Hawaiʻi Review Issue 25 Paradise Now: 1989 by Hawaiʻi Review Archive

>ring 1989

Issue 25

Vol. 13, No. 1

PARADISE NOW

Cover photograph , "Makapuu Lighthouse" by David R. Schrichte. Illustrations by Amy K. Williams.

Hawai'i Review logo redesign by Guy Gokan. Anne Misawa's "The Anatomy of Air" was first published in Brouhaha, No. 8 Oune 1988). Fred Baysa's "A Study of Protea in a Basket under White Light" first appeared in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin on April20, 1987.

Hawai'i Review is a tri-annual publication of the Board of Publications, University of Hawaii at Manoa. It reflects only the views of its editors and writers, who are solely responsible for its content . Correspondence and subscriptions should be addressed to Hawai'i Review, Department of English, University of Hawaii, 1733 Donaghho Road , Honolulu , Hawaii 96822 . The editors invite submissions of an, drama, fiction , interviews, poetry, uanslations, reviews and literary essays. scripts must be accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope. Su rates: one year (three issues), $10.00; single copies, $4.00. Advertising rates available upon request. Hawai'i Review, a member of the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines, indexed by the American Humanities Index, the Index of American rr.T~·, 1Ul£.a.l Verse, and Writer's Market.

Staff for this Issue Dellzell Chenoweth Puanani Fernandez-Akamine Kelly Ellis Nguyen T. M. Goto Russell Medeiros

Editor-In-Chief Managing Editor Fiction Editor Poetry Editor Nonfiction Editor

Special Thanks to: Joe Chadwick Doris Ching Vallaurie Crawford James Kastely Joseph Kau Ian MacMillan Elizabeth McCutcheon Paul Pinkosh Margaret Russo Roben Shapard Michael Simpson Frank Stewan Jeannie Thompson

CONTENTS

FICTION FOUR STORIES THE SUITOR THE SQUATIER WORRY PATIERNS OF GEOME1RY REUNION LUNCH THE AMPERSAND OF BEUlAH LAND DADDY JAMISON'S MEAN PIT BUlL SHE WANTED JUSTICE

33 43 71

Ursule Molinaro Sanford Goldstein

Tom Ha.zuka

Daniel Panger Lanning Lee

114

POETRY THE DESERT POEM THE RENAISSANCE WHALES WAIIdld KID STANDING OUTSIDE BERETANIA FOlliES TWO POEMS Bundas MY DOG BUNDAS

30 37 39 41 52 53

ARMENIAN MOTHER THE DESERT MAKER 45 IN A DRY SEASON THREE POEMS DEAR ADOLF TRAVELLING SNOW

54 55

56 65 69 77

Anne Misawa Ronald L. Johnson Stuart Ching

Ursule Molinaro Jesse McCarty Haunani-Kay Trask Mahealani Ing Joseph P. Balaz Janos Olah translated by Nicholas Kolumban Jack Shadoian Paul Ramsey Rebecca Lee Goldie Chenoweth A. M. Friedson Rob Wilson Mark Osaki

A STUDY OF PROTEA IN A BASKET UNDER WHITE LIGHT WE CALL YOU OUR CHILD: HIROSHIMA MAIDENS 1Y COBB BLOODS PORT CERTAIN WORDS HOW TO END A CONVERSATION (METHOD #33) AFTERNOONS IN THE BLUE RAIN, RAVENA FIERCE MEADOWS MASTURBATION A WEDNESDAY NIGHT IN

Fred 0 . Baysa

94 96 101 102

Daniel James Sundahl Parke Muth Alex Argyros Julia Thomas

104

Robert Payne

106 107 108

Lyn Lifshin Tony Quagliano Joseph Gillespie

1969

109

Kelly Romero

ON LOOKING AT AN X-RAY OF MY DAUGHTER'S SKULL GODMOTHER TWO POEMS NADAL ALL SOULS

112 119 121 127 128

Mitchell LesCarbeau Leona Yamada Kathryn Waddell-Takara Bronislaw Maj uanslated by Daniel Bourne

NONFICTION GAUGING THE SPEED OF DARKNESS

129

James R. Harstad

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

134

THE HAWAI'/ REVIEW EDITORS DEDICATE TillS ISSUE TO THE MEMORY OF JOHN UNTERECKER.

. . . heavy persecution shall arise On all who in the worship persevere Ofspin't and truth ... then raise From the conflagrant mass, purged and refined, New heavens, new earth, ages ofendless date Founded in nghteousness andpeace and love, To bn'ng forth fruits, joy and eternal bliss. John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book XII,lines 547-551.

PARADISE NOW equals the capacity of a single human being to nurture ; it declares that nothing is lost if we refuse to submit our dignity.

Ursule Molinaro

THE DESERT POEM

When the moon dies in the desen & the sand looks almost black The dune expels the six-toed lizard whose tail wipes out the travellers' tracks Hooded figures on shy camels scan the horizon for their way But the stars are shooting eanhward & the travellers go astray The sudden blackout lasts a nightmare that slowly turns an irate red Then the noon sun in the desert dries mammal bones a brittle white Four-footed souls on hooded bipeds ride a straight course to the light

AnneMisawa

SLAVE OF THIGH

It was looking at her again . Squirmish, her dog jumped off from her lap, from in between her proud thighs, and chased its tail into some corner. She closed the lid of the squinting box, made sure the lock was twisted to the side. Bacon was due in half an hour. She opened another, pulled out a set of teeth made of blue porcelain and tried it on against her painted red lips, white flesh . It clashed in the full length mirror. She peeled off her lips and replaced them with another pair, a lick of turquoise, in its place. Made sure the adhesive was wet with saliva first. A flash of embarrassed moments when a dried lip had fallen off into a drinking glass, in full view, in public. Mariette had chanced to swallow some in those quick moments of despair, dread. Etiquette made its disappearance barely noticeable to those around her. "Oh yes, I think the mouth of Agua Sole is a wonderful place to visit this time of year." She'd smile and pretend that her lower lip had chose not to attend the occasion in the first place. A Mr. Wols curled the ends of his lips and nodded. She swallowed again . In the corner of her studio, the sewing mannequin grinned. The lazy muscle will season tender. Just the right size for one ponion. Rendered beautiful. " Don't flatter yourself, as though I was lying on the sidewalk, tongue-tied." An enormous woman bolted open the door, the wedgebone knob elbowed the wall. " Don 't trouble yourself, I can get it." Lips pursed. She pegged the door shut with an easy kick of the stiletto heel. The thick, ground beef calves, the basic oven-broiled arms. The cheap Italian checkerboard cloth, bought at Lu Fung's , draped over the perpetually gas-pregnant torso. Tent bubble. " Chow Chow, my little piggywinkle ,' ' she babbled down at the side of beef, poodle- sized , collared on a chain. Plump fingers that hardly bend tugged at the leash. "Hello, Mama. A visit?" Mariette's dog crawled under the bed. Remove from heat and stir in sour cream. "You're not wearing that again, are you?" she squinted. Mariette studied her nude flesh in the mirror; and saw no flaws . " But Mama, this is always fashionable ." 2

"It's so old. Don't come crying to me when your seams fall apart in public." She pulled her dress up above her heavy thighs, sat herself down on the stove-top , and relieved herself of gas. A sudden flame licked her clean. " But Mama, it's the rage." She felt her smooth skin , the inside of her lean thighs. "No unsightly sweat stains." " God never intended you to walk around stark naked. If He did, He wouldn' t have invented hangers or mothballs." And she popped one into her mouth, fingers in the candy bowl, and burped. "Mama, why don't you sit down on the sofa or the bed?" " I don't care to sit down on moving objects." The taste of the top sirloin depends on the collar of the short loin. " Did you change your snatch today?" " But Mama, the clock is panting and the wine is getting younger. Besides, Bacon Francis should be here any moment now." Her mother rifled through her wounded purse. "I always carry a spare one. Here," and she tossed it to Mariette. " Don't embarrass me. What if you get into an accident? " "Look ... , I've already fed it." She replaced it anyway. From in between her lean thighs and threw the old one to the poodle, who sniffed and chewed, then hurried to bury it in some corner. The mannequin licked her lips. The cheapest of meats, lightly marbled, but flavorful. Perfect for stews or party favors . Someone knocked. Fat-bloated calves made to the door. "Well, hello Bacon, do come in." She smiled and fluttered her eyelashes. Thick mascara, eyebrow and lipstick grease. Rouge. "Rose." He nodded. " And how many gallons can you drink? " He curled the tips of his lips. "Bacon, you 're looking good today." Leather and beaded hide, a heavy-saddled tan on his chest. " Of course." He ignored Mariette's gaze and took a good look in the mirror instead. " I've been watching you lately, noticed something nasty." "Yes, me too . Never can trust that girl, wench." The mother plopped herself down on the sofa, sound of escaping air. "I have things to do. Appointments every day of the weak. I have to ID2ke a living too, you know." Mariette eased herself next to Bacon's side, played with the strands of black hair, cut-off ear. "Sure you do .. ."He brushed her hands away and sat down on the armchair, legs parted. Now the rib-eye must be pounded according to the needs of the divided T-shape bone.

Mariette understood. "Just as I suspected. The wine is sour." The mother spat once, but then poured herself a glassful. Mariette eased herself between Bacon's legs, the black wing-tipped boots. " Impatient aren't we today?" and pushed her away. The mother swallowed a burp, getting larger. "Here you go, Bacon." She poured him a drink, and wiped the edges clean of lip grease with her checkerboard dress. "Now there 's a woman who knows what to do." And he let her hugeness rest on his lap. She smiled at Mariette, cheeks swelled, and placed her oven-broiled arm over his shoulder. "Now get me another," he eyed. "Mariette," her mother smudged her lipstick with another smile, "Why don't you go and fetch a better bottle of wine from the store? This one's spoiled by the heat." She swallowed a burp, noting the presence of company, and got slightly larger. "But Mama, you're drinking that anyway." Bacon picked up the bottle with two precise fingers and let it drop to the floor, breaking a stain. "Not anymore, Luv. Why don't you go? Rosie here can tell me a story." And he slipped his palm up her checkerboard hem , the fat-veined thighs. "There's a good girl." "Don' t forget it's bright outside, dear. Not good on your flesh . Wrinkles." She smeared another burp, eyeing her nude frame, her flat bones. Mariette grabbed a hat, pink chicken feathers, and slammed the door. With easy steps, she let herself down the apartment stairwell. Gazing at her lean thighs, 'not too muscular, but firm,' she decided , and stroked away some dust with a quick palm. Her stride was consistent. She passed the tumbled garbage cans of butcher Friday's , dogs sniffing and wrestling scraps of fat laced with meat. Bottom rounds. Bloody paw-prints tracked the cement. But none near the stacks of cow-hooves, ankle legs, that were lined up in the sun like a display of ladies' shoes on sale. The slaughterhouse dances, on hind legs . Charity benefits. In the window of Friday's, two great sides of beef were hung near the glass, beside the picture of the Pope in red velvet. The once white smock stained a crimson, Friday smiled at Mariette. " Mama told me to get some skin, butcher's steak, for eight. She's having society friends for dinner, I think." Mariette was twelve then. "None left, but I'll get the frozen ones I save for my suppers." Then, she noticed the dripping. Little drops of red, slow, on the white-tiled floor. At the inner sides of her pink shoes, laced socks. She placed her right foot over it and looked up-directly into butcher Friday's round face . Hotness

brushed her cheeks. He winked, and curled the tips of his lips. That curled moustache. "Mariette . .. Mariette . . ." It w~ Mr. Tuiles with thick kneady hands and cheeks caked with flour. "I've got some fresh croissants, just out of the oven. My, you' re looking pretty today. That suits you." He winked. "Yes, that's what I told Mama." Mariette paid for a bagful of five. "Could you have your boy deliver a fresh leg of French bread tomorrow, at noon? I'm expecting someone." "It seems you always are ." He winked and handed her some change dappled with flour. The stench of relieved gas caught her nose with a pinch when she reached her own door, left slightly ajar. The sight: slabs of meat and fat graced the walls and floors. The scant furniture . The sewing mannequin was shoulder-padded with oven-broiled arms . Pieces of torn checkerboard. No side of beef, poodle-sized, on a chain. Just Mariette's dog licking some lip-greased piece of flesh in a corner. 'I guess we'll be eating in tonight,' thought Mariette as she tossed her pink hat, little chicken feathers and a bottle of wine onto the bed. Chop the meat up. Below the bone is not too tasty, but fine for braising or stew. A very economical belly for two. "I hope you don't mind leftovers." Mariette fed her dog on her lap with a silver spoon. Fuzzy ears. Outside, the children were singing on skip-rope, ''Meat market, meet market, slave of thigh .. . ." Pink ribbons jostled up and down. A boy in blue plaid scurried across the street with a smile and a long leg of French bread. He nibbled on a toe. Mariette admired herself in the mirror again. 'Such lean thighs, smooth skin, slightly pink today,' she thought, 'best bare.' Not even a pat of talcum powder. 'Yes, Mr. Wols will be very pleased today.' She turned around to look at her backside. 'No Mama today.' And she placed a couple of gold-tipped nipples on her bare breasts with fingernails manicured a natural green. She opened a jewelry case, one a pleased client, a particular Mr. Paupiettes, had given her. A pair of baby feet earrings. The flesh still a chocolate brown with toes like black and pink pearls. All the way from Africa, clips of course. "No need for any more holes," her mother had said, "barbaric." Cut around the choice fillets with a sharp knife, delicate and small. Garnish with green peas. Fit for two. It was looking at her again. The eye- pin her grandmother had left

her; she poked at its side. Her grandmother had died past eighty, but now even after her death, she had piercing vision. Her mother had said, "All those carrots. Such a shame-a vegetarian in the family, not what God intended." Mariette poked at the eye-pin again, hoping it would decide to sleep. It never slept, hardly winked. Sometimes, there were tears. Mariette wore the eye-pin on a few occasions; it was the style of that season. She wore it when it was cold, pinned to a sweater. She wore it once to a cocktail patty-where the knowledge of onions made it cry. Mr. Ossi Buco said, "The true forbidden fruit, good for digestion." He always ate onions for lunch. He winked at the eye-pin . It was crying a bitter red that stained her beige cashmere sweater. All she could do was smile, nod, act as though it was natural. She developed a tic on her left eyelid. It blinked without grace. It staned to bleed. Mr. Buco nodded, curling the ends of his lips. "Such wonderful weather lately." Someone knocked. Thin legs made to the door. The flour boy. She paid him a tip more than usual as he stared directly at her-at the goldtipped nipples. "You sure are pretty today, Ma'am. That suits you fine." "Yes, that's what I tell my Mama," and she shut the door. "My God, he's eaten the big toe again. I can't serve this." "Meat market, meet market, slave of thigh," the children sang and laughed. Dice it up fine, sprinkle some salt. Add garlic and oil to make crispy cubes for chicken soup-pink feathers optional, according to seasonal taste. "I hope you don't mind leftovers," Mariette smiled at Mr. Wols while she played with a lock of her black hair. "This is very tasty, indeed. A recipe of your mother's? " "Somewhat," she crossed her legs to keep her thighs in full view, "I added the finishing touches," and she smoothed away some dust from her thighs . He poked at some red lip-grease, "Colorful too," and swallowed. Mariette eyed the long gift box on the bed that he had brought with him. Pink ribbons curled at their tips. 'Flowers?' she thought, 'No, must be something special. A surprise of sorts,' for he hadn't presented it to her yet. "More?" she smiled, letting an imaginary shoe dangle on the toes of her crossed leg. He nodded, "Just a small piece, crispy." She pricked the end of her fork into a long flaky piece about the size 6

fa man's thumb. "I have plenty more where this came from," and she thought of her mother. "This will be ftne ," and he spat out a long fingernail discreetly into 路 napkin. "Bones ... another piece of bread, please." She had served it after all, hoping that he wouldn't notice the missing toe. He bit one off and chewed it with a mouthful of meat. She looked intently at him, 'He's a very ftne gentleman,' Mariette thought, 'for he cuts away the fat and puts it neatly on the side of his plate by the broiled tongue. Perhaps, I over-cooked it. He isn't eating it.' But then, he did cut it up into small pieces and take a bite. "Consistent," he said and curled the ends of his lips. She extended her legs out more to the side, in full view for herself and especially for him. At the inner thighs, make a triangular cut of about 3 inches; this is sometimes called the sirloin tip. "This is for you," a grand smile, and he handed her the box that had been resting on the bed. "Why, thank you. I didn't expect this," said Mariette with a quick look at herself in the mirror, unnoticed by Mr. Wols, but noted by the corner mannequin. "It's been a long time since anyone has given me a gift. I c:enainly didn't expect this," and she peeled off the ribbon, picturing a fur coat, a mink perhaps, but of course, shon, so as not to cover the long legs, the proud thighs. "I hope it'll please you,'' and he stretched his grand smile. "Oh ..." and she dropped the cover. Speechless for a moment as she tried to regain her composure. It was a pair of legs, of chocolate brown, longer and leaner than her own. The mannequin in the corner smiled. "All the way from Mrica," he explained, "terribly expensive, but you're such a doll." "Yes, I would think so . . ." "Why don't you try them on? I'm sure they will suit you better than the old ones you have on now." And she winced. He picked one up from the box. "Marvelous color," and handed it to her. "Yours, well ... bruises, I mean, and that dark hair on such pale skin of yours. Better to trade it in." And she hit him with the leg, across the cheek, the side of head, and landed a naive tongue.

Make sure to tender the meat before roasting. She lay on the bed, her legs sprawled on the floor. She had twisted them off after Mr. Wols had left, apologizing, and tossed them there, where they lay now. The table by the window for two was still occupied. Plates, with little piles of fat, gathered dust along with the now hardened, half-bitten leg of French bread. The mannequin said nothing, but stared motionless. When the meat gets tough to eat, let soak for needed hours. Someone knocked, a dull thud. No one answered. After some time, it knocked again. Still no one answered. Instead, Mariette rolled over to the edge and pulled out the long box from under the foot of her bed. Those chocolate thighs. She felt the smoothness with her fingertips . Then, she took them out for closer examination, and snapped them on where her own legs had been. Made sure the locks were twisted to the side, so they wouldn't go out from under her, exposing her rump to the floor. She looked herself over in the full length mirror. "Just like you to have broken your arm at such a time," her mother had told her when she was seventeen. Mariette was at a social dance . " For society ladies," her mother had noted, "Don't embarrass me." Having fallen down the stairs before leaving for the dance, Mariette had no other choice but to borrow her mother's arm. That oven- broiled arm, the right one next to Mariette's leftover one. "Don't you lose it. I haven't got a spare one to match. They don't make them like that anymore, you know." And Mariette began to hiccup from drinking some clear liquid out of a glass held by two clumsy fingers, her mother's . A Mr. Madril asked, " Would you like to dance?" And all Mariette could do was nod. It was a waltz. But the right one, the heavy oven-broiled one, wouldn't cooperate, and instead , started to twirl aroupd in circles on the hook by her shoulder in a spastic sort of dance. Mariette just had to pretend that it was some new rage, the new dance step of the season. Mr. Madril curled the tips of his lips and followed her gestures, and soon, even the society ladies, hind legs in stilettos, mimicked the dance. Arms swinging. Someone knocked. Mariette sat down on the bed , yanked off the brown legs , and threw them into the corner by the mannequin. The mannequin tried them on. Mariette put on her own pair of legs , made sure the locks were twisted to the side, and answered the door. A big thing, presumably a body wrapped in newspaper that smelled like fish, was just about to hit its head on the door, but stopped. The mannequin looked over her shoulder. 8

"Mariette?" It was Mr. Wols, from the sound of its voice. She pushed him away evenly at the shoulders and down the stairs. The top loin is what most people reach for. Mariette decided on a walk. "This empty room, you should have left the light on ," the mannequin's first spoken words, and she followed the hushed Mariette out. Those chocolate thighs of subtle persuasion. Mariette's of a dominant drag. Children chanted with a looped rope at hand, "Meat market, meet market, slave of thigh, string the meat up with a poke in the eye." Pinklaced socks jumped up and down like skipping stones. Severed, bottom calves and hooves, lined up in rows by the brick wall, tapped their hidden toes for a shon moment, long enough for Mariette's corner eye to notice. " Cheaper Than You Think" sign painted in red lipgrease. Fuzzy splints tracked for roll call; branded fixations . Dark lean legs shadowed pale ones, getting paler, like X-ray eyes. A leather-wrapped male by a squinting lamppost leaned forward . "Any kind you want," and opened his coat flap-a dozen male genitals complete with pink ribbons curled at their tips. A smile of auto fetishes dangling behind; their penis eyes drooped. "Cheaper than you think , Luv. Try one on for size. Have you changed your snatch today?" The pair of figures in his eyes winked . "You wouldn 't want to embarrass your rna, right Luv?" Buy a rump or a sirloin tip, cut the first 4 inches off, toss into a potted rack and marinate. If no wine, don't despair. "Accidents are sometimes lethal." But Mariette walked on, eyes hooked onto a convenient blind spot an empty hand away from her face. The shadow mannequin lingered a few steps, a slight touch of indulgence, but no money at hand. She caught up with Mariette who was just turning a possessive corner on its heel. The ordinary relief denied , they sat silent at a slightly tilted table, a smudge of grease on checkerboard doth. Mariette burped. Just two glasses filled with some dear liquid. The one by Mariette boasted no ice cubes, but a hint of leftover lipstick. A dust fly landed on her thigh. She adjusted her eyes to the stale light of this commonplace, previously denied by Mariette due to its dim acknowledgment of seasonal taste . Even though it leaned on the backside of Friday's butchery like some dank cellar for overnight patrons. Besides, it had always seemed too dark for proud thighs. A few scattered figures sat at tables, loosely dislocated . One or two nodded at some joint-wrinkled doll propped up in the seat across from

them. A spotlight, like the one that warmed Friday's specialty meats, but larger, focused on the unoccupied center ground . Lightly-ashed, bloodprints tracked the floor ready for dance lessons. Or any ritual of dressing. Square a hole in the middle of the shoulder bone or thigh. Spare rib. Stuffing will fit, room enough for two . "Would you like to dance? " A flaky-broiled arm smelling of onions. "Cheaper than you think; it's Good Friday. Ladies' night." Mariette sneezed, and for a sudden moment, tilted the table on its hind legs. " How about a bacon-wrap, in wine? " She began to cry. Little drops of red , slow, bled onto the floor by the tapping toes of the mannequin. A slight humming of the lips. No one asked again. Some figure caught the attention of the mannequin, who was faceless as a boxing punch with lips. She focused at Mariette's closed eyes, having drained themselves, and nodded. Mariette paid no attention. So, they rose, the mannequin and the man, and met at spotlight. Almost. Flatboned arms raised up to the grease-boned ones, like wings, barely touched. Their feet in proper places, there seemed to be an adjusted space between their connections, like a pane of glass. They glided in a waltz of silence; exact traces coordinated like invisible lines between their smooth foreheads, their palms, their torsos, and their thighs and legs that smeared the lightly- ashed footprints in red. A somnolent dance of whispers in spot路 light, twirled in circles. No one looked . Don't forget the roast; a couple of carefree hours at the most, or it'll dry up to a shrivel and out with the trash. The dance continued out the door. The light of the moon, a slippery grin through the gliding clouds. Another doll leftover in a seat. " It's ladies' night." The sunlight of butcher Friday's by the wall. Dogs sniffed and wrestled fat laced with meat by the overturned garbage cans. A side of beef, poodle-sized, barked at the wagging tails , curled at the tips. But, as usual, no dogs by the rows of severed steer legs with hooves for sale , plus one , two -a pair of pale legs carved at mid-calf that stood at the end of the last line. Mariette, with short stumps barely under the knees, was propped up on a wooden chair. Eyes closed, but still with decided thighs in a cross. "Meat market, meet market, slave of thigh, string up the palms and feet, and poke out the eyes." 10

Misawa ALL KINGDOM IN ONE HAND

Ma Lucy got furred up to her elbows, but she answered the door anyhow. With two plump fingers, she brushed away some salt dust over the cyesweep and gritted her teethA begga.r lady was on the stoop. -wooden toothpickets grained with pepper. She'd forgotten the red lipstick, but she was a pretty flap in her polyster pants. Curlers spooled in her hair. A beggar lady was on the stoop. Since it was Saturday, the light was as tall as she, bleeding the poor blue of her wrinkled stones, skin the color of slate. She asked for Petri, or so I think, she asked for the little boy, pointing a pebble-tipped finger at Ma's knitting chin. Shadows crouched behind the two trees of salt framing the doorway. "You can' t have him, you know," Ma said, closing the door a bit on the smell of olive oil that was spilling in. " Have you a care for a piece of bread? " the old beggar lady asked, breaking off a finger. " Nos, we have enough to eat. Thank you." Ma closed the door on the beggar lady before the next word, but I heard a crunch as footsteps stole away among the gravel bones. And the shame of your nudity may not be known. " Now, don' t look at me like that, little Mr.," Ma says, wiping the sweat off her chin. " She smelled like a strange wine to me. You be good or I'll let you out to the old beggar lady for supper." And it tasted like blood. Sheba laughed and skunked her head under the cunain frame. She's a broken hand smaller than me. Sometimes, she lets me in when the window dresser comes to wash her good and thorough . " Shine, shine ... Your child's all wood," she'd point at me between my legs. And Ma wouldn' t be angry no more. She came again the next day at about noon when in the middle of 11

Ma's favorite soap. Ma was wet up to her elbows in tears she bought with a coupon on Good Friday, but she answered the door anyhow. The sun shined so bright you could hardly see between the glare and the high-shingled voice" You' re one mighty lucky witness," the beggar lady held out a pair of shades. The kind that can see through everything like Superman-like in the back of Marvel Comics with the ad for the black chewing gum Ma gives to the more permanent guests . "I have Truth in the eyes of the enlightened, for a limited time only," she said , waving the shades in front of Ma's face . "Your eyes will see strange things and your mind will utter upside down things," squawked the green- leafed rooster on the old beggar lady's shoulder. Its feet- vines crawled down her arm . "See how good and pleas. . ). . . ." anuus When it sparkles in the cup; when it goes down smoothly. " But, I see nothing," Ma said, handing it back. " You're misery on all fours ," squawked the rooster through the patch over his good eye, "You're as one who lies . .. as one who lies in the heart of the sea, he who opens wide his lips when he bears fruit ." "He cores the apples of truth." The old beggar lady patted the rooster's head and it faned a pine fresh scent. " Seek and you shall find him in two other country odors ," she said. Then , she pointed at me. ''I'll give him to you in exchange for the little boy." "Keep me as the pupil of thine eye for three weeks guarantee .. your place or mine." The rooster winked . Ma spit in his eye. "They struck at me; I did not feel it. They beat me; I did not know it," it squawked , flapping its wings until Ma heard no more. That night we had peas and fowl for dinner. Sheba wouldn't eat. She poked at the limp pieces with her finger, "I know your doings, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either cold or hot. So, because you are lukewarm and neither cold nor hot, I am going to keep you out of my mouth." She pinched her nose. 'Cause of the smell. Ma sprayed some lemon fresh pledge on it, but she still wouldn't eat. She had to sit there for another hour. She pouted her face into a lizard's tongue. I counted her toes and licked each one-by-one until she smiled. Ma tossed the food out to Grandpa who was buried up to his neck in the living room salt. Grandma got to eat last night's roast. I watered her today.

