Hawaiʻi Review Issue 26 White Bread: 1989

Issue 26

WHITEBREAD

Vol. 13, No. 2

Cover art by Martin Charlot.

by Amy K. Conners. i Review logo redesign by Guy Gokan.

Somono's essay, "Bagwis," was first published in journal of the Women's Group, Wai'anae Coast(Fall1987). "'i Review is a tri-annual publication of the Board of Publications, University Hawaii at Manoa. It reflects only the views of its editors and writers, who are responsible for its content. Correspondence and subscriptions should be to Hawai'i Review, Department of English, University of Hawaii, 1733 Road, Honolulu, Hawaii 96822. The editors invite submissions of art, , fiction , interviews, poetry, translations, reviews and literary essays. Manumust be accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope. Subscription one year (three issues), $10.00; single copies, $4.00. Advertising rates are ble upon request.

Review, a member of the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines, is by the American Humanities Index, the Index of American Pen"odical , and Wn"ter's Market.

University of Hawaii at Manoa. ISSN:

Staff for this Issue Dellzell Chenoweth Amy K . Conners Kelly Ellis Nguyen T. M. Goto Russell Medeiros Paige N. Donner

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

Special Thanks to: Nell Altizer Lizabeth Ball Wes Calvert Steven Curry Willis Dunne Puanani Fernandez-Akamine Christine Froechtenigt Dana Naone Hall Craig Howes Kii Susan Kahakalau Lilikala Kame' eleihiwa Joseph Kau Sonia Khatchadourian Zdenek Kluzak Michael Marceil

Elizabeth McCutcheon Rodney Morales EshaNeogy Margaret Russo Todd Sammons Roben Shapard Michael Simpson Frank Stewart David Stroup Dorothy Tamura Jeannie Thompson Haunani-Kay Trask Rob Wilson Leona Yamada

CONTENTS

FICTION Philip Shiva Damon Willis Oshiro Valerie Wieland Ruth Mclaughlin Kristopher Saknussemm

THE DREAM STONE BAD COOKIES THE OLDEST GENERATION SOMETHING LIKE GOD ON DUTY A LITTI.E SEASON THE LITTI.E WITNESS CHEER THE TRYST I MAKE ENOUGH BROKEN ICE SHELLS IN THE NUDE

2 14 16 21 33 34 36 38 43 56 71 82 94

AN IMPOSSIBLE TASK A FUNNY THING FLIGHT

99 107 120

Sussy Chako Robert Welshons Harry V. Vinters Dirk van Nouhuys Kevin Phelan and Bill U'Ren Martin B. Sherman Bruce Douglas Reeves Debbie Lee Wesselmann

1 15

Jay A. Blumenthal Robert Funge

20

Paul N . Silas

28 29

Greg German D . Castleman

30

Mary Eiser

POETRY

THE LAST GREAT AGE OF BREAKFAST FATHER AND SON PIECES OF NIGHT, POEMS FROM PRISON #35 THE LIMESTONE COWBOY SEES GOD , AND IT'S A WOMAN EPITAPH I DREAM ABOUT MARRIAGE, AFTER THE FIGHT

Vl

31

Priscilla Atkins

32 40 51 52

Marcia Womongold Masami Usui Matt Duarte Dion Farquhar

54

Lyn Lifshin

64 66 69 70 91

Eve Shelnutt Doug Turner K. Coughlin Lyn Lifshin Ronald Smits

92

Fritz Hamilton

117

Susan Ashbury

118 135 136

Louis Phillips Michael Simpson Kathryn Takara

Nonfiction by PROUD MONSTER: A SEARCH FOR HUMANITY BAGWIS

138 144

Brien Hallett Celeste Somono

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

147

CORNFLOWER WOMONGOLD'S COSMIC ALPHABET TWO POEMS MIKE TYSON EMPIRE STATE HE'D RATHER HAVE A PAPER DOLL SHE SAID WHERE ARE THE OLD FATES? TWO POEMS OARSWOMAN AFTER THE WAR THE WHALE ROCKS WHEN IT'S RAINING DOGS & ...

WHEN WE WALKED PAST THE DeANDREA SOME SOURCES OF THE CHINESE TRADITION HAPPY NEW YEAR ELEGY

VH

Jay A. Blumenthal THE LAST GREAT AGE OF BREAKFAST

It was in the last great age of breakfast when all things seemed possible, when the salmon, fed up with petty ambition, climbed the stairs to my bedroom and expired in my arms, when poached rhinoceroses grazed in the high grass of forethought, vowing their Type B armor could not be penetrated by direct insult, when marmalade strode as never before, when eggs remained silent, never cracking under the torturer's intimate attention to detail, when abnormally healthy cereals muscled into memory, their continuity unbroken by the intermittent cowardice of childhood, when bacon scorned its heritage and toast knew its place, when apples, oranges, and bananas -each personally mooned by a caretaker god-were fullsize, delicious to sybaritic touch, when milk flowed like juice from a spectacular wound, and when coffee, great pools of robust vapor, steamed the consciousness of an entire race of poetspoets who, once fonified with imagination , grew strong on their own myth , and never hungered for the quick fix of metaphor.

1

Philip Shiva Damon THE DREAM STONE

"Rice andfish! Rice andfish! Oh how we love to eat nee andfish!"

It was a chant, and the boys had been singing it over and over since

even before the first serving, continuing to keep it alive right through the feast. Sometimes only a few of the boys would be chanting the wordsscarcely intelligible through the vigorous efforts of their own chewing and swallowing-and then at other times it seemed as if all twenty-five of them had joined back in the chorus. Laughing and choking down their food , they sang: "This sticky nee tastes real mee, but our only wish is more fnedfish!"

For awhile the girls would sing along too, when their mouths weren't full, but after a few stanzas the seriousness of this other business would come back to them . Then their eyes would drop, and they would return once again to eating in silence, or else stop eating altogether. A few of the girls even looked over at the boys with little-girl frowns on their faces, but they were acknowledged in their disapproval only by one another, and silently they returned their attention to their own confused thoughts and feelings.

Bess picked at her mahi mahi with precious little appetite. She had no heart to sing about food at a moment like this, yet she felt no desire to glare accusingly at the boys either. She almost felt as though she liked the boys more at this moment: they were at least sincere in their enthusiasm.

She wasn't sure at all how she felt about the girls. Yet it was only what her dad called a gut feeling, and he always said that while at some moments it was the most trustworthy feeling you could have, there were also times when the gut level could lead you down to your lowest emotions and get you into a whole lot of trouble. All she knew was she wished there was some way she could let Miss Morioka know how sorry she felt for what had happened .

Miss Morioka was standing up now, from the small table she shared with the other three teachers chaperoning the weekend, and Bess studied her favorite teacher's lovely hands: confidently they gripped the chair- back as she flexed her arms and her shoulders gracefully upward until she stood 2

elegantly erect. Except for this afternoon in the ocean, this marked the first time Bess had ever seen her teacher without her famous rings, and it was as though she was watching a totally different woman. It seemed kind of silly to say that without them she looked almost naked-Bess knew a cliche when she heard one-nor was it that those slender and ringless hands were any less expressive of all the qualities of Miss M's which Bess had come to admire so strongly. On the contrary, it was almost as if they were even more so .

Bess watched Miss Morioka approach the girls' table. Bess's heart suddenly fluttered, and her skin puckered up like poultry. No one could ever tell by the way her teacher was walking-this was for sure-that she'd just had all her rings stolen. Nor by the expression on her face either. Maybe this was why Bess felt so unexplainably guilty. Maybe she wouldn't be sitting here feeling as though she had been the actual thief if Miss Morioka wasn't being so supernaturally even-tempered about it all. She clapped her hands for attention, and Bess watched for the violet flash from the amethyst crystal on her left index finger. But it wasn't there, of course.

Instead there was a louder, stronger clap as her hands and fingers came unencumbered together.

"All right, girls," Miss Morioka announced. "I just want to give you a chance to go back for seconds before the boys go back for thirds."

"Or fourths!" called a boy's voice.

"Or fourths," agreed Miss M with a nod and then a smile. She started to raise her ringless right hand in mock amusement to her mouth and then abruptly lowered it, in a gesture that Bess knew was meant to save her students any additional embarrassment. "And furthermore," added Miss Morioka, " I want to remind you there 's no rule that says the boys can only sit with the boys and the girls can only sit with the girls." A chorus of groans rose up from the boys' table, and an infectious rash of giggles broke out around Bess. "We have the whole weekend together," Miss Morioka assured them, "and wouldn't it be nice if everyone could go home with some new friends from both genders?" There were more groans and giggles . Bess noticed that the only one beside herself who wasn't laughing was the quiet vegetarian Chinese girl, Kwan Yin, the one Tawna and the other girls called "Hollow Laundry."

Miss Morioka reminded them all of the bonfire and story-hour songfest scheduled for the beach after sunset and told them not to forget their jackets. It was at moments like this that Bess felt she could almost see Miss Morioka's depth of concern for her students. It was never as though she was simply telling them a rule. It was rather as though she was unusually sensitive to their comfort, almost to the point of feeling their deepest

3

discomfons along with them. Now Bess concentrated on feeling Miss Morioka's discomfort along with her: she had to be suffering the loss of her rings at least a little. Yet all Bess could feel was some kind of crazy guilt that made her want to step forward and confess irrationally to a crime she'd never committed. She was mystified by the feeling, and she found herself suddenly looking down toward the end of the table where the silent Kwan Yin had been sitting alone eating rice and salad. But her place wu empty, and Bess just caught a glimpse of her long black hair disappearing through the dining room door to the beach.

They were free till sunset. Immediately all the "popular" girls gath路 ered together outside beneath the plumeria tree, with Tawna in the mid路 dle. Tawna was considered the prettiest of them all , and she was unquestionably the most physically developed: Bess herself had looked up to her at one time. Some of the girls wanted to talk about where the boys were going to be between now and dark, and some of them wanted to about who had stolen Miss Morioka's rings.

"I'll bet it was one of the boys," said one of Bess's friends.

"Or more than one ," said another.

"I think it was a girl," said still another.

"Yes, why would a boy want to steal anyone's rings?" someone dered out loud.

"Because he's a boy!" someone else reasoned.

"What do you think, Tawna?" several of them finally asked, in chorus with one another. Tawna thoughtfully fingered her blond hair.

Bess stood at the outer edge of this discussion and watched Morioka talking to the other teachers over by the swings and the slide. looked as though she was trying to convince them not to feel so about what had happened. Some of the less popular girls walked talked in groups of two and three. There were no boys in sight. Bess see Kwan Yin anywhere either. She had a sudden picture in her however, of where she might be. Miss Morioka went inside the tea,chelli cabin.

