blanket with her warm air where she ought to be. No running water from the bathroom. Across the hall, the bathroom door is open. Dark inside. Ian hears a thump and moan. He follows the noise to the end of the hall, to George’s door.

The door is cracked. It swings open silently before Ian’s careful hand. From the doorway Ian sees George’s ass hover and fall. Leanne is on her belly and her flesh ripples away from George’s hips in waves and her arms stick straight back to hold her ankles in her hands, glowing pink against the pale, as if she’s trying to turn into a human wheel. Her forehead is an inch from the wall. When George falls, her head meets her shadow and thumps against the wall. Leanne moans from the inside out. The room smells of beer and sweat.

Ian tries to think of what he’ll draw for this. He tries to think of what he’ll draw but he can only see George and Leanne there, on the bed, glossy with sweat. Ian tries to think, but nothing comes. Ian grabs a lamp.

The lamp is marble. It belonged to their grandmother. It’s heavy with a shimmering satin shade and little yellow tassels. Ian feels the cord pull tight and then come free of the wall socket. The dense marble absorbs the impact when the corner of its felt-bottomed base hits George in the back of the head. Ian doesn’t feel the blow in his arms, just the weight of the lamp.

George falls forward as if he’s trying to swan dive and Leanne gets out of her human wheel. She rolls over and closes her legs and screams and her scream shakes in Ian’s eyes but Ian can’t hear it. The base of the lamp comes down between Leanne’s eyes and the room gets still.

George has blue sheets. On the sheets the blood is purple. On Leanne it’s red. On George it’s red too, but darker because George has a tan. Ian drops the lamp. The base comes down corner-first between the bones of his foot.

“Fuck,” Ian says.

Ian hops on one foot. George and Leanne go up and down.

“Oh, fuck,” Ian says.

Ian goes back into the kitchen. His foot is forgotten. His fingers fumble the cigarette from behind his ear. It shakes between his fingers above the spiral coil, glowing red now in the dim. Ian puts the cigarette in his mouth. The heat makes his eyes water. He sucks on the cigarette, smells his eyebrows singe, and the end of the Marlboro flares.

He smokes his cigarette. He uses the orange ember at the end of the filter of the first to light the second. He smokes the second until it’s a filter with an ember at the end. He uses the second to light the third as he thinks about burying them. He knows how to bury things in the desert.

Ian had a dog named Jasper. Jasper died beneath the trailer.

Jasper was a good dog. He loped to Ian out of the desert on long goofy legs. Jasper was a desert dog. Hips like axe heads, a spine of giant pearls, a tongue like a thick slab of bologna.

Ian used black plastic garbage bags rolled up around his arms and cinched at his wrists with rubber bands as gloves. Jasper was stiff like a rocking horse when Ian pulled him by a hind leg from under the trailer, dragged Jasper a few yards away from the house, and started digging.

Digging holes in the desert is hard. Sand fills in what you dig out, but if you keep at it you can make progress. Ian dug three feet deep by sunset. It was a nice sunset, a perk of the desert. The sky was all orange at the horizon and above the orange horizon it was purple like the middle of a fresh bruise. The mountains in the west were flat and sharp-edged shadow like the cracked edge of an eggshell cupping the world.

While Ian was digging George brought a big white toolbox from the pick-up. It was the kind of toolbox that you install on the back rim of a truck bed, right next to the back window. George sat on the toolbox with a silver can of Coors Light and watched Ian dig. Ian had paid thirty dollars so that George would let him use the toolbox as a coffin. George thought it was a waste, but he needed the money for beer and dip and he didn’t have any tools to put in it anyways. Ian needed the toolbox. Desert dogs would migrate in the night from miles around to dig up Jasper and eat him. Some of them might be Jasper’s own children, if Jasper had any. Jasper probably had lots of children because desert dogs are never fixed.

By the time Ian got to four feet the top half of the eggshell had settled back over the earth. Ian picked Jasper up and the half-digested kibble still caked in Jasper’s hair felt like frog skin through Ian’s garbage bag gloves. Ian put Jasper in the toolbox and the awkward weight almost brought Ian tumbling in but he caught himself with his palm on the edge of the toolbox and stood and closed the lid. He locked the toolbox with a tiny silver key and shoved the toolbox off the lip of the hole and let it slide down on the sand to the bottom. George smirked with the silver beer in his hand. Ian put the key on his Budweiser Promotional Bottle-Opener key chain. George laughed at him and asked, “What? You’re going to maybe want to dig him up sometime?”

George wiped beer spittle from his lips while Ian shoveled sand back in the hole. He used a blown tire to mark the grave when he was done.

Ian flicks the spent filter into the pan under the coil and digs his flat hand into his pocket and gropes for his key ring. He gets it out and holds it up before him. The silver key dangles, but who? Only one can fit. Ian considers a coin flip. He considers enny-meeny-minny-moe. Ian decides to save the decision for later. Either way he’ll need another coffin.

Ian takes off his shirt and goes outside.

Outside it’s bright and the ground is bleached and glaring and the bumper of the pick-up is a silver explosion. Ian walks in the desert with a shovel. His eyes are closed to slits and his feet sink in the sand and the bones of his right foot still hurt. Ian will find an appropriate coffin. It’s a matter of looking.

The desert is a dump. Garbage from decades past lies buried beneath the sand like fossils. The desert is full of naturally occurring soiled mattresses, tubeless television husks, Beta-max cassettes, Beta-max tape players, cracked and bent aluminum siding, headless dolls, bodiless doll heads, rusted swing-set skeletons, stray dogs, and plastic flowers.

There’s a cemetery ten miles to the west of Ian’s trailer. It’s the Evergreen Cemetery. It’s a patch on the desert like some secret garden granting entrance to an underworld, and it’s always green. The cemetery sprinklers hiss at sun sets. The bodies float in their coffins. In the morning, when the bodies settle, the caretakers place plastic flowers on the markers. The flowers migrate in the wind. Eventually they get stuck in the branches of the creosote around Ian’s trailer.

Ian walks toward a dark glob in the sand. It’s too solid to be chaparral. It’s a thing and it’s big. Big enough for a body. Ian walks and the thing resolves. The thing is an oil drum. It’s intact except for small rust-rimmed .22 holes. The oil drum’s mouth gapes too small for George’s shoulders, but Leanne should fit.

The oil drum is half-full of sand and Ian can’t lift it. He scrapes out sand, green and brown pieces of broken bottles, and an ice cube tray with his shovel. Ian can’t get all the sand out, but he doesn’t have to. Ian grabs the rusty edge of the drum and pulls. The rough edge cuts into his palms, but the drum rises and spews streams of sand from the .22 holes.

Ian puts his shovel in the barrel and drags it back to the trailer. He picks up plastic flowers and throws them in along the way. Sand gets mixed with sweat between the metal and his palms and scours his skin. The drum leaves a giant snake’s trail behind it.

Raw palms and the snake’s trails or no, Ian is thinking about what he’ll tell Dave. Dave will see him at shift-change and ask him if he’s seen Leanne and Ian could say he dropped her off and hasn’t seen her since or he could say that he caught George and Leanne in bed together, which is true, and that they professed their love and ran off together, which isn’t. Two birds, one stone, but Ian has the pick-up. If Ian has the pick-up then that leaves George and Leanne to run away together on foot through the desert. Improbable. Ian decides to deal with them one at a time. He practices his line:

“I dropped her off…”

Ian is the monkey with his hands over his ears.

“I dropped her off at the mall…”

He is the monkey with his hands over his eyes.

“I dropped her off at the mall and I haven’t seen her since.”

He is the monkey with his hands over his mouth.

Ian is the six-handed monkey.

Ian leaves the barrel by the trailer in the shadow of the satellite dish. Ian needs to cool off. He can feel the grit of sand in his sweat on his skin. The gloom is heavy in the trailer. It’s dark but not cool. Ian goes to the freezer and opens it and sticks his head inside. He rests his forehead on a family sized bag of chicken tenders. It makes his forehead numb and helps him think and he thinks he should clean the blood off the lamp. Ian thinks he should wrap Leanne up in the sheets and drag the bodies outside before they make a smell inside the trailer that will never clear out.

Ian gets the lamp. The shade is clean. It fell off when Ian picked it up. The marble base is caked with dried blood like dark chocolate. Ian takes the lamp to the kitchen and puts it in the sink. He leaves the cord dangling over the side and glosses the marble with yellow Palmolive gel.

Ian turns on the water and the soap mixes with blood to make warm, pink foam in spirals down the drain. Ian leaves the faucet on until the water and foam spinning down the drain goes from pink to clear. Clean the lamp: done.

George and Leanne are naked and dead on the bed. Leanne is fetal. George is parallel with the far edge of the mattress on his stomach. His eyes are closed and soft like sleeping. One arm hangs from the side as if he’s reaching for something under the bed. The other arm ends with George’s hand still holding his boxers. Ian grabs George by an ankle and pulls. George’s own weight takes him over the edge and onto the floor. George didn’t bleed bad. There’s a stripe down his back that ends an inch below his shoulder blades. Ian leaves George on the floor and turns to Leanne.

A triangle of blood starts between Leanne’s eyes and paints the bottom-half of her face. Ian can see little white bits of bone like baby teeth in the red, wedge dent between her eyes.

Ian doesn’t linger on Leanne. He pulls the elastic at the corners of the sheets free from the mattress and wraps Leanne in the sheet. Ian tries it like a burrito first. He folds one side over and puts his hands on her back. He feels her, firm and warm through the cotton. Ian pushes against her back so that she’ll roll. Leanne will not roll. Ian pulls the sheet back, bearing her flesh again. He bites his finger, grinds his palm against his forehead, and nods to himself. Ian grabs a corner of the sheet. He folds it over Leanne. He folds the opposite corner: top-left to bottom-right. He folds top-right to bottom-left and ties the corners together. Leanne is in a giant hobo’s handkerchief sack.

Ian gets his flat hand in the hollow between Leanne’s arm-pit and the floor. He shoves his arm in. He gets his other arm under, behind her knees, and lifts. A threshold carry for Leanne: a crumbled up mannequin bride in a purple wedding dress. Her arms stay out and bent, like she’s holding an invisible beach ball.

The arm under Leanne’s knees does most of the work. It burns by Ian’s third step. Leanne hits her head on the doorframe. Leanne drags her feet along the hallway wall. In the living room, Leanne catches a corner of the television in the eye socket. Ian sways to keep her weight afloat. When he gets to the landing he takes a blind step towards the first stair. He over shoots and his heel comes down on the edge. Leanne and Ian fall to the sand.

Leanne hits first and Ian comes down hard on Leanne’s hipbone just below his ribs. It digs up and under, crushing his air out just before his nose comes down on her knee. Ian smells copper and his eyes flood. Inside the trailer the phone rings.

Ian gets to his feet and tries to fill his lungs again and bends over with his hands on his knees. Everything is blur through the tears from his sore nose. He can feel warmth building in his sinuses. He gets to the phone on the fifth ring. He feels as if he’s going to sneeze and the desire not to hear a sixth, seventh, eight, or ninth ring picks up the phone.

“Hello?”

Ian’s mom says, “Hi, hon.”

Ian’s mom is 49. She is a medical assistant in Phoenix Arizona. She is divorced, has been divorced, since Ian turned 18. She carried Ian for nine and a half months, she gave birth to him at the tail-end of the 1970s, and she’s on the phone. She calls every Friday. It’s Friday.

Ian’s mom says he sounds like he has a cold. Ian sniffs and smells more copper.

“Allergies. Mom, I’m —”

Ian’s mom asks how he is doing. Ian is preparing to bury his brother and his girlfriend on a Friday afternoon.

“Fine. Mom I —”

Ian’s mom asks how his brother is doing. He is dead on the floor in his bedroom face down on the carpet.

“Fine. Mom —”

Ian’s mom wants to know how work is going. Ian can taste copper dripping into his throat. His nose is bleeding. He is beginning to get nauseous.

“Fine. I’m —”

Ian’s mom asks if he’s busy. The copper taste is replaced by Coke and bile. She asks what he’s making. He sees a note on the refrigerator. A yellow post-it note he left for George.

It says, G: Out of milk. Will pick up OMW from wk.

Ian forgot to get the milk.

“Cooking. Mom, I’m cooking. It’s burning —”

Outside, Ian can see the bottom of Leanne’s foot sticking out of the sheet. It looks oddly lavender against the glowing sand. Ian’s mom asks if she should let him go.

“Yeah. It’s burning. Sorry mom. Call you back, love you.”

Ian’s mom says she loves him too. Ian hangs up the phone.

When the phone hits the cradle, Ian runs to the bathroom. He has to slide on his knees to kneel before the toilet. He can feel solids in his throat and more solids rising. Ian vomits.

When the heaves subside, Ian gasps. He breathes hard into the bowl and closes his eyes with his cheek on the cold plastic toilet seat and listens to his breath, dying into a fading hush in the bowl, but beyond his breath he hears something drone. An engine. There is a corpse at the bottom of his front steps wrapped in a purple sheet and, somewhere out there, an engine.

Ian hits his knee on the toilet getting up.

The engine belongs to a mail truck. It is white with a blue postal eagle on the side. The mailman is wearing his blue uniform with short-shorts and dark socks pushed down around his ankles. Ian waves from the landing to see what the mailman will do, to see if he has seen. The mailman waves back and his smile is a melded blotch of harsh white in the darker blotch of his face across the distance. The mailbox is about fifty yards away from Ian’s trailer and it serves everyone who lives on Calcott. It’s a big aluminum cube on an aluminum pedestal. It has a blue postal eagle on both sides. It has nine locked compartments. The mailman has the back of the cube open so he can see all nine compartments at once. He takes nothing, puts nothing in, gets in his mail truck, and makes a U-turn.

When the truck turns into a white pixel, Ian gets the shovel from the oil drum and leaves it in the sand. He leans into the barrel and grabs the plastic flowers and drops them in the sand next to the shovel.

Ian covers the foot that escaped the sheet and dead-lifts Leanne. He dumps her headfirst into the barrel. Her shoulders stop her against the side of the barrel, so Ian grabs it by the rim and shakes it. Leanne inches down while Ian wobbles the barrel until her head hits the bottom. Leanne’s legs are sticking out of the drum from her knees up to her feet. Ian wraps his hands around her shins and pushes. Her legs are locked in L’s. He feels them give a little but they spring back as soon as he stops pushing. Ian kicks the drum. He uses the drum’s rim to pull himself up backwards to sit and bounce on Leanne’s shins until something in her legs snaps. The stiff muscles release and Ian falls inside. His ass is wedged in and he can feel Leanne’s toes. Ian pushes with his palms on the lip of the barrel and the small of his back scrapes against the wall of the drum. The drum tips and Ian is free. He grabs the shovel and swings. The blow jolts up the handle and stings Ian’s palms.

“Fucker,” he screams.

He swings again and the blow stings his palms and he says, “Fuck.”

Leanne is in the barrel. Ian starts to dig. His skin spreads tight and dry across his back in the sun. His nose throbs and he sucks back copper-and-bile-tinged snot as he digs with robotic persistence against the sand that tries to rush back in to fill his hole. The sun sinks towards the mountains. Ian digs until he’s done.

Ian rolls the barrel into the hole. The barrel rolls like an egg. Leanne’s odd weight fights against the rolling and then speeds it up. Covering the barrel is easy work. Ian scrapes sand and caliche back in from the pile he made. When he’s done, Ian plants the thin green stems of the plastic flowers in the shallow mound of displaced sand and stands with his hands on the small of his back to see the grave in the round shadow of the satellite dish bolted to the corner of the trailer’s roof. Sleek and grey and relatively beautiful, as if the trailer was put there just to hold it. A pedestal of sorts. Ian judges the flowered grave good enough for Leanne. He judges it fit and wipes his brow and heads inside for his brother.

George is still loose. It’s as if he’s made of rubber. Ian drags him across the floor because George is almost twice as heavy as Leanne, and Leanne had been difficult. The carpet makes the dragging difficult, but Ian has his hands wrapped tight around George’s ankles and gets him to the front door. George is naked. Ian is tired of seeing his penis. Ian grabs George’s boxers from his half-clenched hand. They’re green boxers with monkey heads on them. Yellow bubble print says Monkey Business. Ian kneels before George and slides the boxers on with his head turned. He is very tired of seeing George’s penis. He forces the boxers under George’s ass and pulls hard on the elastic hem and the penis is gone.

Ian drags George until his legs are out on the landing. He hooks his arms under George’s and props him on the doorframe. Ian’s forearms come away wet with George’s sweat. Ian tries to make him look natural. He crosses George’s arms across his lap. He bends one leg and lets the other one hang off the landing. George looks as if he’s resting after a long day’s work, watching the sun set.

There’s a tire sticking out of the ground just a few yards from the trailer. It’s a blown retread tombstone. A couple of feet beneath the tire there is a white metal toolbox. It’s the kind that goes on the back of pick-up trucks. There’s a dog inside. It takes Ian three seconds to pull the tire up. It takes him an hour to hit metal with the spade of his shovel. The toolbox looks the same as before it was buried. Rust damage on the right corner, a dent in the middle of the lid where George sat. Ian unlocks it with the tiny silver key and opens it to find that Jasper is little more than bones. Not just bones, because there are still tendons like dried strands of wood glue and patches of skin like sandpaper with hair still intact. Jasper is a mummy dog. His teeth are very white.

Ian can’t work anymore. He’s drained. He is sticky with dried sweat. He doesn’t even want a cigarette. Ian leaves the toolbox and Jasper to get George’s last Coors Light from the fridge. The cold burns his throat and Ian can imagine himself drinking Coors Light after Coors Light until he bloats and passes out next to his brother. There is only one Coors Light though, and Ian takes his time with it. He sits down next to George, puts his arm around George. When he’s not sipping his Coors Light he rests his cheek on George’s head. Ian smells George’s familiar smell: sweat and Irish Spring. Ian tries to say he’s sorry. What comes out not of vocal chords, but of other, deeper innards. An animal sound. Ian has his mouth open with his lips on George’s head and he can taste the sweat on the prickling hairs while he makes this sound.

Ian cries and tears roll down through George’s hair to wet the dried blood so it runs in thin pink lines down George’s back. Ian rocks his brother back and forth in his arms on the landing of their trailer and, for the first time in this long day, he has time to think. Ian knows they’re nowhere, now. Knows there’s nothing left of Leanne because he saw the wedge he made, the bone and blood wedge between Leanne’s eyes, as if there used to be a gem there and Ian worked it out with a pocket knife. There’s nothing left of her. Nothing left of George either, anymore. Only sand. Sand to hide them like it hides all kinds of secret trash.

And it wasn’t fair that the lamp was so heavy and so close to his hand when he saw them and he wishes it had been a normal plastic, or aluminum, or ceramic lamp. He wishes he had worked his full shift. He wishes the pick-up truck had blown a piston on the way home. He wishes he had remembered to ask for matches. He wishes he had stayed in the living room and watched TV until they were done.

The milk. If he’d gotten the milk he wouldn’t have grabbed the lamp. He would’ve hit them with the milk instead, busted the container on George’s head and spilt milk all over the bed—just milk.

And through his tears, Ian sees his brother’s scalp, the pattern and purpose and chattering frenzy of his brother’s hair.

There are bugs in the desert, hidden in the creosote. They hum. The noise spreads to the horizon like the desert around, staring blank-faced up at the sky. Not the sky before with others, people, beneath it—Ian’s own hideous sky, now, hideous for it’s nothing because it’s not even blue but grey as something vast and black erased, telling him how he’s alone and he can sit on the landing of his trailer with his dead brother in his arms and no passerby will ever gasp at the Cain and Able scene. He can sit on the landing for days, rocking his brother until the body begins bloat and bruise, its face becoming the face of some gargantuan, asphyxiated infant before a vent opens in the decay and the body begins to waste and fall apart in Ian’s arms and no one would ever know. The bugs won’t care. They won’t care and Ian can mourn as he sees fit. He can scream and no one and nothing will care.

Ian props his brother against the trailer and strips down to his boxers. The air feels good on the sweat on his legs. The sand is warm on his feet. He screams at the big sky. His scream isn’t much. Ian’s mouth is open and his teeth are barred but what comes out is a whimper from his dry throat. Weak, but it doesn’t matter. No one’s there to hear it.

Ian pushes off with his right leg. He jumps and turns in the air and lands in the sand on his left foot. It buries itself and he pushes off again, kicking up a trail of dust. Ian picks up speed. He turns in a wide circle and jumps and flails his limbs as if he’s on fire. His feet sink into the sand, but he pushes himself free, over and over. Sometimes he falls to his knees, but he gets up and keeps going. Sometimes he lands wrong so that it feels as if one of his toes might pop out of its socket. He keeps going. He is silent and his tongue is moist against his upper lip. He can’t catch his breath long enough to scream, so he does it in his head.

Ian lands on rocks sometimes, sharp bits of gravel kicked from the road. His weight grinds them into the soft flesh of his arches.

Ian feels his sunburn rise and feels the blisters bubble up. He feels the skin on his shoulders pulled tight and numb. It won’t be numb for long, but it doesn’t matter.

Why’re you dancing, Ian?

Because the hot, hot sun.

His limbs burn. The dry air hurts his lungs and his pulse beats hard and loud in his temples, his neck, his chest. He keeps going. His muscles cut shadows across his back and limbs, surging tense then lapsing to surge again to keep Ian going, to pull each foot in turn from the soft sand. The chattering frenzy of his brother’s hair is pulling away like clouds fat with rain from his circle where he turns and works his body and drives memory from the desert.

You’re not an Indian, Ian.

Do I have to be?

Sweat stings his eyes and congeals on his skin. The big sky and his dead brother and the trailer and the creosote and the mountains come and go. He keeps going.

You’re dancing like an Indian.

Indians don’t dance anymore.

The horizon heaves and tilts. Ian stumbles and his shoulder slams into the door of the pick-up.

They don’t?

I don’t know.

The metal gives and bounces back. Ian is reflexive. An outstretched arm keeps him up, keeps him going. Ian’s pulse and breath beat time in his head.

Are you still dancing, Ian?

Yes.

Ian can feel his body struggle and his body moves without his mind to keep him going.

Why’re you still dancing?

The hot, hot sun. The hot hot mother fucker.

Ian sees the obvious way.

But it’s almost gone now, Ian.

The sun sets while Ian dances. The light simmers and the mountains to the west become flat and grey beyond the clumped grids of streetlights which twinkle in the bruised distance. To the east, a false horizon like a welt before the Huecos. Close at hand the creosote casts bristling shadows where the pick-up and trailer come and go like relics of some failed venture abandoned and forgotten for shame. All in passing. In glimpses. Ian keeps going.

I’m dancing till it’s gone.

No. It won’t. Not for me.

Ian is not alone. There’s a dog, a brown mutt desert dog watching with dull eyes. The dogs plods down from a dune and anchors its confounded shadow beneath its haunches. Its bologna tongue lolls and retracts in time with its breath. The long mouth smiles. It pants and laughs and watches Ian dance. It barks, tilts its head and watches and waits. Ian screams. There is no voice in him. The dog gets off its haunches and retreats a few steps with its tail between legs. It comes back. It sits and lolls and watches and laughs – it waits. It will eat George. It will dig up Leanne and eat her, too, if Ian can just keep going. If Ian can just keep going, the dog will eat him, too. A little bit longer. It will close in and everything will go back to normal or go on to nothing. If he doesn’t stop the dog will eat him and eat the whole damned desert if he can just keep dancing: because it’s waiting and hungry, because it’s almost over now. The sand at Ian’s feet is marred but patient in his wake. The sun is almost gone.

What about the milk?

G: Out of milk…

He forgot the fucking milk, and Ian’s right knee buckles. He falls at his brother’s feet and feels the sand on his gums and in the spit on his lips. He has sand in the snot that runs down from his nose and sand in the sweat all over his body. Where Ian is wet there is sand. He can feel it. His hamstring cramps and spasms and there is a pain in his side like a hard, solid thing driven deep in his flesh and under his bones. Ian can see what’s left of the sun through the skin of his eyes like a blood-veined yolk, pulsing with his pulse. Ian opens his eyes and sees his brother’s toes swinging back and forth. The trailer swings, too. The mosaic of sand with its light and dark grains, so close to Ian’s eye, swings back and forth. He sees the empty Coke bottle, close in the sand. It swings like the sand and the trailer and George’s toes. Before was the Coke. It slows and slows and stops. Ian tries to stand, but falters and winces at his leg’s quiet pain. His arms work, though, and he hauls himself up like a seal. Ian sees the dog. It watches. It cocks its head and turns to trot behind the dune. It disappears. Ian forgot the milk. From the Carnicería, he forgot to get the fucking milk. The last words between them, the last promised thing, and he failed. He forgot the milk.

Why’d you dance like that, Ian?

I forgot the fucking milk.

Before was Coke and a cigarette, but no milk. Ian forgot the milk so now is the heavy lamp and skin sacks of meat and guts. Before was George alive between hate and love and wanting Leanne alive under his blanket with kisses and pancakes and a shower. Could have been was the milk, but Ian forgot the milk, so now is dead George and dead Leanne with no souls or thoughts, between hate and love, because they are dead and all the sand and a shovel for hiding now. But it could have been milk. He forgot the fucking milk, so everything is now. And before and now and then could have been nothing, but his legs won’t work and he can’t dance and since it’s all not nothing it has to be now. The dog is gone to chase rabbits.

What’re you going to do now, Ian?

…

And now is horrible, and now becomes a horrible then when the bodies get under the sand. And under the sand is where it’s very simple, and that’s where Ian decides to put George so he can just act like it’s all before, for himself, because what else can he do?

What’re you going to do, Ian?

Bury him.

Ian rests his head on George. He hugs his brother’s legs while his own legs spasm. He wishes the mountains to the east and west would come in around him and hem in the sky, be close enough to have depth and mass, to hide him. Ian coats George’s shins with snot and tears. His cheek slides against the slickness.

Ian punches the sand. His fist sinks in. Ian wants to roll under the trailer where it’s cool and smells like wet stone, to rest and prepare to put his brother under the sand. He forgot to get the milk and his legs were weak, but none of that will matter if he can just get his brother under the sand. Under is cool and dark and quiet. When George is in the tool box under the sand that’s all there’ll be. All that needs to be.

But George groans.

Ian tries to stop crying. It shakes inside him, tries to convulse its way out. Ian heaves. George groans and opens his eyes.

Ian lets go of George and rolls away. George can groan and George can speak. He tells Ian he can’t move.

“George?”

George says he can’t move.

“I’m sorry, George. I’m sorry. Oh, fuck.”

Ian’s eyes ache and George asks what the fuck is going on. Ian rubs the back of his leg, he digs his fingers deep and kneads his flesh. The muscles there convulse against him. He gets on his knees. He stands and winces.

“I forgot the milk.” Ian can’t catch his breath and his legs shudder and threaten to bring him to the ground again. “Oh, fuck.”

George asks Ian what he did.

“I forgot the milk.”

George’s eyes roll around and land on a mound of dirt covered in plastic flowers. George asks Ian where Leanne went. Ian takes a deep breath.

“You can’t move?”

George says no, he can’t. George says it feels like he’s trapped inside his skull. He says it’s like he forgot how to use his body.

“But you can talk. You know how to talk. Try moving.”

George looks at his hand as if it’s a spoon he’s going to bend. George’s hand doesn’t move. Ian limps closer to George, reaches out and touches his cheek. It’s a tender touch. Ian has caught his breath, the nausea has passed.

“You can’t move.”

George asks what happened. He asks it angry.

“I hit you with the lamp.”

George‘s eyes roll back to the mound. He asks if Ian hit Leanne too.

“Yes.”

George tells Ian it’s okay. He says he won’t tell. George tells Ian to call an ambulance.

George is dead. Ian hit him with the lamp. He hit him and left him dead in the bedroom while he smoked a cigarette. He was dead when Ian went out to find the barrel. He was dead when Ian pulled him off the bed. He was dead when their mom called. He was dead when Ian buried Leanne. He was dead when Ian dug up the toolbox. He was dead when Ian broke down and cried like an animal and hated the sky and felt too alone for words. George is dead, has been dead. Dead is dead, and can never be alive again.

“But you’re dead.”

George says he isn’t dead. He says it angry.

“You’re dead, George.”

George says he isn’t. Ian puts two fingers on George’s neck.

“No pulse. You died George. You died hours ago.”

George’s eyes bounce around and land on a white metal toolbox. George says that Ian put his fingers on the wrong place. He says Ian missed the vein. There’s a muscle on the left side of George’s neck that ticks. Ian thinks it might snap and writhe at him like a snake.

“No, you’re dead. I caught you fucking Leanne and I hit you with the lamp. I didn’t mean to hit you, I meant to say something, I just wanted you to know I knew but instead I hit you with the lamp and then you died and Leanne screamed so I hit her, too.”

George says he’s sorry. He says she came to him. He tells Ian to call an ambulance. He asks it desperate. George says he’ll say he fell. George says he’ll go with whatever story Ian wants. George tells Ian to please, just use the phone.

“No, I can’t. No ambulances.”

George says fine, says to put him in the truck instead. George tells Ian to drive him to a hospital so the ambulance doesn’t have to come. George says Ian has to. He just fucking has to.

“No hospitals.”

George is a zombie. He has risen from the dead after six hours of non-life. Ian thinks it must be a progressive condition. If George can talk now in a few hours he’ll be able to walk. If he can walk he can grab and bite. Zombies are incredibly strong. Zombies want revenge. That’s what makes them. It spreads slowly and animates. George is a zombie, and he wants to eat Ian. It is because of the boots. George has no boots on and he wants his boots, must have them to be buried and rest in peace. Boots because they will always fit because the flesh rots and the clothes fall off but the boots stay on the bones that will never rot. George’s boots—his snake-skin and ostrich and alligator boots. It’s because the boots, but it’s too late for that now.

“You’re a zombie, George. You don’t need boots.”

George’s eyes are still on the toolbox. He asks Ian what he’s going to do.

“Don’t have time to fuck with boots.”

George says he is not fucking dead, says he doesn’t give a shit for boots. He says it angry and loud.

Ian nods. The sun is setting. The mountains are like the broken edge of an ebony eggshell. George says he is not a fucking zombie. George says Ian is fucking nuts.

“You’re a zombie, George.”

George says fuck you. He screams it. Ian locks his arms under George’s. George tells Ian don’t do it. George tells Ian he can’t. George’s feet dig trenches in the sand. The sky moves above him. George’s eyes roll to see behind him and he screams, talk to me. Say something, Ian. Speak. George tells Ian to stop, to look. Just listen.

Ian stares at the toolbox. He judges the gloomy space fit for his brother. George tells Ian to just stop, listen. Just for a sec.

Ian looks at his right index finger. It’s dirty. He can see the ribs of his fingerprints full of black dirt and rust from the oil drum. He smells his finger, the rust and sweat. There is a tang to the smell, chemical-lemon, from the Dawn soap.

George tells Ian he has to listen. Just one fucking minute. There have to be other options. There’s got to be something else.

Ian picks up the shovel. He stabs it into the sand and a splinter slides into his palm. Ian looks at the tiny blur-line of dark wood beneath his skin. He chews at the splinter, trying to catch some tiny piece between his front teeth so that he can pull it out. The splinter is stubborn. Ian resists the urge to bite deep and leaves the splinter. He wipes his hands on his jeans and runs his hand through his hair to bring it off his forehead. The sweat stings his palm.

George says Ian has to hear him. Look, listen. George says Ian owes it, for what he’s done. George says say something. Say something. Speak you mother fucker.

“Shut up, zombie.”

George says he’ll lie, that he’ll help make sure Ian never gets caught. George says that once he lies about how he fell he can never tell the truth. George says they can fix this, escape it, together. He says they’ll get their story straight, get it smooth and flawless. Ian turns away at looks up at the satellite dish looming on the corner of the trailer’s roof like a blank-faced witness.

George says fuck you. George calls Ian a fag. He calls Ian a pussy. Cunt. Motherfucker. A bolt of spittle flies from George’s mouth and a tail tethers it to George’s lips. The bolt dribbles down George’s chin and reminds Ian of a spider’s egg hanging from a strand of silk. Ian limps around the toolbox. George softens.

Ian stares up at the satellite dish. The edges are smooth and perfect-molded and unmeant for the desert. Ian turns to face George.

George tells Ian not to do it like this. He tells Ian to hit him with the shovel. He says that if he’s a zombie then Ian has to. Ian paces and stares at the satellite dish. George calls Ian a pussy. Ian turns away. George says no. He tells Ian not to bury him in the toolbox. George says it crying. George tells Ian not to do it. George says please. He shuts his eyes so tight they flicker. George tells Ian that he can’t fucking do this to him. George says we’re brothers. Brothers, Ian. Talk. Fucking say something. Ian.

“Shut up.”

George calls Ian a fag and Ian stares at the satellite dish.

“Shut you’re fucking mouth.”

George calls Ian a cunt. Motherfucker. Fucking pussy ass. George calls Ian a murderer. Ian slumps and stares at the satellite dish. George calls Ian a murdering fag. Ian grabs a handful of his own hair and pulls. His grip wrings a drop of murky sweat.

“Shut up.”

Murdering fag.

“I’ll brain you.”

White trash mother fucking fag. Murderer.

“Shut up. Stop it.”

Ian grabs the shovel and holds it high above his head and stumbles toward the trailer. He swings the shovel at the satellite dish. The spade hits the dish and cracks it. Ian swings again, the plastic bends, and the shovel bounces back. Ian falls to a knee but he pulls himself up with the shovel. He stumbles to stand above George with the shovel in his hand.

“I swear to God I’ll brain you.”

Ian’s face is furrowed and red and his lips quiver as he stares down at his brother in the sand. George is silent.

George will find a way out of the toolbox. George will dig his way out from the sand. George will come into Ian’s room while he is sleeping days or months or years from now. George will grab Ian and eat him alive.

You cannot suffer a zombie to live. They are unnatural things. When you see a zombie, and it was someone you knew, it is not the person you knew is gone. They can’t hold jobs, they can’t go to the movies, they can’t chew a pinch or drink a beer and they can’t be your brother. Ian’s brother is dead. The thing in the sand is a zombie. There’s only one thing a living, breathing, human should do with a zombie. When you find a zombie you have to kill it.

George lies with his legs straight in the sand and his hands above his head, as if he’s being stretched at both ends. He is wearing Monkey Business boxers. Ian raises the shovel. George waits for the blow with his eyes pressed shut.

In the desert east of El Paso Texas, out on Montana Avenue, there’s a trailer. Inside this trailer is a man. His name is Ian. Ian is taking a shower. He is almost done. His story is over. It is Friday night and the sun is finally gone. There’s a blown out tire that marks a grave. Beneath the tire there’s a toolbox. Inside the toolbox there’s a dog’s skeleton and a dead zombie that used to be Ian’s brother. His skull is crushed and he will never rise again. There’s a mound of dirt with scattered plastic flowers too, beneath a cracked satellite dish, beautiful for its crack so that nothing can desecrate the satellite dish’s sacred space. The plastic flowers look like offerings to the satellite dish, but they’re not. The flowers are for Leanne. You can’t see these graves in the darkness but they’re there, and in a hundred years they will be buried under tons of migrating sand.

When Ian is done with his shower he wants to sleep. In the morning, he wants to move to someplace where there’s trees and green stuff everywhere. He’ll be twenty-four soon. He can get financial aid and go to a community college somewhere and take art classes. Ian wants a place where the sky isn’t so huge and the sun isn’t so bright. He wants a place where strange shit can’t happen because there’s too much life. Strange shit has no room to breath. Ian wants to leave the desert and the memory it keeps in the sand just as well as it keeps bodies, the only things it keeps aside from junk. Ian will leave them behind. His story can’t follow him where he’s going, there’s not enough sun, but he will draw it all in a notebook and take that with him. He will change the story a little. His brother will be in it, alive and well in full Texan glory. Leanne will be in it, with full breasts, a curving ass and a pulse. Ian will be in it too, and they’ll all live together. Maybe he’ll set it up so that George and Leanne were always together. Ian’s not sure. There will be no marble lamps and no zombies. He knows he might get caught. It’s so likely he’ll get caught. He deserves to get caught, but maybe he won’t. He’s going to keep going. He’s going to leave in his pick-up with nothing but money, clothes, a spiral-bound notebook, and the satellite dish, because it’s beautiful and because maybe, without a reason to exist, the trailer will just blow away.

But it must be that if you wait long enough even the worst wounds scar over because here she was at her grandson’s engagement party in a part of New York they used to call Hells Kitchen but had now been renamed Clinton.

With an off-hand e-mail from a realtor’s blackberry generations of squalor erased, she thought. The Girls would like that turn of phrase and she reminded herself to use it when she told them about the weekend at next Thursday’s Mah Jong game.

“You could be Parisian, Sasha,” the woman next to her said.

“Parisienne.” The woman’s daughter pursed her lips and fake kissed the air.

