Muri did not deserve to know. No one did. I would not even leave a note behind, I would just pack my things and go. We were never really friends anyway and though we shared many nights, there was a space between us that only the warmth of a friend could fill. I think he knew this. 

     Over our first year in Bosso I had gradually lost the will to function. Going to lectures had become a chore and Geology, a course I was very excited about, had become a drudge. I had failed enough courses to guarantee an extra year at the university and was still in my first year. And if no strikes occurred I was looking at five years in that school after which I would probably only work as a Civil Servant earning a pittance.

     I called home often to find out if my visa had come through. At first Mama found it amusing. Then she began to avoid me and made my sister answer the phone. The last time I called my sister told me that I was refused a visa. My heart sunk with a thud. I was about to hang up when her shrill laugh filled my ears. I got annoyed and hung up.

     She did not understand why that visa was important. She thought I just wanted to go to London because it was London. She did not have to lie in bed at night waiting for Muri to come in. She did not have to smell his hands that reeked of cigarette and dirt. She did not have to lie underneath him in the dark his warm breathe pressing against her face.

     Leaving is the best way to end this horror. I hated looking forward to what we did. I enjoyed smoking but then after the first cigarette of the day the rest became tasteless. I deserved more.

     Muri and I never talked about it since the first night. We were outside smoking under the mango tree when there was a power cut which brought a thick darkness about us. He wanted to light another cigarette so he felt the space in-between us for the lighter.  His hand found my lap and I froze. He rubbed down towards my waist, then stopped. I stood up, flicked away my cigarette and went into the bedroom. He followed me. His hand ran along the valley in my back. I felt nothing. When I ran my hand over his chest he shuddered. I recoiled. This made him laugh. Embarrassed, I moved to the corner of the bed. He said sorry and tried to pull me back. I refused. He apologised again and I told him never to laugh at me. He nodded. If he had said okay I would have known that he did not mean it. When it came to it I stilled myself. The feeling was confusing. I wanted to know what I was feeling. I wanted to know if what I was feeling was what I was supposed to be feeling.

     When he finished he lay back down and lit a cigarette. I moved to my side of the bed and pulled the cover over my head. In the morning I heard him dressing up. I refused to wake up. I didn’t want to see his face.  I didn’t want to know my reaction to it. The door clicked shut. I raised the cover and looked about the room. Nothing happened.

     I felt the floor for my shirt and found a cigarette and a lighter, Muri’s gift to me. I lit it and sucked. Muri did not come back home the next night, I’m sure he stayed at Bami and Maro’s room. All they ever did there was smoke, drink and talk inanities. I used to hang out at their place. There was never any food but the weed we bought could last us days. After smoking we would all go to a bukka and binge on cheap eba and pounded yam, from where we would either  go back to Bami and Maro’s and watch porn or, if it was evening, we would go to the basketball court and watch games till night fell.

     There was little else to do in Bosso and very few girls around. Even the ugly ones were sought after. So I went to Joddi’s Joint. Joddi was a graduate from OAU and his Joint had computer games which students paid to use. But I never played such games as a child and found it difficult to indulge in them later. I went there for the company. And Joddi never talked down to us though he was much older. 

     He had two regulars, Tolu and Mike, and together they would banter about rock bands, old school HipHop and the thrillers they had read. Most times I sat down and listened to their chatter and laughed at their jokes especially, Tolu’s who said if  you play Enya at night in a closed room  the lights never come on and candles never light.

     I told Joddi about my plans to leave the country. I told him the moment my visa came through I would head for the bus garage without saying goodbye to anyone. Then why are you telling me he asked. I owe it to you I said. He nodded and gave me a sachet of pure water for free.

   What are you going to do when you get to London?

   Start living again.

   Will you tell me before you leave?

   I nodded. But he knew I would not. On my way home it occurred to me that I did not tell Joddi which country I was going to. And he did not ask. I felt purged to have told him about my plans. My mood brightened. I stopped at a kiosk and bought two fingers of cigarette, a tin of groundnut oil and maggi cubes. I made jollof rice and kept some for Muri. After eating I sat outside under the barren mango tree and lit up. It was not my first cigarette but it was not bland either. I saved the other one for later.

     I was half asleep when Muri came back the next night. I heard him in the kitchen.  I heard his feet on the rug. I heard the wardrobe squeal. And then I felt the lights die. I felt naked but my cover cloth was still above my head. The mattress sunk when he climbed onto the bed. I felt submerged. Into what I could not say but I felt as if I would drown if I didn’t pull myself up. I could hear myself breathing. Please get it over with, I wanted to say. Muri slipped his hand under the cover and found my buttocks. He pressed them lightly as if to make sure they were really mine. Were you waiting for me? He asked.  I shook my head but I had gone to bed naked. As if not to waste time he climbed on my back. I clenched my belly and buried my head in the pillow. He came in but stopped. What’s wrong? I asked. He continued moving and then stopped again. I’m not the first person you have done this with, he said. I did not respond. He carried on.

     Have you done this before? I asked Muri who lay beside me with his face to the ceiling. He shook his head. Will you do it with someone else? He began shaking his head and then said no…I don’t know. I just hope I’m not gay. I put my hand on his belly and circled his navel with my index. I wanted to run my hand below his belly but I was not sure how he would react.

I hope I don’t have to worry about being gay. There’s nothing as clichéd, I said.

 Being gay is clichéd? He asked.

No, worrying about it.

     Muri placed his hand on mine and pushed it away from his navel towards his middle. Do what you want, he said. 

     By morning he was gone again, but this time I did not miss him. He would come back at night. And I’ll be here. So for now all I had to do was exist. I did not get out of bed immediately.  Naked I lie under the   cover and let my mind take flights. I imagined myself in London schooling and working part-time. I imagined my new girlfriend but was unable to put a face to her body. I wonder about London girls. I knew they spoke differently but did they smell different. I realise that I knew less about them than I did the girls I’ve known. They all belonged to a separate entity from which I wasn’t barred but was not enthusiastically welcomed. They were there, I was here.

     Now that I was beginning to find my way around Muri’s body I wondered if I could find my way back to a girl’s. For a moment this thought unsettled me I opened the windows to air out the room. I made pap and while I left it to cool I went to the kiosk to buy kosai and some cigarettes. The morning dragged on but I did not care. I thought about stopping by at the afternoon lectures to collect the handouts. And then stop at Joddi’s Joint around noon to hang out. I had to return his Enya cd anyway. It was just rock music like the many others that have been made before.

     Next time I looked at my watch it was past noon. Anxiety tampers with time, I have noticed, for good or bad.  I had over-fed on the pap and was slowly overcome by drowsiness. I gave in and went to bed. I would just skip lectures and go to Joddi’s instead after I woke up. My sleep was light.  A tap on my shoulder and I opened my eyes to find Muri in my face. I smiled and made to kiss him but he recoiled. Maro and Bami are here. He said. I sat up and asked. What do they want? Muri turned to the door and then back to me. One Nation.

     I climbed down from the bed annoyed and disappointed in Muri. I came into the living room and found Maro, Bami, and a girl. Bami was in the girl’s ear. She giggled in fits and I wondered why because Bami could not tell a joke. Maro sat opposite them with a parcel of weed on a stool in front of him. He had rolled two sticks and was on his third when he looked up. Person. He said to me. Where you? I asked. I hold side.  He replied and eased his tongue underneath the paper greasing it with his saliva before sealing it.

     The girl looked at me, smiled and said Hello. I said Hi and took my eyes off her yellow teeth. Her feet had stained our blue rug. Bami winked at me and carried on talking to her. I knew he thought he was about to do me a big favour by bringing a girl to our place for an orgy. But I did not want to know where they found this one. And Muri would have to clean the rug.

     Bami lit up one of Maro’s sticks, took a few drags and passed it to the girl. She shook her head. He dragged some more and passed it to me while he led the girl to our bedroom. Muri came out of the kitchen with one of our ceramic plates to use as an ashtray. I still use that plate. I said. I will wash it. He said. I tried to trace hatred or distance in his voice. I stared at him hoping he would meet my eyes. Instead he lit up another of Maro’s sticks and sucked. The bastard.    

      I’m next. Said Maro.

     Here, take mine. I said proffering my weed.

     Maro looked at me then Nasir and they both laughed

     Is that how scarce toto is, that now this Chairman does not know that it is what we’re talking about? Said Maro.

     To mask my embarrassment I smiled along and said things hard.

      Are you sure you can recognise toto when you see it eh Chairman? Don’t go and put your blonkos in the girl’s ass oh. Said Maro.

     Muri’s laughter was wild. The weed was getting to him. But he still avoided my face. I decided to play some music. Joddi’s Enya cd was in the deck. Standing up to change it I felt the contents of my head swirl. My body was weightless but I could not move it. I slumped back in the chair. Muri and Maro’s laughter rang out. I laughed at me too and picked up the remote from the centre table.  I turned on the deck and played the Enya. Her ghostly voice rang out of the speakers but in my head I heard silences.

     Bami came out and Maro went in.

     Clad in only boxers Bami held on to the air with his left hand and pumped his waist to and fro while smacking the air with his right hand. Nasir broke into a big laugh. Bami took my weed from me and sucked hard. Any water, I want to bath? He asked. I laughed and surprised myself by how loud I was. We haven’t had water for two days. Said Muri. And how is that funny? Asked Bami. I shrugged. He dragged the weed one more time and stretched it to me but I refused it. The walls of my stomach were beginning to stiffen.

     Who’s playing this noise? Asked Bami. Change it if you want. I said to him. He changed the cd and the first track was Bad Boy For Life, and immediately Bami began chanting along to the refrain.

     We aint, we aint going nowhere

     We going nowhere, we can’t be stopped now,

     Cos we Bad Boy for life…

I needed to leave that place. By now I found it easy to imagine myself elsewhere. I hoped Muri would miss me so bad that thinking about it would pain him. I think that was partly why I made the effort to make him enjoy what we did. So that he would get used to it, so that he would begin to expect it the same way I did.

     When Maro came out Muri stood up to go in. Just then he caught my eyes and looked away. I found a blip of satisfaction in the fact that he had avoided my eyes all this time. Perhaps he did not want to know if I approved of what he was about to do. Perhaps he thinks I would be hurt knowing he was doing to that girl what he should be doing with me. Maro had a cloud on his face. He kissed his teeth and picked up of the stick to light. What happened? Asked Bami. Maro lit his weed, sucked it till the tipped burned evenly and then said;

     I come quick. 

     How come? Asked Bami.

    What do you mean how come? I said.

     I wasn’t talking to you. Said Bami.

    The thing just come quick, I have to stop smoking this weed. Said Maro.

     I began to laugh but noticed neither of them shared the humour.

     And we spent so much to convince this girl to come here with us. Said Maro. I was too high to empathise with him. Not that I really would if I was sober. Because of him and Bami, Muri was on our bed doing things with that girl. I prayed that he too would come quick or that his condom would burst while inside.

     I’ll go back in after you. Said Maro.

     I’m not going. I said.

     Why? Asked Bami, his face behind a white mist.

    I just don’t want to. 

    Are you afraid?

    I said I don’t want to. Is it by force?

    You’re not even grateful that we brought you free toto.

     Don’t you see how dirty she is?

     It’s all pussy. Said Maro.

     This one will burn you dick.

     It’s all pussy. Said Maro.  

     To you maybe, but to me it’s a death trap and I have bigger plans for my dick.

     Cool but go easy with the lotion. Said Bami.

     I rather help myself than get my dick fried up. Like I said I have bigger…

    Oh just shut up, you’re ruining my high. I also have bigger plans for this high, it’s going to take me places. Bami began laughing at his joke but neither of us joined in.

     Why did you guys bring her here? Why not take her to your place? I asked.

     I don’t even know. Said Maro whose clouded face loosened with every drag he took.

     Muri said we should bring her here. There were too many boys at our place and we didn’t want to share. Said Bami and laughed too hard he choked and had to sit up to relieve himself.

    So Muri said you should bring her here?

   Yes. Maybe he took pity on you because the last toto you saw was the one you came out of. Said Bami.

     I doubt you saw that one because you were blind. Added Maro.

     Bami began laughing but then choked and coughed in rapacious fits. He ran to the kitchen.

     There’s no water. I called after him.

     Bami walked back to the living room still coughing. He looked around for his trousers. As he made for the door Maro asked him to buy more cigarettes from the kiosk.

     I wanted to think about Muri’s motive for asking them to bring the girl to our place. But my thoughts were light as though they hovered above my head lacking enough reasoning to drag them down and be processed. I let that thought fly at which point the fire on my weed was beginning to burn my fingers.

     Muri came out. He looked around his eyes droopy.

     Where Bami?

     Kiosk. Said Maro.

     Muri looked at the parcel of weed on the table and then raised his head to Maro and said;

     Next time I’m going in first.

     What happened? Asked Maro. 

     Nobody likes leftovers. Said Muri and sat down.

     This time I did not look at him. I tried not to.

     Your boy said he’s not going in. Said Maro to Muri.

     Why?

     Ask him.

     Muri turned to me.

     Why?

     I just don’t want to.

    Yes but why?

     I did not respond. I could feel Muri’s piercing glare.

     You’re going to let free toto go to waste. Said Maro. He adjusted himself in the chair and picked up a cigarette. I picked one as well but went outside to smoke it. I was gladdened by the slat of anger in Muri’s voice. His guilt must be working him.

     When Bami returned he saw me outside and hurried in. I decided to take a walk. I needed the distance and leaving might further hurt Muri. I hoped it would. I went back into the living room. Maro was not there. He must have gone back in. I searched for my shirt, put on my slippers and left.

I wandered about our area. I went to the shade where we often played snooker. As it was evening the bodies had started to crowd the scene. Next door was a woman who sold hot drinks from her room. Upturned benches leaned on the wall beside her door. I walked past her as she swept the ground raising mild red dust. I walked past the mechanic garage in front of the only storey building in the entire area. I’d never stopped to count how many stories there were. As if automated, I realised that I had been gravitating towards the bukka all along. I wondered if that was my plan when I left the house but my recollection was hazy. Now I was becoming lucid. I felt a tightening in my belly. This added a spring in my step as I made for the bukka.

     The zinc shack was empty except for a mechanic who sat in a corner neck deep in his eba. I ordered poundi and egusi. The aroma of food encouraged more drum-rolls in my belly. The sweaty waitress said the egusi was just getting ready and it would take another minute. She placed the washing hand bowl and water in a plastic cup on my table. The red cup had circlets of brown dirt in it. I asked for pure-water instead. She brought me a sachet. I held it up in the remnants of light the sun had left behind. Brown sediments settled at the tip-end of the sachet. Next time the waiter entered was with my poundi and egusi. Do you have coke? She nodded. Give me one. I was half way through the food when I realised that the egusi was hotter than the eba. The pepper in my soup burned my tongue and hastened my lucidity. This was what I loved most about weed – the anticlimax. I washed my hands and guzzled down the last of the coke. Standing up I felt the weight of the poundi push down my bowels. I had to ease myself. I paid and left. There was no water in the house so it had to be the bush. I bought three fingers of Rothmans and another sachet of pure-water. I asked the kiosk owner for some paper. He looked around his shop, found a newspaper and tore out two leaves for me. Leave some space for me too. He joked. I nodded and made for the bush. Because of the water shortage, even the locals and not just the students defecated in the bush. I walked past a phone box that hung on the side wall of a business centre. The urge to call home welled up in me. I thought about leaving it till after my bushgame. I decided to make the call quick, pressed as I was. No one picked up. I dialled again and on the first ring my sister’s voice poured down my ears. She was excited and this made her incoherent. We just got the letter, just now. I was waiting for her to settle down when a clipped sound rang in my ear. I looked at the screen on the phone box; my credit was low and I had to insert another card. I felt my pockets and realised there was not enough for a card. My stomach growled. I hung up the phone and made for the bush. I would hurry home when I’m done and get more money for a phone card. This could be about my visa; why else would she be so excited about a letter just received. I wetted the newspaper with the pure-water even before I finished. I lit a cigarette and in-between hurrying home and thinking of the letter that got my sister excited I forgot to smoke the cigarette till it was half-size. I sucked what was left and flicked away the stub. The night had fallen when I reached our place.

     I opened the door and was raising my hand to switch on the lights when I heard stop. It was Muri.

     I need to get something. I said.     

    Why did you leave? He asked.

    Leave where?

    He did not respond. I could make him out on the bed under the weak light that peered through the curtain.

      You mean the girl?

      Yes. He said.

      I just didn’t want anything to do with her.

      Why?

      I just didn’t.

      Do you now hate women?

      Hate women?

      Because of what we did, do you now…

      No, what makes you think that? 

     Then why didn’t you do it?

     You mean with her?

     Yes.

     Did you see how dirty she was?

     When has that ever stopped you? Did you not do it to punish me?

     Punish you?

     You’re repeating my questions.

     I switched on the lights. Muri sat up with his back to the wall. I could tell he had no underwear on. He knew I noticed. His eyes trailed me across the room to the wardrobe where I searched for my wallet.

     I wanted to make sure I wasn’t …you know… that’s why I did it with her.

     I ignored his prod. My wallet was in none of my trousers. I looked on the top shelf. I looked in my box. I stood up and tried to think of where I’d left it. I looked in Muri’s wardrobe. I flipped through his clothes with less care than usual. He said nothing. I looked around the room; everywhere but the bed. I had it with me before I went to sleep, before Muri brought that girl to our place.

     I checked my trousers again. Muri stood up and made for the door. I thought he was going out naked but he stopped and switched off the lights.

     Can’t you see I’m looking for something?

     I felt him walking towards me. Before me he smelled of cigarette and Muriness.

     What do you want? I asked.

     He tried to kiss me. I did not refuse. He moved closer, I took a step back and hit the wardrobe. He kissed me again.

     Have you seen my wallet? I asked.

     He began to unbutton me. I helped him with my shirt.

     You want to leave, don’t you? Said Muri.

     I did not respond for I was unsure if he meant leave him or leave the school. Or leave the room. My anger surged. I turned him around so that his chest was now against the wardrobe. His head hit the door and he squirmed. He craned his neck to look at me and I pressed it to the door. When I came in he groaned. Then laughed wildly. I pushed harder and he fell quiet.

Dean Jollay

Caroline wiggles her toes, trying to restore circulation to feet numbed by spiked heels, feet which, left on their own, would descend from the stage, walk out the front door, and never look back. But escape is out of the question. Her father cups his hand on her elbow and whispers, “Here we go, honey.”

The announcer calls, “Miss Caroline Muchalsky escorted by her father, Robert.”

A recording of “The Way You Look Tonight” plays on the auditorium’s sound system. The CD skips and crackles. Caroline dons the smile she’s been crafting. Polite applause skitters across the drafty hall, more tentative than for the girls who have preceded her. Retribution, she guesses, from her kick-ass days at Parker High, where she led the girls’ basketball team in personal fouls per game.  

By order of the Cotillion Committee: No waves, spontaneous outbursts, or words of greeting are permitted on the grand tour, as such behaviors will slow down the promenade. The debutantes and their fathers shall maintain a brisk pace. Four minutes are allotted for each father and daughter to circle the room and return to the stage to await the closing ceremony. Caroline has coached up her daddy, telling him they can make it in three. Nine other girls and their fathers have preceded them. She studied their technique as they paraded about the hall.  

* * *

The cotillion was Stepmother Penelope’s idea. “What well-bred girls do,” she said. Caroline has checked the calendar. It’s 2011, not 1911. A newly declared history major, she’s under the distinct impression that important events have detoured around Parker, Georgia. The War Between the States, for example, not to mention the Spanish-American War, two world wars, the Korean War, Vietnam, Granada, Panama, Desert Storm, Iraq, Afghanistan, the Civil Rights Movement, a depression, and numerous recessions, including the Great Recession, which might as well have been a depression had the good citizens of Parker cared to pay attention. Year after year the cotillion persists, surviving all misfortune.

* * *

Last summer, before Caroline headed to the University of Georgia for her freshman year, Penelope dragged her on a road trip to Buckhead in Atlanta, her stepmother gaga over the “cutest little place you’ve ever seen in your entire life.” An old college chum of Caroline’s owned Helen’s Boutique. Three hours up I-75 in Penelope’s Range Rover to buy a dress. “You’ll just love this place, honey. They carry all the top designers. We must find a dress that makes you look…well…bigger up top. Maybe something full length too. No point exposin’ those heavy legs of yours, darlin’.”

Penelope made Caroline try on dress after dress. This one, too short. That one, sleeveless. (“Darlin’, those arms aren’t exactly one of your best features.”) Another too modern. “We’re going for the classic look, aren’t we? I don’t think folks in Parker are ready for that.”

Desperate for the endgame, Caroline picked a full-length mermaid-style gown that hugged her body to the knees and flared at the bottom. She didn’t particularly like the dress, but it was marked down and she wanted to cut her father, about to lose his construction business, some slack. His brand-new gated community on the outskirts of Parker stood almost vacant, swimming pools dark with algae, air conditioner pads empty, condensers stolen for their copper and steel, foreclosure and short sale signs as common as the weeds and thistles growing in the yards. He’s told her he might not be able to pay her tuition after this semester. She should think about applying for a scholarship.

Penelope wrinkled her nose at Caroline’s choice and shook her head. “Heaven sakes, you look like Jessica Simpson in that thing.”

“It’s on sale.”

“Honey, good luck walkin’. How you fixin’ to get up and down those steps by the stage?”

“Don’t worry. I’ll manage.” The dress squeezed her knees together, as if they were wrapped with bungee cords. “Daddy’ll help me.”

Where did her father get the cash for her dress, money for the cotillion fee, plane tickets for sister Meg and her husband to fly in from LA, flowers, favors, Penelope’s dress (not a Vera Wang but a tailored original with hand-sewn beadwork)? When they returned to Parker and he complained to Penelope about the expense, she said, “Why, honey, that’s why they invented MasterCard.”

The Vera Wang required only a few simple alterations. Last week Caroline came home from school on Christmas break and tried it on. The gown hung on her bones like linen on a mummy. Dorm food hadn’t appealed—her freshman fifteen on the minus side. She’d been running eighty-five miles a week training for a marathon. Caroline sneaked the dress to Superior Drycleaners. A Latino woman who worked in the back took it in for her. Snugged the waist too much, she discovered when she picked it up, but it was too late for a do-over.

* * *

            Her daddy extends his right elbow. It’s his moment, not hers. She feels like a 4-Her’s pet sheep being shown at the county fair. She curls her hand around his right bicep, granitelike from years of labor in the blazing Georgia sun. Heart-of-pine boards on the Palladium stage squeak as father and daughter head for the steps to the auditorium floor, squeezing by the other girls and their fathers, her gown so tight she’s forced to take baby steps. Damn if she’ll let Penelope see her struggle. She whispers, “Go slow.” He lifts his hand to steady her as she bends to grab the front of her dress.

The stairs are cloaked in shadows—the Palladium’s overhead lights dark, the only illumination strings of tiny white Christmas lights woven around the wooden trusses. The dimness suits her purposes, if she can only navigate the steep treads. The Cotillion Decorating Committee has conjured a starry post-Christmas fantasy in the rickety Quonset hut. Candles in hurricane lamps with red bows flicker on the tables. Pine boughs give off an aroma that reminds her of a certain cleaning liquid.

            They regroup at the bottom. She lets go of her dress and hooks her arm in his. She wobbles in her three-inch stilettos like a boat pitching in light chop. She tightens her grip on his arm to make sure she doesn’t fall. She can’t recall the last time she wore anything but sandals, flip-flops, or running shoes—New Balance, American-made, her favorites, the ones that helped her cruise to a second-place finish in the state cross-country championship.

Across the room Lorenzo, her new boyfriend from UGA, waves and gives her a thumbs-up. Graduating in the spring, he came to the U.S. from Colombia to study international business. Caroline’s brother, Paul, accused her of dating him with the cotillion in mind, knowing how pissed Penelope would be when Caroline brought a foreigner into the house, a South American with skin slightly darker than her own, not a Negro mind you, but darker all the same. Paul’s wrong about her motives. She’s really into Lorenzo.

