Dad towered above, hands on his hips, sunlight filtering through a cross-hatch of sycamore branches, his smooth, pink scalp illuminated and glistening with sweat.  He wore grease-pocked tan Chinos savaged at the knees from planting radishes and carrots all morning in the backyard.  His canvass hunting jacket was fastened together at the unspooling seams with a foot-long patch of silver duct tape.

“…You can’t just cut their heads off.”

I shifted my weight, working the flat of one palm into the wet grass, adjusting my gaze so that Dad’s shoulder obscured the sun. Several score of yellow dandelions lay scattered across the lawn where I’d neatly severed them mid-stem.

“Why not?”

“‘Cause they grow right back, that’s why. These weeds ain’t no Marie Antoinette and King Louie, you know.” He hitched up his trousers by the belt loops and grimaced, estimating my acquaintance with the events of 1789, and then ploughed ahead just the same. “You can’t go decapitating these fellas like some crazed Jacobin.”

Dad was in a fine mood this Saturday morning, the cool spring air sharpened with the scent of bay salt and arsenic swept in from the landfill at the edge of town. He’d been up since dawn, relishing several hours of complete dominion over the yard.  In his hunting jacket’s inside pocket, he kept a small notebook and pencil stub, ticking off the chores and projects as they fell one-by-one.

Crazed Jacobin:  Almost certainly, this was a compliment.

“Here. Try this.”  Dad flung a nine-inch screwdriver into the lawn. It thronged.  I would have heard all about it if I’d been the one playing with tools.  “Dig ‘em out.  Every one of ‘em. By the roots.”

He stalked off and I rolled back on all fours, retracing the zigzag of luminous yellow petals beginning to wither and curl in the glare of mid-morning. Basically, he was saying:  Start over. I stabbed the screwdriver into the lawn, imagining it to be the fat belly of Superman’s arch-enemy, Lex Luthor.  Only this morning in bed, sheets pulled up to my neck, I had started reading the latest issue of Jimmy Olsen Comics – a three-part exploit in which Superman’s pal is mysteriously transformed into a human porcupine.  I suspected Luthor was behind these shenanigans.  (Shenanigans, meaning mischief, pranks, monkeyshines, or tomfoolery – whatever that meant.) I’d come across the word in a recent issue of Action Comics in which an inexplicable energy burst from inside a scientist’s laboratory strikes Lois Lane and gives her x-ray vision so she can spot Clark Kent changing into Superman in the men’s lavatory.  Comic books can be very educational.  On my third try, the screwdriver found a soft spot amid the gristle of Luthor’s belly and sank up to the handle.

My father did not object to comic books, but he argued that greater satisfactions could be obtained by making a necessary contribution to the household.  I plunged the screwdriver into the heart of a headless dandelion.  It squirmed under pressure, its stem mashed and slivered, but the root wouldn’t budge.  I leaned into the tool and we sunk another inch. Working from the wrist, twisting and flicking, I up-ended the weed at its tip and it flipped out of the ground and into the air like a little man in a flowery hat shot from a cannon.  Its crisp tail had broken off. That made me think of a carrot chomped a third of the way up, like Bugs Bunny on Saturday morning cartoons.  I was hungry. I wanted to go inside, get out of the sun, eat Frosted Flakes, watch TV.  Maybe spend some time later with Jimmy Olsen, cub reporter for The Daily Planet, a great American newspaper in the city of Metropolis.

A blast of water rattled the pipes along the side of the house. Almost immediately, my nostrils throbbed, registering the tang of iron. My throat burned.  Dad out back spraying the roses.

I sank the screwdriver handle-deep into the lawn and hurried into the backyard to watch him work.

Dad was leaning against the compost bin, cradling a brown plastic bottle like the head of a snake slinking out from a dirty coil of sun-baked hose. When he fingered the release valve, the fine, acrid mist of Ortho Home Orchard Spray doused a platoon of aphids tramping across our butter-yellow roses and I gagged.  Insecticides, said Dad, had won the war, along with plastics and light-metal alloys and radar and jet engines and a thousand other inventions and improvements.  Insecticides and herbicides had saved the bacon on Saipan, flushed Japs out of the bush on Guadalcanal, mowed down mosquitoes and chiggers and tiny blue flies that laid eggs in your eyes and killed men in twenty-four hours and otherwise would have cut a swath through the best army in the world.  They probably saved my uncle’s life in the Solomon Islands, said Dad – though Uncle Win pointed out that he seldom got to land unless it was by swimming there after being sunk at sea and it was the sharks he had to worry about then.

Yet my father did not apply Ortho to our front lawn where it might have done some good against the dandelions.  Mom disapproved.  Dad could do whatever he wanted in his backyard, but the front was public property – at least in the way it got used every day by us kids slithering through the grass, grinding ourselves into the dirt, soaking up through our open pores the lurking vestiges of modern science’s most recent realignment of the ordinary molecule, the poly-chlorinated hydrocarbons and biphenyls that made life out on the patio pleasingly free from gnats, that caused California’s Central Valley to blossom into the greatest fruit basket and the best-spread vegetable table the world has ever known, that gave the citizens of suburbia the green gushing pleasure of backyard horticulture, the companionship of flowers, fruits, grasses, shrubs, and trees all year long.

“You done in front already?”

I shrugged, sniffing the air.  The scent of Ortho was both repellent and delectable, like the rot of your own athlete’s foot.

“I guess so.”

“Why do you have to guess?”

“I’m not finished yet,” I explained more judiciously.  “Not nearly. But I want to help you massacre the snails.”

Dad peeled back his lips to expose a faultless set of alabaster false teeth.  The army had yanked all the originals, saving him a fortune in dental bills for the rest of his life.  “Okay.  Go get the Bug-Geta.  It’s under my work bench.”

When I returned with the green and orange cardboard box featuring a menacing gargantuan snail on the front, we sprinkled its contents across a patch of beets, onions, and spinach.

“Dad, can this stuff hurt people?”

We both studied the russet carpet of petrochemicals.

“You an aphid?”

“No.”

“A snail?”

“No.”

“A slug?”

“No.”

“Well, then…”

“But you wouldn’t want to eat it,” I asked innocently enough, “would you?”  Soon as we stopped talking, I’d have to return to the dandelions.

Dad cocked his head.  “Look,” he said, his voice rising in faint exasperation.  “I know what your mother thinks, but there’s people in India and China and what-not now that’ve got enough to eat two and even three times a day thanks to Bug-Geta and what-have-you.  There’s even a scientist, and this fellow’s got himself a Ph.D. from the university – a doctor of plants or animals or insects maybe.  And every morning during his coffee break, along with his Nescafe, he treats himself to a nice little meal of a bug poison with a funny name.  I believe they call it 2,4-D.  And what do you think it’s done to him?”

“Nothing.”

“Not a damn thing.  Said he’s even got to enjoy the taste.”  Dad grinned bumptiously at the audacity of learned men, at progress itself, and then he suddenly tightened his lips and his expression straightened like a clothesline. “Now don’t you go snacking on this stuff yourself.  It’s for snails only.  At least,” he said, clapping me on one shoulder, “you wait until you get a laboratory of your own.”

I laughed along as though I thought I might actually grow up one day to be a scientist, or a farmer, or even the guy at the nursery who sold us the box of Bug-Geta.  It seemed the perfect moment.  So I asked him.

“Can I have a dog?”

*                *                      *                      *                      *

Gil was the youngest brother of Mrs. Bingham, the butcher’s wife.  After two years in the army and an honorable discharge, Gil decided not to return to Mitchell, Nebraska, so the Binghams let him move into their garage. “Just until something opens up somewhere,” Mrs. Bingham explained to my mother. Gil owned a primer grey ’55 Buick that he planned to repaint sky blue and cherry out with chrome mags, headers, and a tach once he started working, but for now it sat on the curb outside the Binghams’ house and seldom moved before noon.  On the driver’s side above the gas tank, in four-inch ivory block print, Gil had hand-painted the name of his former girl friend:  Dee Dee Dinah.  They had been engaged back in Nebraska, but the girl found an older man who worked in a bank while Gil was fulfilling his military obligations.  Gil was stationed in Germany the same two years as Elvis.

“You ever see him?” asked Benny.  The Changs lived three houses down from the Binghams and Benny had talked me and Phil into tagging along. The garage seemed far too dark for the middle of a Saturday afternoon because the Binghams’ new boarder had covered the lone side door window with several layers of The Oakland Tribune’s help wanted section. Mrs. Bingham said Gil was still exhausted from active duty.

“More than see.”

Gil sprawled the length of his canvass cot, a relic of family hospitality that staggered and whined on its spindle legs every time he shifted his weight. He sparked up a fresh Marlboro and puffed lazy smoke rings into the rafters.

“What do you mean?” demanded Phil, fanning himself with splayed fingers.

“I’m not saying I was his closest friend, you understand. But me and Elvis, sure – we hung out together.  Now and then.  You see G.I Blues?”

“No.”

“You remember the part in the barracks, everybody singing along?”

“We didn’t see it,” explained Benny.  “None of us.”

“That’s me.  Standing next to him. My elbow’s leaning on his bunk.  He didn’t mind. He’s a cool head.”

Elvis Presley was a cool head.  Who could dispute it?  At our house, my mother only paid attention to the radio when she heard “The Theme to Exodus” by Ferrante and Teicher or anything by Connie Francis (whose real name was Concetta Rosa Maria Franconero, though she changed it so the Protestants would buy her records, too). Dad preferred the news or a Giants’ doubleheader with Gaylord Perry and Juan Marichal pitching. It was Benny’s older sister Bernice who owned a copy of 50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong with Elvis wearing a gold suit that hung on him like damp sheets of Cellophane.  If anything happened to his sister, Benny said he’d inherit all her albums.

“You ever see Elvis fight?” demanded Benny.

“Nah, he kept to himself.  Colonel Tom Parker ordered him to.  Didn’t want no bad publicity when he got out of the army like me.” Gil groped blindly under the cot until his fingers located the dial of his plug-in table radio.  Its vacuum tubes warmed to cast an orange glow on the underside of the canvass so that it looked like its occupant was being pan-fried. Twisting the dial through a hail of static, Gil settled finally on “The Battle of New Orleans” by Johnny Horton.

“I heard he knows judo.”

Gil yawned, his lips forming an infant’s perfect O. He was twenty-two years old, long and sinewy like a knotted rope. He wore thick black frame glasses in the style of Buddy Holly before his plane crashed and they made his eyes look like steelies, the chrome-plated marbles we prized above all others as the most devastating shooters. After the service, Gil had let his hair grow, lubricating the sides with Butch Wax, an indolent chocolate-brown wave teased over his forehead like a unicorn.  He clapped a hand over his mouth when he saw me staring.

“Do you know judo?” persisted Benny.  Sometimes Benny was like a little mutt with a rubber bone in his mouth that he wouldn’t let go of for anyone.

“Judo’s for babies.”  Gil puffed a smoke ring in Benny’s direction.  It landed and dissolved on the tip of his nose.  “I learned Karate.”

“My Dad’s got a black belt in Karate.”

“No, he doesn’t, Benny.”

“Benny lies like a rug, Gil.”

“I bet your hands aren’t registered as deadly weapons with the police.”

“I still got to do that,” admitted Gil.  He cranked himself up on the cot and surveyed the three of us. “You kids want to trade or not?”

“I got some Archie and Veronicas,” said Benny.

Gil nodded his approval.  “Where are they?”

“In my sister’s drawer.”

“Go get them.”

Benny threw open the side door, flooding the garage with the light of day.

“What about you two?”

“My dad doesn’t let me read comics,” said Phil. “He says they make you stupider.”

“I got Jimmy Olsen,” I admitted.  I didn’t feel like I had any choice.

“Jimmy Olsen, Superman’s Pal, or Jimmy Olsen appearing in Superman?”

“Both. I just read the story where Jimmy gets amnesia and thinks he’s an orphan and he only wishes he were Superman’s pal. But Supergirl’s living in the same —”

“Go get it.”

“Okay.  But what do you got to –“

“Go get it.  Then you’ll see.”

I hesitated.  It wasn’t that I didn’t want to trade, but I knew that my parents were bound to ask where I was going if I rushed out with an armful of Jimmy Olsen’s and I suspected that Gil’s garage was not the right answer.  Nobody had said anything directly against him.  Still, my father had a way of tilting his head whenever Gil got mentioned, while my mother nibbled her lips as though discretely swallowing some uncharitable comment before it escaped to run riot in the world. Gil was too old to trade comic books, even I could see that. And the last time, all he had were two issues of Casper, the Friendly Ghost, both of them smudged with grape jelly.  I was summoning the courage to ask if he had any Green Lantern’s when the kitchen screen door flew open and crashed against the wall.

“Gil, can I have a ride to the store?  We need some things for dinner.”

Sandy Bingham lined the door jamb, her torso a seesaw of triangles fastened loosely at the corners – the head of blonde curls bobbing across one shoulder, her hips filling out a pair of green-striped culottes and jutting the opposite direction. Sandy was only three years older than me and Benny, and for as long as I could remember we had all played together on the neighborhood’s front yards – Freeze Tag, Simon Says, Mother May I? But ever since starting junior high the previous fall, she had begun calling us as “the little kids.”

“What’re we having, cousin?”

“Pork chops. But we don’t have enough.”

Gil turned up the volume to “El Paso” by Marty Robbins. He ran his hands down the front of his t-shirt, ironing away its wrinkles. “Then we better get enough, shouldn’t we?  You know I love my pork chops.”

Sandy laughed way too loud and I didn’t see the humor. Gil read my mind.

“Elvis loves pork chops. You know that?”

“Un-huh.”

“Sure, you do.”

Gil shoveled his legs off the cot and reached under his bunk to pluck a midnight blue satin jacket from a nest of littered clothing.  He slowly rose, shook the kinks out of his legs, and with a serpentine shrug slipped both arms into the sleeves. A half-moon of hand-sewn gold letters spangled the jacket’s backside:  DUSSELDORF U.S. Army.

“You come back later with that comic book,” he told me, “and I’ll give you a Prince Valiant for it.”

“I don’t like Prince Valiant.”

“Come by tomorrow.  I might be busy tonight.”

*                *                      *                      *                      *

“What should we call him?”

“He’s so…” Mom ransacked her polite vocabulary for the proper word.  “Huge.”

“A whopping big name then,” suggested Dad.

“He’s great!” I squealed and knew I sounded just like a girl.

“Did you have to get the biggest one?”

“The biggest and the best,” said Dad.  “Am I right?”

“Right!”

“Oh, I don’t know…”

“We’ll name him after your people,” Dad offered. “After some dago.”

“We will not call him that.”

“One of your emperors.  Caligula.”

“Who?”

“Or Nero.  Nero means black in Italian.  Black as sin.”  Dad drummed both hands on the flat pan of our new family member’s rump, and his tail switched like a whip of steel cable lacerating my legs. “I bet your mother didn’t know that.”

“Why is he drooling? Are they supposed to drool?”

“No, not Nero.  Nero had a black heart. Fiddling around when he should have been governing.  Let’s call him – oh, I don’t know… How about Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus.”

“Your father was reading the encyclopedia all last night. I don’t know why.”

“It’s kinda… long.”

“Augustus.”

“Franklin, really. What kind of name is that for a dog?”

“Rome’s finest emperor.  Of course, they had given up on self-government by that point.”

I lay my hand across his forehead as though taking his temperature through the thick coal carpet of fur.  The distance from my thumb to little finger wasn’t long enough to span his two rheumy brown golf-ball eyes.  Part-Labrador, part-mastiff, part hound of indefinite origins.  “A mixed breed,” my father had explained at the pound as I pressed my face against the wire mesh cage and allowed his wet pink six-inch tongue to marinate one cheek and then the other.  “Just like you.”  Our new dog was eight months old.  Seventy-five pounds.  Almost big enough to ride. The animal control officer said he had the rest of the day and if nobody took him home, then that was that.

“Augustus!”

“So be it.”

*                      *                      *                      *                      *

Dad planted a bountiful Valencia orange as the sun shone intermittently between winter’s fog and spring’s drizzle. Alongside it, he placed a Meyer lemon of the improved dwarf variety.  In the shade, he tended columbine and rock rose in the sunlight, geraniums in a red brick planter box and pyracantha for the springtime rattle of scarlet berries.  He lavished care upon carpets of lamb’s ear surrounding the hop seed bush and phlox selected to attract butterflies and hummingbirds, along with stalks of crimson amaryllis and towers of agapanthus cast in shades of virgin pale and heliotrope. Our backyard remained treeless, but bushy – red azaleas stationed amid eggshell-white and lavender rhododendrons, the redwood fence corners flush with sticky, saucer-shaped ocher flowers branching from the flannel bush, a Fremontodendron named for John C. Fremont who drove out the Spanish, served as the state’s first senator, and now had a suburb christened in his own name down the road from ours. Dad told me all about him as we watered, turned the compost, and poisoned our enemies. Everything, he said, grew better in the west.

That was one reason they were pouring into California from everyplace now – our neighbors, our future fellow citizens. Seventeen million already and we drew another thousand, another fifteen hundred new people each day.  We had become the biggest state in the union, more populous than New York, which hardly seemed worth imagining now, or even Texas – where cowboys still roamed, where Davy Crockett had died defending the Alamo, a place that just sounded big, but we were bigger.  Bigger and better than anyplace that anybody had ever seen before.

Mom collected magazines that trumpeted the good news and piled them on the end table in case relatives from Massachusetts should come to visit:  evidence that she had made the right choice.  Newsweek put us on the cover, declaring:  “No. 1 State:  Booming, Beautiful California.” Time called California “A State of Excitement.”  Life said, “California Here We Come – and This is Why.”  We were building houses, highways, hospitals, new universities up and down the state and the best public school system in the country. Just stand at the kitchen sink and you could see the scope of our ambition emerging from the stainless steel faucet, the end result of the California Water Project with its eighteen pumping stations, nine power generating plants, and hundreds of miles of canals and levees.  There was nothing like California back where folks came from, nothing to match us in distant forgotten Kansas, Missouri, Arkansas, Iowa, Alabama.  California was a desert, but we were making it bloom.

I concentrated on the dandelions. Every afternoon after school, I plucked at least fifty from the ground. But they kept growing back.  Perhaps I’d miss one or two – even Dad admitted that you couldn’t get them all – and they’d explode the next day into starry blossoms, thousands of taunting yellow flowers arcing towards the sun only to collapse overnight, turning into prickly globes obliterated by the slightest breeze, their seeds and parachutes unscrewed from their cushion heads and sailing, lofting, floating, and finally descending into the hundreds of hospitable perforations I had created in the moist ground with my screwdriver.  The more I picked, the more grew back.  A half-dozen sprouted from a hole where a few days before I had evicted a single weed.  Each night as I fell asleep, the dandelions etched themselves onto my eyelids, their green stem plumbing, their flattened yellow helmets, their wicked beige taproots and insinuating tendrils that I could never, ever extirpate for good.

Our neighbors sought long-term solutions for their front yards. The Sandersons paved over their slope of Merion wonder grass and painted it South Seas green, calling to mind a pool of lime Jell-O. The Changs introduced ivy, and then sat back to watch it run rampant through the course of a single thirsty summer. Some homeowners did nothing at all, allowing their property to revert to a state of nature, which entirely missed the point of living in Washington Manor where our lawns were meant to be aligned as indistinguishable patches of one-and-one-half inch tufted emerald carpet reconstituted as a garden of endless duty:  as Eden.

In March, Dad and I drove to the nursery to purchase three twenty-pound sacks of Scott’s Turf Builder.  In April, Dad sowed grass seed in the spots that had parched and spoiled, sousing the soil with a frothy ammoniac blanket of Cope to suppress grubs.  In May, we layered more fertilizer and inspected the ground each evening until the seeds sprouted.  We watered once in the morning and again at night during the summer – then spread around Weed and Feed to bring the clover to its knees and replace the gobs of nitrogen it otherwise drew from the air and injected into the ground.  We attacked the crabgrass with Clout and Kansel and pummeled the remaining insects with another aerial barrage of Cope.  When in doubt – it was like washing your hair with Prell – we lathered up and did it all over again.

But mowing and feeding and watering and mowing again had no end. To my father’s way of thinking, this was the price you paid, though sometimes he spoke of a devil’s bargain.

Leaves had begun to yellow and fold on the Bearss lime – Citrus x latifolia, also known as Tahitian or Persian lime according to Sunset’s Western Garden Book. The culprits appeared to be ants.  Dad pinched his thumb and forefinger at the crown of its slender stalk and watched a dozen misdirected workers scramble across the back of his hand.  He had worried about lime blotch or scab or greasy spot or even red alga, but the man at the nursery said he’d probably just over-watered, flushing the ants from their nest and weakening the tree until it turned ripe for invasion.  We purchased a half-dozen Grant’s Ant Stakes. Active Ingredient: 1.0% Hydramethylnon.  The buggers died quickly.

Two weeks later, they were back – and twice as many.

*                      *                      *                      *                      *

“Is Dagwood and Blondie all you got?” asked Benny.

Gil sparked up a Marlboro, inhaled rapturously, and blew the smoke directly into Benny’s face.

“Why? You don’t think Blondie is bitchin’?”

Benny shrugged.  Augustus was sprawled across the cold concrete floor close to the door where a slim margin of light leaked in through the crack.  In the gloom of Gil’s garage, my dog looked like a big black boulder, dense and immovable, except when he was licking himself.

“Think about it,” advised Gil. “Blondie is bitchin’ – that’s a fact. And you can have her for two Betty and Veronicas.”

“How come two?”

Gil swiveled around on his cot and squinted in my direction.

“What about you, kid?  What’d you bring me today?”

I made a face that I was glad Gil couldn’t see in the dark.

“Speak up. Whaddya got?

I rolled my copy of Jimmy Olsen, Superman’s Pal into a periscope and casually surveyed the garage.  I’d read the issue three times already, but still wasn’t sure about trading it.  In the featured story, Jimmy drinks a vial of serum that temporarily gives him the ability to stretch every part of his body like a rubber band that will never break. As Elastic Lad, he can peek over tall buildings like the world’s biggest giraffe and tie villains all up in knots with his rubber fingers. Once he grabbed a bank robber down the block without leaving his chair (and then he made a crack about the long arm of the law).  Serums had previously turned Jimmy into a werewolf, a giant turtle, a Bizzaro World version of himself, and an incredibly fat freak.

“Betty and Veronica,” purred Gil, his voice syrupy and spit-filled.  “I wouldn’t kick either of ‘em out of bed.  Ronnie’s got those big tits, man… I’d come all over them and she’d probably lick it right off.”

Benny’s head tipped back like he’d been winged by a slingshot.  “Man, you’re gross, Gil.”

“Betty’s not so bad, either.  Little Catholic girl, probably.  Wearing her uniform all innocent like.  Hell, they can’t keep it out of their mouths.  You know what I’m talking about?”

Benny and I glanced at one another, admitting that we probably did not.

“It’s just,” said Benny, easing away from Gil’s cot, “that I already traded you this one before and I’m not really interested in reading it again.”

Gil flopped down on his back and sighed. His head rolled my direction and we locked indifferent gazes.

“I bet you two would rather fuck Little Lulu.”

“No, we wouldn’t!” I objected.

“I bet you would,” sniggered Benny, the traitor.

“You don’t even know what it means, Benny.”

“I do, too. My sister told me.”

“I don’t even like Little Lulu,” I protested.

Gil kept puffing on his Marlboro, his puckered lips surrounding the glowing red dot.  His waterfall was greased thick with Butch Wax.

“You two are a couple of real poker players, aren’t you?  Holding out on me until I bring out the good stuff.”

Benny and I didn’t say anything.

“You’re pretty smart, aren’t you?  Be honest.”

“I am,” admitted Benny.

Gil wiggled his way to the edge of the cot and sat up straight from the belly, like he was still in the army.  He muttered to himself about how we had really pulled one over on him this time.

“You,” he ordered, pointing to Benny.  “Get my duffle bag from underneath.”

Benny dove for the concrete, slipped under the cot, and hauled a big duffle out from the shadows.

With two hands, Gil yanked open its string purse and sunk one arm down deep, blindly fondling its contents.

“Here it is.”  He flapped a magazine onto the cot.

I could hardly see anything except Gil’s ball bearing eyes vibrating above the glow of his dwindling cigarette.  He reached for the flashlight he kept under his cot. A milky beam splashed across the cover.
“Cool!” said Benny.  “Look at his face.”

Famous Monsters of Film Land, an issue featuring Lon Chaney as the Phantom of the Opera.  He had hardly any hair parted down the middle and the worst set of rotting teeth you ever saw.

“I’ll trade,” I said.

“No,” objected Benny, “I will. Gil asked me.”

“Gil asked us both, Benny.  I said it first.”

“That’s a good lesson for you, kid.  Take what you want.”

I firmly held Jimmy Olsen between the pinch of my right hand’s thumb and forefinger until my left felt Gil loosen his grip on Famous Monsters.

“Wait,” Gil told Benny, “I got something for you, too.”  His hand slithered back into his duffle bag. He grunted with the effort of further exploration. “Yeah, here, it is.”

He trained the flashlight on his open hand. Stretched across his palm was a long skin-colored balloon with a puffy tip at the end, like a rocket ship.

“You know what this is, right?”

“Yeah.”

“What?”

Benny’s voice dropped to a whisper.  “A Trojan.”

“That’s right.  Your sister tell you about them?”

“No. I just know.”

“Gimme Betty and Veronica.”

Benny handed them over.

“Wash it out before you use it.   If you know how to use it.”

I wanted to get out of there, but Benny was already at the door.  He cracked it open and the light pressed hard against our eyeballs.  I grabbed Augustus by the collar and dragged him to his feet.

“And hey, kid,” said Gil, settling back down on the cot to read at his leisure Jimmy Olsen’s adventures as Elastic Lad. “Your dog stinks.”

“He does not,” shot back Benny.  Benny always stood up for dogs, but he especially respected Augustus.  Augustus was huge.

“Smells like a barn in here,” said Gil.

Benny straddled Augustus’ haunches, hunched over his big head, and sniffed.  “He smells good,” he reported.  “It stinks in here ‘cause of you, Gil.”

Gil didn’t even hear him.

“And hey,” he said from behind the comic book, “you tell your sister I want her to come by and visit me sometime, okay?”

*                      *                      *                      *                      *

I longed for super powers.

Usually, they descended upon an ordinary, but virtuous mortal by accident. An unduplicable error in the student chemistry lab.  A lightning strike at just the right angle.  A bite from a radioactive insect.

In comic books, only the villains plotted to acquire the powers of flight or invisibility or blinding speed, and then they invariably paid a great price. Banishment to the Phantom Zone.  Being hurtled to the furthest reaches of the universe by a superhero’s shove of superhuman strength.  Finding themselves reduced to a quarter of an inch so they fit snugly into the municipal jail of Kandor, the former capital of the planet Krypton that was shrunk many years ago by the green-skinned supervillain, Brainiac, and sealed in a bottle that now safely resides in the North Pole inside Superman’s Fortress of Solitude.

In the shower, I watched the water roll off my shoulder to trickle down the naked sleeve of my straightened arm and I wondered what it might take (thunderstorm, earthquake, strange brew radiating from the municipal waterworks?) to transform my molecular make-up so that I was granted the sudden power to shoot streams of water from my fingertips with the concentrated force of a fire hose? Better yet, Yosemite Falls! (Someday we were going there for vacation.)  I pictured myself as Shower Lad, blasting villains against brick walls, reducing them to a piteous slosh – a technique I’d seen on the TV news in Birmingham, Alabama. I’d join the Justice League of America, along with Superman, Batman and Robin, Wonder Woman, Flash, and Green Lantern. Together we would battle and bring to justice Brainiac, Bizarro, General Zod, and Mr. Mxyztplk, the imp from the fifth dimension. Almost certainly, I had a vocation.

“When’re you gonna clean up after that damn dog?”

I lay on my bed, arms stretched wide and fastened at the wrists, feet strapped to either corner, staring up at the ceiling and into the bald-headed face of evil genius. From a trembling steel cable, Lex Luthor slowly lowered the boulder of kryptonite and I was rendered defenseless into the clutches of the merciless supervillain.

“You hear me? Quit daydreaming and get out there and clean up after that dog or he’s going right back where he came from.”

Luthor’s smooth, pink, evilly hairless skull hovered above, glaring down at me – until I realized that, of course, it was Dad. I bolted upright and slid off the bed and hurried out into the yard.

Next to the compost bin, in the dirt, covered with straw and grass and a conspicuous wide stripe of his own shit smeared across his rump, I found Augustus, sleeping.

One eyelid flapped open, spotted me, slammed shut like a gate.

Augustus was always sleeping.

“Wake up!” I lifted his long black rope of tail by the tip and wagged it for him.  “C’mon, boy!” I scratched his head with both hands, drumming my fingertips upon the flat plate of his skull.  “Thatta boy, Augustus, good boy!”  I slipped my arms around his neck and shoulders, lowered myself on to his back, taking care to avoid the putrid smear at his other end, and I squeezed. His planet head slowly rolled into one shoulder, his features materializing like the man in the moon.  A wide ribbon of red tongue washed my mouth. “Good boy, Augustus.  Want to go for a walk, boy?  Do you?”

