University of the Damned

2007-01-22T11:36:00.000-08:00

Sister Strangers
Three months after her daughter was born, my younger sister, Deidre, married the father. Just before she walked down the aisle, Mom whispered to her, “You don’t have to marry him just because you have his kid.” Their relationship has been on thin ice ever since. That’s what happens in my family—tell the truth and get burned. The truth is something we don’t want to hear. It ruins our perception of things.
At the wedding, I was the Maid of Honor and all I thought about as I stood with my sister at the alter was whether or not my feet were going to swell because of the heels she made me buy. My future brother-in-law cried as he said his vows, leading me to conclude he was sobbing because he was getting married. It never occurred to me what a phenomenal moment that wedding was, what a big deal—the first of the three of us girls to go off on her own, braving our family’s checkered past, to begin her own family.
At the time of Deidre’s wedding I was dating a boy I thought I loved, but who treated me like a sex doll and cheated on me with other women. I never told my family anything about our relationship, but April, my youngest sister, had suspicions. Deidre, on the other hand, didn’t have time to care. Namely because, I now realize, she was dealing with similar problems, only she couldn’t just break-up. She was married.
Of course, I can’t prove my brother-in-law has ever cheated on my sister. I can’t prove he’s ever hit her or threatened to hit her. All I have are the following observations: At family gatherings he calls her Retard; Deidre’s called Mom on more than one occasion, asking if she and the girls can move in, only to have the phone ripped from the wall; I’ve heard my brother-in-law say, “If she ever divorces me she won’t get shit. This is my house. Those are my kids. I make the money”; he calls April That Bitch Sister, and me That Lesbian Sister and when their oldest daughter was six years old she said to me, “I don’t want to go to college like you, Auntie, because it makes you too smart for your own good.” That same daughter calls Deidre Retard.
But my sister married this man, not me, and it was her conscious choice. All I can do is reflect on myself with my college boyfriend and suspect that my sister is married because she’s a little like me—afraid of not being loved. I tell her these things, but she yells at me and insists I’m crazy, that I shouldn’t project my relationships onto hers. That her life’s normal. Maybe I’m the one who’s screwed up.
**
April copied Deidre’s family plan to the letter—baby at eighteen and married the next year. Except April’s husband is likable—he tells fart jokes at the dinner table and calls April by her name. A typical conversation between April and me goes something like this:
Her: Have you heard from Deidre?
Me: No, she’s not talking to me because I called her husband an asshole.
Her: God, she’d never talk to me if she couldn’t get over that. I’m sure she’ll call in a few days. Anyway, they just got a new [fill in the blank with any high-priced useless gadget].
Me: What did they get that for?
Her: Because it’s expensive.
(We both sigh.)
Me: She’s on me about kids again.
Her: That’s all she ever thinks about. She really needs a life.
(We both sigh again.)
We’re awful. We think because we work and juggle family that we have a life. We think just because we’re united in our disdain for her husband and not afraid to talk about it that we’ve got love so much better than Deidre. Really neither one of us knows how she passes her time when her oldest is at school and the youngest is napping. Really, we have no idea about her husband’s capacity to love her. Recently, my stepfather said to me, “Oh give Deidre a break. She has so many damned crosses to bear.” My initial reaction to this comment was that everyone in our family has a cross, and if her’s is so much worse than the rest of ours then she’s kept herself nailed to it.
**
When we were kids, I liked April more than Deidre. She was glowing and tough; Deidre was dark and dainty. Deidre also didn’t look anything like us. She had brown-black hair that was as thick as a horse’s mane; we had wispy blonde locks. Her nose was smaller, button-like, and April and I had bulbous noses like Mom. Deidre was always wetting the bed, whining, carrying around a doll and playing in a corner. April rode her hobby horse like it was a bucking bronco. Even though nearly a four-year gap separated our ages, there was no contest which one I’d choose to build a fort with. It was April who always hugged my legs and hid behind me in front of strangers. Deidre just side-squeezed me, as if a handshake would be more comfortable.
It’s hard not to love someone who won beauty contests like April did when she was a baby. Deidre and I were God’s rejects—the experiments of our parents’ reproductive systems until they could perfect April. She was one of those white-haired angels that women cooed over at the Alpha Beta supermarket, so I thought I had to coo over her too. Each time she won a new ribbon, Mom put it into the curio cabinet where she kept her other prized possessions: her salt and pepper shaker collection. In the few photos of April with our biological father, he’s always holding her in front of the cabinet, showing her the beauty ribbons. She’s laughing at the big blue bows, and he’s smiling with his squinty eyes. April was too young to have any memories of him, though. The man in the pictures with her and the beauty ribbons is a complete stranger.
Of the three of us, Deidre was the closest to our father. He bought her a T-shirt for her fourth birthday that read Daddy’s Girl across the front, although he’d misspelled her name on the back. In our long-abandoned family photo album, Deidre’s always being held by him or sitting in his leather recliner. If I got a new toy the first thing he’d say was, “Remember, you have to share with DeeDee.” She tore the eyes off my teddy bears and pulled off my He-Man’s head. The one time I flushed her Barbie in the toilet, my father whipped me until I fainted. At an early age I learned to fear him, and I suppose I hated Deidre because she didn’t.
**
So many wrenches have been thrown into the gears of the relationship I have with my sisters it’s a wonder any of the cogs are moving at all. The fact that, when we were kids, our father was arrested and sentenced to life in prison for the rape of seven women in Los Angeles County wasn’t the start of our demise, but it certainly didn’t make us any closer. By then I was nine and Deidre was seven and already reserved and distant. Neither one of us knew what rape was, really, but we knew it was something to be ashamed of. We couldn’t even look at each other.
April, on the other hand, was completely oblivious and made it easy to forget about our father. We were boisterous together. I was a big dog on the street because I’d just gotten a boy’s BMX that could haul ass. And April was my mate riding at my side on my tiny old red Schwinn. When I got in trouble she cried.
But as April grew up and began to forge her teenage identity, I left for college. The friendship we built was based on weekend visits and summer vacations spent working in retail stockrooms. I knew less about my sisters than I did about my college pals. Then we got older; I moved further away from my childhood home. Now the only contact I have with my sisters is a week during the Christmas holiday and our telephone conversations. A typical call to Deidre goes something like this:
Her: So have you thought about having a kid yet?
Me: Well, it’s really not a good time. I’m still getting used to my job and I want to publish and travel. Those are a little more important.
Her: You’re not getting any younger. What could be more important than kids?
Me: I have other plans.
Her: Like what? Wait, now you’re moving to Africa, right?
It’s an uncomfortable conversation for me first because I feel guilty for living far away and not being a regular fixture in her life. Second, what I really want to tell her is Just because some people have children doesn’t mean everyone wants them. Some of us want convertibles and quiet nights on porch swings. But I don’t want to devalue the life she has. She made a choice to create a stable environment for her children to grow up in. I imagine her trying to recreate the few years she had with both of our parents in our home, when on the surface we all looked normal.
I cringe. The memories I have of my father I wouldn’t push on my worst enemy, let alone my child. But Deidre and I don’t remember things the same way.
Once I asked her, just after she’d had her first daughter, what she’d tell the baby when she asked about our father. “Why won’t she think our step-dad is her papa?” Deidre said.
“Are you kidding? You don’t even call him dad. Don’t you think she’ll get suspicious?”
“Kids believe what you tell them. She won’t have to know.”
I imagine Deidre in her house, weaving a tale of our father’s existence like Penelope weaving her nightly cloth. I wonder if she unravels it every evening and begins again. Will she be able to tell the same story for twenty years? Will it stave off any truths she’s long forgotten? Will she start to believe it herself?
I have few memories of my father. They’re vague recollections, a fog that becomes less than vapor if I try to hold onto it. But the feeling I have when I think about him is always the same—a cold ball in the pit of my stomach, sweat running down my spine. I envy my sister, her ability to weave and forget.
**
Once in the spring of my kindergarten year I got off the bus only to find our house in the middle of the desert empty. This was before Latch-Key-Kid America and Mom always stayed home. She never had a reason to go anywhere, to hear my father tell it. But today she wasn’t there. I went around to the back of the house, swinging my book bag at the green tumbleweeds coming up around our foundation. I played on the swing set for a while, then tried the garage door only to find it locked. I was in trouble, I knew, because I needed to use the bathroom. I never used the one at school because it was off a dark corridor behind the classrooms. Every day I’d get off the bus, throw my bag in my room, and head for the toilet. Today I didn’t know what to do.
I scanned our neighborhood. Each house sat on its own acre. Some yards were like ours, bare save for tumbleweeds and toys, others were fenced and manicured. From the backyard I could tell the Deitmeyers were home because their barn door was open. Mom’s friend, Rhonda, who lived at the end of our road was home too. But the closer houses, ones whose bathrooms I could make, were deserted.
I opted to do my business in the tumbleweeds behind the house. They grew the thickest under the kitchen window, and with my notebook paper in hand I was finished in no time. What to do with the evidence? I picked it up with more notebook paper and tossed it all into the back field. It was then that Mom’s Ford sedan came down the road fast, the tires jiggling on the ruts.
The second she got out of the car I told her what I’d done and started to cry—I knew I should be ashamed. I kept blubbering, “I could’ve waited. I’m sorry.” April started bawling too. Deidre tumbled out of the car, gaping from me to Mom. Then she said, “You took a dump?”
Before we went into the house Mom made sure I’d thrown all the used notebook paper into the trash can. We combed the field looking for my other evidence, but couldn’t find it. By the time we were done, Mom was crying too, looking across the acres at the other houses and cursing herself. She hugged me while April twisted around my legs and Deidre sat in a swing.
We went into the house and Mom unloaded the groceries she’d been out buying while I was home alone. She started dinner and I changed into a clean pair of pants. Just before my father was due home Mom sat us down on the couch like she was going to take our picture, April between the two of us. But instead of pointing a camera she squatted down and said to the three of us, “Don’t tell your father about this. Don’t say anything. It was nobody’s fault. Okay? It’s just there’s some things that we shouldn’t talk about.” She looked us each in the eyes. “This is bathroom stuff. It’s not funny. It’s a secret. Got it?” We all nodded and in the pit of my stomach I knew that to tell would be a bad thing.
I thought she gave the warning for me, so my father wouldn’t add insult to my embarrassment. But after dinner that night, when my father took Deidre onto his lap and asked what her day had been like, Mom interrupted, “Hey you two, come and get it. I made DeeDee’s favorite dessert, strawberry shortcake!”
**
April knows about the poop story because I’ve told her about it a thousand times, not because she remembers it firsthand. “It was the only secret we had from him,” I’d tell her. “And how stupid was it? But we did it. He never knew I had to shit in the yard.” We laugh, but the cold ball in my stomach returns when I think about what he might have done to me, to Mom, if any of the neighbors had seen me squatting in the tumbleweeds.
April also knows about the scar on the back of my head. A few years before she was born, when we were still living in an apartment and Deidre was just learning to walk, I’d been playing in the small square courtyard off our front door. Somehow I tripped into the wall separating the courtyard from the parking garage and gashed the back of my head open. How I fell was never determined, only that I needed stitches and that my father had been with me at the time.
Knowing these things April still attempted to have an epistolary relationship with our father when she was thirteen. The letters would come to the house stamped GENERATED FROM FEDERAL PRISON on the front and back of the envelopes. I’d hide them if a friend was coming by—I never told anyone about my jailed father. All of my friends at my high school, a high school I transferred to in order to get away from everyone who knew the truth, thought he was dead. That’s what I told them and they had no reason not to believe me. Subsequently I didn’t invite them over to my house where any minute my sister could prove I was a liar. I never knew why she wrote the letters, but I like to imagine it was to put a life with the pictures of the man holding her in front of her beauty ribbons.
She only talked to me about them once. “He asks about you,” she said, as we were sitting at the dining table doing homework.
I lit a cigarette and tried to finish my last trigonometry problem. “I don’t give a shit.”
“Well, he thinks it’s great you’re going to college.”
“How does he know that?” My ears burned suddenly and April looked away. “Are you telling him about my life?”
“No. Not really.” Her voice was tiny and she hid her eyes behind her platinum bangs.
“I don’t want you talking about me. There’s all kinds of stuff you could talk about. Why don’t you ask him why he’s in jail. I’m sure he’s got a lot to say about that.”
For a long time she was silent, moving her pencil over her notebook and staring at her open text. Then she said, “He said he was innocent.”
“And, of course, you believe him.” I scoffed and crushed out my cigarette.
“He said you wouldn’t. That you never liked him.”
“I never liked him. Yeah, it was me. I did this to myself, right?” I pulled my hair away from the back of my neck to show April my scar. “You think a father who liked their kid would let this happen?” She was quiet, and tears were pooling in my eyes. I slammed my books closed and I went to my room to smoke.
I heard Deidre through the wall talking on the phone to her best friend. “No you can’t come over. My sisters are fighting right now. Oh,” she said, “Joyce’s is mad,” but she didn’t tell what I was mad about. I ended up getting so angry that night, I punched a hole in the wall between our bedrooms. A few months later April quit writing her letters.
**
As far as I know, my father never touched the three of us sexually. I think I’d be the authority on it since I’m the oldest, but it’s not something we’ve ever discussed as a family. How could we when the three of us are like strangers? Plus, something of that magnitude would be like poking a dirty finger into a festering wound. The nagging fact that we never received psychological analysis during his trial, and that I’m the only one of us that I know of who’s seen a shrink or suffers from depression, grates on my nerves. There’s no way to know for sure if my sisters were harmed in any other way unless I come out and ask. But something tells me April wouldn’t remember, and Deidre wouldn’t tell me anyway.
I try to recall living in my father’s house, try to conjure the image of him visiting my bed. But the only memory I have of my bedroom was when an intruder popped my screen, climbed through my window, and made his way into the bathroom across the hall to look for prescription drugs. I ran to my parent’s room and my father took a nickel-plated shotgun from the closet and made the man leave. Mom slept with me that night.
No, at least on my part, my father reserved his physical contact for the times when he was angry. He’d trip me for no reason, bruising my knees so badly they were purple for an entire year. He threw a baseball at my mouth and split my lip because I couldn’t ground the ball during T-ball practice. He held me up by the neck against a door jamb until I couldn’t breathe. Strangely enough, it’s his anger I can accept. If he was that mad at me, that repulsed, I know he never touched me.
Among the photos of us, though, there’s one that’s disturbing. We’re all sitting on his lap while he reclines in his favorite leather chair. On the surface, if you don’t know anything about us—if you don’t know that beneath my pink jogging suit I’ve got bruises up and down my legs or that April’s almost choked on a chicken bone that day, or that a few short months from that moment he’s going to be arrested for serial rape—we don’t look like we’re strangers. We look like one of those photos that come standard in 8x10 frames. I’m next to his left knee, smiling so big I’m all mouth. April’s on his knee, laughing so hard she’s as purple as her jumpsuit. Right on my father’s lap is Deidre, wide-open eyes fixed on the camera, her lips pursed. And behind her, peeking out from over her right shoulder, is my father’s grin.
Maybe my step-father is right, Deidre is bearing a great weight. My mind returns again and again to the Daddy’s Girl T-shirt she got when she was four. And to the man she’s married to now. Really, because I feel more like a stranger to Deidre than a sister, I have no reason to like or to dislike her husband. They’re any couple I could meet on any given day at a play or a park where it’s obvious the man is overbearing. I come home and think to myself That woman needs help. Doesn’t she have a family she could go to? The cold ball hits my stomach. I’m so afraid of getting burned by the truth I let our fragile relationship move on. I get so mad at myself for not having the courage to dial Deidre’s number and ask for the truth that I throw the telephone across the room. I wish I wasn’t afraid to ask her what happens during a typical day in her home. I wish a hundred times over that I didn’t believe in secrets.

2006-10-01T08:39:00.000-07:00

The Killing Jar

By Andy Davidson

Note: Guys, this is my detective character. I'm not sure I mean this as a publishable piece so much as an exploration of characters, style, etc. to get a handle on him before I write his longer work. FYI. -- AD

Sam Quint was eating a ham on rye at his desk when the bell above the office door chimed and the old man in camouflage pants entered. It was half past noon on a Tuesday. The man was tall and thick through the middle, wore rimless spectacles, and possessed a mane of bushy white hair. He leaned on a wooden cane and clutched a gallon-sized glass jar with a blue metal lid close to his chest. Inside, atop a bed of rotted bark and leaves, was the biggest black beetle Quint had ever seen. The detective set his sandwich on its wax paper wrapping and rose to his feet, brushing crumbs from his white slacks as he rounded his desk. “Fascinating coleopteran,” he said, bending forward to inspect the jar.

“You know beetles, sir?” The old man’s voice was thick with a combination of accents Quint couldn’t place. His pants had Velcro flaps and he wore an olive colored vest with a half dozen zippered pockets.

“I collected butterflies when I was a boy,” Quint said. “Does that count?”

The old man narrowed his eyes.

“How may I help you, Mr.…?”

“Oberwart. My name is Ari Oberwart.”

Quint gestured at one of two green vinyl-padded chairs opposite his desk. Oberwart cast a glance over his shoulder, through the open blinds of the office windows. Outside, the parking lot of the Twin Pines shopping center was bright and empty save a lone blue pickup parked in the shade. The old man grunted and took a seat, placing his jar on the desk next to the rolodex. The beetle—as big as Quint’s fist—lurched against the glass

Quint sat down and picked up the remaining half of his sandwich. “Do you mind?”

Oberwart waved impatiently.

“Tell me then, Mr. Oberwart, what can I do for you?”

The old man sat lightly on the edge of his chair, hands clasped atop his cane. “I have seen your ad in the Sunday paper and I wish to employ your services.”

“In what capacity?”

“Two nights ago, some—”

The old man growled a word in a language Quint didn’t immediately recognize.

“—stole a number of my specimens. His identity is the mystery.”

“Specimens?”

“Large African scarabs. Family Scarabaeidae, subfamily cetoniinae, tribe goliathini, genus goliathus. Giants, Mr. Quint. I breed giants.”

Quint swallowed a lump of sandwich. He wiped his hands on his pants and drew the glass jar closer. Inside the beetle trundled a brief circle and raised its antennae. “Stolen giants,” he wondered.

“Six, to be precise. Goliath beetles bred in captivity are worth a great deal of money, Mr. Quint. This handsome fellow here is worth five hundred dollars.”

“The five-hundred-dollar handsome,” Quint said, turning the jar atop his desk planner.

“Will you help me?”

Quint leaned back in his chair and steepled his fingers beneath his chin. “I gotta ask, Mr. Oberwart, why come to me? Why not go to the police? Stolen property’s not usually my thing.”

Oberwart’s eyes narrowed. He leaned forward on his cane. “I do not wish to involve the authorities.”

“Again, sir, I ask why.”

“I’m afraid, Mr. Quint, I have not been entirely forthcoming with you.”

“If you could be, please.”

“I regret to say that I am not a U.S. citizen. My visa….” He spread his hands and shrugged.

“I see,” Quint said. He looked from Oberwart to the goliathus. The beetle had tossed aside a piece of bark and was burrowing into the leaves with its toothed front legs. “My rate,” Quint said, watching the scarab, “is thirty dollars an hour plus expenses.”

“How many hours?”
“Assuming you want me only to recover any stolen property, I should think no more than ten or twelve.”

“That is satisfactory. Obviously, I do not care to press charges, only to have my beetles returned.”

“Very well, Mr. Oberwart. What say I drop by your place this afternoon around four and have a look at your setup? I’ll bring along our standard contract for you to sign. My assistant usually draws these up. She’s out to lunch just now.” Quint pulled a black notepad and pencil from a desk drawer. “Your address?”

“Morning Glory Mobile Manor. 614 West Avenue, lot C. You will see pink plastic birds from the street…”

Quint nodded. “I know the area, sir.”

“These birds, I do not understand their attraction.”

“Nor do I, sir. Until the afternoon then.”

The two men rose. Quint was about to offer his hand when Oberwart seized his jar without ceremony and started for the door.

On the sidewalk outside, the old man waved at the blue pickup under the trees. The driver, a thick-armed redneck in a sleeveless T-shirt, Confederate ball-cap, and sunglasses, cranked the pickup. He pulled alongside the curb in front of the office and leaned across the cab to open the passenger’s door for the old man, who set his jar in a pile of rags in the middle of the seat and climbed in after it.

Quint reached for the phone as the truck pulled away.

After two rings a girl’s voice answered, crackling with static: “Yeah, boss?”

Quint heard the rattle of a fast food kitchen in the background.

“Janie? I can barely hear you.”

“I’m at the Burger Dump with Alice and Mary. It’s loud. What’s up?”

“I need you to find out everything you can about beetles.”

“Like the group?”

“Like the genus goliathus. African scarabs. And not just size and mating habits either. We’re talking value. What’s a giant winged beetle worth to the average entomologist?”

“Are you on the new cell?”

“What?”

“The cell phone I got you. Are you using it?”
“I—yes.”

“No you’re not. You’re on the office phone. I know because I’ve got caller ID. Just like you’ve got. On your new cell phone.”

“Janie.”

“It’s the twenty-first century, Squint.”

“Janie.”

“I know I know. Beetles. Check. I’ll drop by the county library on the way back. There’s this cute guy in reference.” There was a pause. “Anything else?”

“Yeah. Go to the courthouse and find out if one needs a permit to breed insects.”

“Eww.”

“And stop by the sheriff’s station, too, will you? Talk to Grover. He owes me one for that business with the carnival people last fall. Have him run a name through the usual databases. Last name O-b-e-r-w-a-r-t. First name A-r-i. Address 614 West Avenue. Pull up whatever public records you can find.”

“Who’s this?”

“New client.”

“And why are we running a background check on a new client?”

“Call it unusual circumstances.”

“You’re the boss.”

“If I’m not here I’ll be at the Beacon. Say hey to the gals.”

“Will do. And take the phone.”

She disconnected.

Quint dropped the receiver in the cradle. He opened his desk drawer and stood staring down at the little silver phone nestled in the paper clip tray like some weird, futuristic egg incubating. He closed the drawer. He crumpled the remains of his sandwich and tossed the ball at the wire wastebasket by the filing cabinet.

It glanced off the rim and rolled beneath the legs of the hat stand.

Quint didn’t bother to pick it up. He grabbed his hat and hit the door.

From a back corner booth at the Beacon, he had a clear view of his office six storefronts down between the Wondermat and the Blood, Sweat, and Shears beauty salon. The diner—a greasy spoon run by a full-blooded Nez Perce Indian named Chapowits—was empty save one of the long-haired kids that worked at the Filmporium next door; the kid, whose name was Fitch, spilled over a stool at the counter eating a cheeseburger. The detective was on his third cup of black coffee, the funnies of the Morris County Monitor open and unread before him, when Janie’s yellow square back zipped into its regular space outside.

“I’ve been trying to call you,” she said, thumping into the seat opposite Quint’s. She slipped a green suede satchel from her shoulder, tossed her keys on the table, and immediately set to thumbing numbers on her cell phone. Her short nails were colored the same bright shade of red as her hair.

Quint folded the paper and set it aside. “Do you know what I’ve been thinking about ever since our new client walked in? I’d forgotten—”

“It picks up right away, see. Here.” She thrust the cell phone at him. Her cheeks were flushed from the afternoon heat. “Listen.”

Quint took the phone. He heard: “You have reached the office of S. Quint Investigations.”

“This is you,” he said.

Janie reached for and unrolled Quint’s silverware.

“If you are calling regarding a pending investigation, please press one. If you are calling to hire a professional investigator, please press two. All other inquiries please press three.”

Janie snagged Quint’s coffee. “Press three.”

He did.

“We apologize for being unable to take your call at this time. After the tone…”

Quint held it away. “What do I do now?”

Janie poured a fall of sugar into the coffee and banged the spoon around. “It’s voicemail. It’s recording.”

“I don’t want it to be recording.”

“So hang up.”

“How do I do that?”

“Press the button or close the phone.”

Quint snapped the phone shut and dropped it on Janie’s placemat.

“I wanted you to hear,” she said. “That’s what I hear every time I try to call you on your phone. Because it’s off. If you’re not going to use the thing—”

“It seems complicated,” he said. “Simple is better.”

Janie shoved the phone into her satchel. “So fire me. My practical science prof at Morris County Community College is just dying to give me a position in his office.”

Quint leaned forward, elbows on the table. “What you got?”

She grinned. “I got a date with the new guy in reference.”

“A new guy? Lots of turnover in reference these days.”

“Most men can’t handle reality.” She sipped her coffee. “He’s really cute.”

Quint snapped his fingers.

She drew a brown manila folder from her satchel and plopped it down. “Everything you ever wanted to know about big dirty bugs. Gross.” She pulled another folder and slid it across the table. “Everything there is to know about your Mr. O-b-e-r-w-a-r-t., address 614 West Avenue, lot C.”

The folder was empty.

“Nothing in criminal or civil records. No driver’s license, no tax information. Rental property’s registered under the Morning Glory landlord, Tim Poole. Your new client might as well be a ghost.”

Quint closed the folder.

“What do you think?” Janie said.

Quint glanced at his watch. “I’m meeting him in two hours. I’ll use the time between now and then to bone up on beetles. Meantime, you draw up a standard contract and keep digging. Try the landlord, Poole.” He paused, considering. “Can you access visa records?”

“Like a credit card? Sure.”

“No, travel visas. He’s not from around here. He his visa was expired. He spoke in a language, Russian maybe….”

“We’d need his signature for a third-party request, have to mail it off.” Janie bit a nail with no thought for the polish. “You know, people without paper trails generally have things to hide. What if this guy’s, like, a deranged Nazi?”

“We’ll burn that bridge later. Right now he’s a paying client. Prep the forms for me, including the third-party request. Bring them back here when they’re done, will you?”

“You need a ride?”

“I’ll take a Green Cab.”

She gathered her things and slid out of the booth. She’d gone a dozen steps when she turned on the heels of her red Converse sneakers. They squeaked on the linoleum. “Hey, boss.”

Quint looked up from a diagram of goliathus orientalis.

“Earlier, what were you thinking about?”

“Sorry?”

“When I came in, you said you were thinking about something you hadn’t thought of in years. The old man made you remember. What was it?”

“Butterflies,” Quint said. “I used to collect butterflies when I was a kid.”

Janie tucked a lock of red hair behind her ear. “Be careful, Squint.”

He flashed a smile.

She tossed a brief salute and left.

At 3:57 p.m. the Green Cab, a 1983 Caprice the color of fresh limes, dropped Quint at the entrance to Morning Glory Mobile Manor. An iron rainbow arched over the mouth of the trailer park’s gray gravel drive. A flock of pink plastic flamingoes grazed in the grass on either side. The rocks in the drive were salted with broken sea shells.

Lot C was at the far end of the row, more a converted camper than a mobile home. The trailer itself was short and round and resembled nothing so much as a freakish mushroom sprung from contaminated soil. The overgrown yard was huge compared to others in the park. It was enclosed by a rusted chain link fence.

Quint entered through the gate and followed a barely visible flagstone path. He was about to ascend a set of wooden steps and knock on the door when Oberwart lurched around the end of the trailer, propped by his cane. “Detektiv!” the old man called, waving Quint over. “Here. Come this way. I will show you the damage to my laboratory.”

Quint surveyed the rest of Morning Glory. Not a soul was stirring in the late afternoon. Only a mangy orange dog lay panting in the shade beneath the neighbors’ mobile home, staring out from its cool dry bed with rheumy eyes.

They rounded the end of the trailer and there, in the middle of the backyard, creeping with potato vine and saw briars, was the old man’s laboratory: a small, makeshift structure like a poor man’s greenhouse—corrugated fiberglass walls, a rusted tin roof.

Oberwart fumbled a set of keys from a vest pocket. “I changed the lock after the break in.” He inserted his key into a silver padlock screwed into the door’s aluminum frame, just above a section of scored metal where the previous lock had been.

“Looks like they forced it with a crowbar,” Quint said, running his thumb over the metal. “Have you ever had trouble like this before?”

“Never.” Oberwart paused, hand on the latch. “Please, do not touch anything.”

They went in.

“Welcome to my bughouse,” the old man said.

The air inside was moist and smelled of earth and decaying plant matter. Along both walls were long wooden tables lined with large glass terrariums, some fitted with fluorescent lights. In the greenish-blue gloom Quint could see shiny black beetles the size of baseballs working in six-inch layers of leaves and wood, the intricate patterns on their backs pearlescent beneath the artificial lights. Under the tables were plastic buckets of rotting leaves and bark, bags of peat, old metal watering cans, coconut husks and cobwebs.

Oberwart crossed to a work table at the back of the shed.

“The tanks without lights,” Quint asked, “are those for larvae?”

“Good, Mr. Quint. Good. The larvae live inside the substrate so they have no need for light. This particular substrate is a special cocktail of my own invention: equal parts rotting mulch and leaves—there is oak, elm, some beech wood—and a dash of coconut fiber for texture, eh?”

“What was taken, exactly?”

“You see the two empty spaces.” Oberwart pointed at the table to his left. “Here were two fifty-gallon terrariums populated with breeders: two females, one male per tank.”

Quint drew a penlight from his coat pocket. Where the tanks had sat were a few withered leaves and a dead brown spider. He squatted, peered under the table. At the floor.

“Footprints in the dirt here.”

“These I did not disturb.”

“Maybe not these, but any leading in have certainly been trampled. How heavy were these tanks?”

“I had not moved them since I filled them. Even if I wanted to I could not pick them up.”

“Three pairs of sneakers, one pair of something heavier. Work boots maybe. Too messy to tell.” Quint stood up.

“The grass behind the shed was trampled, too,” Oberwart said.

Outside, Quint walked along the backyard fence row until he found it: a trampled section of grass where the intruders had vaulted the chest-high fence. Behind the fence was a thick stand of shrubs and mimosa trees. Quint removed his coat and draped it over the chain link. He tucked his tie into his shirt and climbed over. On the other side of the trees was a narrow dirt lane, an alley that opened onto residential streets at either end. To the left, a few blocks away, Quint could see the old paper mill, empty and silent. Across from where he stood were more backyards enclosed in chain link, their clotheslines deathly still in the hot August evening. The yard directly in front of him had a pink plastic swimming pool with a skein of dead bugs floating on the water. Plenty of windows, he thought, looking along the row of houses.