"I think it's probably someone we'd least suspect," replied Tawna.

"I bet it's Hollow Laundry," someone whispered.

Tawna narrowed her steely blue eyes and assumed a knowing sion ''I'm not saying it is," she told them, "and I'm not saying it isn't."

They were at a Y camp on Oahu's North Shore, and the teachers been relieved that there was no surf to speak of. The Banzai Pipeline menacingly in only during the winter months, of course, but the ocean unusually flat even for June. The blue water looked peaceful and

4

Yet Bess knew there were invisible currents of great force lurking only bikini-bottom-deep to a water-treading girl: beneath the tranquil surface.

Maybe the same was true for Miss Morioka. Maybe a huge undenow was welling up inside of her and was destined to explode on some distant and unsuspecting shore. If so , Bess would be very surprised.

She would also be terribly disappointed, she now realized, as she found herself leaving the gathering of popular girls and walking toward the beach.

"Hey, Bess, where you going? " called one of her friends .

"Yeah, stay with us!" called another. ''I'm just going to walk on the beach and watch the sunset," she called over her shoulder to them. 'Til be back."

"Let's all go," suggested another of the girls, and there was a brief murmur of agreement.

"No," Bess heard Tawna suddenly decide for them. "Let's stay here instead." And Bess was all alone when her bare feet made contact with the late afternoon sand.

She found it hard to believe that they had all been swimming joyfully in this water only a few hours ago, ftfty boys and girls celebrating their graduation from the eighth grade, already thinking of each other in terms of what school they would be attending in the fall-St . Andrew's, St. Louis, Maryknoll, Iolani, Kamehameha, Punahou , or perhaps one of the Windward Side public high schools, a far less enviable prospect. Miss Morioka and the other teachers had been in the ocean with them, splashing water and making jokes and predicting great futures for them all as though there were no undenow tugging away at them beneath the joyful surface of the moment . Bess had spotted Kwan Yin much fanher out than the rest of them, effonlessly swimming with long and graceful strokes in a line parallel with the shore. It wasn't much later that Miss Morioka had discovered her rings missing from the; spot where she had left them .

Without any effon Bess found Kwan Yin sitting exactly where she 'd pictured her: back under the plumeria tree. She sat with her eyes closed in a small grove of ironwoods at the edge of a fteld of cane, facing the ocean and the setting sun. She was resting comfonably in the yoga posture that Bess's lanky dad had been practicing for years but had only recently begun to master with any degree of comfon, the one they call the lotus- in which one sat perfectly symmetrical with either calf locked securely on the opposite thigh. Bess was not surprised to see her sitting that way. Their fathers knew one another. Bess's dad had told her once that Mr. Yin was a Taoist and a master of tai chi. He also was divorced. The difference was that Kwan Yin lived with her father, while Bess lived with her mom and her

5

step-dad. Kwan Yin opened her eyes and smiled. " Hello," she said. "Hi," said Bess, and she joined the other girl in the ironwood trees.

"Were you meditating?" she asked Kwan Yin after she'd sat down in the pine needles beside her.

"Yes," answered Kwan Yin, "but only lightly."

"How' d you know I was standing there? " Bess wondered.

"How'd you know I was here?" Kwan Yin asked in reply. They both smiled.

Together they watched the sun sink toward the ocean. Bess was suddenly conscious of her own posture next to her graceful Chinese classmate, and she made a determination to straighten her back and shoulders. The wind whispered through the trees. She thought of Miss Morioka's ringless hands. "You're not playing with the other girls," Kwan Yin observed.

"I don't feel like being with them right now," said Bess. Kwan Yin nodded.

"All they ever do is gossip," said Bess. Again the other girl nodded.

They watched the sun sink lower and lower.

"You'd better not stay away from them too long," Kwan Yin finally commented, "or else they might start gossiping about you."

Bess looked at her, and suddenly they were both giggling. "I think that's why they all hang around with each other all the time." Bess said.

"So that the others won't gossip about them." They sat beneath the ironwoods giggling softly, and together they watched the sun quietly disappear into the ocean.

As they walked back along the beach together it occurred to Bess that she had never before heard her new friend laugh. ''I'm sorry we didn't have more time to talk," Bess said.

"Remember what Miss M said at dinner," Kwan reminded her. "We have the whole weekend." " But we hardly know each other," Bess said.

Kwan smiled but made no answer. They walked silently in the sand.

Bess felt that she wanted the other girl to say something yet she wasn't sure what it could do. She knew that Kwan had already said more than she was accustomed to. She struggled to keep her own silence, to be content with the company of this unusual girl and the peacefulness of the dusk settling all around them.

Nonetheless, she wanted to say something more, and she probably would have if they hadn't been interrupted by a bunch of noisy boys rummaging among the brush along the beach for firewood . Then, just as the two of them separated to assist in the gathering, Kwan surprised her by speaking again: " Maybe sometime you can show me your crystal."

6

Kwan's words were still echoing in Bess's mind as she dumped her of branches and driftwood onto the rising mountain of flammable that would soon be a blazing bonfire. After getting her hooded ~·L~•.•ul from the cabin, she took her place among the girls in the growcircle around the fire-to-be. As soon as she'd sat down, Tawna leaned and eyed her shrewdly across three of her old friends. "Did Hollow show you where she hid Miss M's rings? " Some of the girls gigand some of them looked silently down at their own girlish rings and Safety-pinned inside the left pocket of Bess's blue sweatshirt was the hand-embroidered pouch with the delicate drawstring her dad had ..v ..•.::•n back for her on his most recent return from Mexico. Deftly with fmgers of her left hand she undid the safety pin and slipped open the ..... .,uu . '"' · Into her waiting palm-almost with a will of its own-rolled warm and already tingling crystal. She closed her hand around its and lowered her eyelids, exhaling slowly, forgetting immediately about Tawna and the other girls and Miss M's rings. As her dad had her, she concentrated on allowing herself to be transported to somebeautiful and full of harmony, and it wasn 't more than two or three ~..,.," ... breaths before she was back among the ironwoods in her mind, silently with Kwan Yin, watching the sun dip into the ocean. She still gently holding that mental picture when the mound of wood into flame and they all began singing " I've Been Working on the " Not a single soul beside her dad knew about Bess's crystal-not even mom or her step-dad, from whom she had no other secrets in the wide world. Yet somehow Kwan knew. Bess scanned the glowing of the kids who made up that part of the circle not obscured from her by the bonfire. She located Kwan about a third of the way around to left, sitting comfortably between two of the less popular boys in the grade. Neither Tawna nor any of Bess's other friends would have been dead sitting between those two boys , but Kwan didn't seem to Cheerfully she sang: "Dinah won't you blow, Dinah won't you Dinah won't you blow your ho-o-orn?" Bess squeezed her hidden and joined in the chorus.

The closest anyone could actually come to knowing anything about crystal was from a poem she had written as part of a creativity project in . They had been instructed by Miss Morioka to write a poem which awuated some insight into themselves or their world which they could with others. Several of the kids wrote poems about being Oriental, or tta,r.>at..tan or Haole, and a few wrote simply about being girls or boys. They

7

all had to read or recite their poems in front of the class, and then Miss M put several "particularly noteworthy" ones up on the bulletin board where they remained for the rest of the year. Tawna hadn't completed her poem in time for her to present it orally, so Bess never learned what it was finally about. Meanwhile hers and Kwan's were among those that Miss M had selected as particularly noteworthy. Even so, no one could ever have known a thing about her crystal from reading her poem. It was called "The Dream Stone" : It's not a fancy jewel, this stone I love to dream.

I never ride in pretty fashion on its magic beam .

It's not a weapon either, my warm and glowing stone.

I would never think to throw it to break another's bone.

But I see it when I quiet down my busy daytime mind : A gem as precious and as potent as I ever hope to find .

Whenever from my present place I feel the urge to travel, Whenever my web of fears seems too tangled to unravel, Whenever my impatience casts me tumbling into the gravel, I simply smile and dream my stone-all motherwarm and glowingInto my waiting hand.

Now up along my trembling arm the energy comes flowing And fills my ever grateful heart with memories of knowing.

Then with a loving rush through my throat to my brow I am finally at peace with the here and the now.

Even Bess's mom and step-dad had assumed it was about an imaginary stone.

Now they were singing "She'll Be Coming 'Round the Mountain When She Comes." Bess watched Kwan smile at the boys next to her as they sang, and she suddenly remembered what her dad had told her about unconditional love. He said it was when you loved somebody not because they were in your family or your race or your religion or your neighborhood or your school or your club, but just because they were pan of God 's Kingdom. And they didn't even have to be people. They could be animals, or plants, or grains of sand even. And they didn't have to be animals or plants you liked either, like Bambi, or plumerias. They could be fleas or roaches or weeds or poison ivy. That was the unconditional pan. Bess understood that Kwan didn't have any thoughts or feelings about those two boys either way. She was just loving them unconditionally.

Kwan had complimented Bess on her poem one day coming out of the school cafeteria on the way to Mr. Wo's math class. "I liked your poem 8

very much ," was all she'd said, but Bess had been walking with Tawna and another friend , so she had simply said, "Thank you," and continued walking. Even so , she had not felt that Kwan had meant anything more than to give her that simple message. It had left her embarrassed and confused.

She didn't know how to respond moments later when Tawna and her other friend made some wisecrack about Kwan Yin and her poem. Bess couldn't say she understood the poem entirely, but she had had that gut feeling that it was very special from the moment the Taoist's daughter had recited it in her calm and detached voice in front of the class.

The next day when Miss M tacked it on the board she commented on the charming spelling, but Kwan immediately raised her hand and explained without apologizing for herself-that she'd simply made a spelling mistake when she had titled it "Hollow Laundary" : The thinking- you thinks this is me that you see.

We all prefer to think that we think, therefore we are : And in your wishful thinking you only think that this is me To bolster up your thinking that that, dear friend, is you.

Wistfully you think that together we make we.

The knowing- you knows that there is more to the plot.

We all know with that knowing which knows who we truly are: This speaker can not be me; that listener you are not.

For in our deepest knowing we are one instead of two, And this we we think we see is just our own frozen thought.

This your knowing-self knows to be your daily quandary: To recognize your thinking-self as merely hollow laundary.

Bess realized that she knew Kwan Yin's poem every bit as well as she knew her own, just as if she had recited Kwan's that day in April instead of hers. She knew it by hean, and the realization brought a glowing warmness to her own chest.