Augustus pushed himself up by the front paws, assumed the sitting stance that I tried to teach him, and began to bark.

“Quiet, boy.  Quiet.”

Augustus kept barking, his pace quickening, the singular yelps now blending into an air raid siren ululation, a hearty yowling with long gummy ropes of saliva dangling from his cavernous maw as he threw back his huge meaty head and gobbled the air for no reason at all.

*                      *                      *                      *                      *

Dad used a licked-clean root beer Popsicle stick to ladle the fresh pollen of a pink cotton-candy hybrid tea called Bewitched onto the stamen of a lavender Lady Banks climber – forever altering the destiny of his roses. Creating something aromatic, beautiful, or peculiar, something new – that was the thing! When cross-pollination failed, Dad resorted to simple grafting, placing five varieties of pears on a single rootstock, showing anybody who cared to observe (I watched, but my mother did not) how to execute a whip graft, cutting both the branch and scion at a shallow angle, binding them together and sealing the joint with candle wax. Nursing along the graft, watching it take, flourish, blossom, fruit.  Sometimes Dad sang to his plants, as Luther Burbank had done, coaxing them along with “They Call the Wind Mariah.” Something about vital forces, he explained, an instinct surpassing mere cell division.

And yet reminders of the susceptibility of all living things to accident, pillage, and decay also littered his garden.  Rust attacked the roses.  Gophers raided his staggered rows of peas and carrots, pulling them underground like Morlocks devouring the Eloi.  In the side yard, next to a wreath of wound-up hose and nozzle, Dad planted a regiment of snowy freesias. Natives of South Africa, he bragged, tough as nails and sweet as honey to the nostrils.  Augustus thought so, too, and one afternoon he devoured a half-dozen aromatic funneled flowers, leaving only the tooth-sawed shoots.  My dog foamed along the pink and black folds of his blubber lips and his breath smelled like Dial soap.  We staked him out back with enough rope to slink into the shade once the wrathful sun began to cross our yard.

“You come in now,” suggested my mother.  “You’ve been out here working all morning.”

Dad snapped shut his Army-issue teeth like an angry tortoise. He glowered at mom as though she had straight out called him a failure.

For whatever refused to thrive, Dad had nobody to blame but himself, and so he always did.  But he also bristled and fumed at the positioning of the sun, the stab of a late spring freeze, the stinginess of seeds bought cut-rate and hoarded over too many winters to produce what they had originally promised.  Earlier that morning, I had watched him fling a shovel across the yard and then throttle a wilting sunflower, yanking it out of the soil by the throat.

My mother folded her arms across her chest and stared far over my father’s shoulders, the corners of her mouth pinned tight.  The end of our block was still fenced off with barbed wire warning against hunters on the prowl and game birds honked overhead every morning:  not a town at all, she sometimes grumbled, but an empty place still making itself up.  If a snail devoured his shoots of red chard and spinach, it really wasn’t her fault.

I sat on the concrete walkway, both arms wrapped around Augustus, his neck as thick as an elephant’s foot.  I could sense my parents’ uneasiness as each gauged some rivalrous absence in the other.  The bay breeze fluttered through my dog’s matted black fur and I felt frightened and cold.

One Sunday afternoon, I was surprised to see Dad cheered up within the barony of his bushes, fruit, and flowers by a visit from Uncle Win. They stood alongside the trellis of wisteria, its stalk of violet petals sputtering in the breeze like Roman candle fire.  Their heads tipped towards one another in concession to the blood tie and neighborliness.  I couldn’t even smell an argument.

Dad hefted a lightweight black plastic pot off the ground and fit it into Win’s clutches. Then he stood back and beamed.  They both admired the plant’s tangled sunburst of tiny petals, the center of the flowers swollen into the shape of raspberries.

“Now you need to plant this fella someplace with plenty of sun, and water him good. You understand?”

My uncle nodded. “Sure, Slick.  I’ll do it today.” He seemed touched by his older brother’s tenderness towards the flower pot.

“Maybe drop by the nursery on your way home and pick up some fertilizer.  Feed and water is the secret.  You be sure to feed and water this youngster and you’ll get results before you know it. Maybe I’ll even rustle you up a few more for your back yard.”

Win wrestled the pot into a surer grip, resting its edge against his belly.  “What’s it called?”

“I’ll write it down for you.”  Dad extracted his notepad and pencil stub from his jacket’s inside pocket and bore down hard on the page, studying the results as they materialized.  “The scientific name is Nilkanrf’s Deew. Think you can remember that?”

“What is that, Latin?”

“Old Norse.” Dad tipped back the brim to his cap and ran an open palm over the smooth dome of his skull.  “The Vikings brought it to Greenland long before the Spanish and the Portagees even set sail.  It took a spell to get to California.”

“I appreciate that, big brother.”

When my uncle left, we all took a lunch break in the kitchen.

“What did you give Win?” asked Mom. She removed a frosted pitcher of blue Kool-Aid from the fridge and found a glass for me in the cupboard. Then she pivoted to face the stove and stirred a pot of Campbell’s SpaghettiOs. The kitchen smelled like boiled catsup, but sweeter.  It made me hungry.

“What’re we having for dinner?” wondered Dad.

“There’s Rice-A-Roni, if you want.  Or I can take the Chef Boyardee pizza out of the freezer.”

“Pizza!”  I had already decided.

Dad sampled a mouthful of SpaghettiOs and issued an extravagant sigh of satisfaction.

“Say, when’re you going to make that Tunnel of Fudge cake again? I enjoy a good Tunnel of Fudge.”

“What did you give Win, honey?”

Dad pulled his pipe out of his shirt pocket and began stuffing the bowl with a sack of Lucky Strike Half-and-Half.  He sparked a match, and I remembered him telling me that years ago they used to sell the strike-anywhere variety under the brand name of Lucifers.

“I offered him a nice little specimen of common ragwort.” His false teeth parted in a smoky rictus.  “Nilkanrf’s Deew.  That’s Franklin’s Weed spelled backwards. It’ll be all over his yard by the end of summer.”

I laughed.  Dad puffed grey clouds over the SpaghettiOs.  Mom slammed my glass of Kool-Aid down hard on the Formica table, its blue wave lapping over the rim.

“There is something mean about you,” she told him.  “Sometimes something mean and small.”

I drank my Kool Aid and they didn’t talk.  When we finished lunch, Mom joined me in the front yard, down on her hands and knees, rooting out the dandelions with an awkward pull on a foot-long screwdriver that didn’t begin to get the job done.  I snuck a glance at her face once or twice when she was stooped over on all fours and found that her eyes were as empty and bored and faithless as I feared my own must be.

*                      *                      *                      *                      *

I came home before dinner to walk Augustus, but he was gone.  In the backyard, I found paw prints in the radish patch and a large pile of dog doo that turned out to be cold when I prodded it with my index finger, but no sign of my dog.  I thought he might be sleeping behind the fireplace out back, but all I found was his muddy hole and a broom handle ravaged with tooth marks. I wondered if somebody had left the side gate open by accident.

Maybe me.

I jogged into the middle of the street and whistled.  Augustus never came when I whistled.  I called out his name, though I wasn’t absolutely positive that he knew it.

I cut a path down Brook Street, crisscrossing at Yale, Harvard, and Princeton.  No Augustus sprawled across the hot tar, no dying dog flopping on his side like the goldfish I’d won at St. Bernard’s Easter Festival the year before and spilled one afternoon onto our kitchen linoleum.

Of course!  He must have headed to the park.  Augustus loved to mark his territory, kill squirrels.  He would have remembered the park.  Augustus was smart, probably.

“Augustus!”

I pictured him at the edge of the swimming pool, lapping up refreshment, urinating into the gutter, diving into the deep end with a deafening splash and sinking to the bottom like a boulder wrapped in bear’s hide.

I gripped the cyclone fence with two hands, pressed my face into its mesh, rattled the screen.

“Augustus!”

No dog in the swimming pool.

Maybe the eucalyptus grove where he chewed the bark off saplings and bayed at the sea gulls.

“Here, boy!  Come home, Augustus!”

In the parking lot, beyond the grove, I spotted a familiar car:  Dee Dee Dinah inscribed in pale ivory above the gas tank.  I dashed to the driver’s window, breathless and full of hope. My head bobbed at the open window.

“Gil! Did you see my dog?  Augustus?  He’s black and huge.”

Gil gripped the steering wheel with both hands. He cocked his head in my direction and squinted as though he couldn’t quite place me.  His upper lip curled like Elvis.

“You talking about a nigger?”

Sandy Bingham was crumpled in the corner of the passenger seat. For some reason, she was crying. She turned her head, concentrating on the eucalyptus grove.

“Did you see him, Sandy?  You know my dog.  He’s gigantic.”

“Go away.”

I ran home two blocks.  The front door was open which meant my mother or father must be there.

Mom stepped into the living room as soon as I shouted for her.

“Mom, Augustus got out.  I looked all over for him.  But he’s disappeared.”

She hesitated, shifted her weight from one foot to the other.  “Your father,” she stated, as though that explained everything.  Her eyes scoured the carpet as if it were rippling with grubs and maggots. “Your father brought him back to the pound.  You weren’t living up to your responsibilities.”

“What?”

“He was too big for here, honey.  He was a big dog and he needed a place to run.”

“He brought him to the pound?”

“This morning.  He felt very bad about it. He did.  I could tell.”

*                      *                      *                      *                      *

The existence of Superman raised questions.  Why didn’t he go back in time using his super-speed to visit Germany before the Nazis and strangle Hitler in his cradle?  Why didn’t he squeeze coal into diamonds and pass them out to everybody so everybody could be rich? If he was so powerful and so smart and so good, why didn’t he irrigate the Sahara desert somehow – he should have figured out how – and turn it into a place where everything grows with plenty of room for everybody and everything.

Superman did not exist. So you didn’t need to worry about it.  You didn’t need to talk. I didn’t say a word for days.

I felt sleepy and restless, blurry, vacant – every part of me down to my fingertips too sensitive to the touch like my skin had been scoured down to the nerve endings.  I didn’t cry.  My father passed me in the front yard while I was rooting out dandelions – I didn’t see him.  I refused to see him.  I felt sick when I heard his voice.  I stopped listening.  I plunged the screwdriver deep into the green belly of the lawn, but I didn’t think anymore about Lex Luthor.  I dug up that lawn with a thousand puncture wounds, my screwdriver like a dagger to the heart of every innocent dandelion.

I missed Augustus:  I must have.  I thought about the times I stuck my nose into his collar of fat, wrapping my neck around his neck while he panted his meaty bad breath and I inhaled the loamy odor of dog, my dog.  Then I forgot about him for a day. Forgetting made me furious:  I squeezed both hands into bloodless white fists when Mom called me for dinner, retreating into the backyard for as long as five minutes.  If they were both sitting at the kitchen table, waiting, I might place the heel of my Keds on the tip of a white freesia and mash it into the soil or yank a radish and lob it over the redwood fence into the yard of some stranger.

Dad said maybe someday we’d try another dog and that made me feel like my insides were bleeding, my guts riddled with BBs.  I hated him.  I told Mom that I hated him.  She said that I didn’t and offered to help me outside with the rest of my job.  We worked together on our hands and knees, not talking. In an hour, there were hundreds of dandelions scattered across the front lawn like tiny corpses in their silly, stupid yellow-flowered hats.

Phil asked about Augustus and I explained that he was a big dog and needed room to run.  Benny never mentioned him, but he stopped coming by our house for nearly a week.  At school, on the playground and in the halls, he wouldn’t look me in the face.

Then one night, I heard a small fist pounding frantically on our screen door and I knew Benny was back.

The porch light blazed above him and from behind the grill, he looked like he was shattered into a million pieces. Benny was hopping up and down, actually hopping.

“‘C’mon, hurry!  Mr. Bingham’s got Gil treed.”

I slipped out the front door and we tore across our yard, down the block, and onto the sidewalk in front of the butcher’s house.

Gil had climbed to the top of the Bingham’s sycamore, perhaps seven feet high, and he was now inching along on both feet across the only branch sturdy enough to bear his weight.

“Daddy, stop!” Sandy rocked back and forth, her hands wrapped around either shoulder like it was impossible to stay warm.

Mr. Bingham stood next to his daughter, directly below the sycamore, arching up on his toes and swiping at Gil’s ankles with a meat cleaver.

“Ernie!” shouted Mrs. Bingham from the end of their walkway.  “You’re not making it any better.”

Mr. Bingham took another swing at Gil and barely missed.

Gil crept further out on his limb, balancing on hands and knees. He was talking fast to Mr. Bingham, not looking down at the ground, not making much sense I thought.  Mr. Bingham’s white t-shirt was soaked with sweat and his face had turned red and gold.

Gil froze on the far end of his limb.

Mr. Bingham wrapped both hands around the cleaver handle, bending back so far that his spine looked like it might snap, and then threw all his weight forward. The blow severed the branch cleanly, though I could almost swear I saw it freeze in midair for an impossible instant like in the cartoons when the Road Runner screeches over the cliff but doesn’t realize it yet – and then it crashed to the ground with a crack and bounced several times across the lawn along with Gil who rolled over twice and tried to scramble to his feet, but fell, and was curling himself into a ball when Mr. Bingham got close enough to kick him twice in the stomach, hard.

Lucky for Gil, I suppose, the police were there by now – a pair of squad cars rearing up over the sidewalk with cherry tops flashing, the policemen hustling Gil out of the way of Mr. Bingham’s feet, scooping the meat cleaver off the grass, and then placing either of them in separate backseats.  They drove down the street and around the block, and disappeared.  Everybody went home after that to get ready for work or school or whatever the next day was going to bring.

*                      *                      *                      *                      *

“What’re these?” asked Dad.

He studied his plate. A large heap of greens occupied the center, pooled in oil. To me, they looked familiar, though oddly placed.  Dad sucked on his teeth and kept both eyes pointed down at the table.

“Your dinner,” said Mom. She ladled two large spoonfuls onto my plate.  “Soffione.  It’s a southern Italian specialty.”

I scattered them with a fork, searching for yellow blossoms. The light from the overhead milk glass fixture bore down on us like the sun.  “Dandelions?”

“With garlic.”

I could smell the garlic.  Some people said it stunk, but I never thought so.

“This all we having?” asked Dad.

Mom served herself before answering.

“Yes.”

Dad didn’t touch his silverware.

“If you don’t like what I give you, you can always fix yourself something else. Nobody’s helpless around here, are they?”

Dad prodded his mound and fished up a long green stem on the tines of his fork. He studied his dinner.  Then he eased it into his mouth, nibbling delicately with his front teeth like a rabbit.

Mom sampled a forkful.  She made a little face and patted her mouth with a napkin.

“You’re excused,” she informed me.

“I’m hungry.”

“Make yourself a Pop Tart.  There’s strawberry.”

“I like apple-cinnamon.”

“Mind your mother,” said Dad. But his blue eyes roved easily in my direction and he vaguely smiled.

I found the Pop Tarts in the cupboard over the kitchen counter.  Cherry.

“I’m going back to work,” announced Mom.  “They need a secretary at the elementary school.  Somebody with experience.”

Dad kept working the dandelions around his plate, concentrating very hard on swabbing the greens into one of the puddles of oil and garlic that had accumulated at the margins.  He didn’t look up.

I dropped two cherry Pop Tarts into the toaster and poured myself a large glass of Cranapple.

“He’s old enough.” Mom pressed the weight of both elbows onto the table.  “He can come home and do his homework.  He can watch television if that’s what he wants.”

My mouth was full, but I spoke up anyway.

“I’m not picking any more dandelions.”

“You don’t have to,” my father conceded, his voice raised to warn off anybody who might think that I did.  “You done a good enough job already.”

Mom placed her fingertips against the rim of her plate, pushing it to the table’s edge.  “If you want, I can still be home in time to make dinner.” Her voice was trembling. “If that’s still what you want.”

Dad eased back from the table, chewing his lower lip.  He drew a long breath, his chest swelling indecently before it collapsed. Then he remembered me and winked without actually turning his head in my direction. “Long as we don’t get too many more nights of these dago greens, right?”

I watched my mother refuse to smile.  Her face looked like marble, pretty and cold.

“‘Least we’re not eating snails like those French people.  Right outta the garden, they pop them in their mouths for a little snack.  Maybe some parsley and a glass of froggy red to wash ‘em down.”

I didn’t say anything.

Dad forced another forkful into the side of his mouth and ground them with his back molars. “Hey, these are all right.”  He rose from his seat and scooted over to the stove.  “See here – I’m going to help myself to more.”  He scooped out a generous second serving and set the ladle across his plate.  For a moment, he stood at the stove, paralyzed:  wondering, I suppose, about that little twitch of unhappiness, his fear and restlessness, where it comes from and how it worms its way into our hearts.  What and who, when you came down to it, was really to blame? He was still trying to decide how to return the ladle to its pot while gripping his plate with both hands, knowing that everything now depended on him getting back to the table and finishing dinner without uttering another word.

Unless the moon shone, you couldn’t see the river or the hulk or much of anything down there.  On one of those moonless nights in the summer between Osvaldo’s junior and senior years of high school, he and two carloads of his homies drove to The Edge.

They sat on the warm hoods and cracked cold beers.  Every few minutes, a car or truck rumbled across the invisible bridge spanning the gorge.  When they finished their beers they tossed the cans into the abyss.  They listened for them to hit, and, as always, heard nothing.

“Hey, eses, where’s the bitches?”  Manuel said.

“They didn’t want to come,” someone else said.  “Not even Lola.”

“Maybe they don’t like black primer.”

“Black’s bad,” Osvaldo said.  The week before, he had stripped his Isuzu Amigo of its pinstripes and pearls and painted it completely in black primer.

“But it scares them off,” said another voice.

“Maybe it’s just him that scares them off,” Manuel said, meaning Osvaldo.

Osvaldo’s nickname was The Bad.  Lola had given him that placa a few months before, when they were watching The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly at the Starlighter Drive-In.  He had planned to go to the movie with Lola alone, but Manuel managed to invite himself along.  That was Manuel: always getting in other people’s mixes.

During the movie, the three of them had sat on the Isuzu’s tailgate, Lola in the middle, Osvaldo wondering how he was going to put the make on Lola with Manuel there.  When The Bad appeared on the giant screen, Lola shrieked, “That’s you, Osvaldo!”  Manuel laughed and said it was true.  Osvaldo studied actor Lee Van Cleef’s slit eyes and sharp, beak nose and high, sunscorched cheekbones.  Angel Eyes was The Bad’s other name.  By the end of the movie, Osvaldo had learned to shift his narrow eyes badass like Angel Eyes, making Lola shriek some more, driving her into Manuel’s arms, who grinned and hugged her.

The Bad face was good for cruising the Taos plaza with his homies and scaring tourists.  It was funny to watch a lumpy-legged couple in shorts pick up their cowlike gait after seeing his face.  Mad-dogging a ranfla full of cholos was a different matter.  It made his guts watery.  They might cap a round between his angel eyes.  But there was no other choice when his homies said, “Show them The Bad, homes.” Their lives depended on him making it good, on making the cholos not want to fuck with them.

The beers got shaken on the drive over the rough road to The Edge and foamed when they were opened.  Primer stained easily, and Osvaldo suspected the beer cans were making rings on the hood of his car, though he couldn’t see them in the moonless dark.  But it would seem joto to mention this to the others, and anyway where else were they going to put their beers?  Anyway, maybe it was badass to have beer circles on the hood of your ranfla, like bullet-hole decals on your door panels.

It had rained that afternoon, and it looked like it would rain again tonight.  The air smelled like chemistry class.  A steady growl of thunder came from the mountains, as if there was a giant dog behind them.  Then came lightning, which was like God zapping the dog with a taser to get him to shut up.

“What kind of dog would God have?” Osvaldo wondered.

“Pit bull,” Manuel said.

“Listen to these locos,” someone said.

“Well, I don’t think it’s gonna be no fucking Chihuahua,” Manuel said.

A couple of voices laughed nervously at this blasphemous talk of God.

“So what kind of dog you think Satan has?” said Osvaldo.

“You should know,” someone said from the darkness.

“Poodle,” said Manny, cracking everybody up.

The growling and the tasering got so mixed up that you couldn’t know if the tasering was making the dog growl or if the dog was being tasered for growling.  As the storm approached, the growls exploded with the flashes.

People scrambled into the cars.  Only Manuel stayed outside, dancing in the rain.

“Crazy loco.”

“Pinche vato.”

Sizzle-crack-flash, all at once, exploding around Manuel.  It could easily be sizzle-crack-flash-dead-Manuel all at once too, a single event.  Both cars honked their horns and flashed their lights at Manuel.  But he danced away, out of the beams of the headlights.

“Somebody go grab that loco.”

They said the safest place in a lightning storm was inside your car.  Osvaldo never quite understood that.  The tires grounding it and all that shit.  Maybe people believed it just because the lightning had just never happened to strike a car.  Badass if the first car lightning decided to strike was his, right there.  Badass, and fucked, too, as they all fried inside the black, electrified box.

“I’ll get him,” he said, forcing his door against the wind and ducking into the hail.

The others, under questioning by the police, would say that as Osvaldo approached Manuel, they saw, in the next blinding flash of lightning, horns sprout from Osvaldo’s head.  One boy swore he saw Osvaldo’s arrowed tail lash the ground and his feet morph into cloven hooves.

Osvaldo told the police that he only reached for Manuel, but that Manuel danced away, laughing, into the darkness.  Osvaldo yelled, “Fuck you, homes”—a couple of the others testified they heard those words too, faintly—and scrambled back to his car.  The hail had coated the ground white.

“Let’s get the fuck outta here,” he told the others.  He shuddered with cold.  The hail was nicking the new primer.  If Manuel wanted a ride, he could go in the other car.  Another bolt of lightning struck.

“You didn’t touch him?” one of the detectives asked.

“I didn’t touch him.”

“So he just kind of danced out into the Río Grande Gorge,” said the detective, fluttering his fingers in the air.

“Maybe the lightning got him.”

“The lightning, you think?” said the cop in a friendly tone, leaning close.

Osvaldo said nothing more.  He was booked and arraigned on an open count of murder.  To get released on bond, Osvaldo had to hand the title of his Isuzu over to the bondsman, and his parents had to put up the deed to their house and apple orchard.

At the grand jury hearing, the prosecutor asked the other boys what Osvaldo’s demeanor was like.  What was he acting like?

They told about the horns and hooves.  All the boys, including the ones in the other vehicle, told about it.  The horns and the hooves and the pointed tail, illuminated by a flash of lightning.

#

The grand jury handed down a true bill.  That meant, Osvaldo’s lawyer told him and his parents that he was going to trial, unless she could get the case dismissed.

“Trial?  When?” said his father.  On the lawyer’s table, his father’s hands looked old and wrinkled as winter apples; he twisted and rubbed them together, as if trying to still their trembling.

“The date hasn’t been set yet,” said the lawyer, a skinny, Anglo Public Defender who kept brushing her hair from her face.  “The prosecution is going want to continue the case—that means postpone things—until they come up with a body.  Hard to get a conviction without a body.  An indictment’s different.  As they say, most grand juries’ll indict a ham sandwich.”

Osvaldo’s father stopped rubbing his hands and looked at her as if she were insane.  His mother kept her eyes lowered.

“See, motive’s all they’ve got at this point,” said the lawyer.  “Osvaldo Mondragón, a.k.a. ‘The Bad,’ sought revenge for Manuel’s having taken his girlfriend Lola from him.  Osvaldo perceived that Manuel had made a cuckold of him, ‘put the horns on him.’  How does it go in Spanish?”

Now even his mother stared at her.

“Poner los cuernos, that’s it!” said the lawyer.  “Right?  Am I right?  I’m sorry, my Spanish isn’t great.  I’m working on it, though!”  She turned pink and began to talk even faster.  “The jury up here’ll be mostly Hispanic, of course, and prosecution is going to make a big thing of this horns thing, you can bet on it, have the witnesses say they saw actual horns sprout from Osvaldo’s head right before he shoved Manuel into the chasm, allegedly shoved.  Exploiting people’s superstition.  It’s racist.  It’s so disgusting.”

“No body,” said Osvaldo’s father.

“I’m sorry?  Oh, yes, no body.  No body!”

Search-and-rescue teams had combed the sides of the gorge for Manuel’s body, though their dogs were too terrified of losing their footing to be of much use.  The Sheriff’s Department dragged the Río several times, fruitlessly.

“He was a floater, wasn’t he?” the lawyer asked.

“Then they would have found him,” said Osvaldo’s father.  “Floating.”

“Oh, no!” said the lawyer.  She gave a kind of desperate, whinnying laugh.  “I meant—a throwaway kid.  He didn’t really have a home.  Kept running away from foster care.  Nobody reported him missing for three days.”

“So,” said the father, “he could be anywhere.”

“Anywhere at all!  That’s right.  Could’ve run away to Alaska for all anyone knows.  That’s all we need to say.”

“And all my son has to say is that he didn’t push him,” said Osvaldo’s mother.  “Under witness of God.”

“Oh, no!  He shouldn’t take the stand.  He shouldn’t testify.”

“Why shouldn’t he?”

The lawyer turned pink again.  “It’s better not… Anyway, there’s no need to talk about that now.  We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

“But if he’s innocent.”

“Ya déjale, mamá,” Osvaldo murmured.  He knew what the lawyer meant.  After all, hadn’t Osvaldo’s grandmother said, when she was scolding him, that the Devil himself must have scratched those ojos rasgados into Osvaldo’s face with his three-clawed hand?  Hadn’t an uncle once said how curious it was that Osvaldo’s parents had given the boy the same name as the satanic assassin of the great John F. Kennedy?  Hadn’t his father called him, as a young child, mi diablito, until it wasn’t funny anymore?  The lawyer was right: at the trial, he would have to sit quietly at the defense table, as far away from the jurors as possible.  He could not bring his face to the witness stand, to be displayed and animated before the jury, have them see the evil yellow in those scratched eyes and the even, satanic red glow beneath his skin.

#

While out on bond, Osvaldo continued working at his summer job for the Department of Transportation, fastening netting on the slopes that rose above the highway and the river, downstream from the Gorge.  DOT was eager to get the job done before the monsoon rains dislodged more rocks.  Earlier that year, a boulder had loosened and bounced down the mountainside and crushed a Bible-school bus from Texas before rolling into the Río Grande.  Several children on the bus had died.

Osvaldo’s fellow workers nicknamed the killer rock Baby Huey.  Baby Huey was a great big clumsy comic-book baby who couldn’t help breaking things and wreaking havoc.  Of course, being a baby, he was innocent and didn’t realize the damage he was causing.  Just like the rock, which now sat guiltlessly in the middle of the river, creating a pleasant swirl for river rafters to whee over.

“You don’t know Baby Huey?”  they asked Osvaldo.  “Caspar the Friendly Ghost?  Hot Stuff Sizzlers?”  Most of these guys were permanent employees and older than him, and those must have been old comics.

They explained.  Caspar was a wimpy ghost who had a ghost horse named Nightmare.  Hot Stuff Sizzlers was a fat little devil with a pitchfork.  All the men laughed, and so did Oswaldo.  They got Osvaldo a pitchfork and had him pitch straw mulch over the newly seeded hillsides, and called him Hot Stuff.

But that teasing had taken place before Osvaldo’s indictment.  Now the men gave him his space.  Osvaldo concentrated on his work, pitching straw and moving rocks and fastening netting and thinking.  Why did Baby Huey after all those centuries of just sitting there, decide to roll down the hill at that moment?  Well, of course Huey didn’t decide anything.  The rains had come, and the last molecule of dirt had released its grip, and there went Huey.  And there just happened to be a church bus tooling along the highway below.  Shit happened.

God’s will, his mother called it.  Why would God will a church bus full of children get crushed?  Osvaldo wanted to know.  Just calling His angels to heaven, she said.  Like Manuel, said Osvaldo.  Yes, like Manuel, said his mother, looking away from him.

Osvaldo’s father told him he should thank his lucky stars Manuel had no relatives in the area to take revenge.  Like if that rock had killed people with familia?  The relations would have long since tied dynamite around it and blown it up, right there in the river.

Osvaldo’s brothers were both in the Army overseas, in Iraq.  They sent him letters telling him to hang in there.  Sober, formal letters, not like previous ones where they’d joked about his joining them in Iraq and scaring the enemy to death with his Bad face.  They said they didn’t know if they could get leave to attend his trial, but that hopefully it wouldn’t come to that.

The judge told him sternly to not communicate with his homies, or he’d be clapped in jail until his until his trail.  He saw Lola once on the plaza but she pretended not to see him and disappeared into a store.  He could only hope that Lola would tell the truth, that she and Osvaldo really hadn’t been going out and she wasn’t his girlfriend, so how could he be jealous of Manuel?

“Don’t kill yourself,” one of the men murmured to him one afternoon as Osvaldo, thinking about these things, heaved straw furiously up a slope.  The guy was trying to be friendly, Osvaldo supposed, break the ice a little, but what Osvaldo heard was, Do kill yourself.