The old beggar lady wrinkled her stubby toes up the salt porch the day. This time, she come late when Ma was up to her elbows in pressnails and crazy glue . The eggtimer was set. She blew at her fingenipsLet them melt away like outrunning water. -until they dried or the paint peeled. The eggtimer was set. The were always as shriveled as a trumpet's cry squirreling through a tun. Handheld . I'd put my ear up against it to catch the ringing. Some~wo;;:~ , it would ask only for Sheba. Ma answered the door with her teeth ...Ivnow. She was used to the salt. That would not listen to the voice of charmers. ''I'm collecting your well-kneaded donations for the charity ball." old beggar lady held out a clear globe with three square stones in it. the color of slate. "Three stones are cast in your name, with the ICIJlan4:e to multiply winnings of bread to loaf around many days on end ." Ma fanned herself with wet fingenips spread apan. Long life in her right hand. "I ask not for two hundred days' wages, not even one. Only a mere handful will assure you a place at the table." The globe lay on her one clear . "I shall give you a white stone, and if you win, engraved on the stone a new name," she said, " And for a limited offer-" She unscrewed the top of her head, at the site of her hard temples . She made a little gesture of a bow to Ma and water poured out of her head and into the glass globe. The three square stones plumped up and full like the shrunken flat sponges that look like bite-size wafers left on our porch on campaign trails. They become alive , three bold fishes that swam around in the globe. They had "Eat at Big]'s Bakery" printed on them with indelible ink. "-three Tidy Bowl cleaners of genuine plastic at no extra cost if you act now. Also available in three fashion statement colors ," finished the old beggar lady. " I don 't have no cares for all that water," Ma said, " Besides, my house being so white don 't naturally match your colors." She flicked her plastic fingernail on the glass of the globe, poking towards the green, mauve , and gold-toned fishes. And she naturally told a lie. I and Sheba knew right well that Ma's red-plucked telephone was paired to fit the duo-tone answering machine . She subscribed to Time for a month just to get the right color. Ma tucked the big tall magazine under Grandpa's weak chin so as to slow the dribbling that stained the living room salt. And it wouldn't wash out no matter the scrubbin' .

My pants itched. Sheba stuck out her tongue, licked her lips, and rubbed her soft hands. The beggar lady poured out the water, tilting the globe towards the whiteness of the ground. It burnt a hole a sore foot wide. The fish dried up on the bottom being so tossed like on the salt. Sheba looked at me and sucked in her cheeks, squint fish lips. I fell on the ground and floundered about. Dinner was ready, or so the eggtimer decided. Ma was wearing her bunny slippers. I looked up her dress. "I don't have the time for your poor sellings," she told the old beggar lady, "I don' t have the taste to stand here and wear you out." Like a gold ring in a swine's snout. Eat what is placed before you. I got up and stamped around Main a circle, making sure she could hear the jingle in my pants. I've got pocket- pooled stones that I plucked when it hailed once. I want a fish too, to aim at when I have to drown myself in the flushing bowl. Ma has a rubber duckie. The pink kind. That foam up their own disgrace. "My being so old and itched at the knees, perhaps at least, you could be so kind as to lend me your little boy to help me on my rounds 'til dark?" the old beggar lady looked at me with a voice the sound of many waters . And I jingled my pants. Sheba carne out from behind Ma and took my hand. "I'm sorry now, I need my boy to help me chop the wood , my nails having just grown in so pink and perfect," Ma said , "We got old folks of our own who need their splinters pruned." "But, Ma .. ." " Scat, or I'll stick you in next to Grandpa 'til you ripen." Ma brushed me away with a quick swat on the back. I went to the corner to lay my eggs. Ma wore bunny slippers. And a concealed tongue. I spit a little in the corner when Ma was looking the other way. It made a little dent in the smooth salt. Stolen waters are sweet. Ma slammed the door tight on the old beggar lady's face. That night, I ended up taking a bath. Since Grandpa had been so giving in his dribble lately, Ma had to put the big bucket under his chin. I Sheba played the runs around Grandpa and Grandma who were buried up to their necks in the living room salt. They watched t.v. while Ma did toenails in the kitchen.

Sheba blew in Grandpa's ear, then went around patting the two heads ward off the flies, chanting, " Duck, duck, goose . . ." I yanked at Grandpa's last nosehairs. He didn 't seem to care none. Sheba pulled up her skirt and sat on top of Grandma, covering her e. Grandma sneezed. She didn' t like to miss any of her favorite show ut the fancy rich and famous. She'd wail when it was time. I took off my pants and made Grandpa a hat. Donkey ears. Too bad rest of him was buried. Grandma had a long grey braid, rough as an 's tail that Ma's been growing with extra fertilizer. Sheba picked up the braid with one hand and twirled it like a rope , ping inside. She hummed. She sang. "Shine, shine ... Your child's wood . . ." I knocked on Grandpa's hollow head. I stuck my arms out like the odel airplane I plan to send out for and whirred about, clipping ears and "pping Sheba's pace. I jolted Grandpa's bucket a dribble, but broke no 路 . I climbed myself onto Grandpa's head, towered high over Sheba, d jumped off, wings spread. I did it again. This time, I aimed at Grandpa's bucket-enemy waters. It was a hit, bulls-eye. I was bare bottomed , but the floor was too. The water ate away such at the salt that both I and Sheba knew we were gonna have no last supper. I don't think Sheba minded, since there was liver and all that blood. Somehow, Ma could always smell spilled whine. She came out bursting red and made us patch up the potted holes with salt from our own beds. It wouldn't help to cry none. Early next morn, I and Sheba was watching t.v. 'toons. We weren't suppose to bother Ma any. Ma was up to her elbows in telephone wire . There was a knock at the door. Sheba looked at Ma, then at me. She being 10 busy, I decide to answer it myself. I couldn' t reach the eyesweep, so I opened just a little crack to peep. In the beginning there was the word"Rise and shine." A hand stuck in, hard like stone, and tossed some peppered dirt into the room, onto Ma's white floor. I thought Ma's gonna hang me for this or at least, bury my neck up without any lunch. I'd probably end up getting Sheba's leftovers if Grandpa was sleeping. But, no des-

sen. The door flung open. Light poured in. "Let me demonstrate to you the power of my service," a votce called out. Ma came storming in, must of noticed the flood of light that so bleached the walls.

"What in damnation is going on here?" Ma still had thorns of telephone wire hanging on her chin. " The door blew open," I said, taking hold of Sheba's left hand. " Let me demonstrate to you the powers of my service," the voice repeated through the shutters of light, "a very efficient way to do the cleaning." On top of the stoop was an open cardboard box filled with and pieces of a broken body. A hand stuck out of the box like a bent matchstick. Ma sometimes lets us play with a whole book of them we'd been extra good. I looked at Sheba and thought of heat, the rub 路 of hands. Two loose arms from the box attached themselves to hands. They picked up the box and carried itself into the hallway, through the air. "I will put the case in order right before your eyes," it said. Ma glared down at the stain on the floor. " Lick it up." "Yes, Ma'am. As I will show you, never has there been one that suck the breath out of the unclean like I can," it said. It spat itself, bits pieces, out of the box and onto the floor. The two hands started to put its whole body together. It was the old beggar lady. Buck-naked. Obscure the thoughts of flesh and blood. She looked simple, but peculiar. Her skin was still creased with them hard wrinkles, but it had the gleam of polish that Ma uses on newborn plastic. I knocked on her trunk. It made a hollow sound. Like the sound of rising water. "Now I need your help , little boy. Let me lean on you." The old gar lady rocked a little and ended up stepping on my toes. "Plug me in," she said. She pulled out a long cord from the crack of her bottom. Where wisdom flows so sweet to the tongue like honey. "This best not take long," Ma said, " I've got to pack more dung sages into Grandma's braid before noon, she being so bound in the that naturally comes when your old." Ma poked a finger into her ear. The seeing eye and hearing ear. "I assure you the cost of your time will be well spent," the old lady said as she shifted the positions of her hands. "Go and come back tomorrow. I will give , when the time comes." let out a yawn. "But you are one of the chosen few to the power of this product-on free trial basis." The beggar lady patted her own belly. She wrinkled lips of her long whiskers, her long snout .. "It won't cost me a dime?" Ma squinted her eyes at the glare.

"I'm fully redeemable for any trouble that befalls you. Just keep ed the receipt for funher notice ." Sheba toyed with the little rollers attached to the old beggar lady's ees. "Well then, I suppose you can stay a while bit longer. Just as long as u suck up that mess you brought in with you ." Ma drew a circle around din with her naiL Sheba clapped her hands. "But no funny stuff. Or I won 't hesitate to bury you neither." The old beggar lady crouched on the floor. I and Sheba nodded. We knew right well that Ma can keep her words 'ght. There was a humm. A song that causes vapors to rise. The old beggar lady puckered her lips. The long whiskers bristled. e was down on all fours like a jack-rabbit sniffing glue . Her arms and curled under and rested on little wheels that were tacked to her joints. low, her belly almost kissed the salt. She sucked in, and in no less than ee amazing strokes, sucked up all the dirt. With the increase of her lips, she was satisfied. She got up and smiled. She licked her lips as Ma left the room . A bit saliva dribbled down the old beggar lady's whiskers. Sheba kissed the floor. I fell on the ground as if struck dead. We decided to keep her. Ma hung the old beggar lady up on the wall with a handful of hooks en she wasn' t in use. I'd tickle her toes and she'd wail sometimes with dma to the tune of the fancy rich and famous. Sheba would dance, so pretty like. Like the precious oil upon the head, flowing down the edge of garts.

Ma would pluck off a hand , a foot, or her long mouth-brush to tend some stain that's been spilled. Grandpa never seemed to learn none. Sometimes, though, when Ma was asleepA little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest. -I and Sheba would pull the old beggar lady down from the wall and y with her 'pans. She had a bottom that snapped open. I had to dean good and thorough after each use. She had a leak. She dripped little ts down along the wall. Most times, she was dumb and mute, especially when Ma was dose 17

tered scot- tissue dress. By no means, he was not of scottish incestry. The full illogic of his attire was accentuated with the tarlatan that was replaced by a netted ballet tutu. His leggs, left crosswalked over the right, heavy ftl. tered stockinks and button shoes. Hubbard sat theatre width constrained track-minister repose. He handled in his right hand the curving woodscoop, tap tap, of a cane, a cane. Tap tap , he wood poke the tired floor every time Ciggy spewed smoke , and then off course, whenever he fell for his habitual senile burpings, tap tap. Sigmund with the cancerous upper jawstill stub.burn .ly insisted on smoking his Havana cigars-that is, whenever Lucia did not shade the room with her presence. But off course, she would smelt the thin escaping breath of burnt ashes later on. Sigmund loved the smell of lit cigars as if the air was fresh and blossoming. He also got anuttier amusing, benefiddle enjouselment out of smoking-that is, Hubbard distasted to his grated knees any smoke uespassing over his boundaries-to arouse his throat lines with smoke. It was silently considered fair dealing for Sigmund, or Ciggy Mouth as Hubbard nicked his label, for Hubbard annoyed him for early rise all the tic toes of never-faultering tap taps of his cane. With Hubbard's last tap tap, Sigmund accentuated hiss annoy.ants by an echo of tap tap fingered upon his crawling-ash cigar shedding the exhausted contents of smoked tobacco leaves onto the patchwarp quilt, and thereby, blow-wing them flutter leafed out of spite. Hubbard pluck-eared the scarpet of a lost parrot feather and twirled it betwixt rubbing fingers expenly as if warming a dart abowed to aim at no Tell . Appled-eyed, Sig strayed on straits. "Hey pickled feet ," Hubbard grazed at him suspiciously and impa路 tiently, "Piggled feat, prickled heat. Gib me sumthink goo to eats." Dense, softer and sow-eared he asked, "Tell me william befon you waste i wait ..." Hubbard leaned over with an insistent gloom. His frame sim路 1 mered to scheme a stilouette sofizzticate of light carved bare-boned in spy路 ral, teas-sing behind hymn . Glimmers of clear act -nodgle.mint spinned and twirled width his unresolved spearit. Half-forlornly, half-threateningly, he seamed to pout though his gestures have alreddy resorted to a mocking appeal of larfer at hurt knees. He soft-leaf whistled melancholia and the lyricals to hymnself, " fallen leaves unwound the air . . . out路 stretched branches bare . . . Blue Delilah, Sweet Delilah ..." Sigmund man -aged a pathetic cough in reply and released each of his breaths with a somber twhistle of gravity. He was week kneed in his numbbeard settings-hourlets toasted seconds and funneled sands slippered awaste too easily, too easily. Hubbard buzzed close bee-side him, neigh. boring his nagging wares. 20

posed the questshun again with an almost pleading look-one recognized as the same that spanned his face incessantly over the foneeth and more yearns. With his rites crossed over and left, Hubfiddled, onion peeled, and examined a rubber leaf from his both shoe sole. This soul man. "Shoo, shoo," Hubbard scardled, "you wretched flies, fly filed '"""'"-''4'J"Âˇ''-'"Y I meshelf says to you ." Slap! Slap! Hubbard flaps the rubber shoe shoo swatch upon IKll' â&#x20AC;˘.... u 's tired face and skinned, unamused-for at no flies in the vicinSlap! Slap! as san's wich Sigmund closed his eyes in responseHubbard width an annoying complacency. "Shoo shoo slap slap! Shoo fly, shoo flight, a choo a choo! .. . choose to swat your eye . . . a chew a chew!" burst the mimickink parrot as flapped over Hubbard and perched on the left bed knob . "Ghost away I tell thee ," Hubbard said. Slap! Slap! One two i.magairy, imagmanary fig.newtons of flies. Shoo, slap slap. Hubbard sat with a triumph.antsy tap tap of his cane, to which Sigmund feigned . 'ZZZ:Zzzz zzz,' as well as Hubbard 's fanciful fictive flies went 222 .'

Dense for the oddest momense, sigh.lence waltzed in- at first beat it soothsing to Sigmund, but later, this noted odd.ditty grew, and he knot wrestle his disturbulated curiosity. His fever boggle-minded at the ole senile delinquint could be twerdling anew. No tap taps. No slaps. Strangled- handedly, Siggy finally suck.comed and creaked an a peek to check. "Aha! I knew you were nut dead ," Hubbard stamped. "I assumed you had levered the room, or by anystink set my bloody pan on fire," Sigmund mun.stired. "That you wilt no doubt do yourself. Gas for you, never ass.u.me ...........n.. Redismember that all your liver long day dribbles," explaimed with a pointer as Sig quickly re.clam.erred to simmer.ulated He preyered, "Redismember our quiet Mutter who bound your feats yarn that summer." " I never win. teared to hail or heaven," Sig sid. "Oedi pussy! " blasted Hubbard. "And you?!" hung Sid. "I am truth jung to be afreud," smugged Hub. Sigmund, fee . bullied, rebutted by sweeping his leaping quilt over his IICUI-a,cne and maid like nobody home. To wince, Hubbard counter- reptiled by shouting, "That's it, my boy, so glad you thought of it-yes, yes, we must have a practice run 21

for your up-and-coming funeral. We mustn't forget ," he raisoned and graped an attemple to belly roll Sigmund within his quilt, "Yes, yes . .. " as when Lucia entarred and grazed at Hubbard's "u""''K.. proposal. "Sir, now, please, he is much too ill to be playing with ye now ," said as she tugged at Hubbard's shoulders and urged him out the " Please. Sir, let hymn rest. You can.dull him later. Now take your cane." Hubbard dejected, tapped downstares loudly. Hubbard duck ambled three-leggedly stoutside, and sibilated a tered of alley drone on his wait to requench his thirst . "Well, the blinds are heavy and poured a pitch to breed . .. blind are heavy and poored a pitch to breed, but your eyes run colder the wine i knead to drink . . . so , close your eyes and ease me to knees 'cause two night i've got no one else to go . . . tap, tap .. well . . . the spades clog my byways they check all sighs from me . the spades dog my byways they check all signs for me , but i leaf no trace 'cause the wind is at my ease . . . so, unfold your mind lead me down your street . . . 'cause right now i've got no wear else go . . . tap tap . . . so let me in let me in while 路 crawls an easy rain faster reel to real reel to real turn to cain solemn creed when tides recede night crawls easy rain . . . (like wine poured a pitch to breathe each so let me tease you to untame . . . . breeze a numb release) Well, the clock strikes a shaded past before the hour of clock strikes one shady cast before the Our of Twelve but so i hear no chamber bell . . . so , set your my sun burns black riot and start me rocking well 'cause two night i' ve got no time let me in while night crawls an to go . . so let me in rain . . .." tap tap tap . Tap, tap, clap clap upon a slap slap. His slapstick. A penny tap tap douse to the liquer shop to humor his spirit with jugular wine rum, or maybe whiskey. "Hullo, Sir Flemings, how can I ease your knife tonight? " greeted stocky, reddy- eyed clerk. " Dears and antelopes to you too," addressed Hubbard as he to a bottle of whiskey. "Hopsscotch me gosh,'' he imagined Sig's parrot have coughed a spout at that . The clerk with a slight hand hesitating, browed baggied it 路 exchange for a few crumpled bills. "You ought to lesson your drinkin' sir.

Sir Sigmund's well bit due to his excessive smoking. Aye, cancer it his pain now?" he asked . "Oh, he 's just.ice faking, putting on airs of smoke that wilt kill me befort him. Alio," answerved Hubbard. "Thank you , Sir. Watch them cobbles to slip and give my regards to Sigmund as swell, Sir," the clerk bid farewell. "I won't be needing this," thought Hubbard as he crinkled the feedbag and tossed it awaste . He snapped his cane handle open to a hollow interior. "Time to be refed, down the hatch it." He a slip before pouring the rest to fill his cane, then placed the bottle in the middle of the streak. Whisk, whisk, gobble bubbles, whisk. Soon Hubbard reely kneeded his crutch a cane as he tapped wobbling side waltz in a drunken stupor. Across the pin-striped street, walked this blue jay wild a woddling gramps wobbled weave a throat. The 'ole dottering spool is he-o' 11rV--r-v1â&#x20AC;˘n dim rim swallow perched specktattles and an o' hangnail of a betwixt his metaphores. A yippity yap clap clap tap tap with a heavy tap of a cane timbered play. "Mind ye those, mind ye dose," he , drottle droll all pixy-eyed and wagging finger, "Give me liver or give me dates," -on Fib.u.airy 29-leaps his submargin conaotlS-rtest stains aback. A wobble wobble, drink and baubles. "Give me spleens or glib me deaf," he stings. Whisk , whisk. A throttle round arouse a jugular vein bottle of whiskey in his hollowed cane tap, tap tap, tap-and whens his other pea.nut lookin' away, a quick of the cane upon his tongue-down the hatch it, 'ole boy. Whisk, , tap tap against a clap clap-his slapstick. He points his rears at the of those, "Mind dose mind doze, I says, I knose me prose in strollscane," tap tap against a clap clap. When a tickles had tocked a blinded mouse, Hubbard wobbled back into the house. Nut bean bothered to attemple to climb up the ~m=PJ4eS ; he curled up upon the tired , wood- stark floor and almoist immelarfter, he pinched a numb asleep , a snooze, a snooze. In the mourning a wake by shaking of Lucia, Hubbard rose scrambled the snews of Sigmund's demise. "Final.winged," thought Hubbard, ..he was stretching the w.hole bit too long." Well as the preperations were looked after by Lucia and acquaintances ("beastly frenzies ," thought Hubbard), he only needed to attend the funeral and lead the procession.

The air wore a thick cloak woven out of the limest of ten1oe:sturcs.1 Sweat crawled on the a. peeling bodies of tree branches, and the arranglement of insects insisted on a rather mundane incest of pro1pnetJ,i Thoughts dribbled slow and laid stilted. Sigmund lay very still. Hubbard itchingly rubbed his crossed , side slacks and twiddled his poke-it watch chain spinning a squashed whirled of miniturn brass sies. "I galloped past the Golden Gait with gallows of po~;tn1um.ero'U1 regrets," he muttered to Sigmund, "Didn't you have anything to me?" A tear slip-purred , fingertips of rain in his mindow; he ..........u ........ but for someone else. Sigmund still lay very still. Hubbard glanced at Sigmund. Sigmund had finally collected on stub. burn.ly smoked Havana cigars-he died, rather pain.faultly, cancer sandwiched betwixt his jaws. A prothesis was placed in view of upper palate and had been delicatered out-and morphine dead its Sigmund lay stilted, snug and shuttered in his coffin with no sure of discomfort arouse his wares. Actually, as Hubbard graveled clearing cough. in stand of last words to Sigmund, he was con-vinced of rather smug dimpression ribbing his brother's facial fish . With that, bard sweated a slight hesitashun of granting Sigmund an indulgence of last Havana cigar. "It couldn't hunt him now ," Hubbard sigh.lently. He surmised that at any length of his slice, Sigmund and had bean , at yeast a yentil, beastly frenzies in their mute.u .all oro1tner~ hood. Hubbard Jr. and Ciggy-so, he pocket ticketed a token cigar the cold-fleshed handles fixed in prey.err, that is, after Hubbard Sigmund's topstep laddered button, loose noosened his bow tie, and a green carnation by his rite earclasp. Hubbard moaned boring his unattenshun while enduring the -menial send off. Tap, tap, he poked and urged the somber pebbles scurry and git it over with, widdle, widdle, tap , tap. Sigmund's crayon-waxed parrot, the one that Hubbard had upon his pretzle.dented surprise at his 64 breath date , paced side by dle with his clenched-winged feat back and forth along the back seat railing . " Day is berried , day is buried, the coffin's ready to stay up night . .. Awrk, awrk ... man overboard." Siren the parrot """"路-路路v...... back and forth, back smack and forth , back and forth, crooning in back Hubbard until Hub pester-winged, stuck out his index finger and Siren 's pace. The pared parrot recaptured his shelf width a bewildered of breeze of his flail feathers.