In the middle of the lane, darkening the grass that grew there, not far from Quint’s feet and between a faint set of tire tracks in the dirt, was what appeared to be a recent oil stain.

Quint hunkered down. He scanned the weeds on Oberwart’s side of the lane, the undergrowth beneath the trees. He spied two white, crumpled objects at the base of a mimosa. He picked one up. It was a crushed pack of Camels, its butts scattered among fallen pink blossoms in the grass. Sixteen butts total. Quint checked the line of sight from the spot where the cigarettes were heaviest: a direct view of Ari Oberwart’s backyard.

“Mr. Oberwart,” he announced once back over the fence, “I have a theory.”

The old man had followed Quint’s wake of trodden grass. He leaned expectantly on his cane.

“There’s evidence on the other side of those trees to suggest whoever infiltrated your shed was watching you for some time before they moved.” Quint slipped back into his coat. “The night before you discovered your bugs missing, what time did you go to bed?”

“Every night I go to bed at ten p.m.”

“I’d guess not long after your lights went out you were hit. Four men to move the tanks, possibly another waiting in the car. I’d also bet at least two of the thieves are residents of this very neighborhood.”

“How can you bet this?”

“Because those backyards on the other side of the fence have nightlights, and men committing felonies in residential neighborhoods don’t hang out in plain sight long enough to smoke two packs of Camels and lose a quart of oil from their engines. Unless, of course, one of two things is true: a) they’re complete idiots, or b) they belong here. Given the fact they aren’t stealing television sets and car radios, I’d put my eggs in basket b. Does anyone in the neighborhood know about your bugs?”

“I keep to myself.”

“What about that fellow you were with at the office today? Drove the blue Ford.”
“Ezekiel? No, no, he lives in a camp out by the river. He is harmless. I call him when I need transportation. He has recently found Jesus, as they say.”

“I see. I think I’d like to have a walk around the neighborhood, if you don’t mind.”

“You are the detektiv.”

“Which reminds me.” Quint reached into his jacket and removed the standard contract Janie had drawn up for Oberwart. She had clipped a ballpoint pen to the top right corner. “If you could sign here, sir.”

The old man pushed his spectacles up his nose, planted the contract on Quint’s right shoulder blade, and scrawled his signature.

“And on this one,” Quint said, pulling a second sheet from his pocket. “It’s simply a waiver that states we at S. Quint Investigations are not liable for the condition of any stolen property if said property should be returned, etc.”

Oberwart signed.

“Oberwart,” the detective said, pocketing pen and papers. “Is that German?”

“Polish.”

“But your accent, it’s….”

“My father came from Russia. Oberwart was my mother’s name. I took it when I came to the United States.”

“I see,” Quint said. “Mr. Oberwart, may I use your phone?”

Quint arranged for a Green Cab to pick him up in front of Morning Glory in approximately half an hour. It was 4:31 p.m. when he set out around the block to the house with the pink swimming pool.

The front yard was freshly cut. Red and blue pansies grew in narrow beds along the walk. After three knocks on the outer storm door, a middle-aged woman in the blue uniform of a security guard appeared. Her hair was rolled and she had the weary air of a woman whose days and nights exchanged places on a regular basis. Quint knew the look well. He had seen the same slump to his father’s shoulders, the same dark circles under the eyes, after long stretches of graveyard shifts at the mill. It was a posture, he imagined, common to this neighborhood.

The woman cracked her storm door.

Quint tipped his hat and introduced himself, offering his ID and business card through the gap in the door. “I’m looking into a robbery that happened just behind your house at the residence of a Mr. Ari Oberwart. Do you know him?”

“No, I’m afraid I don’t.” The woman examined his card. “I was just getting ready for work—”

“Five minutes, ma’am. Please.”

She glanced at her watch. She opened the storm door and stepped out onto the concrete porch in her stocking feet. Quint took two steps backward, off the porch and onto the walk that led up from the street.

“I thought men like you only worked in big cities,” she said, passing his ID and business card back.

Quint tucked them into his shirt pocket. “Actually, ma’am, I grew up not four blocks from here. My father was Hiram Quint. He worked at the plywood plant for thirty years.”

“I worked a gate three years over there till they shut it down. Now…” She flicked her silver badge with her thumb. “Mall security.”

“Not Twin Pines?”

“East River. You said something was stolen?”

“I was hoping you might recall whether you saw a vehicle parked in the lane out back after ten p.m. two nights ago.”

She crossed her arms. “Two nights ago. You mean Sunday night?”

“That’s right.”

She shook her head. “I had to work a concert over at Millbranch Sunday night. But my son would have been here.”

“Is he here now?”

“No, he and a friend left to go night-fishing a little while ago. I’ve got his cell number….”

She disappeared inside and returned with the number written on a paper napkin. Quint thanked her and set out walking for the Conoco at the end of the block. He dropped a dime in a payphone and called the number. The woman’s son picked up on the third ring. There was a low hum in the background—tires on pavement, Quint figured—and a steady warble of static. The boy who answered said his name was Eddie. He had a faint country twang. Quint went through the same spiel he’d gone through with the mother, and the boy said yes, he had seen a car parked out back Sunday night. Quint asked the make and model. He got his answer just before the other end of the conversation dissolved into a steady hiss and died.

He hung up.

A white ’76 Firebird.

He checked his watch. He still had fifteen minutes.

He threw his coat over his shoulder and set out down the nearest street, eying cars parked in driveways and along curbs. Mostly they were pick-ups and Japanese imports, bald tires and busted odometers.

He’d gone a block when he came to Sycamore Way.

At the end of the street, across pot-holed Summer Avenue, the empty paper mill brooded like a forgotten giant.

He made his way up the street.

Tufts of milkweed split the sidewalk.

The seams in the avenue were black and sticky in the summer heat.

He stopped at the turnout of 124 Sycamore Way.

The house in which he’d been raised had burned six years ago, shortly before his father’s stroke. Six rooms, yellow linoleum in the kitchen, pink flowers in a blue vase on the Formica-topped table. The air had smelled of boiled cabbage and pipe smoke.

The rubble had been cleared. The pin oak still stood in the corner of the lot, its

scorched lower branches trimmed away not long after the fire.

Quint glanced at his watch. It was five o’clock.

He cut through the lot onto the neighboring street, where he found the Green Cab waiting.

The grass at 124 was tall. Dandelions and purple violets grew among the weeds.

A butterfly, its wings golden orange and spotted brown, moved uncertainly among the flowers.

When he got back to the office, Janie had left for the day. Quint hung his hat and coat on the rack and tugged loose his tie. He called Janie on the landline and arranged for her to meet him at ten that evening to make a thorough search for the Firebird in Oberwart’s neighborhood under cover of darkness. She grumbled something about not having a life and said she’d be there. “Wear black and bring a thermos of crushed ice,” he told her before hanging up.

In back of the office, through a door marked “PRIVATE,” Quint collapsed on a ratty green sofa. He took a nap and woke as the shadows in the alley were slanting through the blinds. He grabbed a quick shower and dressed in a black T-shirt and jeans. In the office, he fetched his leather surveillance satchel out of the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet and made a quick inspection of all the equipment. Then he went down to the Beacon for a steak.

Chapowits—build of a boxer stuffed in an apron and a paper hat—stood at the grill shoveling an omelet. There were two other customers, an old man with hands that shook and a bleached blonde at the counter, a full ashtray and two cups of coffee between them.

“How about a T-bone, Chappy,” Quint said, taking his usual booth.

The big Indian’s head might have turned in his direction, Quint couldn’t tell, but he knew the order had been heard. Fifteen minutes later, the plate was on the table: steak, mashed potatoes, mushroom gravy.

Chapowits wiped his hands on a dish towel, slung the towel over his shoulder, and said to Quint, “A young brave walked into a bar in Tempe, Arizona, followed by his three-legged dog. The white bartender said, ‘Hey, Indian, why does your dog only have three legs?’ The brave said, ‘This dog, he is very special. Two nights ago my house burned to the ground. This dog ran into my burning house, retrieved my infant daughter, and laid her at my feet. Then he ran back into the house, fetched my credit cards, car keys, and insurance papers and laid these at my feet, as well.’ ‘Incredible,’ said the white bartender. ‘And did your dog lose his leg in the fire?’ ‘No,’ said the brave. ‘A dog like this, you do not eat all at once.’”

Quint cut a hunk of steak and gave the Indian a thumbs-up.

“You on the clock tonight?” Chapowits asked.

Quint swallowed. “Will be soon.”

“Is it dangerous?”

Quint only grinned.

The Indian wandered over to the counter and emptied the blonde’s ashtray. She lit a fresh cigarette and gave him a brief nod, a wrist-flick of gratitude. “I worry about you, Sam,” he said when he returned. He sat opposite Quint. “Sleeping in back of your office. Eating this food, night after night. You need a woman to cook you vegetables grown with her own two hands. My Loretta, rest her soul, grew succotash in her garden. She made a casserole that was out of this world.”

“Why don’t you just change the menu, Chappy.”

Chapowits stabbed a thick, grease-scarred finger in the middle of the table. “Men weren’t made to be alone, Sam Quint.”

“You knew my father, Chaps. He lived alone twenty years after mom left.”

“Yes, and he died alone. Too proud to let even his own son care for him.”

Quint sawed his steak. “Yeah, well, I’m not proud.”

“But you’re every bit as stubborn.”

Outside, Janie’s Volkswagen drew along the curb and honked.

Quint dropped his knife and fork and slid out of the booth, snagging his surveillance satchel. He gave Chapowits a warm clap on the shoulder. “Thanks for the grub, old pal.”

The Indian watched him go. “It was nothing,” he said and returned to his grill.

“It’s gonna be a long night,” Janie said when she saw the satchel.

Quint sniffed the air and buckled his seatbelt. “Is that gasoline?”

“A hose somewhere needs replacing. Which way I am going?”

“West Avenue. Are you wearing a cocktail dress?”

“It’s black, okay? The jumpsuit smelled like crotch.” She downshifted on a turn, gears grinding.

“You bring the thermos?”

“My bag, backseat.”
Quint crunched ice one piece at a time for three complete circuits of Oberwart’s neighborhood. The houses were mostly dark. Nightlights in yards cast fluorescent pools across the lawns and chain link fences spun web work shadows on the sidewalks. Over the steady chug of the Volkswagen’s engine, Quint could hear the zap of bug lights on porches, the distant barking of penned up dogs. They had cruised for half an hour when Janie spotted a white Pontiac Firebird parked along a curb two streets over from Morning Glory Mobile Manor. “That wasn’t here before, was it,” she said, hanging a U-turn.

The house the Firebird was parked in front of looked like every other house on the block: old, cramped, shingled with white asbestos. The yard was mostly hardpan; what little grass grew was tangled in the gnarled roots of a dead pine tree. A dozen moths battered themselves against the bare bulb of a porch light.

Janie parked several cars back and cut the engine. They sat waiting in the dark.

“So when’s the date with the guy from reference?” Quint asked.

“Friday night.”

“Dinner and a movie?”

“That’s the plan.”

“What movie?”

“Like I’d tell you.”

“Why not?”
“You’ll just make fun of it. You’ve become a total movie snob since I bought you that DVD player.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“Oh yeah? You spend your Friday nights with those geeks at the Filmporium, don’t you?”

“Just a hint.”

“Forget it.”

Quint crunched a piece of ice. “What’s his name?”

“Why, so you can—”

The front door of the house opened and four men stepped onto the porch.

Janie fell silent. Quint capped the thermos.

Three of the four were young, no more than eighteen. They wore jeans and dark T-shirts, sneakers. One wore glasses. They thrust their hands in their pockets and cast wary glances into the shadows beyond the porch. The fourth—a head taller than the others and a few years older—was shirtless, wearing only a pair of black cargo pants and heavy combat boots. His head was shaved. He said something to the kid with the glasses then, a second later, slapped him hard across the face. The kid’s glasses flew into the yard. The others recoiled. Skinhead pointed at the Firebird. Slowly, they filed down the broken concrete walk and into the car.

“Let’s go,” Quint said when the Pontiac had pulled away from the curb.

They turned east onto 70. Once Quint had the plate number, Janie kept a quarter-mile between them. They passed darkened storefronts and rolled through four-way stops downtown. In five minutes the orange sodium lights of Morris Creek were behind them and they were headed south on a two-lane blacktop. About a mile past the city limits, just over the River Bridge, the Firebird whirled right onto a county road.

They hit gravel and were swallowed by the night, the woods, the square back’s headlights spilling into the dark before them, the Firebird’s dusty red wake far ahead. Rocks popped and skittered beneath the Volkswagen’s chassis. In the hot rush of the wind Quint could smell the river, damp and earthy, just beyond the trees.

“They’re turning again,” Janie said.

The Firebird slowed and made a right, toward the river. It disappeared in the woods.

“Keep going,” Quint said.

They passed where the car had turned—Quint saw lights shining dimly in the trees—and rounded a sharp bend.

“There,” Quint said, pointing at a narrow dirt turnout just visible through the undergrowth.

They sat in the dark, hot motor ticking, a chorus of night sounds rising from the woods. Quint rummaged in his satchel and took out a pair of Rigel night-vision goggles and fastened them to his head. “Where’s the switch on these?”

Janie reached over and flicked it.

The world flared into green relief.

Quint gave a thumbs up she couldn’t see and climbed out the open passenger’s window. “Be back,” he said and set out up the road. He moved as stealthily as the gravel would allow, keeping his stride wide and long until he cut through the trees, ducking limbs and dodging fat green spiders in their webs. Soon he was hunkered down behind a thick pine with an unobstructed view of a hardpan cul de sac. The Firebird was parked in the open, its trunk up. At the far edge of the clearing a camper sat on concrete blocks, party lights in the shape of chile peppers strung from the faded canvas awning to the trees. Here a blue Ford pickup was parked, a blue Ford pickup Quint recognized from that morning. Standing in front of the Pontiac, talking low to Skinhead and Glasses, was Ezekiel, the thick-armed redneck who’d recently found Jesus. They all leaned against the fender, Skinhead and Glasses sharing a cigarette. The headlights threw their shadows into the trees. The other two kids from the Pontiac were shuffling toward where the land fell steeply away to the river. Between them they carried, shining in the Firebird’s beams, one of Ari Oberwart’s missing terrariums. When the boys reached the tree line at the edge of the river, they counted to three and swung the terrarium into space.

Quint heard the distant cracking of tree limbs followed by the shattering of glass.

Skinhead pitched his butt into the woods and pushed angrily away from the car. “Goddamn!” he roared. “River ain’t wide enough you titwits can’t hit it?”

He and Glasses went and stood between the others, peering over the edge. Ezekiel hung back at the car, thumbs hooked in his belt loops.

“We got close,” the kid on the right said.

“What? What did you say?”

“Todd,” Glasses said, placing a hand on Skinhead’s elbow.

They pulled the second terrarium from the trunk and gave it a little more lift. This time, there was no shattering of glass, only the cold hard smack of the tank hitting water.

Glasses said something Quint couldn’t hear as they made their way back to the car.

Skinhead opened the driver’s door and thrust a finger across the roof. “If you don’t shut up about those bugs, Lewis, I swear to Christ, I’ll put my foot about a mile up your ass. Enough!”

“You assholes get the hell out of here,” Ezekiel said, bathed white in the eerie glow of the Firebird’s headlights. He stood with his arms crossed and his head thrust back. “Before I call down some righteous thunder.”

Doors slammed.

Quint shrank back against the pine as the Pontiac tore out of the cul de sac and onto the gravel road. A moment later he heard the rusty squall of a pickup door, the rumble of its engine. The Ford rolled slowly out of the clearing and turned in the direction of town. After its taillights had diminished through the trees, Quint made a slow count to ten then crossed to the riverbank.

The drop was perhaps fifteen feet, not quite sheer. Stunted cedars and pines littered the embankment wall, their roots twisted in the mud. Far up river, Quint spotted what might have been the second terrarium, a dark rectangle drifting like some strange bassinet in the current. Directly below were the remains of the first terrarium. It had taken out a few branches on the way down to break against a piece of driftwood. Quint fumbled with the night-vision goggles until he was able to magnify the scene. The terrarium’s insides spilled out in a heap. Three of the Goliath beetles had survived the fall and were trundling off into the underbrush like shell-shocked soldiers, leaving tiny footprints in the sand. Quint focused on the mound of rotted bark and leaves that had lined the terrarium.

Something other than dead beetles glinted in the substrate.

He was about to start picking his way down the slope when he heard, from the turnout behind, the chug of an engine, the crack of tires on gravel. Without thinking he turned, night-vision goggles on full zoom, and the world went white like a nuclear blast. He tore the goggles from his head even as the nerve endings behind his eyes detonated. He reeled. The soft earth at the edge of the embankment gave way. He fell.

He had no sensation of falling, only of being pummeled. Branches whipped his face. Roots snagged his feet. His right shoulder cracked against a tree trunk. He came up hard against the same log that had broken the terrarium, just to the right of the substrate and glass. He lay breathless on his back, right arm thrown across the driftwood, the other planted elbow-first in the mud. The furious rush of the river filled his head Everything was black. He tried to push himself out of the mire. Something screamed in his right shoulder. He cried out, fell back.

He closed his eyes, opened them.

At the top of the bank, someone was yelling.

“Squint! Squint!”

An image took shape far above him, a blurry figure silhouetted against a swath of light that cut through the trees and extended out into space like a bridge.

“Call out to me, boss!”

He tried to, but he didn’t have the breath. Her name came out an empty gasp, then a croak. “Janie,” he managed, barely a whisper. Then, louder: “Janie!”

“Squint? Where are you?”

He felt something tickle the back of his hand. He tried to pull away, draw his arm from across the log, but it wouldn’t move. Whatever it was tickled a moment longer then ceased.

“Goggles,” he said, no idea if she could hear him. “Find the goggles.” Something wet was running down his chin. He ran his tongue over his lip and tasted blood.

He blacked out.

Her voice pulled him back. It was trembling, desperate, near: “Wake up, boss, please, please wake up….”

He opened his eyes. Two green orbs swam in the dark before him. “Good girl,” he mumbled.

She was close, right beside him. On her knees in the mud. “Something’s wrong with your shoulder,” he heard her say. “I think, I think it’s broken…

“…there’s something in the sand here, it looks like blood…

“…glass everywhere…

“…a path up the bank, just over there, hang on, boss, please….”

“…boss…boss?”

He’s aware of movement, her arms beneath his, the whisper of branches against his left cheek like fingers—feelers—in the dark. This lasts a while. Some of it he’s conscious for, some of it he’s not. When he comes back for the third or fourth time there’s the smell of gasoline, and when he opens his eyes he sees the orange lights of town flashing behind Janie, Janie who’s hunched over the wheel driving furiously, mouthing words he cannot hear.

He tries a smile, slow and bloody.

She doesn’t see.

He fades.

When he woke he found himself in a strange bed in a dark room, covered with an afghan his mother had made for him as a boy. It was a crookedly hooked, amateur job, her one great project: blues and reds and yellows and purples, colors lovely but matching nothing. He tried to sit up and felt a sudden burst of pain in his shoulder. His right arm was in a sling. He touched his forehead, felt a bandage there. Another on his right side, just above his hip, this one larger, wider. The air in the room was tinged with the scent of antiseptic. A series of paced electronic beeps emanated from somewhere near. He let his eyes adjust and looked around: he was in the hospital.

Janie slept curled beneath a Morris County Medical blanket in the recliner under the TV, her legs tucked beneath her, her chin resting on her collar bone. Her black Converse sneakers were set neatly at the foot of her chair. Quint saw she had covered the sneakers’ white logos and laces with black electrical tape.

“Wear black,” he’d told her on the phone that evening.

He drifted back asleep.

Late the next morning he was discharged stiff and sore and covered in bruises. Janie brought the square back around as they wheeled him out to the curb. He left with his arm in a sling and thirty stitches suturing a gash in his forehead and a puncture in his side from a sliver of terrarium glass. It turned out his shoulder wasn’t broken, but it had been dislocated in the fall. Back at the office, Janie brewed coffee before she left for home to shower. He poured one cup, took a sip, and tossed the rest down the sink. After a shave, he put on a white button-up and slacks and walked down to the Beacon for breakfast. Chapowits gave him a long, curious look but said nothing. Quint ordered two eggs and three strips of bacon. When he got back to the office, it was just after one. Janie was already back, working the desk in a T-shirt and jeans. He sat down in one of the green vinyl chairs. “You should take the rest of the day off,” he said.

“Mrs. Hallenbeck called about her daughter’s cat.”

“That’s twice this summer.” Quint fiddled with the bandage on his forehead. “Tell her to call the pound.”

“Ned Land out at the sawmill wants to know about his wife.”

“No, he doesn’t.”

“He sounded pretty upset. Said you’ve had three weeks.”

“I’ve had a lot more than that.” Quint touched one of the larger bruises on his

cheek. “Anything else?”

“I over-nighted the request for Oberwart’s visa to the State Department. Of course, we’re talking weeks, minimum, for a response.”

“Did you call the landlord at Morning Glory?”

“Said the old man rented the trailer six months ago, pays his rent and utilities in

cash. He was reluctant to say more, but I gathered there wasn’t much more to say. Bottom line, boss: we may never know any more about Ari Oberwart than we do right now.”

“You run the Firebird’s plates yet?”

“Top of my to-do list.”

Quint took a deep breath, let it out. “What day is it?”

“Wednesday. I’ve got chem-class at six tonight.”

“You really are a good girl, you know,” Quint said.

Janie put her feet up on his desk. “That mean I get a raise?”

“A raise?” He gestured grandly at the office. “Someday, kid, this will all be yours.”

They laughed.

Quint spent the rest of the afternoon on the sofa watching French crime movies and dozing in a fog of pain medication. At half past six he got up and showered. He wiped steam from the mirror and inspected himself. He looked a shambles. Bruises on both cheekbones, a nasty scrape on the tip of his chin. Dark circles beneath his eyes. Of course, those had been there before. What was it Chapowits said? “I worry about you…sleeping in your office….” Quint popped a codeine tablet. “You assume I sleep,” he said to the mirror.

He put on a T-shirt and jeans and called a taxi. “Yeah, it’s me again,” he told the dispatcher.

The Green Cab dropped him at Morning Glory, lot C.

Oberwart answered the door in khaki shorts and a Hawaiian shirt. His legs were thin and pale, his knees knobby. “Detektiv? Mein gott, what has happened to you?”

“I have news regarding your case, sir. May I come in?”

“Certainly. I was just in the middle of a case myself. Perhaps you will join me?”

Oberwart ushered Quint into a cramped living room and gestured at a wooden rocking chair. “You sit. Please. I will get the beer.”

Quint took in the space, small and gloomy, the walls decorated with various species of insects mounted in shadow boxes. A goldfish bowl atop a narrow table, a bookcase brimming with tomes on entomology, science, history. An old Victrola and a box of records on the floor beside it. A short, wicked sword mounted above the bookcase.

Oberwart returned from the kitchen—little more than an alcove around the corner from the living room—with two pints of frothy bitter.

“That sword,” Quint said, taking his glass. “I’ve seen them in books. Russian, isn’t it?”

“You have a good eye, Mr. Quint. Yes. It belonged to my father. He was an Ussuri Cossack.” Oberwart took a seat in a wing-backed chair opposite Quint. “Do you know your history, detektiv?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“In the Revolution, the Ussuri Cossacks fought against the Bolsheviks. Unfortunately, they fought on the losing side. My father was one of thousands who fled the Soviet Union in the wake of the Red Army’s victory. He gained citizenship in Poland, where he met my mother. When the Germans invaded he was recruited, as were many Cossacks, to serve in the ranks of the Reich. He accepted, but not because in his heart the Revolution still lived. His wife was Jewish. They would have killed her if he had not agreed to be their spy.”

Quint drank his beer.

“Toward the end of the war, Cossack leaders persuaded Hitler to allow them to relocate to the Italian Alps, where they established refugee camps, churches, schools. It was there that I was born in the winter of 1944. Not a bad place to be born, no?”

Quint nodded.

“Well, when the Allies advanced, the Italians ordered us out, and so we retreated into Austria. It was along the banks of the River Drave, near Lienz, that the British caught up with us. They held the Cossacks but assured us we would not be handed over to the Soviets. The Red Army was advancing only a few miles to the east, but my father and my mother, like thousands of others, believed they were under the protection of the British.

“Of course, that changed when word came they were forcing women and children onto trains at bayonet point. This was exactly the fate my father had sought to avoid for my mother. So he took her and his newborn child and fled for the second time in his life. In the end, the Bolsheviks received over thirty thousand men, women, and children from the British government, many of whom died at the end of a rope or a gun barrel.”

“Where did you go?”

“Into the forests and mountains. We were taken in by a wealthy German family named Hubert. We disguised ourselves as Ukrainians. I grew up in Austria and, after the death of my parents in a fire, came to the United States in 1969 on a student visa. I never went back to Europe.” Oberwart chuckled, gestured at the walls. “And now here I am: an old man living all alone without a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of. All I have are my giants.”

“What is it you love about them?” Quint asked.

Oberwart smiled. “From dung they are reborn. You have to admire that, yes? Beetles are beautiful because they possess a kind of immortality we humans can only dream of. Immortality independent of belief, of faith. They are immortal by design, Mr. Quint. They care nothing for war, revolution, the eternal struggle. There is only birth and rebirth, never death.”

“You sound like a passionate man, sir.”

The old man shrugged. “If there is a corner of the universe free of melancholy, it’s the corner I cultivate in my little shed.”

Quint finished off his beer.

“Tell me, detektiv, where are my beetles?”

“The man who stole your beetles is your driver.”

“Ezekiel? But surely he could not—”

“I saw him, sir.”

Oberwart thrust his chin out and narrowed his eyes. “What did you see?”

“Your driver and four other men disposing of the evidence.”

“The beetles? They destroyed them?”

“The tanks, too. Threw them in the river. Which, I have to say, sir, doesn’t make

much sense. Why go to the trouble to steal something worth a lot of money if you’re only going to trash it.”

“Then Jesus was not all he found,” Oberwart muttered.

“I’m sorry?”
Oberwart shook his head. “These others, who were they?”

“Four accomplices whose identities are, at the moment, unknown. I should have their names by tomorrow. But I have to tell you, sir, if you’re unwilling to take any legal action against them, I’m afraid you’ll have only paid me to tell you your property’s lost.”

“Yes. Yes, I see. This is most unfortunate.”

“Mr. Oberwart, this may seem like an odd question, but did those tanks contain anything other than beetles and larvae?”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

“It just seems that’s the only reason they’d get rid of the bugs—if there were something in the tanks worth a lot more than five or six African scarabs.”

“Five or six African scarabs would fetch a substantial sum, Mr. Quint.”

“Yes, sir. I understand. But the question remains.”

“No,” Oberwart said. “There is nothing in my tanks but that which I care most deeply for, my beetles.”

He’s lying, Quint thought.

“Very well, sir,” he said. “Just come by the office tomorrow and we’ll settle the bill. I’m sorry I wasn’t able to recover your property.” He offered the old man his hand.

This time, Oberwart took it, a pained, distracted look on his face.

“Thank you for the beer,” Quint said.

“Yes,” Oberwart said. “Of course.”

The sun was on its way out by the time Quint left Oberwart’s. The sky had filled with purple clouds and lightning flickered in the west. He took a cab straight to Ezekiel’s camp by the river. On the way he began to feel the beer working with the codeine in his system. He told the driver to wait and pounded on the trailer door. When the thick-armed redneck filled the frame, he was wearing nothing but a pair of jeans and flip-flops. He stepped outside under the shade of the canvas awning, massive chest tattooed with Christ’s bleeding head, the eyes upturned in holy agony.

“Someone catch you peepin’ through windows?” Ezekiel said.

“You know me then.”

“I got nothin’ to say to you.”

“Mr. Oberwart tells me you’re a born again Christian, Zeke. Ever hear the one about the truth?”

“You ever hear the one about the cat?”

“Song of Solomon?”

“Watch it, dick.”

“Listen, I don’t know why you took the old man’s bugs, Zeke, but one thing’s for sure: you’re no weekend entomologist. Maybe that guy Lewis last night seemed more the type, but that guy Todd wasn’t interested in scarabs, was he.”

Ezekiel’s eyes darted toward the river, settled back on Quint. He smiled. “You been at the devil’s brew, dick?”

“That’s right. What was in those tanks besides beetles, Zeke? Something shiny?”

“I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about.”

“Sure you do. Man finds an oyster, he keeps the pearl, not the shell. That you toss.”

“I don’t like oysters. But if you’re referring to Mr. Oberwart’s terrariums, all I ever saw was bugs and dirt.”

“Technically, it’s not dirt. It’s wood and leaves. They call it substrate. I learned that from reading. Do you read?”

“Mister, you’re beggin’ for it.”

Quint stepped in close. “I sure am, cracker.”

Ezekiel’s hands tightened into fists. He looked from Quint to the Green Cab idling a few yards away. The driver—a kid in a blue baseball cap—was watching them intently.

“How’d you meet the old man, Zeke?”

“He put an ad in the paper for a driver. He never learned, he said.”

“That makes two of us. So you answered it out of Christian charity? Wanted to be a Good Samaritan?”

“He offered me a hundred bucks a week to shuttle him around.”

“Pretty decent rates for an old man in a trailer park, wouldn’t you say?”

“I wouldn’t.”

“Want to know what I think?”

“You go to hell.”

“I think you got curious where the old man’s cash was coming from. I think you started asking questions and the old man started answering because the old man likes to talk. So he showed you his bughouse, his tanks, and all his treasures.”

The redneck spat on Quint’s shoe.

Quint looked down. “So that’s it.”

Ezekiel folded both arms over Christ’s upturned eyes.

Quint smiled. “All right. Thanks for your time, Zeke.”

He turned, got back in the cab.

Ezekiel slapped a mosquito on his neck and drew away a smack of blood.

In the west lightning ripped the sky, spilling a slow roll of thunder.

The storm broke pouring cold rain onto the hot streets of Morris Creek. Flash floods washed paper cups and plastic food wrappers out of the sewers and onto the sidewalks. Basements flooded. The downtown stores and shopping centers emptied. From behind his desk Quint watched the world outside whip itself into a mad frenzy. Rain sheeted across the asphalt in the headlights of idling cars—big bright drops swirling like stars in cosmic flux, entire galaxies born on the pavement. Quint sat in the dark, counting the seconds between the lightning and the thunder.

