Category: Fiction

When Felix’s special phone rang at 2:00 in the morning, Kelly rolled over and punched him in the shoulder and hissed, “Why didn’t you turn that fucking thing off before bed?”

“Because I’m on call,” he said.

“You’re not a fucking doctor,” she said, kicking him as he sat on the bed’s edge, pulling on the pants he’d left on the floor before turning in. “You’re a goddamned systems administrator.”

“It’s my job,” he said.

“They work you like a government mule,” she said. “You know I’m right. For Christ’s sake, you’re a father now, you can’t go running off in the middle of the night every time someone’s porn supply goes down. Don’t answer that phone.”

He knew she was right. He answered the phone.

“Main routers not responding. BGP not responding.” The mechanical voice of the systems monitor didn’t care if he cursed at it, so he did, and it made him feel a little better.

“Maybe I can fix it from here,” he said. He could log in to the UPS for the cage and reboot the routers. The UPS was in a different netblock, with its own independent routers on their own uninterruptible power supplies.

 

Kelly was sitting up in bed now, an indistinct shape against the headboard. “In five years of marriage, you have never once been able to fix anything from here.” This time she was wrong—he fixed stuff from home all the time, but he did it discreetly and didn’t make a fuss, so she didn’t remember it. And she was right, too—he had logs that showed that after 1:00 a.m., nothing could ever be fixed without driving out to the cage. Law of Infinite Universal Perversity—aka Felix’s Law.
Five minutes later, Felix was behind the wheel. He hadn’t been able to fix it from home. The independent router’s netblock was offline, too. The last time that had happened, some dumbfuck construction worker had driven a Ditchwitch through the main conduit into the data center and Felix had joined a cadre of fifty enraged sysadmins who’d stood atop the resulting pit for a week, screaming abuse at the poor bastards who labored twenty-four/seven to splice ten thousand wires back together.

His phone went off twice more in the car; he let it override the stereo and play the mechanical status reports through the big, bassy speakers of more critical network infrastructure offline. Then Kelly called.

“Hi,” he said.

“Don’t cringe, I can hear the cringe in your voice.”

He smiled involuntarily. “Check, no cringing.”

“I love you, Felix,” she said.

“I’m totally bonkers for you, Kelly. Go back to bed.”

“2.0’s awake,” she said. The baby had been Beta Test when he was in her womb, and when her water broke, he got the call and dashed out of the office, shouting, The Gold Master just shipped! They’d started calling him 2.0 before he’d finished his first cry. “This little bastard was born to suck tit.” 

“I’m sorry I woke you,” he said. He was almost at the data center. No traffic at 2:00 a.m. He slowed down and pulled over before the entrance to the garage. He didn’t want to lose Kelly’s call underground.
“It’s not waking me,” she said. “You’ve been there for seven years. You have three juniors reporting to you. Give them the phone. You’ve paid your dues.”
“I don’t like asking my reports to do anything I wouldn’t do,” he said.

“You’ve done it,” she said. “Please? I hate waking up alone in the night. I miss you most at night.”

“Kelly—”

“I’m over being angry. I just miss you is all. You give me sweet dreams.”
“OK,” he said.

“Simple as that?”

“Exactly. Simple as that. Can’t have you having bad dreams, and I’ve paid my dues. From now on, I’m only going on night call to cover holidays.”

She laughed. “Sysadmins don’t take holidays.”

“This one will,” he said. “Promise.”

“You’re wonderful,” she said. “Oh, gross. 2.0 just dumped core all over my bathrobe.”

“That’s my boy,” he said.

“Oh that he is,” she said. She hung up, and he piloted the car into the data–center’s lot, badging in and peeling up a bleary eyelid to let the retinal scanner get a good look at one of his sleep-depped eyeballs.
He stopped at the machine to get himself a guarana/medafonil power bar and a cup of lethal robot-coffee in a spill-proof clean-room sippy-cup. He wolfed down the bar and sipped the coffee, then let the inner door read his hand geometry and size him up for a moment. It sighed open and gusted the airlock’s load of positively pressurized air over him as he passed finally to the inner sanctum.

The heat rose into the clearest dawn I’d ever seen. A corridor of one hundred men extended a quarter mile, their yellow hardhats bobbing against the gray terrain, the ring of their spike malls, the clang of their shovels quickly swallowed up by an endless flatland of dust, sagebrush, and rattlesnakes.

I’d been given an anchor bar—iron, an inch thick, five feet long, easily fifty pounds. When properly put to task, it curled up under the rail and with a click secured an anchor tight against the tie. With each new click, I swear, it gained another pound.

“Ever do a virgin?”

“What?”

“Everything they say is true, like doing it with a vise grip, only softer”—then the laugh, the guttural, Dracula laugh that I would come to know so well by summer’s end.

This was Lenny. Tall, Nordic Prussian, green eyes, blond, Romeo of the Railroad. He was from some little town in Idaho, but that was all I knew. Like most of the others, when it came to the past, you couldn’t wrench a word out of them.

Snap!

“No, dumb shit. Hold it this way, then muscle into it.” Click. Click. Click. Smooth as a pirouette.

Snap!

“Jesus. Where do they find you guys?” He showed me again, but the bar had become so heavy I could barely lift it into position much less produce the desired click.

For the next three hours, we worked on, Lenny clicking away, me hauling my bar from tie to tie, the thought of finishing out the day becoming unbearable.

At 9:30, the call came from up the tracks—“Break! Brreakkk”—and a hundred guys dropped their tools and headed for the water cart. Time for a cigarette, a cup of mud (only the new guys like me fretted about picking out the little green bugs), and a quick review of last night’s brawls, boozings, and beddings. (The detailed account would come at lunch.)
“You make it last night?”

“What do you think?”

“C’mon.”

“Ask the Spic. He held her down. Hey Spic! Show ’em where she bit ya.” The stocky Hispanic raised his forearm to a round of raucous applause.

I failed to see the humor.

That night, I hitched a ride into town to call my father, but when the operator asked if he’d accept the charges, he declined and we were disconnected. Figuring there’d been a mix-up on the line, I tried again, but still his answer was no. I changed a five into quarters, made a paid call and there he was, simple and direct as always:

“Your call. You pay.”

“But—I’m at a pay booth. In Gillette. I didn’t think you’d mind if I—”

“So how was your first day?”

“Terrible. The work’s a killer, just like you said it’d be, and this place—nothing but flat and ugly as far as you can see. I swear, if the moon could grow sagebrush, it’d be Wyoming.”

“You’ll get used to it.” He sounded amused.

“Thanks. I’ll remember that next time you’re stranded on the moon. Man, was this a mistake coming out here to this god-awful job. I don’t know what I was thinking.” Then, with a desperate laugh, “Get me outta here!”

Silence.

I pressed ahead, cautiously, first suggesting, then coming right out and asking to come home, but at each new turn, a brick wall. I recounted the exchange at break, certain it would have some shock value for him, but nothing.

He listened, courteously, yet unmoved and strangely preoccupied, as though he was working one of his coveted crossword puzzles in the comfort of our sunroom. I could almost see him eased back on his Stratolounger, a splash of Chivas at his side, his gold pen lettering in a word or two as I popped another couple of quarters into the phone.

“You still there?”

“Yes.”

“I figure I need about two hundred bucks to get back.”

“What about your college loans? I thought you wanted to graduate debt-free. Wasn’t that the point of all of this? That you couldn’t make nearly this much money with any other job. Isn’t that what you said?”

“Yeah, but—”

“Isn’t that why you took this ‘god-awful’ job?”

“Yeah, but—”

“Stick to your plan.”

“But I could still pay off—”

“Listen to me. You need to do us both a favor, okay?”

“What?”

“You need to start honoring your commitments, especially the ones you make to yourself.”

“I know that, I really do, but this is different, this is—”

“And you have to quit running from life’s little challenges.”

“Hey, man, this is no little challenge. If you could see this place, these people. I could be killed out here, and for what? To pay off a few college loans before I graduate?” Surely there was something he could arrange for me back home.

And then the shocker. “You’d do well to stop thinking of this as your home.” He wasn’t mean about it, or the least bit distant, just matter-of-fact. Then, almost cordially, “Uncle Henry’ll be here next week from San Diego. Maybe you could call Sunday when the rates are low. I’m sure he’d like to visit with you. Have a good week.”

Dial tone.

Dial tone? I had felt certain that I would spend this night in the comfort of a motel, that in the morning, a ticket would be waiting for me to return to the lush summer in Minneapolis, with its many lakes encircled by bathing beauties.

Instead, dial tone, my own father leaving me to face the dusty streets of Gillette, Wyoming, and a nine-mile trek over a gravel road to a string of boxcars, revamped as sleeping quarters, on a side rail in the middle of nowhere.

I pulled an army blanket over my head—inadequate to shield me from the cold night air—and swore never to speak to the bastard again.

Next morning, I was teamed with Fitzman, a spiker—short, brawny, with mean eyes. He bummed me a cigarette.

“Thanks. Got a match?”

“Yeah,” he scoffed. “Your breath and a buffalo fart.” He tossed me his matches, but that was it. Not another word the rest of the morning. At lunch, Lenny answered all my questions about Fitzman with a simple statement:

“He hates you.”

“Why?”

Then came that laugh of his and, yelling across the crowd, “Hey, Fitz! The new guy wants to know why you hate ’im.”

The gang busted up as Fitzman looked our way and smiled his sick, intimidating smile. Back on the tracks, he told me he’d killed someone, someone just like me.

“You kidding?”

He stared right through me.

“Why?”

“He was wearing one of those green sweaters. Wimp green, with an alligator on it, and I just hate those fucking sweaters with those alligators on ’em and the fucking cocksuckers who wear ’em!”

He held his point for an instant, then laughed in my face.

“How many of those sweaters do you own?” he asked, his gray eyes growing psychotic. “Well? How many?”

“Eight dozen.”

He raised his spike mall.

“Three dozen yellow, a dozen pink, and four dozen wimp green.”

For a moment, I thought I was dead. Then the glare in his eyes softened.

“Not bad, Alligator. I might not have to off ya after all.”

I asked about Fitzman at dinner, whether he’d really killed anyone, but the guys just smirked and shook their heads as if I were too naive to be alive.

After dinner, I set out for town, figuring my father’d have to listen to me now, if he’d believe me at all. I was approaching a curve in the road, thinking how he wouldn’t want his only son working with a fugitive murderer, how I could appeal to his sense of family; then, suddenly, my confidence shrank.

There, lying ahead in the rocks and dust, were several long, narrow sticks. “Rule is,” Lenny had told me, “if it looks like a stick, it’s a snake, cuz there ain’t no trees that big out here to make a stick long enough to be a snake.”

There they lay, soaking up the last rays of sunlight. Bull snakes. Harmless. A handful of gravel and they sprang to life, slithering over each other with a frenetic whisss into the grass. I took a step forward, but thought, Suppose they come back, come back when you’re right up there beside them?

Sure enough, a couple had already slipped out of the grass. And now, a few more. I reached for another handful of gravel.

Suppose they get pissed? Turn on you? Start squirming down the road after you?

But—snakes don’t chase people.

Says who?

Says … Besides, they’re bull snakes. Harmless.

Harmless, hell! A snake’s a snake!

I froze. Then—and I know this sounds crazy, and I knew it was crazy at the time—I tore out of there like a kid running up the stairs in the middle of the night with the biggest, scariest bogeyman fast on his heels.

I’d never felt so thoroughly ashamed, diminished, and defeated. I stared into the vast, desolate twilight and began a letter to my father:

“This may mean you never let me live in ‘your home’ again, but it’s time I got some things off my chest.

“Ever since high school, you’ve been riding me, always on my back, a little harder every year. It’s like you resent me for being alive. And the way you are around mother and the girls, all sweetness and light, so happy to see them, gave Sherry a free ride through nursing school and popping for Martie’s wedding next year. But me, I have to pay for every cent of every shitty little thing I do and even some stuff I don’t do, like that time you handed me the water bill and said it was time I started learning how much it costs to run a household. What is that? None of the other dads do crap like that. And even after I paid the damn $14.63, you still, still look at me all disappointed, like I’m some three-foot putt you just missed on the goddamned golf course!

“Well, listen up, you mean old son of a bitch. You’re not the only one who’s disappointed.”

Sons stand up to their fathers in many ways. Some have that one great argument that breaks into a fist fight. Some wage cold war right to the end. Some get higher-paying jobs.
Me, I did it with a letter. Paragraph after paragraph, heaping every contemptuous thought I had harbored since childhood, and even coming up with a few I hadn’t just for good measure.

More than a bitch list, it was a relentless diatribe that sought to hurt him to the core, and concluded with the declaration: “Your whole life, all sixty-three years of it, adds up to nothing but one big piece of shit.”

I felt relieved, if a little anxious, but then there was nothing to do. The foreman would mail it from town that night and before the week was out, my father would have a taste of his own medicine.

The wind kicked up as it can only in eastern Wyoming. The work, the crew, the snakes, the wind, the vicious letter to my erstwhile friend … it was all too much to take. I lay still in my bunk, lonely and afraid that I would never get out of this terrible, terrible place.

Those first two weeks, everything ached: arms, legs, back, even fingers. Each day began with a gutful of the grease they called breakfast and ended with the delusion that tomorrow would bring a plan of escape.

I declined Lenny’s nightly offers to tear up the town, preferring instead to turn in early, physically drained and emotionally weak, although I’d never admit it. Mostly, though, it was just exhaustion. This was not work. It was hard labor, chain-gang-style, complete with ex-cons, illegal aliens, and straw bosses everywhere, crowned with white hardhats in contrast to our yellow.

Spikin’: Me, Fitzman, Lenny, and a guy named Eric who’d been transferred down the rails to us for mixin’ it up with the steel gang. The tracks of a woman’s fingernails ran from his brow to the stubble on his chin—battle scars, he told us, of a successful conquest the night before.

Fitzman laughed. He liked Eric’s take-what- you-want approach, while Lenny preferred the more subtle strategy of his “Fifth Night Advent.”

“First night, you don’t even kiss her. Don’t even try. Instead you pretend to listen to all that crap they talk about, then end the night with your sweetest little-boy face, saying, ‘This has been one of the most special evenings of my life.’