Penelope won’t let Lorenzo sleep in Caroline’s room. “I don’t care to know what you do at school, but whatever it is, you’re not doing it under my roof,” she said. Caroline appealed the verdict to her father, but he shrugged and walked away. Maybe Paul’s right about his being pussy-whipped. Caroline made Lorenzo a bed on the couch in her father’s study. In the bustle of the cotillion, they haven’t been able to sneak a minute by themselves. Caroline misses having him in her bed, imagines his fingers brushing her nipples, tracing the contours of her stomach, working their way gently between her thighs. Remembers how she apologized for her small breasts the first time they made love. But not anymore. Lorenzo prefers spare, small-chested women. “Large breasts are such a waste,” he says. Oh, how she wants to believe him.

He reads poetry to her before they make love. Caro and Silva. Speaks in Spanish, then translates to English. Octavio Paz is her favorite. “Contigo (With you)”:

                                                        …The day

                                    is a great clear word

                                    a fluttering of vowels

                                                                        Your breasts

                                    ripen before my eyes

                                                                        My thoughts

                                    are lighter than the air

                                                                        I am real

                                    I see my life and death

                                    The world is true

                                    I see

                                           I inhabit a transparency

Lorenzo recites in a voice full of sadness—lingers on every word, every syllable, polishing its surface.

            Three-quarters of the way down the right side of the room, her father clears his throat and whispers, “Doin’ okay?”

            “Guess so, but you were shaking.”

            He chuckles. “That’s a fact. I’m so proud of you is all. You’re the most beautiful girl here.” A lie, of course. Obligatory. Total crap.

            They make a left at the exit sign and head toward the empty buffet tables. She steals a peek at the overflow seats for townspeople who don’t have a young lady in the cotillion. Old folks who may have introduced a daughter to Parker society once upon a time. The rest, gawkers and wannabes with no skin in the game. Half the chairs in the back of the auditorium are empty. Not even a black face. Blacks have their own cotillion, have since the Second World War, she understands.

The music’s not quite as loud back here. She relaxes and glances at her daddy. His shoulders tilt leftward, his right leg longer than its counterpart. This morning he visited Dr. Leeds, his chiropractor, and had an adjustment so his back would make it through the evening. She’s pretty sure her father hates the cotillion as much as she, though he’d never let on. He’s going through the motions for Penelope. Keeping up appearances until his company goes belly-up.

Her father sits in his home office late at night with the lights off. Leaves his cell in a desk drawer and never answers their home phone. Poker club, Saturday morning golf, hunting and fishing with his buddies, weekends up in Atlanta to watch the Braves—all discarded. She wonders what will happen to him when Muchalsky Construction Company, his baby, shuts down. Building is all he knows. “I’ll find something else” is all he’ll say. But he’s fifty-one.

A Coca-Cola machine blinks in the alcove straight ahead. Peach Blossom Catering hustles to pack up their chafing dishes, china, silverware, coffee urns, tableware, serving pieces, and flower arrangements. She wonders what will happen to the uneaten food—fruit and cheese plates, braised beef tips, chicken cordon bleu, asparagus almandine, mixed green salad, potatoes au gratin, sourdough rolls, and crème brûlée. Hopes someone will think to donate the leftovers to a soup kitchen. Plenty of folks in Parker need food these days. If her mother were running the show, she’d make sure it didn’t get wasted.

* * *

            Her mother flew south for the cotillion. Penelope insisted that Mamma stay at the Hampton Inn, as far from them as possible. When Caroline was thirteen, her mother left to teach English at a college in Boston. “Can’t spend another minute in Parker,” she said. “Not a second.” Caroline guessed her mother had no idea what she was getting into when she fell for her father. She attended college in Atlanta because it was as far away from Newton, Massachusetts, as her parents would allow her to go.

            Caroline understood that her parents’ breakup had been inevitable. She supposed that Daddy had quite enough of Mamma, so outspoken and independent, a wife who couldn’t be bothered to cook or clean, who hadn’t set foot in church since Caroline was baptized. A woman who butted into conversations, mocked the Daughters of the Confederacy, and called football “that plague on contemporary civilization.” Penelope is Mamma’s polar opposite, a Southern lady to her core. No wonder she snagged Robert Muchalsky not long after the divorce.

            Unlike her father, Caroline won’t give up on Mamma. If only she were in Caroline’s day-to-day life, her real life, not just graduation and the cotillion. A phone call once or twice a week for openers. How’s school? What have you been up to? Why don’t you fly up to visit me over break? When Caroline broaches the subject, her mother says, “Don’t be so insecure. You know I love you, even if I don’t call all the time.” Now that she’s nineteen, the obligatory visitations called for in the divorce decree completed, Caroline wonders how much time she and her mother will spend together.

            Yesterday Caroline went to see Mamma in her motel room, time stolen away from the bustle of pre-cotillion festivities—luncheons, rehearsals, an interview with the Parker Independent. Mamma’s even thinner than at graduation, Caroline thought as they embraced. Her hair, waist-length during her Parker days, was cropped short, strands of gold and silver parted and combed in a boyish style. Mamma had always favored ball caps over dark glasses and straw hats. Now the corners of her eyes were furrowed from squinting at the sun. Still, from a distance, she looked younger than her forty-eight years.

            They sat cross-legged, opposite one another on the king-size bed. “Paul tells me you have a boyfriend from Colombia.”

            Caroline wondered what Paul might have said. She decided to proceed with caution. “Yes, I do as a matter of fact.”

            “Tell me about him.”

            “Well, he comes from a prominent family in Bogotá…”

            “Not that,” Peggy interrupted. “What does he look like? What color are his eyes?”

            “He has a birthmark on his calf the shape of a dolphin.”

            “The eyes, Caroline.”

            She closed hers. “Black at night, chestnut during the day.”

            “Is he good in bed?”

            “Mamma, please.”

            She insisted that Caroline bring Lorenzo to meet her, brushing aside her daughter’s protest that there wasn’t time. Mid-afternoon before the cotillion, Mamma let them into the room and Caroline introduced Lorenzo.

“My, my, Caroline,” she said. “Aren’t you the lucky one?”

Lorenzo went immediately to her mother’s stack of books on the bed stand. When Caroline was a little girl, Mamma always had a book in her hands. He lifted each one carefully and studied it in turn. A John Cheever biography anchored the bottom of the pile. He leafed through its pages.

“Have you read his stories?” Mamma said.

“A few. Not my cup of tea, as you say in the States. A nasty, ungrateful man, I’ve heard.”

Mamma smiled. “What has that got to do with anything?”

            He shrugged and set the book back on the heap. Sitting in the armchair in the corner of the room, Lorenzo entertained her mother with stories, like the time his father escaped from an ambush in downtown Bogotá. He discovered that Mama knew Spanish, learned it when she lived in Parker because the town had a large population of Mexican immigrants and she volunteered at a food pantry.

Caroline felt left out as they spoke in his native tongue, wishing she’d learned the language in high school when she had the chance. When they were leaving the motel, Mamma tugged Caroline’s arm, pulling her backward, and whispered, “I like this boy, He seems so—well—mysterious.” Halfway down the hall, Lorenzo turned and smiled as if he had heard every word. Backpedaling, he blew Mamma a kiss. They exchanged a few more words in Spanish.

* * *

The Muchalsky family table is twenty feet away, on the left. Whoever printed the invitations misspelled their name, M-u-l-k-a-l-s-k-y. Not even close. Penelope was upset. She thought someone on the Cotillion Committee had done it on purpose. The culprit made sure the engraved cards arrived the day before they had to be mailed so that a correction was impossible. Caroline’s stepmother loves conspiracies. She’s certain George W. Bush took part in planning September 11.

As they approach, Lorenzo and Paul smile at her from opposite ends. Penelope sits beside Father Nick, back straight, hands folded, chin slightly raised. Mama gives Caroline a little wave, barely moving the tips of her fingers, the corsage of white roses her father sent pinned to her lapel. She looks like a lawyer in her gray suit and maroon blouse, as different from Penelope as she could possibly be. Sister Meg and her husband, Tim, are immersed in conversation and don’t even look up.

Caroline exhales as she and her father pass by. They start for the steps on the end of the stage. “Won’t be long now,” he mumbles. Her shoes rub. Blisters have popped on her heels. Seventy, eighty miles a week and she hardly ever gets one. A few hundred feet around this room and her feet are toast. With any luck, this is the last time she’ll ever wear a pair of high heels. She glances at the stage, where the other girls and their fathers await them.

She begins to relax, to congratulate herself for pulling this off, for running the gauntlet and escaping with only sore feet for her troubles. Her father pauses at the bottom of the steps and waits as she teeters upward. He extends a hand to her. She stubs her toe on the top tread and loses her balance. He tries to steady her, grabs for her shoulders, but her skin’s moist and he loses his grip. She falls backward, reaches for his outstretched hand, and barely holds on. His strong arm breaks her fall, but she lands on her tailbone, her dress seam ripping from waist to ankle.

Someone in the crowd shouts, “Is she all right?”

Another voice, possibly Penelope’s, screams, “Call 9-1-1!”

Her father lets go of her hand, bends down, and whispers, “You okay?”

She nods. “My butt stings like it’s about to go numb.” For once she wishes there were a little more meat on the bone. She drops her head to inspect the damage. This fucking dress. Fucking Vera Wang. It’s the last time she’ll ever wear a gown. If she ever marries, it will be in jeans and a T.

Lorenzo and Paul hover at her side. “Can you move?” Lorenzo says. “Did you break anything?”

She shakes her head, more embarrassed than hurt. Nothing in the Cotillion Committee Rules and Regulations tells the young debutante what to do when she lands on her ass.

Paul elbows Lorenzo out of the way. “She needs air. Back off.”

Lorenzo staggers, then regains his balance. A crowd encircles them. She recognizes some of the faces. Father Nick stares down at her, mumbling a prayer, but Caroline’s certain she won’t be needing his services.

Her brother crouches beside her and strokes her hair.

“Paul,” she says, “I’m okay. Lighten up.”

Lorenzo balls his fist, takes a step toward Paul, and stops. Mamma, beside him, grabs onto his wrist. She whispers something in his ear. He relaxes his hand. Mamma’s fingers slip into his.

“Can you get up?” Daddy asks, wrapping his arm around her back.

“Think so.”

Her father lifts her by the armpits. “Easy,” she says. “I’m not a slab of beef.” When she’s on her feet, he pulls her arm over his shoulder and neck and helps her to the table. “I’m not sure I want to sit,” she says, but does so anyway, trying to disappear. Thinks she hears a snicker close by. Then a laugh. People return to their seats and the festivities resume. The master of ceremonies announces, “Laura Pinckard escorted by her father, Stanley.”

Caroline’s bare leg is cold. She tries to hold the seam together, but there’s not enough fabric. She gives up. Paul slips into the chair on one side, her father on the other. “Sure you’re all right?” Paul says.

“Jesus, Paul, come on. I’m fine.”

Mamma wiggles in between them. She bends to her daughter’s ear, rubs her arm, and says, “I’m so glad you’re not hurt.”

“I run ten miles a day and couldn’t make it up the damn steps?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Mamma says. “None of this does. Ten years from now this will be a funny story to tell your children.”

Caroline tries not to look at Penelope, dreads the lecture forthcoming, predictable as her allergies in the spring: I warned you not to buy that dress. Told you it would be difficult to get up and down those steps. For now her stepmother keeps it zipped, but looks like she’s just won the lottery. Father Nick seems disappointed too, as if he regrets Caroline’s body and soul are intact, still a singular unit.

Lorenzo holds Mamma’s chair and scooches her in.

“My—that was exciting,” Penelope says.

Caroline watches the Pinckards as they circle the room, calculates the time it will take for the remaining couples to complete the promenade—twenty minutes, give or take. Twenty minutes until she can flee. Maybe she and Lorenzo will return to Athens tonight. Perhaps this is the last night she’ll ever spend in Parker, Georgia.

After the last pair tours the room, the announcer begins the closing ceremony. Her father looks at her, raises an eyebrow, as if to ask whether she wants to give it another go and join the group onstage. Caroline shakes her head. The class will remain one girl short. “Ladies and gentlemen,” the master of ceremonies intones, “may I present to you the debutantes of the 2011 Cotillion.” The crowd applauds. Cell phones and cameras flash. The ceremony concludes with the announcer’s thank you, on behalf of the debutantes and their families, to all who attended.

Caroline wants to leave immediately, but Penelope insists on pictures. She recruits Lorenzo to take them with her Nikon—a way, Caroline supposes, to make sure he doesn’t appear in their family photos. She puts Caroline in the center of the back row, where the riven bottom half of the Vera Wang doesn’t show, and moves back and forth to view the digital images as Lorenzo snaps them. Half the auditorium is empty by the time Penelope declares she’s satisfied. She’s chairwoman of the cleanup committee, so she pecks her husband on the cheek and tells him not to wait up.

The remaining families mingle, congratulating one another on the evening, how beautiful their daughters look, how this has been the best cotillion ever. As if by unanimous secret ballot, the Muchalsky entourage leaves the building with the most meager of polite good-byes to their friends and neighbors. Caroline closes her eyes and sighs as they pass through the glass doors into the chilly night air. A poster on the side of the building announces tea dances held every Friday night through April. Spotlights on the Second Baptist Church across the street cast shadows that float upon its brick facade.

She’s on her father’s arm again as they walk to the car. He pats her hand. In a strange way she feels sorry for Penelope. Every one of her stepmother’s women friends will want to rehash the evening. We’re so sorry about Caroline. Why did she fall? Is she okay now? Didn’t you warn her about that dress? It looked so uncomfortable. Nothing like that has ever happened at the cotillion. A hundred different conversations, each exactly the same.

In the parking lot Lorenzo turns to Caroline and says, “I’m going to take your mother to the motel. I’ll see you back at the house.” Meg and her husband are a hundred yards away, heading for their rental car. Someone has to drive Mamma, Caroline supposes, but why Lorenzo?

With help from Paul, she climbs into the backseat of her father’s Tahoe. The leather is softer than the wooden chairs in the Palladium, yet her butt still throbs. Maybe she cracked her tailbone after all. She considers asking her father to drop by the emergency room, but decides to see how she feels in the morning.

Paul slides into the passenger seat, and they join the long line waiting to exit the lot. Lorenzo and Mamma are in the queue, two cars in front of them. Headlamps illuminate Lorenzo’s BMW. Backlit, her mother’s hands jump about like a shadow boxer’s.

Paul leans in her direction and says, “Lorenzo and Mamma sure have gotten to be friends in a hurry.”

The remark stings. “Colombian boys are close to their mothers,” she says, not knowing whether it’s true.

“She’s not his mother.”

“Thanks for pointing that out, Paul. I wouldn’t have known.”

The line of cars barely moves. Her father taps the steering wheel and yawns. “Your mother always fancied the new and the different. I suppose that’s why she married me and moved to Parker.”

At home, Paul asks Caroline if she wants to watch Saturday Night Live with him. But she’s had enough comedy for one night.

She changes out of her dress, into jeans, and heads downstairs to her father’s study to wait for Lorenzo. She collapses onto the foldout sofa and awakens an hour and a half later when the garage door whirs open. Footsteps fall upon the stairs, the master bedroom suite doors rattle. Where the hell is Lorenzo? The mantel clock chimes once. Wide awake now, she turns on the floor lamp and looks around. His suitcase is missing.

Sitting at her father’s antique desk, Caroline calls the Hampton Inn and argues with the desk clerk, who refuses to connect her to her mother’s room at the late hour. She tells the clerk it’s an emergency, that she has to speak with her. Eventually, he gives in and puts her through. The phone rings, six, seven, eight times. Finally, a click. Her mother says, “Who is this?” Mamma sounds like she’s awake.

“It’s Caroline. I want to talk to Lorenzo. I know he’s there.” Her wound pulses, counting out the seconds. She imagines her boyfriend in bed with her mother and covers her mouth.

“He’s not here. He dropped me off two hours ago.” Her mother yawns, pretending she’s been awakened.

“You’re lying. I drove over there. I saw his car in the lot.”

“That’s a terrible thing to say.” But her mother doesn’t deny it.

“Mamma, just let me talk to him.”

She hears Lorenzo in the background. They speak in Spanish. “Sorry, Caroline,” her mother says, “he doesn’t want to talk to you.”

“I’ll bet. He’s a coward. When I see him at school, I’m going to kick his skinny Colombian ass.” She picks up her father’s brass letter opener and stabs the MasterCard bill on the corner of his desk.

“You’re overreacting.”

“I don’t think so. Penelope was right about you.”

“Oh come on, it doesn’t mean a thing. Lorenzo and I are just having some fun. We aren’t hurting anyone.”

“How about me?”

“He’ll be going back to Colombia soon, Caroline.”

“Jesus, Mamma, grow up.” She slams the receiver into its cradle and looks for her father’s car keys. She needs to confront Lorenzo tonight. Her mother too. She pops four Advil to relieve her aching butt, then hobbles about the downstairs looking. They’re neither on the kitchen counter, where he usually leaves them, nor on the stand in the hall by the front door. She thinks he has a second set in his desk, but searches the drawers to no avail.

Frustrated, she eases into her daddy’s chair and closes her eyes. Driving to the Hampton Inn is a bad idea anyway. A waste of time and energy. Would it have proved anything, made her feel better? Unlikely. Perhaps she’ll torch the Vera Wang instead. Fire up the patio grill, throw the dress onto the flames, and watch it melt into a charred lump of designer chic. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Now that will improve her mood.

Her father appears at the doorway. Spikes of brown and gray hair porcupine from his head, his eyes slits in muffins of flesh. Alabaster legs peak from beneath the burgundy robe she gave him for Christmas. “Caroline, why on earth are you up? Where’s Lorenzo?”

“With Mamma at the Hampton.”

“I’m so sorry. Your mother…” He drops his chin, finishing the sentence.

“Been looking for your car keys. Thought I’d go over to the motel and raise some hell. Take your shotgun too, if you don’t mind.”

His face brightens. “I’d pay good money to see that.” He tosses his head back, chuckling.

“Want to come with me? I’ll take Lorenzo. You can have Mamma.”

Laughing full bore, he staggers to the sofa, covers his face until he runs out of breath and begins to cough. “Honey, you’re a hoot and a half. I miss you away at college.”

“Me too, Daddy.”

He slaps the couch. “Come sit by me.”

“We’re not going to the Hampton then?”

“Nah. We’ve had enough fun for one night.”

“Dern.” She joins him, nuzzles against his shoulder. Fish sleep in the tank on the bookcase opposite them. “You sit in here all alone with the lights turned off. What’s going on?”

He takes her hand in his and sighs. “Lately it seems my life is running away from me. I can’t catch up.”

“Why’d you do it? The cotillion. Spend money you don’t have. Why didn’t you tell Penelope to bugger off?

His shoulders heave. “Sorry I didn’t catch you.” He pauses, then says, “It was a good night anyway, wasn’t it?”

Caroline realizes her father must believe this. For all her stepmother’s finagling, no matter how he had let it appear like the cotillion was Penelope’s idea, her show, his sacrifice had been for his daughter and her alone. To make a shared memory, his evening and hers. Lorenzo and Mamma be damned. But her mother is right about one thing. The embarrassment of Caroline’s fall will pass. Her tumble will be recorded in the annals of Muchalsky family lore, a tale to entertain children and grandchildren.

“A very special night,” she says, squeezing his hand. “Yes, it was.”

They sit in semi-darkness, elbow to elbow, knee to knee. Neither wishes to switch off the lamp on the corner of the desk, to call it an evening, breaking the current that flows between them. This notion transfixes her—how much her father has tried to shelter her from the disappointments of a lifetime—unhappy years with Mamma and Penelope, his failed business, the melancholy that has overtaken him. And this one too—that he wants her love, not her pity. Soon enough she’ll return to school. Her life will go on as it always has, exactly the same, but forever changed.

            It was all on account of a bird that Harry Jeter lost his job.  When this bird was added to some government list that would have it protected, Harry and his fellow loggers of Sugar Home were forced to put up a fight, but in the end their legal efforts were no match for an endangered species.  The mill was shut, finally, and the gates locked, after a judge ruled that over a million acres of forest in which this bird was said to dwell were off-limits now to the metal teeth of the chainsaw.  Critical Habitat was what the officials designated these piney hills, set aside to conserve a vanishing creature that none of the outraged locals had ever heard of before, let alone seen.  So for most of the unemployed men with mouths to feed there was no choice but to leave, to pick up roots and ply their trade elsewhere or learn new trades or find any type of family-wage job.  But Harry Jeter, with only his own ailing self to support, was firm on staying.  Sugar Home was indeed home to him, always had been, and he considered this dying company town and its surroundings as much his rightful habitat as that of any other living thing, threatened or not.

At least he wasn’t alone in this.  A handful of his former colleagues were also stubborn in their conviction to stay, which meant whiling many of their waking hours away in Tom’s Tavern, the once busy but now suffering establishment in the shadow of the empty mill.  From the time the last pink slip was issued, there was never any talk of the bird in Tom’s, as if mere mention of it would bestow even more ruin upon everyone’s head.  But as their bitter days and nights wore on, there was less and less talk about anything at all between the tavern’s four walls, and if no one had sunk their precious quarters into the jukebox you could almost hear the hearts of these defeated men beating in the barroom. 

Then one evening it was Gus Bishop who decided to split the silence when he lifted his head from a table, knocked back his whiskey and said, “Goddamn bird.  If I ever get my hands on one I’ll wring its neck.”

After a weighty pause, Ray Nash unhooked his boot heels from his barstool and swiveled around to say, “That’d be a heavy fine, Gus.  Ten grand, I think.  Plus jail time.” 

Gus narrowed his rheumy eyes.  “I don’t care,” he growled.  “I’ll roast it on a spit.  Eat the fucking thing.”

“Well,” Ray chuckled, “don’t expect much of meal.  Going by the pictures the feds posted, that bird’s a puny thing, could fit in the palm of your hand.”

“Can’t trust photographs,” said Cal Lynch, who was dealing cards to Charlie Grimes in a booth.  “They can distort.”

Ray scratched his head under his cap.  “Or be faked, I suppose.”  

“Faked is right,” piped Charlie, gathering up his cards.  “Know what I think?  I think there never was any such bird.  I think it never did exist.  I think this whole thing was a hoax.”

Behind the bar, Tom Foley looked up from his crossword puzzle.  “You mean like a conspiracy?” he said.

“Call it what you wish,” Charlie told him.  “I’m just saying that we might’ve all been fooled.”

 “A scheme!” cried Gus, banging his fist down.  “Cooked up by the government to grab the land.”

 “It was no hoax,” claimed a baritone that belonged to Lyle Cox.  All eyes turned to Lyle, hunched as usual on a stool at the far end of the bar.

“How are you so sure?” Tom asked him.

“Because I saw one of them birds,” Lyle replied.

Tom slid his pencil behind his ear.  “Hold on,” he said.  “I thought nobody’d seen one.  Jeez Lyle, all this time and you didn’t say nothing?”

“Tell me, Tom, what good it would’ve done.” 

“None, I guess.  But what’d it look like?”

“Big,” said Lyle.  “Bigger than any bird I’d ever laid eyes on.  And it was black.  Blacker than death itself.  With claws that could carry a small child away.”

 “Talons, you mean,” Tom said.

“That’s right,” Lyle nodded.  “Talons.”    

“What kind of wingspan did this bird have?” asked Gus.  “Did you see it spread its wings, Lyle?”

“Yes, sir, I did.  And I can tell you that it had a tremendous wingspan.  So wide in fact that when it flew over head it blotted out the sun.”

Ray laughed.  “Are you on drugs, Lyle?” he said.  “Or you just jerkin’ our chains.  Sounds like science fiction.  Did this bird breathe fire too?  Did it shoot lasers from its eyes?”

Lyle drank down his beer and rose up off his stool.  “I know what I saw,” he said on his way out.  “And no one can tell me otherwise.” 

Quiet returned to the barroom after Lyle pushed through the tavern door, and after the last gear change of Lyle’s truck had sounded in the distance, Tom twice counted the five twenty dollar bills that Lyle had left under his mug.  “I wonder,” he said.  “I just wonder.”

“Wonder what, Tom?” said Gus.  “Lyle’s honest as they come.  He wouldn’t lie about something like that.  If that’s what he said he saw, then that’s what he saw.”

“Look, I’m not calling the man a liar, but remember when Lyle was sure he’d seen a Bigfoot?”

“Turned out to be a trapper in a beaverskin coat,” Ray said, unable to hide his grin.