When the downpour finally ceased and the storm was flickering to the east beyond the river, Quint called a cab. At 11:34 p.m. the driver dropped him in the alley behind Ari Oberwart’s, where Quint instructed him to wait for him in the parking lot of the Conoco at the end of the block.

Quint pushed through the mimosa branches—the hard rain had cast more blossoms to the ground—and climbed the chain link fence, a more deliberate act now that one arm was out of commission and his right side was sewn up. The wire at the top of the fence tore a flap from the rear pocket of his slacks. He slogged through wet grass and crept alongside the bug house and around front to the door. From the inside band of his hat he pulled a tiny lock pick and tension wrench. He inserted the wrench into Oberwart’s new padlock first, held it in place with his lips, then used his good hand to lever open the lock with the pick.

Once inside, he pulled the door shut and flicked on his penlight.

He moved among the tanks, peering closely at the substrate in each. A few of the giant beetles inside the tanks scurried from his light. Others remained still in the rotting mulch, their antennae listing in Quint’s direction.

He shined the light over Oberwart’s work station at the rear of the shed. What he saw had not been there the day before: spools of wire, cutters, a stack of six-inch-deep shadow boxes. Quint remembered similar boxes from his childhood, only smaller. He’d mounted butterflies in them. Also scattered about the table were several jars as big or bigger than the one Oberwart had brought to his office the morning before. Only these were filled with cotton and gauze, not beetles and substrate, the bottoms inside coated with thick layers of plaster of Paris. Quint recognized these, as well. They were killing jars for chloroforming insects.

Also among the implements on the table were a box of surgical gloves and a scalpel, the tip crusted black.

Quint let the penlight linger on the blade.

Slowly, he turned to the nearest terrarium.

He stuck the light between his teeth and wrangled the lid free.

The moist smell of decay rose up from the tank. The beetles scurried for cover, burrowing into the substrate, disappearing.

With his right arm—the one in the sling—he rolled his left shirt sleeve as far up as he could. Then he took a deep breath and plunged his fingers into the tanks. He felt inside the moist leaves, the coconut fibers, the bark. He went up to his wrist, brushed a beetle, felt its carapace scrape his knuckles before it shot away. Something soft and squishy moved between his fingers. He cringed, kept feeling. There: something cold, hard, lifeless. Not bark. Not beetle. His fingers closed. He turned the penlight on his fist, opened it.

In his palm lay a diamond the size of his thumbnail.

Quint set the stone on the work table and stuck his hand back in the tank. In less than a minute he’d found two more. He looked around the shed and counted at least a dozen terrariums lining the walls, all of them full of substrate and bugs.

He replaced the tank’s lid as quickly as he could with one arm, switched off his light, and pocketed the three diamonds.

He thought, as he refastened the lock outside the shed, that a great deal of last night’s mystery—why the boys had tossed the tanks—had just been resolved.

He was turning for the fence when something heavy struck him from behind. He pitched forward in the rain-wet grass, and before he could get his balance, strong arms seized him from behind and another hand smashed a wet gauze pad against his nose and mouth.

The world tilted.

Was gone.

Quint woke in darkness thick as oil to the horrible stench of sulfur and the urgent ringing of a cell phone. He lay in a shallow trough of foul, metallic tasting water.

His eyes were streaming tears, his nostrils burning.

He sat up, coughing and spitting. His injured shoulder was throbbing, and there was a new pain now in his left knee. He eased back against what felt like a concave metal wall.

The cell phone’s ring was amplified so that it seemed to be shrieking in his skull. He was in a tank of some sort. A hollow chamber.

He reached for his inner jacket pocket. No sooner had his fingers touched the little silver phone Janie had bought him than it ceased ringing. He fumbled it out, flipped it open. The LCD cast his face in a crescent of blue light.

Light.

He felt in his hip pocket for the penlight, found it, switched it on.

Its feeble glow did little to drive away the dark. He ran the light along the wall to his left and right, saw the rusted, sulfur-stained innards of what could only be a train car. The water at his feet was not very deep, likely rain from the storm.

How long had he been here?

He tucked the phone back in his pocket and struggled to his feet. He hobbled along the length of the car, shining the light over the walls and ceiling.

The hatch was directly above where he’d awakened. He reached for it. Stretching, he heard the stitches in his side rip and felt blood begin to seep through his shirt. His fingertips barely scraped the edge of the hand wheel.

He dropped his arm, wheezing. His lungs were on fire from the sulfur.

He felt a sudden surge of panic like a riptide pulling him down into the bottomless dark. He did the only thing he could think to fight it off. He jabbed two fingers into the gash in his side and let the pain fill his head, nothing else.

When the panic had passed, he remembered the phone.

He flipped it open, found a single bar, and dialed Janie’s cell.

She picked up immediately. “Are you okay? I’ve been trying to call.”

“I’m in a spot here,” Quint said. “I may be dead already. It’s getting tough to breathe. I don’t know how long I’ve been in here.”

“We’re right outside.”

“Really? Where am I?” Quint turned his head and vomited.

“You’re at the paper mill, in a train car.” He heard her speaking to someone else:

“But which one is it?”

Then she said to him: “Bang on the walls.”

Quint pounded the metal with as much strength as he could muster.

“We got you, boss.”

“Janie, don’t hang up.”

“I’m with you.”

Quint heard the sound of shoes scuffing metal outside, above.

“Butterfly,” he breathed into the phone. “First butterfly I ever caught, Janie, it

beat itself to death against the glass. Its wings…they came apart like ash….”

“We’re opening it now.”

The hatch overhead squalled. The hand wheel began to turn.

“Janie—”

Quint collapsed.

At the hospital his clothes were stripped and thrown away. He was put under a warm shower. His skin was broken out in red welts from the sulfur.

In his room, only half conscious, he was aware of two blurry shapes retreating from his bedside. One of them was Janie, the other a tall, broad-shouldered sheriff’s deputy in a cowboy hat. He heard Janie saying, “He took the phone. If he hadn’t taken the phone, I couldn’t have, there would have been no way—” Her voice broke. The deputy put an arm around her, ushered her out.

Quint glanced over at the bedside table, where his silver phone perched next to a hospital-issue vase containing an artificial daisy.

He pulled his mother’s afghan to his chin and slept.

* * *

“GPS, Squint,” Janie explained the day following his release from the hospital.

They sat together in their booth at the Beacon mid-afternoon, Quint sipping coffee, Janie eating cherry pie.

“I subscribed our phones to an Internet locator service.”

“How much does that cost?”
“$12.95 a month.”

Quint held aloft his coffee. “To the twenty-first century,” he said.

“You know the taxi you hired waited two hours at the Conoco before he gave up waiting and went back to the cab stand. He and the other cabbies played cards the rest of the night. When I came in the morning after the storm and found you not there, first thing I did was call Green Cab. Why’d you never learn to drive?”

“No one ever offered to teach me, I guess.”

“Well, I’m offering.”

“Thanks, but I’d better take it slow.” Quint let his gaze wander around the Beacon, taking in the familiar patrons on their stools, the smells of bacon grease and cigarettes, the dust motes shimmering in the picture windows.

“Grover came by this morning while you were sleeping,” Janie said. She slid a piece of paper across the table.

“USNCB,” Quint read. “This is a wanted notice.”

“Sheriff ran his name through Interpol. Our client was an international jewel smuggler. His father was a Russian soldier, made off with a bunch of the Third Reich’s loot after the war. Deranged Nazi, hello?”

“He wasn’t a Nazi, Janie. His mother was Polish.” Quint read the fax. “Volker Hubert, alias Karl Lambert, alias Edgar Wichmann, alias Ari Oberwart.” The picture in the upper right corner was fuzzy, and the man was at least twenty years younger, but there was no mistaking the mane of white hair, the piercing blue eyes.

“Yeah, well, Grover said the state police still got bupkiss on Mr. Alias and the Good Samaritan. Morning Glory landlord said the old man left in the middle of the night. He found the shed and the trailer empty. Cleaned out. Sheriff said the same about Zeke’s camp. APB’s still out on the Firebird, too.”

Quint sipped his coffee.

“So,” Janie said. “Oberwart breeds giant beetles, kills them, sews sixty-year-old diamonds into them, mounts them, smuggles them to parts unknown. He moves from place to place every six months or so, lives alone. Always hires a driver. Here he makes the mistake of hiring a redneck who gets wise to his scheme. Redneck has some buddies raid the old man’s shed. They make off with what they can, dig out the loot, toss the bugs in the river, divvy up and blow town. Zeke, meanwhile, stays behind because the old man’s gotten desperate and hired a private dick. Zeke figures he can’t take a chance on some peeping tom learning the truth, and if he skips town, well, Oberwart will know it was him.”

Janie swallowed the last bite of her pie. “Of all the stuff I don’t know and probably will never know about this case,” she said, “there’s one thing—one thing—I can’t get out of my head.”

“What’s that?”

“Your butterfly.”

Quint only looked at her.

“Just before you passed out in the train car, when Grover’s deputy was opening the hatch, you said the first butterfly you ever caught beat itself to death against the glass. What did that mean?”

Quint stared over the rim of his coffee cup past Janie to the bright parking lot beyond the diner. He didn’t answer for a long while. Finally, he said, “I guess it means I didn’t want to die alone.”

They sat there for a time, each immortal in the other’s presence, warm and silent, full of coffee and pie.

2006-05-12T11:39:00.000-07:00

Hey, guys:

Because I'm lame, here's a story that's not what I've been working on from the novel. I'm back in savage torpor with that. Temporarily, of course. This one, I think, is close to being ready for publication.

Andy

“It’s My Birthday, Do I Get a Discount?”

I look up from the register. It’s a girl. Big. Not fat, but she will be in five, ten years. Her voice is deep and she’s wearing clothes with no visible tags, homemade, the fabric cheap—Wal-Mart, by the look of it. A pink floral-print skirt and matching top. She wears too much make-up and her blonde hair straight as a plank. She’s smiling.

“I wish it worked that way,” I say, taking her purchases and offering my own smile in return—a smile, I’ve been told, charms mothers. “Last week was my birthday.”

“Oh,” she says, sounding out of breath. Her face is still firm so I figure she’s not very old, maybe twenty.

At register one to my left, Becka, who’s ringing up The White Stripes for a frat boy, sniggers. Becka’s tall and thin and wears Gap, Abercrombie, Hot Topic. She listens to Tori Amos. She claims she’s a vegan, but I know better. I’ve seen her refrigerator, her trash.

The big girl doesn’t hear. She’s leaning on the counter, all arms and cleavage, awkward.

“Yeah,” I say, scanning the DVD—the first season of the animated series Punky Brewster—and still smiling. “If it worked that way, I’d have gotten a discount.”

“Employees do get discounts, numbnuts.” Becka reaches in front of me, beneath the counter for a bag as her customer’s credit slip stitches out.

The big girl’s eyes are large and round and blue.

“I mean, beyond what we already get. Employees, I mean. That’ll be $48.63,” I say.

The girl reaches out of sight and produces a small pink purse that matches her dress and pops it open. A handful of change and several crumpled bills spill onto the counter. The head of a tampon applicator pokes out of a nest of tissue like a hungry baby bird. She starts pushing coins around with her thick finger, the nail painted, what else, pink. From behind, Becka makes a sucking sound through her teeth and I know, without looking around, she’s leaning against the counter, arms folded across her tiny, pert breasts, peering over the rims of her black frames and doing her damndest to telepathically violate this girl with the blunt end of her superior lifestyle choices.

“Uh,” the girl says, staring at the mound of change and paper she’s arranged like the pieces of a puzzle that don’t quite fit. “You sure there’s not a discount?” She gives me that look again, big doe eyes, blue. Medicated smile.

“How much are you short?” I’ve already cracked the plastic rind from the DVD.

She says nothing, only stares down at the pile.

I can feel Becka’s smirk from here. “You know, it really doesn’t matter to me,” I say, scooping up the change and bills.

The girl’s eyes shift slowly from the cleared counter to my hands counting the coins. She’s got $46.73. A buck eighty-eight short. I drop the money in the register, bag the purchase, rip the receipt, hand it all over. “Happy birthday,” I say, again with the smile.

She grins down at the orange bag I’ve placed in her hands, like I’ve worked a minor miracle. “Thanks, same to you,” she says and turns for the exit.

Becka sidles up to me and through the storefront window we watch the girl make her slow, happy way across the lot to the bus stop under the tree. She takes a seat on the bench that bears the store’s logo—Dominion Records, a black vinyl record wearing a crown—and removes her purchase from the bag. She hunches over, reading the back cover, waiting for the number five.

“Jesus,” Becka says, curling her mocha-painted lip. “What was she wearing?”

“Don’t be cruel,” I say, and help the next in line.

“I can get someone on two,” she says with a flick of her wrist, and moves away, whispering in my ear as she goes, “You love it.”

I take the next customer’s purchase, a Ben Folds Five CD, crack it.

The truth is, for four months now, I’ve been sleeping with Becka on a semi-regular basis. When it comes to that, she’s phenomenal.

The first time was after the Christmas Party last year. I wasn’t drinking much so I drove her home and she invited me in and we ended up tangled on her Kyle Bunting rug. She has a condo overlooking the Mississippi. Her parents pay for it, along with books, tuition, credit card bills, etc. She’s majoring in graphic design at the University of Memphis. It’s a nice condo, or at least it would be if Becka wasn’t such a slob. At work, she’s put together like a precision instrument. At home, the mechanism falters.

She’d had five beers that night. It was December cold and she huddled close as I unlocked her deadbolt with her keys. She told me the security code once we were in the apartment because she couldn’t make sense of the keypad. We’d stopped off at Joe’s on the way for a bottle of Riesling’s, and while I uncorked it with her keychain, she disappeared into her bedroom to change. I took the place in: the kitchen had copper cookware hanging, pots and pans glazed with dust, dishes in the sink. In her chrome, foot-pedal trashcan, there were Chinese takeout boxes. In the living room leather furniture, a modest hi-def television, a few DVDs scattered on the carpet and glass-top coffee table. There were clothes draped everywhere: skimpy blouses, running shorts, a pair of tennis shoes discarded at the base of a floor lamp. A futon, its purple throw pillows on the floor. On the walls, she had expensive-looking, abstract oils, a couple of female nudes in charcoal, maybe her own. If so, she was good. The ceiling was vaulted. There were no photographs.

Bottle of wine and two glasses in hand, I crossed to the couch and sat down and sifted through the DVDs. Three cases on her table were Harvey, Elizabeth, and While You Were Sleeping. Harvey was in Elizabeth, Elizabeth was missing, and While You Were Sleeping was face-up under the case.

She came out of her bedroom, shoeless, wearing jeans and a white tube top, her bare shoulders small and freckled. She seemed steadier on her feet. She sat down at the opposite end of the couch and drew one leg beneath her and regarded me with solemn brown eyes. Her black hair was longer then, not short and bristly like now. It fell about her shoulders, framed her face.

“So,” she said. “Tell me a secret.”

She’d been hired the week before. We barely knew each other. I shifted nervously, took a drink from my glass. I brushed at the sleeves of my tweed coat and said, “I was raised on a farm in Texas. I was adopted.”

“That’s two secrets,” she said, and reached for her glass.

When she moved, I saw, incredibly, that her fly was open. I caught a flash of black lace. “They’re a package deal,” I said, trying not to stare. I gestured at the ceiling. “This is a nice place.”

She looked around, shrugged, drank some wine.

“Are these yours?” I asked, indicating the oils and charcoals.

“That one is,” she said, and pointed. “The charcoal is me. I posed for an artist when I was an undergrad.”

I got up, made a show of peering at the drawing. There was no face, only breasts and a stomach, a tiny, chiaroscuro waist.

“I’m a recovering coke addict,” she said, and tugged at her top, which slipped an inch or two when she moved.

“No kidding,” I said.

“That’s my secret.”

“Trumps mine.” I gave her the charming smile.

She set her wine glass on the coffee table among the scattered DVDs and got down on all fours on the floor. I stood with my glass in hand, watching as she began a series of stretches and contortions.

“This is the Seated Wide Angle,” she said, maintaining eye contact as she spread her legs to the side, bent forward from the hip. “And this,” she said, moving again, “is the Camel.” Now she was on her knees, reaching backward, grasping her ankles, chin and chest thrust toward that high, high ceiling.

I said the only thing that came to mind: “Your pants are unzipped.”

In one deft motion she rocked forward and was on her knees at my feet. Her hands flew to my zipper and tugged it down. She looked up, her face round and rich and pale.

“Now yours is, too,” she said. “What are you going to do?”

By the time I knew the answer, she had already done it.

My commute to and from work is about half an hour, give or take the occasional crazed motorist or drunk pedestrian. This afternoon, a hot Tuesday in mid-May, the day of the big girl’s birthday, things are moving slowly. I’ve got my Civic’s window down and I’m listening to a Stones bootleg and sweating through my shirt, thinking about the birthday girl, wherever she might be. In fact, most of the afternoon, when I wasn’t stealing glances at the gecko tattooed in the small of Becka’s back, I was thinking about that girl.

Where does someone like that come from? Someone so achingly honest, who brings almost enough money to spend on a Punky Brewster DVD, and why does she come alone on her birthday? Was the money a gift from some aunt? Where was her mother, her sister, her father to buy the present for her? Did she make that pink dress or did her grandmother? Did the old woman teach her how to sew? Why isn’t she going out, to a movie, the pizza café, a bar? The question of a boyfriend never even occurs.

I’m on Poplar, headed for Union. I stop at a light, glance out the window, notice a word spray painted white on an ivy-laced brick wall that surrounds a ritzy apartment community: “Locate.”

I give her a name: Anne.

I give her an address: Bright Point Trailer Park, 38 Knight Arnold. I’ve driven past there once or twice. There’s a plastic menagerie in the tall grass outside the gates: lions, tigers, elephants, gnomes to shepherd them.

I give her a mother and a younger sister: Momma, Little Rachel. Little Rachel sings Gospel at the First Pentecostal Church on Sundays.

I give her a fat, diabetic cat: Topaz. They can’t afford the shots….

The light is green.

The guy behind me, a trucker, blows his horn.

I shrug at the rearview, accelerate.

I’ve been at Dominion on Poplar in Memphis for a year now. It’s one of those jobs that starts out part-time while you earn your master’s in film theory and then, after graduation, becomes the nexus of your financial, social, and spiritual life. The fast-track to assistant manager. As my unemployed roommate Hunter says, between joints, “The three Fs: it gets you food, it gets you films, it gets you fucks.” Which is mostly true. I eat well, get discounted Criterion DVDs, and spy—if not take—the best lower-middle-class trim in the world. Other than chain record stores, the only other retailer that offers as wide a selection of unfulfilled female shoppers is Hobby Lobby. If you don’t believe me, go there on a Saturday.

Hunter and I live in an expensive apartment on the edge of a bad neighborhood off Union. Our second-floor window overlooks the parking lot, which—along with the basement laundry—floods with every hard rain. Though we live near the center of town, the Latino man who lives on the other side of the fence owns six chickens and a Bantam show-rooster that crows all night. The rooster’s name is King Cock. Every now and then, the Latino man yells from his kitchen window: “¡Rey Cock! ¡Consiga lejos de la cerca! ¡Consiga ausente o sueno su cuello!” The rooster ignores the man and squeezes through a gap in the fence and struts about our gravel parking lot wearing a set of dog tags stamped with its name. Upon spying the rooster from the kitchen table, Hunter, if not too busy searching the classifieds for work, will leap to his feet, snatch up a Daisy BB rifle he keeps in the pantry, and position himself at the open window. The long barrel extends and…snap. King Cock leaps into the air, dog tags jingling, feathers flying.

For my birthday last week, Hunter invited some friends he’d made at his last job bartending at Red Lobster—a motley group of part-time musicians, poets, and one nervous fifteen-year-old kid who might have been someone’s little brother along for the ride. I invited Becka and a guy from the film program who was writing his thesis on David Lynch. “‘Un Auteur Tordu,’” he called it. He had long hair and three-day stubble. His name was Gregor.

The apartment, when not decorated for my birthday, is old and lovely: hardwood floors, peeling wallpaper. There’s character in the plaster. That night, however, the doorways were strung with donkey piñatas, the walls with red lights in the shape of chili peppers. There were a dozen of us crowded into three small rooms, a buffet of taco casseroles and Rotel dip spread on the kitchen table. Bottles of Corona on ice, tequila on the coffee table. Los Tigres Del Norte on the CD player. Hunter, despite his shortcomings as a roommate—namely his habitual drug use and chronic unemployment—has flair. He spent the night playing host in a sequined sombrero his grandmother had brought him from Old Mexico.

My birthday, if I haven’t mentioned it, is May 5.

Gregor and I were taking up space like people do at parties. I leaned against the living room wall and listened and nodded as he told me all about his exhaustive excursions into Twin Peaks. I tried not to notice one of Hunter’s Red Lobster co-workers—a Goth girl with the entire jewelry department of JC Penney in her face—licking the ear of the fifteen-year-old on the couch. He had on a T-shirt that read “Cause Anime Is the Suck” and a beer in his crotch.

Becka showed up half an hour late, already tipsy.

I let her pull me away from Gregor to the kitchen, where we got two beers.

“Is this cheese dip?” she said.

“Velveeta,” I said.

“Barbarians.” She took me by the hand and led me back through the living room and out onto the balcony, which overlooks a green courtyard, at the center of which is an empty fountain. On the balcony next door I could see the shapes of my neighbors sitting in patio chairs, smoking in the dark. I waved. They called out, “Happy Birthday, Nick,” to which I replied with a tip of my Corona.

“I like it better out here,” Becka said. “It reeks of chili powder in there.”

I smiled, took a drink. It was my second beer and I was beginning to get that tingly feeling in the bottom of my feet. “Hunter’s a pal,” I said. When I drink, I get munificent.

Becka snorted.

“What? It’s my birthday. I can afford to be forgiving. A few months’ rent is an acceptable price to pay for such a fine soiree.”

“You’re full of shit, you know that.” She reached up, brushed a lock of hair from my forehead. “You also haven’t returned my calls for about a week. You work the days I’m off, the shifts I don’t. I’m starting to think you’re giving me the brush-off and I don’t know why.”

“Preposterous,” I said, no handle on where the evening was going. I was drunk.

“Maybe.” Becka clicked her nails against her bottle. “Maybe not. But whatever. It is your birthday.”

She leaned in close, slipped an arm around my neck, kissed me.

When we drew apart, she said, “You’re unhappy with me. I don’t get it.”

“You’re unhappy, too,” I said.

“But I admit it. I told you at Christmas: I’ve got problems. Still, I don’t just fuck any guy who comes along you know.”

“You’re a liar,” I said. “You eat meat. I saw the boxes in your trash.”

The lights from inside the apartment were reflected in her narrow cat eyes. “You’re an ass,” she said, and turned away. She leaned against the balcony railing, sniffed, wiped at her face. I reached out to touch her but she stepped beyond my reach.

Inside, Hunter started up a chant: “Nick! Nick! Nick! Nick!” The others took it up, drowning out Los Tigres Del Norte. “Where’s that birthday boy?” my roommate cried. Through the door I could see he was standing in the middle of the living room holding a writhing black pillowcase over the coffee table.

I went in.

Becka remained on the balcony, though she turned to watch.

“For the birthday boy,” Hunter exclaimed, swinging the pillowcase in a wide arc above his head, like a bolo, “a party favor!” He turned the bag upside down.

King Cock tumbled out in a fury of red and yellow. Beer bottles toppled as the rooster landed on the coffee table, got his feet under him, and sprang at the nearest person. This happened to be Gregor. The bird’s spurs dug into Gregor’s belly and both went tumbling backward over the couch, smashing the nose of the fifteen-year-old kid, sending a gout of blood across the upholstery. Everyone jumped to their feet and we all stood staring as, behind the couch, the rooster assaulted the film student. Hunter’s face had gone slack with amazement. Gregor was screaming. And suddenly the bird went flying through the air and cracked against the wall, knocking loose a framed lobby card of Dark Passage, featuring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. The rooster plopped onto the floor and dodged into the bathroom. A set of dog tags lay tangled along the baseboard.

I ran like a shot and yanked the bathroom door shut.

Gregor rocked on the floor, holding his stomach, breathing rapidly.

“What the fuck was that?” I cried.

Hunter removed his sombrero and held it in front of him, a penitent peasant. “Forgeev me, seen-yore,” he said, but no one laughed.

“Peroxide,” Gregor said from behind the couch. “I need peroxide.”

“Oh come on,” Hunter said indignantly, glancing around.

Everyone stared.

“You like that rooster,” he said to me. “You always say it reminds you of home.”

King Cock warbled in the bathroom.

“Betadyne?” Gregor had gotten to his feet and was holding his tattered shirt against his belly to staunch the bleeding. “Something. Please.”

I looked at him. “It’s in there,” I said, and hooked a finger at the bathroom.

“Fuck,” he said.

Becka stood just inside the balcony door, arms folded across her chest. Her expression was something between sympathy and disgust.

On the stereo, Los Tigres Del Norte played on.

She stayed and helped me corral the rooster after everyone had left. Hunter drove Gregor to the Walgreen’s on the corner for antiseptic then took him home. We chased the rooster around the apartment for half an hour, finally cornering it behind the TV. When I seized it and picked it up, its heart was pounding and its eyes were flashing. I took it downstairs and released it through a gap in the fence. It raced across the hardpan and joined its six hens under a rusted swing set.

When I got back upstairs, Becka had disrobed and climbed into the shower. Without a word I joined her. We thrust about under the spray until the water ran cold.

A few days after the big girl’s birthday, she returns to the store, wearing the same floral-print skirt and matching top. The bus drops her off. She wanders up and down the animation aisle, staring at the titles and mumbling to herself as if working some weird incantation upon them. She bites her thumbnail. Becka’s in back, taking inventory. I watch the girl between customers. She picks up box after box, title after title, always reading them thoroughly, always placing them carefully back on the racks. After thirty minutes, she leaves, goes out to the bus stop, and sits down to wait.

Must not be anyone’s birthday.

“What’s that?” Becka says behind me. She taps me on the shoulder with her clipboard.

I turn. “Nothing,” I say, and smile.

It’s a smile, I’ve been told, charms mothers.

2006-04-20T10:55:00.000-07:00

More poems from a collection that--right now--has three parts: Gethsemane, Golgotha, and Galilee. That doesn't really matter, except that I'm still trying to figure out which parts certain poems go in. I'm thinking the Gethsemane poems should be concerned with imagery/events of the biblical past; Golgtotha should contain poems concerned with the mainstream christian present; and the Galilee poems will be imagining some kind of future synthesis of the antitheses between what I think of as authentic historical socialistic/communistic christianity and contemporary capitalistic pop-'christianity'. Anyway, here are a few more poems.

Adam

Super Bowl DCLXVI

Down on Bourbon Street, after we have showered the Saints with unleavened bread, old Simon the Leper will break a jar of alabaster on the corner of St. Peter, then spike hard the spikenard, pour it over his head, and give chase to the man with the pitcher of water. Upstairs, in a balcony over the Quarter, in the bread-body blood-wine upper room, we’ll kill the shepherd then scatter the sheep into the cocked night. In Jackson Square, the palmreader will shake hands with a ghost in a nightshirt who once fled naked toward the river. Somewhere under the bloody moon, straddling puddles of fallen stars, the Nazarene will carry torches, a lantern, and a sword. And this will cue the march.

Easter Sunday at the Olive Garden

During the Lord’s Supper Old Miss Mary stood up from the back pew, pulled a bottle of Chanel No. 5 from her purse and poured it over Brother Sulfur’s head. We, the congregation, were outraged: five ounces of good-funk, very expensive.

Later, loosed from the Invitation, from Brother Sulfur’s tractor beam—that penetrating gaze that planted seeds of fear and harvested the excess duty to feed his endomorphic body of Christ instead of uplifting our lack of spirit into the light of day as one would an empty glass to be filled with living water—we pals and I piled into my Suburban and lit out for the birthplace of the King for one last supper before Spring Break. Pious disciples, we prayed over our meal when it arrived, careful to stay bowed long enough so our Nubian waitress would be forced to wait to fill our glasses after a resounding Amen.

She kept the salad coming, the breadsticks, the cokes, and halfway through the meal we were stuffed but kept on eating, eating, eating and repeating sour judgments on the old couple across the way who clearly hadn’t been to church that day since he was an evident biker and she was an evident sway. Judging by his Samsonite –do and her Magdalenish eyes, we could tell they were much too unblessed to afford real meals. They were a little tipsy from all that bread and wine. Their lively spirits spilled over the boundaries of their booth into ours, and we rebuked them.

We, however, dry-county tee-totalers that we were—patient sufferers, breakfasting on the dawn’s orange juice and donuts, supping on dry crackers and Welch’s—had earned our desserts, having been taught by Lottie Moon’s example (starvation, China) to always clean our plates, which we did, despite the epic proportions of our portions.

One of us, though—the disciple whom Jesus loved—moved to pity like Pilate at our waitress’s obvious misfortune, left a tract instead of a tip (Transformation: How To Become A New Creature, like the great examples we’d just set) a better tip by far, we thought, than, say, thirty silver dollars. But now, looking back, the disciple recognizes it for what it was. Nothing more than pocket-change.

Fire and Brimstone

We are stoned to the brim
every Sunday,
in our dresses, coats, and ties—

Brother Sulfur stands
on our skin-diseased hands,
and pulls pits from our eyes.

It’s a Heavenly game of dodge-ball
except he’s hurling rocks
and we are anxious to be put out.

So we suffer his Soul’s Fury—
despite the glowing sun
& though the body count is high.
He’s our weekly reminder
of where we’re going all along

(Until we get a whiff
of Brother Stiff—

or did somebody just let one?)

Christus Canibalis

Full of the body,
of bread and wine,
we lick our stained lips
and grab for seconds.

eternal
insatiable
seconds

To Thomas Merton

Aren’t we all islands, though,
our words the bridges that connect us?

I run across these waters,
thump across these boards,
and stand on your shore
(crane’s prints beneath my feet)
to contemplate sand and trees:

Is it that no man is an island

who has done with inner toil,
who rejoices in the snowflakes that connect him,
who dwells in the boat,
has felt the subtle brotherhood of men,
has plied the oar again and again
and yet is not so swift to swim
to feel upon his skin
the frozen melt of his own last end?