“Second night, you let her touch you—and they always do the second night—but instead of grabbing her, you make your voice as sappy as you can: ‘When you touch my arm like that, you touch my heart,’ then just kick back, and let her keep touchin’ you.

“Third night, you kiss her. You’ll know she’s ready by that stupid look they all get on their face, then give her a peck, mouth closed, very tender like you’re tasting a Dairy Queen that you want to make last the whole day. She’s gonna look surprised at first, but later, maybe ten minutes, maybe half an hour, she makes that stupid face again, and you take another taste of the curlicue.

“Fourth night, you do it, but all in slow motion, little steps that last five minutes, maybe more.”

Fitzman was fidgety; Eric picked up a spike and looked like he was going back to work; I’m Catholic, and I stood there disgusted, all ears.

“You start by just playing with her hair a little, and touching your lips against her cheek—not kissing, just touching—in little circles up to her eyes then over to her ears. If she’s a virgin, she’ll love it, and if she’s not, she’ll go wild. Before you know it, you’re home, Jerome.”

“Suppose she tries to stop you?”

“That’s when you play your ace, Alligator.”

“What ace?”

“You look at her with a little surprise and a little hurt and a little whimper, ‘Don’t you know I love you?’ ”

“Fuuuu-cckk,” Fitzman scoffed, going back to work. “At that rate, you probably don’t get laid twice in a lifetime.”

“Never fails,” Lenny said, his green eyes dreamlike. “Yep. The old Fifth Night Advent,” he mused.

“What happens the fifth night?”

“You tell her to fuck off,” and Fitzman and Eric busted up.

“Hey . . . what’re you girls doing back there?” one of the straw bosses yelled.

“Just teachin’ Alligator how to drive them spikes home, boss, how to drive them spikes home.”

I decided to go home, not home-home, but back to Minneapolis. I arrived at the decision a couple of weeks later in the dinner car where we sat, fifty guys on either side of a dozen picnic tables, and ate something the cook proudly referred to as “corn steak.”

It was nothing, really. Not the wind burn on my face, not the creosote in my pores, not the handfuls of salt tablets that rotted away at my gut, not even the bright-red ranch dressing that now dribbled from Eric’s chin as he sat across from me, mumbling something with his mouth full of the slop they called food.

And yet it was everything.

Maybe I wouldn’t finish college, maybe I would. All I knew was I couldn’t take another day with Sled Gang #2. So without telling anyone, I took only the things I needed, not even a second set of clothes, and headed for town.

Whatever happens, you’ll come out all right. Hell, you’ve been through tougher than this … or have you? Just don’t forget to look out for the—Snakes!

Maybe you can go around through the grass, but wait!—isn’t that where the rattlers are?

“Damn snakes. Get out of here.” I threw fistful after fistful of gravel, until the whole entangled mess tumbled off into the ditch.

You just gotta keep throwing that gravel, Alligator, just gotta keep throwin’ it, just gotta keep throwin’ it!

But as I did, I could feel those snakes filling in behind me, ahead of me, their numbers multiplying, a few even daring to rear their heads from right there beside me in the dwindling twilight.

They’re coming closer, crisscrossing, reeling, hissing: listen!

I swear they were closing in, certain I wasn’t imagining it, encircled, trapped, heart pulsing, no way to fend them off, my body too rigid to stoop for more gravel, the gray strands taunting, squirming toward my boots, every one of them winding, twisting, thrashing in the frenzy.

Then gone. Like that! Scattered. All of them. Back into the grass.

Lenny laughed the loudest, though Fitzman and Eric ran a close second. Lenny slammed the car door and walked over to me.

“Alligator, look at you, you’re shakin’ like a leaf. What happened?”

“Shit, he’s scared to fuckin’ death. Alligator, them’re bull snakes. They don’t bite. C’mon, get in the car. You need a drink.”

The Gaslight was the antithesis of everything its name implied. Walls covered with cowboy bric-a-brac, linoleum floors, blond paneling, Formica tables, the stale stench of spilled beer hitting hard as we walked into the place, four conspicuous railroaders in an obvious ranchers’ watering hole.

“The usual,” Eric said with a smile as the waitress, looking a little worried, nodded and walked off.

“What’s the usual?”

“What do you care, Alligator?” He wasn’t looking for an answer.

A bottle of Wild Turkey, four glasses, popcorn. Two drinks later, and somebody yelled a toast to us from across the room: “To the faggot gandy dancers,” to which Fitzman raised his own glass: “To the skanky whores the ranchers call their women.”

That did it. A hard woman, one who’d seen more than a few mornings face down in the dirt of the corral, got up, headed in our direction, and thinking I’d said it, slugged me square in the mouth—bam!—and I’m down on the floor sure as I just wised off to my paternal grandmother.

Incredibly, Fitzman decked her, knocking her cold. Then, like someone called a cue, the place burst into upheaval, chairs and tables flying, bottles and glasses missiling through the air, guys gruntin’ and wailin’ and bleedin’ and spittin’ and me, a dumb, scared-to-death college kid right in the middle of an honest to Jesus barroom brawl.

On my hands and knees, I was making for the door when I heard Lenny yell—“Alligator”—and I knew I had no choice but to get into it.

The first guy I caught totally off guard, hitting him so hard I nearly threw my shoulder out. A second punch and he was finished. As the fight went on, I became aware of the strength I had gained in my arms and shoulders and back. Big guys, 6 ‘ 4″ and 210 pounds, were throwing their best shots at me, and although their punches were like bricks in my face, mine must have been like freight trains in theirs. Same for Lenny and Eric and Fitzman. They just kept coming and we just kept taking them on.

I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t fun. It was goddamned exhilarating! Before, I’d always been the sissy getting beat up on the way home from school. All of a sudden I was a tough guy, ruthless, busting heads in a dingy saloon in the Wild West, just as God intended!

We did the town that night, the four of us, hitting every bar on the strip, our bludgeoned faces, bloodied shirts, and puffed-up lips like battle scars and challenges to anyone who dared mess with us. No one did.

“Hey,” Eric laughed, “you see Alligator flat-fuck fall when that cowboy kicked him?”

“Yeah, but he got up again,” said Fitzman in my defense.

“Sure, he got up. Spread that bastard’s nose clear across his face. Oooo. Then all that fucking blood! I never woulda believed it.”

“Here’s to you, Alligator, you faggot,” and all at once, they’re holding their glasses up to me, they’re toasting Me!

For the next two months, the four of us were invincible. Nobody crossed us, not even the straw bosses. Hell, we were the Defenders of the Railroad.

We worked the hardest part of the gang, the tail end, spikin’ and anchorin’, daring the 110-degree days to drop us sure as they would half a dozen guys before the whistle blew. This was home, I decided. The harsh terrain, the ungodly work, the searing heat reflecting off the ballast onto our blistered lips, the grit in our teeth, the sweat rolling off our noses—all of it bearable precisely because it was so unbearable.

Muscles bulged, backs bowed, lungs filled with the aroma of creosote and manhood.

August was full of noises, sharp and piercing, made louder by the sudden stillness of the wind. The shrill of the killdeer, the crack and crunch of ballast beneath our boots, the whine of the locust, the screech and grind of heavy machinery, the hiss and flutter of the snakes just yards away, restless and shedding their skins in anticipation of winter, and everywhere, the rrringgg of spike malls falling hard, and all the more piercing on hungover ears.

I was showing some new guy how to spike the day it happened. Lenny, who’d been working his Fifth Night Advent on last year’s homecoming queen—“a real looker,” he assured us, “and best of all, a virgin”—dragged himself up to the tracks, still half-drunk, looking like shit with a smile.

“It worked,” he said, and we all busted up. The details, as always, would come at lunch. But lunch never came for Lenny.

Instead, a dusty red pickup came. It roared off the road, right through the snakes and sagebrush, then ground to a stop a few feet from the railbed. The face of the little man who got out was so flushed with anger and rage that it looked like he’d dipped his head in a blueberry pie.

Lenny played it smart, letting the guy plant one right on his lip, then fell back onto the ties.

“You ever so much as look at my little girl again, and I’ll kill you.”

I stood there, deeply saddened, slowly growing conscious of the fact that there was nothing funny, never had been, about Lenny’s little schemes.

Before the guy was even back in his truck, Straw Boss #1 was coming down the line, his belly barely able to keep pace with his fat little legs.

“Outta here,” he was yelling and pointing at Lenny. “You! Outta here! Now!”

But next day, there was Lenny, packing a letter from the union attorney, back on the tracks, cocky as ever.

It was hard for me to make conversation with him that day, but I felt obliged. Aside from my contempt, there was gratitude. He had, after all, been a mentor of sorts. And there was a kind of nostalgia, too, as though something I had been clinging to was finally slipping away and in its wake there’s a lukewarm chill that comes when you suspect your life is changing, changing again.

A day or two passed and I still felt the same. I hadn’t talked much to Lenny or to any of the guys for that matter. I didn’t feel like a Defender of the Railroad anymore, but I didn’t feel like a dumb college kid, either. My whole life to that point seemed to have been made up of a series of random events that happened around me, to me, when all along I could have changed them somehow, worked things to my advantage if I had only tried.

I was turning this over in my head, feeling it gnaw at my gut, when I noticed Fitzman slacking off—the only sure way to get canned on the railroad.

“Hey, Fitz, what’re ya doin’?” I said. “Get to work, girl.” But he just leaned back on one leg, rested his spike mall on his shoulder and stared up the tracks.

A gray sedan, very official looking, had left the road and was rolling slowly toward the head of the line. It disappeared into its own trailing dust, then a minute later, Straw Boss #1 and these two suits came through the cloud and were heading our way. I figured they were brass come to haul Lenny off, but Fitzman knew better.

“What?” someone said. “Who are those guys?”

He didn’t blink an eye.

“Richard Fitzman? You’re under arrest for the murder of John Shane. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say …”

Our mouths dropped open. Everyone’s. Even Straw Boss #1’s.

Fitzman had actually done it. He wasn’t lying. All those times we teased him, taunted him, turned our backs on him as that crazy glaze veiled his eyes and he trained his spike mall on us—Jesus, he’d done it!

I don’t remember the FBI cuffing him or what anybody said or what we worked on that afternoon or even if we worked at all. All I remember was straining to see the license plate of that gray sedan, trying to make out the letters and numbers as though by knowing them I could somehow bring Fitzman back and undo some past action that I couldn’t begin to fathom.

Dinner was quiet that night. No threats. No lies. No bold proposals to trash some new saloon. Just the clink of army-issue forks and knives on army-issue plates and saucers, just the smack and chomp of a bunch of gandy dancers sloppin’ it down.

I took a bottle up the track a ways and sat on the rails. Way off in the distance, a diesel chugged, a horn blared, and I got to thinking how things sometimes happen for no good reason you can figure, how life just rolls on and on, like that coal train out there moving into the cool, silent night. And there goes Fitzman, like he’s waving from the caboose, the only guy who’d ever given me a nickname I actually grew to like.

Last week of August, we got word that the stretch was finished. Day after tomorrow, we’d be laid off. The news had no effect on me. I wasn’t happy or sad or anything. For me it was just another day on the railroad except for the little surprise waiting for me on my bunk: a letter from my father. No apologies. No query as to my well-being. Not even a mention of the philippic I’d written a hundred years ago. Just news of the family and the old neighborhood. It was signed, simply: The Mean Old Son of a Bitch.

I read it again and again, noticing finally that it was dated nearly two months before the postmark. I never asked why. Didn’t need to. I just stuffed it in my back pocket that last day as I gathered up my gear, said good-bye to Lenny and Eric and the guys, and headed down that gravel road for the final time.

Those snakes, I didn’t even see ’em. If you just keep moving, steady as she goes, they don’t bother you. Hell, they don’t even know you’re passing through.

That night, on the step deck of the last car, in the open air, rolling over the very track I’d given my tears and toil to, I felt a deep and lasting sense of accomplishment. No concerns about how hard my last semester might be, where I would find a job, whether I could pay a water bill or even how much a water bill was. Only the glide over the ribbon rail, the vastness of the sunset, and the roar of the ride.

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The brightness that sustains me is meant to blow away. Almost every day, I walk down to the college to watch the Buddhist nuns. The young Tibetans fold themselves crossed-legged on the wooden platform, funneling colored sand grain by grain onto a chalked pattern in the center. They wear cloth masks so their breath doesn’t scatter the sand. Grain by grain, color by color, creating a circular mandala, the house of a god. It’s the only thing that brings me peace, makes me forget my empty hands. Silently they pray as they work. Four at a time they bend over the great wheel, heads bowed, hands curled, shaping, as patient as stalking cats. I guess they believe life is only suffering, but they seem so contented.

 

Talking to God, that’s all some people talk about, at the bus stop, laundromat, the bank. They are full of advice, stories of the Lord’s personal favors. I know that the black woman is supposed to thump on her Bible, serve up the family dinner, and call on God to help her keep it all together. I know that’s my place. But since when did I ever do what I’m supposed to do? Still, these people keep at me, talking about their gods. Even on TV, the running back in the end zone says, “I thank God, he was with us today,” because his god is a Jets fan, his god does not listen to the pleas of the Miami quarterback, the Denver coach. I am told many things by many people anxious to help. They claim to talk to God, and he (or she) tells them things to tell me, things to make me change my ways, my whys, things to make me see the light, to open my heart, and so it does; the chambers open, open, shut, shut, like hands in prayer.

How I’m raised to judge myself: Woman is the pillar that holds the roof when other support gives way. She is the anchor, the rock, guardian of her family’s health, spiritual and mental. So where does that leave me? I couldn’t help my baby. I’m no help to my husband. I haven’t been on speaking terms with God for years, and certainly not since Daisy died, and her so little, not even talking. People keep telling me God has a plan. If that’s so I’d have to believe He had something to do with her death, too busy taking calls from football players and soap-opera actresses. Who can suffer a God like that? Even cruel nature seems more kind.