"A wake in mourning son shall rise in gloria . . ." someone contimy eulogized, ("I wilt knot pray for thee ," thought Hubbard,) "Letnut wilt befon its thyme, a sprinkle, a sprinkle." Hubbard grew more impatient with dentist teeth, stuffed cough.in. jerked, stinging with an urgent need.dull of movement. Words by and dribbled mon.i.five minuets of patience. Hubbard grazed himshelf, counted, and polka-doodled the differessent collar-bred and hair mops of the peebles scat. turd within the churp. Mr. Smithereens was closet to him with his head hung low and eyelid • iPOilses draggled on the floor, "prodoubly sweeping a snap of sleep as as 1," thought Hubbard. Rice in frontal lobe of the bobbling man the Hunimungers, newlywebbed and inmediately more involved in own lubby-dubby pecks and squeezes than Sigmund's funeral. The - oo(x-heired dogster ringed ricely her hus. band. She was pregnate with idea that was at the tip of his tongue . Sigmund had been a quackified doctered who just haphazard to -~~ore his own add. vice to not smoke; he was chained to cigars with an contempt at anystink out of his habit. Moist recognibbles probably his forewarned patients. There was a bawling lump of a baby bean . -ued by its sMother and burped. Tap tap, poked Hubbard. A spinstir, Miss Anthrope, knitted a nag and was known to haggle any for a convenient pricetag. She swore black, as use.u.all. There was _ ....,..". lady three seats left of her with a tremendust hat upon her twiggly llat.Sed hair. "Must be to keep the wiggle from flying away," mused Hub. He was tempted to hunt flies and accidently knock it over, but IIIIC:StgJtt.did it was not worth the tremble. "Perhaps, Siren would take cares that hattie twat." There were a feud couples mar.ried and setted with stirs of mediocrity ~11nn.·,n their stares. One weighty pair seamed so heavy in lards and jollity make Hubbard wince in thought of a pew crash and hymn under it~IWL:l•Ut:l.l. There were also a spriteful of youngstirs-moistly at the stage of and flatter, wink wink and shy tease. ''As human beans often blunder estimate circumstances whimful and spastic throw of dice ..." the sum.wander still contimbered with _..,ull.:lt:u spokes. Hubbard sneaked a couple whisk whisk of the 'ole comD mH>nable cane. Whisk whisk. Aspirin' to beat a song, Hubbard let a lazy tossel through his boredunce head-ache. "To lay your eyes and lay your weary eyes beneath a pillow tree .. swat gimbles me forlooth a matter for ye three . . . says i watt a of matters pour each a penny's worth . . . grabble carving not a . . . and it certainly warts. . ." 25

Oblivious to the eulogist as he wars, he noticed a shuffle. The rose togather, bowed their heady bys in preyer and grace, " and no less, thought Hubbard, "for the thankinks to the end of this dulldrum ." Hubbard grottled by as five others tipped in to carry aweigh the drawer. Awe except two, swore piping heat exasperational expressions squashed any solemn gestures. As Hubbard dogteared in a late lazily, he issued only a left-handle index and tapped his stride stones judge- mockingly as they grudged on. Upon pebble cobbles stood a ished hearsay carriaged with two indifferent hoarses reined and eyes shields. The casket hefty-bagged pall was awkwardly shoveled in the cartridge with huffs and puffs almoist enuf to blow the houses down. and then , Hubbard climbed onto the mastear seat and urged the · to ease an effortless pace. Hubbard wheezed and coughed in and out as the procession ~•,•h,...u tailed behind. With the spacings trundled by residentists and .,...........,......,~ holme-steads, oblonged-faced Hubbard groaned a noddy foolybarrel , heat gradually startled to presspyre the steedies. A trot a trot bespangled trot a trot munched faster as the tailgating pebbles hastened themselves · footy toots as swell. Then Hubbard grave it to them; he whippled bang-tails in a sincreasing acceleration and hoofed. Tap, tap, clonk, swish. Upsteaming achoos and draggled the now gallow-ping plagued upstreak, upparent then it wars, that he had lost in sight membraines of the procession far behind him. Nevertheless, he made hay to the burial spite. Whoaing an ease, he waitered for the lagging and drugged the time freely with a whisk whisk of his cane full of toddlewinks. One by wander, exhausted, heaving gulps of air staggered like victims of an unhealthy marathorn. It was too cLear that the meny never bothered to continue , including Siren. So, with little ceremtonlal excercises, Sigmund was laid to wrestle the dirt.

ANATOMY OF AIR

I strapped her gown with hospital sheets, tore the faucets till they _ ......... of tapped water and semen flies . The wind pouted through a lllllped window. I wore the proper, rubber-proofed curtains of the day. , it was night. This monument is made for sausages, not for the flavor of pain. Persistence. Blood in nervous vessels, her arms stretched out and across for a stopwhile I tickled loose, but insistent feathers on her bare soles. Her tied to the knuckles of the brass bedposts. A pagan sign during the training . "You can't resist indefinitely." Bella whistled; a bird appeared out of the trap door on her forehead . picked up a strand of hair and flew spiraling upward, unwinding her, she was freed from the confines of the bed. She formed herself back ·-._..........~again . Her shell bonnet tightly hooked onto her bun , hair wound a braid and cautiously tucked under. " Now where do you want the dust?" She stuck out her tongue , and I locked it between her lips in a kiss. clenched her fists. I uncuffed the buttons on her sleeve and unscrewed right hand at the wrist. Tucked it into the folds of my pants. She manipulated the locket between her thighs with the other hand. overturned the nest of hummingbirds I had secured on her lap as She picked one up by the wing and plucked off the feathers by blowat them through her teeth, daintily as a wind undoes a dandelion puff. bit the head off, sucked it like a delicate morsel, a gumdrop or a butlte:rsc<>tdll. Looking intently at me, she chewed it into a pulp and blew a l hu•hhlll"'. A bubble of smooth white skin. She let it float unattached in the air. I clapped in delight. She blew again. Not only once, but several times. A slight of hand love of speed. And then, she stopped. I cried. 27

The leftover torsos of the birds lay mute like stubby finger-stalks the nest. "They're for you," she pointed, "to nibble on when your mouth wet and in need of flesh, plucked clean, as if untouched, pink and pimpled, though they're cold." I gave her back her left hand, screwed it on with the palm facing wards from her body. "For you to scratch your back with ." Grabbing onto some transparent tangent, she did a quick ,....,..,,...,h_ in the air. She landed silently on her feet. Her hand as well as her perspective were in perfect alignment again. She held her breath visibly; and the furniture , exhibited lamps, rocking chair ... wobbled on their toes, then slowly rose , floated in as if they had taken on the appearance of something lighter than cranes. She held out her arm and slowly twirled around with a er's grace. They followed the movement of her waist, fingenips , and . . . until the whole room swayed with a rhythm as natural as breathing. I tore my throat as the only discordant anchor. Everything ucâ&#x20AC;˘uu~:QI to her. The mobile and mute object. " Beware of imitations, the symbolically functioning object, the spheric chair." She provided valid examples and resumed work, twirling. She the billiard table and grassy coffin, aligned in a locked-mating uu~rtu\ru through the air. Cast shadows shifted their spiral-based designs. enthusiasm was not waning, and I was increasingly getting dizzy. "I have a theory for relativity, but wait for me." The paintings displayed followed her gaze. Automatism. "It's only a matter of creating a stimulating environment." She carried onto her field some astronomical blueprints. A man and woman. Without restrictions, but with intended precision, she sucked in great interest of air. With a spectral sex appeal, used paint from the vases bled into her mouth. The ponrait of my great grand uncle was his hair. Flowers out of vases, the ashes out of the heanh, and the tie my neck swam to her lips. My penis rose hard. She sucked in even harder. "Are you following me? Do you see?" The acute sense of unconscious mechanisms . Buckles off the chest and my belt, brass bedknobs, and the fine fur the slate rocking chair sprung in through her mouth . Growing bigger, was spinning increasingly faster. And faster. The walls of the room and 28

throbbed, palpitated by heat. She took one last agonizing breath the lights sucked out and into her great pregnant enigma. I spat out a tooth. My pants were wet. Bella slowed down . Swollen. The furniture and the other phantom , objectively offered , found their places again. And stood heavy, as her. A triumphant internalization of desire. She was glowing. Her round stomach showed flesh as a function of ~&&u.â&#x20AC;˘...uu ..... u â&#x20AC;˘. I lit a candle. Gradually, air and light had eased a return . "But Haus, when are you going to eat?" She patted her greatly stomach. It was radiating the visual incantations of the blind. She out a burp. Full brilliance. I could feel the heat longing to give life, and it grew more persistent. , I had to back away. My eyes wanted to stay independent of her eggconstruction. I backed out of the room. She sang. Her voice contributed a means of attracting sleep easily. I and lay newly baptized. "A loaf of bread begs entry into this tongue," she sang. Inspired.

Jesse McCarty THE RENAISSANCE WHALES

I am aswim in the rivers of whales, Rivers through oceans, rivers of Renaissance, Black and white whales, and steelgrey, and blue whales, Where I am a whale , a whale-river whale, In rivers of swim, in oceans of river, I joysombre Spermwhale, I Renaissance Riverwhale, churning the ocean, Completely at one with my moveplace, Coasting and gliding and powerdiving Through the whole Ocean, Realizing that I am a Whale, Realizing how I am a Whale, Moving, and moving, and part of the Sea, Feeling the sea, and the wholeness of sea, All the sea around me, and all whole Sea all through me, all the rivering Sea, from around my braindome Huge in front and all the way (smooth) Around me and along me, Clear smoothly to my tail , Sea along me smoothly to the tapering Tip of my powerleaf tail,

Braindome going through the ocean, Through the oceans, all rolling, Mountainous and sunsmooth, Braindome going through, Electric with sonar and matesong, Braindome lS feet across, 20 feet Rounded, heading through Ocean, The water smooth, around, alongme , Clear to the tapering tip of my own Powerleaf tail , and sea seaing on Into my wake, My lifelong, Lifesong Churning wake, All sea going 'round my lifelong lifesinging Domefront, and along me, and on, Into my lifelong waking, All sea through my mind and sea Into sea, going all Around me , Coming all around me, While I live and go , Gliding the sea,

All my being swimming and thinking, All singing out, and humming, and humping, Pan of the sea and the same as the sea, A brainboney, natural animal, Going, and looking, and coasting, Churning, churning, swimming eternally, Whalebeing, and oceanbeing, Me having no possessions for life except Confidence and power and family and community, All along with my powerdiving and powergliding, Bursts of energyjoy cranking Up and speeding, shimmering, and always curving.

SUITOR

This morning after breakfast I walked over to the, Kingman's place, dJess and I fell and bucked out a half-dozen cord. There's tamarack on e ridge behind the big hayfield, a good stand, the trees straight and tall , aced out well so you don't have to worry about one handing up when it oes down. Even though there's nothing really big up there-it's all secnd growth-the trees don't taper much and so you can make a good 路 e. Mter lunch, Jess harnessed up Buck and we began skidding. I had ever handled a workhorse, so I didn't know just what to expect. After a few trips down to the landing to show me the hang of it, Jess handed me the reins and took my place to set the choker. I held the thick leather straps loosely in my hands, like Jess had explained I should, until he gave the all clear, and then I flipped them across Buck's back. Buck took the bit in his teeth, and I tried like hell to get it back, but I couldn' t get his head down so I just held on running. He didn't stop until the landing, and then he stopped so quick I almost ran on top of him. Behind me, Jess was coming down the trail, laughing so hard he could hardly walk. I threw those leather straps right at Buck's ass, and he took off again with a lunge, that log swirling around behind him as he looped back. I jumped on the far side of the deck as he thundered by, eyes rolling, dirt clods flipping up behind. Jess caught him heading back up the trail. Buck stood there, black hide trembling along his back. "That son-of-a-bitch!" Jess started laughing again . "That son-of-a-bitch." Buck might have caught me off guard that first go-around, but I was ready for him the second trip: if he were twice the horse he is, he wouldn't have been able to get his head up. My dad always said that the first time a man or animal makes a fool of you, it's his fault; the second time he does, it's yours. I told that to old Buck when we started down with that second

log, and he got the message. I might be a fool, but I sure as hell going to be his fool. By the time Mr. Kingman came up from the house, four cords loaded on the truck. While we topped it off, shadows began across the landing until the sweat didn't run as fast and that lightheadedness from working in the sun went away. There was just enough chain to catch the binder. Instead of the pipe to use as leverage, Jess and I both pulled-it was quicker that -our legs over the end of the load, and finally our whole bodies, pended in mid-air, our weight slowly dragging the hooks together. As chain links grooved into the logs, chunks of bark fell away, until the 路 clamped into place. There's something about a binder fastened on a that really finishes it off, that sets something inside you free. Jess began unharnessing Buck while Mr. Kingman and I tossed saw and gas can on top of the load. " Art tried skidding today," Jess said. " Oh yeah?" Mr. Kingman said, a half-grin on his face as he turned me , "how'd you make out?" "Oh, Buck and I understood each other after a fashion." Mr. Kingman and Jess both laughed. Jess pulled the collar, and Buck shuffled sideways toward us, his tail and shaking his withers with dust flying in little clouds off his settling down . When he had worked out the day's pull, Jess and I led down the cutoff through the woods. Below us, shadows stretched the big hayfield, but the house was still in the sun's last rays, the soft brown with the windows reflecting a light gold. A half- dozen brothers and sisters were playing in the dirt yard, like I used to when I a kid. Shouting, their sounds carried up to us along with the un1muttle roar of the truck coming around the road on the far side of the hill. they heard the truck, they all raced across the field toward the opening the woods where the logging road comes out, running as fast as they the oldest one in the lead and the smallest one trailing, his short little churning in his coveralls. Jess rode Buck down the long-rutted driveway as I held open the wire gate, waiting for Mr. Kingman . The truck didn' t jounce like it when it's empty: it rolled , with a smooth heaviness. Hollering to other and to Mr. Kingman , their faces alive with excitement, the kids respectful distance down the lane before the truck as if they were it home. Mter the truck pulled into the yard, the women came out to see, Karen was there. She waved , and smiled at me , and when I waved

there was that special understanding between us that sometimes happens. Even though we don't say anything to each other. Mr. Kingman asked if I could stay for supper. "We've got to butcher · U be a little late." "That sounds good to me." Was that his idea? Or had he seen the way Karen and I had looked at other? "I'll get the gun," he said before I could read his face, and he left for house. The women trailed after him, Karen to the porch were she was churnbutter. The kids helped unload the saw and gas can. The fresh cuts the logs were clean, so you could count the age rings, and pitch was ~.......~·.•,. out of the butt cuts, gooey strings dripping down the deep red of the tamarack. Dripping down across all those years of growth, after ring, down over the little black core in the center-before I was Mr. Kingman came back out of the house with a .22 in one hand and ear of corn in the other, and we all walked around to the other side of barn, kids trailing after us in single file with their heads bobbing along the tail of a kite. In the lot was a big, young Chesterwhite, laying with feet tucked under him, his rear end sideways in a shallow, rooted-out . He raised his head, his ears flopping, and looked at us. Mr. Kingman handed Jess the corn, and Jess propped it against his stripping the crisp green leaves. The pig grunted, pulled itself up, feet first, and trotted over, high on his feet and stiff-legged-like a wearing high heels. Mr. Kingman took his knife out of his coverpocket, flipped out the blade, and offered it to me, handle-first. It was good and hard in my hand , a thick bone-handled knife, the pocketknife I'd ever seen. A half-moon is hollowed out in the end your thumb keeps your hand from sliding down on the blade. Mr. Kingman pointed the muzzle of the rifle in the air, pulled the , and inserted a dull brass cartridge. Then he eased the bolt into place nodded to Jess. Jess dropped the ear of corn through the planks into the trough and pig went for it. While bringing the muzzle down in a slow arc, Mr. Kingman began in a slow, gentle voice, more to the pig than to us. "You draw a from one ear to the opposite eye, then cross it with another line from other ear to the other eye ..." The pig was wide in the jowls, with a short snout and a pair of wideeyes, a deep reddish black. He jerked up his head too quickly and his

head went back into his neck with the shot, skin folded in ridges u~ullUv: his ears. The yellow corn dropped from his mouth , hit the ground and over. A red hole the size of a dime was above where it was supposed to be, a little trickle of blood flowing down into his short, wiry white hair. grunted-a deep low grunt that I had never heard before , like he , ..,~u-......., knew, with a thousand years of knowing, what it was all about. He swiftly, silently, and trotted around the lot to the shed clear to the where he lay down, feet out in front of him. "Take him, Art," Mr. Kingman said. I didn't go around by the gate, but straight over the top plank of lot fence. The dust puffed out around my boots as I walked, with sized splotches of blood every few paces; it clung to my boot toes, .., ...~......... 路 up dirt as I walked. I came up beside him, grabbed an ear, and pulling his head up in jerk, twisted it backward over my knee. The knife went in faster and than I thought it would. I jerked it once and jumped away as blood shot a thin geyser from the slit. Kicking stiff-legged, his hooves slashing the air, the pig with a great shudder, beating the ground with his body. When I turned back to Mr. Kingman, he nodded his head once both he and Jess looked away, from each other and from me. People don like to look directly at each other when you take down an animal like that. We hung the pig head-down from a doorway in the barn, the legs tied wide apart so that we could work on it. The kids brought a washtub around from the back porch, and we placed it underneath, ing out the heavy green guts and letting them slip downward into the the smell warm and sharp-like nothing else in the world smem>-:aoo then Mr. Kingman cut the neat, clean hole around the asshole so it all break free. As we worked out the liver, the kids lost interest and off to play. It was deep twilight when we finished. Jess and I squatted in the yard by the truck. We watched the coming up over the ridge behind the hayfield. Night shadows from barn and the house and the truck etched into the dry, dusty dirt. "Fresh pork liver," Karen yelled from the kitchen porch. "Let's go," I said. I was hungry.

unani-Kay Trask

ay tourist waste

~endezvous for

pimps Hong Kong hoodlums apanese capitalists haole punkers condo units of disease drug traffic child porn

AIDS herpes old fashioned syphilis gangland murder

gifts of industrial culture for "primitive" island people in need

of uplift discipline complexity sense of a larger world beyond their careful taro gardens chiefly politics lowly gods

Waikiki exemplar of Western ingenuity standing guard against the sex life of savages the onslaught of barbarians

STANDING OUTSIDE BERETANIA FOLLIES

private pans pleasing proponions fiUII~l;)Uâ&#x20AC;˘ lJ:; plenty-);

, ...uL-uu

Palmetto heels

Plinkity seranade as pets prowl pandered alley;

Oh, Sally! Your prepubescent pally Can poor hypothesize Can scarce surmise The tin pan dally Majestic Beretania plies.

pastiche: musical piece consisting of motifs or techniques borrowed many sources; musical hodgepodge Beretania: ref. to Great Britain

Beretania Follies was a well-known Honolulu striptease nightclub in 1950's.

P. Balaz

brah!

kahiko tonight! honor of da shiny new gods15 dollah entrance fee see who wins blue ribbon prize.

dance old

Jos~ph P.

Balaz

KALA TALKS

dey like me speak good Pelekane mo bettah I speak good Kepani-

da buggahs goin own everyting anyway.

kala

money Pelekane English Kepani Japanese

SQUATTER

His hut was a small mound on the wide sea of red dirt, and it had thiny-eight days before the rains swept it away. He built it the night the construction workers bulldozed Father's land, and the next mornwhen the workers arrived with cranes, tractors, an<;! truckloads of dirt to and landfill the streams, they found the wild grass and coconut piled in haste upon four bamboo stilts bound together by sennit from the husk of coconuts. I was sitting with Adam outside the , sandpapering opihi shells, which we would later polish with kukui oil into handsome jewelry to sell in Honolulu, when the construction came running and shouting, "Mr. Kapele , the old man refuses to Father stepped onto the porch and fiddled with his tie. " What The worker pointed to the lowland . "In that hut, there is an old man doesn 't move for anything, not even the sound of our machines." The whole family herded some hundred yards down the sloping land observe this spectacle. I snuck away from Mother and wandered among workers. "The devil ," said someone. " An ancient medicine man," said IIO<eorle else. The old man chanted Hawaiian words I could not underas I peered into the small, black mouth of the hut at his wrinkled his knees and shoulders pointed like the legs of crabs. "He doesn't wear clothes," I said. "He must be a squatter." "Get away from the heathen," Mother said. " No doubt he carries and lice, and once they enter the house they will infest the sofas and " I backed out of the hut, and Mother made me stand still while she with her fingers through my hair. " Who speaks Hawaiian?" Father The foreman , an elderly Hawaiian, took off his steel helmet and into the shanty where he and the squatter talked briefly in a mix of - .......u. and Creole. When the foreman crawled out of the hut he said that the squatter's 43

name was Koloa Kapika. "He calls himself the kahuna of Mipili. This is family's land. His ancestors are buried in the mountains ... in Some of the construction workers crossed themselves, murmuring to other as they walked away from the hut. My brother and I had explored trails to the end of the valley and climbed to the ridgeline where we as high as the clouds, but we had never seen caves or tombs made of heiaus. I looked at Adam, but he was absorbed with drawing a sn路cK-Ill! in the dirt. " There are no caves," I said. " Of course," Father said. "The old goat is a ragpicker. I see his forever combing the beaches when I drive to the city." "This man is different," said the foreman . "The men are afraid work. They say he will curse them with disease and turn their children wild pigs. My father once told me of a kahuna in the days of old who a man terrible arthritis. The man's family found him dead in bed and ried him stiff as a board to be burned, thinking it was the rigor, but the fire burned him to cinders and all his flesh was gone, they saw that skeleton was one giant rib." ''The men have to work,'' said Father. ''Or they don't get paid.'' "They refuse," said the foreman. "We go back to Honolulu until settle with the kahuna. " The construction workers drove away in a rumble of dust with tractors and cranes, leaving the hut standing. I looked at Father who dumbfounded; he picked his mustache and fiddled with his tie. The next morning during breakfast, Adam leaped off his chair pointed out the dining room window. "He's coming out!" Crowded around the window, we watched the squatter crawling from the hut. He looked like a small dog wagging his head, his silver matted and unkempt. He wore only a malo around his waist, exposing hind quarters-tanned- except for his loins , which were covered by thin strip of cloth. He crawled twenty yards to the stream where he his face into the water, and returning to the hut, he paused v ...., ....,.v.......11 rolling his body in the din or lying flat on his belly the way a sun lazes in the sun . Then he crawled near to his hut, crossed his legs, and as still as a wooden tiki. Father bolted out the door down the hill , and Adam and I ran keep up. ''I' II be civilized," said Father. ''I'm asking you to get off this land.'' "No," said the squatter. "Get off my land or I'll bring the police," Father said.

