“Any day,” he shouts.

I look around like I’m not sure where his voice is coming from. The gas station is on the corner of a busy four-way intersection next to the highway. It’s early morning and the sun is in everybody’s face. Nobody is slowing down. Nobody is giving anybody an inch.
“Nice car, buddy. You tryin’ to save the world?” His voice sounds like gargled steak.
I set my sights on him as if finally realizing something painfully obvious.

“Save the world?” I ask. “Do I look like Jesus? I’m just trying to put the likes of you out of business.”

He gives that a ridiculing laugh.

“It’ll never happen,” he pipes up. “The price of oil will go down and people will go back to not giving a shit. We’ll make sure of it. We’re too big to fail.”

He’s the kind of guy who talks at you with his chin. He rolls the sleeves of his New England Patriots sweatshirt and folds his arms across his chest like it’s supposed to scare me. I am somewhat intimidated, but not by his hairy forearms. It’s his confidence that frightens me. He’s absolutely sure that he’d kick my ass. I don’t have that kind of esteem so I fear his. I often resort to this kind of cowering and sometimes hate myself for it. One of my knees, I can’t tell which one, has already started shaking. It’s not the usual fear. There’s some anger in there as well.

“Sure you’re big, but I’m too small to step on.” I say this with my head slightly turned from him, kicking my driver side tire for good measure.

He coughs up a wad of phlegm and launches it in my general direction. It lands a good distance from my Prius, but insultingly close to what little ego I have left. He’s really taken me for a wimp. He can’t see past my brown corduroy blazer and matching Italian loafers. I can’t say that I blame him. The costume that I wear is a convincing one. It has thus far kept me safe from maniacs like my father and blowhards like the fireplug.

I get in the car and look down at my lap. Both knees are shaking. Maybe one with anger. Maybe one with fear. I drive over to pumps. There’s only one available. I pull up to it, kill the engine, and reach down for the fuel cap switch. I flip it and the hatchback opens. I still do this from time to time, especially when I’m distracted. As I get out of the car, the fireplug shouts something else at me, but I can’t hear over the television screen mounted atop the pump. They’re everywhere these days, waiting rooms and checkout lines. It’s not like they’re showcasing classic cinema. Exxon never plays Antonioni. Neither does Stop & Shop, nor your primary care physician. Would it kill them to show something artistic while bleeding us dry? It doesn’t have to be high-minded. There are commercial masterpieces like The Godfather. Instead, they got some plastic blonde julienning vegetables for a pasta primavera recipe. I try ignoring her, but she’s louder than the morning commute itself.

I swipe my debit card. After considerable delay, the computer asks me to see the teller. It says please. Beyond the shadow of a doubt, I have sufficient funds. This particular gas station doesn’t always agree with my magnetic particles. I often take this personally and why shouldn’t I? They’re suggesting a metaphysical flaw on my part when in fact the misconception belongs to them. There’s no excuse for it. They’re too big for shoddy equipment, but they can afford to belittle me. They’re the only gas station on this side of the road. It’s not like I’m going to cross two lanes of rush hour traffic just to make a point. Location, location, location, and individuals somewhere between.

I don’t want to see the teller. I know what he looks like. He’s tall and gray with a big round pregnant stomach. Every time I see him, he’s wearing a blue Exxon sweatshirt with Earl embroidered over his heart. Earl never looks at me when I pay. He never mutters a sorry when their state of the art technology rejects my existence. He sits on a stool and listens to talk radio. I can well imagine his outlook on things. Tom Brady is God. Barak Obama is the Devil. If he can’t be swayed by runaway icebergs crashing into Australia then what good will getting in his face do? I press cancel and swipe my card again. The shaking has traveled up to my hands.

While the pump re-processes my data, I watch the fireplug open valves and lift lids. He dips a long measuring stick into the gas tanks. Something gets into me. I refuse to give him the inch.

“Don’t let that ruler get to your head, pal. It’s not that big!”

He holds his hand to his ear feigning deafness, daring me to repeat myself. I don’t look like the kind of guy who would smash his head in with a tire iron. My father looks and acts like that kind of guy. He was born in Quindici, a small town in the province of Avellino. At twenty, he immigrated to Boston in order to pursue a career as a union laborer. People have always said that he looks like Sonny Corleone. My father has never seen The Godfather. It’s a three hour film. He’s never sat down that long. James Caan has twice won Italian-American of the year for his performance as the hot-headed oldest of the Corleone brothers. James Caan is not Italian. He is the son of a Jewish butcher. It’s never made sense to me. How can my father look Jewish? Is there something about my lineage that I don’t know? People also say that my father has the body of Hercules. Sometimes they say he has the body of the Incredible Hulk. In this case, I know what they mean. They mean he has the body of Lou Ferrigno because nobody has ever seen Hercules or the Incredible Hulk in real life. They’ve seen Lou Ferrigno with a beard and club or they’ve seen him painted green. Hercules was not Jewish and neither was the Incredible Hulk. Sonny Corleone had a Herculean temper and I’ve read stories that the real James Caan is a black belt in judo. Put it this way, I wouldn’t be surprised to someday find out that I’m part golem.

The pump has rejected my existence a second time. The fireplug uncoils a large hose. With both hands, he holds it between his legs while filling one of the tanks. More wishful thinking on his part. He continues to glare at me. I blow him a kiss. He removes both hands from the hose and sculpts them into a makeshift megaphone.

“Stick around so I can put my foot up that candy ass of yours.”

He has hit a soft spot. I do have somewhat of a sugarplum ass. I’m not fat by any stretch of the imagination. I’m 5’9”. I have a 34 waist, but my ass is full and soft. It’s my mother’s ass. I am built like her. I also have her long eyelashes. Personally, I think she bears a striking resemblance to Marisa Tomei. Nobody else sees it, not even my father. Marisa Tomei has a brother Adam. I once Googled Adam’s image wondering and inexplicably hoping that we’d look alike, but it wasn’t meant to be. In looking like my mother, I look more like Adam’s sister Marisa. I also inherited the Oscar-winning actress’s angelic countenance. In all my thirty years, I’ve never struck another human being. Growing up in East Boston, I never had to. My father’s reputation and stature protected me from those who might capitalize on my Christly nature, but he’s not here anymore. He’s hiding somewhere in Italy. The authorities spend more money than he’s ever made trying to find him.

I swipe my card a third time. The plastic blond dispels the myth about adding oil or butter to your pasta water. Doing so coats the pasta and will prevent it from absorbing the sauce. They’re divulging our secrets. They’re reducing all of our worldly contributions to a few cheap and easy clichés. They will leave us with nothing. It’s not personal, Sonny. It’s strictly business. They say this and the most inhumane acts become wildly practical.
“Come over here and I’ll beat you down to size!” It’s the loudest I’ve ever yelled.

Holding up his index finger, the fireplug signals that he’ll be right over. Customers stop pumping. Some head into the store with hurried footsteps. Others duck into their cars and lock the doors. They see it coming before I do. The voice of Earl comes over the intercom system.

“Knock it off,” he says.

I look towards the store, but can’t see Earl. The morning sun is setting the windows ablaze.

“He started it,” I say aloud, not really sure if Earl is listening.

“I don’t give a rat’s ass. Either come inside and pay or get the hell out of here.”

“Whatever happened to the customer always being right?” I quip.

“I ain’t selling nice sports coats. You’re not a customer until you come in here and pay for gas.”

I take my blazer off and throw it to the ground. If it was up to them, I’d be playing Sonny Corleone my entire life. I’ve seen footage of Robert De Niro trying out for the role of Sonny. He doesn’t pull it off, which is somewhat surprising given his Oscar winning performance as Sonny’s father, Vito Corleone. You’d think traces of Vito would emerge in De Niro’s performance of the Sicilian Don’s son. Every so often, when the feds coming knocking in regards to my father’s whereabouts, they’re always surprised by our unlikeness.

“Earl, climate change isn’t a fairytale. It’s real and you’re one of the primary contributors. You’re also responsible for both wars.”

There’s some crackling feedback before he responds.

“That’s it,” he says. “I’m calling the cops.”

I’ll never know for sure if my subconscious purposely popped the hatchback instead of the fuel cap. I never did reach back inside to correct the error. Having the hatchback open made my next move all the more accessible. I unbuttoned my shirt cuffs and lifted the hatchback open. I removed the tire iron from the spare tire compartment. It wasn’t like the weighty tire irons of old. It was made of some cheap alloy but heavy enough for the job at hand. I had no intention of hitting him. I just wanted to leave an impression. I wanted to raise it above my head and see him cower. Put the fear of Jesus into him and the anger of the Hulk inside of myself.

The fireplug had turned his back to me while coiling the hose. I wasn’t looking for a cheap shot. I wanted him to see and understand my frustrations with the world. I wanted my frustrations to appear relevant and powerful. In my best Hercules pose, I raised the tire iron above my head and tapped him on the shoulder. He didn’t think twice about spinning around and catching me in the chin with a wild right hook. My head barely budged. All the shaking in my limbs stopped. I was tougher than I’d ever thought, but my arm panicked. It swung with the tire iron in hand—a kneejerk reaction some thirty years in the making.

I stuck the fireplug just above the brow, knocking him to one knee. He pressed his hand against the wound and whined profanities. There was lots of blood and so forth. Everything was going horribly wrong. This wasn’t what I had wanted. He looked terrified. He seemed to resent my existence, which was exactly how I had previously felt about him. He wanted to stand up and kill me. I could see it all over his face. I had no choice. I had to hit him again. I wouldn’t place the full force of my anger behind it. Just a little something to keep him down, as my father had always told my deaf ears.

The fireplug’s eyes were shut tight as if making an excruciating wish. I wanted him to see it coming. It was the decent thing to do.

“Look at me,” I said. “I want you to see me.”

He refused. He shook his head. He didn’t understand so I tried explaining it to him.

“It’s personal,” I said. “No more business as usual. I want you to see me. I’ve taken you personally, and now I want you to take me personally. It’s common courtesy. We all deserve to be taken personally. The world would be a better place.”

He still couldn’t understand. I didn’t understand either, but it was my job to make believe. This is the role of those in power.

“See that car over there?” I pointed to my Prius with the tire iron. “It gets forty-seven miles to the gallon.”

“Your fucking car? Is that what this is about?”

He wasn’t very happy. He took a pitiful swing and missed by a mile, nearly falling over in the process. Of course it was about my car. It was about global warming. It was about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was about the BP oil spill. It was about James Caan breaking Gianni Russo’s ribs while filming their Godfather fight scene. It was also about me defining myself in the absence of my father. But I wasn’t going to tell the fireplug that. I had to keep a few secrets for myself while I still had a self to save, before I turned green or grew a beard. I heard sirens. The fireplug heard them too. They gave him the courage to look up. The second blow caught him just above the left ear, a few inches shy of his temple. And it had come to me just like that, from somewhere way back when, just as I’d always anticipated.

Felicia’s Journey was before I understood I couldn’t watch violence and during the time when I was still going to men’s movies. I hadn’t yet analyzed the fact that wives went to Memento and The Blues Brothers, but husbands didn’t go to wedding movies like Pride and Prejudice or to other films that take place after the wedding. Men’s selfishness in movie choices was like the rest of life in which wives went to football games but husbands didn’t attend the deep-thinking plays their wives wanted to see, even though every Sunday magazine survey showed that men liked being married more than women and should therefore be more willing to compromise. But, no matter how many times they printed the surveys, the results were always new to the young women like the bride-to-be who didn’t believe the surveys were true.

Soon after I realized I couldn’t watch violence, I was watching Pulp Fiction with my boyfriend and his ex-girlfriend, the mother of the bride-to-be. She had suggested a movie and in a burst of friendliness, I had agreed but shortly after the movie started, I heard music that meant bloodshed. Stumbling over my boyfriend and his ex-girlfriend, I ran down the stairs to the lobby. Because I couldn’t watch violence, I was willing to leave them together to watch what men thought was an exciting movie and what therefore might be an aphrodisiac for my boyfriend, leading to the possibility that he and his ex-girlfriend might get together again, but I didn’t care.

Since Pulp Fiction, I carry a New Yorker in a correct-sized purse so I can stay in the lobby and read because, more and more, such scenes of violence have to be avoided. Sometimes, the lobby is freezing and to stay warm I pace back and forth on the dirty carpet with its popcorn-infested smell. Sometimes I go to another movie in the same megaplex. It doesn’t matter if I come in late because the movies are predictable and I can guess what went on before.  Sometimes, a movie shows an uninteresting story and tries to make it interesting by telling it backward or repeating the same scene again and again. Memento was such a movie, popular especially with men, no doubt because of the continuous thuggery. A low life kills someone, forgets what he did, drives around, kills, forgets again, drives, kills. This was supposed to be interesting because it combined both questionable techniques – repeating the scene and telling the story backwards.

My boyfriend can watch such inferior movies no matter how many times the same murder was committed by the same person. Our male ancestors must have scanned the horizon for moving images and the scanning genes are showing up in this way only now. When I met my boyfriend, I thought he had intellectual rigor and understood he couldn’t afford to spend his time in non-worthwhile movies or repeats of Dr. Who and Sherlock Holmes. It doesn’t matter, he says, the setting, camera angles, color, there’s always something to see. It is this that will make him wake up one day in five years and ask where his life has gone. The human race is lucky that moving images weren’t invented until the late nineteenth century, after other important items had been discovered, such as Bach cantatas, coffee, reading glasses, embalming, and romantic love. For centuries, this last had been classified as an illness for which it was thought that marriage was a remedy.

You would think that being invited to a wedding was preferable to a movie about  serial killers and I was glad the bride’s mother had invited me, although I knew she had invited me only because of my boyfriend. Living in a large city, I wasn’t part of any real community and I was grateful to be invited to be part of a fake community for a day. I had attended only a few weddings in my life, perhaps because I don’t have a community or maybe because my friends were smart enough not to marry. The first wedding was that of an eighteen year old friend. A year after the marriage, I met her and her husband for lunch at a café on the Mississippi River during the time when you could order only herbal tea, before my generation realized we couldn’t live on love and needed caffeine to rush to work and earn money, as well as to prevent migraines. The three of us ate avocado and sprout sandwiches on whole grain with soy mayonnaise, which was all the dressing that was allowed. The wanton divulging of unwanted information on Oprah wasn’t in fashion yet – also feminism was in a superb bloom –  so I was shocked when her husband said, “I think my wife should emulate the Virgin Mary.” Who was his model? He didn’t say. What would come of a marriage where the man saw the Virgin as a model for his wife. What became of that marriage was, a few years later, the husband married his wife’s friend’s ex-husband.

At the second wedding a beautiful twenty-two year old friend married her college sweetheart. It was a short-lived commitment but our friendship didn’t last either. The last time we talked, she wanted tips on how to talk to her now ex-boyfriend but what could you say when someone asked how to talk to a man? And her boyfriend was even worse about television than mine. I have called, sent letters and birthday cards, but she’s avoided me – it could be said to be more than “avoided” since we haven’t talked in eight years. Had I offended her by being honest? I said I had no idea how to talk to her boyfriend. Or maybe we simply had nothing to talk about anymore. My doctor said her friends don’t talk about work or kids or mates, only about The New Yorker. Knowing my doctor was up to date on her New Yorkers, I considered what that meant for my medical care but if my friend read The New Yorker, maybe she wouldn’t be a former friend.

Even though evidence for short-lived marriages was everywhere, the young knew about marriage only as a gay issue. This was one of the differences between now and when I went to college. The others include pants hanging past the butt crack, global warming, carpal tunnel from overuse of the internet, florescent lights that cause cataracts, and migration from sensible midwestern places to the California playground where the dry light causes cataracts as well as skin cancer, jitteriness, and addiction to new age philosophies as an antidote to jitteriness.  Did my boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend’s daughter and her fiancée know about the oppression of women and the patriarchal legal structure? When they heard about the Defense of Marriage Act, didn’t they think, “I don’t want anything the federal government defends”? But they didn’t know because schools didn’t teach those things.

“The younger generation commits to each other,” the bride’s mother said.  “We married to get presents or because someone was too stoned to say no.”

I referred her to Virginia Woolf. Nine out of ten people on the street, Woolf wrote, would say they wanted love, nothing but love, but, once married, women would say “This is not what we want; there is nothing more tedious, puerile, and inhumane than this; yet it is also beautiful and necessary.” Here were two conflicting ideas that could give you a headache and had probably given one to Virginia Woolf. I hoped the bride’s mother had told her daughter what to do when marriage went bad and your dopamine receptors meshed with your mate’s and you couldn’t leave without a huge downer. Would my boyfriend’s ex secure the necessary dopamine and inject it so that the daughter’s endorphins didn’t die?

I had attended only a handful of weddings in thirty years. Now there had been ten in the last four. Also many movies about serial killers. What did serial killers and weddings have in common? Maybe it was suspense about what came next. One event was so rosy and promising; the other wretched and hopeless. I wanted to know what parents and siblings thought. Many novels said how parents felt about their daughters’ weddings but no one explained what a mother and father thought about a serial killer son. This was something to wonder about. It was also hard to find out what parents of Nazis felt when their children turned into thugs.

It wasn’t long enough ago that I was addicted to Law & Order SVU, following the plot while I pretended to read War & Peace, reaching only p. 36 before the book was due for the second time at the library. As I pretended to read, I wondered if the victim on L&O SVU would live and, if so, would rape ruin her life? I made up back stories for the lowlife on SVU. How did the rapist get that way? What about the feral teenagers who raped the handicapped thirteen year old? It seemed to me that no amount of therapy or substance abuse treatment was going to help, even though at one point in my life I had worked with sexual perpetrators, most of whom had been married. That job taught me something about these people and their back stories that L&O never explained.

The back story of Mariska Hargitay, the female detective on SVU, is that she’s the daughter of Jayne Mansfield and Mickey Hargitay. Growing up, I read Movie Screen Magazine and systematically examined Jayne Mansfield in her floor-length, sequined skin-tight sheathes. Her IQ was 168 and she had been a classical pianist. Jayne Mansfield wore low-cut gowns that she let slip when she was out to dinner so her nipples exposed themselves and she got more exposure, too. In sixth grade, I saw that looking like her would mean a life unlike the boring one that seemed inevitable for me, even though I too was a classically trained pianist. Maybe if I hadn’t considered Jayne Mansfield second rate compared to Elizabeth Taylor, I would have tried to be more like her. Then I would have had a fuller life, married three times, and wanted to spend my time with friends at weddings instead of seeing a movie about a serial killer, although Jayne Mansfield was killed in a car accident at thirty-four so maybe I would be dead. I didn’t know then that three year old Mariska Hargitay, in the back seat when the car was hit, would grow up to star on Law & Order SVU and that I’d watch Jayne Mansfield’s genes for half of my waking life.

These were the things I mulled over while my boyfriend watched television. “Let me watch This Old House,” he always said. “You already know about building houses, ” I said. What could you think about while you were watching the house builders? These wholesome men never had a back story like Mickey Hargitay. House builders or serial killers – some nights that was the only choice.

It was like Nazi Germany, also a time of wedding, propagating and serial killing when German newspapers detailed gory details of the killings and artists painted murdered prostitutes. I realized I had to be vigilant and not only in movies. I would have to close my eyes in museums, especially in Vienna, where many of these paintings hung. The Nazis called these artists degenerate. Normally I disagreed with the Nazis but, in this case, I wasn’t sure. Still, I didn’t live in pre-Nazi Germany. Why were there so many serial murder shows now?  And weddings? I didn’t know.

Before I was invited to my boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend’s daughter’s wedding, another friend’s daughter told me she was having a pirate wedding. Rape and pillaging, I thought. This was because I hadn’t seen any Johnny Depp movies nor attended a theme wedding. I knew of a wedding where the guests had to wear white and of one with no dress code but where the guests had to fly to Mexico City, then drive three hours to a remote village. Where did the money come from? This was something else that had changed since I was in college.

I invited the future pirate bride to lunch in a restaurant called a roadhouse, but it was nothing like the roadhouses of my childhood when families stopped between small towns on Saturday evening for chicken with mushroom soup on top. This restaurant served Ahi tuna sandwiches with aioli on sourdough bread, another reason to ask where the money came from although I knew the money for this lunch was coming from me.