She was such a little thing, eight months, and her symptoms seemed so slight. When I called the doctor back and said, she’s still fevered, they weren’t really worried. We took her to the hospital, then everything went horribly wrong. The fever kept going up and there lay my poor baby, packed in ice like that with all the IVs. She was blotchy and puffy, and then she just quit on me. Something went, her liver or kidneys, then her heart. The doctors leaped in, blowing air into her with a bag, shocking her chest. Even they were shaken. A matter of hours. I could say I prayed good and hard but frankly, I didn’t have time to mumble one under my breath. And I could say that bitter trial strengthened my faith, but it wasn’t much to begin with, and after—well, just another thing dusted over by neglect.

Then all this crazy comfort, talking about God. Some fool gives me a coffee mug with the story about the one set of footprints in the sand and why, God, did you leave me in my heartache and God says, that is when I carried you—a coffee mug, as if that will mend my heart, clear my head. Well, carry me or not, we aren’t speaking now. Somehow it never took root in me. The church of my childhood was custom more than devotion in my household. My mama, as intelligent a woman as you’ll ever meet, a teacher, wasn’t particularly devout, and she’s got her reasons. My grandma used to “get the spirit” and it seemed to me then, a girl in pigtails, like a demonic possession. Not the Word, a bird, fluttering epileptically inside her. I only saw it happen once or twice; she rarely came to visit. She lived down south, and my mama had a strange pride in saying she would never set foot in Alabama again. We all have lines we won’t cross.

Gerald and I work at the phone company. Gerald is a lineman, out in all kinds of weather, up in the cherry picker, rotating night shifts. It was always Gerald I worried about, not Daisy. Out in ice storms with the downed electric lines and all. Daisy was safe and warm at home with me. She would grow up, have her chicken pox and skinned knees, get her grown-up teeth, have birthday parties, learn her times tables, and be someone. It was my husband in the dark storm I worried over.

When I went back to work they all knew about Daisy, so I didn’t have to excuse my bone-tired stare. Checks kept coming in and I kept them credited right. Credits and debits, cool, clean numbers, safe enough; people pay a lot to talk. Lately friends point out to me it’s free to talk to God. That big hearing ear, big piggy-backer, enfolding hand; he’s all there in bits and pieces for some game-show winner, but who’s minding the store for the rest of us? Charlanne just sat quiet with me at coffee break, for which I was grateful, sometimes rattling her braceletty arm toward me and putting a warm hand on mine. Just keeping me company in my devastation. No chatter about taking up the burden, following in His footsteps. You don’t talk that trash to a grieving mother. You don’t go around saying that her baby girl is in a better place.

One day on our lunch hour Charlanne said, get your coat, we’re going out. We walked down the street to the college. In a room with high ceilings, almost like a chapel, the Buddhist nuns worked quietly. They sat on a big platform in their maroon robes; their heads, shorn to black stubble, all looked alike as they bent over their work. Charlanne and I pulled up chairs and watched the mandala take shape. Now I go back almost every day.
They are Tibetans living in exile in Nepal, here for some special occasion at the college. At moments when they take a break, smiling, chatting, we realize that they are just girls, college-age themselves. One of the older nuns, perhaps my age, takes me by the hand. Her English is good; she has a lazy eye. Smiling, she explains their rituals, the symbols of the mandala. It represents the home of a deity of compassion, with a central medallion, the four gates, a symbolic tapestry of color. In tempera-bright colors—red, yellow, blue, dark and pale green, orange, and white—they sift tiny lines: scrolls for clouds, religious symbols, small rainspouts for the palace roof. The patterns are bright and fine as embroidery, a quilting of sand, held together by nothing, yet whole. She nods toward the altar, explains the offerings of flowers, waxy cakes, incense. How they asked the Dalai Lama (I guess that is like asking God) to be allowed to learn the sacred art from their brother monks. For this act of devotion they’ll gain merit in the next life, my guide explains. They’ll dismantle the mandala in a ritual, to return the blessings to the earth.

Sometimes the nuns climb down and refold themselves before the altar at the far end of the room, each clasping a bell and a charm of bronze like interlocking figure-eights. I don’t understand what they’re saying, but they’re talking to God with fine, curling, undulating hands, low chanting that rises and falls. Then they shake out their limbs, chat for a bit, crawl back on the platform and pick up their narrow silver funnels, their meditations.

The pattern must be a mystery my heart knows, not my head. I come back as often as I can.

“These things just happen sometimes,” the doctor had said, meaning to be kind, laying a hand on my shoulder—a young woman like me, tired and stunned. “The infection was just too persistent. I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t tell me that, sometimes—not to my baby,” I’d cried out, throwing off her touch. “Don’t gimme no sometimes, there’s my girl, there’s supposed to be antibiotics, there’s supposed to be—” One minute in my arms, the next, small and lifeless on the bed. I collapsed against Gerald, his own hot tears washing his face, knowing I should be comforting him, that he needed me to hold him up. But I had no strength. We cried into one another’s neck and shoulders, our baby girl before us with a tube in her arm and the mask off her face, done with struggle; cried there without pride, without hope, as the hospital shuttled all around us.

She was named Danielle after Gerald’s mother, a tall woman with a long face, soft-spoken and fiercely dignified. But I called her my little Daisy. She was born February 7, eight pounds, twelve ounces, with a little mole above her butt on the left. She was only eight months, still at the breast, a child with a sunny disposition, a curious expression of surprise on her fat cheeks, a squeaky laugh.

I took a week’s vacation and lay around the house crying, or stone-faced, unable to. My mama came for a few days, quietly took over the kitchen, let me cry when I could. “I should’ve taken her to the doctor sooner.” Cold, like it was someone else’s life, a movie I’d seen. “Tell me what to do, Mama.”

“Times like this it’s hard to find your way, I know,” she said, rubbing my back.

Gerald and I passed like ghosts, not saying much, brushing closely past each other, grazing fingertips, curling desperately together in bed for fear the other would vanish. I made myself cook him proper dinners, meat and vegetables, potatoes or biscuits, so he could keep his strength up. I couldn’t eat. My breasts were still swollen. I had to express the milk with that pump, everything flowing out of me, all milk and tears, leaving me empty. The doctor said I’d have to stop soon, to let my body adjust to the absence of suckling. Sat in the rocking chair with my hands empty except for that damn breast pump and my body grieved for my child, my arms aching for the weight of that little warm shape. It took all the will in my slack body to do the dishes at night, to rake myself out of bed before noon. Sometimes Gerald got the coffee on, washed the pots.

One morning, passing the half-open door to the bathroom: Gerald’s face lathered up but only half shaven, his palms braced on the sink, his head hangs, he’s crying so quietly I hear only breath. I hushed past. He used to curl her on one arm like a sack of flour, a football, tickle her chin with a finger to get that squeaky duck laugh. For some reason we tried to smile bravely at each other, but it was grotesque and we sank into wordless touches. I felt like I had no voice.

It’s Gerald I come home to, but I don’t like being in the house alone. I make excuses to go out, invent errands; the botanical gardens, the mandala-makers, movies, window-shopping. One day I’m driving to work and I hear an ad on the radio for the zoo. I think of toucans and flamingos all day as I sit at my keyboard. It’s not far and I stop on the way home, pay my three-dollar donation. I look at the birds but they don’t hold my interest long; the gorilla is throwing his poop at the spectators. My feet take me to the cats.

When I was little I begged for a cat like my friend Donetta had, but my mama had a horror of them, I don’t know why—some ancestral voodoo nonsense. I walk down the ramp into that cat smell, and I can see the pens are too small, though they’ve tried to shape them with landscaping and all. A Siberian tiger sleeps on a concrete ledge, its back pressed against the thick glass, half an inch from my hand. I could tap on the window and I bet the big cat wouldn’t even jump. The sign says there are new cubs, but I don’t see them. Her fur looks stiff as wire, luscious black and white paintings on her face; the bristly whiskers twitch occasionally, a paw as big as my face flexes. Some hunting dream.

In the next pen the leopard is restless—pacing, pacing, a lopsided arc around the oak with its clawed bark. The sunken enclosure must be a good half-acre, but he is hemmed in, no horizons; the autumn sun gives little heat. He belongs someplace huge, the African savannah scorched yellow, not in a grimy northern city. Tongue lolling out, he stops, pants listlessly. I know this look, this dulled perseverance. The look says, what are we doing so far from home? Where’s my sun? However did we get here? Capture, displacement.

On my way out I pass seals barking, begging children for fish, a polar bear swimming laps in the too-small pool. Someday we would have taken Daisy to feed the seals. The smell of fish makes me want to cry. I am late to make dinner.

Gerald knew when he married me that I didn’t claim faith. Man and wife four years, and I still marvel at his. My husband, he’s got a man’s God and a man’s minister, all sanctifying and testifying, scouts all in uniform, merit badges shining.

I love Gerald—but his words have no more wings on them than mine. Yet he stands up and sings his hymns, accepting grace as his due. I sing, too. Rock of Salvation. Someone’s singin’, Lord, kumbaya. Go tell it on the mountain. Someone’s sing-in’, Lord, but it’s for my own comfort; preachers know the power of giving voice.
Gerald is a kind man, quiet like his mother, confident, without anger. He goes to his church and comes back full of rescue. The world owes him better for his uncomplaining patience. I owe him better. I should be his rock, but right now all I’ve got is blood and milk, tears and sweat, animal things washing through me, things that don’t bear reckoning. I’ll suffer through and give him what I can—my love for him is primitive and holy. He’s my sun. I can’t help it; I love that man more than I could love any god.

I know it’s a jealous God in the Old Testament, envious of a woman’s love, her ability to bring forth life. Woman is fierce in her loving, like a cat who owns you, commands you or is your equal. A cat wants to sleep up against your heat, to breathe in your face, share your space as close as possible; then walk away, walk the perimeter on the fence tops, before she comes back. A cat has secrets. A cat could talk to God. Never a dog; a dog only wants to please master, whatever the cost. All these people throwing platitudes at me: “Offer it up.” They only understand a god they can be subservient to, give up their will to, cast off the burden of their own hearts and minds. “Give over the burden.” They want me to hurry up already, get it over with, a sudden resolution—as if grieving has a deadline, like it’s not a long, hard walk.
In bed I listen to Gerald’s breathing go loose and soft; his hand brushes my hip. As I start to doze I see the leopard looking for its big sun. The tiger twitches her paw, her whiskers. Why can’t God be a creature like that? A sensual creature, a thing with fangs and claws. An instinctual god, no promises, no preaching. My spirit has longings, too. I need a god that wants us to dance. One two three, one two three, a fine old waltz, scandalous. A holy roller shaking in the ring of a great colorful circus. None of us want to feel so small, so alone, shut off from the sky. But I need power here at hand: old gods out of the forest, all kinds of howling juju and Mary in her motherly sorrow, animal spirits.

Beside me the tiger stirs and growls. I feel her warm back pressed against me as in some deep dream she prowls her territory, sniffs the Siberian air, recalls only in sleep the scent of freedom, some other way of being.

The nuns are serene as ever and I can tell the mandala will be finished soon—the huge wheel is almost filled with intricate shapes, a colorful fever-dream. My guide, the nun with the smile and lazy eye, says there remains only the lotus-petal border of white sand. Her name is Domo. The blessings multiply as they work and pray. In a few days, she says, it will be completed, then demolished, because the devotion of making is enough; nothing is permanent. Domo says the gift remains precious, not less cherished for being destroyed. I guess their gods, too, have ways that come to us as mysteries. In the end they will sweep all the colors together, carry the sands in a procession to the river, return the blessings to water, to earth. Maybe someone will be talking to God meantime, among the waving tangerine sleeves and shaved heads, cymbals and horns. Yes, I think, that’s right. Shouldn’t we dance behind the nurses, the hearses, to celebrate the freed soul, give back its many brilliant reds and oranges and blues to the dark water, stars in the pond? But no; we mutter, wear drab, drape in crepe. Did so, myself. Did not raise a mighty noise. Back into the brown earth, brown child.

It’s a Saturday, just three weeks after we lost her, when I send Gerald out to the store. I’ve been wearing a cabbage leaf in each bra cup because the doctor said it would help stop the milk flow—folk wisdom, not medicine. But after a couple of days, the soft crinkle and cabbagey smell is making me so sad, I go to the kitchen, peel the wilted greens from my breasts, throw them in the trash can. I take out a box of old friends—Mahalia Jackson, the Clark Sisters, Sissy Houston—music, what’s left of my faith. I pull out an old record of the Terrell Sisters and I turn it way up and let the gospel music full of praise and sorrow wail up around the walls, splatter over the furniture, slide along the floors. Guide us through the storm, oh Lord, through the bitter rain, they sing. I go into the little room we’d made into Daisy’s nursery with the flowered curtains and wallpaper border. My Lord, oh my Lord, speak to me. I know these songs not just by heart, but in my heart, harmony and melody; hymns, that’s what I’ve kept from churchgoing.

I go in there with boxes and I take out the clean clothes, the onesies and the tiny T-shirts. The little pink knit sweater and cap, the frilly dress from her Granny Danielle, ridiculous for a child so small. Is there only darkness? Only pain and strife? I sing along. I take those things and the tiny booties out of the little drawer and I fold them neatly and pack them away. The little ribbon bows for the barely kinky hair she barely had. The shoes. The plastic pants, little towels, all the while my eyes burning with tears. Do my prayers fail in darkness? Stand on a chair and take down the mobile over the crib, tear off the light blankets, put them in a bag. I start to choke on the words while I let my madness out, singing hard. I pound the wall with my palm, I shout out with the Terrell Sisters, No, no! The Lord shines down a light—but it’s just howling. It’s release but not rescue, just more tears clacketing through my back, my ribs, the wailing that has to come. I take the sheets and the toys—Do my tears go unheard?—and stuff them in a bag to burn them, burn them all, all the traces of the infection that robbed me of my baby girl. Scalding, hacking with sobs, resolute. I turn the record over and get a bucket of hot suds and that’s where Gerald finds me, on my knees, scrubbing Lysol over the crib, walls and everything and wailing at the top of my lungs because Clea Terrell can sing Awake to Miracles but there wasn’t one coming for me.