" Not yours," said the squatter. "Get off my land," Father said. "Do you hear, old goat!" Father to leave. "Are you gonna get your gun?" I asked. Father did not answer as he to the house. I approached the squatter and poked my finger an from the squatter's nose. "He's gone to get his gun," I said. "He's a man, but he's a pretty good shot when it comes to hunting. He's shoot a bullet through your head." The squatter's nosuils flared like hull's, and I ran away, leaving behind Adam, who was making faces , tryto make the squatter laugh . The squatter's nose was flat and wide, and his lips-grey, wrinkled, blistered-were those of a fish . His body was gangly, but his bent and the way he sat all crumpled up made him look like a monkey. left for the city, and I spent the day reading in his library. I greeted at the door when he returned in the evening. "I discovered what he is," I said. "He's some kind of Neanderthal " lmtted down in a block of ice from the Arctic." "Shut up," said Father. "Are the workers coming tomorrow?" Mother asked. " Where are the ? What did you do all day? What about the children, will they be "The squatter can 't survive without food ," Father said. "Nature will its course. He'll crawl away one night to save face. Then we can christhe land and build. Two or three weeks extra is nothing." But the squatter did not leave. He sat through hot summer afternoons the sun scorched the land, and the streams shriveled to ribbons, and earth, badly sunburned, cracked into millions of squares. When the winds lifted the floor of the valley, billowing douds of dust into the the squatter became a pillar of red dirt, his silver hair undiscernible. At he looked like an enormous ant hill, at other times, a beehive. Summer passed; school started. Despite Father's orders for absolute Adam talked in school, and the fishermen from nearby villages began visiting the squatter. They walked across the dusty flats, bananas, breadfruit, and pork or fish wrapped inti leaves slung over their shoulders. September brought heavy rains and flooding to the northeastern shores of Oahu. The streams swelled onto the lowlands of our valley, sweeping the out to sea, but the squatter remained. Sometimes only his head showed, and it was hard to tell whether it was he or a coconut bobbing on the murky water. At other times, I saw him back-floating, flitting his arms like dorsal fins to dodge large rocks that rolled like the humps of whales toward the sea. Now the villagers who visited the squatter swam or pad45

died long surfboards, and on nights when there was only drizzle, I the smooth hulls of their canoes making headway on the water. "Why doesn't the water sweep him away?" Mother said. ' doesn't he drown?" "I don't know," Father said. "He's over a million years old," I said. "He's already a fossil, bones can't die." When the rains stopped and the water drained off the land, the was muddy for many days. Walking home from school, I passed one of small coastal fishing communities that had been leveled by water. The lagers had come down from their makeshift refuges in the mountains rebuild their huts. Still, people visited the squatter. They slogged across our land, and Father's only solution was to post "No Trespassing" signs over our property. "Without food from the villagers," Father said, " the donkey will lose his strength. Ay, he is stubborn like a donkey and has the brain of a donkey." Father began locking himself in his study for long periods of · sometimes for days. Mother served him food on trays . This was not the time Father had disappeared from the world; he did this when he developing new plans. He had already built on our land an electrical powered only by windmills that he claimed generated enough eJectn:att for the entire island, and I had seen in the city the hotels and cort<lomulli urns he had designed with their revolving turrets that glinted in the and flashed at night-green, red, green, red-like helicopters. He worked with the U.S. Navy to chan the sea floor of the Pacific recording the location of volcanic hot spots, aquatic vectors and ter trenches and canyons. But there had been many false starts, incomplete sketches of buildings shaped like horseshoes, tunnels uu,uuwl.lll mountains, and pumps and pistons that could transform volcanic into energy. I caught glimpses of Father-his arm sliding the metal tray '"""•"•~"~1•1 the door, his back disappearing into the room. While I lay in bed, I his feet pacing heavily in the hallway. I smelled his cigarette smoke. I curious and began listening through the door in the middle of the night tO the tinkering-! thought my father was building an enormous watch. Eventually Father unveiled his latest creation, one of his smaller ideas, I was still fascinated to see in the center of the room upon the glass the model replica of the White Sands Reson: horse stables; golf courses; five tennis couns; and swimming pools complete with artificial islands and waterfalls, poolside bars, and bronze carp that squirted water. 46

"Wonderful," said Mother. "Twice the size of the original," said Father. "What about the squatter?" Mother said. "Squatter?" said Father. " From now on there is no squatter." When we drove on and off our property, Father and Mother no longer the squatter. Father gripped the steering wheel with both hands and sat ramrod stiff. Much of the road had been washed away by the , and on weekends, we drove to the city on twenty miles of highlittered with shells, coral , and dead fish . Arriving in Honolulu, Father Mother left Adam and me in Waikiki where we sold opihis, polished as irises, to tourists for two dollars a piece. And after my parents were shopping at the malls, they picked us up, and Adam and I divvied our money in the backseat during the drive home. But while my parents grew blind to the squatter,. Adam became obwith him . I watched him in those days from the corner of my eye .._,~v...r we passed the squatter, the way Adam sat with his hands pressed the window of the car, his eyes wild, an oval of mist where he the glass. Adam began visiting the squatter. He treaded across the land, last turkey or chicken in one hand. Adam would leave school early, and I arrived home, I saw him swimming alongside the old man up and the narrow streams. When Adam climbed out of the water and lazed the banks, his naked body glistened like a polished stone. He disapinto the valley and returned to the lowlands with mountain apples guavas netted in his shin. I saw Adam's freedom and I was jealous. "What do you do with him?" I said one day when we were sitting on porch. "I chew his food because he lost his teeth. I rub aloe on his blisters mosquito bites, and burn the leaches from his feet ." Adam emptied our jar of opihis on the ground and smashed each with a hammer. "Stupid," I said. "What are you doing?" "They are the charms of fishermen and should not be sold," he said. flecked the shards onto the din where they glistened like fish scales. "You owe me ten dollars," I said. "Bullshit," he said. I bloodied his nose. Adam began speaking and chanting in Hawaiian, and Mother, afraid Adam was possessed by evil spirits, called Father Iopa, to pray for Father Iopa arrived in a black robe and white collar, wearing a gold around his neck. After an entire night, Father Iopa, shaking his , left Adam's room and told Mother that her son was possessed by the "He chants toLono and Pele. I will take him to the monastery where

we can pray for him. I am sorry to say that the child's head has also infested with bugs and he will need medicine. You should burn the immediately. And that is not all. He refuses to wear clothes, and he has rible diarrhea. I believe worms live in his stomach because he says he the water of the streams." The next day, Father Iopa came in the jeep take Adam away. Father and Mother hugged Adam and cried. Adam pered in my ear, "Will you take care of him for me?" I kissed Adam on the cheek. I did not know him anymore. Mter Adam's departure, the squatter slowly turned an even shade black, and his shoulders and limbs appeared one slab. Father threw a big party to celebrate the twin tower skyscraper that would erect at the mouth of our valley whose escarpments opened on 路 of white, sandy beaches, coco palms and the wide blue Pacific. Father his investors stood by the parlor window, the sunlight lighting the in their hands, and looked toward the ocean and up toward the tains. "You have gold here, Kapele," they said. No one saw the squatter, probably because he looked like a When the sunlight hit the squatter at different angles , he sparkled as stone does. At other times it was impossible to see him because he grown patches of hair on his back, and when he bent over he looked moss. Still I knew that he was out there , crouched, hiding c:nrn,.,.,h,.. along the bank of one of the streams, blending with the other rocks pebbles. At school, the children from the villages stayed away from me, in the restroom where they emptied my pockets of all my money. I was ferent . My legs were white and smooth, not browned by the sun and ered with sores from work in the wet taro fields . I wanted to be an arch.Itc:G or engineer. My great grandfather had traveled in 183) with the mts:st~ aries to study Christianity in Europe where he had been baptized Solomona Kapele before returning to Hawaii. Years later, my father, Iakopo Kapele, son of Peter S. Kapele Jr., traveled to the rnruu路,,.",.. United States and attended Harvard University before returning to with his Caucasian wife Oessibel Hall) to settle on the land that was acquired by his father during the Great Mahele, the land division the Icing's land had been apponioned to government, chiefs, and people. I did not speak the pidgin dialect, for I had learned to imitate speech of my teachers, and they had arranged for me to go to the city take a battery of tests with other children-girls who wore dresses and who wore buttoned shirts, slacks, ties, and shoes. One day after school, the five Kalima brothers surrounded 48

me two miles to the beach. They did not hit my face, but they off my clothes and burned them in a fire of driftwood and dried They beat me until I could not stand, and kicked sand all over me. I opened my eyes, I saw their grandfather, Josiah Kalima, stooping my head with his withered hand. "Why you hun this boy?" Josiah said. One of the boys spat on me. With his good hand, Josiah slapped the face. "But he's bad, kupuna kane," the boy said. "He lives in the valley." "Ay," said Josiah. He shook his head. "You fat~er is the crazy. The . The misfit . What good he do? Help us catch fish? We live a hard I was born a cripple. Look my hand. No more thumb, no pinkie." He his stumpy fingers. "No more car. But still I would not be your What kind of Hawaiian you? Kill you own people. You are a tragboy. Go home. Don't come back. You hear?" I forced myself up and ran. I ran as fast as I could. I fell down, and I got up and ran again. I fell. I heard them laughing. I hobbled to a of mangroves and hid there among the thick leaves and wiry until dark. That night my body hun all over, but I didn't tell Father and Mother happened. For two weeks, I didn't take off my shin, and I stayed far from the Kalimas in school. Afraid that I would run into the villagers came home on the road, I searched for another route behind the school discovered a zig-zagging trail beaten by pigs or dogs through the wilof thorny haole koa on the foot of the mountain. Once home, I afraid to leave the house, and in my spare time I took Adam's place at window, staring down at the stream and the open space of din where squatter sat like a rock. I wondered how the squatter withstood rain heat, how he lived without food and water. What magic he must poslhated him . Owing my second week of solitude, the trade winds lulled , the wind , and the Kona wind swept across the valley, bringing the rotten to the house. It was then that I knew the squatter had died long ago. wind carried the squatter's smell from the lowlands. The dead smell my nostrils. Even after the trade winds returned, I could not forget smell. "Where are we going to bury the squatter?" I asked. "What squatter? " said Mother. "It is the cesspools of the villages," Father said. "But when we build hotel we will install a sewage system that will pipe everything into the ,

I nodded, walked to my room, and tried to read, but I only tossed around on the bed. I returned to the dining room window to watch the squatter. He was shrinking. His body lay on the ground, a water of skin. His head was the size of a baseball. I went to the refrigerator, and when I returned with a cup of juice, I discovered that his skin had dried and shriveled and blown away, leaving only his bones that glistened in the sunlight like ivory tusks. I dreamed that night that his bones turned to powder and the winds swept through the valley, lifting him into the sky. The next day I wakened and he was no longer there, and I thought a heavy burden had left me and that my dream had come true.

Janos Olah Bundas

Mikor idekoltoztunk, ugy gondoltam, tiiladok rajta. Csak akkor enyhiiltem meg nemileg iranta, amikor kiderult, bogy -bar tobb gazdaja is volt-senkinek se kell. MeggyUlt a baja neki is evvel-avval, a postas a fogat vene ki, mas massal kedveskedett: kovel, rugassal, mergezett hussal, ki-ki a termeszete szerint. Kozben azen sem maradt ados , lassan a kornyek reme lett belOle. -Nem sajnalja a gyonyoru gyerekeit ett61 a pocsolya kutyat61-kiaba.It at, talan komondor-szorere, puli-borzassagara celozva a kerftesen a szomszedasszony a minap. -Pusztulna el a ronda kutyajaval egyiittdobta a foldre ugyanakkor a leveleket a postas. Hat fgy allunk?-kepedtem el, annal inkabb magamra ismerve benne, minel tobb hanyattatasa keriilt a napvilagra.

·.

the time we moved to the suburbs, I should get rid of him. mtened when I heard that nobody liked him he had had several masters. got into scraps with numerous peoplemailman kicked his teeth in ; indulged him with different gifts: , a good punch, poisoned food . -.,,""'·h• followed his individual bent. ""'"w'""= he repaid his debtsbecame the dreaded nightmare of my neighbors. should guard your children from this beast!" she was alluding to his motley state.shagginess, his thick komondor fur. week the mailman tossed my letters on the stairs: to hell with your dog.'' this is how things are? " I asked flabbergaSted . tuc•gm'.zed myself in the dog, the vicissitudes of his fortune.

Jack Shadoian ARMENIAN MOTHER

you can' t laugh don't even try not yet Turks burn out an eye they hold a tongue to cut it off oh god it hurts it hurts somewhere behind you the river rocks dead children don't laugh yet don't cry forget soon all you know or see then go laugh

if you can go love

Paul Ramsey TilE DESERT MAKER

He built the desert, slowly at first , his hammer striking resistant rock many and many a time, then striking the fragments until they glittered sand. Until it was easy, accustomed, a smooth labor. Next he invented the machine, rock- driven, sand- spiralling. The loops of sand went back into the energizing dust and sped the machine, friction perfecting labor until the efficiency was more than one , his fingers sandy at the controls, rapidly in motion, rustily smudged , his nails beginning to crack. He turned off the switch. His hand grasped, ached , blistered , returned with an anguish to flesh of flesh, bone of bone, sandless, still functioning, human, warm. His lungs, little hammers and crystals, sobbed slowly warming as the sand settled, as air-enough in barely enough time-cleaved the sand spirals, fed his blood, hean, the dance of oxygen, the climb to soft valves, lymphatic enclosures, a place of thought cooling from its own ardor, protected of sand. He climbed rock, looked on saltened , brackish oases, mirage or not, ready or not , seen . The rocks which he had not built or invented, held his weight, stayed. On rock he meditated rock, in desert air.

Rebecca Lee 45 IN A DRY SEASON

The cat turned into a rock. She put it in the back yard. It died. She said, " I didn't think it would die. It's a rock." But it did. She placed her heart in the sand . A seashell. The waves juggled it, tossed it, beat it . It lost its markings. No one could tell it was a heart. It was a grain of sand. Her cum was dark. A hole in a rock. Her mouth was sand. She drank seawater and ate seaweed. And the wind nippled the rock. The palm prickled in the wind. She climbed it. The bark notched her sides. The fronds tangled her hair. The air fenced in the desert. James Dean, James Dean on my shoulder. You said, "That car's got to stop ." You kept your foot on the pedal. It hit you. Then you became James Dean on my shoulder. A monkey. The Elvis impersonator wore red pants. She slicked her hair with sea foam. She curled the left lip of a wave. In grace. On land she felt it when she danced. She drummed a red flower. Her smile shadowed the grass. The wind ripped it. She hid it behind her heart. A butterfly's wing. A pixie peeked from behind a grim shoulder. She said, "I have my eye on you, dark one. I watched as the sparrow flew . I have my eye on you, scarred one. I see you through the feather blue." The wave roared overhead years long. A grey dome . She slithered among the spokes of vanna. She danced with dolphins . They kissed her. She leaped through the crest of the wave . The sky smiled .

Ursu1e Molinaro

WORRYPATTERNSOFGEOMETRY

The watcher's eyes are dark ovals, framed by the glass slats of a first-floor window as by a veil. Which does not necessarily imply that the watcher is a Bedouin woman, although the eyes are all that is visible to the outside world. -Unsuspected by the watcher, who feels totally invisible at first . Who realizes only later that the street light that slants in through the tilted window slats picks up the eyes. Oily reflections on the surface of night that flicker into the vigilance of the dark man who emerges from the flesh-colored boardinghouse directly across the street from the watcher's window. At 4: 30 in the morning. The flesh-colored boardinghouse rents mainly to the young. A specific type of young whom the watcher recognizes -by surrealist hair & nightshade makeup; a peculiar stride, indolent yet purposefullong before they turn into the well- lit passageway that leads to the apartment doors on the groundfloor. Facing the doors is a fence of frangipane leaves & fruit , wrought in heavy black iron . The owner perhaps only the manager is a solid young island woman with glasses , & a fat black braid that hangs down her back like a rope. She lives on the groundfloor apartment nearest to the street, with a sleek brown cat, & 2 white chickens. She always lets them out together, & when they're ready to go back inside they line up in front of her screen door: The cat in the middle, the larger chicken which may be a rooster toward the street, the smaller hen toward the door of the dark man, at the end of the passageway. They don' t cry out. They don't whine . They don 't scratch or peck at the screen. They sit in a straight line, patient, trusting that sooner or later the door will open to let them back in . & they're right. Whereas the door does not always open to impatient young renters who pound on it for what sounds like hours. Yelling that they lost their key, & need to have a right to be readmitted to their rightful, paid- for efficiency units .

The flesh-colored boarding house comes alive mainly after midnight. When the dark man 's screen door starts opening & closing on soundless, well-greased hinges. Emitting a muscled shadow arm , with a hand that closes to receive, withdraws briefly, & returns as a shadow fist, that opens to remit . Something that remains invisible to the watcher. Something that passes too fast to be seen. Into the outstretched instantly closing hand of an expectantly leaning shadow figure. Whom the watcher recognizes as one of the regulars. One of those who come almost nightly. The watcher has given them names: The most regular is Whiteboy, a sugar-faced young man in a white Tshirt, with a military haircut. He teeters into the well-lit passageway on bicycle , arms flailing to ward off the fence. Then flies back into the like a winged steed. Next is The Bride, a tall skinny girl, always clad in a long white gown the way to her bare feet . She slinks in with her chin on her chest , shoots back out like an empress on coasters. Then comes Mother, a roundish woman in an ample skirt , who always ries a baby; perhaps a large doll. &Jesus, a tall cat-like man with flowing hair that glows under the light the passageway. He is clad in a G-string, as though he were coming ntrPnllâ&#x20AC;˘ from the beach. Where he may be living. & The Ringworm, a slender androgynous figure in a glittering tank who wears bracelets on both arms, from the wrists to the elbows. Some nights the watcher counts as many as 18 shadow figures, floating & out of the passageway. -At what appears to be precisely intervals. Never do 2 shadow figures pass each other, although The stands waiting at the screen door as soon as White boy has bicycled out. When it's over toward 4, or 4:30 a.m. the whole man steps out into well- lit passageway. His impressive torso casting the shadow of an ,Âˇrm.,,.,,... triangle on the ground ahead of him as he leisurely walks toward the - - The watcher's name for him is Tri- angel.- The torso is the work of a conscientious bodybuilder: the ,.v,-,.,.,.~, wide base of the shoulders sloping toward a waist that narrows almost to point. He easily circles it with his hands. Which he often does, when he stands on the sidewalk buttocks quivering inside black-and-white- striped swimming from which emerge energetic shon legs; the spike-haloed head

, almost neckless, above the impressive expanse of the shoulders up at the watcher's window with deliberate directness . -If it were daylight, the watcher would be able to see the zipper-pull Trihad tattooed slightly below his Adam's apple, as if it were attached to the 2-inch-wide scar that runs down the built-up chest, all the way into the swimming trunks. Although, in daytime Tri-angel usually wears a loose white shirt over black exercise pants. Lately his deliberate staring has been forcing the eyes of the watcher into a Jock denouncing their visibility before he floats back behind his door. Or around the corner of his building, out of sight into the parking lot in the back.

Which worries the watcher. Who has been told about : Eyes on the Sueet. By the Police Commissioner. llepeatedly. On Radio & on TV. According to the Police Commissioner, Eyes on the Street are the law-abiding citizen's best protection. Better than burglar alarms that only irritate the neighbors, but don' t send them rushing to their telephones. -The alarm is still whining away when an owner returns to his car. To a chorus of: Turn it off, Asshole. People are sleeping. As well as his The returned owner finds his radio neatly lifted out. As well as 5 expensive small white envemobile phone, if he had one. lopes he was stupid enough to store in the glove compartment. According to the Police Commissioner, Eyes on the Street are more crimepreventive than mace in a woman's purse. Which is the first thing a perpettator snatches, before mistreating her otherwise. More crime-preventive than the police whistle she carries around her neck. On a suing the perpetrator uses to strangle her with . But the watcher also knows about eyes that look, but seem not to see, from reports on Radio & on TV. Eyes that see , but do nothing about it. That watch a rape progress, & culminate in murder, on a suburban summer evening, & no one rushes to the telephone. At least not until it's over. & the perpetrator has left the scene. & there's nothing left to watch. Because, watching a crime taking place from an invisible front seat produces an adrenalin rush that beats expensive drugs. & it's not illegal for the watcher. Who may be an insomniac, idly staring from a first-floor window, at 2, 2:30, 3. 4, 4:30 in the morning.

An old man who happens to live across the street from the flesh-colored boardinghouse. Whose nocturnal liveliness he can 't help watching, when he gets up for a drink of water, or to smoke a cigarette. standing by the window. Who feels exposed by Tri-angel's deliberate stares. & has tried to send little signals of non-interference. Waving a hesitant half-raised hand . But so far his overtures have gone unnoticed . Or at least unacknowledged. If anything, the staring seems to have intensified. Sometimes Tri-angel is joined by various shadow figures Whiteboy, The Ringworm who stand on either side of him, staring up. The watcher hastily steps away from his window. He does not want to be mistaken for Eyes on the Street. But then he hastily steps back up, worried that they suspect him of rushing to his telephone . -To report what? Three people standing on a sidewalk, at 10 minutes to)? He waves: Hi! To stony stares. Then hastily lights a cigarette to camouflage his unacknowledged gesture. He hopes they don' t hold him responsible for the swarms of police cars that regularly swoop down upon the flesh-colored boardinghouse. -At least once a week. Usually in the daytime, when Tri-angel is asleep. Or out, building his body. Often on Sunday mornings, when the working neighbors are at home. & resent young keyless allnighters yelling & pounding on doors. Or screaming bloody hangover from inside their efficiency units. Usually the solid young manger I owner comes out & talks to the policemen . She stands barefoot on the sidewalk, rebraiding her hair. They scribble into small brown books, & soon drive off again. Even so, the watcher does not wish to be associated with their fleeting presence. He has been wondering if Tri-angel recognizes him when he sees him in the street. By the eyes. If he has noticed that the tall old man with the Panama hat has the eyes that stare down at him, at odd hours of the night. He probably does. He probably knows all there is to know about him. That he's a professor emeritus of mathematics. Who still goes up to campw one day a week. On Thursdays. He has been wondering if he needs to worry about being recognized. or a About perhaps being intercepted on his way to or from campus store some beautiful Island day. -He rarely goes out when it

Pushed inside the open door of a waiting car, & driven to some place. & roughed up . Or followed to his apartment, pushed , etc. -When he'll probably have a heart attack; & die of fear. As a warning not to make any more phone calls to the police. he has never made. & has no intention of making. Ever. Shon of a rape, or a murder. Tonure. he doesn't expect to be seeing. At least not at Tri-angel's shadow . The man has a voice like Paul Robeson, with gentle inflections he soothes lamenting shadow figures on the rare nights he runs out nights his door remains closed, & they hang around the well-lit pasor on the sidewalk, looking like lost children whose father has on a ride without them. man can't be a tonurer/murderer/rapist . He's too pragmatic to give to violence. Unless it's useful violence , necessary, like roughing up a ~ao;uu..... informer. Jttlgn.terled old professor emen路t us of mathematics. Who is trying to exorhis fear of the dark man Pythagorean fashion changing invened trianinto reliable squares. On endless sheets of graph paper which he then & flushes down his toilet, in a private pagan ritual. himself for playing second-childhood games. having reached an age of second androgyny, when men grow breasts. age of frailty that can no longer rely on the body's reflexes -like ~....... ,...,. a suspiciously waiting car, or running from someone's pursuit& has grown apprehensive of the outside world. whom he tries to present a still-able-bodied image. has stayed carefully lean. & is meticulous about the clothes he wears. 路 casual clothes: Extra large white shins to hide his age-nasbreasts & sleek black pants. Not unlike the daytime attire on the l"&',..........y able body ofTri-angel. he fantasizes spreading rumors about him. Among the other in his building: A 2-storey rectangle which rents mostly to reGood afternoon, enthusiastic: Good morning, Professor Good evening, Professor How are you, Professor . .. used to avoid as politely as he could. But now they seem to be avoiding . Avening their eyes when they pass him on the stairs. Using the other 61

exit, when they spot him standing beside the mail boxes, waiting for the mailman. -Who has stopped saying: Hello ... It's a fantasy that borders on paranoia. His wondering what unspeakable obscenities they've been told about him, that paralyzes even their old-folk curiosity. Unless they're suddenly afraid of catching old age. & are avoiding also each other, since most of them carry the disease. -Most of them lea well than he does.-Which is turning into an epidemic, & they don't want to be lumped in with the ever-growing army of faceless invisibles & 路 dibles that is invading all the public places. With canes, & walkers, mumbled monologues of apology for still being. Wherever they are. moring for attention. -Which translates at best into a seat on the bus. Onto which the watcher gratefully sinks, with a muffled groan of Because of the 2 paths of pain that have recently begun to lead from buttocks to his knees, & down the front of his legs to the second toes. Pain as a teacher of anatomy. He forces himself to walk anyway -If you don't use it, you'll lose路 (Lose what? The pain?)trying to disguise his increasing "'v'""'.,. behind a jaunty swinging of arms, & a ram-rod posture. Lest deduce a slowing of mind from slower legs. Which is also why he a carrymg a cane. Sometimes the pain becomes overbearing. Exclusive of his other t'rtter路estli & he has fantasies of asking Tri-angel for some of the relief he has him hand out his door. But he doesn't know how to approach him. If he stops him in the street, & whispers his request even if he in a normal casual voice the man will think that it's a set-up. deny that he hears or understands what he's being asked & oro1bat禄11 become more determined to mistreat him . The same would probably happen, were he to stand quietly outside angel's door some night. Upsetting the precise schedule of shadow Whom he has also thought of asking. - How did they find out to go for their pain-of-life relievers?But they've been about him. Some have stared up at him. & would probably pretend not hear or understand his question either. Or else drag him before ..........,o for mistreatment. 62

So he does nothing. He stays away from his window when he wakes up at night. Depriving himself of interesting goings-on, & fresh night air. He lies on his bed & watches the smoke from his cigarette come alive in the light that slants in from the street, & form rhomboids & dodecahedrons as it drifts toward the tilted window slats. He does not get up & go to his window when a high-pitched female voice breaks into hysterics at a quarter to 4. Give me my shit! she yells. I'm not moving from here until I have my shit! She refuses to let herself be consoled by the Paul Robeson-voice that keeps saying: Tomorrow, Baby . . . tomorrow . . . tomorrow . . . tomorrow for sure . . . tomorrow. . . . The voice is ocean deep. So soothing that it welds his wandering consciousness to a dream: In which a fire engine comes howling down his street, & stops in front of his building. Its lights spin red circles on his ceiling, which he lies watching. Counting their rotations. Until he wakes to the shocking possibility that his building may be on fire. When he flies into his clothes, & to the window. To his relief the fire truck is parked flush to the curb of the flesh-colored boardinghouse. Whose youthful renters are crowding the sidewalk, mingling with night-shined retirees from across the street. Whose Eyes on the Street have turned into mouths, strident with curiosity. The solid young Island woman stands draped in her hair, directing 2 laughing firemen armed with huge pliers toward the end of the well-lit passageway. Where The Bride is clinging to the iron frangipane fence like a giant nightmoth. She handcuffed her ankles to the iron frangipane stems to make sure nobody could make her leave. The laughing firemen force the handcuffs open with their pliers. Shaking their heads when she remains immobile on the same spot. The others gather on either side of her, & stand staring up at the watcher's window. The line of their eyes is the hypotenuse to the right-shoulder angle ofTriangel's shadow torso that is preceding him down the passageway. He's coming toward them, leading a pitbull on a flesh-colored leash.