#

Downriver, about half a mile from where Baby Huey sat, lived Osvaldo’s chemistry teacher.  Osvaldo found this out one afternoon when, over lunch, the foreman, who’d spent the morning informing people who lived downstream that the netting project would soon include the hillsides above them, told about this one loco, a hippie with a bald top of the head and a ponytail, who told him that just because we always saw rocks roll downhill didn’t mean they always would; maybe one day they’d roll uphill; how could we be so sure they wouldn’t?  Had we observed the movements of all the rocks in the universe?  This loco’s house was a little blue one right on the water, with weird metal sculptures all around.

Osvaldo knew it had to be Gene.  The dude was always saying crazy shit like that.  He told the class that there was so much empty space in atoms that if you shrunk the world to where it was really solid, it would become the size of a ping-pong ball.  If you got sucked into a black hole, like the one at the center of our galaxy, you’d get stretched out in a long line of atoms, feet first.  Our bodies are made of so much water that you might as well think of yourself as just water doing its thing.  The sun was a big hydrogen bomb, constantly turning mass into energy, and, by the way, each of your bodies has the energy equivalent in mass of thirty H-bombs, which is something you might think about whenever you’re having self-esteem problems.

Gene had been a scientist in Los Alamos.  No one knew exactly how he ended up being a high-school teacher in Taos, but there he was, and the school was proud to have him.  He had a PhD, maybe two, but he didn’t like being called Dr. or even Mr., so he was just Gene.  He’d once brought to class a brownish glassy thing in the shape of a lightning bolt, about half an inch thick and a couple feet long.  It was melted dirt from lightning: lightning came from the ground up, he said.  It occurred to Osvaldo (maybe because lately he’d been stuck at home at night watching cop shows on television) that Gene would make a great expert witness at his trial.  He could bring in the glassy thing—what was it called?  Fool-something—and tell the jury that since lightning came from the ground up, Manuel could have been blown sky-high.  Maybe even evaporated—after all, lightning was like eight times hotter than the surface of the sun, Gene had told them.

After work that day, he told the foreman he didn’t need a ride back to town; his father would be picking him up.  The foreman looked relieved; since the indictment, those rides proved what Gene, quoting Einstein, said about time being relative—a minute’s not the same length when you’re eating chocolate ice cream as when you’re sitting on a hot stove.  Since the indictment, riding with the guys had felt a lot longer for all of them.

At quitting time, Osvaldo sat on a rock on the side of the road until all the crew had driven off.  Then he walked down the road to his teacher’s house.  It was blue, all right, and perched right over the water.  The sculptures were like strange windmills, their delicately balanced silver vanes in constant motion under the cottonwood trees.  Gene was outside, in shorts and a Hawaiian shirt, peering at something in the water.  Storm clouds billowed above the mountains to the north.

“Hey, Gene.  Hey, we’re working on the road, I mean, the hillsides—”

Gene shielded his eyes from the sun.  “So I’ve been told.  Osvaldo?”

“Yeah, it’s me.”  Teachers always remembered his name.  “Oh, you already know?”

“I’ve been apprised.  You working on that?”

“Yeah.  Labor.”

It was always weird meeting teachers outside of school.  At the movies or the grocery store, or like this, in shorts.  Showing up at their houses—nobody did that.  He realized he’d made a mistake.

“Okay, yeah, next week we’ll be up there.”  Osvaldo waved at the steep hillside and started back to the highway, wondering now how he was going to get home.

“Want to come in?” Gene called.

They entered the little house.  Books everywhere, and two computers, a big laptop and a desktop, that looked cobbled together from all sorts of parts.  Gene rummaged in a groaning old snail back refrigerator and brought out two cans of beer.

A teacher offering a student a beer!  But if any teacher broke the rules, it would be Gene.  It seemed pussy to tell Gene what the judge had told him, that if he broke any laws, such as underage drinking, his bond would be revoked immediately and he’d be sent to jail.  Osvaldo took a seat on a tatty sofa in the dim, low-ceilinged living room.  Outside, the river rushed.

Osvaldo propped his elbow on the armrest of the couch and held the beer up to partially hide his devilish face from Gene, whom he felt observing him even as he pretended to straighten the books on one of the tables.

“So how’s your summer been, Osvaldo?” he asked at last.

“Not too good.”

“Want to tell me about it?”

Gene listened attentively, but Osvaldo got the feeling he knew the story.  When Osvaldo broached the idea of Gene’s testimony, he pointed to the glass lightning bolt on the bookshelf.  “You could bring that in.”

“The fulgurite?”  He smiled at Osvaldo, regarded him for a long moment.  Then he asked him if he’d like to smoke a joint.  “It’ll help us think.  Strategize.”

Weed did make you think.  When he smoked, Osvaldo often pondered the weird things Gene said in class.

“Like what?”  Gene asked, passing him the joint.

“Like about almost everything being empty space.  Like inside the atoms?”

“How about at the trial I testify to that, too?  Since everything’s mostly empty space, how can you say anything really touches anything?  That should establish some reasonable doubt.”

Osvaldo wondered if he was being serious.

“I used to work in fusion, you know.  Up in Los Alamos.  The hydrogen bomb: now that’s really squeezing things so they touch.”

“Really,” said Osvaldo.

“The prosecutors could bring in a rebuttal witness and we could argue about force fields and shit.”  Gene giggled.  “The Uncertainty Principle.”

“The cat thing.”

“Schrödinger’s cat!  Alive and dead at the same time.”

It was getting dark.  Thunder struck, and lightning flashed in the dirty window.

Osvaldo wondered how he was going to get back home.

“Lightning, man,” said Gene.  “Weird shit, all right.  People think the lightning causes the flash.  The lightning is the flash.  No cause outside of its effects, right?”

Osvaldo nodded.  Speaking of effects, this was pretty good dope.  The couch felt like it was swallowing him up, but he found himself moving when Gene said, after another, louder bolt, “Come on, let’s go out and watch.”

They went out on the narrow, rail-less deck that overlooked the river.  The water roiled and frothed at their feet—raining hard upstream.  Crazy lightning split the sky.  It seemed to Osvaldo dangerous to be standing out there, but he wasn’t about to pussy out by saying so.  Gene appeared lost in thought.

“I think,” Gene said after a while, “that your best chance of winning is to dispute the motive.  You say Lola wasn’t your chick, right?”

“We went out a couple times.”

“So no need to be jealous of her, ¿que no?”  Gene was Anglo, but he thought using Spanish expressions was cool.

“Not really.”

“Ever fuck her?”

This was one of those questions it was good to lie about, and the low, conspiratorial way the teacher asked it put him on alert.  But Osvaldo murmured the truth, “No,” and felt his face get hot.

A quavering bolt lit the mountains like a fluorescent bulb going bad.  A cold breeze blew off the river.  Osvaldo shivered.  Gene put his arm around him.

Osvaldo didn’t get touched much—his mother’s hugs were always fleeting, and his father only ever shook his hand.  Gene’s arm felt good.  But it stayed too long, solid and unyielding; and he sensed the heat of the man’s thigh next to his.  He waited another moment for Gene to break the spell with a comradely jostle, and then he threw the man’s arm off.

“Pinche puto!”

“All right, now,” said Gene, backing up.  “What are you saying?  Are you saying I touched you inappropriately?  Is that what you’re saying?”

The man talked too fast and too slick, as though he had been in this kind of situation before.  Or maybe he just was scared.  He should be scared, pinche joto, fucking with The Bad.

Osvaldo took a swing at him.  But either he slipped or Gene tripped him, and he fell into the thrashing river.

#

The river dragged him over rocks, pitched him through the froth.  He cracked his head on a boulder and felt warmth on his scalp.  His work boots grew heavy with water, but when he managed to get on his back and going feet first he was grateful for the way they bore the blows of the rocks as he shot downstream.  Without knowing how long or how far he’d gone, he found himself twirling gently in an eddy.  His buttocks scraped coarse sand and anchored him.  He pulled himself onto a tiny beach on the other side of the river.

In a panic to get away from the roiling water, he clambered up the rocky slope.  From the safety of the flat plain, where the three-quarters moon silvered the sage, he contemplated the river below, his scalp and elbow and tailbone throbbing.  He couldn’t make out Gene’s house, and it was impossible to tell how far the water had carried him.  Fucking Gene!  But with his mind now cleared by the shock of the water, he wondered if the dope hadn’t made him paranoid back there, hadn’t exaggerated the length of time the man had had his arm around him.

The closest place he knew of for crossing back to the other side of the river was the bridge over the Gorge, several miles—exactly how many, he had no idea—to the north.  All he had to do was walk over the rocky ground between the clumps of chamisa and sage and grama grass, keeping the river on his right until he got there.  He set out, his soaked boots squeaking.  After a few steps, he caught a glimpse of flashlight beam sweeping over the water below, and heard Gene’s voice calling him, a hoarse, pleading voice: “Hey.  Hey, Osvaldo.  Hey, man.”

He walked on.  The storm had receded over the mountains and the wind died down, but he was still cold.  He stopped and took off his clothes and wrung them out.  For a while he walked only in his boots and his underwear, so the damp clothes wouldn’t chafe his skin.  The chasm to the river deepened.

Several hours along, when the moon was high and small, he lay on his side to rest.  He couldn’t lie on his back, because his tailbone, which must have struck a rock in the river, hurt more than ever.  The wound on his head had swollen and become tender all around.  So things don’t really touch things, Gene, you stupid fuck?  Maybe Gene could tell the jury that other thing he’d said in class, that just because you saw something happen the same way a million times didn’t mean it would happen that same way on the million and first.  You just have faith that it will.  One day a rock might run up a hill instead of down.  Maybe Manuel had flown into the sky instead of fallen into the Gorge.  Why not?  Everybody now seemed to think Manuel was an angel anyway.

He shivered his way into a fitful sleep.  He dreamed he was falling headfirst into a chasm, and when he hit bottom he hit just so, causing the atoms to fuse into a nuclear explosion.  He opened his eyes to the first rays of the morning sun blasting into his face.

No more than quarter mile farther along, his body stiff and his clothes still damp and his stomach an empty hole, and there it was, the steel lace of the Gorge Bridge, bright in the early morning sun.

A single car, a beige hatchback of some sort, was parked in the viewing area, someone sitting on the hood.  As he got closer, he saw it was a girl with short, glossy black hair, writing in a notebook.  From what he could tell, she was alone.  The car had California license plates.

Absorbed though she appeared to be in her writing, she sensed him.  She slipped the notebook under the black jacket next to her and watched him calmly.  Her lip rings glittered in the sun.  She couldn’t have been much older than he, maybe twenty.  Dressed all in black.  The upper end of a red-and-black tattoo crawled from under her t-shirt and up her neck.

“What’s up?” he said.

She didn’t draw back at his approach, and not a spark of fear crossed her dark, sunlit eyes.  A tough Goth chick.

She shrugged.  “Sun’s up.”

“Feels good.”

“To you, especially.  You’re wet.”

Osvaldo offered no explanation.

“You hungry?”  Without waiting for an answer, she reached under the jacket and produced a foil wrapped burrito.  He took it.  Chorizo and egg, the picante already in it, warming him from the inside as the sun warmed him on the outside.  The gorge lay deep in morning shadow, the river a black snake.

He eyed the corner of her notebook and wondered what the writing was about.

He couldn’t help but think of the several people who had jumped from the bridge in recent years.  The last guy, who’d driven up from Santa Fe, had brought his sack lunch with him and written the goodbye note on the bag.  Before that, a couple had jumped, holding hands as they sailed into the abyss—their hands the last thing they touched before hitting bottom.

“They’re looking for you, dude,” she said.

“Who?  Where?”

“Down on the highway, by the río?  Search-and-rescue big time.  Divers and the whole shebang.  Don’t tell me that’s not you.”

He waited a while before answering.  “Yeah, that’s probably me.  My chemistry teacher pushed me.”

“Your chemistry teacher pushed you.  Okay.”

“Or I fell.  I probably just fell.  It’s complicated.”

“Always.”

He told the story from the beginning as best he could, his brain foggy from lack of sleep, realizing only afterwards that all the time his eyes had been on the pink and blue smudge at the Edge where people had placed plastic flowers to mark the spot of Manny’s disappearance.  Miles beyond stood the dark mountains that birthed the lightning storms.

“Well, if you’re gonna skip bond, this would sure be the time to do it,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“Because in about two days you’re going to be presumed dead.  Unless somebody sees you.  Here, get down.”

He crouched in front of the car.  A truck went by, making the bridge tremble.  The car’s license plate in front of his face read California, plain and simple.  When the trembling stopped, she said, “Coast is clear.”  He found himself gripping the chrome fenders of the car; but as she touched his hand, the lightest of touches, his grip loosened, and he rose.

Two thirds of my life ago, I lay next to her in the big bed she had shared with my father.  He lay in the hospital dying and she did not pick up her book.  Instead, she kept placing her hand on the telephone and petting it lightly with her fingers like it was the back of a small animal that needed comforting.  When the phone rang she lifted it gently and slowly from its cradle and placed it on her ear with her eyes closed.  At least I saw it that way, her movements in suspended animation, her face trained to unbearable sorrow, perhaps because my heart sped up, my teeth clenched, and my stomach pressed up into my throat with a breathless nausea.  My body didn’t care that I had known he would die.  My body planned to relive that moment often in the months to follow.  My body had a memory that wouldn’t quit.  My stomach remembered.  My heart had its own mind.

The hearse, the tears, the grave and the stone, the cards and the kind words all sifted out of my body and my mother’s body, eventually.  We kept other pieces.  My mother kept herself from any other man.  I kept remains from the winking place that showed me how to live without him.

*****

My brother, Ben, learned how to press the frets, stroke the strings and hug the curvy body of the polished Martin guitar he’d saved forever to buy, all on his own.  Self-taught, he quickly got points for the same fret-pressing, string strumming and hugging of the women who called or came looking for him.  The seventeen, eighteen, and nineteen year old sylphs never asked, nor did he disclose his age of fourteen. Though artists and poets have had their ways with the similarities between guitars and women since there were guitars, I suspect only my brother literally practiced parallel moves while he composed and made love.

My father, a crew cut Navy vet, with a concave scar in his back the size of a jack knife,  found Ben’s long hair, hip hugger bell bottoms, and his slow, blue stoner eyes, one big objection.  Ben didn’t care much for academics or for sports.  He didn’t care much for curfews, or other stupid rules.  Jammin’ with his band often went on late into the night, long past my parents’ waiting-up time.  After working hard and fathering five children with the love of his life, Dad stirred up with one finger all the sad and bitter stories in a glass of Jim or Jack, and ice.

We moved to Israel, my mother told me much later, to cure my father of his demons.  In the stucco house with the cool tiled floor, lemon trees fragrant by the line of sheets drying in the back yard, she thought he might return to something essential he had lost along the way.  He might have been an engineer had his father not willed him the retail store.  He might have avoided being the fat boy if his mother had not fed him so much love. He might not have beaten his own children had he not grown up with the belt.  Or cheated on his wife.  Or drank.  Or invented his monumental and compensatory charisma.

I learned by way of his hand across my face, that if you met Dad at the door, coming in at night, or going out, you’d need to out-slick him in conversation.  You would have to think like a drunk.  Any question he asked, no matter how benign, resulted in your wrong and therefore punishable answer.  If he asked, “Where are you going?” or “Where’re you comin’ back from?” the stated location would, de facto, contain a fatal flaw:  not enough parental supervision, a dangerous location, an unfamiliar location or too far away.  Likewise, if he asked who you had hung around with, the cast of friends always suffered in his estimation.

While I had little of Ben’s straightforward charm, I had developed enough analytical skills to beat my father at his own tongue-twisting game.  Just like maneuvering the car around potholes in the less than perfect roads of the Holy Land, I found a couple of ways to tilt the axis of our dialogue in my favor.

One method involved beating him to the opening gambit.  Hey Dad, I’m incredibly glad to see you.  I have the most mind-bending question about a trigonometry problem.  I couldn’t wait to get home to ask you. I’d quickly waltz up the front steps and cross the porch, opening the door to the house as he, taking another swig of good old Jack, processed what I’d just said.

A second fairly workable method, involved hearing his question, scratching my head, appearing to answer his question while in fact redirecting his attention.  Dad, I’d say with the most awe struck voice, Look at those stars tonight.  You can see every constellation! As he glanced overhead I’d slip inside.  Maybe the star gazing helped in some way.  With stars in his eyes he rarely came in looking for me, and I’d head to bed and pretend to sleep soundly, catastrophe averted.

One Sunday afternoon Ben came home from a jam session, took out his guitar and showed me some riffs.  We sat in the dining room with the chairs casually pushed back from the table, me rocking mine back and forth on the back legs, something mom hated because we might fall back and smash our heads or, at the very least, loosen legs.  Dad came in from doing errands, some plastic bags and mail in his hands, to find the trash overflowing.  Rage climbed up his neck in red spasms.  The gray rag of his face knotted into a grimace, and in that moment his eyes blocked out all light.  Glassy and dark, they shrank back into his head.

I stood frozen, an acrid pit odor greasing my nostrils.  I did not even try to speak as dad deftly lifted the guitar from Ben’s hands, and placed its body with utmost delicacy on the dining room table, its mother-of-pearl ringed mouth open to the ceiling light.

He yanked Ben out of his chair by the neck, the chair crashing back, and hurled him into the wall.   The momentum threw me off balance.   I saw the moment reiteratively, my mind stuttering like a scratched record.

The moment stretched, bent, and finally broke as Ben screamed, “Stop, stop, you asshole, stop.”

My father’s rage built higher.  “Who’s the asshole?”  He screamed, poising his foot over Ben’s hip.  Ben just lay curled, his arms covering his head.  But the stamping and kicking didn’t stop, even though I’d reentered my own body, screaming, “Don’t, don’t.”

I grabbed my father’s shirt and pulled down and back hard.  It ripped, but he didn’t feel it.  I ran to the kitchen and pulled the knife drawer all the way out of the cabinet by the sink.  My phobia of sharp things notwithstanding, I grabbed the large butcher knife among the clatter and clang of all the others that scattered on the floor in runes as portentous of things to come as tea leaves in a china cup.

I ran back to the dining room and kicked our father in the back, high up, near the scar, and when he turned, startled, I held the knife against my own chest, pushing in, just slightly.

“Kill me, kill me; if you have to kill someone make it me.”  I said that.  I did. And he stopped, his hands dropping, his eyes turning their ice blue color, the fatal darkness receding.

“Never, ever,” I said to him, staring straight into his eyes, “touch him again.”

I threw the knife onto the tile and the point broke off, skittering somewhere.  He tried to move past me to get to Ben but I screamed, “Stay back.”

I wrapped my arms around Ben, lifting him, lifting him. And all his parts held. Curled forward, blood oozed from his nose and stained his teeth.  Dad backed away, confused. I knew that later on he would knock on my door, kneel down, plead for forgiveness, his plea a spreading stain.  But this time he had gone too far.  I would hold on to what he wanted and not give it back.

I brought Ben into my bedroom and locked the door.  I laid him on his side on my bed and docked down behind him, my fingers quietly counting his ribs.  I wondered where my mother had gone, not for the first time.

*****

At the Independence Day races in Orchard Hills, dad was the fastest swimmer of all the dads.  He never practiced the crawl or the butterfly but his thick arms clobbered the water when he sped, lap after lap, while barely breathing.

Bobbie Sanchez asked me and Ben where dad got the bayonet wound in his back, and had he been in the war? I had no idea what a bayonet was and Ben was just six and barely knew any constellations except the Big Dipper. What would he know about bayonets?

Later I asked mom about the scar, and she said that the doctors had had to drain his lung during the year Dad spent in the sanitarium.  When mom told us, “Dad will be staying in a sanitarium with TB for awhile,” I had thought TB must be his war buddy and cried that he would prefer a friend over me and Ben and mom.  But, at the time, I didn’t know that the scar had a connection to the sanitarium, so, when Bobbie Sanchez asked me about the bayonet wound and the war, I said, “Yeah, my dad got that scar in the war.”  And Bobbie Sanchez said, “Cool, man.”

When he went over to Timmy Donaldson and John Bingham and started pointing at dad and whispering in an excited way, I felt proud of my dad, for fighting in the war and living with a wound in his back, even though it was only true for the minute that I thought it might be true.

My recollection had made of that whole year dad was in the sanitarium, a single day. I was five and Ben only three at the time.  Boston’s four seasons seemed like a single season, and of our hundred and something visits there at roughly two times a week, I can remember one day only, or all the days merged into one.  I don’t know why that day, because nothing particularly remarkable happened. I remember standing in the shade of the brick building, strands of light brown hair blowing across my mouth.  Mom stands next to me holding a stroller in one hand and Ben’s hand in the other.  The little guy looks at the cracks in the sidewalk and slides the toe of his untied sneaker over one of them, making a gravelly sound.  Dad looks outside from a window above us, with his light blue eyes and big forehead.  He waves and we wave back.  He winks and we wink back. He blows us kisses and we blow back, only Ben kisses his hand and leaves it over his mouth until I yank it away and he cries and mom gets mad and tells me, “Stop.”  Then she looks up at Dad and mouths the words “I love you,” and puts her hand over her heart, the one that was holding the stroller.  She never lets go of Ben’s hand because the cars whiz by on the street sometimes and grit flies into our faces when we turn to look and see about the color and make of the car, or if it’s a truck.  Ben likes trucks.  But mom holds his sweaty little hand tightly because kids are like dogs and might chase balls or dreams or squirrels into streets even when cars could kill them.  “They don’t have good judgment yet,” mom says.

When we wave “goodbye,” to dad, we do it the same way as when we said “hello.”  I move my hand back and forth like a windshield wiper blade, but Ben opens and closes his hand like he is trying to grab the air.  I think, “This is how people speak sign language.  We know how to speak sign language.”

Sometime after dad died, when he was forty four and I was nineteen, I wondered whether we had always spoken sign language, on opposite sides of a pane of glass, he floating several stories up, and me bolted to the ground.

Light blue eyes in the pale face, his hair receding early, that’s how I remember my father in that winking place.

*****

Dad’s birth, in my Grandmother’s mind, was not the lone feat of an incompetent cervix, but a lucky prize in the sweepstakes of survival, the pot having grown more impressive over the course of the seven sad miscarriages.  Her prince had incorporated, into his flesh and his mind, all the virtues of those others who had not made it past bits of flesh and bone with bulging eyes and fast beating hearts.

Not a birthmark or a hair would escape her ministrations.  Because her precious baby had come prematurely and lay in an incubator for a month, barely touched, his vision thankfully undiminished, she intended to make up for that by bathing him with her until he was six, and feeding him with her own buttery fingers until he blew up into a fat boy.  Granny got Dad a scruffy terrier for a friend, and when the dog died, substituted a foster boy from Germany who was older and more curious and whose hands loved pockets and pocketing and secretly roamed everywhere, even between the sheets in the bed where Dad lay in the premature body of his dreams.

*****

A white haired woman looks up as I approach the circular, wood grain Formica information desk and ask for him.  She points to the bank of elevators, her whole shoulder lifting to lift her thin arm. For a moment, her arm sticks straight out like a scarecrow’s arm.

The gray concrete floor, to either side of the rubberized roll-out rugs, shows off its buffed waxy surface.  Though thick and solid enough for the bottom floor of the hospital, in fact it has stories below it where rooms without windows stand along undecorated corridors.  The morgue resides at the lowest point in the ground, with its cold, stainless steel boxes.

Even the cadavers have names I suppose.  Switching their tags would constitute as much of an offense as switching the names of newborns.  As I head toward him, and his time is near, I know that we all want to hold onto our names even into the next world, even if there is no other world.  I head up, entering the steel marionette of the elevator with its hungry, robotic mouth, the whole thing hanging by wires.  And, as we rise and stop several times before the fifth floor, I welcome the shimmy of the cables through my body.  My stomach briefly lurches as the momentum stops, the elevator falling slightly into place, the cables stretching infinitesimally.  I yawn and lift my arms above my head as I step out and look for ‘531.’  He would have a bed in a room of odd prime numbers counting backward by two, to oblivion.

I see signs of morning as Zodiacal rising signs:  the drawl of steaming coffee with its slow wake, individual boxes of Raisin Bran, cartons of milk, eggs hiding under aluminum helmets on white china plates that clank along on cantaloupe colored plastic trays slid onto wheeled carts.  The wheeler-people have nets on their heads and laminated identifiers hang from their necks.

I grab the oatmeal and applesauce intended for him.  I enter the room and a shrugging, yellow odor, without excuses, meets me just beyond the doorway.  I see his shape but do not look at his details yet, not until I’ve managed to glide the tray onto the cluttered surface of the side table where a full pitcher of water sits untouched, next to newspapers, tissues, a vase of flowers, cards.  And then he holds my hand, opening his eyes for a few seconds at a time.  A half a smile sits in each corner of his mouth, like cats crouching under the oxygen mask.  Lilly he whispers, each syllable of my name distinct, his cyanotic face and hands portraying a robustness long gone.  But I remember his strength for him.

How the community pool closed at six but didn’t stop dad.  He would march me and Ben up the dirt path, take a running leap, grab the points of the stockade fence and hurl himself to the inside.  Unlocking the gate we would file in, excited to have the pool to ourselves.  There I learned to swim, whether I liked it or not.  Dad heaved me onto his shoulders, climbed up to the diving board, took three steps and jumped off.

“Hold your nose,” he screamed as we arced into the air and fell into the chill aqua water, sunlight scattering from its surface.

“See? That was fun wasn’t it?”  And all my gut clenching monosyllables slid back down my throat so I’d laugh, my eyes only wet from the swim.  He threw me in the deep end without warning so I’d find my arms.  Or my balance with the one-push bicycle lesson.  And the transmission when I drove the VW station wagon for the first time.

“I have something to ask you,” he said, straining to keep his eyes open, the blips and bleeps of the machines chanting behind his head.  “I’ll probably be out of here in a few days.  But just in case I don’t make it, know that I love you and Ben, and I’m sorry.”  He took my hand and closed it as if he’d given me something to hold.

“Let me feed you some of this lovely oatmeal before it gets too cold.”  I got that out of my mouth before the tightness in my throat strangled me.

“Just say you’ll be happy and get outta here.  You’ve got better things to do on a day like this.”

“OK,” I said.  “Done.”

I bent over his shrunken chest.  His heart fluttered between tiny squeezed breaths, in a tangle of plastic tubes.  I inhaled the odor of his lost war, his resignation and I left him then.  I turned to look at him one more time at the doorway, but he had closed his eyes so they wouldn’t touch mine.  I left the door open. I found the red exit sign, the heavy steel door, and raced down five flights of stairs.  And then I called my mother.  “You better get here soon,” I said.

But this is not what happened because I never got to the hospital.  This is my sister Susan’s story.  She was the one who came to our father’s side, as often as she could, and right before he died. She was the one he spoke to while he still could.  I stayed away.  Ben stayed away.  I waited.  I figured I would, God damn it, wait for the right day.

*****

I galloped down Blackberry Lane because my best friend Tricia loved her horses and I wanted to be one.  I’d stayed late at her house, the way end of summer days stay, cattails of light thickening into dusk.  Even mom’s dinner bell rang unheard in the quieted neighborhood. Wires on the telephone poles stretched like a musical staff across measures of dirt road hemmed by tall grass. Wild grapes, strung more opportunistically among the willing trees, flashed their fragrance. Their evening-purple globes reminded me of Christmas lights and ping pong balls, and marbles with tigers’ eyes in them.

Though barefoot, I succeeded in nearly touching the tops of the telephone poles, each time I leapt into the air, or so I imagined.  The lights of the lampposts came on as if to say so.  And their glow led down the hill to home.  The air chilled and gradually seeped into my bare feet, making the road hard.  As I walked, the shadow approaching me on the road turned into my father, but to take my mind off meeting up with him, I thought of Tricia. How earlier that day we had played in my yard, under the great willow tree.  We sat underneath it and made up stories, or climbed onto the lowest branch and balanced there with no hands.  The slow fall of leaves made a veil between us and the beyond.

When we got hungry I yelled for Ben to make us peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.  He brought them out on a teetering paper plate, walking on an imaginary tightrope across the yard so as not to drop them.  We clapped for him and Tricia’s braids wagged.  We all ate on the ground and told Ben they were the best sandwiches ever.  The great willow sank its roots ever more deeply underneath us and spread out to net the entire yard, so it could hold all our sweetness together.  I didn’t know what or who God was, but when we leaned our heads back against the willow tree I thought, God must be holding my head.

But here dad was, only one telephone pole away.  He said nothing but his eyes shot red-hot holes in the dusk.  I hung my head and clasped hands behind my back. He tore pale leaves from a willow branch and flicked it.   He lifted it like a baton before he spoke.

“Where were you?” he said.

“At Tricia’s.”

“Mom rang the dinner bell.”

“I didn’t hear it. I was having too much fun.”

“It was getting dark.”

“I’m coming home now and it isn’t even all the way dark yet.”

“Ben managed to hear the bell.”

“I will definitely notice next time.”

“Ben noticed it was getting dark. He came home for dinner.  But not you.  What, are you special?  With a special excuse?”