Down here, we’re all for show.
We rarely get a good snow,
mostly just heat and humidity.
Down here the view is—
well, oppressive.
Our ignorance is a thirst—
despite the salty sweat,
what more our swift conversions?—
for a fingertip to dip
a cool, clear drip of living water on our tongues.

But you,
asleep in your coffin,
you show us better.

You know us better
than we know ourselves.

2006-04-05T09:25:00.000-07:00

Prologue:

The sun broke over ploughed cotton fields and dry irrigation ditches as the old man shambled out of the Crescent’s diner, a metal folding chair and Old Timer pocket knife in one hand, a green apple in the other. He set his chair in front of the soda machine, between the restaurant and the first of the motel’s eight air-conditioned cabins. A metal sign screwed into the brick behind him was stamped with red letters: “Vending & Ice.” He sat and smoothed the wrinkles from his faded chinos, gazing down the concrete breezeway. Red wasps bobbed around fat nests outside cabins four and six. The old man, whose name was Curtis, had meant to sweep these down and spray some Raid, but he hadn’t gotten around to it. He pulled a handkerchief from his shirt pocket and wiped his neck. The day was already hot. In the parking lot heat shimmered above the asphalt, the empty concrete bowl of the swimming pool, the highway beyond. Curtis knew he would have to clean and fill the pool in a week or two, police the pine needles, the toys the boy had left there through the winter—a red tricycle and stick horse, a couple of silver cap-pistols that had rusted in the rain. He’d most likely wait until after the spring pollen had run its course, when the chalky dust from the tractors in the fields had settled and the new crops were sewn. There was no hurry. At the Crescent, there never was. The old man hunched forward, elbows on his knees, and went to work on the apple with the knife.

He had most of it peeled when the pickup arrived for the McElroy kid in six. As usual, it swung into the Crescent’s gravel turnout trailing exhaust, three men in the cab, one in the rear. A blue Chevy with a cracked windshield, the truck drew parallel to the motel and idled roughly. The men inside were dark and weathered. They wore T-shirts and jeans and cradled hardhats and lunchboxes in their laps. They stared straight ahead. Directly, cabin six’s door opened and Billy McElroy emerged, a brown sack in hand. He was fit and tanned from weeks of outdoor work with the DOT. Tattoos crawled from his wrists beneath the sleeves of his white T-shirt. He wore black, steel-toed boots, had a shock of red hair. He lingered in the door until the girl, Ginger, appeared in the frame. She gave him his hardhat and he kissed her lovingly and caressed her swollen belly, whispered in her ear. Curtis watched them. The girl was barefoot and pregnant in a pink cotton shift. She had a small, delicate frame, dark hair, pale skin. The men in the truck were watching, too. The McElroy kid kissed her again and hopped into the back of the waiting pickup. He settled against the cab, beside the other man, who had a gray beard and a blue bandana around his head. They spoke to one another and laughed. Ginger closed the door. As the Chevy rattled past, out of the lot, Curtis lifted a hand. When the truck had pulled onto the highway and disappeared, he began quartering the apple.

Three slices were left when McElroy’s girl emerged from six in her bright green maternity swimsuit and flip-flops. She wore matching heart-shaped shades studded with rhinestones and carried an empty ice bucket under her left arm. A canvas beach bag was slung over her right shoulder, stuffed with a hotel towel, sun-block, tanning lotion, a Diet Coke in a plastic bottle, and a paperback copy of Richard Adams’ Watership Down. The old man popped a wedge of apple into his mouth and chewed, watching her stroll up the walk. She moved with one hand on her belly. Her apparent destination, the ice machine, hummed in the concrete recess behind where Curtis sat.

“Good morning, Mr. Curtis,” she said, flashing him a smile that would have set the world spinning had he been twenty, even ten years younger.

“Morning, Miss Ginger,” the old man said and offered her a slice of apple.

“Ooh,” she said and ate half. “Yummy.”

“Ain’t that something?”

She ate the rest. “You get that from the kitchen?”

“Sure did.”

She wiped some juice from the corner of her mouth, opened the ice machine, and filled her bucket. “Yow,” she said when the bucket, already sweating, touched her bare stomach. “Cold.” She dropped the lid on the machine and stuck a piece of ice in her mouth. “Got any more of those in there?” she said around the ice.

“Sure. Sign in the window says closed, but the door’s unlocked. Miss Angel’s still upstairs. You just go right in and help yourselves.”

At his use of the plural, she smiled, and a lovely blush the shade of ripening strawberries crept into her cheeks.

“New book this week?” He indicated her bag with the tip of his knife. A bit of green peel clung to the blade.

“Yes.” She pulled out the paperback. “Billy picked it up for me down in Clarksville last week.” She turned it over, studied it. “It’s about…bunnies.”

“Bunnies, well. Hear little ones like bunnies.”

She smiled again.

“Good day for sunning,” he said.

Ginger nodded and they passed more words about the sunshine, the heat. Her ice had already begun to melt when she excused herself and crossed the parking lot to the pool, the apples she was welcome to in the kitchen apparently forgotten. She let herself through the chain link gate and set her bucket and bag on the ground beside a tattered patio chair. The ice bucket made a wet ring on the concrete. Curtis watched as she pulled her towel from the bag—she had bought the bag last week at the Dollar General in Big Moon—and spread it on the collapsible lounge. She sat down, kicked off her flip flops, and nestled her Diet Coke snugly in the ice bucket. She began spreading tanning oil over her arms and legs. When she was sufficiently slick, she lay back on the towel and cracked the novel.

For three days now she had come, every morning after her husband left for work, to lie by the empty pool inside the rusted chain link fence, where weeds grew through the cracked concrete and ants made hills in the grout of the tile. The old man could hear her voice as she read aloud, soft and measured and lovely, a Hattiesburg lilt, deep Mississippi. It filled him with something that was not quite regret. He ate the last slice of apple and listened.

She had finished only a few pages when the bell over the office door, just down from the diner, jingled softly from inside.

An old woman, a good ten years on Curtis’s seventy, pushed through the glass door and onto the walk. She stood for a moment in the rosy light, let the door swing shut behind her. Her hair was long and silver. It hung straight and unwashed. She had a lined, stony face. There were thick purple veins on her arms and calves, whiskers on her chin. She wore a cotton bra and panties and nothing else.

Curtis folded his knife and slipped it in his pants pocket. He got to his feet.

Taking no notice of him, the old woman set out across the parking lot. She stepped on rocks and cracked pieces of asphalt, stepped around a jagged sliver of glass that had once been the neck of a Coke bottle. Despite the bra that held them, her breasts jounced with every bare footfall.

“Gram Smith?” Curtis called.

The old woman seemed not to hear. She was headed for the pool.

Ginger stopped reading and glanced over her shoulder. She saw the old woman fumbling with the metal latch at the gate and her mouth dropped open. She lowered her heart-shaped sunglasses and placed her book facedown on the concrete beside the ice bucket. Its sweat soaked the novel’s pages.

“Miss Smith?” Ginger managed.

Again, the old woman seemed not to hear. Her dark nipples showed through her thin cotton bra.

Ginger struggled up and into her flip-flops, started toward the gate. “Miss Smith.”

The old woman was bent now, inspecting the latch. “I can’t seem to…” she said.

“MOMMA!” someone yelled from the office.

Ginger looked up to see the Crescent’s owner, Angel O’Zan, striding across the parking lot in a maroon bathrobe, her long legs flashing in the folds. Her dark hair was wet and clung to her neck and freckled shoulders where the robe fell loose in back. She moved to the old woman’s side, took her by the elbow, and gently steered her away from the gate, back toward the motel. “Momma,” she whispered. “Momma, come on. Come with me.” The old woman muttered something in feeble protest—Ginger didn’t catch it—and let herself be led away. Angel gave Ginger a furtive glance, an apologetic smile, and suddenly Ginger felt like a little girl who’s seen too much of the adult world and been caught looking. She blushed for the second time that morning and returned the smile as best she could, then saw her book facedown in the ring of water and bent to pick it up.

As Angel and the old woman made their slow way across the parking lot, Angel being careful of every rock and shard, the office door opened and a little boy stepped out in green Yoda pajamas. With one hand he held the door for the women. In the other was a blue plastic helicopter. He seemed about to follow them inside when he saw Curtis standing nearby under the breezeway. Curtis lifted a hand, and the little boy let the door close and walked over in socked feet, his hair a straw-colored rat’s nest.

Curtis sat back down in his chair and gathered up the apple peel from between his feet and tucked it in his shirt pocket next to his reading glasses. “Morning, Mr. Andy,” he said.

Out by the pool, Ginger resumed reading.

“It’s broken,” Andy said, and held up the helicopter.

“Yeah? How’s that?” Curtis took the toy and turned it in his hands, looked at the boy.

“The blades won’t spin.”

The old man reached for his glasses, then his knife. He flicked the knife open and began fiddling with the screws holding the plastic blades in place.

Andy said, “She told me she was going swimming.”

Curtis glanced up. The boy was staring at the empty pool, Ginger beside it. “Did she now,” he said, and turned his attention back to the toy.

“I tried to tell her there wasn’t no water, but she wouldn’t listen. So I told her it was too early for swimming. We’d just had waffles. But Gram said, ‘Early’s best for swimmin’.’” The boy bit his thumbnail. “Momma was in the shower. I had to yell.”

“You did right,” Curtis said.

“She scares me sometimes.”

Curtis pressed the dull edge of his knife on his thigh, closing the blade. He slipped it into his pocket, removed his glasses, and held up the helicopter. With a flick of his finger he set the plastic rotors spinning.

Andy smiled, took the toy.

“Truth is,” Curtis said, tucking his glasses into their black case in his shirt pocket, “she sometimes scares me, too.” He winked. “Specially when she ain’t wearin’ no clothes.”

They laughed and, after turning the blades for himself, the boy spun on his heels and disappeared into the office. The bell jingled above him as the door swung shut. Curtis watched dust motes swirl in his wake.

In a little while, the old man got up and closed his folding chair. He called out to Ginger, “Watch out for them wasps till I get ’em sprayed, now.” She waved without looking around, and a second later he was shuffling toward the diner, chair tucked under his arm.

Out near the road, the motel’s sign stood tall and incongruous to the flat, sun-washed landscape. It was shaped like a rocket. Written in red, looping script along the fuselage was the motel’s name, and at the tip of the rocket was a crescent moon, tilted on its back, the yellow paint long since worn from its rusted rivets. A gray hawk perched atop the moon, its head swiveling against the cloudless sky. Its eyes flashed and suddenly the bird unfurled its wings and dropped upon some small, unsuspecting creature in the grass. Its talons left the metal with a sharp snick.

By the pool, Ginger paused at the sound, then, a second later, continued reading.

Check-In

1. Memphis

Early Dodd walked out of Memphis International and dropped his leather carry-on at his boots. He stood at the curb near the Northwest kiosk and lit a cigarette. It was only five past eight but already the air above the idling Red Cabs was full of the sun. Early smoked, eying a young girl in a purple tube top and jeans wheeling a black nylon suitcase. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail. She wore flip-flops and a silver ring in the pale flesh of her navel, a stud in her nose. She cut her eyes at Early as she passed—and quickly looked away. He watched her disappear into the tinted terminal glass, caught a glimpse of his reflection there. He was not a handsome man. His face was clean-shaven but craggy, his eyes deep-set. He was tall and wore a pair of faded Lee jeans and a blue button-up shirt beneath a denim coat. He kept a battered Montana pulled low on his head. He stood, people flowing around him like water around a rock. He dropped his cigarette and ground it beneath the toe of his boot.

Across the street, a black Mustang convertible was parked between a stretch limo and a mini-van. The driver sat behind the wheel, one arm thrown across the beige leather seats. He had a big build, tattoos on his biceps, black spiked hair. He wore a black, short-sleeve button-up embroidered with palm trees, jeans. He was young, maybe twenty. He saw Early and raised his hand. He cocked an index-finger pistol and shot a lopsided grin.

Early picked up his bag and crossed the street.

“Like Uncle Jack said,” the kid said, “You’ll know the man by his hat. Name’s Luke.” He stuck out his hand. There was gold on his fingers and wrists. He wore Birkenstock sandals.

Early tossed his bag in the backseat. He ignored the hand. “Let’s go,” he said.

They left the airport. FedEx jets and a white wisp of cloud moved in an otherwise empty sky. To the south, the horizon was dark.

The kid said, “Better hold that beauty or she’ll blow right off.”

Early took his hat by the brim.

They blasted along the freeway and shot off at the 78 exit. They passed a garage, a pawn shop, Jack Pyrtle’s Chicken. Four cracked lanes, big rigs, fumes. Whores trolled the streets in skirts and tops bright as lures, angling for truckers at red lights. Some waved at traffic.

The Americana Club stood on the corner of 78 and Winchester, huge, red white and blue with a garish marquee and smoky glass. The kid parked in back, next to a battered red ’77 Cadillac De Ville. He led Early through the rear into a dim, cool corridor. Early carried his bag at his side. The air smelled close: sweat, dust, perfume. The walls were wood paneling, the floor blue shag. Somewhere up ahead, country music drifted, “Heaven’s Just a Sin Away,” the Kendalls.

At the end of the hall a woman shoved through a beaded curtain. She wore a purple thong, an orange wig, and silver glitter.

“Evie,” the kid said, spreading his arms as she approached. “How’s that new routine coming? Be ready for tonight? Can’t wait to see it.”

“Fuck off, Luke-ass,” Evie said, tugging free of the wig as she brushed past.

The kid laughed and said to Early, “Given name’s Lucas.”

They came to a door marked Manager. The kid knocked twice, waited for the gruff “Come” that followed from inside, and entered. Early went after him, and the kid closed the door behind him.

The room was lit harshly with fluorescents. A box fan hammered away from a window and a fat man in a brown blazer was bent over a scarred, walnut-finished desk, scribbling into a ledger. A cup of coffee steamed at his hand. Receipts were scattered across the desk, along with ink pens, pencil nubs, a Howard’s Donuts box. The fat man stopped writing. He put his pen in a ceramic cup shaped like a boot and leaned back in his chair. It creaked with his weight. He had small, black eyes and a receding hairline. A black boar’s head hung on the wall above him, cobwebs in its snout. “You’re Dodd,” he said, and gestured at the imitation-leather chair opposite his desk.

Early nodded but did not sit.

The kid sat on a bar stool in the corner by the door, arms crossed at his chest to show off his muscles. He watched the left side of Early’s face.

“You’re Kitchens,” Early said.

“I am.”

“Where’s the girl?”

The fat man pointed at a sideboard to the kid’s left. “Drink?”

“No. Is she here?”

The fat man chuckled. “Bossman said you weren’t one for pleasantries. Said don’t be put off by it though. I ain’t yet.” The fat man pointed at the kid. “Luke here can take you to her. Today’s her day off. On Lucy’s day off, she stays home and watches TV.”

“Fine,” Early said, and unzipped his bag. “I’ll need some things later, when we get back. Here’s a list. I’ll phone from her place if there’s anything else.”

The fat man took the twice-folded paper and read it. He grunted. “You don’t want much, do you.”

“You’ll be reimbursed.”

“How much later we talking?”

Early shook his head. “When I get back.”

The fat man re-folded the paper and passed it to the kid. “Take this out to Mackie. Tell him get on it, have it all here by three o’clock. Everything.”

“Noon, at the latest,” Early said to Luke. “I’ve got a schedule.”

The fan in the window rattled.

Luke looked to Kitchens.

The fat man shrugged. “Okay. Noon.”

“Lotta stuff here,” the kid said.

“Just tell that barfly get to it or I’ll pitch his lazy ass in the goddamn river.”

The kid laughed, left the office.

“Mind if I smoke?” Early said, already reaching.

Kitchens shook his head. There were beads of sweat on his scalp.

Early tapped one out. “That your pig?”

The fat man turned in his chair and looked up at the head on the wall. “I killed that big bastard ten, must be twelve years ago. Ain’t touched a gun since.”

“You don’t clean it?”

Kitchens pushed a black plastic ashtray across the desk. “Pride takes too much work to maintain. Just a lucky shot. What about you? You a hunter, Dodd?” The fat man laughed. “Animals, I mean.”

“I fish.”

“Now there’s a sport I never got the hang of. Man goes out to the middle of a lake, sits in the burning sun all day, watches a little Styrofoam cork bob in the water. May catch something, may not. Don’t make a lick of sense.”

Early blew smoke. “That’s a point of view.”

The door opened. From the hallway the kid said, “All set, boss.”

“He give you any shit?”

“The usual.”

“Right.” Kitchens stood. “Then take the man to see a lady. Have him back by noon.” Kitchens winked at Early. “He’s got a schedule.”

Early stubbed his cigarette in the ashtray.

The kid, grin firmly in place, followed him out.

From the Americana the kid drove Early to an apartment complex in Whitehaven called Rainbow’s End. The “o” was missing from the sign. They parked near a dumpster in the shade of a stunted elm and took the stairs to the second-floor landing. Early let the kid lead. An old black man in a wife-beater stood in the frame of an open door, scratching his chest with one hand, in the other a dog-eared copy of The Wanderer and His Shadow. The old man watched Early and the kid with hooded eyes as they passed. When they came to unit twelve, the kid stopped. Early removed his hat and pressed his ear to the door. Over the roar of the window-unit AC he heard the faint drone of a television. Early tried the door. Locked. A deadbolt, pin and tumbler. He reached into the bowl of his hat and pulled two metal objects from the band, a lock pick and tension wrench, neither bigger than a matchstick. He put his hat back on, checked his watch, and said to the kid, “Ten minutes.”

“You sure you don’t need—”

“You wait.”

The kid held up both hands, palms out. “You the boss, boss.”

Early let his eyes linger on the kid—he didn’t like that grin, not one bit—then turned and inserted the wrench into the lock. He turned it as he might a key, slid the pick in above it, and carefully worked the pins. He closed his eyes, listening. Moved the pick. Listened. Moved. Seconds later, the door clicked open.

The old black man down the way set a bookmark between the pages of his Nietzsche and leaned out of his door, staring.

The kid put one finger to his temple in salute.

The old man re-opened his book to the page marked.

Traffic whirred past on the highway.

Early pocketed his tools in his jacket and slipped inside the apartment, closing the door softly behind him. The living room was dim, the only light stealing between the cracks in the blinds. The walls were some un-color paint, the floor a dingy, threadbare gray. No pictures on the walls, no trinkets on shelves. No books. A kitchenette in the back, dishes overflowing from the sink onto the counter. In the living room a couch and coffee table, the table covered with cigarette butts, an open Doritos bag, empty beer bottles, roach clips. A telephone on one corner, the cord snaking to a plug beneath the couch.

He could hear the TV from a door to his left, could see its blue glow. He took a few careful steps toward the light, pausing when the floor creaked beneath his boots. He edged to the doorway and saw, reflected in a full-length mirror mounted on a closet door, a queen-size bed. A black male and white female were both naked and sprawled atop the covers. The male was only a boy, couldn’t have been more than sixteen, seventeen. He was asleep, his mouth open, one arm thrown over his face. A few years older, the girl was awake and sitting up, her back against the wall. She was hunched over a lighter, snapping it at the bowl of a hash pipe. Early heard canned laughter from the TV, which stood on a wire cart adjacent to the mirror. The girl had a plump, full body, pale skin and dark hair, large breasts, razor wire tattooed around her right wrist and ankle. She might have been twenty. Her stash was spread on a piece of butcher’s paper atop her lover’s stomach. She couldn’t get the pipe to light.

Early stepped casually into the room.

The girl, pipe to her mouth, lighter to her pipe, froze. She stared.

Early put one finger to his lips.

More canned laughter from the TV.

The girl glanced at her lover, his chest rising and falling.

Early shook his head.

Slowly, the girl put her pipe and lighter down on the bed as Early moved across the room. She was trembling, staring straight ahead, when he leaned into her ear and whispered. She listened. Nodded. Early took her by the hands and helped her off the bed. Then, standing behind her, he tucked her right arm into the small of her back and slid his left arm around her throat. His fingers constricted lightly around her windpipe, and this way he led her from the bedroom to the living room, pausing only to close the bedroom door behind him.

The couch was the color of used limes. The girl sank into the middle. Early removed two blue handkerchiefs from his right coat pocket and tied her hands and feet together. Then he took a third handkerchief from his left pocket, and when she saw what he intended with it, she shook her head, squirmed backward on the couch. He seized her left ear, twisted it, and when she opened her mouth to cry out he stuffed the wadded handkerchief in. He removed his belt and knotted it around her head to hold the handkerchief in place. She whimpered, held her arms over her naked breasts.

Next Early went to the kitchen, rummaged in a drawer. When he returned he moved three of the empty beer bottles and the full ashtray to the floor and sat down on the coffee table, directly across from the girl. He carried a Phillips’ head screwdriver with a yellow plastic grip in his right hand. The girl’s eyes fastened on it. Early leaned forward, resting his elbows on his thighs. The screwdriver dangled between his legs. He said, softly: “Lucy.”

The girl stared at the six-inch length of steel.

“Lucy.”

She looked up. Her eyes were wet, the remnants of her Mascara running. She tried to speak behind the gag, a series of broken, desperate murmurs.

Early put one finger to his lips, shook his head.

She quieted.

“I’m going to ask you some questions, Lucy. And in order for you to answer them, I’m going to have to remove your gag. If you answer my questions quietly and honestly, I won’t hurt you anymore than I already have. If you cry out, scream for help, or lie to me, I’m going to take this screwdriver and show you that up until now, I really haven’t hurt you at all.”

She closed her eyes, opened them.

“Now, are you ready to answer?”

She nodded.

“Good.” He stood, unfastened his belt from around her head, and yanked the handkerchief from her mouth. She stifled gags as Early stuffed the cloth back into his pocket. The belt he ran through his jeans and tightened. After he had sat back down, he said, “So. Where in Mississippi is Elmo Carter?”

“Elmo?”

Early said nothing.

“Why you want Elmo?”

Early pressed the cold length of the screwdriver against her inner thigh.

She drew in a sharp, sudden breath.

“He’s, he’s in Big Moon. Little town down south, in the Delta. He grew up there. He got a cousin down there. Hector. I don’t know his last name. We stayed with him but I don’t know.”

“Where exactly did you stay?”

She opened her mouth to answer, hesitated.

Early slid the screwdriver up, toward the dark thatch between her legs.

She grabbed at his wrist and he backhanded her across the face. She gave out a single sob. Early rose up from the table, planted one knee hard between her legs on the couch, his weight pressing down, smothering her. Then he inserted the tip of the screwdriver into her right ear canal, applying pressure.

“Oh Jesus oh God,” she gasped, “he, he lived out in the country somewhere, some old farm, there was a barn, but, but they didn’t tell me nothing, mister, I swear, they never told me shit. I swear, I swear. Swear.”

Early watched a bubble of snot form in her left nostril and pop. Her lipstick had smeared where he slapped her. He backed off, resumed his seat on the coffee table. “What was the cousin into?”

She was shaking all over now, unable to meet his eyes. Her arms were like planks at her sides, her legs clutched together. Her head drooped and her hair hung down on either side of her face. “Bad stuff. Drugs, dogfights. Other stuff he wouldn’t tell. He and Elmo, they, they don’t get along.”

Early thought, said, “They have the fights there, at the barn?”

“Ever other S-Saturday night.”

“Did Elmo have plans to go anywhere, leave?”

“I d-don’t know,” she said, shaking. “I don’t know.”

“What was the cousin’s last name, Lucy? Hector what?”

Suddenly her eyes shifted focus, to something behind Early, and he forced the screwdriver between her legs even as he heard the click of a gun cocking.

Lucy squealed in pain.

A voice roared behind him: “WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS?”

Early didn’t move. He didn’t look around. He only said, “You hang on a second and listen to me, Romeo. I got a screwdriver an inch into this gal’s cunt. You shoot me it might just—”

That was as far as he got before the first shot rang out.

Early threw himself to the floor, knowing full well he couldn’t dodge a bullet.

Two more shots rang out. A third.

The girl was screaming.

He wasn’t hit. He rolled from where he lay on the floor and saw the lover—who had emerged from the bedroom naked—reeling against the wall, his gun dangling from his index finger by the trigger guard. Blood spurted from a hole in his neck. Romeo sat down in the floor, against the baseboard. He reached up and touched his neck lightly, then dropped his hand.

The girl was still screaming on the couch.

Another shot rang out.

Early jerked, arms over his head.

And suddenly the girl wasn’t screaming anymore.

Early looked up.

The kid stood in the doorway, a 9mm Beretta in hand.

The girl sprawled on the couch, a quarter-size hole above her left eye. The back of the lime-green couch dripped red.

For a handful of seconds, neither Early nor Luke said anything. Early put one finger in his ear and jiggled it. Luke lowered his gun and stared at Lucy’s corpse. Against the wall, the lover continued to gurgle and twitch. The room was close and hazy with the acrid discharge of the gun.

“Shell casings,” Early finally said.

Luke slowly turned his head from the girl to Early. “Huh?”

“Pick up your shell casings, put them in your pocket, and walk calmly out the door and to the car. I’ll be right behind you.”

Luke looked down and around like a man suddenly aware of a lost dime or quarter. He bent, picked up one brass casing. It had rolled near the edge of the couch. “I don’t see the others,” he said.

“By the door,” Early said, snatching loose his handkerchiefs from Lucy’s corpse and tucking them, along with the screwdriver, into his pockets.

Luke went out the door and down the stairs, and Early followed. The landing was empty, and all the complex doors were shut.

Early drove.

Across town to Union, far from the Rainbow’s End, where he chose a pay phone at an Exxon. The phone was near a hedgerow, a good fifty yards from the nearest parked car. On the way, as they’d passed the gates of Graceland, three black-and-whites and an ambulance had screamed by, headed for Whitehaven. Early leaned into the phone, pressing the receiver against his ear to drown out the midday rush of traffic. Behind him, Luke sat in the passenger’s seat of the convertible, staring straight ahead, hands clasped in his lap.

The fat man picked up on the third ring: “Yeah?”

“It’s Dodd. Is there any reason I can’t speak on this line?”

“What—?”

“Are your phones tapped, wired, is anyone listening?”

“No. I’m clean with the locals. I pay my taxes. Even got a friend or two in vice.”

“We’ve got a problem.” Early looked over his shoulder at the kid, but the kid was no longer in the convertible.

“What kind of problem?”

Early scanned the parking lot, the Exxon. He saw the kid inside the store, walking up and down the aisles.

“Hello? Dodd?”

“Your nephew. He got a little trigger happy, killed two ducks. One of them watches TV on her day off.”

For a long moment, the only sound on the line was the steady hiss of pay-phone static. Then: “Ah, Jesus. Ah, fuck. Who was the other?”

“Some mallard had his feathers up….”

Early stopped. A black and white Memphis PD cruiser waited at a nearby intersection, its blinker signaling a turn into the Exxon parking lot. The light changed and the car pulled in, parked next to a red Volkswagen beetle. The driver and his partner got out. The driver, broad-shouldered with bristly short hair and sunglasses, hitched up his belt. He spoke to his partner, a woman, her hat pulled low on her brow. The woman nodded, leaned against the fender of the cruiser. The man went into the store.

“Listen,” Early said, “The kid may have also saved my skin, but that doesn’t change the fact you and me are in a pickle.”

“What exactly are you—”

“You and I work for the Man, and we both know he won’t be happy if fires start burning he wasn’t already planning to have put out.”

Silence. “No. No he won’t. Hell, nobody needs that kind of trouble.”

Inside, the kid was at the counter, paying for something Early couldn’t see. The cops were in line behind him.

“Then let me ask you this: do you love your nephew?”

“What?”
“Do you love your nephew?” Early glanced back at the store. The cashier was making change for the kid. She must have offered him a bag for his purchases because he shook his head and turned for the door. He forgot his change. The cashier called out, the kid whirled. He laughed, took the money, but in his haste dropped several coins. They scattered across the tile. He kept walking.

The cop held out an arm, bending for the change.

“Shit,” Early said.

Kitchens said, “I don’t understand—”

“Wait, damn it. Just wait.”

Early glanced over at the cruiser. The woman, too, was watching her partner in the store.

The kid took the change and nearly tripped over a plastic “Piso Mojado” sign on his way out.

The woman cop’s eyes followed the kid, moved to Early, then to something else.

Early let out a long sigh and realized, as he did, he’d been holding his breath.

“All right, Kitchens. You listen and listen good. I’m on my way to pick up what I asked for, and I’m adding your nephew to the list. So you better think of everything you ever wanted to say to him and didn’t because you won’t see him again after today.”

“You mean you’re going to—”

“We’ll be there in fifteen minutes. Have everything ready.”

Early hung up. He tried to slow his breathing, which had become rapid and shallow. His pulse was racing.

The kid hurried across the parking lot, a cup of coffee and a cheese Danish in hand. The Danish was open. The kid was taking big bites as he got into the car.

Early cranked the engine and pulled into traffic, careful to signal before he turned.

They sat in a roomy, red vinyl booth with Kitchens at the Americana Club, Luke nursing a tumbler of whiskey. The kid was quiet, pensive, had been ever since leaving the Exxon. His only comment had come at a red light on Poplar. He’d looked over at Early after finishing his pastry and said: “That was the best goddamn Danish I will ever eat.” In contrast to Luke’s cool, it was apparent by the half-empty bottle of Jim Beam set squarely in the middle of the table that the fat man had been boozing it since he’d hung up the phone half an hour ago. He sat with his head in his hands, his tie loosened, staring at the last slug of liquor in his glass. His eyes were shot with red. Early had nothing to drink, only a cigarette. He lit it and tucked the complimentary matchbook—featuring the silhouette of a naked woman draped in an American flag—into his coat pocket, with the handkerchiefs and screwdriver. The club was mostly empty, a few regulars hunkered at the bar. The room was dark, gloomy. The stage wouldn’t come alive until after five, or so the sign in the front window said. There was music on the juke, Kenny and Dolly, “Islands in the Stream.”

“You’ll come with me,” Early said to the kid.

Luke did not look at him.

“As for the car,” Early said to Kitchens, “long-term storage or salvage. Keep it off the streets and out of sight, whatever you do.” Back to Luke: “You got a record?”