“Why a pirate wedding?” I asked over seared fish. “It’s symbolic,” she said. “People wouldn’t ask if this were a Renaissance wedding.” This showed others, too, had been puzzled. When I read the wedding invitation, “Pirate dress expected. Thank you for the love, magic and collaboration you’ve shown us,” I knew the bride and I lacked a common language so I did as I was told for that wedding and rented a cleavage-revealing gown in the pirate-wench theme. But my own offerings, unlike Jayne Mansfield’s, went unnoticed. This was because of the cleavage the young revealed, which could have supported love, collaboration, and also pewter platters.

The good thing about my boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend’s daughter’s wedding was that it wasn’t in Hawaii or Brazil and we could wear whatever we wanted; the bad thing was it was the daughter of my boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend, My boyfriend is close to his many exes. One invites him to her modern dance performances, one offers her house in Provence, another knits him scarves in a village where everyone is an artist or grows Gravenstein apples, although she has never brought us any. All these ex-girlfriends are annoying and his ex-wife is especially annoying. I had kept my balance in the middle of my boyfriend’s friendship with the ex-girlfriends by figuring we were roughly equal in the looks department but then my brother met the mother of the bride-to-be. “She’s gorgeous,” he exclaimed. This was demoralizing. I had always believed my mother who always said, “Just be yourself and boys will like you.” How wrong she was.

Before we could go to that wedding, we had to go to one in Portland, Oregon. So that we could preserve good will towards each other, we listened to Pride and Prejudice in the car. This put us in a romantic but realistic mood, which helped when I ran into my boyfriend’s ex-wife.

“Hi,” I said, “it’s me,” and then my name.

“Do I know you?” she said.

She must have learned this sense of humor when she became trained in Laughter Yoga, a discipline that brings oxygen to the body and brain as I found on the website. I noticed there was a laughing club near my apartment. It could be a way to counter the sadness and depression that any thinking person must feel in the face of rampant capitalism, famine in Africa, and cell phone use while driving, not to mention the failure of marriage as a cure for the disease of romantic love and the bad choices on late night TV.

A few weeks later our car twisted up the switchbacks to my boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend’s daughter’s wedding in the brown California hills. I calculated how far we were from a corner store if the couple didn’t provide chocolate and I needed to charge up my endorphins. If I needed to cry because my life hadn’t worked out as well as the young couple imagined theirs would, I couldn’t very well excuse myself by telling the groom, “I’m sorry, I need to get away so I can stop being bitter because my boyfriend likes bad movies and I never went to live in France and now it’s too late.”

As soon as we stepped out of the car into the 95 degree heat, I saw that wearing the long, pleated red scarf had been a mistake. Under an oak tree, the groom and bride, more beautiful and elegant than Jayne Mansfield, picked from a wicker basket scraps of paper on which they had written vows. When the couple began to read the paper scraps, I was glad for the scarf. “I will make you laugh when you’re down, I will support you in your work and your hobbies and all that you do, I will help you play, I will listen always.” The problem with self-written vows was no training in poetry, which was now composed by typing on the computer, then separating words into lines according to commas. There were entire classes taught in how to determine line division in poetry but the young didn’t know this. They hadn’t read Elements of Style by Strunk and White: Rule #17, “Omit Needless Words.” The old vows were short and to the point, you had only to adjust them slightly to eliminate the non-feminist aspects.

Even though the couple was young and didn’t have cataracts, the hand-written vows were hard to read and many were repeated. Wouldn’t it have been better to type them in the best font for reading, 16 point Tahoma? I took the scarf off my neck, opened its pleats, wrapped it around my head and let it fall over my face, implying it was protecting me from the 100 degree sun. This way, I could sleep through the vows that were repeated.

Among the young people at the wedding, everyone was a singer, writer,  performance artist or computer expert. The computer experts had the money and I had to hope they were marrying the singers and artists. What would happen to California with only computer experts and artists? Who would write the wedding vows – the computer experts or the artists? I didn’t know which to wish for. This bride was an art curator, but she must not know that the most stable of all five marriage types was the breadwinner man and homemaker mom or it would have worried her.

After the vows were finished and the Universalist Life Minister pronounced them wed, the guests began the toasts. “We’ve learned so much from you,” their best friend said. The next friend repeated this, then five others did, too. I was puzzled. How much could they have learned from people who were twenty-five years old? Had they learned about Jayne Mansfield? Did they know about Abraham and Isaac and that our generation would send their generation to war? Had they learned what not to say when they got mad at their spouse? They were too young to have learned about lust fading.

Why was learning so important at a wedding? Maybe their parents hadn’t taught them enough. They hadn’t taught them about poetry or economy of language, that was true – that had been left to schools with disastrous results. They hadn’t learned about modesty in dress. Maybe, like many young people, they thought their parents hadn’t taught them anything. They had a point.

What had the couple taught their friends? Had they taught them about love? If so, how had they done it? I needed to learn more about love, and tolerance, too. Maybe I could get in on the learning but then I would have to ignore that generation’s shamelessness in dress and deficiencies in language. Why were weddings so earnest? Couldn’t they just be a good party? The couple should hope for kids, good sex for a while, and two incomes to support aging parents.

The mother cried at the wedding. She was a romantic – she hoped for a bright future and forgot the sad parts. Or maybe she cried because, like me, she compared her life to the happy couple’s and found it lacking. Of course, there was also the teary relief of getting a child off your hands.

*******

After the wedding I went to the French movie which wasn’t, in fact, about serial killers although it had nearly as many murders – it was about parents who murdered to defend their children, another result of marriage. The movie makers must have thought that the words “serial killer” in advertisements would make people want to see the movie, although only six people were watching that night.

After the movie, a young friend and I walked up a hill overlooking the Pacific Ocean.

“Are you going to get married,” I asked.

“I’m not categorically against it,” she said.

She was my hope for the future, neither an artist nor a computer expert but a researcher on women’s reproductive health, who knew about economy of language.

“It offers security,” she said. “Like a weight watchers’ contract. Just having the contract makes it harder to divorce because of the legal hassle.”

I didn’t say anything. Maybe she was right. I’d never been married, but I doubted her reasoning, although the comparison of marriage with a weight watchers’ contract showed levity, which was good because leaving your spouse today wasn’t the same as when Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina left theirs. You might see him and his new wife when you and your new same sex partner went to a gluten-free wine-tasting party, whereas Madame Bovary had to kill herself, although if she had owned real estate, she probably could have lived.

I told my friend, if you do marry, I don’t care if you stay married, and if it doesn’t work out, I hope you don’t cry too much. But as we walked up the hill with the setting sun peeping out from the fog to reflect on the steps tiled with flowers, fish, birds and sun, every one, a marriage symbol, I knew that if she didn’t cry about that, there would be something else. I cry when the Countess in The Marriage of Figaro sings, “Dove sono.” “Where are the lovely moments of sweetness and pleasure? Why, despite tears and pain, has my love for him not vanished?” The melody is tight. Five notes next to each other, like soft crying, capture the anguish of faded love. The Countess’s song is heart rending. She was old enough to know that her husband was a sex addict but she could still be disappointed and she could still make me cry.

The neighbors weren’t a part of the evening, so they didn’t concern us too much.

What did concern us was the body, that it fell.

The body had fallen from the sofa and landed on the carpet, but the neighbors couldn’t hear that. The body landed softly, like it had been laid down on a soft surface, like it was a baby put to bed.

It’s not as if the neighbors don’t make any noise themselves. Yesterday one of them was trudging back and forth in high-heeled shoes. We listened to the high-heeled shoes and imagined what it would be like to walk in them. We don’t allow high-heeled shoes in the house, so we can’t say for sure.

We knocked on the ceiling with a broom handle and they knocked back. This went on for about twenty minutes.

Most of us wanted to go home at this point, once the body was on the floor like this, as it was late. Most of us were tired and had to get up for work tomorrow. Not everyone had to get up for work, but everyone said they did. The truth is most of us don’t work. We either don’t have to or don’t want to. No one blames anyone else either way. We all understand what everyone is up against.

We weren’t sure who was responsible for the body falling on the floor. All of us had been near the body at some point during the evening, but there was no way to tell who was responsible.

Still, none of us ever point fingers.

We drew lots to see who would take the body away. The process was equitable and went off without incident. One of us with soft-soled shoes drew the body lot and this signaled the end of the evening.

Everyone was then reminded of the neighbors. We told them to be mindful of the neighbors on the way out. We told them about the noise, the complaints. We said we didn’t know what was wrong and we apologized.

People were milling about as we did this, putting on coats and hats and discussing what they were doing for the coming weekend and the rest of their lives. Everyone had similar plans. All of us were going out east or skiing up north or to their villa in the south. No one was any different. We all blended into each other, one body into the next, arms and legs, hands and heads.

On the way out everyone whispered that it was a lovely evening, that they were happy to see everyone else and looked forward to next time.

“Patty, how are you feeling?” Dalton’s mother asked as she hung up her son’s coat. She didn’t wait for an answer. “I’m sorry if Dalton’s a bit wound up. He had a doughnut and two glasses of grape juice for breakfast.”

“My husband’s on call this weekend,” she added, as if that explained everything—the tardiness, the “challenges” Dalton’s behavior always presented, the self-importance that each of the D’Amicos wore like a family crest. The woman flashed Miss Nugent a photo-ready smile, kissed Dalton, and hurried out.

Parents who were too busy during the week usually ran errands, and a few chatted outside the classrooms, but the majority of the moms and dads spent the hour at the Waffle House across the street. To them, Sunday school was just another kids’ activity, like T-ball or pre-ballet. Early in the year, Miss Nugent had overheard complaints that one hour wasn’t even enough time to read the Sunday paper. She confided to her sister, who worked at a Measuring Up daycare center in Connecticut, how some of the parents grated on her. “Patty,” her sister declared, “the children are never the problem.”

At the boys’ table, Dalton looked comfortable and relaxed in his blazer, button-down shirt, and paisley tie—a smartly dressed young man rather than a six-year-old playing a grownup. He reminded Miss Nugent of his father when she’d first met with the man at the hospital.

In that pre-op meeting, Dr. D’Amico had seemed pleasant and reassuring. “We’ll nip this thing in the bud,” he said with such finality that she almost believed the threat already neutralized, the cancer excised and disposed of. (She couldn’t help but note, too, the way he’d included her in the nipping, as if they were partners in the endeavor.) He predicted six weeks of steadily diminishing postoperative pain and joked that she would be ready to return to the singles scene in no time at all.

After the surgery, Dr. D’Amico had visited her room in high spirits, friendlier than ever. “We’re golden,” he said, rapping his knuckles against her bedside table. “No sign of spread beyond the ovary, and the path report came back with Stage 1A.” Of course, to be on the safe side, he’d had to take out the whole kit and caboodle, as he called it, but they’d discussed that beforehand, and he was pleased, so pleased with the outcome. As he headed for the door, he’d beamed as if she’d won him a prize. “See you around, gorgeous,” he called.

Miss Nugent tried to shift her focus back to the children. As usual, Dalton had distracted everybody. He was rocking back in his chair and sticking his tongue out at Joey N. while the other children tried to keep from laughing.

“Sit up straight, Dalton. Feet on the floor.” Miss Nugent nudged the boy toward a more proper position. “And don’t disturb the others. Let’s be nice.”

She placed a coloring sheet in front of the boy, taking care not to lean too close. The last time she’d seen Dalton in class, weeks ago, he’d crinkled up his face as she stapled together his Lost Sheep lift-the-flap page. “Miss Nugent,” he said, his voice nasally and his eyes squinting nearly shut. “Miss Nugent, why do you smell like fish sticks? I don’t like fish sticks.” There were snickers and scattered announcements of “I don’t like fish sticks either.”

That day after worship, Miss Nugent had gone straight home and laundered her entire wardrobe. Following a tip she read in the newspaper, she set a tray of charcoal briquettes in her closet to trap any residual odors. She began showering in the morning rather than at night, using the Plumeria-scented body wash that Clarissa’s parents had given her as a Christmas/thank you gift. (Had Clarissa also detected an odor?) She brought in cinnamon sachets for her cubicle at work.

During the week, Miss Nugent audited employee expense reports for TerraOne Financial, for which she earned fifteen dollars an hour plus health and dental. Her most exciting moment in thirteen years at TOF had come last year, when she rejected a report from the vice president of business operations, who’d requested reimbursement for dry cleaning, greens fees, and cover and gratuities at a gentlemen’s club. As she positioned her mouse cursor over the DENY button, her fingertips had trembled with the stirrings of power, a kind of vigilante justice, a feeling both thrilling and terrifying that had revisited her when the man resigned at the end of the year.

Brenda Glidden, the children’s ministry director, beckoned Miss Nugent out to the hall. Brenda was teaching the First Communion class that morning, and she handed over the key to her office. “I’ve informed the other teachers you’re in charge,” Brenda said and smiled. “If anyone wants supplies, they’ll have to go through you.” Miss Nugent blushed at the pride she felt for being entrusted with this responsibility.

Returning to her class, Miss Nugent beheld a small miracle: the children, every one of them, were seated and quiet. Clarissa was decorating a frame she’d drawn around her masterpiece. Joey B. had sketched in a background with birds and trees and a happy-face sun. All were passing the markers without fuss. It was at moments such as this that Miss Nugent felt most acutely the longing to have, or have had (before the hysterectomy, of course) children of her own.

There would have been the matter of a father, though. The boys had always treated her differently than the girls did. The girls loved to tease her, for her height, her weight, her dyslexia, her packing lunch every day, her inability to turn the rope, much less jump double Dutch. The boys, however, simply ignored Plain Patty Nugent, and they kept right on ignoring her long after the girls’ taunting stopped. A faithful and practical person, Patty eventually accepted her spinsterhood and sought to discern in what other ways God was calling her to serve. Last summer, when Pastor Conn and Brenda Glidden had asked the congregation for someone to instruct the kindergarten class, she’d scarcely hesitated before volunteering.

Though she hated to disturb the tranquility in her classroom, there was a lesson to teach. “Two more minutes,” she said, circling the tables. “You can finish your artwork at home.”

As she passed the boys, Dalton blew a raspberry.

“Who tooted?” demanded Joey N. The boys laughed.

“Let’s not make impolite noises,” Miss Nugent said, as Dalton lunged over the table and scribbled across Joey N.’s paper. The two began dueling with their markers.

At the elementary school, kindergartners were subject to an array of incentives and punishments. There were extra recesses, a prize chest, Peacemaker parties. Pink slips, the safe chair, the principal’s office. In Sunday school, on the other hand, there were neither carrots nor sticks. At the beginning of the year, when the need for encouraging appropriate behavior was already clear, Miss Nugent had asked Brenda Glidden if she could reward the good children with cookies or candy. “Patty,” Brenda said with a look of genuine astonishment, “you know the Lord doesn’t see them as good or bad.”

Miss Nugent was always making mistakes like this. Grace, Pastor Conn would say. We can’t do a blessed thing about it. God gives us grace no matter what.

Miss Nugent clapped her hands and called the children to circle time. They claimed their carpet squares from the stack in the corner and filed into place. Dalton sprawled between Jimmy and Joey B. instead of taking his assigned spot beside Miss Nugent.

“If you can’t behave,” she warned, “I’ll have to separate you.”

She sent the offering plate around the circle. Dalton shook his head when Jimmy tried to hand him the plate. “I’m exempt,” he said, upending the collection and scattering the envelopes. “I’m exempt,” Dalton said again.

Frowning, Miss Nugent gathered the envelopes and replaced them. She passed the plate to Joey B.

The offering was put away, and Miss Nugent settled into her reading chair to begin the lesson. She watched as Dalton inched his foot toward Jimmy’s carpet square. Jimmy lifted Dalton’s leg and heaved it away with sufficient force to permit Dalton to spin around on his bottom and drop his other foot onto Joey B.’s lap, to which Joey B. responded with a shove.

“Crisscross, Dalton.” Miss Nugent told herself it wasn’t the boy’s fault. The gray-haired set in the congregation was forever noting how parents these days didn’t know how to be the boss, didn’t set limits, didn’t discipline their children. Although she was still some years away from the gray-haired set, Miss Nugent tended to agree with their sentiment.

The lesson was from the tenth chapter of Mark, in which Jesus compared a camel passing through the eye of a needle to a rich man entering the kingdom of heaven. She distributed the story leaflets, reminding the class to treat the papers with respect; the church didn’t have the funds to buy new sheets every year. (Clearly, the wealthy members of First Mercy didn’t tithe.) Not that the children would have done the at-home activities with their parents if they kept the papers—the leaflets would probably have gone straight into the recycling bin. Miss Nugent suspected that the same families who read together for twenty minutes every night didn’t pray together more than once a week.

After reading the story, she quizzed the pupils. “What did the man call Jesus?” She glanced around. “Clarissa?”

“He called him teacher,” Clarissa said.

Miss Nugent flushed with pride. She felt an allegiance to educators of all kinds. With Joey N.’s mother, who taught math at the high school, and Mason’s parents (home ec. and middle school guidance), she was more than congenial, and she adored Clarissa’s parents, who were professors at the university. They all shared a common mission as stewards of the future.

“What did Jesus tell the man to do?” she asked. Clarissa raised her hand again. “Clarissa, honey, what did Jesus tell the man to do?”

“To sell what he owns and give the money to the poor,” Clarissa said. Miss Nugent, in her weakest moments, considered Clarissa her favorite, the child she would most like to have had.

“What does poor mean?” asked Joey B., whose family had moved to Woodview Estates in the fall. He’d missed three Sundays in a row, including the lesson on the widow’s mite.

“Poor means you have no money!” Dalton said. “What are you, stupid?”

“Dalton, please raise your hand,” Miss Nugent said. “And let’s use kind words.”

“Kind words,” Dalton mocked. He bounced on his carpet square.

She sighed. Was it the boy’s fault that he had no manners? That he was selfish and inconsiderate? That he couldn’t sit still for one minute? Whether poor conduct sprang from nature or nurture or both, the parents were to blame. Mrs. D’Amico. And Dr. D’Amico.

“Let’s pray,” Miss Nugent said. She asked the children to join hands.

“Ow!” Joey B. was yanking his hand away from Dalton. “He’s squeezing too tight!”

As Dalton grinned, a knot of frustration rose through Miss Nugent. Unable to work it loose, she forced it down again. She prodded Dalton outside the circle and sat him in a chair in the corner.

She finished the prayer and moved on to the song. Jesus loves the little ones like me, me, me. The melody and finger play were as simple as the words, and the children all participated. Jesus loves the little ones like me, me, me. They were smiling and sitting nicely at their places. Little ones like me . . . sat upon his knee . . .  Jesus loves the little ones like me, me, me. After going through the song once, Miss Nugent allowed Dalton to creep back into the group. She asked the class to sing the song again.

But now the boys turned silly. The girls looked bored. Me, me, me. As the children pointed to themselves, Dalton poked his chest and collapsed. “I’ve been stabbed,” he moaned, and the class giggled.

“Dalton, get up.” The knot inside Miss Nugent rose again and tightened. She stood, looking down at the boy lying on the floor. He grinned at her again, ignorant of his effect on the others, how he was keeping them from God’s word, obstructing God’s work.

She took his hand and pulled him up. “We’re going to have a talk.”

Still smirking, Dalton at once lurched forward, tugging her along. His strength surprised her, and she couldn’t undo his grip. When they reached the far edge of the circle, Dalton teetered out away from her and then pretended to stumble.

“Stop, Dalton!” cried Miss Nugent, bracing for a fall.

The boy abruptly reversed direction, swinging out to her left side and then veering back again toward her right. Unable to halt her momentum as he crossed in front of her, Miss Nugent lost her balance. She sprawled to the floor, the back of her hand striking Clarissa’s cheek as she fell.

Miss Nugent sat for a moment in the center of the circle. The children stared at her. Clarissa was crying.

Dalton pointed at Clarissa. “That wasn’t a nice thing to do, Miss Nugent! You hurt her! Keep your body to yourself!”

At this, some of the boys began to chuckle, and even a few of the girls were smiling. The frustration inside Miss Nugent broke free. She stood, seized Dalton’s arm, and jerked him up.

“That’s it.” The children stopped as she said this, but she didn’t look at them. “Stay in the circle, class,” she muttered.

She dragged Dalton out into the hallway and steered him toward Brenda Glidden’s office. She took the key from her pocket and unlocked the door.