“No.  I’m not special at all.”

“I’ll show you special,” he said, as if I had not answered him.

Peeling the remaining leaves from his willow branch, running blunt fingers over its smooth skin, he bent and straightened it, whipped it loosely.  Night air fluted between us and stung me.  Shrill pond sounds lifted above the thrum of bull frogs.  My heart lost its place.

“Get going,” he said, stepping to the side so I could pass him.

I smelled the drink on him and heard the willow snap as it sliced across my wrists, which I held behind me.  Again he whipped me, across the backs of my legs.  So I let my arms hang by my sides, and I walked.  One foot and then the other.  But not hurried.  Not fast.  Not special. I walked in front of him.

The whip cracked my back and then my legs again. The lines burned into me and widened until all my skin was on fire. I knew I was not special, but he must have thought me bad.  Was it possible to be bad and not know it, to not remember it every day?  I walked slowly until I got to the bottom of the hill.  I wanted to run, sure, but something in me would not let me go.

A half moon sorted itself out from behind clouds and cooled my shadow on the road.  I could not see his shadow.  I did not hear his voice.  I only heard the little gasps of air as he swung the willow whip and then the slick crack of it. Near home I walked on the air, higher than telephone poles, and felt nothing.

“Wait,” he said, at the front door.

But I did not wait.  I was not special.  The hallway seemed long, leading to the kitchen where Ben and Mom sat on the high-backed orange banquette, their plates half gone.  Behind their backs the tiny trenches of etched vinyl patterns looked black.  The shadowy remains of former dinners rose above their heads in dark halos.  Mom had a napkin in her lap, her fork poised. They did not look at me when I entered the room.  My father walked over to the hungry end of the table and lifted his fork before he sat down.  He was a man ready to strike.  The fluffy mashed potatoes, now congealed, plowed onto his fork in a stiff mound.  He could chew through mountains.

I sat down though I could not sit down.  My fork trembled slightly under a small wad of meatloaf.  I ate a few bites, but the food had no taste. Everything stung and quivered.  My body disintegrated and rose in tiny particles, almost dust motes above the familiar faces of my family.

Later Ben asked if I would tell him what happened and I said, “No.”

Later dad knelt by my bed and asked, “Will you forgive me for hurting you?”

But I said nothing.

“Come on, baby, I didn’t mean it.  You know I love you more than anything.”

Then tears poured down his face and he set his glass down by my bed.  His heavy hand rested on my back and I cringed.  His words came out wet and stuck together.

“Please, Lilly.”

“Yes,” I said, my throat clogged with stones.  “Yes, I forgive you.” I said in a willow voice.

“Do you love me?” he demanded.

“Yes, I love you, Dad.”

As I fell asleep, the willow whispered apologies and asked nothing in return.  Nothing at all.

*****

The infant lies on a Tide-washed flannel blanket with pink flowers.  Mid-May, the oaks have unclenched their fists and small young leaves taste the wind.  Lilly presses her head and chest up on her fat hands to look out the picture window.  To her left the glass-topped Noguchi table, scoured by sunlight, reveals its small scratches and a fine coating of dust near a coaster, a glass vase of carnations, and a photo album.

In the channel of light, dust motes float, and Lilly watches, reaching out to feel them.  They feel like nothing, of course, but their dance inspires.  To three month old Lilly, dust will not, for a long time, turn into one of many things tagged for removal.  Nothing has become unacceptable yet; nothing is dirty.  She puts the world into her mouth to learn its many names.

The fine hair on Lilly’s head sticks up like strands of milkweed and disappears into the wash of bright sunlight.  Also, the edges of her body seep into the rug’s whiteness except where one arm casts a shadow.  Now, as the camera moves you can see some dog hairs on her face around the wet mouth, her tongue moving back and forth, tasting.

Only after some time has passed does she turn her head from the window to see her mother gazing at her. She wants to see her smiling father holding the sixteen millimeter movie camera, although the film does not show him, of course, because he is making the movie of his first child.  To accomplish this she has to roll onto her back.  Her mother claps. The tympani thunder in Lilly’s brain as new synapses forge the connections necessary for such a major feat as rolling over.

I don’t remember any of this, of course, not that spring or the picture window, or rolling for the first time, or how either of my young parents looked, in their new house with their new baby.  But I remember the light on my face, the altar of it, to which I always return.

Watching the movie, I wish I could have held onto my mother’s dedicated gaze that day, and my father’s hands adjusting the lens of the camera.  But everything presented itself to me without names.

My first memory is what I want to remember, the way love lit my face and I rolled over to bathe in it.

*****

On a Fall Saturday morning the gray skies, having poured down heavy rain, stopped.  Afterward, an even grayer gathering of clouds produced hail.  The hail stones looked gigantic to me and to Ben, as we stood on his bed and placed our chins on our arms which reached the casement window sill in Ben’s basement room.  The hail stones must have been the size of golf balls.  At the very least, the largest sort of marble. They clacked and thudded, clonking the window occasionally in the wind.

Ben got the idea that we should put a chair on top of his bed to push us higher, get an umbrella, and push open the window so we could go outside and collect the hail stones in plastic buckets.  Small and determined then, I was six and Ben four, we inched our way out the tight angle of the window’s opening in our bare feet, our pajamas instantly soaked, our feet freezing in the icy puddles between the grassy bulges of the yard.  I had a red bucket and he a blue and we gathered hail, trying to share the umbrella, each of us jumping out to find the biggest ones before racing back.  We popped those globes of ice in our mouths and crunched them, felt them melting on our hot, happy tongues until our tongues froze and neither of us could talk without slurring.

“I’m tasting the sky,” Ben yelled, stretching his arms out and letting the umbrella fall.  While picking it up the hail started hitting my head.  “Ouch, it hurts. I can’t believe they hurt so much,” I said.

“Whaddya think,” Ben laughed, getting pelted himself, but bearing the bruises by covering his head with his hands.  “They’re coming all the way from the sky.”

Looking up I yelled, “Stop sky, stop.  We’ve had enough.”  And in the momentary yawn between two clouds, the hail thinning, we believed the sky cared.  At the time we played in a yard at the crossroads of Barberry and Field Roads and they crossed each other at the exact center of the universe.  Everything, the orchard to our left when we faced the gravel road, the willows to our right, the woods behind, and the two streets crosshatching the green hills with their old stone walls meandering like long serpents, the serpents inching their way along, slumbering until moss grew on their skins, until chipmunks and larvae made homes in their crevices, grew up around us.  They were the arms and the legs of our childhood.  The hills filled our faces and the resinous smell of the pines our sleep.

The brief indulgence of the sky now over, the hail pelted us even harder.  I got two bruises on my arm and a bump on my head.  Still, when I looked up at the sky, at its fathomless face of blue, or at the shape shifting clouds spelling their forecast, I thought the punishments brief, then over, something done for our benefit.  Undone for the same reason.  It was so much better than hairbrushes or belt buckles.

Ben and I, shimmying back inside the house, sliding down the bedroom wall from the window in our rain-soaked pajamas, handing each other our buckets of hail, had everything, and we had gotten it all by ourselves.

*****

“Love doesn’t conquer all, you know, or even anything.  It’s just what’s left after everything else gets incinerated.  It’s the bit of bone and hair peaking from the ash.”  I might have said that to him if the clever things to say sounded like writing and didn’t take a few hours down the hair-raising highway to materialize, all the while noticing a Mack truck in the rearview mirror gaining ground fast enough for me to change lanes and drive further away from dad for the last time.

So many times after that meeting, in the shower, on a walk, or in the car, I saw him standing there in the Cathedral of Pines where he took me after I had picked him up from the halfway house where he tried for the umpteenth time to sober up and stay that way.  I drove to meet him in his former VW bug, and had had it long enough by then that it smelled like me.

I never passed along what he told me, to my mother, what he had said about loving her still and always and hoping they could get back together.  I don’t know why he thought me the appropriate emissary or imagined that I could put together anything his Jack Daniels had burned to the ground.  But the truth is that I didn’t want him to come home any more, to find him passed out on the living room floor where he had fallen after gashing his forehead somewhere, while out the night before.  I didn’t want to see his belt, hanging from the waist of his pants where it had been too restless to stay when Ben and I were younger.

She never knew what he told me in the Cathedral of Pines. Sometimes, even though it’s a crazy long shot, since he died, I wonder if that would have been the abracadabra.

*****

Lying in my small Japanese bed in the basement room of our first house in Orchard Hills, I looked out the bare casement window at the milky moon and stars with only the flutter of my eyelids for blinds. The moonlit and lightless nights, both, made of the pane a blank page.

I loved listening to the grown-ups in their cocktail dresses and high heels, upstairs on New Year’s eve or on a Saturday night in mid-summer, their sounds all lit up and sparkling, their talk blending with Billie Holiday and the blues, and their glasses clinking toasts. I would sleep, knowing I was sleeping, in the blanket of their heat, and awaken easily when Dad came downstairs as he inevitably would, to check in on me.  Sitting at the foot of my bed, he would light a fresh cigarette and take a long drag of it, before setting his tumbler of Jack on the floor and placing a hand on my leg.

With the glowing nib of his cigarette, he would burn a hole in the darkness and snake it into figure eights and squiggles, all fluid and fascinating.  He sang “Watch out, watch out, watch out for Jimmy Valentine, watch out!” in a baritone chant that scared me in a way I loved to have him scare me.  It was all sorcery and fire.  He took a sip of his drink, sucking air through his teeth.  And when he left the room I could always taste his smoke.

I here or there? he wondered silently, allowing the broadside of his fingers to follow the lines as they curved upward and away from the centers of her palm, splintering into the dark streams that flowed to the sea of rich, warm color.  He never spoke his query out loud, instead swallowing it, letting it move with lightening speed to the base of his belly where he would restrain the urge to push himself into her, looking at her hands, feeling them already cupped against the small in his back.

In these hands now, Houraye held a chipped plate, her face turned downward in a frown, her nose flared in distaste.  Edward stopped his typing, carefully leaning back in his chair to watch her.

The alleyway that the kitchen window opened onto offered a small, but trapped light that cast indeterminable shadows on her face. September already, autumn barreling into their newlywed lives with all the precision of a blunt knife. The plate in her hand like the many she had pulled down from the cabinets now littering the floor between the half bedroom where he had set up office and the kitchen where she stood, hands akimbo on hips still slight. Me life work to watch them fill out, he thought lightly, stretching his arms into the air and across his head where they could only hold each other patiently.

It had been the phone call from her father; the one she had answered and for the first time not thrust the phone at him with a nervous laugh, forcing him to bridge the crackle of language, place, culture; reach out to speak to family in Africa, greet them in his best and politest French – speak to she mother and father and make nice. Nah, this time, see, she had held the phone clenched in her hand, nodding and answering in a false gaiety, like she swallow a bowl of hysteria. Nodded again and again, snapping at him with hands suddenly brought to life, indicating pen and paper (always close by, he had thought cheerily), and then writing down a date in September, and underlining 5 days in furious slash strokes. Edward never taking his eyes off her, until the phone call over, the phone hung up and she absentmindedly biting the nails she just started to grow.

All this because Father coming, he think now from his space in his office. Father as in capital F, as in proper pronoun. Father as in:

“He is coming to visit. He will be here in two weeks. He is staying for five days.”  She had parroted the information to him like straight translation.

“He staying with us?”  Edward had asked, unsure of how these type things went.

Houraye had frowned, and the movement seemed to bring her back from the stupor of the phone call. She looked at him, then, as if just seeing him for the first time.

“My father always stays at the Inter-Continental. Always,” she said flatly.

Edward whistled. The whistle of an ignoramus, he know now. A low-class never been nowhere man. Inter-Continental mean class, man. Mean he a sure Some-Body. Inter-Continental big bucks, mid Manhattan’s finest hotel. What Edward know? Certainly not a thing at all about this visiting Father thing. He know nothing then, still don’t know much now.

For weeks, as the days come closer, Houraye start unfolding, unraveling, biting her nails further and further into the safety of ragged cuticles. Edward wrapped up in getting the play finished, getting it done in the eight hours of discipline he promised himself. What he know? Couldn’t have known that their lives, their joyous coming together in this apartment now under a looking glass, Houraye hell bent on finding the broken and weak. Laying it before him in both a triumph and despair. So now, where once was kitchen floor – uneven, yes, missing tiles, perhaps — now a sea of ruin grown between them. Chipped dishes, cracked glasses, bent and unwieldy silverware.

Edward shook his head slightly.

“You know I could tell you the story behind each one of them faults,” he said, raising from his chair and moving toward her. Houraye was not listening, instead inspecting plates and saucers.

“Three matching.  Just three matching and one to serve with,” she muttered to herself with some force.

Edward kneeled and picked up a lone glass encircled by coffee mugs with peeling letters and amputated arms.  The glass — part of a once upon a time set cut down in its prime from six to a lonesome two — bore a crack that threatened to widen with time, time he had once thought of happily.

“That glass? From Denis’ visit.”

The memory was still warm in his mind.  Their first real visit, Denis christening their home with his ancient bottles of rum. They had talked long into the night, their bellies filled with a curry she had prepared, each trading boyhood tales of a Caribbean that no longer existed.  Houraye had left the dishes in the sink to come and join them, taking a seat at his feet. That night, as he reached to massage her shoulders, the thought of he and she, the two of them afterwards cleaning the kitchen together –she washing, he drying — the thought of all that domesticity gave his stomach a pond of quiet in which to see Denis through. Two people he loved most in the world, fans and family both, he had thought, pushing back her heavy hair, as she had leaned against the inside of his legs.

Denis had left late after the midnight hour, and Edward had walked him down the three story walk-up, onto the broad avenue to help him to a cab. When he had returned from assuring Denis’ safe passage in an illegal taxi downtown — what else would stop for two black men, husky with night — walking firm legs upward, upward to his top floor heaven where a woman waited for him; not just any woman, but a wife now, a permanent place of comfort behind a heavy door bearing the name Joseph.

Houraye’s cheeks had become flushed from the rum she had sipped with them.  Graceful still, but the clumsy beauty only liquor painted her with. She had reached out for the glasses, reaching through her drunkenness, missing the glasses but still smiling sweetly even as they shattered at her feet.

“Diamonds,” he had teased her, inspecting her feet gently, carefully, for razor thin marks of where the glass might have cut her.  “The Queen stands in diamonds.”

Drunk, she had not even rolled her eyes, the way she did most times at his off the cuff poetry.  A good sign, and she, unhurt in the end, had ended up drying, as he washed and told stories about the once upon days back in his island home. Then, after they made love and she had curled up to his side, her eyes closed, her breath still scented with the spicy scent of rum, one hand spread wide over his heart, Edward had reached for the bedside pad and pen and there composed a poem about she as queen standing in midnight glass.

Now, Houraye snatched the glass from him and threw it into a garbage can where it landed with a thud. “Nothing. Nothing good,” she said decisively.

“Ain’t it all right though, woman?” Edward waved his hand over the dishes on the floor. “Some good and decent somewhere in here?”

His turn to handle the plates and saucers, but no harm warned him in their chipped roundness or faded color.

“Nothing good,” she insisted, turning from him and viciously stacking orphaned Tupperware tops, the remains of a wedding gift. Hasty ceremony at City Hall, dinner in Chinatown, they had since taken to using aluminum wrap for their leftovers instead, but Edward had promised himself they would do it all again. Better. A real ceremony some place overlooking the sea. Tante Vee sitting proud, the Father guiding Houraye down an aisle edged by hibiscus and flavored by jasmine, holding out a firm but warm hand toward Edward standing waiting at its edge.

“It won’t work,” she repeated. “None of this I can present, much less serve,” she insisted, her eyes not meeting his. Edward shrugged and returned to his typewriter, preferring to sit before the window in memory.

Houraye had moved from the kitchen to the living room. At least her inquiry thorough, he mused. Though still none of it up to standard.

Man, where you move her to? he asked himself. His eyes followed the wind outside of the window of his writing room, whipping dance steps from newspapers and already dried, fallen leaves on the corner.

They had made love in all the corners of the house, he recalled, something in Houraye finally made safe in this place. They can’t find her here, he had thought once, madly, as she had spread her legs for him on the kitchen counter. His marriage to her — he shook his head — it had saved her from some terrible, he knew, something she had never spoken of, but he had always sensed shadowing their company.  At first he had thought it was her brothers; their departure now more than two months gone meant she was here in America alone, with no safety, no catches, only me. The thought had filled him with such a tremendous pride; she need me, man, a woman like she need me to keep her safe.  He had awoken first each and every day to watch her face turn and slant toward daylight in dreaming.

“I here,” he would whisper, putting fingers to her face. “I got you.”

Even now, in her disarray and unease, she beautiful too. And all the luck in the world he needed. Pushing he to his room each day, pushing he to the typewriter to write, nose open, ears wide. Hearing the call of the saints, as Tante Vee claimed.

“Listen for them when they call you. Listen when they whisper.” Tante Vee had nodded at him as a young, wide-eyed boy.

Surely the saints had been whispering the day Houraye walked his way. Surely they had whispered and he had stopped and been changed forever by this one true African woman.  She beside him and the play unfolding in good time, as she went about her day, still going to classes up the hill.  Edward knew all her sounds, knew her key upon the kitchen table, the sound of her footfall in the kitchen, as she stood and sorted the junk mail and bills addressed to them jointly –Mr. and Mrs. Joseph, Edward and Houraye Joseph, Houraye K. Joseph.  He a part of she and she made his.

And always, the African in her accounting for his well being, the stomach he imagined Aunt Vee would poke to with mock alarm.  Never would Houraye eat alone. Everything split and shared, even half eaten sandwiches from her lunch at school, she lovingly wrapped and brought home for him, placing it on those imperfect plates she now so ready to spit upon — placing them on plates she left wordlessly beside his typewriter. He not even have to look up, but find she offerings there, beside him.

Now suddenly them same plates found deficient. Them plates, this apartment, had held all Edward had wanted:  a woman loving and looking out for him, a woman who fed and looked out for he and his things and then in the night held tight onto him and his dreams.

“Edward, you listening?”

Her voice aimed at him, pitch perfect but broken around some idea.

“You speaking, course I listening,” he said automatically, turning toward the place she had resumed again in the doorway.  Her face was torn by the worry, the fret. She Father coming, she Father coming to decide upon she and she choices. But she had made them, she had lived through them, where the worry then? Some plates chipped, some cups uneven? He tried to understand. Give she his patience.

“I can’t serve,” her arms flew out by her side, grasping, “like this.”  And then falling.

What all this about serve and service? Yeah, yeah, she Father a Prime Minister, suppose they don’t eat like we.

Different from a President, Houraye had explained, second in command, almost ruler of the whole damn country, hear she tell it.

“I can’t serve,” she stated again.

And me thinking all this time words like service belong to whites and their kind, not no Africans.

“What about the hand eating and common bowl?” he asked innocently enough.

The teeth suck. Long and hard. Worthy of a Tante Vee.  A long, good, hard laugh scratched at his throat, but Edward bit his lips to keep it in.

“Mais tu penses quoi, finalement? Nous sommes des sauvages ou quoi?” She had begun, her body ramrod straight, jackknifed backward, away from Edward’s.

“I just asking,” he muttered, secretly pleased with her anger, and the color it brought out in her. At least something more recognizable than all this fear fading her away.

“Do you not know who my father is?” she asked.

A better question, he thought suddenly: You know who my father is?

The answer had long ago echoed emptily in Edward. Who his father was, what a father was…It no longer mattered. No, he had decided long ago from the safety of Tante Vee’s, no it could not matter.

“Mais nous mangeons de la même façon que tout le monde,” she continued, enraged.

My Father no blue blood prime minister. That much he knew. And he certainly wasn’t walking in off the street, looking for Edward, hunting for the faults and fall-aways of a make do life.

Houraye stayed with the insult to Africa, stayed on the offense, like that he intent.  He shook his head, returning to the view from the window. What the wrong with what we are, where we is? And anyway, ain’t a father supposed to be a soft space, a forgiving space, a place where you come to and he reach out his hands and say, Son, I been waiting for you?

“ Je n’ai même pas le temps de tes bêtises! I need knives. I can do something with everything else,” here, Houraye rolled her eyes, “but knives, good cutting knives I need. There is a sale at Woolworth’s.”

Edward saw her then, her anger retreating, giving him another chance to make do. Asking him to bring them to the place where the Father could come in and find them in some kind of respectable.

He turned his chair around and faced the window with a heavy sigh.

“Knives,” he sighed. “Yeah. I can do knives.”

Her instructions so specific. Aisle and row, color and kind. How long she thinking these type of thoughts then? Edward wondered.  Already looking at replacements and they married only since August.  Edward turned up his collar against the wind as it hurled the debris of the street at him. Still he marched resolutely downhill. Houraye had turned her back on him before he had left even, her instructions for color and type specific enough for her to return to the cabinets and drawers and fill them with the roach colored boxes that trapped the unwanted guests that lived and bred in the midst of their imperfections.

Father must do these type of inspections, he figured. Go through the drawers and private spaces, check what ruined, what not.

“But what about fixed?” he wondered out loud. “What Father do with worked over, salvaged and saved? Do Father turn it over in His hands and look at the tape and glue and smile at the effort? Or do He frown and wonder why it broke in the first place?”

The corner of their block was the cross place of winds, and Edward braced himself as he turned onto the avenue. Broadway, at the other end of the street, held a warmer breeze, but the way into Harlem was as hard as Harlem itself.  But I kept you daughter on the edge, he thought, you see that?  She ain’t living just nowhere, but the best place I could find.  One day soon, this neighborhood be something and she and I might be owners of that space there. Maybe build it up, rent it out even, move to a brownstone in Brooklyn.

On the next block, a Korean couple had opened a grocery. Houraye had taken a quick tour, but had declared “too expensive,” her African nose turned up. And Edward had felt proud at her economizing in both their names. Proud of the bags of groceries she carried in like trophies from the supermarket four blocks down to make their evening meal.

He supposed Father had raised a princess. She an African queen and all, used to fine things, he supposed. His footsteps quickened as he walk toward Woolworth’s.  Fine things, Edward Joseph, not them cheap things on layaway of you and your kind. Fine things.

An enterprising pair of Dominicans had opened up a laundromat in the middle of the block next to the Italian pizzeria, and the smell of soap powder suddenly filling the air always made him think of an old woman, her hands wrinkled from taking in so much clothing, stiff from the blue and starch for pressing.  The thought troubled him, as it did always.  Back home, his thoughts begin, wanting him to swing back to the village and his Nana washing by the stream. He thought of Houraye suddenly, thought, what she know about washerwomen and work? And then wanted to know badly, what she know about work and stiff hands? Arthritic hands?

He directed his thoughts away from those choppy waters, away from the village and a Nana who had pushed the wide-eyed boy onto the plane to meet a mother he never knew. A mother who despite a life in New York, despite living in New York almost a whole lifetime and a half, still didn’t know anything at all about fineness. For all her fair coloring, Bearnice ran cheap and the life she had thrown him into was cheap as well.  Supposed saving from an island life raised and loved by a woman who did washing for a living. Who did washing as grace.  Edward, seven years old and discovering America polluted by the cheapness of Bearnice. He shook his head. Crossed Amsterdam to walk down One Twenty Fifth, his stride lengthening as he crossed first Eighth Avenue and then St. Nicholas.

You could have done better. He wondered if Father will know it, will see the knives, see Woolworth’s, see him on this stretch of rough street, see him seven and coming to America the first time and sniff out the cheapness of Bearnice.

The wind fought him for his melancholy and won, carrying it down the block with all the others in a low, triumphant whistle. Shame she pick Woolworth’s.  Some finer stores on Broadway, further downtown. They should be in the car going there together now, covered in laughter and play, picking out the newlywed stuff of plates and wine glasses and all that good old shit he never knew meant anything at all.

Edward, his mind returned to safer places, thought of the knives instead and not the cutting thoughts liable to leave him in pieces. Knives. What Houraye doing so far over here anyway, he wondered. How she see these knives? What happened to those they had in the house?  They work for him. What she making for Father that they won’t do?

“S’posin’ fathers can’t use no regular knives neither,” he said aloud.  One Hundred Twenty-Fifth swallowed his voice in the din of cars and street noise, the new sound they called rap. Nothing but rap and braids and gold chains, he thought to himself as the husky young men filed past like panthers, the radios carried on their shoulders like a palanquin of language and sound.

Hey, Asante Kings, Edward wanted to yell at them. Come and see the real life King coming to eat with me. Going to get his silverware right now.

The boys walked past him, he of little interest to them at all.

I am a bridge, he thought suddenly. Africa and here. The Father and Sons. Between these modern day Asante warriors in their gold chains and thick leather coats, and the King, coming to visit. Walking between worlds, he thought again, willing the thought to stay – Black worlds colliding upon themselves, kings and rappers – old world and new world…A poem, he thought eagerly, an image to use in the play.

The lines powered him and he moved through the streets forgetting Houraye and her worry, he and his permanent loss.  In front of Woolworth’s, Edward held the door open for an old woman pushing a cart.

“Thank you, sonny,” she said, and then stopped in the entry to pick up the circular. She reached back to hand him one.

“Get you one of these,” she said, waving the circular in front of him like a benediction.

The Father and the Son, The Old World and the New… The Warriors of One Hundred Twenty Fifth and the Prime Minister. And somewhere in between all of that, a boy, a nobody son of Dessalines and Toussaint, Christophe, and Anacoana…

The poem unfolded in his head, replacing the specific instructions for aisle and row, color and cost.

“Thank you, ma’am.” he said, and patiently opened the second door for her.  He tapped the store’s circular against his palm distractedly.

Son of Africa, son of glory, now on new world streets, Harlem colored.

He walked past nylon cotton underwear and sock blends, greeting cards in Spanish and out-of-season stationary.

Your King coming for a visit, for an inspection, coming to gather the lost tribes and reunite them,

Fold the long lost prodigal son into his arms.

If the play sells, and the groups downtown interested, he will take her beyond Broadway, he thinks cockily, sauntering past rubber palm trees glued to their pots, plastic tablecloths and woven placemats. Take her down to Macy’s where a salesgirl would sniff at them, but then sniff again when he lay down a card – gold– and buy his Queen her heart full: her gold, her diamonds put together for service of the all right kind.

Fold the son into his arms, gather him and anoint him.  All this is yours…

Before him lay the packets of silverware. Eight to a set. Individual packets of knives, forks, and spoons all wrapped in thick plastic bags, sat in boxes alongside.

Just patience is all. Just a little patience, she see me working every day at it. Not a day I not before the machine, doing the work of the Gods…

Edward picked up a pack of spoons, absentmindedly checking the price.

What? How he don’t think I good enough? If what I offer is good enough for me, is good enough for she. I she husband, after all.  I she choice.

The curved cast of the spoon reflected back his distorted face, broke it into a million pieces in their highly polished but fake silver shine.

Aww hell, he thought suddenly. Who coming anyway and why what I got, don’t work for you, Father!

He clutched at the spoons, walking toward the register.

Where you been all my life anyway, hunh Father? Maybe you be around, I never leave Nana come to this place? My Nana and the quiet place in the stream and all those warm hands handling me, massaging me, making me close to you even if you was never around?

The cashier pointed to the register, and Edward pulled the appropriate bills out of his wallet.

Back home folks coming up to me knowing I was yours because I favor you –  Ti’ Joseph they call me, you big Joseph, even if you never around. But still, you never call, never come for me, instead let Bearnice come and take me away from everything I know is true and good. Bring me here to this place.

“Thank you for shopping Woolworth’s, next customer on line, please.” The girl’s voice was a drone.

What it matter anyway? I set up house with all I had. Give she my best. Father don’t appreciate honesty, what a Father for anyway?

Edward pushed the box and the bag under his arm, no longer thinking of color, or costs or specification. He had no credit card, no inheritance, no piece of anything but cheapness anyway -  it Woolworth’s after all.

This do, Father?

The plastic Woolworth’s bag tucked under his arm, Edward rejoined the din and the quiet anger of the street.

What I know about fathers or Africa anyway, Edward thought bitterly. Not a damn thing, he knew, not a damn thing.

The stairs of the walk-up carried the aroma of fried onions, first step in the preparation of all good things, he liked to say. Opening the door to the apartment, the mess of the kitchen floor was gone. In its place incense burned.  Long time since she light that, he thought, wondering where she got the incense from. Somewhere on the route back, he had lost his anger, disappearing into the same dark hole it had flashed from.

Houraye was busy, her body in motion even as she stood still, slicing carrots, yam, and manioc with a knife. A quick glance into the living room and he saw that she had strung curtains hurriedly made from fabric. Curtains that covered where even in her best cleaning moments, the grey residue of the city’s grime could not be reached and so effaced, blocking afternoon sun from reaching and brutally exposing their second hand couch.  On this too, she had put a fanciful slip cover, he noticed.

This her Africa side, he thought proudly. The cleaning, the preparing, a pot on the stove already sizzling and humming.

“Knives,” he announced happily, placing the plastic bag beside her cutting board.  His heart was filled then with a returned happiness. Not only to come home to a house rich with the sights and smells of everything he had ever wanted, but to be part of it, to play some small role in it all. He leaned against the counter, wanting to see her eyes look at him gratefully and all the old feeling come back.  Maybe even a kiss and a beer to send him back to his machine, to get them lines down.