The kid took a gulp of whiskey. “Once. Juvie stuff, nothing since. Five, no, six years ago.”

“You didn’t touch anything in the place, did you?”

“In juvie?”

Early snapped his fingers three times in front of the kid’s face. “In the apartment.”

Luke shook his head.

“Tell me about the gun.”

“I bought it a year ago, across the river in West Memphis. Some pimp selling out the trunk of his Caprice. No serial numbers.”

“Then it’s not likely they’ll be able to trace it, sure enough not back to you.”

“Thank Christ for small favors,” Kitchens grumbled.

“You handle the cops?”

“I been there before.”

“For what?”

Kitchens shrugged. “I ran some girls outta the back once or twice. Word got around. Nothing major.”

“No drugs?”

Kitchens downed the last of his drink. “Nothin’ ain’t legal.”

“They’ll ask questions, and I don’t know how hard they’ll ask. Not too hard, less you give them reason. It’s a safe bet Romeo’s gun was just as hot as the kid’s. Add to that a fair amount of dope in the apartment and what a cop eye sees is two lowlifes who met their inevitable ends at the hands of worse men than they. Case pretty much closed.”

“She always had problems,” Kitchens said. “Lucy. I can say that. If they ask about her, I mean. That ain’t a lie.”

Early blew smoke. “The neighbors got a good look at us, but I don’t figure that’ll matter. After this afternoon we won’t be around for anyone to spot.” He stubbed his cigarette in a black Bakelite ashtray.

Kitchens reached for the bottle of Jim Beam, and suddenly Early’s hand shot out and seized the fat man’s wrist. He squeezed and said in a low, calculated voice: “I don’t need to remind you that this is all your nephew’s fault, do I?”

Luke stared at his glass. He had not taken more than three drinks from it since they arrived.

Kitchens shook his head, the waddle of fat beneath his chin jiggling.

Early let go and said, “Then let’s have a look at my list.”

The black Jeep Cherokee and Ranger Comanche were parked in the rear of the building, alongside Kitchens’ Cadillac. Early walked around the Jeep and boat once, inspecting tags and tires. The boat was a twenty-two-footer, complete with trolling motor, Lowrance fish-finder, livewell, and a 300-horsepower Evinrude. The boat and trailer were brand new, while the Jeep, a four-wheel drive, was used, just as Early had requested. The keys were in the ignition. His leather carry-on had been removed from the Mustang by whoever had driven the car away and placed in the driver’s seat, along with a laminated road map of Mississippi. The rear cargo space was packed with the other items on his list: a blue Igloo ice chest, a cane fishing pole and Zebco rod, two tubes of crickets, three cartons of red wiggler worms, several yards of blue plastic tarpaulin rolled and tied, and two five-gallon, red metal gas cans.

“We’re going fishing?” the kid said.

“That’s a point of view,” Early said.

Kitchens leaned against his Cadillac.

“You get the license?” Early asked.

“Oh. Yeah.” The fat man reached into his slacks and drew out his wallet, produced a set of Mississippi fishing license. “Under the name and address you wrote down. There’s only the one. I wasn’t figuring….” He trailed off, shrugged.

Early inspected the license and tucked them into his wallet. “Say your goodbyes, kid,” he said, and opened the driver’s door. He threw his bag in the backseat and climbed in, fastened his seatbelt, started the engine. He watched in the side mirror as Luke passed words with his uncle—the fat man actually hugged him—and when the kid got in, Early threw the Jeep in drive and swung out onto 78, eager to be shut of Memphis and the Americana Club and the fat man named Kitchens. He never knew what the kid and his uncle had said to one another. It never occurred to him to ask.

They rode in silence until Tennessee was behind them. In half an hour they were clear of Memphis traffic and over the Mississippi state line. Early set the cruise control at seventy and tossed the map from the dash to Luke.

“Find Big Moon,” he said, lighting a cigarette.

“I hate Mississippi,” the kid grumbled, unfolding the map.

“That’s upside down.”

“What?”

“You’ve got it backward.”

“Yeah, well, suits this fucking state, don’t it.”

Early cracked his window and blew smoke into the sudden rush of air. Ahead he saw a state trooper parked beneath an overpass. His hands tightened on the wheel. They passed and Early checked his rearview. Loosened his grip.

“Here it is.” Luke tapped his finger on the map.

“Where?”

“Here.”

“What’s it near?”

“It’s near the ass-end of nowhere is what it’s near. What the fuck do I know, man, it ain’t my state.” He tossed the map in the backseat.

“Look at the map again and tell me.”

“Kiss my ass.”

“Look at the map, kid.”

Luke stared hard at Early. He reached around and snatched the map, studied it. “West of Yazoo,” he finally said.

“Lakes nearby?”

“Lakes, lakes, Let’s see…lakes. Lake…George. Panther Creek. Deep Bayou. Old Peckerwood Stream runs straight into Big Nigger Bottom.” He made an angry, awkward attempt to re-fold the map, cussed it, and threw it in the floor.

Early let this pass.

Luke hooked a thumb over his shoulder. “What exactly are we doing with all this shit anyway? You didn’t fly all the way out here to go fishing on the big man’s ticket.”

“Not with you I didn’t.”

“Fuck you, man.”

“Didn’t your daddy ever take you fishing?”

“Fuck you,” Luke said. “Yeah, my daddy took me fishing. And when I couldn’t sit still in the boat he picked up a paddle and hit me in the face. Split my bottom lip in two fucking halves.” He propped his elbow on the window sill, cradled his head in his hand. “Fishing. Shit.”

Early took one last drag and said, “You ain’t been able to fold a map right since, that it?”

Slowly, the kid turned away from the whipping pines and hills and stared at Early. He opened his mouth, shut it. He laughed.

Early flicked his butt out the window, rolled it up.

“What do you do back west?” the kid asked. “You’re what, some kind of bounty hunter?”

“I do what people pay me to do,” Early said.

“Yeah? What are they paying you to do this time?”

Early didn’t answer.

When the roar of the silence had almost drowned even the hum of the tires, he switched on the radio. He trolled and found a station playing old country, Hank Williams, “Cold, Cold Heart.”

Eventually, the kid turned his head and planted his chin on his hand, gazing out the window as he had before.

2006-03-29T12:41:00.000-08:00

Gethsemane and Golgotha, or
The New Fundamentalists, or
4 Poems Intended to Begin the Tradition of Southern Baptist Recovery Poetry

"Gospel Troy (played by Billy Bob Thornton)"

Yeah, I’ve been a Deputy goin-on 18 years now.
I was 9 when I signed up. Tin star came in the mail,
stuck it on my pearl-capped brown-plaid button-down
& wore that thing ragged.
Don’t have a hat, Don’t need one:
this is the Lord’s Wranglers we’re talking about.

Listen here,
This is what I tell the Lord’s Lawbreakers:
“You’re wanted, son. Wanted for a price.
Heaven’s after you, spraying bullets of glory
(thank you Jesus).
One of these days he’s gone run you down,
string you up by your sins,
& hang you out over hell.
Most likely you’ll meet on the street round high noon
& he’ll draw on-ye quickern youn confess.

So what’ll it be, pard?
I’m own pray for-ye now,
& in tongues if you don’t mind:

Shabala hubadah lebadah…

(thank you Jesus)
Here’s you anothern.

Mount up.We’re rounding up the Lord’s Most Wanted.

"Scripture"

OVER BLACK
Peter, Paul, and Mary sing
Olive tree very pretty
and the olive flower is sweet
but the fruit of the poor olive…
FADE IN
on the Mount, the garden, the orchards,
the black beat of vultures’ wings on a pale pile of skulls
DISSOLVE TO
the page, the Sermon
words like red & black ants crawling across angels’ wings
CUT TO
the bitter drupes, pressed in an iron squeeze
FADE TO
the empty darkness of an orbital, a cave, or a tomb,

and,

FLARE TO WHITE
Roll credits—
The Book of Life—
scrolling up the screen toward heaven
all the old names written in black
or blood

"Brother Bailey Tells It Like It Is"

"It is interesting at great political rallies how you have a Protestant to pray and a Catholic to pray, and then you have a Jew to pray. With all due respect to those dear people, my friend, God Almighty does not hear the prayer of a Jew. For how in the world can God hear the prayer of a man who says that Jesus Christ is not the true Messiah? It is blasphemy."--Bailey Smith, president, Southern Baptist Convention, Aug. 22, 1980.

I call ‘em like I see ‘em, my friend,
cause Darlin, my eyesight’s twenty-twenty
(at least when I got my Jesus-Goggles on).
God, on the other hand,
when it comes to Jews—
of course—
is deaf.
We all know that.
Look at history:
Auschwitz.
Wailing in the gas chambers.
You mean to tell me he heard all that?
Christ! That ain’t my God Almighty.

"A Family Tradition"

1.
We go back to ’61,
baptized in blood,
since which time
we’ve established quite a history
(if I do say so myself)
of ignoring all-things-poetry.
We are not Yankee
or industrial
and by no means modern.
Pastoral, yes (but males only, please)
and without the dang harps
And pretty sheep
(we’ll keep the Psalms, though,
seeing as how they’re already in there).

2.
This ain’t no Lost Cause.
No ma’am,
the South—like Christ—
will rise again.

3.
Don’t give me that crap
about Ham and whiskey.
I mean, come on,
look at Lottie Moon.
She ain’t no white sheet.

4.
Let’s make that old-time religion
really speak to the youth of today.
We got all your modern conviences:
we’re basically Wal-Mart
with Christ on every aisle.

And T-shirts—
the youth love ‘em,
and why not,
what a witness,
what a message—
100% cotton=100% Christ
“American by birth,
Southern by the grace of God.”

5.
Brother Hank, I’m here to tell you
(I guess I’m in the right place
I look around and all I see're white faces):
it’s a lot like Dixie.
I mean a lot.

2006-03-24T08:15:00.000-08:00

Where You From?

FALL
In 2000 I move to Mississippi from Irvine, California to attend graduate school. I’m instantly greeted with two things I didn’t really expect—the suffocating humidity and the fact that for the last twenty two years I’ve been pronouncing the state name wrong. It’s Miss-ippi. What other syllable? What are you talking about? You sound like a Yankee. I write my old history professor, the one who was so elated that I’d accepted my post at Ole Miss. I demand he use the proper name at once so he won’t taint any more young minds with falsities concerning Missippi.
When I complain about the humidity, the sweat stains spreading on every shirt I own, I’m told there’s an actual product a woman can rub all over her body to keep her from sweating. It’s for pageants and weddings and stuff. You know, when you don’t want to sweat.

I’m amazed by the number of batters on the shelves at the grocery store. I count them: fifteen varieties of Fish-Fry, ten for hushpuppies, another twelve for shrimp boil. Regular, Hot, Spicy, Mild, Cajun. I think I’ve simply not noticed this at home. I call Mom. “What the hell are you talking about?” she asks. “What’s ‘Soul Food Seasoning’? Is that anything like ‘Mexican Seasoning’? I bet it is.”
By late fall I decide that the number of Fish-Frys is somehow cosmically connected to the way people identify themselves here, by county. They won’t come out and tell you what town they’re from; they hint around at it. I’m from Yalobusha County, Lee County, Pontotoc County. It’s even on the license plates. I get so frustrated I stop asking for directions and just buy a county map. I’m sick of hearing things like, “Well, just take a right where the old Ice House used to be till you come to the old theater that was tore down in eighty-nine in Desoto County. What you’re looking for is about four miles north of there, just outside before you hit Tippah County.”
I never told anyone I lived in Orange County. Where you from? Santa Ana, Newport, Irvine. As if to prove me wrong, Aaron Spelling comes out with a new TV show, “The O.C.”

WINTER
I’m afraid of being alone at the Nativity Play and take the plunge to date someone from around here. He thinks it’s funny I don’t say y’all or supper. He takes me to his parents’ for dinner and shows me off like I’m a snow globe, shaking me at my shoulders and spinning me around the room and saying, “She’s really from California.” They’re Southern Baptists. Perfect, since I have one foot in Atheism and the other in Gnosticism.
I make the mistake of not only overdressing, but also wearing jeans with holes in the knees. “You done worn out the knees of those pants prayin’ to Jesus haven’t ya?” his grandfather asks. In a conversation concerning the current situation in the Middle East, I hear someone say about Saddam Hussein, “His cornbread ain’t cooked.”
When I return to my apartment I’ve got a stack of Christmas cards waiting in the mail. One is from my bank. In the same envelope is a recipe card from Teller Number 37: Meatless Meatloaf Bake. Who is Teller Number 37, and how does First National know I’m a vegetarian?

I can’t help wondering why so many students, most of them sorority girls, drive SUVs. I’m told these vehicles are the dowry of the twenty-first century and since spring is rapidly approaching every father within a ten mile radius is out to prove his daughter is ready for marriage. This bothers me for two reasons: One, I own a compact car. Two, is the girl who drives the Toyota actually worth less than the one driving the Lexus?
In order to make sense of this new world, I catalogue the bugs the way I do these students—big wings, Lexus, small wings, Toyota. It’s not hard. At first I let them land on my notebook and snap it closed. I have pages of tiny flattened carcasses I’ve teased apart to measure. I then divide them according to color. The down side is, I think some of them are the same bug at different stages in life. Once I start letting them bite me I can begin to truly identify them. There’s a small one that looks like a baby mosquito. It can make my elbow swell to the size of a turnip. I keep this in mind as I watch girls driving around in their Suburbans.

SPRING
Mom comes to visit just when the pollen is coating everything with a yellow fur. We’re both sneezing and I take her to the grocery store on Sunday to prove they don’t, in fact, have a liquor aisle. “See,” I say, walking her next to the potato chips, “it should be right here and it’s not.”
“But you’ve got beer. Here’s let’s get something. It’ll cure these allergies.”
“It’s Sunday,” I explain.
“So.” She takes a six pack of Berry Mountain Coolers to the checkout.
“Oh,” sighs the checker, “I can’t sell that to you, it’s the Sabbath.”
“See,” I say.
“It’s okay,” Mom tells her. She takes out her wallet and flashes her driver’s license. “I’m from California.”
Instead of drinking we end up frying okra in my kitchen. “Do you think I could smuggle some of this on the plane?” Mom asks, examining the small nuggets as if they are gold.
Once she’s safely tucked back into her Southern California living room, Mom tells me she’s not coming to visit again. “I got a rash,” she complains. “And I think you have mold.”
“It’s not mold,” I tell her, looking up at the black stain on the ceiling. “It’s mildew. There’s a difference.”

Why is it that my neighbors refuse to buy a trashcan, throwing their garbage onto their lawn for the stray cats who’ve multiplied since last summer? It’s now Friday and why hasn’t the guy who’s supposed to paint my front door not been back since he started the job on Monday? Why does my boyfriend act like I’m an alien from another planet every time I ask why Jeopardy comes on at noon?
My one girlfriend says, “Things get done a little slower here. You’ll just have to slow down. Do you think this animosity has anything to do with the fact that you’re not married yet, that what your boyfriend gave you for Christmas was that deep fryer and not an engagement ring?” I dump the friend, buy a paintbrush, and finish the door myself.

Friends from my college days visit in May. They’re getting married and I just know they’re going to ask me to be a bride’s maid. We spend the first night of their stay crouched in the sports bra section of Wal-Mart convinced we’re going to be swept away by the impending tornado, sirens going off in the parking lot. I try to soothe them by saying, “This has never happened to me before, really. There hasn’t been a single tornado since I moved here.” By the time it’s all over, I’ve got hail dents on the hood of my car and I’ve been reduced to the person in charge of the guest book.

SUMMER
Because the grilling season has begun, my boyfriend’s parents want to make a Drunk Chicken. This is where you stick a half can of beer up a chicken’s ass and set it out on the grill. They live in a dry county. Not only that, he’s a church Deacon. So there won’t be a scandal, I’ve been elected to buy the beer. What I want to say is, “Gee, thanks. It’s such an honor to buy you both your first beer. When I’m done here, do you mind if your son and I fuck in the bathroom?”

On Labor Day I meet a member of my boyfriend’s family who rattles off who the last five quarterbacks have been for the State college and where they now play professionally. He also tells me the number of rushing plays versus passing plays the University coach is planning to run in the coming year. He’s five. He’s got his allowance on Bama.
I’m trying to explain to some of his cousins that where I come from we pronounce a word spelled Y-O-C-O-N-A as Yo-cone-a, not Yawknee. Likewise, Tu pelo means your hair, not the birthplace of Elvis. “Say it again, say it again,” they say. They won’t stop laughing at me.
It’s true, chivalry is dead. I break up with my southern boyfriend the next day because he didn’t defend me. All he says is, “You’re afraid of my faith. You can’t handle that I’m heaven bound and you’re not.”
I say, “Geez, you’re right. That’s been eating away at me ever since I conceded to letting you fuck me in the bed of your pickup on the Fourth of July.” I can tell he feels some remorse, like he should stay and offer to take me to a cotillion. I throw the deep fryer onto the front porch so he knows it’s over. And for the first time in a year I feel like I belong here.

hey guys
this is in NO WAY a jibe at the south...i don't hate the south, i don't hate the south!...i'm trying to perfect a series of non-fiction pieces and this one is giving me the most trouble...is it coherent? does the "narrator" make sense...is the way it's organized confusing? i guess, more importantly, does it make you laugh at all?

any advice is most helpful
--joy

2006-03-20T13:09:00.000-08:00

Prologue:

“Good morning, Mr. Curtis,” she said, flashing him a smile that would have set the world spinning had he been twenty, even ten years younger.

“Morning, Miss Ginger,” the old man said and offered her a slice of apple.

“Ooh,” she said and ate half. “Yummy.”

“Ain’t that something?”

She ate the rest. “You get that from the kitchen?”

“Sure did.”

“Sure. Sign in the window says closed, but the door’s unlocked. Miss Angel’s still upstairs. You just go right in and help yourselves.”

At his use of the plural, she smiled, and a lovely blush the shade of ripening strawberries crept into her cheeks.

“New book this week?” He indicated her bag with the tip of his knife. A bit of green peel clung to the blade.

“Yes.” She pulled out the paperback. “Billy picked it up for me down in Clarksville last week.” She turned it over, studied it. “It’s about…bunnies.”

“Bunnies, well. Hear little ones like bunnies.”

She smiled again.

“Good day for sunning,” he said.

Ginger nodded and they passed more words about the sunshine, the heat. Her ice had already begun to melt when she excused herself and crossed the parking lot to the pool, the apples she was welcome to in the kitchen apparently forgotten. She let herself through the chain link gate and set her bucket and bag on the ground beside a tattered patio chair. The ice bucket made a wet ring on the concrete. Curtis watched as she pulled her towel from the bag—she had bought the bag last week at the Dollar General in Big Moon—and spread it on the collapsible lounge. She sat down, kicked off her flip flops, and nestled her Diet Coke snugly in the ice bucket. She began spreading tanning oil over her arms, legs, neck, and belly. When she was sufficiently slick, she lay back on the towel and cracked the novel.

She had finished only a few pages—the apple peel curled in one piece on the concrete between his shoes—when the bell over the office door, just down from the diner, jingled softly from inside.

Curtis folded his knife and slipped it in his pants pocket. He got to his feet.

“Gram Smith?” Curtis called.

The old woman seemed not to hear. She was headed for the pool.

“Miss Smith?” Ginger managed.

Again, the old woman seemed not to hear. Her dark nipples showed through her thin cotton bra like pennies.

Ginger struggled up and into her flip-flops, started toward the gate. “Miss Smith.”

The old woman was bent now, inspecting the latch. “I can’t seem to…” she said.

“MOMMA!” someone yelled from the office.

Curtis sat back down in his chair and gathered up the apple peel from between his feet and tucked it in his shirt pocket next to his reading glasses. “Morning, Mr. Andy,” he said.

Out by the pool, Ginger resumed reading.

“It’s broken,” Andy said, and held up the helicopter.

“Yeah? How’s that?” Curtis took the toy and turned it in his hands, looked at the boy.

“The blades won’t spin.”

The old man reached for his glasses, then his knife. He flicked the knife open and began fiddling with the screws holding the plastic blades in place.

Andy said, “She told me she was going swimming.”

Curtis glanced up. The boy was staring at the empty pool, Ginger beside it. “Did she now,” he said, and turned his attention back to the toy.

“You did right,” Curtis said.

“She scares me sometimes.”

Andy smiled, took the toy.

“Truth is,” Curtis said, tucking his glasses into their black case in his shirt pocket, “she sometimes scares me, too.” He winked. “Specially when she ain’t wearin’ no clothes.”

Out near the road, the motel’s sign—fashioned in the unlikely shape of a rocket—stood tall and incongruous to the flat, sun-washed landscape. Written in red, looping script along the fuselage was the motel’s name, and at the tip of the rocket was a crescent moon, tilted on its back, the yellow paint long since worn from its rivets. A gray hawk perched atop the moon, its head swiveling against the cloudless sky. Its eyes flashed in the morning sun and suddenly the bird spread its wings and dropped upon some small, unsuspecting creature in the grass. Its talons left the metal with a sharp snick.

By the pool, Ginger paused at the sound of shuffling wings, then, a second later, continued reading.

2006-03-18T14:44:00.000-08:00

Junior Surrenders to the Will of Mazie
Joy, Adam:

You've read this one before. Please let me know what's wrong with it, why someone wouldn't publish it. It's been rejected a couple of times. Is it preachy? Too narrow in its focus, what it's about?

I'm still working on the novel revisions, should have something headed in the right direction by next week.

Thanks,
Andy

Junior Surrenders to the Will of Mazie

Pastor Roy scares me with all that girth. He’s got hands the size of shovels. He wears a blue blazer two sizes too small, packed into it like a sack of meal. His jaw and head are square and hard. When he moves he strides. His voice is huge. It drives out silence and replaces it with the echoes of an angry spirit. It’s not the Spirit, I’m pretty sure. But it’s something.

I am a wretched, filthy Christian.

I try to tell Mazie about it in back, in the hall of fellowship, where we’re filling juice cups with a turkey baster and nibbling bread bits the size and shape of Chiclets. It’s a thing we do, prep communion. We’re serious youth, unlike the others. I love Mazie. She’s holy, the kind of girl you could only defile. She has olive skin, dark eyes. She wears these long yellow skirts and white socks that bunch around her loafers.

“Have you ever talked to him?” she says, squirting grape juice.

“I’m afraid of his voice.”

“Balls.” She’s squirted some on the Formica countertop.

I snatch a paper towel from the roll. “Big, booming, hearty man-laughter. It would haunt my dreams. You don’t know, Mazie. I’m insecure. I tell you, you just don’t have a clue.”

“You’re your own problem, Junior.” She tosses the towel in the wastebasket under the sink. Purple, dime-sized droplets on the linoleum. I move from those to Mazie’s calves. She runs every weekday, four miles. Her daddy owns the lumberyard and a big brick house. I imagine sneaking into her bedroom by moonlight, the old man catching us among the sheets and teddy bears in some twisted conjugation. His silhouette in the doorway, wringing an aluminum bat. I flee bare-assed into the lumber, into the night.

I tell you. I’ve got a problem.

“Junior? Junior? Here. Carry the wafers.”

We head to the vestibule to set the trays—like Chrysler hubcaps—on the table for the deacons. The 11 a.m. service is well under way. I hear Pastor Roy through the doors, same as eight o’clock, raining down all kinds of righteous indignation at “society today.” Baby-butchers and queers. “Jesus FORGIVES!” in letters ten feet tall and dripping red.

We stand close to the doors, listening through the cracks, Mazie’s round face inches from mine, her scent—Ivory soap—creeping on me like a sweet-smelling vine.

“He’s hypnotic,” she says.

I smell the Juicy Fruit on her breath. Something falls away inside me. In an instant, I see myself reaching out, touching her, first her hair, then her ear, then the mole at the base of her neck. She becomes a pillar of salt, crumbles away. I blink.

What the hell is wrong with me?

“Come on,” she says. “Let’s cool it in his office.”

That’s next to the gym. We close the door behind us. Through sheetrock we can hear the thud of balls, the squeak of shoes. The real youth are praising Jesus in game. I sit behind Pastor Roy’s desk, put my feet up, and flip through a book on marriage counseling. Mazie stretches like a cat on the lime green couch across the way. Have I said anything about Mazie’s breasts? They’re very small and nice. I’ve thought to tell her several times, but I choke. I’ve known her for five months now. She showed up one day at the door of our house, which is across from the lumberyard, where my old man drives a forklift. She invited me to spring revival. That night I gave my heart to Jesus and became a member. Now, I get rides to church with her family. I never see her except on Sundays.

“Do you think he appreciates her?” Mazie’s gazing at a picture above the couch: Pastor Roy and his slim blonde other.

“It says here,” I say, waving the book on marriage counseling, “that couples who’ve been together for a long time develop Needs.”

“Do you think she calls on Jesus when they’re doing it?”

I close the book. “What?”

“When I was little, I used to think Pastor Roy was Jesus. During the dismissal prayer, I used to wonder how he got from the front of the church to the back in order to shake everyone’s hand as they left, without me seeing him get there.”

I re-shelve the book and smooth my clip-on. “How’d you find out?”

She looks at me. One calf dangles off the couch, a socked heel slipping free of its loafer. She grins. “I opened my eyes during the prayer.”

“I’m not sure I’m cut out to be a Christian,” I say, staring at her heel. “I have carnal thoughts.”

“Do you have compassion?”

“Not much.”

“Do you have love?”

“The selfish kind.”

“Do you lust?”

“Three to five times a week.”

She shrugs again. “You’re your own problem, Junior. Like I said.”

It’s you, I almost say. You’re my problem. Instead, I come out with: “I lack his conviction.”

“Christ, Junior. Pastor Roy’s a fucking idiot.”

I blink.

“Haven’t you noticed?”

I shake my head.

“I saw this picture once of a thousand sheep lying dead in a field in Montana, killed by

lightning. Some mineral in the ground, conducts electricity, sent it through them and fried

every last one of them. I think about that when I’m sitting out in church sometimes.”

“Why did you invite me to church?”

She shrugs. “Just doing my part.”

In the gym next door, the balls have ceased to thud. The youth are singing now, softly, a chorus: I surrender all. I surrender all. All to Jesus I surrender, I surrender all.

“I really do feel broken up about things,” I say. “I have the desire to be…more than what I am. I just can’t transcend. I can’t…” But I don’t know what I’m saying, not really, so I shut up.

Mazie sits up on the couch. She hunches forward, props her elbows on her knees. Her dark hair falls over her shoulders, spills around her. “Why do you think I spend my Sundays with you instead of them?” She nods at the wall.

“Because…we’re different.”

“How? How are we different?”

“I don’t know. We just are. We don’t like Petra. We don’t like sports. We don’t like fucking jamborees.”

She hesitates. She says, “I want to show you something,” and sits up straight on the edge of the couch.

I drop my feet from the pastor’s desk.

She gathers two fistfuls of yellow cotton at her thighs and draws her dress quickly up her legs. Calves, knees, hips.

I’m sitting staring at the dark thatch of hair between her legs, and beneath it the bright pink furrow of her apex.

“There’s not a boy in this church I could show this to who wouldn’t fall down before it and worship.”

I can only stare.

She shifts closer to the edge of the couch. It hangs in space like a sideways smile.

“Not them, not you. Not even Pastor Roy.” She drops her dress, sits back on the couch. “Truth is I don’t spend my time with you because I think you’re any different than the rest, Junior. And that’s the trouble you make for yourself, thinking you are. You want to be a good Christian? You never will. You know why? You mistake the sheep for the lightning.”

I swallow, hard, the image of her sex seared into my retinas like the sun splitting the horizon. I shake my head, close my eyes, open them. “So,” I say, “why do you spend time with me?”

She laughs, high and startling. And suddenly looks very much like the fifteen-year-old girl she is. She shrugs. “I don’t know. I guess I like your hair.”

We walk around outside in the field adjacent to the church. It’s getting near noon. We don’t say much. We step on crawdad mounds and swat bees. At some point, Mazie kicks loose a loafer and I squat to slip it back on, and my hand steals from ankle to calf, firm and tender. I leave my fingers there and glance up, but Mazie’s looking off toward the church, toward its steeple, toward the blue sky beyond, some high and lofty place I cannot be.

It’s not long before the church doors open and Pastor Roy emerges into the afternoon sun, warm and friendly, bellyful of blood and crackers. He shakes hands and claps backs. People stream out. Cars dislodge and drift away. Mazie’s parents appear, wave to us, and head for their black SUV.

“Things’ll be different now,” she says beside me. “You know that.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t have.”
“I had to. You’ve got to stop obsessing, Junior. You obsess about everything. It hurts you.” She moves away, across the grass, toward the pavement.

I watch her go, note the way her hips move beneath her dress, marvel at the mystery between them. I follow.

2006-03-07T10:21:00.000-08:00

A Child To Those Who Mourn

The year my sister was born, my mother made me promise I would never play in the woods behind our house. So I didn’t, for a while. But five years later when I was twelve and my sister was diagnosed with autism, after Mom had packed up and left and had taken Carrie with her, it wasn’t long before my neighborhood pals--Tuffy and K.P.--and I set out into the dense pine woods to make camp and play war.

After all, Dad had never told me I couldn’t go back there. Whether the woods were a dangerous place or not, he never tried to scare me into avoiding them. But he didn’t just allow me to confront them, either; he forced me to. It became my job, every Saturday--from my tenth birthday until six years later when I drove away--to mow the grass, to establish the boundary of our yard against the encroaching kudzu of passing years.

Since I was just a boy then, cutting back the creeping vines was a chore. They’d get knotted up under the mower’s blade housing and I’d have to choke the throttle and cut the mower out of their grip, then turn it up on its side, knock away the sweet-smelling clumps of grass, and untangle the twisted creepers from the hot metal. I’d usually start on the yard in the morning and by noon the dewy grass would have stained the soles of my Jordans, and I’d be soaked in sweat and have to take a break and go back out after supper, because it was always too hot and humid between the hours of ten and six to do much of anything except sweat.