“Don’t do this, baby, don’t do this,” he says, taking the brush out of my hand and wrapping his arms around me. I can see he is scared, of me, of my passion; he doesn’t see it’s just the body’s alarm. I hold my hands out to the side with my wet rubber gloves and howl some more, ’til I can get a grip on myself. “It’s okay,” I say between gasps. “It’s okay. I’m okay. I—just been quiet as a church mouse, so quiet, and I need to cry, I need to yell. Oh no,” as the tears well up again. My body has the rhythm of the sobs and it won’t let go. “I just need to cry for a week of Sundays.” Tears in his own eyes, he lets me go, pats my back and nods, and I stand stupidly crying in the middle of that room with my yellow gloves dripping, and wave my husband out the door.

I cry, I sing, I yell ’til I’m drained, then I put out the boxes of Daisy’s things. I ask Gerald to burn the small bag of sheets, the few crib toys, all infected, tainted—to burn them, burn, I want to see my rage done up in kerosene. He shakes his head at me, no; no, girl, goes and pushes the bag deep into the trash can.

So the sun keeps rising and somehow Gerald and I do, too, something to be continued, and hold our breaths or silences, and hold each other. The future seems heavy as a roof. And so goes all this talking to God: those Black Muslims down the block calling on Him a dozen times each Friday, the Jews who don’t say His name, and earnest Christians, the football stars and the bottle-blond rappers testifying. But I need a God more fierce and close. Maybe it’s me, in my loss, in my need, that can’t cotton to theology, sermonizing. An old-school African nature-god might suit; some long, masked face that speaks in dance and movement, music instead of testaments. She needs to come shameless and simmering around my leg, saying, You’re mine. A god who wants my speech, she’s got to take it. She’s got to say, you and me, we’re attached; then maybe I’ll start talking. She’s got to make me hers, rake her claws up and down my shabby bark, mark me with her fine, scented whiskers, and yowl.

More than ever, it’s hard to find my place, my breasts still leaking unclaimed milk, my body missing my baby in ways that won’t meet words. What’s a body to do but go on—it’s in our blood to continue. I guess maybe Gerald and I will have another child someday—I owe him that, too. But right now my body’s still slack from childbearing and weary with grief. I will need to make up some kind of faith before then, a cat faith or a dog faith, something to hang my mortal hat on. I need something to cling to, otherwise there is just the sand sifting in a random dance. Things don’t happen for a reason, not things like that—unless you give them a pattern to fit into, “God’s will.” How else does a people bear strife and loss, oppression and cruelty and downright evil? They say, “God’s will.”

I’ve got those longings for a thing that might be faith, a wheel swirling with color, a mystery only the soul and body understand. One day I may find myself in veils and trousers, like Khalila who found Islam and a husband in Cleveland. I might yet find my way back to Jesus. Maybe I’ll go Buddhist like Tina Turner, like the nuns, and then I can learn to just be in the universe and lose my prideful pain.

If there’s nothing else, there are the seasons that govern all creatures, music that dances in our veins, senses beyond knowing. Or I’ll have to find some other way, between the parked cars and rainstorms and monthly bills, the blizzards in my heart, cyclones churning history around our ears until we fall down wailing—because that’s what animals do, in the heat and the storm, without reasons, without shelter; we cry out, we endure, and we suffer.

“All This Talking About God” appears in Alicia Conroy’s Lives of Mapmakers (Carnegie-Mellon University Press).

 

Some of you I would hope have read Dianne Hart’s monograph Enough Is Enough: Prodigality Celebrated and Condemned in the Carter-Era Recordings of Barbra Streisand. Although Dr. Hart’s study is limited in scope, her thinking is expansive. My own forthcoming book on Streisand’s middle period is indebted to her penetrating analyses. I must also thank Hart for exposing me to the criticism of Doug Belknap. A footnote in Enough Is Enough led me to the man’s review of Guilty, Streisand’s 1980 collaboration with Barry Gibb, and I have since become an admirer of Belknap’s idiosyncratic and loudly autobiographical work. The review of Guilty appeared that year in the September issue of Spunk magazine, a formerly influential rock monthly by then considered debased by the relevant tastemakers. Spunk at the time was mostly devoted to rock of a decidedly masculine cast. One imagines that Spunk readers were united in enmity or at least apathy toward Streisand and Gibb, and would have considered an endorsement of Guilty distasteful and a pan gratuitous. It’s odd, then, that the magazine gave the album any coverage at all, odder still that they ran Belknap’s long, discursive review.

What I’ve since managed to learn about Belknap is that he lived in Minneapolis, briefly attended the University of Minnesota, and worked, moonlighting presumably, as a freelance writer, most provably during 1979 and ’80. I found one piece published in the University’s Minnesota Daily in May of 1972, a recommendation of Weather Report’s I Sing the Body Electric notable for employing two food metaphors. In the first paragraph Belknap calls the album a “spicy gumbo of New Thing jazz, acid rock, hot-buttered soul, classical gas, and Latin passion”; in the closing paragraph he likens it to a “steaming bouillabaisse.”

Belknap may have written as well for community newspapers throughout the 70s, but his byline doesn’t return to an officially archived publication until late ’79. Again it’s attached to a review of a Weather Report album—the concert recording 8:30—penned for the short-lived Rhythm-A-Ning magazine. A warm appraisal of the music quickly gives way to a digression about a record reviewer, apparently a gastronome and fusion buff, who constructs a model suspension bridge from clippings of the 147 reviews he has written for a jazz newsletter. Each review contains at last one food metaphor, a feat of stylistic persistence that apparently went unnoticed by the newsletter’s subscribers or its alcoholic editor. The reviewer then takes a fatal dose of sleeping pills and lies down next to the model bridge, in effect jumping off his own work.

Belknap wrote three relatively restrained reviews for Spunk in the summer of ’80, followed by the Streisand piece, which is quoted in its entirety below, and which seems to mark the end of his career in music criticism. My efforts to track down Belknap have been unsuccessful. If you know anything about his whereabouts, please contact me. I remain eager to speak with him.

Barbra Streisand

Guilty

CBS Records

Reviewed by Doug Belknap

I see that Guilty’s liner notes have Richard Tee playing electric guitar on the “The Love Inside.” If you know your session men, you’ll raise an eyebrow at the credit, and sure enough, the electric instrument Richard Tee is playing is a piano, not a guitar. One thing Barbra Streisand’s latest success is guilty of, then, is shoddy liner-note composition. Otherwise it’s pretty much blameless.

Maybe you’ve already seen the jacket, with Gibb, who wrote or co-wrote all of the album’s songs, wrapping his arms around a coquettish Streisand, both dressed in angelic white, à la Johnny Mathis on the cover of Heavenly. It would be too much to call this music heavenly, but it is ethereal, so light you have to adjust your tone arm to play the LP version. And yet the album’s consommé of pop and Broadway, disco and light R&B isn’t wholly insubstantial. I find it moving. Streisand and Gibb haven’t lent great stores of genuine emotion to their collaboration, but they’ve given the listener the tools to do so: the bravura phrasing, a drama in nearly every measure; the voluptuous, occasionally capricious melodies and chord changes; the trademark vocal harmonies, both transcendent and rodential, that Gibb honed with the Bee Gees.

I’ve liked Barry Gibb ever since I heard “Massachusetts” on the radio of a cream Mercedes 450 SEL belonging to Linda Morgan’s mom. We kissed that night, Linda and I, standing up in front of the car, and her breasts were large and her sweater was softer than any fabric I had ever felt. I hadn’t previously associated with people who could afford cashmere sweaters, or even cashmere socks. Our subsequent outings, however, were washouts.

Let me return to “The Love Inside,” which is indeed lovely, and not only on the inside. Expansive, resigned, middle-aged, it’s like a Sondheim ballad minus the erudition. The clever turns of phrase have been replaced with clichés—“I’m just an empty shell” and so forth—but the lachrymal high notes are present, yearning and wheedling. During this song one might pause for a pensive break from preparing something out of Elegant Dinners for Two, perhaps absentmindedly taking a sip of economical red wine. I did just that earlier this evening. Also, I cut the recipe in half. “The Love Inside” isn’t free of the breathless histrionics Streisand brings to nearly every performance, but it is sung with the proper subtlety, which is to say, neither too much nor too little. Streisand remains a stage singer, of course, a belter for whom amplification is a luxury rather than a necessity. Only a fool would refuse to use such a voice to its full capacity.

A fool or an ascetic, because it must be a pleasure to sing like that. It must be a pleasure to be outstanding at something. Yesterday I was given my United States Tennis Association rating. I’ve decided to play competitive tennis in a league, to meet new friends as they say, and because Sharon once said I looked good in white. Before signing up, you must have a coach rate your game on the official scale. There’s an official scale that goes from one to seven. One is a paraplegic three-year-old with imperfect vision and a carelessly strung racket. Two is a paraplegic three-year-old with perfect vision and a decent lob. A 6.9 is John McEnroe. I’ve been judged a 3.2, just below the mean. I’m competent, obviously no beginner, but also not impressive, not the sort of player whose strokes inspire admiration from passers-by in the park. I suspect I’m a 3.2 in general. Once I asked a girl from work how she would rate my looks on a scale of one to ten. She said I was a seven, maybe even an eight. I’m not sure how that translates to a one-to-seven scale, but it beats a 3.2. Of course she would never have called me a six or below to my face. And she wouldn’t have given me a suspiciously generous nine or ten. Really, then, she was working on a two-point scale, seven acting as one and eight as two. And she went with one, approaching two on a good day. So that probably is a 3.2.

Sometimes when Sharon would play her Barbra Streisand records, I would make noises of disapproval. One time she responded by hissing, “anti-Semite,” jokingly. I laughed enough for the joke to become a ritual. Sharon wasn’t routinely funny, but when she was, she was, I thought, quotable. My complaints were good-natured, you see, in contrast to how she and Donald would disparage my Weather Report and Chick Corea albums, once quite harshly when I was allegedly reading in the other room. “Oh, don’t take off the Chick Corea album, Sharon,” Donald said, coaxing a laugh out of Sharon. “I’d love to hear it again and again!” His sarcasm was strictly of the meat and potatoes variety, never clever.

I doubt it would interest Donald or Sharon to know that Steve Gadd, featured on the Chick Corea album derided that night, also plays on Guilty. He plays superbly, with manly assurance. Thanks to his hiccupping fills toward the end of “Promises,” even Barbra Streisand can claim to have almost made a funk single. What a sad, strange song that is, Gibb’s hooks like icicles, Streisand’s singing joyfully desperate. “I am the love, don’t let me die away,” she sings, with several Barry Gibbs answering “Die away” in harmony, appropriately stretching out “die” like a last breath. I wish I could hear this album with Sharon. I could listen to it every night with her, twice. I would gently rub it with a pink felt record-cleaning cloth after each airing, apologizing for the tiny needle pricks.

When we first started dating I perhaps mislead Sharon by saying that I liked Barbra Streisand, too. What I meant is that I found her charming in the mid-60s, especially on the “My Name Is Barbra” TV special, flirting with kettle drummers and singing songs about poverty and against materialism while vamping and hamming, by turns enviously and contemptuously, through Bergdorf Goodman. She was brilliant, funny, and gorgeous. I watched the show with my mom. I guess I was fourteen. My mom grew up in New Jersey, and although she was estranged from her family, she missed the East Coast, missed the Italians and Jews she used to hang out with. Not that there aren’t Italians and Jews in Minneapolis, but they’re much scarcer. My mom loved Streisand, loved her misfit glamour, her wit, her Jewishness, her abnormal voice. “She has the lungs of a beluga whale,” said my dad, passing through the room. “You flatter the beluga whale,” said my mom.

I also sheepishly enjoyed The Way We Were, which I saw on an inauspicious first date with Lorraine Ibsen. But for the most part though, prior to Sharon, I ignored Streisand. I mainly listened to jazz and rock and fusion and hardly ever tuned in AM radio. Streisand’s sometimes maligned attempts to sing contemporary material couldn’t bother me because, except for the hit she had with Laura Nyro’s “Stoney End,” I didn’t hear them. I was unaware of her version of John Lennon’s “Mother,” for instance, until Sharon and I moved in together and Sharon’s extensive collection of Streisand records and memorabilia arrived as an unwelcome dowry. “She’s singing it like it’s called ‘Second Cousin Twice Removed,’” I cracked, as Sharon arranged the furniture. It came out more cuttingly than I intended, but Sharon chuckled. Later we made love on a mattress on the floor, and the night proved to be the apex of our predominantly healthy sexual relationship. There are at least two images from that night that I still use, not always happily, as masturbatory aids.

Every morning, except Tuesdays and Sundays when she didn’t work at Carson Pirie Scott, Sharon would do her ablutions to Streisand’s “I Can Do It.” Most evenings she would play a Streisand album or two, and occasionally Donald would come over for a “Babsanalia.” Mostly this just meant talking and playing records, but sometimes they’d pantomime and dress up, Donald in half-drag, or they’d reenact scenes from Streisand’s movies. The Babsanalia were always spontaneous, usually involved pot or coke, and often lasted into the small hours, at which point the accuracy of the reenactments was suspect. My only contribution to these endeavors was the coinage “Babsanalia.” I participated once, on a night when I felt it was important for me to get high. It was hard to be the third wheel. I was insufficiently equipped with knowledge or enthusiasm.

Sharon and Donald were too sophisticated to be truly idolatrous, but not sophisticated enough to blend sincere passion and self-aware irony in the manner of high camp. That was how I saw it anyway. The frivolity of it all chafed me. Nothing important was important to Sharon or Donald. Their Streisand club was purely escapist, of course, a means of pretending not to be of our generation and not from Minnesota, or to be witty and urbane and to have a bona fide witty and urbane gay friend instead of a dim closet case. I was never explicitly excluded from the Babsanalia but it became clear that these evenings were for serious fans only and that I should find other amusement. Usually I’d read in the bedroom. Sometimes I’d go to a bar alone.