Asante kings on 125^th street.

Houraye’s shoulders sagged.

“Spoons, Edward? Spoons? What will we do with spoons?”

He looked at the package she held despairingly in her hands, trying to remember how the knives had turned to spoons somewhere in the heart of Woolworth’s.

“Eat,” he suggested, lightly, wanting to make her laugh and like that name him hers, claim him still before all fell apart.

Houraye placed the pack of spoons onto the counter with a bang and strode past him to the bedroom.

Edward was silent as he heard the door slam. Reaching for a spoon, he dipped it into the frying onions. The taste hot and bitter, soured his tongue.  He tossed the spoon into the sink.

The line, the poem. Worth more than a thousand knives suddenly.

“Worlds collide. Asantehene kings on 125^th.  Knives cutting hands draw blood but we still and always one people,” he said out loud.

The pot sizzled.

Edward retired into his writing room, turning on the typewriter. Its hum reassurance.

And I got me a princess, a Queen on One Twenty-Third and Amsterdam, reigning from the top apartment in a three-story walk-up, he typed. So come along and see about me, Father. Come along and see about me.

Your five year-old son’s Spiderman umbrella bounces beside you. Ignoring his question, you fumble with the baby you’re carrying. Your fingertips flatten her curls. Your son’s teacher called you the night before to tell you he had disrupted the class because he wants to be a gravedigger when he grows up.  He made a classmate cry with his graphic description of what he thinks happens to a human body after it’s been buried a long time. After watching a Discovery channel program, he told the class that he could turn them into zombie slaves. You promised his teacher you would talk to him about it. But, now you stare down over the baby’s head and watch the water move through the dirt clods, making mud.

“I guess they couldn’t,” your son says, “on account of they’re already dead.” You like the sound of those words. On account of, so not New England. You wonder where he learned them. The baby hiccups and you cup your hand under her chin. Her eyes are closed. Snaking your hand beneath your son’s umbrella, your skin touches his. The humidity seals you together.

“Let’s get you to school.”

“Third day.” For a moment, you believe if you knocked back the umbrella, you’d see a skeleton’s head and then his body would crumble. You rub your eyes with the back of your hand and rain drips on the baby’s uncovered head.

“Kindergarten is where it all begins.” He’s the first of your kids to start school. You thought it would be scary. But, it’s not.

“I know. You’ve said that before.” He carefully maneuvers around a puddle that your two year-old would have jumped in.  “You say a lot of stuff over and over again.”

His skin is cold and slick. Suddenly, you’re aware that you don’t think of your children in terms of their names. Shaking your head, you say their names, “Julian, Rose, and Orlando.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“Why are you saying our names out loud?”

“No reason.” When you start walking again, your son moves with you as if he anticipated your move and you’re leading a dance.

“Did you forget?”

“Forget what?”

“Our names.” You’re at the yellow door Julian goes through and you’re opening it. Julian is shaking rain from his umbrella and you catch a glimpse of his face and it’s pale with dark blue eyes and long lashes that everyone comments on. The attention has made him wonder if there is something wrong with his eyes. He hangs his umbrella, knapsack, and coat in his cubby and exchanges his boots for sneakers. He kisses you on the lips and you make a puckering noise and then he’s gone.

That night Orlando is sick. Her temperature is 105 degrees. The skin on her hands and feet is scaly and red.  Your fingers leave white marks on her crimson flesh when you try to console her. Her swollen lips part and her tongue looks pained. You long to give her words so that you can understand what is wrong.

“Kids can have fevers that’d make us feel like we were hit by a Mac truck. It probably doesn’t mean anything,” the doctor says over the phone. “Give her some Motrin. How much does she weigh? Call me in the morning.” Absurdly, you wonder why the doctor doesn’t know how big your baby is. You’d been at his office that day.

Orlando can’t swallow the Motrin. She can’t swallow your milk. It escapes her mouth and runs down her striped pajamas.

Your husband punches a hole in the wall.

“That quack didn’t listen.” Your husband stomps around the room like a SS soldier. His face is red. Julian and Rose scatter, tripping over each other on the way up the stairs. They aren’t fighting. Your hand flutters to your throat.

“Did you tell him she’s been like this since her shots? He gave her shots, remember? This morning.”

You don’t say anything. You look at Orlando trying to nurse. Rose nursed right up until the baby was born.

“I’m sorry.” Your husband touches your shoulder. “I’m just scared.”

He insists you bring her to the Emergency Room, but you don’t own a car. You did once between babies. You remember driving it around thinking how easy it would be to get to prenatal appointments in a car.

You decide to phone a friend to drive you to the hospital. She works there and you catch her just as she’s walking in the door from a fourteen-hour shift. She tells you she’ll be right over. When she arrives at your apartment, she’s eating jalapeno poppers that she bought on her way home. Strapping Orlando and her seat into the car, you wonder if your friend feels stuck because you only see her when one of you needs something. You know you feel stuck when she calls you. Stuck because even if you don’t want to help out (you feel guilty because that’s most of the time) you do it anyway because that’s what friends do.

You fill out clipboards full of paperwork once you arrive at the hospital. Orlando is squeezed against your chest even though she doesn’t seem hungry. It is all you can think of to offer. Her skin burns yours, warming your milk. A middle-aged woman sleeps across from you. Her legs are spread and her knees graze yours in the tight space. Her reddish hair (dyed you’re certain) curls over her collar and spreads across her breasts. Her hair makes you touch yours, which was once long, but you cut it off after you found out you were pregnant again.

You had this vision of what kind of mother you were going to be and that was easy the first time around. You brought Julian to Pagan gatherings on the beach, danced in moon circles with him. You kept his hair long, weaving ribbons through braids. Still a pagan, you try to stick to your faith by raising your children in a Goddess tradition, but you no longer attend circles. You haven’t been to a Wiccan retreat since right after you found out you were expecting Orlando.

Shifting, you look down at her. She’s pink, no red, crying, but only half-heartedly. You look at your friend to keep your mind free of all the horrible things that might be happening to the baby’s brain. High fevers are bad, snaking their way through the body’s system. You have broken your baby in the two months you’ve had her.

Orlando makes a sound and spits up, choking. Milk runs down her chin. You wipe it with your sleeve and pull her away, holding your breast cupped in your hand. Milk drips from your nipple.

Your friend holds out the box of poppers. Your throat hurts. There’s a boy on the opposite side of the waiting room. He sits under the television. An older man sits next to him crying, “I’m sorry.” The boy winces and turns away revealing the steel hook and fishing line sticking out of his left shoulder. You wonder why they didn’t remove the line.

The baby hiccups. Turning her, you rub her back. Her arms and legs dangle over your lap. You cried when you found out you were pregnant again. The baby is still. She was never so still when you were pregnant. She wanted out in a bad way, putting you into premature labor. Five months ago, you sat in this same seat, the baby resting on your lap. Only then she was inside.

Your nursing baby, Rose, was at home. She had never been separated from you and your milk. You told the baby to stay put. You hissed in a voice not unlike your own, but different from the one you used with Julian and Rose.

You ended up in the hospital for a few days. IV’s dripped depressants into you, soothing your uterus. This made you cry at the commercial where the kid is sobbing, his mother yelling, and his Dad is passed out on the couch. A number for Alcoholics Anonymous flashed across the screen. You called the nurse in and pointed at the machine monitoring your contractions.

“Whew, that one looks like it lasted five minutes.” She patted your head, smoothed hair from your face. “Now, we know that can’t happen. You probably shifted and the monitor moved.” She tightened the elastic belt around you and hurried out. Moans rippled to you from the labor room across the hall. You sighed. There was an oarfish on the television. It looked like a Chinese dragon, but it was swimming. You closed your eyes and opened them quickly. The fish’s face looked like the luck dragon from The Never-ending Story.

You called your husband. The oarfish was gone when he answered the phone. The apartment sounded loud.

“What’s wrong?”

“Everything.”

“I saw this fish.” You chewed your lip.

“Fish?” He was shouting. Rose was crying.

“On the Discovery Channel. It didn’t look like a fish.”

“What did it look like?” Rose’s cries became louder.

“A dragon. It’s an orb fish.”

“Get some sleep.” He cooed to Rose. You looked down and saw milk spreading across your hospital gown.

The nurses brought in movies for you to watch. Only one was any good. You figured you liked Lord of the Rings because you had been a fan of the books as a child. You felt your adult self separating from your true self while the movie blared to drown out the laboring women around you.

When you were discharged, you ignored your strict bed rest long enough to dig out your leather bound special edition Tolkien reader your mother had given you for your eleventh birthday. Rose climbed over you and stretched out on the couch. You weren’t supposed to nurse her anymore because it could cause contractions. But she cried. When your husband left for work, you read your book out loud, Rose nursing on one side of you and Julian curled up on the other.

You pick up Julian a week later. You don’t have Orlando because she’s still in the hospital. You have been staying with her on account of her being exclusively breastfed. The doctors don’t know what’s wrong with her. She’s been pumped full of antibiotics. Her blood has been sent to the CDC in Atlanta. The nurses wear paper coats and face guards whenever they enter her room. There’s a yellow biohazard sign on her door. You kind of like it because the room is private. When you walk by the multiple rooms on your way for coffee and crackers, you feel bad for the parents in them. Four cribs line either side, separated only by curtains.

“I missed you.” Julian takes your hand. He smiles up at you, squinting in the sun.

“I missed you, too.”

“Really? Where was I supposed to be?”

Confused, you stare at the ground. You think of asking him if he wants to play in the park instead of heading right back to the apartment. You like bringing him to playgrounds. He’s finally old enough to manage the equipment by himself and you get to stand off to the side or sit on a bench. Sometimes you sip coffee while writing in a notebook. You like to write letters to childhood friends that you never see anymore. You have an entire journal addressed to your best friend from high school. You kept it up for almost seven years and then he ruined it by contacting you. You met him for a drink and listened to his words. He had been traveling all over the world. He said he was writing a book about it. He showed you what he had scribbled on napkins and scraps of paper, his words covering newspaper print in different languages.

“Do you want to watch a movie when we get home?” You only have a little time before Orlando’s next feeding.

“I want to stay here.”

“You want to play in the park?” You think about how you read Lord of the Rings sitting on the park bench and fell in love with Legolas again as you had when you were a child. You think about how you used to play Dungeons & Dragons with your best friend from high school, who is now on a real quest.

“No.”

“Okay. Then do you want to watch a movie?”

“No, I want to stay here at school.”

You focus on the jungle gym across from you, pleading with it to give you the right words. Suddenly, you feel an urge to smoke, a habit you gave up years ago. It seems if you could light up a cigarette and inhale, the words you’d need would fill your lungs.

“Today was the art show.”

“Oh.”

“You were supposed to be here after lunch.”

“I’m sorry.” You pull him close.

“Daddy liked my orb fish.”

“You made an orb fish?” You hug him hard but he doesn’t hug back. “It’s an oarfish, remember?”

“I like orb fish better.”

“I do too.”

Your husband had googled the oarfish. He showed you the pictures and even a video he had downloaded, setting up your favorite as the computer’s background. He brought out Julian’s drawings. You didn’t like the way the fish swam in the water, straight up and down. It was sea serpent like. You hated myths being defined. There seemed nothing left to believe in.

A couple of days later, you googled Legolas and came up with the actor who played him, Orlando Bloom. He didn’t look anything like Legolas and that disturbed you. Grabbing your book, you sat down on the couch. You read for a few minutes and then shifted. You put the book down and rubbed your belly. Eventually, you returned to the computer and pulled up a biography on Orlando Bloom. He was four years younger than you. You wondered if that fact made him a child. You began to feel guilty for finding him unattractive. Clicking over to Amazon.com, you ordered a copy of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. On a second thought, you added the Lord of the Rings box set and the movie, Orlando. After typing in your address and credit card information, you clicked off the Internet and stared at the oarfish on the computer screen.

“Can I see your picture?”

“We could go back inside. My fish isn’t swimming. He’s flying. He has wings.”

“I’d like to see that.” Hugging him tightly, you notice that he smells of earth and sandalwood soap.

“When the dead people are waiting to be born again, where are they?” Julian’s face is so close to yours that it is a blur of color and shape. You think of a bunch of ghosts hanging out in a waiting room.

“Are they in the belly of the Goddess?”

You like that image so you nod.

The doctors are beginning to look the same to you. The residents come and go in a flurry of white coats and tired eyes. You are watching too much television, Orlando propped on your lap. She eats all the time due to the steroids being pumped into her amongst the antibiotics. You are waiting for her primary care physician who visits between appointments. To your relief, he doesn’t bother with the biohazard gear. Your husband and Rose are with you because the doctor says he has something to discuss. They are wearing the paper coats and face masks. You don’t have to because it would hinder the ability to nurse. It is the first time Rose has been to the hospital. Your husband has visited only once, when your mother took the kids overnight. Julian is at school.

When the doctor arrives, he tells you he is convinced that Orlando has Kawasaki’s Syndrome.

“Does that mean she’s allergic to motor bike fumes?” Your husband’s smile looks painful because of his chapped lips.

“He’s from Ireland. That’s why he says motor bike,” you say.  You start to explain how you met when you did your senior year abroad and that when you discovered you were pregnant with Julian, your husband proposed and accompanied you back to the States. The doctor’s laugh is nervous.

“No, no, no one is one hundred percent certain how to define Kawasaki’s.” He makes eye contact with you and then with your husband.

Rose jumps from the couch to the reclining chair and back again. The doctor stares at her until all of you are watching her blond curls bobbing from beneath the white hat and the gown billowing around her.

“I think the best way to explain it would be to say that Orlando caught a virus and after her body fought it off, her body kept fighting, unable to stop.”

“So, it’s an autoimmune response gone haywire,” your husband says.

The doctor studies him the way the scientists on the Discovery Channel have been studying the first oarfish caught alive. You have been watching that all day.

“Well,” the doctor clears his throat and watches your husband suspiciously, “we only have an eleven day window to treat Kawasaki’s, and though I don’t have the Cardiology Department completely convinced given Orlando’s young age, I’d like to begin the treatment.” Today is the eighth day you’ve been in the hospital. You feel like you are shrinking so you sit in the rocking chair. Orlando stirs in your arms. You can’t put her in the crib. She won’t stay there. Your husband thinks it is because they use the crib when they want to jab her heels with needles to steal her blood. The nurses say it doesn’t hurt, but Orlando turns red and sometimes cries. You study her crimson palms and peeling feet.

Your husband rescues Rose from the couch and stands near you with her on his hip. The room is very quiet except for the crinkling sound of paper against paper. You watch your husband and he is staring at the doctor who watches the television.

“What’s that?” He points to the screen. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“An oarfish,” Rose tells him. “They’ve got one in Orlando’s Sea World.”

“Sea World doesn’t belong to Orlando,” your husband tells your daughter.

“But, it’d be neat if it did,” the doctor says to Rose. “Then the two of you could play with that oarfish all day long.”

All of you watch the television. The oarfish swims straight up and down, a handler beside it, stroking its blue body, running her hand through the fish’s red whiskers.

“Do you always mute the TV?” The doctor asks.

“I like to read.” The body of the oarfish undulates in the water. You imagine what it must have been like the first time the fish was seen. Human beings are hardwired to exaggerate. Sea serpents.

“Did you name her after the book?” The doctor picks up Virginia Woolf’s novel.

“Sort of.”

“Orlando’s a boy’s name.”

“Orlando isn’t only a man.”

“No, no he isn’t.” The doctor lays the book back on the table.

You begin rocking. Orlando is rooting so you lift your shirt for her. The doctor stares at the two of you longer than necessary. You notice he isn’t watching you inappropriately because his eyes are lost as if he has drifted away from himself. You see the doctor sleeping while he makes his rounds like Legolas, who is able to sleep while his body continues the quest.

“So, are you going to begin treating her?” your husband asks.

“Yes, I think we should. Dr. Bloominthal, the cardiologist, would like to do an echocardiogram, but we can still begin the treatment. It’s a simple intravenous technique,” the doctor says without looking at your husband.

It’s March 21^st. Julian is telling you about the vernal equinox, showing you the pictures he’s made with pastel tissue glued to construction paper. You try to focus on what he shows you, but Orlando’s been in the hospital for fourteen days now. You’ve been at the school every day to pick Julian up, but somehow you missed the snow melting. Sunlight reflects from the turquoise playground equipment creating a holographic image of ancient ruins. You raise your thin hand to shield your eyes. Julian’s jacket is unzipped, sliding from his shoulders.

“Did you know if you place an egg on its end today, it’ll stand up? It won’t fall over.”

You almost ask if they tried that in class because you’ve never seen it work, but your tongue feels thick and strange in contrast to Julian’s energy. Lately you’ve been analyzing the way your mind works. This has made your brain hurry to get through one thought to the next and it seems there is a constant chatter going on in your head. You wake up gasping for reality in your baby’s hospital room.  Your mind screams, “Are you really going to think about this?” But the other half of your brain wants to and so the debate begins before the sun has slipped its rays through the blinds on the window. You crush Orlando against you. You shiver, but you’re covered with sweat. You mentioned what was going on to your doctor who believes you are suffering from postpartum depression combined with posttraumatic stress disorder. She told you if you’d quit nursing, she’d prescribe Zoloft. When you didn’t want to do that, she suggested a smaller dosage and a sunlamp.

“The world is in balance.” Julian’s pale face reminds you of what you saw in the mirror that morning. You wonder if your whole family has become the walking dead.

“Have you been sleeping?” You remember you bought a candy bar for him and root in your pocket for it.

“Kind of. Rose has been in my bed every night.” His eyes are your hand.

“She must miss me.” You hand over the Milky Way and lead Julian to a bench.

“When are you coming home?” His mouth is already full of chocolate and you study the streaks it’s made across his lips.

“Hopefully tomorrow.” You think about how you screamed at your husband the day before. You told him it was never going to end, that Orlando was going to just keep getting sick. Later you tried to make it a joke. “We got ourselves a lemon.”

“Our fence is falling over.” Julian licks his fingers.

“Our fence?”

“Yeah, they dug it up to put in a new walkway.”

You’re bothered that you can’t even recall having a fence.

“And they left the fence lying there.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I wish you’d take it away. It looks like a graveyard.”

You sigh. “Julian, I thought Daddy talked to you about your obsession with death.”

“I’m not obsessed with death.” He has trouble with the word, it comes out like a hiss.

“Well, you do talk about it a lot.”

“I just wonder where people go. Where Orlando was before she was here.” He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand.

“She’s here now.”

“But she doesn’t want to be.”

“That’s not true.” But the idea is already chewing up your brain.

“She must have liked where she was a lot better than here.”

“No.” You look away from his white face. His eyes are too bright.

“Then why is she trying to get back?”

Staring over the tar ball court at the jungle gym, you realize you are failing this test. You’re not a good parent. You’ll be up with these thoughts tonight, offering your breast to Orlando over and over again as if that would ever make it right.

When you get back to the hospital, Orlando is screaming. She’s alone in her metal crib, lying on her side, her eyes wide. The nurses assure you that she is all right. She’s just hungry. She’s always hungry. You lift her to you and rub her back. Walking in circles, you whisper.  On your third trip around the room, you realize you’re not saying any words. It occurs to you that you walked to the hospital talking to yourself. You ask yourself when you began doing that? Flipping on the television, you find the Discovery Channel. Pacing the room, you watch footage of the last Tasmanian tiger. Orlando begins to relax. The nurse comes in with the supper tray. You take it in one hand and thank her. When she leaves the room, you realize that you hadn’t spoken words to her either, just mumbled something that resembled what you thought you should be saying. Sliding the tray onto the table next to the rocking chair, you begin swaying. You’re holding Orlando in one arm, your palm cradling her head. Looking down, you catch her eyes. She’s not just pale like Julian and Rose, she’s almost translucent. The Kawasaki’s made her anemic. She’s taking iron mixed with juice that’s forced into her with a syringe once a day. She’s on aspirin therapy because the syndrome caused her arteries to dilate. The aspirin is crushed into applesauce and slipped over her tongue, which she instinctively tries to thrust out.

You’re panicking when the phone rings. Lifting it to your ear, you clear your throat over and over again, but your voice won’t arrive.

“Hello?” Your husband sounds merry even when he’s not. You wonder what it would be like to have an accent that perpetually put others at ease and retrieve your voice at the same time.

“Hi.” In contrast, your voice is deep. Your best friend from high school told you it was a sexy voice, one that turned men on. Looking down at your brown cords and yellow shirt, you try to imagine turning a man on now. You haven’t had sex since you told your husband you were pregnant again. You think about the fight you had. Your husband insisted one more kid wasn’t a big deal. He budgeted that it would cost another twenty dollars a week after Orlando was born. You refused to hear the humor in his voice. But sometimes, you still do blame him for losing yourself. Briefly, you humor an image of yourself searching for yourself in drawers and cupboards, closets, pushing aside cobwebs.

“How’s Orlando?”

“Fine, she’s hungry.”

“Okay.” You hear Julian’s voice behind your husband’s explaining the egg thing and springtime.

“She seems much better now,” you say.

“Good. Did Julian tell you that we googled Kawasaki’s?” Julian’s voice rises over your husband’s. He’s singing a song about the vernal equinox. The words have something to do with bunnies and woodland fairies. You imagine Julian and Rose with wings chasing rabbits through the forest. Suddenly, you see your husband, Julian, and Rose as a family separate from you and Orlando.

“No.” Admitting this makes you feel left out. “Did you learn anything interesting?”

“Not really. It’s also called Kawasaki’s Disease.”

“So, it’s not merely a syndrome?” This sounds stupid, but you can’t think clearly enough to participate in a conversation.

“It’s named for the doctor who discovered it.”

You hear Rose’s voice joining in with Julian’s now that she has somewhat grasped the words.

“It usually strikes Asian males between the ages of two and four.”

“That’s certainly comforting.” Kissing Orlando, you let your lips rest against her thin hair.

“Most kids don’t get treated in time because of the lack of symptoms and they end up with permanent damage to their hearts.”

The cardiologist had been there that morning and confirmed that Orlando was getting better. Her arteries were returning to normal. The fact that she will be followed by cardiologists for the rest of her life scares you. There’s an image that runs through your mind constantly of an adult Orlando not caring to make her appointments. How will you explain that she needs to if for no other reason than to help the doctors learn as much as they can about the long-term effects?

“It was only discovered about twenty years ago.”

“I already know that,” you say. “Dr. Bloominthal presented Orlando as a case study a couple of days ago. Did you know she is the youngest patient ever treated for Kawasaki’s?” You close your eyes and listen to Julian telling Rose that they’re going to paint eggs in a little while, as soon as Daddy gets off the phone.

“I guessed as much. Wasn’t today the last treatment?” Rose’s laughter rings through the wires. Julian’s giggle is deeper.

“Yeah. They’ve already removed the IV.”

“Does that mean she can come home soon?”

“I haven’t seen the doctor yet.” You balance the phone between your head and shoulder and lift the cover from your plate and stare at the dried out chicken, pale green beans, and instant potatoes. You like to cook. You miss cooking. Looking over your clothing pouring from the bag on the floor, you think about your toothpaste and toothbrush, facial cleanser, and skin cream in the bathroom.

“He should be here soon. He usually stops by after his office hours.” Julian is telling the story of Persephone’s return from the Underworld. It bothers you that he is telling his teacher’s version, which is different from yours. His voice sounds serious as he explains how the goddess spends half the year as the Queen of the dead and the other half with her mother fertilizing the earth.

“Okay. Call me when you find out.” Rose is retelling the story now and Julian is making funny voices. You hear your husband’s chuckle fade as he hangs up on you. You cover the food and walk to the one window. You see the green grass and purple flowers trying to bloom in the hospital gardens. Your eyes grow wet. Attempting to swallow tears, you fail. They come anyway. Orlando has fallen asleep, her little mouth forming words without sound.

His wife Florence came up to the truck for water too.  Her hair was wrapped in a white bandanna, a gorged knot in front with its ends stuck out like rabbit ears.  “How many crates we got?” she said.

“Thirty,” Jerome said.

Florence said, “I picked some green ones.  Clarabelle wants to fry some up.”

A drop of sweat rolled down the slight hump in her nose, grew full at the tip of its descent, and was lost in the clods of dirt in the field.

Jeannie looked up at her mother’s neck, bright red with small white dots, speckled by the sun.  A roll of whiter flesh folded out from under her mother’s blouse where the side panels were tied at the midriff in a knot like the one in the bandanna.

Florence said, “Morning glories choked off ten, eleven vines by the side fence.”

“Get the kids over there with hoes,” Jerome said.

“I’m sending this one in for a while.  Her head hurts from the sun.”

“Kids sure ain’t made like they used to,” Jerome said.   He sounded mad but then winked at Jeannie.  He also believed that too much washing made you weak and snuff kept cavities from forming in your teeth.

He wiped an arm upward over his face to douse the sweat and then walked back out in the field with long strides, his white painter’s overalls folding in sharp smiles behind the knees.  The smell was overwhelming in the closet where Jerome looped the straps of his overalls on a nail at night, almost as strong as the few crates of garlic kept in the hot garage until they could be brought to town.

Florence yelled to their son, who was out in the field still picking.  He was ten, to Jeannie’s eight.  When he came and Florence told him he could take a rest for a while, he and Jeannie charged across the few dried, unplanted furrows, their ankles twisting in their sockless shoes.  The piece of cardboard in Jeannie’s right shoe slipped from its position, letting in a puncture vine seed with its horny shell.  She had to stop and reposition the piece and try to hold it in place with her toes.  Then she was up and running, singing a song she liked from the radio:  “Shoo-fly pie and apple-pound dowdy/Makes your eyes light up and your tummy say ‘Howdy!” giggling from the heat and the relief and the senseless words.

In their room, Vernon got out his airplane-model kit.  Jeannie didn’t have anything to play with, and it was way too hot to stay besides.  Their room was just the wallpapered attic.  The ceiling sloped too much for an adult to stand up fully.

She went out to the front porch and lay down on the army cot.  Her head hurt pretty bad, so she tried to sleep.  She drifted off thinking of Shep, the German Shepherd that came with the farm when Jerome and Florence bought it last year, saw the dog catching clods of dirt tossed in the air, how he’d whirl in a dusty-brown leap, a happy smile on his rubbery mouth.

*

When Jerome arrived home from the Pacific where he served as a cook in the Merchant Marine, he sought something else to do for a living than to hang wallpaper in other people’s houses.  A man in a bar told him about a tomato farm that was up for sale outside the small town of Lodi, forty minutes from Sacramento.  Three-fifty an acre was just too good a deal to pass up.  The place came with a cow and a clutch of chickens, too.

The house had never been finished.  Each family that moved in added a room or framed one without completing it, knocking out a wall here, a doorway there, until it looked like the confused mouth of an old man.  Gaps in the floorboards admitted spiders and silverfish, but as time went by Jerome nailed tin can lids over the larger knotholes, and laid down throw rugs so you didn’t notice it wasn’t a perfect floor.

The kids discovered a triangular peephole at the top of the stairwell that led to their room.  They could peer into their parents’ bedroom and, on the other side of the stairs, into the kitchen.  One time they saw their Uncle Andrew at the table, crying.  Jerome had brought him from the jail at Stockton.  Andrew promised he wouldn’t get so drunk next time.  Jeannie thought her uncle looked like the drawing of Ichabod Crane in the book at school, gangly and axe-faced, with a prominent Adam’s apple.  His full name was Andrew Johnson Pelke.  Jerome and Andrew had another brother they didn’t get along with, named George Washington Pelke.  They had a cousin named Jude, short for Julius Caesar.

Sometimes Jeannie would creep out of bed and peer through the hole that looked into the kitchen, to see her mother yelling at her daddy.  Once she saw her hit him with her hand.  She was short, so she had to lunge at him.  He just stood there grinning, saying something she couldn’t hear.  A little while later, he slammed out the door.  Jeannie jumped back into bed then, hoping her mom wouldn’t come and wake them up and yell at them too.  She could, when she was drinking.

One night of a bad argument, Jeannie and Vernon gazed out at the stars from the small window in the attic-bedroom and planned their escape.  They talked of tying blankets on their scooters, loaded with a few things they’d need, and just running away.  Might have to steal a few things from stores, though.  Jeannie said no to that, but her brother was older so of course knew best.  He said sometimes you do what you have to do.

Jeannie did cry a lot when things got loud.  One time she was peeking through the hole to the bedroom during an argument and saw her mother ripping pictures out of the family album and then packing her clothes, throwing some on the floor out of the closet, blobs of shoulder-padded dresses and blouses on the floor.  When Jeannie went back to bed she was still sniffling, so much so that her brother had to threaten to tell their father she was a dirty German if she didn’t shut up.  Vernon had caught her scratching a swastika in the sheetrock on the back porch with the sharp end of her bobby-pin, so he could just go point it out to their parents.