Not long after Mom left, Dad started pulling graveyard duty because he couldn't sleep. Every morning he'd come home from work smelling like dried sweat and stale cigarette smoke, and when I’d hear the cruiser pull up in the yard outside my window, I'd wake and we'd eat breakfast together before he went to sleep. He’d stand over the stove in his brown uniform shirt, the tail hanging out, beating up four or five eggs in a bowl with a fork, complaining the whole time about the stunts people pull on the highway, explaining to me the reasons behind the rules and regulations of road safety, preparing me for the day I'd turn fifteen so I'd already know how to drive. He never mentioned specifics about his job, no gory details, only general rules and the general idiots who broke them. But I didn’t care about all that. I was into “The General Lee” and Knight Rider by that time, so I guess that’s why he was so anxious to teach me a few things. Or maybe he was looking forward to the day I’d bring home a paycheck of my own to help pay the bills.

"The sooner you get your license," he'd always say, "the sooner you'll get a job."

In the woods behind our house that summer, the summer I turned twelve, my pals and I fought the last great wars of our childhood. We threw pine-cone grenades, shot broken-limb machine guns, and stepped carefully over briars and patches of poison ivy as if they were land-mines waiting to explode. The previous summer we had discovered an abandoned vehicle deep in the jungle, and now we marched out daily with my Dad’s machete to hack away at the overgrowth of cane and kudzu. The car was long and yellow, its chrome tail and fins rusting away like a 1950s version of a futuristic rocket ship that had crash-landed from another planet. When we finally cleared away the twisted briars enough so we could squirm inside, we realized it made a perfect tank or sniper’s den and would double as a clubhouse during peace-time. Inside, in the musty heat, it didn’t take long for the windows to fog up, especially when we lit up the filched cigarettes from our fathers’ packs. A couple weeks later, after we found the titty-mags under the floormats, K.P. and I were down there nearly every day.

By that time, though, Tuffy usually didn’t come around until after lunch because his mom was always enrolling him in Vacation Bible School or etiquette class in the mornings, but one day he showed up wearing school clothes and his good Nikes. We saw him enter the woods and aimed imaginary laser sights at his head. When he was close enough to the car so we could hear him, he stopped, picked up a stick, and started breaking it into tiny pieces that he flicked toward us as he yelled, “My mom says we have to stop playing back here for a while.”

“She’s not my mom,” K.P. said.

“Mine either.”

Tuffy’s voice raised half an octave. “She says there’s a convict loose. He took that girl up in Tupelo and he might be headed this way.”

Since my Dad was a Chukafalaya County Sheriff’s Deputy and I hadn’t heard anything about it, I figured he was crapping it. Besides, Tuffy was always making up stuff just to get us to believe it. This was the same kid who said he was Jimmy Swaggart’s nephew and Jerry Lee Lewis’ cousin, the same kid who wanted to be an astronaut when he grew up, that or an Elvis impersonator or a time-traveller.

“No crapping it,” he said finally, almost pleading. It was weird, almost scary. “I’m serious as a heart-attack.”

So, of course we had to go home. And when we did, we watched television and movies and played Nintendo. We watched MacGyver and The A-Team and G.I. Joe cartoons, Die Hard, Predator, Commando, First Blood. We played Contra and Renegade and got into fist-fights over whose turn was next. Normally our folks wouldn’t have approved of all this violence, all those wasted summer hours spent indoors, but at least we were out of the woods, safe from all the wackos wandering around on the loose.

One day we rode our bikes to the pool and spent the whole day swimming under the blue sky and hot sun, diving for shiny pennies and braving the high dive. And, of course, K.P. and I were both in love with the lifeguard, Tuffy’s sister, sitting way up there under the pine trees, wearing her green bathing suit, sunlight pinwheeling off that lucky silver whistle dangling between her breasts. Her mirror sunglasses hid her eyes so no one would know she was looking at us, marvelling at what great men we almost were. K.P. and I had watched her once from my backyard fence, our hands stuffed in our pockets, while we waited for Tuffy to finish his homework. She had spread a lawnchair out in the tall weeds of their backyard and was lying down in a lavender bikini, and when she turned over on her stomach and reached behind to unclasp her top, she nearly sucked us through the fence. Eventually, before Tuffy came out, we started up a whiffle-ball game, but K.P. said there was something strange about her hands, like she only had a thumb and a pinkie, and they were closer together than normal, with no fingers in between. I hadn’t noticed, but I didn’t believe him because she was the captain of the varsity cheerleading squad and I’d seen her on the sidelines during home games, shaking her pompoms and holding smaller girls up in the air. But I’d never really looked at her hands before. Whether it was true or not, I never forgot it, and every time we went to the pool, I found myself taking long glances when Tuffy wasn’t around and his sister was looking the other way.

Late that afternoon, the sun was still high over the McBride Quarters as we turned onto Harpole Street. I had just asked Tuffy and K.P. to spend the night when I saw Dad's patrol car backing out of our yard. It was almost seven o'clock, but still very light out. Dad rolled down his window and motioned for me to stop.

"When you get old enough to drive," he said, "don't ever let me catch you stopping in the middle of the street like this. If you really need to talk to somebody, get off the road and out of other people's way."

"But you're stopped in the street,” I said.

"Just this once. To teach you a lesson. That's what I'm trying to tell you, son."

"Yessir."

"I left you a list of chores I want you to take care of." He smiled and rubbed my head.
"You don't have to do it all tonight, but I do want the grass cut before I get home in the morning. You've been putting off that yard-mowing for too long now. I'd get that done first thing if I was you, before it gets too dark."

I stood on my bike pedals and started pumping around the curve toward the house, but Dad called me back and I circled around, bracing myself against the car, hanging on to the rearview mirror. "One other thing," he said. "I talked to Tuffy’s sister. She’s going to come over and check on y’all, maybe cook you a pizza." He winked and I shot Tuffy and K.P. a high-five with my eyes. We were twelve; pizza was a great thing. "I want that work done first, though. Hear?"

I must have whined.

"Straighten up. Get Tuffy and K.P. to help you. It won't take long if y'all work together. I imagine you can get most of it done while you're waiting on the pizza. Got it?"

"Okay."

"Be good, little man."

Besides mowing the grass, Dad also wanted me to take out the trash, unload and load the dishwasher, fold the clothes in the dryer, dry the load in the washer, vaccuum the living room, and clean my room. I didn’t do any of it. Tuffy’s sister came over and made the pizza. I stood in the kitchen, showing her where everything was, trying not to look at her hands. It was hard, though, because she was kneading the dough, forming it into a circle, and she kept asking me if I thought it was big enough and if I liked thin crust or deep-dish. She asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up and I told her I’d play football for a while and then retire to become a mercenary.

“I love football,” she said. “Will you get me tickets so I can come see you play?”

I shrugged. “Okay.”

Tuffy came in the kitchen and started smarting off to her, making fun of her, talking about some boy she was interested in.

“He thinks he’s tough,” he said. “He thinks he’s Brian Bosworth, but he’s not. He thinks he can do anything cause his dad’s the mayor.”

Tuffy’s sister rolled her eyes. “You sound just like Dad.”

But then she just ignored him and put the pan in the oven. She set the timer and told us when it would be ready, then she left saying she’d be back around bed-time to make sure we brushed our teeth. When she was gone, we sat down to play Nintendo and eat our pizza, and I forgot all about my list of chores.

The next morning when I heard the car door slam in the yard, I hadn't even been to sleep yet. All around us, on the floor and on the coffee table were empty rootbeer bottles and the paper plates filled with chew-shaped crusts, candy bar wrappers, spilled popcorn, and half-empty cups of cherry Kool-Aid. We'd been playing video games all night and there I was in yesterday's T-shirt and swim trunks, sitting cross-legged in the floor not three feet from the television, wailing away on Super Macho Man with crusty eyes and blistered thumbs. The air smelled like chlorine and old cheese and foot-funk. I could feel Dad’s anger squeezing into the house with him as he entered and stood above us. The screen door banged shut behind him and he said in a tired voice, soft but stern, "What the hell was the last thing I told you before I went to work last night?"

Tuffy and K.P. stared at the television. I shrugged. He twirled his keys around his finger. His hair was graying at the temples.

"You don't know?" he said. "Or you can't remember? Let me tell you something.” He wasn’t even looking at me now, but I wasn’t sure if that made it better or worse. “Ignorance is no excuse for being too lazy to pay attention."

I stood up, but couldn't look at him. His boots were shiny and his pants were wet from walking through the tall grass. My lips felt heavy. I mumbled, "I thought you said I could do it tomorrow. I mean, today."

"Straighten up," he said. "I can't hear you. What did you say?"

"I said--I'm sorry."

"Well, sorry didn't get it done, did it?"

He yanked his shirt-tail out and started down the hall. "I'm gonna take a piss. And then I'm going to sleep. And when I come out of that bathroom, you'd better be out of my sight and out of this house. It's too pretty a day to be inside anyway."

K.P. said he was hungry. We heard the commode flush, water running in the sink. Tuffy said to come on, that his mom would make us pancakes, so I cut off the television and the Nintendo and we went outside, hopped on our bikes, and rode across the street.

In Tuffy's carport, when we were bored of smashing Hot Wheels with claw hammers we rummaged through a metal trunk and found an old pair of boxing gloves, black Everlasts. The gloves were too big for our hands, but we tried them on anyway. They smelled like salty mothballs. Since it was Tuffy’s house, his mom's trunk, and his dad's carport, he took the right-handed glove and gave me the left. We took off our shirts and hung them on our handlebars. K.P. refereed. In the driveway, we wrapped our off-hands in beach towels and bounced on our bare toes. K.P. made fun of Tuffy's titties, calling him Queen Hippo. We needed mouthpieces though, so Tuffy found some newspaper in the carport and we each took half a page of the comics and folded it up and bent it around our top teeth. K.P. walked out of the carport holding a flashlight to his mouth.

"Ladies-adies and-and gentlemen-men.”

"You're a fag," said Tuffy.

K.P. called him an asshole and threw the flashlight down in the yard.

"I'm Mr. T," Tuffy said.

"It's Clubber Lang, stupid," said K.P.

"I know."

"I'm Apollo," I told them.

"You can't be Apollo," said Tuffy. "Apollo died."

"He can be him before he died," said K.P., whose black skin made him look more like
Apollo or Clubber Lang than either of us.

"Nah," I said. "I'll just be the Russian. 'I must break you.'"

K.P. found a rock and drew a square for the ring then he called us to the center to hear the rules: no rabbit punches, fight fair, shake hands and may the best man win. Tuffy tried to ask how many rounds we were going to go, but before he could, K.P. said, "Ding-ding," and backed away. We bounced on our toes, making a little circle inside the chalk square. Then Tuffy stopped and mumbled something. He started gagging on his mouthpiece, so I stepped forward and jabbed him in the stomach.

"Body-blow!" K.P. yelled, and Tuffy fell to his knees, spitting out the newspaper in chunks of vomit and stringy spit, wiping his mouth with the towel wrapped around his hand. His face was red. Tears dropped onto the cement as he stood and stooped over, his hands on his knees, drool dangling from his mouth to the concrete.

He looked up, but he could’ve been talking to either of us. "I said wait, you bastard."

"No you didn't,” we said.

"Yes I did!"

"I didn't hear you," K.P. said. "Did you hear him Quinn?"

"You didn't call it," I said. I looked at Tuffy.

"I did so.”

"No, he's the ref," I said, pointing at K.P.. "And he didn't call it. So it doesn't count."

"You bastards, give me my glove," Tuffy said. "Get off my driveway."

"You’re such a pussy," said K.P..

"There's your glove," I said, and threw it at the carport, but it sailed high and landed on the roof.

"Oh, smooth move, Exlax," Tuffy said. "You better hope my dad doesn't come home, cause if he does and he sees his glove up there he'll kill you."

"Bullshit,” I said. “He ain't gonna kill me. You're the one who said we could play with them."

"I didn't say you could throw them on the roof."

"I didn't."

"Well how'd it get up there, dumbass?"

"I mean, I didn't do it on purpose."

Tuffy walked into the garage. "Well I'm gonna call him at work and tell him you stole his gloves. I hope he comes home and beats you silly." Then he said, "And I'm gonna tell your dad too." He went inside.

"My dad don’t care," I said, trying to convince K.P.. "He could kick Tuffy's dad's ass in his sleep."

A second later, Tuffy came out of the house holding a cordless phone to his ear. "You better get my dad's glove," he said. “It’s ringing.”

I told K.P. to come on. "Let's go play Punch-out."

We picked up our bikes and walked across the street, stopping on the black-top to look back at Tuffy who was thumbing numbers on the phone.

K.P. said, "Look, he's dialing."

"He's faking," I said. “He’s always acting like he’s going to do something.”

At the house, the front door was locked. The carport door was closed and the back door was locked, too. I beat on the walls, rang the door bell ten times, counting out loud, shouting the numbers, but Dad never came. K.P. said he had to go home so I rode down Fifth Avenue with him thinking he’d invite me over, but when he turned off to the McBride Quarters, I turned around and rode back to the house. I looked under the doormat for a key, but there were only a few dead crickets. Then I remembered the half-window in the bathroom. It was pretty high up, but I found a few bricks in the kudzu out back and stacked them up until I was able to pry out the screen and wiggle through the window.

In the kitchen, I unloaded the dishwasher as loud as possible, slamming cabinet doors, clanging pots and pans, throwing silverware in the drawer. It was what Mom used to do when she was angry. I loaded the dishwasher, then mixed up some chocolate milk, gulped it down, threw the spoon in the sink and ran about three gallons of water over it. In the laundry room, I took clothes out of the dryer and folded them, then threw the washer load in the dryer, and slammed the door. But Dad never woke up. He never came out. I even vaccuumed, back and forth, banging into furniture, stubbing my toe, but his door never opened.

So I gave up. I walked down the hall to jiggle the knob and stick my fingers underneath and yell my head off until he would be forced to come out just to get me to shut up, but as I pressed my ear to the door, I heard his voice talking low. He was on the phone.

Back in the kitchen, I picked up the receiver and heard him, mid-sentence: "--should come stay with you for awhile, at least until school starts."

There was a moment of silence. I held my breath so they wouldn’t hear me.

"Rhonda?"

"What?"

"Why don’t you come home?"

"Why? So I can do your laundry? So I can feed you? Iron your uniform? We’ve been over this."

"I need you."

"You don't need me, you need a maid."

"Quinn needs a mother."

"Don’t give me that. And don’t put this off on him. You know how worried I used to get over him. Every second of the day, I had to know where he was and what he was into. I can’t do that again. And if I came back now, I would. We both know--right now, anyway--I’m a better mother to him here than I was when I was there."

I hung up the phone, gathered up the trash, and went out to the carport, locking the door as I went out. I found my tent and set it up in the backyard, away from the house, facing the kudzu. I wasn’t sure what my mother meant. But what it meant to me was that after Dad went to work and I was alone again, I was finally going to go back to the woods and find out why they were so dangerous. I stretched out in the tent and before I knew it, I was waking up.

The sun was setting and Dad was standing outside the tent, telling me he was about to leave for work. "How'd you get in?" he asked.

"Through the bathroom. Did I wake you up?"

Dad shook his head. "The phone did. Your mom called."

I didn’t say anything.

"She said she wished you could come see her this summer but she's going to be so busy with her classes and work, she wouldn't get to spend much time with you."

I shrugged.

"She said to tell you she loves you."

We both looked at the grass for a while. “I’ve got to get to work,” Dad said.

“Tuffy said some guy’s on the loose, is that true?”

Dad sighed heavily. “Yeah, he’s out there somewhere. So I’d better get on up to the station and see what’s going on.” I unzipped the tent and walked with him around to the front.

“Are you going to find him?”

"I don’t know, son. We’re going to try. The house looks good," he said. "You still haven't cut this grass though."

"I know."

"Don't mess with it tonight," he said. "I'll get it tomorrow."

He sat down in the patrol car and started the engine. "Tell you what," he said. "I'll make a deal with you. You wash the truck tonight--the keys are on the counter by the phone--and in the morning I'll bring you something, an early birthday present."

"What is it?"

"I don’t know yet. I’ll have to see what I can find. Run get the keys real quick so I can back the truck out where you can get to it."

I told him I could back it up myself, and he said, "All right. Show me."

I ran inside, found the keys, ran back out and held them up.

"That's them," Dad said. "Go slow. Make sure you check your mirrors and adjust your seat."

I climbed into the cab and slid the seat up so my toes touched the pedals. Fiddling with the mirror, I saw he had gotten out of his car and was waiting in the driveway for me to start the engine. I rolled down the window and stuck my head out.

"You ready?"

He nodded his head and motioned me back. "Yeah," he said. "Come on with it."

The truck jerked with the slightest pressure of my toes on the brake and accelerator. Finally I got it out of the carport, and Dad stood at the window laughing.

"I did it.”

"It takes practice. You'll get there."

"Can I drive it back in when I'm finished?"

"Sure. But take it slow. Don't get in too big a hurry. If you have any trouble, Tuffy’s sister’ll be over later to check on you, so you can ask her to move it."

Tuffy and K.P. rode up as I was finishing the truck.

"Did he let you in?" K.P. said.

“I snuck in.”

"What happened?" said Tuffy.

"His dad locked him out."

"He had to sleep," I said. "He let me drive the truck, though. I backed it out all by myself."

"I want to drive it," Tuffy said. He jumped in the front seat, slammed the door and locked it.

"Get out!” I banged my fist on the door. "You can't drive my dad's truck, he'll kill you."

Tuffy cracked the window enough to where he had to strain his neck to stick his nose out. "Go get my dad's glove off the roof, and I'll get out of the truck."

"You're an asshole," I said.

K.P. said, "Get out of his truck and I'll go get the glove."

"You didn't throw it up there,” Tuffy said and then looked at me. "He has to get it."

"Shut up," I said. "I'm not going to get your stupid glove. Now get out of my truck."

"Your truck?" he said. He started the engine.

"Tuffy, quit being a fat-ass. Get the hell out of there or I'm gonna kill you."

He put the truck in reverse and backed out a few feet. We stepped back.

"Stand behind it and don't let him go anywhere,” I told K.P.. “I'll go get the stupid glove."

I ran across the street to Tuffy's house. Inside the carport was a metal ladder that I set up in the driveway and used to climb up on the roof, taking small pidgeon-toed steps across the scratchy shingles. As soon as I threw the glove down, I saw the truck barrelling around the corner onto Old Highway 15, Tuffy waving his middle finger out the window. He drove to the stop sign and slammed on the brakes, turned right and then he was gone. I hurried carefully down the ladder and picked up the glove, meeting K.P. in the street.

"The first thing I'm gonna do," I said, "is piss and shit all over this glove."

Tuffy showed up a few minutes later, hauling up the street, and slammed on the brakes before gliding back up the driveway. I held up the glove, which was full of dog turds, since I wasn’t able to get my bowels moving on command. Tuffy cut the engine and hopped out.

"That's not a bad ride," he said, kicking the front tire.

"I called my dad and reported his truck stolen," I told him. "He’s going to take you all the way to Parchman."

Tuffy looked at K.P. who was nodding. "I heard him," K.P. said. "You're in big trouble."

Tuffy snatched the glove out of my hand. "Y'all are full of shit," he said. "I didn't steal nothing. If they ask me, I'll tell them you drove it. They'll believe me before they will you."

When Tuffy smelled what was in the glove, he threw it back at me. Then he lunged, but I dodged his fist and punched his head across the top of his nose. As he fell, he grabbed my leg and pulled me down on top of him. I pinned him, but he reached for the glove not far away in the grass and tried to smear it in my face, and when I backed away, he kicked me off and tackled me. We rolled in the grass, trading blows, punching each other in the ribs and stomach. We were both crying hot angry tears, cursing each other through tight lips and grinding teeth. Tuffy's nose bled. My side hurt. K.P. was laughing. He said he was going home, but he didn't. He picked up the water hose and sprayed us down till we both stood up sopping wet, asking him what the hell he was doing.

"Y'all are both gonna be in trouble now," he said.

I told them both to get out of my yard, but Tuffy said if I didn’t tell my dad, he wouldn’t tell his, so I thought about it for a second and it seemed like a good deal, so we shook hands. We both apologized and agreed to the terms. I’d never throw anything on his roof again and he’d never steal my dad’s truck again.

So I took them around to the back yard and showed them my tent. “I’m camping out tonight,” I said.

Tuffy’s sister must’ve heard all the commotion because suddenly she was standing there beside us. She was dressed like Paula Abdul or Madonna, some sexy singer I’d seen in a video on MTV. “Y’all aren’t fighting back here, are you?” she said.

Tuffy scowled at her. “What are you doing here?”

“She’s checking on me,” I said, defending her. “My Dad asked her to.”

“She painted that dot on her cheek. It ain’t real,” Tuffy said, and then he swatted at K.P.’s elbow and ducked under his sister’s purse as he ran into the woods.

“So you’re okay, then,” Tuffy’s sister asked.

“Yeah, I’m okay.”

“Well, your Dad did ask me to stick around and keep an eye on you, but you don’t really need me around, do you?”

“She’s got a date,” I heard Tuffy yell from the edge of the woods. “With that Brian Bosworth punk.” It felt more like a jab at me then at her. “She doesn’t have time to take care of little babies.”

I looked up at Tuffy’s sister. She was so beautiful I didn’t even think about looking at her hands anymore. I wanted her to tell me she was going to cut her date short and come back to be with me, that I was young, but in a few years I’d be old enough and she’d wait for me.

“I won’t be back until around twelve or so,” she said. She bent her knees, her skirt riding up her thighs, and looked me in the eye. “Can you do me a really huge favor?”

“Make her pay you ten dollars,” Tuffy said. He had run back over to stand beside me. “Or fifteen. She promised me fifteen if I don’t tell Mom and Dad.”

I nodded, ignoring Tuffy, glad to show her how grown up I was.

“If your dad calls like he usually does,” Tuffy’s sister said, “around ten or eleven, do you think you could just tell him I’m in the bathroom?”

When she was gone, Tuffy smirked. “You’re a pussy, she would’ve paid you.”

I told him to shut up.

“So you’re camping out in your own back yard,” he said. “But your house is right there. That’s not camping out. Do you even know how to build a fire?” He knew I could. We had been in the same Scout Troop, although I had stopped paying my dues and going to den meetings.

“Yeah,” I said, “But I’m exploring the woods tonight. You guys can come over and go with me if you want, unless you’re too chicken.”

But of course, they weren’t. They both went home to get their sleeping bags, flashlights, and snacks. They said they’d be back in a couple of hours which gave me enough time to rig up a way to scare the hell out of them. There were carcasses all through those woods, possum and raccoon, sometimes cats and dogs, too. All it took was a little surgery. I hammered some tomato stakes into the ground near the old car and shoved the rotting organs down onto them. It was stinky business and I had to stop after the second one I put up, but I also had some leftover fireworks, so I dug holes for the bottle rockets and arranged them in a perimeter aimed at the old car in the center. Knowing Tuffy, he’d be the first to hole up in the sniper’s den, but I’d be ready for him.

As the sun burned out behind the tops of the trees, the tall silhouetted pines draped in kudzu resembled witches huddled around a cauldron of fire. The darkness of late twilight fell in the tent, and we could hardly make out the shapes of each other’s expressionless faces. We had rolled our bags out and were trading our snacks when Tuffy and K.P. seemed to be laughing at some joke I wasn’t in on.

“What’re you girls giggling about,” I said.

Tuffy stood up. He said, “So what’s our mission?”

I didn’t know what he meant.

“We got to have a plan,” he said. “I heard there’s all kinds of dead animals back in there. Coons and possums and deer, maybe.” He started laughing again, looking at K.P.. “We ought to see if we can find some and take their skins.”

“There’s just one problem,” K.P. said. “What’re you going to skin them with?”

Tuffy pulled something out of his pocket and we heard it flick open. “This,” he said, and he raised it to his head and started combing his hair, laughing. “I won it at the carnival.”

“Come on.” I crawled out of the tent. “Let’s go.”

We probably would’ve gotten separated anyway, but a few steps into the woods, I told them I had to go back to the house to take a crap. They called me a wuss for not squatting in the woods, but it worked out for the best because they went on ahead. I went inside the house just in case they were watching and waited long enough for them to get halfway to the old car. Then I grabbed a lighter out of a kitchen drawer and set out. As I neared the perimeter, moving slowly and quietly in the near-dark--my flashlight switched off in my pocket--I started looking for the bottle rockets, feeling around in the leaves and pine straw for the buried bottles. Across the perimeter, on the other side of the car, I could see a flashlight, the beam circling a pink five-gallon bucket in some heavy briars. The bucket had been tipped over and bleached-white animal skulls and bones were spilling out.

“I told you,” I heard Tuffy say, whispering loudly. “Dead animals. Right there.”

“Those are just the bones,” said K.P.. He reached down and lifted a skull from the pile. I couldn’t tell if it was a cat or a possum or what, some small animal bigger than a rat but not as big as a big dog.

“I bet there’s some more around here somewhere,” Tuffy said, and I heard his running footsteps crashing away through the woods.

“Look what I found,” K.P. said as he followed after him, shining his light onto a video tape jacket. The glow of his flashlight receded in the darkness and I was left there to either give up on my plan or wait for them to return and hope they came back the same way they went.

So I waited. I didn’t realize how tired I was till I sat down. Before long, I was backing up against a tree trunk and nodding off.

When I heard voices again, I woke up, unaware of how much time had passed, though the darkness had fallen complete like a heavy curtain.

And then I saw it. The tiny orange circle of flame glowing behind the fogged-over windows of the old car. My eyes were beginning to adjust as I pulled the lighter out of my pocket and scrambled back over to the perimeter, feeling around for the nearest bottle. The cigarette was still glowing in the car. Two vague shadows shifted around inside. Finally, I found a bottle and lit the fuse. The spark caught and ran along the fuse toward the tip as I backed away, but then it just fizzled out. A dud.

And then I heard it. Not Tuffy giggling or K.P. telling him to shut up, but a girl’s voice, a familiar voice. I tried to watch where I was going using the lighter, but my thumb started to burn and I dropped it. I took my flashlight out and held it a few inches off the ground and turned it on so I could watch for sticks in front of me as I moved quietly toward the car. The muffled voices grew louder, and as I knelt by the back tire I could understand what they were saying.

The car rocked to the side a little, and then I heard the girl’s voice.

“Get off me,” she said, her words strained through clenched teeth.

Then I heard the male voice, deep but young-sounding, almost pleading. “Come on, what’s wrong with you?”

“I said I don’t want to.”

“What do you mean you don’t want to? You were the one who said you wanted to come out here.”

The car rocked again and this time the girl repeated in the same strained tone, but louder: “Get off me!”

The driver’s side door cracked open and the girl’s leg stuck out, but then it disappeared back inside the car and the door slammed shut.

“Oh my God,” I heard her say. “What is that? What are you doing? Are you crazy?”

I wanted to stand up and look in, but I was worried they would see me. Still, I turned and tried to peer over the top of the door, but I couldn’t make out anything.

“Yeah, I am,” the guy said. “Unless you do what you said we were going to do.”

“Well, I don’t want to anymore. I changed my mind.” The driver’s side door flung open again and Tuffy’s sister stepped out, already running, moving quickly through the woods in the direction of my back yard. When she was far enough away that her shadow blended with the darkness, I caught a glimpse of a hand grabbing the inside door handle and swinging it violently toward the car. As the door slammed shut, I jumped, even though the sound of the shot was muffled. It was loud enough that I thought a bomb had exploded inside, and beneath it, I heard the heavy thud and glass breaking, the shattered pieces landing in the leaves a few feet away on the other side of the car.

When I reached the clearing at the edge of our back yard, I ran up the hill, lifting my knees high, the kudzu vines breaking around my ankles. The tent was empty. I went in the house and turned on all the lights and the television and locked the doors. It was after eleven-thirty. The local news mentioned the convict and the missing girl from Tupelo, but the breaking news was about a car wreck on Highway 15 in South Adair County. It couldn’t have been more than a few miles away. A helicopter had been called on the scene and there were pictures of medics lifting a stretcher into an ambulance. And then I saw my father, standing off to the side, looking at the wreckage, a styrofoam cup in his hand. He looked tired, worse than he usually looked in the mornings when he came home, worse than I’d ever seen him. His eyes seemed weakened by whatever he was looking at off-camera. The video cut to shots of a broken windshield, the hood of a car crumpled up against a tree, dark stains and glittering broken glass near the white stripe at the edge of the highway. And then there was my father again, in the same picture as before, only later, taking a sip, then flinging the rest of his coffee out of his cup with a disgusted swat at the ground, and crumpling the cup in his fist as he walked out of the frame.

When the phone rang at two-thirty I was still awake, but feeling delirious. I was scared it was the convict calling to see if I was alone in the house before he broke in. The phone rang five times and then the machine picked up and beeped.

“You awake, Little Man?”

“Hey Dad.”

“You are awake.”

“Yeah, I can’t sleep.”

“Did you decide not to camp out?”

“Yeah, Tuffy and K.P. had to go.”

“Well, you can do it some other time. So why can’t you sleep? What have you been doing?”

“Nothing.”

“What do you mean, ‘nothing’?”

“Nothing. I’ve just been sitting here all night playing Nintendo.” I knew before I said it that he knew it was a lie.

After a pause, he said, “Well, that’s two nights in a row you’ve been up late. You’d better get to bed.”

I wanted to tell him I was scared, that I couldn’t sleep, that I kept seeing Tuffy’s sister running through the woods, that I kept hearing the gunshot and seeing blood splattering the walls of my room.

“Do you need to tell me something,” he asked when I didn’t say anything.

I told him I loved him and he said the same thing and told me to get some sleep.

But I was still awake at four o’clock when the headlights swung around the curve down at the south end of Harpole and turned into Tuffy’s driveway. Dad got out, walked around the back, and opened the door for Tuffy’s sister who was hugged almost immediately by her parents who came rushing out of the carport. I saw Dad lean against the cruiser and light a cigarette. He and Tuffy’s dad shook hands. Tuffy’s mom gave him a big hug and then blew her nose and wiped her eyes. I watched it all through the blinds. Eventually they went inside and Dad toed out his cigarette, staring long and hard at our house, as if he knew I was watching, before getting back into the car and going back to work.