“Eyes can play tricks,” said Charlie, arranging the cards in his hand.  “I once thought I saw a flying saucer, a UFO.  But it was… well, hell, I don’t know what it was.  Maybe it was a UFO.”

Cal lowered his cards.  “I believe Lyle,” he said.  “Even if he’s prone to exaggerate.”

“Makes sense, though,” said Gus.  “How could the one thing that’s put us all out of work fit in just the palm of my hand?”

This set everyone thinking, and for a stretch nobody uttered a word, until Tom, wiping down the bar with a rag, said, “What about you, Harry?  You’ve been quiet on this.  Have you ever seen the bird?” 

Alone at a table, Harry Jeter was tilted back in his chair.  All night he’d been nursing not just a single beer but also an ache behind his eyes that he was sure no amount of aspirin could cure.  Pain of this magnitude had been plaguing him with such frequency that he’d grown used to it, could barely remember a time when it wasn’t there.  Harry lowered his chair legs to the floor and looked around the dim barroom to focus on the five gloomy souls looking back at him before he drew a breath.

“Nope,” he said.  “And I hope I never will.”

#

When Harry’s phone rang the next morning, it was Tom with the news that Lyle Cox was dead.  In a shaky voice, Tom said, “Neighbor noticed the exhaust fuming from under the garage door last night.  But by then it was too late.”

Harry slumped against his kitchen counter as if he’d been socked in the gut. 

“It might’ve been an accident,” he heard Tom continue.  “He wasn’t stone drunk, but he’d had a few.  He might’ve just conked out after pulling into his garage and lowering the door.  But why’d he leave me a hundred dollars last night on a fifteen dollar tab?”

Harry rubbed his brow.  “Then it was no accident,” he said. 

After returning the phone to its cradle, Harry stood there with arms folded, gazing down at his linoleum floor, wondering who would bury Lyle.  Like him, Lyle had never married, had no relations to speak of.  His beloved Betsy was the closest thing he’d probably ever had to family and she died after being tagged on the nose by a rattler.  No dog that Lyle had ever owned was as good as Betsy, who’d saved his life by sacrificing her own when jumping between him and that snake.  And a year later, having not had the heart to replace her, Lyle still grieved, his eyes welling just days ago when he recounted her heroic act to everyone at Tom’s.  They’d all heard the story before, but no one wanted to stop Lyle from telling it again.   

Harry put up some coffee and while it brewed he paced his kitchen floor, massaging the back of his neck with hopes that he’d be spared the headaches today.  Last week he’d woken on his cold bathroom tiles, a bruise above his eye and the taste of blood in his mouth.  He’d passed out, bit his tongue, reasoned that he’d had a seizure.  He didn’t need a doctor to tell him that something was seriously wrong, that his symptoms suggested a dark ill in his head.  A cancer?  A tumor growing like a walnut or orange?  Well, thought Harry, so be it.  God’s will, as they say.  No doctors, he decided.  No tests or exams.  No surgeries or grueling treatments or hospital beds for him.  Having already suffering the indignity of an elusive bird robbing him of his livelihood, he’d had enough, was ready for the worst, and if it came to it, he’d simply check out, follow in Lyle’s sorry footsteps.  Who, Harry wondered now, would miss him anyway?  Who would shed even a tear?  Who would pause a moment to remember him?  Just who?  He stopped his pacing suddenly, dropped his hands from his neck and let them dangle at his sides for a second before he threw open his cupboards.  From a shelf he retrieved a sugar bowl and under its lid found the thick roll of cash that he’d stashed there in the event of a crisis.  He shoved the roll in his pocket and the next minute was out the door.    

#

“So,” Gwen said, “for what do I owe the pleasure of this visit?”

Harry set his coffee mug on the table between them and leaned forward a bit.  Rubbing his hands on the worn out knees of his jeans, he noticed the lines in her face, the streaks of gray in her once vibrantly red hair.  “Gwen,” he said, “I’d first like to apologize.”

Gwen lit a cigarette, took a pull and gusted smoke from her nostrils.  “A little late for that, don’t you think?  I’m glad at least you and me never tied the knot, never made it official, you know?  And I did appreciate the checks you sent over time.  I put the money in Violet’s college fund.  Not that it matters now.”

Harry’s stomach clenched.  “How do you mean?”

“Vi’s gone, Harry.  You missed her.  And I don’t mean like she’s run to the store for milk.  I mean she’s gone.  Haven’t seen her for the better part of two years.”

Harry sank back in the couch.  “What happened?” 

 Gwen chuckled, picked a speck of tobacco off her tongue and said, “She grew up, Harry. When she started high school we fought all the time.  I didn’t like her friends, her clothes, her hours, her drinking.  And Jesus, those tattoos of hers.  Not to mention the piercings.  Girl turned herself into a pincushion.  We finally had it out, a real bruiser.  Next morning her bed was empty and she’d pinched all the money in my purse and a carton of Camels.  Punk didn’t even leave a note.  Took after her dad, I suppose.” 

Harry lowered his head, gazed at the olive green carpet.  “You know where she is?” he asked.  “I’d like to see her.”

“Why now, Harry?  This have something to do with the layoffs?”

“In part,” Harry said, feeling a blister of pain begin to pulse in the back of his skull.  “Well, if she’s not here, there’s nothing I can do about it.”  He pushed off his knees and stood up from the couch, but teetered when his balance suddenly left his senses.

Quick to jump out of her chair, Gwen gripped his elbows, steadied him.  “You okay?” she said.  “Maybe you ought to sit back down.”

“I’m fine,” said Harry, straightening. 

“You don’t look it.” 

“Take my word.”

She hesitated before letting go, then eased back a step with both hands in front of her, as if he might collapse like a house of cards.  “Just hold there a sec,” she instructed him and then turned to dash into the kitchen.

While Harry could hear her rummaging through a drawer, he rubbed his eyes, and when he opened his lids and focused he was looking right at the china cabinet against the far wall.  It was on the sharp corner of this cabinet that his young daughter had gashed her head, a memory that still haunted him.  Stuck in the house on a wet afternoon, Violet had been acting up, was bored, restless, prancing around.  Trying to paint a birdhouse that he’d set across newspaper on the dining room table, Harry warned her a few times to settle down, until finally he lost all patience and backhanded her, sent her spinning.  So much blood, he would forever recall, for such a little girl.  He’d lied to Gwen, told her that Violet had accidently spun her own manic self into the cabinet.  As for Violet, she had no memory of the incident, but after the stitches were removed she was left with a small but undeniable scar in the shape of a horseshoe above her right eye, and this scar, despite its size, was unshakable proof in Harry’s conscience that he was not suited for family life.  So he pulled on his coat one morning and walked out the door.

“Found it,” Gwen said, emerging from the kitchen with a crumpled envelope.  “Her address is scribbled there in the corner.  I tore up the nasty letter she wrote but kept this, thinking I might write her back some day.  Never did, though.”  She put the envelope in Harry’s hand.  “If you look her up, Harry,” she said, “maybe you can ask her to come home.  Tell her I won’t be sore.”

Harry folded the envelope, shoved it into his back pocket and then noticed, sitting atop the china cabinet, the dusty birdhouse, half-painted.

#

When the city loomed into view, the glass towers glinting in the morning sun were a welcome vision to Harry after driving so many hours through the night.  The directions he had in hand steered him around the cluster of tall buildings and shot him through an exit and into a run-down part of town with boarded-up storefronts, littered streets and laced-together sneakers slung over telephone wires.  Pulling up to the address he was seeking, Harry felt his shoulders droop.  The building looked ripe for the wrecking ball, a three-story eyesore of sagging brick and mortar.  He climbed from his truck, bounded up the front stoop, and cupped his hands around his eyes to peer through the cracked window of the padlocked door.

“What’re you looking for?” he heard someone call.

“A girl,” he called back to the woman sweeping the next door stoop.  “She used to live here.”

“Squatters lived there,” said the woman, working her broom.  “Cops tossed them out a few weeks ago.”

“Any idea where they might’ve gone?” Harry asked.

The woman gestured over her shoulder with her chin.  “Try the park.  Trash like them don’t scatter too far.”

Harry hurried down the stoop and then across the street and when he entered the scrappy park, pigeons took flight ahead of his long strides.  Stopping by the dry, graffiti-sprayed fountain, Harry cast around, spied more than a few indigents sprawled on the grass, picking through garbage cans, sleeping on the park’s peeling benches.  He fixed on a young woman with choppy red hair lying across one of these benches.  Eyes shuts, she puffed on a cigarette.  From his wallet, Harry pulled a wrinkled snapshot, the sole picture he owned of his daughter.  In the photo she was about five years old, with red pigtails and a freckled face, and he held it up to compare it to the grown-up girl on the park bench, but it was of no use.  So Harry took a deep breath and walked over to the bench where he stood silently over the woman.  Sensing herself in shadow, she opened her hooded eyes and said, “You’re in my sun.”

Harry paused, thinking he saw something familiar in her face.  “Violet?” he said.

The girl took one last drag on her cigarette and flicked it away.  “Who the fuck are you?”

“Harry,” he said.  “Harry Jeter.”  He held out the snapshot.  “I come all the way from Sugar Home.”   

The girl swiped the picture from him and sat up in the bench to scrutinize it.  “Shit,” she said, with a crooked smile.  “I was one ugly kid, wasn’t I?” 

#

 “You believe this?” she said to the bartender.  “You believe this is my dad?  My dad, man.  My fucking dad.  I haven’t seen him in…” She looked to Harry on the stool next to hers for the answer.

“Quite a long time,” he said. 

Squeezing Harry’s bicep, she said, “Dude, check him out.  He’s the real thing.  A lumberjack.  My dad’s a fucking lumberjack.”

“Logger,” said Harry.  “Used to be, anyway.”

She finished her Jack and Coke, rattled the ice for the bartender to see and said, “Hit me, Rocco.  Fill’r up.”

The bartender folded his arms and stood rigidly with a toothpick stuck in the corner of his mouth.  “I remember you now,” he said.  “You burned me a few weeks ago.  Left me high and dry.  If you want another, I have to see some cash.”

Batting her mascara-laden lashes, Violet said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.  I’ve never been in this dive before in my life.”

“Then tell me how you know my name.”

Harry produced his cash roll from his pocket, peeled off a hundred and laid it on the bar.  “You can draw from that,” he told the bartender.  “And take out what you think the young lady owes you, though I’m sure you’re mistaking her for someone else.” 

“Ha!” said Violet.  “See?  That’s what fathers are for.”

The bartender swiped the hundred from the bar, held it up to the light, then opened the register and returned with change.  After refilling Violet’s glass, he said to Harry, “How ’bout you, Paul Bunyan?  Another beer?”

Harry nodded and the bartender opened a fresh beer for him, but by the time Harry had even raised the bottle to his mouth, Violet was already draining her drink down her throat.  She lowered her glass, erupted with a burp and then fell into a daze at the edge of her stool, allowing Harry the opportunity to take a closer look at his own flesh and blood.  She was a sinewy thing, with sharp features and doe-like eyes.  On her neck was a tattoo of a spider, and above that silvery rings ran in numbers along her ears, dangled in hoops from her lobes, even pierced her bottom lip and left nostril.  A tiny barbell was stuck through one eyebrow and in place below her lip was a shiny stud.  The lapels of her beat-up leather jacket were studded too, with buttons and pins bearing human skulls, a theme she repeated on the gnarly rings that decorated her fingers.  Harry’s eyes continued down, traveling past the hem of her dark skirt until they settled on her boots, which were of the military kind.  Her exterior was tough, no doubt, but Harry wondered if under all her leather and ink and hardware there was still the fragile little girl with the pigtails and freckles that he’d known for only a few brief years.   

 “Hey,” she said, having shaken from her stupor to snap her fingers at the bartender.  “Rocco.  I’m ready for another.”

“Maybe, Vi, you’ve had enough?” Harry suggested.

“Enough?” she said.  “I’ll tell you when I’ve had enough.  You don’t tell me.”  She waved her hand over her glass, signaling the bartender to pour.  Then she began rummaging through her shapeless handbag.  “Shit, Harry, you think you can disappear for how many years and, wham, just reappear one day and tell me what to do?  Uh-uh.  No way, chum.”  She turned her bag over to shake all of its contents – chewing gums, tampons, band-aids, lip balms, condoms, sugar, salt, and ketchup packets – out onto the bar.  “You just don’t have the right, Harry.  You gave it up a long time ago.  Don’t you think?”

Harry took a swig of his beer, wiped his mouth with his hand.  “I won’t argue with that,” he said.  “It wasn’t my place.  I’m sorry.”

“Apology accepted,” she said, plucking a cigarette from the crumpled pack she’d found in the pile on the bar.  “Long as we’re square on that.  ’Cause, you know, we have to lay some ground rules.”

Harry watched the bartender disappear through a doorway at the other end of the bar and he told his daughter that he didn’t think smoking was permitted. 

Violet gave him a look.  “Ground rules, Harry,” she said.  “Ground rules.  We’re the only ones in here anyway, so who we bothering?”  Locating a book of matches among the heap from her bag, Violet struck a flame and lit a bent cigarette. 

“Camels,” Harry observed.  “Like your mother smokes.”

“How is dear old Mom?” she said, shaking out the match.

“She’s okay, I guess.  She asked me to ask you to come home.”

Violet threw her head back and laughed.  “Not a chance,” she said.  “When I bailed that town, I left it for good.  Why are you still there?”

Harry shrugged.  “Probably because it’s the only place I’ve ever known.”

She took a sip of her drink, another drag on her cigarette.  “That’s a lame-ass excuse,” she said.  “I got news for you, Harry, there’s more to this dreary fucking world than Sugarville.”

“Sugar Home,” he said.

 “Whatever,” she said.   

#

The zoo was Violet’s idea, her curiosity having been piqued by all the fuss lately over its newest addition, a baby hippopotamus named Kiki, whose picture was hard to miss on the side of so many city buses and on billboards all over town and on posters papering the scrappy boards put up around construction sites.  Neither she nor Harry had ever visited this or any zoo before, so both agreed that it might be a nice place to get reacquainted.  Anyway, Violet had exchanged words with the bartender about her cigarette, which resulted in her flicking the lit butt at him, which bounced off his chest, which resulted in his telling her and Harry to get out before he called the cops, which was okay with Harry because a seedy bar wasn’t where he’d imagined spending an afternoon with his daughter after locating her anyway. 

It was a Saturday and this meant mobs of people crowding through the zoo’s gates.  But the masses didn’t lessen Harry’s thrill for the animal exhibits and attractions.  He craned his neck at the giraffes, smiled at the sight of an elephant hosing itself down with its own trunk, and envied the lions lazing on their backs with their tawny bellies exposed.  The gorillas, however, the great apes, were what Harry marveled at most of all, especially the male Silverback postured stoically on its knuckles while a young one clung to its arm. 

Violet clung tightly to Harry’s arm herself as they strolled from one zoo enclosure to the next.  She was woozy still from the bar drinks and after just ten minutes of waiting to see Kiki the baby hippo, she shoved her half-eaten bag of cotton candy into Harry’s hands and broke for the nearest trash receptacle to heave.  Harry hesitated before giving up their place in the growing line to go rub her back while she purged.  But he didn’t mind so much, having done the same for her one long ago Halloween when on someone’s lawn she threw up the Jolly Ranchers and Smarties and M&Ms that she’d been sneaking under her Wonder Woman mask all through the crisp October evening.  Now, the grown-up Violet let out a groan and spit one last time into the can she was gripping between both hands. 

“My fault,” Harry admitted.  “I shouldn’t have bought you so many Jack and Cokes.  Not to mention the cotton candy.”

Violet lifted her head and drew the sleeve of her leather jacket across her mouth.  “Kiki,” she said.  “What kind of stupid name is that for a big, fat hippopotamus anyway?” 

“What would you call her then?” asked Harry.

Violet straightened up.  “Edwina,” she said, with a weak smile.  “That’s a good name for a hippo.  Edwina.”     

When they returned to the line for Kiki it was stretching longer now than either of them were willing to stand and wait and bake in the afternoon sun.  Harry proposed they take the zoo trolley to the polar bears but Violet had another idea and led him by the hand to the Reptile House, and it was in this dark pavilion that she was able to reboot.  Moving from window to window, she was nose-pressed-to-the-glass enthralled with every one of these cold-blooded creatures.  The alligators and crocodiles were her hands-down favorites, but then, past the lizards, she and Harry reached the vipers and constrictors and her eyes lit up like sparklers.       

“Can anyone blame Eve for taking the apple?” she said. 

“Technically,” said Harry, “I’m not so sure it was a snake.  I seem to recall it being described in the Bible as a generic kind of serpent.”

 “I don’t care,” Violet said.  “Long as it has a forked tongue it’s cool with me.”

She stopped then in her tracks when they arrived at the Burmese Python coiled in its enclosure.  This monster was more than eighteen feet in length and, according to the information panel below the glass, could unhinge its jaws to swallow a full-grown pig, hooves and all.   

“If you like that one, I’ll buy it for you,” Harry joked.

“Thanks, Harry,” Violet answered, “but I already got one.  See?” and she pushed the sleeve of her jacket up past her elbow to show him the tattoo of a snake that wound its inky way around her skinny forearm. “What’re those holes?” Harry asked, bending for a closer look at the punctures marking the veins in the bruised crook of her arm.

“Nothing,” she said, yanking her sleeve back down past her wrist. 

#

Harry hesitated with Violet outside the World of Birds.  Given that one particular species of bird had cost him and his friends their jobs, he naturally had some reservations about entering, but once he and Violet stepped inside he relaxed some.  It was hard, though, for him to drum up much enthusiasm for the many varieties of birds flitting about their aviaries.  And Violet felt the same way, for it was obvious that feathers and beaks just couldn’t measure up to the scaly hides and retractable fangs of the reptiles.  Even the show of some dazzling plumages drew little more than a yawn from her.  But then Violet perked up a bit when she and Harry came upon the larger birds, the predators, or raptors as they were known, in their netted enclosures.  The eagles and hawks and falcons held Violet’s attention long enough, but it was the vultures that really did it for her, that put her in a trance.  These bald-headed scavengers seemed to speak to her in a way that Harry was only beginning to understand.  It was everything about them: the grimly hunched poses, the dark feathers, the naked necks bent like kitchen sink pipes, and the curved beaks with razor-sharp points built to strip carrion to the bone. 

“You know what you call a bunch of vultures?” Violet said, looking at the information panel.  “A venue.  A venue of vultures.  Also known as a wake.  I like that better than venue, don’t you, Harry?  A wake of vultures?”

Violet turned to see Harry moving on and she followed him through the door leading to the nocturnal birds, and when it shut behind them it was as if they’d been stricken blind, until a moment later their eyes adjusted to the dark and the dim exhibits began to dawn.  There was a hush in these rooms, as if everyone wandering through them was stepping quietly through a still forest, mindful not to make any noise lest they disturb the nighttime creatures. 

“Hey, Harry,” Violet whispered, tugging on his shirt.  “If you could be any bird, what bird would you be?  I’d be a vulture for sure.  What about you?”

Pausing in front of an exhibit, Harry didn’t answer as he looked for any birds in the trunks of the pine trees behind the glass.     

Violet giggled through her hand and said, “Maybe you’d be that one.”

“Which one?” he said.  “Where?”

“There,” she breathed, pointing.

He followed her finger to the shadowy hollow in one of the trees and at first saw nothing inside but then squinted to make out a small creature with large round eyes set on an owlish, heart-shaped face.  Less a bird, Harry thought, and more a tiny stuffed toy.

“Funny little fella, ain’t he?” said Violet. 

Harry looked down at the panel below the window.  He read that this endangered species of bird inhabits just one small geographic corner of the United States, and this habitat, Harry could see highlighted on the map, happened also to be his own.  He fixed again on the bird with marbled feathers sitting motionless in the tree hollow and gazed into its dark, unblinking eyes and its eyes gazed back at him.  Then something went off in Harry’s head, like a gunshot.  He shut his lids and steadied himself while pressing his fingertips to his pounding temples. 

“Harry?” he heard Violet say in the fog outside his ears.  “Harry, you okay?”

“Help me to the exit,” he muttered. 

When they emerged from the pavilion, the immediate glare of the outdoors intensified the agony in Harry’s skull, and he had to let his daughter guide him over to a bench where they sat down.  When Harry bent with his head in his hands, Violet rubbed his back, just as he’d rubbed hers a little while ago, and she asked him if he needed a doctor.

 “No,” he grunted.  “No doctors.”

Violet continued to rub his back while they sat there quietly.  Then she noticed the hordes of visitors making their way to the exits.  “Zoo’s closing,” she said. 

“It’s a shame we didn’t get to see Kiki,” Harry said under his breath.

“Well,” she sighed, “when you add it all up, I guess there’s a lot we didn’t see together.”

Harry opened his eyes, raised his chin.  “Did you at least have a nice time today?”

“Yeah,” she smiled.  “I did.” 

“I’m glad then,” he said, blinking, trying to focus.  His head was so dizzy that he worried he might pass out, even worse lapse into a seizure, which was the last thing he wanted his daughter to witness.  “Maybe it’s best you go,” he told her.  “You think you can find your way back without me?”

“Back?” said Violet.  “Back where?  You mean the park?  It doesn’t really matter.  I can flop anywhere.  But I don’t think I should leave you.  Not like this.”

“Don’t worry about me,” he said.  “Just give me a hand.”  Violet gripped his arm and helped him to his feet.  “You think, Violet, that maybe I can see you again?”

“I don’t see why not,” she said.     

“How do I get in touch?”

“Oh, I’m not so hard to find,” she said, then lifted her arms and threw them around his shoulders and tilted her face to look up into his.  “But Harry?” she said, batting her long, dark lashes.  “Dad?  Daddy?  Until we see each other, you think I can have some money?  Just a little something to hold me over?”

Harry set his hands on her waist.  “Of course, Vi,” he said.  “But can I ask you one thing?”

“Anything.”

“Do you think you’ll ever forgive me?”

She shut her eyes and nodded her head like a genie granting a wish.  “You are forgiven,” she said.  

“Thank you, Violet,” Harry said, then paused when he realized that something was missing.  The scar.  The horseshoe shaped scar.  Where was it?  Studying her brow, he knew exactly where it should be.  There, directly above her right eye.  But it wasn’t.  This girl’s pale forehead was without blemish, had never suffered a scratch.  Harry let his hands fall from her waist.

“Something wrong?” she said, dropping her arms from his shoulders.

Harry hesitated, then reached into his pocket.  Taking the girl’s hand, he pressed the roll of cash into her palm and curled her fingers around it and she gaped for a moment at the wad in her fist before she popped to the tips of her boots, pecked Harry on the cheek, and turned and walked away. 

“Edwina!” Harry shouted.

The girl stopped, whirled around and looked at him with a knowing smile.  “Eddie,” she called to him while so many men and women and children flowed between them.  “Please.”

“Your real father, Eddie,” Harry called back through the crowd.  “Will you ever forgive him?”

“You kidding?” she laughed.  “I never even knew the son of a bitch.”  Then she spun around on her heels and disappeared in the throng. 

#

All of them were there that evening, just as Harry had last left them.  Working on a crossword behind the bar was Tom.  Gus had his head down on a table.  Hunched on a stool was Ray.  And in their regular booth, Charlie and Cal were throwing down cards.  Something was different, however.  They weren’t in their usual flannels and jeans but dressed in rumpled suits and white shirts and loosened neckties, and their faces were clean-shaven and their heads neatly combed.  Different as well was the empty stool at the end of the bar that had always been occupied by Lyle.

Tom glanced up from his puzzle to see Harry gazing at the space.  “Harry,” he said.  “Where’ve you been?”

            “I had some business to tend to,” Harry replied. 

            “Business more important than Lyle’s funeral today?”

            “A family matter,” he said.  “It couldn’t wait.”

            “Family?” said Tom.  “Didn’t know you had any.”

Harry started for usual chair in the corner, but then stopped, changed course to fill Lyle’s stool.  For a moment he felt uncomfortable in it, but Tom put a beer down in front of him and it didn’t seem to matter.  “It was a nice service,” said Tom.  “Small, but nice.”

            “I’m sorry I couldn’t attend,” Harry said.  “Who all was there?”

            “Us,” said Ray.

            Harry took a pull on his beer.  “I’ll go pay my respects,” he said.  “Where’s he resting?”