They were chanting a well-known mele now, and as Bess closed her eyes and concentrated on her crystal, the meaning of the traditional Hawaiian chant seemed to bind them all together in a continuous circle of invisible energy. It went much deeper than the words, which were in Hawaiian and which Bess could never keep straight, and it went deeper than the immediate meaning of the chant. This, she understood, was what Kwan Yin meant by knowing. Everyone was knowing each other right now, whether they knew it or not. With the help of the crystal she could feel this knowing-or imagine it-as an invisible ring of healing fire .

As the blaze died down they roasted marshmallows in the embers, 9

and Bess watched the moon come up over the cane fields. It was a couple of days past full, yet it still painted a shimmering glow over the rhythmic tide beaching beyond the plumeria trees and the pines at sand's edge. The night seemed invisibly full to her. The mystery of the moment had caught them all, in their own ways, and the shadowy circle of early teenagers was soon buzzing electrically with ghost stories. One of the boys told the story of "The Ghost with the Golden Arm." But when he got to the ending pan and began moaning eerily, "I want my gooooolden arm, I want my goooooooooolden arm," everyone anticipated the punch line and suddenly turned to one another and screamed: ''And you've got it! '' Several versions followed of the famous taboo about carrying pork over the Pali. Before the construction of the modern Pali Highway and its two tunnels, the steep ascent into and through the rugged Koolau Range between Honolulu and Oahu's Windward Side had been a perilous journey on a narrow and winding cliffside road, which howled each night with windswept rain through the tall and ghostly evergreens. Many of the kids' parents could recall those earlier times. A sizeable number of the boys and girls in the circle-with the exception of most of the Haole kids and the introspective Kwan Yin-contributed additional tales of mysterious automotive breakdowns at the summit of the pass through the mountains. The Pali was said to be ruled by the fearsome goddess Pele, who commanded the element of fire and could bring on the eruption of a volcano for the merest human indulgence, and traveling Hawaiians had believed the only guarantee of a safe journey over the Pali was to bring an offering of pork and deposit it reverently along the wayside. Thus it was only when someone in the car remembered the undeposited pound of bacon among the groceries in the trunk, or the ham, or the chops, and the offering had been dutifully made, would their car just as mysteriously start up once again and as though nothing unusual had happened.

Suddenly Tawna interrupted the part-Hawaiian boy who was talking.

"Come on," she scoffed, "are you trying to tell us your parents left a whole ham on the Pali?" A response of appreciative giggles rose up among the girls. "Well, what would you do?" the boy challenged back. "Stay there all night?" Several of the other boys chimed in with their support.

In Bess's mind's eye the unity of the circle had been suddenly u•v,......... ; She felt it was now girls against boys, Hawaiians against Haoles. The ble current of harmonous energy had now been severed, and what she in its place was a chaos of angry and vindictive emotional sparks, ""~'llll'u. at each other and recoiling in their own pain. It made her sick in her and she felt that same sense of inexplicable guilt she'd been feeling the theft of Miss M's rings. She looked at Kwan and immediately their 10

joined. For a moment she lost all sense of time; then she felt her crystal come alive in her hand with a healing mystical radiance . She understood that there was an even deeper level to what was happening here and that they were all still connected, all still joined, all still in some kind of harmony despite this bickering on the surface. At precisely the same moment, she and Kwan Yin both smiled.

Everyone seemed exhausted, and Tawna switched the subject to Pele's ancient trick of coming to someone's lodge or hut in a disguise to play mischief on them. Tawna's favorite version had Pele in the role of a beautiful temptress in a red dress who enticed the husband to betray his wife and then brought a rain of volcanic ashes down upon the house in punishment.

Bess and Kwan were still locked together in their peacefully smiling gaze.

Bess could read the chaos of thoughts and emotions ringing through the glowing embers of the bonfire, but she felt no attachment to them. She knew that she and Kwan were somehow elsewhere: somewhere where peace and harmony reigned, and they knew each other as one. Yet she also understood that all of them were in that place, every last one of them. It was just that they didn't know it.

Miss Morioka admitted that she'd never heard that particular Pele story. There were, she emphasized, several more positive versions. In her favorite, Pele comes to the hut disguised as an ugly old hag, begging for whatever scraps the poor couple might be able to spare from their scanty store of food . Already hungry and virtually hopeless, the couple share their last bowlful of poi and their last bit of dried fish with the old beggar woman, who is suddenly transformed into an image of awesome fiery beauty. She tells them that never again will they want for food or shelter, and that they will be protected against all danger from volcano and fire for as long as they live.

It was time to turn in. They had a busy day scheduled for tomorrow.

Miss Morioka suggested that instead of going to bed with images in their minds of fear and destruction, they should remember as they went to sleep the old couple and their act of kindness. The boys and girls got up and stretched their legs. A few of them started for the light of the cabins and some of the others lingered around the dim coals of the fire . An arm's length away from Bess, Tawna grumbled, then said under her breath: " Say goodbye to the fairy tales of elementary school, girls." Several of them giggled . Apparently Miss Morioka had heard her. Their teacher's voice thrilled Bess like a magic harp in the darkness. "You can never say goodbye to the things that are elementary in this world, Tawna."

Bess felt tears in her eyes and she resisted the urge to say something mean to Tawna by trying to find Miss Morioka in the darkness . She wanted 11

to tell her how much she loved her. She wanted to tell her they were going to find her rings for her. Yet she didn't for the life of her know how that was possible. She didn't even know whether Miss M wanted them back.

Maybe Miss M felt that this was her way of sharing her last bit of poi and dried fish with Pele. But did she need to prove anything more than she al路 ready had?

Then it struck her-rather, it spoke to her right through the palm ci her hand holding the crystal in her sweatshirt pocket-that for her even 1Q be thinking about love, she had to be feeling it for Tawna as well. found herself imagining how much inner suffering Tawna must be encing right now to be so full of cynicism and hatred. And she was founeen . Bess felt so lucky. She was learning so much. It was almost ening. Then she realized she was walking on the beach, and the moment she was standing face to face in the darkness with the :>IULWIII Kwan Yin .

Without a word they began walking together toward the rising Bess spoke first. " I haven 't had the chance to tell you how much I awurn~ your poem," she said. " It was nothing," said Kwan. " I guess that's what I admire about it," Bess said. Kwan just and they continued to walk. The moon hung over the water almost enough for them to touch . "It kind of grows on you," said Bess.

Kwan nodded. "It has to," she said, and they both laughed. were some gentle waves now, and the sound of their laughter and sound of the waves blended softly together.

The cane fields stretched to the right of them as they walked. Bess alen to the fact that she was walking on the beach, yet she felt conscious of the moment. She felt as though the pace was in rhythm with the elements of the night world around them : the ocean, beach , the wind, the stars, the swaying cane. She knew it would be to allow herself to lose her mind in the elements, but she knew also that was time to talk. " Why do you live with your dad and not your mom?" finally asked Kwan Yin .

Kwan's answer did not come right off. As they continued """'""'11..

Bess knew that Kwan could just as easily turn the question around back on her. But she knew she wouldn't. "I had a choice," Kwan told her. "I was nine."

"I was four," offered Bess.

"I like my mother," said Kwan , "and I like her boyfriend too. they're devoted to buying and selling real estate. My father is devoted the I Ching." She laughed, and Bess joined her.

12

They came to the ironwoods and stopped. " It's difficult for everyone understand you," Bess told her, "but I'm sure it's only because they 't really know you." " If they did know me ," Kwan replied , " then they would know that no one here to know." They looked at each other and began laughagam .

Bess thought of her father. He had told her once that the more things the world he had taught himself how not to need, the less of him there to be to need them . "I think I know what you mean," she told " Yes ," said her friend, "it seems that you do."

"Would you like to see my crystal?" Bess asked . Despite the darkness, thought never crossed her mind that it might be difficult for Kwan to the crystal until she took it from the warmth of her sweatshirt pocket opened her palm to the night air. This was the first time she had ever the crystal out of the pouch out of her pocket anywhere outside of own room. " No one else figured out what my dream stone was," said "I knew about it before I heard your poem," said Kwan .

"It's changed me ," said Bess.

Kwan Yin nodded. "And now you know there is no injustice," she Bess, "and the thief of the rings will pay for her crime."

"Would you like to hold my crystal now?" Bess asked .

"Just for a moment," Kwan replied. "Just to feel the energy."

Kwan extended her hand, and Bess carefully rolled the quartz crystal of her protective palm. Together they watched it, an inch and a half in almost perfect in its cut, passing through the space between their as though it were all of space itself, until it touched Kwan Yin's palm and was immediately ignited into a bursting bulb of lightalmost blinding to behold. Bess felt no impulse to look away. She transfiXed by the love and the meaning she read in the light, and the crystal spoke to her, she saw in her mind Miss Morioka's rings: where they were meant to be.

Her new friend suddenly smiled, and in the same memorable she rolled the crystal, still shining as bright as the top ornament a Christmas tree , back into Bess's hand. Together they exhaled, and the between them was alive with vibrations of light-a miniature universe tiny, living stars, revolving around the joyful glowing in Bess's open Then without a word they turned, and together they followed the energy of the dream stone, along the moon-shadowy beach.

13

Willis Oshiro BAD COOKIES

Mom takes three weeks to fill the cookie jar. She just bakes at her regular pace of one cookie a day. "It's a waste of energy to bake only one cookie at a time," I tell her, but she just smiles. Every day, one dollop of batter placed right in the center of the cookie sheet, fony five minutes or until brown, then into the cookie jar with its combination lock. I get so crazy sometimes that I have to go over to AuntieJo's house, but her cookies aren't like Mom's. It takes hours to get there and by then , they've gotten cold and slippery.

At last, Mom unlocks the jar and I eat. I eat them all at once because she tells me to . Once, I tried to save a few for when Mom is baking, but when I looked for them later, they were gone and Mom shook her finger at me and said, " Don' t play games with your cookies; they're just looking for a chance to escape." So I hung my head and went to my room mumbling that cookies shouldn't be smaner than people.

When Mom was out to dinner with Dad, I tried to make my own cookies. The recipe was for one dozen but I knew I'd have to eat the evidence so I only made three. Halfway through, the recipe shut and I was on my own. Not knowing what I was doing, the cookies turned out really bad, so bad that they bloodied my nose and hid in the washroom before my Dad came home and put them to sleep . Mom shook her finger at me.

14

Robert Funge FATHER AND SON

a son cannot judge his fother Ivan Turgenev

I never knew the ghosts that haunted him.

He housed the ghost of a father he never knew .

And I am my father's son and sometimes see too much through him as through an unholy ghost .

I feel I must understand him or become him.

He left a mad wife 's prison or drove her mad.

He housed our mother in Bedlam and us with strangers.

I stood on the corner after school and confessed to the Sisters I don't know where I live and dreamed I walked long rows of houses all alike.

We visited her silent world each Sunday.