When I was seven, I sent off ten dollars in the mail to join Ranger Troy’s Bible Club for a year, and within a couple of weeks, my badge arrived in a manila package along with my first issue of Ranger Troy’s Gospel Kids magazine. It was loaded with serious stuff, articles about God and Jesus and kids in Kenya, but I quickly found the issue’s greatest appeal--the real reason kids everywhere wanted to join the club--in a super-hero comic strip about a guy called “The Human Mustard Seed.” He was a cross between Jonah, Superman, and the Inch-High Private-Eye. In his normal life (which was actually pretty normal despite the standard guy-who-lives-in-a-matchbox conflict that opened every episode), he wandered around neglecting God’s calling, but when the Spirit finally moved, he transformed from a whiney bible-thumping type into a super strong miniature Billy Graham. He leapt into action like a mutant flea, moving mountains and converting witch doctors.

The first episode I read was about some boys who rode their bikes out to an abandoned construction site at the edge of their subdivision. The boys knew they weren’t supposed to ride their bikes that far, but they went anyway, and one of them ended up breaking a hip (or stepping on a nail, I forget which). Anyway, they were lucky--blessed, actually--that The Human Mustard Seed just happened to be down on his knees at that moment, because the boy who wasn’t strong enough to carry his injured friend remembered his Sunday school lesson and put a prayer in to God who speedily dispatched His faithful superhero. In the end, the boys survived and asked God to forgive them and told their parents they were sorry, but the one boy lived on with the limp (or the scars, whichever) to remind him of The Human Mustard Seed’s admonition to us all: “Always honor your father and mother, and most of all, love God and keep his commandments.”

When I woke the next morning after only three hours of sleep, Dad was sitting beside me on my bed asking me if I knew I’d locked the keys in his truck. It was early, around seven o'clock. A bird chirped outside the window.

I stretched my arms above my pillow. "It was an accident.”

"Good thing I have an extra set," he said. "Are you gonna sleep all day, or do you want to come see what I got you?"

I jumped out of bed so fast Dad had to hold his coffee cup with both hands to keep from spilling it.

"It's in the driveway," he said. "Behind the truck."

Outside, a tow-truck disappeared around the curve. Then I saw the surprise. It was still pale yellow, rusting all over, with a white roof and deflated, cracked tires. A long car, the tailfins hung out of the yard into the street.

“Don’t you like it,” he asked, rubbing my head.

"That's mine?"

"When you're old enough." He sipped his coffee. "It’s a Galaxy 500. It needs work, but in a few years you can get a job and fix it up."

"What's wrong with it?"

"Just about everything. Its missing a window, it stinks, and the engine’s burned out.” He grabbed the chipped chrome handle and the door creaked and knocked as it opened. The interior smelled damp and smoky, like the underside of a rotting log. The floorboard had a hole in it. The dash was dusty. A mud-dobber's nest hung from the steering column and a spider’s web draped across the back glass. All our old butts and magazines were gone. Only a few tiny shards of glass glittered on the floorboards. "But I thought we could work on it together,” he said. “You need to learn about cars anyway, if you're going to be driving one, and I can't think of any better way to learn."

“Where’d you get it?”

“Sheriff. He bought at an auction, but didn’t want it, so I told him I’d take it.”

Three more times that day we went outside to stand in the driveway and look at the old car. We popped the hood, looked for a spare tire, rolled down the windows to let it air out. After lunch Dad took a nap and I cut the grass. When it was time for him to go to work we went outside and he patted the hood of the car. "If you want something to do tonight," he said, "you can start cleaning up the interior. I had them do a little bit at the station, but there’s still a good bit left."

I said, "I want to wait till you're here to help me.”

"Good. I'd like that too."

All day I’d been wanting to ask him about the night before. I wondered who’d been in the car with Tuffy’s sister, and where he had found her. I wanted to tell him I’d seen her and knew about the car, and maybe walk down into the woods with him and show him where she’d been. But something held me back, not the car, and not the fear of getting caught or ratting somebody out, just some understanding that there were things you didn’t talk about, and these were some of those things.

Still, something was welling up inside me, something important I had to say, but was scared to, knowing it was going to come out exactly like it happened. “Dad--”

But he stopped me. “I don’t guess you heard about the accident last night.”

I shook my head. “Was it the bad guy?”

“Well, we caught that bastard, but you know Trevor Stallings? The quarterback on the high school team?”

I nodded.

“Trevor died last night.”

“What happened?” I was beginning to believe what I’d seen in the woods was a nightmare, that I really had been inside playing Nintendo all night long.

“That bastard that was on the loose, that guy that took that girl up in Tupelo, pulled Mayor Stallings’ boy over out on the highway and just shot him in the forehead and ran off in his truck.”

It wasn’t until a decade or so later, after Mayor Stallings was dead, that Tuffy started telling everybody the truth. But by then, his sister was fat, divorced, alcoholic, and working at the grocery store so, of course, nobody believed him.

Four years later, I hated my father, although I never would’ve admitted it, and I didn’t really know why, except now I think it probably had something to do with knowing a lot about road safety and very little about him. When I was sixteen and the Galaxy was driveable, I drove to Little Rock and found my mom and tried to get to know my sister, which turned out to be not so smart because five months after that I was in rehab. But that’s another story.

This one ends with dreams of driving. That night, after Dad had gone to work, I couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking about my mom. About the way she left, how she said she loved us then she told Dad we were too much trouble. I got out of bed and stood at the window for a while looking out into the street, down at Tuffy's house, down the road toward K.P.'s. My eyes settled on the car so I picked up my pillow and a blanket and got into the front seat where I sat behind the wheel pretending to drive to Little Rock and up into my grandparent's driveway where I'd honk the horn and my mom would come out and I'd rev the engine and back out into the street and spin the tires and drive off with a lot of smoke. I'd leave the smell of burned rubber hanging in her air. I made up my mind when I turned fifteen and fixed up the car, I'd drive all the way up there just to see her watch me leave. I'd speed home and when I crossed the state-line a trooper would gun me, but I'd race ahead of the sirens all the way home right up to the front door and we'd both get out and Dad would be there and he'd know the officer and they'd shake hands and then the officer would get back in his car and drive off. I'd ask my dad what the officer said and Dad would say, "He didn't know you were my son."

2006-03-01T10:29:00.000-08:00

Dancing with the Wolf
Dad was standing in the middle of the living room knee high in cardboard boxes and newspaper and even before he opened his mouth I knew it was a bad day. “Where in the hell is Dances with Wolves?” he asked me.

“What?” I tossed my keys on the table, wiping my dirty chapped hands on my jeans. “Dad, how’d you get all these boxes out of the garage?”

“Answer me dammit, Walter. Where’s that Kevin Coaster movie where he plays with the Indians.”

“Costner, Dad. It’s with the rest of your movies in your room.”

“No it aint. I looked there first, Smarty Pants, and it’s not there. I want my movie.”

“The movie’s in your room, Dad. Let’s just go in there and—”

“You stay the hell out of my room! I know you’ve been in there. Trying to get up in the crawlspace. Climbing up in the attic! I can’t leave the damned house for one day!”

Too tired to hold my tongue I shouted back, “I haven’t gone into your damned room! Why would I need to go in there!”

“To steal my tapes!” he yelled back.

I couldn’t help myself and started to laugh. “Dad, if I wanted to watch a movie I’d go rent one.”

“Yeah, with my money.”
“I have a job, Dad,” I said.

“Moving boxes. Jesus! I preached college for what!”

The familiar ball came to my throat. I’d never been the best student in the world, but I’d had some college offers. I just didn’t take them. I wasn’t ready. So the fall after high school ended I took the job at the JCPenny loading dock. I was under qualified but they hired me because their stock was three months behind and the holidays were sure to make things worse. I couldn’t explain this to Dad, knew my voice was weak, but I managed to say, “So I should quit my job then, Dad? Is that it? You want me to sit around the house all day, counting your videos?”

“No, Smart Ass, I want you to stay the hell out of my room. I don’t give a shit what you do out of this house, but here you stay out of my stuff. I don’t begrudge you of anything. I just want you out of my things.” He sauntered out of the living room, lighting a cigarette and leaving me in the middle of the mess. I stared at myself in the large mirror over the fireplace—tall, stocky, eighteen-year-old kid with cardboard debris all over his flannel shirt and dark circles under his eyes. I’d changed so much in four months, I hardly knew myself. I spent the rest of the night stacking boxes back in the garage—stuff I hadn’t seen in years like Mom’s clothes, her combs things Dad wouldn’t throw out. Elvis 45s, framed photos of Bob Hope, Ronald Regan, Johnny Carson—all autographed—sat among Mom’s hairpins and rollers.

When I found an envelope full of Bazooka gum wrappers, the comics brittle and flaking from the waxy surface, I remembered my middle school graduation. I was eleven, a year younger than everyone else, and Dad rewarded me with a BMX bike that I’d thought was a bunch of crap. I didn’t want a bike. But Dad made sure to keep an eye on what was going on around the neighborhood. It got into his head I needed one and that was the end of it. Even though I tried to convince him a membership to a book club was better, he wouldn’t have any of it.
*
I was thirteen the first time I fantasized about Dad’s funeral: It was a hot day and we all wore shorts and Hawaiian shirts. The casket was closed. Dad had been attacked by a wolf he’d been trying to tame and there was nothing left of his face. We lowered him into the ground, next to where we buried Mom just after I was born, and Jimmy Buffet played from the speakers set-up behind us. We drank Mai Tais. Then I came home, the place all to myself. This fantasy got me through my early years. Especially on days Dad accused me of doing things I’d never dream of, like climbing onto the roof and pulling off the tiles, tinkering with the gas meter, flushing out the water heater. A couple of times I thought about leaving: I’d stand in the kitchen and tell Dad, “I’m tired of your shit. All we do is fight. You’ve never got nothing nice to say to me. I’m leaving.” But I was the star of the varsity tennis team so me leaving didn’t make too much sense.

Dad hardly ever talked to me back then but he’d spend the weekends at ball games with friends telling them whopper stories that began, “When I was working in The Blue Café in El Paso, Elvis Presley came in and left me a one hundred dollar tip on his way to Hollywood.” If anyone stopped and thought about it they would’ve realized two things: Elvis flew to Hollywood when he made Blue Hawaii; and even if he did drive, El Paso is in no way on the road from Memphis to Hollywood. When I figured these things out I said, “Those guys are stupid enough to believe you? Or are you just making an ass out of yourself?” Then we tied up for days. You can only take so much bullshit before it all hits the fan and spatters back at you. It wasn’t until a long time passed that I got tired of being covered in Dad’s shit. I never understood why he just couldn’t admit that he’d gotten the signed records when he installed the fifteen phones Elvis had in his Beverly Hills house. What difference did it make when he still ended up with the records?
*
JCPenny’s had trucks and trucks of boxes off somewhere and everyday they drove up three or four of them for unloading. I spent my time tossing boxes from the trucks to the conveyor belt that took them into the stockroom. It was a cold dock; I wore two pairs of socks and the women in the stockroom had heaters at their feet. Three times a day we took a break. It was the only time I talked.

Because I was always reading—a novel, the paper, Newsweek—they called me College. “You’re a quiet one, College,” they said.

I shrugged. “Not much to say, I guess.” They all smoked cigarettes and drank Pepsi, throwing their butts and cans into the box crusher. “Smoking will kill you,” I said.

“Well if that’s what you’re gonna say every time you open your mouth, keep it shut.” This was Shelby—a longhaired, Native-American woman who wore flannels and gold boots. Like most of the women in the stockroom, she was in her late thirties and had never been married. If I had a friend, she was the only one.

We were only supposed to take three breaks, but working on the dock there was no way for our supervisor to know when we went outside. That dock was a strange place—dark, windowless, and cold. But it was more comfortable than home. We each had a locker back there and some radios. The sales room doors squeaked badly, so when any salesperson made their way back, we could hear them coming and get back to our stations in plenty of time to look busy.

“What do you do all day, College?” Shelby asked one day. We were on our second morning break. The other women and dock boys huddled in a circle, lighting their cigarettes.

“Move boxes,” I said.

“No shit? I thought you were here with the union.” She snorted. “You’re too quiet, College. You don’t talk to the other guys.”

“Not too much, no.”

“You don’t think your shit don’t stink. You just don’t like to talk.”

I didn’t know how to tell her I spent most of my time thinking about Dad. I was on the dock from six to three and most of the time I thought about coming home and finding him dead, choked on a piece of bread. I’d been thinking of ways I could put him out of his misery without anyone finding out. The only thing I could think of would be suffocation, since that’s what the lung specialist said would kill him anyway. But there was something about offing Dad with a feather pillow that didn’t sit well with me. Poison was out, so were the obvious like shooting and stabbing.

“Hello?” Shelby moved her gloved hand back and forth in front of my face. “You in there?”

“Sure I am,” I said, shaking it off.

“You’re doing it again. What the hell you thinking about?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Just worried we’re gonna get caught back here. And about you smoking.”

“Don’t worry about me. We work damned hard,” she said, stuffing her hands into her flannel jacket. “Those suits can give us a break once in a while.”

She was right. I moved more truck then than I would for the rest of my life. I still think of that time as the most honest work I’ve ever done.
*
After the emphysema diagnosis came there wasn’t a day that went by I didn’t plan on his death. Every morning I’d wake up and the first thing I’d think was today could be the day. I’d spend my time in the shower thinking about what casket to buy. There were days I was okay with him dying and I’d picture myself at the podium delivering a eulogy to a crowd of his old pals from the Phone Company and the ballpark. I’d say profound things about Dad and get everyone crying on each other’s shoulders. On other days I’d be pissed because he’d accused me of hiding the mail from him or pissing in the potted plants and I’d tell myself there was no way I was going to go to the funeral, helping with the flowers, or picking out slacks to bury him in. I wished he would die that day, just so I could protest, boycott his funeral procession with a sign that read He Never Met Elivs! I imagined an empty mortuary, a big hole in the ground with no headstone.

He’d had all his front teeth capped years before I was born, and plates replaced his missing back teeth. He hadn’t worn his plates in months, complaining they kept falling out, so he’d chew his food with his front teeth. At dinner they’d be covered in food when he tried to talk.
One night I said, “You planning on going out to the ballpark, seeing the end of the season?”
Just as he opened his mouth to answer, an incisor, no bigger than a pinkie nail, tinkled onto the plate. This was something his doctor warned us would happen; with a loss in body mass, his gums would shrink. “Shit,” he said. “Dentist told me these would only last fifteen years. Seems like it’s been twenty at least.” He picked up the cap and inspected it, then ran his pinky finger along the row of top teeth until he found the rotten hole. “Shit,” he said again.

He wouldn’t leave the house after that and sent me on his errands after I got home from work. He said he was too ashamed to go out in public and smile with a rotted tooth. “Lots of people are missing teeth,” I told him. “Especially older people. I doubt anyone would even notice.”

“I’m not just another person, I’m me dammit. How am I supposed to smile like this?” He grinned and where the cap had fallen out a greenish-black nub of a tooth was exposed.

“Just don’t smile.”

“I swear, son. No wonder you work a shitty job. You probably never smiled a day in your adult life.”

“Let’s not start this up, Dad.”

“I’m not starting anything. You’re the one telling me not to go out.”

“No, you made that decision. I’m just the errand boy.”

“Errand boy? If that’s so how come you come back with all the wrong stuff?”

“I won’t buy you cigarettes.”

“It’s my money!”

“The doctor told you to stop—”

“To hell with them, what do they know? A little ash-ma and they think I should stop smoking? I’ve been smoking my whole life. Besides, I don’t inhale.” Another tall tale, akin to the El Paso Elvis. Dad liked to say he smoked Lucky Strike Non-Filters but the reason he didn’t have cancer was because he only puffed. Sometimes I wished he did have cancer just so the doctor could make him wrong about something.

“Dad,” I said, “if you want to buy cigarettes, if you want to buy anything, go do it. I don’t mind, but don’t feel like you have to stay in the house all day.”

“‘You don’t mind.’ I’ll decide when to stay in the house. I’m the father, remember. You’re still the child, no matter how old you are.”
*
When two more caps fell out he finally made the decision to see a dentist. On the night before his first consultation, Dad stormed out of his room throwing a dozen videocassette sleeves on the floor in the living room. “I want to know where the rest of my videos are!” he yelled. “Goddamned if I haven’t given you everything and now you’re stealing from me!”

“What the hell is wrong with you, Dad? Where’d you put the movies?”

“Don’t play innocent with me,” he said. “You know damned well where my movies are. You’re the one stealing them.”

“Why would I steal your movies?”

“I don’t know. You’re just greedy. Haven’t I always given you whatever you wanted?”

I wanted to say At the cost of constantly reminding me about it but held my tongue. I fought back the urge to push him down, to hurt him in a way that could be blamed on an accident, but that might actually make him die. I squeezed my thoughts closed and managed to say, “Dad, when did you last see these movies?”

“I don’t ever watch them. You’re the one who watches them.”

I got up from the couch and walked down the hall. Inside his room the air was thick with smoke. The picture above his bed of Mom was harly visable, the glass yellowed with nicotine. His television blared and when I tried to turn it down, the channel changed. “Need to get those buttons fixed,” I said.

He stood at the door. “It’s fine when I use it. Just what in hell do you think you’re doing in here?”

“Looking for those videos.”

“They’re probably with the dancing wolves one I’ve been looking for.”

“I told you I don’t have that movie.”

“Just like you didn’t take Young Guns.”

It was just like him to have a moment of lucidity when it came to remembering something I’d gotten wrong. “Okay, I had Young Guns,” I said. “But I checked my room. I don’t have Dances with Wolves.”

Instantly, he was completely calm. “Is that the name of it?”

“Jesus, Dad!” I choked back my anger again then flung open the drawers to his video closet and rummaged in the very back of each row. It wasn’t until I got to the last drawer, where he hid a dozen Reeses Peanut Butter Cups and two cartons of Lucky Strikes, that I found the videos. I tugged them out and threw them on the bed. “There! The next time you want to accuse me of stealing something you better damn well be sure you know you haven’t hidden them somewhere!”

“I didn’t put those there.”

“No, Dad, of course you didn’t. The movie elf did.”

“Don’t be an ass.” He picked up the movies and returned them to their cases. I stood at the door and watched where he put them—into a cardboard box in the corner of his closet. It was like watching a kid stack their toys neatly in a toy box. When he was done he said, “That wolves movie wasn’t in there.”
*
“I’m going with my dad to the ballpark this weekend,” I told Shelby. “I’ve got an extra ticket.”

“You asking me out, College?”

The rest of the stock workers were huddled again, laughing and talking loud about the bonus they weren’t going to get again this year.

“It’s the end of the season, you know? Dad has box seats every year. Some of his pals from work will be there. Dad hasn’t been a lot this season. So I thought you’d go.” She took a long drag from her cigarette. “You really should quit smoking,” I offered.

“Look,” she said, “if I go to this game will you get off my case about smoking? You sound like my father and I’m old enough to be your mother. Lay off.”

“Okay.” I hung my head and she squeezed my shoulder.

We picked her up that Saturday afternoon and Dad was having a good day. He didn’t smile and tried to hold his lip over his top teeth when he spoke. “You know anything about Elvis, girl?” he asked. So began his stories and Shelby listened all the way to the park.

Some of his pals were in our seats. “You guys never thought you’d see me again, huh?” Dad joked. I didn’t know their names, or if I did I didn’t remember them. They were all Dad’s age—hairless, wrinkled, age spots on their hands and necks. And all four of them had a look on their faces as if to ask me Why the hell did you bring him here?

“Get your butt out of my seat, Harry,” Dad said to one of them. “I want to sit down before they throw out the first pitch. You always did want that seat because it’s the best. Every time I’d use the john you’d be in my seat when I got back.”

“One time,” Harry said. “One time.”

“We thought you’d died,” another of them said, half laughing, half asking when he would. Shelby and I exchanged glances before we sat down next to Dad.

“No, no, boys. I’m here. Been taking care of my son. You all remember Walter?” I shook their hands, trying not to notice how none of them looked at me while they did it.

Two of the men smiled, forcing it. “Yeah, yeah,” one said. “We’ve all heard about him.”

“You want anything?” I asked Shelby.

“I’ll take a Coke,” Dad said. “And bring the boys here something too, Walter.” He handed me money, as if I were a child.

The men declined, still not looking at me, watching the game as if at any moment it might disappear.

I didn’t make it back until the top of the third inning. Shelby was watching the game much like the men by then and Dad was saying, “Tommy, you still chasing after that little gal who works here. The one with the popcorn?”

“Chasing? You mean you were chasing her, like a damned fool. I’m married, Max. You know that.”

“Oh, now, Tommy. We all know you’re not the most faithful man.”

“Dad,” I whispered, handing him the Coke.

“Thank you, son.” He took a long swallow and for the next three innings remained quiet. I eased up, released the tension in my neck that always creeped up around Dad. Shelby and I shared popcorn and during the seventh inning stretch we belted “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.” There were times growing up I felt as at ease as I did at the ballpark. Back then the world was a perfect place. Like the summer when I was ten and everyday it was almost one hundred degrees in the shade. Dad would turn on the sprinklers—even in the drought—and I’d lay in the grass letting the water tickle my stomach. I’d close my eyes and breathe in deep the smell of grass and dust, and almost feel the earth turning beneath me. It was a time when the house seemed to be normal and we weren’t fighting.

Just when I’d gotten comfortable with the smile on my face Dad said, “Your boy still working the plant, Harry? Did his wife get smart and leave him?”

“He’s doing fine,” Harry said.

“I ever tell you guys about the time I worked at the plant with Johnny Cash?”

Shelby sat up, smiling for the first time since we’d arrived. “The Johnny Cash?”

The four men looked at her as if they’d not noticed she had been there before. “Oh god,” one of them said. “He’s got a new audience.”

“What is it this time, Max? You write I Walk the Line and he took all the credit?”

“Or did you get him and that wife of his back together?”

“No, this time he’s gonna tell us how he taught him to play the guitar. Right, Max. Which is it?”

My ears burned. The smile fell from Shelby’s face and she was scowling at them. The ballpark seemed filled with silence. The pitcher finished off the inning, striking out the final batter. Then Dad said, “Well boys, I guess these seats will be yours.”

He got up and Shelby and I followed. We didn’t talk on the way to Shelby’s house except when Dad said, “I did know Johnny Cash. I did. I remember knowing him. It was Cash, wasn’t it, Walter?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know Dad. That was before I was born.” Shelby looked out the window.

“Your mother would’ve known,” Dad said.
*
He was every kid in the first and second grade who lost their teeth and got a complex about it. But instead of putting his caps under the pillow for the Tooth Fairy, he hoarded them after the dentist pulled them all and stored them in a jar atop his bedside table. He put the plates in too, insisting, “I’m gonna melt down all that plat-knee-um and make a money clip or something.”

“Platinum, Dad.”

“Maybe a nice plat-knee-um ring.”

“And who would you give it to?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Some pretty young gal I find down at the ballpark. There was one there who always flirted with me. I think I have her number somewhere. When I get me my teeth I’m gonna call her.”

I fantasized about a small casket, the size of a baby’s, and a tiny headstone. I saw myself like a tree, standing next to his grave. It was always raining at that funeral and there were only a handful of people there. Water would run into the hole and people would shift their weight under the muddying ground. Everyone wore galoshes. The preacher would be the only one standing under the awning, everyone else would have umbrellas. Except me. I’d stand in the rain. I wouldn’t cry. I’d be the pillar. The pillar that fell on him in the middle of the night and choked him to death. I’d gotten it over and done with.

But once all his teeth were out he calmed down. We didn’t fight as much. I didn’t mind going to the store for him every night. He ate pudding and soup, softened crackers in milk and boiled chicken until it was mush. The dentist told him it would be a month before all the swelling went down in his gums. Then he could be fitted for a full set of dentures. Dad took antibiotics to ward off a mouth infection and I think they helped with his lungs. He was lucid most of the time and remembered who he talked with on the phone and when they called. He even cut back to half a pack of Luckies a day and got used to wheeling around an oxygen tank. Then one morning he came into the kitchen and started to fry himself some eggs and bacon.

“You sure you can eat that, Dad?”

“I’m hungry dammit. I haven’t eaten anything in days. Damned doctor, what does he know? He damned well better give me my teeth this week or I’ll sue him.”

“It’s only been two weeks. You have to wait a month. He told you that.”

“I’m starving, can’t you see that? I’m wasting away. Look at me.”

He’d been skin and bones for years. It’s why I first thought he might be sick, why I thought it was cancer, why I took him to the doctor for a check-up in the first place. The only thing about him that was large, that looked normal for a man his age, were his broad shoulders. And what made his shoulders so broad were his lungs expanded inside his ribcage, pushing out in front and back. They were filled with brackish goo.

“Let me get you some applesauce,” I said.

“A man can’t live on applesauce, son. I need some real food, dammit. I’m starving. I could eat a whole cow if that doctor’d give me the teeth to do it with.”

“We’ve got the check-up today at three. We’ll see what he can do.”

“Damned foreign doctors. I should’ve known better.” He cracked three more eggs into a bowl and started to stir them. He took out another pan and began to scramble the eggs. “Now get out your plate and eat these eggs.”

“I already had cereal.”

“What did you fry these eggs for?”

“You fried the eggs.”

“I did?” he asked, staring at the two pans popping on the stove. The bacon was reduced to four black strips.

At that moment, and for the first time, I was afraid he’d hurt himself—that while he rummaged through boxes and movies in his room he’d set himself on fire with a cigarette he’d left burning. Or that he’d forget to turn on the cold water with the hot before taking a shower and be covered with third degree burns.

I wondered what he thought about all those hours he spent smoking at home while I went to the dock. I wondered if he fought everyday not just to breathe but to remember what he’d done the hour before, the morning before, the day before. What if he left the house for cigarettes and forgot how to get hom, or worse got into an accident and died on the side of the road? What would he do all day besides sit in front of the television in his room, watching videos. Would he pick up the phone to call someone only to forget who was on the other end? Would enyone want to talk to him?

I should’ve asked him how he was going to spend his day, but I didn’t. Instead I plated the eggs, threw out the bacon, and sat down to breakfast for the second time.

I watched Dad eat, pulsing his gums to grind the little bits even finer. He didn’t say anything, concentrated on putting the eggs into his mouth without poking his gums with his fork. He lit a cigarette halfway through the meal and let it burn in the ashtray. I should’ve asked him if he was worried about anything, if there was anything I could do for him while I was out that day.
*
It took me a long time to apologize to Shelby about the ballpark. I took my breaks without the rest of the stockroom, retreating to the JCPenny break room, surrounded by suited and skirted salespeople. I imagined what they saw when they looked at me—a young, dirty stock guy covered in dust. Someone hired right off the street to do nothing more than get their product on the floor for them. No one spoke to me. No one even asked my name; they already knew me.

The holidays came and went. Dad and I didn’t put up a tree because he was convinced I’d hidden the Christmas decorations. The only thing he wanted for Christmas was teeth, but the dentist told him his gums were still too swollen for plates. I made a small dinner on Christmas day. The next morning I went to work. Hanging on my locker was a stocking with the word “College” stitched across it. Inside were pens and a leather bound notebook. The card from Shelby read Maybe you could write down some of your Dad’s stories for me. Still, it took until the new year before I apologized and thanked her for the gift. By then I’d gotten my walking papers.

Shelby was outside with the others. “You’re gonna work yourself out of a job if you don’t take more breaks,” she said.

“Maybe.”

She snorted. “You know, College, I never met someone like you before. Most people want to talk your ear off back here. It’s so noisy.” She puffed her cigarette. “I didn’t get it. But I think I do now. You’ve got a lot on your mind.”

I thought I could trust her with the truth, that I could maybe even ask for her help. “I’ve been wanting to tell you—” I began, but she cut me off.

“You think about your dad a lot,” she said.

I shrugged.

“You sure do have a lot to think about,” she said again. Then she put her hand on my shoulder and squeezed. “You’re a good kid, College.”

That afternoon my mind wandered again to Dad’s funeral. I thought I’d come home and find him in his room, propped up on a stack of pillows, the television turned off. The windows would be closed, the blinds drawn, and the smoke in the room would be like molasses cotton candy. I’d wave some of it aside and make my way to the bedside. At first I’d think he was asleep, taking a nap before his dentist appointment. But then I’d smell him and see how blue his face was, how his eyes bulged, the vomit and drool running from his mouth.

He’d have soiled himself and the room would stink of piss and shit. I’d open the window but leave the blinds closed, afraid of looking at him in the half-afternoon sunlight. I’d go into the living room and dial his doctor. I’d go back into his room to wait for the paramedics. The smell will have dissipated. I won’t want to move him but I won’t want them to see how dirty he is so I’ll take a blanket from his closet and cover him with it.
Then I’d notice the movies stacked behind the blankets, hidden away from the casual eye. One of them would be Dances with Wolves. I’d throw it at the bed, to show Dad he was wrong.
*
That afternoon Dad died. I can’t help thinking all these years later that he wanted to die. He chose that day to do it. He made his bed, put on a coat and tie, put in his old back plates so he’d have some teeth in his head, wheeled his oxygen into the bathroom and lit up a cigarette. End of story. He’d figured out a way for it to look like an accident. He knew if he flubbed things up and the explosion didn’t kill him he’d have time to get a story all figured out. He’d say, “That damned tank shouldn’t be so flammable. Like I’d stop smoking from a little ash-ma.”

“Asthma, Dad.”

“Damned doctors, what’d they know.” He’d spend the rest of the night in his bedroom, the reserve oxygen tank next to the window and an extra long tube running across the floor, to the bed, and ending at his nose. Over the next few days, he’d be careful not to have an open flame anywhere near the tank and if I tried to cook while he was in the kitchen he’d say, “Caint you wait until I’m outta here? You wanna set me on fire?” Then I’d picture him blowing himself up: I’d come home one day and the house would smell like an electrical fire. I’d yell from the front door and race around the house looking for him. The doorknob to the bathroom would be cool, but when I’d open it the smoke would leap out and he’d be lying between the toilet and the tub, pants still up, a pack of Luckies next to the bar of soap on the counter. The towels would be ash, the bathmat gone, pieces of metal from the tank lodged in the walls and floor. The mirror would be black and broken, the shower curtain a plastic mass melted around the tub basin. Dad’s face would be pink and black, his feet melted to his shoes. I’d pick up the phone and, without dialing a number, scream and scream, for help.