            “He’s not,” said Tom.  “Not yet, anyway.  He’s going to be cremated.  We figure on spreading his ashes just where he’d spread Betsy’s last year.  He’d like that.”

            “I believe he would,” Harry said, and in the mirror behind the liquor shelf he saw Gus lift his head from his table and blow his nose into a handkerchief.

            “Goddamn fucking bird,” Gus said, shoving his handkerchief into his pocket.

            Harry set his bottle down.  “I saw it,” he said.

            “Saw what?” Tom said.  “The bird?”

            “That’s right,” Harry told him.  “The bird.”

            Tom laid his hands flat on the bar.  “No kidding,” he said.  “Was it all Lyle said it was?  Was it like he described?”

            Harry turned in his stool to look at the grieving faces of his friends waiting for his answer, at Gus leaning over his table and Ray on the edge of his stool and both Charlie and Cal, with cards still in hand, rapt in their booth.  “It was,” he said.  “Just like Lyle had described.”

            Gus slapped his hand down hard.  “I knew it!” he said.  “Lyle was no liar.  He knew what he saw.  And he was telling the truth!”

Ray cocked his head. “Was it really all that big, Harry?” he said, skeptically.

“Bigger,” said Harry. 

“And was it as black?” asked Cal.  “Black as Lyle said it was?”

“Blacker,” said Harry.

“How about its claws?” Charlie said.

“Talons,” said Tom.  “That could carry a child away, according to Lyle.  Were they that large?”

            “Larger,” said Harry.  “Could probably carry two children away, one in each.” 

“What about this bird’s wingspan?” asked Gus, wide-eyed.  “Lyle said it was tremendous.  Did you see it spread its wings?  How big did they span, Harry?  Come on, tell us.”

Harry guzzled down his beer, then rose up off his stool and paused on his feet to rub his palms together before he unfolded his arms, opened them, spread them, stretched them, fingertip to fingertip, as far and as wide as they could reach.

Dad’s eightieth birthday was a costume party. I was Maria Von Trapp, my sister hid her annoyance behind Jackie O shades, and Dad’s stooped wife, April, wore a burnished–orange sari and a third eye.

Dad was Ghandi, and it wasn’t a stretch. His limbs were sticks, for he had cut down to just one meal a day since leaving the university three years before; his head was naturally egg–shaped and bald; his incisive eyes twinkled behind round wire–frames; and his chest showed snowy through his … uh …

“Dhoti, daughter.”

I knew it, and Frannie knew it, but neither would risk mispronouncing the word for fear of being cut by a grin for our academic underachievement.

“It looks good on you, Father,” Frannie said flatly. She had discarded Dad several decades ago and knew that Father vexed. But it didn’t today. “Thank you, Frannie,” said Dad in a benedictory tone. He dipped his finger in the water–bowl—we were scooping April’s runny dal with banana leaves—and anointed Fran’s forehead. She choked off a laugh and gaped in shock. Dad lowered his head with a soft inward chuckle.

The next day, my father was Gandhi again. He was Gandhi next week, next month, and next year—all day, every day. Frannie and I drove by and saw Dad outside in his dhoti, sauntering in a weak–legged way to the corner market for lentils and peas. “He’s demented,” said Frannie with bite, but I noticed myself unconsciously mirroring the grin Dad bestowed on fellow walkers.

Dad was still Gandhi when April died, and soon “nursing home” and “his own good” were Frannie’s constant themes. So we sat down with Dad in the light that streamed into his study, illuminating the books he had loved for so long behind a door he had rarely opened to us. These days he merely caressed their covers.

I was the younger, favored child. “Dad,” I said. He offered a birdlike hand and I took it. He beamed and offered his free hand to Frannie, but she turned with a pretense of not having noticed. “Dad,” I repeated. Dad smiled with wonder, innocence, and grace. Frannie considered this childlike affect further proof of dementia, but I discerned wit deep inside his eyes. And his smile at last was mockery free.

“I can’t,” I told Frannie. “There are some things you don’t do to a mahatma.”

Joe recognized only two seasons: baseball season and the rest of the year. In winter, he’d skim through football and basketball scores to the page of roster additions to the Double A farm team based in the neighboring town, looking forward to his job selling beer at the stadium.

“Shit,” Joe said when his ‘84 Ford wouldn’t start. This late-June Saturday was a big selling day for beer vendors; the local brewery and downtown bars sponsored Brew Game, offering lager at half-price. The souvenir sellers complained that fewer children showed up but Joe sold “a series worth of suds” in the one game, he’d bragged.  After slamming his hands on the steering wheel, he got out and opened the hood. The wind lifted his hair, which was combed flat and stiff like a strip of plywood. He picked at the carburetor and when he turned the key, the weakened starter gave a grinding surge and the car reluctantly turned over. The ballgame began at one o’clock and he had to pick up his girl friend Lorraine, who also worked at the stadium, drive a half hour in pre-game traffic, park at the edge of the lot, load a tray of beer and a few sodas for the fathers ordering for himself and his child, and walk to his station at the third base section of the ballpark.

Joe pulled in front of the apartment house where Lorraine lived and pressed the horn several times. An elderly woman in a nearby apartment raised her window blinds and looked out; when his girl friend still didn’t come out, Joe got out of his car, the motor running, and rang her doorbell. “I’m ready,” she shouted through the intercom, her voice scrapping the rusted tubing that ran from her apartment wall to the round grill above the tin mailbox with her misspelled name written on white tape. Coming through the door, Lorraine was putting on her jacket over a blue Mets shirt with Strawberry in gray lettering across the back—a shirt she’d been given years before by the troubled New York Mets outfielder, Darryl Strawberry, when she’d visited Shea Stadium as the star pitcher of a national softball team. The porous canvas of her sneakers was imbedded with field dirt. Her eye make-up was clustered on the edge of her lashes and in an uneven line below her pupils, and her red lipstick blended with her unpainted, flushed cheeks.   She wouldn’t look at Joe and hurried to put on her sunglasses. “Sorry;” she stretched the word by trilling the r’s.

Joe had met her last season when she’d parked her dented van next to his car and stepped out the back doors dressed in her mascot costume less the covering hood—a squinting, sunburned face on top of the round, exaggerated form of an animal. Seeing the surprised expression on his face, Lorraine laughed. “Can’t figure out why men don’t find me attractive.” A stadium security guard had described her as “once pretty”—an early beauty altered by furrows and lines cruelly carved in her face by harsh experience; to Joe on that day of their first meeting, she was very appealing, but even then he soon suspected something was amiss, like the near-duplicate photographs in a magazine with the challenge to find the variance—a missing detail, unobvious, requiring a long stare to identify.

On the ride she asked, “Did you hear about going down to field boxes?”

The trapped wind that came through the open windows pushed her words to the back and Joe could barely hear her: “Yea, the guy there is moving to Florida next month and I can get his territory—big tippers and regulars in those seats.”

“Next thing, you’ll go to the big league parks, and I’ll still be a fuckin’ minor league clown.”

Joe glared at her, reflecting his disdain for her using foul words.

 By the time they’d arrived, the lot was nearly full, and they had to park in a distant corner and run to the side entrance of the stadium.

“If we’re late again, and on top of everything else, you’re going to get canned,” Joe said as they hurried.

“What does bi-polar mean?” he’d asked her when she first told him why she swallowed pills at the restaurant.

“It means I live between the North and South Pole,” she joked.

“I can look it up,” Joe responded to get more details.

“Think of the North Pole as a happy place and the South Pole as a depressing place and I’m traveling between them all the time—until I take my meds. It’s why I lost my curveball, Joey, and got booted from the softball team and why I like my job: I could be smiling or bawling under the costume head and no one knows which. This happened when I was sad.” She pointed to white-line scars on her wrists.

Joe had seen her mood changes before: it was the incident that nearly got her fired. One of the opponent players—the shortstop who’d been sent down from the majors to recover from an injury—had heard about the mascot who could throw underhand as hard as half the bullpen. As the stadium filled that day the shortstop saw her on the sideline with her costume hanging over a folding chair. He called to her and she came toward him in unsteady steps.  

“How about showing me what you got,” he said as he handed her a ball and jogged away to a spot near the third base seats.

 Lorraine, standing between the pitcher’s mound and the shortstop, smiled sheepishly and twirled the ball in her hand with practiced ease. The first pitch she threw was an arching curveball that popped in the shortstop’s glove. Lorraine danced around the mound and looked out at the uncrowded stadium.  She spun her throwing arm angrily in circles and released the fastball on an upward movement.The ball sailed above the outstretched glove and into the stands striking a boy in the fifth row. The game was delayed until the paramedics treated the bleeding child.  

The ballpark filled early on fair weekends. A group of men assembled in the parking lot tossing a baseball; a van lettered First Baptist Church pulled in and a tall, skeletal man waved in circular motion as black men jumped out of the side doors; couples walked toward the stadium, the men ahead, whooping with excitement, while the women strolled behind, chatting. Raucous fans came dressed in outfits of the team’s emblem on sweatshirts and hats worn backwards, ascending the concrete walkways to the back loge, upper stands and outfield bleachers, drawn by the fervor of contest, their palpable exuberance combined with the cloud-free sky and deep green grass to illuminate the gray stadium. By the time Joe got to the field, the high school band had finished a flat rendition of the Star Spangled Banner and the teams had left the dugout edges to prepare for the game. The screen above the outfield flashed clips of ballplayers sliding, chasing fly balls, which was the signal for the game to begin, much like the dimming lights at a theater before the performance. The black-suited umpires came out first and walked toward the bases; a few unenthusiastic shouts came from the upper seats and were more a ritual than directed razzing. The home team ran out in zigzag motion like charging soldiers anticipating mortar fire. An eruption of cheers filled the open stadium and drifted to neighboring apartment buildings and one-level homes. The voices of the crowd, like a rehearsed choir, let out with an a capella note of a stretched out vowel: booooooo; as the first batter of the opposing team came out slowly from the dugout, the harmony of rants turned into the cacophony of cheers and hoots while the loudspeaker voice introduced the home team players on the field. The pitcher, who’d moved furtively to the mound and tossed fastballs to the back-up catcher before the rest of the team came out, shook his head at the deafening sound and slapped his glove—a signal of readiness.

  When Joe put on the stained apron and reached for a tray, his boss, who’d seen Lorraine mouth “love ya,” as she ran away, smirked. “She’s going to drag you down,” he said.” Joe carried the cups on a slotted, tin tray suspended from his neck, the swaying white foam contained by the transparent covers. After a season in which the small disc covers flew onto the field like errant Frisbees, the tops were removed before selling. Each vendor had a distinct call to identify the product: pretzels, hot dogs, ice cream, cold drinks. Joe shouted an iambic chant: “Co’ be¢a, drink da be¢a.” The call marked territory and drifting shouts that strayed into another beer seller’s section brought rebuke at closing. There were tricks Joe learned in his first year at the park: follow the pretzel or hot dog sellers, move quickly when the home team was scoring and the shouting fans were getting hoarse, pass the beer across others who might be tempted by the smell. He had the highest sales in the stadium last year and the other drinks vendors reluctantly called him by the honorific title—Beerman.

 Lorraine went into the players’ locker room off the dugout; as the only woman, she used a body-length locker door as a shield while she changed, and walked past the urinals into a bathroom stall. Leaving the locker room, she stood near the outfield fence and saw a fly ball descend toward the waving glove of the right fielder. The shouts of the crowd at the final out of the inning was her cue; Lorraine came on to the field dressed as the team mascot—a rabbit.

 Joe recognized the leer in the changing cheers and looked toward Lorraine. “Nice tail,” someone from the upper seats shouted. Lorraine turned and shook the wad of cotton she’d sown to the back of her outfit. A boy charged down the aisle of the field boxes and waved a carrot at Lorraine, who reached toward it, but the boy pulled it back and she put her hands on her hip in mock frustration. A burly man in a gray t-shirt stretched over his protruding stomach handed her a tall cup. She took it and downed the contents, spilling on her soiled costume. Her face was flushed and she waved her tail at the man and ran off the field.

Between the early innings, she gathered kids from the stands and led them to a slick strip of rubber with a torn base on the other edge where they could slide like the big leaguers. On the way off the field, Lorraine tripped over the third base bag, and the crowd laughed. While the game was played, Lorraine stood in a small square behind the outfield stands. Joe saw her bend over and get sick; ignoring a call for beer, he walked to the edge of the stadium just above her.

“Are you all right?” he asked. She looked up, confused by the voice coming from out of sight.

“Joe?” she asked.

“I’m right above you.”

“It’s the pills. I told you that before. The fuckin’ meds.” She looked up and smiled, squinting through reddened eyes. “Can you reach down to me?”

“Yes,” he answered, puzzled by the question.

“Give me a beer; I’m so thirsty. Pour it in a soda cup and fill it half way so no-one sees the foam.”

Joe reluctantly handed her a partially-filled cup of beer and watched her down it without a breath. He suspected that she’d had others—helped herself to the filled cooler in the locker room after the team was on the field. When she looked back toward him, he could see the word another form on her lips but the sound was drowned out by the shout of the concession manager walking fast toward him. “Joe,” he said angrily, “this is not your section,” pointing toward the upper stands further back.

“I was just giving a soda to my girlfriend.”

The concession manager looked skeptically toward Lorraine. “You ain’t helping her. This is our best day of the year and you can’t waste no more time with her.”

  Later in the game, Lorraine tossed rolled up t-shirts with the team logo at fans raising their arms to get her attention, like children signaling to be lifted from a high chair.  Letting go late in the arc of her overhand motion, the first waded t-shirt fell in the first row of the stands; the upper level hissed, and when someone yelled, “You throw like a girl,” the taunts turned to a derisive laugh. 

After a groundout in the next inning, the home team had runners on first and third; Lorraine came out to excite the fans into a supportive roar. Joe saw that the crowd was unmoved by her antics, and knew her fear of being ignored would bring her to panic.   He looked down and she was waving in a purposeless, frantic motion to draw attention. The batter hit into a double play and a booming groan reverberated in the conic stadium. Lorraine walked off the field, her eyes blinking uncontrollably.      

 Joe kept his attention on the seats in his section, looking for waving hands or beckoning nods; periodically he turned toward the field to watch, knowing that if he blocked the view at an eventful moment, the seat holders would yell, “Move your ass” or throw crushed cups at him. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the thin, raised arm of a pallid young man whose long, unwashed hair seemed attached to the edges of the baseball hat. When Joe asked to see his identification, he pulled out an expired driver’s license from his wallet: the worn picture was of a smiling, oval-faced young man in a sailor uniform. The Beerman handed him a cup. He remembered what Lorraine had once said to him: “Everybody deserves a beer; you never know what they’re trying to wash down.”

Before the sixth inning, Joe saw Lorraine come out again; she’d changed into a team uniform: the tight pants were stretched over her thighs and thick waist. She’d tried to push her straight hair underneath the cap but the hat was lifted slightly off her head as if covering a lump.  When she appeared on the sidelines, the crowd applauded. Low scoring games, like this one, were unappreciated by the fans and they directed their straying attention toward any available distraction. Cheers broke out at a beach ball tossed from the high seats and slapped from section to section.  Lorraine started her awkward routine—crouching in a batter’s stance, holding a Styrofoam bat, swaying her hips and waiting for an imaginary pitch.  The fans directed their restlessness toward her; the bleacher crowd’s encouragement came in waves of unintelligible shouts. A man in the upper rows cupped his hands over his mouth to magnify his voice and yelled: “Go, bitch.” The words caught like a spark in dry grass and the chorus of shouts reverberated: “Go, bitch; go bitch!” At baseball games, taunting, mocking calls were tolerated as overextension of fervor. The teams gathered on the steps of the dugout, most grinning at the unexpected display. Lorraine’s motions grew more exaggerated as the voices loudened. She swung her hips in wide circles and twirled until her back was to the seats closest to her. Across the field a deep, resounding voice called, “Over here;” like an echo, the solitary shout was repeated and others joined in. An umpire came charging out on the field, pointed his finger toward Lorraine and looked around for someone to intercede. Lorraine bent slightly forward and shook her buttocks; the cleavage between her soft breasts deepened.  She was unaware of the team coming on to the field and continued her increasingly frenzied movements; she saw a camera aimed at her, and her image was on the wide screen on the scoreboard. Security guards leaped over the low fence and moved toward her. She didn’t notice the screen go black as she swung at an imaginary pitch. Instead she saw a man with a gray circle of hair and sun-reddened face come out of the stands and run toward her. In a quick, off-balance motion, he grabbed her roughly, bent her backwards and kissed her half-opened mouth, catching the edge of her lip and lower teeth. When he lifted her straight, he stood there smiling and bowed to the encouraging crowd just as a security guard grabbed his arms. Joe looked down at the field ignoring the tug on his shirt and the call for beer that came from the higher rows. The concession manager roaming the stadium glared at Joe from the next section and signaled to the nearest beer seller to attend to the impatient customers.

Lorraine turned toward the field and saw the pitcher staring at her.  The infielders looked away as if embarrassed. She began to cry just as two security guards gripped her arms. One guard put his arm protectively around her and led her to the dugout. She kept her moist eyes staring down at the grass; just before the dugout steps a cheer broke out as if recognizing the valiant but losing effort of a starting pitcher. Changing slowly in the locker room, Lorraine walked out along the edge of the field to the outfield gate. Joe looked at her. There was no identity with the job, her face largely covered by the mascot head or the oversized cap; no one would notice if she was replaced.  Someone else who’d failed at waitressing or assembling toys in the nearby factory would wear the same costume—worn, soiled, and bleached white at the crotch.  For reasons he couldn’t fully understand, she loved the job; for brief moments, she drew attention from the game and the players of promise, whose lives had hope, she’d once explained.  The ballpark was resonant with impermanence: fans shifted between season sports; players kept hometown addresses, planning a year or two before moving to Triple A or giving up; the park was reshaped from a diamond-centered stadium to a rectangular, football field for a semi-pro league; food and drink vendors left cheap rental flats in the early fall for Florida and work at raceways. But she would have been content to return each year, she told him, like a migrating bird, nesting in the same comfortable grounds, oblivious to change, finding joy in the infrequent, directed cheers.  

 Joe watched her being led out. He thought he saw her look at him, pleadingly but knowing that he could not comfort her. The concession manager was walking toward Joe with the slow, disappointed amble of a pitching coach to the mound after runs scored. In that moment, he thought of starting over a new ball park, away from the hovering supervisor, away from his crazy girlfriend, away from slurred calls for beer. Just as Lorraine was at the gate, the ball flew from the pitcher’s hand—a wide curve; the surprised batter, expecting a fastball, swung early and the ball sailed high and foul. The fans in the rows behind Joe stood up and watch the arc of the ball until it began to descend toward their section. Some got out of their seats and into the aisles, running toward where the ball might land. Joe saw the gate close behind Lorraine, and lifted the tray of beer from the ground where he’d placed it for a sale. Ignoring the hand snaking toward his tray to steal a filled cup, Joe envisioned her sitting in the car, her face streaked from mascara mixing with tears. As Joe straightened, a burly man with a child’s mitt on his hand charged forward, looking up. Joe imagined Lorraine reaching into the glove compartment of the car and finding the sharp-edged screwdriver.  Colliding with the Beerman, the bulky man screamed profanities as the ball fell a few feet in front of him. Joe pictured Lorraine pressing the edge of the screwdriver into the swollen veins above her clenched fists. Joe’s tray swung free at one shoulder, caught the man’s knee, and the cups of beer flew out like launched missiles. The blood from Lorraine’s limp arm stained the gray upholstery—he was visualizing. The beer struck the ground; the stream of golden beverage poured over the concrete steps and blended with the tracked-in dirt and spilled soda to form a stream of brown, useless liquid. In Joe’s mind, small puddles of deep red were widening on the crusted mat of the Ford. The concession boss called out angrily to Joe; by then, the Beerman was on his way to the parking lot.  

“Under capitalism man exploits man.

Under communism its just the opposite”

-John Kenneth Galbraith

        In a pond located on the estate of—well to do—biologist Sir Adams, there lived a small community of anthropomorphic froglings. This pond was certainly no puddle. It was a lavish freshwater paradise, with an extensive rock garden and a ten foot waterfall. The sheer size and superfluous amenities of this microcosmic utopia were greatly enjoyed by all of the inhabitants, who were oblivious to the existence of Sir Adams and the fact that everything was bought and paid for by him.

          Originally Sir Adams’ pond was heaven on earth for the froglings. They had ample time to lay out in the sun on their lily pads and pursue social, cultural and athletic hobbies. Life was good for these frogs of leisure. But that was many years ago, before employer-worker—master-slave—relationships had been established. Back when the population was low, back before every cubic centimeter of the pond was spoken for. Newcomers used to arrive, choose a nice location under a branch or rock, and subsequently build a modest home and raise a family. There was no payment that needed to be made to anybody. Yeah, it was a good time to be a frog living in Sir Adams’ pond. But word quickly spread and soon there was a mass influx of frogs from local swamps who came in search of a better life.

          Things went from bad to worse when a few shrewd frogs decided that they would simply claim all available pond space for themselves and charge a fee for the new immigrants to live there. Ipso facto government was founded, ergo a new system was designed, a caste system, a system in which the propertied class became the masters, and the propertyless became vassals. The cunning and lackadaisical propertied frogs found it easy to exploit the new immigrants, who were so eager to get out of the swamps they unwittingly signed the contracts entailing their own indentured servitude.

          As the centuries passed there was no longer any vestige of what the pond used to be. Free trade gave way to voracious commercialism, democracy gave way to plutocracy, and one percent of the frogs owned ninety nine percent of the pond. Indeed it was no longer a good time to be a frog living in Sir Adams’ pond, unless of course you were a noblefrog. The noblefrogs lived the good life, and at the expense of the workingfrogs they lived in ostentatious 2000 cc citadels. There—in their luxurious chateaus—they would hold banquets, feast on fine wine and escargot, and debauch their chamber maids. The noblefrogs had only one hang up, they had only one fear. It was the fear that one day the proletarians will become aware of their oppression. They dreaded the day in which the workingfrogs would rise up and—like the lechriodus—”eat the rich”.

          Consequently the affluent noblefrogs spent an enormous amount of time, energy and resources on propaganda. They controlled the media outlets so it was easy for them to fabricate stories about how, without the noblefrogs, the waterfall would cease to function and the pond would stagnate, causing the community to be inundated with algae. In addition to fear tactics they would also attempt to divide and conquer, because the worst thing that could happen would be the organization of the workingfrogs. They made a concerted effort to focus the anger of their subjects on each other and/or external enemies at the swamplands.

          Another useful myth that they created was the belief that those who posses a larger amount pond-space only do so because of merit, and if the little tadpoles work hard, maybe one day they too will become members of the propertied class, maybe one day they too will be allowed to vote. But it was obvious to any thinking amphibian, that this was a wart faced lie. It was tantamount to hearing a prince say to his slave “if you work hard, maybe one day you too can become prince”. Yeah, it was patently clear that the propertied frogs were not working or creating anything of significance, other than the self made fallacy. The ones doing all of the work were the ones held in hock to the noblefrogs.

          There was a rigid dichotomy at the pond, a massive chasm between the haves and have nots. But a cataclysmic event would forever change life at the pond. Unbeknownst to the froglings, Sir Adams was offered a job at a prestigious university in another country, and therefore he was selling his home.

          On July 14th, it seemed to be an ordinary late evening at the pond, when suddenly the waterfall stopped flowing. The 10,000 gph pump, the filtration system, and the ph monitor had all been disconnected by the new owners, who had just received their 500 dollar electric bill.

          At first the noblefrogs—knowing that this could potentially be the impetus for revolution—lied to the public.

          “Everything is fine, fellow froglings, we are just doing routine maintenance on the waterfall and it will be up and running shortly”.

          But as the weeks passed, the waterfall remained out of commission, and the more intelligent workingfrogs grew suspicious. They began to question. They began to wonder if the noblefrogs really had any control over the waterfall. They began to doubt that the noblefrogs were the ones filtering the water and monitoring the ph. Eventually some of the workingfrogs began distributing pamphlets with headlines reading;

          “Workingfrogs, you have been duped!”

          “Rise up against these tyrannical bullfrogs!”