Who were these women? She didn’t recognize anyone at her table. Not that she would. It’d been what? Thirty years since she’d left? Packed her stuff in a slim black case while Isaac was at work and Susan at school. She’d boarded the train at Penn Station mid-afternoon and traveled south until she hit the hometown she’d once been so desperate to leave. God what a homecoming that had been.

The restaurant’s dining area was divided into two camps: Susan and her people along the north wall and the fiancée’s family huddled in the side corner behind Stella and whoever this mother-daughter duo were next to her. Only a few members of the French bride’s family could afford to fly in from Marseille for both the engagement party and the wedding at the end of the summer. Still, Susan was making as much of an effort as she could to make them feel welcome.

Which was the right thing to do. Susan was good about things like that. The niceties. Where she’d gotten that, Stella had no idea. Not from her.

That was Isaac’s baby sister over at the table by the window. Jesus H. Christ she’d gotten fat. Last time Stella saw her, in ’88 or ’89, she’d been on an aerobics kick even though she’d been pushing 50. Headbands and wristbands and candy-colored leotards. Just goes to show you some people just don’t age all that well.

She should probably go over and say how-do but just the thought of it sent her stomach into spasms. Who knew what they’d all said about her over the years?

Stella scanned the room for other familiar faces, but other than a 70-something bottle-blonde by the door who might have been Isaac’s second or third wife she was coming up with a blank.

That’s right, two wives since she’d left. Which didn’t surprise her all that much. Isaac was a looker and smart as hell but Christ. What an ass.

Not like Stan. Now Stan sure wasn’t anything like Isaac but Stella had known by then that kind of passion just wasn’t her thing. Too much drama. Stan was more stable. Plus, he brought her coffee and oatmeal every morning. Granted he invariably left coffee grounds scattered across the counter and the pot of oatmeal simmering on the stove so she always had to soak it a good hour or two before scraping the brown scabs off the bottom, but it was the gesture that counted. His bleary-eyed cranky face morning after morning, carrying that tray across their bedroom, coffee sloshing over the edge of the mugs onto the napkins. Every goddamn morning for the past—what was it now? Ten, fifteen years? That was something.

But Isaac? He’d made a mess of things, that’s for sure. Even more than she herself had.

“You’re not going to eat that, are you?” the woman (who Stella had just remembered was named Cici) asked.

“No,” her daughter replied and dropped the fried calamari onto her plate.

“Those are at least 100 calories each, Sasha.” Cici reached over to wipe grease from her fingers.

That poor girl—woman, actually—couldn’t be more than 100 pounds so what the hell was her mother on her back like that?

Why had she come to this thing again?

Oh, yes. Susan.

When Susan called and said she was throwing an engagement party for her son and would Stella please come she hadn’t hesitated even though Stella hadn’t been to a single event in her daughter’s life since she’d left. Not the high school graduation nor the college graduation nor the wedding, or even the baby shower or first birthdays. She’d made it to Isaac’s funeral, though. She wouldn’t have missed that.

Stella agreeing to come this time had surprised them both.

For a long time, you see, whenever she talked to her daughter she’d get that same sinking feeling she’d felt when she lived up here. That suffocating sadness. Somehow she couldn’t ever be warm enough, loving enough, for any of them. A cold fish, Isaac had called her.

Except how could she be a cold fish and still feel so much all the time?

“Mommy’s going to buy me a dress for the wedding,” Sasha cooed to Stella.

“You want to fit into something nice, don’t you?” Cici asked. “Eat that.” She gestured to a plate of celery.

Her friends had insisted she go. You’ll regret it, they’d pointed out when Stella had been on the verge of calling Susan up and saying she couldn’t make it after all.

Stella tucked a lock of frizzy curls behind her ear and smoothed her slacks over her belly.

The way these women looked. So thin and just about all of them with a full face of makeup and their nails done. Not that her friends down south didn’t make themselves nice for parties like this, but. Well. Old women were supposed to have a little to grab onto and these woman were so stick straight you’d think they all gave each other liposuction for Christmas instead of good old bath salts and lotion.

“We’re going to Saks, right Mommy?”

“Whatever you want, baby.”

She was staying with Susan and her husband in their Brooklyn Heights condo. Three bedrooms but it still felt so cramped Stella was already antsy to get out of there after only two days. Somehow Susan had inherited Isaac’s mother’s obsessive cleaning habit. Yesterday afternoon Stella had gone into the bathroom to blow her nose and dropped the used tissue into the empty trashcan only to find, fifteen minutes later when she’d gone back in to get some hand cream, that it had already been removed. Just to test her out she’d dropped another tissue, and then another an hour after that, and sure enough they were both removed just as quickly as the first. Now that was weird.

Stella gazed across the room at the ornate floor-length mirror propped against the wall.

The thing was angled in such a way that she couldn’t see anything right in front of her but rather slivers of action on the other side of the room. Amid the gangling of limbs she saw her daughter’s chin jut into view. She’d recognize it anywhere: it was her own jaw, the way it had looked before that waddle had crept up on her.

The longer the moment drew out, the more seconds that ticked by as she stared at that sliver of her daughter’s face the more she thought of something she hadn’t thought of in 43 years—how, in the stunned brightness of the hospital room she had looked down at the bloody squalling infant lying on her chest and realized with a horrifying thud that it wasn’t going to work, that this girl could never drown out the silence left by the dead son, that she would never be able to love her, not really.

“Grandma Stella, its so wonderful that you came up from Virginia for this.”

Cici smiled expectedly at her.

There was no getting around the fact that Stella had left. Not only that: she’d never, not once, wanted to come back.

She’d liked her life just the way it was. Her job as a teacher at Free Union Elementary; her friends; her crafts projects. It wasn’t as lonely as you’d think. She had television, after all. And Stan.

“Oh I wouldn’t have missed it,” Stella finally said. “Not for the world.”

And nothing to remind her of Ben anywhere.

There are certain memories a person carries with them and for Stella one of those was that beautiful September afternoon fifty three years ago.

She’d been standing at the top of the stoop, fumbling with the mail and the stroller and trying, at the same time, to wrench that front door open. The landlord had never fixed it even though it’d been sticky for months now. Isaac had finally threatened to get it fixed himself and just deduct the cost from next month’s rent. A lot of good that had done. Three weeks later and he hasn’t done that either.

It was a warm day and Ben was wearing his favorite green corduroy pants. Three little girls, sisters, who lived down on the corner were playing with a bunch of dirty Raggedy Ann dolls on the sidewalk and Ben was peering through the railing at them, reaching one grubby fist out to grab at the blonde’s hair.

“Stop it!” the girl had wailed.

“Leave them alone, Benny,” Stella had said distractedly. She glanced over her shoulder at the group. The bossy redhead was trying to get her sisters to place the dolls in a circle around a pile of sticks.

Red and yellow and orange leaves sifted over the sidewalk. Maybe she’d make warm cider when they got back from the library later that afternoon.

“I want I want I want,” Ben had squealed and lunged forward, his shoes scuffling against the point where the railing and top step met.

Stella jiggled the door again and leaned into it. This time it gave. She un-strapped Ben from the stroller and hauled him and the bag of Red Delicious apples she’d just purchased up the three flights of stairs to their apartment. The far window was open and the lime-green curtains she’d sewn the first year of their marriage billowed in and out with the wind. She dropped Ben in the center of the bed where he rolled onto his back and reached out his chubby hands to grasp at the fabric.

Her purse. She’d left her purse down on the stoop. She rushed to the window and called down to the girls playing on the sidewalk. All the cash they had left for the week was in that wallet. How could she be so careless?

“I’ll be right down,” she’d shouted. Her hand rested on a loose bar in the window rail and reminded herself to tell Isaac to bill the landlord for that repair, too, when the time came.

She looked back at the bed one more time. Ben’s eyes were closed and he was breathing softly. His left leg tucked under his right and one of the little socks had bunched down around his ankle. It’d been a hard day. Three of his favorite little boys had been at Carroll Park and they’d played in the sandbox for over an hour before the oldest mother had headed home to begin preparing lunch.

So she closed the door behind her and ran down the stairs.

She’d done that dozens of times during the two and a half years of Ben’s life: to get the mail; to open the door for visitors; to grab a few daffodils from the small patch of green out front. This day was no different.

Except it was.

She was standing on the stoop, talking to the red-headed sister.

Tell your mother there’s going to be a party in the park on Halloween, she’d said. If she wants, we can make candy apples together.

There was a scraping sound from above and she’d looked to see Ben’s plump arms flailing against a cloudless sky. She heard her own soft exhalation then a whooomp and a thwack that echoed up and down the block.

Silence. For what Stella now remembered as a sickening eternity but in reality had been just a few seconds. A heartbeat. Maybe two.

And then she’d opened her eyes and looked down at him lying there on the ground.

The loose railing.

“He’s bleeding,” one of the girls had said in the softest voice possible.

But he’d been asleep on the bed. She was sure of that. Even now, after 53 years of turning the scene over and over again in her mind, she was still sure of that one glaring fact: “He’d been sleeping, ” she’d whimpered to the gathering neighbors. “Sleeping, ” she sighed as she moved blindly among them, holding her son’s limp body in her arms.

Stella had worn a black dress to the funeral. She’d bought it months earlier for Isaac’s upcoming office Christmas party and for some reason the memory of the afternoon Ben died and the day she’d bought the dress were forever linked. She never thought of one without thinking of the other and so those twinned recollections played over and over in her conscious life like some sort of montage horror film every day since.

She’d seen the dress on the rack from the store’s aisle and she’d removed her gloves to touch the fabric. Other shoppers flowing around her and Ben strapped into his stroller. It was too expensive, she’d told herself, but she’d rolled the child into the fitting room all the same. She was only going to try it on. Just to see.

But then after she’d stepped into the dress and seen the way that satin fitted so nicely across her waist and chest and that little flare in the hem… Well. She never indulged, especially since Ben had been born. She conserved even dish soap: a trick her mother-in-law had taught her—cutting the Palmolive with water.

She looked at herself in the mirror and realized that she really was beautiful, in her own way. Despite what her own mother had said. And behind her image there had been Ben’s serious little face reflected in the glass. She’d watched the boy flick at the end of his nose with just the tip of his finger, staring up into space…. Thinking.

Susan was doing it now, here in the restaurant: that quick flicking coupled with a spacey stare.

Are gestures genetic, too then?

Stella gripped the edge of the table.

Ben lying on the sidewalk, one tiny leg angled to the left. It looked like he was playing.

“Get up, Benny, get up,” she’d pleaded. “Get up.”

In the present, Sasha and Cici whispered heatedly among themselves for a few seconds and then Cici called the waitress over with an irritated wave.

“Ma’am? My daughter would like a glass of water.”

At the other end of the room Susan and her son and the fiancée were opening presents.

God they’re young, she thought. But then Susan’d been too.

“I don’t know where they’re going to put all this stuff,” Sasha said. “They live in a studio.”

What was it that Ben had said that afternoon before they’d left the apartment?

“Mama?”

They’d been talking about his upcoming birthday party and she’d asked what he wanted. Ah. “I need some guys, Mama, I need some guys.” Only later did she realize he’d meant those plastic action figures he’d seen advertised in the Sears catalogue.

“Mama?”

Stifled guffaws billowed behind her.

“Stella. ” Cici poked at her upper arm and pointed to the front of the room where Susan was waiting.

“Don’t you want to help with the presents?” Susan called over the rows of perfectly coiffed heads and balding pates.

And there it was, again, in her very glance: Stella had failed her daughter, failed the lot of them, not only in the glaringly obvious ways but also in infinite subtle failures she wasn’t even fully aware of. Like not hearing her calling just then.

“No,” Stella said, more sharply than she’d intended. “I’m--. I’m. My feet are hurting.”

Susan flinched but recovered her composure so quickly Stella was sure she’d been the only one to notice.

She’d wanted to get pregnant again right away. Isaac had wanted to wait—give yourself time, for chrissake—but every time Stella passed a woman with a baby her heart just clenched. The apartment was so empty. Ben’s crib in the corner and all those toys still stacked in the entryway closet. And so she’d tracked her cycle, marking the first day of her period and counting back 14 days to when she was most likely to ovulate. Those nights she’d make something nice for dinner and wait to shower until four so she’d be fresh and pretty when Isaac came through the door after work but the months slid by and still: no baby.

Until one late June day, a week after her period was late, the doctor told her she was due at the end of February. For a brief time she and Isaac had been happy again. But then the worst morning sickness she could have imaged set in, her ankles swelled, she gained over fifty pounds and the birth, with its 33-hour labor, sapped any sort of excitement she’d mustered. Susan had looked so much like Ben even in those first few days. The same large blue eyes and deep dimpled chin it broke her heart. Except Susan wasn’t Ben and how could Stella forgive her for that?

Stella had breastfed Ben for a full year. He’d latched on right away and it had been easy--but Susan! She’d screamed and squirmed from that first morning and this in the days before enriched formula. She’d had to keep trying no matter what, both of them frustrated and sleepless and the baby’s face so godamn red, her body stiffening like she was having seizures except it was all just fussiness. Or willfulness.

And so when Stella had developed a sore on her right nipple after only three months and the doctor told her to wean right away she’d been relieved. It wouldn’t heal if she kept nursing. Susan’s mouth would have prevented that.

In the restaurant, the happy couple opened their presents one by one. Susan held each object up to the crowd for a few minutes so everyone could oooh and ahhhh before handing it to one of the bridesmaids to pack into waiting shopping bags. The bride’s mother catalogued names and gifts in a spiral notebook for Thank You notes.

After about half an hour Sasha went to the bathroom. Then for a cigarette.

“I can’t stand sitting still like this,” she said under her breath when she returned, reeking of nicotine and sweat.

She sat between Stella and her mother, fidgeting.

Fifteen minutes later: another bathroom break.

The last time she discreetly ran her hand under her nose when she returned and wiped it along a discarded napkin.

“You got a cold, sweetie?” her mother asks.

“Yeah. I’m having digestive problems, too,” the girl smirked and patted her abdomen. “Can I have more Champagne?” She grinned at the beleaguered waitress.

“I love your lunettes, ” a French woman at an adjacent table crooned.

Sasha fingered the bubble sunglasses perched on the top of her head

“Thank you.” She smiled softly. “They’re Dior.”

“Ohhh,” Susan cried and thrust a quilted white wedding album above her head for all to see. “How precious!”

All those years ago, that last weekend before Stella had packed her clothes and left she’d come into the back bedroom with a basket of laundry. Susan was perched on her twin bed, her hair in giant curlers and a shoebox filled with the family’s photos scattered across the bedspread. A black-paged photo book and paste lay beside it.

Ben as an infant in his crib.

Ben as a toddler in a red snowsuit.

Ben in Isaac’s father’s arms and Susan was carefully trimming the white frame from a shot of Ben in the tub.

“Who said you could touch these?” she’d hissed at the girl, snatching the scissors from her hand so quickly the blade cut a swath across her palm.

At the table Cici told her daughter, “I’m going to wear that Dolce & Gabbana dress.”

“Oh, you’ll be so sexy! Wear your hair down, though.”

How close they were, these two.

“Yeah, right?”

“I still need something, though, Mommy.”

“Well, we’ll see what’s at Saks. If they don’t have anything we can go to that boutique out on Jericho Turnpike. She’ll give me a deal. The amount of business I gave her back in the late 90s? Makes me sick.”

Stella and Susan had never gone shopping like that together. Used to be she’d take Susan over to Sears and they’d pick out whatever she needed. But Susan’d never even shown an interest in Stella’s appearance, even as a child. Her father was the one she’d adored, right from the beginning.

“Someplace in The City. Something special,” Sasha said.

For a few seconds Stella allowed herself to imagine it: herself in a new red dress, twirling before a seated Susan and a trio of mirrors. Stella putting a black skirt back on a hangar while Susan slipped into a blue version of the same item. The two of them snacking on a chicken salad at the Food Court afterwards, shopping bags by their sides. She glanced at the front of the restaurant at Susan, who was carefully folding a sage green tablecloth.

“We’ll find something, baby.”

This distance between them was her fault. And she didn’t have the faintest idea how to breach it. Did she even have the energy to try?

“Did you buy a dress yet Stella?” Cici asked politely.

“I bought a dress 53 years ago.” And in that instant she realized that that was precisely what she would wear. The black dress she and Ben had bought. She’d probably need to have it let out, though. “I bought it for a Christmas Party before Susan was born.” God her voice sounded so stilted. She almost didn’t recognize it as her own.

How was it that she could detect an emotion in this sudden silence? But she could--the current of tension snaked through the cold air as it shushed past the air conditioner vent behind their table.

Funny, how much the statement shocked these women.

“Stella,” Cici said in a voice people normally reserved for puppies and babies. “You can afford something new—it’s your grandson’s wedding!”

But how could she tell her that a thing’s newness was relative. That each time she’d worn that dress she’d felt the same thing. The same adrenaline rush and once more she’d feel young and strong. A whole lifetime stretched out before her. So much possibility and promise woven right into the fabric. Even the day of Ben’s funeral. Even then.

But you couldn’t explain that to someone if they didn’t already, deep down, just know. Sometimes the truest things sounded the craziest when spoken. Which was only part of the whole tragedy of life, as far as she was concerned. You could never tell anyone the things that really mattered. Each time they had to find out on their own. Over and over.

By five o’clock most of the guests had left and only a handful of the bridesmaids and a cousin or two remained to help pack up the gifts.

Stella’s feet ached. The shoes that had seemed to fit so perfectly when she’d bought them at the Belk sale last Sunday were tightening around her ankles like a leather band. She slipped them off and rubbed her bare feet against the tile floor.

Waiters moved quietly among the tables, removing plates and resetting for the night crowd.

“Mama,” Susan said. “You’re tired.”

Stella wasn’t sure but it sounded like an accusation.

“We can drop her off. She’s staying with you guys, right?” Cici asked.

“Oh no,” Susan protested. “That’s too far?”

“Give me a break, it’s right off the BQE.”

“Mama,” Susan said, “you want to hang around for me? I’m going to be here for a while….”

If Stella went now, she’d have a few hours to herself in the apartment. She could make tea and sit at the kitchen table by herself. Whenever Susan or her husband were home they invariably put on the TV or the radio. Silence unnerved them.

“I’d like that,” she said to CiCi. “You’re very kind.”

Stella felt a growing pressure on her bladder. All that Diet Coke. So while CiCi went to fetch her Lexus from the valet out front, Stella headed to the bathroom.

In the back of the restaurant there were two doors marked Toilette. The door on the left gave a little then caught and so she pushed again and this time it swung open with a thud.

Sasha sat fully clothed on the toilet seat, bent over the tank. She held a rolled up dollar bill in one hand and pulled her sleek black bangs away from her face with the other. There was a small compact open and three tiny lines of powder on its mirror.

“Oh, I—“ she gasped.

My god. Well, that explained the thinness.

“Grandma Stella!” Sasha scolded, “I’m almost done.”

Flashing that megawatt magazine grin at her as if Stella were retarded.

Standing there in the doorway, Stella thought about Susan and herself in an imaginary department store dressing room and poor Ben crumpled at the bottom of the stairs. All it rushing over her, the generations cresting like waves: mothers broken against daughters and daughters twisted into their mothers’ shortcomings. All of it an ancient and unending knot she couldn’t figure out what to do with.

So she took a step into the bathroom and locked the door behind herself.

Sasha looked up. “Please don’t tell Mommy,” she whispered even though they both knew she would.

John would never admit to Dorie why, but he likes Auction Guy, thinks he’s like a cartoon. He’s somebody’s grandpa, or at least wears somebody’s grandpa’s old checked suit. He comes on cable Friday and Saturday nights.

“It’s the best of Bargain City,” Auction Guy says. “Just look at everything we have for you tonight, folks. If you like what you see, call the number on your screen and be the first to bid.”

There is no number on the screen. It’s someone on the stage holding a poster board with a phone number written in Magic Marker. John can see the person’s hand holding up the board.

John knows Bargain City’s set. It’s the stage at the community theater. He’s delivered for Coke there. It’s not his regular route, which is the best one in the Great Plains district, the one with all the convenience stores on US 81. It pays and it pays good for this part of Oklahoma, but John knows all he really does is stock groceries and drive in circles.

Auction Guy is wound up tonight. His toupee is a more cock-eyed than usual. The show raises money for charity, but John doesn’t remember which one. He’s never called the poster board number. He just likes watching Auction Guy’s energy, the way the old man is never slowed when he gives the wrong prices, mispronounces the names of donors. He doesn’t stop even when he breaks things. Tonight he stands in front of a folding table stacked with purple shot glasses, old boxes of hair dye, and dolphin figurines made of genuine porcelain. When Auction Guy bumps the table, the dolphins ring together like bells. “Whoa there, fishies!”

John laughs.

Down the hall the bed creaks. John mutes the tv and listens. Dorie doesn’t move again, but John leaves the sound off. Auction Guy motions his viewers to follow him to some items hanging from a pegboard at the back of the set. The camera jerks and shudders as it follows Auction Guy. He’s already pointing to item in the row, but the picture blurs to refocus as it moves to each one. It looks like something Christmasy, but the camera is too out of focus for John to tell. He leans forward, hopeful. The bed creaks again. John turns the tv off.

In bed he works the pillow, looking for a cool spot. It’s warm for October. Everything feels slightly off. Dorie sleeps like a child. She’s very clear, John has observed, in her wants and her ways. Life is not the mystery to Dorie that it always is for John. She’s good at lots of things, especially playing house and having someone to take care of, and John feels pained sometimes that she’s as good as she is. He had a fantasy once of telling a girl how they’d be partners. That was the word he’d said in the picture in his head: we’re partners. He thinks Dorie might even like that he is the one she takes care of. But he’s not sure if she’s that specific. He hasn’t asked her to marry him, but she seems to assume he will. She gave him a bracelet she made, a leather cuff with two strings that tie. It has silver conchos and looks faintly Indian, and Coke won’t let him wear it while he’s on the job: non-regulation uniform. She says she loves him, and John has never asked for details, like why, for example, but he’s wondered. He kneads the pillow some more, trying to shape it into something he hasn’t found yet.

In the morning, when it’s light and Dorie is already moving in the house, John wakes on top of the covers. He figures he’s slept about three hours, what has recently become normal. He stares at the clock on his dresser where it sits aligned with his wallet, his watch, and a small black bowl for his change. Dorie brought the bowl when she moved in, and the aligning of his things is all her.

“You’re up?” she says from the doorway. John smells green apple soap and dryer sheets. She holds a laundry basket parked on her hip.

“I’m alive.”

“That’s good news. You got anything you especially want washed today?”

John wears red and tan pinstriped shirts and tan pants everyday, sometimes shorts when it’s hot. It’s the same uniform all the drivers in the Great Plains district wear. He owns little in the way of clothes of his own, but Dorie keeps all he has washed, ironed, and hung in coordinated rows: a-these-shirts-go-with-these-pants kind of thing. She gets most of it done when he’s not looking. He misses doing his own laundry.

“I’m good,” John says.

“Yeah? You don’t look all that good. Maybe vitamins.” She zips through the bedroom checking for items to add to the basket. She has the energy of Auction Guy, but she has all her own hair.

“Vitamins?”

“Maybe if you started taking vitamins. I saw some on tv the other day. Ones for men. If I see the commercial again I’ll order them for you. Okay?”

Dorie stands at the side of the bed and looks down at him. John feels heavy, cemented there. “Thanks,” he says.

Dorie smiles. “Sheets. Get up so I can wash the sheets.”

When John shaves he looks at his face in the mirror for longer than he probably ever has. He is 32 and looks old-man tired. His father would have said “Son, if you was a gas station dog, somebody’d done shot you.” That’s the look John has now.

He doesn’t know why he doesn’t sleep anymore. It’s just this thing that started one night, a few months ago. He lay awake in bed, in the room overstuffed with the dark bedroom suite, in his house that felt so full. He tugged on the sheet, and Dorie tugged back in her sleep. It meant nothing. But he felt the fabric pull from his hand, the slight ripping sound it made. He’d laid there, suddenly restless. Panic had trickled through him that Dorie would awaken and ask why he wasn’t sleeping and he’d be dumb about what to say, how to say it. He’d gone to the couch every night since.

Now of course Dorie knows he doesn’t sleep. She worries. She has bought him teas from a health food store, played soft music when she cooked. She changed all the light bulbs in the house to ones she says give off a diffused glow. She offered to give back her side of the bed. John has okay’ed all of her suggestions, tried each one though he has known all along they would not work. He has assured her she is not the problem, and he doesn’t believe she is. He just thinks about things he can’t put into words.

John craves home and good coffee. He wants to see to the end of his world, but not the end of his life. He wants a day off, but he can not name from what. He wishes keeping a cooler of beer next to his porch swing didn’t make him a redneck. He wants peace and quiet. A book that makes all the sense in the world. His name said out loud, always at the ends of things.

The day is Saturday. Chris arrives early in his pickup. John doesn’t know where they are going, but he has already said yes.

“I gotta go see a guy in Charlie,” Chris says when Dorie asks.

“Charlie?” she says. “Texas?”

“Charlie, Texas. Yeah, I think that’s what they call it.”

“That’s like fifty miles from here.”

“More like a hundred.” Chris places his palms together and makes an arrow of his hands. He looks down the length of his fingers like he’s sighting a deer standing just south of him. “See, Texas—“ he pauses in a way that John knows irritates Dorie, “Texas is all the way down in Texas.”

Dorie looks at John. “What is there in Charlie?”

“This guy I’m going to see. I told you,” Chris says. “And peaches.”

“Peaches? In October?”

“No, there ain’t no peaches in October. There’s peaches in the summer time.”

“Then why did you say peaches?”

“’Cause you asked about them They’re the best peaches down this way. Everybody goes to Charlie to buy their peaches.” Chris pats himself down, looking for his lighter. “’Cept for those who go to Stratford. Now Stratford’s got some good peaches.”

“Just stop talking,” Dorie says. John watches as her forehead scrunches tighter and tighter. She sorts clothes on the kitchen table. She makes a pile of her panties separate from John’s boxers. “So?”

“I’m going,” John says. “He might need me to help him with some stuff.”

“Stuff?”

They talk as if Chris isn’t in the room.

“I don’t know. I didn’t ask.” John stands up. He takes his jacket from a hook by the door.

Chris lights his cigarette. He’s set his Zippo on the highest setting. The hiss crackles in the cool air of the house.

“Outside,” Dorie says. John’s notices she no longer adds “please.”

He watches Chris go out the screen door, puffing smoke through the mesh.

“I don’t mind you going,” she says. “It’s just you’re gonna make yourself sick. You don’t sleep. Then you run around with that one. You can’t be healthy like this.” She moves the clothes into their assigned piles. “Just don’t stay gone all day. Come home before supper.”

“Yeah,” John says. He watches Chris through the screen, shaking his head no.

“Y’all be careful.”

“Harmless fun,” Chris says through the door and smoke. “I’ll bring him back in one piece. Honest, Ma.”

“Not likely if you’re driving.”

“One sheep,” Chris says. He tosses the cigarette into the yard. John watches it pitch into the gray. “I run over one sheep and suddenly I’m the world’s worst driver. Wasn’t even a big one. I’d’ve swerved if it’d been a big one.”

Dorie looks at John. “Just be careful,” she says into his chest.

Chris’s canoe is still tied to the roof of his truck, there since the one trip he took to the river in July.

“You ever going to take that thing off?”

“Nah. It’ll be spring again in . . .” Chris looks at his watch.

The view from the truck’s cab features a triangle of the yellow nylon rope that holds the canoe secure. John stares at the apex of that triangle as it disappears into the hull. He likes the way the rope seems to hold the truck steady when Chris swings onto the road, and the way the hull curves into a point and sails on. Chris has a brown paper bag of beer on the floorboard. John takes one. He doesn’t drink it. Right now he just likes holding it. “Where’re we going?” he asks.

“Hell if I know.” Chris looks in the mirror as if to check all the rest of John’s world stays behind them. “You want to go to Charlie?”

They arrive close to sundown. The exact distance and direction from John’s house in Oklahoma to Charlie in Texas proved more difficult to remember than either man has anticipated. A two-hour trip has taken the entire day. It is past supper time when Chris pulls them into town. Most all of the 109 population of Charlie mill the few blocks that make up the main drag. Long tables and awnings sit outside the storefronts. Church women sell apple butter and chances on a gas grill.

“Well, if it ain’t Sunday-go-to-meeting,” Chris says.

“Fall Fest.” John reads from the banner strung between streetlights. Rain sprinkles the windshield.

“Looks like we got here just in time.” Chris parks at the end of Main Street and they walk back. John thinks how happy all this would make Auction Guy. He sees pottery, horse blankets, shot glasses in just about every color. A man sits in a lawn chair at the side of a van, its doors thrown open, a brown and white cow hide displayed over the open doors. They pass tables covered in music boxes, necklaces made from rolled strips of newspaper, the same dolphin figurines John had seen on tv last night. Most of the sellers are stowing their things. Wind blows the rain a little harder. A sign, “Hides $295,” hits against John’s leg.

“You boys are late.” A lady puts rag dolls in a white Stroh’s box. “Should’a been here before the weather.”

“That’s us,” Chris says. “Always a day late and five dollars short.”

The lady waves her hand at Chris and they laugh like old neighbors. Chris stops, takes a doll from the box. John walks on to the end of the block, to a blanket spread on the sidewalk. Row after row of paintings on black velvet. They’re all of Mary, Jesus, bullfighters, cowboys, mountain men with pelts. They all look stark and defined against the velvet. John doesn’t know anything about Jesus, but he likes Jesus’ eyes in the picture at the end.

“All pictures ten dollars.”

John notices a woman in a coat so puffy she seems swallowed by it. She sits on the sidewalk next to the portraits. She motions John to look on.

He goes straight for the Jesus picture. He holds the frame loosely, feels the velvet hurriedly tucked and nailed, sees the dust in the pleats. Solid and square and warm and light.

“That is the scariest thing I’ve ever seen.” Chris stands behind him now.

“Come on.”

“You come on. You can’t be serious, man. Why would you want that thing?”

“It says something to me.”

The way the fabric holds the paint, the fibers matted underneath. The muted, earthy colors, nubs raised on the surface.

“You know, I ain’t gonna be the least bit surprised if that thing does start saying stuff. Look how its eyes follow me where ever I go.” Chris sways back and forth. “OOOOooooo.”

“Shut up. I like it.”

“You would. But you can’t think Dorie’s gonna let you keep that in the house. She don’t even let you smoke in the house.”

“She doesn’t let you smoke in the house.”

“Same difference. She’s got a lot of rules, is all I mean. When the dog can come in, no shoes on the carpet. She picks your clothes out for you.”

“What do you know?”

Chris taps his temple with one finger, squeezes one eye almost closed. “Ol’ Chris is always paying attention. You think I don’t notice? Chin plowing the ground. Hell, man, your house don’t even smell the same. Something wrong with that.”

Chris turns from the wind and lights a cigarette. John concentrates on the portrait. He spreads one hand across the fabric, pushes in with his fingers. He likes the weight and strength behind Jesus’ eyes.

“I’ll get her to like it.” He reconsiders. “I can explain to her why I like it.”

“Good luck. You’re married to a funny girl, that’s all I can say.”

“We’re not married.”

“You sure about that, man?”

John isn’t. Dorie has a way of shaping his life for him when he isn’t looking. She could have gotten them married and he not know it. She could have his life written out on paper somewhere.

Chris is gone. Johns looks around. A squatty whitewashed building with a red door, The Crack-Up Lounge painted in gold letters, stands across the street. All of the other booths are closed now. He looks back at the painting.

“You buy?” the woman asks. She has packed most of her stuff. Two Mexican boys arrange cardboard boxes like a stacking puzzle. The woman leans in, pretending to admire the portrait. She pats the frame. “Pretty,” she says.

“Yeah.” John stands thinking until the woman shuffles around him. He wants his decision to be clear. He could think clearer if the woman weren’t waiting on him. He holds the last of her pictures to be sold or packed. One of the boys says something in Spanish that makes the other boy laugh. Maybe they are her sons, John thinks. The woman snaps her fingers at them. When John looks up, the three of them stare at him.

“Yeah,” he says again and passes some money to the woman.

She sweeps the cash into her puffy coat somewhere. She and the boys are gone before John makes it to the Crack-Up’s door.

Inside the Crack-Up is shaped like a spaceship, with red carpet and a domed ceiling. The walls curve down toward the outer rim of the room, and John has to duck to keep from scraping his head when he comes through the door. There are fewer than a dozen people in the Crack-Up. Chris sits a table near the bar, a beer mug already in front of him. When he sees John he says “Oh, Jesus, it’s Jesus,” and laughs.

John feels too noticeable in the small bar. No music plays, but the chatter of the few patrons echoes in the round room. He sits across from Chris and leans the picture on a table leg. A group of old farmer-types watches them. They are strangers here. Chris is too loud for the Crack-Up, and John is too tall with his funny velvet Jesus. He is embarrassed and slides the picture under the table with his foot.

“Man, of all the ways to waste ten bucks,” Chris says.

“Just shut up about it.”

“Fine. You’ll catch enough shit at home, anyway.”

“Shut up about that, too.”

Chris shrugs and smiles. “Fine for that, as well. I’ll just sit here with my mouth closed. I’m shutting up starting now.” Chris points his index finger at the tabletop as if to mark the moment in history.

John gets that feeling again, the one he got the first night he couldn’t sleep. It grows fast. Panic creeps up his chest from his stomach. He places a hand over his jacket, as if he can stop it, then thinks he must look like he’s saying the pledge of allegiance, and puts his hands back on the table. He looks around. There are gold sparkles sprayed onto the low ceiling. Dust is collected over them, dimming their effect.

Chris hums.

John sees a woman with long brown hair. She sits several tables away but looks up when Chris starts to hum. She looks right at John and smiles. She points to the ceiling, then to Chris. “Echo,” she mouths.

John nods, and she looks away. He’s sweating. He thinks the brown-haired woman must be waiting on someone. She seems like she’s waiting, he thinks. But calm. Her face is so clear.

She looks at John again, but John looks away this time.

“I’ll be back” he says.

“Yeah, man,” Chris says.

John walks fast toward the other side of the room. A dark narrow hall extends off the circle and probably is where the restrooms are. He feels a little stupid, and like he wants to leave, but like he doesn’t want to go home. The ceiling curves down again and he feels much too large for the room. He stands out.

Just now, like the brown-haired woman, he hears the echo of Chris’s humming. Only now Chris is half-singing. John gets a funny urge to tell the woman. But this is stupid, too, he thinks. She’ll think he’s crazy. He feels crazy. He should not say anything. He looks over his shoulder but too fast to see her, or anything, in focus.

What John does see, and all too plainly, is the sign posted over the little hall. It is about eye-level to John. HEY, DUCK! it says. There’s even a little red duck smiling at him. But he sees the sign, takes it all in, a split second too late. About two years ago, John had locked the keys in his Coke truck. And the funny thing was, he knew he was going to do it. It was that same split second, the one before he let go of the door handle, that he saw in sharp detail exactly what was going to happen, the keys swinging from the ignition, the click of the door closing. And he’d liked it. That’s how clear it had been.

And just like that, John smacks into the duck sign. He can’t draw a breath. A tinny-feeling pressure ripples through his brain. There is suddenly a lot of noise in the Crack-Up. A roar of sound sweeps up from the floor and over John’s head. It falls like rain from the sparkling ceiling, right down on John.

“Oh, man, oh man. That was something. You should’a seen yourself, man. You went down like a rock.” Chris demonstrates by whacking fist against palm, then sliding the fist down his arm. He laughs.

John only now hears what Chris is saying. He remembers seeing Chris’s face but not hearing him. It was dark. Were they singing? He remembers laying against Chris’s shoulder a little before now, maybe just a few minutes ago, but he thinks it was far away from here.

“You should keep your head tilted back. I think.” It is the brown-haired woman. John can’t see to his left without turning his head. The woman moves too fast for him. He feels heavy. She unwinds yards of toilet paper off a roll she’s pulled from her purse. She makes a huge ball. “Is that right?” she asks Chris.

“Hell if I know.” Chris squats down next to John. From one eye John watches Chris study his face. Up close, even in the dark, Chris looks much younger than John. They are the same age. “Man, you busted it pretty good. That’s a lot of blood.”

“Thanks,” John says. His skin feels warm and thick.

“Here.” The woman holds the wad of toilet paper out to Chris while she starts another one.

“It’s cold,” John says. No one answers. They both study his face. He realizes they are outside, in the grass lot next to the Crack-Up.

Chris tosses the wad of paper to John, the ends fluttering in the wind. It has stopped raining. “Well, you’re in good hands for the time being.”

“What?”

“Where’re you going? I don’t know what to do,” the brown-haired woman says. She winds and winds more paper.

Chris is standing, already walking away. He grows tiny in John’s vision in just a couple of seconds. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

“Okay,” the brown-haired woman says. She pushes the first of the paper into John’s hand, tries to help him make a fist. “You should,” she starts to say but doesn’t finish.