2006-02-16T19:56:00.000-08:00

1. August 6: 4 miles northwest of Big Moon.

The old man and dog arrived at the boarding house on foot, shortly before dark. They rested in the shade of a sweet-gum, the man sitting in his wrinkled suit, black fedora tilted back on his head. The dog—no bigger than a sack of flour—lay curled on its belly in the fresh-cut grass. In the distance, beyond the railroad tracks and cotton fields, beneath telephone wires upon which hawks perched in wait of twilight, the highway the two had walked ran red with the dying light. From where he sat against the tree, the old man could still see, down the hill, the rusted shape of the pickup, peering out from the edge of a tall field like a tiger in the grass.

They came from the north, shuffling along the shoulder of the road, the dog loping behind on three legs. Its right hind leg was withered and drawn. Every now and then the dog collapsed, and when this happened the old man would stop and wait, face shaded and cool under the brim of his hat. He would open a leather Bible he carried in his left coat pocket to a marked passage in the book of Jeremiah. His lips moved as he read silently, waiting, and when the dog had gathered itself on its haunches, the old man would close the book and walk on. After a moment, the dog would follow. When cars passed, the old man lifted one hand, palm out in greeting, the sleeves of his coat riding high above his wrists. The dog would scamper into the ditch and hide in a stand of field grass. Its fur was thick with burrs and nettles. They never took rides, though several had offered. Not even in the backs of pickups. They had traveled together for most of the day. At noon, they rested under an oak in a green cotton field and shared half a peanut butter sandwich the old man had saved from a diner in Clarksville the night before. He tossed pinches of crust to the dog, which snapped them up and danced away.

At dusk they stopped at a sign posted at the head of county road 312. It read: “Room and Board.” The letters were hand-painted and faded, the wood cracked and scattershot. From here, where the gravel met the asphalt, the old man could see the boarding house atop a small hill, just over the hump of the railroad tracks that ran parallel to the highway. It was a two-story farmhouse with a wraparound porch, a tree, an empty tire-swing. There were two large, plain cars parked in the grass beside the house. He scratched his head beneath his hat and rubbed his eyes. He had not slept in two days. His legs ached, his breath was short, and there were strange, dark shapes waiting at the edges of his vision.

Over the tracks they came to the pickup, or what was left of it. The old man slowed as he recognized the model: a Ford F-100, late 1950s. He stopped. His gaze lingered on the rust-eaten fenders, patches of blue shining through like sky. The windshield lay caved on the dash, crushed by a giant rock still lodged half in, half out of the glass. The seats were torn and flapping; red and blue wires poked from smashed headlights like nerves from a ragged socket; kudzu strangled the tires; and growing in the space where the engine had been, the hood long since missing, probably stolen, was a blooming red rose bush.

The old man removed his hat and ran a trembling hand through his thinning white hair. He was pale. The dog sat several yards away, snapping at flies.

The old man put his hat back on, thrust his hands in his coat pockets as if cold, and made his way up to the house. The dog followed. The old man sat down in the shade of the sweet-gum. He leaned against the trunk. The dog settled down several feet away and panted over its white-tipped feet. The wind gusted and a set of pipe chimes hanging from the porch eaves sang out. A trellis twined with rose bushes skirted the porch, the flowerbed itself hemmed in by large gray stones. There was a flattened, yellow patch of grass where one of these was missing. From an open window on the porch the old man heard the sound of running water, the scratch of a record, the gentle lilt of “Begin the Beguine.” He closed his eyes.

He had been dozing in the shade of the sweet-gum for a quarter hour—eyes opening every now and then to the sight of the truck at the bottom of the hill—when the front door creaked and a woman with gray hair and a blue apron stepped onto the porch. The dog’s head shot up from its paws. Joints popping, the old man struggled to his feet. The woman had a round, worn face, wire rimmed glasses on the end of her nose. She rubbed dishwater from her hands on the hem of her apron. The dog fled down the hill when the screen door slapped shut behind her.

“Yes?” the woman said.

The old man removed his hat and, clutching it by the brim, made a slight bow at the foot of the porch steps. “Ma’am,” he said, voice low and deep.

“Can I help you, sir?”

“Oh, I…we…saw your sign.” He stepped from word to word like a man crossing a fast-moving river one stone at a time. He pointed over his shoulder, toward the highway. “Was hoping you’d…have a bed.”

“Well, I have several beds, none of which is under my tree.”

“No, ma’am.”

“Is it just yourself?”

“Myself and the dog.”

“What dog?”

“That fellow yonder, down in the ditch.”

The woman saw the dog huddled in the tall grass by the road, watching her with hooded eyes. “I have a strict policy against pets. I do not allow pets in my home. They dirty up the furniture and piddle in the floors and I’ll have none of that.”

“No, ma’am. He won’t likely come in…he’s an outside dog and…truth is, we don’t know each other all that well.”

The woman planted her fists on her hips. “Are you—?”

The old man only looked at her, turning his hat in his hands.

“No. I suppose not.” She shook her head, as if to clear it. “Did you walk here?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And you’re from…?”

“Ohhh.” The old man gazed out at the cotton fields, the distant horizon where the sun was almost gone. “All over.”

“And what is your profession?”

“I give a sermon every now and then. I’m good at praying.”

“And that puts food on your plate?”

“Don’t own a plate.”

“I see. And how do you expect to pay for a room?”

The old man met her eyes for the first time. His were clearest blue. “The Lord

will provide,” he said.

“My husband used to say that.”

“He sounds like a…wise man.”

“He died broke.”

The old man held the woman’s gaze, then nodded. He set his hat on his head and said, “Sorry to have troubled you,” and turned away.

He had reached the foot of the gravel drive when the woman called out: “Sir?”

He stopped.

The dog had hobbled from the grass to join him and sat waiting a few yards away.

“We were just about to set down to supper. I suppose, we could use a prayer. Afterward, maybe a hand in the kitchen.”

The old man stood just beyond the reach of the long shadow cast by the house in the waning light. He glanced over his shoulder at the rusted frame of the pickup, the rose bush growing from its empty skull. He clutched the solid, square shape of the Bible through his coat pocket. The dog sat in the road and whined as the shadow of the house touched the old man’s dust-covered boots. “Yes, ma’am,” he said. By the time he reached the porch, the sun was gone, and in the purple gloom of twilight, in a distant field, from a distant wire, a hawk screeched and fell upon the night.

2006-02-09T13:22:00.000-08:00

Dancing With the Wolf

I was fourteen the first time I fantasized about my dad’s funeral: It was a hot day and we all wore shorts and Hawaiian shirts. The casket was closed. Dad had been attacked by a wolf he’d been trying to tame and there was nothing left of his face. We lowered him into the ground, next to where we buried Mom just after I was born, and Jimmy Buffet played from the speakers set-up behind us. We drank Mai Tais. Then I came home, the place all to myself. This fantasy got me through my teenage years. That and the one I had a couple of times about leaving: I’d stand in the kitchen and tell Dad, “I’m tired of your shit. All we do is fight. You’ve never got nothing nice to say to me. I’m leaving.” But I was the first sophomore to make the varsity tennis team so me leaving didn’t make too much sense.

Dad hardly ever talked to me back then but he’d spend the weekends at ball games with friends telling them whopper stories that began, “When I was working in The Blue Café in El Paso, Elvis Presley came in and left me a one hundred dollar tip on his way to Hollywood.” If anyone stopped and thought about it they would’ve realized two things: Elvis flew to Hollywood when he made Blue Hawaii; and even if he did drive, El Paso is in no way on the road from Memphis to Hollywood. When I figured these things out I said, “Those guys are stupid enough to believe you? Or are you just making an ass out of yourself?” Then we tied up for days.

You can only take so much bullshit before it all hits the fan and spatters back at you. It wasn’t until a long time passed that I got tired of being covered in Dad’s shit. But instead of moving out, I started figuring out how to kill him.
**
The fall after high school I took a job at the JCPenny loading dock. I was under qualified but they hired me because their stock was three months behind and the holidays were sure to make things worse. They had trucks and trucks of boxes off somewhere and everyday they drove up three or four of them for unloading. I spent my time tossing boxes from the trucks to the conveyor belt that took them into the stockroom. It was a cold dock; I wore two pairs of socks and the women in the stockroom had heaters at their feet. Three times a day we took a break. It was the only time I talked.

Because I was always reading—a novel, the paper, Newsweek—they called me College. “You’re a quiet one, College,” they said.

I shrugged. “Not much to say, I guess.” They all smoked cigarettes and drank Pepsi, throwing their butts and cans into the box crusher. “Smoking will kill you,” I said.

“Well if that’s what you’re gonna say every time you open your mouth, keep it shut.” This was Shelby—a longhaired, Native-American woman who wore flannels and gold boots. Like most of the women in the stockroom, she was in her late thirties and had never been married. If I had a friend, she was the only one.
**
Dad’s emphysema diagnosis came that fall and afterward there wasn’t a day that went by I didn’t plan on his death. Every morning I’d wake up and the first thing I’d think was today could be the day. I’d spend my time in the shower thinking about what casket to buy. There were days I was okay with him dying and I’d picture myself at the podium delivering a eulogy to a crowd of his old pals from the Phone Company and the ballpark. I’d say profound things about Dad and get everyone crying on each other’s shoulders. Someone would play “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” on the organ. On other days I’d be pissed and I’d tell myself there was no way I was going to go to the funeral, helping with the flowers, or picking out slacks to bury him in. I wished he would die that day, just so I could protest, boycott his funeral procession with a sign that read He Never Met Elivs! I imagined an empty mortuary, a big hole in the ground with no headstone. I even thought we could just cremate him—something he was afraid of.

But I thought—maybe even hoped a little—that something in Dad might change after the official diagnosis. That while he said he only had asthma he’d cut back on smoking, and start to exercise. I thought I could get him out of the house more, put him on the diet his doctor thought was best for him. I bought a pillbox with a timer. I fixed the garage opener and got the oil changed in his Lincoln. And for a while things were okay. He was breathing better and I was able to bring home enough money each month to buy things he really liked—like Tapioca pudding and Lays potato chips.

Our honeymoon period ended when I came home and Dad was standing in the middle of the living room knee high in cardboard boxes. “Where in the hell is Dances with Wolves?” he asked me.

“What?” I tossed my keys on the table. “Dad, how’d you get all these boxes out of the garage? It took me two days just to stack them.”

“Answer me dammit. Where is that Kevin Coaster movie where he plays with the Indians.”

“Costner, Dad. It’s with the rest of your movies in your room.”

“No it aint. I looked there first, Smarty Pants, and it’s not there. I want my movie.”

“You sound like a twelve-year-old. The movie’s in your room. Let’s just go in there and—”

“You stay the hell out of my room! I know you’ve been in there. Trying to get up in the crawlspace. Climbing up in the attic! I can’t leave the damned house for one day!”

“I haven’t gone into your damned room!” I shouted back. “Why would I need to go in there!”

“To steal my tapes!” he yelled back.

I couldn’t help myself and started to laugh. “Dad, if I wanted to watch a movie I’d go rent one.”

“Yeah, with my money.”

“I have a job, Dad,” I said.

“Moving boxes. Jesus! I preached college for what!”

I felt the ball in my throat. I’d never been the best student in the world, but I had some college offers. I just didn’t take them. I wasn’t ready. I knew I couldn’t explain this to Dad, knew my voice was weak, but I managed to say, “So I should quit my job then, Dad? Is that it? You want me to sit around the house all day, counting your videos?”

“No you smart ass I want you to stay the hell out of my room. I don’t give a shit what you do out of this house, but here you stay out of my stuff. I don’t begrudge you of anything. I just want you out of my things.”

I spent the rest of the night stacking boxes back in the garage, looking for the movie I knew wasn’t in there. For some reason the memory of my middle school graduation came to mind. I was eleven, a year younger than everyone else, and Dad rewarded me with a BMX bike that I’d thought was a bunch of crap. I didn’t want a bike. But Dad made sure to keep an eye on what was going on around the neighborhood. It got into his head I needed one and that was the end of it. Even though I tried to convince him a membership to a book club was better, he wouldn’t have any of it.
**
At JCPenny we were only supposed to take three breaks, but working on the dock there was no way for our supervisor to know when we went outside. That dock was a strange place—dark, windowless, and cold. But it was more comfortable than home. We each had a locker back there and some radios. The sales room doors squeaked badly, so when any salesperson made their way back, we could hear them coming and get back to our stations in plenty of time to look busy.

“What do you do all day, College?” Shelby asked one day. We were on our second morning break. The other women and dock boys huddled in a circle, lighting their cigarettes.

“Move boxes,” I said.

“No shit? I thought you were here with the union.” She snorted. “You’re too quiet, College. You don’t talk to the other guys.”

“Not too much, no.”

“You don’t think your shit don’t stink.” It was a statement not about my character, but something she’d gathered from the way I worked. She wanted me to know it. “You just don’t like to talk.”

I didn’t know how to tell her I spent most of my time thinking about Dad. I was on the dock from six to three and most of the time I thought about coming home and finding him dead, choked on a piece of bread. I’d been thinking of ways I could put him out of his misery without anyone finding out. The only thing I could think of would be suffocation, since that was what the doctor said would kill him anyway. But there was something about offing Dad with a feather pillow that didn’t sit well with me. Poison was out, so were the obvious shooting and stabbing.

“Hello?” Shelby moved her gloved hand back and forth in front of my face. “You in there?”

“Sure I am,” I said, shaking it off.

“You’re doing it again. What the hell you thinking about?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Just worried we’re gonna get caught back here. And about you smoking.”

“Don’t worry about me. We work damned hard,” she said, stuffing her hands into her flannel jacket. “Those suits can give us a break once in a while.”

She was right. I moved more truck that fall than I would for the rest of my life. I still think of that time as the most honest work I’ve ever done.
**
Dad had all his front teeth capped years before I was born, and plates replaced his missing back teeth. He hadn’t worn his plates in months, complaining they kept falling out, so he’d chew his food with his front teeth. At dinner they’d be covered in food when he tried to talk.
One night I said, “Did you go out to the ball park today?”

Just as he opened his mouth to answer, an incisor, no bigger than a pinkie nail, tinkled onto the plate.

This was something his doctor warned us would happen; with a loss in body mass, his gums would shrink. “Shit,” he said. “Dentist told me these would only last fifteen years. Seems like it’s been twenty-five, at least.” He picked up the cap and inspected it, then ran his pinky finger along the row of top teeth until he found the rotted hole. “Shit,” he said again.

He wouldn’t leave the house after that and sent me on his errands after I got home from work. He said he was too ashamed to go out in public and smile with a rotted tooth. “Lots of people are missing teeth,” I told him. “Especially older people. I doubt anyone would even notice.”

“I’m not just another person, I’m me dammit. How am I supposed to smile like this?” He grinned and where the cap had fallen out a greenish-black nub of a tooth was exposed.

“Just don’t smile.”

“I swear, son. No wonder you work a shitty job. You probably never smiled a day in your adult life.”

“Let’s not start this up, Dad.”

“I’m not starting anything. You’re the one telling me not to go out.”

“No, you made that decision. I’m just the errand boy.”

“Errand boy. Ha! Every time I send you out you come back with the wrong thing.”

“I won’t buy you cigarettes.”

“It’s my money!”

“The doctor told you to stop—”

“To hell with them, what do they know? A little ash-ma and they think I should stop smoking? I’ve been smoking my whole life. Besides, I don’t inhale.”

Another tall tale, akin to the El Paso Elvis. Dad liked to say he smoked Lucky Strike Non-Filters but the reason he didn’t have cancer was because he only puffed. Sometimes I caught myself wishing he did have cancer just so the doctor could make him wrong about something.

“Dad,” I said, “if you want to buy cigarettes, if you want to buy anything, go do it. I don’t mind, but don’t feel like you have to stay in the house all day.”

“You don’t mind. I’ll decide when to stay in the house. I’m the father, remember. You’re still the child, no matter how old you are.”
**
“I’m going with my dad to the ballpark this weekend,” I told Shelby. “I’ve got an extra ticket.”

“You asking me out, College?”

The rest of the stock workers were huddled again, laughing and talking loud about the bonus they weren’t going to get again this year.

“It’s the end of the season, you know? Dad has box seats every year. Some of his pals from work will be there. Dad hasn’t been a lot this season. So I thought you’d go.”

She took a long drag from her cigarette. “Sure,” she finally said.

We picked her up that Saturday afternoon and Dad was having a good day. He didn’t smile and tried to hold his lip over his top teeth when he spoke. “You know anything about Elvis, girl?” he asked. So began his stories and Shelby listened all the way to the park.

Some of his pals were in our seats. “You guys never thought you’d see me again, huh?” Dad joked. I didn’t know their names, or if I did I didn’t remember them. They were all Dad’s age—hairless, wrinkled, age spots on their hands and necks. And all four of them had a look on their faces as if to ask me Why the hell did you bring him here?

“Get your butt out of my seat, Harry,” Dad said to one of them. “I want to sit down before they throw out the first pitch. You always did want that seat because it’s the best. Every time I’d use the john you’d be in my seat when I got back.”

“One time,” Harry said. “One time.”

“We thought you’d died,” another of them said, half laughing, half asking when he would die. Shelby and I exchanged glances before we sat down next to Dad.

“No, no, boys. I’m here. Been taking care of my son. You all remember Walter?” I shook their hands, trying not to notice how none of them looked at me while they did it.

Two of the men smiled, forcing it. “Yeah, yeah,” one said. “We’ve all heard about him.”

“You want anything?” I asked Shelby.

“I’ll take a Coke,” Dad said. “And bring the boys here something too, Walter.” He handed me money, as if I were a child.

The men declined, still not looking at me, watching the game as if at any moment it might disappear.

I didn’t make it back until the top of the third inning. Shelby was watching the game much like the men by then and Dad was saying, “Tommy, you still chasing after that little gal who works here. The one with the popcorn?”

“Chasing? You mean you were chasing her, like a damned fool. I’m married, Max. You know that.”

“Oh, now, Tommy. We all know you’re not the most faithful man.”

“Dad,” I whispered, handing him the Coke.

“Thank you son.” He took a long swallow and for the next two innings remained quiet. Shelby didn’t talk either. Then out of the blue Dad said, “Your boy still working the plant, Harry? Did his wife get smart and leave him?”

“He’s doing fine,” Harry said.

“I ever tell you guys about the time I worked at the plant with Johnny Cash?”

Shelby sat up, smiling for the first time since we’d arrived. “The Johnny Cash?”

The four men looked at her as if they’d not noticed she had been there before. “Oh god,” one of them said. “He’s got a new audience.”

“What is it this time, Max? You write I Walk the Line and he took all the credit?”

“Or did you get him and that wife of his back together?”

“No, this time he’s gonna tell us how he taught him to play the guitar. Right, Max. Which is it?”

My ears burned. The smile fell from Shelby’s face and she was scowling at them. The ballpark seemed filled with silence. The pitcher finished off the inning, striking out the final batter. Then Dad said, “Well boys, I guess these seats will be yours.”

He got up and Shelby and I followed. We didn’t talk on the way to Shelby’s house except when Dad said, “I did know Johnny Cash. I did. I remember knowing him. It was Cash, wasn’t it, Walter?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know Dad.” Shelby looked out the window.
**
There were times growing up I thought the world was a perfect place. Like the summer when I was ten and everyday it was almost one hundred degrees in the shade. Dad would turn on the sprinklers—even in the drought—and I’d lay in the grass letting the water tickle my stomach. I’d close my eyes and breathe in deep the smell of grass and dust, and almost feel the earth turning beneath me. It was a time when the house seemed to be normal and we weren’t fighting. I tried to remember that quiet stillness in those last few months with Dad.

When two more caps fell out he finally made the decision to see a dentist. On the night before his first consultation, Dad stormed out of his room throwing a dozen videocassettes on the floor in the living room. “I want to know where the rest of my videos are!” he yelled. “Goddamned if I haven’t given you everything and now you’re stealing from me!”

“What the hell is wrong with you, Dad?” Most of the video sleeves were empty. “Where’d you put the movies?”

“Don’t play innocent with me,” he said. “You know damned well where my movies are. You’re the one stealing them.”

“Why would I steal your movies?”

“I don’t know. You’re just greedy. Haven’t I always given you whatever you wanted?”

I wanted to say At the cost of constantly reminding me about it but held my tongue. I fought back the urge to push him down, to hurt him in a way that could be blamed on an accident, but that might actually make him die. I squeezed my thoughts closed and managed to say, “Dad, when did you last see these movies?”

“I don’t ever watch them. You’re the one who watches them.”

I got up from the couch and walked down the hall. Inside his room the air was thick with smoke. His television blared and when I tried to turn it down, the channel changed. “Need to get those buttons fixed,” I said.

He stood in the door. “It’s fine when I use it. Just what in hell do you think you’re doing in here?”

“Looking for those videos.”

“They’re probably with the dancing wolves one I’ve been looking for.”

“I told you I don’t have that movie. I went through the boxes in the garage and it wasn’t there.”

“Just like you didn’t take Young Guns.”

It was just like him to have a moment of lucidity when it came to remembering something I’d gotten wrong. “Okay, I had Young Guns,” I said. “But I checked my room. I don’t have Dances with Wolves.”

Instantly, he was completely calm. “Is that the name of it?”

“Jesus, Dad!” I choked back my anger again then flung open the drawers to his video closet and rummaged in the very back of each row. It wasn’t until I got to the last drawer, where he hid a dozen Reeses peanut Butter Cups and two cartons of Lucky Strikes, that I found the videos. I tugged them out and threw them on the bed. “There! Now the next time you want to accuse me of stealing something you better damn well be sure you know you haven’t hidden them somewhere.”

“I didn’t put those there.”

“No, Dad, of course you didn’t. The movie elf did.”

“Don’t be an ass.” He picked up the movies and returned them to their cases. I stood in the door and watched where he put them—into a cardboard box in the corner of his closet. When he was done he said, “That wolves movie wasn’t in there.”
**
He was becoming so much like a child. He was every kid in the first and second grade who lost their teeth and got a complex about it. But instead of putting his caps under the pillow for the Tooth Fairy, he hoarded them after the dentist pulled them all and stored them in a jar atop his bedside table. He put the plates in too, insisting, “I’m gonna melt down all that plat-knee-um and make a money clip or something.”

“Platinum, Dad.”

“Maybe a nice plat-knee-um ring.”

“And who would you give it to?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Some pretty young gal I find down at the ballpark. There was one there who always flirted with me. I think I have her number somewhere. When I get me my teeth I’m gonna call her.”

His favorite pastimes became grinding food in the processor and belittling the East-Indian dentist responsible for pulling his teeth.

I fantasized about Dad’s funeral even more. I pictured a small casket, the size of a baby’s, and a tiny headstone. I saw myself like a tree, standing next to the grave. It was always raining at that funeral and there were only a handful of people there. Water would run into the hole and people would shift their weight under the muddying ground. Everyone wore galoshes. The preacher would be the only one standing under the awning, everyone else would have umbrellas. Except me. I’d stand in the rain. I wouldn’t cry. I’d be the pillar. The pillar that fell on him in the middle of the night and choked him to death. I’d gotten it over and done with.

But once all his teeth were out he calmed down. We didn’t fight as much. I didn’t mind going to the store for him every night. He ate pudding and soup, softened crackers in milk and boiled chicken until it was mush. The dentist told him it would be a month before all the swelling went down in his gums. Then he could be fitted for a full set of dentures. Dad took antibiotics to ward off a mouth infection and I think they helped with his lungs. He was lucid most of the time and remembered who he talked with on the phone and when they called. He even cut back to half a pack of Luckies a day and got used to wheeling around an oxygen tank. Then one morning he came into the kitchen and started to fry himself some eggs and bacon.

“You sure you can eat that, Dad?”

“I’m hungry dammit. I haven’t eaten anything in days. Damned doctor, what does he know? He damned well better give me my teeth this week or I’ll sue him.”

“It’s only been two weeks. You have to wait a month. He told you that.”

“I’m starving, can’t you see that? I’m wasting away. Look at me.”

He’d been skin and bones for years. It’s why I first thought he might be sick, why I thought it was cancer, why I took him to the doctor for a check-up in the first place. The only thing about him that was large, that looked normal for a man his age, were his broad shoulders. And what made his shoulders so broad were his lungs expanded inside his ribcage, pushing out in front and back. They were filled with brackish goo.

“Let me get you some applesauce,” I said.

“A man can’t live on applesauce, son. I need some real food, dammit. I’m starving. I could eat a whole cow if that doctor’d give me the teeth to do it with.”

“We’ve got the check-up today at three. We’ll see what he can do.”

“Damned foreign doctors. I should’ve known better.” He cracked three more eggs into a bowl and started to stir them. He took out another pan and began to scramble the eggs. “Now get out your plate and eat these eggs.”

“I already had cereal.”

“Then what did you fry these eggs for?”

“You fried the eggs.”

“I did?” he asked, staring at the two pans popping on the stove. The bacon was reduced to four black strips.

At that moment, and for the first time, I was afraid he’d hurt himself—that while he rummaged through boxes and movies in his room he’d set himself on fire with a cigarette he’d left burning. Or that he’d forget to turn on the cold water with the hot before taking a shower and be covered with third degree burns.

I wondered what he thought about all those hours he spent smoking at home while I went to the dock. I wondered if he fought everyday not just to breathe but to remember what he’d done the hour before, the morning before, the day before. But I didn’t ask him. Instead I plated the eggs, threw out the bacon, and sat down to breakfast for the second time.

I watched Dad eat his eggs, pulsing his gums to grind the little bits even finer. He didn’t say anything, concentrated on putting the eggs into his mouth without poking his gums with his fork. He lit a cigarette halfway through the meal and let it burn in the ashtray. I wanted to ask him if he was worried about anything, if there was anything I could do for him while I was out that day, but I didn’t.
**
It took me a long time to apologize to Shelby about the ballpark. I took my breaks without the rest of the stockroom, retreating to the JCPenny break room, surrounded by suited and skirted salespeople. I imagined what they saw when they looked at me—a dirty stock guy covered in cardboard debris and dust. Someone hired right off the street to do nothing more than get their product on the floor for them. No one spoke to me. No one even asked my name; they already knew me.

The holidays came and went. Dad and I didn’t put up a tree because he was convinced I’d hidden the Christmas decorations. The only thing Dad wanted for Christmas was teeth. The dentist still told him his gums were too swollen for plates and even I was beginning to disbelieve him. I made a small dinner on Christmas day. The next morning I went to work. Hanging on my locker was a stocking with the word “College” stitched across it. Inside were pens and a leather bound notebook. The card from Shelby read Maybe you could write down some of your Dad’s stories for me. Still, it took until the new year before I apologized and thanked her for the gift. By then I’d gotten my walking papers.
Shelby was outside with the others. “You worked yourself out of a job,” she said.

“It looks that way, yeah.”

She snorted. “You know, College, I never met someone like you before. Most people want to talk your ear off back here. It’s so noisy.” She puffed her cigarette. “I didn’t get it. But I think I do now. You’ve got a lot on your mind.”

I thought I could trust her with the truth, that I could maybe even ask for her help with how to kill dad. “I’ve been wanting to tell you—” I began, but she cut me off.

“You think about your dad a lot,” she said with finality. She cupped her hand to her mouth and turned to the others. “It’s College’s last day. Should we get him something?”

“How about a carton of cigarettes?” another woman laughed.

“Yeah, that oughtta do it,” Shelby said. “What do you think, College?”

I shrugged.

“You sure do have a lot to think about,” she said again. Then she put her hand on my shoulder and squeezed. “You’re a good kid, College.”

That afternoon my mind wandered again to Dad’s funeral. I thought I’d come home and find him in his room, propped up on a stack of pillows, the television turned off. The windows would be closed, the blinds drawn, and the smoke in the room would be like molasses cotton candy. I’d wave some of it aside and make my way to the bedside. At first I’d think he was asleep, taking a nap before his dentist appointment. But then I’d smell him and see how blue his face was, how his eyes bulged, the vomit and drool running from his mouth. He’d choked. Exactly what the doctors told me would happen.

He’d have soiled himself somewhere along the way and the room would stink of piss and shit. I’d open the window but leave the blinds closed, afraid of looking at him in the half-afternoon sunlight. I’d go into the living room and dial Dad’s doctor. I’d go back into his room to wait for the paramedics. The smell will have dissipated. I won’t want to move him but I won’t want them to see how dirty he is so I’ll take a blanket from his closet and cover him with it.
Then I’d open the cardboard box in the corner of the room. Inside would be all the movies Dad claimed he’d lost. One of them would be Dances with Wolves. I’d feel like hitting myself in the face with the black case, or throwing it at the bed, to show Dad he was wrong. Then I’d remember he’s dead.
**
I don’t remember much about the real funeral at all. I don’t remember how I found him dead in the bathroom the same afternoon I lost my job. I remember opening the door after he didn’t answer me. The house was filled with smoke and I thought he’d left a cigarette burning and it’d caught on his mattress or a blanket or something and he was embarrassed about it. The fire department told me later it was the oxygen tank that exploded.

The crowd wasn’t large, but most of the people from the ballpark were there when we interred Dad’s body. There was no headstone yet.

I can’t help thinking all these years later that Dad wanted to die. He chose that day to do it. He made his bed, put on a coat and tie, put in his old back plates so he’d have some teeth in his head, wheeled his oxygen into the bathroom and lit up a cigarette. End of story. He’d figured out a way for it to look like an accident. He knew if he flubbed things up and the explosion didn’t kill him he’d have time to get a story all figured out. He’d say, “That damned tank shouldn’t be so flammable. Like I’d stop smoking from a little ash-ma.”

“Asthma, Dad.”

“Damned doctors, what’d they know.” He’d spend the rest of the night in his bedroom, the reserve oxygen tank next to the window and an extra long tube running across the floor, to the bed, and ending at his nose. Over the next few days, he’d be careful not to have an open flame anywhere near the tank and if I tried to cook while he was in the kitchen he’d say, “Caint you wait until I’m outta here? You wanna set me on fire?”

Then I’d picture him blowing himself up. How I’d come home one day and the house would smell like an electrical fire. I’d yell from the front door and race around the house looking for him. The doorknob to the bathroom would be cool, but when I’d open it the smoke would leap out and he’d be lying between the toilet and the tub, pants still up, a pack of Luckies next to the bar of soap on the counter. The towels would be ash, the bathmat gone, pieces of metal from the tank lodged in the walls and floor. The mirror would be black and broken, the shower curtain a plastic mass melted around the tub basin. Dad’s face would be pink and black, his feet melted to his shoes. I’d pick up the phone and, without dialing a number, scream and scream, for help.