Vernon told her she asked too many questions about stupid things, such as why their parents’ friend, Clarabelle, pulled up her sweater and took out a pudgy breast in front of a bunch of men who were sitting in the kitchen.  Their mother was out at the pump-house getting some fruit she put up in Mason jars.  There were a lot of other things Jeannie didn’t understand, like why all the girls in school wore dresses and not overalls, and how come you couldn’t eat cherries with milk.

Jeannie knew her brother was proud of her sometimes.  Like the day she got the snotty-nosed kid some kids at school called Fat Pat down in the dirt and rubbed his wrists till he said “I give” three times.  His mother said the other kids picked on him because he had no toes.  She couldn’t help it if it was so cold in Seattle when her Al was working in the shipyard they had no heat but from the fireplace.  The blanket in the bassinet caught fire from a spark and burned off his toes.  His mother just knew kids at school didn’t like him because he had no toes, and they should just be thankful they have toes and don’t have to walk like a goose.  She went through the whole story again one time when she was helping to fix a joint-family meal, and she cried in the potatoes as she was mashing, saying, “My poor Pat, my poor Pat.”  That wasn’t the reason Jeannie didn’t like her son, that thing about the no toes.  It was that he’d pinch her or poke her or even trip her when nobody saw.

*

When Jeannie awoke from her nap on the cot, she felt much better.  She looked for her brother and saw he was out in the field again.

Behind the house, her grandfather was irrigating the walnut trees.  Her mother’s father, he came to live with the family sometime in the last year, but to Jeannie it was as if he had always been there.  It just seemed there were always adults, and their world and the kids’ worlds barely met.  Her grandpa slept on the back porch.  It wasn’t screened in like the front porch; it had walls.  His French-Alsatian features were coarse, and his black hair streaked with white.  Jeannie kept out of his way while he was making water flow into the ditches.  She went to the part of the main ditch that was closest to the house and slapped the sides of it to make the mud specks fly.  Done with that, she wiped her hands on a patch of weeds and went to sit in the barn.

There she removed bits of crust from her overalls pocket left over from her peanut butter sandwich.  She turned a milk bucket over for something to sit on while waiting for the mice to creep out.  She hoped she wouldn’t get a bloody nose, the way she did the last time, sitting in the heat.  That time, she had put the bucket on an old square of plywood.  A shaft of light lit a portion a foot away from where her head was positioned, so she quickly noticed when the big red drops splatted beneath her.  She paused with interest in their tiny pinking-shear edges, before tilting her head back, closing the nostrils with her fingers, and making her way to the house where she could put a cold washrag to her nose, lean back, and tolerate the tinny taste of blood in her mouth.

This day in the barn, before too long a wait, two mice sneaked out from the shadows, their legs bent low for fast escape.  Just when they took a few nibbles of crust, Jeannie stamped her feet and yelled.  That was her mouse game.  The rodents ran in terror back to their nests.  But even before the bloody-nose day, she had begun to feel sorry for the mice, so it wasn’t so much fun.  She got up, put the bucket back, and vaguely knew she wouldn’t come there anymore to do that.

After dinner, the family sat around a table under a light bulb and sorted small rocks from piles of red beans scooped from a gunnysack brought by a neighbor.  The beans shone like the bugs that clung to the outside screen door, June bugs, is what her parents called them, but she didn’t like that name because that was her middle name:  Jeannie June Pelke.

*

One night in bed Jeannie and her brother heard their parents say that they would have to slaughter the calf.  Andrew would do it in the morning because he had to go into town later and look for a job.  Jeannie used to pretend she was the calf, following behind Vernon with her eyes closed the way the blind calf followed another cow through the brush, nuzzling its rump.  She, of course, was very careful not to touch her brother.

She and Vernon sat on the corral rail near the barn the next morning to watch the slaughter.  Uncle Andrew led the calf into the corral.  Its coloring was as dark as what it must be able to see.  Without the cow to guide it, the calf moved uneasily around the cramped corral.  Andrew was in the corral, had a rock ready, a big one, the size of one of his feet.  From about four feet away he threw it.  The rock struck the calf on the shoulder, and the calf bawled and ran around the corral, bumping into the posts and rails.

Stringy blonde hair blew in Jeannie’s eyes, which she did not bother to brush back as she watched her uncle pick up the rock again and throw it at the calf, the rock thudding against its side.  The calf ran wildly around the corral now, terror slobbering out of its mouth, its white, sightless eyes rolling to reveal bright pink cornea at the rim.  Jeannie fell out of the corral, scraping her ankles.  Straw and dust flew as the calf charged past her, bawling, “Mww-a-a.”

“Stop it!” she cried.  She yelled it over and over, but the torture did not end.  Running toward the sound of the green John Deere where her father was plowing a new plot east of the house, she yelled, “Daddy!  Daddy!” the veins standing out in her neck.  “Uncle Andrew’s killing the calf with a rock, Uncle Andrew’s killing the calf with a rock!”

Jerome shut off the tractor and stalked to the house.  He came out of the peeling doorframe with a .22 rifle, walked to the corral, aimed, and fired.  The calf dropped to its knees, then flopped over on its side.  Flies gathered in seconds.  Jeannie was still sniffling, but she stayed.

The calf was gutted and skinned, the two men working together soundlessly except for the sluicey sound of the knives.  When they were finished, they lifted the carcass into a wheelbarrow, and then Andrew dug a shallow hole using a fold-up army spade and the manure hoe.  He put the head in there and scraped dirt in, then covered the hide and entrails with a piece of plywood he got from the side of the barn while Jeannie’s father wheeled the meat to the house.

Later on, the kids uncovered the mess to see the progress of disintegration.  More than once they returned to the disinterred head to explore, with the cool objectivity of vivisectionists, the nasal and ear passages, using sticks.  Finally, they brought twine and used the army shovel to dig a different hole for the calf’s head near some bushes that looked pretty, with their slight sprays of flowers in early bloom.  Vernon snapped off two dead limbs from a laurel tree, tied them at right angles, and stuck the makeshift cross in the ground where the calf’s skull was interred.

Jeannie did not hold animosity toward her uncle for killing the calf.  He wasn’t as bright as her daddy, though she might not have put it in those words.

He saved her one time from her mother’s temper.  Her mother was drunk and mad about something, and threw hot rabbit out of the frying pan using a fork, hurling it toward Jeannie while she was setting the table.  The piece skidded across the table and splattered in greasy marbles all over the new wallpaper Jerome had put up.  Another piece was about to fly through the air, but Uncle Andrew came into the room and put his hand on her mother’s wrist.

Months after, whenever Jeannie’s eyes lit on the greasy spots, it made her stomach twist in sympathy for her dad.  And the fact that Uncle Andrew blocked another missile made Jeannie think she would be grateful to him even if he threw a hundred rocks at blind calves.  Add to it the time he took a butcher knife away from her mother when she was going to slap Jeannie with the flat of it for not finding her own coat.  It was a green coat, and it should have been in the shed out behind beside the house, but Jeannie could not, could not, find it.  Her mother said she was just being a smart aleck.  After her uncle saved her that second time, she figured he could pretty much do anything to her, even rub her behind, and she wouldn’t tell.  But he only did that once, and he went away one day and never came back, and soon he was only a name she had heard once, almost not even real.

*

One night while the kids were waiting in the car outside a bar in town, Vernon told Jeannie their grandpa was dead.

“He is not,” Jeannie said.

“Oh, yes, he is,” her brother said.

“Is not.  Stop that.”

“Mom told Auntie Alice out in the yard this morning.  Grandpa turned purple in the face and died.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“You’ll see.”  His bare feet turned outward on the top of the car seat in front of him.  He was slouched down in the seat, curling his hair with one finger.  Vernon was sullen and continuously grumpy.  His black hair and brown eyes matched the nickname their mother gave him:  “Grandpa,” old and un-shining.

The kids had not known their father’s father.  Now, if what Vernon said were true, their mother’s father was gone as well.  He had existed in his own foreign world of artichoke plants at the side of the house, digging the ground carefully and watching the barbarous plants grow.  Under his bed he kept a box of yellowed letters and photos of himself and his short fat wife, who’d borne eleven children and died at fifty-six because she had cancer and didn’t want to live with a bag on her side.

From the car, Jeannie could see her mother through the windows of the tavern, a man laughing beside her.  The faceless head of another man bobbed like the mercury-headed bird with a feather above his eye that sat on the kitchen sill at home and dipped its head for water from a cup if you slightly tapped its head.  The bird sat next to a blue plastic statue of a girl with lettering underneath her pregnant belly that read, “Kilroy was here.”

Wavering colors from the jukebox spread over the hard-packed ground in front of the open doorway of the bar.  Jerome came out with two bottles of Nesbitt’s Orange.  The bottles were warm, but the kids drank them and argued about this and that, and finally went to sleep in the back seat with their feet in each other’s faces.

*

Still another day hot enough to bubble road tar, Vernon and Jeannie pushed scooters over tire impressions already laid in the road.  The kids were coming from Mr. Owens’ house.  He was selling his extra milk.  The Pelke’s cow had gone dry.

Alongside the road, in the fields filled with golden poppies, jackrabbits cowered rock-like until the kids came within unbearable proximity, and then the rabbits bounced over nodding poppy heads.  Kildeer repeated their own names, and red-winged blackbirds arrowed silently in the dry sky.  Bound with wire wrapped around the long steering posts of the scooters, the glass quart-jars of milk tinkled.

Jeannie panted to her brother, “You’re going too fast.  Wait up.”  He looked back and slowed.  “I want to ask you something,” she said.

“So ask.”

“Why do Mom and Dad drink beer so much, you think?”

“I don’t know,” Vernon said.

“It stinks.  Why would they drink it?”

“I tasted it.  It’s not so bad.”

“Ew-w!  How much?”

“Made me dizzy, but I liked it.”

“It makes Mom mean,” Jeannie said.  “Like when she made us eat those pig things when we went to visit the Ziesers.  I asked if I could not eat them, and she said no and pulled my hair.  I heard the pigs squealing, and I just couldn’t.  I sneaked them off my plate and gave them to their dog when Mommy wasn’t looking.”

“I hit her,” Vernon said.

Jeannie frowned.  He surged past her quickly on the scooter.  She pushed wildly to catch up to him and said, “You hit her, really?”

“Yeah.”

“When?” Jeannie said defiantly.

“She whipped me with the cat-o-ten-tails.  You weren’t here.  I punched her in the stomach.”  When their mother made the whip, she liked the sound of “ten tails” instead of the usual nine.  The whip was short, had knots on the rawhide strips, and hung on the wall in the kitchen.  Other homes with kids had some with just nine.

Jeannie thought about what her brother said, looked at him with awe, and said quietly, “You did not.”

“I did too.”

Jeannie’s mind raced.  Her face burned to think of the last time she got it.  She’d wet her pants.  The floor in her parents’ room was covered in Masonite.  Her baby brother’s crib was in there too.  She was told to find his undershirt, but she couldn’t.  When her mother hit her, the drops darkened the wood like the drops of blood from her nosebleed in the barn.  It shocked her to see what was happening, her pee then snaking in a line.

She didn’t know whether she believed Vernon or not, about him hitting their mom.  He might do it.  Her mother had laughed to Auntie Alice when she came to visit that she wrestled Vernon to show him who was boss, and won.  But that was at least a year ago.  Maybe he was big enough to take the whip away now.  Might be.  He was almost eleven.

They were coming up to the front porch now, where their mother sat turning a handle on an octagonal wooden butter churn.  She was eating yellow pear-tomatoes with the other hand and reading a crime magazine at the same time that was laid at her side on a crate set on its edge.  She read a lot and liked to work crossword puzzles.  That’s how she knew to correct her husband’s speech when he’d say things like “warsh yer hands” and “crankcase earl.”  She had gone to tenth grade, while Jerome had only been to the third.

Vernon unwrapped the milk from his scooter to bring it into the house, Jeannie bringing hers along behind.  Their mother said, “You’re back, huh?”

Vern said, “Yep.”

In the kitchen, Jeannie said, “I’ll bet you never hit her,” to his back.

“What?”

“Forget it.”

Though it was true that their mother never touched the kids except to hit them, and never praised them except to compare one’s worth over the other, on Jeannie’s last birthday a remarkable thing happened.  Her mother drove into town and stopped at the drugstore, leaving Jeannie in the car.  When she came out, she handed Jeannie a birthday card with a satin, perfumed heart on it.  Jeannie could hardly believe it.  Her mother went down the sidewalk to the grocery store, again leaving Jeannie in the car, and Jeannie sniffed and stroked the heart and felt a stirring of love for her mom.

That was the only time she felt like that, though.  When she was in first grade, Jeannie told her brother she wanted to be just like Miss Woods, her teacher.  The kids were watching for frogs in the irrigation ditch.  “Be like Miss Woods.  What do you know?”

“She has us bring things to show in front of the class.  I brought Mommy’s hankies.  The embroidered ones.  She didn’t even mind when I brought in that frog you killed with your slingshot.  I left it in the box, and put some grass in there.  It wasn’t bloody and all.”

“You moron.”

Jeannie was hurt.  She looked at him, trying to discern from his face or from what he might say next what he could mean by calling her that.  She pressed on:  “Anyway, Miss Woods, she wears dresses every day.  She marked an ‘O’ for Outstanding on my test.  I like her a lot.”

“Well, good for you,” he said, and pushed her over the side of the ditch.  But she straddled it, and it was just a little muddy anyhow, hardly any water in it.  “Yah-yah, yah-yah-yah,” she yelled, and ran away from him.

She wished she could marry her brother.  But she heard that people couldn’t do that.  He knew just about everything and the only reason he wouldn’t answer her questions is he didn’t want to show off too much.  He let her help him when he was building a tree house.  Once when they were in the tree house he gave her a cigarette he’d taken from a carton in their mother’s dresser drawer.  Jeannie didn’t inhale the smoke, just pretended.  She wondered what he was thinking about as he puffed on his and watched the smoke trail out of the tree house.  She tried to hurry up and burn down the cigarette she held, hoping her puffing didn’t sound too false.  At the finish of his, Vernon mashed the stub on a floorboard and with thumb and middle finger flicked the cigarette out the opening.  She did the same.  Then he said to her, “Pretty good, huh?”  His teeth leaned back slightly in his mouth just like their father’s.  She didn’t want to smoke again, but she felt she had a partner now in this world.

The evening had cooled down, and the kids were on the floor in the front room reading funny-books.  Their father was sitting in a chair reading one too, when Florence started yammering in the kitchen.  Jeannie turned her head that way.  Her father winked at her.  That conspiratorial movement of an eyelid filled her with warmth, like a mustard pack on her chest when she was sick.  She loved her father so much.  The only two times he whipped her with his belt Vernon got it too.  She cried but knew he wouldn’t do it unless she was really bad.  A thing that did bother her about her father was that one time, in their other house, he went away for a long time, leaving even though Jeannie had clung onto his legs and cried and begged him not to go.  But he came back, and everything was all right again.

Deep in sleep that night, the kids were awakened by their parents arguing again.  They’d been at the tavern.  The fight was about Clarabelle and their father being gone a long time when they went to the restrooms in the bar.  The kids got up and took turns looking through their spy-hole in the stairs.  Vernon went back to bed.  Jeannie stayed crouched on the stair, wiping her nose on her nightgown.

The fight got to the point that when her father said something low to her mother that Jeannie couldn’t hear, her mother jumped as if he’d slapped her.  She zipped over and began hitting him in the face and over the shoulders.  It looked kind of funny, little her to big him.

Then Jeannie saw, just as she was about to dash back to her pillow, saw her father raise his hand and hit her mother three times, hard, in the side.  Florence said “Oh,” and buckled at the knees.  Jerome picked her up and sat her on a chair.  Jeannie flew up the stairs then and went to her brother’s bed.  “Vernon,” she said.  “Vern-on!  Wake up.  Daddy hit Mommy!”

“So what?  Go to sleep.  Leave me alone.”

Jeannie was panicked.  “No, Vernon.  You don’t underst—”

“I’ll tell Dad you’re a dirty German,” he said.

“But…”

She could see his face clearly in the moonlight.  The look he gave her said he meant it.  She got into her bed and didn’t cry any more.

*

The next day a car pulled a bustle of dust up in the yard at daylight.  It was Clarabelle Jones and her husband, Leon.  Jeannie had gotten up to go to the bathroom downstairs.  It was early, much earlier than any grownups usually came.  She slipped into the living room to listen, when Leon knocked on the wooden screen.  It rebounded unevenly against the jamb.  Jerome came, hooking his straps to the bib of his overalls.  He let Leon and Clarabelle in, saying, “What happened, the town burn down?”

“Actually we….  Well, uh—” Leon said.  His wife interrupted.  “Oh Jerome,” she said, her mouth twitching in imminent hysteria.  Her hair was black as a crow’s, as she was part Indian.  Her eyes squinted so much when she smiled or cried it looked like she surely couldn’t see out at all, like the calf.

Leon took over again.  “We found Florence’s car in the blackberry bushes by Peterson’s ranch.  We was on our way for pancakes.”  He hesitated a minute to watch the expression on Jerome’s face, which remained immobile.  “We phoned the doc from Peterson’s, but she looked gone before he even got there.  She was out of the car, must’ve hit her head.”

“Oh, Jerome,” Clarabelle wailed.  “I’m so sorry.  You a widower now, with those darling kids and all.  I can’t believe it, I just can’t.”  She put her arms around him and cried as if the remorse were rightfully hers.  Jerome just stood there looking at Leon, arms stiff at his sides.

“The car’s pretty scratched up,” Leon said.  “It was on its roof, you see.  I’ll fix her up for you, though.  Don’t worry.  The least I can do.  You let us know can we do anything, all right?”  Leon moved away from the door, pulling his wife with him.  She had her hands folded in front of her stomach, her head tilted in an expression of piteous grief.  “I think a sheriff might be out,” Leon said, “later, you know.”

*

Clarabelle took care of the children the following few days.  Either there wasn’t a funeral, or Jeannie didn’t recall one in her later years.  Children wouldn’t have gone to it anyway, in her family.

The kids stayed in Clarabelle’s house a short while.  There weren’t any toys at all there.  They mostly stayed out in the yard, built little houses out of sticks, and poked into holes in the ground to see what might come out, and examined everything in the garage.  Clarabelle petted their heads and even spoke to them in baby talk.  They asked to go home a couple times every day.

Finally, she put them in the car.  In the back seat they found two comic books.  Clarabelle said they were for her grandkids.  Jeannie couldn’t imagine her grandkids.

At the farm they found Jerome stacking crates onto the flatbed from the shade of the garage, the garlic and onions in front of the tomatoes.  Jeannie and her brother went out back and sat under the walnut trees.  They watched Shep crack walnuts in his teeth and lay them in front of the paws of another smaller dog that couldn’t crack them, a dog that showed up from somewhere in the days they were gone.  Shep would then crack one for himself, lapping his slick tongue around the sides of his mouth and rolling his black eyes toward the children as if to say look what I did.

Jeannie’s brother said, “First you’re here and then you’re not here.  Like Grandpa.”

“Vernon, I got to tell you something.”

“What?”

“That night?”

“What night?”

“That night before our car went in the ditch?  Daddy hit Mommy.”

“You told me that, stupid.”

“But it went ‘thud’, ‘thud’, ‘thud’, like the rock hitting the calf.  You know, when Uncle Andrew—”

“Jeannie,” he said, shaking his head as if to convey his utter helplessness in ever getting things through her dumb noggin, “it doesn’t matter, it just doesn’t matter.  Can’t you understand that?  None of that stuff that went on before Mom died matters now.”

She glanced down, ashamed and also afraid, but spoke again.  “What I didn’t tell you was, Daddy had an ice-pick in his hand when he hit her.”  She stopped and waited, her muscles taut.  When her brother didn’t sock her or even say anything, just looked into her face as if she were nuts, she went on.  “Daddy had this ice-pick in his hand.  It went ‘thud’, ‘thud,’ ‘thud,’ and it looked like he was pulling red strings out of her side.  Then Mommy said, ‘ugh!’ and fell down.”

He made her say it again.  The whole thing.  His eyes were fierce as a snake’s, all slitty, or like Clarabelle’s.  Then he stood up.  Jeannie stood up too, getting ready to run.

“Listen, and you listen good,” Vernon said.  “Don’t be saying that.  Not to me or nobody else.  Do you hear me?”  He took her by her shoulders.  He was speaking quietly, like her father did most of the time—nice, not mad.  “If you ever say that again, you won’t have a brother no more.”

“How can I not have a brother?  You are my brother.”

“I’m saying, if you ever tell anyone that, anybody at all, I won’t be your brother.  You’ll be on your own.  Nobody will talk to you.”

“I won’t say it.  I promise.”

“I’ll tell Daddy you’re a German for sure, you ever say that again, to anybody.”

“Please don’t.  I won’t say what I saw, ever.”

“You didn’t see it.  You only think you did.”

“Okay, Vernon.  I guess I made it up.”

“That’s right.  Now let’s go help Dad.”

On the way, Jeannie said, “Vernon?  I want to ask you something else.”

He turned and glared at her, but she proceeded.

“How come Clarabelle has those real red cheeks?  Is that ’cause she’s Indian or ’cause of rouge?”

“I don’t know.  I guess so.”

“Do you wish you were an Indian?”

“Yeah.  No.  I don’t wish I was a Indian.  What a stoopnagle you are sometimes, Jeannie, what you come up with.”

“I just wonder what it feels like to be a Indian,” she said.

The loose sole of her left shoe slapped and slapped in rhythm as they walked side by side to their father’s truck.  “Like in the old days,” Jeannie said.

The Silk City Police Department.  I am waiting in the police station in an interrogation room for my father to show up.  A friend of my dad’s from high school sits with me.  Just like on TV, a square brick room, one-way mirror, three chairs.

He chits and chats.  I nod.  “I went to SCHS with your dad,” he says to me just before my father walks in.  I’m a sophomore there.

“Hey Hank,” my dad says.  They shake hands.  A great hand shaker, my father.  On Hank he uses the one pump with the left hand coming on top as he says, “Thanks for taking care of my girl.”

“No problem, Matt.”

It’s exactly what Hank wants to hear, my father fulfills his fantasy, making him my protector, a knight.  Hank will do anything for him now.

My dad looks at me.  Something weird in his eyes.  Pride?

“Hey, bub,” he says. “A little too much excitement for one night, huh?”

“Yup,” I say and stare at the table.

“Are we free to go, Hank?”

“I think so.  Let’s go check at the front desk.”

Like we’re checking out of a hotel.  In the lobby, among the wanted posters and D.A.R.E. pamphlets (‘This is your brain on crystal meth,’ one shouts), Bobby’s father, Mr. Donovan, is screaming at the desk sergeant who is carefully ignoring the tirade from behind bulletproof glass.  Lucky he can’t smell Mr. Donovan’s oppressive aftershave there.

“- massive lawsuit this town has ever seen.  Look at my boy!”

We all look at Bobby.  Nicks and cuts all over his face where I gouged him.  Later my father will say he looked like he’d been attacked by a bear.

To avoid looking at his father Bobby turns and looks right at me.  I want to say something, but not in front of my father.  I try to put it all in my eyes.

Mr. Donovan notices us.  He looks like he wants to collect everything that just spilled out of his mouth and slurp it up.

My dad looks from Bobby to Mr. Donovan.

“Your boy just got a lesson on the word, ‘no.’  I hope it takes because the next lesson’s coming from me.”

Bobby’s head hangs, his beautiful, marred face looks at the ground.

His father is choking, can’t get the words out fast enough.  “Are you threatening my boy?”

My father smiles.  “Let’s go, Casey.”

Casey Jones, that’s what he named me.

“Hank, you heard him.  He threatened Bobby.”

“I didn’t hear anything, now you keep that boy of yours on a leash.  Be glad nobody’s pressing charges.”

Bobby’s dad snorts.  “His daughter’s the one who needs a leash.”

Hank sees it coming too and puts my dad in a restraining hold.  They are both straining, necks taut, faces red, eyes bulging.

“Okay, Joe, get out of here,” Hank says.

Mr. Donovan can’t resist one comment before scurrying out the door.  “I see where she gets it.”

But he’s wrong.  My temper comes from my mother, always churning right on the surface.  My father’s temper is deep down under, hard to find.

In the parking lot, in my father’s car, we sit and exhale.  We both know Bobby just got a lesson on the word, ‘maybe.’

“Dad, it wasn’t all Bobby’s fault.”

“I know, Bubba.  That temper of yours strikes again.”

‘Bubba’ is my father’s nickname for his girls, me, my sister Addison, and my mother.  A bittersweet word for me.  Addie and I are the only ones he can use it on now.

“What would mom have said?”

It’s something we started doing a little after she died.  When I get into trouble my dad says, “If your mother were here…” and he gives me the lecture she would have given me.  Sometimes he is cruelly accurate, impersonating her shrill tone along with the words.  It helps me remember her.  Of course, I never paid much attention to those lectures when she was around.

“I wish I knew, Bubba.”

At home I kiss my grandma and go to the room I share with Addison.  She’s ten.

After I shut the door she whispers, “What happened?”

We can hear my father thanking grandma for watching Addie.

“The usual,” I say.

“Sounded like more than that.”

“What do you mean?”

“Was there a boy?  Was it Bobby?”

“Yes,” answers both questions.

“The police called,” she says.

I picture my father, talking to Hank probably, asks him to look out for me; tries to keep the panic out of his voice.  The next call to grandma.  Addie listens, trying to figure out what’s happening.  Unable to sleep.

“Daddy was worried.”

“Were you?”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Why are you so angry?”

I sigh.  It isn’t her question.  “Let’s talk about it tomorrow.”

I pretend to yawn.  Wait for her to fall asleep.  Wonder, jealously, what she is dreaming about.  We look so much alike, so much like mom; dark hair, olive skin – but she keeps things hidden deep under the surface, like dad.

Downstairs, he paces, listening, I imagine, to our mom’s ghost.  I try to hear her voice, hoping to pull it into my bed, like a blanket.

It is difficult to explain my rage.  It sneaks up on me like a fever.  I imagine it sometimes as a shadow.  My shadow, but like Peter Pan’s, one I can’t control.  I picture it, at times leaping into me and turning everything red.  I don’t get black outs, I get red outs.  I can’t hear myself screaming but it’s been described enough times to me so I know I do it.  Like a girl possessed, someone said once.

I must have been hollering pretty loud when the cops broke up the party tonight.  I don’t remember them coming into the room to find us, me and Bobby, mostly naked.  Bobby with both of my wrists in his hands, trying to keep me from hurting him, trying to make me listen, to get sane.  Just like the cop who dragged me away, who asked me sweetly to get dressed while he turned away.  That’s the next thing I remember.

“Okay, can you put some clothes on, honey?”  The cop’s voice was a father’s to a child waking from a nightmare who thinks there might still be a monster in the closet or under the bed.

That’s how I felt.

I think it’s the screaming more than anything that my father can’t understand.  He is quiet personified, the king of the wordless conversation, all gestures and eloquent facial expressions.  Even when his temper gets the better of him it’s more like a scathing whisper than a scream.  The only person who ever really made my father scream was my mother.  Now he’s got nobody to scream at.  Oh well.

He has aged well.  Quitting drinking probably helped.  In pictures of when he was younger he has those boy next-door looks that must have calmed all the mothers down, that and his good manners; but the fathers probably knew better.  And in the really old pictures, before I was born, there is always a drink in his hand.

He is slim, with wiry, ropy muscles and broad shoulders.  People talk about his high cheekbones a lot but once you get to know him, you realize it’s his eyes that are special.  His eyes and his smile can make you go weak and the absence of his smile can still make me tremble.  When my mother used to get into arguments with him, she wouldn’t look at him.  She knew she couldn’t win that way.

I once asked my father if he stopped drinking for me.  It seemed to make sense.  His drinking anniversary was the year before I was born.  He smiled and shook his head.

“I didn’t know you then.”

“So why’d you stop?”

“For your mother.”

“Because she asked you?”

“Because she didn’t ask me.”

My parents are fighting and it’s my fault.

“It consumes me,” my mother is saying.

“Because you let it,” my father says again.

“Why does she hate me?” my mother asks for the hundredth time that day, I’ve lost track of how many times that week.  This whole fight is like a rerun.

“Mommy, you’re fresh,” my sister Addie says.  She is almost two.  Anyone who yells is ‘fresh.’

Our mother behaves as though we are in soundproof containers in our car seats in the backseat.  I chew on my pigtails.  I am seven years old.  My memories are faded, the colors are not quite true, the details grainy.  I don’t remember where we are going.  I don’t remember what she is upset about.  The rage in my stomach brews, gathering strength.  The windshield is a blizzard, snowflakes like stars at warp speed.  My face burns.

“She doesn’t hate you.”

The edges of my vision blur with scarlet.

“Hate you!” Addie parrots.

My mother shudders, it’s in her voice.  “You always take her side,” she says between clenched teeth.

The next few moments are taken by my monster, my Miss Hyde.

I don’t realize, at first, that we have driven off the road, over the curb and into the snow.  What I notice is how quiet it is, even my sister seems frozen.  We careen, silently down a hill.  There is no friction.  Then we hit the ice of the frozen reservoir, still noiseless, gliding.

There is a delicious moment of relief before our world caves in.