John’s entire body except for his head hurts. He thinks that’s weird, and probably a sign of something bad. He holds the toilet paper to his nose with one hand. The woman flinches when the wad meets his face, but John does not feel it land. With his other hand he touches his lips. They feel fine under his fingers, but when he moves his hand away his lips throb like demons.

“I’m gonna lay down,” he says.

“I don’t think you’re supposed to do that.”

“No?”

“I don’t think so. I don’t know, really.” But she sounds to John as if she does. The woman shifts to his right every time she talks.

“Am I leaning?” he asks.

“It’s your eye.” She points. John’s left eye doesn’t open.

“I’m gonna lay down now.”

The woman puts her hand on John’s, the one holding the toilet paper, and draws his arm toward her. He sees the paper. It looks black in the dark. When he drops it, she puts a newly winded ball in his hand, a couple more in his lap.

“I don’t think this is gonna be enough,” she says.

“I’m okay,” John says. “Really.” He puts the paper balls in his pocket.

“You sure?”

John stretches his neck to one side, then the other. He imagines each part of his body before he moves it, unsure which parts of him work and which don’t.

“Can I get you anything? Call somebody?”

“No. Really. I just need to sit.”

John looks at her. She is pretty. The more he moves and talks, the less worried she seems. The broken thing inside his head lets go just then. He starts to float. “Do I know you?” he asks.

The brown-haired woman laughs. “No, sweetie. You don’t know me at all.”

She sits next to him, hands him the last of the toilet paper from the roll.

“Then you know me.” He doesn’t know why he says this. Whatever has broken is letting out words John didn’t know he had.

“Maybe,” she says. “Maybe I do know you. John.”

He feels something slip away from him. It’s okay it’s going, he thinks. Whatever it is. Close to him like this, he smells her flowery shampoo. He feels warmth from her body. He thinks maybe he should tell her he’s not that loopy, that he knows what’s going on, that she can leave him there. But he’s not sure that he does, so he doesn’t say that. He just sits.

“It’s okay if I keep an eye on you for a while?”

He thinks about saying an amen. Something inside John is spinning away, leaving his body. “Yeah,” he says.

“All right. I think I’m supposed to ask you questions.”

“Sure,” he says, not catching on.

“Okay. Do you know what day it is?”

“Yeah.”

“No, you’re supposed to say what day it is.”

“Oh. Yeah. I know what you mean.”

“Okay, again. Do you know what day it is?”

“Saturday. It’s Saturday night.” It is long time past time for John to go home. It is too late, he knows. “It’s Sunday morning, maybe.”

“Good,” the brown-haired woman says. “I think you covered all possibilities.”

“Maybe questions aren’t good.”

“Why?”

“I’m just saying stupid things.”

“Not at all.” She smiles.

John is surprised when she moves in front of him, almost right into his lap. “Look at me,” she says.

The brown-haired woman has teeny freckles. She wears no make-up but mascara. John thinks that her eyes are pale green. He can’t see this, not really, in the dark. These are details too fine, but he knows they are there. For a second he thinks about leaning forward. He wonders what she will do if he does.

Just then she places her hands on either side of his face, carefully, and asks, “Okay? Well,” her voice has changed. She talks like she’s talking to someone who’s falling asleep. “I don’t think you need a doctor. Or you can wait, at least. I’m pretty sure you’re going to live.”

“Probably.” John almost laughs. “That’d serve me right.”

“Now, why would you say that,” but she smiles at him. He does not mean to be funny. He is, though, dizzy. The brown-haired woman and he sit here, just like this, for an amount of time John can not count. It might be a few seconds, maybe it is minutes. But John wants it and does not move.

The woman’s hands slide away. They stay there while the wind picks up. It rustles the woman’s hair. They each move, pulling jackets into place, and they look at each other. She is safe, John thinks. Not safe like she’s safe because she’s with him. But John is safe because he is with her.

“I think it’d be okay now if you still want to lay down.”

Then she does. John is bewildered that she seems not to have thought about where they are, that she has never even seen him before this night. Her long brown hair spills over the ground. “There,” she says, and points.

“You don’t have to stay with me. He’ll come back. Some time.”

“This is fine,” she says, and John thinks what a strange and perfect answer it is. “There,” she says again.

John looks up. Tiny silver slits of stars.

“They’re changing as we’re looking at them,” she says.

He’s fascinated, but he’s not sure why, or by what. “How?”

“They’re dying. Really,” John watches as she measures a star with one forefinger and thumb, “they’re already dead. We’re seeing their light from a long time ago.”

“That’s depressing.”

“Not really, just the opposite.” She sounds happy to him, like a giddy girl. “Think about it. They’ve been dead all this time, hundreds and hundreds of years. And here we are still talking about them.

He feels like laughing again. “I guess that’s nice. Nice to be remembered.”

“Yeah. Absolutely.”

The part of John that has broken loose and gone spinning is almost gone completely.

“Ruth,” the brown-haired woman says.

“I can remember that.”

Ruth sits up. John watches her scoop a handful of sand from the ground between them. Then she lays her palm open, and he stares at the sand puddled there. He wants to hold her hand. Or maybe just touch it, or maybe it’s the dirt he’s thinking of. He’s suddenly filled with remembering, even though he isn’t sure what he’s remembering. He doesn’t know where to look, or what to say to this woman. He tips her hand down with his fingers and watches the sand slide out.

She lays back down, closes her eyes. Moonlight shows a grain of sand that has somehow landed in the hollow of her throat. The sand trembles when she breathes in. Its color changes from blue to purple to gold as she moves. John aches for that sand. He aches to wet his finger, to touch the brown-haired woman’s throat, to lift the sand from her skin.

“I bought a picture of Jesus today,” he says.

“Really? Why?”

“Don’t know.”

Ruth doesn’t answer. It is something Dorie would ask more questions about. She wants to fix him, make him feel better.

“I just don’t know.”

John laughs. His head hurts now. He feels drunk and can’t think of another word to say. He lays back on the ground, his face on the sheet Ruth’s hair has made. It’s velvet. She puts her hand on his. He feels the sand grind across their skin. “I haven’t slept in months,” he says, and then he does.

****

“You with me, man, or what?”

John opens his eyes. “What time is it?” His face hurts around his eyes when he talks.

“Finally. Jesus.” Chris stands next to John, where he has been sleeping on the ground outside the Crack-Up. Chris leans close. Ruth is gone.

“You are drunk,” John says.

“I was drunk hours ago, I’m just drunker now.”

“How’d you manage that?”

“I got to talking to this guy in the parking lot. He was okay.”

“Who was he?”

Chris shrugs. “Hey,” he says, “I can feel all the blood in my forehead.”

“Get away from me.”

“Come on.” Chris grabs John’s arms and pulls. “Get up, already. I want to show you something.”

“Leave me here.” John’s face feels flat and thick, like he’s talking through water. He looks past Chris to where the stars had been. He closes his eyes. He’s fine, he thinks, just to stay here.

“Get up, man. It’s really cool. You’ll see.”

“I’m tired of this,” John says. He’s fine, so fine with what has let go and left him. “I’m fine,” he yells.

Chris pulls harder. John stiffens like a board, but Chris keeps pulling. He shows remarkable strength for a man as drunk as he must be. John keeps his eyes closed and resists. Chris’s tugging begins to spin him like some bizarre snow angel. He sees it in his mind and laughs.

“Get up,” Chris yells. “Get up, get up, get up.”

Maybe he is too tired, maybe it’s the laughing. John relaxes, and Chris succeeds in getting him into a sitting position. His head, he’s almost sure, is so heavy it’s still on the ground.

“Just get the fuck up already,” Chris says. He’s laughing, too. “It’s cool. I swear. I swear to God.” Chris lets go, stands up. He backs away. “It’s cool, I swear.” He starts to run. “I swear to that freaking Jesus picture.”

John follows. They wind through Charlie, away from the highway, across a bar ditch, through weeds up the their knees. John follows the sounds Chris makes, unable to lift his rock of a head. They stumble up onto a side street. It’s raining again, or maybe still. They are lost, John thinks, but he doesn’t much care. There is a row of small white houses with a church at the end on one side of the street. It’s nearly sunup. Chris points to the church. “Down there,” he says.

“Where’s the truck?”

“Don’t worry about it.” Chris runs again. “Just come on, old man.”

Chris is being too loud for Charlie again. John waits for lights to snap on in the row of houses, for some pissed-off guy with a shotgun to step out on one of the little porches. But none of that happens.

He walks to the point at which Chris has disappeared. The street ends right in the church parking lot. Two giant floodlights are mounted on either side of the church’s announcement board. Without giving a thought to the consequences, John touches the surface of one of the lights and draws back instantly blistered fingers.

“Look.” Chris stands, his arms spread like a welcoming Jesus. “It’s the circus. Cool, huh?”

John sees the parking lot is packed with folded-down carnival rides. There is a Tilt-A-Whirl, a Zipper, a ride called the King of Hearts. “Are you fucking kidding?”

“We missed it. Can you believe, it?”

“Because you have got to be fucking kidding me.”

Chris looks at him like he’s crazy. John thinks maybe he can’t hear him, that talking through his broken face has made him impossible to hear.

“What? You do see it, right? You see all this stuff?” Chris waits for an answer. “Come on.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Ah, just forget it. You ain’t no good time, anymore.”

John walks through the parking lot, twisting around the bodies of the silent rides. They are all covered in fading paint. Half the ones that would be lighted are missing their bulbs. Worn duct tape hides a split in the Zipper’s seat. A dead armadillo is wedged under the bumper of the ride’s tire, and the sweetening smell makes John want to vomit. He presses his face on the cold wet metal a moment.

Chris sits on the steps of the church when John emerges from the dormant carnival. He takes a bottle from each of his coat pockets. “Here.”

“Where’d this come from?”

“Guy in the parking lot. He was okay. Didn’t I tell you?”

“You told me.”

Chris pulls one hand inside his jacket sleeve and uses the sleeve to twist off the cap. Foam spews over the bottle’s lip and spills a dark star onto the parking lot. John watches the star as it bleeds into the cinder. He holds his bottle in his burned fingers.

“You know what your problem is.” Chris states it as fact. “You think too much. Me?” he says. “I’m a purist.”

“A purist?”

“Yep, I’m a purist. I take things as they come. Not you, man. You’re always fucking thinking.”

Slips of paper, chances purchased on the grill, roll across the parking lot. They stick here and there in the rain, one on the star. John watches as a man’s name and address are wiped away in the rain.

“People say shit about people like me,” Chris says, “but the truth is I’m having a very good time.”

“I can see that.”

They sit on the church’s steps until Chris has finished half his bottle. Then they walk to the pickup at the end of Main Street. They flip the bottles into the bushes.

“Oh yeah,” Chris stops. He pulls something from his pocket. “You lost this. That girl gave it me. Must’a come off when you busted your nose.”

Chris places Dorie’s bracelet on the truck hood.

“Thanks.”

They get in. Chris backs into the street. John’s fingers and face hurt only distantly. Dried blood darkens his jacket. He is a mess hard to explain. He stares ahead, the point of the canoe aimed north. For the first time in months, John doesn’t think about anything but what’s in front of him.

Chris misses the shift on the first try. The transmission lurches, then catches. John watches Dorie’s bracelet sail over the hood and out of sight.

One fisherman wore a tee shirt with a slogan that read, “Gone Off the Deep End.” He spit brown juice into a can. Fishermen as a rule kept to themselves, didn’t say hello, didn’t want to be bothered, she was learning. It was just them and the sea and the fish. Judith could respect that need to be alone with nature. That’s why she moved to the Outer Banks—to get away. No more worrying about men and finding the right one and if she would ever marry and have a family. She had finally decided she was going to learn to live by herself and make a good life. Which is why it struck her as odd the first time she saw him—the guy in the orange windbreaker. Were her vows that flimsy? She caught herself wondering what if …

He was staring into the water as if he had lost his soul twin. Maybe he was trying to resolve something. If he noticed her—her wispy hair that required regular lowlights or people said, “God, you’re blonde!” and the way she slouched trying to blend into sand—he made no acknowledgement except a lifting of the head, a swift registering and then back to the tide pool. Still, he seemed friendlier than the fishermen.

Here he is, she thought, sneaking a peak as she walked past. His hair was curly and dark like waves and his glasses reflected water. Keep walking.

The next time she saw him, it was after work. She was trying to accomplish her daily goal of back and forth from the Sunny Dunes Hotel, when she looked down the beach and there he was. She could see the orange dot of jacket, the black tuft of hair, the tint of glasses. She trudged to a certain point. It was a public beach, a wide beach. Why stop--just because that guy is standing there staring at kelp, seaweed, and the tan tops of his feet? Before dating Edward last year, she had confidence in her ability not to attract someone. Now every male seemed dangerous, especially the older, wavy haired ones that liked water. What if this guy came over and talked to her? What if he seemed nice? She refused to enter into any agreements or expectations. She walked past him and made it to the hotel. On the way back, she took Beach Road.

The next day he was in the same place staring and she sped up. She walked past in a flurry of her own narrow footsteps. A few yards up, she slowed and began to notice the rectangular pads of her long narrow footprints with the five jagged points. She scooped up a handful of the damp sand. If he could study pools, she could study granules. Dark and round, or white, quartz-like and jagged, she let the wet clump loll on her palm.

Sand here was rougher than at Virginia Beach where her parents vacationed in an oceanfront house with four bathrooms. They still lived in Richmond but liked that their daughter was “a pioneer” to the Outer Banks. They were already talking about a Thanksgiving visit, wanting to see her one-bathroom place, with the rutted driveway. “Let me get back to you about that,” Judith had said when it was mentioned over the phone.

The other thing she left in Richmond was Edward. She used to think it was possible he was “husband material.” When she kissed him, the insides of her wrists became warm and her mouth naturally opened. Edward led a club called Rapid Riders all over the U.S. and Canada in search of the perfect ride, so he was not around all that much. He did keep in touch by calling sporadically from West Virginia, Colorado, and British Columbia. She might have spent more time with him if only she had not hurt her back last spring when she accompanied him on a Colorado River trip. Now she had to walk a lot to keep her back from hurting, and she was not supposed to sit for long periods of time. Her chiropractor back in Richmond said so.

One of the last times she saw Edward she made dinner and brought it over to his leaky, brick bungalow. They were sitting at his round wooden table, about to taste her homemade turkey tetrazzini—she’d brought it in a casserole dish—when his cordless phone rang. He took the call from his ex-wife in the other room and Judith just got up and left without saying goodbye or anything.

When she tried to break up with him the next night over the phone, he made it difficult. “No, we can’t be just friends,” he insisted.

“I’ve always wanted a brother. Maybe you could be like my brother.” She said, the back of her knees propped up on a pillow and a heating pad beneath her back.

“Nope.” He drove over and spent the night, placing another pillow under the small of her back. The next morning, he kissed her lower spine before he left. “Get better,” he said.

All she had to do was see him and she got sucked back into the vortex of dying her hair again. She maxed out her credit card for 15 streaks. For all she knew, it could be ten years from now, and she would still be trying to look good for him. He did nothing to his short kinky mess, besides shower and shake it dry. It frizzed on top from wearing a rubber skullcap on the rapids, and he had bald spot, but that didn’t stop him from meeting people.

He dated other kayakers and then he was free again. Judith couldn’t keep up with when she was supposed to call, not like when she was in college and the guys called her. She was looking for a new way to connect, one that did not involve prefacing conversations with “Is this a bad time?”

It was good practice, stopping just when it looked as if she might meet someone new on the beach. The guy in the orange jacket seemed to be walking about the same time everyday that Judith did.

Work was going well in her job as sales-assistant. Personal ad sales were up and there was a need for someone thoughtful and articulate to write the classifieds. Judith didn’t know what to make of her boss Cheree though. Cheree’s presence in the office seemed about as dependable as the wind. When Judith tried to talk to her about protecting clients from revealing too much, Cheree batted Judith’s shoulder and said, “Come take an aerobic-boxing class with me.”

“Can’t. My back.”

“It’s still hurting?” her boss said.

Another time, Cheree returned from one of her whirlwind trips down to Florida, up to Maine, over to Chicago and then back to the Outer Banks, promoting the new Web site and advertising what a great way it was to meet people, and she wanted to see the ads Judith was writing.

“No one’s going to respond to that.” She pointed to one that Judith had been extra careful about hiding the client’s identity. Judith needed her walks to get away from her boss’s voice saying, “People should reveal more to meet someone, not less.”

The guy with the orange jacket was still walking about the same time every day. Judith never knew when they might crash. It became a test. She had to stay close to the shoreline to avoid eye contact. She thought she might have to introduce herself he walked by so many times, but then the weather changed. The water darkened. The sand formed trenches. Judith climbed hills and trudged through ditches. If she weren’t careful she stepped into cold pools that suctioned around her feet. It got harder and harder to plod to the Sandy Dunes Hotel and back. She bought a windbreaker, a blue one because her gray sweatshirt no longer kept out the damp air. She wore suede Reebok walkers with fleece socks. She stopped seeing the guy with the orange jacket. It got too cold even for him, she supposed.

She liked noticing the changes. The abrupt cutaways in the sand, the white caps and the churning water, the new birds she had not seen before. They were black with elegant long necks, a tuft of white under their bills. They could bend their necks backwards, like a cat, to clean their feathers. They sat in the dark blue water just off shore and dove searching for fish. Judith bought a Peterson’s field guide and found a picture. The Common Loon, the guide said, passes through on its way down the coast. The loons would leave and it would just be Judith and the steadfast gulls the size of schnauzers throughout winter.

One day Cheree was in town and said, “Let’s have lunch.” They went to a diner on a pier.

“I want you to take on more responsibility,” Cheree said. “More hours. You don’t mind, do you?”

It was getting darker earlier and it didn’t feel safe walking alone on the beach at night. “I don’t mind,” Judith said.

One of her new responsibilities was training other phone sales reps. She guided them through how to place orders and coached them on how to write ads. She found herself saying, “Stay away from candlelit dinners and moonlit walks. Never use the word ‘need.’ The main thing is to make meeting sound fun, but not get too personal.”

One day Cheree was out of town and Judith’s day was slow. Sales seemed to halt after the holidays. People were in no hurry to gear up for Valentine’s Day, still a month a way. Judith’s parents were in Honolulu and had not called for a whole week. She had seen them for three days over Christmas, so that must have been enough for a while.

She decided to revisit the Pier Diner for lunch. She was finishing her last bite of fried trout sandwich, when she saw him, not recognizing him at first. He looked stiff in a navy suit with a high-collared gray shirt and maroon tie. He was wearing his reflective glasses though, and she recognized the wavy hair. He stood waiting to be seated, and that’s when she did an odd thing—she went over and talked to him.

“Hi,” she said. “Don’t I usually see you walking on the beach?”

“Yes … you’re?” His shirt collar was stiff.

“Judith. I haven’t been walking much lately. I get home so late from work and it’s so dark and cold out.”

He stretched his neck a little from the collar.

“Do you work around here?” she asked.

“Milepost 13 in an accounting office.” He focused on the wall festooned with a stuffed marlin.

“Well, that’s close to me. I work at Milepost 11, the Coastal News. I help with Internet ad sales.”

“Do you like it?” he asked.

“Most of the time … but I miss walking.”

“Yeah, walking takes a lot of time.” He looked at her, and the insides of her wrists warmed.

Then the waitress-hostess came over, handing him a laminated menu. “Table?”

He glanced at Judith, who had slung her briefcase over her shoulder. He held up one finger.

“Nice seeing you,” she said.

The next time was at a party. Cheree had asked Judith to attend on her behalf.

“You’re me,” she said. “Be sure to make lots of contacts.”

He was wearing a cable knit sweater. He leaned forward listening to people that Judith recognized from work, designers. At the newspaper office, ad salespeople were confined to dusty cubicles, but the designers sat in one huge sunny room with windows that overlooked the beach.

He stood with them on an open deck around a large kerosene heater. They shucked roasted oysters with small flat knives. Judith watched from the yard and the keg. When she glanced up, she caught him looking. “That’s her,” she imagined him saying.

Judith had a beer and filled her quota of handing out 30 cards, giving 20 of them to a 40 year old who said she could use all the help she could get, and so could her friends. Judith was back at the keg, when a designer came over.

“You know Gordon?” The designer indicated with her elbow who she was talking about as she refilled her cup. Him.

“I see him walking on the beach sometimes.”

“Nice guy,” the designer said. “He’s a friend of ours.” Judith supposed “ours” meant the designer and her date, a tall, tan person who shucked and threw shells like he was netting baskets.

“How do you know Gordon?” Judith asked.

“We take Tae Kwon Do together.”

“Is it hard?”

“It’s challenging, but I like kicking ass.” The designer added, “Hey, maybe we should all get together sometime.”

“I’d like that. I’d like to see a demonstration.” Judith pumped the keg and refilled both their cups.

Weeks passed, but she never saw Gordon and the designer never mentioned getting together again. Judith did not look for him on her walks. Instead, she thought of why she had liked Edward. It was easy to see why she got swept up. In Richmond, he had taken her to minor league baseball games, they drank tankers, and yelled at the ump. He made dinner for her, clams casino out of a can. He played songs on his guitar inserting Judith for Michelle. “Judith, ma belle,” he sang. He gave back massages. He mentioned wanting to fall in love again some day. Sometimes Judith would call at night and he would be crying. She would ask, “What’s wrong?” and he’d answer, “You know.”

A month after she moved to Kill Devil Hills, his voice was on her phone saying, “I’d like to see you.”

“Bring the kayak,” Judith said, and she cleaned and cleaned.

A few days later, he called and said, “Sorry, but something has come up.”

The next time Judith walked on the beach, it was a windy day in March. Judith was back to wearing just a sweatshirt with her jeans. She had reached the Sunny Dunes Hotel when she ran into Gordon.

He walked up to her, hands in his pockets, chin tucked. “I wondered where you have been.”

“Busy. In February, people want romance, and in March, they just want to hook up.”

“How about I take you to dinner? Would you like to go to dinner sometime?”

“I guess that would be nice,” she said, but it was still cold out. The water on her pants leg was chilly.

“How about tomorrow?”

It was last minute, but she didn’t have plans. She told him where to find her house, “the 8th milepost.”

The next night was cold and clear. Gordon took her to Murphy’s By the Sea for Irish stew and music. The first beer, he glanced up from his mug as if checking to see if she was still there. On his second, he leaned back and tilted his head, studying her.

“I really like this place,” he yelled. “Don’t you?” He tapped the table in time with the fiddle.

Judith was the one who suggested they leave during the second set.

“Hey,” he said, as they paused outside the restaurant. His smile was sloppy.

Three beers must work faster than they used to because she asked, “You want to go for a walk on the beach?”

“’kay.” He swayed a little as he reached into his pocket for keys.

“Let me drive.”

“’kay,” he said.

Judith took them to the nearest access road and got out first. “You coming?” She slammed the door and led the way past the empty lot. They climbed through trenches until they found a flat stretch of beach. Judith got too close and water flew up to her feet.

“I’m cold,” Gordon said, behind her.

“You want to turn back?”

He nodded, shivering, and zipped up his jacket. “Race ya.”

He wove too much, so she made it to the car first. Inside the red Corolla was clean and practical. She put the key in the ignition, turned a dial, and blasted the heat. She focused on the shard of moon through the windshield. Once he was in, he stopped huffing, and she turned to find him studying her. His thigh was only an inch from hers.

“You look good in my car.” His voice slurred on “good.”

After a minute, she said, “We shouldn’t keep running the heat. It’ll run down your battery. How about I drive us to my place?”

“Good,” he slurred. “I like you driving.”

On the way back, the inside of his car seemed to become sharper with every knob, needle, and ridge clearly outlined. She pulled in front of her small beach house with its driveway that lacked gravel. He lived only two streets down in brand new condos with sparkling asphalt.

“Are you going to invite me in?” he said.

“Maybe next time.” And she did something really confusing. She leaned over and kissed him. The insides of her wrist warmed and her mouth naturally opened.

“Wow,” he said. “Did you feel that?” He tucked his chin and looked up at her.

“I better go,” she said. “Here are your keys.” She put them in the ignition, and jerked the door open. She’d made it half way up her drive, when she looked back. He had not moved from the passenger side.

She walked back. He rolled down his window.

“Are you okay to drive?”

“Can I have another kiss?” he said. “You’re good.” He bowed his head. On top, she noticed, was a bald spot.

He got out, and they leaned against the clean car. This time he reached for her. His warm fingers caressed both cheeks. She felt her bottom rise to her top and her hands wanted to hold onto to his back.

“I have to go.” She pulled away.

“Is it all right if I call you sometime?” he said.

“You’re good,” she said over her shoulder and kept walking. She was laughing.

When the phone rang the next night, she thought it might be him, but it wasn’t like she had been sitting around waiting. In fact, she had been dancing around her den to the top ten music countdown on VH-1.

“I have something to tell you,” he said.

“What?’ she said, a little out of breath.

“I’m separated.” The phone became a very cold object. It was just a phone after all. Judith held it away from her.

“My wife and I are talking about divorce.”

“How long have you been separated?”

“Six months.”

“Whose idea was it?” She caught herself. “You know what . . . You don’t need to answer that. I want you to know I had a nice time last night. I hope everything will work out for you.”

“Can I call you some time?”

“No. Best not. I’ll probably see you on the beach sometime, though. It is a public beach.” She replaced the receiver.

She turned off the television and went directly to bed.

The next day—after crying and flinging herself around in the sheets last night, trying not to picture Edward and all the kayakers he must have slept with—she took a long walk past the hotel. She stopped and took her time studying the tide pools. She wrote in a small spiral notebook her observations. Some green today. Sea lettuce or kelp? Look up the difference. One white shell with a hole in it. She slipped her notepad and pen back into her pocket. She was going to start telling her clients to reveal more for other people’s protection.

As for her, she lifted the shell, felts its damp, smooth ridges and looked through the hole to the ocean. A warm breeze picked up, a promise of a return to something. She stashed the shell in her pocket, a gift to remember herself by.

With the last of his money, Alex McHealy bought a bag of potato chips and a Coke from the vending machines and stood staring at the empty parking lot, his head so foggy that he couldn’t recall his destination. His mind flickered out sometimes like a light with a faltering connection. He began to pace, massaging his scalp.

Savannah, he realized at last. Savannah, idiot.

Alex lugged his gear down the ramp to I-26, heading west, and stuck out his thumb in the cold rain. Mid-afternoon, a late model Buick stopped. A longhaired kid with a fluffy little beard helped Alex store his gear in the trunk.

“I never pass up hitchhikers,” the kid said. “I’ve picked up, like, hundreds.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t, son. There are some rough characters.”

“I can handle people.”

“My friend, there are psychos around,” Alex said. “Not everybody’s a decent guy.”

“I’ve never had any trouble.”

“Maybe you’ve been lucky.” Sprawled on the Buick’s plush seat, Alex wanted to close his eyes.

“How do you know I’m not a psycho?”

Alex grunted skeptically.

“I could be one,” the kid said. “You don’t know. You can’t tell by somebody’s appearance.”

Then the kid talked about surfing over the weekend at Folly Beach near Charleston. Each evening, the kid said, when he emerged from the sea he shivered from cold and exhaustion and hunger, but then he ate and bathed and the next morning returned to the ocean and surfed until he felt on the verge of collapse.

“To find ecstasy,” the kid said, “you have to go to the very edge. Right?”

“Son, every day I go to the edge,” Alex said, “and it doesn’t seem ecstatic to me.”

“Are you hungry?”

“Starved,” Alex said.

“There are apples and crackers in a bag in the backseat.”

The kid pulled out a leather change purse, which he opened to reveal small pieces of paper. “Four hits of mescaline. Want one?”

Alex swallowed a hit. He bit an apple as a chaser.

Soon after they swung onto I-95, it started to rain violently. The boy, named Joe, said he’d dropped out of Georgetown after his freshman year and moved to Winslow, South Carolina, a small town where his wife looked after her sick mother.

“Are you old enough to be married?” Alex asked.

“Accidents happen.”

“There’s a baby?”

“But he died.”

Alex winced, an electric surge of grief running through him.

“Stillborn,” Joe said.

“Jesus, how awful.”

“His brain didn’t send the correct impulses to his heart, and it stopped. My wife had good doctors. But the baby died.” Joe’s face turned bright red.

“Nobody’s fault then,” Alex said at last. “When a baby dies, it doesn’t have to be anyone’s fault. Though the parents naturally feel guilty. Especially the woman. She has a biological response to the loss. She can never really get over it.”

“You just told my life story.”

“I have a son.”

“Lucky man,” Joe said, his voice tight.

“Six years old. His name is Luke.” Alex pulled out a pocket-sized photograph. The studio that shot the picture turned his son’s dirty-blonde hair into Marilyn Monroe platinum and his lips a fire-engine red. Luke’s cheeks looked rouged. Washed by this artificial, cloying color, his son resembled girls in soft drink advertisements of the 1940s.

“Adorable,” Joe murmured.

“He lives in Charleston with his mother. Saw him day before yesterday, first time in three years.”

“That’s tragic.” Joe shook his head. “Broken families.”

“I thought I’d try Savannah. I heard they need carpenters down there.”

“So you had to go,” Joe agreed. “A man has to work.”

Alex took out another picture -- a folded, cracked Polaroid of Luke sitting on a red tricycle and peering into the sun, his little face scrunched up as if he were about to cry.

“Neither picture really captures him,” Alex said.

“What photo ever could?”

“Exactly. Walker Evans was once asked if a photograph can lie, and he said something like, ‘It almost always does.’”

“No kidding!” Joe exclaimed, his face brightening. “My father was a student of Walker Evans! Really! At Yale. My old man was crazy about him. Once for a family vacation he actually drove us down to Hale County, Alabama, to see the place where Evans took photos for Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.”

They stared at one another, astonished. And under the mescaline’s deepening spell, they gazed at the wet road that soaked up the headlights and at the dark forests they passed through and at the billboards and overpasses framed in the car’s windows. Everything was beautiful and shapely. God’s cadences were revealed.

Wisdom is not about chasing things, they agreed, but about seeing and understanding what comes across your path.

“Can you recognize the essential elements?” Alex said and laughed inwardly.

Joe said, “This is kinship.”

“Sure. Absolutely.”

“We have seen and we have acted. We have not held back.”

Alex knew that his own crazy grin looked like happiness.

It was exceedingly black out, black as deepest night, a menacing rain lashing the car. There were immeasurable depths in the woods, Alex thought. Staring into them was like standing in a small boat and looking down into the ocean. How far would you sink if you fell in?

Joe invited Alex to stay overnight in Winslow, twenty minutes west of the interstate, and Alex agreed, figuring he could continue toward Savannah in the morning.

They left the highway and rode along a two-lane road. But they got lost twice, and it was nearly midnight when they finally reached the house in Winslow. In Joe’s kitchen, they ate a giant frozen pizza, and drank a substantial quantity of beer before Joe showed Alex the spare room.

---

Alex had dozed off. Blinking, he found himself in complete darkness, confused and terrified. An evil presence -- an hallucinatory pattern of red and blue and green – had suddenly appeared a few feet above his head. The pattern was stalking him; it wanted to kill him. Alex stretched out rigidly, blood thumping in his ears, trying to force his eyes open. As the pattern moved closer, Alex groped frantically and felt a lampshade. He turned on the light, and the presence quickly faded and disappeared. And he saw that he was sprawled on an unmade bed, barefoot but otherwise fully dressed, his gear nearby on the floor.

Alex pulled a sheathed hunting knife from his gear and moved cautiously into the next room. He saw a sofa and a littered coffee table. He crossed the rough carpet and found a light switch in the kitchen. There were dirty dishes in the sink.

He remembered Joe, the mescaline, getting lost, eating pizza.

Hearing a noise in the next room, Alex thrust the sheathed knife behind him into his belt, out of sight.

Joe appeared, blonde hair tousled, wearing jockeys.

“You’re up, too,” Joe muttered. “I couldn’t sleep.”

“I heard something outside.”

Joe frowned and went to the window. “Feral cats.”

Pulling the knife from his belt, Alex showed it like a gift. “I thought there was a burglar.”

“No burglaries around here.” Joe poured a glass of water from the tap and took three long swallows and wiped his mouth. “Hope you’re not one of those psychos you talked about.”

Alex smiled. “Not that I know of.”

“That’s a relief. Turn off the light when you’re done in here.”

Alex returned to bed and lay in the dark. Soon the presence reappeared a few feet away. It was a brightly colored maze, geometrically perfect, pulsing like a blood vein. It didn’t seem evil anymore, but patient, as if it were waiting. Alex admired the thing’s intricacy and beauty, but when he shut his eyes, the pattern was inside his eyelids, against his brain, and he opened them again.

He found some old issues of National Geographic in the closet and sat reading until dawn. When the sun poured into the room, the pattern became a mild shadow of itself, but didn’t disappear.

He was napping when Joe appeared, hair wet from the shower, and said that Alex ought to stick around another day.

---

After Joe left, Alex took a walk through the neighborhood of huge trees, moldy trailers, and concrete-block houses with screened porches. He was nauseated, sick of himself. Looking back, he saw only wreckage. I can’t keep this up anymore.

He glanced through books scattered around Joe’s living room -- Light in August, The Mind of the South, Deliverance -- before he opened A Good Man Is Hard to Find and read the title story and read it again.

Joe came home late in the afternoon, carrying a grocery bag filled with beer and several huge steaks. He was an apprentice butcher at a grocery store and bought meat at a discount. “I eat like a pasha,” Joe boasted.

“You’re a decent kid,” Alex said. “Good-hearted. Promise me something. You’ll stop picking up hitchhikers.” He held up O’Connor’s book. “There are misfits everywhere.”

“That’s just fiction.”

“There are bad people. You don’t seem to know that.”

Joe laughed. “You act like my father or something.”

They grilled steaks in the rain-soaked backyard. It was a gorgeous evening, the sky pale pink through the yellow trees. The neighborhood lacked streetlights, and Alex watched stars emerging. As night came on, the pattern of red and blue and green grew increasingly brilliant against his open eyes, pulsing, and he shook his head, blinking to make it go away.

“Gnats bothering you?” Joe asked.

“A little.”

“You get used to them.”

Joe asked if Alex wanted another hit of mescaline; there were two left. Alex said no, but accepted a can of beer.

“You’re missing out,” Joe said and swallowed both hits.

Alex recalled backyard picnics with his wife and son under the shade of a live oak. He’d held his baby son on his lap, the boy smiling a gummy smile and kicking his dimpled legs.

Almost three years ago, Alex lost his job as a photographer at the Charleston newspaper and subsequently left his family. He ended up in North Carolina, working on a roofing crew and later on a house-framing crew. In Wilmington, he could handle the work, but he was still drinking and he moved to Norfolk, where he wrote a number of bad checks and was picked up for marijuana possession. Alex went to jail for nine months, and after he got out, he returned to Norfolk and worked as a roofer again.

It was a grim time but not nearly as bad as his stint in jail, which had almost broken his spirit. If he ever had to go back, he was afraid it might kill him. He attended AA daily, saw his parole officer, pounded roofing nails, and wrote letters to his wife and son. He joined a tiny evangelical Christian congregation, mostly black, who met in a storefront in a deserted strip mall near the house that he shared with three Mexican illegals from the roofing crew. The congregation’s mood swings from sweating sorrow to frantic, hand-clapping ecstasy somehow soothed him. But he grieved over his estrangement from his wife, Mary, and his son. Luke was Alex’s only living blood kin. If I died tomorrow, Alex thought, would Luke remember me?

In September, several days before meeting Joe, Alex fell off the wagon and skipped an appointment with his parole officer and boarded a Greyhound bus with a ticket to Charleston, drying out, shivering, in the back of the bus. Late in the evening, Alex arrived at Mary’s house. He made up a story that he was passing through on a trip to Savannah where he had a job lined up. Although startled to see him, Mary allowed Alex to sleep on the spare bed in her studio, a large drafty room where she sewed quilts in her spare time.

At the breakfast table next morning, Luke called his father “mister.”

“You should call him ‘daddy,’” Mary said, looking sleep-deprived.

“Why?”

“Because he’s your daddy.”

“Are you sure?” Luke asked.

She smiled wearily. “Yes.”

Luke stared at his father. “You don’t look like you. Like you in your pictures, where you’re handsome.”

“Luke!” Mary admonished.

While Luke got dressed for school, Alex packed up his gear in the guest room. Heartsick, his face white, Alex gazed at Mary standing in the doorway. In jail, he had dreamed of reuniting with his family, but now that hope seemed farther away than ever.

Alex asked, “If I could find a job in Charleston, could I see you and Luke?”

“If you’re sober.”

He nodded. “I am. I’ll stay sober, too.” But first he needed a drink, a hair of the dog.

“Alex, please, it’ll kill you this time.”

He did not need to be told that he was passing deeper within a narrowing downward spiral, against which he had long struggled with his steadily declining strength and will.

“I’ll go to Savannah for a couple of weeks,” he said. “Then I’ll return with some money.”

“Well, your son needs you,” she said. She shrugged; she had no expectations.

A few moments passed.

“I guess you should go,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Luke,” she said, “give your father a hug. You might not see your dad for a while.”