The office, an old storage room, had never been remodeled. It was cheerless and cramped. She recalled the spacious office that Dalton’s father occupied at the hospital, the walls decorated with paintings of tall ships and sunrises, diplomas the size of small posters, gleaming windows that overlooked the courtyard.

Miss Nugent closed the door. She kept her eye on Dalton as she banged open the supply cabinets and the drawers of the desk, furniture inherited from the minister before the minister before Pastor Conn.

Sifting through the items at the bottom of the arts and crafts rack, her hand closed on a two-foot-long wooden board, the horizontal piece for the cross used in one of the Easter displays. As her fingers ran across its glossy surface, they caught on the three bolts that attached the board to the vertical beam. She slid the bolts out one at a time and set them on the desk.

Dalton looked calm, if slightly puzzled. Maybe he was calculating how to wheedle his way out of this situation. “Miss Nugent—”

“You know how to behave, Dalton.” Of course he knew. He was sharp as nails, already excelled at reading, writing, and arithmetic. Although he didn’t understand the first thing about feelings, or kindness, or love.

“Miss Nugent, I have to—”

“Stand still, Dalton.” His fidgeting was yet another sign of his lack of discipline, how his parents were failing him. “Put your hands on the desk.”

Instead of obeying—already he was more accustomed to leading than to following—Dalton continued to stare at her. He certainly was his father’s child: full lips and cheeks, a mane of rich blond curls, brown eyes big as quarters. He would do well in school, college, medical school. He would be wealthy and successful. An attractive wife. Gorgeous, truly gorgeous children. The world belonged to people like the D’Amicos.

“Hands on the desk, Dalton,” she said again. “Bend over.”

Miss Nugent had last seen Dr. D’Amico the week after she left the hospital, as she was walking through Market Square. (Where else could she have encountered that man, aside from the hospital or at Sunday school pickup, except among shops and restaurants she could never patronize?) She started to approach him, but another man hailed him first. She hovered under the awning of the Once Upon a Toddler boutique while the man asked Dr. D’Amico how business was.

“A lot of cutting lately,” Dr. D’Amico replied, making a scissoring motion with his fingers. “I did my hundredth hyst for the hospital a couple of weeks ago.”

She hung back on the sidewalk. She hadn’t meant to eavesdrop; she just wanted to thank him again. The pain had seemed to be waning.

“They should give you a watch or a plate or something,” the other man said. He laughed. “I hope the clientele’s keeping it interesting at least?”

Dr. D’Amico made a face. “It’s like the Westminster Dog Show in my O.R.”

The man woofed and then laughed again. “Look at it this way,” he had said. “You’re keeping the world beautiful.” The men shook hands. “Stay strong, D’Amico.”

Dalton was leaning against the desk now, on tiptoes, his legs jiggling. He turned toward Miss Nugent once more.

“Turn around, Dalton.” Yes, the D’Amicos owned this beautiful world; they had their reward. The first would be last, and the last first.

“Dalton, it’s for your own good.” The board felt heavy in her hands. She tapped it on the desk, as she imagined a policeman might when interrogating a criminal.

“When you’re unkind to others, you make God unhappy.” She put a hand on his shoulder. “God’s like your father, Dalton. Do you understand? You don’t want to make your father unhappy.”

Out in the hallway, footsteps and muted murmurs. Shadows fluttered across the slit beneath the door. She waited until the noises faded and then raised the board with her right hand.

“Lord helps us both,” she murmured. She clenched her jaw, concentrating the entire force of her being midway down her skull, and she didn’t feel the exertion in her arm when she swung the paddle down and smacked it against Dalton’s backside.

There was silence afterward—no cry, no plea, no apology—only silence, as teacher and student waited. And then Miss Nugent heard a trickle, like water flowing over an infant at the baptismal font. Dalton turned, his face contorted and red. Wetness streamed down the inseam of his trousers, urine drizzling onto a growing pool between his loafers while the tears spilled from his eyes. She softened, loosening her grip. The board fell to the floor. He’s just a boy, she thought. He’s just a little boy.

She scooped Dalton up—awkwardly, she’d never carried so heavy a burden. Ignoring the smell and the dampness that spread over her arms and onto the front of her dress, she held him close and hurried out toward the bathrooms. The boy shuddered with quiet sobs.

When she reached the ladies’ room, she looked up and stopped. Her gaze focused down the hallway, and for a moment she was drawn by a temptation to flee, to rush outside with Dalton, wondering where in the world they could go to hide one another, save one another, because there in front of her classroom door, all of the parents were gathered with Dr. D’Amico standing at the head of the line. And then Brenda Glidden arrived, and she and the parents turned as one to face Miss Nugent.

Miss Nugent approached the crowd. Dr. D’Amico stepped forward, and their eyes leveled at one another. She released Dalton.

“I’m sorry,” she said as Dalton scrambled to his father. “We had an accident. He needs to be cleaned up.”

Dr. D’Amico lifted Dalton up. The man’s expression was placid and matter-of-fact, a match to his dull green scrubs.

“That’s okay.” Dr. D’Amico set Dalton down and raised the boy’s chin with a finger. “Everybody makes mistakes. Right, D.?”

Dalton sniffled and rubbed his face against his father’s legs. Dr. D’Amico pried away and squatted before his son. He put a gentle fist to Dalton’s cheek. “No tears, D. Ready for the world.”

Dalton sniffled again, but he was no longer crying. Slowly, a smile appeared. He didn’t look at Miss Nugent as he closed his own fingers and put his fist to his father’s chest, just a soft beat at first, and then another, and again and again with increasing tempo and intensity, a pounding that would echo within Miss Nugent long after she had talked to Brenda Glidden and explained everything and left the church that morning, her final morning in the Sunday school.

“Ready for the world!” the boy shouted. “Ready for the world!”

“Maricon…” goes the whisper. What?! Was that at me?! I looked down quickly and took inventory. I was still in uniform but most kids leave that alone. Wasn’t like you had a choice in it.

I am the baby brother and the first to be sent to Catholic school. My mother says I’m lucky. They couldn’t afford it when my brothers were in school. So I luck out. My brothers got to go to public school. They tell me I’m missing out on a lot– but Papa says he doesn’t want me turning out like they did, so Catholic school for me. But Domingo is at UCLA so how bad did he turn out? He’s a junior and when he’s done it’s right back into law school there.

But where was I supposed to change clothes? A Superman phone booth? Maybe they were saying it to someone else.

“Maricon…hey we’re talking to you.” That was definitely one of the ten words white boys knew in Spanish. Along with ‘fuck your mother.’  I’d heard this from white boys, but they’ll call anyone a fag. I’d be walking with my brothers, the three of us, and the white boys would let loose with maricon or pendajo. We ignore it. We never stop to see who they are talking about and white kids never learn enough Spanish to learn plurals or anything more colorful, as my Mama would say. So we just figure they are just talking the only shit they know.

Not everything translates or sounds as beautiful as our mothers intended.

Girls named Beatriz and Mercedes hate their names in English–especially when white teachers with Midwestern accents from California towns like Hemet and Bakersfield call their names. When I was in junior high school we changed principals and the new one didn’t have a clue about Mexicans. Now, it’s a Catholic school in southeast LA. At priest school they don’t have guidebooks for this sort of thing? All our priests are directly from Ireland. The priest/principal we had could fuck up saying Gonzalez (goonzaaylees?) never mind more obvious fare like Martinez or Garcia.

So with a name like Renee Fabian, I am freaking doomed. In Spanish it doesn’t sound so bad—I just sounded like a telanovela love slave. And if I could be a love slave with giant pecs and silk smooth skin like on TV no one would be following me home after school trying to kick the shit out of me. Fabian the telenovela star has women––all kinds—the brown ones, the white ones, falling at his feet. But no, Renee is a girl’s name to white boys. And Fabian is (Faybeeyin). And there’s no use explaining that my mom was in Mexico watching American TV and thought Fabian was the ultimate masculine American name and named me it and then Mexicanized it.

They don’t talk about this in the schools yet. In between wanting to deport every person with a Z in their last name, they just haven’t realized that when my mother was in Mexico she was watching American movies dreaming of being here. And her sister was watching Japanese movies and dreaming of being there. That’s how come my cousins are named Toshiro and Akura, which of course, American teachers think must be cars just like all those poor little Mercedes girls.

Maricon, on the other hand, is not my name. There’s only three of them. I have a fighting chance. I turn around and face them, their crisp white t-shirts reflecting a blinding sunlight against the blinding white concrete sidewalk.

“Who are you calling a fag?” I say, fist clenched and ready. I turn around. These aren’t white boys.

“Do you do it with your brother? I heard he’s got quite a technique with that big ass mouth of his.”

They must have been talking about Jesus Jack. I winced but didn’t mean to.

Jesus Jack and I still live at home off of Whittier, in Pico almost to the border of Montebello. Jesus Jack says that’s not the only border we ride.

Jesus Jack’s real name is really Jesus Juan but he says that just reeks of wetback so he changed it. Jack is a couple of weeks shy of his barber’s license. And he swears he’s not cutting any wetback hair once he gets the license. Papa says he’ll cut the hair of anyone walking through the door. Money is money. But Jesus Jack says you gotta have some principles and what celebrity is going to want his hair cut in a wetback shop? I can only imagine what Jesus Jack may have said.

“If that thing was my brother,” says the shaved headed one with the crisp white tee shirt closest to me, “I’d beat the shit out of him daily, esse’.”

That’s all I remember hearing. Maybe they said more, I don’t know. I would like to think I would have just kept walking as usual when the public school kids come out to mock us Catholic school kids, I mean, I’m use to it. But I had to have my brother’s back here. You just can’t let people talk shit about your family. One of them kicked me in the back of the knees so that my legs folded on top of me. Someone kicked my face. Someone dropped my backpack full of books on top of me.

I don’t know how long I was on the sidewalk. It felt like my brains were oozing out of my head. My hair was sticky. I do remember swinging at the Mr. Clean smooth head of the guy in the center as I went down. Then I think I stared up at the storefront party supply place on one side and wedding and quincera dresses on the other. My mind drifted to Jesus Jack as I looked up at the white opaque sequined gowns. The silk formal guyaberas. Jesus Jack was always pissed that boys didn’t get thrown a quincenera too. Though Papa said that was the one good thing about having a family full of boys.

I look up from the sidewalk at the bus stop sign. From the bus stop to home is only five blocks but that’s five homie blocks and I’m not sure where my assailants have gone. There are just as many white kids as Mexicans now, and a melting pot of bad attitude too. My grandfather says it used to be all Jews, Armenians, and Japanese here. No shit? I asked him. I can’t picture it though. Where did they all go? They made money, my grandfather says. They moved to Friendly Hills in La Whittier. He ought to know. He’s a gardener. He does their lawns, but if they used to live in the neighborhood with grandpa, they sure didn’t take him with them.

The bus stop reeks. Freaking Catholics and their fish on Fridays. Vatican II people, it’s over. But H&R fish and chips is packed so it must be 4:30 with every mother in town lined up for a bucket of that nasty fried, that ain’t fresh fish. I try and talk my mom out of it every week. Fish tacos, yes. But not that crap. She just smiles and tells me it’s a tradition. I roll over and try to get up. Fuck it hurts.

“Renee! What the hell happened to you? Sanchez said you were in a fight. He saw you go down from the corner.” It was my Papa. Standing there, bare beer belly hanging over yellow shorts. Black socks in flip-flops. He always does this. The one time I ever brought a friend home from school to hang out, Papa sat in the front room just like that –the yellow shorts and the black socks in the flip flops, no shirt on watching TV. His English was even worse a few years ago and thinking he was saying ‘join me,’ he looked up at my friend in the doorway and said with big open arms “ENJOY ME!” Nowadays, he’s lost that immigrant pride of being in his Sunday best for all occasions out of the house. He no longer wears dress shoes to the beach. And finding his son beat up on the sidewalk is no exception.

“There were three of them, “ I mutter by way of explanation. He mutters something in Spanish that I don’t know.

“Ay, your Mama’s going to have a field cow.”

“Field day, Papa, field day. In English, you can have a cow or a field day but you can’t have both at the same time.” I want to laugh but just wanting to made my side hurt and as he helped me up I could feel myself strain not to walk crooked.

I wasn’t sure I felt like going out anymore. Jesus Jack and I were taking the bus out to stay with Domingo for the weekend. Domingo got us tickets to see Bowie. Jesus Jack is always singing along to Bowie. If he could fake being English over Mexican-American he’d do it, but his face is painfully not British. I’m cool with Bowie, I guess. Whatever. With two older brothers, I just listen to whatever they throw down to me.

The stairs to the front porch seem like they’d grown in height, after five long blocks. I made it to the dusty metal swing with its once aquamarine cushions and tried to sit. I tried to prop my legs on the bright blue chair Mama keeps there, sitting next to the bougainvillea that seemed to always be climbing away from our house. But I couldn’t lift my leg; it hurt too much. I could hear strains of Ziggy Stardust coming from the front bedroom window. Jesus Jack was home.

When Jesus Jack is home, I can tell because Mama has fresh flowers on the kitchen table in the big white glass vase left over from grandma’s funeral. When Jesus Jack is home the TV speaks only in English and if it’s not on, then the radio is and that’s only English too. When Jesus Jack is home the curtains are pulled back and the sun is beating in making us all too hot and tired, but for some reason Jesus Jack has plenty of energy. Always.

He says we are too dreary. We can’t see ourselves in conversation because when he’s not there the curtains are drawn and the lights off. True, this time of year we don’t open anything to let light in until after the sun has gone down. No air conditioning. But Mama doesn’t want the windows open all night––what if someone breaks in? To steal what, Jesus Jack laughs? If he’s home and not going out, the windows are open till midnight at least. It makes Papa nervous and then he can’t sleep.

“What were you fighting about?” Papa asks me again.

“Nothing,” I say catching my breath.

Papa goes inside the house and gets a beer. He offers to get me one for the medicinal properties it will have on my aching side and what appears to be a black eye. He shuffles back and hands me an Olympia. I drink it slow. I still feel weird drinking with the old man in front of the house. Papa looks like he’s enjoying it though. And he doesn’t press on about the fight. Papa pats my knee and gets up to move inside again. I can hear the TV switching on to Spanish.

“Jack?” I call into the house.

“Yes?” He answers in a sing-song voice, peeping his head out of the front door screen. Jesus Jack sits down on Mamas’s aquamarine chair with his legs stretched out onto the railing. The bougainvillea he pretends to drape around his neck. I have been looking down at my leg, but then I look up at him. My mouth hangs open. I can’t breathe.

“Jesus! Jack.”

I don’t know whether I want to puke or punch him. There stands my brother in a light blue t-shirt with a rainbow across it, tight enough that his nipples are showing through like darts. His pants are belled and shiny silver. I mean they’re still jeans but they’re covered in silver glitter. More glitter than a five-year-old girl would know what to do with–and the shoes. The shoes. I didn’t know they made men’s shoes that high or that sandal like. I couldn’t see too well at the moment but I’d have sworn that when the sun hit Jesus Jack’s face, it sparkled, too.

“Has–Papa —seen you?” I ask half disgusted and half amazed.

“No, I’ve been in my room since I got home. This is what I’m wearing to the show.”

“Are you supposed to ––to–be something? No fucking way I’m sitting next to you on the bus.”

“A Space Oddity! I’m a Space Oddity! Get it?” I stare at Jesus Jack for what seems like a black hole of time. Maybe it was. Or maybe it was just a minute. Jesus Jack was looking me up and down as if coming up with fashion ideas for me too.

“Don’t you come near me with glitter, goddamn it. What the fuck’s wrong with you?” I could hear Papa in the kitchen opening another beer. I could feel the bruising under my eye. Then it dawned on me.

“Wait. Did you wear any of that outside the house? Outside the house you fucking moron?”

“Just the shoes from the Barber Shop to here. Wanted to break them in¬–“

“You’re a, a, a…” I couldn’t bring myself to say it. And suddenly our lives flashed before my eyes. How could I have been so lame and stupid? How could I have not noticed? Hairdresser? Glitter? Glam rock? From down the street I can hear some fresh over the border oompa oompa music. From Jesus Jack’s open window I can hear “…I’m a space invader/I’ll be a rock ‘n’ rollin’ bitch for you…”

“Maricon!”

Jesus Jack and I both turned to see our Papa drop his Olympia straight onto the linoleum inside the front door. I think shit, Papa’s going to kill Jack and I don’t know which side to jump in on. Whose back do I get now?

“Marisela! Marisela!” My Papa calls to my mother. He’s not able to move at first but then charges through the house like a rocket ship—backward and coming in too fast for a landing too.

“Shit,” says Jack, almost remorseful. “I didn’t think he’d waddle out from the front of the TV for at least another hour. “

Mama and Papa are arguing now the way they always do. Only now? I understand part of it. I don’t get all the Spanish but it doesn’t matter what language they speak, it was all kind of foreign until now.

“If we’d have stayed in Mexico,” my father screams, “this kind of thing,” he points to Jesus Jack’s room that was Domingo’s old room too, “would never have happened!”

Then there’s a round of:

“This is from your side of the family!”

“No, your side!”

“You have that cousin that never got married what do you think he was doing?” My dad screams to my mom.

“You’ve got that prima that looks like a guy!” my mom yells back.

It goes on and on in circles. For the first time, ever? I feel sorry for my parents. All they wanted to do was raise their kids in America. They really had no idea what they were going to be up against.

I’m feeling funny in my stomach now. Like if I’m on the bus with him…? What if we get jumped again?  Jesus Jack says there’s lots of guys like him where we are going. Great. Are there any guys like me? Guys that just want to hang with their brothers and look at girls? My body is still sore.

I need to see Domingo. Mingo will set me right about things. I think Domingo will have to take a side and that will be my side but I’m not even sure what that side is.

Jesus Jack bought a shirt for me to wear to the show. It has ruffles on it but Jesus Jack is saying it’s like a pirate would wear, not a girl, and not a fag–and pirates are masculine. They steal, have no teeth, and fuck women. My ass, I tell him and punch him hard in the arm, so that he staggers, twisting his platform shoes a bit and busting the strap. It makes me smile. Now, he’ll have to wear flats.

“Does Domingo know about you being—-your clothes?” I ask gulping down the last of my beer with my words.

“Ha! That Sister? You little brother, have not seen our pretty boy Mingo lately have you?”

This is how. This is how I find out that not one, but both of my brothers are fucking gay. And this is how Jesus Jack chooses to tell me. Getting my ass kicked when it should have been his ass. I look down at my dirty uniform pants, sparkling with his glitter in the twilight.

I get up to shower and find clean jeans for the evening. I think of not going while the water, piss and blood hit the drain of the bathtub in Mama’s pink bathroom. But I can’t let him get on that bus alone. You have to change buses downtown. There’s no direct way to get from the east side to the west. Like they did that on purpose so we’d stay where we’re from.

I miss Domingo and I think I need to hear this from Mingo. Maybe Mingo still likes girls and Jesus Jack is just playing a fucked up trick on me to trip me out before the show.
But we’re going to head out with three tickets to see David Bowie, and all along the bus ride there I know deep in my heart that I’ve known this all along. How could I not? The bruises are purpling from the beating. I know they will be dark and sore soon. Jesus Jack wanted to bring his make up kit. No matter how great the concert is and no matter how good a time we have tonight, it’s going to be impossible to hide all this in the morning.

But even that came to an end when other guests were due to stay at the friend’s home, and Eileen found herself flitting from place to place, housesitting one week, living in a room another. By the end of it, Eileen had even lived in a poxied doss house in Cricklewood, with no hot water and drug addicts in the communal bathroom. It was during the time that she acted in a play at a theatre in Hampstead, but she hadn’t received any money for the production, nor was she likely to get any the way the books were kept at the theatre box office. Eileen lived in seven or eight different places during the months of March, April, and May. Finally this place came along in Maida Vale, just on the edge of Kilburn. The building was big, more like a hotel than an apartment building, with about 150 flats, all bedsits or one-bedrooms. It was called Hotel Kilburn by the people who lived there, but that was not really its name. In the first week Eileen lived there, she was in the laundry room doing her wash, and she got into a conversation with an older woman who used to live in Hampstead. When Eileen asked what she thought of this neighborhood, she told Eileen straight away.

“Kilburn is a tip,” the old woman shouted.