It is dark, like we’ve been swallowed by the night; only the night is ice cold and pours through the window my father has opened.  My sister is screaming, alternating between “Mommy’ and “Daddy,” or unintelligible noises of anguish.  I am scared for her.

Our father is whispering to himself as he undoes all of our seatbelts.  My mother is silent, still.  I strain to hear him.  “Babybabybaby.  Babybabybaby,” he is saying.

“Daddy,” I say.

“I know, bub.” His voice is as cold as the water.  “Casey, can you find that flashlight near your seat?”

“Oh yeah,” I say trying to match his calm.  A miracle, I find it.

“Cold,” Addie whines.

“It is cold,” my father says, almost singing, “and it’s going to get colder.”

And it does, the cold is like the fear, chilling me to my bones, grabbing, hurting.  The water rises, creeps above the seats.  I don’t want anything to do with it.  Dad pushes Mom away from it.  Her head lolls.

The window is submerged, and he turns to us.  “Hold your breath,” he says, “One.  Two.  Three.”

He pulls us, my sister and me, through a window.  He has us by our collars, it is too cold to move, too cold to think, too cold to hear.  I don’t know how he gets us to the shore.

“See those lights?”

I nod.  A house’s windows look at us through the trees.  All our teeth chatter.  My sister is too quiet.

“Hug your sister.  Count to a hundred.  If I’m not back – Casey! – if I’m not back, take your sister to those lights and bang on that front door.”

“I can’t.”

“You will.  One hundred.  Start now.  Be brave for your sister.”

He dives back down – the thought of the water shivers me.  Nine, ten, eleven…I can just make out the light of the flashlight, like a firefly under the water, twenty-five, twenty-six, heading towards the lights of the car, like one of those fish so deep underwater they glow in the dark.

Fifty-seven, Fifty-eight.  The trees are swaying in front of the house lights but I can’t feel the breeze.  Eighty-one, eighty-two.  Addie isn’t speaking.  One hundred nineteen, one hundred twenty.

I start.  My sister is stiff and slippery.  Twice I stumble.  Not a sound from Addison.  I count with each footstep, one hundred thirty-three, one hundred thirty-four.  When I get to the house, I pound as hard as I can but I can’t hear the noise or feel the door under my fist.  Still counting I knock, one hundred fifty-six, one hundred fifty-seven.  A strange couple opens the door.  Their faces are pure shock.

The heat in the house embraces us; the smell of warmth makes me tear up and everything goes fuzzy.  The couple shares the competence of parents.  Concerned questions are asked and ignored, towels are fetched in a blur, our wet clothes are peeled off.  One ninety-nine, two hundred.  The scent of something chocolate from the kitchen is mixing with the lingering odor of baked bread.

When I hear my sister cry it is like she has been born again.

“Daddy!” she screams and as if he has been summoned he bursts through the door and lands in a splash on the carpeting with my mother.  The couple is almost relieved.

I am only half paying attention, trying to chase the cold from my bones.  Noises are coming out of my father’s mouth, but not words.  Two hundred and one.  Will I ever stop shivering?

Minutes or hours or seconds later, the paramedics arrive with a stretcher and rubber gloves and a mask they put over my mother’s mouth.

The woman who lives here is trying to soothe my hysterical sister.

My father, a shuddering mess, is on his back, on the floor, with nothing left, his last hopes leaking out of his eyes and escaping in contorted shivering gasps from his mouth, and it is beautiful how much he loves her.  I think if he were to look at Addie and me, he wouldn’t know us – but he doesn’t look.  He is being restrained, being questioned, it must look to Addison like he is being tortured.

“Do you think your father loves you that much?”

I don’t like this shrink, don’t like his eyes.  I’m here because of the Bobby thing.

“Sometimes.  Most of the time.”

They’re like my father’s eyes, not missing a beat; they seem to know the real reason you say or do something – always reading between the lines.  I try to picture this guy in the sack, something I do with most men these days for better or worse.  Are all fifteen-year-olds like this?  I have no mother to ask.  The office and his face combine to give an impression of plump comfort – books stuff the shelves, his cheeks like the leather of his chairs are curvy.  The pictures on the wall, I’m sure, are meant to be soothing.  I find their abstraction distracting – are they framed Rorschachs?

“So you hit your mother?”

His hands, with pad and pen, are small and tentative.  I decide my doctor would be a boring and lazy lover – but I could be wrong.  I was wrong about Bobby.

I thought Bobby would stop when told, thought there were lines he wouldn’t cross.  My mistake.  I didn’t realize how hard it would be to stop.  Like sliding down an icy hill – nothing for the brakes to catch on, but plenty of friction.  Everything slippery, wheels spinning, careening, out of control, breathless.

“What?”

“So you hit your mother?”

“Kicked her.”

I don’t really remember.  I imagine the fighting continuing as if I’m not there.  The rage rises inside me.  Higher and higher.  Unbuckling my seatbelt.  Boiling over.  I picture my toe connecting with my mother’s head, making the car lose control.

“Did your father ever hit you?”

I don’t like the question because I don’t know where it’s going.  “Sure,” I say.

I always know when it’s coming, like the air just before a lightning strike, charged.  The hair on the back of my arms stands, just like it does now.

“Did he ever hit your mother?”

And it’s like a hole has been punched into my brain, like when a submarine goes too deep and cracks from the pressure – and ice water is rushing in, bringing nightmares with it, but they aren’t dreams.

My father is driving.  The hair on the back of my neck is tingly with electricity.

“She is fucked in the head,” mom says from the passenger seat.

My seatbelt is off.

He strikes quickly but I don’t hear a slap – his hand is a fist.  My mother whimpers.

Then the toe of my shiny black shoes with the Velcro straps connects just behind my father’s eye.

Paint everything red.

The chords of my voice are thick and sore from screams I can’t remember making.  The doctor is frozen, poised with pad and pen.

He is there, soothing as a snake charmer, trying to chase the bad dream away with one word, over and over, “babybabybaby, babybabybaby.”

The only other sound, the impact of my knucklebones and the tips of my shiny black shoes with the buckles, again and again and again.

The girl’s eyes were closed as if she were sleeping, but Titong knew by the way her eyebrows joined together over her nose and her front teeth bit her bottom lip white that she was only pretending.

The red numbers on the girl’s clock radio blinked and Titong thought of his friends back home. Probably they were at the pool hall, drinking San Miguel beer on ice during a mid-afternoon merienda. Perhaps his buddies were talking about Titong at this very moment, imagining all the luxuries of his new American life: private bedrooms, riding lawn mowers, swimming pools, brewed coffee, toilet paper soft as silk.

Titong had experienced those niceties in his son’s American dream home, but he felt he was a prisoner of winter. Until the weather warmed up in late March, the ice on the ground and the freeze in the air forced Titong indoors. When it was finally warm enough to venture outside, Titong spent an afternoon walking through Split Rock Estates, stopping in front of each giant home and studying it. Americans had small families–two parents and two children. Titong thought of his friends, who crowded into one and two bedroom apartments with their sons and daughters, their half dozen grandchildren, and the occasional spinster aunt or widowed uncle. He imagined the clans moving into these mansions and thought how happy that would make him to see their dark heads in the windows or smell adodo stew or fermented fish sauce belching from their front doors. If Titong’s friends were living here, these chemical green lawns and ornamental bushes would be replaced with rows of tomatoes, corn, and squash. When Titong encouraged his son to replace the daffodils along the fence with okra or bitter melon, his son laughed at him, “We can buy those at the market.”

On another warm day, Titong stepped outside as a yellow school bus pulled up to the corner. Out tumbled little American girls with backpacks that hung over their rears and boys with crew cuts and blue eyes. Titong waved at them, but the mothers, dumpy in their sweat suits and ponytails, hurried the children along. For almost a week, Titong stood outside to watch the bus empty of children. Then, he went on his walk around the cul de sac and made up stories about his friends. He had already decided: the blue house was Bien’s; the yellow one was Gerry’s; the tan house was Fred’s.

Later that week, Titong’s son took him aside and told him, “There have been complaints about you.”

“What?” Titong asked.

His son explained how a spokesperson from the neighborhood mothers had called his medical office about the “threatening Oriental man” who stared into their windows and waved to their children. Switching into English, his son complained, “I am a respected doctor. Don’t ruin this for me.”

Titong obeyed his son, but he hadn’t anticipated how lonely his new American life would be. His son and his daughter-in-law worked long hours at their medical clinic; his grandchildren were at school all day and shuffled off to piano lessons, dance class, and soccer in the afternoons. It was just Titong and his thoughts all day, trapped inside the house. He was allowed to smoke in the two-car garage as long as the automatic door was open. His son bought him cartons of menthols from the Duty Free. The second refrigerator in the garage stored spare gallons of milk while the produce drawer kept his cigarettes fresh. His son turned the second garage into a workshop, flush with power tools and different sizes of wood and Titong built things: bookshelves, nightstands, stools, chests of drawers. Every room in the house burst with his furniture and his son’s wife complained, “We can’t use these.” Titong asked if he could sell the furniture through a “lawn sale.” His son’s wife lowered her voice and whispered fiercely to her husband, “Don’t you dare. You’re a doctor for God’s sake.”

Titong carved wooden spoons and broom handles with his paring knife, items that wouldn’t take up a lot of space. For the first time in his life, Titong lost himself in the making of something without worrying about whether that thing would sell.

In his new American life, Titong drank strong brewed coffee and his feet sank deep into carpets, but he was miserable. Titong didn’t dare complain to his son, but every now and then, he couldn’t help playing the fantasy of squeezing his son’s neck until his head burst like a popped balloon.

The first morning after he arrived from the Philippines, his granddaughters had gathered around him at the kitchen table. Jade, the curious toddler; Mari, the sullen teenager; and Lala, the schoolgirl, were pawing through many pasalubongs, gifts from the islands. The girls shook the plastic packages of candies made from caribou milk or sugared tamarind or caramel. They sniffed the pastries–the empanadas of ground meat and potatoes, the sweet ensamada buns like snail shells spread with butter and cheese, the ear shaped cookies grainy with sugar.

“Why do you have watermelon seeds?” Lala said. Lala tossed the bag of salted black seeds from one hand to the other.

“To eat,” Mari said.

“But we throw watermelon seeds away. We stick them on our foreheads and name them after boys we like and the seed that stays on your head the longest is the one you’ll marry,” Lala said.

Mari said, “That’s dumb.”

Titong took the bag from Lala. He noticed she shared the same long fingers as his. He bit a hole in the plastic and fished out a seed. “Like this,” he said. He was ashamed to speak English. His F’s and P’s were mixed up; Titong would say “he” when he meant to say “she.”

Lala stared at him as he cracked one seed between his front teeth. He peeled the two black sides of the seeds down until the creamy seed peeked out. He pinched the bottom of the seed and held it to Lala’s lips. She scrunched her nose.

“Bite it already,” Mari said.

Lala stretched her lips away from her teeth and bit down delicately as if her teeth were a parrot’s beak. Titong felt her tongue on his fingertip.

Titong lined up perfectly cracked seeds on a napkin. The white of the seeds were prepared and ready to be eaten. He pushed the napkin to Lala. He watched her eat the seeds one by one with delight. Lala was at that moment in her childhood when she wasn’t conscious of her body. She had long limbs, smooth and brown, and she moved like a cat, rubbing her hands over anything that inspired her curiosity. She had a habit of resting her leg over a sofa arm or kitchen countertop and bending over to stretch the long muscles.

Lala made her body big in the world, not like Lala’s mother who was taller and wider, but had a way of pulling her shoulders together, or like Titong’s wife, who by the time of her death, had shrunk into herself, as if her hunched back could protect her from the pain of life.

Lala was at that special time in a girl’s life when she hadn’t yet learned how the world would hurt her. Titong was sure that Lala’s older sister, Mari, already growing breasts and hips, understood from the looks of men and the women that her almost woman’s body was not only hers anymore.

Jesus said: “It is far better to put your eye out than look at something that causes you to sin. If your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off. It is far better to lose a hand than lose eternal life in heaven.” The story he heard that Sunday in his son’s church was the same story priests told in Catholic churches all over the Philippines or Mexico or France. This particular story stayed with Titong throughout the year until he heard it again the next. Many times, when he was building something, maybe a bench or a stand in his workshop in the Philippines, or chopping lechon into bite size pieces for the diners at the sari-sari store, Titong would remember this lesson. He would hold the hatchet above his wrist or a carving knife against his palm and tell himself, “If your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off.” But he could never do it. He could never remove the part of him that was making him sin.

Titong remembered the man, a nipa hut builder, whom Titong knew in the barrio. The nipa hut builder had a minor stroke and after recovering, found that his left hand was possessed. He couldn’t make his left hand behave. He wanted to continue working after his stroke and build nipa huts, but while he was hammering a nail into a bamboo pole, his left hand tried to pull the hammer from his right hand. He would wake up choking in the middle of the night with the possessed hand clamped around his throat. When he tried to pick up a glass of water, his possessed hand would turn the glass over and spill the precious water to the floor.

The local healer, the hilot, gave the man a charm to wear and tried to massage the demon out of the arm, but the man’s possessed hand pinched the hilot on the nose so fiercely it almost came off. In defense, the hilot bit the hand as if it were a tough piece of meat, drawing blood, and only then did it let go. A famous physician in Manila, American trained, said the man had something called alien hand syndrome, a very rare neurological disease. There was nothing he could do for it.

The man got so frustrated with his alien hand that he would slap it and bite as if it was a mischievous child who would not behave. He couldn’t trust his hand around his building tools and grew depressed because he could not work. He tried to restrain his alien hand by tying leather belts around his torso and arm to keep his hand still against his side, but his alien hand always escaped. He begged his son to amputate his alien hand. The man couldn’t do it himself because he was afraid the alien hand would wrestle the knife out of the right hand out of self-preservation and try to kill him. Titong pitied the once productive man and when he walked by him in the barrio, Titong pretended not to see him.

It didn’t begin the way you think. At first, Titong only watched her, a distant and admiring observer. He didn’t touch her. Her bedcovers were always tangled in her ankles and her legs were exposed, her nightgown twisted above her panties. He read, “Monday” embroidered in red above her left thigh. Needles of hair poked through the fabric of the girl’s underwear. It was probably her first growth of hair. A person’s pubic hair could change many times in one’s lifetime. It might start out soft and fine like the first hair on a newborn’s head. Then, it might curl into tight ringlets and years later, start growing in straight. In the later years, it changed color. His hair was gray now. All of his wife’s body hair, including her eyebrows, her eyelashes, and the hair under her panties had fallen out from her cancer medicine before it had a chance to gray.

A man doesn’t blink his eyes awake and think, Today, I will be evil.

On the contrary, a thoughtful man, a wise old man, the kind of man Titong believed himself to be, understood that each morning brought him one day closer to the end. In those dark mornings when he awoke in the spare bedroom of his son’s American Dream house, Titong asked himself, “What pleasure can I squeeze from today?”

Titong wasn’t an important man, no one would be writing down his memoirs or passing his stories down from generation to generation. Like his parents and his grandparents and his great grandparents, all peasants and farmers, all traces of Titong’s life, except for the qualities of nearsightedness and hearts prone to attack after age 65 in his offspring, would disappear once he did.

Valentino Romero, Titong for short, was born in a barrio in the Philippines countryside seventy-two years ago. After the third grade, he quit school to help his father in the fields. Barely eighteen, he married, had approximately the same number of children as his parents–a dozen, give or take, and squeezed out every peso he could from each working hour so that his oldest son could go to school.

To pay for his oldest son’s high school tuition, he bought a tricycle with a cab on the side and rode passengers from the market to home. By the time his son went to college, Titong had invested in several more trikes and the younger children collected fares. His oldest son went to medical school on income from the small store that his wife started below their home. The sari-sari store sold single packets of Tylenol, cigarettes by the stick, two finger shots of Tanduay rum. When Titong bought the first black and white television in the neighborhood, he charged children admission to sit on the floor in the sala and watch Woody Woodpecker.

When his oldest son Antonio started receiving a small stipend from his medical internship, he paid for the nursing school tuition of the next oldest child, Dolores, a daughter. When Dolores the nurse began to earn, she paid the next child’s way. And so on. This family financial aid system was Titong’s greatest achievement.

And now, at last, he was reaping the benefits. Many of his children were heroes of the country, OFW’s, Overseas Filipino Workers, and served the world’s wealthy. With his wife long dead, he rotated through his children’s homes, living a month in Hong Kong, Saudi Arabia, Bermuda, or Canada–any place in the world where college educated English speakers were needed to change a diaper or carry a tray of food.

But when one son, the doctor Eduardo, settled in America, Titong decided this was it. No more rotating from house to house and flying all over the place. This is where Titong would stay until the end.

Sometimes, all a man can do is to listen to his body and what it wants.  He wasn’t hurting anyone. He never intended to cause anyone pain. On the contrary.

When he remembered them now, those nameless girls and boys from his past now all grown up, he felt some pain and shame, but not enough to stop him from hovering beside his granddaughter’s bed. His hunger grew in him each night, filling his head with murky swirling water until he couldn’t sleep or find peace. Titong knew the only way to stop the anxiety was to go to his granddaughter. He would only watch the nightlight flicker under the door and press his cheek against the buttercup yellow wood. He would only push the unlocked door open an inch and smell the sweet warmth of the girl’s bedroom. He would only take his slippers off for a moment, just to feel the plush green carpet under his toes, and remember that afternoon when he walked by her door to find the girl reading a book, lying on her back, legs spread like a compass, and her feet against the yellow wall, making black marks. When she noticed him, she dropped her book and said, “I didn’t mean to.” She sat up, rubbing her footprints from the wall with her shirt.  Titong looked away and waved his hand as if to say, “Your secret is safe with me.”

Every night he swore he wouldn’t go back, but each night he found himself unable to sleep. The metal mattress coils seemed to burn holes in his back. The ceiling above him threatened to sink into his face. His pulse was a loud clock ticking in his ears. He lay very still, realizing this is how he would lie in a coffin at the end of his life. The end of his life was closer to him now than it had ever been. With each day, he was moving towards death. Titong could forget this during the day. He could get lost in building shelves and coat racks, but at night he would remember that those things that he had made so well would outlast his body.

Titong imagined pangs of hunger and would stand in front of the refrigerator with the door open, unable to find anything appetizing. He would wander the house, eventually ending up in the girl’s room. He wasn’t harming anyone, he thought.

As the digital clock marked the minutes he was surprised to see so much time had passed. By now, his friends in the Philippines were leaving the bar and heading to their cramped apartments for dinner with their families.

Titong watched the girl’s eyelids flutter as if she were trying very hard to keep them closed. The girl was in the same position he had found her in when he entered her room. It was as if she were frozen in that shape, unable to move. She was sprawled open, one arm above her head as if she were catching a ball, black strings of hair caught under her neck and spread over the pillow as though it was seaweed washed ashore. His own daughters had never slept so provocatively. Because his daughters had slept in the same room as his sons, they made sure to wrap their sheets tightly around them and under their chins, even though the Manila heat was stifling. His daughters, once they reached a certain age, knew they should be modest or suffer the consequences of what a boy, even their own brother, might inflict without meaning to cause harm.

Titong’s eyes lingered on the girl’s calves, which were shaped as elegantly as the legs of a well-made table. She had breast buds forming on her chest and her eyes darted under delicate lids as though they were fish in a tank.

He stood and watched until the moonbeam moved across the room a few feet.

Titong couldn’t ever harm his granddaughter. She was his flesh and blood.

But suddenly, tonight, Titong was overcome by a desire to kiss her. He told himself that she was sleeping. And even if she wasn’t sleeping, night made everything different, unreal. What harm could he really inflict when the girl was floating inside the night’s protective shadows?

A man can only put together so many shelves and make so many nightstands before he must answer his needs.

Titong took a step towards the girl’s bed. He could feel the warmth radiating from her body. Under the cover of night, she would never know it had been his fingers in the soft spot along her thighs or his tongue tasting her lips.

Titong thought, She will only remember the faint sensation of a dog licking her knee in the thin memory of her dreams.

But Titong was wrong. Although no one bothered to publish an obituary once oblivion swallowed him; he would always be remembered by Lala. She could never forget him.

I walked over to the bar to get away from Decker and ordered another shot, but I could see him in the greasy mirror over the rows of liquor bottles. He was lined up behind the pinball machine, arms outstretched in a pantomime of driving, hands gripping an invisible steering wheel, laughing his spooky laugh. Carl, our lead man, sat on the stool next to me. “That Decker is one crazy fuck,” I said.

“On me,” Carl said when the bartender brought my drink. He didn’t mention Decker, but he watched him in the mirror. The hotel barroom was called Little Joe’s, a workingman’s place: brawlers, big drinkers, and country music fans—the hard hat crowd. A person could avoid his depressing room and forget that he had a family or a girlfriend or a past. The only woman in the bar most of the time was Debbie, the short-order cook who put together burger baskets in a backroom kitchen and brought them out to men who didn’t want to interrupt their drinking to eat in the restaurant across the street. Everybody in the place wanted to fuck her.

The jukebox played tunes by Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, Hank Williams, and Johnny Paycheck. Two pinball machines competed with each other with clangs and dings every night until closing. Yellowish bulbs cast a dim light in the room, except over the pool table, where a pair of long, fluorescent tubes flickered and flashed. The place was busy for a Monday night, and a group of men gathered around Decker. They egged him on for a while, then somebody told him to shut up, and he threw a punch but missed. He spun around, bounced off the pinball machine, and hit the floor hard. Carl and I and some of the crew picked him up and carried him to bed.

* * *

I remember Decker’s probation officer dropping him off his first day. Hans was looking over topographic maps with Carl, as he did every morning. Hans was the boss, a private contractor who secured tree-planting jobs from the US Forest Service and timber companies. He was a small man who wore an aluminum safari hat, smoked a pipe upside down to keep the rain from putting it out, and signed our checks in green ink. Carl hunched over him like Bigfoot taking directions from the Tin Man. A brown Ford Fairlane with state plates pulled up behind them, and a pale, blond-headed kid with a baby face—practically an albino—got out of the car with a plastic garbage bag full of clothes. Carl looked away and leaned over the maps, as if trying not to be noticed. Hans nodded to the officer, who didn’t get out of the car, but pointed Decker toward the “crummy,” a beat-up, old van that hauled us to and from work sites. The rest of us shivered in our seats, waiting for Hans and Carl to come up with a plan.

The crummy was our hideout and our shelter once we hit the backcountry, our hideout from whatever demons were chasing us and our shelter from unremitting bad weather, but no one wanted to be in it if we weren’t on the move. It smelled like death. Rotten food filled the air from old lunches workers left behind, and the dried blood on the floor, in various places from broken blisters or fights over a seat or some minor insult, reconstituted to an infectious goo every time it got wet. It never stopped raining—except when it snowed—so we were soaked all the time. Why they called it a crummy, I never knew—loggers, tree planters, farm workers, road crews, and chain gangs all called these run-down, shitbox vehicles crummies and always had. Ours was rusted-out green. We filed in and out like fish on a conveyor belt every morning and every evening and let it take us to and from the slash-covered hillsides where the work was, where a man could leave the world and never be found or sneak back into civilization from the beyond.

Decker stood by the door in the rain, waiting for his orders. Finally, Hans snapped up the maps and headed our way. Carl climbed in ahead of Decker and pushed his way to the back, and Hans jumped into the driver’s seat. Decker threw his shit under a seat and sat down next to Ajaib, my friend from India, but immediately got up. He moved to the back next to Carl, glared at Ajaib, then looked down and shook his head. Carl welcomed him with a handshake.

* * *

Nobody planted trees for a living if they could do anything else. Tree planting was for ex-cons, probationers, dropouts, homeless veterans, and alcoholics. Poor people. Poor people climbing over shale and slash from old logging operations, slogging through shin-deep mud on eroded hillsides, lugging 50-pound canvas bags of seedlings up and down, up and down, up and down, all day. Ajaib and I were college dropouts. He’d lost his student visa and I was dodging the draft, so we got what we could for work as far away from the government as possible. The pay wasn’t good, but you could make extra money if you planted fast, and you planted fast when you had a good lead man.

When we’d finished five or ten acres—I couldn’t gauge a piece of land for shit—we stopped for lunch. Decker didn’t have a lunch, so Carl gave him a bologna sandwich and then started yelling at us. Ajaib and I were vegetarians, and Carl liked to let loose when he saw us passing around bags of granola.

“You can’t live on those fucking seeds.” Carl’s scraggly beard covered a long scar on his neck that looked like it would pop when he got mad. “You gotta eat meat if you want to make any money up here.” His bugged-out eyes were buried in a face with bushy red brows, and they made him look like a vicious nocturnal animal. His hands could palm a basketball or take hold of a man’s head and twist it off the neck. “Meat!”

Nobody fucked with Carl. He told us about a guy at Soledad Prison who fucked with him once.

“Louis Collins, big fuckin’ nigger that ran the block.” Carl was big but Louis outweighed him by a hundred pounds, he said, and was a foot taller. Decker glowered at Ajaib when Carl said the word “nigger.”

“When Louis said, ‘Take it out, boy,’ you took it out. When Louis told you, ‘Bend over, boy,’ you bent over and asked, ‘Far enough, boss?’”

Ajaib passed me a bag of dried fruit.

“One day Louis doesn’t show up for chow. Motherfucker’d walk around the room, take food off anybody’s tray, especially if they looked hungry, and put it on his own. He’d sit his ass down at the table and say, ‘Pass me that piece of meat on Carl’s plate’ or, ‘I’m putting Carl on a starvation diet, startin’ right now.’”

Carl grinned at Decker. Decker chomped on his sandwich.

“So that day he don’t show up, and the pigs go on a full-scale search. Finally, they find him in the laundry with a welding rod shoved right up his ass, straight through his belly button, and a couple of bites taken outta his juggler veins.”

Decker laughed his spooky laugh, and bits of bread and meat fell from his teeth. Carl said they never found out who did it.

* * *

After lunch it was shit-soup fog, like every day on the slag, and I was halfway up my row on a steep hillside when Carl popped menacingly out of nowhere, breathing hard, face red, lips blue, smoking a wet fag, looking like he’d fucked a small animal or a fox, just for the rush, or a crow, because it was black, and was about to pay for it with a heart attack.

“Watch where you’re planting,” he said, and moved on down the hill to check on someone else. About a hundred feet further on, next to a slate cairn formed by someone hacking with a hoedad, the tree planter’s hatchet, I came across a big rattlesnake, hacked into forty or fifty pieces—one hack would have done the job—as if a madman had gone to work on it. Thank God for Carl, I thought, in spite of myself. The snake was right in my path; I would’ve sunk my hoedad right next to it and never noticed until its fangs ripped through my raincoat into my arm.

* * *

Carl and Decker were sitting at the bar when I walked in with Ajaib a couple of days later. I hadn’t slept much the night before because I’d gotten the hives. Almost anything could set them off. Sometimes I knew exactly what it was: strawberries, peanuts, sulfa drugs, nerves. Most of the time I didn’t, but they were gone by the time we came in from planting. We’d gotten paid and Decker offered to buy me a drink.

“Hell, get ’em both one, Decker,” Carl ordered. “Don’t be a fuckin’ asshole.”

Decker ordered a couple of beers, and Carl bought each of us a shot. Debbie brought out a burger basket from the kitchen and set it in front of Decker. Carl started flicking his tongue at her, and Decker kicked him under the bar. Carl could have killed Decker with one punch, and from the scowl on his face, it looked like he was having a split-second temptation to do just that, but he let it go. Debbie looked pretty sexy in her long, blue apron with the bib turned down and her sleeveless white tee shirt with “Don’t Even Think About It” stenciled across her tits. She slapped the bill facedown on the bar and turned to go back to the kitchen.

“Debbie,” Decker said. His voice was soft, controlled, almost like a lullaby. Debbie stopped but didn’t turn. “Hey, Deb,” Decker said. “How about some ketchup?” This time she did turn, and Decker smiled such a warm, open smile, it left her defenseless, and she had to smile back.

“Sure, babe,” she said, and grabbed a squeeze bottle off the back bar.

“Tell her to squeeze it for you,” Carl said.

“Be quiet, Carl,” he said. He didn’t say Shut up, Carl or Shut the fuck up, Carl. He just politely said, Be quiet, Carl, and Carl shut up. Debbie set the ketchup bottle down in front of him and, with her back to Carl, gave it a little squeeze.

“Thanks, Deb,” Decker said. “I owe you one.”

* * *

The next day we were back on the mud-slick hillside planting trees, and I had to know.

“Decker,” I yelled. Rain beat on our aluminum hard hats and blew in our faces. Our yellow rubber rain suits rattled and snapped like tent flaps in the wind, and voices were muted by swirling fog. Decker didn’t turn; he just kept moving up his row and faded into a fog bank that rolled over the crest of the hill.

“Decker,” I shouted, louder this time. He must have been hard of hearing. He always talked too loud, and there were a few times I’d seen him wait until the last second to move out of the way of a car or truck bearing down on him from behind. He looked like a ghost when I reached him, standing there in the mist, waiting.