          Malcontented froglings began fanning the flames of dissent, as it became more and more obvious that the noblefrogs had socially constructed a false reality. An inverted fallacy, in which they —the noblefrogs—pretended to be the producers of wealth and pioneers of new concepts. But, as a matter of fact, they had merely deceived the citizens of Sir Adams’ pond, and for centuries the froglings had erroneously believed that without the noblefrogs, the pond would cease to function.  

          The Great Anuran Revolution took place just six months after the waterfall mysteriously stopped flowing. Frogs of all different colors, shapes, and sizes finally rose up against the noblefrogs that had swindled them for so many years. Many of the noblefrogs—knowing they didn’t stand a chance—hastily hopped back to the swamps whence their ancestors came. Those that didn’t make it out of the pond in time would soon become frog soup for the angry crowd. The workingfrogs immediately organized kangaroo trials which resulted in the enslavement, imprisonment, and execution of over a hundred noblefrogs. The ones that were fortunate enough to not be executed died within months, due to starvation and excessive physical exertion at the labor camps. The day that the noblefrogs had dreaded for centuries had finally arrived.

          After the storming of city hall, the workingfrogs drafted a new document they called the 5 Frogling Precepts.

          Precept 1. Exploitation

          No frog shall be allowed to employ (enslave) another frog.

          Precept 2. Property

          “Property is theft” and therefore no frog shall be allowed to own, buy, sell, or rent property.

          Precept 3. Commerce

          We froglings perceive commerce to be vicious and cruel, and for this reason no frogs shall engage in trade.

          Precept 4. Free speech 

          The froglings right to free speech shall not be infringed, unless it is to be deemed hateful, disruptive, anti-communist, racist, abhorrent, fascist, or argumentative.

          Precept 5. Equality

          No frog shall surpass his peers with regard to income or possessions. If a frogling does or shows any desire to do so, he will be subsequently be immersed in sodium chloride.

          It appeared that the workingfrogs were becoming just as tyrannical as the noblefrogs that preceded them. And unfortunately the mass movement of the workingfrogs had metamorphosed into an archetypical mob mentality. They became increasingly nefarious with every vociferating chant.

          “Death to the noblefrogs!”

          “Dissect the the enemies of the Anuran revolution!”

          But it was hard to blame the workingfrogs—with their ambivalence and thought-asphyxiating mental unity. After all, this was the unconscious and predictable effect of the self-absorbed causation that was made possible by the noblefrogs. This was the pendulum swinging back to the other side, the inevitable backlash. This was despotic free trade giving way to intemperate democracy. Notwithstanding, this was also a substantiation of the fact that the powerless, once given power, will not conduct themselves as magnanimously as some contend that they would.

          Under capitalism the workingfrogs were oppressed. Now under communism, all of the froglings were suppressed. It had been a mere paradigm shift of maltreatment. And whether the form of government was democratic or autocratic, it seemed that the plight of the frogs in Sir Adams’ pond would never cease. This is because the desire to dominate others was deeply ingrained in the genome of all of the froglings.  

END OF BOOK ONE

P.S. For book two observe modern homo sapiens.

Twelve year old Abraham Mullins opened his eyes and watched the rear wheel of his dirt bike nicknamed Old Huff, whirl in the clammy autumn breeze; the front wheel was warped and surrounded by wet leaves and dead grass. The bicycle’s frame was intact but without the front wheel Abe knew it was useless. A sharp pain slid down the young man’s back, and he sat puzzled, trying to determine what had happened.

     He moaned, and his voice ebbed in the gloom of St. Thomas cemetery. Upon falling, his head fashioned a small groove into the wet ground, and except for where the lid of his eye opened, his face was covered in mud.  A slight shiver crawled over him.

      Machine gray clouds loomed and thunder clapped in the sky. Nearby, he heard the drone of car engines and the whisper of wind through the cemetery’s old trees. Soon other senses returned; his shoulder throbbed, and having chomped down on his tongue, he tasted the bitter-sweet tang of his blood.

     Hoisting himself from the ground, he limped over and rested on an old burnt tree stump. He glanced up and watched the moon peek from behind dark clouds veiled with light sheets of rain. His mom would say the storm was toying with him. When dark clouds moved in, thunder roared and lightning searched the sky. “All that fuss,” she would say, “but you put your hand up and only a wee bit of rain fell on it.”

     She’d smile at Abe and assure him, “Oh, it’s just Gods way of teasing us. He’s gotta have a little fun too.”  Abe found no humor in his current situation, though. And hadn’t that same God taken his dad? His dad had died miserably (and, slowly, over the course of five years) of lung cancer. Just how far did God’s teasing go?

     As he registered this thought, he heard footsteps stomp through the haze of the old cemetery. Suddenly, he remembered why he had been looking back and then crashed into the rock and tumbled. Someone was following him. The footsteps boomed through the howling wind, the rattling trees and the lingering fog. Abe tossed a sharp glance over shoulder, scanning the sloping, splotchy dirt hills. There was no one there.

     The footsteps abated.

     Another soft breeze sowed through the trees, leaving only the “wee bit of rain”. And then the rain ceased.

     The Lord teasing me again, ma? He wondered.

     Abe clamored to his feet, using the sleeve of his shirt to wipe the caked mud from his face, and that’s when he heard the staccato melody of the harmonica. And the voice,

     “Bad place for a fall, kid!” The old man’s words twanged like an untuned harp.

     Abe whipped his head around and saw the old man sitting across the winding pathway, up on a hill, beneath an old magnolia tree. He wore a faded, button up shirt and tattered jeans. Between his ashen hands, the polished metal of a harmonica gleamed against the moonlight. His hair was a boomerang of peppered cotton with white sideburns, and he had a long hooked nose and a narrow curved chin.  He grinned at Abe and set his lips, blowing the harmonica again.

     Abe was certain that the man had not been there several moments ago. He shook his head and peered through the mist to gain a better view. It was true. The old man sat there resting beneath the tree.

     Abe didn’t speak, and he was apt to grab Old Huff and get the heck out of there, leaving the old fart to blow on his harmonica. But when he took a step toward the bike, the pain stung him. It shot through his back and he cried out.

     The old man stopped playing long enough to glance up. He threw his head back in a wheezing cackle and watched Abe struggle. Abe took a knee, eyeballing him closely. The old man was an odd and frail fellow, and Abe was more curious than threatened by him. He thought he could take the old codger if it came to it.

    “What’s so funny?” Abe hissed.

     “Just tickled,” the old man said. “Your body keeps telling you to rest, and your head’s hard as that there tombstone. Get good advice, but we don’t listen.”

    Abe thrust himself from the ground, still eyeballing the old man. Last thing he needed was a lecture from some grown up. He took one step to leave and placed far too much weight on his ankle. It was tender, and he winced.

     “You sprained it, kid!” The old man wheezed. “It’ll ache for a spell and then swell up like a balloon.” He pointed the harmonica toward an old crumbling tombstone, not far from where Abe took the tumble. “If you had hit your head on that thing,” he paused and rested his back against the tree. “Well, let’s just say a little swelling would’ve been the least of your worries.”

     Abe glanced at the tombstone. The thing would’ve split his skull.  “Guess you’re right.” He looked at the old man. “Who are you?”

     The magnolia tree shook its limbs, expelling a soft mist from infirm autumn leaves. In the distant black firmament, clouds smashed together and drifted like small continents while rivulets of lightning poked the sky.

      “Call me Ref. That’s what my friends call me.” The old man paused and seemed to consider. “The ones still around anyways.”

     Abe watched lightning crackle, closer now. Thunder boomed.

     “Why are you sitting out here in the rain? A storm is coming,” Abe said, he gestured to the massive gray clouds.

    Ref glanced up with a befuddled frown, as if noticing the clouds and the lightning and the roaring thunder for the first time.

     “Reckon you’re right, kid. A storm’s definitely brewing.”

     Abe glanced around. “Guess I better try to get home, now,” He said and started to hobble down the hill, but the rain poured in great heaps. Abe shook his head. He joined Ref under the tree. He hated cemeteries, but he had hoped to take the short cut through St. Thomas. He sighed. “I should have taken the regular way home.” He glanced toward the sky. “Maybe I’ll let the rain calm a bit, first.”

      Ref threw his head back and burst into laughter. Rivers of wrinkles poured from the hooded corners of his eyes. His mouth was filled with jagged, blackened teeth, his shoulders were thin, and the collar on his tattered button-up shirt looked too big.

    “Yeah, reckon you’re right, kid. Let’re calm down a bit.” He blew one long note across the harmonica. “After that, then go on. No since hanging round here, wasting your time with an old coot like, Ref.” He glanced down at the harmonica between his calloused hands. Abe thought the man looked miserable.

     Abe looked towards the clouds and then back at Ref. “Shouldn’t you be trying to get home too, Ref?”

     “Ain’t been home in a long time.” Ref licked his tongue across dry lips. “Reckon I forgot what it looks like.”

     Far away, thunder exploded like dynamite.

     “Forgot home?” Abe was astonished. And he couldn’t imagine not going home to his family. After all, it was always there. He stared at Ref for a moment. “You homeless, Ref?”

     Ref appeared to ponder this. After a time, he said, “Let’s just say, I make home wherever I lay my head.”

     The rain fell hard. The wind blew huge nets of mist across the distant graveyard, whistling through the trees, waving the tall, lifeless grass. Abe watched as the trees chattered, and the sky snapped several shots of the land.

     The two sat beneath the trees wavering branches, up on the hill. Ref played several soothing tunes amongst the howling wind. Among them was Let The Good Times Roll—

     Well come on baby let the good times roll.

     Well come on baby let me soothe your soul…

 He blew through a jazzy rendition of Oh Susanna, Clementine, and a personal favorite–The Great Pretender…

    Abe, not recognizing any of the songs (except maybe Oh Susanna) glanced around and saw no valise or bags that held a change of clothes for the old man. How could a man so talented become homeless? Surely some band needed a good harmonica player.

     His mom always told him that everyone possessed a gift to offer the world. Realizing that gift and using it was the key. And though he thought this was just another one of his mom’s anecdotes on life, there were times when he thought that she was right. How many times had he passed a homeless person at the bus depot or on the side of the road by a stoplight, or looked out the car window and saw them bunched in swaddling rags on the concrete incline under an overpass. How many? And hadn’t his heart sunk when he saw this, wishing he had the power to show them what their gift was and let them know that they didn’t have to live like that?

     He glanced over to Ref, who had his head down and was blowing softly into the harmonica, his hooded eyes fixed upon the wet ground.

     “Ref, you got family?”

     “Course!” Ref bellowed. “Everybody’s kin to somebody,” He pushed one breath through the harmonica, one quick riff.  

     “Do you see them much?”

     Ref looked up. “From time to time.” He set his lips and frowned. “You see, they don’t take much to me. I’m what you might call the black sheep of the fambly.” He wheezed and then coughed bitterly.

     When he finally caught breath again, Ref said, “But it’s okay. Like it better this way. No putting on airs for anybody. No constraints; nobody telling me what to do and how to do it. Free, you get me?” He nodded and glanced at Abe with those beady eyes, much like black marbles pressed into boiled leather.

     “Sure, sure I do Ref. I know exactly what you mean. No constraints. Do this! Do that! I’m always told what I can and can’t do, like being a slave.” Abe thought about his mom and Charlie, his stepdad, “Clean your room! Wash those dishes…cut the grass. Do your homework!” It was ridiculous. And Charlie, who chained smoked Kool 100’s, came home drunk on the weekends and propped his stinking feet on the coffee table, his big toe with the sharp nail never disappointing at slicing its way through a new hole. …Abe wasn’t even sure if the guy had a real job.

     “That’s right,” Ref said. He shook his head in disgust. “That’s why I live like I do. I’d rather be free then bow down to the rules of hypocrisy.” And Abe knew exactly what a hypocrite was. His mom had told him.

     “A hypocrite,” she explained once, when Abe inquired after reading the word in an old magazine as they rode along in the Impala. “A hypocrite tells you not to do something but then they go and do it themselves.” She looked at him sternly with both hands gripped on the steering wheel. “They talk the talk, but don’t walk the walk.”

      Later he thought about his mom who always taught him not to tell a lie. But the same mom assured him that Santa Claus was real. And that all the gifts under the brightly lit Christmas tree were placed there by Jolly Old Saint Nick, not purchased from a department store by his mother. Hadn’t she been a hypocrite anytime she told him not to lie? They talk the talk, but don’t walk the walk, right mom?

     Ref’s voice broke the thought, “What are rules anyway if people—adults; break them anytime they see fit?”

     “Yeah,” Abe agreed, and nodded his head, hardly believing he’d found an adult who agreed with him. Ref blew another note on the harmonica and they both broke into laughter.

     In the sneezing-rain drenched sky, the pale moon glowed beneath a thin layer of cloud. Its face shone upon the rolling headstones of St. Thomas. And Abe and Ref watched as the rain pounded the earth.  

     A moment passed and Ref glanced over at Abe, said, “Hey, what do you say we be friends?”

     Lightning snapped, and a large crooked tree branch crashed against the wet ground several feet away.  

     Startled, Abe’s heart pounded his chest.

     “Umm, sure, Ref,” he said, his eyes fixed on the large tree limb that had crashed to the ground. “Sure, we can be friends.”

     “Not just friends, brothers! We could be blood brothers for life,” Ref promised.

     Abe looked at him perplexed. “Blood brothers?”

     “Yeah, like I said, never had close fambly. When you forge a blood brotherhood, it’s binding.” Ref extended one wrinkled, bone-white hand. His fingers were long and queer and on the top of his index finger one drop of blood bubbled from the edge.

     Abe recoiled.

     He and his best friend, Robbie, had forged a bond last year, with spit. Robbie had told him that a spit bond was sacred and meant loyalty and friendship forever.

     “Is it kind of like a spit bond?” Abe wanted to know.

     Ref nodded. He reached into the torn pocket of his old shirt and produced a handful of gray lint. He blew the lint away and plucked a small needle from the wrinkled cup of his hand. The needlepoint twinkled in the rain reflected moonlight.

     “Just like a spit bond, Abe,” said Ref.

     Abe took the needle and moved the point toward the tip of his finger but then he stopped.

     Thunder rolled over St. Thomas, and Abe stood under the black heavens for a moment with a quizzical look on his face.

     “What’s the problem, Abe?” Ref asked. “Prick your finger let’s be blood brothers.” He grinned and watched, anxiously.

     Abe slowly moved both hands to his sides. He glanced up and stared at Ref like he saw a different man.

     “Ref?”

     “What is it?” Ref asked. A hint of agitation grew in his voice.

     “How did you know my name was Abe?”

     All about them was white with the steam of rain. Several dirt pits were overflowing with water and consequently trickled down hill in sublets, and they snaked their way through the spaces of the iron gates crested with two gargoyle statues and emptied into open drains.

     Ref stumbled, now. “I’m sure you said it earlier, kid. That’s how I know.”

     “I didn’t Ref.” Abe shook his head and took another step back. “I never told you my name.”

     Ref shrugged. “Then I must’ve picked it up during the conversation—What’s the difference? We’re friends, right?”

     Abe watched him cautiously. He dropped the needle to the ground beside his foot. “I don’t think that’s a good idea, Ref.”

     Ref took a deep breath and sighed in exasperation. He fixed his gaze on the boy. “I need you to do this, Abe.” The old man’s voice was low and controlled, not the weak and frail voice which issued from his lips when they first met.

     Uneasiness swelled in Abe’s stomach. It was something in Ref’s eyes. Those beady marbles now looked wide and distant and blank. Abe suddenly thought he saw a flicker of light go out in the black of them.

     “You’re just like the rest of’em, huh?” Ref said. His head was down and his shoulders rose and fell with each wheezing breath.

     “You okay, Ref?”

     A low chortle rose from the old man.

     Abe moved to where the curtain of rain stopped and the shelter of the trees began. Rain washed over his back and neck. But he never took his eyes away from Ref.

      “Just like the rest of ‘em.” Ref repeated.

     “I-I gotta go, Ref.” 

     Ref threw his head up and snarled. His face looked like the mask of a demon. Worms of veins wriggled under pale skin. His mouth twisted and when he grinned, his teeth were sharpened to fine points.

     “What are you?” Abe shrieked. The rain matted his hair over his forehead. His bottom lip quivered and his eyes flared with horror.

     “Reficul is the name.” He spat a particle of undigested food through one of the spaces in his teeth.  “Lucifer, if you like that better.” Lightning struck the air between the old tree branches.

     Abe stood with his mouth gaping, and his entire body soaked in the rain. It took a while for his brain to tell his legs to get moving. But another resounding boom of thunder decided for him.

     Abe turned and scrambled down the hill, high stepping over dead tree branches and old cracked tombstones. Each time he planted his foot, a jolt of pain ran up the side of his leg.  

     The fear of Refucul . . . “Lucifer,” as the old man so haughtily called himself. He learned few things attending his Bible study classes at the church, but, the analogy for Satan he remembered.

     Abe glanced into the thinning rain. He saw two spires that marked the entrance to the cemetery–the wrought iron gate, where the two gargoyles had sat. But the gargoyles were gone. Abe glanced a bit higher and saw both birdlike beasts rising into to the air, braying laughter and shedding the metallic shell of skin from their bodies.

     The iron-gate felt miles and miles away, stretching farther and farther from his hands with every thunderous step. In haste, Abe had started running towards the front gate of St Thomas, but under the tree, he was closer to the rear of the cemetery, where he originally was headed. He was running away from home.

     That didn’t matter now. All that mattered was getting away from the old man and away from the gargoyles. He was half way down the slope, when his foot fetched against a thick root and sent him sailing forward, landing hard on the ground and rolling the rest of the way downhill.

     The gargoyles screamed in triumphant voices.

     Abe winced. He rolled over and glanced up. The two creatures glared at him, their eyes burned like red embers in their small heads. They dove toward him.

     “Get him!” a whispered voice ebbed through the darkness. “Get him, now!”

     Abe’s heart turned cold in his chest. Lightning snapped and the sky opened white, filled with a million droplets of rain.

     One of the gargoyles swooped on him, giggling and spreading two long curved talons. He clamped onto Abe’s shoulders.

     Abe screamed in agony. The creature’s nails bit into his skin like fangs.

     “Yes, yes, get him,” Ref’s voice called from the dark. Abe felt his body leave the earth, dragged along by the heels of his sneakers. They dug into the mud soaked ground.

       As the beast dragged him, Abe spotted a broken tree limb extending from the ground. He grabbed it, gritted his teeth and summoned a burst of energy.

     “No”! Abe cried and swung the branch, smashing it against one of the gargoyles wings, causing the beast to release his grip, and Abe fell to the ground.

     The gargoyle screeched and fluttered through the air, howling and hissing in pain.

     Abe glanced through the shifting rainfall for the other beast. The gray clouds were low, and the fog had thinned enough to see the areas speckled by the soft glow of the moon.

     He staggered to his feet; tears flooded his eyes mixing with the rain. His heart was torn with fear and anxiety. He wanted his mom. She would know what to say and what to do. Presently, Abe wasn’t past eliciting the help of his mother’s boyfriend, Charlie. He could remember Charlie bragging about his days as an amateur boxer, and “kicking the shit” as he so colorfully added, out of some reigning champion. Of course, Abe always felt Charlie’s stories came with some critical side note that was edited out during the telling.   

     Something squealed in the air. Abe wheeled around and saw the second gargoyle boring down on him like a great horned owl.

     Abe clutched the old branch with both hands and squared his shoulders. As the gargoyle drew near several drops of rain fell into Abe’s eyes. He lowered his head and frantically used the back of his hand to clear his sight. But it was too late.

     The gargoyle snagged his arm and Abe dropped the tree branch. Then he felt the wounded gargoyle, somewhat recovered, grab the other arm with a feeble grip.

     “Let me go!” Abe screamed. The gargoyles cackled as they dragged him through the air.

     “Yes, yes, yes,” Ref cried, in a high, clear voice. Then the voice deepened and shook the ground. “Bring him to me!”

     Abe looked where the gargoyles were taking him. Beside the tree, where the old man had sat, a source of red light bloomed from the ground. It was a pit. Tongues of red fire licked the sky and Ref released a raspy, rumbling roar of laughter.

     “Bring him, bring him.” Ref mocked. “My blood brother!”

     Abe swung and writhed in the air. He tugged and he pulled and used every inch of strength he could find, but the gargoyles were too strong. They were taking him to that fire hole. And they meant to pitch him inside.

     The flame from the pit was extremely hot. And there was a brief moment when Abe thought, the rain, the rain! Yes the rain will extinguish the fire. It had to. But the fire bloomed higher and swept the sky.

     Ref stood at the edge of the pit. His sneer made his mouth stretch wide, and the corners of it reached up and touched his curly, white sideburns. His eyes were cold and black but the small flicker that Abe noticed earlier was now a dancing flame.

     “Mamma was right, Abe.” Ref said and smoke puffed from blackened lips as he spoke. “He loves to toy with ya!” He squinted toward the sky. “Loves it!”

     Abe felt the grip from the injured gargoyle slacken.

     “All you wanted was to hurt me!” Abe yelled.

    “I want your soul!” Ref said, releasing another powdery dust of smoke. Lightning filled the sky and thunder rumbled, making Ref shrink a bit, his eyes turning toward the low-hung clouds. Then he grinned, indignantly, and said, “Can’t have the steak without killing a few cows, right?”

     The weakened gargoyle fluttered and his claws held only the tip of Abe’s shirt.

     Ref gazed into the fire and said, “Toss him in!”

     Hot cinders floated amidst a haze of black smoke that rose from the pit. The gargoyles swung him back and forth, like a terrible game of “Red Rover”. But the weakened gargoyle released too early and Abe seized the opportunity. He used the free arm and grabbed the stronger gargoyle by the wing and yanked down.

     The gargoyle screamed and went fluttering down toward the pit, holding onto Abe’s shoulder and clawing at the air. But just before they reached the hole, Abe pushed hard off of the writhing beast and flung his body toward the ledge, causing the gargoyle to plunge uncontrollably into the pit where the fire swallowed him with one satisfying gulp.

     “What are you fools doing? Get him,” Ref yelled at the remaining gargoyle.

     Abe suddenly understood. Ref couldn’t do anything himself. Unless, of course, Abe had offered his blood and made the friend pact. But he hadn’t. And now Ref sent his goons to drag him into the pit by force.

     The wind picked up. Abe turned to the devil, “What’s wrong, Ref? Can’t do it yourself? Picked that old body and now, you can’t fight your own fights. I guess I always knew Lucifer wasn’t that bright!”

     Ref glowered at him, fists clenched, black lips pulled back over pointed teeth.

     “Kill him, now!” He snarled.

     Abe glanced around him and found a small bed of broken tombstone and rocks. He dropped to the ground and collected as many into his shirt as he could. The gargoyle flapped feebly toward him, grasping at him from the air. Abe pelted the beast with several of the rocks and one of them landed on the injured wing.

     The gargoyle screeched and flailed backwards. Abe tossed two more stones, forcing the creature away.

     “Watch out you idiot! Get him over the pit.” Ref cried. Abe tossed another rock and this one popped the beast in the eye. The gargoyle pin wheeled. He was now reduced to one fully operational wing and one eye. Too weak to fly, the he landed on the ledge of the pit and swayed back and forth, inches from the blazing fire.

     “Get away from the fire!” Ref cried.

     Suddenly, as if tasting the leaking blood from the gargoyles damaged wing, the fire swooshed up and wrapped around him, yanking him into the fiery depths and then releasing a resounding burp.

     Ref roared in the air. Pieces of his face peeled away, exposing a bloody brittle skull underneath. The fire rose from the pit and brushed across Ref like a tidal wave, devouring him and anything else in its path.

     Abe shot through the graveyard, still feeling of the aching in his shoulder and his ankle. He stumbled along, falling once and getting back to his feet. He reached the wrought iron gate and it was shut, its rusted bars, a series of twisted iron and steel. But Abe scaled the gate and fell to the other side.

     The fire roared high, and spread wide across St. Thomas, charring all manner of branch and grass and debris in its wake. The fire searched for a while, looking for anything left to destroy–anything not yet dead. Satisfied, it vanished, and left only thick puffs of smoke snaking through the old cemetery.

…One week later

The weeds in St. Thomas Cemetery bloomed wild as ever on the calm autumn day that Abe and his mom rolled past in the Impala. The sun washed over the tops of headstones and streamed between remaining brown and amber leaves that hung on the branches of several weatherworn magnolia trees. The gargoyles set atop the rusted wrought iron gate in their accustomed places, guarding the entrance.