When Eileen was hungry, Kilburn High Road looked like manna, especially the food shops. An Irish builder once said to her that if the British gave them back Northern Ireland, the Irish would return Kilburn to Britain. But that was a lifetime ago when Kilburn was London’s Irish ghetto, just like Camden Town once was. The playwright George Bernard Shaw was so disgusted with his fellow Irishmen pissing on Camden’s High Street that he had those urinals built at the intersection with Parkway, or at least that is what someone told Eileen once. Kilburn had no such literary benefactor. It was gritty and workaday, what Americans would call blue collar. To be sure it was still Irish, but now it also was a kind of league of nations. Veiled women from the Middle East passed by in black robes. Little Chinese children still wore silk jackets they probably brought with them from China. African children spoke with perfect working-class London accents, the kind of speech that pronounced words like computer and butter without the t’s. But Kilburn was more chalk and cheese than a melting pot, more a collision of cultures than an harmonious merge.

Eileen was reminded of her own childhood in Dublin.  She still remembered that her family’s kitchen was in the basement—the lower ground floor—of the terraced house in which they lived. She loved that house, the classic urban dwelling, with its lower ground floor that led to the garden out back. Up the front steps, you walked to the elevated ground floor of the house, and above that were the bedrooms. The kitchen was large, much bigger than the one they would use in Dalkey when they finally moved away. Eileen remembered their dog, a big Irish terrier, and she remembered her aunts and cousins visiting them and standing in that big kitchen. It was not their house, though. It belonged to the people whom her mother worked for, and Eileen’s family lived in the maisonette flat on the ground floor and the basement. That great kitchen was really in the basement, though it had French doors opening onto the garden. Eileen’s mother was not the world’s worst cook. But her mother was not the best either. Her food was nutritional but not tasty. Still, as Eileen’s parents reminded her and her siblings, they did not starve. They always had food, even if it was not as delicious or redolent as their Italian neighbors’ meals. That food smelled of garlic and herbs. The herbaceous Eileen’s family ever got was to use parsley with lamb, though never at the expense of mint jelly, the most unusual they ever got in the kitchen.

Kilburn was not a tip; it was more like a scrum. People moved in every direction banging into one another. Eileen had taken to circumventing the high street. If she needed to go to the post office, she would wait until she was in Hampstead—where the lines were shorter—or Camden Town—where the long lines went faster than Kilburn. (Of course, there were no ‘lines’ in any of these places, as no one called them that, but rather queues. Eileen had picked up such expressions as “lines” from the four years she worked as a high-school teacher in Boston.) Instead of going to the grocery stores on the high street in Kilburn, Eileen took to shopping  in the little stores on Abbey Road or walked down to Maida Vale or Little Venice, sometimes, rather than approach Kilburn High Street with, not so much crowds, as throngs, hordes, or as a friend called anyone not himself, “you lot.” Of course, you lot was really Eileen herself, the unwashed masses of Kilburn, “the bloody Irish,” as she once heard it so lovingly put, in the days when terrorists were Irish instead of Middle Eastern. The former terrorists lived in County Kilburn, as Eileen also heard it called, with great humor and affection. Kilburn was like Dublin, Galway, or Limerick, crowded Irish places. They were not much different, for that matter, from parts of Brooklyn or Boston or Chicago.

But Kilburn was different.

On the surface, it possessed the Irish penchant for the shambolic, even the anarchic, like her family’s own nightly dinner times, which were more like food fights than meals, and more like gun battles than supper. This organized chaos reminded Eileen of how the Irish prayed, never in unison, always to their own drummers, in their own biological rhythms. She had heard this joyful noise since childhood, no one saying the Hail Marys and Our Fathers together, but in a group, but always apart, at one’s own pace. Later she would come to think of this discrete way of praying as deeply spiritual, each person finding a personal beat to communicate with God. Yet saying this, Eileen did not mean to equate Kilburn High Street as being a spiritual experience; it had a way of robbing your energy, of sucking the life out of you. It had a way of wearing you down in the manner of the professional boxer who leans on his opponent in the later rounds, exhausting the opponent further, then setting him up for the kill.

If Eileen took the Number 31 bus from Camden Town, invariably she got off the stop before Kilburn High Street, and walked the block along Abbey Road—the long and winding road that lead to Boundary Road and her flat. There were green grocers, corner grocers, and even a Middle Eastern super market across the street, and yet sometimes she just had to go to Sainsbury’s on the High Road for certain things, though never Marks and Spencer which seemed like the laziest way in the world to make dinner, not a food-lovers place but rather an emporium for someone overrun by the vagaries of the New Age, busy, busy, busy me, I’ll simply pop this bag of veggies in the water to boil, and voila, a gourmet meal. Eileen wanted tomatoes, garlic, olive oil, parsley, lemon juice, pepper and salt added at her pace and taste, at her own leisure and doing.

This was a Sainsbury’s day, much as she dreaded coming onto the High Street to shop. Eileen had run out of money after paying the weekly rent. But she remembered that—although all the other credit cards were frozen because she was at the limit with each—she had paid this one on time and there was enough credit available for a carefully selected week or so of groceries, and maybe even she could top up the mobile phone to make some calls, not just receive them. Eileen might even be able to get another Zone 2 weekly travel card for the local tube and the buses. Whatever the outcome of this trip, she had no fear of embarrassment because she literally knew no one in Kilburn. So Eileen went into Sainsbury’s to shop, and who should she run into but Tanya, from a job counseling group Eileen attended, at the strawberries, and in the dairy was a woman named Roberta, whom she knew from her teaching days, and by the checkout she saw another person named Casey, whom she briefly dated ten years earlier when she used to attend London Irish rugby football matches with some friends. Thank God I have some credit, Eileen thought, and am able to buy some groceries, am able to feel civil and centered, alive and well. Thank God I was not whingeing about being broke and complaining that I had nothing to eat. People frankly were sick of hearing my sob story.

Eileen would forever remember each item that she placed in her hand-held blue plastic basket, for it began to buckle as she shopped. She had entered Sainsbury’s around four o’clock of a halcyon summer day in later June, not too hot, one of those cloud-scudding blue skies that John Constable painted in Hampstead a few miles east, and a few hundred years ago. Even the bumping and abutting of Kilburn High Road had a rhythm to it, a musical shuttle like bebop or Thelonious Monk’s thunkingly melodious piano.

Eileen started in produce, placing cheap, delicious strawberries in the blue basket. These were native ones, nearly at perfection, or maybe just past it, as the expiry date was that day, and she’d luckily found a pack that wasn’t bruised or rotten. Next she picked a pack of blueberries from Spain, more expensive, she thought, but one of her extravagances. Didn’t the doctors and nutritionists say that there was nothing healthier than blueberries? It was a superfood, whatever the hell that was. Eileen also got some curly parsley, cheaper than the flat kind, less tasty, too, but good in a fresh tomato sauce for pasta. She also got some new potatoes, a bunch of cherry tomatoes, two for the price of one. Then came carrots (organic) and apples and ginger for juicing through the week. She topped it off with some Fair Trade bananas.

In the dairy Eileen got three cartons of orange juice for two pounds and a big hunk of cheddar cheese for a little over two pounds. She bought a big tub of plain organic yogurt, wishing she could buy Rachel’s vanilla yogurt, but she’d already indulged herself with the blueberries, and now she needed to move on. Lastly, before leaving the dairy section entirely, Eileen bought some grated Parmesan cheese from Reggiano, Italy, expensive, but the best tasting of this cheese, and her rationale was that it lasted a long time, which it did. Next she bought a big bag of brown organic rice and a big bag of penne pasta, but no sun-dried (sun-kissed, the jar says) tomatoes as she already had some at the flat. Eileen then got some dark rye flatbread crackers and a big, cheap bag of Scottish porridge oats for a month of breakfasts. She bought sweetened, organic soya milk, and some Sainsbury’s instant coffee, and then got some Dove soap and deodorant, some toothpaste, and looked for cheap bread and some olive oil. Logically, the olive oil should have been with the pasta and the tomato sauces, but in this Sainsbury’s, it was in the back of the store, with bread, condiments, and eggs.

The handle on the plastic basket was bowing, and so Eileen grasped the heavy load with both hands, cradling it in her arms as if it were a baby. In the way a child was precious, so were those groceries because Eileen didn’t think she could afford them until she checked the various credit card statements from the month before, and then she saw this window of opportunity, as the benighted politicians say, and therefore went to the bread basket of Kilburn High Road to affect the transfer of credit for food. In the scheme of things, Eileen felt like a millionaire, like a million bucks, i.e., like five-hundred-and fifty-five-thousand pounds, give or take a shilling.

Eileen put down the bulging market basket, this horn of plenty, and she recalculated its expense, estimating it to be thirty pounds, well within her credit limit and budget, and then she re-examined the grocery list, making sure that there was nothing there that still needed purchasing. In recent months Eileen had taken to going to the Tate Modern to look at four magnificent paintings by Cy Twombly called Quattro stagione, the four seasons. The Serpentine Gallery also had his drawings on display, and the Gagosian Gallery in King’s Cross showed ten new paintings and a sculpture. In all of these, Twombly wrote words in pencil, then scratched them out, and wrote other words. The seasonal paintings—the Vivaldian paintings—had poems and words from poets like Dante. The words in the drawings, as she recalled, were more muted, and the ten new paintings didn’t always have words at all, except the occasional word Gaeta, and the date. Twombly, an American, had lived in Italy for nearly half a century, and Gaeta is where he had lived. Eileen thought of him because her grocery list had words that had been written over and crossed out, so that her own list resembled a palimpsest, the same way that Cy Twombly’s paintings were. Her words were in blue ink, the lines through them in black, only because she had used the blue pen at the flat, and had the black pen in her pocket in the supermarket, a chance occurrence, a happenstance more than a willed artfulness like the paintings, had come into being. It was less Cy Twombly than Kurt Schwitters, an art of poverty and circumstance rather than imagination and wealth.

In fact, the list bore no resemblance to art. It was a life list, as sustenance, a boon, a blessing, a gift. Eileen had imagined she would eat nothing but a crazy salad of air and anger, vinegar and despair for the next month. Instead she had a plastic blue market basket bursting at its seams with food and provender, with the abundance of life.

Here is the list Eileen used:

The list seemed modest enough, but Eileen had managed to improvise from it the way a jazz musician might take a popular musical standard and give it pure, improvisational form. She had added strawberries, apples, carrots, and ginger, just like Charlie Rouse adding his saxophone solos to Thelonious Monk’s piano music. Eileen had plucked fruit from the bins into the blue basket the way a bass player—Ahmed Abdul-Malik at the Five Spot Cafe in August 1958 did with Monk—plucked improvisational chords on the big, stand-up bass, full of life’s rhythms, really full of optimism in this sea of despair, not Kilburn High Road, but Eileen’s own later life, so seemingly hopeless and foregone. Now she had been given, in Wallace Stevens’ words, a momentary stay against annihilation, she had been given a governor’s stay against execution. She had enough credit to buy this mother lode of groceries, this treasure trove, this gift of abundance.

Eileen smiled at the people in front of her and in back of her in the queue—the line, her Boston friends called it—to check out. They looked at Eileen as if she were crazy. After all, this was not some arty redoubt like Hampstead; it was working-class Kilburn, tough and no-nonsense, a commonsensical place, practical, crowded, and blindingly efficient in how it gave people what they wanted, then shot them back out onto the High Street, bag-laden, poorer, but with the potential to be less hungry, perhaps even less grumpy, less angry and feeling alone. They would eat dinner with family, watch television, and go to bed with their stomachs full. Eileen saw nothing but hope on this check-out queue, this queue that was like a stairway to heaven, if she might sample from Led Zeppelin.

Then came her turn. The check-out person wore a badge that said her name was Mary.  Eileen had encountered her many times. This Mary was decent enough, not harsh like the other clerks. There was a note of compassion in her face, especially her eyes. Like Eileen, Mary looked as though she lived by herself or perhaps with an elderly parent. At any rate, Mary had never married; that was obvious. She was a big, round, slovenly sort of woman, the kind you see everywhere in America, especially in the countryside. Eating was probably her only pleasure, Eileen imagined. Eileen was not a big, round, slovenly woman, but in every other way, she thought that she resembled that clerk Mary.

The groceries zipped through Mary’s scanner, and the end result was a figure just over thirty pounds, well within Eileen’s credit limit. She would top off the mobile at the cigarette counter near the exit. Then she would go home to cook dinner, not watch television because she had none, but maybe listen to jazz on the radio, and actually go to bed with her belly full, no food anxiety, no mad jealousy of other people’s good fortune, no desire to be anyone but who she was, Eileen O’Faherty; she would be stuffed, sated, elated, sleepy, and ready to drift into the deepest slumber. Eileen fumbled with opening the last of the plastic bags, her hands all thumbs, and Mary and the person behind Eileen popped open the bags for her to fill the remaining items into them. Eileen then handed Mary her credit card, and waited for Mary to come back with the slip for her to sign.

“I’m sorry,” Mary said, “your card has been declined.”

Eileen had bagged everything now, the olive oil, the juice, the instant coffee, the bag of penne, the fruits, the cheese, the yogurt, the oats, and all.

“Declined?” she asked.

“That’s right,” Mary said. “Declined.”

Mary asked what Eileen wanted to do.

“I don’t understand,” Eileen said. “I checked my credit before going out, and it was fine.”

“What’s the problem?” the brusque assistant manager asked, stepping over to unclog the logjam Eileen had created in this queue.

The assistant manager was small and angular, brusque, bristly even, impatient to be done with Eileen or this problem or whatever it was. The assistant store manager had a touch of Irish in her voice, but not that lyrical Irish of Eileen’s mother and grandmothers, nor any of the compassion of the clerk Mary. This was the clipped brogue of angry head sisters in parochial school. Mary explained to her manager that Eileen’s card had been declined.

“Do you have another card?” the assistant manager asked.

Eileen had many cards. The only problem was that none of them worked. No, she said, that was the only card she had at the minute.

“Then there’s nothing we can do,” the assistant manager told her. “You can go off and call the credit card company to sort it out straight away and I’ll hold your groceries at the courtesy counter in the front of the store for a half hour.”

As Eileen walked back along the Kilburn High Road towards Maida Vale to the south, it seemed like every mother and child, every drunken father, every drunken bum and vagrant, bumped into her and shouted for her to watch where she was walking. Veiled women dressed from head to toe in black, with only a slit in the veil for their eyes, also bumped into her, and let fly with what Eileen imagined were infelicities of the Arabic tongue. African women, who were taller than Eileen by a head, told her to watch her step, to look where she was going. Teenagers in blue nylon jackets and pants with white stripes down the sides of them shouted in her face, and their girlfriends with their loopy gold earrings called out things like “Yo, bitch” or “Watch out, ya feckin’ eejit!” Eileen walked off crestfallen, a black cloud over her head like Pigpen in the Peanuts comic strip she read religiously when she lived in Boston, Massachusetts. She walked along the high road to a call shop and called up the credit card company to sort out what had happened. Though Eileen had paid the credit card bill with cash in a bank, she was told that it was not credited for four days—two days after the due date—and the late fee, plus interest, plus being fined for going over her credit limit—which they mistakenly put Eileen over—closed down her credit line automatically. They were sorry, the voice on the end of the telephone line said, but “there is nothing we can do about it, madame.” So Eileen went back to her flat at the beginning of Maida Vale, stomach growling, arms empty of any provender, and she wondered how much longer she could continue to live like this.

It was hot, bright; I don’t remember sound.  I recall a woman with hands pressed against her groin, I remember the Augusta twins, boys my age, had their arms around each other, and that my father shoved his pistol in his belt.  Albert lay on his back, eyes open, the blood dull red beneath him, a ring of something blue around his mouth.  When I turned to follow my father’s eyes, I saw Reesus trotting down Montana Street toward us.  He wore a yellow coat, a purple scarf on his head like a pirate.

Here comes Reverend Smiley, someone said; Reverend Smiley, said another, and there he was, rolling past Obediah’s houses, bounding from the buckboard, pushing past a drifter with a melancholy face.  Then he stopped the way a blind man stopped who’d walked into a wall.  He sank to his knees and touched Albert on the shoulder.

What happened?

Reesus began to sing about a light gone out.  My father’s shirt was green with blue suspenders.  Shut up, he said, and Reesus did, and the Reverend asked, What happened?  .

He had rocks.  Was going to brain me.

We looked.  There was a rock the size of a fist on the ground next to Albert’s body.  There was one in my father’s hand; he moved as if to weigh it.

My Lord, Ebenezer, you couldn’t manage a ten year old boy with a rock?

My father stiffened; for an instant worry made his eyes small, and then they weren’t.  I didn’t, he said, mean to kill him.  The Reverend stared at him.  My father stared back.  Then he dropped the rock, stood with arms akimbo, and when he spoke his voice had changed.

Get up off the ground, Reverend.  This here is sheriff’s business.

It’s my business, too, the Reverend said, and didn’t move.  My father said something to his deputy, a big man, who shook his head.  My father looked directly at him and said something again; the deputy shook his head.  So my father did it himself: pulled the preacher to his feet, began to push him toward the surrey, firm shoves between his shoulder blades, though measured; he’d not have wanted to be accused of mistreating the Lord’s anointed.  As he went, he seemed to search each scowling face to see if his restraint was noted, and when he saw me, his eyebrows raised.  I knew instantly what he was thinking, could see it on his face: he’d found an ally.  But he was wrong, I wasn’t his ally; only blindness or a gift for self-deception could have told him so.

He had rocks, my father said—he who never explained anything to me beyond the heat of hell, the worthlessness of negroes—he had rocks, I told him to put them down, he wouldn’t….

Somebody coughed, then it was still, absolutely silent, and I knew from my father’s shrug that it had dawned on him that he need provide no further explanation.  He stepped the preacher up into the buckboard, gave him the reins; he slapped the horse who went obediently forward.  Then he turned to us.

Go on, now.  You know I can’t have you blocking the street this way.  Go on. Some left hurriedly, as if they feared reprisal if they didn’t, or wished to put as much space between them and what had happened as quickly as they could.  Others took their time, and held my father’s eyes as he glared.  I was one who chose to be deliberate in retreat, keeping my head turned so my father couldn’t see my face or hear me.  You are a murderer, I whispered, I’ll never be like you.

I looked to see him lumbering into the jail.  His deputy was lifting Albert’s body; the head hung as if too heavy for its neck.  I could feel the sun, how hard it was to breathe, and I turned toward home, carrying the powder my mother would use to make biscuits light as air we’d later eat in silence.

There was only one church in Dominion, Missouri in 1851, Christ the Redeemer, and it was to it we walked on Tuesday next for Albert’s funeral.  I recall how Bass, wearing a blue tie with no shirt beneath the black suit my father had given him, smelled, inexplicably, of milk, and how three lines of people merged to make one line, and how it broke to let Adrian pass when he arrived.  Years later, Adrian would be the drummer for a traveling band out of Saint Louis, work he’d give up for a widow with four children and a voice like smoke, but on that morning—bark colored, thin as a second thought—he sat cross-legged on the ground, his back against a gravestone, pulling from his drum the measure for our walking.  We went slowly—first my father, then my mother, finally Bass and me—we were silent, heads down until we stepped into the sanctuary where two ushers bumped as they approached us.  The white one deferred, left the negro flustered.  She was, I later learned, going to lead us to the front of the church as befit my father’s standing, but she didn’t know what to do concerning Bass.  Slaves had the right to worship, but could they sit in front?  Behind us, people leaned to either side, stood on tiptoe to see what the matter was, and when they did the drum began to beat like the heart of a man who was running.  My father, annoyed that attention had been brought to bear on him, pointed to the nearest available seats, one row from the last, only to have the usher balk again at how far they were from the pulpit.  Only when my father hissed did she relent, and it was in that charged uneasiness that we took our places.  I looked to where Reesus sat, a lime-colored cloth around his head; in front of him were the Wright and Webster families.  Then the Bowman clan, a light complected gathering of eleven: we’d learn that the fifteen year old, Harvest, had given her virginity to Reverend Smiley just the week before.  Across the aisle from the Bowman’s was Samuel James, who ran the bank, and Chauncey Riddle, who owned the general store.  The Augusta twins sat with their parents next to the Dixons and the Higginbottoms.  In front was Della, Albert’s mother.