“Daddy!” Luke cried. “Daddy, I love you!”

Alex wandered the streets until he stumbled into a bar on King Street, a dark sodden familiar cave. Just a few drinks to tide him over, then on to Savannah.

Alex and Joe pulled the food off the grill and carried it into the kitchen. They ate the tender steaks and steaming potatoes smothered in butter and ripe tomatoes from the garden as sweet as peaches. Alex tasted everything with the greedy, grieving relish of a man who would face punishment when the food was gone.

The pattern was insistently vivid even in the well-lit kitchen. The pattern, he decided, had to be Bad Luck. Over the years he had tried to shake free of misfortune with fresh starts, running from place to place, but he couldn’t loosen its grip. Now Bad Luck was exposed, floating on his eyeballs. Perhaps his life was not his fault.

“The problem,” Joe said suddenly, “is butchery.”

“You mean of animals?”

“We’re cut off from realities -- not like people ages ago who experienced raw nature, you know, red in tooth and claw. I was at Georgetown, and I thought, this isn’t life. So I came down to Winslow, miles from anywhere, gigantic forests all around. I found a job cutting meat. I thought that butchers would be different, that they would be more real, honest. I thought being a butcher would make you think harder about living. About the consequences. We kill to live -- and who would understand that better than a butcher?”

“So butchers are unreal?”

“Well, the men I work with. . . . You ought to be new everyday. I couldn’t be a butcher for years.”

“You’re a smart kid. Why would you want to be a butcher anyway? Go back to college where you belong. Quit messing around with drugs.”

The phone rang and Joe left to answer it.

“That was Darlene,” he said, returning.

“Darlene?”

“My wife. She wants to meet you.” He shook his head. “Whoa. The buzz is coming on very strong.” His smile was wide, the corners of his mouth curling toward his jolly eyes. “Don’t tell her I picked you up hitching.”

“Then how did we meet?”

“On the beach.” Joe began rubbing his mouth as if he were trying to mold it back into a less extravagant expression. “You were surfing too. Darlene is open to lot of things, but she draws the line at hitchhikers. They’re too creepy.”

They watched baseball on a tiny black-and-white TV in the living room. As Alex drank beer, the pattern brought the pulsing colors of red and blue and green to the infield and gave the ball a tail like a comet’s.

“Alex, you travel all around, right? Take jobs where you find them? I think that would be a great life.”

“Joe, you know what I am? A homeless alcoholic.”

“That’s not true,” Joe protested.

“My friend, you don’t want to emulate me.” His own words frightened him.

“You’re all right,” Joe said, sounding determined. “Let’s go see Darlene.”

They stopped at a liquor store and Alex bought two pints of Jim Beam with money borrowed from Joe. Alex stashed one pint in his jacket pocket and swigged from the other.

Darlene’s mother lived in a tiny brick house in a subdivision of tiny brick houses, where the ditches spilled over with rainwater. Approaching the screen door, they could see a white-haired woman sitting in a rocking chair and watching the baseball game, breathing through a tube attached to a silver cylinder. The old woman looked at them with bitter solemnity and then returned her attention to the game.

Joe knocked and stepped back quickly, whispering, “Darlene’s mother hates me.”

“Why?”

Joe was amused. “You really need to ask?”

A young woman came out to the stoop. Darlene had straight black hair pulled into a ponytail, and she wore a sleeveless white blouse.

Darlene gave Alex a mocking smile. “So you’re a surfer. You don’t look like one.”

“All kinds of people surf,” Joe said.

“Surfers are seals -- muscular, skinny seals. This one,” Darlene nodded toward Alex, “is more like a bear.”

Joe suggested they take a ride down to the river.

“I don’t think so.” Darlene peered at him. “What are you on?”

“Nothing,” Joe said.

Darlene stepped closer and looked into Joe’s eyes. “You are lit.”

“A thousand-watt bulb,” Alex said.

Joe grinned aimlessly. “I can drive.”

“Give me the car keys,” Darlene demanded.

Joe giggled and stepped away from her.

“How about you, Alex?” she asked. She sniffed suspiciously. “Can you drive?”

Alex held his back straight, head high. “I’m perfect. I’m ideal.”

“Are you?” she asked. She looked doubtful. “All right, Alex, take the keys from him.”

The men looked at one another.

“I’d rather not,” Alex said.

“Hand the keys to me then,” Darlene ordered Joe.

Joe, knees high, pranced away across the wet grass. “No chance.”

“Alex, you’re bigger than he is,” she said. “Take them.”

“That’s not a job I care for.”

“Go on, then, Joey,” she said, “kill yourself. I don’t care. But I’m not riding anywhere with you.”

Joe let out a theatrical sigh and tossed the car keys to Alex.

“You’re so stupid when you’re high,” she told her husband.

“Come on, sweetie. We’ve got company.”

“You promised, Joe,” she said.

“I took the last of it,” he said. “Now it’s gone.”

“I’ll wait by the car, little brother,” Alex said.

Alex got several mosquito bites and scratched them until they bled.

Darlene came outside carrying a sweater. “My mother wants to finish watching the game. That gives us about an hour. I have to help her to bed.”

“She’ll be all right alone?” Alex asked.

Darlene ignored him.

On a winding road out of town that descended through black woods, Alex drove and Joe gave directions.

“I was in a car wreck right here,” Darlene said. They passed a break in the woods, a pasture. “Summer before last. Four of us, bars closed, going to the river, the car went off the road through the fence, tipped over. Amazing, a miracle, nobody got a scratch. But I hit my head and I was out for a minute -- maybe more -- and when my eyes focused I saw where I was. Sprawled in the grass, thrown clear. Everybody was sitting around me, dazed, and the other girl was crying, but she wasn’t really hurt. I was so happy. Because ... something ... finally ... happened.” She pounded her fist into her leg between each word. “I felt different about everything in those days.”

“We met that summer,” Joe said.

Alex parked in front of a yellow barrier and they walked down the road and through a parking lot and across a green swath of grass with picnic tables and swing sets, to the edge of the river. The ground was soft and lumpy and they could see their breath. “No Swimming” signs were half-submerged.

Alex finished off the first pint and threw the bottle into the water. He cracked the seal on the second bottle and took several long pulls from it. He offered Darlene a drink, but she shook her head. He grinned crookedly at her pale, hard face, and it seemed to him that she gave him an amused, intrigued smile in return. Because he was huge and powerful – anyone could see that -- with a steady fire burning in his belly, sending heat down his arms to his fingertips.

“Look at the river, how swollen it is,” Darlene said.

“Swollen,” Alex muttered.

He thought of the frothing waterway that swallowed his first child’s clumped, papery ashes. When Mary got pregnant with Samuel, her doctor ordered her to bed and she followed instructions to the letter. But Samuel was born in the fifth month and died two weeks later. During a fortnight vigil, Alex and Mary watched their son struggle for his life. Samuel never opened his eyes, but Alex grew to know him, brave tiny boy. It was Christmas season, a festival of grief. Their baby was cremated, his ashes in a ceramic urn. Mary placed the urn on a small glass table in their bedroom, in a circle of votive candles, lit for an hour every evening.

Alex and Mary carried the urn to the northern tip of Folly Beach on Christmas Day, humid and overcast. They walked along the old Coast Guard station road and stopped at the edge of the sea and looked across the wind-swept inlet at Morris Island. There was an abandoned lighthouse in the inlet, the Morris Island beach having been eroded away decades ago. Their favorite spot before they married.

Mary swaddled the urn in a blanket. They watched the tide violently rushing out, the sea boiling and frothing. A greenish soup that slopped and licked at the shore. It made a sucking sound on the wet sand.

“I can’t,” she said, “leave him here.”

“But we agreed, darling,” Alex said. “We talked about this for hours and hours, and we agreed.”

“It looks monstrous.”

His lungs knotted, his heart tight, Alex could scarcely breathe.

“You do it.” Mary handed him the urn and turned away.

A whirlpool swallowed the ashes. Alex knelt brokenly at the water’s edge.

When Mary got pregnant again, she was again ordered to bed for the duration. Alex quit drinking and every night came straight home from work. She went into labor a month early, in the middle of the night, and Alex rushed her to the hospital. After Mary had struggled for nineteen hours, she was almost delirious with exhaustion.

“Please, don’t let him die,” she groaned.

“Nobody’s dying,” the doctor answered sharply. “Push.”

Over the previous months, Alex had grown closer to his wife, sharing her terror of another failure, her emotional strain, but in her pain and fatigue of course now she was alone. “Push,” he whispered.

Suddenly the baby’s head crested, and in a rush he was out, the doctor catching the squalling boy the color of bloody liver. Alex cut the cord. Blood and fluid had splashed across the floor, and the nurse, holding the infant, cautiously stepped through it. She wiped him down at a table across the room.

Mary lifted her head. “Is he all right?”

“Beautiful,” the nurse said.

The swaddled baby was brought to his mother, who counted his fingers.

Alex gazed at his squashed, red face. “Son.” He took one of the newborn’s tiny fingers. “May we call you Luke?”

Mary smiled weakly. “Look! He opened his eyes!”

“He knows his name.”

Alex stayed sober for a long time -- until the Christmas after Luke turned three. Then Alex began sleeping on the spare bed in Mary’s studio so he wouldn’t disturb her when he stumbled in late. Nevertheless, he awakened her, so he made a hideaway in the garage. He bought a space heater and a cot and an old chair and a lamp and a radio. After he lost his job, Alex and Mary had terrible quarrels. The police were called once because they were making such racket. The air in the house seemed to grow dense with hatred. Yet sometimes when he was sober, they still came together, pale with sorrow, trembling with love.

One night while his family slept, he wrote a goodbye note and slipped away. He carried his things in an old camping backpack. A cowardly way to leave, but he didn’t think he could manage it during daylight, seeing their faces, Mary and Luke’s.

“My boys,” Alex mumbled, looking at the black, swiftly moving water.

“Who?” asked Darlene.

In the distance, Joe was sprinting along the shore, splashing through the soaked grass, his arms out, shouting: “I’m free!” Soon he disappeared around the bend, but they could still hear his voice: “I’m free!”

She said, “He’s not always stoned, you know. His father was an ambassador. He’s retired now, a widower, lives in D.C. Joey has been all over the world, speaks three or four languages. His dad won’t have anything to do with us.”

Joe came jogging back, grinning. “I love to run.”

“Apparently,” she said.

Joe picked up a long stick from the ground and pointed it at Alex. “En garde!” He danced forward and backward, pointing the stick. “I challenge you to a duel, monsieur. But I warn you, I was fencing champion my junior and senior years at Bartram School.”

“For heaven’s sake,” Darlene objected. “Put it down.”

“Don’t worry, I’d never hurt him. Alex and I are old, old friends. We’ve been friends forever.”

“But you met on the beach,” she reminded him.

“No, we are ancient pals,” Joe said, dropping the stick. “Known each other for centuries. In a past life, maybe we were brothers.”

“I suppose,” Alex said, suddenly irritable.

“No, don’t you see?” Joe demanded. “My old man was put here to test my spirit, you see? He tried to break me. But he couldn’t. That was my father’s purpose in life. And it’s been my purpose to defy him, you see?” He looked affectionately at Alex. “I never had a brother.”

“Calm down,” Darlene snapped. “You’re losing it.”

“Alex loves Walker Evans,” Joe said.

She turned to Alex: “Who do you love?”

Joe laughed miserably. “Walker Evans, Darlene. I’m talking about Walker Evans, the great photographer. You don’t understand anything.” He pointed to a “No Swimming” sign. “That strikes me as an invitation.”

“Well,” Darlene said, “I’m not fishing you out.”

“I could swim across.”

“No,” she said.

“I could.”

Her eyes were at half-mast. “You think you’re going to scare me? Well, I’m not scared.” Snorting with disgust, Darlene walked away to the swing set and began swinging slowly.

Joe looked at her, then at the water. He took out his wallet and handed it to Alex, who stuffed it into his jacket pocket.

“I’m really going in,” Joe called out in a teasing, high-pitched voice.

Alex threw the second empty pint bottle into the river. He put his fists in his armpits and waved his elbows, imitating a chicken. “Talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk.”

Joe took off his shoes and socks and rolled up his trousers to mid-calf. He stuck one foot in the water. “Freezing!”

“The trick is to dive in,” Alex said. “Your body will adjust.”

Darlene stopped swinging. “What are you telling him?” she called out to Alex.

“Nothing, we’re just joking around,” Alex shouted. He turned to Joe and said in a low voice: “Don’t lose your nerve, little buddy. Your girl is watching.”
“Darlene thinks I shouldn’t. I try enough crazy things as it is.”

“She doesn’t like blowhards.”

“I got a bad feeling about this,” Joe said. He grinned, his pupils dilated and shining.

“So walk away,” Alex said. “Swallow your pride. Be a coward. What the hell, do you need to be pushed?”

“No. No, I’ll go.” Joe ran into the water and leaped in, belly-flopping. When his head came up, he shouted, “God, that’s cold!” He stroked with an elegant, powerful crawl toward the main channel. His long arms flicked out of the water and across the surface and down again like silvery flying fish. When Joe reached a place where the river rippled in waves sparkling in the moonlight, he lifted his head again and shouted, “Hey!” in an excited or alarmed voice. Then he thrashed his arms and went under.

The pattern of red and blue and green burned brilliantly on the black water as if stimulated by Alex’s concentration.

Darlene was at his side. “Where’d he go?” she cried.

“He’s a strong swimmer,” Alex said, trying to conceal his fear. “Terrific swimmer.”

“But where is he?”

With astonishing speed a tree trunk floated by, a small limb pointing up like a human arm reaching for help. Then the entire trunk slipped under the surface and disappeared.

“Joey!” she shouted. Her voice echoed among the pines.

Alex rubbed his eyes with his knuckles, making the pattern spin and change shape – it was like twisting a kaleidoscope.

“What did you say to him?” she asked.

“Nothing much.” He felt blood drain from his head.

She stared at the black water. “Joey can swim an amazing distance underwater.”

Alex sat on his haunches and wrapped his arms across his chest. He counted to one hundred. Then he started from one again.

“So he can swim a long way underwater?” Alex asked.

“At the city pool, two lengths without coming up for air.”

At the water’s edge, Alex shouted, “Boy! Where are you? Son! Talk to me!”

“Joey plays stupid games. “Sometimes I hate him. You – you – you were playing a game with him. What did you say to Joey? What was your game?”

“Nothing. No game.”

The pattern was spreading rapidly from Alex’s eyes down his face and neck to his shoulders, where it burned. In this place, Bad Luck grew wildly. What have I done? Alex asked himself. He was aghast at his own recklessness and cruelty. And a wave of grief for Joe’s father washed over Alex. Such regret and guilt that poor man is about to know.

“I’ll kill him,” Darlene moaned, weeping.

Alex looked at the sky. Wish upon a star. I take it all back.

In his jacket pocket, he reached for Joe’s wallet and keys. Alex knew how it would play out. A hopped-up kid from a nice family drowns, and somebody has to be blamed. Alex couldn’t take responsibility for this. When Alex thought of jail, he was terrified; his chest tightened from claustrophobia, his heart racing. Don’t panic. But I can’t go back to jail.

Make a plan, he thought, get out of here. Get away. Run, man. He covered his face with his hands, trying to think straight, but his mind was blurred and slow. He wished he were sober.

“What about your mother?” Alex asked, his voice breaking.

Darlene didn’t seem to hear him.

“Your mother will wonder where you are,” Alex said. “She’ll be scared if you don’t come home. Look, we drive to your mother’s house, you call the police, and then we return here. We’ll leave Joe’s shoes on the riverbank if he comes back before we do. He’ll need his shoes.” Run, he told himself.

She picked up Joe’s sneakers, held them against her chest.

“Amazing that you look after your mother,” Alex said. “Who does that nowadays? We go to your house and then we’re back here, twenty minutes, and then we’ll sit here all night if we have to. Your mom is in a lot of pain.”

Darlene’s face was drained of blood.

“We’ll sit up all night,” he said. “Let’s go.” He took her arm. “Your mom needs you.”

Darlene didn’t seem to remember who he was. Finally she said, “What do you care about my mother?”

“I’m just trying to help.”

“No. I’m not leaving,” she said.

“We can’t find him by ourselves.”

A quarter moon rose above the trees on the far side of the river, casting a dispiriting light. Waves lapped hungrily on the bank.

“My baby,” she said, weeping. “My babies. Joey! Joey! Baby!”

“Stop,” he said, grasping her arm. “Stop. Look down the river, Darlene. See? The river overflowed its bank into the woods. So I’m going into the forest, downriver, to look for him. Maybe he swam ashore; maybe he got snagged on a tree limb. Can you wait here for me?”

She nodded doubtfully. “Okay.”

“Don’t move.”

He started toward the woods. “Darlene, what are you going to do?”

“Wait here,” she said, almost inaudibly.

Under his boots the soft forest floor, wet, smelled of pine needles and rot. Obscuring the faint moonlight, the woods deepened. In the darkness he couldn’t see the river, but he could hear it rushing past, a low roar. Keeping the river on his right, he climbed a small rise and then went down into a low place. A swamp. Water came to the top of his boots; his feet burned with cold. Something scraped his forehead – he’d bumped into a low-hanging limb. “Joe!” he called out. “Joe! Can you hear me?” This is crazy, he thought. I’m walking blind. Again Alex listened to the river rushing past. The current could’ve taken Joe miles from here. Go back, he thought, and tell Darlene that I did what I could.

He turned around, walking with his hands in front of him. He pushed through a thicket, and thorns scraped his face. And then he tripped and put his hands out to catch himself, sprawling elbow-deep in freezing water, his shirtfront and pants soaked. He pushed himself to his feet, outraged.

Shuddering, he climbed the rise again and caught his breath, listening for the river rushing implacably on his left. Then he went down into the clearing.

“What happened?” Darlene asked.

Alex felt so cold that it was difficult to speak. “I fell.” He caught his breath. “Listen. We have to go. Find help.”

They went across the grass to the Buick. Teeth chattering, Alex turned up the car’s heat, but the vents blew cold air, while he blinked past the pattern to view the black road snaking through the woods.

“He’s alive, isn’t he?” she asked.

Alex didn’t answer. The car’s heater was working by the time Alex pulled into her mother’s driveway, but his hands still trembled.

“Go inside,” he told her. “Call for help. I’ll go to Joe’s house and get into dry clothes.”

“You’ll come back?”

“Of course.”

She opened the car door, but Alex grabbed her arm. “Listen,” he said. An important point needed immediate clarification. “Darlene, I didn’t give Joe anything. What he put in his body was purely his deal. I gave all that up years ago. I’m clean.”

“He’s a very good swimmer,” she said.

“Go, Darlene. Go.”

She got out and ran up to the house and went inside. Under the overhead light, he examined Joe’s wallet and found identification cards, a driver’s license with a Winslow address, and five dollars. He pocketed the money and put the wallet in the glove compartment and backed out of the driveway.

At a convenience store Alex asked directions to Joe’s address and bought several candy bars.

“What happened to you?” the clerk asked.

Joe’s house seemed smaller than he’d remembered. Alex turned on all the lights until the place was blazing. He stripped off his wet clothes and dried himself with a towel. He took dry clothes that he’d left hanging in the bathroom and put them on. After carrying his gear outside, he locked the front door and stood on the porch. Spooked, shivering, he shook his head to clear his thoughts. He couldn’t stay and face the police; he had to go. The car’s gas tank was full. He was two hours away from Charleston and his wife and son. He understood again how much he needed them.

Careful to stay below the speed limit, Alex took a two-lane highway toward the coast, Bad Luck still dancing on his eyes, though it was distinctly fainter now. Maybe the residual drug in his system was finally fading. Or perhaps he had become accustomed to the pattern, the way you accommodate a chronic condition.

Outside of town, driving over the swollen river, Alex pulled into a gravel swale beyond the bridge. He drew Joe’s wallet from the glove compartment and walked back over the bridge. The wallet sunk into the syrupy water.

Back in the car, he paused, exhausted. The sound of the rushing river worked on him; he was too weary to go on. His muscles were spent. He had to close his eyes for a moment. He let his head fall back and fell asleep.

Abruptly he was awake, his heart and head pounding, his tongue dry, his neck aching. He rubbed his eyes. Where am I? He was conscious that something terrible had happened, but he couldn’t place what it was. He looked around at the strange car, and then he remembered and his face flushed with shame.

The car’s digital clock said twelve-thirty. How long had he drifted off?

I’ll drive back to Darlene’s house and return the car, he thought, and help search for Joe. Poor Joe, poor kid. In his mind’s eye, he could see the boy’s pale, broken body washed up on a riverbank.

I’ll go back to Darlene’s house. I’ll take whatever punishment comes. Why did I panic? It only makes me look guilty.

It seemed to Alex that trouble always searched him out, which was strange because in reality he was a man of peace.

Maybe if I tell the police that I was drunk when I stole Joe’s car . . . I didn’t mean to do it.

“So walk away. Swallow your pride. Be a coward. What the hell, do you need to be pushed?” My God, he thought, that’s bad.

Alex started the car. It was a hundred miles to Charleston. The Buick chugged up a steep hill and Alex ate a Snickers bar, not tasting a thing; his tongue was dead. His hands lacked feeling, and he shook them and rubbed his waxy face. He rolled down the window and took deep breaths of the rich, humid air. At the crest of the hill, he saw the stars and then as the road turned sharply, the soft-edged quarter moon swung into view, painted delicately in red and blue and green.

Willie grabbed hold of the bridle with his left hand, his fingers interlocking so tightly around the horse’s red cheek straps his knuckles turned white. He let his right hand glide over the top of her nose and up to her ears before resting it uneasily at the base of her charcoal mane, then leaned his face in close to hers and pulled upward on the bridle, steadying her as he pushed her head and nose towards the stall’s rotting rafters. The dappled skin of her neck pulled taut, exposing a straw-sized vein that protruded from her chin and down the center of her neck to her speckled chest.

“You got her?” Hogg asked again with hurry in his voice.

Willie wiped sweat from his forehead with his t-shirt sleeve, pulled up on the bridle once more, and readjusted his grip under her mane. “Yeah, I got her. Just do it already.”

The needle went in easy, and once Hogg was certain the horse was steady, he pulled out the plug of the syringe half a centimeter until horse’s blood trickled down the needle, tingeing the medicine red. He pushed the plunger back up the syringe’s narrow shaft until all the fluid disappeared, then removed the needle from the vein. The horse jostled her head backwards and picked up her left hoof as if shooing flies.

Willie eased his grip a bit to let the horse’s head and neck move freely about. As he patted her head, more for his own comfort than hers, he gave her a good look-over. Her muscles twitched in spasms. “This is all normal, right?” he asked Hogg, who was wrapping the needle and syringe in a blue bandana. “I mean, her twitching like that. That’s what she’s supposed to do, isn’t it?”

Hogg didn’t look up. Instead, he bent down and placed the blue bandana back inside the tackle box among the medicine vials and wrapping tape, then closed the lid. “There ain’t no such thing as ‘normal’ or ‘supposed to’ with horses,” Hogg said. “They’re like people. They all react different. But yeah, I guess you could call it normal. That’s what she does—what she’s doing. Twitching like that. She knows it’s about time. She’s just getting herself ready. Shakin’ out the nerves and all.”

Willie leaned in close to the spinning blades of the box fan perched above the stall’s warped two by four walls, closed his eyes, and took a deep breath—a breath so deep his lungs almost felt cool in his chest despite the heat. If the horse in the next stall hadn’t started gnawing at the boards that barely kept the two stalls separate, he might could’ve stood in front of that box fan all day.

“Quit it, now,” Willie said, slapping at the board with his palm. The horse nudged the wood again with his nose, then backed away.

“Don’t you go lettin your nerves get to you, Willie. She can sense it,” Hogg said before opening the door to the stall. His red shirt had turned maroon from sweat and appeared to cling unwillingly to the stretched skin of his belly. “This is a big race she’s got coming up, and don’t you nor the guy ridin her want her to get up there in the starting gates all jittery. Now take her out and walk her around a bit. Get her blood flowin right. I’ll be back in a bit.” With that, Hogg walked off—past the barn stalls and the small crowds of people gathered around them, leaving Willie to tend to the horse on his own.

Willie’s mother, Barb, a pure bred Southern Baptist originally from Columbus, Mississippi, and Steve, his father and the President of Green River People’s Bank, held no bones about openly acknowledging their disappointment in Willie. While almost all the other nineteen-year-old boys from Green River County, Louisiana had moved on to various universities, Willie still lived at home and, most days, worked at his Uncle J’s farm, tending horses. Though Uncle J was Willie’s blood uncle—on his father’s side—no one but Willie acknowledged him as such. To everyone else, Uncle J was a disgrace, and according to Willie’s parents, Willie was well on his way to achieving the same status.

What started as a tiff between Willie’s father Steve and his Uncle J had, in the past year, escalated into complete and utter estrangement. Because Steve never mentioned Uncle J—except when he cursed him or when he cursed Willie for associating with him—and because Uncle J never mentioned Steve—unless he, too, was doing some kind of cussing—Willie knew little about the animosity between his father and uncle. What he did know, he learned in pieces from Hogg, Uncle J’s farmhand for some twenty odd years. According to Hogg, Uncle J had run into financial trouble and, in fear of losing the farm, went to the bank and asked Steve for a loan, which Steve denied. That was all Willie knew.

Two days before the start of the Dansby Derby, the last horse race of the season, Barb and Steve’s frustration with Willie hit its peak. They were sitting around the dinner table—Willie, Barb, and Steve—each one of them tense and reticent, and each refusing to glance in the others’ direction. Silence at the dinner table was not uncommon, but this night was particularly quiet: the forks didn’t scrape the plates, the ice didn’t loosen and clank against the side of the glass tea pitcher, and the dry toast didn’t crunch when one or the other of them took a bite.

“It’s just not Christian,” Barb said, unable to endure the quiet any longer. She took another piece of toast from the basket.

Without the slightest acknowledgement of what his mother had said, Willie kept stabbing the green beans on his plate, eating them one at a time.

Willie, Uncle J, and Hogg had been prepping Blue Lady, the fastest three-year-old at the farm, for the Dansby Derby all year. Even though they had raced over six horses throughout the season, the Dansby Derby was the race that mattered the most, and Blue Lady—race name Leave Me Lucille—was the horse that could win it for them. The purse was well over ten thousand dollars for the 1st place overall winner, and the winner of each individual race was guaranteed at least two thousand dollars and a spot in the finals.

Unlike other horse races of the season that started on Thursday and ended Saturday afternoon, the Dansby Derby started on Thursday and ended Sunday. To Barb, racing, and therefore working, on Sunday proved blasphemous, and the fact that Willie had even considered skipping the Sunday morning sermon to race horses almost two hours away in Yellowbrooke was what had probably caused her to speak in the first place.

“Your mother just asked you a question, William. I suspect you better answer her.” Steve didn’t look up when he spoke, but the fervor in his voice verified his seriousness.

Willie stabbed another bean and put it to his mouth, but he didn’t eat it. Instead, he let it hang there on the fork, like a temptation he was still unsure of indulging in. “She didn’t ask me a question. She made a statement.” He put the green bean in his mouth and began to chew, hoping that the volume of the single bean would multiply in his mouth and inhibit him from speaking again until he could get it all down.

“Don’t you be smart with me,” Steve said. He was looking directly at Willie, and though he didn’t look up, Willie could feel Steve’s eyes upon him.

Barb put her fork down and leaned back in her chair. Though she appeared sorrowful for what she knew was about to happen, Willie knew that behind her reluctant grimace lay a pleased smirk. She had a way about her—an instigator’s way of starting conflict and an instigator’s way of backing off to let others finish what she’d started. To Willie, Barb and Steve were a team, high-fiving each other in the ring and alternating blows.

“It’s just a race,” Willie said, unable to feign the mouthful of food any longer.

Barb crossed her legs and placed her hands in her lap, one on top of the other, as if interviewing for a job.

“It’s not just a race,” Steve said, leaning so far across the table that his chest hovered over his plate. “It’s a dirty race. They’re all dirty races. There’s nothing just about your Uncle J or anything he does, and you’re starting to turn out just like him—a pair of dirty boots and no sense.”

Willie knew what his father meant. The races were dirty. The policy was You Pay, You Play—translation: you give us an entry fee, we won’t test your horse for drugs.

Willie thought about staying silent, but he’d been in the ring by himself long enough. It was time to fight back or lose. “No, it’s just a race,” he said.

The vein on Steve’s forehead popped out like a pencil and just as quickly retreated. “Well then, if it’s just a race, there’s no reason that you can’t miss it. You’re not going.”

Barb leaned in towards the table and picked up her plate. The hidden smirk had become faintly visible now, and when she got up to put the dish in the sink, Steve picked up his plate and followed right behind her. They might as well have high-fived right there, out in the open.

Willie led Blue Lady up and down the path in front of the stalls. His nerves had gotten the best of him despite his willingness to shake them off. She can sense it, he kept saying over and over again in his head, but the anxiety, nonetheless, remained constant.

“Well I’ll be a monkey’s uncle.”

The voice was coming from behind Willie, and because there were what seemed to be hundreds of people gathered around the stalls, Willie didn’t take notice.

“I said, ‘Well, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle,’ there Willie Garrison. Though I guess you’ve got enough uncles to worry about with this race here today.”

Willie craned his neck backwards to see Slim Pickens hobbling towards him on a pair of old wooden crutches, his right leg in a full cast. Despite the fact that his name was the most comical of anyone Willie knew, Slim Pickens, whose birth name was Jim Winston Pickens, was the best underground jockey in the state of Louisiana, except for maybe Tim Pickens, Slim’s identical twin brother. Both of the Pickens boys held the record for the most races won for the past two years, each year alternating between first and second place.

When he got close enough, Slim reached out and slapped Willie on the back. “Good to see you here, Willie boy. Rumor around the stalls was you weren’t gonna make it at all on account of your folks.”

Willie tugged on Blue Lady’s bridle, and she slowed her step before halting completely.

“Yeah, well, I’m here anyways,” Willie said, reaching up and petting Blue Lady on the nose.

“You missed that beaut there win her her first Dansby Derby race on Friday. Ain’t that right?” Slim said, propping himself haphazardly on his crutches and looking in Blue Lady’s direction. “She beat those other sonsabitches by four lengths. Blew em’ outta the damn water.”

Although Willie had missed the first two and a half days of the weekend long Dansby Derby because of his parents, Saturday morning Willie decided that he was grown enough to do what he wanted to do, and without saying a word to either Barb or Steve, who were both sitting at the dining room table reading the morning paper and sipping coffee, Willie walked right past them with an overnight bag slung across his shoulders, got in his truck, and left.

“That’s what I heard,” Willie said, referring to Blue Lady’s Friday win. He gave Slim a good look over, paying special attention to the cast covering Slim’s entire right leg.

“Oh that,” Slim said, realizing that no one had caught Willie up on the events of the weekend thus far. “It don’t even hurt no more. It happened Thursday afternoon. First damn race of the weekend. They had me riding that dumb old filly, Tinkerbell—what a stupid race name, don’t you think? Anyway, the dirt ain’t packed so well on the track this time around and when she came outta the gate, she kinda hesitated, see, pulled back on her own, and it threw her off course. When we came around that first turn—I don’t really remember it being that sharp of a turn, but by god, it’s a sharp turn—well, she just couldn’t get inside good enough. She started headin for the outside fence, and I tried to turn her, then I tried to bale, but it was too late. She already had me pinned up against the fence. Broke my leg—bone came straight out through the skin. Snapped like a piece of kindling.”

“Jesus,” Willie said, taking hold of Blue Lady’s lead rope and guiding her back towards the stall. “What did you do?”

Slim opened the stall door, and Willie led Blue Lady inside and turned her around so her head could look out and above the gate. Slim closed the door behind them and talked to Willie over the fence.

“I let go is what I did. And Tinkerbell just kept on runnin. She ran with the rest of ‘em, got way ahead of ‘em too, for a while. Then she lost momentum at the end. At least that’s what Tim said. He was racing in that race too. Saw the whole thing go down—me, and the fence, and the horse trying to run the race all by her lonesome.”

Willie nodded. He could tell Slim had told the story dozens of times already by the way the words seemed to flow together, like they’d been rehearsed.

“Hell,” Slim went on, “as soon as it happened, people and hands were all over me, asking me how many fingers they was holdin up and shielding me for when the horses came back around to that side of the track. Granted, when it first happened, I couldn’t feel a thing, but when all those people started gatherin around me like hogs to slop, I started thinking that I might ought to feel something, but I didn’t. Somebody asked me if I was alright while we were waitin for the ambulance to show up and get me off the track. And you know what I said?”

Willie’s nerves had become worse. He had tied Blue Lady to the dividing wall between the stalls and had released hold of her altogether for fear that Hogg was right, for fear that Blue Lady really could sense his anxiety. If she was feeling what he was feeling, she might not even be able to make it to the starting gates, much less run the race.

“Well, since you ain’t gonna ask, I’ll just tell you. I told that man that asked me if I was alright, I told him, ‘I’m just fine. Just give me a Marlboro and a beer and don’t put me in that ambulance. I’ll be back on a horse tomorrow.’ Ain’t that something? I didn’t know how bad it was till I looked down though, saw the bone sticking out of my leg. That’s when I knew I wouldn’t be back on a horse for a while. Least not this weekend anyways. I still wanted the smoke and the beer though. That’s a right funny story, don’t you think?”

Willie had known Slim since the race at Meadow Lake, which had been at least a year ago. They met at the stalls where it seemed that everyone met everyone else. The stalls were the kind of place where people met people, people talked about people, and where all the rumors started. And while Willie never tired of hearing Slim talk, and he talked quite a bit, in an over-exaggerated and over-accented way, Willie’s nerves were so shot he couldn’t even hear what it was Slim was saying. He heard noise and he saw Slim’s mouth moving, but he couldn’t understand anything—like Slim was trying to convey a message under water—a bunch of mumbling and gargling noises.

“You look like shit, Willie. Like you might pass out or something. You’re all white, like a haint.” Slim pulled out a water bottle from his back jean pocket and some kind of pill from the pocket in his shirt. “Here, eat this. They gave me some good stuff for my leg. It’ll calm you down.”

What Slim didn’t know, or what he knew and had forgotten, was that it was Willie’s first time tending to a racehorse by himself on race day. Although Willie had been at every race for the past year, Uncle J refused to give him any responsibility or any control. He said he didn’t want anybody that was unsure of what they were doing anywhere near his horses on race day. He had meant unsure of what they were doing in life, not unsure of what they were doing with horses, and Willie knew and understood this the first time Uncle J had said it.

The tensions between Willie and his father Steve had been a running joke at the farm for Uncle J and Hogg, who every now and then would make comments like, “It’s getting dark out, Willie. You best get home before your old man comes looking for you and gets us all in trouble. We don’t want you to get a spanking on account of us.” Then Uncle J and Hogg would laugh and carry on in their usual way, ignoring Willie until he finally had no choice but to leave.

When Willie showed up, unexpectedly, to the track at Yellowbrooke on Saturday afternoon, something between Willie and Uncle J changed. Willie was standing next to the fence by the barns watching the horses come out to the track for Second Call when he saw Uncle J walking towards him. He appeared to Willie a clear vision amongst the crowd, almost as if he had the ability to part the sea of people around him without their consent, like Moses or Jesus. Because Uncle J was a stolid man, Willie always found it difficult to decipher his mood. His stoic face and leathery skin, often hidden under a blanket of long-sleeve button down shirts and jeans, even in the thick heat of summer, made his disposition all the more mysterious. Even his name, J, an initial sans a period, proved enigmatic. Though Willie had heard that J was the first letter of his uncle’s birth name, and that his birth name was fit more for a daughter than for a son, he had no idea what his uncle’s name really was.

When Uncle J finally reached the spot where Willy was standing, he didn’t speak. Instead, he stood next to Willie and propped his elbows on the fence. Together, they watched the horses walk the track, both of them fixated on the sorrel thoroughbred, whose conformation made the other thoroughbreds look like toys.

“Looks like you decided something for yourself,” Uncle J said as the horses neared the starting gates. Uncle J never looked over towards Willie. He kept his elbows on the fence and his eyes on the track. “So here’s what I’m gonna do. Blue Lady is yours tomorrow. You’ll get up early. You’ll feed her, and walk her, and mud her, and wrap her, and wash her, and walk her again. You’ll race her. Got it?”

Willie nodded, attempting to contain his excitement through a look of indifference.

All the horses were in the gate now, and without any further instruction, Uncle J pushed off the fence with his hands and turned his back to Willie. The gate stalls slammed open, and the announcer’s voice stagnated in the humid air—And heeere theyyy come.

“Hogg will be there if you need him,” Uncle J shouted over the announcer’s voice. And, with that, he walked back to the barn stalls without ever looking back to Willie or the racetrack.

“What time is it?” Willie asked Slim, who was still standing outside the barn stall chatting away. Willie’s eye began to twitch. He squeezed his eyes shut and opened them again wide, hoping the twitching would stop.