CHASING WATER

are they saying? half light grey ducks are not talking, blowing horns, chasing mystery over the water, at each other. INobo<tv listens to anybody. scold. Winter

mystery, mystery, only God 's ground.

Goldie Chenoweth

NO PLACE CALLED FOREVER (A DIO)

Let us live in the country And play idyll forever In harmony with the deer At our back door. Running wild With the rabbits of the glade In front of the field, Walking in that bristling field , Hiding in the circling moist woods With the curled ferns engaged One with the other in lacey Patterns and dense entwinings. Sparing no songs at the sunrise And no cock a doodle do's At sunset when the sheep In the pen bray. Let us cavort with eternity here In the meadow lands Blessed with rainbow lights. Let us play with the orange Turtles from the garden outside On the living room floor And rise in the morning Like the purple clematis at our kitchen Door, to sing matins In praise of the fields everlasting And the ancient grey rocks eternal.

a ftre and cold water can split a rock a dog tear down a vine the tunles disappear silently a cottage house ghosts and long emptiness. let's not live there too long for, , no place is called forever life is but a station moving and dying.

Goldie Chenoweth

LA VITA NOVA

A new life. Swimming Waters. In the dark Streams that run Continents, islands, countries. My silver scales, gold Eyes, motility. My gills breathe And their songs set The sirens free .

ADOLF

where due, old spon the flight of my life; at seventeen most worthwhile men are in a flat spin . I was most wonhwhile. for pulling me out from the good school , from violin lessons , from funereal remorse over a shavedhead coffin-bound young sister, from masturbation after confumation , from the tennis club, Miss Hunter Dunn, from the good life. know about the good life, Adolf. one you never had in Linz-or ever. had the good life . But it was no good. wanted to end it; the old death wish. ll'!CitbJIOI! brave. No air rifle to the Christian brain. gas in the aeromodelling room . No healthy poison dribbling into the bathtub. ,.......,.,, ......路,'"y no magic end in a bunker with a tragic, flaming fraulein . (No fraulein gave a damn .) Nothing brave . But I prayed for an agent of the dark to ftnish it painlessly with speedy syphilis or a mauve kosh in the lonely night slums. Thanks, dark agent of Lucifer For a deadly baptism, for the living ftre,

For sending the Jews seeping over the channel with marred or frostbit limbs and stories of blackshirst bullyboys and sad camps. For firewatching the droning nightblitz lying with dozing shopgirls and storytelling oldtimers. For the headshaking love of codgers and crumpets For the flight from pacificism to bomb bays For posting me to shaking, fiery London; For Manchester and the wondrous chatter of the holy alien Nonh; For dancing France and sunburnt Tripoli; For bruised Benghazi, Cairo and old Palestine; For smiles and scowls with friendly crews and Jerry prisoners; For bunkering trysts with wombwarm WAAFS, and desert funerals with a fractured bugle or the dripping coffin. I owe you, Adolf, mein gnadigelebensfuhrer. Danke schone, old lifesaver. Happy landings. Rest in peace. For good!

LUNCH

I was flapping my round fan less from the heat in Sato's office than my usual feeling of nervousness around my Japanese colleagues. had always been a suffocating closeness in Sato 's guarded citadelwall of books without the appearance of order or regularity, the enorwooden desk equally chaotic with its scattered piles of paper, the maroon couch on which I had sometimes found Sato lying in his even the box-like refrigerator in the corner by the washstand . llm,eh<Jtw my colleague's office always reminded me of a Japan that was at overly static and yet overpopulated. "That was a delicious lunch. Thanks again," I said, wondering why rauw••J'I; and Kinoshita had invited me in for more talk. Actually I had to return to my own office down the corridor where I was hoping to a few letters to friends about my safe arrival in Japan. "The coffee wasn' t good," said Watanabe smiling, his thick-lensed somehow adding to the dissatisfaction . One of the main topics we talked about over the curried rice and vegetables had been sports, · Watanabe's heroic jogging feats of eight to ten kilometers each ~··~l"-· After all, he was, he kept reminding us, ftfty-four. He appeared vigorous to me as when I had last seen him six years ago. I looked on as Kinoshita wiped the sweat off his thin arms. Late along the Sea ofJapan can be extremely sticky, especially under an afternoon sun. The handkerchief Kinoshita used for that purpose was white, always neatly folded when he extracted it from his pants "Here, have my seat by the open window," I said, offering to take his on the couch. I half rose even as I kept my round fan in motion. "There's too much sun by the window. Much obliged anyway," IIDoshl·lta said , putting the handkerchief back into his left trousers pocket. ftne, just ftne." And he came out with his usual delicate soprano "Kinoshita's the aesthete among us," said Watanabe, taking off his and wiping the sweat from them. "And Sato , as you know quite

well, is the nervous one. All you have to do is glance at him." Even Sato joined in the laughter. We had spent the first half of the lunch talking about Sato's bruised loin. The restaurant he had driven us to was itself a fractured hole in the wall with its half-dozen tables, its chef busy behind a counter piled with magazines Japanese students like to read over their plate of pilaf or spaghetti or breaded shrimp. The Golden Grill was about a ten-minute drive from the university campus, though Sato's nervous turns and sudden stops had made it seem longer. "He claims he got it carrying a sack of books on Virginia Woolf," Watanabe had said just before putting a large spoon of curried rice into his mouth. " Actually it's from too much sex with his beautiful fifty-eightyear-old wife," Kinoshita suddenly interrupted. " Is that not so, Watanabe?" "Stop that!" Sato had said, waving a cup of steaming broth at Kinoshita. "Those books were really heavy!" Recalling the scene made me smile as I watched Watanabe wipe his glasses with a Kleenex he grabbed from a box on Sato's desk. Somehow I was reminded of the way Japanese women seem to age faster than their mates whereas in America the reverse seemed to be true. Sato jumped up to arrange some teacups on the small table to my right even before he said, " How about some green tea? Japanese? You know?" And he turned to me as if the decision were all mine. "Of course," Kinoshita said, immediately nodding. "Where would Japan be without its green tea? By all means, let's have some." "But we just had coffee," said Watanabe. "I don't mind though." "I had milk-not coffee," said Sato, whose passion for accuracy was known to all of us. At lunch we had learned not only about Sato 's loin complexities but also about the limits of his caffeine consumption. "You're turning into a slobbering baby," said Watanabe, who was already pouring some of the tea leaves into a white porcelain teapot on the small table. The water had been heating in one of those plugged-in Japanese thermos jugs of brobdingnagian size. "You used to be our master even in the preparation of boiling water for coffee," I said, surprised as I had been earlier about this change in Sato's catalogue of nervous habits. All of us taught English at the university, but at times I imagined Sato lecturing to his general education students about the various brands of coffee beans one could purchase in town. When Sato had ordered his cup of hot milk from the Golden Grill waitress, he had said, "One cup of java a day and only at breakfast." As he

路drank the heated milk, I had seen traces of white lingering at the of his thin lips. Before long he kept making faces . Eventually he comi;D~Wl(:d about the strange taste. "Perhaps they took it straight from the cow's udder," Watanabe had pounding his hand on our shaky table, perhaps waiting for some ~..,,.,..-"'" sarcasm from Kinoshita. Even as I was recalling Sato's cup of warmed milk , I couldn't help saying when I saw how Sato was still being teased, "Well, you probably see ~eVeral changes in me ." But Watanabe suddenly burst fonh with, "Oh, but we don't see a single transformation in you, do. we?" I didn't like his choice of words, but I said, "Oh? Come on! I've got all this uncovered space on top!" "Yes, still it makes you look even more intellectual," Kinoshita said with what I thought was Japanese grace. I was the only one who laughed, yet almost at once it seemed to me that they were indirectly telling me, yes, I was six years older since that first uip as their visiting lecturer and the passage of time had made a difference. "Kinoshita's the intellectual in our group," Watanabe said. Across from me at the cramped Golden Grill table, I had noticed the perpetual smile on Kinoshita's smooth face, and I noticed it again . Not once had I seen even a whisker along his cheeks, though he might have grown a Meiji-style moustache if he had wanted one. For a brief moment all of us were silent as if the word intellectual had some special power. It seemed to me my three colleagues were giving it special consideration, a silent reverence before some imaginary shrine. Suddenly a motorbike sped down a street along the campus, and then I heard footsteps and two or three voices muttering in soft Japanese , perhaps some university clerks checking equipment before the resumption of classes in a week. "They hated intellectuals during the war," Kinoshita said, the unusual tone in his voice surprising me. "I mean soldiers in the army did. That's why I joined the navy." " You were in the navy?" Though I had known each of them for two years during that first visit and had carried on a sporadic correspondence with each one, I had never once asked them about the war. It was a subject I had avoided in spite of Japan's meteoric rise in the four decades of the postwar world . "He was supposed to be a hero on a submarine," said Sato, pouring hot water into the teacups first to warm them, something I remembered from many visits to his office during those earlier years.

"I don't get it," and I looked at Kinoshita for an explanation. "You never heard of the two-men submarines?" Watanabe asked. "We had lots of them. Just aim for the red, white, and blue, and wham! A smile on our Emperor's face! " "Were you that dedicated, that patriotic?" I asked, turning to Kinoshita on my left, my round fan held in mid-air as if it too were waiting for answers. The look on Watanabe's face made me feel like a schoolboy glancing up from a history textbook in anticipation of something remarkable. "That dedicated?" And again Kinoshita giggled his soprano set of notes. "Intellectuals have other things they want to do ." "But-" and I hesitated though only for a second, "the defeat? How, how did you feel when Japan lost the war?" "Feel? I was overjoyed, at least about my submarine life. I didn't want to die. Nobody in his right mind wants to die." I was aware now of the sweat on my own brow, and I flapped my round fan even faster. " Mishima did," I said, suddenly recalling a newspaper photograph of the novelist's grotesque decapitation by his homosexual lover in the bizarre suicide ritual Mishima had finally carried through. I couldn't remember, though, whether the head had been lying on the floor inside that army office or outside on the balcony where Mishima had made his historic declaration. "Oh that?" And Watanabe laughed, grabbing the porcelain teapot from Sato and pouring with expen steadiness the green tea into the four waiting cups. "He didn't actually have to live on a front line or move with a torpedo strapped to the side of a submarine." Again Watanabe came out with the kind of laugh I had never heard from a Japanese at close range. "He was stuck with his tuberculosis-that saved him, though it fired his imagination." " I know how Mishima felt ," said Sato, pointing a finger at his nose, the usual Japanese gesture for personal identification. The nervous laugh he made was one I could easily recognize. I looked at Sato as if I had finally found someone with whom I could discuss Mishima's novels. "I had TB too," said Sato. "All my university friends went off to war, but I alone couldn't. I was so embarrassed. I sometimes thought killing myself. Yes, that's true. It's really true." Again I looked at Sato as if seeing him for the first time. "You mean you actually wanted to go , to serve? But of course you -it's our Japanese image of you." It was a feeling I myself had had 74

war-even to its very end. And yet as a soldier I had gone through uvâ&#x20AC;˘.u.u..'"'â&#x20AC;˘ had done nothing. "So many of my friends died," said Sato as if he hadn't heard my stupid question. "Now all he does is read books and worry about his loin or his urination," said Watanabe. "Right, Kinoshita?" "When did you get it? The tuberculosis I mean?" "Just before, I thought I'd be headed for the army. One day I felt a constriction in my chest. And when I went to wash my face, since I was suddenly sweating, I spit up a-a-how do you say it? A load of blood? I still remember the color of that blood." ' "Your destiny ought to have been to load a sub with torpedoes," said Kinoshita. "And then to drift off into the rising sun." "You never offered him the chance to trade places," said Watanabe. "He, the smirking one over there," said Sato, holding his teacup straight out and pointing it at Watanabe, "saw the bomb." And Sato vigorously nodded his head up and down. "Bomb? You mean the atomic bomb? Saw it? You saw it and lived?" "Saw it and lived," and this time Watanabe pointed his teacup at me. "I was only twelve." I suddenly felt like saying that only Japanese eighteen and older who had seen it had died. Instead I said, "You weren't burned? Weren't disfigured?" "Not really." I saw Watanabe down the rest of his tea with a kind of zest . "I still don't get it." "You're awfully dense-for an intellectual!" At that moment I seemed to see all the hatred piled up from the bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, piled up and imprinted on Watanabe's thick lips and heavy chin. Kinoshita broke in, "It wasn't beautiful, was it? It wasn't aesthetic." And Sato chimed in, "He's got a list of memories that would move even the heart of the world's ugliest rogue." Sato chuckled as he spilled the remaining green tea from the porcelain pot into his own teacup. I stopped flapping my fan, suddenly feeling as if I were in the midst of a tempest no power in the universe could stop. I looked from one to the other and back again, my own anger flaring up. "I did nothing in the war! I was only a typist stupidly typing up drafts, repaying soldiers for the unused ponions of their furlough transportation tickets!'' I was glaring at Kinoshita as if his Whisderian dilettantism had been a mask through which he could himself glare at me.

"You don't have to apologize," said Sato. "Who wants more tea? I can make some more ." "Offer some to our guest first," said Kinoshita. "You're forgetting your Japanese manners." "When my wife died," I interrupted, "I was angry with the Buddhist priest. The ceremony went on interminably." Now it was their turn to look at me as if my nonsequitur meant something else. "We didn't think it was long," said Watanabe. "We thought it was short-for a Japanese funeral, it was short." I saw Sato and Kinoshita nodding in agreement. When my wife had her heart attack four months before my stay ended, it was Sato who had driven me to the hospital, and it was Kinoshita who had gently warned me before I had gone into the emergency room. A white cloth had covered her face. Kinoshita had put his arm around my shoulder. "Perhaps you should have gone in to gather the bones after her cremation," said Watanabe as if a new thought had occurred to him. "But you were the one who told me not to! " I shouted, my voice louder than the cramped space could bear. "Why tell me that now?" I stood up as if to gather in more air-from the corridor, my office, somewhere. "You'd have seen what we Japanese have to go through-even without a war." I stood facing Watanabe. "Were your parents killed in the blast?" "They died when I was three. I was raised by my grandparents." "Then-were your grandparents killed?" "Yes." "How terrible for you-and you were only twelve." "Yes, twelve," said Watanabe, turning away to face the window. That evening Sato telephoned me to tell me he hadn't had sex with his wife for fifteen years. His loin difficulty had come, he insisted, from that pile of books.

Travelling out of the body by staying too long in one place, entered the room and began travelling. In certain parts of all the villagers held a gun pointed at the head of the stranger. Though he used to dwell there long ago, some two ago, they held the guns pointed to his head , just

In other neighborhoods, loud laughter was heard as if it were Sunday afternoon in summer, and the men did not have to about working in the brass mills. He was in the Puerto pan of town, and nobody talked to him, but he wanted to in the tiny bars with small change and much laughter. In another part of town three and four shopping malls were up, but he felt like he had never been there, even when he there. He hid in the cool churches of his childhood, praying. It to make the day immaculate, like one event might lead to IDOtner.like a friend's unexpected waiting at the airport or a call from out west summoned by a kindly thought earlier the day. Then the factory whistles were starting to blow, and he work in the same shop his whole life, mute and without uaâ&#x20AC;˘n;;uuâ&#x20AC;˘~::, like the men in the town before him . The town was in his own head, but he brought it across continents and , travelling to the same place over and over like the pumc::a sunset seen ten thousand times from the same dirty :wu1aow, without curtains.

Mark Osaki SNOW

Saigon The photograph is badly smudged, most of the girls are lost forever with the missing half, torn away years ago. Their poses would have been what you'd expect: a lineup before the orphanage wall, the starched jumpers, the disposing faces of the nuns; except for the lone girl at the end , not holding anyone's hand . Unsmiling, her eyes look fitfully into yours. Below her, someone has written, Antoinette- Snow Hors le peche original.

Paris In the embassy garden she stared at you like a girl cornered by passion for the first time, then smiled, certain. All winter she became the likeness you had always believed in. That last night you flew across the Channel and watched the moon light her face, the white camisole, her nipples, like a final memory.

was as though you had completed nightmare begun long ago by ftnding the picture's vanished the row of girls aren't even """'&llJlf:. at the camera. are turned towards her, each holds the hand of the other. last in this succession , a nun , who ttaches for a frightened girl's arm.

From a file you take a smudged, tom photo of a girl so beautiful it is as if she came into the world without parents. More than a lifetime has passed since she was pulled back into that atavistic light. Then, too, a shutter closed and left you this: a past already developing into your future, a contrast of black and white, gray resemblances, and love flattened paper thin.

TomHazuka THE AMPERSAND OF BEULAH LAND

Henry Winter plucked a nose hair and blew a smoke ring the size of a frisbee . He pointed his pipe stem at me. "Look, Blackburn-your lover dumps you for a pockmarked putz with a calculator on his belt, whose wardrobe doesn't contain a speck of natural fiber. Okay, that's a given. Major bummer, but history. Now stop playing Captain Dipshit and go grab a new squeeze. What the hell are students for?" "Would you believe to learn?" "Jesus, Joseph and Mary." Henry emptied the pipe out his office window. "How can you teach? You don't know anything. Ivory Tower Blackburn at your service, specializing in Victorian piano-leg dressing and pinhead angel counting. Just hit on one and do her a favor-give her something to tell her friends when she's tipsy, and to remember ten years down the road when you're a hotshot writer on Phil Donahue and she's home watching with brat number five drooling on her housecoat." "That's reprehensible, Henry," I said, and stood up to leave. "I'll think about it." On the back of his door was a poster of Duchamp's Nude Descending A Staircase with a buck-naked shot of Madonna taped sidesaddle to the balustrade. "You see, I appreciate art and feminism," I heard as I got out of there. That afternoon there was another department cocktail party. My glass held only clinking ice cubes but I couldn't remember downing the drink. I found myself next to the visiting scholar in whose honor we were drinking the taxpayers' liquor, a vermiform Limey who was waving a Pall Mall and blathering about "a drain in topographical specificity chez Turner." He glared at me when I chewed an ice cube. The chariperson of the depart路 ment, a feminist critic whose Boudoir Literature at the Bamcades was a cult classic, greeted me so sweetly that I knew I was on her shit-list again, and rather than deal with the situation like a man, I put away a couple more cocktails and some pig meat on rye, discussed Henry James and the Cleveland Indians with our Elizabethan scholar, switched to red wine with

demise of the gin, and stumbled home in time for Three s Company. I bean dip all over my Timex, and it didn't taste half bad. That weekend I spent a lot of time clapping with one hand and thinkabout Henry the Serpent's advice . My book on naturalism , Me Teague's Tooth: Norris, Nabokov, and the TobtlCco Road Tradition, had just accepted and I owed myself a break from scholarly rigors. I rode my to the campus pond to watch the ducks, but when they started ""'"'"'"''fi> each other in that stagnant green goop I packed up my bread and pedaled to the nearest gin mill. As behooves a college town, was plenty of choice. The Stagger Inn was a sle~zy cavern with exotic and waitresses in dirndls, perfect except the ball games were over and had music videos on the tube, eager flesh filling the screen like ducks. home to read Augustine and take a cold shower and a long nap . Monday I cancelled classes, avoided my colleagues, skipped office and a faculty meeting. It wasn't the first time for any of those dull but in my state of mind it was like hitting for the cycle. I lurked at fringes of women's gym classes till mid-afternoon, occasionally turning or two of Lolita. At four o' dock I popped a beer and watched Leave to Beaver on UHF. It was the one where Ward calls up his friend at State get Lumpy his athletic scholarship back even though Lumpy got a "D" math and Wally got squat and would have to pay his own way. I knew dialogue by hean-same with lots of the Honeymooners episodeswho could resist seeing those swinging kids do the twist again in the living room? That, dearest Blackburn, is academia in a nutshell, in despair I pulled out a stack of exams over two weeks old. The top one was already fuzzy with dust. I gave it a birthday- cake and wiped the rest on my pants. After grading only six of fony- three mind was as mushy as a dunked donut, my stamina leaking like juice through a shopping bag. Determined to do at least ten dropping, I unscrewed a jeroboam of liquid evil masquerading as and hit up the pantry for a bag of Oreos. My dentist would never under pedagogy's furling pennon I would brave the Black Plaque of Oreos. Two glasses and ten cookies later I reached test number thineen. It written in black ink and a cat-an ingenious cross between Felix and a button-was doodled on the cover of the blue book. The cat was at his reflection in a mirror, with a brick in his paw primed for and a light bulb shining in the bubble over his head. " was scrawled under the picture, then "vie/ Spafl, mein