The drumming stopped; the sun punched through the haze, and in the pulpit the stained glass window of John the Baptist’s head appeared to bleed.  Albert lay at the foot of the altar, but I couldn’t see him.  I could see the sap that stained the white pine casket; I could see the lilies bowed above it, but I couldn’t see him.  When I stretched to make myself taller, there was movement at my back, and I twisted to see the negro choir file in in military neatness: men in black, women in white, and when they reached the altar they arranged themselves to sing.  Our God is a mighty God, His glory to be praised, they sang, one verse repeated, one verse that soared, diminished, and when they were done, the Reverend stepped to the rostrum.

His text was taken from Romans 6, verse 9: For we know that Christ being raised from the dead will never die again; death has no dominion over him.  He was halfway through his sermon when I understood there’d be nothing said of how Albert had died, or who’d done it.  I sat, holding myself, seething, and the white choir, the women with daisies in their hair, trooped from the back of the church, gathered at the casket where they sang a song I don’t remember.  When they’d finished, the Reverend announced it was time to view the body, and in the hush that met those words, Albert’s mother began to moan.  Nine months before, she’d lost her husband; it was Saturday, the two of them playing cards, she’d accused him of cheating.  Drunk, laughing, he’d taken the lantern to the privy, trailing a blanket because the October night was brisk.  He’d fallen asleep, the lamp tipped over, lit flesh and blanket, corncobs….

I stood before the body of the boy who’d been my friend, his white shirt starched and ironed, the hands at his chest so scrubbed the flesh below his fingernails was raw.  The blue had been wiped from his lips, and he’d been rubbed with oil that left him shining.  The oil smelled sweet. I wanted to lower my head to see if beneath it I’d find the smell I knew: dried leaves crumbled in the hand, mown hay, a musty blanket.  I wanted to open his eyes.  I was standing next to Bass, who was shaking his head as if he’d just been asked a question; the negro choir was humming, the drum outside a steady, solemn beat.  The usher said I had to move.  She said it gently, and I turned, blinking, and followed Bass to where my parents stood in front of Della.  My father’s words were awkward, rehearsed; my mother’s heartfelt, though without distinction.  I swallowed, said I was sorry.  Bass chose not to speak, simply placed his hand on Della’s hand.

Back in our seats, the drumming stopped, the negro choir sang again, and the congregation honored its exhortation to join in.  In the pew before me, November, a negro girl who’d recently come to Dominion, turned and greeted me.  Her smile was wide and warm; a purple scar the length of a finger marred her throat.  I was later to wonder what had caused that scar, and if it was why she’d left where she was to come to Dominion, but by the time I’d gathered courage to ask, she’d been slaughtered.  But then, on that morning, she was very much alive, and when she reached for me, I gave my hands and let her pull me to my feet.  Her eyes were gray and danced despite sorrow.  I smiled back and let the tears come.  I was standing next to Bass who was singing with great force, and now, all around us, white and black raised hands and swayed to song that made this promise: we were not without hope; while we waited for the life to come, the life we lived could be worthwhile, abundant.  All we need do was learn to bear each other’s burdens; all we need do was learn to grieve each other’s loss.  I was twelve years old, but I understood this.  I wept  as a sweet and powerful feeling rose in me.  I knew where the feeling came from: community, the sense that I belonged and didn’t have to be alone.  What I didn’t know was that the feeling wouldn’t last the hour, or come again until the negro troupe arrived.

My father went off after the service, but I stayed with my mother and Bass through the burial and then the funeral feast, during which Reverend Smiley circulated between tables of ham and chicken, greens, biscuits and lemonade, avoiding any mention of what had happened, choosing only to note how fine it was that all of Dominion had sat down to eat as one.  I’d asked Bass why negroes and whites so seldom came to the same Sunday service—the nine o’clock attended largely by whites, the one at eleven by negroes—and he said that most of his people preferred to sing and dance their religion, while whites praised God in a less expressive way.  It didn’t have anything to do with better, he said, it was just different, and so the first separation of the races in Dominion came not by law, but custom.

When the Reverend had retired, and all eaten their fill, several whites, led by Samuel Adams, took it upon themselves to speak to what brought us together.  Albert’s death was unfortunate, they said, a tragic misunderstanding.  But we must not let it poison who we were, we who lived in peace, who stood by one another.  We’d always done this; if one needed an example, recall this January past when, for four days running, snow fell, filling the valley to our knees, and how those men arrived wearing great coats, steam at their mouths and at the mouths of their horses.

Can you prove these slaves are yours, they said, are these negroes free?  Where are your bills of sale, your papers?

Remember how they waved that proclamation permitting them to carry away any negro whose status couldn’t be proved, and how we, white and colored, stood shoulder to shoulder, defying those men, and how God-fearing Ebenezer Dooley stepped forward to say he’d neither answer their questions nor allow the head of any negro to be touched or taken from us?

I watched as the negroes nodded.  You right.  Sheriff stood up to them mens, and us’n wid him.  You got that right, they said, their responses tight and muted.

It wasn’t until later that I learned why my father had been so noble: Obediah, the mayor, had insisted that my father carry out his duty as sheriff and protect all citizens and their property, or lose his job.

Obediah sensed the mood of negroes after the shooting, and convened a group

to discuss the incident.  The white men were Samuel James, the banker, Chauncey Riddle, who owned the general store, and the post master, Jonah Willis.   The negroes were Lucas Webster, the richest negro in Dominion, and Alexander Tibble, who owned the stable.  Rumor was that the negroes’ argument was brief: my father’s actions were indefensible.  But Samuel James said that to punish a sheriff for the shooting of someone he thought was about to commit a crime would be to strip discretion from him and to undermine the effectiveness of his office.  Then a vote was held, and the outcome, posted on the courthouse door, held that the shooting of Albert was self-defense.  The finding further noted that both my father and Albert would have benefited from restraint.

The night after the funeral, I lay in my room thinking of how Albert had come to Dominion a year and a half before, like me, an only child, his father a carpenter, his family free.  He had large, startling eyes, dark and depthless; he was small, what old folks referred to as “delicate,” and I felt a connection to him, though it was almost a week before I went up to him at recess.  When I did, he was sitting by himself, back against a tree, looking off into the distance.

Hello, I said, and he said hello, his face so open, and we began to talk. I decided what made us friends was that neither of us cared for baseball; later I understood that what drew me to him was his kindness, his stillness that mirrored my own, and because we shared a reverence for beauty that we found in the shapes of clouds, bird flight, the depth of a rose’s red.  I couldn’t bring him home, my father wouldn’t have stood for it, but I could go to his.  His room had books along one wall, and small carvings of animals and people his father had made which delighted us for hours.  When we were done with those, we made up stories, we fished, caught fireflies in jars and ran through nights holding their glowing before us.  Once we tried to move the Founder’s Rock, convinced treasure hid beneath it.  Then Albert’s father died, and Albert’s face went shut like a slammed door shuts, and what we did came between us.

Outside, heat lightening lit the night.   I blinked, and my grief came down, not in tears, but desolation.  Albert was dead.  And my father had done it.  I sat up, lit the lamp, then tiptoed across the floor to the dresser, opened the next drawer from the last, took the watch from where it lay beneath two sweaters.  My father had given it me for my tenth birthday; I was not allowed to use it except on special occasions—Christmas, Easter Sunday.  I carried the watch back to the light; it had wound down, the hands said 4:22.  I blew the lamp out, went past my parents’ room to the door that led to the yard, stepped into air thick with the smell of two stones struck together.  For an instant lightning made the night noon-bright, lit the shed, the barn, and I went to the side of the barn and threw the watch as far as I could through the darkness.  I heard the sound it made when it struck a tree, and I stood, wondering if there was anything else that came from my father that I could be rid of.  I thought of his God, and eagerly denied Him.  Said to all and to anything that would listen that I’d live out my days as a disbeliever, that I’d not serve a God that allowed my father to go unpunished for what he’d done.  For a moment I experienced a fear that God would strike me down, but the moment passed, only to be followed by the sense that my father, glowering, loomed in the dark behind me.  I spun, but there was nothing.  Trembling, exhilarated, but needing something I couldn’t name, I set out for Bass’ shed, only to pause when I reached his door.  Bass had recently said I was too big to sleep with him, that big boys didn’t go crawling into other people’s beds.  I’d turned back toward the house when his voice called out, so unexpected I jumped.

Who that?

Me, I answered.

Me got a name?

Me, Bass.  Michael.

What you want?

To come in.

Well, come on then.

I pushed the door back.  I couldn’t make him out in the darkness, but then the lightening flared.

You all right?

Yes.

I could hear him make room in the bed.  I climbed in, my back to him; he put his arm around me. You scared of dying?

I’d seen death: the horse thief my father hanged, the surprise in the doomed man’s eyes when the fall stopped so abruptly.  I’d been to funerals before, and I’d gone with my father when Albert’s father burned himself to death, saw his body, gaunt and blistered, sitting straight up on the privy hole though there was nothing evident to hold it.

No, I ain’t scared.

Sad?

I miss Albert.

I know you do.

We lay awhile, not speaking, the lightning coming and going.

Bass, why’d my father do it?

Baby, I don’t know.

I should have done something.

Like what?

I don’t know.  Anything.  Not just stood there.

Wasn’t nothing for you to do, Bass said. You do what you can in life.  Just don’t let it pass when you have the chance for doing.  Otherwise you live with empty.

Empty?

Uh huh.  Here…and here. He’d touched my chest, my stomach….

Bass, I said.  I feel things….

Do?

Like I’m different.  From everybody else but Albert.  Alone.  I make up stories.  Some times a thing’s so beautiful….

You wants to cry?

I nodded, forgetting he couldn’t see me.  I do.

Aw, baby, that ain’t nothing to worry about.  That’s fancy, imagination.  Another source of truth.….

Fancy’s true?

Sometimes.

How’s that?

Just is.  Make sure you feed it.

Feed it?  How?  With what?

Learn to pay attention.  Read.

Read?  Can you read?

No, baby, I can’t read.

Want me to teach you?

Can’t, it’s ‘gainst the law.

No, it’s not. I sat up.  Nearly every negro in Dominion knows how to read.

Not slaves.

Well, we won’t tell anyone.

He laughed.  Last thing old Bass want is for you to get put in jail by the sheriff.

He put his arms around me and laughed again; he was what he called “tickled.”

I turned so my knees were pressed to the backs of his thighs.  What about alone?

What about it?

Why do I feel so alone?

You’re not alone, Bass said, you got me.  You got your mama and your daddy.

I didn’t answer, and he, as if he sensed how unsatisfactory his answer, asked, How about we go fishing tomorrow?

I could feel his slow and steady heart against my hand; I could smell him, the odor of milk gone now, leaving the scent I knew: deep musk and slightly sour, and as I burrowed against him, lightening lit the room.

My father was an angry man.  Once, furious at something I can’t recall, he dug a

hole in the yard large enough to hold a body, then filled it.  Another time, again driven by rage, he cut down a tree that narrowly missed the house when it fell.  Shaken that he might have destroyed Obediah’s property—the house, the barn, and Bass’ shed were part of his salary—he took the afternoon to recover, then set up lanterns, sawed and chopped the tree into pieces, telling Bass he didn’t want assistance, and so labored through the night.

He called, my father, all the time on Jesus, but had no compassion.  I suspect he became a sheriff solely for the joy of apprehending those who broke the law; such acts were, at root, ungodly, and he was a hater of all ungodly things, not just crimes, but men and women who committed them, that and pleasure: sex, laughter and the drama, and he’d speak of these with a fervor that made his eyes shine, the light of which served not to lead, but blind him.  His recipe for salvation called for purifying the mind through observing the properties of fire, by subjugating the flesh through fasts and prayer, and he held that if one must stoop to craving, let it be for naught but sacrifice.

My mother’s name was Kathleen; she made a life for herself that consisted of her garden, of visiting the sick, and assisting savages in Peru.  On my fifth birthday she began my education about work and thrift and money.  It was my charge to feed the chickens, one of which she gave me; I sold the eggs to Dominion’s wives.  Half what I earned went toward the upkeep of the house, half into a can that sat on the mantle, and it was these savings that provided me means for a peppermint stick or a gift for someone’s birthday.

Substantial in stature, my mother carried herself in a way that suggested she was trying to hide her size—shoulders hunched, arms held to her sides—postures even more exaggerated in the presence of my father.  She called my father Dooley; she, to him, was Mother, and their preferred medium was silence occasionally broken by references to sin and the wretched Peruvian poor.

I know little about my parents’ lives before they married; my father had come from North Carolina and met my mother in Dominion, she the daughter of parents who moved to Tennessee after the wedding and who died before I was born.  Of my father’s family, I know that a group went to California to make their fortunes, only to vanish in 1830 somewhere between Haywood and Sacramento.  My father never spoke of them, and I wondered what they were like and why he hadn’t gone with them.

At some point after he killed Albert, my father took to whiskey.  At first he sought to conceal it, but soon gave up the pretense and carried a flask in his back pocket for the last years of his life.  He’d reach for it in the midst of one of his rantings: how negroes, in their failure to invent things, to explore the world, to make art, were of no account, and so to be used for one’s purpose, monitored and soundly punished should they step beyond their place.  Their natural condition was slavery and if, by some act of providence, they managed to rise above it, they inevitably turned to crime.

Now that I have some sense of human complexity, I’m prepared to argue that no man is entirely evil, nor none entirely good, and so I search for the good in my father.  The effort leads to Bass.  Although my father loathed negroes as a group, it was Bass who received his most meaningful affection.  I know this is contradiction; after all, my father whipped Bass, changed his name from Curtis, and never set him free.  But there’s also no denying the pleasure my father took in putting a window in the shed so his slave could have light, or the fact that he gave Bass a stove for heat in winter, and I know I didn’t imagine the laughter they shared at the hole my father dug and filled all by his self.  Neither have I invented the fact that when my father grew ill, it was Bass he wanted at his bedside, Bass he chose as his companion for the journey to his death.

A week after Albert’s funeral, Samantha Dixon collapsed outside the bank, spit glistening on a tongue that never spoke again, though she lived to be one hundred.  In the wake of Samantha’s silence came awareness that slaves had been afflicted with an ailment that caused them to drop plates and stumble over slop jars.  Shortly thereafter, this malady appeared to affect free negroes as well; they began to bump against their neighbors at the bank, or in the aisles at Riddle’s, causing whites to step back, perplexed, not only at negroes’ sudden clumsiness, but at their refusal to smile and beg their pardon.

Then Reesus, in blue pants and shirt, a white scarf around his head, appeared outside the courthouse at four o’clock one afternoon, ringing a cow bell.  When he had sufficient audience, he announced that what was wrong with negroes, slave and free, was that they were upset with the ruling that Albert’s killing was in self-defense.  In addition, they were disappointed with Reverend Smiley, who’d not sufficiently lamented Albert’s death, or challenged the notion that the life of a negro boy had no value.

We’re upset, too, whites said, but it’s over.  Let bygones be bygones.  No one’s said the boy’s life had no value.  No one’s said that at all.

Thank you, Reesus said, as if they’d given him what he’d asked for, thank you very much, and he went away, only to come back the next day at the same time to prophesize of bones scattered in a wilderness, a blood red sun above a desolate horizon.  While most were taken with the imagery and found it thought-provoking, a few divined that Reesus might be trying to stir up trouble, and so they went to my father, who said it was best to ignore Reesus (who he’d always referred to as crazy).  Folks shouldn’t come to hear him speak and shouldn’t respond to him, my father counseled, for if they did, he’d simply be encouraged.

The next day, wearing blue pants and a yellow hat, Reesus held out his hands so all could see the carving on the right one.  Times, he said, were about to get hard.  A pestilence was coming, from the throes of which a savior would appear, only to have his life taken, not on a cross, but by hanging.  Then he told of a mighty struggle, the deaths of boys like Albert multiplied, and no one there to mourn them.

None of this raised anybody’s ire.  The trouble began when Reesus foretold that once the struggle had ended, white people’s unborn children would slide from their mothers’ wombs to ravage the world by eating up everything in it.  This caused negroes to smile and whites to shake their heads and hiss at him.  Others tried to engage him in debate, which he studiously avoided, saying it was his job to tell the future, not explain it.  If they needed things explained to them, go see a preacher.

All while this was going on, my father was taking his own advice and not looking in Reesus’ direction.  It wasn’t until Riddle’s pregnant wife screamed at Reesus for suggesting that her child would be a monster, then collapsed, weeping in the street, that my father intervened.

Reesus, he said, You need to stop this mess.  You can’t talk about people’s children that way.  People particular about their children.

I ain’t said nothing about that woman’s child, Reesus said.  Her child be half-grown by the time monsters start arriving.

But it’s not necessary.  None of this is necessary.

I ain’t doing nothing, Reesus said, but saying what I seen.

What you seen? You can’t see if tomorrow will be Tuesday.  You can’t tell if ice will melt in the sun.  Now I want you to stop.

Stop what?

Whatever it is you call yourself doing.

Why?

My father sighed.  Because I say so.

Oh, Reesus said, because you say so. He shook his head and looked at those of us who stood there as if to say did we see what he had to put up with.

Reesus, my father said.  Don’t make me hurt you.

Oh, you goin’ to shoot me, too?

If I have to.

My father didn’t get too close when he said this; he knew the history, how Reesus had come to Dominion in 1836, a boy of thirteen, the word Tiresias carved on the back of his hand.  Negroes took him in, but when they asked, he wouldn’t tell what had happened.  Neither would he stay long with any family, as if he feared to be indebted, or wanted to distribute fairly the small burden that he was.  While negroes eventually shortened his name, for the most part they accepted a boy who was in love with colors, who wore long sleeves in all weather, who swam in the pond fully clothed.  He held to modesty even when it came to baptism, which he submitted to in a green scarf and overcoat and a borrowed winter hat.

It was Miss Alice, the colored school teacher, who told us who Tiresias had been named for, and for a while some wondered if what made him so strange was that he was both female and male.  Reesus never responded to that wondering, though when he heard of his namesake’s gift, he declared that he was a prophet.  His first pronouncement came in the spring of 1837: a president, he said, would die in Texas, men would fly and women storm the gates of power waving underclothes.  When none of these came true, Dominion lost interest in him until five white boys sought to see for themselves what lay between his thighs.  One of those boys grew up to go to Albuquerque where he worked in a gambling house, forever lisping because of what teeth had done to his tongue.  Another’s nose never regained ability to smell; the rest were beaten to unconsciousness.  Following that skirmish, Reesus disappeared (gone off to prophecy school, some joked), returning seven years later to live by odd jobs, refusing to say where he’d gone or what he’d done while he’d been there, much less what he made of the fact that in his absence slavery had come.

He made another attempt at predicting in1849, proclaiming that a drought would descend upon Missouri, and it was while he waited in vain for this to happen that I went up to him where he leaned, disconsolately, it seemed, against the Founder’s Rock.  He wore a yellow shirt and hat, green trousers, a blue sash around his waist.  I had no strong belief in Reesus’ gift for prophecy, though sometimes, for reasons I didn’t wholly understand, I’d wished he could tell what was to come.  So it was with one part unfounded hope and one part desire to make him feel better that I asked if he’d consent to tell my future.  He blinked, then looked around, insuring I was alone.  He was cautious about children; the Augusta twins had set fire to a bag of cow dung left at his door, and some other boys were fond of throwing rocks at him.

Three, he said, and held up that number of fingers.

Three?  Three what?

Three people.

What about them?

You’ll love three people.

That’s all?

No, you’ll stand and watch a fire.

A fire? What kind of prophecy is that? I said, and when his face fell, I walked away, disgusted.  He called after me, said something I couldn’t make out, but I never turned back to hear it.

Later, I wondered why he’d said three people and not three women.  And did he mean that in all my life I’d love but three?  Or that I’d love all three at the same time?  Each notion confused me.  Finally I concluded that the stricken look on Reesus’ face came from his understanding of how poor his prophecy had been.  It was second-rate, possessed neither art nor vision, and while it might have mentioned fire, shed no light.

Ginger’s had over a hundred lovers and with all of them, she says, she tried to convince herself she really didn’t want to see them, that they weren’t worth seeing, but she’d wear herself down and go back for more every bloody time.  It was all about appetite, she said.  Abstinence may lead you to God, but in the end hunger will feed you.