     Abe Mullins hit the button on the passenger side window and it slid down and vanished into the door. His eyes raked over the cemetery, not believing what they saw. He had begged his mom not to take this route past the cemetery. And as far as he was concerned he never wanted to past by St. Thomas again. But she just kept babbling on to whoever was on the other end of the cellphone line, periodically throwing her hand in the air to gesture a point that the listener would never see.

     Since his encounter at St. Thomas, Abe found that his relationship with his stepdad and his mom had improved. The experience changed Abe’s look on life and he saw a welcome change in his parents. No more fighting and arguing over the small stuff. Abe’s grade’s had improved—he went from a D- to a B+–something his mother had told him she knew he could do. He found himself happy to have his parents around, appreciative in more ways than he could explain. Near death will do that to you, he supposed.

     But now as Abe Mullins sat in the car and ponder this, he was astonished that the old cemetery that had traumatized him so badly, and that he hadn’t laid eyes on in almost a week, looked as if nothing had ever happened.

     The ground was dry, but not charred from fire. It was green and yellow with weeds in the same places. The rank grass, the trees, the dandelions that littered the winding cobblestone pathway was all there. And even if one week was enough for the soil to recover from a massive burning, which Abe doubted–what about the gargoyles?  —chrissake, how could they still be there. Hadn’t he pitched them both into the fiery hole from hell? Had he dreamed it? Abe shrank back from the window as the car turned a corner and passed close to the entrance where the sentinel-like gargoyles perched. No, he hadn’t dreamed it. He had the scars to prove it.

       His mom pressed the end call button on her phone and glanced over at him. “What’s with you? Your face is white as ivory,” she said and frowned.” It’s like you saw a ghost.”

     She glanced past Abe through the passenger window, where he was still gaping out. She regarded him for a moment, both hands on the steering wheel and looked forward again. Abe knew she could tell something was wrong.

     “And what was all that ballyhoo about not coming this way?” she asked.

     Abe just stared across the cemetery as she turned onto Washington and headed toward home.

     “Nothing, ma, I guess it was all nothing.” He was about to roll up his window when he glanced back over his shoulder once more and saw the old man, Ref, sitting under the same old tree blowing the harmonica.

     Abe sucked in breath and his mouth hung open. Definitely the same old man: the peppered boomerang of hair, the red and black plaid shirt, the harmonica. It was Lucifer!

     Ref looked up from the harmonica and grinned, exposing blackened, pointed teeth. Abe blinked and wiped his eyes to get a better look. But when his vision was clear, and he had nearly turned completely around in his seat, no one was there. The magnolia tree sat stoically, waving his branches up on the hill.

     A gentle breeze sowed through the window and with it, a mock whisper slid over Abe’s ear.

     It said, “Blood brothers, Abe–Blood brothers.”

     A light cackle vanished with the wind.

Jesus has been to Idaho. Evan knows it. Dirt turned over with last years’ alfalfa roots, waiting out the frost; testify of His life when the spring comes. It’s not just sod, it’s the resurrection, green shoots, then clover looking bunches of life after a winter death. So Evan doesn’t work Sundays. The fields go unattended for the day, solitary in their rest, they take their sacrament of irrigation water at 10am—a full load if that son of a bitch Arlen isn’t siphoning off a little more than his rights allow, which he always does on Sunday because he thinks nobody is watching. “God is always watching,” Evan tells him. “And if He doesn’t do something about your stealing water, I’m gonna hit you with a shovel and we’ll sort out justice and mercy in the next life.” Arlen hasn’t been to Church forever. His family has been Mormon for a hundred years, but somebody backslid some time ago and Arlen got used to the idea of having a coffee then stealing water when his neighbors were at Church. But Evan never misses. “There’s a law for everything,” he often says; which is really his way of getting around the whole idea of faith. “You can live without it if you have a knowledge,” he says to the young men in his ward. “And I have a knowledge.” 

Evan likes to sit on his porch on Sunday mornings, even in the cold. He doesn’t own a wristwatch. He reads the Book of Mormon and the Sunday paper until he hears the Church choir rehearse, then he finds Meredith, his wife of fifty-one years and they walk across the street to the chapel. Evan has never told Meredith that he doesn’t understand the Book of Mormon. Meredith has never told Evan what she doesn’t like. She has sat in the same kitchen chair for so many years that the linoleum beneath her feet is worn down right to the cardboard. She reads a page in the bible, mostly from psalms because she likes the way the words sound, and then the words of Jesus. She stares out the window for a time after reading then does a crossword puzzle until Evan finds her. “It’s time,” is all he says. She imagines that one day he’ll walk in and say it again, “it’s time,” just like that, and lay down on the sofa and die, go right to heaven with their firstborn son who drowned in an irrigation ditch when he was seven. Meredith crocheted a little frame around his picture with words from the Book of Mormon: “Little children have no need of baptism, but are alive in Christ.” Evan Jr. was getting ready for his baptism by immersion when he fell headfirst into a muddy hole and the arms of the pump held him under until he stopped kicking. The water was still when Evan found him.

John left the farm some years after that. He was five when his brother died, and nineteen when he left home—not to serve a mission for his Church, to make his father proud as a representative of Jesus Christ, but off to mechanic school where he learned to repair small engines. Evan liked to think John was working on a better pump motor, one that wouldn’t drown seven year-old boys; but he wasn’t. John was fixing whacker motors for a cement company. He liked the pounding noise they made, maybe because it was louder than the pounding in his head. John went to Church on Christmas with his parents and the hymns were almost as good as that whacker motor. But somehow, John just couldn’t get back again until the next Christmas. Evan’s Bishop always called him Jack for being a Jack-Mormon, and John smiled about it. He didn’t read the Book of Mormon. “That’s something I’ll do when I get married,” he said to himself. But he never did either.

Evan wasn’t thinking about John when they crossed the road to the chapel. The Bishop had called that morning and wondered if he might have a moment with them. It was half way through July and the heat apparitions were not on the highway yet, though they would be when Evan and Meredith made their way back to the clapboard house Evan was born in. The choir sang A Mighty Fortress, but it was weak. There were too many women and not enough baritones to make the verses a force. Evan could not sing, and he hoped the Bishop was not going to ask him to. Evan would say yes, of course, since he believed in Bishops getting revelation for their people. So sitting in the hardback chairs outside the office, Evan began to feel like his faith was about to be tried. He didn’t know if he could even sing baritone. He reached over and laid his hand on Meredith’s wrist, mindful of the pain her arthritis kept her in; he didn’t look at her. He couldn’t squeeze her hand, but through his calloused fingertips he could feel the blood pulsing in the veins on the top of her wrist, the tiny hairs on the back of her hand deliver that feint electrical surge. Evan had never told Meredith that he could feel her without actually touching her; that he believed her soul was larger than her body and it sometimes burst out through the pores in her skin and he could feel it when she was thinking about him.

“Do we have a hymnbook at home,” he asked.

“In the curio,” she answered.

Evan took his hand off Meredith’s wrist and picked at a sliver festering in the fore-knuckle of his left hand. He noted each of his scars methodically until the door opened and the Bishop welcomed them into his office. When they were seated across the desk from the bishop, he smiled, and leaned toward Evan.

“Do you believe in a living Prophet?” The bishop asked.

“Yes I do,” Evan answered without hesitation.

“Good,” the Bishop said, sliding a few papers toward Evan. “As you know, our Prophet has asked older couples who are capable to consider serving a mission.”

Meredith gasped and held her trembling fingers to her mouth so as not to say anything that might jeopardize her standing with Jesus.

“If that’s what the Prophet is asking, then that’s what we will do,” Evan said.

“I’m not asking for yes or no right now,” the Bishop said. “I want you to go home, look at the affairs of your household, talk it through together, pray about it and ask God if it is something you should do.”

“I understood you to say the prophet was asking,” Evan said. “We’re capable. John can watch the farm if he has some help from the deacons.”

“OK,” the Bishop said, leaning back in his chair. “Take your time, fill out the papers…”

“I said we’re capable…”

The Bishop was quiet for a moment. He was young by Evan’s watch; mid-forties. He owned a pharmacy in town and worked half-days so he could spend the rest of his time being a bishop; visiting widows, camping with the boy scouts, keeping track of every member under his care. It was something a farmer-bishop couldn’t do, not with the sun-up to sundown hours it took to keep tractors running and fields producing. Evan’s resolve was as much a protest against the easy life the pharmacist-bishop enjoyed as it was a manifestation of his faith.

“How is John?” the bishop asked.

“He’s capable too,” Evan answered.

“OK,” the Bishop said. “Let’s talk again.”

Evan stood up, helped Meredith out of her chair. She leaned heavily on the Bishop’s desk until she got her legs under her.

Before Evan left, he turned back to the Bishop. “When we get these papers all filled in, we just take them straight to the Stake President, right?”

“Why don’t we go over them together first,” the Bishop said. “Then you can sit down with him.”

Evan nodded. The Stake President oversaw five Bishops in the Snake River Valley. He was a farmer like Evan, only with seven boys, all of whom stayed on to work the farm. Evan trusted him. Meredith squeezed Evan’s arm. He could tell she was thinking about him.

Evan stared at a talking rubber fish that hung on the wall in the kitchen. It was a present from John some Christmases ago; it sang Blue Moon and moved its mouth mechanically. Hysterical at first, then the batteries died. Evan half wondered if the bass was going to give him some kind of an answer. Miracle of the fish, he thought to himself. And he would need a miracle. His pride had gotten him into a situation. Something his father told him would happen when he was younger, “don’t let your pride get you into a situation,” the old man said, and Evan didn’t even know what a situation was, not until it earned him three stripes on the backside for cheating because Elsa Jane said she would kiss the boy with the highest math score. From then on, that was Evan’s definition of a situation: a promise that turns into a pain in the backside. A pain that can make a boy shy about his feelings. “Maybe I’ve gotten us into a situation,” Evan said to Meredith as she orbited around the kitchen stove. Meredith just smiled. Evan looked away from the fish and through the window out onto the fields thick with green corn stalks not far from harvest. He knew John would take care of the farm for a week, maybe ten days before leaving a note on the bishop’s door that went something like: “I hereby consecrate this farm to the church until my father’s return.” John knew the gospel, but he only lived it when it favored him.

“I believe I’ll need another pair of low heels,” Meredith said. “Maybe next time we’re at Sears….” 

“I’ll check the water,” Evan said. And Meredith smiled. She took it as Evan’s way of saying he was off to pray until he got an answer. She knew the story of Joseph Smith, how he prayed and got his answer. The only scripture she knew by heart was the one young Joseph read before striding into the sacred grove: “If any of  you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, who giveth to all men liberally and upbraideth not, and it shall be given him.”

Evan knew what she was thinking; he could feel it when he turned away from her. He knew he had to come back with conviction on his face because in all the years they had been married, he had never been able to fool her. He went first behind the barn, peaked back to see if she was looking at him through the screen. She was. He picked up a hoe and ambled along the side of the irrigation ditch and poked at a few weeds, then hacked until he remembered it was Sunday afternoon. Suddenly he felt unworthy to get any kind of answer and he knew Meredith would read it on his face. The only thing to do now was walk to the edge of the property and wait until the guilt left him, just sit, and wait. Besides, he might see Arlen stealing water and giving him a good clout with a Hickory handle could remove a lot of uncertainty about the way a man felt about himself.

And so it went for a week. Evan would walk out of the house with that searching look on his face, and Meredith would smile, and wait for him to come back after dark. She never asked him where he went, what he fixed or where he watered. She knew her husband was soul searching and that it was a holy process and that she needed to be ready. Some days she clipped pictures of modest shoes from the newspaper. Some days she tried to memorize hymns, but mostly she stitched up the holes in all Evan’s black socks. She wanted her lamp to be full of oil when the call came. But on Sunday morning, Evan hadn’t said anything to her except “I’ll check the water.”

They walked across the street to the tune of Master the Tempest is Raging, Meredith holding the crook of Evan’s arm the way she had since she was 19 years old, the only man she had ever loved. It seemed to Evan that the flesh on his arm had grown around the knuckles of his wife’s hand the same way the skin had migrated over the thin band of gold on his finger. When they sat across the desk from the bishop, that tendon strung diagonal from Evan’s forearm to bicep tightened, a sign of conviction Meredith must have figured because she in turn tightened her grip, and Evan flushed with the warmth of Meredith’s electricity.

“So,” the bishop said, with a little humor. “Have you two done enough praying this week?”

“Can never pray enough,” Evan said, believing he was reprimanding the bishop, keeping him in line. The bishop shifted in his chair. Evan was satisfied with this response. “It’s the same as last week Bishop,” Evan said. “We’re capable, John will take the farm. You don’t say no to the Lord.”

“Sounds like you got an answer to your prayers,” the Bishop said.

Evan stiffened his jaw muscles.

“And John willing to help with the farm,” the Bishop continued. “That is a good situation.”

Of course Evan hadn’t prayed about it at all. He hadn’t discussed it at all with Meredith or John. And suddenly the use of the word ‘situation’ by the Bishop made Evan wonder if he was making a huge mistake, that the Bishop was inspired to use that word as a sign to Evan that it was all wrong. But it was too late, he was already doing the math in his head, adding up the days in the eighteen months they would be gone, trying to figure a way to come out on top of this thing with his pride intact, but deep down, he knew he was cheating at arithmetic again.

From the moment Evan left the Bishop’s office for the second time, he just said yes to everything that needed to be done. He set his resolve and he stuck to it, figuring it was worth the stripes he would take in the end. There was the meeting with the Stake President who was delighted to hear that they were ‘willing and capable.’ There were preparation classes on Sunday afternoons to learn the lessons, but Evan spent much of his time showing off with metaphors, likening corn shucking to repentance and pig breeding to salvation. “Castration is like the Lord’s way of casting off an offending member,” Evan said to a class of three old couples and a mousey woman in wide brown shoes who was supposed to be teaching the class but couldn’t do much more than read from the manual. The women nodded their heads in agreement. Evan was at the head of the class. He even wore a starched white shirt, a charcoal suit from Sears and a rifle tie-clip he got in the mail from the NRA. When the mousey teacher asked about the tie clip, Evan answered: “The Lord needs a straight shooter.” Meredith just smiled. She smiled a lot in the next six weeks. Every little thing had been prepared for; that is, except for John. Evan put it off until the week before they were to leave. Meredith asked John to come for Sunday dinner. John agreed as long as he didn’t have to go to church or have some surprise meeting with the bishop; so the three of them had pot roast in the linoleum kitchen.

“How’s the whacker business?” Meredith asked John.

“Fine, mother,” John said.

“Is there a certificate you get for that?”

John shrugged.

Meredith measured everything in life by certificates. Mastering times tables. One-hundred percent spelling accuracy. Pneumatic tool repair proficiency. These were the measures of eternal progression. So long as they kept coming, Meredith knew her family would be together in heaven forever.

“Your father and I got our gospel teacher certificates today,” she said. “It’s hand-lettered on expensive paper. They sent it to someone in Twin Falls to calligraphy it. It’s a gentleman who specializes in certificates.”

“They don’t do that at the whacker factory, mom,” John said. “They calligraphy your name on a paycheck and you hope it don’t disappear by the time you get to the bank.”

“Gospel Teacher certificate,” Evan said with emphasis. “You do know what that means, don’t you son?”

“’fraid I don’t.”

“Means the Lord has called us on a mission, tested our faith for six weeks and we passed. That means you’re gonna watch the farm while we’re gone.”

“I’ll need some gas money,” John said. “It’s a longer drive from here.”

Evan let his temper simmer for a moment, then a scripture came to him from his six week course. “Will a man rob God?” He said to his son.

“What does that have to do with anything?” John asked.

“It means, you’ll take care of the farm and you won’t be getting any damn gas money,” Evan shouted.

John leaned away from his father and looked at his mother.

“Have some pie, John,” she said, handing him a large slice of rhubarb and raisin.

And that’s how the last of the preparations were settled, except for one final comment from John, a comment that sounded like an angel’s trumpet in Evan’s ear, a comment that would keep him awake that entire night.

“Well,” John said. “This seems like an interesting situation for the both of you.”

            A month later, Evan and Meredith boarded a bus with two suitcases each and settled in for the long ride to the airport after three weeks of missionary training in Provo Utah. Meredith sat by the window next to Evan, slid her hand into the crook of his arm, slipped her sensible shoes off and fell asleep on his shoulder. Evan reached in his pocket and carefully unfolded the letter they had gotten from the Prophet of the Church. He flattened it across his knees and carefully read it again. ‘You have been called to the Hyderabad, India Mission,’ it said. And there was a nice letter from the prophet himself and a whole packet of instructions—medical check-ups and shots they had to go to Twin Falls for and other things to fill out to get passports and papers and clearances. Through it all, Evan wondered why they needed shots to teach Indians about hydraulics. He’d been on the reservation a number of times, and opening his call from the prophet he was relieved to know he would be teaching some kind of trade. Meredith only said she would go wherever Evan felt good about, but she trembled a lot after that. Evan didn’t figure out they were going half way around the world until he read the letter the second time and noticed there was no ‘n’ on the end of India. He looked carefully at the Encyclopedia Britannica to see where Hyderabad was. That’s when he understood why Meredith was trembling.

            Ever since they were married, Meredith and Evan said their prayers at night before they went to bed; Meredith on her side and Evan on his. They bowed their heads and each said their own prayer, usually Evan finished long before Meredith, he waited with one eye open, and when she lifted her head, he closed his eye and kept his head down just a few moments more, until he could feel Meredith thinking about him. Then he opened his eyes and climbed into bed, one blanket in the summer, two in the winter. The night before they left, Meredith squeezed the crook of his arm when Evan was lying beside her “It’ll be OK,” she said softly. “Mother used to tell me you know a prayer is answered because the wind blows just a little when you finish your prayers. Did you feel it blow just then, with your eyes closed?” Meredith asked

Evan stared at the muslin curtains, studying them for any movement at all, then he patted Meredith on the wrist and closed his eyes.”

            In the last few years, Evan had taken to falling asleep in the tractor. It was something that just seemed to come on him with age. He’d finish a run with the steel discs down, turning up the earth, or with the trailer on hauling manure, and after a couple hours, usually in the morning, he would stop and let the motor idle. Then he’d pull his cap down over his eyes, lean his head back against the cage and let the low rumble rock him to sleep. The edge of a field was as familiar as his own bedroom, a place to sit and close your eyes among the decomposing rot, the smell of exhaust and hydraulic fluid, the muffled thumps pulsing through the machinery, through his bones. “I’d like to have seen an ocean before,” he said with his eyes closed.

            “What made you think of that?” Meredith asked.

            Evan shrugged. “Seems a lot of good lessons take place on oceans. It’s good to know what you’re talkin’ about.”

            “Like Jesus on the water?”

            “That’s a good one,” Evan agreed. “The waves and all. Storms are good too. You can teach a lot with a good storm. We’ve never had so much as a small tornado. Just makes me wonder about being able to teach effective without having been on a ocean.”

            “Nobody can live everything,” Meredith said. “If so, we wouldn’t need faith. And that seems to be the better part of the plan, to believe without having been.”

            “I know the plan as much as anybody,” Evan said. “Just seems a little experience with a storm at sea would be a good thing to have when you go to teach folks with no knowledge, that’s all I’m sayin’.”

            “I have a feeling you’ll have plenty to teach about,” Meredith said. “Your heart’s bigger than most. What comes out will be what’s supposed to come out. Like King Benjamin teaching from the tower, and all the people pitched their tents with the opening toward him and they listened to him teach day and night, almost everything that was in his heart, about how the people should have faith and believe in God and look forward to Jesus and not have so much pride.”

            They unloaded curbside at the airport like a tour group—a dozen young men in new blue suits, four young women sensibly dressed, and Meredith leaning on Evan while he directed traffic over the voice of the man who was actually in charge. Bags were tagged and emotions checked. It would be two years before the young men saw home again, eighteen months for the young women and the older couple from Idaho who’d never been anywhere beyond settled Idaho before.

 “I still don’t understand how it takes three days to get to India when the plane ride is only eighteen hours,” Meredith said, standing in the security line exactly two hours early.

“Flying against the grain,” Evan said, holding his thick hands out like he was holding the world. “Kinda like turning a brake rotor, it spins one way and the file spins another, shaves more time off. If I file the same direction the rotor is turning, well, it takes longer to take anything off. Time works like that.”

“Oh,” Meredith said.

There isn’t much to look forward to on a long flight. Evan learned this three hours outside of San Francisco, somewhere over the vast ocean the Australian pilot joked was a watering hole. As Evan had boarded the plane, a woman in her fifties was talking loudly on a cell phone. She was dressed like one of those women in that show Evan sometimes came across when he couldn’t sleep at night; Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. As Evan was standing there, behind a line of bent-over passengers, the woman ended her conversation abruptly, turned off her phone and tucked it under the strap of her brassier. Evan was horrified, and he blushed. He told Meredith about it when they settled into their seats, and for three hours he turned it over in his mind, like a barn cat that fixates on a mouse, nipping at it, pawing it, wounding it, letting it go, then stunning it with a slap, teasing it out of unconsciousness only to nip it again until finally it dies and the cat becomes bored. Evan couldn’t sleep with his hips against the back of his seat and his knees against the seat in front of him. He watched the wing of the plane heave in the turbulence for ten hours, his mind surging mechanically forward, unable to release his exhausted body to sleep.

The plane landed badly in Madras, shook side to side as if the pilot was trying to keep it on the runway. Then lifted off two hours later and touched down in Hyderabad. It was the sort of thing that happens in India. The available connecting plane was unavailable. The passengers had all booked tickets to Hyderabad, but the plane stopped in Madras in order to change the passengers to the express flight to Hyderabad. Instead, they waited in the stale air, on the runway in the rain for two hours before lifting off again. By the time they got through immigrations, where Meredith gave up a pair of nylons to the Security Inspector “because,” he told her, “they are flammable,” Evan was so fatigued everything seemed a dream. At 6 feet 2 inches, he was taller than every other human being in his vicinity by more than a foot. Meredith, on the other hand, was the roundest human they had ever seen. She walked slowly, breathed heavily, and smelled like lilacs at a nursing home. This oddity was the center of attention as they finally reached the landing where two young missionaries from the Hyderabad Mission were supposed to meet them. They stood among an entourage of slight men in tattered red coats who offered to carry their bags. But Evan didn’t trust them, so he struggled with all four bags at once while Meredith waddled behind him and dozens of hands pawed at his forearms, and even more voices pleaded: “Please sir…Please sir to carry your bags.”

But Evan wouldn’t relinquish his hold. The sea of brown faces reluctantly parted in front of him, but crowded in behind him, pushing and bumping up against their backsides. Evan set their bags down and an army of cab drivers began the same onslaught. “Please sir to drive your destination. Perfect driver. Please sir.”

Evan could think of nothing else to do but raise his arms, as if he were going to give up the ghost and collapse into the depths of humanity. It was then that he saw two white shirts pushing through the crowd toward them, two young men with the countenance of angels. Seemed like hours before the two reached Evan and Meredith. To Evan, the heavens had parted and messengers arrived. But no sooner were the four of them together than the sea swallowed them up again.

“Elder Sanchez and Elder Haslam,” the taller, whiter one said. “Namaste.”

“Namaste,” Meredith said, delighted to use the only Hindu word she’d learned in her two weeks of training in Provo.

“I’ll get started,” Elder Haslam said. “You get the bags and find a driver.”

“Is it always like this?” Evan asked about the throngs of people pressed so tightly against them that there was no way out.

“Only rains half the year,” Elder Sanchez said. “The other half is pretty hot and dry. That’s comin’ up.”

Evan was still dazed, he was so overcome with culture shock that he hadn’t even noticed it was raining. “I mean…”

“Stay with me,” Elder Sanchez said. “There will be a break in the crowd in just a minute.”

Elder Haslam moved off, away from the other three missionaries. He reached down and plucked a small beggar boy from the crowd and stood him on a trash container. “Ahhhhhh!” he said loudly. The boy was uncertain what he had done wrong and stood petrified. “This boy,” Elder Haslam shouted. “Has something wrong with his head!”

The crowd quickly migrated over to where Elder Haslam was standing to see what was about to happen.