They shocked one madness out and shocked one in.

He housed us with our mother over a cigar-store and took us out some Sundays with his friend.

Hours alone we spent in his parked car.

He gave us money when we needed it not time.

My sister emulates his faults as vinues .

I exorcize his ghosts thinking them mine.

The testimony can never be all in.

We judge from more than we can ever witness.

He drank and lost his world and then went mad.

We housed him in a room in a prison-house with others who had gone old or mad and we told ourselves ours was a necessary crime .

He died and then we burned the evidence.

15

Valerie Wieland THE OLDEST GENERATION

I'm becoming the oldest generation in my family, and I'm not pared.

Within the year, Mother died almost wholly in spirit and though her physiologically sound body still wanders the H-shaped halls the nursing home. In my recurring dream, we leave the nursing arm-in-arm-her confinement was a mistake. Then I'm in her kitchen ting on the tall metal stool watching her add more paprika to the Steam rises from the bubbling noodles to fog up her bifocals and reaches up with her apron to wipe the condensation away as we laugh some remark that continues to elude me.

At the nursing home, she eats popcorn from a brown paper bag in dimmed room while John Wayne shoots the bad guys. Then she smiles one or another of her fellow residents as the relighting of overhead cents forces blinks and squints onto startled old faces.

My visits are brief. Lucidity toys with her few remaining brain she knows that she knows me. But names are gone, with whole h,.,,tn,.,..,.

With the grandchildren, the Lake of the Ozarks vacations, the recipe meatball sandwiches and the stories of her granny that I always meant write down.

She survived miscarriage and addictions, widowhood and cancer. naivete commingled with her world- weariness to seduce all my ever after, and to bind us thickly, a Turk's head knotting of bone and I wear her rings now, but my fingers are not slender enough, nor nails long enough and painted red enough for a perfect fit. My hair grayer than hers, and I think I dream of her more often than I recall.

And now, Lila is also leaving. It's not, of course, the natural (if is one) order of things, she being several years younger than me. I was when she was born. Until then, I didn't really feel intense love, or The gift of a lifelong companion was, I look back and see now, not in the proper perspective. But how could I have allowed her any place in my life?

Lila's tears catch up to me forty years later, drowning my

16

a three-year-old's devastation of she-won't-play-with-me. Our chitwere born in alternating years, not by any plan that I know of. Lila married . I didn't. She cans pole beans, and decorates wedding cakes icings of Crisco. I'm the better seamstress, but she has the flair for the handcrafted skin with the secondhand-store cashmere sweater. chose a service career, polishing her white shoes nightly, and her skilled eased the pain from violated bodies, the number of which she long lost count of, as now someone else will try to ease away her discomfort .

The year before Dad died-Lila and I were friends for a while thenand I pooled our money to buy Mother and Dad a complete set of Libglasses from Waibel's Five & Dime. Eight-ounce goblets, stemmed lhl'lrh,.·t( juice glasses and Manhattan size. At founeen , I'd gotten my half the money from babysitting and from ironing for neighbors after . Lila got her half, I think now, from Mother, because Lila was never to save more than about $1.50 from her allowances before she'd buy dolls or Evening in Paris perfume or Holloway Bars.

I kept my right hand tightly gripped on the ten , two fives and four dollar bills in my pocket, all the eight blocks to the store. Years of · to Waibel's, and the shoe repair shop next door to it, had allowed to discover the most leisurely route, zig-zagging around blocks; the fun, climbing over fenced-off coal piles at the local college and brick _ . ..........v .• ., off alleys in backyards; and the fast route , used for serious mislike buying anniversary presents for our parents. In two days, they'd their anniversary, and we'd forgone our usual Saturday afternoon the double feature to buy their gift . We'd made our selection weeks after walking slowly up and down the aisles and considering a set of blue enameled roasting pans with white speckles that we dismissed as more for Mother than Dad. Starched and creased table linens also •mr.nt•n from consideration for that reason. Lila suggested a present for of them-I had to explain that the anniversary celebrates another year so we'd have to give them a together present. During most of our through Waibel's, we'd concentrated on the aisle with jacks and magnets, tiny plastic dolls whose movable arms were connected by a rubber band, and metal miniature cars, all compartmentalized by ~>de:n dividers along with dozens of other toys. Whenever something cardboard kaleidoscope, or a wooden paddle with a hard rubber attached to it by a string of elastic-appeared in stock, we talked how we needed that and when we'd get it. At the end of the aisle a rack of paperdoll books, coloring books, paint-by-number, followme·-oclr , and tracing books. Esther Williams was my prized paperdoll and once I had bought it, when I was younger, I hid it relentlessly 17

from Lila's young and clumsy fingers, cutting out swimsuits and evening gowns only when I was sure she would not find me out.

We seldom went down the aisle where glasses were stacked. Mother had conditioned us to fear that sleeves had a mysterious way of lashing out at glass items on store shelves and smashing them to shards. But just the two of us would sometimes venture down the glass aisle, arms pressed tightly against our sides, and look at the rows of clear glass pitchers painted with orange or red flowers, etched bud vases, bouquet vases whose insides had been painted yellow or green or blue. But the matched sets of four or six drinking glasses intrigued us both. Our biggest set of matched glasses at home was of the juice size, that had once been filled with bacon-cheese spread, or olive-cheese spread, or the still intolerable to my tastebuds pimiento-cheese spread. How many tin lids had been pried off those containers and how many boxes of Ritz Crackers had been topped with the stiff spreads and decorated with green olive halves and sweet pickle slices?

And all for a set of matching juice glasses, and even then , the match was not always perfect.

We agreed on a pattern that was clear glass cut with tiny ovals that reflected colors from the glasswear surrounding it. Lila carried the juice and Manhattan sizes, I carried the water goblets and stemmed sherbets the cash register. We had $1.02 left after paying for the glasses, and after they were bagged with a "You girls be careful carrying these" we started on the shortcut home.

Following our second stop to rest our arms, we continued homeward, this time singing roundelays she'd learned at Girl Scout meetings and I'd remembered from my scouting days. We'd walked these sidewalks alleys a hundred times and knew every bump and hole and eruption, so was surprised when , during the second chorus of "White Coral Bells,'' was finishing alone. Lila had stumbled into a particularly deep tire 2:roow• in the alley. As I helped her up, I just knew she was going to cry. she wasn't hun, a fearful sobbing arose . Between her outrushes of and catches of breath , she said, "I think (sob, gasp) I heard (sob, sob) glass (wail) break."

We sat on the cindered alleyway, leaning back against the IJI;I;UUII• wood of a garage and took inventory of our purchases. Lila was right. small juice glass had broken. To get her to stop crying, I enlisted her in forming a plan to fill the void in our anniversary gift.

Mter continuing home and hiding the remaining glasses under a of my dirty jeans and three shins that were already in the back of my on the floor, with nervous giggles we told Mother and Dad that we had

18

back to the store for one more thing for their anniversary. How could refuse to let us go?

Now, though my courage and daring have multiplied as my years added, and I have fought real and imagined dragons and climbed ice ,.,............ 路 .,bare- handed for the sake of my children, I know I would not able to repeat that one cunning and adventurous act that made our gift ,.u.,....,... My desperate, cool maneuver of pocketing a juice glass and only for two boxes of sweet candy cigarettes erased Lila's accident.

After that, we were enemies, and friends, and ranges in between. it was supposed to last for all our lives, until old age had set us into chairs and peculiar ways . So I wasn't prepared for her last letter, ended , " ... not to worry. Inoperable and terminal mean nothing me. They' re just words the doctors use to pacify us, right? I'll be okay. seen hospital miracles. Love, 1."

I visited Mother this morning and methodically pointed out Lila and husband and children and me and my children, from the photographs - taped to the wallpaper in her room. We smiled at each other a lot held hands. The exertion of responding satisfactorily to her half-senand isolated words (sometimes my response is wrong and she then changes her expression to wordlessly assure me it's all right ifl a mistake) tired me swiftly. But not yet wanting to go , even at fonystill needing the strength of a mother's touch, I sit on the bed next to and put my arms around her thinning body. She hugs me back, and I myself she still knows.

19

Paul N. Silas PIECES OF NIGHT, POEMS FROM PRISON #35

Bandages and drainage tubes give them away, That and the way the entire body focuses On the part that is missing: the thief Who has had his hand cut off, the eye Plucked from the lecherer. They come in promising Revenge on the priests who presided over it Until finally absence takes their faces And they sit for months (Some never come back), Awaiting that shudder that signals to the knowing That moment before we know that this Is an earthquake, and then they smash themselves Into the door, begging to lick The hand that has offended them. The desperate Become desperately religious. From then, They study the methods of their captors And inflict us with tracts and homely wisdom, Practicing future cruelties.

20

Billy told Ellen religion mattered. He said it was in horses. They drove

by long idle pastures of them on their way to work.

"Horses could be substituted in Bible passages," he said , "without effect. Horses look like Jesus talked."

He had a theory that horses were Jesus busted up into a million pans dropped from the sky. Scattered over the eanh,Jesus' love. " Show me a Shetland living," he cried, " who doesn't still carry children in his great man, fist-sized hean!"

Ellen didn't answer him, but she believed it mattered to him. Somemattered to Billy besides their relationship which was failing , dying the flowers in their yard, or their dishwasher.

They worked at making plastic eyeglass lenses in a factory five miles town, passing horses everyday to and back from work. Billy had beauthings to say about the horses, which reminded Ellen of a more innotime in their own relationship.

"Horses are a triangle ," he said, "the balance of head, hean, and Wlm--tramrroJrmc~a into the liquid silver of spirit."

Once they talked about faith sitting in their kitchen. The dishwasher was leaking. They had two different kinds of faith on which they couldn' t agree. Billy said faith transformed his spirit, restored and healed him.

Lifted him to God from the woes of the world.

Ellen saw faith born in bitterness. Seeds that struggled to live in a barren ground . She was never transformed, but even as she believed felt in her nostrils the sterile dust of disbelief on the ground from which she struggled to rise . There was pain in every step she took toward God . Perhaps from holding too much to the earth, as Billy accused.

The dishwasher had expelled a glossy puddle onto the floor. The .....,,..u,路,u-. had to be opened from beneath to examine it. A big black crescent wrench lay in a drawer near it for that purpose. It lay like Ellen's enemy, waiting for her to use it. It refused to get a grip, then slipped out of her hands to smash them. Then as she leaped up to suck her fingers it watched her from the floor ; staring upward in its reptilian gaze. It cracked 21

whatever she threw it on-the concrete steps outside, the bottom of the drawer again-it was as dense and foreign as faith . Perhaps it was antifaith . Billy would tell her it was a trial sent by God. Ellen wanted Billy to use the crescent wrench, and directed him to the dishwasher. "What is faith without good works? " she asked .