“Don’t know,” Slim said, readjusting himself on his crutches. “Last race just got over a minute ago. I’d say you got about fifteen minutes till First Call. You got something in your eye?”

“Yeah, I guess,” Willie said. He assumed his eye twitching was from his nerves. First Call was coming up, which meant the race was approaching sooner than later. Between races there was about a fifteen-minute break until First Call, in which all of the horses for the race would be led out of the stalls to walk around a bit. It was also the time that the jockeys started finding the horses they would ride so they could saddle them up. Second Call came about fifteen minutes after First Call and was when the horses started heading towards the track and over to the starting gates.

Willie closed his eyes again tightly to try to stop the twitching. When he opened them, he saw the sorrel that he’d seen race the day before walking in front of the stall. An older man, probably in his early fifties—tall, tan, and thick—had hold of the lead rope. The man glanced over at Willie and nodded. Blue Lady saw the man and the sorrel too and rared back with a heavy snort. “Woooo, there,” Willie said, grabbing hold of the tied rope and pulling Blue Lady’s nose down towards the ground.

“Looks like she’s ready, man,” Slim said. He was talking about Blue Lady. “She don’t seem to like that horse at all, and rightly so. That horse is mean. And a damn good runner.”

Willie still had hold of the rope, but was rubbing Blue Lady’s back to try to calm her down. “Who is that guy?” he asked.

“That there is Rusty McClellan and Almost Illegal, the baddest horse you ever seen,” Slim said, watching the man and the horse walk further down the path in front of the stalls. “Hasn’t been beat in thirteen races. Won the overall purse in every race for the past month.”

Willie had heard the name Rusty McClellan before, often in conversation around the barn stalls. From what he gathered, Rusty McClellan was part owner of the track at Yellowbrooke. Something about the original owner dying a few months back and a group of five or so men, Rusty included, getting together and buying the land, laying down a better track, and adding new stadium seating so horses could race there more often. He had also heard that Rusty was all business and that he raced horses simply because it made him a lot of money, which seemed to intimidate all the other racehorse owners.

“Yeah,” Slim said, backing away from the stall gate. “I gotta get outta here. Takes me a while to hobble around on these things, and I don’t wanna miss you and your girl there. Find me later. I think me and Tim are going to the titty bar when this shit is over. We got room for you if you wanna ride.”

Willie waved and again felt a rush of anxiety, but this time the anxiety was numbing. His eye was still twitching, but now it felt tingly, like it tickled, and Willie kind of liked it.

He heard the announcer shout out First Call from over the loud speakers. “Well, you ready?” he asked Blue Lady, as he untied the rope from the stall’s divider. She jostled her head backwards and kicked her front leg, her hoof making contact with Willie’s right shin. “Shit,” Willie yelled. His shin felt warm, and at that moment he knew she’d broken the skin. He pulled down on Blue Lady’s bridle with his right hand and tried to regain his balance. “I mean, Jeez,” Willie said, bending down and grabbing hold of his shin with his free hand. “What’d you go and do that for? I can’t even walk.” Willie could feel the stream of hot blood going into his sock. When he looked up, Hogg was standing there with his arms folded across his sweaty t-shirt, trying to contain his laughter.

“You gotta be careful, Willie boy. When she’s on go-juice, she’s unpredictable.”

Willie opened the stall door and tried to lead Blue Lady out of the stall. His leg felt like lead, and he walked as if his whole leg was asleep.

“Give her here,” Hogg said, taking the lead rope from Willie. He didn’t quite snatch the rope out of Willie’s hand, but he did give it a good tug. Willie looked over at Hogg in apology. His eyes were enormous—pupils dilated to such an extent that his brown irises merely looked like a thin colored-pencil outline.

“What the hell did you take, Willie? You look like you done dropped some acid. Jesus.” Hogg was frustrated now, but his voice still came out friendly.

“Slim gave me a pill to calm my nerves. I’m fine.” Willie pulled up his pants leg to see a flap of skin hanging from his shin. Blood ran down his leg.

“Well, you can’t walk to the starting gates all bloody and hobbly like that. And if your uncle sees you with your eyes bulging out of your head…hell, we’ll all be in trouble.” Hogg pulled on the lead rope, and Blue Lady readjusted her footing. “Look in the tackle box and wrap your leg up with some tape. That should stop the bleeding. You’ll just have to watch from the sidelines. I’ll take care of Blue. And don’t run into your uncle. I’ll come up with something to tell him.” Hogg patted Blue Lady on the nose and led her about ten yards to where her jockey was standing with a jockey pad. “Just find us when the race is over.”

Willie found Slim leaning against the railing of the first turn and took a place beside him. He had taped his leg up over his jeans with neon green wrapping and white tape. When Slim saw him, he laughed.

The dirt track was a half-mile oval, and people gathered in groups all around it. Some sat in lawn chairs with beers in the cup holders, some stood, leaning against the white fence railing, and others, mostly older people and women with children, sat in the bleachers in front of the finish line, eating corndogs and drinking fountain cokes through straws.

Willie could see Hogg and Uncle J on the other side of the track walking Blue Lady towards the starting gate beside the other horses and their owners. It was a six-horse race, and each horse looked fit and lean. Satisfaction was the one horse, an Appaloosa from Pheba, Mississippi, who had won his spot in the finals through sheer luck. The horse that was supposed to win that race had scratched at the gate when he wouldn’t go into the stall. The two horse was a buckskin that went by Not Much, Just Chillin’, Willie’s favorite name of all the horses on the track. Blue Lady, race name Leave me Lucille, was in the three spot, followed by Almost Illegal in four. Jumping to Conclusions and Little Bit of Luck were both blood bays and held the five and six spots.

As the horses made their way to the starting gates, Willie’s eye started twitching again, and with each pounding heartbeat in his chest, he could feel that his shin was warm and bleeding.

“The horses are making their way to the starting gates, ladies and gentlemen, for the final race of the Dansby Derby. This is the best of the best here for this three-quarter mile race, and the winner will receive a blanket from Yellowbrooke Building Supply along with twelve thousand dollars.” The announcer’s voice came out muffled through the loudspeakers. Because the race was a kind of underground race, not even coming close to races held at either Delta or Louisiana Downs, the announcer didn’t make his announcements from some kind of announcer’s box. Instead, he sat behind a folding card table, scattered with sheets of paper, and talked into a stand up microphone that leaned in close to his mouth.

“Satisfaction is making his way into gate number one,” the announcer said as the horse got close to the starting gate stall. “He’ll be ridden by Tim Pickens of Slidell.”

Slim leaned over to Willie and said in a hush-hush voice, as if someone might be listening, “He was supposed to ride Almost Illegal, but the guys from Pheba slipped him an extra two hundred bucks to ride that horse there. I’d a taken it too, though that horse ain’t gotta chance in hell of winnin, even if Tim is ridin him.” The announcer’s voice rattled through the speakers as Slim talked.

Willie nodded. There was still a whole world of racing that he knew nothing about. The two horse went in the stalls easy, as did Blue Lady, who followed close behind. Almost Illegal gave a good jerk, but made it in the stall safely nonetheless. The five horse took some time getting in the stall, and it made Willie nervous. “Hurry up,” he said quietly under his breath. He knew once the go-juice kicked in for good, Blue Lady wouldn’t have the patience to wait it out and that she’d use up all her energy before the gates even opened up. The five horse finally went into the stall, and then the six horse took his place.

The moment that all of the horses were in the gate seemed the most nerve-racking to Willie because in a matter of seconds everything would be over. The announcer came over the speakers again. “Looks like they’re all in the gates,” he said. As soon as he said it, the five horse stood up on his hind legs, throwing the jockey off to the side gate where the owners stood between stalls, steadying the horses. “Looks like we got a little trouble in the gates, folks. Just be patient for a bit while they get him settled down.” The announcer’s voice had become annoying to Willie, and he imagined himself grabbing the announcer by the collar, both hands tight around his throat, shaking and jostling him, telling him to shut up.

The five horse settled back down and the jockey mounted him again. “Come on girl,” Willie said, looking at the horses lined up neatly down the straightaway in front of him. “Come on. You can do this.”

With a loud bang, the stall gates slammed open, and the horses began charging towards the first turn. Blue Lady had gotten out of the gates just ahead of Almost Illegal and was starting to make her way to the inside of the track. The other horses followed close behind. “Come on. Come on,” Willie said. Each time his voice was a little louder.

Almost Illegal was only a head’s length behind Blue Lady as they reached the middle of the first stretch. They were getting nearer and nearer to the first turn. Almost Illegal sided up right beside Blue Lady, head to head, nose to nose. Willie couldn’t look away, and he felt as if he were falling into some deep abyss, like he was diving into the black of the horse’s eyes. The eyes were fiery and big, and Willie still couldn’t look away. As the horses approached the turn, Almost Illegal’s eyes went blank, and Willie jumped back, as if someone had pushed him. Everything appeared to happen in slow motion. Maybe it was the pill he’d taken. He could now see the whole horse—his front legs crashing, one right after the other on the dirt track, his chest and nose following close behind. The jockey was thrown slingshot into the air as the horse’s head met the red dirt and bounced, its back legs still trying to run until they too gave out and seemed to melt into the track.

The other horses jerked, trying to make their way around the fallen horse and the unconscious jockey. One of the horses, the six horse, tried to jump Almost Illegal altogether, but his back legs missed and came down on the fallen horse’s shoulders, and Willie heard something crack. Somehow the jockey was able to hold on.

The race was still going on, but no one was watching it. The jockeys stood up on the horses and pulled back on the reigns, and a group of men who had been leaning against the fence jumped the railing and ran out on to the track, their arms waving in wide motions over their heads, trying to make all the other horses on the track stop. It was then that Willie could hear the crowd’s gasps, and as he looked around he saw people in shock—mothers bent down, pushing their children’s faces into their breasts, shielding their eyes and consoling them as they rocked back and forth on the balls of their feet, grown men standing with their hands over their mouths, teenage girls crying. It reminded Willie of the tent revivals that his mother had taken him to when he was a child, but here no one was being saved, no one was feeling the goodness of God. Here, everyone was in panic. Willie felt like he should pray, but he didn’t know what he was supposed to pray for.

The announcer came on the loudspeaker. “Ladies and gentlemen, if you could just remain calm and begin to exit the track. Medics need room to get through. Again, if you could please begin to exit the track. Under the circumstances, the race has been postponed indefinitely. Please, ladies and gentlemen….”

Willie stood there looking at the fallen horse. He couldn’t look away. The ambulance had pulled up in the infield, and the medics were attending to the jockey, who had by this point regained consciousness and was sitting up on the track with his hands over his eyes.

“That’s some crazy shit,” Slim said, touching Willie on the arm. “Damn horse’s heart just blew the hell up. Let’s get outta here.”

Willie stood there for a moment, unable to move. “What are they gonna do with him?” Willie asked, talking about the horse. His stomach felt queasy.

“I don’t know, but whatever it is, you don’t want to see it. Let’s go. We’ll just walk back up to the barns.” Slim grabbed Willie’s arm and began pulling him away from the fence. “Come on now, Willie. Let’s go.”

The walk up to the barns was silent, and Willie couldn’t quit replaying the scene in his head. The horse just kept falling. One leg, then the other leg. One leg, then the other leg. The crash and bounce of the head. One leg, then the other leg.

As they made their way to the barn stalls, Willie saw Rusty McClellan standing in a huddle with two other men. His arms were folded across his chest, but he didn’t seem upset or even surprised that his horse was dead. “We got a trackhoe still sittin around here somewhere from when we redid the track. We’ll just get it in here and bury him right there in the infield,” Rusty said. “I’m sure as hell not loading him up and taking him home.” The two men standing next to Rusty chuckled, the way people chuckle when someone tells a joke that isn’t really funny.

As Willie walked past Rusty and the other two men, he looked up, only to see Rusty staring right at him. Willie almost spoke, but Slim shook his head and grabbed Willie by the arm before he had time to get the words out.

“Not a good idea,” Slim whispered. “Just keep on walkin.”

When Willie and Slim made it back to the stall, Hogg was sitting on a bucket wrapping Blue Lady’s mudded legs in Saran wrap. Uncle J was standing beside him with one hand on his hip.

“I knew it was gone happen, J. I just knew it. I told you they done pumped that horse full of so much stuff its heart was gonna explode, and look what happened.” Hogg’s voice was angry, and the wrapping got faster with each word out of his mouth.

Uncle J kept his eyes fixed on Blue Lady. “Well, we can’t fix what’s already happened. It could’ve been any one of us.”

Hogg didn’t say anything. He just kept wrapping.

“I heard him say he was gonna bury the horse in the infield,” Willie said, leaning over the stall gate and looking down at Hogg.

“Who said that? Rusty?” Hogg asked.

Willie nodded. He knew horses died. He’d seen them die before. His first horse, Buck, had to be put down when Willie was sixteen, and Willie was there to witness the whole thing. He saw the vet give the horse the shot, and he watched the horse fall. Thud. Like a sack of feed. This time, though, he felt different.

“Willie, are you watching Hogg?” Uncle J asked, changing the subject. “You watch how he wraps her. You’ll be wrapping her up next time around.”

Again, Willie nodded.

“I’m going to talk to the guys from Pheba and see what’s going on with the horse on the track. You stand there and keep watching, Willie. Understand?” Willie moved out of the way of the gate to let Uncle J through.

“ The go-juice. That’s the same stuff we give Blue Lady, isn’t it?” Willie asked Hogg once Uncle J was out of sight.

Slim, who had been standing next to Willie the whole time, knew it was his cue to leave. “Just find me and Tim later on,” he said. “You know where we’ll be.” Smiling, he put his hands in front his chest as if he were cupping two large pieces of fruit and pretended to squeeze them. Then he readjusted himself on his crutches and hobbled off.

Hogg, still wrapping Blue Lady’s legs in Saran wrap, looked up at Willie. “We don’t give her that much though,” he said. “Just enough.”

Willie half expected Hogg to sound ashamed or, at the least, concerned, but what had come out of Hogg’s mouth was the same angry tone that he had when Willie first walked up to the stall.

The pill Slim had given Willie had left Willie with the feeling that he was floating, high above things, a little like he was in a dream, and the intensity of the medicine didn’t seem to let off. One minute his shin was throbbing and he was talking to Hogg, the next he was above the top pines, looking down at the red dirt track in its perfect oval, birds chirping as if they were singing an anthem. Tweet, tweet, they were singing, each sound in perfect rhythm with the one before. It all seemed so real that Willie thought he might actually be flying. “Do you hear that?” Willie asked Hogg, hoping the sound of Hogg’s voice would bring him back down to the ground.

“Hear what?” Hogg asked, as he finished wrapping Blue Lady’s last leg.

“That sound. That chirping sound,” Willie said. He turned his head to one side and then the other, trying to find where the noise was coming from. “Listen. There it is. There it is again. And again.”

“That ain’t no chirping noise I hear. That’s a beep,” Hogg said, tossing the empty box of Saran wrap on the ground next to the tackle box.

In an instant Willie came crashing down from the treetops. He now knew what the sound was, and Hogg was right. It wasn’t chirping.

At the track, a yellow Caterpillar trackhoe was digging a hole in the infield. Almost Illegal had been covered up with an oversized black tarp and Willie was glad. As he stood next the fence, he watched the heaps of dirt and grass spill out of the trackhoe’s claw onto the ground beside the hole and he wondered why he was there.

Rusty McClellan and his friends were standing beside the corpse. Every now and then they would point to the horse or make wide motions with their hands as if they were explaining to each other what they had seen happen during the race. It didn’t take long before they noticed Willie standing next to the fence a few yards away.

“You’re June Garrison’s boy, ain’t ya?” Rusty said, pointing to Willie.

June? That’s his name? Willie thought. June Garrison. The name didn’t seem to fit Uncle J at all. He was too chiseled to have such a girlie name. Without thinking, Willie answered. “Yeah, I’m his boy.”

“Come on over here,” Rusty said, waving at Willie. “I gotta a favor to ask.”

Though he didn’t remember jumping the fence or walking to the middle of the infield, Willie found himself, in a matter of seconds, standing next to Rusty McClellan and the dead horse.

“I saw you with your horse today,” Rusty said, as if his horse wasn’t lying there dead at his feet. “She’s a keeper. A good looking thing. Pretty fast out there today too.”

For a moment Willie wondered if any of this was even happening or if he was imagining it all, like he had imagined flying and the birds. Then he felt his shin begin to throb again and he knew it was real.

“Yeah, she was pretty,” Rusty said, looking Willie in the eyes. “You run and ask your old man how much he wants for her.”

“She’s not for sale,” Willie snapped.

“Ho there, Garrison. You’re gettin a little upset, aren’t you?”

“No. She’s just not for sale.” Willie looked over at the dead horse.

“Well, I think she is,” Rusty said, turning to his friends. They each gave a nod and a wave. “You probably don’t know this, but your old man’s in some pretty big money troubles. He owes a lot of people a lot of money, including me. So here’s what you tell him. You tell him I said I’ll give him $12,000 for the horse and we’ll call it even.”

Willie had no idea what Rusty was talking about, but as he stood there thinking of something clever to say, things started becoming clearer: all the horse races, the loan his dad wouldn’t give Uncle J, the pressure to win the biggest purse of the season. He started to look around, as if someone somewhere would magically appear and explain everything to him. Give him some answers. That’s when he saw Uncle J, standing a few yards behind him, propped up next to a post with his arms folded across his chest.

“Well, you gonna go tell him what I said or what?” Rusty asked.

Willie felt dizzy, like he was about to lift off again. “Ask him yourself,” he said, turning around and pointing to where Uncle J was standing.

“We’ll just let it wait a bit,” Rusty said. “I got a horse to bury.” Rusty put his arm around Willie’s shoulders and waved at the trackhoe driver. Willie cringed, but didn’t move. “Come on with it,” Rusty said, motioning the trackhoe towards the hole.

The trackhoe inched its way forward, made contact with the horse’s body, and slowly began pushing it towards the hole. The black tarp covering the corpse moved as the horse moved, and Willie could just make out the shape of the horse’s head before its whole body flopped uneasily into the ground.

Willie wanted to yell. He wanted to scream at the top of lungs so loud that the blackbirds would fly out of the trees and people would come running to see what had happened. He wanted to hide. He wanted to disappear. He wanted to cry. But he couldn’t seem to do anything—not even talk.

“Well, Garrison,” Rusty said, his arm still wrapped around Willie’s shoulders. “I guess that’s that. Now you run off and tell your old man what I said.”

Willie, visibly angry now, squirmed out of Rusty’s hold. He walked a few feet to the heap of dirt piled next to the grave and gave it a good kick. Red clay and grass fell into the hole and splattered in clumps on the horse’s dead body. “I said you could go and ask him yourself.”

Before Rusty could respond, the trackhoe began beeping again. The rhythm reminded Willie of passing bells, but he knew it was too late for bells. The burying of the dead had already begun.

Osip Mandelstam: “Take, for joy’s sake, from these hands of mine/A little honey and a little sunlight/As the bees of Persephone once ordered us to do.” Poem 116, November 1920.

"Give me the skinny, Doc," I said, as if I were a real swashbuckler. Not the moment of reckoning, the last hurrah, the final goodbye, the diminishing hourglass. He was shining a slender flashlight, the size of a cigarillo, into my eyes. For a moment, I saw a wondrous rainbow. But when I blinked again, Dr. Ivanov's violet blue eyes were scrutinizing me. Instead of my ratty blue jeans with the Grateful Dead patch over the bum, I was wearing a crinkled paper gown. Otherwise, completely starkers, except for my yellow boxers. I could see why men avoided prostate examinations, like the Bubonic plague.

"I'm sorry, Joe," Dr. Ivanov said.

My mother gasped. "Jesus." Her old-fashioned black purse, which she usually carried with her to Mass, was hooked through her arm. Poor mom. Dad had dropped dead of a heart attack the year before when he was watching the final bout of World Wide Wrestling: The Masked Marvel vs. The Mighty Zorro.

I giggled. I had smoked a joint, instead of wolfing down Lucky Charms cereal for breakfast.

"Too bad," I said, as if I had just lost a few bucks on a Maryland lottery ticket, not been given my notice. "Hey Doctor Ivanov, what do you do for stress?"

Teachers tell students they are going to fail; bankers tell customers they don't have any money; traffic cops tell drivers they are going too fast. A doctor at the Johns Hopkins Medical Center has to say: Sor-ry, but tick-tock goes your clock. You have three months. Six months. Maybe a year. Even a trainload of gold, wouldn't make up for having to deliver such bad news. I didn't enjoy shouting at my Egyptian students, "You're plagiarizers. Cheaters. I told you a thousand times to cite from your sources. You don't listen." Or did I?

"Marathons," Ivanov said.

"Maybe, you ought to try something lighter. Say, ballroom dancing? Or spinning? You ride and ride on a stationary bike and don't go anywhere. Personally, I would love to learn the tango with Marilyn Monroe.”

Neither my mom nor Dr. Ivanov laughed.

"Doc, do I have time to go back to Cairo for my guitar? A Washburn. My Dad gave it to me.”

When I was not writing poems about Egypt, I was plucking out folk ballads.

Even in the spring, I had a queasy feeling that the old boy had returned. Your words begin to slur and you become a tadpole, swimming in a thick, brackish pond who is trying to come up for air, but can't. Can't. Can. It. I(t). Tah. Aah. Aah. Syllables dribble out of your mouth, like snot—a profound punishment for a poet. I felt so lousy in the last month before I left Cairo, that I simply dropped wads of dirty Kleenex on the floor of my apartment. Left hundreds of McDonald's bags on my dining room table.

When there wasn't a single rigatoni left in my apartment and I couldn't drag myself to the store, I called McDonalds for a Happy Meal. I over tipped those Egyptian slobs. "Buzz off, pal," I'd say, before I slammed the heavy wooden door in the delivery boy's face. Immediately I regretted it, when I saw the hurt look on the kid's face. Why was I behaving like such a lout? Considering what a runt I was, (all one hundred and thirty five pounds) I'm surprised no one punched me in the face. But like so many expatriate losers in Cairo, I enjoyed lording it over the locals.

Shortly after I wolfed down the Bargain Bonus, I barfed it up. Sometimes, I didn't make it to the toilet. Afterwards, I crawled into bed and closed my eyes and slid back into the brackish pond, a tadpole again. Curled up in the fetal position. Going back, back, back. Wished mom would cover me with a blanket, like when I was a little kid. Make soup with homemade dumplings. I toyed with the idea of strangling myself with my Flintstones' tie, but frankly, I didn't have the energy. Instead, I picked up Mandelstam's poems, which were dog-eared on my bedside table: “Take, for joy’s sake, from these hands of mine/A little honey and sunlight/As the bees of Persephone ordered us to do…/All we have left to us are kisses/Sheathed in down like tiny bees/That die as they scatter from the hive…"

I should have visited those gargantuan statues at Abu Simbel in Egypt, a tribute to one man's desire for immortality. I should have lived every day, as if it might be my absolute last.

After my return from Egypt, I was shuttled off to the Johns Hopkins Medical Center. The lights were too bright--atmosphere sanitized. I was bundled up in a crinkled paper gown, which made me feel like a blob of toilet paper. Doctors and nurses wear green, shapeless outfits with papery shoes, as if they are on the Apollo Space Shuttle. Everything was disposable. I longed for the chaos of Egypt. Emotion was messy, like the wads of Kleenex, which littered the Egyptian apartment I left. I wished I could apologize to all those McDonald's delivery boys.

Ivanov was giving me the Latinate medical terms for the old boy. Why was he going through the motions? The correct medical terms were gratuitous information.

In the middle of this sleeper, I said, "Tell me Doc, are you related to any famous ballet dancers?"

"Joe, please," my mother said. It was the exasperated voice she used, when I lay down in the middle of the Piggly Wiggly and threw a tantrum if I didn't get a Hershey's kiss when I was five. Of course, there were worse things in life than not getting a Hershey's chocolate kiss at Piggly Wiggly. Feeling ugly. Never getting a single one of your poems published. Never having a girlfriend. Losing your job. You would never, ever go to St. Petersburg, the city of your dreams.

"This is the treatment we can offer," Dr. Ivanov was saying. Even though his voice sounded professional, his violet blue eyes were sad.

In a flash, I know I won't return to Cairo, even for my Washburn guitar. Never finish my project of learning all of Peter, Paul and Mary's ballads. Never finish my collection of Egyptian poems. Never have another party with my pals. I see myself in Cairo on the roof of my apartment building, plucking out "Puff the Magic Dragon Down By the Sea" for my drinking buddies. There's Big Tulie my two hundred and twenty-five pound sidekick; Margarete, a good egg; Carter and Rachel, my pothead pals, old hippies. Carter shouts, "Yo, Joe, play Puff again. They lean against the satellite dishes, drinking Egyptian beer, Stella Local, out of the bottle. The sky is the color of lapis lazuli and the Pyramids, perfect in the distance. A blue sky, so rare in Cairo. The sky was usually a tepid yellow from pollution. In March, the Khamaseen, the dust storms, whirl through, blowing boards and crates off the roofs of buildings. From my one of my Egyptian poems: October, farmers burned cane in faraway fields/bitter smoke spirals and rises in this wild city/I yearn for grainy, pink cotton candy at the Maryland County Fair…

No happy ending, dear reader. Sorry that as an author, albeit an unpublished one, I cannot deliver delusion. However, if you keep reading, I promise I won't give you too much sadness, although I can't promise absolute hilarity, either. (April Fool.) I barfed a lot. I dreamed Sylvia Plath was a champion boxer. Would she approve? This is funnier, though, than The Bell Jar. (Although that wouldn't be too hard.) Sometimes, I made patients laugh, by pretending to be a mummy. Other times, with my red bandana wrapped around my head, I was Snoop Doggy Dog. One day I got carried away, impersonating Osamma bin Laden and caused a national emergency on the floor.

"9/11. 9/11. 9/11. Terrorist on the floor," I shouted.

How ridiculous could that be? I was a one hundred pound shrimp sporting an IV, not a tall Saudi with a beard.

An Indian orderly, named Gopi, said in all seriousness, "Yaaar, Mr. Pulaski, don't make jokes about 9/11. This is a very serious matter, indeed.”

"I'll make jokes until I'm dead, pal," I said.

"I am sorry, Mr. Pulaski," he said, wagging his head.

"Does that mean yes or no?" I asked.

"I must escort you back to your room, Mr. Pulaski," he said, wagging his head again.

"I'm just like any Joe. Call me Joe, Gopi," I said.

But he never did. I was always Mr. Pulaski.

Occasionally, I tried to write poems, but I could not thread the words together, each word, a lone pearl.

One day Ivanov brought me a guitar, a Gibson. Mom was watching "As The World Turns." (Helen was sleeping with her best friend's husband and had just discovered she was pregnant.)

"Wow! Incredible, Doc. Thanks,” I said, admiring the rosewood on the back of the guitar. I plucked a string. My fingers burned to play.

For a minute, Ivanov smiled.

"Hey Doc, have you read Mandelstam?"

"Both the sea and Homer--all is moved by love./To whom shall I listen? Now Homer falls silent,/And a black sea, thunderous orator,/Breaks on my pillow with a roar."

"Very cool, Doc. An American doctor would never quote poetry. Most American doctors talk about golf. Their investments. How high their malpractice insurance is. They’re bores.”

Dr. Ivanov shrugged. "It's high."

"Why did you come here?"

"You have heard of The American Dream?'"

"Nice sense of irony, Doc. But you know, no one would die for poetry here."

"Opportunities. Better jobs. We wanted a better life. Why everyone wants to emigrate to America."

"So what? Have you seen how many street people we have on the streets of Baltimore. It's a fuckin' disgrace."

"Joe. Watch your language," Mom said.

"Hey, Mom. No big deal. The f-word," I said. “Am sure Doc has heard the word before.”

"Sometimes, we miss home. Speaking Russian," he said, suddenly waving his hands, expansive. "On long winter nights, we drink vodka and eat caviar and sing with our friends…"

"Sure," I said, remembering the evening on the roof of my building in Cairo with Tulie and Carter and Rachel and Margarete.

"Do you have any kids, Dr. Ivanov?"

"One daughter. Natasha. She's eleven," he said.

"That's a nice age. Before they become teenagers," Mom said.

But I noticed she had one eye cocked on “As the World Turns.”

"Maybe you can play me a song, next time, eh?" Dr. Ivanov said, smiling briefly.

I was not fooled. His violet blue eyes were sad.

One day shortly before my finale, I dreamed I was at the circus in St. Petersburg. The ceiling is gilded with gold leaf, flecked with silver stars. No lions. No elephants. But acrobats soar through the air on trapezes. Their courage is breathtaking. Clowns are higher still, riding bicycles back and forth, as if they are tiny bees on a thin gold thread. At the same time, they are dropping sheets of blank paper into the vast net below. Are those my poems they are dropping into the air? Who will catch them?

“Take, for joy’s sake, this wild gift of mine/This uninviting dessicated necklet/made of dead bees that once turned honey into sunlight.”

Dear reader, there will be no artifacts. No sheaths of poems, wrapped in pink ribbons. No manuscript to be published posthumously. No Confederacy of Dunces. None of that glory and fame for me. Nyet. Nein.

Cut to the next scene in this script. I am nine feet under. Dry as dust. Departed. Deceased. Extinguished. Ex-tinct. (An aside: I gave away my heart, my eyes, my kidneys and my liver for transplants. Needless to say, other parts, weren’t up for grabs. They chucked the rest. Along with the crinkled paper gowns and the disposable shoes.)

When Grandma Pulaski died, we had to chuck a lot of stuff from her attic. "Hey Mom, is there any reason we need to keep all these sequined purses?"

We laughed a lot about those sequined purses. Just how many sequined purses did you need in a lifetime?

Very cool, were the rubber banded rolls of hundred dollar bills tucked everywhere. Underneath the cushions in her couch. In her panty hose. In jars of Ajax under the sink.

Mom let me keep the cash for helping her clear out the junk. I bought plenty of lids of pot and other goodies with Grandma Pulaski's stash. Pleasure, instead of insurance. So don't save your acorns for the winter. By the time winter arrives, you might already be eaten by the big, bad wolf. (I preferred the three little oinks.) Thanks, granny. When I was naughty, Granny P. chased me around with a pancake turner.

A professional packer, a lady named Zahra, (flower in Arabic) with a mummified-looking face and a few teeth will go through my stuff. Flotsam and jetsam. It is her job: to pack people. Of course, my circumstances are rather odd in that I am not going on to the next job. But to the next state: Ca-da-ver.

In Cairo, the housing office will have to hire a locksmith to bust open the lock. (No one has a spare key, not even my close friends. I was manic about my privacy.)

Ladies and gentleman, here was what was left:

Molded rigatoni with oregano and ant sauce still in the strainer in the sink. (Not my mother's homemade dumplings.)

Hundreds of packets of sugar in the kitchen drawer. (Zahra is a first-class forager. A scavenger. Read my lips: a crow, not a flower. Packets of sugar are enough to cause her orgasmic delight.)

Kitchen drawers: packets of plenty from McDonalds. Natural Incense. Trick birthday candles. A lemon squeezer. Plastic Handiwrap. Zip lock bags. Receipts from Sun Lite cleaners. A bottle opener. One jar of unopened pepper. (Worth fighting over, eh? I was a lousy housekeeper.)

One very doleful microwave. (Never bothered to wipe up the coffee inside.)

Zahra will spend two hours looking for a short wave radio that I got at the Saint Anthony's charity sale in Baltimore for twenty bucks.

A Beatles suit. Very straight style. Blue. Chinese collar. A matted wig. (I wore to Tulies' Halloween costume party. I was a skinny Ringo Starr. Love me like that, yeah, yeah, yeah.)

Wide ties with goofy designs. Yellow elephants tiptoe through the tulips. Scoobie-Doo. The Flintstones. Yabbba Dabba Do. The Sphinx. (Loved to be a goof.)

A pair of faded Levis, left on an unmade bed. Waist '30. Grateful Dead patch sewed on the back pocket. Who in this world could have such a tiny waist? Give to one of those skinny traffic cops in Cairo. (They won't.)

One very handsome guitar, leaning against the couch. (Dad gave me the Washburn the year before he died. His favorite Johnny Cash song: “I Walk the Line.” We begged to differ on musical taste. And although, he never understood the appeal of poetry, he loved music. Close enough?)

One well-thumbed copy of Playboy. Silicone boobs, pressed flat under the mattress. (Who will kiss me?) “All we have left to us are kisses/Sheathed in down like tiny bees.”

A cigar box, bursting with promising poems-in-progress, written on matches from Harry's Pub, bills from Sun Lite cleaners and Fourth of July napkins.

Passels of sheet music on a rickety music stand: Peter, Paul and Mary. The Beatles. Bob Dylan.

Books from my smallish library: Dostoeysky's. Crime and Punishment. The Gambler and Other Stories. Heidegger. Sartre. Camus. Joseph Brodsky. Anna Akhmatova. Bulgakov. The Master and Margarita. The brilliant Russian poet, Osip Mandelstam. Sentenced to the gulag and exile for his ode to Stalin:

"At ten feet away you can't hear the sound/Of any words but 'the wild man in the Kremlin,/Slayer of peasants and soul-strangling gremlin.'/Each thick finger of his is as fat as a worm,/…

Mandelstam's wife, Nadezhda, and the poet, Anna Akhmatova and friend, Natasha Shtempel preserved his manuscript in pillowcases and saucepans. Reconstructed fragments from memory--the sacrifices of love and friendship. For the love of poetry. But who loves words in America? Cliches: the bottom line. If you are not for us, you are against us. After 9/11, Terror Twaddle. Fiddle-faddle. Tomfoolery. George Sprat, a man who liked no lean. W. was Humpty Dumpty who sat on the wall.

Publishing in America is a bazaar, like the Khan il-Khalili in Cairo. Where they sell hubbly bubblies and brass trays and alabaster statuettes and muski glass and bottles of oily perfume. Special deal for you, my friend. But here's the deal--as a dead boxer of no great fame or notoriety, who is out of the ring, I can offer you this advice: Under no circumstances, hang rejections on your fridge under a corny cow magnet.

Read this beauty, if you are suffering from insomnia:

From Tristia: "…Who can know from the word goodbye/What kind of parting is in store for us,/What the cock's clamour promises/When a light burns in the acropolis…"

Lights burning in the acropolis. In Egypt, lights blink on and off. Keep a candle in a jelly jar in your kitchen. Just in case. Although it is more fun than you can imagine, to cook pasta in the dark!

I am no Osip Mandlestam. Nyet. Just plain Joe Pulaski. I have no squeeze who will memorize my poems. Who will kiss me? No one will save my beauties in pillowcases and saucepans. (They are in the cigar box. A better conceit.)

But the university will ask Margarete, a friend of mine to be present while they pack up my possessions. Witness to Zahra, the mummy lady and her entourage. Witness to the flotsam. Could you please sign here? We did not take snitch the McDonald's sugar, even though we lusted after it in our hearts. We did not filch the handsome guitar. We did not loot the Beatles suit. We did not fleece the worthless microwave. We did not pocket the clock. (I tore off the hour hand for obvious reasons.) We did not hock the faded Levis. We did not purloin the Peter, Paul and Mary sheet music. We did not hook the Russian books. We did not pinch the poems in the cigar box.

We have an announcement to make:

There will be no memorial service, no wreaths of flowers, no chocolate sheet cake, no spaghetti casserole, no booze, but wait, wait, wait. Sssssh. I hear some murmuring. Listen:

"Poor Joe." (So what? Everyone's a poor Joe. Or a poor Mohammed, if you are in Egypt.)

"He must have suffered." (You don't know the half of it. I mean, that adage about walking in someone's shoes is garbage, unless you have an imagination.)

"Didn't he write a poem for you?" (From one of my poems: Phallic column in a stone-pit/ below the level of the river on Roda Island/measures river's rise and good fortune for Nile Valley…)

"His behavior was outrageous." (So I wasn't dull?)

"I just couldn't renew his contract. His behavior was so unpredictable." (I agree with the boss, even if she wore the most ridiculous high heels. It was stupid to shout at the top of my lungs at a security guard at the Ramses Hilton. I don't know why I took my class to the Ramses Hilton mall. Er, no lesson plan?)

From one of my poems: “Your last minutes are gold dragoons/you lasso jokes and swagger like a cowboy…”

What isn't sent to my parents in neat boxes, but tossed in a green garbage bag: packets of sugar, mustard, mayonnaise, ketchup, a checkered lunchbox without a latch, a cracked coffee thermos, rusty wire in the form of a figure eight, a box of Band-Aids and a giant jar of orange flavored Tums. Who doesn't suffer from heartburn?

Margarete will lug all that detritus down the stairs and give it to the bawab, the gatekeeper of our building. He is as happy, as if someone has given him a big Chevy. Ash-raf will say, "Iowa." Yes in Arabic, sounds like the state, Iowa. I only learned "Iowa," which means Yes, and Laaaah, which means, "No." Just say No to Arabic. Yes, to Russian. Once I tried to tell Ash-raf, "Look, pal, I'm fluent in Russian." But he just looked baffled. How to explain: I never really wanted to live in Egypt.