Elder Haslam grabbed the boy’s head with both his hands and playfully shook it, as if he was trying to empty it of its contents. “There seems to be something stuck inside his ear!”

The crowd moved closer, curious. The boy’s eyes grew wide.

“Quickly,” Elder Haslam shouted. “A tin container! Quickly!”

An old beggar with a long gray beard offered his. Elder Haslam tilted the boy’s head to the side. Then he had the boy hold the tin can just below his ear. “Don’t worry boy, we’ll get it out!” The boy looked as if he was about to cry. Elder Haslam held his hands up in the air and flexed his fingers. Evan, too, was puzzled. Then he felt Elder Sanchez tug on his arm. “We can go now,” Elder Sanchez whispered to him. “I have a car waiting.” The three of them made their way around the enthralled crowd to a car Elder Sanchez had commissioned. The driver threw one bag onto the roof, and the others in the trunk. Evan helped Meredith into the car, Elder Sanchez sat in the middle, and Evan climbed in and shut the back door. From the window, Evan watched Elder Haslam.

“This will only take a moment,” Elder Haslam said. And with that he tapped on the boy’s head the way one taps on a nearly empty ketchup bottle. Within a few seconds, a rupee clanked into the tin can. The boy looked at it, rattled it in the can then drew it out for the crowd to see. Of course, the crowd moved in closer.

“Stand back!” Elder Haslam shouted, raising his arms. “There’s more.” He helped the boy pocket the rupee, and taking the tin can, bid the boy to shake his head. “Harder!” Elder Sanchez shouted, but nothing came out. Then he grabbed the boy by the side of the head and looked at him, then at the crowd. “I don’t think he can hear me.”

The boy stared at Elder Haslam, who tugged at the boy’s ear, examined it for some strange obstruction. Then he reached inside it and drew out another rupee. “No wonder!” Elder Haslam said, holding up the tarnished coin. The crowd was delighted. “Now shake your head!” Elder Haslam commanded. And the boy did, and coins rained out of his ear into the can and spilled on the ground. Elder Haslam collected the coins and threw them into the crowd.

“Pinata time,” Elder Sanchez said from the car.

“Elder Haslam hugged the little boy, left him with a piece of candy and another rupee and dashed to the waiting car. Before the crowd could look up, the car was edging its way into the river of traffic.

“Where you from?” Elder Haslam asked.

“That trick, that’s not something they teach at the Missionary Training Center,” Evan said, not answering the question.

“Learned that one on my own. It’s what you’ll figure out about being a missionary in India. What you see isn’t always what’s really going on.”

“Oh,” Meredith said. “I guess we’ll have to get used to that.”

“ I’m from Sacramento,” Elder Haslam said. “Elder Sanchez grew up just south of the border…The Canadian border.”

Elder Haslam laughed

“Michigan,” Elder Sanchez said.

“We have some Sanchez’s in Idaho,” Meredith said. “Maybe you’ve heard of them, Pedro and Jeannette?”

“Hmmm,” Elder Sanchez pondered. “Must be my mother’s side.”

Elder Haslam laughed again.

Evan interrupted the small talk. “They have any tractors in this country?”

“Not many,” Elder Haslam answered, just lots and lots of people.”

“You two don’t look old enough to be missionaries,” Meredith said.

“Both of us are twenty,” Elder Sanchez said. “I just look younger.”

“Mexican’s are like that,” Meredith said. “Can never tell their age.”

“We’re prepared, you know,” Evan said. “We can teach the gospel and tractor mechanics, whatever is needed.”

“Good,” said Elder Sanchez. “There’s an irrigation project where you’re headed.”

Evan went quiet.

“We’re familiar with that kind of work,” Meredith said.

“Well,” Elder Haslam said. “It’s more of a water management project. During the wet season, the fields and roads, even their houses get washed away. So we’re helping the villagers build levees, and a series of drainage ditches, what’s most important is we teach them how to do it.”

 “Thought we’d start with a get-together,” Meredith said. “I brought Jell-o.”

“Awesome,” Elder Sanchez said. “I haven’t had Jell-o for over a year.”

It took nearly three hours to drive the fifty miles outside of Hyderabad, wedging first into the series of roundabouts, bumping against oxcarts and diesel trucks piled high with stalks of sugarcane; through the mud, passing the motor-rickshaws packed with schoolchildren; and then on to the bordering towns of gray, crumbling cement with doorways on the curbs and roads so narrow the tires of the car bumped either side like an amusement park ride. And everywhere vendors squatting with bunches of thumb-sized bananas or fried dough, or rancid meat. The rain lifted, but not the grayness.

“I love the colors,” Meredith said, watching three women in rain-soaked saris hurry across the road ahead of their car. More than once their driver swerved into the ditch letting another truck pass—bearing down on them, laden with half-naked laborers and bags of rice or bricks or more sugar cane.

“I don’t see many tractors,” Evan said, sitting uncomfortably in the back seat, clearing the window of steam in the humidity. The towns had thinned out and there were more fields, but scant machinery.

“I’m sure there will be lots of things for you to fix,” Meredith said.

After a few more miles, and one more near collision, the driver stopped at a small cement building with a palm frond roof.

Evan was nearly in shock. “This is where we are going to live for eighteen months?”

“Oh no,” Elder Haslam said. “This is our chapel. It is the only building in the village with indoor plumbing. Thought you might want to freshen up.”

Evan warily got out of the car. He looked about for the throngs of beggars and vendors who would descend on him. He held his elbows out. He wasn’t about to be jostled the way he was at the airport. But no one came. He slowly made his way to Meredith’s side of the car and helped her out. Elder Haslam opened a padlock on the wooden door and swung it open. The room smelled of days-old sweat and the dankness of a flooded basement.

“Two months ago there was three-feet of water in this building,” Elder Sanchez said. “We had to have our services on the roof.”

There was a single closet of a bathroom, with one toilet. Evan motioned for Meredith to go first; then for lack of anything else to do, he traced the waterline left on the wall, just below the pictures of Jesus.

“President Austin will meet us sometime today,” Elder Haslam said. “We don’t really go by watches since the rest of the population doesn’t either.”

“Like farming,” Evan said loudly trying to cover the sound of Meredith in the bathroom.

“I suppose,” Elder Haslam said. “So we’ll get you unloaded at your flat and maybe meet some of the locals before the president arrives.”

Meredith finished her turn in the bathroom and Evan stepped in. The door hung loosely on its hinges, and he coughed the entire time he peed, trying to cover up the embarrassing tinkling sound. He’d gotten older, that was sure, he thought to himself.

The flat was even smaller than the chapel. But the veil of clouds had parted a bit and there was sunlight spotting the landscape. The walls were gray cement, and on the roof were fresh palm fronds. The walls were adorned with the muddy handprints of children, and stones had been painted white and placed in a row leading up to the doorway. There was no door, so Evan and Meredith could see inside: flower petals scattered on the floor, two iron beds with thin mattresses, a wooden table, two chairs and a wash basin.

“It’s beautiful,” Meredith said.

“The village children decorated the outside, and the women did some clean-up.” Elder Sanchez said. “But I’m afraid Brother Dahiri is late building you a door.”

Evan stood peering through a doorway that was a foot shorter than he was; the word ‘situation’ running through his mind, repeating itself in the voices of his bishop, his son, and finally his father. He wasn’t about to let the missionaries wait on him like he was an old woman, so he grabbed two of the bags and struggled through the narrow door. He bent his head, lowered it onto his chest —a pack camel entering the eye of a needle, that narrowest of passages stepping down through the outer wall of Jerusalem. Upon entering the tiny flat, Evan dropped the bags, shuffled to one of the beds and sat down.

“Why don’t you two rest,” Elder Sanchez said, seeing Evan’s drawn face. “We can unload the rest of your bags.”

“Thank you,” Meredith said, limping to one of the wooden chairs and easing into it. “My knees aren’t what they used to be.”

Elder Sanchez smiled. “My mother used to say that.”

“Really?” Meredith replied. “Did she have the knee replacement?”

“No,” Elder Sanchez said. “She died.”

“I’m sorry,” Meredith said.

“It’s OK. We all die. My mother lived a saintly life; fed the missionaries every Sunday.”

“Well that’s good.”

The two young men finished unloading, paid the driver and stepped to the doorway to say they would be back in a bit, and for Evan and Meredith to get some rest while they had a moment, then disappeared. Evan was still staring straight ahead; Meredith approached him, put her hands on his knees and looked into his tired eyes.

“I think there’s more here than we can do something about,” Evan said

“We’ll just do what we can,” Meredith answered. “Now get some rest.”

Meredith helped Evan lie down on the metal bed and pulled off his shoes. Evan remembers his wife rubbing his feet for a moment, then feeling her presence beside him until he fell into a troubled sleep. His head buzzed and when he tried to push it away by tightening his eyelids, light flashed in his eyes and the strangest patterns formed in his mind. He couldn’t control what he was thinking and his thoughts were so lucid, so clear that he didn’t believe he was asleep at all. He stepped over rows of alfalfa, reached into the chestnut tree to find a toy truck in the branches, heard the church choir singing. It was as if all the images his life had stored up were dumped into his head and randomly examined. His heart raced. His breathing shortened and he woke up to a roomful of people, small brown people; children, half naked. He looked around the room for something familiar, and finally found Meredith, sitting among the children, reading a bible story to them. She looked up at Evan when she heard the bed squeak.

“Well, look who is awake?” she said.

The children turned and looked at Evan, thin and gaunt, pale and old, perhaps the oldest man the children had ever seen.

“Does this man know Jesus?” A small boy asked.

Meredith laughed. “Well, he is certainly old enough.”

“He can tell us m’am?”

“I think he needs his rest,” Meredith said. “Why don’t you show me where these beautiful flowers came from?”

The children filed out of the room and Meredith smiled at Evan the most beatific smile he had ever seen. The children clung to her hands and dress, she moved with them out the doorway and when she was gone, the sunlight lay down at the entrance. It was so bright Evan could not see beyond it, but could hear the children laughing and Meredith teaching them songs. Evan closed his eyes again, and the next time he woke up, it was gray outside and raining. Meredith was curled up on the other bed, sleeping. Evan struggled to his feet and stood at the doorway; but the light was gone and everything was gray. He wished he’d had the courage to stand up before, to move to the door and see everything in the light. But he hadn’t, and now it was gone.

“They’ve left,” Evan heard Meredith say.

“Who?”

“The children,” Meredith answered. “It’s been raining for some time. I really don’t know where they all came from or where they went. Cutest little things. They were just standing in the doorway, curious about Jesus.”

“You were reading from the bible?”

“Yes.”

“I thought we weren’t to do that?”

“Well, we are missionaries.”

“But it upsets the Muslims. We’re here to fix things.”

“I know.”

“Elder Sanchez said we can only teach in the chapel, and only if the father is present and wants to be there. That’s all.”

“OK. But I think we are going to be on our own for a while. Elders Sanchez and Haslam came by and said The Mission President has a parasite and won’t be out of bed for weeks.”

“So what should we do?”

“I think we should have a social,” Meredith answered smiling.

“I think we should unpack first,” Evan said. “Then we should find this Brother whoever and see why it takes so long to make a door.”

At night, in the village of Vudumudi, the men gather at the temple to smoke and chatter in Hindi or their tribal language. The women are at home, washing children or scrubbing down cooking pots with sand and soap. Some of them come to the well for water, but the men pay no attention to them. There is always a radio playing traditional Indian music somewhere in the distance.

Evan and Meredith sat on the steps of their flat.

“What time do you think it is?” Meredith asked.

“In Idaho or here?”

Meredith smiled. “One day in the field and already we’re lost in the work.”

“I’d say we’re just lost,” Evan answered.

“The stars remind me of home,” Meredith said.

“Same stars.”

“And the moon…”

“Same moon.”

“I could sit here a while…like we used to on our back porch after putting the boys to bed.” Meredith said.

“Those were good years, watching those boys wrestle around like a couple of bear cubs.”

Meredith put her head on Evan’s shoulder, held onto his arm and began to cry.

“What is it?” Evan asked.

“I just haven’t heard you talk about those years for a long time. It makes me happy.”

Evan wanted to tell Meredith how happy she made him, but he was choked up, and he couldn’t think of how to organize his words. Suddenly he could see the last 40 years as if they were forty days, laid out in every detail and denial; and Meredith, always there; weeping at the funeral while Evan stood emotionless; cross-stitching their boy’s name on a tapestry for the living room, letting her tears go every Wednesday at the cemetery while Evan waited in the truck. There were times in Church when she cried, times she said she could feel him beside her and Evan wanted to ask: “Who? Jesus? Or Evan Jr.?” But he never did. He stuck to the hymn and let Meredith cling to him, hold onto his forearm as if he were about to help her stand, but stayed sitting, always there to be physically strong. It was about that time when Evan began to feel Meredith, feel when she was thinking about him. The first time it happened, it was in church, during the sacrament. It was quiet. They sat motionless; Meredith with her eyes closed like always, Evan staring straight ahead, his mind on some checklist when a rush of warmth moved through his body, a kind of electricity. He glanced at Meredith. She smiled with her eyes closed, and that’s when he knew she was thinking about him. He felt it on and off for years, most of the time when she was close to him, but once or twice when she was in another room. Still, he never told her what he felt.

That night, since they had no door, they went to sleep in their clothes. The distant radio turned off. The lights in their flat flickered, pulsed, then shut themselves off and when a distant generator spun to a stop, Meredith and Evan kneeled down together and prayed out loud. It was their first night in India, and the first time they had ever said their nightly prayers together.

They awoke the next morning to a sea of brown faces, sitting around their beds, on their doorstep, peering in through the one window.

“What’s this?” Evan asked, rubbing his eyes.

“Look who’s back, and they brought friends.”

Evan sat up and rubbed at his gray hair. The children giggled.

“You must be quite the sight,” Meredith said.

“Apparently.”

“Please to read Jesus,” a small girl asked.

All the brown faces nodded.

“Well,” Meredith said, looking at Evan. “We were going to read anyway, in our own home, so if you listen in I guess it can’t hurt.”

A stern look crossed Evan’s face, but it dissipated when he felt Meredith thinking about him again. She grabbed her Bible and opened it up, flipped through the pages looking for a story. She had drawn pictures in red pencil on the pages to help her navigate—a fish for that sermon, two eyes for the blind man, a sun for the resurrection. She settled on the passages adorned with a sheep. “What man of you, having an hundred sheep, if he lose one of them, doth not leave the ninety and nine in the wilderness, and go after that which is lost, until he find it?” Then she handed the bible to Evan.

“Your turn,” she said.

Evan took the bible reluctantly. “And when he hath found it, he layeth it on his shoulders, rejoicing. And when he cometh home, he calleth together his friends and neighbours, saying unto them, Rejoice with me; for I have found my sheep which was lost.” He looked up into the brown faces and was struck by their beauty, their perfect shapes, their liquid, innocent eyes. It was then that he heard a harsh female voice yelling at the kids outside. Immediately, all the children jumped up and ran out of the flat. Three women entered; the shortest one carried a palm frond basket filled with bananas and papayas. One of the others carried a bottle of drinking water. “We are here from the church…breakfast for the missionaries,” she said. “So sorry about the children, ma’ms.”

Meredith and Evan both stood up.

“Namaste,” Meredith said.

The women laughed. “Assalamu-Alaikum. We are Muslim and won’t be pleased to be speaking Hindi.”

“Aren’t you Mormon?” Evan asked.

“Only on Sunday,” the short one said. “It pleases our families to be Muslim the rest of the week.”

“What about your husbands?”

“They are pleased to take this arrangement too. But there are Christians in the church. There is no Seventh-day Adventist congregation here anymore so they are Mormon today.”

“Are there any tractors in the village?” Evan asked.

“No machinery but the Jesus pumps,” she answered. “It is why we are Mormon too.”

“Why is that?” Meredith asked.

“The pumps are a miracle when they are working.”

“How long have they not been working?” Evan asked.

“Some time now. There is not enough faith in this village for Jesus to work.”

“Sounds like you could use a little knowledge,” Evan said.

“You’ll be gone like the others,” she said. “Missionaries don’t stay for long.”

And with that, the three women left.

“What about our door?” Evan called after them.

“Dahiri will come…” she called back without turning around.

Evan spent the next few days looking for a set of metric wrenches so he could fix the series of pumps; twelve of them and not a one worked. Each feeds a ditch that moves around the village and into a muddy river, that is if they did work. It would mean that the fields could be watered without flooding, the moving water would not let mosquitoes and malaria breed, and parasites found in the muddy paths that burrow into infant’s feet and knees would disappear. Evan discovered that each pump had basically the same problem: rusted out coils that needed to be rewound. He wished he’d brought a spool of copper wire. Meredith wished she’d brought a jell-o mold and a hot plate to boil water. They ate fruit and used the latrine out behind their flat, and everywhere they went they were followed by children, most of them calling Evan Jesus-Sir and begging him to read them a bible story. Sometimes he would take a break from a swamped pump, or stroll through the street market looking for copper wire and read a few passages to the children to keep them happy. Then he’d get back to the pumps. In a week he had most of the coils unraveled, solenoids scrubbed of corrosion and a new set of copper wound into place. But the skin on his feet was peeling off from standing in the water for hours at a time. Meredith, on the other hand, seemed to be reading to the children and women in the village all the time—beside the well, outside their flat, even on the steps of the Hindu temple. In return, what she needed just turned up at the flat: first a pot that could be used for a jell-o mold, and then the hotplate. Evan just shook his head. All this time he’d spent scrounging for tools and Meredith reads a few bible stories and things just show up. Lacking enough copper wire, Evan began greasing a flywheel. That’s when Kumar came splashing through the field. Kumar was a small boy with a shaved head—the remedy for lice, and a withered hand from falling into a fire when he was a baby. He had taken to Evan, followed him most places since he wasn’t big enough to work the fields with one hand yet. It was getting toward the end of the day and Evan was about to knock off when Kumar made the ruckus.

“Jesus Sir! Jesus Sir! The time has come, please to your presence. The door is complete. The door is complete!”

“Dahiri has finished the door?” Evan asked.

“Complete!” Kumar yelled. “You must come!”

Evan wiped his hands and rolled his wrenches up in the rag and stuffed them in a shoulder bag, then sloshed through the water and mud behind Kumar. When they reached the road on higher ground, Kumar ran ahead. Evan couldn’t run. He shuffled like a farmer that had worked too long, his back bent over, his legs a little unsure.

When Evan entered the village, there was a throng of people at his flat. The door was carried ceremoniously like a precious slab. There was singing, and flower petals falling from the sky. The men of the village moved the door above their heads toward the flat as if they all had a hand in its creation. The children struggled to touch it as it passed, jumped or begged their mothers to lift them. Meredith was standing in the doorway, wearing a sari and that beatific smile. When the door finally reached her, three men set it down carefully beside her. It was painted white and somehow reflected the fading sunlight onto Meredith. Evan finally made his way through the crowd to stand beside his wife of fifty-one years. Dahiri stood proudly with them, spoke in his tribal language to the crowd for over fifteen minutes, then, with the help of three other men, nailed the hinges of the door to the frame and demonstrated its swing. The crowd cheered. That night, for the first time since arriving in Vudumudi, Evan could undress completely. He stood in the middle of their small flat, poured water over his body and lathered up. It was the kind of soothing lather that was almost hypnotic in its sensual pleasure. At the end of it all, Evan poured a bucket of water over his head and rubbed at his eyes. “If I was a Catholic like the Mexicans back home,” Evan said, sputtering through the water, “this would count as a baptism.”

Meredith just smiled and shook her head. She had never been one to put any religion over another. When Evan was done, she blew out the candle and bathed herself in the dark.

The next morning, Meredith was up early boiling water, one pot for potatoes, another for jell-o. The children were outside the door. Evan hesitated opening it, enjoying the time alone. But Meredith prodded him. “There are people waiting,” she said.

Evan struggled to his feet and shuffled to the door. When he opened it, a flood of brown faces poured in. He sat down on his bed and began reading about Jesus, not from the bible, but from the Book of Mormon: ‘Therefore, whoso repenteth and cometh unto me as a little child, him will I receive, for of such is the kingdom of God. Behold, for such I have laid down my life, and have taken it up again; therefore repent, and come unto me ye ends of the earth, and be saved.’ Evan wiped at his eyes. He was weeping and didn’t know it. The tears just flowed out of him, natural as breath. They just came like unexpected guests, like the brown faces that appeared, then drifted off one by one. Evan continued reading, all that day, with the door open and his voice growing hoarse, and Meredith humming to herself, stirring potato salad, mixing jell-o, the stream of brown faces appearing, disappearing, napping on the floor. Meredith whispered to everyone who came by: “Social tonight at the Hindu Temple. We’re having Jell-o.” By late afternoon there were pots of potato salad, and pots of jell-o covered with plastic wrap and hung by twine in the latrine to cool. “Closest thing to a refrigerator we have,” Meredith said to Evan.

“Well don’t let anybody see you pulling it out of there,” Evan said. “They’ll think American’s are cannibals.”

Meredith stood in the middle of the flat wondering how she could possibly transport all this potato salad and jell-o. The children had gone by then, Evan had stopped reading an hour earlier. “We can use the door,” Meredith said.

“We’ve only had it for a day,” Evan answered.

“We give all that we have,” Meredith said. “And anyway, we’ll bring it back tonight.”

Evan reluctantly knocked the pins out of the hinges and laid the door across the two beds. Then he and Meredith stacked the pots of potato salad and jell-o on the door and walked it carefully out of the flat; then Evan turned around to lead the way, holding the door on the small of his back so Meredith could walk front ways. She limped a bit, and struggled with the weight on the uneven dirt path that led to a road, equally uneven. The children began to gather, cheering and running in circles around the food bearers; they sent for their siblings and parents and before long there was a procession of women and children, then the men came and quietly observed, some smiling, some wondering. Evan and Meredith were both sweating under the load. Children were waving palm fronds to cool them off. They trudged along, from the dirt road to the edge of a gravel road where the trucks sped by stacked high with laborers and sugar cane. They waited some time, crowded up so close to the speeding trucks that the wind would almost blow them backwards if it weren’t for the crowd of people against them from behind. Finally there was an opening in the traffic and the procession hurried across the road onto a narrow sidewalk that circled into a roundabout, and onto a bridge that spanned a muddy river that would’ve been much shallower had Evan finished the pumps and they were gorging the furrows with life rather than baking in the sun. By now the white shirt Evan was wearing was soaking wet, Meredith was limping along, sweat pouring out from under her wig into her eyes. Horns were blaring at the skinny children trying to keep up, who stepped into the road, waved palm fronds, dashed in front of trucks or rolled under ox carts to get close to the two white people; the tall man, bent under his load, his eyes steady on his footsteps, and the round woman in the plain-colored dress and low heels walking with a hitch in her hip, both of them straining under the weight of a door made from green wood and the heaviness of potato salad and jell-o and the expectations of so many brown faces who have never been to a Mormon social before. The sidewalk narrowed even more after passing through the roundabout. Evan and Meredith walked with one foot up on the curb and the other in the street, while keeping the offerings square on the door. Evan looked up for a moment and through sweat-blurred vision, sees the temple just across the bridge, on a small rise, situated so that the sunset during these months after the rainy season, bursts through its dilapidated columns. He wanted to rest, but the closeness of the traffic worried him. He tries to look back, but can’t crane his neck enough to see how Meredith is doing. What he also can’t see is a truck swing wide coming out of the roundabout to pass an oxcart and jump the curb to the sidewalk, hit its worn brakes too late and collide with Meredith; edge her into the railing on the bridge, just above her knee and send her headlong into the muddy river.

One end of the door, Meredith’s end, slams to the ground, spilling potato salad and jell-o on the sidewalk. The truck driver backs up, changes course slightly and roars away. The little brown-faced children pounce on the spilled food. Evan drops his end of the door and it scrapes the back of his legs badly. There is a moment lost when nobody knows what to do, then several of the men scream at a ferry crossing the river, scream to move upstream, but none of them can swim. Meredith has disappeared.

Meredith’s body is laid out on the door in the small flat, spanning the two beds. Evan spent more than an hour pulling leeches off Meredith’s body, and his while the villagers argued about the type of burial Meredith should receive. She was not Hindu. She was not Muslim. She was Christian, but was she a Hindu Christian or a Muslim Christian? The women of the village wrapped her body in linen and covered her with scented oil and flower petals. Evan wept for three days while the villagers argued. Elders Sanchez and Haslam sat at the entrance to the flat, sleeping on the porch, waiting. It rained. Evan couldn’t sleep. He watched the feint light come and go and could eat nothing. The arguing continued, sometimes a village elder would push his face into the room where Evan was sitting next to the corpse and shout something, or spit.