Billy was stumped.

On their way home from work one day they stopped to look at horses.

They parked, and crossed the long, grassy ditch. The horses leaned their heads across the wooden fence , and Billy stroked them. " They are the perfect muscularity of spirit," he said, "softness and firmness met." It was winter and the horses' coats were a shon fur that padded under their fingers .

Billy explained faith was not a matter of seeing.

"The guys who wear those lenses we make" -some were a half inch thick which was why they were plastic- "they can have faith , too."

He said you could be blind and not see a horse but believe in it. Catch its essence.

When they had climbed back in the car Ellen wanted to talk about their relationship . There was a way they didn't meet anymore. She felt the anger and helplessness of it more than Billy, she thought.

It was another triangle when they sat on the sofa watching television as they did now most evenings. But the television screen was not the silver of spirit. They were tuned side by side into the same programs that always failed them; only the shon drive home past horses never did.

Billy said that their love was not gone, but transformed. He said it hadn't been real love, human love never was ; but something base that grew from the need of fellow flesh . They had been young. Even aged, Billy said, beyond the fetid exchange that satisfied body parts there was a need for comfon; old as the clutch of eggs, the burrow of foxes.

He said that their love was not gone, but refined; the silver pan of it straining toward God. The purpose of human existence was disappointment, Billy said, that if properly followed it led one toward God. Ellen could not argue with that. Yet around her were the principals of her life ; how could she exchange them? She saw their chairs, the worn draperies with their own peculiar smell, the colors on the walls that faded a little each year. She liked the colors best when they had faded to an endurable shade-the rose in the living room drained to an essential rose she thought she could own.

Her mother had given her some dishtowels-neither grey nor white

22

washed to a blank between; she thought the blank of the sky, between and the eanh. They were not of God, who had to be imagined, neiof the breakages of life everyday.

And she loved them . She did love them. Not God whom she had to but these things that seemed true to her; at once in her grasp and So they met at the horses. The two at the wooden fence had by now used to them and hung their heads over to be stroked. They stared through their glass eyes; at Billy and Ellen and at the hills

Sometimes Ellen grew frightened at how odd they had become. They the horses every day. People from work saw them parked along the They waved or pulled over, wondering if there had been car trouEllen didn't known what to say, nor did Billy have an answer when the at work asked if he were going into the horse business, if that was it. knew horses for sale and quoted prices and hands high. Billy didn't them, and Ellen thought he was growing more alone.

Ellen worked in the busiest pan of the factory, seated with a dozen women at machines that cut the lenses to the right size and shape. It more difficult for her to be odd; several of the women she had been with for years. Some she had been as close to as with Billy, she She thought even of giving it up, driving home with one of them letting Billy stay at the horses alone.

One day she tried it. She made an excuse to Billy, arranged with Maryto drop her home after work. She sat beside Maryjane in her car as it in the parking lot. Billy 's space was already empty.

They pulled out of the parking lot, through the factory gates and onto street that turned into the highway home. An awkward silence lay IDr4:>ken between them. Stale air from the heater warmed Ellen's legs and upward into her nostrils. They rode quickly, glassed from the counthat pushed by in a blur. The car smoothed over bumps with a velhum. Maryjane punched buttons on the radio; bursts of song like color the air inside.

Then Ellen felt soothed. The upholstery in the car lay against her like Maryjane 's long fingers looked dainty fiddling with the radio. PerEllen thought , Billy was wrong. Perhaps God wasn' t in horses but in after all , in bursts of intimacy such as she now felt with Maryjane. moments would decay- as would the car- but wasn't the seed or here-that made things come alive? Had she and Billy given up soon?

23

They came upon Billy over a hill. He stood in a little drizzle, past a ditch lush in grass, petting the horses over their worn fence. He looked lonely; even the horses' heads drooped, as if they all doubted the purpose of this . He glanced up as Ellen passed. She did not even have Maryjane slow; the car glided by without a hitch in speed. Maryjane said nothing, as if Billy had not been there.

But the little scene Ellen carried home with her. She didn't speak to Maryjane, didn't hear the radio as it played-emptied now of its first large effects. Maryjane let her off at the gate through which she walked up the little road to her house.

She couldn't forget her betrayal-Billy, the horses, had needed her, if only for a moment. She and Maryjane had sped on in the car, filled to that moment with something like Christ-but a false Christ of Maryjane's music, her delicate hands-that made it impossible for Ellen to shout her to stop.

Billy came in the door bedraggled and wet. Ellen knew there could no forgiveness , no erasing of the blot of her failure. They sat together supper as Billy's head dripped. Outside, the wind blew; Ellen Billy had brought in a chill the food couldn't warm. They didn't speak it, but followed each other to bed as soon as the meal was over.

The next day, and the next , throughout the winter, Ellen stood Billy at the fence. She thought they had all of them grown more ...v .... ..,..,....

Billy's gentleness-even at her despite her failure . The horses stood ble under the rain, but as if they knew that someday it would end. stroked the water from their necks and around their eyes. Water hissed the tires from passing cars. No one from the factory waved anymore.

Winter weakened into spring. The rain stopped. Billy and Ellen tinued to work at the factory. Ellen guided the machine that ground lenses fine, while Billy packed them carefully into boxes. After work would stop at the horses.

Spring had scented the pasture in which the horses stood and 路 their coats a silky gleam. Their muscles rippled and shone under the They reached across the fence to munch on the new sweet grass and ered and stamped as Billy and Ellen approached, as if their bodies hardly contain them.

Ellen thought it sweet the way the horses bobbed their heads the fence at them, inclining a velvet ear to be rubbed.

She thought she felt a renewal in it , and in hers and Billy's ship, too. Even the highway going past took on a shine along its length, if it felt the touch of spring, also .

24

In the evenings she and Billy sat outside their house. Their flowers grown sturdy and bloomed. A line of them trailed to the empty lot door, shining like bright lights at them through the thick grass and that sprung up there .

Ellen and Billy didn't speak. Still, Ellen felt them entwined in each as the weeds across the way. She sat close to Billy as the sun went casting a lingering glow before disappearing. Then she would folhim to bed; waking early as the new day exploded around them, ridin its brilliant glare to work.

Their horses they had come to know-as if their teeth and little injuwere their own. Ellen smelled a scent of pasture grass in the warmth of coats she inhaled. Billy rubbed his hands along their flanks, to their buttocks ending in a graceful tail. Ellen thought they had come to the horses inside and out.

One day the horses were gone. The pasture beyond the scarred fence was empty. They searched in corners from the car, believing horses still fed, or had found a new growth of grass on which to roll. Or had slipped through a gate or were being exercised. They drove home The next day, too, the horses still were gone . The next day the fence was gone.

The rest of the horses along their route were missing, their fences torn down. They saw it suddenly; perhaps it had happened all "Haven't you heard the talk?" the people at the factory said. "We're a competitor."

Down the road a new plant would be built, easily twice as large as own. Already the pastures were stacked with rows of culvert and steel. worked all day rolling asphalt onto the roads that ran to the Billy and Ellen rode home quickly through the air full of the sounds smells of the factory being built. Gone were the pasture and the trails through it, replaced by machines Billy and Ellen couldn't Beyond the factory land a row of homes sprung, and at their edge a scatter of buildings soon to become new stores.

Their own flowers still bloomed and held to the ground. Ellen with Billy in the evenings as the last light struck their petals , dazand went out. Then the vacant lot seemed larger and close, wakening sounds and rustles. The black tangle of weeds crisscrossed the fading as she watched. Then Ellen would turn to Billy, and sometimes took his But he did not yield, gazing instead at the lot as if he could make it again; Ellen would go indoors alone.

2)

Still she sat with Billy in the evenings, preferring his silent company to the bright voices of the women she knew.

As they sat on the porch together-Billy did not speak- Ellen felt their purity, the purity of giving up . All that she and Billy had lost. Still, they had some world together.

They drove to the factory and home. The people at work spoke of the changes; Billy and Ellen were silent. Ellen wondered if they should quit, never drive by again where the horses had been. Summer came and the days opened wide. Then it was time to go to bed before darkness fell. light would fill the day again before they were awake.

One morning they awoke in their house to what Ellen thought was panicular brightness outside, a pure light that promised the height summer. It was Saturday and they did not have to get up. Ellen found self reaching towards Billy, despite their apanness.

Billy allowed her to touch him in a moment, then he suddenly up his hand. Ellen thought she heard a growl. It was not Billy-his was flxed, nor did they own any pets. Ellen thought briefly of the not~l they missed. The growl had come from outside, perhaps from beyond yard. When she heard it again it was much louder, and accompanied by sound of breaking or cracking, as of rubber bands snapping at close range.

Ellen looked past Billy to see a truck parked at the vacant lot. A pillar sat on it, ready to roll down a ramp to the ground. Already some the weeds and vines were crushed beneath the truck .

Ellen made breakfast slowly, thinking of the lot next door. Billy silent in the bedroom as he dressed. After breakfast they went outside, sat on the porch as the caterpillar worked.

Ellen watched as weeds and shrubs were torn from the ground , hills and craters smoothed. Stubborn grass was scraped away. By noon of the lot had been cleared, and lay wilting under the sun.

At exactly noon, the driver slowed his machine . He guided it to edge of the lot to park, though all the raw red eanh looked the same. man climbed down as the engine halted.

Ellen watched the man. He looked around at the lot and at machine again, and then he discovered Billy and Ellen: he waved .

When they did not wave back, he waved again. He was shon square like his machine, and his arm was shon also . But his wave was insistent that Ellen rose, and picking her way across the fresh din, moved toward him.

He had sandwiches and milk out when she arrived, and Ellen with a pang that she had forgotten about lunch. The man was settled

26

shade of his machine, and motioned for her to sit down. She refused sandwich that he offered her, all but a piece. Then the man said what had beckoned her over for-to tell her about this lot.

They were sitting in someone's yard, perhaps under trees. There be room for another house here, even two. He gestured in the dirt the place where the houses would begin. He made a line of shrubs and ; perhaps a fence would divide them. He planted new grass . He out where someone threw a basketball that missed and it rolled a driveway. Ellen laughed.

She settled back in the shade, the dirt beneath was cool, and her fintrickled through it. Suddenly, the driver crushed the waxed paper his lunch and rose. With a shock Ellen realized that the lunch hour gone, and she had forgotten about Billy. She squinted through the 路 light to see him.

He still sat on the porch; he was staring at them. He looked tiny in the , like something a child owned. Behind her, the driver was making with his machine as if readying it to begin. Ellen rose and waved to She retraced her steps in the dirt back home. All along the path she feel excitement rising, and it could not be killed for Billy. When she the porch, she stopped to look up at him . He was sitting in his ; she thought he looked small, weakened , emptied out.