The housing office sent the handsome guitar home. We're late for a very important date. Could you please sign here?

It will be at least a year before Mom will sift through the flotsam. I didn't win any trophies in high school, no letter jacket, no prizes. I was not a macho jock with sinewy muscles and wide shoulders. Not the Most Athletic. Not the Most Handsome. Not the Most Popular. Not the Most Likely to Succeed. However, Mom had framed the certificate with the gold seal from the National Council of English Teachers. A literary prize, for a short story I called "The Loser" about a pimple-faced pip-squeak, who was so lonely he read Yeats "The Second Coming" to his pet turtle, Jimmy Hoffa. Mrs. Kissman, my eleventh-grade English teacher had said, "Joe, you're so talented. You ought to write. I see great things for you in the future." Her idealism and kindness were intoxicating. I started dreaming about taking down her silky, brown hair, from the small knot at the back of her neck.

I was even mean to my cat, Pirate. Although maybe the old boy affected my behavior more than even I might admit. Was the Joker pressing on my kingpin, my wizard, my Einstein? Making me act like a jerk?

I wasn't even nice before I got sick the first time. And don't think I'm telling you, because I'm afraid of God. Even though we're Polish Catholics and we had purgatory crammed down our throats at that crummy school, Saint Anthony's, God is for the buzzards. I believe in Nothingness, the Existential Void, the Blank. Camus is my man. After, Mandelstam, of course.

The Peace Corps sent me home from Uzbekistan. I was so drunk on vodka that I picked a fight with a border guard. I broke his thumb. He broke mine, too. Tit for tat.

I always hung with a guy named Big Tulie in Cairo. (Yeah, he's white. Last name is Tulip.) He weighed about two twenty-five. And everyone used to call us Mutt and Jeff. Don't get me wrong, he wasn't dumb. He just wasn't as sharp as I was. He thought Steinbeck was one of the greatest writers of all time. And every time, we had passed the tenth Stella beer, he brought it up to needle me. "You don't know shit about writing. You're a fraud, pal," I said. I threw beer in his face and stormed out of the Last Pyramid Bar.

Another thing: we had a business prof. named Clyde Honeydew in our building, who went loopy after 9/11. He told his Egyptian students that Arabs were wading knee-deep in blood. I used to call him up and say in an Egyptian accent, "Fuck you."

Here's the good me:

I saved a street cat with a gouged-out eye.

I used to give a few pounds every day to the one-legged beggar on Kasr el-Aini. Granted, I didn't say God help you in Arabic, but mean stuff, like, "Hey man, why don't you buy yourself a peg leg?"

I listened to Mimi wail when her diabetic cat, Rumi died. Mimi was a goofy Iranian painter who lived on the top floor. (Even though I was tempted to tell her there was no Cat Heaven, I did not.)

The day before I left Cairo, I jerked off in front of my she-cat, Pirate. I was remembering the doughy middle-aged woman from my host family in Uzbekistan. Boy, was I surprised when she came in my room in the middle of the night and went down on me. I am thirty and I have never really had a girlfriend. No Nadezhda for me. (Her name means Hope in Russian. Good, eh?)

Afterwards, I opened the kitchen door. "Go," I said. Pirate looked at me, as if she were surprised.

When she refused to go, I stomped on her tail.

"Find true love," I said.

I wandered into the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror. A few black whiskers sprouted from my chin. I looked liked a stray. "Loser," I said, examining my whiskers. Didn't even have full beard. I wiped the tears away with my hand. Even my fingers were slender. Looked feminine.

But I heard my high school English teacher's voice, Mrs. Kissman. She was saying, "Joe, you're so talented." What happened to her after she moved away? Was she still alive? How was it that people who were so important to us, just slipped out of our lives?

That night I had boiled Rigatoni for my last supper. When the Egyptian driver, Khaled, came, I wasn't packed. I thought I would be leaving the following night. In the middle of our row, the electricity went out. He shone a flashlight on my ticket; he was right. He was surprised when I didn't take a suitcase. "Bags?" he said. "No bags? No shunot. ”

"No shunot, pal," I said, slamming the door to my apartment, as hard as I could. On the way to the airport, he didn't say a word. But when he left me next to the road, he said, "Ma Salamma. Go in peace, Mr. Joe."

I felt my eyes well up with tears. Why was I crying? I didn't know the guy. He was peaceful. I was not.

But suddenly, Ivanov was shining a light in my eyes. I was in the hospital. Not Egypt.

"You worry too much, Doc. You should take up ballroom dancing."

Did I say that? Or was that another time? I have to get a new punch line for the ole Doc.

"Can you hear me, Joe?" Ivanov was saying.

But I am faraway, in the Tsarkoe Selo, the imperial palace designed by Rastrelli for Tsarina Elizabeth. I am gluing amber panels back onto the walls in the Amber Room. And no, the Germans didn't abscond with the amber during WWII. The Russians desecrated their own palace and stole the loot. I am reciting Mandelstam, while I glue the amber panels back onto the walls of the palace: “Take, for joy’s sake, from these hands of mine/a little honey and a little sunlight…” It is a noble project, renovating the Amber Room. As noble as writing poetry, that will never be published. As noble as playing ballads, however imperfect, on the guitar for my friends in Cairo. As noble as listening to a loony Iranian woman, who is sad because her cat died.

Mom is handing me a panel of amber. I am saying. “Don't be sad, Mom. Take this necklace of dried bees. Once upon a time, those bees turned honey into sunlight. I promise you. This necklace is much finer than one of Grandma Pulaski’s sequined purses.”

But I cannot speak now, the syllables won't form, even though I hear my own poetry: “The eye of exile is violet blue, my dear friend/Nostalgia defies reason, as it should./The sweetness of your gift, a guitar, rich rosewood/Since, of course, you knew/my fingers would refuse…Bubbles of oxygen float to the surface of the brackish pond, as if they are in slow motion. One of the amber panels has fallen to the bottom of the pond. I want to touch the luminous amber. I feel light and free. Almost weightless.

Even death defies my expectations.

That afternoon on the schoolbus, Harold told Angela Rosenberger he was running away. She was sitting in the seat in front of him. Her tape player played, "Play that Funky Music," by Wild Cherry, and she was singing along in a voice that didn't sound like hers.

Harold said, "I really mean it. I’m leaving."

Angela said, "Listen to this part."

"I'm not coming back," Harold said.

"I'm working on a dance routine to this," Angela said. Then she played it again.

At her stop, she patted his hand. She said, "See you next year, Harold."

"No you won't," he said.

When he got home, he oiled his bicycle chain. He tested the brakes. He packed a sandwich. He checked the South Georgia sky, cloudless, and deemed conditions worthy of takeoff. Then, remembering his manners, he called his father to tell him he was coming.

His father said, "Hell-fire, Harold. If you want to run away, I'll come get you."

Harold said, “Hurry, please."

That night over dinner, Harold told his mother that his father was coming to get him.

His mother laughed. She said, "Harold, honey. We've talked about this. Your father says things sometimes just to make you happy, and he never follows through."

They were sitting at the table. Harold's stepfather, Henry J. Rowland, said, "Maybe he means it this time." Then Henry took a sip of milk.

Harold's mother looked at Henry like he was shooting toward the wrong basket.

"He said he'd be here tomorrow at four o'clock," Harold said. "He said he was going to call you tonight to talk about it."

Harold's mother and Henry argued over whether Harold should leave with his father, should his father show up at all. They had started washing dishes, but Harold could hear everything from the table. Harold's mother said it was a bad idea for Harold to spend even one second of unsupervised time with his father. Then she asked Henry if he remembered last summer when Buddy had visited for a couple of days and then called at one a.m. asking if someone could bail him out of jail.

Harold's mother and Henry spent a lot of time lately reminding each other of things. Henry asked Harold's mother if she remembered how he and Buddy went from the jail to have a nightcap, and how Buddy had apologized deeply and then thanked him for being a good father-figure to his son, which was something Buddy admitted he hadn't yet been able to do, though he hoped one day he could, Henry said.

Harold's mother asked Henry if he remembered what Buddy did for a living. Then she reminded him. She said he was a salesman and a bullshit artist. Henry reminded Harold's mother that Buddy was improving lately, citing the Sunday night phone calls and the frequent letters he sent (with handwriting just like Harold's).

Henry was a kind man that Harold had called "Dad" since Harold was four years old. He had three daughters from a previous marriage, but they were older and lived with their mother, who told them bad things about him that they believed because they never had anything much to do with him. When Harold was five, Henry named him "Harold the Leech," because as soon as Henry got home from his hardware store, Harold attached himself to Henry's leg and Henry carried him through the house like that, laughing. Contrary to the nuns, Henry possessed some mysterious faith that Harold might one day amount to something. And just now, Henry seemed to be taking Harold's side. He told Harold's mother that Harold should get to know his father.

Harold's mother reminded Henry that he might be forgetting the big picture. Henry said he hadn't forgotten anything. Harold's mother said it was just like Henry to remember only the good things. Then Harold's mother went to her side porch studio to paint and listen to Neil Diamond. Henry took Harold's plate away and winked. He asked Harold if he felt like working on his knuckleball, his splitter, his two-seam fastball, his slider, and his curve, a nightly ritual. Henry believed Harold might make a pitcher. That, or a cabinet-maker. Henry saw that Harold had a good eye for strike zones and architecture. He'd given Harold a tool-belt and equipped him with his own eight-ounce hammer (later, he could graduate to a sixteen-ounce), a box of nails and a pile of scrap lumber and showed him proper technique in grip and form. Harold wore his tool belt now, at the kitchen table, in case something should need hammering. He took it off and got their gloves and ball and they went out into the late light of early summer, passing through the turpentine-saturated side porch where Harold's mother applied touches to another lighthouse. Neil Diamond said I am, I said, to no one there.

The next day at five-thirty, Buddy ducked through the front door with the aura of a circus star. He wore dark glasses, and even though Harold couldn't see his eyes, he felt his father staring down at him with full approval. He was a 6'6" giant, and he brought a gust of air into the house that smelled of something strange and new Harold would later associate with the mountains. Harold imagined some exotic playground his father was taking him to.

Buddy said, "Hey pal."

While Buddy and Henry talked in the kitchen, Harold's mother pulled Harold into the living room, squatted in front of him, put her hands on his shoulders, and issued a heart-to-heart.

"Look at me," she said.

Harold looked. Her eyes were wide and serious.

She said, "It'll only be for three weeks."

Harold nodded. He had figured on staying permanently, but he thought he'd wait to tell her this by phone, three weeks from now, when she'd be used to his being gone.

She said, "I want you to call me every single day and tell me how it's going."

Harold nodded.

"If you get homesick, let me know, and I'll be right there."

Harold nodded again. She hugged him tightly. He was pretty sure that she was crying. He was her only child, and he had never spent the night away from her. She stood and walked him back into the kitchen, prepared to hand him over. She was pleasant to Buddy, but she didn't have much to say. She stared at Harold, wet-eyed. When Buddy pulled away, she was standing in the driveway, her hand over her mouth. Henry had one arm around her shoulders, waving with his other arm. Harold's stomach started aching. He kept seeing his mother's wet eyes, and it made him wonder whether he should be leaving after all.

Buddy said, "You okay, pal?"

Harold said he was.

His father told him he had a spot on his shirt and pointed to it. When Harold looked down, Buddy hit him in the nose with his finger and called him a sucker.

It was 1976, and Harold was eight. Buddy owned a custom van—carpet on the walls, floor and ceiling, a mini-refrigerator, cabinets, leather chairs, CB radio, hi-fi stereo, and a bed in the back partially concealed with a bead curtain. He told Harold to grab a couple Cokes from the fridge. Harold's mother didn't want him drinking these because she thought the sugar would make him a diabetic like his father, but here was his diabetic father telling him to get some Cokes, so he did.

Somewhere near Savannah, Harold went to the bed, and there discovered a stack of Playboy magazines. He flipped the pages slowly, not knowing what to think, except that further flipping was necessary. Toward the center, he discovered some pages that opened out to reveal a woman named in honor of a month. All the women seemed extremely comfortable lying on beds with cozy-looking blankets and pillows all around them, or sometimes even on the floor or in the back seat of a limousine without seeming embarrassed at all, really. They were very friendly-looking. Harold figured the people taking their pictures must have been their husbands or some family member who saw them first thing in the morning before they had time to put on clothes. Sometimes the women looked so comfortable their eyes were almost shut and their mouths were open just a little like it was the most relaxed they'd ever been, and they looked as if they were still half-asleep and hated the thought of getting up. It made Harold want to curl up beside them. He studied the hair between their legs and he studied their nipples and belly buttons and the curves of their hips and legs. He got to know all about them too, because in their own handwriting (much neater than his) they revealed their turn-ons and turn-offs, their hobbies, their career goals, and their definitions of the perfect date and the perfect man. A lot of perfect dates involved flying off to places like Paris or Rome in a private jet. By the time he got to the last centerfold in the last magazine, and for reasons he didn’t fully understand, he began to lick the bodies on the pages. He felt a little stupid at first. Then he licked again. He found himself thinking of Angela Rosenberger, a third grader, in a whole new light. He remembered what she had confided to him about kissing her older cousin for hours at a time just so she could practice, and he suddenly wanted very badly to be the next boy she might want to practice with.

When Harold licked himself into a thirst, he went back up front, stopping at the min-refrigerator for another Coke. Buddy was listening to his CB radio, channel 19, which was reserved for truckers. Learning trucker language was to be another part of Harold's education that summer. Buddy was reading his mail, which meant he was eavesdropping without talking. He was listening for reports of Kojaks with Kodaks, or bear sightings (cop alerts) at his front door (ahead of him), especially plain wrappers (unmarked police cars) parked at specific yardsticks (mile-markers) taking pictures (using radar). Harold took his seat next to him. His father went awhile without saying anything, and then Harold realized he'd probably seen him in his rearview mirror licking his magazines. Buddy lit a cigarette started a philosophical conversation.

He said, "You know, son, there's a lot more to a woman than just a body."

"I know," Harold said.

Buddy said, "There's a lot more to a good relationship than just sex."

"I know," Harold said. He looked out the window at the moving woods, knowing all about it. "How much further?"

"A long way," Buddy said.

They didn't say much else. A few miles later, a woman's voice came over Buddy's CB.

She said, "Silver-Lining—is that you on 95th Street northbound over?"

"Roger that, Lady-Luck. You must be following me over?" It was a woman trucker he'd been talking to the day before when they'd both been southbound. She'd dropped a load of apples in Florida, and now she was northbound with a load of oranges.

She said, "What're you carrying over?"

"The fruit of my loins," he said. "My one and only from my first over."

"Silver-Lining. I don't believe you mentioned young'ns. Did you kidnap him over?"

"Got him on loan. Hey, what-say we tie on a feedbag, then tie one on, then tie each other up over?"

She laughed at this. Then she addressed Harold. She said, "Junior, I hope you get a better education than your old man got over."

Buddy handed Harold the receiver so he could reply, but he waved it away. He knew a lot of other people were listening, and he didn't feel like explaining anything about his first three years at St. Francis of Assisi Catholic grade school.

"His mother tells him not to talk to strangers," Buddy said. "But we'll get past that over."

Lady Luck and Buddy flirted for awhile. They talked as if they thought Harold wasn't listening. At first, Harold figured them to be old friends, but pretty soon he realized they had never met. Buddy wasn't shy at all, and it made Harold want to be like him. Being friendly with women seemed to come easy to him, and Harold wondered how. Now, Buddy was trying to talk Lady Luck into stopping so they could get to know each other better.

He said, "How 'bout a quickie at the next pickle park over?"

A pickle park was a rest area, but Harold didn't know why they called it that.

She said, "You're not that lucky, Silver Lining. I better keep her in boogie toward Virginny, where my ball and chain is waiting over."

"Hell-fire," Buddy said. "Virginia ain't the only state for lovers over."

She laughed again. They talked awhile longer until Buddy took an exit and changed interstates. She said maybe she'd catch him in a short-short the next time through. He turned off his CB and pushed in an eight-track tape of Willie Nelson, who kept singing about phases and stages and circles and cycles, and when that was over, he pushed in Waylon Jennings, who sang about ladies loving outlaws like babies loving stray dogs. The music made that stretch of highway feel sad and lonesome. The whine of the wheels got brighter. The shadows in the woods got louder.

In another hour, Buddy said they should stop for the night at a motel near Columbia, South Carolina. He drove through two unsatisfactory motels and stopped at the third, which had a restaurant/lounge attached. It was here where Buddy came up with the idea that he could use Harold to meet women. He shared his plan while Harold finished a cheeseburger, fries and a Coke and Buddy finished a steak with whiskey. He'd spotted a woman sitting alone at the bar across from their booth. He wanted Harold to approach her and say this: "Would you like to meet my Daddy?"

Harold was too shy and he didn't want to.

"Just go up to her and ask the question," Buddy said. "She'll either say yes or no. If she says no, say, thank you anyway. If she says yes, then lead her back over here."

Harold didn't want to. Buddy wanted him to and Harold wanted to please him, so he did.

Harold rehearsed. "Like this? Do you want to meet my father?"

"No. Would you like to meet my daddy?"

"Would you like to meet my daddy?"

"Just like that," Buddy said.

Buddy knew Harold was nervous, but he must have believed his nervousness would improve their chances.

"Hurry," Buddy said. "Before she leaves."

She was sitting on a high barstool, and Harold's head came to just above her hip, which is what Harold tapped to get her attention. She smiled down at him, flapping her arm in front of his face to wave away cigarette smoke.

She said, "Hey sweetie, is something wrong?"

"Would you like to meet my Daddy?"

She stared at Harold. The corners of her mouth moved up, then down. She looked around the room and back to him. Harold pointed to a booth across the room, where Buddy was staring down into his drink. All of a sudden he looked pretty sad too. The woman said what the hell, she was all alone, so she put out her cigarette and followed Harold back to Buddy.

Buddy stood when they got to the table, towering over everyone. He politely introduced himself, invited her to sit, then ordered her a new glass of wine. They started talking pleasantly, explaining how they came to be here at this spot and time in history. Buddy lit her cigarette with his flip-top silver lighter. They turned their heads to blow smoke away from Harold. She explained that she was on her way to Ft. Lauderdale from Louisville, taking a vacation from her husband to meet a former lover. Buddy said he'd drink to that. Then he explained how he'd just picked up Harold in Florida. He always said Florida instead of Georgia, which confused Harold until he figured out that Florida must sound prettier than Georgia.

Pretty soon, Harold started yawning.

Buddy said, "Hell-fire, let's have one more round."

A waiter brought wine, whiskey, and Coke. The woman pulled out a picture of her daughter and claimed she was close to Harold's age. She said her daughter would fall in love with Harold in a New York minute if she were there. Harold tried to picture her daughter as a Playboy centerfold. He decided she had too many freckles. When the woman excused herself to go to the bathroom, Buddy slid him the motel-room key across the table and said he should go watch television and then go to sleep.

"I'll be there shortly," Buddy said. "I'm going to have one more drink, and then I'll be along. You’re okay with that aren’t you? Our room's just a few doors away."

Harold did as he was told. He watched Charlie's Angels, who worked hard to please their invisible boss, laughing and lounging at the end while they gathered around the intercom his voice came through. He watched late-night television full of beautiful women being in love with rich men. He watched until he fell asleep. When he woke, three hours later, Buddy still wasn't in his bed. So Harold went looking for him. He put on his shorts and t-shirt and slipped into the size sixteen cowboy boots Buddy had left beside the door. He shuffled across the parking lot to keep the boots from coming off. He went back to the lounge, which had grown more crowded and much louder. “Love to Love You, Baby” was playing loudly. Harold knew the song from the tape recorder Angela Rosenberger carried on the school bus. Strange-colored lights were swirling. Harold didn't see his father anywhere. He had to pee. He found the bathroom, and stepped up to a urinal. A man in the next stall looked down at him. He was trying to be friendly.

The man said, "How's it hanging there, good buddy?"

Harold didn't say anything. He looked down at the stream he was making.

The man said, "Nice boots you got there."

Harold finished quickly and went back out, shuffling between all the bodies, weaving through the loud voices and laughter and cigarette smoke, ducking beneath glasses people held out to their sides. A couple of red-eyed women patted him on the head and called him "Sugar," but he kept moving, looking at every face for his father's face. He circled once more, and went outside. He looked in their motel room again, but he wasn't there. He went to the van. The side door was locked, so he banged his fist against it.

The first thing Harold saw was the pistol his father was pointing at his face. The second thing Harold saw was his father's penis, which was also pointing. Buddy lowered the gun and cursed. This was the gun he kept in the glove compartment, which Harold had discovered several hours earlier, and which Buddy had ordered Harold never under any circumstances to ever lay a finger on. Harold had asked him if it was loaded, and Buddy said, "What the hell good is an unloaded gun?"

Then the woman came into view—the same one Harold had approached in the bar. She was pulling her dress over her head. Then she picked up her underwear and her bra and shoved them into her purse. She gathered her shoes then and made her way to the door, holding on to Harold's shoulder as she lowered herself to the ground. Then she zig-zagged away in no particular hurry. Buddy fell back on his butt and frowned. He held the gun across his crotch, and stared out the open door past Harold into the night at some spot that must have been the saddest thing he'd ever seen.

He said, "Get in here and close the door."

Harold closed the door, crawled in and sat next to him.

Buddy patted his leg and sighed. He said, "Were you scared?"

Harold nodded.

"I'm sorry," Buddy said. "That won't ever happen again."

Harold thought about the sad spot his father had been staring at and tried to find it, even though the door was closed.

"You like those boots?" he said.

Harold nodded.

"We'll try to find you some that fit."

Buddy got dressed, and led his son back to the motel room. He fell asleep quickly and started snoring. Harold listened to the rhythm of his breathing and tried to match it.

Some twenty years later, after Harold fell into the side door of a college-teaching job, and then found himself taking over a course called Women’s Studies, he asked his father if he remembered that night the same way. Buddy didn’t remember it at all. But he did not, to his credit, deny it could have happened. He was wise enough to admit that he’d done a lot of things he might not remember. When Harold accused his father of being a womanizer, Buddy said, “Hell-fire, son. Sounds to me like it was your fault that a woman was deprived of some pleasure that night.” When Harold asked him about being used to meet women, Buddy said, “I don’t remember that. That may not have been right, but hell, I was young.”

That summer, Harold and his father slept together on the waterbed that took up the entire bedroom of the trailer Buddy had been renting since he split from his third wife, a woman Harold had never met. Above the waterbed he'd hung a vinyl painting of a naked woman lying on a bearskin rug. They slept late and stayed up late. They ate their meals in restaurants and diners, where Buddy flirted with waitresses who knew him by name. Every time a waitress told Harold that he looked just like his father, Buddy had the same response. He said, "Son, thank the lady."

Buddy taught Harold to play poker. Pretty soon Harold was snapping the face-up cards while dealing seven card stud to his father and to his father's friends, most of whom made up the sales force Buddy supervised at the cemetery owned by his first cousin, a man Harold called Uncle E. On the fifth day, Harold begged Buddy and then Uncle E for sips of beer. They both said no. Harold kept asking.

Finally, Uncle E said, "Go ahead and give him one."

Buddy said, "His mother would kick my ass and cut my dick off."

Uncle E said, "One sip will cure him of wanting another one."

Buddy handed Harold his open beer. Harold held it with both hands, and all the men looked on. He sipped from it. Even the smell was bad, and when he got past the smell, the taste made him want to gag, but he fought it back and smiled instead. Then he took a second sip.

"Now look what you've done," Buddy told Uncle E.

"He's not my son," Uncle E said, and all the men laughed and the game resumed and when Harold finished that beer he asked for another one, but no one laughed and Buddy told him to go to bed.

At the end of the second week, Buddy dropped off Harold and his toothbrush at Uncle E’s so Buddy could have a date with a woman who would later be his fourth wife, a divorced accountant who didn't seem too fond of Harold being there, taking up Buddy's time. He'd been dating her for almost a year, he said, which confused Harold, given the motel incident and the fact that he'd never mentioned her in a letter or on the phone. When Harold asked his father why he had never mentioned her, Buddy said he guessed he was in the habit of keeping his cards close to his vest. Harold knew what he meant. He’d started holding his cards that way too.

Buddy told Harold he’d be back for him the next morning. Uncle E had been Buddy's best man when Buddy and Harold's mother got married. Uncle E explained this at the kitchen table while Harold ate pizza. He poured himself more whiskey and told Harold that his mother was a very special lady—beautiful, talented, and smart. He said he'd been in love with her before Harold's father married her, and even after they were married Uncle E stayed in love with her. Truth be told, Uncle E said, he might still be in love with her. Harold stopped eating. He wanted to call his mother. He wanted her to come pick him up so he could go home to her and to Henry J. Rowland. Uncle E took another sip of whiskey. His eyes were nearly closed.

"One of these days," Uncle E said, "just so you know—I think she and I may start talking again."

Harold said, "Could I please be excused?"

Harold went to bed, feeling homesick. He was tired of Buddy's loud friends, he was tired of Buddy's smelly trailer, he was tired of eating every meal at a diner, and he was tired of being the punchline to his father's jokes with waitresses.

Sometime in the night, Harold got up to get some water. He wandered toward a dim light coming from the kitchen and soon saw Uncle E, wearing only boxer shorts, talking on the phone while sitting on the edge of a kitchen chair that faced the cabinet. His chin was level with the counter, but he seemed comfortable enough. His left forearm rested at an angle on the counter, and his left hand held a cigarette and a whiskey glass simultaneously. Through the hole in his boxer shorts, his erect penis was protruding. But he wasn't touching it. Harold didn't understand. He imagined a penis in that condition would probably itch very badly, but Uncle E seemed comfortable not touching it, and this impressed Harold a great deal. Uncle E whispered something in his deep voice that he followed with a laugh.

He said, "I still have a certain amount of expertise in that particular area, my dear."

Harold went to bed.

The next night, Harold called his mother. He wanted to tell her to come get him. It was Sunday, and he and Buddy had just returned from a diner, where his father had asked another waitress to marry him. Buddy said he'd leave him alone so he could talk in private.

Harold's mother said, "Is everything okay?"

Harold said yes.

"Don't lie if it's not, Harold—you can tell me. Is everything okay?"

Harold said, "What's Dad doing?"

She paused too long, and it made Harold suspicious. It made him wonder whether the next thing she said would be true.

"He's outside," she said.

"Can I talk to him?"

"He's cutting the grass, I think. Are you having a good time?"

"I guess so," he said. It was dark out. He didn't believe Henry was cutting the grass.

"Everything's going to be just fine," she said.

She sounded like she'd been crying, or was about to.

"Don't you worry about a thing," she said.

"Tell Dad I said hello."

Buddy entered the room just then, and suddenly Harold felt unfaithful for calling his stepfather Dad. He could tell he'd hurt Buddy's feelings a little. He sank into a chair and lowered his eyes like he'd just gotten bad news.

Buddy said, "I want you to remember something."

Harold stared through the window toward some dark spot of the future.

"I want you to remember that no one will ever love you as much as your mother loves you, okay? That's something I didn't realize until it was too late with my own mother, and I feel guilty about it every day. So you should try to make it as easy on her as you can, okay?"

Harold wondered if Henry Rowland would be there when he got back. He remembered Henry waving in the driveway and suddenly doubted it.

"Son?" Buddy said. "You hear what I said?"

Harold heard his father's voice, but it seemed to come from some great distance.

He swore to himself just then that he would never, under any circumstances, get so close to a girl that it would require marriage. He thought it would be a great idea, in fact, never to get too close to a girl. The girl he would start not getting close to the soonest would be Angela Rosenberger, whether she'd developed breasts or not.

He thought of Sister Fermina. He imagined the three-minute walk to her office as a kind of private march no one else could know about. He imagined sitting beneath her yellow bulb, back stiff with proper posture. He remembered her familiar odors. He would see her at nine a.m. on the first day of school, and at nine a.m. every day of his fourth grade school year, her heavy and scaly hand pressing itself on top of his as they made their way through every letter of the alphabet, printed and cursive, first lower case, then capitals.

So after the plates Vanessa got tired, I guess, and went in and got only a few glasses to throw, which didn’t sound as good. Then, she sat at the top of the steps, smoking a cigarette and talking on the phone to someone, the avocado green telephone cord snaking out of the house in little C’s. And when Clarice, the other woman who lived there, came home, they stood on the steps together as Vanessa yelled at her and pointed at all the broken plates. I don’t know why Vanessa was yelling at Clarice about the plates; I mean, Vanessa was the one who broke them.

From my bedroom window, I could see the yard across the alley, and Vanessa never did clean up the plates. I never saw Clarice, who was thin with fiery red hair, again, either. Rain would collect in the little curved rims of plate pieces, along with snow and bird poop. I asked my mom whether she could read the plates the same way she read Tarot cards and tea leaves for the Romanian teenagers on the street, who always wanted to know whether Stefan or Seneslav would marry them.

“I see new beginnings,” my mother would assure them, pointing her crooked finger over the ace of cups. Mostly, the girls would be terrified when the death card came up, but my mother always assured them it was the card of change, a destruction of the old and useless. I would always think about the broken plates in the yard. In my Tarot deck, the death card would have a picture of our neighbor throwing plates. The ace of pentacles, with often is connected with planting the seeds of one’s labor, prosperity, would have a picture of my mother and me planting strawberries.

I didn’t have much use for the cards in between those; our life was a series of new beginnings after sudden changes, never endings or long periods of prosperity. Like soon after the plate incident, when my mother got laid off from the community center where she bathed severely mentally retarded residents, got them dressed, and fed them breakfast before rolling them off to their classes, where they learned useless things like learning to hold a block. Well, I thought the lesson were useless because if the only thing you ever learn is how to hold a block, life just doesn’t seem rewarding or fair. But I guess the government didn’t find block holding particularly useful either, because they closed the center and dealt the residents to remaining hospitals like a hand of poker.

So my mother read a lot of cards while looking for a new job, and even wound up talking to the Vanessa Falkenstein, who didn’t really interact with the neighbors much. She taught drawing classes at the community college uptown. She wore a lot of black, had ragged, short hair, and looked like a pipe cleaner. I always called her the caterpillar, although not to her face, because of her spiky, furry head and long, lithe body. She was a rakish, boyish woman who kept to herself mostly. In fact, I’d never seen her with anyone except for her roommate Clarice, who I’d always see more than Vanessa. She leaned over the fence to talk to me when putting out trash, had an easy dimpled smile, and would even get readings from my mother, which naturally made Clarice a positive, charmed person in my mother’s eyes.

“Such a beautiful, radiant woman, Clarice,” my mother had mused some time after Clarice moved out. “The high priestess. I see a bright future for her.”

Even though my mother knew Clarice, getting to the elusive and quiet Vanessa was tough. But somehow my mother convinced her to create some signs advertising my mother’s Tarot reading services to hang up in some of the neighborhood stores. I shouldn’t say “somehow”; my mother was pretty charming when she wanted to be and, when that didn’t get her what she wanted, incredibly pushy. Whatever method she used, the signs were made, and they were very nice.

Even with this favor, I had never really spoken to Vanessa until she caught me one day in her back yard picking up her plate shards. I wasn’t doing it out of charity; I wanted the shards, even if I didn’t exactly know why. I imagined the shattered pieces on my windowsill, their enameled tops catching the sunlight.

“What are you doing?” She asked from the door, smoking a cigarette. I couldn’t tell whether she was pissed or amused, or maybe both.

“I thought it might be dangerous, all these pieces here,” I stammered. I was pretty crafty in many ways, but being a liar was not one of them.

“Dangerous to whom, exactly?” she said coldly, and at that moment I was happy that Clarice was no longer her roommate.

“I guess you...and maybe the birds and strays.”

“Come here.” She held her back door open. I straightened, not sure what to make of her invitation. “I want to show you something.”

Inside the house was dark and smelled oppressively of cigarette smoke. Some disjointed classical music warbled out of the corner from an old tape recorder that had stacks of cassettes surrounding it ominously. By the windows that overlooked the backyard was a large sketchpad on an easel. The unfinished picture was of some of the shards in the yard.

“I’ve been using those plates for some studies, and I’d appreciate it if you didn’t take any of them,” she explained, standing before the easel with her arms crossed.

“Oh,” I laughed. “I thought you broke them because you were mad at Clarice.”

At my mention of Clarice, her lips parted, and some silent disappointment, or frustration, fell in silence from them.

“Sometimes you can find art in the ordinary,” she explained finally, turning to face me. “In fact, most of the time.”

“Well, I’ll put those back.” I took a step toward the door. “I don’t know if I’ll be able to place them exactly where I found them, but I’ll try. I’ll make it up to you, I swear.”

“You really want to make it up to me?” She cocked an eyebrow, and I imagined myself weeding her overgrown garden. “I’d like a model, now that Clarice is gone. You can come as you are, wearing what you’re wearing. I just like to keep up on human subjects. I’ll even pay you---it won’t be much, but I’m sure a lot of kids would love to be paid to sit around doing nothing, huh?”

I began to pose for Vanessa a couple days a week after school so that she could practice some angles that had always eluded her. She would play strange French records like Edith Piaf and smoke thick cigarettes that would leave blue smoke hovering in the dark, damp apartment. She never had sodas or candy or anything remotely edible to a teenager--mostly yogurt and teas and carrots.

“Your body is ready to change, Tara,” she remarked one afternoon, a pencil between her lips as she propped her big sketchbook on her lap. She sat cross-legged on a wooden, straight-backed chair and was all angles. In fact, her body didn’t look like it had changed at all. It was merely a little girl’s body that had stretched. “This will be very exciting--I will be able to capture it all, if you let me sketch you long enough.”

“As long as you pay me,” I answered in the all the tactfulness a thirteen-year-old girl can summon. “You can sketch me until I’m old and gray.”

“Has your mother found work, Tara?” She asked, not paying attention to me. I watched her eyes follow a line on the page. She was not beautiful, although I suppose a case could be made for her beauty, if you argued very hard. Like her body, her facial features were large and angular--high cheekbones, pointy nose, bulgy black eyes with thick, almost-meeting eyebrows, a thin, long mouth. But if she let her hair grow out a little, to cover her large eyes, and maybe if she filled in those lips with lipstick she would be passable. I was an expert on these things because I spent hours pouring over my mother’s Cosmopolitan magazines, albeit mostly out of boredom. I refused to believe that the universe Cosmopolitan advertised existed and often wondered why they spent so much time and money trying to create it.

“She interviewed at a nursing home yesterday. The pay is less, but I’m sure she’ll take it and hope something better comes along.”

“That’s good. How about her card reading?”

“Okay. Svetlana got pretty mad when that boy broke up with her after Mom predicted a few months ago that they would get married.”

“I don’t believe in the cards. I mean, artistically they intrigue me, but I think we are more responsible for our future than outside forces. Of course, Clarice regarded fortunes very highly, and even based her life on it, even when there were other factors--people--at play.” She pursed her lips, then put her pad flat on the table. “I think that’s all for today.”

“How come you don’t have any boys around, Vanessa?” I asked, standing up and stretching. She leaned back and smirked, studying me coyly as if I had said something really interesting and grand.

“I’m too old for boys,” she answered finally, stabbing out her cigarette. “But I can tell you’re just getting started. Any boys in your life, Tara?”

“No.” I blushed. Vanessa could always make me blush. Sometimes the way I’d feel her watching me, or when she asked what I dreamt about, even just looking at her complicated face. Her face was never easy; it was always compressed, furrowed, as if deep in thought or sadly confused.

“Well, I guess we’re even.” She stood up in one elongated motion like someone unraveling a curled straw wrapper. “Would you like some tea?”

She went into the kitchen, and I stood up and poured over the sketches in her pad. Mostly they were of me, but some were of buildings downtown, and there were other young girls like me--I guessed her students. There were also some of Clarice, but they didn’t appear to be as staged as mine. They were of while she was sleeping, a long, nude limb hanging out from a rippled sea of sheets, her profile sunk deeply into a pillow while a small breast, like a saucer, rested on her chest. There were also some of her clothed. I wondered whether Clarice was actually sleeping when Vanessa sketched those bedroom pictures or whether she was just pretending.

When Vanessa reappeared in the room she pulled the pad away from me quickly, spattering a little bit of her tea over the rim of her mug and onto her hand.

“Shit.” She bit her lip, letting her burned hand travel to her mouth after she set the mug down quickly. I took a step back as she closed the sketchpad carefully and set it on the table.

“I’m sorry, Vanessa. I didn’t mean to snoop.”

“It’s all right.” She waved her red, splotchy hand. “I don’t like people to go through my sketchbooks. There are many…unfinished pieces. I don’t like people to look at unfinished pieces.”

“I have this idea for a store,” I said, after a long silence. “To break things.”

“What do you mean? To fix broken things?”