Donald also worked at Carson Pirie Scott, in the men’s casual wear department. He was not an ethical man. When a shirt came in that he liked he would hide it the backroom until it went on final clearance. Then he would sneak it back to the sales floor, as if it had been languishing on the rack the whole time, and he’d get it for even cheaper than his employee discount. Donald was reportedly straight, but I knew this to be untrue, at least not entirely true. Sharon accepted his bluff, though she was attracted to his apparent gayness in the way my mom was attracted to Streisand’s Jewishness. Sharon did acknowledge that Donald moved and talked in a way that would lead many if not most to unfairly question his sexuality. Then there was his Streisand fixation, his interest in clothes (though he dressed badly if you ask me), his passion for the theater, his insistence on being called Donald and never Don, the fact that he had once lured me into the bathroom at Deborah Curtis’ Christmas party, and that once inside Deborah Curtis’ bathroom he had whipped out his cock or at least not strenuously protested when I slowly unzipped his jeans and executed my first and only act of fellatio.

Sharon didn’t know this last piece of evidence regarding Donald’s homosexuality.

Donald had one good male friend that I knew of, a short, part-time actor with Aryan features and the physique of an amateur weightlifter who was even dumber than Donald, and lazy. He didn’t work other than the three or four parts he landed a year, usually one lead in a community-theater embarrassment and a few spear-carrying gigs at the big theater in town. Mostly he cadged from girlfriends and half-heartedly sold drugs. I called him the Slothario, which Sharon, who didn’t like him either, thought was clever. Donald and the Slothario would go to nightclubs often, reportedly to pick up women. They even bought notch-less belts from a neighborhood cobbler and leather worker, stole a leather punch from a hardware store, and would actually add notches to their belts in commemoration of successful seductions. Of course anyone can punch a hole in a belt, and no way was Donald getting it up for all those girls. My theory was that Donald and the Slothario were lovers. Donald also had steady girlfriends, including a tiny, laconic brunette named Sara with no “h” who, when she worked as a peep-show model, called herself “Sar-ahh!” Donald and Sara dated for almost a year. My theory was that Sara was also gay, either by birth or as an occupational acquisition. During the year that Donald and Sara were going out I sometimes found myself in situations that led me to wonder how effectively the tinted windows at Paulie’s Hot Tomatoes cloaked the peeping customers. I figured I caught a break when Donald and Sara broke up.

It was around that time, though, that Donald and Sharon started spending even more time together, mostly away from our apartment. By then there were a few clubs in Minneapolis where one could disco, and they would do that, sometimes going to a party after the bars closed so that Sharon wouldn’t return to our bed until 3:00 a.m. One Easter Sunday I remember she was logy and irritable all day. It didn’t occur to me until late in the afternoon that she was hung over. I was so slow on the uptake, such a dolt. She started telling me about a group of East Indian guys who were also going out dancing, how charming they were. One, an aloof, lanky guy named Divyanga who was said to have fallen out of favor with his Brahmin parents, came to a party that Sharon insisted we throw. He said, “It’s nice to meet you. Sharon’s a great dancer,” as if I had given her instruction. He wasn’t charming.

One night I bought a new edition of Password, the game, and suggested we share a bottle of wine and play a round or two. Sharon and I both liked Password. She however had plans to go out for drinks followed by dancing and then who knows what with Donald and the Slothario and the East Indians. I was welcome to come, she insisted. But I wasn’t. I noted that she took almost forty-five minutes to get ready, roughly twice as long as usual. I also noted that she looked really good. After she left I tried to read but couldn’t concentrate and resorted to TV, which, predictably, only aggravated my depression.

That night Sharon came into bed around

3:00 a.m. again, maybe 3:30, and her breath smelled like vodka and orange juice and cigarettes and she tried to arouse me but I rolled over and feigned sleep. The moment was not unlike those described in “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers.” Later, I suspected that she had gotten horny dancing with the East Indians and had hoped to seduce me in order to pretend I was someone else. Once during lovemaking she had asked me to portray Hubbell Gardiner, the Robert Redford character from The Way We Were, but that was different. I didn’t mind. After Divyanga moved into our apartment and I moved in temporarily with Gary the building manager, I also began to doubt the plurality of the East Indians, a ruse no doubt to make de facto dates seem like non-threatening group socializing. Only Divyanga, whom Gary the building manager seemed to know well, had come to our party, and when I asked Sharon, a poor ad-libber, what the others were named, she pretended not to hear and then when asked again came up with “Ravi” and, after yet another pause, “Big Ravi.”

Two days after my Password proposal was rejected, Sharon told me that she did love me, but she was no longer in love with me. I had no use for the distinction. I fell from the couch sobbing, not a long fall, but dramatic. I held on to the coffee table, my legs were folded up like a little boy’s. Sharon was faced with the situation in which you want to comfort the person whom you have just discomforted. She sat there quietly until I stopped blubbering. Stupidly, we slept in the same bed that night. In the morning I stared apocalyptically at her un-blanketed body. She was wearing only underwear, which I took for effrontery. In fairness it had been a warm spring night.

I’ve been crying with decreasing regularity, though still frequently, during the six months since. Actually, my crying has increased over the past few weeks, since I was assigned to review Guilty, in six hundred words. Guilty is a sad record, a record about being made foolish by love, about desperation and deceit. Gary the building manager is an AC/DC fan and will be glad when my assignment has been dispatched. Gary’s a good guy. Divyanga is cheesed with me for extending my temporary stay at Gary the building manager’s, and seems to think I’m not allowed to do my stair-climbing and hall-walking exercises throughout our apartment building, as if I had access to some other building. But I guess Divyanga isn’t the boss of me. I notice that Donald never comes around anymore. Divyanga has barred him, no doubt. The guy is paranoid, though he’s right about Don.

Guilty ends with a song of romantic betrayal called “Make It like a Memory.” But that’s silly because what’s worse than a painful memory? Barry Gibb has not read his Proust, at least not carefully, though his melodies sometimes approximate Proustian delicacy.

My current favorite is “Never Give Up,” quasi-Arabic funk to my ears, potentially a showstopper, but comparatively paired down, the string and horn players sent home for the night, the bass creeping or maybe skulking. Streisand is self-important where she used to be self-deprecating, but she’s jive talking on the verses and it’s funny, deliberately funny. The lyric has her suffering from a dry throat. She’s non-metaphorically lovesick. “I will never give up,” she sings, stretching out “I will” for a full measure, eliding the “r” in “never,” making the word an even more emphatic “neva!” The point is reiterated on its way to the chorus’ staccato conclusion and the album’s summary question: “I will never give up, never give up, never give up. I will follow you home. How can you turn me away?”

As the babysitter gathers up her schoolbooks and coat, William’s wife whispers—he catches the faint musk of bourbon still on her breath—that she will wait up for him while he drives the girl home. Then she winks, sort of. Gina has never been able to close just one eye without contorting her entire face. Tonight, the man finds it exhilaratingly lewd.

“All set,” Cindy announces, waiting by the front door. “Oh, Mrs. Stevenson, I washed the dishes you left in the sink.”

Gina smiles sweetly at the sixteen-year-old. “You didn’t have to do that.”

“It’s OK,” the teenager assures her, “I thought you wouldn’t want Mr. Stevenson coming home to a dirty kitchen.”

Gina’s smile curdles. “It was just the dishes from the kids’ dinner.”

“Yes, ma’am, it wasn’t any trouble.”

As they back out of the driveway, the man tells the girl, “That was very nice of you, Cindy, doing the dishes.” He has trouble with the string of d’s at the end of the sentence, his tongue still sticky from all the liquor he has drunk tonight.

“It’s the least I can do,” she says firmly, nodding her head.

“Watching those kids is job enough.”

“Billy and Eileen? They’re angels.” Then she adds, “They look just like you, you know.”

“And I thought you liked the way they look,” he jokes.

“Oh, I do.” The girl sighs. “They’re lucky to have a father like you.”

There’s something about the way she says it that makes him ask, “But you’re lucky, too, aren’t you?”

“You mean, to have my father?” She turns to the window, where dark houses whisk past, one after another.

“He seems very nice—at least at the bank when I see him.”

The girl is still looking out the window. “Do you ever wonder what’s going on inside other people’s houses?”

He thinks she is changing the subject. “Sure, sometimes. Especially at night if there’s just one light on.”

“It would surprise you,” she says weakly.

The man smiles to himself. “How would you know?”

Her voice is almost a whisper. “What goes on in our house would surprise you.”

He stops smiling. He looks at the girl and sees the streak of a tear glistening in the light of a passing streetlamp.

He doesn’t really want to hear what he guesses his babysitter is going to tell him about what goes on in her house. But she is crying now, and so he eases the car to a stop along the curb of the deserted street and turns off the motor.

He stares straight ahead. “Look,” he tells her, slurring his words, “if you need a man to talk to your father about whatever … ”

The girl is wiping her eyes. “I’ll get in trouble if I say anything.”

“Well, you haven’t said anything. I’m just offering, that’s all.”

“You’re a real lifesaver, Mr. Stevenson.”

The gratitude in her voice is obvious. He feels good about himself, about being a man who can protect the weak. “Actually, I used to teach lifesaving. For the Red Cross. I trained lifeguards when I was young.”

“Did you teach mouth-to-mouth?”

“Sure. Mouth-to-mouth, inverted scissors kick, fireman’s carry—we taught everything. Everything you’d need to save a person.”

“But it must have been yucky, mouth-to-mouth with all those boys.”

“I’ll tell you a secret: I only practiced resuscitation with the girls.” He smiles sheepishly and adds, “The pretty girls.”

“I bet they must have waited in line to practice with you.”

“Well, maybe. It was a long time ago.”

“Teach me,” the girl insists.

“Now?”

“Yeah. What if I’m babysitting someplace with a pool and one of the children falls in and drowns? I’ve got to be able to revive the kid before the parents come home.”

He is thinking like a man who is a great deal drunker than he actually is. “That’s true,” he agrees, nodding. “Babysitters ought to know artificial respiration—and CPR, too.”

The teenager unbuckles her seatbelt and sprawls across the leather bench of the Crown Victoria, her body limp as a suicide dragged from the sea, her head lolling in his lap, her mouth jutting open, her eyes closed.

“What are you doing?” She has startled him.

Cindy opens her eyes. “Come on, show me how to do it.” She closes her eyes again and lets her mouth fall open.

The man doesn’t allow himself to think about what he is doing, what it would look like if someone found them parked on this dark street. Instead, he concentrates on the mechanics of saving the drowned. Though he is, in fact, close to panic, he bends stiffly, adjusting her head beside the steering wheel, lifting her chin. “In goes the good air,” he whispers just above her face. Clamping her nostrils shut with finger and thumb, he covers her mouth with his own and exhales. Even after all these years, he has remembered to put his hand on her chest to check whether her lungs are expanding with his breath. Yes, there’s no blockage, he thinks with unnecessary relief. It still thrills him when it works. Barely above her lips, he whispers, “Out goes the bad air,” as she exhales his breath, stale with liquor, back into his face.

“That’s cool,” she squeals, her eyes springing open. “Let me try.”

“Oh, you don’t want to do that,” he demurs.

She is on her knees now on the front seat, her back to the windshield. “Lean your head,” she insists.

He tries to keep thinking about this as a lifesaving lesson, so he does as she instructs. Her delicate finger and thumb close around his nostrils beneath his unblinking eyes. Involuntarily, his mouth gapes open to breathe. That quickly, she clamps her lips over his. Her mouth is so small, he has to help her, pursing his lips so she can cover him. He tastes her hot, fresh breath as she empties herself into him. He takes her hand and places it on his chest.

Suddenly, he feels her tongue flickering between his lips. Her slender hand has slipped between the buttons of his shirt and rubs the thick hair on his chest.

He bats away the hand holding the nostrils so he can get a breath. A deep, serrated purr vibrates through him; he realizes it is coming from the girl. Grabbing her by the shoulders, he pulls her away and back toward her own seat. As her hand jerks free of his shirt, one of the buttons pops loose, but he does not notice. He is too busy struggling to keep Cindy from embracing him.

“Oh, Mr. Stevenson, let me make you happy.” She sounds a dozen years older.

“Cindy, stop it.”

“But—”

“No buts.”

The girl pouts, “You kissed me first.”

“No, I didn’t.” He stops himself from adding, “You’re the one who kissed me first.” Instead, now achingly sober, he explains that he was not kissing her; he was teaching her artificial respiration.

It sounds so ludicrous, Cindy looks at him and they both start to laugh.

“Maybe you’d better take me home,” she says.

He starts the car. “Yeah, everyone will be worried.”

Neither says anything else, but then when they pull up, a few blocks away, in front of her house, the girl turns to the man and asks, shyly, “Did you mean what you said about talking to my father?”

“Of course,” he assures her. He had forgotten all about that. “Whenever you want.”

Cindy gets out of the car, but before she closes the door, she leans back in. “You’re sweet,” she tells him, smiling.

It’s going to be all right, he thinks as he watches the teenager climb the steps onto her porch.

“You’re missing a button,” Gina remarks when William walks into the bedroom. It’s the first thing out of her mouth.

He looks down at the rumpled cloth.

“Come here,” she tells him. “You didn’t go out like that tonight, did you?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

She lifts the shirt just above the missing button. “I don’t think so,” she says pensively. “I would have noticed.”

He shrugs, grateful that she hasn’t noticed how long it has taken him to drive the babysitter home.

“And where have you been? Cindy’s house is just on the other side of the highway, isn’t it?”

“You know, now I remember. The button came off during dinner.”

“So where is it?”

He smiles, waiting for the answer to occur to him. “I couldn’t exactly go crawling around under the table looking for it.” Gina seems about to ask another question, so he adds, “Now, how about if I pop a few of your buttons?”

The woman giggles.

He is relieved. His wife is still drunk.

The next morning, as she does every Saturday morning, Gina drives the kids to their Suzuki lesson at Mrs. O’Neil’s house. Each child carries a miniature violin in a small black case; their mother, too, carries a violin. All week, the trio has practiced, over and over again, the Suzuki repertoire: “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” “Go Tell Aunt Rhody,” and “Long, Long Ago.” Today they will try Dr. Suzuki’s “Perpetual Motion” for the first time.

When the bell rings, William thinks somebody has forgotten something. He runs downstairs shouting, “Use your key.” But when he twists the dead bolt with one hand and the doorknob with the other, he finds Cindy standing on the steps. Behind the teenager, her bicycle lies sprawled on the lawn.