She felt them stare at each other across a distance, as if she were still in lot. Then slowly Billy pushed to his feet, and walked across the porch meet her.

That night they lay together in bed. The night was quiet, neither of spoke, but Ellen thought they lay alert in the room. Billy had clasped arms around her, and soon Ellen could feel their bodies warm. She close. Each of them straining for something, she thought-Billy gripped her harder-something that mattered, something like God.

27

Greg German

THE LIMESTONE COWBOY SEES GOD, AND IT'S A WOMAN

Mid-morning, the next day, after the mud has settled and the country roads have turned the color of smooth-grey, I drop by Limestone's place.

Find him there on the front step, barefooted, leaned against the screendoor wearing nothing but Levi's, his boots at ease on the sidewalk .

And before I ask, Limestone tells me he 's had a vision. "Jesus," I swear.

"No," he replies. "God. And She's a woman." He says something about next Sunday, pulls his boots on , and leads me to the place of revelation.

Two miles east and a mile west he parks in the middle of the road.

The dog bales out, and we all walk up the hill.

Halfway, the cowboy stops. Points.

I see nothing but a stone post and a plum bush, together, planted next to a short tree, a torn sack in its branches.

Aware of disbelief he describes to me how She was there, last night, lightning all around Her. Her skirt, and hair wet and windblown in the rain.

A doubter, I stare at the truth.

A believer, Limestone turns and walks back down the hill.

28

rwu'-I..Ul.u with trained nose, twilit past, well-oiled Pentagon's projectile of UI;I!<Uu.luau.路La's mothering love, Wilson Reagan is dead at last. a puppet ever his mother's son his father's beloved enemy, strength for his brother in rivalry a dad for his kids, all men in one? ever a puppet strive for neighbors disdain to assist the bad, the cruel , who would butcher the goose for its jewel give children a pittance for labors? play with a dragon's talons on a string, from the impotent and dead old thing .

29

Mary Eiser

I DREAM ABOUT MARRIAGE, AFTER THE FIGHT

Glass falls from the trees A carpet of chrystals!

I almost believe I will not cut my feet.

Let blood pour from my mouth; How I would like to see a red river!

I walk toward you, my feet sawed to ankles , the ankles fluted to bone shards.

Pretty hemoglobin brushed over diamonds.

30

Priscilla Atkins CORNFLOWER

Bobbie, of the Pepsodent smile who wore every cheering outfit to perfection I remember the autumn day waiting outside the school doors the p.e. teacher spontaneously lifting you up above his head a dimple caught in your cheek brown bangs wispy in the wind.

And in the summers at the pool your stomach flat above the modest bikini. Everything seemed that smooth for you-high school to marriage to a child and I only a sophomore in college with all my decisions endless nights ahead of me.

Maybe, in a sense, your husband saved you the evening he swung a baseball bat into your skullyou never knew the dry taste of three kids too many, no money in the drawer and him with a six pack in front of the t .v. while you stare at a reflection of sunken eyes in a dusty mirror wedged in a window of small- town America.

31

Marcia Womongold WOMONGOLD'S COSMIC ALPHABET

A you're an Amazon Amaterasu a cat named Bast and Coatlicue Delta Europa Freya Gaia Frigg Heresy Hekate Isis on a pig Juno Kali Lilith MaRhea Nammu 0 is the Oracle is Overthrow Persephone Queen Protect us Kuan Yin Rhiannon on a white horse and the riddle of the Sphinx Te Upo 0 Tono Fiti and the cobra UaJit mean Virgo Diana wild Witches Walpurgisnacht Xanthos harpy flying Y is a crooked letter and Z is the Zodiac

32

I'm really hooked on this lifeguard. She looks beautiful sitting up on high metal chair over the water. She wears an avocado tank suit that • IIIJiU\.1(:;) her look lean and smooth. But after yesterday, I have my doubts.

The green water was echoing all around. I look up at her, at the huge ceiling. The way she glanced at me made me feel like I didn't have trunks on. Then I asked her if she was doing anything after work as _ ..........y as I could.

She didn' t say anything at first . I smiled. I put my hands on the ladof her diving board chair. Then she blew her whistle at some kids who playing Frog Fight in the shallow end. I began to wonder if she was • .1;v"''"' to look back down at me again.

Finally, she smiled and spoke to me. She told me she had to wait _ ...v .., ...... because a woman was on her way to the pool. Then she smiled and said the woman had an eating problem. She'd eat and then herself throw up . The woman thinks she's horribly fat, so she makes sick to lose weight.

I asked Babette-that's her name-why she had to wait for the sick • ·'lron1an. Babette said the woman's doctor had phoned earlier. He'd finally • I[Ot1:en the woman to eat a couple of good meals, and he didn't want her to acrw;e it all off. Babette had to stay and keep the woman from swimming - ........ she came.

I got dressed and went outside and waited on the lawn . I didn't her. I was about to leave when I heard footsteps around the back of the building, so I ducked behind the juniper. Sure enough, it was ~labc:tte . She looked around like she was expecting someone. A car pulled and she headed straight for it.

But it wasn't a guy driving. Babette got in and the car drove off .....,,.,....,,., I realized, watching the car pull away, that I didn't really know anything about her. Except how beautiful she looked on that high metal chair the water.

33

Kristopher Saknussemm A LITILE SEASON

Maybe I should 've put my shin on before I went out into the hall. it was so friggin ' hot and I wanted to watch the accident through the windows by the mail slots. Someone in a station wagon had come the corner too fast and cracked up into a streetlight. Kadt·a.tor·-srnelllnt water was gushing all over the curb. I hadn' t seen it happen . I'd heard though . You'd think everyone would 've heard it from the look of mess.

Blue police lights kept circling, lighting up pieces of people's faces · the crowd, apartment fronts, parked cars. People were out on their if they had porches, or out on cramped little barbecue balconies. ~'"'"'"­ who lived in my building was clustered in the hall with the light off so could see, and the window open so they could breathe.

It was nice to have a spectacle to look at. What really looked nice the fish. Whoever had been driving the station wagon had been an aquarium in the back. The aquarium had been full of water. It full any more . It was lying pretty well shattered in the street. The must've jarred it out the back door. But you could see how big it was. was a big aquarium. How could anyone have lifted that big an aq · full of water?

There were goldfish and angelfish flopping all over the street. were as big as the ones you see in ponds in parks. The hot asphalt felt terrible to them . A couple of Chicano kids tried scooping them up.

The driver of the station wagon had disappeared. Nobody knew if or she had wandered off in a daze , or just abandoned the car. Mr. bet me the car was stolen. The cops searched it of course , for drugs what not. One of the cops slipped on a goldfish and fell on his ass. crowd laughed its head off. I thought for sure the guy would be and pissed-off, but you know what he did? He took a bow. Sman cop, crowd loved him. Then I spotted my landlady standing right behind Lynch . I hadn't paid my rent for the last two months and I was broke this week, so I had to hide behind Mrs. Wyatt.

Mrs. Wyatt was mumbling something about the driver being

34

was right about then that the short man wandered out of the crowd. said he used to own a pet store, so maybe the authority in his was justified. Anyway, he said something that just by a chance lull in traffic and the crowd noise, could be heard in our narrow hallway and a ways down the street. The short man said there are way too many fish for even that large an aquarium. Too many fish people repeated . It a kind of chant. The more I thought about it, the truer it seemed. were too many fish lying on the pavement to have lived in that "~u..uu.uu . Not to mention the size of the fish, not even counting the fish had already been picked up.

"What does it mean?" asked one of the cops.

"It means," said the short man, "that whoever was driving this car 't know beans about fish."

The crowd howled, but just for a second. Then it quieted .

In another minute, Mr. Fish was nowhere to be seen. A second squad pulled up . A bullhorn came out. The crowd was told to dismantle . Everyone went home to watch another car wreck on television . It was hot I couldn't blame them. Only a couple of the really decrepit people on in my hall, toying with the aqua ashtray on top of the pigeonI didn't see my landlady come up behind.

She told me I should check my door in case the driver of the station was somewhere in our building. The way she said our just about did in. What was I supposed to do? I could feel her eyes focused on the of my back as I moved to my door. I turned as I opened it, and she me one of those looks that let me know I was due for a little visit.

It was still so close in my room I had to lie down with my eyes shut. I to keep them shut as long as I could. All I could see in my head was boulevard covered with brightly-colored fish-their gills puffing, their and tails twitching. It was so friggin' hot .

35

Kristopher Saknussemm THE LITILE WITNESS

I know he's been doing it. That's why I wasn't keen on him finding where I live. But I didn't want to go to his place. I just wanted to see it was like. It had to be with someone I dido' t know.

My girlfriend's been out of town for two weeks. I was alone that He was drinking Armargnac. I didn't really know what to do. He watching me.

I told him afterward that my girlfriend was coming back. He at me. He had extremely blue eyes , his hair a little damp around those curls pressed against his forehead. He had this tight black corduroy路 cut to the waist. He slipped it on over his bare chest and looped his around my neck. He kissed me on the lips-hard. The only man who kissed me was my father, and that was sixteen years ago. Then he running his fingers over my crotch again. He called my balls 'little nesses ' . He said men used to make vows by swearing on them. I told to get out.

The night after the 'incident,' it rained like a sonuvabitch. I downstairs in the morning and the car windows were rolled all the down. Both doors were wide open. The inside was soaked. The smelled like a wet Norwegian elkhound. I checked for the keys on dresser. They were gone. I have a second set of course, so I decided to it as just a bad joke. Besides, that uncircumsized bastard could 've the car away!

But the second night I woke up suddenly because I heard my car honk. It was a very distinctive sound. I almost called the police right but I was groggy, and by the time they'd get around to dropping knew he'd be long gone. I was stupid not to go down and make some or something. I was worried he was trying to lure me outside. In the ing, I found the car lights had been left on all night . The battery was dead.

The third night was the killer. I came down in the morning and car was filled to bursting with newspapers and streamers. All over the and the windows were obscene little pictures and Happy Honeymoon

36

Mamed written in colored crayon and shaving cream. I started to what if this continues after my girlfriend gets back? I might have to the cops into this after all. I might have to tell the whole story. Then 路~o&JuL~:u . It's not going to continue.