“No--people come in and pay money, and there’s all sorts of things they can break, you know? Plates, glasses, televisions, ceramics. They break stuff for like ten minutes, get it out of their system, and then they leave. They don’t even have to clean it up. I have this theory, you see, that we’d break more stuff if we could, kind of as a release, but we worry about all this broken stuff we have to clean up. But we can just walk away from it all. No responsibilities.”

“Hmm. I like it. So where would you get all the stuff?”

“You know--thrift stores, landfills, the trash. I’d call it ‘Broken Things’ or something.”

“You think people would know what it was?” She set her mug down and fetched her sketchbook. “As opposed to a second-hand store?”

“Well, ‘You Break Things’ sounds kind of stupid.”

“Let’s see.” She picked up a pencil and began to sketch tentatively. “Maybe something like, ‘you bought it, you break it’?”

“Yeah.” I rocked back and forth on my feet. “Yeah, I like it.”

“Well, let me play with a few ideas, and I’ll get back to you. See you next week?”

“I don’t see how she lives.” My mother shuffled through her deck absently. “She’s an adjunct at a community college teaching drawing, you say, and she pays you to model once or twice a week. I saw her at the grocery store the other day, and she bought three cups of yogurt and three cans of cat food.”

“Well, we live, and we’re pretty tight on money.” I pushed my macaroni and cheese around my plate.

“I don’t think she has any friends, now that Clarice moved out. I’m not even sure I like you hanging out with her. You’re a thirteen-year-old girl and...I don’t think she’s good for you. She’s probably forty, you know?”

“What, you want me to hang out with the Romanian girls?”

“Can’t you get involved in something after school?”

“She pays me decently, Mom. It’s no big deal. She’s helping me with a project.”

“Oh, really?” My mother wrinkled her nose, her glasses moving slowly up the long, thin shaft. “What?”

“This idea I have for a store. You know, how she helped you advertise the cards.”

“What kind of store is it?”

“You break things.”

“What?”

“You pay to break things.”

“You spend too much time alone.” She slid her cards into the velvet case. “You know, I did a reading for Vanessa once. A lot of swords, a lot of sevens. A lot of conflict. She’s a troubled woman.”

“So is she going to marry Sven or not?” I smirked. My mother frowned at me. She didn’t seem to find many things funny nowadays. She started at the nursing home on the 3 to 11 shift, which cut into her evenings reading cards, and now she was reduced to reading at the crystal store on Saturdays. If I got my store idea together, maybe she would laugh more, like she did when we still lived with my father. He always ridiculed the cards, accusing her of spending more time using witchcraft to fix others’ lives than her own marriage.

“I want to draw your face today.” Vanessa chose a pencil from her box. “You have a beautiful face. When your angles fill out, you’re going to be stunning, you know.”

“Thanks,” I answered. She had never paid me a compliment before, mostly murmuring ‘keep still’ when I had an unbearable itch or something. In fact, we never talked about beauty much, which was weird, since she was an artist. “I never thought about it.”

“Well, it’s not something you have to think about, necessarily. I mean, if you are at peace with yourself and like yourself, that beauty will radiate out. It’s not something you can fix with makeup.” She studied my face clinically before returning to her sketching.

“I guess you don’t read Cosmopolitan. ” I smirked.

“Not at all. Do you?”

“Sometimes. My mom gets it.”

“I’m surprised. You seem like a very intelligent girl. Inquisitive. Mature for her age.”

“So why did you get a Tarot reading from my mother?” I reclined on the loveseat that smelled faintly of mothballs. I wondered whether she had gotten it at the Salvation Army where I bought all my plates---the store always had an air of mothballs and intestinal gas.

“I didn’t—she offered it to me as a thank you for the signs I made. Plus, Clarice had raved about her, and I--being naturally quite suspicious—had to see for myself.” Vanessa put her pad on her lap. I could see the reserved, gangly Vanessa seated across from my dark, animated mother—my mother’s heavy perfume and makeup, the boisterous laugh, the shine in her eye as she slipped the cards, carelessly and expertly, on the table. “Your mother kept pointing to a man who would come into my life—a boyfriend, she kept hinting.”

I knew my mother, based on the body language and facial expressions of her clients, would always tailor her readings, accentuating, without going beyond the spread of the cards, what they wanted to hear.

“Is there a man coming into your life?” I asked.

“No—at least not in the manner she was suggesting. I felt as if she kept returning to him, to test me—to see whether or not I would correct her.”

“Correct what?”
“It’s nothing,” she answered, drawing her pad back up between us. “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t bring it up again.”

Meanwhile, I had my first customer. Although my 11-year-old neighbor, Joey Baron, had been skeptical of paying to break things he could break for free, I’d sold him on the breaking of them in the front room of our basement, which I’d cleared out mostly except for a ratty shag carpet and some old sofa pillows I’d pressed into the windowsill and other troublesome areas. I played a rap tape Joey had brought for the occasion and watched from the steps as he swaggered around the basement, chucking plates and coffee mugs while donning a pair of goggles I’d stolen from the biology lab at school.

Even with a vacuum cleaner and dust pan, I’d discovered it was almost impossible to completely clean up the shivers and cracks of glass. It was much more work than the five dollars Joey paid me, but I figured I could charge more once I built my client base.

“What do you think?” Vanessa held up a color poster, a small smile on her face. Intricate shards exploded with a great force from the center. The caption underneath read breaking things was never so much fun.

“It’s great.” I held it in my hands like the finest china. “Thank you. You know, I had my first customer last week.”

“Oh? Do tell.”

“My friend Joey brought a bunch of stuff in our basement—he paid me five bucks. It was a lot of work, though, cleaning everything up.”

“That’s life for you,” she concurred, taking a sip of her tea.

“So do you see Clarice much?” I asked, staring at the stained spot on the ceiling where there had once been a leak.

“No.” She sat back in her chair, looking cross. “And there are some things…of which I will not discuss with you, and she is one of them, all right?”

“Okay,” I answered. I had always wondered how someone as seemingly friendly as Clarice could live with someone as dour as Vanessa. I wanted to ask Clarice. I had always looked for her—at the delicatessen, where she sometimes bought goat cheese and pecorino, or at the five and dime, where I saw her get her prescriptions refilled and her maxi pads. She wore big, tinted sunglasses and her jeans tucked into suede boots, the wire arms of her store basket hooked casually around her elbow.

“I’m sorry.” Vanessa shook her head, looking over at me. “I don’t mean to come off so meanly. I just…”

“You loved her, didn’t you?” I sat up. I had seen it in Vanessa’s drawings, the lines and curves, sketched with care and loving, not the somewhat bold, heavy strokes she had used in creating my likeness. Even her sketches of the shards were about finding the soft, shiny surface trapped in the sharp edges. It was the only soft thing about her, I thought. “Did she love you?”

“I think I’ve had enough for today.” She closed her sketchbook and dropped it onto the table. “You’re free to go.”

“I’m sorry, Vanessa.” I didn’t get up from the couch. “We can talk about something else.”

“It’s not your fault, Tara.” She waved her hand at me. “Please understand…I will not discuss it with you. Not because I think you’re incapable of discussing it with me, or what have you, but because I am incapable of discussing it.”

“Well, thanks for the sign.” I held it up in a gesture of thanks. “It looks great.”

“I’m glad you like it.” She stood up, her face doing some sort of contorted gymnastics, and I thought, for a minute, she was going to cry. She walked me to the door. “You’ll have to let me know whether it helped you gain any new business.”

I never hung Vanessa’s sign anywhere, as nice as it was—my business was more or less word of mouth, and the breaking done during the afternoon, after-school hours, when my mother and neighbors were working and less likely to hear the sometimes blood-curling crashes against the concrete walls.

But because my overhead became much more expensive than my earnings—supplied mostly by Joey and his other nerdy friends—I stole a bunch of plates from the cafeteria. Well, I didn’t exactly steal them because I was caught hauling the box from school by the janitor, resulting in their return to their rightful place.

“What the hell is wrong with you!” My mom stood at the kitchen counter, holding a cigarette in one hand, an ashtray in the other. “Stealing from school? What’s next?”

“They didn’t need all those plates,” I shrugged. “I need them for my business.”

“Business—breaking things—that’s a business? I thought you were kidding me when you brought it up.” She shook her head. “First you’re stealing plates, and the next thing you know, you’ll be selling drugs. Or doing them.”

“Please—I was trying to make money. I thought you would commend me on my business acumen.”

“Did Vanessa Falkenstein help you with this?” She asked, stabbing the cigarette out and pulling my sign out from underneath the table. I had kept it in my bedroom closet, and I wondered what other things she had discovered searching through my things. Not that I had much incriminating, but a girl’s privacy is a girl’s privacy, you know?

“She made it for me…I told her about my business plan.”

“Why would a grown woman condone this type of behavior? Look, you’re not to sit for her sketches anymore, you understand? I don’t want you spending any more time with her.”

“Mom, she didn’t do anything. She was probably humoring me.”

“Humoring or not, she should know your mind is impressionable…about many things.” She pressed the garbage can pedal with her foot and stuffed the now-folded sign into it with the remains of some coffee grinds. “I don’t want you hanging out with her anymore, you understand? I’m going to have a talk with her myself.”

“Mom, you can’t,” I spat out, backing toward the door. Although my vehemence surprised me a little, I didn’t want to lose Vanessa’s friendship. In a way, she was my only real friend, if one could even call her that. Whether it was about stuff I should have been telling my mother or my friends made no difference. Vanessa would sit quietly and nod her head as she sketched, asking me to elaborate a point here and there, never judging, never asking. It was different from the school psychologist, who my mom made me go to when Dad left and we had to move into our dingy, two-bedroom place uptown. The psychologist always drank bad coffee out of a rainbow mug and talked getting in touch with my fears of abandonment while playing some weird, space-agey music, even weirder than Vanessa’s.

“What, are you going to disobey your mother, too?” She took a step toward me, and even though I knew she wasn’t going to hit me, the gesture seemed threatening in some way. Ever since we moved here, she didn’t have much time for me, and things weren’t the same. No planting and picking strawberries. No playing gin rummy on Friday nights and watching movies and eating popcorn. I ran out the door and down the street, toward Vanessa’s, although I didn’t stop in, since I figured that was the first place my mom would look. Instead, I loitered around the trash bins of the music school a few blocks over. They didn’t have much in terms of breakage, but sometimes I would find neat things like an old tympano drumstick or snapped strings, which I once tried to fashion into my own string instrument.

“Your mother’s looking for you.” Vanessa stood in her doorway when I approached later. “I told her I’d send you her way immediately.”

“So I can’t come in at all?” I knocked the front of my foot against her step. She eased down into a sitting position at the top.

“No, but you can talk to me here, for a few minutes.”

“She told me I can’t see you anymore, that you’re not responsible.”

“You mother...is just scared. She’s alone and works a lot and is worried about losing control over you. Although I know you’re too smart to get caught up in something stupid, and I’m sure she is, too, she worries. It’s understandable.”

“Yeah, but aren’t you...sad?”

She looked at me carefully, and I could see this spot in her eyes, beyond her stiffness and her tight, long mouth, that made me feel soft, protected. A spot I longed to touch, to curl up in.

“You’ve been a great model,” she answered finally. “I’ll never find a better one.”

“I wish you were my mother,” I pouted, but somehow, that didn’t seem quite right, either. She was not quite what I imagined in a mother, or liked in my own. Yet, I knew I there was something about her I wanted to be close to, all the time seemingly, if possible. A favorite sweater against my skin, or my pillow at night.

“You have a good mother.” She stood up suddenly. “I know she doesn’t mean any harm. Now, I told her I’d send you right home. If she comes back and you’re here...”

“I want to see the rest of your sketchbook.” I didn’t move from the step, even though, now that she stood, I was staring at her navel. “I want to know about Clarice.”

“Maybe when you’re older.” She smiled thinly, tucking one leg back behind her screen door. “Or maybe when it doesn’t hurt me so much.”

“But I’ll never see you again.” I felt tears in my eyes. Images of the death card, so feared in my mother’s readings, stood between us, the hooded skeleton throwing its cape over her and stealing away into the night. I imagined going back to the school psychologist, listening to her stupid music and just wanting to break things.

“Don’t be so glum. As your mother would say, who knows what the future holds? Good luck with your broken things.” She smiled again and, for an instant, she was the most beautiful woman I’d known.

Vanessa moved out of the house across the alley not long after that. I don’t know whether she couldn’t afford it without Clarice or whether it was too hard for her to go on without her, whatever their relationship was, but I’d often thought of them, together and separately, as a whole plate and as shards. I’d collected the pieces of plates from the yard after Vanessa was gone—she hadn’t bothered to take them with her, and they reminded me of a sudden pain, a ferocious cut I got unexpectedly when cleaning up a rather large job of breakage in the basement before my mother put an end to the whole business. Joey and his friends had been throwing some cheap crystal goblets and such, and there was a smallish slither wedged between the floorboard and the floor. I took my glove off and tried to push it out, not realizing how sharp the edge was and sliced my finger right open. Of course, I lied to my mother and told her I did it on the cheese grater. Sometimes, after it had scarred and healed, I’d take a piece of one of Vanessa’s old plate shards and run it along the fleshy ridge, sometimes fast, sometimes slow. Always, when I least expected it, it cut me.

On New Year’s Eve, Richard wrecked the black Lincoln in Charlotte, but the car still drove all right. He and the insurance man did not see eye-to-eye on the settlement. Richard threw the first punch.

After Ken posted bail, he told Richard he had an idea. Ken was the idea guy. They would drive the mangled Lincoln to New Orleans. Ken said they would chill. “I got an idea,” he said, squalling the tires of the Mercury as he pulled onto East Fourth Street from the Mecklenburg County Jail, that good ole Howdy Doody smile all over his face.

The night before Mardi Gras ended, Ken, who had been drinking mescal and snorting cocaine for three days, woke Richard at four in the morning. Richard heard the metal motel door open. The room was black dark. He could smell Ken, but he couldn’t see him. Ken was just a smell and a spooky mescal cocaine voice that sounded like wind and fire, like a hiss.

“If there’s anything in there you want, you better get the fuck up and come get it,” Ken said in that whisper from another world.

Richard didn’t answer. There was something about that smell. Still he understood what Ken was saying.

The motel room door closed. Then Richard Roberts was asleep again. But not for long because of the sirens outside his window and the smell of burning tires that seeped around the motel windows and under the door, moving sinuously through the stench Ken Newcomb had left in the room.

That afternoon, the two men boarded a plane with first-class tickets Ken had purchased a month before. They ordered a Maker’s Mark bourbon before they buckled their seatbelts. As the plane lifted off, Ken turned to Richard.

“Some people hate that burning smell,” he said with his signature Howdy Doody grin. “I don’t happen to be one of them.”

That was in February. Richard’s trial was set for early August. The plastic surgery had helped, but the insurance guy’s face was still a mess. Ken said he had an idea.

For the July 4th holiday, the two men left Charlotte for Myrtle Beach where Ken said they would chill. But when the Mercury reached Darlington, Ken didn’t take the by-pass. Richard asked why. Ken looked at the city limits sign, then over at Richard and smiled.

Now it was midnight and they sat alone at the bar inside The Paradise Lounge, in a small NASCAR town, talking in code.

"Where's the insurance man?" Richard said.

"At the bank, writing a check," Ken said.

"Wrong."

"Banging the wife of the New Orleans Fire Chief?"

"I like it, but wrong again," Richard said.

"At the airport, still scratching his head? Trying to figure out how the hell I got us first class tickets out of New Orleans in the middle of Mardi Gras," Ken said.

"Ding, ding, ding," Richard said, eyeing the breasts of The Paradise Lounge bartender.

Ken signaled to the well-built redhead behind the bar. She reached for two clean glasses and two mini-bottles of cheap bourbon. Ken and Richard watched the way she moved. Their eyes were all over her. The redhead set the drinks in front of them. She knew where their eyes had been. She didn’t look, didn’t speak. When she turned and started back, the two studied her, head to foot, as they had after every drink, and then exchanged smiles.

From the rear storage room where he was sweeping up, the boy, Ryan, who was only sixteen, saw the look the men shared. He knew what it meant, though he had never been with a woman. Ryan’s face was already potted with acne scars and there was no controlling his thick collie-colored hair. But the boy’s pale blue eyes and gentle, disarming smile brought a kind of invisible friendliness to The Paradise Lounge, and its regulars were united by shared custody of the kid. What most of them had never had or what had been irretrievably lost to them, they could still see in Ryan.

The boy watched BB's face as she walked to the cash register and, beyond her, the faces of the two men who were working her over with their eyes. Then he lifted his broom and began again, glancing back as he swept.

"She's married," Richard said. “Wearing a ring.”

"Married is as married does," Ken said. “Built like that? Working here? No way.”

“How would you know?”

Ken closed his eyes and pointed to his temple, like a sage. “I know that smell.” When he opened his eyes, Ken spotted a man with a sandy crewcut and wearing a faded yellow golf shirt nearing a table beside the jukebox. The man sat facing away from Ken.

"I'll be back," Ken said. "Keep an eye on her."

"With pleasure. I'd take out some insurance on that piece if I was her husband," Richard said, smiling, studying the slight sway of her breasts beneath the thin blouse.

Standing at the register, the redhead glanced up into the mirror, following Ken as he snaked between the tables toward the jukebox. More than once she'd seen them walk out on their tabs, shifting about before slithering out the door when her back was turned. She could tell.

Richard looked from BB over to Ken and smiled.

The man in the yellow golf shirt didn’t speak when Ken slid into the chair across from him. Instead, the man stood, stepped away from the table, and fed a dollar into the jukebox. He punched up a George Jones’ song. Then he walked back to his chair.

The man and Ken huddled as they talked.

Richard’s eyes settled on BB, the special way she was put together. When she moved, he thought her body’s mechanics were like shorthand for fuck me. He signaled for another drink.

"How's about some breakfast," he said as she set down a new coaster, then his drink on top, "after you're done here."

"No thanks," she said. She wiped the bar where his glass had been.

"A little over-easy?" Richard said leaning in confidentially, his eyes wide and greedy. “Or are you the scrambled, covered, and smothered type?” BB didn't answer. She turned.

He had her wrist.

"I hear you're not very married," Richard said.

Ryan dropped his broom.

"You need to get your ears checked," BB said, prying off his fingers, then walking away. She nodded to Ryan, and he stopped in his tracks. She nodded a second time and he slowly turned back to his work. She walked to the storage room.

"Keep an eye on him," she said. "If he starts anything, call the cops."

“Yes, ma’am,” he smiled, and with his free hand rubbed circles against his chest. “Shinin’ armor.” The boy looked back over BB’s shoulder. "The other one's leaving.”

BB turned as the door shut behind Ken and the man in the yellow shirt.

"Shit," she said.

Richard watched her throw down her bar rag and start toward him, watched the mechanics of her body, the way the parts worked in sync. He didn’t take his eyes from her chest as she spoke to him.

"Your friend just walked out on his tab. You picking it up?"

He tilted his head and flashed her a look. "That depends," he said. “On how nice you are to me.”

BB sauntered to the register, pivoted and walked back. She laid the two tabs in front of Richard. “Pay up and get out,” she said.

“If I promise he’ll pay, can I stay?” he said in a little boy’s voice.

Ryan watched her, waiting for the look that said call the cops. Instead, BB marched to the walk-in and brought out a case of beer. She began stocking the cooler.

Richard lifted his drink and drifted over to the jukebox. Slowly turning the pages of selections, he looked back every minute, checking the door. The place was empty. Ken had had plenty of time to score some dope, if that’s what he was doing. The crewcut in the golf shirt didn’t look much like the dealer type. Still, Richard had seen stranger.

Ryan, who was picking up dirty glasses and beer cans, emptying ashtrays and sopping down the tables, looked up from his work, across the length of the bar, over at BB, who was counting from her tip jar. She glanced up at him, then down at the dollars and quarters spread out in front of her. BB smiled a sad smile and pinched her nose. Ryan smiled back, feeling his face flush up.

“You got five minutes to pay,” BB called to the man near the jukebox.

“What time do you close?” Richard looked around for a clock.

“Five minutes. We close in five minutes,” BB said. Richard was crossing the room. “And tell your friend,” BB said, “I don’t forget a face. In my line of work, you learn to remember a face. If I see his again, I’m calling the cops. Unless you’re covering his tab.”

Richard took his seat at the bar and looked at the amount, then pulled money from his jeans. He counted and laid the bills on his tab, looked up at the redhead--then pushed Ken’s check back across the bar. “You should’a been nice to me,” he said.

Outside, Ken’s Mercury was nowhere in sight. Richard walked to the end of the town square. He lit a cigarette. He’d just come along for the ride. When he had an idea, Ken liked a riding companion. A Darlington Police car turned onto the square. Ken stepped on the cigarette and moved back into the shadows. Neither of them was supposed to leave North Carolina. When he saw Ken again, he’d say, “Where’s the insurance man?” Then he’d quickly answer, “At the parole hearing.” That was an answer Ken Newcomb wouldn’t guess. That’s what he’d say if something had gone wrong and Ken got that look in his eye. He’d say those words and that look Ken got sometimes would disappear, and Ken would become himself again. But the Mercury was gone.

Richard lit another cigarette, smoked and waited. Ken’s idea was to go to Myrtle Beach, not Darlington. His idea was to chill.

The Mercury. Richard stepped to the curb and raised his hand to catch the door handle. But the car glided past him without a sound, like a ghost ship, then veered right at the corner onto Exchange Street. Richard saw no driver, no passenger. He watched and waited. He had a bad feeling. Then he saw the shadow figure of a man standing rigid as a robot, away from the light at the corner. Richard pulled hard on his cigarette, glancing about to see that the streets were empty, then shuffled toward Exchange Street.

Ken was amped. And now that he was closer, Richard saw that Ken’s every movement was attached like a hotwire to a kink or a hitch. Ken was a man on fire.

“C’mere,” Ken said in a whisper, his wide snake eyes flaming. “This shit’ll knock your socks off.”

Richard followed him across the street to an alley, and then up into the recessed entrance of The Ridgle Law Office. Ken held up the key to the Mercury and dug inside the front of his jeans. He unrolled a plastic bag as thick as his thumb, opened it carefully and shoveled up some of the white powder with the key.

Richard felt the icy kick, even up into his eye, then a numbness raced across his cheek and along the side of his tongue. He swallowed hard, and the coke glazed the back of his throat with the taste of tin.

“Damn,” he said, pressing his hand to his burning nose. Ken was digging him a second bump. When Richard pulled up from it, he felt the hot blood coiling through his chest, arms, and fingers. As Ken served himself, Richard looked out at the new world. Everything, even the darkness, was bathed in lacquer.

Ken was smiling at him like a little boy. But Richard could see his jaw muscles clench, then soften, then knot up again, like a cottonmouth’s.

“This shit makes me thirsty,” Ken said.

There was music from the jukebox inside. The boy had already locked the front door, but Ken could see the kid mopping, his shoulders swaying in time. He didn’t see the redhead. Ken tapped on the window, but the kid didn’t hear.

Richard’s body was electric. He felt a hot breath, almost a whisper at his ear. He whirled to see. The surrounding buildings leaned down over him. There were eyes up there; he could feel them. For an instant, he saw himself through the sniper’s eyes, through the crosshairs of a high-powered scope. He heard the wind and a paper cup blowing half a block away. “Let’s get on to the beach,” he said. “The bars there are still open.”

Ken knocked again, harder. He brought out two bills, hundreds. “Yeah, but they don’t serve what I’m wanting,” Ken said, smiling into the glass. The kid, who was punching numbers at the jukebox, saw him now. He looked back, then moved cautiously toward the door.

“Where’d you get that money,” Richard said, feeling at once that he either wanted to climb out of his skin or do another bump of that kick-ass cocaine. “You didn’t waste that guy, did you? Cause if you did--.” Richard turned again. He felt those eyes, imagined a finger on the trigger. Suddenly a smell he couldn’t name. The kid was closer now.

“Down payment,” Ken whispered, waving the two hundred-dollar bills, nodding and smiling through the glass.

Ryan stood at arm’s length from the door, then reached to make sure it was locked. Ken leaned in close to the glass. “Wanna settle up,” he said, holding up the money, nodding, giving the kid that happy good ole boy grin. Ryan looked back into the small office where BB filled out the inventory sheets and balanced the money at the end of every night. She sat with her head in her hands.

Coach had waited up an extra hour for the phone to ring. His wife had instructed him not to call her at work. They had agreed that she would phone him just before locking up. He was not to call. His calls did more harm than good, she said. His calling forced her to lie about how soon she would be home because she could no longer endure the silence on his end of the line when she told him the truth. They had also agreed that he wouldn’t come to The Paradise Lounge night after night and drink, waiting for her to get off work, watching her every move. His job at the Lawn and Garden was at stake. It didn’t pay much, but without it they’d lose the house. They had agreed that these things were bad for their marriage.

They had agreed that their decisions had nothing to do with another man, or at least BB had agreed with herself about that.

Still she had not called, and Coach lay awake for an hour waiting. It was a Tuesday night, the week of July 4th, one of the slowest bar nights of the year. Coach knew this. He lay in their bed, in the blackness, listening to the air conditioner in the widow shut off, then kick in.

Coach reached for the radio. The pictures had started up again. Flashing snapshots from that crowded night at The Paradise Lounge when he’d seen the man BB denied sleeping with, images from his last day as high school football coach when the kid wagged his finger and blew spit, footage of his fists pounding the kid’s face into a bloody sponge.

Even before BB saw Richard’s knife at Ryan’s throat, she saw the tears streaming down the boy’s pale face.

Ken Newcomb was happy. “I got an idea!” he announced to the room. He snapped his fingers and tapped his toe and sang: “Party time is any time and any time is party time, so let’s parrrrrr-dy!” Then he was not smiling. He looked at BB. “Get your damn purse.”

While Richard stood behind the bar with the blade against Ryan’s throat, Ken rested a hand like a blind man on BB’s shoulder as she shut the place down and switched off the overheads. The red and blue neon beer signs cast a purple light over everything. From the jukebox, Vince Gill sang the song BB requested every night at closing time. Ken led her back to the bar. “Get the phone,” he said. Richard unplugged it.

“Now show the boy how to pour a drink,” Ken said, speaking to Richard, looking at BB. “I think I’m gonna have myself some top shelf tonight,” he said in that singsong voice. His hand glided down BB’s hair. “Yes, sir-ree. I want the good stuff. Maker’s Mark.” Richard lowered the switchblade to his side and led Ryan to the liquor. Ken opened BB’s purse and dumped its contents onto the bar. Her cell phone and a small can of hairspray tumbled out. Ryan set a glass down in front of Ken. Richard drank from another.

“Lookie here,” Ken said. He switched off the phone, then took the cap from the hair spray. BB kept her eyes fixed on Ryan, whose pocked face was red and wet with tears. The tears wouldn’t stop. She tried to look at him the way she did when the cops had been called.

“Watch this,” Ken said. He squeezed his fist into the back of BB’s thick, red hair. She shut her eyes. He pulled. She resisted. The skin tightened across her face.

Ryan felt the cool blade at his throat, saw Ken’s hand slowly close around BB’s throat. Felt the hot urine soak the front of his jeans. The tears wouldn’t stop.

Ken snaked his fingers through the back of her hair, then pulled slowly, holding BB’s head arched back. He lifted the spray can. “Look at me,” he whispered. She closed her eyes. He knotted her hair in his fist, pulled hard, then coated it with the hairspray until the air was so thick she couldn’t breathe. Then he turned her loose. Her soggy, red, matted hair came down thickly, in slow motion. Still, she refused to look at him, not even in the mirror. Ken felt inside his pocket and brought out the cocaine and a cigarette lighter and laid them on the bar. “Looks like we got us a little fireball here,” he said. He tossed back the bourbon. Then he held up the can of hair spray and the lighter.

“Hey, Richard,” he said. “Independence Day. Calls for fireworks.” Ken pressed the spray. Struck the lighter under it. A single burst of flame like a comet shot across the bar. BB’s eyes filled with tears, but she did not look at him.

He lifted his finger from the can and lowered the lighter. He looked at BB, waited for her to speak or move. For her to look at him. Ken Newcomb waited for her to beg.

Holding the can inches from the back of BB’s soaked head, Ken again pressed the nozzle, forming a thick gray cloud. His fingers made a fist around the lighter. “Some people hate the smell of burning hair.” He winked at Richard. “I don’t happen to be one of them.” Ken held the lighter against her cheek and leaned over so that his lips touched BB’s ear. “Swoooosh,” he whispered. Then to Richard, “Damn, I’m getting hot,” he called, giving Richard that hard smile. Ken set down the can of hairspray. “I wanna a drink. I wanna make-hers-mark,” he said. “Get it?”

“Lick-her,” Richard said. “Good lick-her.”

Coach had waited another thirty minutes before he dialed The Paradise Lounge. When he’d not gotten an answer, he walked outside to the garage where he’d hidden a bottle in his toolbox and then sat at the kitchen table in his underwear drinking. He called her cell. Now the bottle was empty and Coach found himself in the land of irreconcilables. He could not sit there and he could not go. Trapped inside his head, too drunk to leave the room. He had to find her, but the odds of his getting out of his own driveway were bad ones. Just the sight of his car at this time of night would guarantee blue lights—and jail time. A certain end to his dissolving marriage.

She sat on the barstool between the two men, upright, motionless, silent, arms at her side. Ken ordered Ryan to line up the top shelf liquor on the bar in front of him and Richard. And now he ordered the kid to drink the liquor in the glass before him. The boy lifted the glass, but the smell of the bourbon made his stomach turn before he could get the glass to his lips, and his first swallow sent up a convulsion. The two men laughed. Richard took the boy’s glass and slid it in front of BB.

“Show him how it’s done, darlin’,” he said in that baby talk voice again. BB looked down at the glass. Richard lifted it, brought it to her lips. Ken was digging his key into the bag of white power.

“Yeah,” Ken said, holding the small pyramid of coke before him. “Part those lips.” He looked over at Richard. “Show us that mouth.” Richard tilted the glass slowly, his eyes moving over her like searchlights.

When the coke reached his brain, Ken closed his eyes.

“Oops,” Richard said. When Ken looked over, he saw the brown liquor dripping from BB’s mouth and soaking the front of her thin blouse. “It’s a shame to waste good whiskey,” Richard said.

“Have to make the best of it,” Ken said. “Pour us another round,” he said to the boy. The two men watched BB’s face as Ken brought his fingers up to the side of her wet throat, then slowly pressed hard down her neck and over her right breast.

“I wouldn’t call that a waste of whiskey,” Richard said, cupping his fingers around her other breast. Their eyes were filled with the hunger of fire.

Ryan looked away as he poured, over to the small wooden door under the cash register, where he knew there was a revolver.

“Bartender!” Ken shouted. “We’ve made a dis-covery.” He slid the bag over to Richard, bowed grandly, then ceremoniously stepped behind BB. He cupped her breasts in his hands and danced from side to side. Her arms remained loosely at her side; she didn’t move. Although her eyes were closed, Ryan could see the beaded tears. “I’ve beeeeen to the MOUN--tains!” he said in a loud evangelical voice. “This calls for a drink-ah! ”

Ryan handed over the two glasses. He couldn’t watch. “One more,” Ken instructed, motioning toward BB. He curled his arm around her shoulder. She didn’t open her eyes. The two men were working her breasts. Ken slid the glass over until it touched her fingers, then he pressed her hand around the glass.

Eyes closed, she lifted it, held her breath and took half of it down.

“Your slip’s showing,” Ken said, looking at the white rim of coke on Richard’s nose. “You fag.”

Richard wiped away the powder with the back of his hand, then passed the bag and the key to the Mercury back to Ken. “Free at last, free at last!” Richard shouted. “God almighty I’m free at last!” Then he laughed so hard he had to stand up and dance a little dance.

Nick Granger taught algebra at the high school where he had played blocking back the year Coach won the state championship. Coach had phoned him before, sometimes in the middle of the night, sometimes incoherent, other times when he just couldn’t sleep. But never like this, crying.

Nick found his trousers and a shirt in the dark and walked barefoot out to his car.

Ryan was two steps from the small wooden door under the register. On a Saturday night, a busy night, the wooden door would be unlocked. Not tonight, though. He’d have to get it open, and he’d have to get his hand inside, and he’d have to point it and he’d have to pull the trigger until the pistol wouldn’t fire any more. But first there was the lock, like the one on his locker at school that he’d have to somehow get past.

“Bartender!” Richard shouted.

“No. No more. That’s enough,” Ken said.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, Ken was all business.

Richard gave Ryan a look that said pour the damn drink. Ryan thought of the blade at his neck. He poured, but Ken intercepted the glass. The eyes of the two men met. Theirs weren’t human eyes.

“Later,” Ken said. He set the drink in front of BB. The two men exchanged ghoulish smiles.

BB reached for the glass and brought it to her mouth. Her hand was unsteady, and some of it spilled over her lips, but this time she didn't stop until she'd taken it all down.

“Hey,” Ken said. “She’s my kind of girl.”

“Mine too,” Richard said.

Then Richard bent his face close to her and pressed the tip of his tongue into her ear. Ken smiled. Then the tongues of both men flickered inside her.

Ryan turned his back and covered his eyes.

“Another,” BB said.

Hers was the only car in the lot. Nick Granger pulled in beside it and parked.

“I’ll go inside with you,” Nick said. Coach hadn’t spoken after thanking him for the ride.

“Not necessary,” Coach said.

“Just to see that everything is okay.”

Coach looked at him, his blue eyes so sad Nick had to look away. “I can promise you, son, that everything is not okay. Chances are, she’s someplace else, not here, which is a discovery I’d prefer to make by myself. Thanks for the ride.” Coach lumbered over to BB’s Honda and looked inside. Nick opened his door, then walked over to Coach. He tucked a folded slip of paper into Coach’s shirt pocket. “My cell number,” he said. “You call me.” He looked up into Coach’s eyes and put his hand on his shoulder. “You call me, you hear?”

Coach lit a cigarette and steadied himself against the trunk of his wife’s car. He watched the taillights of Nick’s car disappear. If the cops drove by they’d have him for public drunk. He’d sit in the car and wait. She’d have to come back for the car and he’d be waiting. He didn’t know what he’d do. But he’d be waiting.

He smoked. The light from the red and blue neon beer signs inside The Paradise Lounge bled together into a purple glow, like a fire just beyond the morning horizon.

Coach crossed the parking lot. Seeing it with his own eyes would take away any doubt, narrow their conversation, establish the soft spots in the defense, his and hers.

Ryan lay on the storage room floor, his hands and feet tied with lamp cord, his mouth stuffed with yellow notebook paper, his eyes Scotch taped shut. Behind his dark lids he couldn’t stop seeing what they’d done to BB, first holding back her head and pouring bourbon over her mouth and down her blouse, then unbuttoning it, pulling her bra straps off her shoulders, and peeling down the cups until her nipples showed, pouring more liquor, but holding up her head now, then their hands lathering her breasts, the hands of the two men. When they realized she had passed out, one stood behind her, holding her head as the other tilted the plastic bag and dumped cocaine down both her nostrils.

Instinct moved Coach’s hand to the door. It was unlocked. He thought for a second about just going back to the car. But he didn’t.

When Ken parked the Mercury behind the dark convenience store off South Main Street, he told Richard he had to take a piss. But Richard didn’t think taking a piss required opening the trunk. Richard craned his head out the window. Ken held three one-gallon cans. “What are you doing?” Richard whispered.

“Shut the fuck up,” Ken said. “This will take about as long as a good piss. Don’t you fucking move,” he said. Then he stepped behind the air conditioning unit, through a small door and out of sight.

Richard inched down into the passenger seat of the Mercury and studied the rooftops. Somebody was up there waiting for a clear line of fire. He felt for the bag of coke on the seat.

Earlier, Ken and the owner of the convenience store had been careful when they laid out the lines of toilet paper, making sure the trailers were thick enough to absorb the acetone and that the place would go up quickly. That was the whole idea, that it go up quickly.

“This shit is gonna show,” Ken had said before they’d laid out the first line of toilet paper. “This is some amateur shit here.”

“No problem,” the man in the yellow shirt had said.

“Maybe not for you,” Ken said.

Then the man handed over the bag of cocaine to Ken. “I don’t have any use for this,” he said. “But I know what it’s worth. Consider it incentive. It’s yours. I stole it. Or, had it stole. From this black guy who comes in here all the time. I’ve called the cops on him a couple of times, for dealing outside.”

“You just keep making more and more sense,” Ken had said. He was handing the bag back to the yellow shirt. “You brought me here for this shit?”

“Word is out that I stole that dope. My place gets torched. Who do you ‘spose torched it? I don’t have any dope, never been known to use it. Don’t make sense, do it? I got an alibi, maybe the dealer’s got an alibi. What do I care? Let the insurance man work it out.”

Now Ken felt the coke drip from his nose when he bent over to check the trailers, trying through the liquor and dope to calculate how to pour the acetone evenly.