It’s Freddy who’s leading me to God, Frederick Jameson Heinz Jr., not the catsup Heinz, who I think were part of the John Birch society, right wing fanatics, but this might be close.  I’m Freddy junior’s art teacher at the Community Center’s After School Program for teens.  He’s the son of a revival preacher, what they’re calling a prosperity preacher of the prosperity gospel, the ones who preach how to come to Jesus and make your fortune doing it; we’re talking private airplanes, yachts, Harleys sent by anonymous supporters, vacations in Hawai’i, New Zealand, Costa Rica, Paris, designer handbags, Prada this and that and this preacher, his dad, wears a pinkie ring plastered with emeralds and diamonds—someone is prospering all right.  God knows where the money is, and he knows how to get the money to you, praise Jesus! the revivalists shout, and I’m ready to commit about the worst sin you can, around here anyway, which is to say the preacher’s son, fifteen years old.

I’m going to fry for this, I tell Ginger.

Be like that Smart chick, she says, was it Pamela Smart?  Goes to prison for having sex with one of her students, gets out and she’s right back at it.  Wasn’t she the one that ended up having a kid with him?  Ginger stubs out her cigarette, stabbing it with the spiked black heel of her boot.  We’re on our break at the Bagel Palace, outside in the alley behind, rain flogging the tin roof of the shed we huddle under, drops whizzing over our heads.

You’re confusing your Jezebel educators, I tell her.  Pamela Smart’s in prison for plotting the murder of her husband, which she persuaded her teenage lover to pull off.  You’re thinking of Mary Kay Letourneau, who did it with a twelve year old.

Whatever, he was big for his age, Ginger sniffs.  Look at it this way, that she could do it, do him, well hell, you got to give it to her.  She shrugs and straightens her eyebrows with a licked finger.  They have those hard young bodies, Ginger sighs, and they’ll never be as handsome again.

My father told me about the handsomest man he knew, part Cherokee, his friend who helped him after my mother died, a generous man.  Then Alzheimer’s struck and the last time my father went to visit him, this handsome man had climbed up on a cabinet and was howling like a wolf.  Just one month later he was gone.

After a careful study of diseases that can kill you I have come to believe that people have sex to stave off death.  Death is in the driver’s seat, the fear of it, mourning what it’s taken, the embrace of it for some, its inevitability for the rest of us.  Sex stalls things, the physical weave of two bodies, two lives, however long it lasts means for those minutes anyway death can’t snuff you because you’re part of someone else.  And if it tries to, the old climactic heart attack, you’ll live on in the other, particularly when he tries to have sex with anyone else.

While not up to Ginger’s stats of a hundred lovers, I do have a history.

There was the baseball player who was actually a minister, but he wore his Red Sox uniform good and tight around the butt and those well-packed thighs the way they do, shoulders too.  Should be a sin to build a minister with muscles like his.  I figured this minister would rather have been a baseball player, which is why he and his almost as hot friend played dress-up in these uniforms, tossing a baseball back and forth on the wide green lawn of the United Church of Christ.  When he invited me inside the Parish, the little house they kept their ministers in, I didn’t have my diaphragm and worried about that, but as it turned out this muscular minister couldn’t get it up and we didn’t need the thing.  Though he sure seemed to have a good time trying.

It started when I was in kindergarten and used to hum and click my tongue against the roof of my mouth during nap time, and when the teacher made me pull my pallet in the corner I’d open my legs so Dougie Dorfman, who always got in trouble too, could see my underpants.  There was the cute mute who used to smoke dope on the rock wall that separated our yard from his, and one day he knocked on my door when my father was out; I’m in my bra and panties and I let him in.  He placed his hand on my chest and pushed me down on the bed like toppling a tree.  Didn’t even slide my underpants off just twisted them to one side.  Which is good time economy, because he was coming to the sound of my Dad’s Chevy truck roaring up the driveway and he wriggled out the window, still buckling his pants right before the key clicked in the lock.  The street kid with the waist-length dreads outside my dorm at art school, townies the rich kids called them, who banged out a rhythm on whatever he could get his hands on—garbage can lids, old coffee cans, wailed on a mouth harp too, peering up at my window, that beguiling grin.  When I invited him in I said here, slide down the zipper so I can check out of this dress; his hand lingering as I knew it would, the dip in my back, my hips, my butt, he who probably didn’t own a second pair of pants to change into.  Driving home with the rock and roll junkie and his car slides off the road into a Mill Valley stream.  Instead of asking if I’m all right, him on top of me and both of us in the black freezing water, he goes, My guitar!  Where’s my guitar!  But I showed him.  I spent the night with the baby-faced cop who investigated the accident.

It wasn’t always this much fun.

There’s getting sandwiched between two greasers on a packed subway in the city, one thrusting one way the other behind.  Another who will forever be faceless, the salty smell of him like raw shrimp, his breath hungering on my neck, his hand swimming around inside the waistband of my pants, pressing behind me in a crowded malasada line at the old Halawa Stadium those years after my mother was gone and my dad said why not try Honolulu for awhile?  This after we lived in Houston, Las Vegas, L.A.; he just kept heading west.  What could I do, eleven years old, but buy my malasada and Coke?  The one in the Chiclet-yellow Corvette who promised dinner but instead takes me to his house in Manoa, breaks a popper under my nose and dives down on top of me on the kitchen floor; we never even made it to his bed.  In a van at Sunset Beach, God was he all of thirteen?  Sun like a dragon’s breath and his hand, a little brown snake wriggling into the open window, stuck inside my bikini bottom, latched on like a leech.  The Panther’s paws squeezing my neck so hard the bruises looked like I’d survived a strangling and the dorm R.A. said You have to tell… his teeth at my throat, roaring me down into a cave so deep and black it would be another decade before I could begin to crawl out.  Maybe the worst was Mick Knowlton, my surfer boyfriend, after we moved back to California, San Diego this time, his hurting sex that made me cry, and how he would comfort me when it was done.  He liked to remind me that his father looked like Kirk Douglas, like this was supposed to make any difference at all.  Shhh, he’d take me in his arms, rock me against his suntan chest; it’s over now.  As if this too, is just another thing we are born to endure.

If you have blurred vision and a sudden, severe headache you might have a cerebral hemorrhage, which means you will probably bleed to death in your brain.  Though you could be a hemophiliac and bleed to death from any orifice.  Or maybe you have Stokes-Adams syndrome, which could stop your pulse due to a heart blockage—now there’s a way not to bleed to death.

I used to have nightmares about my mother abandoning me, particularly the years when we lived in Hawai’i, a recurring one on Kailua Beach.  At least I think it was my mother, a woman who looked like the photograph on my father’s dresser, the one in the koa frame with her long black hair flying out, like a hard wind was blowing and she’s just trying to hold on.  In the dream it’s stormy, pounding surf, its whipped grey froth like a bubbled-over gravy and the churning clouds overhead.  My mother and I sitting cross-legged on the sand at the water’s edge, and suddenly a big wave swoops over us, tugging me out.  I stretch my child-arm toward her, still close enough she could grab my hand and hold on, but she doesn’t.  Sits there as my mouth fills up with seawater and I am being dragged out into those deeper, darker places.

We lived in Kawela, a three room cottage in the Norfolk Pines.  At night geckos chirped and the trade winds whispering through the open screens, and I pretended she was there too.  Would she have made my clothes?  Made us all manner of delectable food, instead of the nightly Spaghettios, my dad’s signature dish?  I imagined watching her get ready to go out, the tangy scent of her—my father would keep her well stocked in French perfumes.  Her small, rounded shoulders in a sleeveless shift she made herself, her tiny waist in the fit of it, the matching heels.  Then my father would go out and I’d feel a small terror that he wouldn’t return and hunker down in his closet, inhaling the Old Spice fragrance of his shirts.

On my wedding night, room service at the Kahala Hilton sent up the customary champagne, and right beside it in a decorative crystal decanter the milk my new husband ordered for his pregnant wife and fetus.  The next day we flew to where I live now, fourteen hours later and my history unmade.

After viewing the Bodies exhibit in New York, with its jars of fetuses at various stages of development, Ginger tells me as we’re trying to flag down a taxi, about the illegal abortion she had back in the sixties when they poked something metal up you to dislodge it, only she was a dancer in those days with tight musculature and nothing happens.  So she goes home, and later that night she’s doubled over in the bathroom, cramping, bleeding, groaning, and she catches the little twelve week old fetus as it slides out of her, holding this thumb-sized, curled up sea monkey, and her mother, a frustrated English major, calling from downstairs, Everything copasetic up there?  For the rest of her life, Ginger tells me as we climb into the cab, she will have recurring nightmares about what happened next: flushing it down the toilet.

When I gave birth to Pet, I hyperventilated and passed out.  I had read that in 1940 hyperventilation was used to alter a woman’s perception of pain during labor, forever after known as Lamaze.  I figured, why bother with the classes?  Scared the bejesus out of my OB, who when I explained about this later said, Well sure, and once upon a time they punched you in the jaw to knock you out before surgery.

You can bleed to death from a childbirth hemorrhage, or a botched abortion for that matter.

Freddy Jr. said to come to the revival service because he has to be there, his parents said so, and maybe we could sneak out, he said, there’s an old abandoned building next door and there’s bats in it.  His eyes shone, pupils small and black as pepper.  He grinned but I wasn’t sure at what, me or the bats?  We haven’t done anything yet, at least nothing I could be arrested for.  A tentative kiss in the playground tunnel as we walked through the park behind the Community Center, and it was him yanking me in there, one of those frothy canvas things painted to look like something that flies.  I thought maybe he’d smell like bubble gum or puberty sweat, but there was no scent, just the push of his chapped lips against mine, the tenderness of his tongue licking my palate.  Monty! he said, blushing.  I had told him to say my name, that whispering Ms. Trent while he kissed me didn’t do much for the libido.  Working with clay at the Center it was Freddy’s hands, running up and down the wheel’s spinning, sloppy movement, attempting to shape something or other and I put mine over his and felt that fifteen year old fire.  You have great hands, I said, and he thought I meant his potential as a sculptor or someone who makes clay pots, which I think showed a kind of maturity.

When the thousands of migrating birds soar through the night over New York, you can watch them from the Empire State Building’s observation deck, eighty-six floors up.  With the city lights illuminating them from below they look like little shooting stars.  Peregrine Falcons, once on the brink of extinction but who have now adapted to life on the skyscrapers, pick off a good hundred or so every season.  This is a success story.  They must think they’ve died and gone to heaven, the skies raining goodies, the ultimate piñata.  They hover up in the clouds, waiting to swoop down on the migrants like bats on a mosquito.  I read in a poem that bats can’t fly up, as in they can’t lift off; they have to swoop down to glide.  Figuring poems aren’t necessarily a source for facts I looked this up on the Internet and never found it.  What I did find was a report from some classroom where the kids studied bats, and one little budding CEO proposed that the reason bats hang from their feet is because it’s easier than hanging from their thumbs.  What the poem was really about was the coroner’s report from the poet’s brother’s death: heroin, cocaine, marijuana, unresponsive….  When my dad found my mother unconscious in their bed it was already too late, but he called 911 and told them she was unresponsive.  Not cocaine or heroin, the old fashioned way, her wrists sliced open with a razor.  Probably he had to throw away the mattress and definitely the bedding, though I never asked and he never said.  I was in the next room, three years old and she put me to bed first, as I picture it, kissed me and tucked me in, told me she loved me.  Sometimes I think I can still catch a whiff of her, a mingling of cinnamon and defeat.  Maybe my father was supposed to come home before he did.  Stopped for gas, groceries, traffic sluggish, a meeting that ended too late.  Maybe if I had cried for her, the sound dragging her out of her perpetual sleep, back into her life as my mother.

The poem began with a bat and ended with one, falling to glide; gliding to rise.

Here’s what I know about bats.  The deadly White Nose Syndrome is a new disease and its affecting bats throughout the Northeast.  Thousands of them have died from New Hampshire to Virginia.  A bat colony right here someplace in upstate New York has had a catastrophic level of deaths in young bats, this article said, which means not a lot of old bats down the line.  They call them maternity colonies, where female bats gather under the roof of a barn or attic, maybe even Freddy’s old building, where whatever heat there is rises to the ceiling—they like it hot—to bear and raise their pups.  If they have this disease they get a white fungus on their muzzles, wings and tails, become emaciated and die.  The females give birth to just one baby and many of these babies have disappeared.  Reports are that the mothers are abandoning their babies.

I read about stuff like this to avoid doing other things, such as my paintings.  I’ve got enough talent, whatever that is, to teach it to kids.  Why would the world need one more mediocre painting that says nothing about diseased bats, disappearing pups, the things that are here then gone?

Of course there’s also Histoplasmosis, a fungal infection contracted by inhaling dirt or dust where the fungus has grown in soil enriched by bat guano.  Or how about rabies, the majority of recent cases having been spread by infected bats?  Viciousness, rage, excitability; after this comes paralysis then death.

What I’m afraid of is if I go to that revival Freddy senior will see it in me, the bad, and drag me down front to try and save me.  I’ve been to one of these before, with my husband when we still thought there was a chance, and nothing excites them more than finding the worst person in there, waving their fleshy arms in the air like antennae, belting out their hymns while somebody leads you down all blazing hot and airless under the lights in front, then Freddy senior will put his hand on your forehead and you fall back with the spirit, or because you’re so stifling you’re about to faint, and start babbling in tongues or some such thing.  Then you’re supposed to be healed, sins washed clean, good to go.  Except with this one, the prosperity gospel, for the rest of your remaining days as a reborn prosperous Christian you’re supposed to give all your money to their church, then pray for more.  God knows where the money is, Freddy’s father was quoted in the newspaper, and he knows how to get the money to you.

I ask Ginger to come with me but she says no, that so many Jesus freaks under one tent gives her the willies.  She shimmies her head, her shoulders, her dyed hair the color of a mango.  We’re working our shift at the Bagel Palace, rubbing our gloved hands up and down the rumps of bologna, hunks of roast beef, slicing deli turkey, shredding the ham for the Palace’s famous ham and egg bagel sandwich.  We’re the meat ladies.  I come here after teaching because part-time at the Center doesn’t give me near enough money to pay child support to my ex-husband, who does nothing all day while Pet is at kindergarten but lie around in what used to be my house too, toking cigarettes, chugging beer, eyeballing ESPN, you name it and it’s not getting a job.  But because I’m the bad seed who left our son alone one day while he napped, for a dalliance with another man, Jody’s lawyer called it, I get to pay the piper—that was my husband’s way of putting it.  You screwed the pooch, Monty!  Another of his witticisms.  Jody boinked his skanks at night while Pet and I slept, which by rule of the court makes him the model parent.

The town I live in, Jody’s home town, is on the Susquehanna, cited as one of America’s most endangered rivers—we’re talking raw sewage, animal carcasses, fertilizer run-off, industrial chemicals, human sludge and waste of all things mechanical to old barns fallen in, anything heavy enough to sink, and even not, judging by the prevalence of plastic tampon applicators whizzing by on the current.  Eventually it empties into the Chesapeake, at a place ironically enough called Havre de Grace.  On the night a man dove into all of this I slept, waking to what sounded like a train wreck, a tornado, the growl of engines battling flood stage currents, the sound that something inside me knew even before the news told it, was death.

Last time I called my father he was trying to get my grandmother up.  Home for him now is St. Louis, his mother’s house.  Am I dead yet? She asked.  I pictured her hunched into a sitting position at the edge of her bed, her blunt shoulder blades, soft doughy skin of her back as he removed her wet nightgown, slipping a dry one over her head.  On the days when she is unable to get up at all (and there are more and more of these) he changes the wet sheets right out from under her, sliding fresh ones on.  Am I dead? I heard her ask again.

Here’s another thing about bats: they fly at night around the bridge the man jumped from into the roiling river water below.  They look like little black firecrackers shooting up into those bridge lights, then soaring down, winking out.  I guess the lights attract mosquitoes, which attract the bats, but what attracted him?

How hopeless was he, the man who jumped?  What is the line for this, where on one side of it we hold forth, soldier on; step over it and we slit our wrists.  Earlier in the week I went back on antidepressants.  A partial list of things that made me miserable:

Squirrels huddled in the rain.

Rain.

Stop-Loss and the exhausted soldiers—kids, eighteen, nineteen, whose only hope for college, for a life was to sign up, sent back to war again and again.

Manhattanites who live in designer high rises, and in our little upstate town half of Main Street is boarded up, its black and empty storefronts.

Birds dropping like wet leaves onto the feeder in the dark fist of a spring that may as well be winter, for all its rain, rain, rain.

The chiming of my phone that day when before I picked it up life was one way—I had just returned from buying a steaming mug of Green Mountains coffee, chocolate milk and peanut butter crackers for Pet from the Quickstop, both of us settling in to watch Animal Planet, Pet’s favorite—and after I hung up it was something else, the lawyer’s call that my son would no longer be allowed to live with me.  My insatiable appetite, they called it.  They weren’t talking about food.

The rain has finally stopped and the late afternoon sky is the color of dishwater when I get to the revival, figuring I can sneak in at the back of the tent, lift up one of the flaps and if Freddy is looking for me he’ll see me, and if he’s not, well, I’ll consider it a sign.  Maybe from Jesus himself, who knows?  Suffer the little children… only I don’t think he meant Freddy.  Who I see right away as I slip inside and head up the bleacher stairs, two by two to the top.  He’s in the front row beside a jowly woman with pink hair.  His back is to me and his head is down, and I can see the outline of those diamond-hard shoulders through his white shirt, that perfect triangular shape of a teenaged boy.  My heart is beating too hard, my breath in my throat.

So the worst has already happened, my son living with Jody who sued for custody to punish me, locking me into a financial obligation that’ll keep me rubbing bologna rumps and trying to convince yawning teens that art matters for the rest of my attractive years—by the time Pet’s finished college I figure I’ll be dried up.  What’s at stake? I think, listening to them belt out some hymn then another, hands pulsing upwards, and Freddy senior, who isn’t too bad looking himself, though with the well-fed middle-aged man’s gut bubbling over his belt, its giant silver buckle that I can see from here has a cross on it (I’m betting it’s real silver), howling about the wages of sin and being saved from the bad we do in the name of the devil to do good in the name of Jesus (he pronounces it Jay-suss).  The air inside the tent is stagnant, the dankness of our sodden spring compounded by however many sweaty bodies, arms waving madly.  Wages of sin, I’m thinking, these prosperity gospels give that a whole new meaning.  Maybe he’s saying you can buy yourself out of the bad you’ve done, for a price and you’re home free.  What would it cost me, how many decades of beefy contributions in the offering plate to purchase my soul back after I lost it, snorting a line with the bouncer at the Positively State Street Bar then blowing him in the storage closet while my two year old napped in his crib, a mile away?

Freddy Jr. as if on cue twists his neck around, stares up at me and grins, makes a motion with a jerk of his heart-breakingly blond head toward the flap of the tent that leads out.  He whispers something to the pink-haired woman who nods, then gets up, that lanky, jangly body with its adorable teenaged butt and moves toward the exit, with me lingering just long enough for him to step outside before I’m there too.

I asked my father once if it was because of me, a kind of prolonged post-partum depression, and he shook his head.  She was just a lost person, he said; I thought I could save her.

Bats are warm-blooded animals that bear their young live and nurse them, leaving them with the other babies while they fly off in search of food.  Bats eat about 600 mosquitoes an hour, one bat, 600 biting, blood-sucking bugs.  Bats are good, Freddy tells me and I nod, though stare up at the rafters with a little trepidation where they hang like bunches of bananas, the building old and decayed and smelling of some sort of rot—just another structure that once housed some failed business long since abandoned when hard times struck.  Hard times have been going on in upstate New York for Freddy’s entire lifetime.  It’s called torpor, Freddy explains with an impressive authority—what did I know about when I was fifteen beyond smoking pot and inviting some boy or another inside my pants.  When they rest their temperature drops, he tells me, to whatever the temperature is around them.  So on a rainy day they’d feel pretty cold, he says.

Freddy’s eyes are glowing in the sunset dark of the room, or what I imagine to be near sunset, who knows with the thatch of grey sky outside thick as a shag carpet.  Did you know, he says, that during their mating season males will do it with a female just coming out of torpor where she’s all sluggish, and when that’s done they’ll go after another female, even other males.  They’re promiscuous, he tells me, flashing that grin.  I know that word, he says.