Siete Afios quebrados De je suis Desolee ... & The acrostic was one thing, but I'd gotten a few of them in my time (though the polyglot angle was a first) . What grabbed me was that perfectly-formed ampersand, bold, elusive, an Everest after the elipsis, inscrutable as a Sphinx. I flipped over the test and tried to copy it on the back cover, but they came out looking like figure- eights with tails, or tilted infinity signs , or mutated treble clefs. I was a rank tyro , unworthy to carry the inkwell of... . It finally occurred to me to check the name. Yes, unworthy to fill the fountain pen-of Beulah Land. The ampersand of Beulah Land . It rolled off the tongue like peppercorns down a ramp. Beulah Land. Of course. She sat to my far right in the front row and though she often skipped, when she did come she arrived early, usually the very first and sat with hands folded and eyes closed, head swaying just a trace like a cork on a calm lake. Maybe fifteen seconds after I started talking her eyes would slowly open, leopard-like, and fasten on me for the rest of class. When I say "me" I don't mean my eyes; rather she fastened on a point somewhere in the suburbs around my belt buckle, my center of gravity possibly, an unnerving practice that caused me more than once to turn my back on the class and check in vain for a gaping zipper. Beulah never took a note. She never carried a book. Her test was brilliant; I could not have written better essays in one exam period. "A," I wrote on the last page, then hesitated. I swallowed another Oreo whole, like a goldfish. Anything I put down could come back to plague me. One look at that perfect ampersand though, and I was molten, helpless, ready to stroll on fiery coals at a finger-snap . "Excellent work," I continued , hand trembling. "Please see me." I underlined the last three words, set the test reverently on the " done" pile, and hurried to the bathroom to scrub the Black Plaque out of my mouth. I felt unclean, like an orthodox Jew two bites into his first BLT, nauseated but yearning to finish that damn tasty sandwich before it gets cold. Monday I passed back the exams, amid sarcastic comments about how quickly I'd graded them. Beulah was not there , her seat filled by a carbuncular dilettante with a rat's-ass mustache and a herculean talent for nonsequiturs. Tuesday she was absent as well, then Wednesday, and I despaired. By Thursday I was so adrift that I contemplated asking Henry for advice. I knocked on his office door but heard only rustling and a series of breathy moans. Good God . In desperation I walked to class ten minutes

instead of the usual five minutes late and found , alone in the room, clasped and lips slightly paned, the atman of the ampersand meditating Shiva-like in her corner. I know it's gauche to disturb anyone in a TM trance, if that's what she doing, but these were extraordinary circumstances. Besides, we were alone . Schmuckily I cleared my throat. Twice. " Beulah?" I said. A pacific smile flitted on her face, slowly spreading as her neck arched and she exhaled audibly through her nose. "Belle," she breathed, eyes still languorously shut. " Please call me Belle-it's so beautiful." "Sure, Belle," I said, "It has a real ring to it." Secretly, though, I was aushed for The Ampersand of Belle Land didn't scan worth a damn. Fizzled iambics, as common as cavities. But was it my place to comment? I snapped a piece of chalk like a wishbone and compared the pieces: identical twins. When I looked up Beulah was staring at me like someone who'd paid an admission and was already regretting it. "Urn, here 's your test." She smiled and laid it upside-down on her desk, obviously in no rush to peek inside. I couldn' t face another weekend without knowing. "You're not even curious?" I prompted. " About what?" Other students were drifting in. I maneuvered closer in an absurd attempt at privacy. "You weren't here all week." " How can I be curious, Dr. Blackburn? I already know that." She glanced down , and suddenly crinkled her forehead as if pondering an Eternal Question. There, on the back of her blue book, was my random Rorschach of aborted ampersands, a quincunx of sad impersonations screaming, "It's not my fault! These are the products of a disturbed childhood!" She looked up at me, a gentle epiphany like a candle in her eyes, and wordlessly opened her test. I was backing toward the blackboard as she read , and my spine hit the chalk tray as she circled something with a fountain pen. "Be glad to," she mouthed silently and I exulted despite bruised vertebrae. Jauntily I addressed the class. "How does the epic ofGilgamesh relate to our own troubled times?" I queried, arguably with more cockiness than was strictly necessary. Half the class stared out the window, half the class pretended they hadn't heard. The carbuncular dilettante raised his hand high while Beulah kept steady tabs on my belt buckle. Everything was set. The champagne on ice, the Pinot Noir decanted and breathing, sexy professorial music on the stereo, and slender scented 83

candles in silver holders waiting to be torched . I got the candlesticks from Henry, who'd picked them up at a yard sale for pennies and insisted they were the key to impressing not only undergraduates, but any woman. The only difference was that with students sometimes you had to tell them it was silver. I didn't argue. The voice of sleazy experience is not to be gainsaid, especially in English depanments. I was sniffing my armpit to see if I'd remembered deodorant when the phone rang. Oh God, Beulah's not coming! She got squashed by a runaway Corvair and it's all my fault-no, she's scraped the veneer off my polluted soul and is bailing out! And who could blame her? I realized I was pacing in ovals and that the phone might have rung many times. I lunged for it. "Hello," I said before she could hang up. " Hey there, Big Boy," Henry said. "Any butterflies before the epic consummation?'' "Henry, were you born this way or can you be blamed entirely on yow environment?" "Whoa, Studley, a little respect or my in-like-Flynn candlesticks will never grace your table again." "What do you want?" "Oh, the usual tripe-happiness, tenure, and a steady supply of lovers with 路no front teeth." "Goodbye, Henry." "So be it. I shall return to my perusal of Pope. Hope you took plenty of vitamin E," he said and hung up. I wished I were English and could use the word "cad" without 路 ing. Halfway through picking lint off my pants again, the classy knocker I'd installed that afternoon rapped twice. I had to admit sounded pretty tinny, but the more expensive wrought-iron ones come in the judicial gavel motif that caught my fancy. I'm no fierce can eagle-type I thought as I opened the door. "E Pluribus Unum," I said. Beulah retreated a step than pointed a finger at me like a friendly ringer. "Okay," she said. "Be fruitful and multiply. Geometrically." " Be fruitfly and multiple," I said. She laughed and I offered 路 hosannas. I was sweating prodigiously, threatening to drench groovy polyester beachcomber shin. Misgivings clung to me like ticks. needed a visible ampersand to pretzel my psyche, longed for a uu路,.'""JII Hester Prynne ampersand to buttress my courage, displayed with /JIZJ'IIJCjN on Beulah's breast. Not, of course, that I could tell her any of this. might take it wrong, conclude that I was unbalanced, and refuse to in the sick activities I had planned for apres-diner.

"You're sweating," Beulah said, touching a finger to my temple. you been slaving over a hot stove?" "I've got lots of stuff cooked up," I said. "You'd be surprised." Beulah smiled and licked her fingenip. "Mmm," she said and my jellied. " Perspiration is such a turn-on. Salt water from the skin-I talk about primal." Suddenly my sweating seemed a perfectly natural function, indeed to be encouraged , and I ceased to worry if I was pitting-out Henry's shin. I kissed her hand like an abject-nerd-romantic-slobbone and her into my digs. "Cocktail, Ms. Land?" "That would be divine, Dr. Blackburn." I moved toward the bar, otherwise known as the formica counter next sink. "What'll it be?" "Anything you like. I always trust my professors' judgment." Ouch, I thought, as I poured gin to the brim of a freezer-frosted mar. glass, then added a drop of vermouth for realism's sake. A tree branch the window over the sink and I jumped. It had never done that . Feeling as creepy as the guy in the movies exploring a dark cellar a match, I leaned forward and pressed my nose to the grimy glass then like a lizard's tongue. My insides twisted like tonellini for out not two yards distant, lay Henry Winter on his belly, coiled around apple limb and grinning at me like a conscience. His round spectacles like flames in the halflight . "Is everything Okay?" Beulah called. She knelt at one of my bookinspecting titles, fingering spines. "Coming," I said. "You can't rush a work of an ." I flipped Henry the through the glass, both barrels, and tried to look ferocious, but when Rp.lenJ'tsh(:d her drink and looked again he was gone . The empty branch against the window, all by itself. The sweat was cold on my skin. a hallucination, I told myself. A simple flashback from teenage acid . Reassured , I sloshed an inch of bourbon over ice and joined my before she could forget why she was there. Beulah surveyed the stuffed shelves of fat volumes, some of them hardcovers, and whistled like someone who'd just missed stepping on a bumblebee. "Have you read all these?" she said. "I mean for God's sake. We're talking first-class dreck here." "Somebody's got to read it or there wouldn't be anyone to teach it." "You're sweet." She tossed off the rest of her drink, then fiddled with empty glass as if unsure what to do with it. "Delicious," she said. " I couldn't decide if the dryness referred to the drink or her glass, but if her too full of gin I knew we'd both regret it. "Champagne!" I cried. 8)

She touched my arm. "Do it hard, Dr. Blackburn. I love to watch it spurt all over." Save me, sweet Jesus. " Call me Richard," I said. "Sure thing, Dick," she said. The cork ricocheted off the ceiling and Beulah grabbed the bottle. She drank the bubbles as they foamed over, lips around the glass and eyes closed as if transponed, maybe to the same place she went during those minutes before class. When the outpouring stopped she looked at me dreamily, the bottle cradled in her hands, and hesitated before giving it back. " That was wonderful," she said. "you really know what you're doing." I swallowed hard. 'Til get some glasses," I said. The champagne glasses were already set out in the kitchen , arranged for easy picking. I love the shape of a champagne glass, the soft curve of the underside, the gentle swell as you set it to your lips, and I lingered moment to fondle them one in each palm, both a perfect fit, the peeking through my fingers like ... . I couldn't finish the couldn't follow through on the image. Blackburn, I told myself, be rational human and confront the facts . You are nonplussed. This is impulsive behavior, with doom looming in the denouement. It is however, too late to recoup your position as a responsible adult if you ply pretend to be one. I realized I was squeezing the glasses, practtc2UJ kneading them as a curious tingle grew in my knees and elsewhere. " Richard, are you still there?" Creative shame is a major motivator of man. I transferred my grip the stems of the glasses and immediately felt shriven, vinuous, and "Coming," I said, but as I turned I was assaulted by Henry's hyena face, grotesquely mashed against the dining room window. tongue lapped the glass like a clam's foot, twitching like tripe in 路 ing water. Gentle Reader, you have never witnessed anything so "Richard?" Footsteps approached. " Look!" I said. "What?" Beulah said and justifiably so, for of course the kook flown . " Is this a trick?" "Good God!" I said though my mind was speechless. Beulah shed her sweater, revealing a cloud white, sleeveless T-shirt with an sand as big as a license plate silk-screened on her chest. "Do you like it?" she said. Under such temptation the best-laid schemes are shoved aside. sinuous arcs of that luscious ampersand, its delicious protuberances upstanding tips, conspired to warm me hairline to toenail with a glow like an hour after you've choked down some psilocybin.

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"Are you sure?" I croaked. "I'm over twenty-one, if that's what you mean." I handed her a glass. Beulah clicked her tongue and tucked in the T-shirt snugly, stretching ampersand over her body's contours. "I really liked Thomas Wolfe in school," she said. "I mean, I was Eugene Gant." "A toast," I said. "To the illusion of words." "And to illusion in general," she said clinking glasses. "With a round applause for the symbols that make them possible. Skoal." "Prosit." "Salut." "Sante." "Cheers." "Bottoms up, for the love of Mike." "God, Richard, I haven' t heard that expression since my grandfather , " 'Bottoms up'? Are you serious?" Beulah swigged like a sailor and sucked her tongue at the bubbly tart"You have the wit of a rapier," she said. "I am punctured and helpbefore its barb." I whimpered somewhere behind my eyes. That makes two of us, I ...,••" .. ' ' and my crisis can't be groaned away like a pun. What would a man do in this situation? How would a divorced man react? I my lack of foresight and experience, my limited bourgeois perspec. Beulah was refilling our glasses, expertly. I felt like a ski jumper waiton the ramp for the guy before him to be scraped onto a stretcher. help me , I had come to this: what would Henry do? One glance at ampersand answered my question, removed any lingering doubt , and me paralyzed. "Loosen up ," Beulah said. This was excellent advice for which I was grateful , but my Puritan nuzzled me like wool underwear a size too small. It was like a sleeping bag with a porcupine. How will you deal with her in it asked, tossing and turning and stabbing at random, Monday or 19~~u•~:~uirly or whenever the hell she shows up? You have one rollerskate a steep path downhill, with splatto-drop death on either side and a factory waiting at the end. Go for it. "Do you like Mexican food?" I asked oozing savoir foire . "Are you kidding?" she said. "It's my favorite ." She sipped, eyeing over the rim of the glass. "Besides, I'll eat anything." I offered her slicedJarisberg and Font's Original Bath Oliver crackers.

$2.19 for about a dozen biscuits, but Henry had insisted. "She'll melt," he told me in the deli. "Look at the label." There it was: Specialite non Sucree pour Deguster Fromages et Vins. Henry spoke textbook French with a Queens accent, like a cheese grater dragging on a blackboard. "English and French, Blackburn," he said. "Stiff lips and passion, roast beef and quiche. Throw in the Scandinavian cheese for reckless abandon and you've got screw stew. Trust me. And don't scrimp on the champagne, even if she doesn't know any better. No sweet pink crap in a screw-top bottle. The point is to maintain the mystery and wow her with stuff she's not familiar with. Sensory overload is your biggest ally." "I get these biscuits all the time," Beulah said, munching. "Even if they are full of butter and animal fat. And great choice on the champagne. It's the best twelve-dollar value I've found in months-I bought half a case last week." "Oh," I said. "Yes, urn , that was very wise." We returned to the living room and Beulah made herself comfonable on the couch, leaving plenty of room for me next to her. I interpreted this as an invitation, a perception reinforced when she patted the cushion at her side and I noticed her gleaming jade ring with an intaglioed ampersand. As I approached for a more intimate inspection Henry's leering mug popped into the window. "Aiee!" I cried and baptised my guest with bubbly. "What's wrong?" Beulah said worriedly wiping her lap. "Did you pull something?" Henry started to peel a banana. Beulah followed my death-ray glower but of course the window held nothing but our reflections, shadows trapped in glass. I ached to dose the curtains , but hesitated-how would Beulah interpret that? If she gleaned the truth I was lost; if any of this got back to the university, I was unemployed. But I was smitten. An ampersand stretched like a rickety bridge between me and the abyss, a plump, ripe ampersand beckoning me, teasing me, seducing me into behavior that had the life span of a jack-o' -lantern. Blackburn, I told myself, once upon a time you were in command of your life and you must never forget that. "Why don't you just dose the curtains?" Beulah said. "Unless whatever you see out there's more interesting than me ." "Than T ,"I thought automatically, feeling programmed for destruc路 tion. Lemmings are fascinating creatures; paradigms, really, and transparent once you take the time to peek inside. "Look," she said. "If there 's a psycho with an M-16let's at least not give him a dear shot." "Sage advice," I said. "Advice to live by." I drew shut the cunains. They were diny, gold, and frayed at the bottom. I felt like a kid playing

••·"''""'·a in an abandoned refrigerator two seconds after he realizes the doesn't open from the inside. "Hungry?" I asked . "Always," she said. "I can't get enough. It's like there's something with me." The phone rang. I ignored it and she noticed right away. "Richard, the telephone's ringing." I looked at her and it. " You're right," I said finally. "Aren't you going to answer it?" The ampersand stared me in the face . My choices were limited, the !lllllltUlc:aw·:ms endless. I lifted the receiver like a jagged piece of glass. "Vice Squad," Henry said. "You're busted, creep." "Hi, Mom," I said. "Get any yet? Don't be shy, you can tell Uncle Henry." "Of course I remembered Dad 's birthday, Mom . I was just about to " "You coy dog, you. Back you into a corner, Blackburn, and you bare fangs almost as good as the next animal." I knew I should hang up . What kind of masochistic moron would play ..,.,,,,....,rrt to such abuse with this week's woman of his dreams only a subplunge away? A petrified one, I admitted to myself. Ampersand or no, despaired of my ability to consummate the evening. I was not a machine, hormonal engine like my colleague. Unless-Oh, lost!-just suppose, lmaj~u·1e ... no! A strategically-placed ampersand tattoo, possibly poly....,.,u••~u·.. , inciting me to bottomless depravity! My bent brain imagined corralling her navel like hastily circled Conestogas, or a lariat looping a twisted halo over a dawgie fleeing a branding iron. What patent How could I even fantasize such drivel? Then I remembered the paint Mona bought us for Christmas. "Dad, you old sonofagun, you finish painting the garage yet?" "You're reaching, Blackburn, you're really reaching." "Richard, am I interrupting anything?" Henry crackled in my ear. "Oh, Richard," he said in a whining "do you often have a problem with conversationus interruptus?" Beulah blew me a kiss and went exploring. I heard the bathroom door "Henry," I whispered. "What would you do? " "Call you for advice, of course. What are friends for? " "Damn you, I'm serious." "What I'd do, Blackburn? I'd have done it by now-dinner tastes so better when its dessen. Ciao, chump." He hung up. I throttled the

receiver and counted to ten until my blood pressure subsided a few points, then staned frying tonillas. All through dinner I swilled red wine and almost kept up with my guest. Ampersands, scruples, and the self-preservation instinct battled like red and black ants with a half-dead grasshopper. "Taco, Belle?" I ventured once after the ftrst bottle, but her groan was so heanfelt that I desisted from humor. Any vestige of resistance she harbored melted faster than the French vanilla ice cream with Grand Marnier we had for dessen. I knew this, intellectually. Physically, I w路as stuck in a mode resembling tapioca. Why had my parents raised me to be good? How could they have handcuffed my normal adult existence, leaving me frozen like yearning Priapus atop a Grecian urn? "Richard," Beulah said, touching my arm. "Do you want me to answer the door?" She was right again. I noticed the doorbell was ringing, peremptory slashes of sound like Civil Defense warnings on the radio. In an uncharacteristic moment of self-doubt I wondered how much else I'd been mtssmg. "No, no , I'll get it." When I rose, the post-prandial brandy drained to my legs and I weaved two steps before evening my keel. The woman is a ftsh. Only a ftsh could drink like this. It's inescapable, Blackburn, I told myself as I opened the door-your student is Vardamon 's mother. "Catch a buzz this evening, Richie?" Henry said, and brushed past over the threshhold. He wore a crimson bellhop's monkey-suit with modifled tarboosh minus the tassel, and carried an enormous, gleaming ghetto blaster with rabbit-ears antenna. A schmaltzy waltz leaked from the speakers, Strauss after a debauched weekend. Henry surveyed the room, then installed the boom box atop my VCR. With anguish I saw that I'd forgotten to hide my cassette of Beyond Behind the Green Door. Henry picked it up and rounded his lips then leered for all he was wonh. Beulah stood in the kitchen doorway. " Seen this yet?" he asked, displaying the title. "Twice," she said. Henry goose- stepped to attention. "Singing telegram for Richard Q. Blackburn!" "Wait a minute! " I said, but his outstretched arm halted me. I trapped back atop the Grecian urn. "It's all paid for, buddy, the least you can do is listen." "Does this guy have a concealed weapon, Richard? Hey, are you ing a piece?" "De rigeuer," Henry said, leering even more shamelessly than before.

pushed a button on the machine and out poured a Muzak rendition of the One You're With." Henry snapped his fingers, Bobby Darin. " Ah-one and ah-two," he said like hep-cat Lawrence Welk, then singing, reciting really, sort ofJohnny Cash doing rap: There's a girl, right next to you, And she's just waiting for something to do . .. was more-the whole song actually-but there's no sense in going all that. By the second verse, Henry's act had evolved into a mutant IOttshc>e on my shag carpet, and I gulped another brandy in self-defense. I a glance of condescending sufferance at Beulah, expecting a warm , .-.v, ..... ,. , insider's smile in return. The brandy burned all the way down I saw instead her toes tapping and head nodding to the synthetic , her beatific visage aimed not at me, but at this interloping Victorian pedagogue dressed to haul Samsonite or American Tourister. Mercifully, the debacle concluded. "Feelings" followed on the tape, even Henry had the taste to desist after one line. He bowed low to Beulah's applause, killing the music while he was down there, then again, flamboyantly formal , in my silent direction. I mentally ~:10c1ea anything I'd ever said against capital punishment and wished I a fireplace so there'd be a poker for me to cudgel the swine. I wouldn't a bullet. "That was way cool!" Beulah said, lapsing into undergraduate argot curled my nerves . "Way," Henry agreed, expertly filling his meerschaum. Suddenly Hlllm::n that monkey-suit seemed to have corduroy patches at the elbows. innocent he gazed at Beulah and puffed professorially. Then, looking at her, he said , "Brandy and an introduction wouldn't be after that performance, don't you agree Doctor Blackburn?" "Oh, I'll get it," Beulah said. Those four eager words told me I was I was , of course. Eventually I decided Henry wasn' t worth life on _., __ ,.... Row either so he survived unscathed. We three sat at the kitchen , the unholiest of troikas, and emptied the bottle of Christian Broth"I have a liter ofRemy Martin V.S.O.P. chez moi," Henry announced. 'scorning?" "Real cognac," Beulah said. "Sounds great." I pleaded fatigue, but it was simple refusal to exacerbate defeat and â&#x20AC;˘ rust:ratJton as a third wheel. Beulah pressed her chest against me in a quick . "Thanks so much for a grand evening, Richard," she said, while over 91

her shoulder, I saw Henry pantomime sticking a finger down his "Are you sure you won't join us?" " As sure as I am about anything," I said staring at her ampersands. There were two, then three, then two again. I was pig-drunk and more maudlin and melancholy by the minute so I hustled them to door before I could disgrace myself forever. Beulah kissed my cheek thanked me again. Henry adjusted his tarboosh and put in another He grinned and flashed me a "V" sign, then strolled off with arm Beulah's shoulders. "Don't push me, 'cause I'm close to the rapped out the blaster as Beulah slipped an arm around Henry's waist they faded to black. "Yell out about his gonorrhea," said something inside me, but I swallowed the urge. I Water-Pik' d my teeth, feeling like an old house somebody used live in . My stomach rebelled, but not too badly, and I figured I could the poison inside. I lay in bed with the light on watching the room until I knew it was hopeless and I broke down. I got the body paint. under sixty-watt yellow I experimented with colors, mixing the cnâ&#x20AC;˘â&#x20AC;˘rt-r11m searching for that elusive perfection even the most jaded believe is there somewhere. A child with fingerpaint , I drew ampersands on thighs, my arms, my smooth, hairless chest, my veiny feet. Each was a ure , a lumpy simulacrum of the ideal. In desperation I painted a on my belly, a simple cross, a poor man's ampersand. It started at breast bone and extended toward the navel, the transverse intersecting the bottom of the rib cage. I studied it , and it was good, but it was and incomplete. Slowly, guided by some inner compass, I traced a rich, circle, arcing thighbone to thighbone, rising to meet the cross at its tip. The scientific female symbol , I realized when it was done. I down my body to the color glistening over my guts . I tossed away the in self-disgust and turned off the light, then curled lovingly around belly and waited for dreams.

water. black center of a mink clustering a flower of five fingers. bring you life fingers the Judas blossoming.

Daniel James Sundahl HIROSHIMA MAIDENS: IMAGINARY TRANSLATIONS FROM THE JAPANESE

Proem

Silence of a sort; those who were left imagined the furnace of a star's blaze, the urgent temperature of heaven, thin drops of blood dissolved and gone. Things dark were things to be endured as blackness blacker still puts out the light I yet understood as necessity I as necessity requires the plain sense of it I it without a body, a nameless feasting wind, an echo clapped dense in bronze bells ringing now deep in grim plumed clouds. But indigence, indigence from children, independent of forboding, figures on the school grounds waiting, hanging on threads, snipped, collapsing, victims of their own consequence I their history, their twittering words, thoughts , stutter small, smaller still I sounds, shadows, pushed down I shapes small in this small shapeless lucent sky adorned with pink and sun-lit glow. Summer of memory for these Maidens remembering the rain drizzling with such sounds the dead keep I living still with images, confusion, still remembering long flat evenings, months ahead I the rest dead and discontented .

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For you who gaze and wonder, clearly the feeling escapes through dreams ' and floods of so much I unmeaning for those who stagger forward I to you who gaze I faces kindle, shadows ask attendance:

we heard the wind moaning I monsoon winds, j/atling wtllows bruised and blazedpulsed I acn"d assaults I massed malevolent enigma ofnature's violence finally magnified I the bullioned weight ofcitron-colored seconds, ornaments bronzed and ringing hard. The mind shivers t~nd spins, and we, trenchant, trembling, tabulate the boomy clouds, summer's groaning mist; anguished tell tJ/1 about, slowly speak, remembenng I these anguished undying memories coming fast I come too near the flames.

ParkeMuth

WE CALL YOU OUR CHILD: TY COBB

He sh~pens his spikes on the top step of the dugout before each game. The shotgun called once that night; on the ladder, his father tried to surprise his mother, a husband's game gone wrong, his face forever lost. When he walks the streets the knife and pistol hidden in his pocket mate. February through September for twenty-five years, he swings a stick to punch his pain to an unmanned field. Scars kiss his hips, knees, and feet, the sacrifice for stealing bases, for grinding his spike-sharpened body into packed din ahead of the throw, the glove. At his funeral, no photographers or friends wrapped their bodies against the dull rain; only two came, left small, tightly wrapped bundles of flowers, let the clouds alone spit legal eulogy, call the game for loss.