He's bigger than I am, but he won't see me squatting in the rhodo. So far there hasn' t been a sound . In another hour or so, the birds stan up . It will begin to get light. I figure if he doesn't come tonight the spell's broken. He won't come back again . But if he does come , if he comes soon- I swear on my little witnesses, he's in for a sur-

37

Kristopher Saknussemm CHEER

There I was, admiring the bright boxes of cigarettes from all over the world, when a little black boy tapped me on the elbow and said his mother wanted me. He was wearing a Green Bay Packers hat pulled too tightly over his head. 'I don't know your mother,' I told him . But the owner wouldn 't sell me my cigarettes until I looked at the boy.

Out on the sidewalk, five black men in overalls were loading sides of beef into a panel truck. The boy motioned for me to follow him and we sidestepped a group of young girls who were playing with one of those jumproping machines that were so popular a few years ago. One of the girls didn't have a shirt on. But she didn't really have tits yet, and it was awful humid. It felt like it was going to rain.

By the time we started climbing the hill, we were drenched. I was amazed at how good the traction was on the leather soles of my boots. When we reached the top, the air had cleared and the houses were much nicer than I'd imagined. There were vanishing snail tracks and loquat trees. All the houses had laundry out on the line. All of it had gotten wet. The damp sheets smelled so alive. The boy took me by the arm.

It must've been his house because we barged right in. A pretty woman was asleep beside a wicker basket that vibrated on top of a washing machine.

She looked like an Ethiopian princess resting her head on a stack of boy's white underwear. 'Don't wake her,' he commanded, and led me into a family room. 'This is my sister,' he said, pulling at a small bare foot that poked out of a heap of balled-up socks. A sleepy girl about rwo younger than himself emerged.

'Do you like beer?' she asked . 'Sure. I like beer,' I said. She handed me Pabst Blue Ribbon. Then the rwo kids coerced me into playing Twister.

You know the game. You spread out a plastic sheet with colored dots on it.

You spin an arrow. Then you rwist your body into whatever position is nee38

to touch a hand and foot to the colors the arrow indicated. You're fall down and laugh a lot. I don' t think I played well. But I flustered . Every time I asked the kids if their father was home, they'd

UDt,OS(:Cl to

wanted to smoke, but not in front of the kids. I'd meant to get a pack of iruvvesanr路s. the kind I liked when I was stationed in Australia. I even got in Holland, but apparently they don't get imported here. Twister me out, and I kept expecting the woman in the kitchen to wake up . was the kids' mother all right. Boy, were they proud of her. After a they started bringing me articles of her clothing out of the fresh pile. her things smelled so clean and new. They were perfect. We held them our cheeks. Then the kids asked me if I'd like to do laundry, too. I told I'd like that very much. I said I'd like that more than anything.

39

Masami Usui TOKYO ROSE

Yet if Iva was a victim ofjustice, it fiNIS because she was also victim ofa legend Masayo Duus, Tokyo Rose

Tokyo Rose was a rose which turned yellow after World War II was over.

Named by the Pacific Gls , her sweet and sexy voice which reminded them of a pinup girl, a blondie and her red lips.

"Your favorite enemy, Orphan Annie" was her opening greeting on the air before jazz records were played during "Zero Hour" over Radio Tokyo, where she remembered her college days at UCLA, studying zoology 40

and helping her father at his) apanese grocery, without imagining she would be jailed in her father's country, and be judged at the treason trial by her own country, the United States.

Tokyo Rose, her name is

Iva lkuko Toguri

a ntsset an American born ofJapanese parents in 1916.

41

Masami Usui

IN THIS COUNTRY,

as soon as I am recognized as a Japanese girl, a black man working on the road cries to me, "Hey! Kon -nichi-waf" in an awkward pronunciation, and soon after I say in English I have been in the States one year, I am told , "Hey, you speak English beautifully!

Did you have an American boy friend?" by a male professor who knows only one Japanese word, "geisha" and uses it in his poem .

42

Sussy Chako

THE TRYST

1981 , ] anuary. Sometimes, I dream of Monique. Her voice is very soft as she bites my ear. She has tiny breasts, tinier than mine. The hairs on her legs are smooth, unspoilt by a razor. I stan to resist, but she kisses me, whispers, "We are here to serve each other." I submit. My passivity troubles me.

I met Monique in 1980 in Taipei, Taiwan. The August morning we met, I arrived at Andre's house, which was in the middle of that city. He was wearing a kimono when he greeted me.

"Come in, come in." He embraced me, kissing both my cheeks. He stepped back to look me over. "I can see why Alan Berman sent you," he said, smiling.

I'm Alan Berman's main woman, in between his typewriter and China. Alan's an American foreign correspondent, a China-watcher who scurries back and forth between Peking and Hong Kong, where I live.

Andre's an Oriental an historian from Paris, and Alan 's best friend in Taipei. Alan has a habit of " sending" me to look up his global friends, which complements my globe scouring life as an English language travel writer. Sort of.

The house was floored by bamboo tatami mats. There were no doors between the rooms. I saw a tiny figure, perhaps a young boy, in the bedroom folding up the covers. Andre was wearing indoor slippers. I removed my shoes.

"Let me make you some tea," he offered. Despite his bulk, Andre moved gracefully. I sat down, cross-legged, on the nearest cushion. " That A - lain," Andre pronounced the name, heavily accenting the second syllable. "He has the eye for Ia petite femme Chinoise!"

I smiled, son of. It was not the first time Alan's dubious compliments had come back to me via a third party. Little Chinese woman indeed. How much longer, I wondered , would I want Alan as my main man?

The young boy entered the living room as Andre brought the tea.

"He" turned out to be a young woman. Her short cropped dark hair, and loose fitting shirt and pants, had deceived me. But there was little mascu43

linity in her face, except for a very slight boyishness. She had large, extremely round and beautiful eyes.

"Bonjour. " She smiled at me. Her tiny mouth pursed slightly, imperceptibly.

I smiled back. In contrast to my tan, her skin was pale.

Andre glanced at me. "Ellene parle pas fran;ais, do you?"

I shook my head. "Not enough." I accepted my cup of tea Andre with both hands. It was hot. The woman seated herself on the ion opposite me. "Do you speak English? " I asked.

She replied, "A little."

"She is shy," Andrew said, placing his arm around her .,....... u .....,......

"You must talk to her. I think she would like to practise English with I nodded. I wondered if this were Andre's girlfriend, "the ............... u.~ beautiful Giselle,'' over whom Alan often raved.

She extended her hand. "I am Monique."

The phone rang. Andre went to his study to answer it. He was on phone for almost fifteen minutes. Snatches of expressive Mandarin out to us.

Monique and I looked at each other. I felt quite dumb, quite my usual self. I certainly was not the lively, talkative young woman had probably said I was. Monique's eyes were really quite startling. caught myself staring at them, and looked away, embarassed. She did lower her gaze. I felt drawn to her.

Monique broke the silence. "You expected Andre's friend, ...................

I nodded, surprised.

"She is in Paris. She'll be back tomorrow." Then, seeing my look, she added, "We are friends, Giselle and I. Andre is both our I caught the pain in her look as she said that. Woman's pain. very brief moment, our eyes locked in sympathy. The moment passed.

"We will be in 'ong Kong next week," she said.

"Really? You must come see me."

"Oh?" Her eyes seemed to widen with pleasure. "Andre will be busy. Can you show me around?"

"Yes." My reply was rapid, without hesitation .

"Then," she smiled, "we must meet in 'ong Kong."

After Andre returned to the living room, I remained for another or so. I regretted having to leave, but I had a plane to catch back to Kong that afternoon. Outside the house, I climbed aboard my motor41:91 and switched on the ignition.

"See you in 'ong Kong, per'aps," Andre said.

I waved as I drove away. Yes, I thought. And Monique.

44

Taipei is a sprawling city, much more spread out than Hong Kong. It's enough, I suppose. But it's very Chinese-in history, tradition, nationalistic spirit. Andre said he chose Taipei for a base because it was Chinese, and the next best thing to being in China itself. Alan bitches China a lot: his vices abhor Communism. I don't like Taipei, and I no desire to visit Peking at the moment (even though Alan is based I'm much happier here in Hong Kong. When it comes to things , foreigners always want the real thing. Hong Kong's good enough me: non-Communist, non-Nationalist. Laissez-foire Chinese, at least now while we're still a British colony.

I was glad to get back home. Two weeks was too long to be in Taipei. · ue had been a high point, making chez Andre worthwhile to visit.

I really did not expect to see her or Andre again. Just another of my typical travel encounters who always said, "see you in Hong Kong."

So I was surprised when, a week after my return, Andre called.

Mter we have dispensed with pleasantries, I asked him, "Do you where Alan is?" He's supposed to be here in Hong Kong."

Andre said, "He arrives in Taipei today. A sudden assignment. I leave to look after Giselle. His cable said to take care of you."

Terrific, I thought. Why couldn't Alan tell me these things himself?

Andre continued, "But first, you must do me a favour?"

"What's that?"

"Look after Monique for me."

It was arranged that Monique and I would have a dim sum lunch , and Andre would meet us that evening at my place. For the rest morning, I was in a state of flux. When Graham (my British lover in absence) called to confirm our dinner date three days hence, I said would not want to see me. I tried to explain the flux, but failed. I could him shaking his head.

"Whatever you say. I'll ring next week."

I replaced the receiver. Graham tolerated my shenanigans involving and his friends, but he did like life ordered. I wondered why he bothwithme.

Monique was waiting alone at the door of the restaurant. We linked and walked in. It was an automatic gesture on my part, something I not done with another girl since school days. On a hunch, I asked · if she had attended an all girls' Convent school. She had. I'm a school mistake myself, Sino-American- missionary style.

The dim sum lunch fascinated her. Waitresses patrolled the aisles, P"-·~· .• "' carts filled with assorted dishes. She ate everything willingly, even chicken's feet. The toenails did not appear to faze her.

45

We talked about France. I was planning a trip to Europe in another month or so. Paris was definitely on my itinerary. She said she was a medical student, and lived outside Paris in Tours. This was her first trip to Asia.

Her biggest surprise was that Taipei and Hong Kong were so modernized and western. She amused me by her observation that Chinese people seemed to be very patient. Was I, I wondered .

Her English, though halting, had a certain lilt, a musicality. The conversation was innocent enough. Hence, she caught me quite when she said, " You are promiscuous? Andre says you are."

"How does he know? " I retorted.

She giggled like a naughty schoolgirl. "Because Andre says Alain fairs promiscuous girls. So he doesn't 'ave to get too involved."

Alan thinks Chinese girls are promiscuous, especially around ....,.. ~~..,,. men . Real life versions of Suzie Wong, the Hong Kong prostitute romantic American (or was it English?) lover sweeps her away in "'4""â&#x20AC;˘'"5"'1 to live happily (and unpromiscuously) ever after (as long as they remain Asia, of course, since Suzie's spoken English is pidgin, at best).