Inside the Mercury, Richard cradled the plastic bag in his hand and looked out at the night. How to get the coke from down there up and into his nose was no longer the issue; he brought the sandwich bag up to his face and hit it hard. Then he slid deeper into his seat, feeling his stabbing heart, hearing his own breathing, smelling the metallic coke bubbling from his pores. He thought now about the woman, how he’d drawn back his fist after the coke hit her, after her vomit covered the bar. Fuck her. He thought, fuck that bitch. He’d wanted to get out of there. He’d wanted to drive on to Myrtle Beach, but Ken had left with the man in the yellow shirt, and for all he knew, Ken would have left him stranded, left him on that street outside the bar if he hadn’t been watching, if he hadn’t seen him drive by in the Mercury, if he hadn’t spotted him. And now Ken had left him here, alone inside the Mercury, while he was who knows where. Ken had left him here with enough coke to send him away for a long time, maybe even longer if the woman I.D.’d them, or worse yet if she overdosed and the kid talked. Even worse if Ken had got that look in his eye and wasted the man in the yellow shirt, which he probably had since there was no way Ken had gotten his hands on the kind of money it would take to buy that much coke. Maybe Ken had run off with the man in the yellow shirt, leaving him with the Mercury and the cocaine and the woman’s vomit on his shirt.

Then Richard thought of his Lincoln in New Orleans and how the thing had gone up. Now Ken was saying to stay put. A man in the cross hairs. The burning in his nose made Richard remember the smell of the Lincoln’s flaming tires.

Something electric flashed through him. He couldn’t stay inside the car another second. No question. The Mercury was about to blow.

The Darlington police were at The Paradise Lounge when Nick got there, but Coach and the kid were gone. BB still lay on a stretcher, her red hair matted with hairspray and vomit. Coach, who had called Nick as soon as the EMS guys said BB would make it, had missed a button when he did up her blouse. Nick could see the white shadow of coke around her nostrils. Now that her stomach was empty, she was sobering up. Nick spoke to her and she seemed to know him. He stepped back, barefoot, and watched a cop scoop up small samples of powder from the bar. Nobody seemed to notice that the lock that held the small wooden door below the register was missing.

Ken had stepped off the lines of toilet paper, divided his steps into thirds, and set the gallon cans on those spots so that he would know how to pour. He checked the lamp cord he’d skinned and felt to make sure it was plugged in tightly and that the raw wire rested in the plastic ashtray he would fill with acetone. All he had to do was pour and then hit the switch beside the front door on his way out.

In twenty minutes he and Richard would be on I-95. Twenty minutes more and they would be off I-95, and an hour later they would be in Myrtle Beach for breakfast. He walked quickly, sloshed as he poured. He filled the ashtray, submerging the naked wire, finishing off the first can. Carrying the empty in his left hand, he quickly followed the path of toilet paper, pouring from the second can.

Ken thought he heard something as he neared the front door, as he emptied the last can. He looked up at the front window. A sign said “fresh fish” and for a second that struck him as something funny, and he almost laughed aloud. He stood in the dark convenience store, holding the three empty acetone cans. The fumes filled the place.

Where’s the insurance man? Richard would ask over scrambled eggs. Eating fried fish, he would answer. Ken opened the front door, set the cans outside, then reached back for the light switch.

He heard a voice at the back of the store.

The explosion lifted Ken’s body. He plowed face-first across the asphalt. The back of his shirt felt like crepe paper. He smelled the odor of burnt hair. A high-pitched squeal, like a painful hiss, whirled inside his ears.

Ken stumbled back to the Mercury, then stopped suddenly. The flames from the building sucked the hot night air past him. The passenger door was open, and when he pushed it shut he felt the blisters swelling on his fingertips. He fell inside the car and dug for his keys. The burning created its own wind, a deafening anger that grew upon itself.

Still, even over the rising sound of the fire’s rolling thunder and the squalling, smoking tires when he stomped the accelerator, Ken could hear them--the last of Richard’s screams from inside.

Coach sat in the passenger seat of the Honda with the revolver in his lap, looking out the window. Ryan drove. They had taken Highway 52 the seven miles to I-95 looking for two men, any two white men walking or riding, and now, having seen no one, they were on their way back into Darlington. Ryan cried when he told Coach about the hairspray and the lighter. He hadn’t told him about the other, about the two men pawing at B B’s breasts, about their mouths on her. He was ashamed that she had seen him cry, that he couldn’t hold back the tears when Coach asked him to explain, but even his shame wouldn’t keep him from crying again when he told it all to the cops.

Coach couldn’t look at the kid. He’d found her half-naked, nearly unconscious. “Who are you?!” she’d said to him, her eyes wild and frightened, her small hand fluttering like a wing above her face.

And his first thought had been to reach for a drink.

He and the boy saw the flames and the fire trucks’ flashing lights.

“Cashua Ferry Road,” Coach said.

The last thing Ken remembered was that floating feeling of the Mercury at 120 miles an hour on the straight stretch not three miles from the interstate. He’d glanced down to look for the bag of coke, and when he didn’t see it, he’d glanced down a second longer. And now he was lying in a ditch as wide and deep as a canal somewhere in Darlington County with the worst sunburn he’d ever known on his back and neck, a bloody face, and a foot that pointed in the wrong direction.

The road was narrow and dark, the curves manageable if you knew where they were, then long and straight for three miles to the Pee Dee River. Ryan took the curves cautiously, looking for a car in the deep ravine or two men on the shoulder of the road, but he pressed hard on the accelerator coming out of each turn. They were nearing the long straightaway. He looked over at Coach. There was something he had to say.

“When we find them, are you going to shoot them?”

“You’ll stop the car and get out when we see them.”

“No,” Ryan said.

“You’ll do as I say.”

“No, and if they are walking, I’m running over both the sons of bitches. You try to stop me and we’ll die, too. Swear to God, Coach. Swear to God.”

Coach looked over at the kid. He’d seen a thousand faces like this one. They shared a look, and then they looked ahead, up the long stretch, where together they spotted the rear end of the Mercury, its back tires up in the air, its body pointed down into the deep ditch that emptied into the swamp.

Ken Newcomb lay only forty yards from the Mercury, curled up in the overgrowth of the stinking water. He heard the car stop and the faint voices, two of them. Wiping the blood and sweat that wouldn’t stop flowing down his face, he listened hard to make out what the two were saying, but the sound of his own heart muffled their voices. He’d lie still, then push on when the voices stopped.

A car door shut. He lay coiled in the shallow water. As the car moved slowly toward him, he heard a man’s voice, the sound of his footsteps, and the sound of metal upon metal when the driver touched the brakes.

Coach studied the spaces between the long rows of cotton and the rows of thick soybeans, watched the tree line for any movement. “We missed them,” Ryan said. They were nearing the end of Cashua Ferry Road. “We’ll turn around and look again,” he said. Coach didn’t answer. The two men had left her half-naked, face down in liquor and vomit. He gripped the pistol in his lap. Then he saw the blue lights up ahead.

“Speed up. He’s seen us now.” Coach said.

The trooper had his flashlight on them by the time they got to the stop sign. Ryan reached for his license.

“Where you headed?” the trooper said. He held the light on the side of Coach’s face.

“Fishing,” Ryan said. “Garden City Pier.” The trooper aimed the light in Ryan’s eyes, studied them. “The spots are running,” Ryan said.

“Not this time of year,” the trooper said.

He turned the light away. “Me and my Dad, we’re going fishing,” Ryan said. “He’s my dad.” The patrolman pointed the flashlight at their feet and then into the backseat. “There’s a car in the ditch, maybe three miles back, a Mercury with North Carolina tags,” the boy said. The cop looked back in that direction.

The cruiser lifted a cloud of dirt and gravel and skidded off in the direction of the Mercury, blue lights flashing.

Ken thought he heard something. He felt the soft clay ooze between his fingers and the stagnant, algae-covered slime creep up his thighs. He wanted to stop his heart from pounding so that he could hear. The blood and sweat wormed down his face. Then the sound was closer, like a rush of wind or fire, and he looked up to see the flashing blue lights streak by, and he smiled to himself because now he was a safe distance from the Mercury, in this deep muddy ditch where even the dogs couldn’t smell. He thought, Where’s the insurance man?

“I’m sorry I told,” Ryan said.

“Take the interstate back,” Coach said. He didn’t reach for the pistol under the seat.

The blood and sweat kept flowing into Ken’s right eye, but he stopped thinking about that every time he tried to make his way up the thick brush of the steep bank. He‘d lift his leg, but his foot came down in the wrong place. Still, two cars had stopped at the Mercury, and soon others would too.

He didn’t know how much ground he had covered, crawling in the deep tangle of brush and muck, how much space he’d put between himself and the Mercury, and he didn’t know where the ditch ended. But he was headed in the right direction. This water emptied into deeper water. When the sun got up, he’d be near the river.

He pushed on until he could hardly move, his arms and belly raw and bleeding from briars and jagged stobs, his face still bleeding, his injured leg a flipper. His neck and back were covered in scales of thick blisters. For the first time, his thoughts turned to Richard. He heard a hiss like a distant voice in the wind. He stopped. There was a smell he couldn’t name. Ken Newcomb whispered, “Where in hell does this come out?”

And in that moment, the answer came to him in another sound, this one more like fire than wind, only it was the sound of his own voice screaming as the white, hot fangs, sharp and fast as lightning bolts, entered his burnt and bleeding flesh; and the nest of cottonmouths, some of them almost babes, converged upon him, churning like flames or eddies, and the July summer night paused and listened, then took all of it in, like the slow in-suck of air.

“What now?” Ryan said, meaning the two men. Coach, who was looking away, didn’t answer. The boy drove on in silence.

They could see the lights of Darlington. Ryan felt it coming up, that retching fear, and he looked around thinking that he might will the sight of the two men and summon the courage to kill them. The killing thing that lived in men was a part of him now, for their killing was the only thing that could make him whole again. The boy drew a deep breath, pushed himself up hard and straight against the car seat, and looked ahead, searching for the two faces branded into his memory. Nothing outside his window looked familiar, not the street signs or the haze of the dim lights, not the old black man on the bicycle or the headstone carver’s shack. He let the air out slowly.

His young body began to collapse in exhaustion. He smelled urine on his jeans. He was only sixteen. This morning he had been a boy.

Coach sat with his face to the window saying nothing, seeing nothing. Lifting his eyes, he saw his reflection. He brought up his hand. Everything was darkness.

“Because of me.” Ryan tried to take a breath. “Oh. God knows, Coach,” he whispered, choking out the words like a stutter. “I feel all tore up.” Ryan couldn’t look at him. Coach didn’t turn from the window, didn’t answer. The boy felt the tears start but he fought them back. “I saw it coming,” the boy said without crying. “I saw it coming and--I didn’t do nothing. Me. That was me.” Coach couldn’t look at the kid. “I should have done something. If--.“ Ryan fought it back, hugged up to the steering wheel, and took another deep breath to steady himself. “When you see her.” His voice was clear, even. “Please ask her to forgive me. Could you do that? I can’t tell her…. Enough.”

The fire trucks were still parked outside the smoking red cinders of the Main Street Convenience Store, but there were no flashing lights, no firemen in sight. Just the smell. Ryan slowed and looked over.

“Down to the ground,” Ryan said in a whisper. “Like that. Everything. Down to the ground.”

Coach had turned his face so the kid wouldn’t see that he was crying like an old, old man. All he had for holding back wasn’t enough and he was crying in that way that makes it nearly impossible to speak. “Yes,” Coach whispered. The smoldering red ashes reflected in his eyes. “Gone.”

Ryan lifted his hand, rested it on Coach’s shoulder. He felt the crying deep inside the other man’s body.

“B.B.?” the kid said.

“Yes,” Coach said in a hushed breath.

Then they didn’t say anything.

On hands and knees above burrowed sand, we sleuth a creature we’ve never seen. Marching knees collapse bubbled soil. Stars blink, birds sing nocturnal songs. We are in an ether dream, skimming the minutiae of mole track—dirt crumbs, leaves, insects.

“Oh God,” Mitch says. He rolls onto his back. “No more scratching sound.”

My eyes feel small and blind, but I understand what is happening. The mole has dove for the deep, past grass roots and termite nests, down a trough of ancient beach sand, through pools of ground water and veins of limestone, to the hot center of the earth.

“Icarus in reverse,” Mitch says. The image of black-haired Mrs. Janzen, our eighth-grade English teacher, blazes briefly before us.

“Whoosh,” I say.

“Sizzle, sizzle,” Mitch echoes.

We lie on our backs and watch moths slam into the streetlamp, resurrect their bodies into fiery brightness, then turn into weak, wobbly streaks of light.

“So this is what it’s like?” I say.

“One and only,” Mitch says.

“Do you think we can go inside?” I whisper. The shrubbery rattles with cricket chatter.

“Play it cool, Charlie,” Mitch says, happiness verging on tragedy.

Banjos greet us, Flatt and Scruggs. Dad turns and looks through us as though the screaming crickets will invade the house. My father isn’t pleasing to look at—he lost his left arm to a German sniper in World War II and his body is slightly crooked (a hiked left shoulder and a slight limp in his gait)—but his face is a comfortable place to rest your eyes, which is what Mitch foolishly does.

Dad says, “Boys . . .” but I’m already gone, heading to the safety of my bedroom.

A few minutes later Mitch enters and locks the door. As I remove the black light from my ancient toy box, the head of Fred, the desiccated stuffed squirrel in the golfer’s cap, plops to the floor and stares up at me. I shove my index finger into its head, feel the crinkled remains of the stuffed newspaper, circa 1938, and hold it up as an impromptu puppet. I speak in the high-pitched squeal of mole: We are brothers. We devour the same earth.

Mitch writhes with laughter until a knock reveals Dad, who sits in my desk chair in front of the window.

“You know,” he says, grinning, blinking slowly, “I used to think you were old if your nose hairs grew out your nose.” The wind that shook the trees now blows the curtains, though the windows are closed. “Then I thought you were old if you shaved your nose hairs.” My father’s eyes are dark caves, his cheeks whorls of black stubble. “But now I know you’re old when you just let your nose hairs grow and you don’t give a damn.”

The curtains flutter their empty sleeves toward my father’s hiked shoulder. Sometimes, when he doesn’t wear a shirt and the scar where his left arm used to be is fully exposed, pink and tender, as though the limb had just been severed the day before, I imagine what his arm must have looked like, removed, before it turned into gray smoke above the chimney at Lawson General Hospital.

Mitch bleats, “Do you see the drapes?”

“Yes,” I say.

Mitch is crying with laughter.

Dad is pleased his joke has been received so well.

“Unreal,” Mitch gasps.

“You boys don’t get into any trouble,” Dad says. He pulls the door to but pokes his head back in for a parting shot: a clown’s rolling eyes.

“You’ve got to be shitting me,” Mitch says, breathless.

Hendrix is dead three years, but his music spins on the turntable. I plug in the black light, switch off the overhead.

“Nice,” Mitch says.

The guitar notes hitch and rise into one another, then round into a larger note, thick and vibrant and tangible—a solid beam of music.

Mitch reads the writings on my wall, a message to Mother written in black-light glow paint above my bunk bed: YOUR LIFE IS NOTHING MORE THAN BASEBOARDS, COUNTERTOPS, WINDOW PANES, CARPET FIBERS . . .

He finds a painting and asks what it is.

“Midge Lovejoy,” I answer, a neighborhood girl—on her side, head propped by hand. The body is orange, mostly curves and flowing lines, no detail except suggestive anatomical attempts highlighted in red.

“Impressive,” Mitch says.

He studies his hand for a while, shades of fingernail, hair follicles, and microorganisms. The music climbs into an electric monk’s chant, full and radiant, and Mitch reemerges, reading a message to my college-attending sister, written under the light switch: MOTHER ERASED YOU THE DAY YOU LEFT.

“Genius,” he says. His face is purple. I know he thinks he has created me, awakened my imagination, orchestrated the entire evening. I don’t care. I know better. On his neck a pimple comes to a volcanic point and glows milky white. I try to pop it, but he slaps my hand away.

Around midnight Mitch comes back in the room with another beer. “Something’s wrong with your dad,” he says.

“He wants me?”

“I don’t think he knows what he wants.”

I find Dad in his couch seat, sitting forward. The music is off, and he is mumbling in a trailing bottomless baritone.

“What’s the matter, Dad?” I sit beside him, Mitch across from us in Mother’s seat, all of us leaning forward.

“There’s nothing the matter.” He blinks. His eyes two stars. His fingers work against his thumb as though they are in conflict with one another.

“He’s talking about the war,” Mitch says.

“I was.” Dad looks at me for the first time. A sick grimace.

What I am thinking is Dachau. I have grown up, after all, playing army, looking at Dad’s army pictures, fingering his war metals, sneaking his army cap from the back of the closet. I have read his war book, The Fire and the Furnace, which chronicled the movement of his infantry division. I’ve studied its maps and diagrams, the pictures of the death train, the three skeletal remains by the potato sack, the severed leg of the Jew. But I’ve never heard him talk about it, directly. The day when he was shot, he has told me, when he was laid on his back on a street in Firth, Germany, burning in the icy numbness of shock, all he saw were his own two legs kicking the air above him. All he heard was the pinging of bullets so constant they whistled—at that moment he began to think he was back in Dachau, that the whistle was the death train, onto which he was about to be loaded.

Dachau, I think, as he begins.

“I had only been in Germany for a few weeks. We hadn’t been in combat yet, but we were headed toward it and we were ready. They’d made sure of that. We were like a spring waiting to be sprung.” He laughs, palms his knee.

“Were you scared?” Mitch asks.

“No I wasn’t scared.” Dad reclines into the cushion and throws his arm back, sending Mother’s doily into a free fall. “We wanted the action. They’d beat the hell out of us in boot camp and we were ready.” He locks onto a space between Mitch and me; his voice drops out from under him. “I was in the best shape of my life,” he says softly. Then cheerfully, “Imagine beat-up me weighing a hundred and eighty pounds. All muscle.” He leans forward, his thumb and fingers going at each other again. “You see,” he says as if it were the most important thing in the world, “we were young. We were ready . . . .” His head goes down. He’s lost his place or remembered something impossible to confess.

“Ready for what?” Mitch asks.

“Ah shit,” Dad says. He rubs his eyes, takes a huge breath. Then as if by rote, “We were out in the middle of—I don’t even—Stratsburg. We were in Stratsburg. It was a nice little village. Trees and a lake and a cobblestone road.” His hand shoots out a pointed finger. “You know they make Volkswagens near there now. The People’s car,” he says bitterly. His hand squeezes his knee, then goes for his drink.

“In Stratsburg?” Mitch says.

“Yes. We were in Stratsburg, just on the edge of town, when we started taking sniper fire. We hated snipers because they only had two purposes. One, to kill you and, two, to get on your nerves. Which was worse. They were methodical. They took their time. They didn’t mind waiting. And they could hide like foxes.

“There were only two ways to get rid of them: kill them or capture them. At Stratsburg, we caught three of them. The patrol brought them to the field by our camp. Naturally we were interested, so we all gathered around. At that point, we really hadn’t seen much of the enemy. We’d seen their damage.”

“What kind of damage?” Mitch asks.

“What kind of—” His mouth hangs open. “Christ.” His nostrils flare as if he’s just been sucker punched. “Things,” he says. He rubs the shoulder of his missing arm, digs his thumb into a chord of muscle. Sometimes he experiences phantom pains, like a fingernail being ripped from his missing hand.

“So what happened?” Mitch asks.

For a second it’s just silence, just Dad’s vacant eyes. “The sergeant asked for volunteers.” When he opens and closes his mouth, I can hear the dryness of lips coming unglued. I hear the clock in the living room, the pinprick sizzle of late-night air. “You see,” he says, his eyes watery now, his face struck with sadness and gloom, “we were just kids. The sergeant said he only wanted volunteers. He didn’t want to make anybody do anything they didn’t want to.”

He stops and closes his eyes. The walls buzz. Light bulbs crackle. Somewhere deep inside my father a memory is being discharged. He inhales, opens his eyes.

“So what happened?” Mitch asks. I look at Mitch and begin to think I don’t like him very much.

“I volunteered,” Dad admits. “Me and two other guys. We were a big circle of men in a clearing at the edge of a field. In the distance on a hill was a house with a stone fireplace. A road cut through the woods behind it. At the center of our circle were the snipers. They had smeared their faces with so much axle grease they were as black as spades. One wore glasses. They were on their knees and the sergeant told us which one to take. One of the snipers kept calling out, ‘Ich habe eine familie!’ I didn’t know what it meant at the time, but I had an idea. ‘Ich habe eine familie, ’ he kept saying.”

“What does it mean?” Mitch asks.

“‘I have a family,’” Dad says. “He was the first to go down. It happened so quick I missed it. There was the crack of the shot, and when I turned, he was already laid out, face first into the dirt. It shook me, you know, him hunched over so unnaturally, the mud on the bottom of his boots still shiny from the morning’s rain. I went second. My man wore the glasses. I raised my rifle until the barrel was behind his neck. Someone—the sergeant, I guess—told me a little higher, so I raised it to the base of his skull. Right before I pulled the trigger the sniper bowed his head and said something.

“He went down, dead weight, and I looked away, toward the house and woods. A flock of white birds had taken to the air. But when I turned back, his right leg was corkscrewing into the dirt, and the sergeant told me to give him another one, which I did, as quickly as I could.”

Here he pauses, so glassy eyed and hollow, I can’t look at him.

“The boy who was supposed to shoot the third sniper couldn’t do it. The sergeant did it with his revolver. And that ended it.”

Dad coughs and blinks and takes another sip of his drink.

“Dad,” I say, “it was war.” My words, I tell myself, excuse him from everything.

“When I came home,” he says, ignoring me, “after I’d been shot, and I was in Lawson General Hospital, on my back, paralyzed, I sometimes . . . I’d sometimes see his face. The black grease, the wire-framed glasses. Even now,” he looks at me, “sometimes, when I dream,” he smiles, embarrassed, “his face comes.” He laughs as if to say this can be a joke if you want it to be. “It’s like he’s still with me.”

“Does anything help?” Mitch asks.

Dad holds up his drink, his eyes, which I realize now are not his own, blur into the clown’s face again.

“Here, here!” Mitch says, an ally answering a toast. I begin to think we might drink more beer, but in the same instant, we are turning our heads.

“Nobody’s helping anybody tonight,” Mother announces, standing over us. “Goddamit, Oli, will you please come to bed.” Her eyes are swollen from sleep. “Do you know what time it is? These kids need to go to bed. ”

Mitch is on the bottom bunk, me on the top. We talk about what happened, but mostly we lay in silence, under the neon constellation of my walls.

I am ready to turn off the black light when Mitch tells me to put my fingers in my ears and listen. I do. The sound is monstrous, a nuclear powerhouse of stored energy.

“You hear it?” Mitch asks.

“Sure.”

“Know what it is?”

“What?”

“It’s your spirit purring.”

“Really?” I say. It makes sense.

Mitch is snickering, but I am somewhere inside the drone of my body’s engine. The static of the acid has faded, and I see myself clearly, objectively, the star of my own documentary. Hendrix is the soundtrack. Mitch is the director. Dad sits on the couch and confides. Mother tries to take back his story, but can’t, because it’s already mine, and somehow I understand that my father’s past is also my own, as if I could see with my own eyes the wet mud on the boot of the German soldier. I lay with my fingers stuffed into my ears, listening to the whir of my body’s motor. Tomorrow we will wake to the smell of bacon and eggs.

“Not clown. Mime.”

“Clown. Mime. What’s the difference?”

The two friends walked up Bourbon Street in the early morning. The heat hadn’t begun to squeeze the city in its suffocating grip as yet but the stickiness of summer in New Orleans was already beginning, even at nine AM. Outside the bars swampers hosed the sidewalks and deposited the refuse from the past night’s revelry in boxes and cans for the morning pickup. Tom and Jason walked past one of the high volume gay bars on Bourbon and noted that it still had patrons and even at this hour the techno dance music blasted from the open doors.

“It’s a simple equation. You’re broke. Your rent is due tomorrow and that old bastard you rent from isn’t likely to cut you slack again. What was it he called you, a—"

“…..deadbeat with no future,” Tom finished glumly, “and he said that….”

“That he wouldn’t give you another break and that he regretted ever having rented that roach motel you call an apartment to you in the first place. Is that what he said?”

The pair stepped around a drunk passed out on the sidewalk in a puddle of his own urine, his Dockers and Tommy Hilfiger shirt soiled by the grime of the sidewalk. His pockets had been turned inside out sometime during the night. Evidently he had staggered away from the tourist end of Bourbon and had landed here, probably having gone looking for his hotel room and not having a clue where he was. Tom shook his head as they passed. Whoever had emptied the drunken tourist’s pockets had most likely taken his hotel room key and the room was long ransacked, emptied of any valuables. That was going to be one sad, sad insurance salesman from Podunk or whatever he was or wherever he came from. It ain’t Kansas, Dorothy, he thought, with a last glance back at the sleeping form.

Well, he had his own problems. It’s every man for himself right now “Yeah, yeah, that’s what he said.”

“And didn’t that delicious – if somewhat strange – girlfriend of yours leave you because of your rather awkward situation?”

Tom sighed. This is what he hated most about Jason. He was just so damn……irritatingly analytical. “Yes, Jason. Debra felt that I was not ‘utilizing my potential.’ She wanted me to go back to school. I told her that I wasn’t ready for….”

“Yeah, yeah…..” Jason cut him off, then did the Charlie Brown schoolteacher thing, “wa wahh waaa wawawa wahhhhhh. Same old shit, man. I don’t even hear it anymore. But anyway, back to the equation. Do the math, Slick. No job. No girl. No money. No shit. And you can’t get a job in any of these fine restaurants or bars because it’s off-season for tourists right now because of this fucking heat. And your last employer threatened to have you arrested if you ever darken his door again after you told him you would kick his rich ass for talking to you like you were an indentured servant. And you don’t want to try the mime thing…..why?”

“I hate mimes, that’s why. Everybody hates mimes. They stand in one place, don’t do shit, and expect people to give them money for it. It’s stupid. And undignified. I won’t do it.”

“Undignified? Well, so is that,” he pointed to a bum standing on the corner as they reached Bourbon and Esplanade, looking around hopelessly, “and if you don’t come up with at least some cash for your slumlord you’ll be sharing that dude’s cardboard box tomorrow night. If he has one. Let me tell you this about dignity: It’s all a matter of perspective, buddy.”

Tom considered what Jason said and replied in the most logical manner possible.

“I hate you,” he said.

“I know,” replied Jason unperturbed, “listen, I did the mime thing for three years before I started here.” They stopped outside the Esplanade bar where Jason was the day bartender, “I never got rich off of it. It’s like anything else, you have your good days, you have your bad. But once in a while I’d have a really good day and make a hundred, hundred fifty. I was good at it.”

“Great. I can see my epitaph. ‘He was good at standing still’. Mom would be so proud.”

“Listen, pinhead. I’m just telling you about a way to make cash. Remember cash? You need cash. Cash is good. Cash is survival. Cash is your friend.”

“What about Les?”

“What about him?”

“He tried it and nearly starved to death. Nobody gave him money.”

“That’s because he’s a physical wreck and an embarrassment to all males of the species. He looks pregnant with that gut. Nobody gives money to someone they don’t like looking at, and the idea behind the whole thing is to be looked at, not ignored. You’re young and in great shape. They’ll look at you.”

“Yeah, you mean those guys in that gay bar back there will look at me.”

“Maybe. But if that means you can pay your rent and eat what do you care who looks?”

Tom sighed again, something he noted he had begun to do with alarming frequency. Jason was right. It was simple math. Get some money – without breaking the law or becoming a male stripper in one of those really sleazy places on upper Bourbon – or sleep on the streets real, real soon. Nobody was hiring in the bars, and he suspected that his former boss, a wealthy cocaine snuffling arrogant prick of a restaurant owner, was calling the locals that he knew and conveying the fact that he had fired Tom after Tom promised to pound him into a gelatinous mass if he ever called him “boy” and snapped his fingers at him in summons again. The black ball system was alive and well in the French Quarter. Any of the smaller businesses that also detested his boss and would normally have hired him under these circumstances couldn’t right now because of it being the slump time of year. Summer in New Orleans is a bitch.

He did the math and reached a decision.

“Alright. I’ll do it. I won’t like it, but I’ll do it.”

“What’s to like? Nobody likes to work. All right, if you’ll do it, I’ll see my boss about taking the day off and give you a crash course in Basic Mime 101. We have a part time standby who likes to fill in. She needs money, too, and doesn’t want to resort to something demeaning like being a mime.” He ignored Tom’s threatening look, “If he can get hold of her he might let me off. Wait here.” Just before he stepped into the bar he turned and said, “It’s good to have a regular job.”

“Shut up, you jerk.” Tom waited, pacing, for about ten minutes before Jason came back out. He couldn’t believe what he was about to do. The amount of dignity he would spill on the streets of the Quarter this evening would make the Exxon Valdez thing look like spilled milk. He had always detested mimes with an uncompromising degree of contempt. And now he was about to become one out of sheer desperation. Tom had never been one to feel sorry for himself but this seemed like as good a time as any to start, so he sat down on the step, put his face in his hands and started. A mime. Oh, man. A freaking mime. And if he didn’t do it well, he’d be a homeless mime. Can you get any more pathetic than that? he asked himself. Life as he knew it was beginning to suck out loud. He was just about to begin moaning softly out of sheer misery when Jason reappeared.

“Okay, Marcel. We’re all squared away. Let’s go start your lessons. Time, she is a wastin’. We need to have you on a corner by this afternoon if you want to make any money. Hey!” he said cheerfully, “I sound like a pimp!”

“I still hate you. In fact, I hate you more than ever now that you just compared me to a streetcorner hooker.”

“Relax my boy, relax. We’re all whores when it comes to money.”

“Thanks. That makes me feel so much better about the whole thing. And don’t call me Marcel.” They trudged off in the direction of Jason’s apartment.

“I hate mimes,” Tom said.

Exactly eight hours later Tom approached Jackson Square carrying a milk carton and a box. He was dressed in one of Jason’s old mime costumes, which consisted of a set of one-piece body covering black tights, and he felt absolutely ridiculous. He felt nearly naked in the body stocking type outfit, and the absurd black derby perched on his head greatly increased his sense of humiliated unreality. The white greasepaint was thickly applied to his face, his cheeks a bright red and his eyes professionally lined in black by the ever more irritating Jason. To top everything, even his black hair was thick with oil and swept back on his head. After Jason had finished with the makeup he guided Tom to a mirror.

Tom was so shocked by what he saw he nearly broke down and cried. He didn’t even remotely resemble himself, which, as Jason observed, was a good thing if he didn’t want to be seen and recognized by his friends or any other people. “Like future employers, for instance,” Jason pointed out with his usual unassailable logic. “And any females of the species that you might want to impress at a later date. Women, for the most part,” Jason continued, “find very little fascinating about a man who stands still for a living.”

“Are you trying to make me feel better?”

“Nope.”

“Good. Because you suck at it if you were.”

The makeup had been a final topper to the afternoon of mime lessons. Jason taught him how to assume the rigid posture of the street mime, how to move when he had to without coming out of character. “Remember – when you move you’ll lose fifteen to twenty minutes of money time. Everyone around you will see you move and you’ll have to get back into position and wait for the crowd to change before you start making money again.”

This was the type of thing that now ran through Tom’s mind as he set the milk carton upside down near the base of the old cathedral in Jackson Square. It was hot, so a lot of his competition – he was horrified that mimes were now his competition – hadn’t yet set up, preferring to wait for the slightly cooler temperatures of evening before becoming annoying pests. Like the mosquitoes that would come out about the same time. Oh, God, he thought for at least the hundredth time that day, I hate mimes.

He resisted the urge to throw the box, the milk carton, and the hat into the nearby Mississippi. At least he looked like a professional mime. Jason’s costume and makeup work were superb. He would be a standout, in appearance anyway. Which was good, since he couldn’t do magic tricks or tie balloons into unidentifiable animal figures the way some could. He and Jason had tried the balloon thing for a few minutes but all he ended up with was something that looked a lot like a balloon tied into a knot and very little like any known animal in this solar system. They gave up after the tenth attempt due to time constraints.

Taking a deep breath, Tom climbed onto his milk carton and into the most humiliating experience of his life.

The crowd, still thin in the afternoon heat, ignored him. They swirled around him, only rarely stopping to look, even more rarely dropping the occasional coin or dollar into his box, which rested open at his feet. As the afternoon wore on, the insults began. People, mostly alcohol fueled men, expressed their dislike for mimes well within earshot, sometimes hoping to get a reaction from Tom. One man, a big redneck looking guy with long hair, an open shirt, and a skimpily clad girlfriend offered several suggestions to Tom on just what he could do with his box and his hat, most of which are physical impossibilities. He then dropped his empty can of Budweiser in Tom’s box before walking away laughing, his drunken, giggling girlfriend draped on his arm.

That was the catalyst that started the change.

Tom felt his anger welling up inside of him, crowding the disgust he felt for himself for room. It was then that a young teenage girl, who had seen the redneck and heard his abuse, walked up to Tom, dropped a dollar in his box and reached out. She touched Tom’s hand in a gentle gesture of support, then walked away.

The whole thing came crashing down on Tom then. The loss of the job, the loss of his girlfriend, this humiliating mime thing, the redneck fool. There was all of twelve dollars in the box and he had been there for hours. Screw this. He was just about to step from the milk carton when heard a little girl say, “Look, Mommy, the clown’s crying!”

He didn’t know when the tears had started to come, but they ran down his face through the greasepaint, leaving the evidence of their passing in tiny trails.

“Ahhh. He sure is. Here, put this in his box. Maybe that will make him feel better.” The little girl dropped a five-dollar bill into the box. A second person, a young man who looked like a student of some sort, came from the periphery of his vision and did the same. Slowly the crown began to gather. The comments began to change from insulting to musing, to wondering about the sadness of clowns and how this young man had managed to portray it in living art.

And the money began to pile up in the box.

He had, through his rage and frustration, become accidental art, shifting from being an object of derision and insults to being an object of wonder and amusement.

The absolutely irrational bullshit of it all amazed him. More tears came, this time tears of relief that this stuff might make his rent after all, and the more tears that came, the more the people paid. He began to have visions of food. Two hours later he was exhausted and cried out. Stiffly, he climbed off of his milk carton and gathered the wadded bills collected in the box. Two hundred and nine dollars. Stunned, he counted again. Yep. Two hundred and nine dollars. Cash. And a Budweiser can. He could pay his rent and have enough left over for food tonight. This one day’s humiliation gave him another month’s grace to find a real job. Well I’ll be damned, he thought as he stuffed the money inside his tights. No sense in getting mugged on the way home. Not that mimes, a notoriously poor source of liquid assets, were big targets for muggers but there was no point in taking chances. Suddenly, a woman’s voice sounded behind him.

“That was amazing”.

He turned. Standing there in the lights that illuminate Jackson Square was a lovely young woman of twenty five or so. She looked at him, head cocked as if expecting a reply. He had to clear his throat because he hadn’t spoken for so long, but he found his voice, “Excuse me?”

“Oh, good. You can speak. I said that was amazing. That was one of the best examples of performance art I have ever seen. I was fascinated. I’ve been watching you for hours. How do you do that?”

Tom was flabbergasted, “Well, I, er, it’s…well you see, it’s…”

“It’s okay. You don’t have to tell me. It’s brilliant, though. The sadness of clowns as performance art. I’m an actress. I know good stuff when I see it. Believe me. You had to have worked hard to get it down so well.”

“Well, it’s…..it’s all a matter of perspective.” He knew that was lame but he couldn’t for the life of him think of anything else to say. She was gorgeous.

“Perspective. That’s amazing. I’ve never heard it analyzed like that before.”

You probably never will again, he thought.

“Are you going to be out here again tomorrow?”

I’d rather be poked in the eye with a rusty nail, he thought but he looked at the clear green eyes of the girl and he said, “Sure.”

“I have something to do tonight, but if you want, would you have dinner with me tomorrow night after you get through here? I’m buying. Please say yes.”

“Well, yeah, sure.”

She turned to walk away, “Great. See you tomorrow then, same time, same place. I really have to go now. Goodnight!”

“Wait! What’s your name?”

“I’ll tell you tomorrow when you tell me yours. I can’t wait. You were great!” And with that she disappeared into the crowd.

He really hated it when Jason was right. And Jason was right about this. It really is a matter of perspective. And his perspective had just changed a great big bunch. This mime thing was beginning to show promise. It wouldn’t hurt to try it for just a bit longer.

It just might work if he could figure out a way to make himself cry everyday.

How could he do that? A tack in his shoe? Think of starving children in, well, wherever? Whatever it had to be, he’d better come up with it before tomorrow because, if it turned out that he sucked as a mime of all things, that would be the very bottom of the heap.

And, besides, if he wasn’t really good at it he would never, ever get laid again because no woman worth having would jump the bones of a second rate mime. Or a homeless, well, anything.

He thought, That’ll do it. If I don’t cry, I don’t get laid! Ha!

Thinking of the actress who had just made his life more interesting he headed home to pay his rent.