Huh, I grunt, and grab his hand that’s been nervously fiddling with the buttons on my shirt cuff as if opening these will expose something.  I consider a strategic placement on my inner thigh but feel instead its smoothness, its newness.  Slender long fingers, already formed, not like Pet’s that are encased in baby fat, the dimples where one day his knuckles will protrude, grow hairy, and then he’ll become a man.  How much of that growing up, I wonder, will I be there for?  A weekend here and there, take him to a ball game like the non-custodial dads do, a hotdog then home to Jody and his skank of the week?  Though maybe that’s not entirely fair.  After all it was my father who stayed with me, my dad who didn’t give up.

The wreck of the building is drafty and I shiver, watching the bats start to stir, a wiggle of an oversized ear here, a sketchy wing there.  Bats are not pretty animals.  Freddy slips his arm around my waist, not with the sureness of a man, rather the boy trying to figure out what the next step should be.  Let’s sit, I tell him, thinking I’ll help him along, as we collapse onto the cold concrete floor.  I run my fingers through his hair, his scalp warm and a little oily—amazing how teenage boys can feel hot even during these damp spring days, their inner furnace fueled by raging hormones.  A memory of a night when we lived in Hawai’i, on the beach with one of them, sneaking out after my dad was asleep, snuggling up with this hot-blooded boy in a sleeping bag on the sand, trade winds blowing the palms above us, rattling their fronds, the moon coating everything with a milky, stippled white.  I barely knew him but let him do what he wanted; what did I have to lose?

Freddy’s hand has made it to my breast and I can feel his fingers trembling.  My heart thrums in my chest and there’s that familiar ache, that physical yearning, but something else too, more empty, a longing, but for what I’m just not sure.  I take his hand in mine and kiss his fingers.  Do your parents do things with you? I ask him.

He shrugs, What do you mean?

I don’t know, ball games?  I stare at him, his funny, distant look that won me over his first day in my art class.  A look like he’s with you, but not.  Like maybe he has another, more essential life somewhere else.

They’re pretty busy, he says.  We have a lot of stuff though.  I nod, remember Ginger telling me I should do the preacher instead of his son.  People think the Holy Spirit has commanded them to write checks to those guys, she said.  That’s got to beat the Bagel Palace.

The bats are randomly flying about, a chaos of flapping wings above us, then gliding out through a hole in the wall near the ceiling, one after the other.  They’re going to look for food, Freddy tells me, it’s sunset.  He points to a weak orange light shining through a cracked window; some of the clouds must have finally cleared.  I gaze at Freddy, his golden arm hairs in the pale light, the perfect line of his spine, his expensive haircut purchased by the grace of the prosperity gospel.  They’ll find their food by echolocation, he says, where they make these little noises, clicks and purrs, and bat mothers find their babies that way too, making sounds that the babies recognize.  But they’re not blind.  People think bats are but they’re not.

I have a sudden image of my father making clicking sounds to my grandmother as he brushes her hair, my grandmother who has macular degeneration and can no longer see.  She was once an impeccably dressed woman, her cashmere jackets, matching pumps, the best bridge player in her neighborhood; a former librarian who taught my dad to treasure books, my dad who read to me every night for years, even after I no longer wanted him to he insisted on that half hour, the two of us.  How must she feel now, or maybe she doesn’t, can’t think it, remember it long enough to know, that all of it is gone?  The most intimate of one’s grooming, using a toilet, is beyond her.  When I visited them last year, in a glimmer of her former droll humor she said: Not a problem, I just wet.  She keeps losing weight, dissolving away.  Is my father afraid of her dying?  Or perhaps he’s afraid of her not dying and losing more and more of her every day.  Does he worry that one day he’ll wake up and the woman that was his mother won’t be there?

I think about clueing Freddy in on the White Nose disease, about how a number of those bats he’s watching fly into the night may not return.  Do you know, Freddy… I picture myself saying to him, staring straight into his earnest eyes, still filled with something like hope.  But why spoil it for him.  Besides, maybe enough will survive and eventually become like the Peregrine Falcons, hanging out in the clouds, under the stars, hovering over a world filled with migrants, theirs for the taking.  A success story.

Saying Triple X made the user feel much badder and cooler and chiller than saying alpha-methyl-dextrose-phenethylamine or the sugarcoated upper or “a secret alliance between some pharmaceutical company and a Monsanto subsidiary that needed to get rid of a lot of excess glucose they’d made from corn.”  It was called Triple X because all these women who overdosed right when it first hit the streets were found naked in these poses that seemed, well, cinematic.  There were still lots of stupid people who posted ads for their “porn stash” on Craigslist; idiots who didn’t mind if the Feds figured out they weren’t discussing their dirty movies.

Jade was a friend of a friend of a friend who’d gone to NYU with me and got sucked into the boring route in life, something that involved offices and starched shirts and accounts and zero ingenuity whatsoever, and now her friends Leyva and Mike were dragging me out to the dance floor in this club, which is exactly where I didn’t want to go.  Almost all the people out here looked as disturbed as they did.  We were all jumping up and down in a rhythm that had nothing to do with the music because the notes were moving twice as fast in their heads.

Leyva was a tall, hot blonde who would be even hotter if she stopped doing this stuff and started sleeping every once in a while, and Mike was her similarly hedonistic man, cut from the same blonde, tan cloth that made them look like surfers, albeit surfers that were a little too gaunt or wasted or thin or unmuscular to hike themselves onto surfboards and attempt to survive.

Jade finally crawled out of the bathroom, grabbed my hands out on the dance floor, yanked them around her neck and forced me to dance with her.  So we bounced and slid and shook while her hair hit me in the face and I spent every single minute of it thinking about what it was going to feel like when I was outside.  The wind would blow my hair up on top of my head and rush through my jacket on my way to the next deal two avenues east and six blocks down at an address across the street from my favorite falafel joint.  And then I was there.  Outside the club and hurrying along the cobblestones to Friday’s next act, determined to finish my night and leave before Eddie’s people found me.

#

As the troubles of the world increased during this recession, demand for chemical ways to wipe those troubles from the mind increased, allowing me to put away enough money to retire at twenty-five.  Retire from this, anyway.  Come Sunday, I’ll be living at my house on Tybee Island and looking for a smaller, less exciting business to purchase and run, like a restaurant or a body shop or something ordinary like that.  When I showed up with several inches of cash at the closing, no one batted an eye, because eye batting isn’t really what they do down there.  There were a couple of whispers and a whole lot of slow uh-huh-ing, and then I shook some hands and went to look at the water from the second floor deck of my house.  Blue and clean country water.  After seven years in the city, I was ready to wake up in the morning and look out the window and see nothing but watery horizons and a couple of other beach houses.  A view that wouldn’t clutter the eye.

I’m from Georgia, but no one here knows that, because when people ask, I tell them “rural South Carolina” or “backwoods Alabama” and their eyes all glaze over, because no one here wants to spend large breaths of time talking about places they have no interest in locating on a map.  So I’m actually, in practice, from “down there,” or “the south,” and the listener always nods and makes a non-committal noise that signifies that they’re sorry I’m not from someplace more easily identifiable yet objectively worse, like Philly.  The part of Georgia I’m from is on the wrong side of the fall line, a tiny town that I always imagined was sinking into its red soil out of boredom when I was growing up, and while I’ll be happy to be in Georgia, I sure am glad I’m not going back there.  Two more deals to go.

#

Some large fraction of the world was smoking on the sidewalks between the club and destination number two, and I looked at all the smokers carefully as I went by, watching for the signals of my people.  Trembling hands, rapid-fire speech, the juiceboxes that women often carried in their purses for the sugar high that enhanced the Triple X high.  The crowds on the streets were popping mints and crunchy candy instead and I liked that, thought it was more original.

The next address was a familiar two story tan brick building in the Village with one of those metal plates on the first floor that said some artist had died there more than a hundred years ago.  I’d googled the artist’s name once late at night when I was curious and was treated to a brief summary of the variety of early twentieth century uppers that had killed him, the powders and pills that had excessively stimulated the people of yesterday.

She’d left the front door open as usual and was on the phone talking about some sort of charity event she’d be attending the next day.  The conversation was over soon enough, and she came to find me and cradle my chin and take her weekly dose from my left pocket, and I inhaled her scent to wipe my nose clean of clubbing smells before getting too involved in her life for the last time.  She only kept me for twenty minutes because I made sure to time our encounter precisely, putting the evidence in the plastic bag she always gave me so I could toss it outside, several feet from her uncurious husband’s domain.  Part of me wanted to say something, to clear my mind before I left, figuring that way at least she’d know, even though I knew it would be in terrible taste to tell her about my weekly visits to the tiny apartment he shared with that woman, that woman with the bony nose and sharp chin who’d propositioned me about five minutes before they propositioned me together three days ago when I was last there in one of those moments that made me glad I was leaving the business and purging my life of these people with their bare knuckled needs.

#

There are a surprisingly high number of people in the drug distribution business.  It works just like all other businesses in that it behooves me to concern myself most with the people operating near my own position.  Eddie is kind of my boss.  He receives large quantities of Triple X, he gives me a fraction of what he’s got, I pay him, I sell the stuff for a profit.  If I hadn’t decided to buy the house, I never would have made my relationship with Eddie more complicated than it needed to be.

I needed to add maybe an inch of cash to my pre-existing savings to become a homeowner.  And some of that inch came from Eddie’s money.  I asked him to front me for this last stash, and he didn’t hesitate, since we’ve been working together for years now.  But I have absolutely no intention of paying him back.  The voicemails on my business phone indicate that he’s figured that out.  But it’s ok, ’cause I’m leaving anyway and he’s not going to waste years of his and other people’s time wandering around the rural South to find me.

#

I tossed the small plastic bag into the trash can outside her building before stepping into the gap between her porch and the sidewalk and hurrying down the street for the night’s meal.  But when I cast my third backward glance at the darkened street, I saw someone duck into a doorway and out of sight.  Glance number six proved that someone was still walking around behind me in that odd way, taking a succession of steps and then making a quick movement off the sidewalk.

Fear is a useless emotion.  It is a primal mistake that I never allow to fully rise up in my chest.  When I feel it coming, it always tries to settle in under my breastbone, and I deny its grip, its determination to rattle my composure.  It is best to close the eyes for a brief second and let it dissipate.  When I saw that he was still following me, fear attempted to make its clammy entrance into my head and heart, and I turned it back at the door.

#

It was finally time to hand over my client list, a spreadsheet that told the only section of my history that the people I met those days really wanted to know.  Rows and rows of names of people who as far as I knew only had one thing in common.  I’d printed it out and it was ready.

Josh reminds me of myself five years ago, doing what he needs to do to pay obscene NYU tuition when his legal money sources proved inadequate.  But he’s smarter than me, with a well-thought out plan to quit the business when he graduates in two years and do something above ground and squeaky-clean.  Hopefully he’s actually got some follow-through in him.  Or he’ll end up like me, with enough money but a ridiculous life.

He showed up in the universal light blue collared shirt of business and a pair of freshly ironed khaki pants.  He shook my hand solemnly as he accepted the list.  I watched him as he walked out the front door and took a second to look at all the stuff in my apartment before throwing a few things in a backpack and going outside.  I threw the apartment keys in a garbage can three blocks away and they clanged on the metal as they touched down.

#

My college fund ran out after freshman year, but I wasn’t ready to give up on New York then.  The city had seduced me with its thoroughly un-southern freedoms and pulsating all-hours activity, and I didn’t want to go back to living life at the pace of growing grass.  But I eventually found that I was best suited to this after striking out in telemarketing, retail, and all of those types of jobs that pretend they’re cool and fresh and fun but really revolve around getting someone coffee.  It’s not like I woke up one morning and decided to do this.  It chose me.  And then it chose me again, pulling me even farther in its grasp after graduation, when I failed to land a presentable position doing something else.  I tried to resist the pull through waiting tables and ringing up others at checkout while I worked on making something better come along.  But I moved here because I had dreams of living a certain lifestyle, and after a few years, it became clear that this was the only thing that was going to make that dream anywhere near possible.

#

The guy who was following me had dark hair and a nose with an inordinate number of bumps that were highlighted under the glut of New York street lighting as he turned his head to the side in the motion he made before ducking back into the darkness right after I tilted my head to search for him.  Why did he think he was so hidden?  It was impossible to hide under all the light from bodegas and grocery stores and street lamps and people’s cell phones bluishly and orangely cracking open the dark sky.

#

The falafel sandwich I downed on my way to my final stop of the night only cost three bucks and was crisp and green tasting from whatever the green stuff is in falafel.  Everyone who worked at the falafel shop thought I worked the night shift at one of the many twenty-four hour drugstores around there, because I thought the play on words was funny the first time that lie occurred to me, and I couldn’t pass for a clubber or a third-shift airport employee.  I was also probably too starched and stiff seeming to pass for a drugstore employee, because all the drugstore employees I’d ever seen around there had enormous tattoos, and I looked pretty corporate.  But the folks frying up the falafel only made that New York level of conversation with me, where you learn everyone’s name and profession and then you turn quickly to everyone’s firm opinions on some flavor of current events and you realize you’ve talked to them for a solid half hour and not revealed an unflattering amount of information about yourself.  The falafel guys bounced around behind the counter with a familiar energy while they snacked on something that smelled sweet and I wondered if they’d finally joined the party, a good party to join if you work third shift.

#

There was only one pursuer, I was sure of it.  But his eyes were everywhere.  Shiny and moist and obvious.  We almost made eye contact around every corner.  He’d moved from hiding in a single doorway to sitting in almost every doorway I passed.  It was amazing that so many bumpy nosed people lived here.

#

My ex-girlfriend started out doing infinitesimally small amounts and took forever to move up the chain.  She lived in a fifth-floor walk up that I was sure my stuff was helping her climb to every evening.  I exhaled deeply from physical exhaustion when I finally reached her landing.  She greeted me with a downward turn of the mouth and a couple of garden-variety insults of my character, and I threatened to leave twice before she got in a more acceptable mood.  And then she did her line and became pliant and lovable and asleep, and I forgot myself and dosed off for a while.

#

When I woke up, someone was pounding on the door.  Her carpet was thick enough that I didn’t feel bad about sidling right up to the peephole and finding my stalker pacing the hallway right outside between knocks.  I tried to wake her up to say goodbye but she was asleep, really dead to the world with limp arms and suspiciously open bare legs, and I looked over on her nightstand and found that she’d done another four lines while I was sleeping.  And then I cracked her bathroom window open and mentally prepared myself to scale the building down to her courtyard, where I’d hit the ground and go running for the bus to DC that would take me to the bus to North Carolina where I’d buy a car and drive to Georgia.

Except that I didn’t get out the window before he cracked the door open to stare at me.  We made urgent eye contact while I took in everything about him that I could absorb in a couple of seconds.  That bumpy nose, his slick dark hair, the angled angriness of his mouth, the dark gun he held in an outstretched hand, pointed roughly at my chest.  I readied my own gun for whatever the future held as he approached me, stopping his advance when we faced each other across from her prone body.  I could hear the low-level buzzing of the fear that I usually ignored rising up in my ears, and it threw me off my game as he raised his gun and aimed for my shoulder.

#

The shot was so loud and so close I was sure he’d hit me.  By the time the noise cleared, my two intact shoulders and I were out the window, my feet pointed down towards the trees of her courtyard as I made up the distance between her apartment and the ground.  I flew past the air and my mind blinked its way into doubt from dread and surprise and I realized I wasn’t sure I deserved to make it to Tybee.

Her father stopped a few yards up the field.  He lifted his head skyward, then turned away, pulled his shirt from his baggy blue jeans and wiped his face.  His recent days in the sun accentuated the creases around his eyes.  His forehead, giving way to a receding hairline, looked pink and painful.  Emily had the urge to press her finger against his head and remove it, to see how long the pale imprint of her fingertip would stay.

Hands on his narrow hips, he said, “No way to spend a vacation, huh?”

“It’s definitely depressing…. There should be more people.”  She thought of the missing girls, two of them twelve years old, a year younger than her.  The third was only three.  Emily imagined them abducted, struggling.  She wondered which was worse, losing your mother slowly, over years, or, all of a sudden she’s gone, vanished.

“For you and me it’s new, we haven’t been up here that long, but these girls have been missing for months.  When they first disappeared, I’m sure hundreds of people were out looking for them.  Over time, though, people…”

Give up, Emily thought.

“…move on.”

His words vibrated in her head – move on - and she felt a sudden need to find clues.  Then memories:  her mother, dead almost a year, the way her fine black hair had framed her face, so pretty; the tiny lines at the corners of her mouth, barely there, delicate.

She felt the sun’s oppressive heat.  It shouldn’t be this hot so early in the day, as though the earth’s thermostat was out of whack.  She wanted to pull her shirt over her shoulders and toss it into the sky, her pants too.  She wanted to shed everything.

“Ready to keep looking?” he said from a bent position, his palms resting on his knees.

She looked out over the field, at the spattering of fellow searchers, leaning over, sweating, eyes squinting from the sun, just like her.  The same thing was happening on the beach, along the roads leading into town, the cliffs.  “What’s the point?”

“What’s that mean?”

“You think they’re still alive?”

“You have to have hope, Em.  It’s what makes you… keep going.”

You have to have hope, the words hung between them like a vicious taunt.  There had been no hope for her mother.  She wondered if joining the search party had been a mistake.

*

Leaning heavily against her Louisville Slugger, she watched her father standing at the edge of his small garden.  He held a dented gray watering can.  “There should be signs of life,” he said.

“It’s only been a week, Dad.”  She admired his enthusiasm for something he had no talent for.  The raking, the research, all the seed and plant catalogues he’d been studying.  In the city, the only vegetables he saw were in the market.  Trying to keep his mind off Mom, she thought, something he hadn’t been able to do in Boston.

“I’ll pick up some tomato plants tomorrow,” he said.  His eyes bored into the ground, as if willing things to sprout.

“They’ll grow soon.”  She saw the shadows from the trees over most of the garden and said, “Is this the best place for it, the shade and all?”

“It’s where the last renters had it.”  He gestured to the perfectly square patch of ground that had been overturned when they arrived, and the foot-high wire fence that surrounded it.  “They must’ve known what they were doing.  More than me….Hey look,” he said excitedly, on his knees in an instant, his thin body and lanky limbs surrounding a corner of the garden.

Emily dropped too.

“Something broke ground,” he said.

“Looks like a weed.”

“You think?”  He leaned in, his nose almost touching the tiny green sliver.  “Damn.”  He pushed away from the garden and crossed his legs.  “So, how was practice today?”

“Fine.”

“The boys give you any trouble?”

“The usual….Hair’s too short….I should wear normal clothes….You might hear from one of the coaches.”

“What did you say this time?”

“Called one of the kids a fatass.”

“It’s about time girls played baseball.  This summer there’s you.  Next summer there’ll be two or three more.  Stick with it.  You’re a born leader.”

She was definitely going to stick with it.  Not to be a leader, but because she loved to play, even if she had to share the field with morons; the game was worth it.  Besides, there was that dark-haired boy she wanted to see again.  “Do you know who founded the town?” she asked.

“Why?”  He looked up at the odd question.

“They kept going on about how Cumberland was discovered by ghouls, and how the ghouls stole away girls.  One kid was a real jerk.  I almost punched him in the face.”

“The fatass?”

“Yes!  He said that’s what happened to those missing girls.  He said I was next.”

“Come on, Em, they’re just bullies.  Ghouls kidnapping little girls?  You want to find out about the town, we can go to the library.”

The noises came upon her so fast she wasn’t sure what she heard first, the chain, the growls or the neighbor’s door snapping shut.  She looked up and saw a black German shepherd racing toward them.  Her father stepped in front of Emily and picked up the rake at his feet.

The dog was enormous.  It had a thick luminous black coat, except for the tops of its paws and around his eyes, which were light brown, and a large, perfectly round mole on the right side of its massive snout that drew attention to its menacing black eyes.  The beast’s mouth was open, its teeth sharp and yellow, thick saliva dripping down.  Her father stood at the edge of the garden, his rake out in front of him, the sharp metal tines inches from the dog’s head.  “Get outta here!” he yelled.  The dog lurched forward and her father jabbed the rake toward it, causing the shepherd to stop in mid-lunge.  The dog looked capable of eating the tines in one gulp.  They stood like that for several seconds, exchanging paces back and forth, each capturing a few feet, then surrendering a few.

“Baron.”  A shout from the next yard over, the jangle of a leash.

The dog turned its head toward the new voice, but only for a second.  The neighbor appeared, a short heavy man.  His stomach rode high on his torso, right under his chest, his undershirt stretched tight across.  He walked right up to the beast and leashed it.  “Sorry,” he said while tugging the chain.  “This has never happened before.  He’s a gentle animal.”