“Hi, it’s me.”

“What are you doing here? Did you forget something last night?” He still imagines this has got to do with forgetting something.

“I wanted to talk to you.” The girl shifts from one foot to the other. “About what we talked about.”

At first he thinks she means the lifesaving lesson. Then he remembers the other thing. “Oh, yeah,” he says, nodding, “sure.” He scans the street. Nobody is outside. “Come in, come in.”

The girl knows the house; she heads straight for the kitchen. The man, wearing only a robe, follows her. He had been padding around the bedroom after his shower when the bell rang.

The breakfast dishes are still on the table. “Mrs. Stevenson must have been running late,” he apologizes.

“It’s OK,” Cindy assures him. “The kids told me they had a music lesson this morning.” She begins to clear the table, carrying the dishes to the sink. When he objects, the girl shakes her head. “I don’t mind.”

He pulls out a chair and watches her rinse the plates. “You said you would talk with Daddy,” she reminds him. “I don’t know who else to go to.”

He wishes he had already had his coffee. “But what is it I’m supposed to talk to him about?” He doesn’t want to sound like he is chickening out. “I mean, what is it exactly you want me to say?”

The girl wipes her hands on a dishcloth and turns to him. Behind her, the water is still running. “Tell him you know what’s going on—and it’s got to stop.”

“But what’s got to stop?”

Her clothes are too small for her; her tight little T-shirt doesn’t even reach the top of her shorts. She wraps one leg around the other and looks away. “You know what,” she whispers.

“But, Cindy—”

She bursts into tears, her body wracked with wailing. He has never seen anyone cry like this before. Choking on hoarse sobs, she sinks down until her arms clutch her knees to her face.

It breaks his heart to see her weep so wretchedly, but after last night, he knows he has to be cautious. He crouches next to her, holding his robe closed with one hand, and gingerly pats her on the shoulder, repeating over and over again, “It’s OK, it’s OK.”

The girl rocks herself from side to side. “What am I going to do?” she manages between sobs. “What am I going to do?”

The poor kid, he thinks. He lets his arm squeeze her a little tighter. “We’ll think of something,” he promises.

She leans her head against his chest. “I don’t know what I’d do without you, Mr. Stevenson,” she stammers, calming down.

“I’ll talk to him. We’ll straighten this out.”

Helping her to her feet, he shuts off the water that has been gurgling down the drain the whole time.

Cindy wipes the tears from her eyes, like a child, with the heels of her hands. “I’ll finish the dishes,” she says, taking a deep breath.

“No, don’t be silly,” he tells her. “I’ll finish them.”

She gives him a shy smile. “And you’ll talk to Daddy.”

“Sure, on Monday. I’ll stop by the bank.”

“Good,” she says. “Tell him, ‘No more.’ ”

“I will. I promise. Now you go on and let me clean this house.”

The girl laughs. “That’s not a man’s job.” By the time she finally leaves, the sink is empty, and the table has been sponged.

Half an hour later, when Billy and Eileen come bursting in, banging their violin cases against the chairs as they run to their father, he is finishing his coffee and reading the paper.

“Oh, you sweetheart,” his wife calls from the door, her violin case and two grocery bags bundled in her arms, “you cleaned the kitchen.”

When someone’s standing at a bus stop with a human head wrapped in a shawl or tucked in a bag, it’s easy enough to stop them from boarding a bus. Simply move away from your coffee at the table on the bar’s patio. Catch the bus driver’s eye as you walk. He will either keep the door closed or start letting people board but will not drive away, whichever is less likely to cause suspicion in the mind of the young woman who is carrying the head. Tap the ear bud hidden behind a curl of your hair—sweat and grime work their way around the thing sometimes, loosening it—and speak clearly as you walk; the receiver in your watch will transmit your voice. Call the police. They’ll arrive quickly, so there will probably be no need for the gun you’ve been issued, but keep your free hand on it, just in case.

Everything is in the eyes. The exchange of split-second glances between you and the bus driver; never losing sight of the woman as she moves through the line; the rest of the people in line at the bus stop and the looks they give—no matter how hard they try not to—the woman with her bird-like eyes, the bulging package, and to each other once they realize there is a smell and where that smell is coming from and what it is. Sometimes there is also a kind of glancing exchange between you and the head. If, as the woman struggles with the police, the head does not remain fully covered or does not become completely unwrapped and thuds to the ground, one vacant eye often peeks through a little, staring you down. Here is my head; where’s the rest of me?

Arthur leans against the greasy, dust-streaked glass of the bus shelter. The police have come and gone, the bus has departed. I’m sorry, but I don’t know, he addresses the head, a sort of reply. That’s all he can ever answer them. The dusty ground whispers and creaks, exhausted from bearing the weight of a bus and the gossip about the arrest.

Arthur’s boss mentored him when he first started his job, but even she, a skilled patroller in her own right, did not possess Arthur’s depth of talent, and he mentally added a few chapters (such as, for instance, to expect talking heads) to her training manual.

Arthur hears voices—a voice—in everything. They generally last only a few days before dying, dying, he decides, like the roses he cuts from his garden and sets in vases around the house. These voices are traces of the person who last touched the object. Arthur wants to be a noise left behind: the tinny drone vibrating from a fork after he is done eating, the muffled sobs issuing from a wastebasket full of soggy tissues when he has a cold, the scuff and crackle of a carpet in winter after he has just shuffled across it. The idea intrigues Arthur: to hum on, to be the bodiless presence of a body already gone, to prolong life for just a little while longer, and then fade away.

In addition to counting on the heads calling out to him (the heads must be fresh enough to work the healing magic their dying buyers hope for), Arthur also depends on his hatred of the head trade to focus him.

When Arthur was a child, his father became gravely ill. For a long time, a string of doctors came and went through the house where his father lay bedridden. None supplied a cure, though all attempted through a variety of medicines and diets. In between doctors’ visits, Arthur sat with him. Another child may have found the atmosphere in the bedroom creepy, heavy with the smell of medicine and unwashed bedding and troubled with a shivering skeleton of a man who was more often than not fitfully asleep. But Arthur loved sitting with his father. Before getting sick, his father had been a busy man, never home a lot and, when he was, never lingering long over any one object. Confined to his bed, Arthur’s father touched the same objects over and over, layering them with noises. Arthur heard each one and came to know through them his father’s routine and emotions.

In a final attempt to save her dying husband, Arthur’s mother bought a human head. The trade was then more widespread than it is now. Though his mother courted danger by carrying out this illegal transaction through a slit in some back-alley door in the middle of the night and in the bowels of the city, she, a mainstream, well-to-do woman, had no problem finding that back-alley. Arthur watched her walk through the city. He followed her on his bicycle, leaving the house when she did, thinking at first she was going to drown herself in the river like the old mayor had when his wife was sick. As they moved deeper into the city, he realized what she was actually doing. Perched on his bicycle, around the building from where his mother stood whispering through a hole in a door, Arthur pictured the transaction the way a boy imagines buying marbles from a dime store: the passing of coins across a counter, a package changing hands, a done deal.

Now only the most well-connected can arrange such deals. The price, though, remains the same now as it was back then: Someone must first lose his head. The homeless, estranged from concerned friends and family, are often preyed upon. Those who lose their heads are innocents: robbed of their lives in one last desperate deal struck by someone else’s desperate husband or wife or parent, a deal which, more often than not, will nonetheless fail to save the ailing loved one. The magic of the sacrifice is not nearly as strong as some hope it will be.

Arthur’s father died, and, as quickly as the object noises faded from his bedroom—the sighs from his pillowcase, the scratchy swish from his toothbrush, the gentle murmurs from his notebook—Arthur realized another person had faded away, too. From his experience with his father, Arthur had learned how meaningful it could be to spend time with someone before that person’s death, and he understood that the victim’s family had been robbed of this experience. His devastation over this never abated.

Arthur moves away from the bus shelter, retreating from the intensifying afternoon heat to sit inside the bar. He fills a tiny plate with a couple of rounds of crusty bread and sweaty cheese from the platters that have been set out. He pulls the toothpick out of each item and leaves them in a small pile next to his plate—a game of pick-up sticks that will, at the end of his meal, determine the total he owes the bartender.

The bar top, its lacquered surface visibly scratchy with evidence of people—the keys, pocket knives, and coins that have been dragged across its surface over the years—is nonetheless silent, indicating that no one else has sat there yet that day. This gives Arthur a rare moment of quiet, which he appreciates; not all echoes are pleasant. He squints out the bar window at all the mid-afternoon noises he’s left outside with his chained-up bicycle, which he rides to and from work (and after work) every day.

At the end of each evening, Arthur sits at his computer, still winded from his after-work ride, kneading his palm into his left thigh, which aches even after months of exercise. Logging onto one particular bicycling website is part of his routine. After registering a few bits of personal information, he is now allowed to record and post how many miles he rides each day. The computer ranks the registered participants daily. Arthur joined because each participant’s name hums with a little echo of its human counterpart. The Web, to Arthur, is one huge, ever-changing, ever-vocal object noise.

“Tread” is the name that stands out to Arthur. Tread is ranked number one both for miles ridden this year and miles ridden this month. Arthur is ranked 285th. Tread is female, and she rides a bike that is very old, a bike that she bought for five dollars from a friend, but that is light and sleek. Even its color seems slick to Arthur: silver. Tread uses the computer at the public library to log onto the bicycling site. She has curly blond hair and a set of scars on her left cheek from when her alcoholic mother burned her as a child. The scars look, if one looks at them while thinking about bicycling, like a very thick tread.

Those details are all things Arthur learned about Tread by reading the short notes she sometimes attaches to her mileage. The notes section was designed to record weather, nature observations from your ride, or an interesting explanation for why you rode so long or so short, but Tread seems to use the space just to talk.

Of course Arthur can look closer and sense things other than just the posted messages. Tread’s name has a very gentle hum. The noise makes Arthur think Tread is a kind person. He knows, from past experience, the noises unkind people emit. Arthur once went on a date with such a person.

It would have been a date, actually, had the woman had more time before catching her bus. He had met the woman at a bar, the very bar he now sits in, gently chewing on a toothpick. She came in to use the restroom, and when she exited, crumpling brown paper towels in her hands, she walked toward Arthur. He thought she was smiling at him, but, as she neared, he saw she was really smiling at his plate of food.

“I’m starving,” she said, sitting on the stool to Arthur’s left. She pounded her open palm on the bar to get the bartender’s attention. “Omelet and potatoes,” she said.

“Kitchen’s closed for the midday,” he said, “but you can help yourself to the snack platters … ”

The woman interrupted him with a snort. “I don’t want the snack platters. What kind of a ridiculous restaurant closes its kitchen?”

“This is a bar. Never claimed to be a restaurant.”

“Fine.” The woman grabbed a plate and, using her fingers instead of the toothpicks, grabbed several items from each platter. She took a bite out of one, mashed another with her thumb, and dropped a couple on the floor. As she stood, she slapped Arthur on the shoulder.

“Enjoy yourself in this hole, buddy. I have to catch a bus.” And then she was out the door.

Arthur was not used to connecting with people, and he was startled to hear a scream when the woman’s hand connected with his shoulder.

Tread’s name on his computer screen does not scream. Arthur could never picture her taking the bus anywhere.

Arthur knows his desire to become an object noise is melancholy and old-fashioned—perhaps even romantic—but also genuine and well-intentioned, the only way to feel wholly human. He thinks from her noises that Tread would understand. He hopes to meet her someday. Arthur looks around and wonders about the possibility of Tread coming into this particular bar. He twirls a toothpick between two long fingers. Who are you, Tread? Where are you? Here is your mileage; where’s the rest of you?

The next day Arthur has to take the bus. His leg completely cramped up during his after-work bike ride the day before, and the ache never really went away, as it usually does. He wakes early enough to bike to work, but his leg collapses as he steps out of bed. He limps to the refrigerator for orange juice, and, when he’s still limping to the bathroom to brush his teeth, he realizes he must forfeit his bicycle for that day and instead take the bus to work.

The bus, always buzzing with noises audible only to Arthur, is not his favorite means of transportation. Though Arthur lives for object noises, he appreciates moments of quiet. The search for a little bit of silence is what prompted him to start riding his bike, rather than taking the bus, to and from work. His hands grip his own bike’s handlebars, which quietly echo nothing but Arthur riding his bike, softly folding into the reality of Arthur riding his bike. He pushes through the wind and, except on the rare occasion that it carries with it the lingering strains of a backyard barbeque or a kite-flying competition, it is mercifully silent.

Arthur winces as he steps onto the bus. The pain in his leg is sharp, as are the wheezes coming from the fare boxes. Fare boxes always sound desperate and tired and a little bit sad and angry—all that hard-earned money people pour into something designed to take them to and from work, where they just earn more money that ends up going to the bus.

Arthur shuffles down the aisle, touching the backs of seats as he walks, hearing the sticky slurp of the legs of past occupants suctioned to the vinyl and the impatient tap of long-gone fingers. These are not noises he wants to listen to for the duration of the commute; he keeps walking.

At the back of the bus there is an old man, cradling a bag on his lap. To the others on the bus, if they noticed at all, the bag might contain a melon or ball used for sport. But to Arthur, the bulging bag suggests something else entirely. He forgets the senses most ordinary people employ —doesn’t it smell yet? Everyone is staring out the windows, picking sprinkles off their breakfast, flipping pages in the newspaper. Arthur doesn’t really know how the package looks or smells to others; he just knows how it sounds to him. He feels his heart beat faster as he turns on the receiver in his watch, then reaches for his gun. He won’t be able to be discreet this time; the man before him clearly has heard him call the police, yet he doesn’t move.

The bus has stopped; Arthur will be able to hear the police siren any minute now. He opens the bag. The head is on its side, but one eye appears to be looking slyly through blond ringlets at Arthur. The thick, ridged scar on her cheek is clearly visible.

As always, everything is in the eyes. Arthur looks at the head and asks the unanswerable: Here is Tread; where is the rest of her?