“Some of the men are upset about your preaching Christ to their children,” Elder Sanchez explained. “They see this as god’s way of punishing you.”

“We were only reading,” Evan said without much emotion.

“To some Muslims, that is an offense against god.”

Water from the rain gathered at the doorway, a rivulet formed and moved underneath Meredith, where it began to pool. Evan struggled to move his body to a dry spot where he curled up and began to pray, to ask god to forgive him of his pride, a pride that had gone back years and blackened his insides, sooted his touch and burned into despair, the last bit of wick in a candle until the light goes out. His head fell back against the wall. He lifted it and let it fall back again, pain shooting through his eyes. He slumped forward, grasping his knees and succumbed to the weight of his past, supplicating, petitioning God’s attention, mumbling the way he used to talk to Meredith in their youth, the woman who had taught him how to talk but could not teach him how to listen, not in fifty-one years of marriage, not until she was gone. His voice slowed, a tractor pulling uphill until the gravity is more than the combustion and it stalls. Evan fell asleep.

There’s a moment of grayness in the fields between the sunset and that time when the stars come out, Evan felt himself drifting among it, not knowing that he was asleep. He was a boy, dressed in white, standing up to his waist in the Snake River. His father pushed him under and he kept his eyes open, staring at the sun through the filter of green waves and feeling so hot that he thought the sun was burning through the thick water. He awakened to a small boy pulling on his arm; Kumar. “Please sir to follow; they have taken the wife of Jesus sir.”

Evan wanted to get up quickly, but his body wouldn’t let him, he got to his knees first, then stood, tottering for a moment and moved out the door. Elders Sanchez and Haslam are there. The rain has stopped, but the clouds remain, shackling the light from reaching the earth.

“Nothing we could do,” Elder Haslam said. “The Minister of Health said there could be disease. The Mission President said we have to abide by their laws. The old men consented so long as we don’t preach in this village anymore.”

“But where are they taking her?” Evan asked, his mouth so dry he could barely speak.

“Anthyeshti,” Elder Sanchez said. “Hindu funeral. Can you walk?”

“Yes, Evan said.

Kumar was tugging at his arm “Time of day sir, we must hurry.”

Weak and stiff from lack of sleep and food, Evan struggled to put one foot in front of the other, but soon his blood was pumping and he began to walk a little faster. They rounded a corner in the tight village and came upon the gray procession. Meredith’s body, laid out on the door, was held on the heads of six men, moving slowly, sweat dripping from their faces became caked with red dust from the brick factory where they’d worked all day, like blood trickling from their rag crowns as they bore their load—a white woman, round and heavy, a woman whom they had hardly known, yet a woman who had been the wife of Jesus-sir, who read of God to the children before being swept off the earth. A cool wind kicked up, but Evan was certain only he could feel it. The hairs on his arms stood up under the electricity of Meredith’s thoughts. Or maybe it wasn’t Meredith that was thinking about him, maybe it was Jesus; maybe it had been Jesus all these years, waiting. A few torches lit the way through the darkness. Kumar grabbed Evan’s hand and held it to his wet face. Evan reached down and lifted the boy up, held him in his arms as they shuffled along. Evan could feel his own heart beating against the heart of this small boy, he could feel Meredith in the crook of his arm, her hand where it had always been when they walked together, her warmth next to him, her way of guiding him without leading him as they moved in a crowd toward the park, to their place on the hill for the fireworks every fourth of July; Meredith cradling the baby in one arm, her free hand clinging to Evan, and Evan the father, holding his first son over his shoulder, covering his eyes as fireworks burst into the sky above them, as the flames burned away the darkness. It was so beautiful Evan wept.

“Jesus sir,” Kumar whispered into Evan’s ear. “For the door, you could forgive?”

“Yes,” Evan said, the night becoming almost as day with the funeral pyre burning; a sun floating just over the muddy fields, waves of humidity tumbling across its face. “Yes, I could forgive.”

I. DREAMS AND LITERATURE

The shape of dreams

That old self of mine who used to hole up in the library stacks to study for ten hours straight, that student who read more books than Wilt Chamberlain had mistresses—he’s been absent in the flesh, now, for many years.  I sometimes wonder if any of those books he once made it his business to know, which used to appear on everyone’s BA and MA English major’s lists, help now to shape my dreams.

It must be acknowledged that those classic novels and collections were usually more mannered than plotty, more character than concept-driven.  So my dreams, which partake of pulp fiction characters, supernatural elements, and Gothic romance twists, just like anyone else’s, at first glance seem to have more to do with the comic books I read when I was cheating on my literary diet, or with the thousands of hours of TV and sports I would rely upon to leaven my entertainment.

Yet it is equally true that even the most fantastic dreams can come across sounding quite boring to others; as nothing special.  To purify the raw ore, to produce poems and stories that will stand on their own right, it is not surprising when flying above the trees or a dog with two heads places second to conflict or dramatic irony.  Or so it goes for me.

So while my brain was picking up, like a magpie, bright odds and props in the usual places, perhaps what I was doing in that library was disciplining my mind, training it to think in terms of dramatic structure, alternate universes of association and allusion, and layers of subplot and subtext: developing what Northrup Frye called an “educated imagination.”

This might be the lasting benefit of majoring in such an impractical and impoverished field as the humanities in the first place.  The more we read, the more we give shape to our dreams.

II. DREAM LAYERS

“Our little life is rounded with sleep”—-Shakespeare

There are many stages of dreams and wakefulness.  When you are startled awake in the middle of the night, you might still be mired in the primordial ooze, with your dreams just a swarm of images that may or may not strike you or anyone else as full of portent.  But they make good source material for poetry or art.

When you are on verge of waking, your dreams become more lucid.  For me, the dreams that rise up out of the ooze can morph several times over until they reach the lucid stage, piling up new situations and props and dramatis personae along the way.  When I write down the dreams in the lucid stage, I always find myself starting to consciously tinker here and there and ending up with (usually funny) flash fiction.

Of course there is a percentage-wakefulness after you get out of bed, too, with layers of consciousness reaching all the way up to enlightenment.  But Shakespeare was right—dreams are what round your life off and are at the core of a person.  To dream is to grow, to self-heal, and to be.

III. THE DREAM-SELF

“Own it all”

Recently, an editor of a journal asked me what advice I would give to a writer who was just starting off.

For me, the best advice is simply to own it all.  Don’t think of yourself in the Western way, as the ghost in the machine, directing all conscious activity from the control center of the brain on down.  Think of yourself in the Eastern way, the way of the Vedas and the Upanishads, as the autonomic self turned on all the time, while asleep and unconscious, while asleep and dreaming lucidly, or even when fully awake and sending out its daytime avatar—that commuting, clock-punching, social-networking outer shell.  It simply makes better logical sense that way—people don’t stop being themselves for eight hours a night.

Provided the ghost allows one to sleep for even that long.  I remember hearing Christopher Hitchens, a very rational soul, stating in an interview that he didn’t much like sleeping because he felt that to lose consciousness was somehow to relinquish control.  To some extent, I used to feel that way, too, though I was probably accused equally often of being a “dreamer” and letting my mind wander while I was expected to be fully alert.

It’s not such a bad thing to let the mind wander, of course, if we may circle back now to the topic of writing.  If you are overly invested in your daytime avatar, or trying to go about the business of writing in a practical, self-help way, you are probably going to get your wires crossed.  Instead, learn to listen: take dictation straight from your dreams, practice writing unconsciously, and understand that everything you once thought the essential you was only an ego-shell, an avatar.  Then pick up a pen and try rebuilding yourself from the ground up.  I dare you.

IV. DREAM WORLDS

Familiar and unfamiliar places

There is sort of a reverse statute of limitations when it comes to dreaming for me.  I had dreams of childhood when I was a college student, dreams of the Minneapolis lakes after I had moved to the desert Southwest, and dreams of Tucson after I moved to Georgia.  The templates for all these places became more firmly fixed in my unconscious mind a few years or sometimes several years after the fact, perhaps for quite different reasons.

It could be that I am trying wistfully to escape backwards, not so much into the past as into the calmer inner recesses of my mind.  It could be that the brain’s synapses and scripts require periodic reinvestment and replacement: because the outward stimulation has been removed, the mental model of the place is in danger of hazing into a cloud, and so through dreams, the brain hits an inward refresh button.  Or it could be that time and distance have simply squeezed the place down into a more usable template for dreams in the first place.  When you are still living in a place, or new to a place, it’s too big to encompass.  You can dream a house, or perhaps a street, but the whole topography is not likely to show up through the reverse angle of the telescope.

That is why familiar places seem smaller to us as we grow older, because they have been resized to fit our conceptualizations several times over.  With the perspective of several years, they often fit neatly onto a zip file, which can be seized by the unconscious mind when it is dreaming and needs a template.

But it occurs to me that the same holds true for “storage files” for people and events and even ideas.  It takes time to encompass and to understand, to be able to adapt these as dramatis personae, plots and subplots, or themes.

Perhaps it takes less time for the prodigious intellect or the empath, the loner or agoraphobe whose interactions with others are caricaturized in the first place, or for the artistic prodigy who sees the world through a lens.

The rest of us have to wait until late middle age when memories simplify of their own accord, our relationships with others have fallen into neat grooves, or the worlds of our experience become as worn and creased as maps in a glove compartment.

Ever since I was a little girl, growing up in a village outside Buenos Aires, I was haunted by an old Ukrainian story.  I often heard it from my mother in a traditional song, her way of keeping intact the strings that tied her to her family and her homeland.  A past she and my father lost during the war.

Oh, do not go young man to the evening revels

For you’ll find the girls there are bewitching devils.

And the one with eyebrows most charming and dark

Knows every spell and will make you her mark.

She dug for herbs on Sunday

She rinsed them clean on Monday

She boiled the brew on Tuesday

And poisoned him on Wednesday

I listened and pictured a forest, a cauldron over an open fire and a young woman stirring the contents that she would feed to the unwitting young man. My imagination became dark and thick as did my eyebrows when I turned from childhood to adolescence.  What had the young man done to deserve death?  I did not find the answer until I was old enough to read the book written by Olga Kobylianska, and then I read and re-read it time and again.  The book’s Ukrainian title–V nediliu rano zillia kopala–means On Sunday morning she dug for herbs.

Olga Kobylianska was born in the southwestern region of Ukraine called Bukovina–land of birches.  The land lies at the foot of the Carpathian mountains which run across Ukraine’s western border and separate it from Poland, Slovakia, Romania, Hungary, and Moldavia.  When Kobylianska described the scenery in her novel–a remote village bordered by a cold stream rumbling from Chabanyza mountain, trees coming down from the top in thick rows, narrow passes bordered by grassy cliffs and a forest of white birches–it was like visiting a familiar spot.

My father was born not too far from here, in a village among firs and birches, in the shadow of a mountain.  When he told me about his childhood, his hikes through the mountains and valleys, he spoke with such passion that I felt I was walking with him.  I could see the craggy mountain passes, smell the lush grasses on birch forest floors and hear the distant mournful sound of the trembita–a giant wooden horn used by shepherds.

More of Kobylianska’s novel touched on the familiar.  Into a remote village at the foot of mount Chabanyzia, a band of gypsies arrived one day.  The elders of the village worried about these “dark visitors,” whose ancient sin doomed them to roam the earth forever.  Legend told how gypsies had denied shelter to Joseph and Mary on their flight through Egypt.  God cursed them and turned them into eternal wanderers.  In the story, the villagers only granted the gypsies permission to stay a few days.

Something about gypsies fascinated me, touched a deep secret in my gut.  Perhaps it was my own rootlessness, and a gnawing sense of doom.  Perhaps it was my fascination with our Romanian friend Madame Azha–a frequent visitor–who read fortunes.  Perhaps it was my father’s childhood stories about an old man, a Moldavian blind gypsy who played the violin at funerals.  I liked their darkness, their mystery, their otherness. It made me feel less of an outsider in a land where I did not feel I belonged.

On the second night of the gypsies’ stay, an uproar began.  Mavra, the young wife of voivode Radhu–the gypsy leader–gave birth.  When Mavra’s mother and the other women attendants shrieked on seeing the blond head, the secret Mavra carried for nine months was exposed.  Her lover’s seed had grown into a child.  It had been so different than with Rahdu.  She feared and respected her husband, but there had never been love, and no child.  Night after night in their tent, Rahdu took her with a desperation palpable on his moist skin.   But with her lover, the lovemaking had been in the shadow of the mountain, in the fields between the town and the camp–and the desperation was Mavra’s.  He was a nobleman who had come to their gypsy camp for weeks, his eyes burning with a blue flame until she finally succumbed.  Among fragrant high grasses she gave herself fully to a man whom she truly did not know.  Then he disappeared into the night on his elegant white horse and she never saw him again.

This was powerful stuff for a nine year old, and the story held me in a vice.  What did I know then of giving up body or soul to a man?

Nothing could mollify Rahdu’s anger, not even the pleas of Mavra’s mother or Andronati, Mavra’s father, elders of the gypsy clan.

“Kill the bitch and her white whelp,” Rahdu yelled again and again in the circle of men around a bonfire.  He strutted among them, threw fistfuls of gold coins for any man who would carry out the deed.  It was not easy to accept such a task.  The men were torn between their sympathies for their leader and the great respect they felt for the woman’s father–the elder Andronati.  They sat motionless, heads down.  Finally Andronati stood up.

“Listen to me, everyone,” he said.  “My daughter has sinned and must be punished.  If not by us today, then someday by the god who is above us all.”

He walked toward the voivide and faced him.

“My wife gave birth only once, and it was a daughter.  When you married Mavra, you became the son I always wanted.”

The old man  put his arms about the young leader and embraced him hard.

“I love you as my own child,” Andronati said, his voice breaking.  “Why stain your hands with death, Rahdu?  Leave her to her maker.”

“And what is to be of the white dog?” rasped Rahdu.

“Let me take them both away.  The child is doomed by his white skin–you’d tear him to pieces if he remained among you.”

His voice broke again and he continued in a whisper.

“He is better off dead–he belongs neither to our world nor outside–”

I identified with this child.  I did not feel part of any world.  Here I was, in a small village on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, born in Europe in a refugee camp, of parents whose homeland I had never seen, only heard about.  Who was I?  And into this murky whirlpool another rock had recently been tossed.

One day, in the spring of 1956, a few months before I turned ten, my father received a letter from Ukraine.  My parents had been trying to contact their families behind the Iron Curtain ever since they had arrived in Argentina.  It was not as simple as writing to them back home–under the Soviet Union’s demonic leader Stalin, anything seen as anti-Communist was a potential death warrant.  To have family in the West, was tantamount to treason, communication with those abroad was suicide.  It was better to assume they were dead, erase their existence, never to speak of them again. When Nikita Kruschev became the new Soviet leader in 1955, after Stalin’s death, he ushered in an ostensibly less repressive era.  It became barely possible to make contact with families back home.

When the letter from my father’s sister arrived, there was a big commotion.  My parents read the letter together and cried as they found out about the deaths of loved ones.  My mother’s parents had died a few years before without ever finding out what happened to their youngest child–my mother.  Til the end, one of the sisters said, they held to the belief that their Olychka, was alive somewhere.  The last time they had seen her was a few days before the beginning of the war, they knew nothing of her capture and move westward.  My father learned about his brother–slaughtered by the Bolsheviks during a massacre of students at the university. He was only nineteen.

The sadness lingered with us after this news.  But something else in the letter came out in bits and pieces weeks after its arrival.  My parents spoke in hushed tones, my mother appeared distressed, sometimes she cried.

I began to put the pieces together.  It was something about another woman.  Something about a wife left behind.  No, my father kept repeating in a whisper–it’s in the past, there was no love, you are the only one for me. And so I created a new life story for myself.  The other woman, my father’s first wife must have been my mother.  That explained my feelings of not fitting in, it explained the lack of documentation for my birth.  There was no birth certificate for me, my parents said it had been lost.  It explained what I perceived as my mother’s preference for my younger brother.  Of course, he was her legitimate son, I was the adopted child of some strange woman left behind in Ukraine. A dark-haired beauty with thick eyebrows.

On the third night after the child’s birth, Andronati laced wine with a sleeping potion, and passed the drink to all.  He gave some to Mavra as well.  And then, when everyone had drifted into heavy sleep, he placed his drugged daughter and grandchild on a horse, and took them away.

Far from the village stood a lone house behind a neat picket fence, surrounded by flowering trees.  It was the home of a wealthy landowner and his wife–childless for many years.  Andronati placed the infant on the front steps, chanted a few magic words, then  bent down and kissed his grandson on the forehead.  He mounted his horse again and sped away with Mavra.  From the distance he saw a light go on in the house and someone opened the door to the crying child.  On the other side of the mountain, in another village, Andronati left sleeping Mavra in the garden of a widow with a baby girl.  The following morning when he returned, the gypsies took up camp and left.

When I was twelve, I thought it would be nice to share the story with my friends in school.  I began translating the book into Spanish, page by page.  I was probably about one-half of the way done when my life changed again.  In 1959, my parents received notice that their application to emigrate to the U.S.A. had been approved.  This was not pleasant news for me.  I had begun to feel a part of Argentine society, the old feelings of reclusiveness seemed to have ameliorated, I wanted to stay.  But in 1960 my parents sold their house and all their possessions and the four of us–my parents, my brother and I–left Argentina forever to move to the United States.  The translation of the book was forgotten for a long time.

When Mavra woke up groggy in the garden, she knew she had been abandoned.  She wailed for her parents and her child, she tore her hair and scratched her face in anguish.  The widow found her and took her in.  For a time Mavra roamed the village and countryside in search of her band of gypsies, she inquired about an infant boy.  The only information was that the gypsies had taken up camp and disappeared.  No one knew anything about a child.  In time, like a wounded animal, Mavra staggered back to the one person who had been kind to her–the widow.  She settled down and became companion, servant, and a second mother to the widow’s little girl Tatyana.  And watched her grow into a beautiful young girl.

I never felt beautiful growing up.  I was too skinny, my nose was too long, everything was out of sorts.  I dreamed of turning into a swan someday, a femme fatale like Tatyana.

For many years, I forgot about Tatyana, Mavra, and the gypsies.  As I grew up, it became clear that my ideas of not being my mother’s daughter were just a childhood fantasy.  The other woman–my father’s first wife–was childless.

I moved on with life–married, had children, dabbled in writing.  And then one day I found the old book in some forgotten box and read it again.  All my memories came flooding back, and once again, I began to translate.  This time into English.

Mavra’s son, whom the farmers adopted and named Hryz–the Ukrainian nickname for Gregory–and Tatyana were growing up only miles away from each other, separated by a mount Chabanyza.  Mavra had turned all her pent-up love to Tatyana, and the little girl grew up with two mothers.  But when Tatyana was fifteen, Mavra’s begged the widow to allow her to live apart, high on the mountain.

“Go with God,” the widow told her.  “If you wish to live alone I can’t stop you.  Come help me out once in a while, that’s all you need to do.”

Every Sunday, Tatyana took the long walk with a basket of provisions to Mavra’s small hut.  She helped Mavra gather tubers and herbs that would become magic potions to cure ills and turn sadness into joy.  In the winter, as the fire crackled, they broke off stems and crushed dried leaves, placed the different plants into separate sacks.  Tatyana inhaled the mix of strange, powerful scents. She learned the ancient skills of enchantment.

On the other side of Chabanyza, Hryz had grown up too.  He was a wild young man, always clashing with his adoptive parents, always running off on horseback, sometimes for days.  The only calming factor was a lovely neighbor girl, Nastya, and a strange visitor.  Once, when Hryz was a young boy, he had met an old gypsy man and they struck up a friendship.  The gypsy continued to return each year at the time of the boy’s birthday with a gift and stories of his travels.  When Hryz was eighteen, he was betrothed to Nastya and their wedding was set for the following spring.

We all know what is to come—strange coincidences that bring people together—more likely to happen in reality than fiction.  One Sunday Hryz rode his horse through the forest on Chabanyza, when suddenly dark-haired Tatyana walked into his path.  He fell under her spell.  And she fell in love with him too; heart and soul.  Again and again they met in the forest, and loved each other.  They were two fire creatures and they loved as hard as they fought, their passion bordered on cruelty. Hryz was in love with Tatyana but his betrothal to Nastya weighed heavy on his heart.  She was the kindest person he had ever met, she loved him completely, she was docile as a lamb.  In the end, he did what he felt was right–he told Tatyana he had to let her go.  He said their love was doomed; the curse of many would fall on them if he reneged on his promise to Nastya.  Hryz mounted his horse and galloped into the forest.  Tatyana turned and ran to Mavra’s hut in the woods.

I also loved as powerfully as Tatyana and believed words of love.  Like Tatyana, I was betrayed.  A betrayal by someone you love is a kind of death.  It is the death of the present, the future, but worst of all it’s a death of your past.  Because all that you have experienced, all the joys you may have had, are negated by the betrayal.  You cannot even trust your memory.

“Oh, Mavra, I will die without him!” Tatyana cried.

She had wrapped herself around Mavra’s knees, sobbing desperately.

Mavra wept too watching the pain of the girl she loved.

“Don’t say that, you’re strong and beautiful.  There will be another who will love you true.”

“No,” Tatyana screamed.  “I don’t want another.  Hryz is the only one for me.”

“Your fate is sealed, my child,” Mavra whispered, “there will be no happiness with Hryz for you.”

“Please help me Mavra,” Tatyana moaned.

“I will try my dearest, I will try,” said the gypsy.  She pulled Tatyana up to her and wiped the girl’s tears.

“There is an herb,” she began in a soothing voice.  “There’s an herb that grows under the white stone.  It can bring back what was before.”

“Can it make him love me again?”

“Perhaps, my dearest.  We can try,” Mavra said.  “But we must be oh, so careful.  This herb is a powerful plant.  Just enough must be given, never too much.  Even a horse can die from ingesting too much.”

It was Sunday, a few weeks before the wedding.  Late in the night, Mavra and Tatyana went into the forest.  They pushed the white stone aside and pulled the herb that grew beneath it by its roots.  They laid it out to dry in the sun, ground the leaves and roots, added water from the spring and made a potion.  On Wednesday before the wedding Tatyana went to see Hryz with two glasses to make a toast.

“Here,” she said, pouring wine into both glasses.  “I come with forgiveness and wishes for happiness in your new life.”

Hryz took the glass and they made a toast.  And then he drank.

When Thursday came he was found dead,

Laid on Friday into his earthly bed

Saturday everyone discovered the sin,

Oh sweet child why did you poison him?

And so I shall I tell you–he had no pity on me

He said I was his lover but another one loved he.

I will not let her have him if he cannot be mine,

Cold earth alone will hold him till the end of time.

Andronati had come for the wedding, but instead of celebrating, he saw  his grandson laid to rest.  Mavra and her father were reunited on that fateful day and she then found out she had killed her own son.  The curse of long ago had come to pass–God will punish, if not now, then later.  Nothing she could have done would have saved her from her fate.

But there is another version.

In this one, I am Tatyana, crazed by the betrayal.  Madness takes over, and in my vision of the world, my lover cannot be with another.  My love makes a leap and in a flash turns to hate.

I read about lethal plants and learn how to extract their poison.  But it is winter and all the plants are asleep like one enchanted beneath the snow.  Then spring arrives and the narcissus blooms in every garden.  I pull one out by the roots, grind it with mortar and pestle, and create a deadly paste.  Then some Sunday morning, when I know he is away, I will let myself into his house.  There is an open bottle on his nightstand.  I pull apart one of the large capsules–horse pills–he liked to call them.  I empty the contents into the sink, spread the narcissus paste inside the empty vial, and put it back in the bottle.  I do it quickly, efficiently, with vinyl gloves to leave no trace.  And then I leave, and wait.

There you are my lover; this is what I’ve done

For this, I shall be punished and will live alone.

But for you my lover, here is your reward

Your eternal dwelling–each side a wooden board.

In this alternate universe’s version, the poison fails.  My lover does not die.

And all I am left with is the futility of vengeance gone awry.