“He’s a crazed animal,” her father said, finally lowering the rake.

The dog rushed toward her father once more, growling, jerking the neighbor forward.  Immediately, the rake went up again, but the neighbor yanked the leash, stopping the dog.

“Really, this has never happened,” the dog’s owner said, struggling to contain the dog.  “I’m John Cutler.  Would’ve been here sooner, but we’ve spent the last couple of weeks in Vermont at my son’s place.”  He looked down at the dog, then shook his head.  “Baron’s usually playful.  Funny – “

“Ha-ha,” her father said, watching the animal take short rigid steps toward the Cutler house.

Baron turned its head back to her father.  If the dog could speak, Emily thought, it would’ve said, “I’m gonna kill you, you sonofabitch – kill you, eat you, and savor it going down.”

*

The following day was a game day and, as usual, the dark-haired boy was in the bleachers.  She saw him from the dugout and from her position at first base.  For most spectators, watching the game was secondary.  They ate, played catch in the dirt parking lot, talked, crowded around the ice cream and frozen custard trucks.  Not him.  He more than watched the game, he seemed to examine it closely.

After the game, her father congratulated her on the win, especially her triple, and suggested a stroll to Cumby Corners, an intersection of stores where he bought hardware supplies and gardening tools, and she baseball cards and comics.  She started to answer, then noticed the boy walking down Seashore.

“You know him?”

“He comes to the baseball games.”

“Is he on one of the teams?”

“I don’t know,” she said.  “He sits in back.”

“Oh.”  Her father continued looking after him.  “So, what do you say?  A little shopping, a little ice cream?”

“I think I’ll hang around here.”  She saw a bandage on her father’s right knuckle.  “What happened?”

“Oh, that dog.  The damn thing won’t let me in the backyard.”

“He was loose again?”

“Yes.  He nicked me before Cutler managed to pull him away.  Swear to God, you need a bulldozer to move that animal.”  He gave her hair a gentle tug.  “All right, I’ll see you soon.  Oh hey, you’ve been staying out too late. I want you home before dark.”

“Just been playing pick-up games when they let me.  Sometimes they go late.”

“Not anymore they don’t.”

“Dad,” she moaned.

“Emily,” he returned the moan, then bent down and kissed the top of her head.  “Want me to take that?”  He pointed to her glove.

“Na, I’ll keep it.”

She moved quickly down Seashore, the boy still in view, a paperback sticking out of his back pocket.  He took a left on D Street.  She followed, but taking the turn she saw that he was moving faster now, until he finally disappeared into a driveway secluded by shrubs and a large willow tree.  She slowed her pace as she approached Pine Rentals, a cluster of a dozen or so small white cottages.  No sign of him, just an abandoned Big Wheel on the side of the road.  She returned to the playground, watched a few innings of an America Legion game and walked to the beach.

It was her favorite time of day at the ocean.  She tossed her mitt to the ground, kicked off her cleats, pulled off her socks and dropped backwards on her elbows.  Burrowing her feet into the warm sand, the tiny coarse grains gliding through her toes, she watched the surface of the still water slowly darken.  There was no one around, but she could hear distant hollers and laughs down the southern strip of the beach, where the skeleton of an old amusement park stood, apartment complexes and condominiums being built around it.  She felt the breeze off the water and leaned all the way back, her fingers interlaced behind her head.

She thought of her triple, sprinting, head down, the approach and inside lunge to each base, the “Safe” call amidst a cloud of dirt; she thought of her mother, imagining how she would have spent time here, where they would have gone together; and of the boy, wondering why he intrigued her, why she followed him home, a boy who would rather watch baseball than play.

There was hardly any light in the sky and Emily wondered how long she’d been there.  She remembered her father’s warning.  The water’s edge drew close.  She heard a sound from the dunes; no one there, just wind.  She thought of the ghouls Fatass had teased her about and imagined a hairy fanged beast skulking out of the tall stiff reeds, sweeping her up in its mouth and lumbering off.  Or maybe the ghouls were sea creatures, green and scaly, with webbed feet and tiny hooked spears for fingernails.

She thought of the boy again, the way her father had stared after him.  Perhaps she’d made a mistake by following the boy.  Maybe he hadn’t been simply staring at her.  Maybe he was lurking, waiting.  Was it him making noises in the dunes, parting the tall grass to get a peek at her?  She quickly put on her socks and cleats and grabbed her glove.

The shriek of a gull tore through the darkening sky like a baby’s scream.  It rose from the northern tip of the beach, Morden Cliffs.  She glanced over and saw the mansions on the mountain slope, huge windows ablaze with warm orange light, lawns that seemed to roam for miles; the water tower, whose thin spindly legs, it appeared, could barely support its massive, bulbous dome.  Where the mountain reached its peak, jagged rock erupted from the water like a battlement and overhung the sea like an extended claw.

*

The following morning Emily awoke, slipped on some shorts and a T-shirt, grabbed one of last night’s brownies from a foil-covered tin and stepped on the porch where her father was reading the newspaper.  She took a couple of bats from an umbrella stand when her father said, “Someone from the league called.  Practices are canceled, the heat and all.”

She turned away, disappointed, thinking of what to do instead.  Maybe grab her mitt and bat, head to the park anyway.  Scrape up a game.  Maybe play some tennis against the old Deerpont shoe warehouse.

“How about the library?” he said.  “I’ll throw some sandwiches together.  We can have a picnic by the high school after.”

The library was on the other side of Cumberland, toward Newcastle Point.  An old green Victorian house with a broad flat railing around the porch, its dowels carved into spiraling curves, and latticework of coiling grape vines and ivy about the shutters. Inside, the cool air enveloped them.  Her father climbed the stairs to Periodicals.

Emily found a couple of books with the help of the librarian, then walked to the paperbacks.  While spinning one of the racks, looking up and down as the books passed, she noticed him sitting alone at one of the two large tables in the middle of the room, reading a magazine.  She strolled to the neighboring table and sat at the end, a clear view of the boy.  His straight nose, tanned skin, wavy dark-brown hair.  She opened one of her books, The Coast of Maine:  A Close-Up Perspective, and quickly flipped to the index under Cs.  Skimming her thumb along the column, she heard, “Hello.”  She looked up to his smile, his wave.  She’d never seen him this close before; something about his right eye.  Not in sync with the other, or any part of his face.  As if it were…dead.  She said, “Hi.”

“You probably don’t – “

“Yes.  From the bleachers.  The games.”

“Right….My name’s Mark.”  He fingered the pages of his magazine, folding the edges back and forth, big glossy pictures, baseball.  Sports Illustrated.

She picked up her books, brought them over to the boy’s table and sat across from him.  “I’m Emily. You go to all the games, right?”

“Right….Sometimes the practices.”

“How come you don’t play?”

“Wish I could.  I was in an accident last year, around Christmas.  My eye, see?”  He rested an index finger below his bad eye.

“What about it?”

“You can’t tell?”

“No.”

“Really?”

“Well….I guess.”

“It’s all right.  Glass eye, but it’s made of plastic.”  He said it like he was showing off.  Maybe to make her comfortable, not a big deal to talk about it.

“Like Sammy Davis, Jr., right?” she said.  “My mother used to sing Candy Man to me all the time.”

“Peter Falk’s got one, too.”

“Who?”

“Colombo.”

“Oh….What kind of accident?”

“Hit by a car,” he said, then fell silent.  She vaguely noticed the sounds of the library…the clack of a typewriter…the turning of pages…a muffled cough.  “Why are you at the library?”

“Books.”

“It’s just I’ve never seen you here.”

“I’m looking something up.  The jerks I play with keep teasing me about the town, saying it was discovered by ghouls.”

“I’ve seen those guys.  They’re the ghouls.”

She laughed.  “They say these missing girls were abducted by monsters.”

Mark told her how, when the girls were first reported missing, the whole town, and even surrounding towns, gathered at the L Street Playground to form search parties.

“I went on one a few days ago,” Emily said.

“Were you here when they disappeared?” he asked.

“No, my father teaches in Boston.  We’ve only been in Cumberland a few weeks.  My folks stayed here for a couple of summers before I was born.”  They sat there looking at each other, then Mark turned to the side, maybe to shield his bad eye, self-conscious all of a sudden.  Maybe that meant he liked her.

Mark spoke quickly, as if to keep her there, “Why did you look for them?”

“I don’t know.  It’s just…”  She wanted to tell him about her mother, but didn’t know what to say.  She’d never brought it up before, not even with her father, afraid he might sink into one of his crying or silent spells.  “My dad said we should.”

More silence.  She struggled for something to say, hoped he would say something.  Anything so this moment wouldn’t just fade away.

She thought of all the days Mark had sat on the last row of the bleachers, leaning forward, studying every game, every inning, every out.  And she wondered what it would be like not to be able to play.  Her eyes on his skin, so brown and smooth, his eyes, that eye, then his mouth, small and somehow sad.  She imagined what it would be like to touch his face, run her fingers along his cheeks, let them rest on his soft pink lips.

*

Practice ran late so Emily arrived at Cumberland High after the opening remarks began.  Her first thought when she stepped into the gymnasium was that someone had played a joke.  Only a handful of people stood in a room meant to hold hundreds.  She walked toward Mark as the volunteer from the sheriff’s office finished his comments.  The crowd seemed despondent, as though resigned to the fact they’d find nothing out there among the bogs, meadows, dirt roads and beaches.

She felt dwarfed by the massive yellow-tiled walls.  At the top, where they met the ceiling, a wide row of windows ran along the gym’s perimeter, allowing in streams of sunlight that illuminated swirls of floating dust.  Emily imagined the rest of the town out there – grocery clerks, lifeguards, retired couples – peering through the glass, looking down on them and laughing.  When it was clear that no stragglers would arrive, the man from the sheriff’s department suggested boundaries where each party search and reminded them what to look for, then led them out the door into the sun.

Although most of the land along Morden Cliffs was private property, there was a public path known as the Cliff Walk.  Mansions stood proudly on their left, with wrap-around porches, greenhouses and cupolas.  To their right was the sheer drop of the cliffs and the ocean below.  This was the hottest day yet, the sky a bleached slate; a weightiness to the heat, like burlap.  It wrapped around them, pressing against their skin, their hair, their clothes.  They wore bathing suits, she with shorts and her cracked worn sandals, Mark in a T-shirt and black ankle-high sneakers.

From behind her, she heard him ask, “Is your mother up here?”

She moved more quickly, arms pumping, a military drill.  “She died about a year ago.”

“From what?”

“Cancer.”

“You must think about her a lot.”

She stopped suddenly and felt his hand brush against her arm.  They were at an outcrop of flat rock that extended beyond the rest of the trail.  She could see a small patch of the public beach; she saw St. Augustine’s steeple piercing the sky; the rolling dunes mottled with long wavy sea grass; but most of all she saw the sea, and when her eyes settled on it, she couldn’t pull them away.  She wondered what it would be like to jump, spread her arms, feel her body stretch its full length.  She knew she wouldn’t get hurt.  The ocean would protect her, cushion her against the shallow bottom and jagged rocks.

A gust of wind shook her from her reverie.  “Constantly,” she said quietly, turning to face him.  “I try to remember everything…fill my head with every memory of her I can, but sometimes they fly away.”

“I don’t…I’m not sure what to say.”

“You don’t have to say anything.”

They made their way along the twisting path, which led inland, and soon found their feet sinking into soft sand, their vision obscured by tall grass and sprawling bushes.  Rounding a bend, the vegetation suddenly stopped, giving way to an old cemetery.  The water tower stood over the decrepit graveyard as though it were an ogre keeping guard, the bent cracked gravestones its malformed children.

Around the small weed-strewn cemetery stood a stonewall, waist-high.  Centuries-old, Emily thought.  Maybe even built by Indians.  They straddled the wall and sat.

“Fatass said those monsters keep their victims’ hearts up in the tower.  And at night, if the moon’s bright, you can see the dome pulsing, as if it were breathing.  Stupid jerk, thinks everything’s a joke.”

“Do you think they’re still alive?”  He appeared hypnotized by one of the tombstones, a miniature Washington Monument, crooked and warped, like the spine of an old woman.  It stood in the row closest to them, or what must have been a row at one time; it seemed now the plots lay there indiscriminately, without thought, the earth’s movement over time causing the sites to shift, disengage from their original placement.

She imagined the skeletons beneath the ground moving ever so slightly, bit by bit over decades, in their disintegrating caskets.  “You have to have hope,” she said.  “It’s what makes you keep going.”

“If they’re alive why would they be out here?”

“Then go home.  I’ll find them on my own.”  He didn’t leave.  His only motion was a slight lean to his side, toward the graves.  “What’s the matter with you?” she said.

“Nothing…Just wonder what it’s like.  When you die.”

“It’s like being asleep.”  She’d never seen her mother’s body, but she remembered all the times she’d seen her sleeping at home and at the hospital.  “You don’t really know.”

“Just because you don’t know you’re dead, you’re still dead.  I was out for almost a month after I got hit.  I mean, don’t you think about the people you’re never gonna meet?  The books you’re never gonna read?”  He stopped, caught her eyes, then looked to the field.  “I talk to my father about it, he tells me to think of something else.”

Emily inched closer to Mark, until their knees touched.  Her hands went to his without thought and he took them in.  She leaned towards him and he did the same, their foreheads resting against one another’s.  They remained that way, everything intertwined, fingers, breath, hair, neither of them speaking.  She lifted her head and waited for him to do the same.  Finally, she said, “Are you going to look up?”  He did, but off to the side, to the grass again.  “Why don’t you look at me?”

“Stop it.”

“What?”

“You know what.”

“I saw it clear enough at the library.”

“Yeah, but I didn’t think you…we’d…end up…”

“What difference does it make?”

“It’s gross.  I can take it out.  It’s disgusting!”

She acted quickly.  Before Mark could move away, her lips were resting on the lid of his fake eye.  He seized up, but only for a moment, and when she lifted her lips from his lid, he opened his eye.  She looked straight into his glass eye, saw its stillness, its separateness from the rest of his face.  Then she kissed his left eyelid and held it for as long as she had held the other.

*

Even though the sun was making its descent toward the bay and the sandstone projects along windy Gulf Road, it beat down like a desert noon.  It was almost 5:00, and Mark and Emily were crossing her lawn along the cement walkway that led to the outside shower and back porch.  She saw her father and her heart jolted to her throat.  Heat immediately rose inside her, sweat breaking out on her forehead, on the back of her neck, the surface of her skin alive with tiny hairs.  He stood like a sentry in front of the garden, rake in hand.  Baron stood unchained, its maw agape.  And from its mouth, like a dark cave, emanated all that was unnatural – the endless unforgiving heat, the beast’s senseless wrath.  The entire sight was completely motionless, the thick hot air cementing it in place.

In the distance, Mr. Cutler rose from the cellar bulkhead carrying the leash, but stopped just before the standoff.  He took a few steps backward, confused, afraid to approach his dog.

The three of them stood around the silent battle.  Mark crossed in front of Emily.  She wanted to intercede, for all three of them to converge and drag the dog into its cellar where it belonged.  But she sensed any slight motion might set the animal off.  So she watched, for what seemed like minutes.  She turned to call the police or fire department and noticed Baron taking a step to his left, as if wanting to circle her father, not kill him but whatever was behind him.

The garden.  Her father must’ve realized it too, because he countered.  The dog took another step left; her father countered again.  Her father no longer blocking the garden, Baron sprung.  With the force of a shotgun blast, grass and dirt exploding beneath his paws, erupting backward, he tore into the garden with his snout, his two front legs digging mightily.  Tomato plants ripped from the ground, flying in the air like shredded paper.

Baron stopped, suddenly bewildered, then scampered to another section of the garden and began digging again, this time more feverishly, obliterating the fledgling carrot, onion and bean plants.  From the garden rose a growling sound, deep and guttural.

An odor suddenly slammed Emily’s nostrils with the savagery of a hammer blow.  Her fingers went to her nose.  Breathing through her mouth caused a rotten foul taste at the back of her tongue.

Her father walked slowly toward Baron.  She followed, but remained at a safe distance.  The dog’s head shifted from side to side at the bottom of the hole, and when it rose she saw something in its mouth, several things.  Maybe stones, or roots of some kind.  Baron spit them out with a grunt.  Pieces landed a few inches from her father’s feet.  He dropped his rake and picked up a two inch-long sliver, ignoring the dog’s saliva that coated it like grease.  He smelled it, then held it at each end, testing its strength until it snapped, leaving a jagged shard in each of his hands.  He dropped them and rubbed his hands fiercely on the grass.

He bolted to Mr. Cutler and grabbed the chain, then ran to the dog and maneuvered the leash around its neck.  He yanked the leash with his whole body, was joined by Mr. Cutler and they pulled Baron, howling and thrashing, from the ditch.  They tied him to one of the supports of the back porch, after which her father ran up the stairs, three steps at a time, yelling, “Don’t go near…Stay away from that hole.”

Mr. Cutler cautiously gazed into the crater, then quickly backed away, a flurry of short steps.

By the time her father came back outside, sat down on the top step of the porch and extended his arms for Emily to sit with him, sirens could be heard in the distance.  He took her hand and led her through the house to the front yard.

Four cars arrived in minutes, cops bursting from the doors.  They followed her father and Mr. Cutler down the side walkway.  Emily and Mark stood to join them, but were stopped by her father’s stern, “Wait here.”

They sat silently, their eyes on the police cars that practically blocked the street, red and blue lights spinning and flashing.  In less than five minutes at least fifty people were gathered around the house and cars, pouring onto the front lawn.  People she recognized from the beach, the neighborhood, the ballpark.  More cars arrived, and a white truck with “MAINE STATE POLICE” across it.  Uniformed cops poured out, removing barricades from the back panel doors and creating a corridor from the street to the yard.

So much waiting, people looking at each other, eyes darting from face to face.  Emily felt the crowd swelling.

Channel 7′s news van came too fast around the corner of Cooper Street and almost rode the curb.  When they pulled as close as they could to the house, they were immediately waved away by two cops and guided a block down to Central Ave.  Several more vans and mini-trucks followed and were sent along.  Emily saw men with cameras fixed on their shoulders and reporters talking into microphones.  They made their way to the house, asking questions to officers guarding the blue barricades:  “What happened?”  “Will arrests be made?”  “Have the bodies been identified?”  “Can they be identified?”

Cops returned to the truck and removed large lights attached to adjustable metal stands and hauled them behind the house.  Also, square black carrying cases and smaller ones, resembling tackle boxes.

Her father came out front to check on her.  He bent down toward Emily and started to say something, but no words came.  He placed his hands on her arms and brought her tightly to him and she felt his chin hard against her shoulder.  His name was called and, in an instant, was back on the other side of the barricade.

She watched policemen walk down the side yard toward the street wearing transparent rubber gloves and carrying different-sized parcels.  Most of them wore casual pants and short-sleeves, two or three buttons undone, revealing soiled t-shirts and shiny wet necks.  The bundles were wrapped in black plastic and labeled with what looked like price tags.  The men walked to the State Police truck and placed everything carefully inside, then shut the doors and quickly returned behind the house.  Few words were spoken; a grim, meager parade.

Body bags were brought down the walkway next, the first two carried by a policeman at each end.  Only one was needed to lift the third, a small bundle.  The bag was the same size as the others, so its ends drooped as the man holding it made his way to the truck.

Even though Mark’s lips were moving, she couldn’t hear him, couldn’t hear the cops, the spectators, the car radios or walkie-talkies.  Mark held her hand and led her past the press trucks, across Central Ave. toward the beach.  The stench still clung to her nostrils.  She walked faster, but there was no use running away from the scene behind her; it would stay embedded in her mind.  As concrete a picture as bones spit up by a dog, or a zipped-up body bag.  She thought of her father’s hope, what a waste, and how she had foolishly tried to pass it on to Mark.

The image of a ghoul flashed through her mind.  She tried to give it shape, a face, anything definite.  She thought of the hairy four-legged beast and the scaly sea creature.  She wanted to see them clearly, conjure them up, stare into their bloodshot eyes, smell their rancid breaths.  There was something comforting in these make-believe images.  Then she thought of all the people she knew, teachers, friends, her father’s friends; and those she didn’t know, strangers on the beach, in restaurants, at baseball games, the people in front of her house right now.  All of them potential ghouls.