Arthur speeds up as he approaches the crest of the hill, then swoops, coasting down it, curving with the winding road, skidding a little when his front tire hits a bit of gravel that has strayed from the shoulder. It’s wonderful to ride Tread’s bike, which Arthur got from the police once they were done with it. The bike would have been sold in one of their auctions anyway, and, since they know Arthur, they just gave it to him.

The wind gently tugs his hair, still thick after all these years. Having learned from the police Tread’s real name, which is—amazingly, perfectly, simply—also her password on the bicycling website, Arthur has already logged on under her screenname. When he takes his own bike out, he records his score under his own name, but, more often than not, he rides Tread’s bike and records under Tread’s name. And though Arthur feels a little bad about being responsible for Tread’s ranking having plummeted to 159th, he will never stop riding that bike. He loves feeling in himself the echo of a person long gone, a person once bodiless and now, strangely, whole.

By Kristin Thiel

It doesn’t take long to call the police. Sally is disappointed. She had hoped to be on hold for a while, listening to instrumental versions of Broadway tunes. She is poised to wait with her elbows and belly pressed against the counter, the phone pressed between her ear and shoulder, an earring scratching against the plastic. This wasn’t such a big crime anyway. Didn’t they have murderers and wife beaters to attend to? She watches the clock on the wall—it is old and sticky with greasy dust, its ornate black hands and tarnished brass pendulums swinging stiffly below. It takes less than two minutes to tell the dispatcher the address and the crime. She shrugs and adjusts her apron, with “Ruben’s Delicatessen” emblazoned on the front in red letters. At only ten o’clock, it is already splattered and smeared with the juice and fat of corned beef, pastrami and roast turkey. She wipes her hands on it one more time, and listens for the first faint call of a police siren. Afraid they’d come more quickly than she hoped, she runs to the screen door and looks down the block. She half expects to see Roland standing there in black jeans, with a grin stretching beneath his eye patch.

“Roland!” Sally yells. There is silence, but she knows he hasn’t gotten far. Even when he was a kid, he was never very fast. He is still in earshot, and Sally knows it. “Listen, moron, I’ve called the police, just so you know. I don’t want you to get arrested—mostly—so just get the hell away. I’m gonna get fired for sure.” Her boss’s wife is a sharp-faced woman with watery eyes, who manages to find an excuse to fire any woman who happens to catch her husband’s attention. This is not hard to do. After four pinches on her rear and twice catching him smelling her hair, Sally has known that her days at the deli are numbered.

Still, she needs to pay the rent. Roland knows this as well, of course. “Stupid, one-eyed bastard,” she mutters, but her breath catches and she stares anxiously out of the window before forcing herself to turn away.

With the hot morning sun slanting into the empty, dusty deli, Sally opens the door of the refrigerated case and gently leans her body onto the rows of Dr. Brown’s sodas, curving her neck and lifting her heavy, red hair in an attempt to get as much of the cold metal onto her hot, damp throat. She does this often when no one is looking. Secretly, she thinks that it boosts sales. She still isn’t used to the summer heat, and often sneers bitterly at the broken air conditioner her boss is too cheap or too lazy to fix, which sits behind the counter. The dial is still pointing toward “coldest,” obscured now by dust. Sally quickly snaps the front of her bra, releasing the small pool of sweat that has collected between her breasts, and pulls the damp shirt away from the small of her back. Usually, the customers standing in line are red faced and cranky even before Sally greets them with a sunny smile that she perfected in front of the mirror. After the morning rush of dark-suited men and women getting their kosher meats and hot bread for the day, the place is empty until lunch. Sally doesn’t mind. The dry shelves filled with condiments and crackers imported from Russia, Poland, and Israel make her think of the small, tight, airless stores back home, before the Wal-Mart moved in, and half the town moved out.

Sally was one of them, one of the first wave of refugees fleeing town in old beaters, watching the legions of Ford Explorers and Jags filled with platinum-headed families heading up to the lake. She sold the leaky, grease-smelling trailer that was once her mother’s, and before that, belonged to some man named Hank who disappeared when he found out that he could go to jail for tax evasion. She liked that trailer. Every square inch of wall space was covered with photographs of her aunts, long dead, or her mother, buried out back, or Jorge, who was never coming back and she knew it. Or that’s what she told people, anyway.

The two windows facing the lake she always kept as clear as water. She could sit there for hours looking out. She used to sit at those windows with Jorge, taking turns resting their heads on each other’s hands, blowing smoke rings toward the lake and sky. When he disappeared, she missed him most when she sat at that table, staring at the bills piling up, nobody’s hands to hold her aching head.

The man and woman who bought the trailer were both glossy-haired and taut-bodied people from the city. Sally never saw them again, but heard that they made short work of the trailer and spent nearly a million dollars building a weekend lake home. Sally really didn’t have much of a choice. With the Wal-Mart there, no one bothered to go to her hardware store anymore, especially the exploding numbers of wealthy boat-owners who distrusted anything local. When Jorge was around, she at least had an extra paycheck coming in. Together they were able to cover the taxes—barely—that doubled every year. Jorge brought home food from the bar where he was a short order cook. Fried chicken usually. Sometimes fish sticks and jo-jo potatoes. Sally kept the cars working.

Roland was around a lot back then. He’d show up late at night with three High Life’s and a pack of Lucky Strikes and the three of them would laugh at the inept and painfully self-involved people from the city who invaded their town every summer. When Roland lost his daddy’s farm, they stopped laughing. Jorge and Sally gave him nearly all they had in savings to help him set up shop in St. Paul.

When Jorge disappeared, she sat in front of the window with her ledger and calculated exactly how much she would need to keep her doors open. Assuming that her calculator was broken, she tried it again. She started picking at the scab above her left eyebrow. A drop of blood began to languidly inch down the curve of her cheek. She did not notice it. In one last, desperate move, she retrieved every box with every order, receipt, tax return, inventory, and even wish lists. At last, with a sigh, she arranged every piece of paper into neat stacks, paper clipped each one, and walked to the fridge for a beer. There was only one left. Walking back to the table, she turned off the light and sat down in the 3:00 a.m. darkness. She didn’t want her mother’s eyes looking at her. Not anymore.

Five others from her old town now live in her same neighborhood in St. Paul. They congregate without making plans. All of a sudden five people arrive at Sally’s apartment and they sit on the bare floor drinking Miller High Life, silently rolling their damp eyes to the ceiling. Or, in Roland’s case, only one eye. Roland had lived in the city before, working in one of the meat packing plants in West St. Paul. He lost his eye and nearly lost his left hand. There is a purple scar that starts at his middle knuckle and swoops around to the front of his wrist. He eventually went back to help his daddy on the old farm right outside of Emily. Corn, mostly. Some potatoes. For the most part, though, they’d spend five months a year pulling stones out of the earth and hauling them into a pile at the center of the field. Roland got the first foreclosure warning a week after his daddy died. He found this comforting. He did manage to sell the farm before it was repossessed, and while Roland was glad to have money in the bank at last, he found out later that the man who bought the land sold the stones from the pile for nearly the price he’d paid for the land.

“If my daddy ever heard that,” Roland would say, “It would kill him again. Forty years he broke his back on those stones. And now those people are buying them for their damn fireplaces. You just never know, do you? If alls they wanted was a rock pile, hell, we could’ve given ’em that.”

Everyone’s story was like that. Margaret’s gas station couldn’t compete with the Holiday. Frank’s farm was repossessed and turned into an ATV course. A petition organized by new residents shut down Irene’s bar, determining it to be an eyesore. Every summer more and more stares told them that they no longer belonged, that their town now belonged to someone else. Now they would watch one another’s faces, noting the dark circles under the eyes, and imagine they were home.

“Remember that time,” Roland had said one evening as they sat listening to the radio. He flexed his toes and shifted his weight on his sore hipbones, “Irene swiped that box of liquor from the sales rep and it turned out to be champagne? First time that old battle-axe didn’t water down the drinks.”

“She even let Jorge go a little crazy in the kitchen,” Margaret said, kindly taking Sally’s hand and stroking it. “First time she let him cook up anything that wasn’t frozen and deep fried. That was some eating that night, wasn’t it? Lord, that man could cook.”

Sally couldn’t look up. Her grief was like that, whacking her over the head when she least expected it. Jorge had gone to visit some cousins who were working in the sugar beet fields over at the Dakota border. The farm workers’ residence caught fire on the Fourth of July while people were inside, drinking and dancing. No one survived. Some of the bodies were charred beyond recognition, but most were crushed by the collapsing building, leaving bone shards and ashes under a pile of brick and concrete. There was nothing for Sally to bury.

“He would have wanted you to move on, Sal,” she thought she heard Roland say as she rested her eyes on her knees. Had she looked up, she would have seen him staring at her, biting his lip, his one eye bright with tears.

Sally closes the door to the case and walks to the window. She half hopes to see Roland standing out there, demanding answers, his coal black eye patch flapping in the wind. She looks back at the counter. There is a perfect square of dust marking where the cash register had stood only twenty minutes before. She reaches out her hand and is about to press it to the middle of the square, but thinks better of it. This is, after all, a crime scene. Instead she uses her knuckles to draw a squiggly line through the entire dusty box.

The second Sally had seen Roland walking down the sidewalk toward the deli, she knew she was in trouble. This has been brewing for a while. Two days earlier, in Sally’s apartment, Roland had neglected to leave with the others, but stayed on the pretense of helping Sally clean up.

“Lord knows you need some help around here, Sal. You’re working too much,” he had said as he sat on her counter, slowly smoking a Chesterfield, watching Sally do the dishes. Her back ached as she leaned toward the too-low sink that was jammed into the corner of the sloped wall of her converted-attic apartment. She was already sleepy, and the smell of soap and the remains of fried chicken were making it difficult to keep her eyes open, like the faint strains of a lullaby, half forgotten.

It was true that she was working too much. Thirty hours a week as a deli clerk, thirty hours as a telemarketer, as well as house cleaning when she had time. She often made time.

“My mother said there was no such thing as working too much,” Sally told Roland. “Hell, a girl’s gotta eat. Besides, I worked more at the … um, I’ve worked harder, Roland. You should know that.” Sally squeezed warm, soapy water through her fists a few times and tilted her head back as far as it would go. Headache, she thought; I knew it. Sally rarely spoke of her hardware store.

“It just seems like you’d be a lot happier if you had someone helping you out a bit, you know, sharing expenses.”

“Roland, I’ve been on my own for quite some time now and haven’t starved yet. Are you trying to tell me that I can’t take care of myself?”

“No, Sal, it’s just that I—” He ran his hand through his hair, which needed a wash. “I just thought you … Jesus.” He took another drag. “Why should you be alone, Sal? Why shouldn’t you have someone to take care of you? I … ” He faltered again.

Sally wiped her hands off on the seat of her jeans. She couldn’t look at him. He coughed and laid his hand gently on her shoulder. She let it stay there for a moment heating through her blouse, until she heard him sigh, and felt the hand start to slide. Then she jerked away. Her bare feet seemed to echo in the empty apartment as she walked to the door. She turned and looked at him, examined his face, his eyebrows arched in anticipation. “Roland,” she began, but stopped. “Just go. I gotta get some sleep.” After he slumped away, she stood by the door for a long time, her breath coming in fierce gulps, feeling the imprint of his hand warm its way from her shoulder into her bones.

The morning of the crime, he had stood before her, hardly able to speak, his breath coming quickly and his good eye crying freely.

“I loved him too, Sal. We all did. But you know it would break his heart if he knew you were wasting your life like this.”

“I’m not wasting anything, Roland. I’m happy.” What a load of shit, she thought to herself. I don’t even believe that.

“You hate your jobs. You hate your apartment. Sal, we’ve known each other since the third grade, you think I can’t tell you’re miserable? Jorge was my best friend.” Roland took her hands. His left hand couldn’t grip as well as the right, but she didn’t bother to pull away. She stared at their hands, her nails bitten to the quick, his purple scar. This is the longest that we’ve ever touched, she thought to herself. She could not bring herself to look at his face.

“He’s not the issue, Roland. What, you think he would want me crying all day, just sitting at my old house and watching them tear it down? I moved on and I kept moving.” Her voice was catching in her sore throat.

“I love you, Sal. I’ve loved you for years.”

Sally knew she should say something, feel something. But her body was frozen and numb.

Roland dropped her hands. He took a step backward. “I need an answer,” he said. Sally still couldn’t speak. She couldn’t look at him, or anything else for that matter. Her chest and shoulders were heavy, and her vision was swimming. She put her hands on the counter to steady herself. She stared mutely at her swollen knuckles, her ragged nails. “Well, if you’re not going to answer me, maybe I’m just going to have to push the issue.” He grabbed the ancient cash register, hoisted it to his chest and headed for the door. “You want this back, you have to at least talk to me.” And then he was gone.

Sally’s skin starts to tingle when she hears the police siren sounding faintly through the hot streets. Panicking, she hurries over to the window to make sure Roland is gone. Pulled by a hope that he is far away and safe, and by a sudden and piercing desire to see him again, Sally has half a mind to give herself a swift kick in the shins. As the sirens grow nearer and pull to a halt in front of the deli, Sally hears the door open in the back and her boss and her boss’s wife walking in through the kitchen. Two police officers, a short, lively-looking blonde woman and a heavy man with olive skin, walk in the front door just as the boss’s wife lets out a shrill scream.

“Sally! What happened to the cash register? Did you—” But before she could finish, the lady cop spoke.

“I believe you were the one who called in the report.” She looked at Sally, who wondered briefly if she had perhaps once worked at the delicatessen herself. “The register was there, I assume.” She pointed to the dusty square on the counter. “Was it electric?”

“No,” said Sally, finally getting her voice back, “it’s really old.” She could hear her boss’s wife whispering frantically to her balding husband who looked at Sally with a combination of desire and pity. Sally was able to pick up words like “completely untrustworthy” and “tart.”

“Can you describe the person who took it?” the officer asked, shaking her head at the wife hissing into her slumping husband’s ear.

Sally met her boss’s eye and gave him half a smile. He licked his lips and stared at her with a combination of lust and despair. Sally nearly laughed out loud. Poor bastard, she thought, and for a moment, like a spark moving along a copper wire, she could feel his aching loneliness coursing from her shoes to her red hair. She looked around at the deli. Roland was right. She really hated her job. And in a split second, she felt herself open up, expand, as though her body had been nothing more than a concrete cast, waiting to fall away. She looked toward the window, her body newly made of light, and color and wings.