“What?” he said. He shaded his eyes and squinted, even though it was overcast and gloomy. He was so pale that he looked sick, and his baby face was that of a kid who played in the high school band because he was too weak for sports. Sometimes I doubted that he’d been in the Army at all. He had powerful arms and legs and a narrow waist—probably from planting trees—but he didn’t look like a soldier to me.

“All that Vietnam shit, running over people, what was that shit?” He looked as if he hadn’t heard me. “That story you told in the bar the other night?” He took off his hard hat, slung the rainwater from it onto the ground, and wiped his face with the back of a muddy glove.

“What story?” he asked.

* * *

He told it again a couple of weeks later, drunk, and no one believed him except Carl. Carl said he knew what men could do. He’d spent the last 12 years in prison for murder. “Self-defense,” he said. “But the judge called it murder.” Carl watched over Decker and anyone who hassled him answered to Carl. Decker said there were never any young men along his Hue-Da Nang truck route, and that’s what really pissed him off. He wanted to run down males his own age, but they were all out in the jungle with guns, digging tunnels and shoving wooden spikes up the dicks of captured American soldiers, so he went for women and old men, anyone he thought could give care and comfort to the enemy—and all gooks were his enemies. Kids grew up to be enemies, too, so Decker ran them down just like he ran down the old men—either side, it didn’t matter. Carl said he understood why it would piss him off. I woke up at four in the morning with hives, craving a drink, and a voice in my head that kept saying, “What story?”

* * *

Ajaib didn’t speak the first time we met; he smiled and held out his long, smooth hand. He wore loose-fitting jeans and a long, cotton Indian shirt that hung to his knees, and he walked slowly in front of a flock of goats. The topknot on his head was undone, and his hair drooped in long, stringy coils around his dark-brown face. He’d never had a haircut. It was a hot, windless summer day, and perfect footprints followed his bare feet in the tan powder of the dusty, unpaved road. He handed me a canteen, three-quarters empty, and lifted his hands in a gesture that said finish it. Jim and Marti Rhodes, my friends in Coos Bay, had told him I was coming, and, even though we’d never met, he walked out to the end of their road to meet me. I’d known Jim and Marti since our student days at the University of Washington, before they got their degrees in philosophy and English and I dropped out. They were used to my calls from the road on my way to or from somewhere, asking if I could come and stay for a while. I helped out with the chores, ran errands, and hung out, drinking homebrew while we figured out new ways to protest the war or resist the draft. Sometimes Jim played “Old-Timey” music on his beat-up, old Gibson while I sang and Marti played the fiddle.

“Should I take the goats out to the field?” I asked Ajaib. “Do you want help cleaning the barn?”

“Whatever pleases you,” Ajaib would answer.

“Okay, man, whatever you say,” I’d joke. “You’re the boss.” We worked together in silence for four or five hours, and every time I looked at him he smiled. Not a broad grin or nervous gesture, but a small upward twitch at the corners of his mouth that suggested a smile. For lunch he’d have an apple or a pear from one of Jim and Marti’s trees and munch on a chapatti, tearing off little pieces and chewing them for a long time. He slept outside when it was warm, not in a sleeping bag, but curled up on the ground under a wool blanket in a different place every night—wherever looked like a good place to lie down, I guess.

Jim and Marti and I usually stayed up late drinking, talking, and playing music, and sometimes Ajaib joined us. He always took whatever he was offered—no hesitation or pretense—but he preferred a glass of chai to homebrew, and he liked to go to sleep early, yet he never left the cabin as long as he was included in the conversation. Sometimes we had to ignore him to give him a chance to leave gracefully.

“Don’t you ever get pissed off?” I asked him the day one of the goats stomped on him. The goat’s hoof opened up a large gash on the top of his bare foot, and one of his toes was bent sideways. He fell back on the ground, gritting his teeth, and a tear formed in the corner of his eye. I’d have screamed and cursed and thrown the nearest heavy thing I could get my hands on, but Ajaib got back on his feet and hobbled out to the field with his hand resting gently on the goat’s back.

“Why would I get upset?” he said in a trembling voice, obviously in pain. “It wasn’t the goat’s fault.”

We had to force him to go to the emergency room for stitches and a tetanus shot, but the foot wasn’t broken, so the doctor wrapped it up, gave him a bottle of pain pills, and told him to wear shoes. I don’t know if he owned shoes at the time.

“Do you like these pills?” he asked me. “I don’t want them.”

* * *

When the rains began in the fall, I headed for the Rogue River to plant trees. I had spent a month at Jim and Marti’s on their piece of scrubland in the hills, where they’d built a cabin and a barn and lived off the land. Ajaib was building a lean-to on the barn the day I left, a place to sleep, I thought, or a shelter for the goats when it rained. They gathered around him like devoted followers, and he looked like Mahatma Gandhi with long hair.

“We’ll meet again,” I told him when I left.

“Let us hope for the best,” he said.

I mentioned that he could find me at the Grant’s Pass Hotel, and a week later, he showed up.

* * *

By January we were planting in snow. Wet, heavy precipitation covered the higher elevations, enough to make hillsides slippery but not enough to stop us. It usually rained within one or two days after it snowed, and we were back to mud, shale, wet gloves, wet shoes, and water filling our canvas tree bags faster than it could run out through the seams. The sky was either white with snowflakes the size of popcorn or gray from one dense horizon to the other. I  began talking to Ajaib about going to California to hoe lettuce in the Central Valley or wash bread pans at Tasahara, the Zen bakery down the coast. I knew he’d go along with whatever I decided. By the first of February, we’d made up our minds to pick up our paychecks at the end of the week and hitch a ride south.

Work was easy after that. A few more days and we’d be gone. I dreamed about the hot sun in Salinas, Bakersfield, and Monterey. I pictured the view from the cliffs of Big Sur, where the fog rolled in at sunset and rolled out in the morning, different from the soaking fog that had socked us in since fall. It hadn’t snowed for a week and the rain had stopped, but the sky remained a dismal yellow-gray, like tarnished silver. Still, the mood had changed. Decker was calm. Debbie spent a lot more time in the bar, always with Decker, and she brought a couple of her girlfriends around to meet some of us.

“Decker’s turned into a goddamn saint since he started fucking Debbie,” Carl said. He ordered another shot.

“On me,” I said when the bartender placed it in front of him.

“She’s pretty goddamn rosy-cheeked herself,” he said. Carl downed his drink and ordered another, plus a couple for Ajaib and me. Debbie let Decker help her line up a shot on the pool table by wrapping his arms around her and pressing his bulky crotch against her ass. “Decker’s a real gentleman, ain’t he?”

Ajaib thanked Carl and held up his glass in an awkward toast, but only took a tiny sip.

Decker didn’t tell his gook story anymore—maybe because he knew it would turn Debbie off, maybe because he didn’t get so drunk, maybe because it wasn’t true. Sometimes I watched Decker in the mirror when he was with her to see if he would grin at us or flash Carl the high sign—or some other sign, some fuck gesture—but he didn’t. I figured that sooner or later, he’d fly into a rage over some small thing Debbie did, like talking too long to other men in the bar or laughing at the wrong time but he never did.

On our next-to-last day, the sun broke through. Steam rolled off the rocks like spirits rising from their graves. Our rubber rain suits quickly became too hot, and most of the crew stripped them off and threw them in the crummy. Some of us draped them through the leather straps on our canvas bags so we could put them on quickly when the rain started up again. But it stayed dry. Carl moved fast and we all kept up, and it looked as if Friday would be our biggest payday yet.

That night I dreamt I was in a foreign country, in a city with rickshaws and water buffalo and yellow rice cooking over dung fires. The smell was so thick and musty, I could hardly breathe, and hordes of people swarmed around me, so dense I couldn’t move. I felt buffeted by millions of giant moths’ wings, only they were women, children, and old men. Then I was on a flat plain with the city behind me. I couldn’t see it anymore, but I heard the sound of traffic and loudspeakers calling people to prayer. On the plain I saw hundreds of yards of brightly colored cloth—orange, yellow, cochineal, and royal purple—stretched out before me as far as my imagination would reach, lying on the ground and draped over wooden racks. The sun was high and there were no shadows.

Then it started to rain. It poured down in sheets, but the sun kept shining. It snowed for a while, but the temperature stayed hot, and the sun continued to shine. Then a rain of ash and soot fell on the plain, and the brightly colored cloth shriveled and turned to a sticky, black goop, like tar. The sun disappeared. A young man walked toward me, and I realized it was Decker, only he was dressed in a saffron robe, like a Buddhist monk, and his head was shaved. He had no eyes.

He extended his hand, as if to introduce himself, and said, “You do not know who I am; this is all I came to tell you.” I woke up with the hives.

* * *

I don’t know why Debbie dumped him, but it was predictable that sooner or later he’d get roaring drunk and tell his tale.

“I knew she was a two-timing bitch the first day we came in here,” Carl said. “Bank that five-ball off the rail.” I was playing a game of pool with Hans, and Carl was telling me how to shoot. “I watched her squeeze that ketchup bottle every time she brought Decker a burger.” I went for the straight shot instead of the bank, and scratched the eight ball. “Trouble is,” Carl said, “she was squeezin’ the ketchup bottle for a couple other guys too.”

“Everyone except you I guess, Carl,” Hans said. Carl’s neck scar got all puffed up and looked as if it were about to pop but he didn’t move. Carl only had to fuck up once, and he’d be back up the river for the rest of his life.

“She’s a cunt,” Carl snapped. “That’s my point.”

I don’t know why Hans decided to let Decker drive the crummy that last day. Maybe it was Carl’s idea. Maybe it was just convenient. Hans, like me, had never believed Decker’s crazy stories, and Decker did have a knack for driving. He was good on mountain roads, and he delivered us to the site and back without getting all nerved up like Hans, whose pipe was always dropping hot ashes on his lap.

We knocked off early while the air was still clear and the sky white with sunlight. We’d had a good week; Hans and Carl had made a lot of money. Ajaib and I were flush for our trip. The rest of the crew was happy, already half drunk. We’d been back at the Grant’s Pass Hotel for an hour or so, and Decker was still outside—probably cleaning the crummy or trying to make up with Debbie (who I’d seen leaving as we pulled in from the job). Ajaib was MIA too, but I kept imagining he’d gone upstairs to pack our stuff for California.

* * *

It was Debbie who burst in the back door screaming. The voice seemed to come from the ceiling or the mirror, but not from Debbie’s mouth. Her hair and eyes looked as if they belonged to someone else, a madwoman or a cornered animal. The room went silent except for a Charlie Pride tune playing on the jukebox. The hair stood up on my arms and neck, and my skin started to itch with the hives. Carl looked at her like he didn’t recognize her. Hans rushed for the door.

“Call the cops,” someone yelled. “Call an ambulance.”

Debbie was halfway to the bar when she started vomiting. The bartender hung up the phone and rushed around front to help her. I was out the door behind Hans, and the rest of the crew followed. I heard Decker laughing his awful, high-pitched, hyena laugh. A pickup squealed around the corner. A log truck rolled through the center of town like a freight train coming out of a tunnel, but I still heard Decker’s laugh above the roar. The crummy faced the back of the hotel, and he was standing on the driver’s side, leaning on the open door.

* * *

Whenever I tell this story, which isn’t often, I’m always drunk, and no one ever believes me. Sometimes I get halfway through, and it just fades out, turns into a jumble of words with nothing to hold them together. I forget what I was talking about and order another drink. People leave me alone. I saw the boot first, lying on its side about 20 feet away, with blood running out of it—then the foot.

“Somebody do something,” Hans shouted. “Get some bandages. Get some towels.”

Hans stood behind the crummy, looking at the ground, but I couldn’t see what he was looking at, so I ran to catch up. Decker was still laughing. Carl stood in the hotel doorway leaning against the frame. I wasn’t sure what I was looking at right away. But then I spied the back wheel of the crummy, and all around it, like a bouquet of poppies, blood and mush and pieces of bone mixed with mud. The big rubber tire had rolled over Ajaib’s head and popped it like a watermelon. There was no face. Black, blood-filled tire tracks flattened his belly, and shit, blood, and intestines oozed out through a huge hole in his side. Hans screamed for towels. I felt like someone had hit me in the stomach and I started to puke. I couldn’t stand. A siren wailed in the distance. Decker was still laughing.

Then I saw Carl. It was like the day he slipped out of the fog with blue lips after hacking up my rattlesnake. He walked slowly from the back door to the crummy and looked down at Ajaib. He went to Decker’s side and put his arm around his shoulder, as if to congratulate him. If I’d had a gun, I would have shot them both. If I’d had an ax, I’d have chopped them in pieces. I retched and tried to get up but I couldn’t. The siren sounded louder. Carl moved around behind Decker, shifting his forearm from Decker’s shoulder to his forehead, cradling the back of his head in the crook of his other arm. The siren screamed from the street out front, and just as the police cruiser pulled into the parking lot, Carl pulled back—one hard, sudden jerk—and Decker’s head flopped to the side like a rag doll.

* * *

Sometimes I tell this story in a bar, if I can get anyone to listen. Sometimes I tell it at the shelter or the soup kitchen. It all depends on how drunk I am, because I can’t remember it when I’m sober. Sometimes these days I hear people screaming that we should nuke the “towelheads” in the Middle East, or that we ought to send all the wetbacks and gooks back to where they came from—they’re usually the same people who have bumper stickers about the Indians that say, “We took your land; get over it.” That’s when I tell it, to try and wake them up, but it doesn’t make any difference. Nobody gives a shit.

I think Decker was still laughing when Carl let go and dropped him to the ground. Or maybe I just imagined that part. I play it up when I’m telling the story in a bar, but it seems that the more I do, the more people want to get away from me. “He died laughing,” I say, and then laugh my own high-pitched hyena laugh. Sometimes the bartender tells me to shut up. Sometimes someone else does and I take a swing. That’ll get me thrown out, which I take as a sign that I should move on, get out of the fog and rain of central Oregon, and head south. I’m still trying to get to California.

I used to work.  I contributed to society for forty-five years, starting when I was fourteen.  I didn’t know how not to work.  It took me months to learn how to apply for unemployment benefits.  Now, I just walk, miles and miles, all over town.  I put it on display – my loss of pride, my shame, my hurt.  I throw myself out there in the shabbiest clothes I can find, let the world see what they’ve done. And, it’s working.  I get stares through car windows that say; look at that bum, that welfare cheat.  Elderly ladies tighten their grip on the steering wheel. Recently, I got a call from a neighbor who wanted to know if I’d lost my license for DUI.   I am what they see.  This is my mantra, my theatre – I am what they see.

My wife says otherwise.  We are still a two-income family, I joke.  My wife works extra hours.  I leap from my easy chair when she comes in after ten hours.  I’m eager to greet, eager to ease her load, clearing a path as she drops her lunch bag, and her computer bag and then her handbag in the front hall.  The dog beats me to her, jumping, begging at her legs.  I give him a hard shove.  “Stop that,” she says.  “He’s my problem.”

“You don’t deserve that kind of treatment after your long day.”

I take her coat and offer to warm dinner.  While she sifts through the mail, I put a hand on her shoulder, careful not to be too forward.  She smells antiseptic.

I wait for the question.

“What did you do, today?”

I put a plate of shriveled stir-fry in front of her.  “Painted the deck chairs.”

“Any jobs?”

“None yet.”

She hardly touches the food, and instead pours a glass of Chardonnay and retreats to the living room couch.  The dog and I follow.  I want to take on the mantle of her fatigue, her workload, her office stress.  I sit close, thinking it might come by osmosis.  I want to do my part. I smile, try to look pleasant, but nothing works.  She remains haggard.  The television goes on.  We don’t speak.  At any one time, there are three, maybe four elephants in the room.  I dance, bob and weave in my mind, I give the Roladex a spin searching for a soft subject, something not too touchy.

“I put my name in with another temp agency.”

“Where?”

“Local.  I doubt anything will happen, but at least it’s something.”

“Yes, it’s something.”  She holds out her wine glass for a refill.

It wasn’t always like this.   Not much changed at first.  Two months of severance pay gave us time to ease into the reality of half our income gone, time to change health insurance, time for her to pick up more hours at the hospital.  “No problem,” she said.  “Something will come along.”  She found meaning in my layoff.  “This is the time to redefine yourself, maybe find something you really want.”  Back then it was cute. Like in so many romantic comedies, she would support me while I struggled to establish my glamorous career – law school, medical school, the great American novel.  We had more than a few newly wed moments, lovers in a bind together.  “We’ll always have a bed, no matter where we live,” she said.  We were closer than when the kids first moved out.

But, those moments didn’t last.  “There’s nothing out there,” I’d say.  I posted my resume everywhere: Monster, Craig’s List, Indeed, and Jobs, another dot com.  I went on every corporate web site in the area.  There were pages of job postings.  “But, no one’s filling them.  They’re waiting to see what happens.”  Then, I’d carry it too far.  “Especially with an old guy like me.  They’re looking for college kids.”

“What are you saying?   That you’re never going to work again?”

At that point, I’d lose her. All the microwaving and dog shoving and osmosis in the world didn’t matter then.

“All I’m saying is, I don’t believe I’ll ever make the kind of money I once made.”

“So do you want me to work even more hours?”

“No, no.  That’s not what I meant.”   And each time, I’d beg her to understand, wasting even more of her waning energy.  The trouble is, I was beginning to enjoy the time off and I think it showed.

I revel in the lonesome feeling of walking around with two dollars in my pocket. Ventures out in the snow and sleet are special too, as are the clumps of slush deposited on my trouser cuffs by passing cars.  Bundled in an old coat, I scurry across streets.  I imagine I’m invisible to the ninety percent still living, that they’d sooner hit me than look up from their Blackberry’s at society’s failure, society’s mistake, society’s potholes.  I move with stealth.  I keep my head down, avoiding icy ruts, slowing to quarter-time on slippery inclines so I don’t get hurt.  I’d be a dead man then.

I try not to watch a lot of television.  But if I do, I make sure it’s educational – National Geographic, Nature channels.  I’m haunted by a recent image of an old lion with a broken jaw, cast off from the pride, starving to death, weak from the injury, growing weaker because he can’t hunt or eat.  All I have now is my body.  My legs keep me fit, strong for manual labor.  The days of big money using my intellect are gone.  Once the government checks run out, all I’ll have is my strength.

I’m in the hardware store.  This guy with an immense ass drooping over the sides of his electric cart zips around the corner.  I almost drop the new snow shovel.  Even with all my misery, real and theatrical, I am grateful not to be him.  That I’m mobile, in the good way, not like that poor sap wheeling around, permanently sitting, head high with the checkout counter.  He looks younger than me.  I wonder what his deal is.  Did he get that fat because he couldn’t walk anymore, or did he just get so fat that he could no longer walk?

I head for the cash register. This is a special bum’s walk today, another addition to the list of  ‘the lasts’, along with the last car I’ll ever own, the last winter coat, the last house, the last New Year’s party.  Today, with the final swipe of my store gift card, the last snow shovel. After that, I let go of yet another tether to this material earth.   But, it’s okay.  I still have my legs, my mobility, my freedom to be one of those people on the sidewalk who commuters stacked up at a traffic light will envy until they get the green.  I finger the gift card in my pocket.  Out of nowhere, the electric cart cuts in front of me, clipping the toe of my boot as he pulls up to the counter.  “Hey.”  He throws back a quick, “Sorry,” and starts his business with the clerk.  The bastard ran over me.  I want to say more, confront him, but the store is crowded.  Picking a fight with a cripple is not my thing.  I let it go.

Halfway home, on the big hill, I feel something sticky in my sock.  Maybe it’s just another cramp, the occasional numbness I get in my tired feet.  I stare at it expecting to see through the boot. There is just the marred leather where the cart swiped.  I don’t dare examine the damage.  It’ll have to wait another mile and a half.  I start favoring the foot.  Add that to the old coat and the snow shovel, I am a spectacle.  I’m getting the looks.  But, instead of reveling in my performance, I’m focused on my toes pulsing to my heartbeat.  Cars go by like gusts of wind and then there is quiet except for the offbeat rhythm of my limp.  I realize now the delicate balance in the jungle.  How quickly situations can change.  I need to be more watchful.  I’ll hunker in my cave.  I’ll lick my wounds, cradle my damaged appendage.  Like the lion, I accept my fate, even infection or gangrene.  I’ll let nature take its course.

My wife says otherwise.  “You need to see a doctor.  I’m making an appointment.”

Reluctantly, I go.  I drive, becoming one of ‘them’.  I try not to judge the people I see walking.  At the clinic, I remember that a big part of going to work everyday was seeing and interacting with people, lots of people.  I am buoyed by the sight of them, and happy to wait the extra forty-five minutes for my appointment.   The doctor explains my injuries.  I picture the sign: street theatre closed for repairs. Three weeks with even more time to think.

I’m getting better at not saying the wrong things when my wife gets home.  I’ve learned to give her space, not to smother when she walks in.  But now, I have a new challenge, not to look too pathetic with my bad foot, with the hole cut in the toe of my shoe.  She starts to ask me what I’ve done today, or to fetch her something, and then she remembers.  Street theatre is now home theatre.  I move about bravely.  I can fake it.  I can hide the discomfort, but the gleaming white ball of gauze at the end of my foot stands out like a clown shoe.  I’m rock-bottom useless – no work for my intellect, no work for my broken body.  I know I’m skating on thin ice, that my wife is at the end of her rope on that thin ice, which is also holding the three or four elephants.

“Are you trying to make me feel bad?”

“I’m not.  I’m not,” I say. “I just want to make your life easier.”

“When you act like we’re poor, you make me feel like I’m not doing enough.”

I apologize.  I can stop it anytime, this act, these theatrics.  But, when friends call on Saturday night saying they’re going out to watch the playoff game at a bar, I do it again.

“What do you think?”  My wife has excitement in her voice.

“You’re talking a sixty or seventy dollar night,” I say.  “Okay with me if you think we have the money.”

“Fine.  Do you think I should just work and never go out?”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“You just stay home and do nothing and I’ll work.”

I try not to reveal that that’s what I’ve been thinking.  I toy with the idea everyday.  Not that I would do nothing, but I’d find something I like, something low key, low paying, something rewarding.  “Of course, we’re going,” I say.  “I was just asking, you know, about the money.  I feel guilty.”

And then I see her smile.  At that moment, my old wife is back.  She gives my nose a tweak.  “Can it just this once not be about you?”

We meet up with the gang.  Everyone wants to pay for my drinks.  They say, “Put your money away.”

I insist just enough.  “Look,” I say, ” my wife is a proud woman.  She’ll throw that twenty out the car window if you don’t take it.  I’ve seen her do it.”  I pocket the money when she’s not looking.

We settle at a table, order appetizers, more drinks.  I look around at my old friends.  We attended each other’s weddings, raised our kids together. They all care for me and my plight.  Everyone asks about my squashed foot.  Everyone has suggestions for what I can do with my spare time.  I tell them I can’t accept a paying job just now because I’ll lose my unemployment checks.  But, I’ll think about it.  It’s a big load to bear, these friends.  I’m trying to play the pathetic man out in the streets.  All that love makes it hard to wallow in self-pity, to revel in the misery.

I’ve been out six months.  I sit outside a coffee shop watching the busy intersection by the highway.  Midday, the traffic lights signal green, yellow and red.  Arrows direct left turns, then right turns.  Trailer trucks grumble, SUVs spill over lane lines, hesitant driver’s draw ire, tinted windows hide prosperity.  The wheels of industry turn, two full lanes of it, in four different directions.  And suddenly, I’m in that movie again, the one where I’m the hero saying to my men, “Leave me, go on, save yourselves.”  My job is gone. I’m never going to make that kind of money again, but it’s okay.  The world lives on.  I feel good, like I’m doing my part.  I see gainfully employed men and women stopping for their afternoon coffee.   They drive nice cars, wear new clothes, sport fresh hairstyles.

Then I think, “Hey, wait a minute.  What if this whole bad economy thing was just a ruse to get rid of me?”  And I slide back into the depths.  What did I do wrong?  What could I have done differently to not lose my job, to not change my life forever like some car accident, or act of God?

My dreams are grandiose now, my head clear, free of the encumbrances of a full-time job.  I dream of Revolution, of Harvard Square in the late-Sixties, of Baby Boomers cast aside.  It’s the new world order, the neo-conservative labor camp of shut up and get to work.  Those still employed are doing the jobs of two or three.  They get unpaid furloughs, and no raises.  Workers look forward to that golden time, the other side of all this down turn, when companies start hiring again.  A time when the money starts flowing.   A time when no one will be looking to hire almost sixty year-olds.

I walk home facing the late-afternoon traffic.  I look into the drivers’ faces for an answer.  Everyone is so young.  I swear I see a time coming when there are bounties on us, black vans scooping up the unemployed, shipping them off to slave camps to make product off the record for corporations.  Free labor like the political dissidents in China.  The bum’s walk is in jeopardy.  I imagine more scenarios, gangs of us on the streets; “They’re watching, pretend you’re busy,” or  “Poor Joe with his shabby clothes, he had a job but they picked him up anyway.”   We are the gray unemployed, the grumps.  Forty years ago in Nam, we were the grunts.

I envision another great march on Washington, walls of gray-haired humanity standing up to the young National Guardsmen.  And then it hits me.  Economic downturn, my ass.  Think what you will, the opulence of the Nineties, the oil spike to five bucks a gallon, the two wars.   It’s none of those.  It’s the man stickin’ it to the Baby Boomers, payback for the Sixties.

My wife says otherwise.  Somewhere along the way, I became her personal secretary.  I run errands, pick up her prescriptions, her mother’s Depends.  Sometimes, I can’t hold back my feelings.  “Sure, I’ll do anything you say.  I’m a broken man.”  But, she doesn’t want to hear that anymore and says sarcastically, “Well, I’m sorry I spent all the money.  I’m working as hard as I can.”

I wanted to do my share.  I drove her nuts trying to re-engineer our new half-income life.  I developed plans for organizing, for cost cutting, running more efficiently.  Maybe we should get rid of the dog: thirty dollars a month for food, fifty for grooming, a hundred and a half for shots.  “I’m just suggesting we look at these things.”  She laughed and gave me her, ‘you crazy engineers’ look.  I wondered aloud if we needed those trays of potted plants she brought home.  Or the new solar patio lights.  Or the food warehouse-size bottle of catsup.

“Are you trying to ruin my day off?” she says, cutting me slack.

I have no answer.  I plant the flowers, install the patio lights and bring the dog to the groomer.  I stay busy.  There is plenty to do with a house that’s probably going on the market.  But, there are also some days when I just let go of the reins and drift aimlessly-napping, skimming magazines, watching television, staring for hours out the back door-another day with nothing to show for it.

Two more months go by.  The unemployment checks are keeping us afloat, but the end is coming.  I try not to think about it.  The wife still comes home from a ten-hour shift and asks the same hard question, “What did you do today?”  Friends say I look great, sun-tanned, muscular, ten years younger.  But, my wife is deteriorating.  Her hair is long past a dye job.  She eats badly, junk food and wine.  Her asthma is getting worse, she’s using more of the steroid medicine.  It’s her birthday.  I want it to be perfect.  She works so hard, waking in the cold, pre-dawn darkness, coming home at sunset.  I wish I could do more.  I buy a cake at a bakery instead of the grocery store.  It’s expensive, but I’ll make up for it, I’ll cut out a few lunches, a few cups of coffee.  I want to give her sex like she did for me on my birthday, but it doesn’t work that way, not for an exhausted, over-worked woman.  With cake frosting still on my lips, I kiss the back of her neck.  I turn to stare into the face I fell in love with thirty-five years ago, the gentleness and youthfulness still there.  She lays her hand on my cheek.  I respond, but she pulls away.  I try to hide my disappointment, but with all the practice looking sad and pathetic, it comes out strong.

“Do you really want to ruin this moment?” she asks.

She’s right.  I need to get me and my hurtful mug out of her sight.  I walk out.  A couple miles away, a downpour opens up.  I’m soaked. There is not a soul out in this weather.  I’ve lost my audience.  The bum’s walk is just embarrassing now.  Lightning flashes nearby, its thunder shaking the ground.  A man was killed last week. I realize I’m in the open and for a brief moment I am actually afraid.  I need to cross.

I slosh through the flooded street, feeling the pull of the stream hurtling towards the storm drain.  Suddenly I’m reciting a rhyme my father used to sing when I was a child:

Fishy, fishy in the brook, Papa catch ‘em with a hook.

Momma fry ‘em in a pan, Baby eat ‘em like a man.

He was the breadwinner.  When he came in from work, my mother had supper on the table. I wonder what he would think if he saw me now.  He hounded me for years to take the PE exam.  I was cocky.  I told him I didn’t need it to impress management.

I don’t hear the vehicle pulling up.  A horn beeps.  It’s my wife.

“I saw the rain rolling in and came to rescue you.”

“I can’t.  I’ll ruin your nice interior.  Besides, I deserve this.”

“It’s not your fault,” she says.

“It is.  I should have worked harder, told one less joke, got to my desk one minute earlier in the morning.” I let it all out and begin to cry.  With the rain, who’s going to know?

My wife holds out her hand to me.  I get in, dripping on the leather seats.  We make love right there in the car on the side of the road, flashers on, windshield wipers slapping away.