DY JAMISON'S MEAN PIT BULL

Daddy Jamison used to give out that he wasn 't interested in money. "Jus' enough for a pot of beans with some ham hocks, a Dutchmaster cigar after, and a can or two of Oly." But after folks in East St. Louis got to know him, it was pretty clear that business about not being interested in money just a lot of stuff. Sure he didn't do much of anydiing during the week and you could see him downtown window shopping; when the day was nice sunning himself in the park, when it wasn't, sitting in the library ~eading room going through newspapers from different parts of the country (he liked to keep up with things). But weekends, Sundays especially, he was busy making money and plenty of it. Where Daddy Jamison came from , down in southwest Texas, he had run cock fights Saturday nights and Sunday afternoons . The Mexicans down there and some of the whites are partial to cock fights and a good bird handler, like Daddy Jamison was supposed to be, could make himself a hundred-fifty to two-hundred dollars a week, tax free . He would have been down there still had he not fed some stuff, on the sly, to a cock favored by the county sheriff that made the bird sick so he was killed by a spur through the brain in less than two minutes . Had Daddy Jamison known of the sheriff's feeling for this particular bird , it never would have happened. But cenain individuals, who wanted to take over Daddy Jamison's business without paying for it, set him up in a matter of speakingthey laid two-to-one on the other bird and took Daddy's bet of fifty dollars-so he had to leave town right away. Daddy did manage to carry three cocks and some steel spurs with him and he tried to set up a cock fight or two after he settled in East St. Louis. But there were scarcely any Mexicans and nobody else seemed much interested, so he just finally turned the one cock he had left loose in his back yard to scratch around, till a big mean cat named P. J . got him several weeks later. Maybe it was the fuss that took place when the cock tried to fight off P. J .-P. J .'s ear was torn clear through before he finally got his teeth sunk

into that cock's neck proper-that gave Daddy Jamison the idea of turning his hand to dog fights. But dog fights with a special twist to them. ''I' ll match my dog against all comers with a purse of two hundred dollars if your dog beats," Daddy Jamison put out after he returned from a week up in Chicago. " And it won 't cost you a red cent to enter your dog," he added banging his big fists down on his knee. Anyone who wanted to watch, and there was plenty, could come to a warehouse where the watchman was some kind of a cousin, to Daddy, and for five dollars they got to see a lady with bare tits do a dance in addition. Daddy had heard of this pit bull a man who lived on Stony Island Avenue there in Chicago owned. He would have been back the next day, after making the deal, but the pit bull would have took off Daddy's arm and maybe pan of his leg had he tried to take that dog before becoming properly acquainted. And properly acquainted meant that Daddy had to buy four or five pounds of beef steak a day for five days running and sit on the floor next to the pit hull's owner and feed the pit bull a bite or two every few minutes while talking and saying nice things. Even with the owner and all that tasty beef steak during that first day, had the pit bull not been chained up just right, he would have taken Daddy's arm forcertain . The next day it might have been only a nasty bite or two. The third, although the pit bull did not make a single lunge in Daddy's direction, its owner felt it best to still keep him on the chain. The founh day, too. The fifth day was extra, just for insurance; the dog laid his head on Daddy's lap and took bites of beef steak direct from his fingers and allowed his head to be scratched behind the ears, wagging his stumpy tail. "Regardless how big your dog is, any breed, any weight, my 78pound dog will whip it or $200 cash money is yours on the spot ," Daddy had printed up on flyers which he handed around down in the railroad yard and at different bars in the neighborhood. The woman with bare tits danced twice the first Sunday. It wasn't fony minutes before two dogs, a Doberman/German Shepherd mix and a nasty black mutt used to guard the loading dock down in the freight yard, were dead and Daddy's pit bull, although pretty well spattered with gore, was scarcely breathing hard. And none of the fifty or sixty men who had forked over their five dollars felt they hadn't got their money's wonh. The next Sunday, Daddy's dog was taken more serious and there was twice as many men in that warehouse crowded around the ring made of packing cases. Word got over the river to St. Louis and there was this tall, square-built fellow with slicked-down blonde hair and a mean look who had come over with a half a dozen of his friends and a St. Bernard/Russian wolfhound mix that must have weighed at least two-hundred pounds.

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There were two other dogs on the card: a pure-bred Doberman Pincher, who had been used in police work until he turned on his handler and would have been put to sleep if not for the chance of this fight , and a Mastiff/Weimaraner cross, who kept his ears laid back and his teeth bared from the moment he was brought into the warehouse. But first , of course , there was the lady with bare tits who did a go-go dance that had all the men stomping and clapping. While the lady danced, the dog that had been brought over from St. Louis and was chained up tight, just rested his big woolly head on his paws and growled-a deep, steady sound like a circular saw with dull teeth working on wood that was still too green. Except for Daddy Jamison and the mean-looking man who had brought him over, everyone stayed away from that dog. But Daddy Jamison, judging exactly what the dog could do chained up as he was, scratched him right at the base of the tail, long, slow scratches , the kind dogs really like. While the mean-looking blonde fellow just sat there chewing snuff, waiting. Daddy Jamison 's pit bull tore the throat out of that Doberman Pincher in two minutes flat. It was hardly a match and everyone whistled and hooted, and the police sergeant, who had brought the dog, looked ashamed. And the fight had an effect on that 200-lb. St. Bernard/Russian wolfhound mix. He wasn't growling anymore an one of his forepaws was up over his snout almost as if he was trying to cover his eyes. But the Mastiff/Weirmaraner cross was madder than hell and ready to go . He pulled so hard on his chain it was stiff as a pipe and the choke collar bit into his neck so his eyes bulged and the inside of his ears turned red. Everyone noticed this so there was plenty of betting with the odds against that dog coming down to only three- to-two. Had that Mastiff/Weirmaraner waited for his opportunity and kept circling , it might have turned into one remarkable fight . But he rushed in and, although he did manage to get a piece of meat out of the pit hull's flank , the pit bull bellied down just right , then came up sharp and took hold of the dog's neck. Then he snapped his jaws in tighter, and then again, until he got his teeth into the windpipe. The 200-lb. dog from St. Louis was trembling now and was pressed down so hard on the concrete floor he looked all flattened out. The big blonde man didn't look so mean anymore; in fact, he looked a little sheepish and his Adam's apple kept bobbing up and down. While the woman with bare tits did another dance, Daddy Jamison conferred with the man . If his dog put his tail between his legs and refused to fight, the crowd would boo him and his friends out of the warehouse , Daddy more than hinted . And word would probably spread across the

river and there would be a lot of horse laughs. The man from St. Louis' face turned the color of raw meat, but he listened. "Once your dog gets his tail down between his legs," said Daddy, " I doubt my dog will do much more than maul him up a little. Might even raise a leg and piss on him." The blonde man almost choked at that. "Better ftx this on your dog's tail so he can't put it between his legs." Daddy gave the man a steel ring with lots of broken needles soddered on all around. Then, while Daddy scratched at the base of the dog's tail saying comfoning things, the man worked the ring up the tail right to the root. The pit bull stood stiff legged on the far side watching out of his tiny red eyes as the big dog was pushed into the ring. First thing, the big dog hunkered all the way down, so his belly was touching the floor, then started inching forward . The pit bull rocked his sloping head from sideto-side , his eyes still ftxed on the other dog, and waited. Finally, with a ripple of his shoulder muscles, he took several steps in the direction of the big dog. With a whimper, the big dog tried to put his tail between his legs. But those broken needles dug into all that soft tissue and caused his tail to shoot straight up. At this, the pit bull rushed in and staned working on the big dog's throat. The big dog began howling and then, as the pain worsened, tried to ftght back. And for a minute, things were furious in that ring. But the big dog never really had a chance once the pit bull took hold of his throat . It was all over when he threw himself backward the wrong way, and the pit bull, holding on fum , broke his neck. Things got a little out of hand after that. An Illinois Central conductor, still in uniform, got so worked up he jumped into the pit. His friends only managed to get him out after he lost a chunk of his thigh. There was plenty of laughing and hooting at that . But when the lady with the bare tits staned doin' another dance and Daddy's pit bull went for her and got a hold of her arm, although he tried for her throat, and the police sergeant had to shoot the dog (it took two shots to get him to let loose and two more to kill him), folks sobered up a bit. And then, when Daddy staned cursing that police sergeant for killing just about the best ftghting dog that ever was, and Daddy had to be put in handcuffs, the evening was pretty well ruin't. And I personally know of at least eight or nine persons who tried to get their money back, but Daddy, who had to be slapped down a little to stop his bellyaching, wasn't giving back nothin' to nobody.

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BLOODSPORT

"I went out to the hazel wood . . . And hooked a berry to a thread; " At times I think that berry time is done, And we have seen the end of the mad girl Who sings in chalky light from moon and bone, A yellow apple in a crystal bowl. But cast your fly, a thorax sulphur dun, When Dorotheas pop, as if from air, And turning inward, there she lies upon The grass, a windy fish with human hair. I was a man when I first saw the boy Who cast for trout with fire in his chest, And had the river braid a river's ploy To rapture him , dismantled, like a guest. Yet still I think that progress has been made, The trick's to keep from choosing between poles, I wander here where biomatter fades, Throw back the trout and coil around her soul.

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Julia Thomas CERTAIN WORDS

Someone I respect once said to me certain words don't belong in poetry. Nose, for instance. Any term for excrement.

Cancer. In the perfect scheme of creation I suppose I agree. However, from this window when I see the Doberman jumping like a puppy, bounding to the waist of his owner I doubt all prescriptions. Rumor has it, and certain rumors we trust, he is cancerous. I first heard a year ago, from a neighbor who knows the owner. How she refuses to treat him differently, accompanies him daily, unreined, to chase that well shadow through these sedate streets. Frisk with squirrels cats pigeons, piss on trees, freely, as if a forest surrounded them. Only those who love the animal soul can accept this woman's strength. A miracle I await daily. His panther change, arc of grace. Burying himself, head first nose ears sinewy torso disappear into piles of leaves. Each day of autumn I have watched this woman come nearer my window.

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' \

could speak without screaming. in the tense rain that holds snow do not come, woman and dog, to frolic like children on my lawn. Tomorrow I will say to her brave you are. And that I, too, have forgotten

the leash at home on its hook by the door.

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Robert Payne

HOW TO END A CONVERSATION (METHOD #33)

Okay I said come on over if you want. She said she'd bring a bottle of vodka. I said I had some lime. When I saw the lime I wished I hadn't said I had some lime. The lime was olive-colored. It had wart-like features all over it. It was hard like floors. I cut it into eighths and fed the pieces to a plastic bowl , a cool whip bowl , whose lid I'd lost. She came over and I told her about the lime . I guess she didn 't get much out of my telling her, except that she didn 't have any lime in her drinks, but she never does, anyway. We played cards; gin rummy. She had some saltines with cheese on them . There were two kinds of cheese , cheddar and some white kind; monterey jack is white and so is swiss. Brie is also white. I didn't eat any crackers or cheese, I just drank and smoked and didn't talk . I didn 't say much at all except for telling her about the lime. But she talked quite a lot. She was seeing her therapist oftener now. " Oftener" was the word she used. Boy, were we getting drunk. (Boy, that sounds like something Holden Caulfield would say.) She told me she was making lists .

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listed all of the wicked and strange things I'd done. would help her deal with her anger towards me. would help her to see me as a human being. list looked like this: lying money men fucking men no flowers blowjobs never 'Rf:jfi#J路,.'ll me good other men 路 she really didn't come over to tell me all this. just came over to get my france wagner print." would let her have it, too; it was hers. was being so polite, though not eating, and drinking a lot and

these pall malls my mother bought me because she had a and I hated pall malls but I had a whole carton. finally said "I tested positive"

.u&\JIU.l11::.

Uluuuu

conversation was over.

She left without her france wagner print.

10)

Lyn Lifshin AfTERNOONS IN THE BLUE RAIN, RAVENA

when I still wondered if you'd ca11 now those Junes, a cake of soap made out of flesh, a lampshade you can see where a nipple or tendon was. I'll wait in the dark for the ice you left plunged in me like a mugger's knife to melt into the Hudson River first I thought your bean was in your penis now I can see lt was 10 the leg you saw torn from you on the other side of the road, Vietnam

106 \

Tony Quagliano

FIERCE MEADOWS

On Oahu I should try something rural and lyrical filled with bright birds skittering through a bamboo grove after dawn rain in the mountains or decry the scattering of ghosts and warrior bones the steely rout of magic places peace and healing but it's no use here behind my pale and desecrating eyes. Blood deep in the lava rock fierce meadows of warrior bones.

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Joseph Gillespie

MASTURBATION

Flowing, an unimpeded stream A stream, its direction undebated Continuous stream, its goal, Become one allotment To the river, to the ocean Immobile, an unyielding dam A dam, withholding its progression Stagnant water, its desire To flow and become something, Something great, something meaningful

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WEDNESDAY NIGHT IN 1969

stumbled into the living room the children's view, were watching an I Love Lucy and waiting for dinner.

......JU>,,;

was sticking her tongue out at Ricky, llbllUDI)s in her ears, wiggling her fingers. was unaware of the antics . . . ....,"'"""'u in his morning paper. children remained seated, peering around their mother ranting before them. Bloodshot eyes bulging, frail, thin body rigid. Her speech slurred, thickened by an afternoon six- pack, evening vodka, tranquilizers, prescribed for depression. The mother's face contorted as she told her children how she wanted to die. The children focused on Lucy's eyes

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Flashing in contemplation, she had a scheme in mind. To become a part of Ricky's aGt at the club. They would have good times together. Lucy also had overwhelming artistic desires. The children sat in silence as their mother informed them about her recent ingestion of her entire prescription. They did not run for help. The week before she had paraded around the house with a gun, bragging about blowing her brains out. The week before that she had walked about naked showing her children the razor reserved for later that evening. The next morning she rarely remembered . Lucy had meanwhile snuck into the Tropicana with her faithful friend Ethel. They kidnapped the woman who was Ricky's partner, bound and gagged her then locked her in a closet.

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so on this night mother collapsed cold to the world.

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Mitchell LesCarbeau

ON LOOKING AT AN X-RAY OF MY DAUGHTER SKULL

So much of what is lost is hunger, the gnawing recognition of a glint or momentary bone-flash past the visible, never welding gestures into content or even someone's held face to consequence. On an ordinary summer afternoon when nothing in the universe can die we see a solitary girl on a beach is toeing something-words, figures in the sandand then she goes her way, disappearing into the mist and a flapping of wings or into bodies so thin and stretched to the sun their very bones seem drinking light. We come to where she stood, and "I love" or "suck" or "Melody" is cut into the grains but we can know nothing, not-even the vanishing weight of her absence. But here, tonight, the tangible x-rayed skull beneath the skin of my daughter vibrates in the fluorescent buzz of a hospital emergency room. A doctor scans for hairline cracks, across the lucent bridge of her nose, just whacked in play a little while ago by a tennis racket's aluminum rim.

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I can see the blacks, the grainy grays of socket holes and whorls as smudged as smoke or etched and jagged as splintered rock (the ancient fear of bone that makes the queasy plexus leap), I can see her fillings like silver islands in the symmetrical archipelago of her mouth, but I can know nothing from this refutation of her immonality, not even the vanishing weight of her absence. Still the laughing jaw yields meaning to the epistemologist of fractures. "She's ok . The x-rays are negative." So. "There's nothing to be done" before this proof of mutability past a father's sight but give her aspirin for the pain , "nothing to be done " before this hungry grin and signature of woman past my daughter disappearing, inconceivably, into bone and light.

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Lanning Lee

SHE WANTED JUSTICE

On Tantalus she lay breathless, in the middle of a fern forest. Furry, brown hapu cylinders rose in the dark spaces around her, and she could not breathe. It was as if she were fighting for air under water, but she did not struggle, could not move. She lay there, absolutely passive. She was losing her mind, could no longer think for herself, cut off from reason. Lost, she lay naked and pale. Alone in the night. Not a sound except the sharp chirp of crickets pulsing through the moist air. No breeze. No moon. Not a light. Not even a single star shining white or blue or red, flashing in the brilliantly clear dark air.

* * * * * In the gray light, filtering through the frosted jalousies, she examined herself in the full-length mirror hung on the bathroom door. Shower steam clouded her view. She gave herself that look reserved for dissecting -dagger-cold. ''I'm fat!" Her sudden realization. Overnight the spare weight had popped up. It wasn't as if her clothes had gradually felt a little u~::........ warning her this was happening. The elastic bands hadn't lost their become limp and wavy. "I'm bloated," she moaned, hollowly, standing before the glass. "No, you aren't," he said, emerging from the shower. "Look at this." She poked her finger into a slight bulge above right hip . An almost imperceptable ripple ran across her abdomen . He wanted to settle her. "That's not fat." She turned on him, angry. "Look," he offered, grasping her shoulders. "Even if you weighed" I passed that, okay? Five pounds ago." He still held her, wanting to say something to calm her. She away. "And look at you!" she cried. " You eat twice as much as I do. I stopped eating lunch."

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'\.

"You know, I used to be overweight," he said, trying another tack. I exercised and-" "Exercise! That's great. I work in that office till all hours of the night, then I'm supposed to find time to exercise on top of that?" She poked her stomach, watching for the wave. "No, no. I only meant that if you want to lose some weight-" "So you're saying I am fat, huh? Why didn't you warn me? Why 't you tell me earlier? Couldn't you see what was happening?" She stood behind him while he shaved. He watched her eyes in the "Look," he said, hoping not to sound irritated. "I don't wantÂˇto this with you. It's gonna' get us nowhere ." Her eyes followed his â&#x20AC;˘ QII!;\..u..uu. He continued: "I wasn't saying you're fat. I'm sorry your casemakes you work like a slave, and that you can't find time for your." She was looking at the frosted windows. "But," he rinsed his razor in steaming water, "I like the way you look." The stubbled lumps of floated like little islands in the milky water. "I feel like quitting. I'm sick of this case. Do you know how long it's us to find the last juror?" He did. Nothing he said managed to settle her down these days. ''Maybe you should quit. Maybe that's a good idea." The razor head fal, and a small dot of blood appeared under his lower lip . "But we'd never be able to pay the bills. I'd really lose weight then, huh? We'd probably starve to death." She walked quickly into the bedroom. After he watched the water swirl down the drain he ran a hand towel tcross the mirror, clearing the glass. She yelled: "I wouldn't even be able to pay for membership at a spa!" Back in the bedroom he watched her frustration rise as she fumbled into a skirt that fit her perfectly. He knew she hadn't gained any weight It all. His tone softened. "I don 't want to fight with you every morning." He always uied to understand her suess. "I think if there ever was a good aason to quit work- " "Damn it! You know that's not it. I'm fat now. It's depressing the hell out of me." She ripped closed the zipper of her skirt. "If you didn't know me, would you want to see me like this? Find me naked? What if you ran across my body in the middle of nowhere. Would you be able to stand looking at me?'' "If you're fat, then why do all your clothes fit? " The question stopped her, momentarily, in mid- blouse tuck. "They tlon'tfit. Look at this skirt. I can't breathe. Take my word for it , okay?"

115

"Okay, okay. I give up." He pulled on his shoes and headed for the hall door. This was about all he could handle in the way of discussion for the morning. Why doesn't she just quit the goddamn job? he thought. He sipped quickly at the hot coffee. "We're not buying any more of this milk," she said , pouring a full carton of 2% down the drain. "From now on it's skim or nothing, okay?" " Yeah, sure. Good idea," he mumbled , burning his tongue numb because he tried to drink too fast. "And this stuff has got too much sugar in it." The pitcher of lemonade he'd hand-squeezed the night before followed the milk. Three kinds of cheese went flying into the garbage can. The lid spun wildly from the force of her throw. "And as for these," she collected ten eggs sitting in the door rack, balancing them along the arm held tightly to her breast, "these are going too." One by one they cracked into the drain. "Jeez," he said, "take it easy on the disposal. I don't want to have to take that thing apart again ." She mashed all the broken shells into the pipe. " See what I mean?" she moaned. "See what I mean? " She looked at him, pleading. He went to her, put his arms around her. " You'll get the last one today." She wouldn't let him go. "It'll be today," he assured her one more time. "You'll find the last one." Finally she released him. ''I'm sorry," she said. After he'd gone, she looked into the refrigerator. "So what am I going to eat now?" She tried to smile at the echo she imagined reverberating through the cavernous, white, plastic space. "I've just got to lighten up," she thought. A half-empty bottle of pickles caught her eye. "Great!" Going out the door she bit hard into one. ''I'm pregnant. That's where all this weight is coming from ." She could see car headlights rush by over on the H-1 freeway. Another late night. But it was important to her. She'd stay around the clock if it meant a conviction. Huge stacks of case-related paperwork sat in front of her. All the documentation, the affidavits, the lists of evidence, the years of patient investigation she would need to convict. Checked, rechecked, checked again. All the preparation. Millions of black words on a million sheets of white and yellow paper. If the twelfth juror had not been found, her strength might have failed her. Her stamina had nearly given out. But he'd been found. It still amazed her that twelve people in Honolulu could actually know nothing about the case. 116 \

She sat behind the cool koa wood table. She wasn't tired . The sound the gathering crowd did not disturb her train of thought. Hoffman padin, waddling his way through the bar. She didn't bother to acknowlhim as he dropped his briefcase and collapsed at the other table. She lbo>U2ltlt about other cases he had taken on-cases no one else would He always seemed to ftnd some angle, some loophole, some minor Rcltuucalt. that allowed alleged criminals to walk away free, often for But she was ready for this particular case, better prepared than for any case she had ever prosecuted-ever would prosecute. She did look up, as she'd planned, when 'the accused murderer IIOt:tchc:d into the courtroom. She gave him the coldest look she could maJnage. And she sensed that her strategy had worked. Just for a moment looked lost, as though, like an animal on the highway at night, he were in the headlights of an onrushing car. Then he shuffled, head , to the seat beside Hoffman. "I am that car," she thought, imagining her foot pressing down on accelerator. When the judge entered the courtroom she rose. As she came to her feet adrenaline began to pump through her system. She felt almost lightheaded as she thought: "This is for all of them, young and old, my age, younger or older, who ever have been taken, or ever will be taken, to die because of a maniac like this. I am doing this for all women." The judge asked for her opening statement. "Yes, your honor." She turned to move out from behind the desk and, as she did, her eyes met Hoffman's. She froze. He looked too confident. But that cold stare, she realized, was not for her; it looked right through her and far beyond. Her brief lapse passed. As she approached the podium she pictured herself lying beaten, ice-cold, stiff. The ferns caressed her bloody, naked body, but she was far beyond feeling anymore. She knew that she held in her unshaking hand, the key to a lock that had already been turned.

* * * * * In a Leeward studio, a young woman worked to perfect segments of her dance routine. Finally satisfied, she walked over and stood before the mirrored wall. She began warm-down stretches, her right leg anchored on the bar. Her eyes travelled slowly along the taut leg muscles as she bent her head toward her knee. Music blasted from a tape deck. Her leg warmers 117

were soaked with sweat. A sweltering summer Saturday; everyone had left early. She was the last one working out in the studio. As she straightened before the glass , she watched the reflection of the front door opening behind her. A man she did not know, wearing dark mirrored sunglasses, a tank top, faded cut-off shorts, and worn rubber slippers, stepped into the room. In the mirror she watched him flash a fierce smile which spread slowly, crookedly, across his face. He firmly pushed the door closed behind him. She felt her body begin to shake, but she could not manage a scream, even as he walked quickly, quietly toward her. She knew she should run, but she couldn't make herself move. It was as if she had lost all control, as if she had lost her power to reason. But she sensed the horror coming upon her, another victim, the same agonizing story continuing. Another woman ... another woman who wanted justice.

118

ouija board and tarot cards over her low black table of a husband's inevitable . No children for

coffee in small cups, with too much sugar: brew. Her voice, hands rubbed together, " Burden and regret." ginger, tangled in coarse hair: petals to the NO of her

119

tl.