“Lady, can you describe the guy or not?”

“No,” Sally said, her eyes leaving the sad old man who dreamt of her body, and looking straight at her boss’s wife. “I never saw him. I was out back smoking a cigarette at the time.” The sharp-faced woman flashed a look at Sally, who smiled. Roland’s never going to believe this, she thought, and she calculated the seconds it would take her to run home.

 

My desk is scooted into the darkest part of the Quonset hut, so that I can read Burro on the Beach while Mrs. Richards makes everybody else go through the math assignment. I hate math, especially fractions. I just can’t do it, and if I stay in the back and don’t make any noise, she’ll leave me alone and I won’t have to. Another acoustic tile falls from the ceiling and hits Zach Hughes, which is good, because he’s a dick. They must be testing out at the range. The ceiling’s been falling all day.

I go back to Burro on the Beach, hidden in my math book. The kids in the book are on the beach with their burro, making s’mores. I wish I had a burro. I wish I lived at the beach instead of in the desert. I look up in time to see Mrs. Richards grab one of the Tiffany’s shoulders. She’s bending over, checking her work. I open my desk and flump the book into all the stuff inside. I get a lot of demerits because of my desk. I feel around and find my big tablet of soft paper with solid pale-blue lines and a dotted blue line between them—if I look busy, Mrs. Richards will leave me alone. There’s a knock on our classroom door, and then Mrs. Richards is making us form our usual single-file line and march out of the room. We march to the farthest edge of the playground and then she tells us there is a bomb threat, and that we will stand there until the base bomb squad authorizes re-entry to the school. I look over and the big kids from the junior high annex are standing around on the other side of the playground. We watch the bomb squad go from building to building. No building explodes and they don’t bring any bombs out, and then it’s 3:00 p.m., the buses come, and we can go home.

That week, there are three more bomb threats. Mrs. Richards sighs and leads us all out of the classroom a little more slowly each time. In Assembly, we get a lecture from the man who usually comes once a year to tell us to report people who ask us about our parents’ work. He tells us we will go to federal prison if we make bomb threats. The microphone squeals and he thumps it with his finger. Then he tells us that they think they know who is doing it. And … The … F … B … I … Is … Investigating. Everybody gets quiet after that. The man looks out at us, and I look down at my hands when his eyes move toward me. Even though it’s not me doing it, I feel like it is. I like the bomb threats and every day I’m in school I hope for one.

Although I never stop hoping, there are no more bomb threats the rest of elementary school or junior high.

There haven’t been any bomb threats since I started high school, but high school is interesting on its own. Sitting on a rock out in the desert, drinking a Dr. Pepper with a mix of liquors carefully stolen from my parents’ liquor cabinet—each bottle left at the same relative level—I find out who the bomber was.

“You’re kidding,” I say to Michael van Dreisen, the most straight-edge person I know, “You?”

“Yeah, Beth,” he says, frowning at my drink. “Me.” Michael doesn’t experiment with alcohol, as he puts it. He seems so well adjusted and mature, and as far as I can tell the only thing he does wrong is hang out with me in the desert at night.

I sit on the rock, staring into my Dr. Pepper. Except for really believing that building better missiles will lead to world peace, Michael’s the most normal person in my world. He’s a National Merit Scholar. He lettered in track and swimming. He’s on the forensics team and he’s a mathlete. He actually has fun at the pep rallies. Not only all that, but his father is on the base bomb detection and removal squad.

“No way that was you,” I tell him. He folds his arms and looks me in the eyes.

Years later, after dropping out of college again, I get a letter with no return address on the envelope. It’s from Michael, enclosing my Social Security card, which he found under the seat of his car. I must have lost it there the last time we both were home for Christmas, about three years ago. The letter wants to know if I’ve been feeling socially insecure since then, and includes a phone number with a 619 prefix. Our hometown is 619, so I decide he must be living there despite all the vows not to be one of the people who end up going back. A slow job in the defense industry and a big, cheap house in Ridgecrest is the La Brea Tar Pits for human beings. I call the number and let it ring for a while, waiting for a machine to pick up, and he answers the phone in a whisper.

“What’s up?” I ask, after he informs me that San Diego is also in the 619 area code. He tells me, very quietly, that a few nights ago something ripped into and partially ate a bag of grits he had sitting on the kitchen counter. He suspects a rat is climbing up the palm tree by his kitchen window, coming in and eating his grits. He is sitting in the dark at the kitchen table with a bottle of whiskey and a loaded Sig Sauer .380; I ask what he’s using as a bullet stop.

“The rat,” he whispers. Seriously, I say, if you shoot at this grits-thieving rat, won’t the bullet go through the wall and maybe hit somebody?

“No,” he tells me, “I’m using the same bullets the Israelis use for hijackers.”

“Oh,” I say. “Huh.” I hear the gurgle of a bottle being inverted, and a soft swallowing noise.

“Excuse me,” he says.

“Certainly,” I say. After that, there’s a moment when neither of us says anything, and then I ask: Why not try trapping the rats? He has, he says, and the traps didn’t work. The rats are too smart. So, I ask him, why not just shut your window?

“Too hot for that,” he says.

Keep the grits in a rat-proof container?

“The bag’s too big,” he says.

“Okay,” I say, “so you get this rat. Won’t there be others?”

“Let ‘em come,” he says, “I have a lot of bullets.”

I look out my own kitchen window. There’s a full moon. I picture it above Michael’s apartment building in San Diego. Silver-blue light streams in through the window he’s left open for the rat, making the whiskey on the table glow. I see the moonlight illuminating his profile, glazing the hand that’s resting within reach of the gun in the shadows.

“If any reporters ask me about you,” I say, “I’ll just tell them you were a quiet, polite young man.”

“Do that,” he says.

 

Loyal collectors believed that Russell Kern was due for a revival. His dealer had kept faith; the right curators showed interest. But this was still the bad year that dear friends whispered about, the year Kern lost his wife in a car wreck, discharged a load of bird shot into a threatening shadow, burned a pile of drawings, unplugged the fax, and let his beard grow in a ragged, grey nimbus which was the first thing locals recalled about him—the silent fellow from down the road who forgot to leave his summer place when the leaves fell.

In truth, it hardly mattered where the painter resided that winter. Kern moved in the globe of his own despair, his sole detour to the Blue Moon Tavern—a swaybacked hall whose neon beer signs winked across an arm of the frozen lake. With trees bare, he could see the tavern from his hilltop studio. He was drawn there whenever the sun set—as much a fixture as the ripped vinyl stools and the pool table.

Most nights, a TV newsman mouthed silently in his box above the bar: a specter to counter the specters that the painter conjured at home. Kern needed such distractions. He needed them as much as he needed a drink, for in the months since sending his wife on her final errand—in the months since her car rolled, struck broadside at a rural crossing by a van full of bow hunters—in all that time, Merrill had clung to him, more now than in life. On that last day, he hadn’t bothered with farewells. He hadn’t turned from the canvas. Now he found Merrill everywhere: in the aria still cued on her CD player, in the blond strand he frantically brushed from his jacket, in the scent of her hand-milled French soap, accidentally pulled from a cluttered shelf, bathing him in the foulest regrets.

If Merrill never spoke, that only confirmed her presence, for she had always been quiet—cowed might be the better word—listening to Kern’s many theories, to all those views that now seemed as pointless as painting. Just a few months ago, he would have shared his opinions about the night’s news—and the newsman’s haircut; would have bitched about the bar room smoke and the stale beer smell of the carpet; would have tuned out the bartender’s Army stories and his chatter about the winter’s interminable length. But Kern kept things simple these days.

“Self-medicating,” he said, addressing the bartender. Kern repeated it nightly—the drink and the phrase—for he preferred the ritual to the beverage, sought the weight of the shot glass clasped in his bony fingers, and always returned the gaze of the barman, a blubbery Swede who crossed his arms and waited while his patient took a first sip.

“That’ll fix you, huh?”

Kern nodded and that was all, safely seated amid beeping poker machines and the bluster of pulp cutters and small-town mechanics. Left to himself, he studied the mirrored bar back as though it were another unresolved canvas. Why didn’t the welder notice when his wife squeezed another man’s arm? Who was the girl in the fake rabbit coat who ran to the bathroom in tears?

Kern looked at everyone: the drunks and big talkers, the women who frowned and those who displayed silver fillings whenever they laughed. Silent as bears, the Peterson twins padded around the pool table, calling shots by pointing their cues. A weasel-faced boy with acne scars jostled past an elderly birder, but the old man never spilled a drop, maintaining a posture as ramrod as the binoculars at his elbow. “Don’t let the door hit your ass,” he said. Beside him, three helmets held stools for downstate strangers—snowmobilers who had promptly hoofed to the jukebox in wet boots and coveralls.

After one such evening, after last call and a zigzag walk through the snow, Kern acted like any wounded animal. He slept through the March night in his paint-spattered studio chair, never stirring to note the dust that settled over him, the drool on his chin, the steady tick of the antique clock that had restarted without Merrill’s hand to wind it. Inured to all things mysterious—except sleep’s mysteries—Kern was spared the heart-thumping visits that so often woke him: the dreamy weight of Merrill’s warmth rolling against him in bed, the imagined creak of the hallway’s plank floor as she paused at the studio door.

Enough was enough, she thought as she stared out her kitchen window at the falling snow covering her garden. Growing things now bored her to tears. It was a brutal and masochistic hobby in such a harsh climate. She’d have three mostly satisfying months, preceeded by two months of dirty work and followed immediately by eight weeks of rain, retrogression, and diminishing satisfaction and diminished spirits. Not to mention the five months of cold misery after that.

Increasingly in her retirement she passed the winters as an almost total shut-in, puttering about the house and re-reading books she’d read years before. She listened to public radio, but even those people got on her nerves anymore. They all sounded so drab, so earnest, and it irritated her no end how they were always pleading for more money. They talked too much about biological terrorism and sports stadiums, and they were constantly bringing that awful, spastic wrestler on to huff and puff and bully people. She could just see him jerking around.

What had the world come to? She’d occasionally venture out to go shopping, but it wasn’t really even shopping anymore; it was more like visiting the museum of a planet she no longer lived on. There were fewer and fewer things she recognized, let alone really needed or wanted. She’d go into an electronics store near her home whenever she wanted to feel truly obsolete and done for. It was oddly thrilling, like a bright and confusing dream.

Thank goodness, she always told herself, she still found people so interesting. She lived across the street from a city park which several nights a week hosted “Community Senior Classes.” She could see the old people through the windows, square dancing or sitting around tables making crafts. She thanked her lucky stars she hadn’t sunk to that level of desperation. It was terrible, but she had very little patience for old people and their frequent gripes and loneliness.

She’d gone on a bus tour with a bunch of senior citizens shortly after she retired—it had seemed like a bad idea even at the time, but a neighbor lady had talked her into it—and she’d never heard so much complaining in her life. Certainly she was sympathetic to their loneliness, but she’d lived alone for her entire adult life, and liked to think she had developed a certain toughness and self-reliance. She supposed it must be disappointing to raise a family only to have your grown children virtually abandon you in your old age, but how much worse her old neighbor friend Helen had it, widowed and stuck with a forty-year-old son who seemed to have absolutely no intention of ever moving out from under his poor mother’s roof.

This man still went about the neighborhood in camouflage pants, wore a ridiculous Australian-style desert hat, and raced a remote-control model car up and down the sidewalk. She knew that Helen regarded her only son—there were also two daughters of normal accomplishment and independence—with a degree of shame, but there was also something of that pathetic symbiotic coddling that starts young in such cases and eventually produces such unseemly dependence in both parties. Heaven knows, with her husband now dead, Helen would have been lost without her greasy and stunted boy.

She and Helen had been neighbors and friends for more than forty years. That was what was so sad to her about the boy; she could remember when he’d been born, and she’d watched him grow up (or not grow up, as it turned out). She could feel a measure of pity for him. She was sure he—Michael was his name—had been disappointed in life, and she was equally certain that he was depressed. Who wouldn’t be, given the circumstances? He’d settled into that disturbing indifference regarding hygiene and personal appearance that you saw so often in the chronically depressed. Once upon a time Michael had been a smart enough boy, and even reasonably attractive, but he was one of those children with an immodest imagination, completely ungrounded in the real world. She’d seen the type every year in her classrooms, those poor prisoners of science fiction. So far as she could tell, such books and films were a hazard to young boys; they eroded their social skills.

She was quite certain Michael didn’t have a job, and hadn’t had one for as long as she could remember. Several times a day she’d see him stalking off to the convenience store up the street, just like the high school students in the neighborhood, and just like them returning on each occasion with candy and snack chips and big plastic jugs of unreal-looking green soda. Weather permitting, he sat out in the backyard at a picnic table, staring blankly at a chessboard or reading one of his paperback Martian novels. He’d gotten less friendly and outgoing as he grew older; he seldom even acknowledged his old neighbor anymore, and if he had any friends they never seemed to come around his house. Sometimes he smoked a pipe, and looked preposterous doing so.

She couldn’t remember anymore what it was he had studied at college, but he had gone away to a good school, small and private and very expensive. The education of their three children had practically bankrupted Helen and her husband. The husband had worked for the city’s utility company, and had fallen over dead shortly after Michael had returned from college for the summer one year. The death of his father had effectively taken the boy off the hook so far as making any kind of a meaningful life for himself was concerned. The father would not have stood for the current arrangement, she knew that much.

All of these things passed through her head as she stood there at the sink watching the snow come down, the day she resolved that she would no longer bother herself with gardening. She even went so far as to haul every one of her houseplants out to the garbage, and felt confident they would be salvaged by her neighbor’s oafish son.

She’d recently taken an old classroom globe out to the trash, a globe that some cretinous former student had defaced with a black ink swastika once upon a time. Less than an hour later she had seen Michael plodding through the snow in his backyard with the globe clutched in his arms.

Why in the world, she wondered as she watched him disappear around the corner of the house, did she feel as if he were taking something from her, stealing something she suddenly imagined she could not live without?