Kathryn Waddell-Takara

C'SCAFE

Imagining the quiet of another age When dogs I pigs I chickens I horses I lo 'i Were abundant as today's cars. Moon-time Another cycle Predictable as progress Swamp become Waikiki Trees become parking lots/ apartments. It is the 4th full moon Since you crossed the threshhold of my house Transforming my vision The third since you imprinted my being With yours The second since the transmission Of secrets penaining to the heanL'amour.

My instinctive center is temporarily satisfied After the breakfast special: Pancakes I eggs I fresh Kona coffeeBien mange.

121

On the wall The poster of a woman holding a large orange parasol Reminds me of a Mahealani moon Outside the window Off the Eastern shore at Punalu 'u, A picture poem, While I danced for you On your bed . Today, I sit like a mannequin Behind a plate glass window Freshly polished. Outside the people walk/wait for buses Serious as the harried drivers Rushing from dreams and nightmares To their morning duties Rising to the full moon madness. Behind the counter, Attentive owners, hungry to earn money For the new Mercedes, Calmly tend The surge of customers. My dream is Still as a plum Hidden by a summer leaf Ripened to bursting On a hot day.

122

I imprint I moon I predictable are connected grains of sand on a single purple beach dance of progress dervish- like

nu.J~~::J I pulsing I memories!

moon phases I traffic I l'uiiorlfru 路 pancakes I yellow eggs I uiClUUlll.'ll at C's Cafe sounds of progression al::\:un.uii!

123

Kathryn Waddell-Takara TREKKING FRIENDS

Riding the belt road to Kamuela from Kona Red wooden church on lap of volcanic cone Precious We stopped, I marvelled at the art piece At Kamuela Airpon by Mirella Belshe, A lifesize mould of my face : One of the several bronzes On the two large cubes. Later we got lost in Kamuela. (How could we?) Soon speeding down the eastern slopes Of the Kohala mountain range , We stopped to enjoy wine in the eerie pine wind Near the llama farm. Beyond Kapa 'au to Makapala I wanted to walk down to Pololu Valley, Lie on the black sand beach-naked You said, too far this time. The mules were still in the field, Mahogany, their large ears Offering humorous relief To the stark cliffs dropping dark To the blue/grey sea. Back in Kapa 'au we stopped . I looked for presents for my daughters, Found a peridot necklace for Karla, Esoterically healing for nervous disorders, Only five dollars, a gift.

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n~~LUU.Lt;

to Hap una Beach saw Maui in the distance, to Mahukona .,.,....uuâ&#x20AC;˘,; by the sea , ,- ..â&#x20AC;˘~~~..... the large desened building. found 'opihi, the sea surges. sun sparkles you collected them, 1th the pointed rock I found And gave to you.

, .....v<eu

You gave me the triangular-wedged White one we forgot in the irridescent lled rent-a-Toyota. We soaked the 'opihi in salt from the lava rock And continued through neon static on the radio To Kawaihae Harbor.

The heiau at Pu 'ukohola was Black and red hues, Fiery vibrations Overlooking the calm of the harbor. Dedicated to Ku, the war God, It became the tomb Of Kamehameha 's cousin Keoua, In the battle for power, Control of the islands.

125

Amid thorns and dry grass A pyre momentarily mythic. The prophet on Kauai had predicted Success. I was glad to move (From Hapuna Beach and the castle of sand.) But you wrote HAPUNA HOTEL on the wall And the children stomped it to oblivion. We came back after the weekend To serpentine streams of traffic And Ka 'a 'awa crickets still singing.

126

~l.LI;;u.â&#x20AC;˘~LI;;

Zaduszki w tym midcie: juz

tu swoje groby: Ela, Piotr, Leszek,

, Staszek, Gwizdek-wszyscy ode mnie. ]ui mog~ bezpiecznie 0 ich zyciu: jest skonczone pelne, doskonale jak dojrzaly 'wv-7vclrv owoc. Niedost~pnie pi~kne tych, kt6rzy jak ja-nieporz~dnie chaotycznie , z dnia na dzien-nadal umieraj~.

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Bronislaw Maj

ALL SOULS translated by Daniel Bourne

Fourteen years in one place. Long enough to have several graves to visit: Ela, Piotr, Leszek,Janusz, Staszek, Gwizdek. All of them younger than I. Already I feel no pain when I look at their lives. They are free of sharp edges, perfect and complete as fruit ready on the limb. So beautiful, so unobtainable, for those of us who in our clumsy and chaotic way still fiddle with the day to day business of how we will die.

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GING The Speed ofDarkness Speed ofDarkness Fiction by Rodney Morales Ridge Press, 1988

The literature of modern Hawai'i has undergone a quiet coming of during the past twenty years or so. Its foundations have been laid upon the truth that the authentic literature of any time and place only be written by those who have grown up in th.at time and place. Local poets and dramatists have led the way through this rite of pas, partly because of the sheer volume of poetry that has been published, tnd partly because poetry and drama are essentially performance arts that can make an immediate and telling impact upon a live public audience. Like performers, the works themselves gather validation and strength from the approval of those who attend each reading or dramatization. While the small body of well-wrought local fiction has been growing steadily, it has not seemed to impress itself as indelibly upon the awareness of the community as poetry and drama. That is at least partly because, even in its shon forms , fiction can be unwieldy to perform. Therefore, local fiction is less frequently read aloud than local poetry, and it is almost never given dramatic rendering. When it is read publicly, its effectiveness is often eroded by the understandable yet frustrating injunction that the reader choose a "small, representative" sample , a condensed version if possible. Predictably, the fiction that has earned the greatest visibility-that of dramatist/fiction writer Darrell Lum-also has the greatest performance potential. While Lum's fictive voice has cenainly not been crying alone in any wilderness, its local inflections have been, deservedly but dangerously, the most heard. They deserve to be heard because they are authentic, entenaining, and thought-provoking. But they are a danger to Darrell Lwn, the fiction writer, because he has in a sense been typecast, perhaps even in his own mind, as da guy who writes (and reads exceptionally well) da pidgin stories. And they are a danger to the community of aspiring local fiction writers, who might feel that unless their work is both strongly pidgin-flavored and first-person it will not be genuine. (Chances are they already believe that if it is not shon it will not be read.) 129

Enter Rodney Morales with The Speed of Darkness, a collection of rambling narratives whose basic voice is unadorned standard English lightly tinctured by the local idiom. In addition to having considerable read-aloud potential, Morales' work is so complex and comprehensive a weave of historic events, social classes, ethnic delineations, and ...~..~"F''""' nuances that it frustrates this reviewer's impulse to fully discuss any these elements individually. It is full of well-conceived, clearly de'velle>otdl characters undergoing credible personal trials in settings recognizable any Island resident. I will hope it is sufficient for our purposes to say this is richly textured writing, the result of exceptional talent and :~~,~lUJu~ vision. Be assured that the light of serious literary scholarship will this Darkness, and that it will reveal a good deal more than my glimmering beam. I don't think I overstate the case when I predict that The Speed Darkness is destined to become the benchmark against which all local fiction will be measured. Yes, like you, I am a charter member of Darrell Lum Fan Club, and, like you, I know and respect the work of eral other local fiction writers-Susan Nunes, Lanning Lee, and Terada among them . And, like you, I am familiar with the 0::.~ ing work of an earlier generation of "local moderns " - Milton John Dominos Holt, and Charles M. Kong, for example. And , no, I think calling The Speed ofDarkness a benchmark publication is nv#'路rct~IN ment. It is that good. While it is beyond my purposes here to comment on the ovenones of its three-part, three-stories-per-part structure, I will say gives the book a comfonable balance. Appropriately enough, the first ("Tsunamis Within") establishes the themes to be explored through sequent characters and situations within pans two and three (" The That Bind" and "The Vonex"). Although the characters don't carry from one story to the next, the narrative consciousness-sometimes person, sometimes third, sometimes somewhere between- does. when it is strictly first-person, that consciousness has an all-knowing, forgiving omniscience that imparts consistent dignity and authority. The book's most persistent metaphor is walls. It is established in first story, "Ship of Dreams," as the walls of the early 1920's Palama munity social hall on Saturday nights, when the Pueno Ricans hold weekly dance. Japanese protagonist Takeshi must cross these walls to the barrier of ethnicity separating him from his Pueno Rican cw,-Ht~o~~~ Linda and from the music within. Fittingly, it is his learning to play Rican music that gets him invited inside, out of the darkness. In the second story, " Clear Acrylic Enamel ," the metaphor ........, ....

" 130

'\ emphatic expression. There are no fewer than eighteen walls in this Rather, there are three walls, those surrounding HIC Arena (now Waikik:i Shell, and Andrews Amphitheater; Lenny, the narrahero , has entered them illegally a total of eighteen times. Like "Ship the protagonist heads for the music within and away from the llarlmess without. His success does not so much represent the melding of groups as it does the invasion of an economic barrier. The "haves" inside with the music of big-name stars like Hendrix, Joplin, and San, while the "have-nots" wait outside, at least a thousand of them who two things in common: we hate (or can't afford) to pay for music , we want to get in ." (p. 34) It is of further significance that "More than half [of the 'have-nots'] are white guys, haoles. There are no fences between them and us shaded ." (p. 34) The music, or the desire for the music, has brought them Nowhere in any of these stories are there value distinctions 路~rwt~en people on the basis of race. If the big picture is not the gauzily airbrushed idyl of James Michener/Hawaii Visitors Bureau " Golden People," neither is it comprised of people divided against one another along ethnic lines. Rather, it is people of whatever race or culture doing their best with the brief period of light between two darknesses that we call life. If walls represent the barriers between us (and sometimes within us), and music represents the joyful harmony that can exist among us, darkness represents more than the literal darkness of night or death. It represents everything that conspires to make life intolerably frustrating and joylessthe degradation of poverty and squalor, the tedious monotomy of manual labor, the stifling pettiness of bureaucracy, the senseless horror of war. Morales' characters seem always to be aware of the transience of light, the necessity of going for the music regardless of what walls have to be scaled, circumvented, or flattened . These metaphors work effectively only in a narrative environment made authentic by an artist who fully understands and faithfully represents the people and place he is writing about. In spite of its incredible panoply of characters, settings, and situations, The Speed of Darkness strikes no false notes, attempts nothing that is spoiled in its dramatic effect by implausibility. Its characters range from elementary school students to cab drivers, from unemployed Vietnam burnouts to widows turned prostitute, from Kaho'olawe campers to physics professor surfers. They represent a wide variety of ethnic cuts and mixtures and speak everything from heavy pidgin to textbook English. They all come to absolutely credible fictional life only because they all come from life. Neither an outsider nor a lesser artist could have encompassed this variety or earned this triumph. &..'. . . . . . . .. , , "

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I have characterized these stories as "rambling." That is not to imply lack of purpose or direction. It does mean that each story represents a journey of exploration through varying facets of the lives it explores. Just as there are no characters who lack credibility, there are very few who are unsympathetic, and none who are outright evil. In large part that is because an unsympathetic or evil character must be portrayed in a onedimensionally inhuman fashion that precludes empathy. Given the constraints of shon fiction, the characters in these stories are remarkably welldeveloped. For example, there is Felipe Magreal , the protagonist of "Saint Paul in the Promised Land." In fewer than twenty pages we know his entire life's story from before the time he left the Philippines to the time he takes flight for the City of Angels-Los Angeles, he supposes; far beyond that, we firmly believe. Not only do we know him, but we also know a good deal about the family he spiritually fathers and the Kalihi neighborhood they call home. The story rambles back and fonh in space and time and is so enriched by anecdote, dialogue, and detail that one completes a reading with the sense of having experienced a novel. Ora movie. Morales frequently uses still photography as a pan of the darknessencroaching-upon-life metaphor. Each photograph represents a moment of caught life, and a movie, which can be regarded as a series of stitchedtogether photographs , is a still bigger catch. For as long as the movie lasts, death is made inoperative. Thus, the cover illustration of a darkened theater illuminated only by the reflected projection of breaking surf takes on an almost cosmic significance. And thus, my last bit of commentary. I have been an English teacher for too long in these islands; I know too well the irresistible compulsion of anybody who has ever surfed to describe that experience ad nauseum in prose. It is like the 60's compulsion to describe in not very interesting detail your first-or last-acid trip. Like rad, like, I mean , it was unreal, like I couldn't believe it was happening to me, like it was just me and the ocean, like I was superstoked. Like that. Like bad. Very bad. Rodney Morales' description of boogieboarding over the falls in the title story, "The Speed of Darkness," is nothing like that. Like much of his writing, it rambles, and on the most literal level it is an exhilaratingly believable ramble down a big wave on a small plastic slab. But more than that, it rambles in a curiously alternating pattern, compressed or expanded with the purpose of dramatically representing the breaking down of at least one very imponant personal wall. Still more, it is a dance to the universal music of the sea, with the uncontrollable laughter of Nick and Ace

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providing the lyrics . The setting, appropriately, is Waikiki's Walls on a bright summer day. For me, the success of this scene epitomizes the integrity of Morales' artistic vision. To depict an event trivialized by generations of lesser pens into meaningless cliche, make it the climax of his title story, invest it with plausible meaning, and manage to make it fresh and exciting is no minor feat of narrative wall-breaking. The Speed ofDarkness is no minor feat . Period. There is a lot more to it than I have commented upon and probably a good deal that I didn't notice. It is a book I intend to reread slowly and carefully when I can fmd time to do so, and it is a book I strongly recomme,nd to people who lQve the literature ofHawai'i, or the literature of anywhere. It seems appropriate to note that The Speed of Darkness was published by Bamboo Ridge Press, now in its tenth year of uninterrupted publication, and to acknowledge again the debt of gratitude owed by our community to editors Mavis Hara, Eric Chock, and Darrell Lum.

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Notes on Contributors

Alex Argyros teaches Literary Studies at The University of Texas at Dallas. His recent work has appeared in Grain, Poem, Stone Country, Confrontation, Cumberland Poetry Review, Boundary 2, and Red Cedar Review. Joseph P. Balaz was featured as a poet in the recent Aloha 'Aina Concert film . He is the editor of Ramrod, and lives in Punalu 'u. Fred 0 . Baysa has previously published poetry in Hawaii Review. In 1987 he was the recipient of The Nation's "Discovery" award. "A Study ofProtea in a Basket under White Light" first appeared in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin on April 20, 1987. Daniel Bourne spent 1985-87 on a Fulbright to Poland for the translation of younger Polish writers. He teaches creative writing at The College of Wooster in Ohio, where he edits Artful Dodge. He has published a chapbook of his own poetry from Sparrow Press, Boys Who Go Aloft, and has also contributed work to American Poetry Review, Salmagundi, Poetry East, and others. Goldie Chenoweth is a "native" of New York City who currently lives outside of Chicago. She has a B.A. in English Literature from Hunter College, did graduate work at Columbia University under Lionel Trilling, and studied creative writing at the New School for Social Research in New York City alongside James Baldwin and Paul Goodman. Stuart Ching a graduate of the University of Hawaii, lives in Fort Collins, Colorado, where he is pursuing an M.F.A. in English at Colorado State University and writing a collection of short stories set in Hawaii. A. M. "Tony" Friedson publishes poetry and prose in Hawaii and on the other Mainlands. "Dear Adolf' is a semi-autobiographical chat on his experiences in WWII. Now Emeritus Professor of creative writing at the University of Hawaii, he writes, and is literary editor of Biography. Joseph Gillespie is a student at Leeward Community College in Pearl City, Hawaii. Sanford Goldstein, on leave from Purdue University, is now at Niigata University in Japan. His short stories have appeared in Western Humanities Review, Texas Quarterly, and Anzona Quarterly. He has published several translations ofJapanese novels and shon stories and tanka collections. Mokichi Saito's tanka collection entitled Red Lights will soon appear from Purdue Press. James R. Harstad lives in Hawaii and is an Educational Associate in the Curriculum Research Development Group at the University Laboratory School. Tom Hazuka is getting his Ph.D. at the University of Utah, where he co-edits Quarterly West. His recent stories appear in The Quarterly, Calzfornia QUIIrterly, Flon路da Review, Chariton Review, and Artful Dodge. Mahealani Ing has published poetry in Bamboo Ridge. She grew up around the

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'\ comer from the Beretania Follies, sold newspapers on the corner of Fort and Kukui Streets, used to pass by the follies often, and really did wonder what was going on inside. She is currently Executive Director of the Native Hawaiian Legal Corporation. Ronald L. Johnson teaches at Northern Michigan University. He is now at work on a book, Anton Chekhov: A Study of the Short Fiction, to be published by Twayne (Boston). Nicholas Kolumban, a native of Hungary, teaches creative writing to adults and children. His new book of poems is entitled Reception at the Mongolian Embassy (New Rivers 1987). His work has appeared in Antioch Review, Hawaii Review, Chan路ton Review, Malahat Review, New Letters, and elsewhere. lanning Lee was born in Hawaii. He teaches English at the University Laboratory School. He has been published previously in Hawaii Review, and his work has been anthologized in Passages from the Dream Shore (University of Hawaii Press 1988). Rebecca Lee is an assistant professor of English at the University of Hawaii, and has poetry forthcoming in Bamboo Ridge. Mitchell LesCarbeau is a winner of The Nation's "Discovery" award, The Grolier Prize , and the Johnson Poetry Prize. He currently teaches at the University of Rhode Island and Rhode Island School of Design. He has been published in a number of journals and magazines, including Hawaii Review. His poems are forthcoming in Columbia Magazine, NER!BLQ, The Graham House Review, and The Widener Review. Lyn Lifshin has just published two new books of poetry, Raw Opals and Red Hair and the jesuit, and has three forthcoming, a new edition of Naked Charm, Rubbed Silk, and Walking Point (a collection of political poems). Karista Films has just produced a documentary film on her, Not Made of Glass. She has just finished editing a collection of women's memoirs, Unsealed Lips, and is working on her autobiography to be published as part of the Gale Research Contemporary Authors series. Bronislaw Maj, born in todz in 1953 currently teaches atJagieUonian University in Krakow. The recipient of the 1983 S~p-Szarpiiiski Prize for Younger Polish Poets and the 1984 KoSc:ielski Prize, also for younger writers, he is the author of several books of poetry, including Wsp61ine powietrze (The Azr we Share between Us) and Zm~czenie (weariness} , in which "All Souls" appears. He also directs the independent literary reading series Na glos (Out Loud) in Krakow, for years one of the few outlets for uncensored literature in Poland. Jesse McCarty is a freelance writer and editor in Santa Barbara, California, and has just finished his first novella, Sky, based on the day he and his baby daughter " wondersprite" escaped a springtime flood of river by literally one or two heartbeats. He is presently working on two full-lengthers: "an Irish history romp" centering on three of his poet ancestors called Riverseed; plus a "semifiction" about a good friend who deliberately disappeared, unarmed, into the Brazilian rainforest called]ungleheimer.

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Anne Misawa is currently an undergraduate at the University of Hawaii. "The Anatomy of Air" first appeared in the limited edition cultural collage Brouhaha, No. 8 Uune 1988). Ursule Molinaro is the author of 11 novels (the latest: The New Moon with the Old Moon in Her Arms forthcoming with The Women's Press in England in 1989), about 100 shon stories (the most recent: "Bird in Ambush" New Directions #52; a 4th collection forthcoming with McPherson in 1989). plays, nonfiction, & fictionalized history. A collection of 20 Word Ponraits of Notable Women from Different Times & Places: A Full Moon ofWomen, forthcoming with E. P. Dutton in 1989. She has received 3 grants from New York State, 1 National Endowment for the Arts, & has been selected twice by the Pen Syndicated Fiction Project. She was twice the Visiting Creative Writer at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, 1985 & 1988. Parke Muth has for the past two years been at work on a long poem. This work will continue for some time to come. On and off for the last seven years, he has taught at the University of Virginia. Janos OJ.ah, 45, is a well-known Hungarian poet and novelist. He lives in Budapest and is a former judo champion. Mark Osaki has work recently appearing in The Georgia Re11iew, Crosscu"entsCaltfomia Writers Issue, and Carrying the Darkness: The Poetry ofthe Vietnam Wllr (Avon). He has won awards for his work from the University of California and the National Endowment for the Arts. He has recently completed a booklength poetry manuscript titled Tradecraft. Daniel Panger has published eight novels and resides with his physician wife, Mary Ann, in San Mateo, California. joanna, the Pope won the Gold Medal in the Sixth Annual Porgie Awards of the West Coast Re11iew ofBooks for best original fiction (San Jose: Resource Publications 1986). His story "Bad Thing" appears in The Anzona Quarterly in 1988. Robert Payne has had poetry published in the Colorado-North Re11iew, of which he is now the editor. He works at a coffee house and says he is financially inept, spiritually accelerated, and living a life some have called "curious." He says he also writes sentences and paragraphs. Tony Quagliano has poems in New York Quarterly, New Letters, Rolling Stone, Rolling Stock, and The Pushcart Pnze: Best of the Small Presses. He has work forthcoming in Exquisite Corpse, The Spint That Mo11es Us, Cafe Solo, and the alternative press of Hawaii, Ramrod. He is editor of the Reuel Denney issue of Poetry Pilot, the magazine of the Academy of American Poets. Along with poet Joseph Stanton, he is Co-President of the Hawaii Literary Arts Council. Paul Ramsey was born in Atlanta, Georgia, and is married to the anist and writer Bets Ramsey. He holds the Ph.D. degree from the University of Minnesota and is currently Poet-in-Residence and Guerry Professor of English at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. His poems, essays, and fiction have been published in the United States, Canada, England, France, India, Italy, New Zealand, and elsewhere, in a number of anthologies and periodicals, including

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\ An Introduction to Poetry (ed. X . ]. Kennedy), !/This Be Love (ed . Rex Harrison), the Pn.ncelon Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, Amenca, ChromC/es, Commonweal, Epoch, Essays on Crittcism (Oxford), Georgia Review, Hudson Review, Parnassus, Ploughshares, Shakespeare Quarterly, Southern Poetry Review, Transatlantic Review, and more. He has published seven books of poems, the most recent titled The Keepers (Irvington 1986), and has edited an anthology, Contemporary Religious Poetry (Paulist Press 1987). Spoken Arts, New York, has produced a recording, The Poems ofPaul Ramsey (1983). Romero is originally from California and has lived in Hawaii six years. She graduated in 1988 from the University of Hawaii with a B.A. in political science. Also in 1988, she received the UH Myrle Clark Creative Writing Award and won an honorable mention in the Academy of American Poets College and University Poetry Competition sponsored by the UH Department of English. R. Schrichte is a freelance photographer in Honolulu. Shadoian teaches film and English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. James Sundahl is an Associate Professor in English at Hillsdale College , Hillsdale, Michigan, where he teaches Critical Theory, Genre Studies, British Romantics, Contemporary American Literature, and Freshman Honors. His poems and essays have appeared in a number of periodicals, including The Alaska Quarterly Review, Ball Stale University Forum, Cottonwood, New Letters, Florida Review, Writers ' Forum, and The Pennsylvania Review. Thomas is a resident of Huntington, West Virginia, and teaches English parttime for Marshall University. Her poems have been published in the Davidson Miscellany, Antigonish Review, Laurel Review, Musings, Thirteen, and Grab-aNickel. Her poetry is forthcoming in Northland Quarterly. Haunani-Kay Trask is a native nationalist who teaches Hawaiian history and politics in the Center for Hawaiian Studies at the University of Hawai' i at Manoa. ~thryn Waddell-Takara is currently reading intensely for her Ph.D. exams in political science at the University of Hawai'i. She is working on her dissertation on Frank Marshall Davis, poet and journalist. She has recently been impressed by the works ofJean Toomer, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich. For balance, she grows orchids and palms in Ka'a'awa. Amy K. Williams, now Amy K. Conners, recently graduated from the University of Hawaii with a Bachelor of Arts in English. She is particularly interested in the visual interpretation of fiction and poetry. lob Wilson has published poems and essays in various journals in America and South Korea. His book of poetry, Waking in Seoul, was published in 1988 by Mineumsa Press in Korea and the University of Hawaii Press in the USA. Leona Yamada has previously published work in Hawaii Review. She is an M.A. candidate at the University of Hawaii. She lives in Palolo with her family and their little valley zoo.

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