I should have been insulted by Monique's cheek. Instead, I found expression appealing.

"I like Andre," she said, " but I pre-fair girls."

This sudden confidence arrested me . I felt like telling her about ham, saying yes, I could be called promiscuous because I had my one two part-time lovers to supplement Alan's perpetual absence. I wanted ask her if " pre-fairing girls" worked any better, since she was Andre's part-time lover. " Don't be angry," she continued, in response to my silence.

"I'm not." There was an uncomfortable pause. What the decided . Experience before moral conflict. " Do you prefer Chinese I asked .

She replied eagerly, "I 'ave never known a Chinese girl."

Her eagerness repelled me. Yet I saw that her smile was gentle, invitation in her eyes unthreatening.

I could hear Alan questioning me, wanting to know details .

I cringed. It seemed this meeting between Monique and me had all arranged by Andre and Alan . Surely they (in their liberated sexual dom) knew about Monique's " preferences" ? But then, Alan knows and feeds my appetite for Occidental-style excitement.

"Have you met Alan? " I asked .

"No. Andre speaks about him, says he is very intelligent, very ing."

46

"Yes," I acquiesced, " that he is. Too charming."

"Like Andre?"

"Like Andre," I agreed.

We both laughed. The tension dissolved. She squeezed my hand, and herself to the bathroom. In her absence, I found myself thinking I wasn't patient, just passive. Especially with Alan. He had too much too much presence. His charm exhausted me . I spent enough and charm creating a presence for myself at work (I'm the only Chibesides the secretary, on an all-Caucasian staff), and for my lovers. energy I spent waiting for Alan to show up. By the time he did, I almost happy to let him take over. Of course, I observed ironically, it very Chinese to be passive.

When she returned, Monique said, "A man directed me to the men 's " Oh! " I exclaimed, indignant, " how stupid of him. Anyone can see rea woman."

She shrugged. "It has happened before."

We ate till we were quite full.

That evening, Andre arrived at my place to reclaim Monique. He did two cheek greeting kiss; one hand squeezed my waist, the other just my breast. It figured.

"You 'ave exercised your Chinese hospitality today, chen路e. Not just air' I hope." He placed an arm around each of us as he spoke.

"Guest air," I said, referring to the Chinese expression of polite social , "ends when the person is no longer a guest. You and Monique both still my guests , aren't you?"

"Ah! Alan describes your patient nature well," he said as he released "Also, your people have such a wonderful tradition of hospitality."

Tradition be damned, I thought, dismissing his enthusiasm. Andre, all his worldliness, knew exactly when to be naive. He played up the of "Westerner-enchanted-by-the-East" to the hilt. Just like Alan, he wanted his way. Perhaps, I wasn't so different: I was enchanted by freedom, by a Western way of life, especially since it meant I abandon Chinese culture and tradition with impunity, when it me.

Monique said in French , "We have been all over 'ong Kong today. is an excellent guide ."

Andre nodded, and smiled at me.

"Practice," I said. "Let's drink some sake. " I served the Japanese wine. Steam rose from the funnel of the tiny, 47

earthenware carafe. We sat on my sheepskin rug. Andre conversed volubly.

He was indeed, as Monique and I earlier agreed, charming.

Dinner was rice, Chinese cabbage soup, and squid cooked with black mushrooms. I had enjoyed preparing it for my guests: tradition of hospitality, I guess . We laughed a lot while we ate . After the meal, Andre went to the bathroom. Monique immediately stroked my bare arm. I felt goosebumps rise .

"You 'ave not forgotten?" she whispered.

I felt ridiculously childish, unable to free myself from this social intrigue into which I had been drawn. "No," I replied.

Andre was more than friendly the rest of the evening. He occasionally touched my hair and neck; once he even rubbed my thigh. Why couldn't I simply say stop , enough of this charade, I've had it with Alan and his friends? I owed Andre and Monique nothing. Yet I submitted, helped on by the sake. I was fascinated by the situation, and Monique's large, beautiful eyes. I belonged in this game, in this temporary triangle. As surely as I belonged in a world peopled by Andres, Moniques, Grahams. And Alans.

At one a.m ., Andre said, "We must go."

I nodded, wishing it were true.

"Unless, or course , you would like us to stay?"

I shrugged. He looked at Monique, who shrugged also. He stepped back and surveyed the two of us.

"Monique!" He sounded angry, accusatory.

She looked away from him. "Rien, " she said, indifferently.

A French exchange followed. It was much too rapid for me to stand. Andre towered over her. I understood him to say something "not again."

The easiest thing to do, I decided, was ignore them. I proceeded lay out blankets and pillows on the sheepskin rug. Chinese prlllCWCaiilJIII Alan would say.

"Goodnight," I said from the doorway of my bedroom. --------.--. caught my eye briefly before I shut the door. I climbed into bed, em,oucâ&#x20AC;˘Dtl ally fed up. So much for cross-cultural communication. I dozed off they quarrelled .

It was three a.m. by my bedside clock when she crept into my bed. got up and locked the bedroom door. As the lock clicked, I heard swear softly.

Andre returned to Taipei, leaving Monique with me. He was good humoured about it by morning. Sophisticated. Thought it ÂĽ7ZP.lrw'-IJ leux that Monique and I got it off together. He didn't understand there was more to it than getting off.

48

Monique and I spent a week together. Mostly, we talked, although we love a couple of times. I confessed to my innate heterosexuality. She I talked a little about Alan and me , about how busy he always was his work. He was jealous, I said, of Graham and my other lovers (I IUSl)ecte<l he had one or two flings, but no other regular lover). Yet he was around to spend time with me .

Monique said of me, "You too are a busy girl."

To avoid boring her with all this, I chose to tell her stories about Asia . She seemed panicularly interested in the story of Suzie Wong, she had neither seen the movie nor read the novel. I said it was a romanticized idea of a Hong Kong prostitute, and that it could give wrong idea about Hong Kong women. Monique smiled and said that 路 fall in love , too.

By the end of the week, Monique had told me a lot about herself. Her experiences always seemed to revolve around the menage a trois. was afraid of being a complete lesbian, she said. Sometimes, we talked night long. Often, she laughed . But I know she cried. Quiet, secret she thought I couldn't hear. The last morning of her stay, she fell in my arms, after she had finally cried her tears to me.

I did not miss Alan that week.

1982. The dream returns less often now that winter's here.

I never saw Monique again after that week. I did receive one letter, . . .,nnt-n<: after her departure. She told me she had become completely les" Andre always preferred two girls," she wrote, "sometimes more . ..,...,.,.~.... was my good friend, and I trusted her. But friends do not always m 1oo:se the right way, for themselves, or their friends. Perhaps I must thank for helping me discover my own way, because you take me honestly as lesbian and friend .

"You are right to say that I should not give in to Andre's 'triangular' . The story I like best is the one you tell me about the Chinese tradiof concubines, that Chinese men show their wealth by having one and many concubines. Perhaps Andre is too long in a Chinese coun? And Alan too? They worship too much the old Chinese traditions, forget they belong to the West.

"But you , you are not Suzie Wong or a Chinese man. Why must you like either? You are too patient with men-they do not love you, only sex. It is a pity you cannot be lesbian, too."

She added an open invitation to visit her in France.

I didn't tell Alan about Monique and me, since I figured Andre . For some reason, Andre didn't. Maybe he wasn't so happy about it all.

49

I moved to Paris this summer, and put Alan-as- lover completely behind me. He drops the occasional line, in pursuit of my 路 路 (as he calls them). He is as witty, amusing, and charming on paper as he in person. Which makes him a troublesome memory, since he is the romantic American I know.

Last night, I dreamt about Monique again . She begins to make love me; Andre and Alan watch, amused. I say "stop," but my voice dies All three surround me : Alan smiles, Andre smiles, Monique brushes tiny lips across my cheek. I look up, above their heads toward the air. The air is whispering: " you have not fogotten?" in my own Then slowly, slowly, I fade out. Like a spectre . My passivity does not bleme .

50

Matt Duarte

MIKE TYSON

who hits like a hunger-starved tiger And knocks out onetwothreefourfive opponents just like that gosh he is invincible and what I want to know is how is your champ's right hook Mrs. Tyson?

51

Dion Farquhar EMPIRE STATE

Trouble with our eyes is 20 I 20 (years ago) we were too much in the sun under fluorescents sit-ins strikes all-nighters changing the world running off purple mimeos before Xerox grey flies in the screened amber of our discontent unfurled now orbit me off my Niked feet let me fly, or fuck or drive we were up against the law loosing Hermes ' grip alive harmonica' d times are a-changin' the body politic fucked by capital: Tampax no pins, no belts, no pads launched salad bars Lean Cuisine, Japanese CDs on Bang and Olafson highest of techs out to work (New Freedom) on the pill solidarity threw down the gauntlet: heart beat still before running it down through exacto- knifed ambition neckties marriage midtown graffiti- free postmodern cliffs of stone seeing eyes of Glass, Nefertiti our momentary Mimi mosquito winged White Rock lady purity peddled American native lando' rakes, a feather in her hair offering butter wounded knee grease Frenched zero degree Triage City pandering pate for the homeless no Lois Lane in dots so lock and load: blammo spot sugar on the Street )2

commoding every thing wild life, the pee of underlings girls acid free cops under covers in subways or glued Soviet space station down the workday from eight to four hours as the world turns before the after , sealed, swornthe breech, no prayer Prorsa the great right way born (re)presentation messengers blind seers ukulele moustaches cradles curse throated wolves (bad press) for life for better and for worse

53

LynLifshin HE'D RATHER HAVE A PAPER DOLL SHE SAID

a porn woman. I'd soak in a tub of bath oil an hour come back and drop the towel and he'd roll over. Even on our honeymoon he was out getting skin flicks he had Play Boy and Penthouse then things in brown envelopes stashed behind furniture, fllms, I was in competition even that week in Las Vegas but I tried Slfz years. I had my breasts done, my belly but he'd lock himself in the bathroom for 3 hours I could hear paper turning he said it had nothing to do with me and he'd been such a gentleman 5 dates before he even kissed me my father told his three girls men just want one thing.

I'd wear teddies to bed eyelashes I tried suicide twice never told anyone thought if I just bought the right nylon or lace A real woman intimidates

54

on paper he can have many, never with cellulite scars or hair where it uvulluu't be doing what he could imagine

Robert Welshons

I MAKE ENOUGH

He comes home by seven each night, the fierce heat blazing in eyes and on his upper back, and by the drag in his step she can tell kind of evening it will be. He marches straight to the kitchen and beer open before even looking at her or the baby. She smiles a greeting his head is thrown back, a brown bottle upturned over his mouth. baby sits on the floor, squealing and clapping his fat hands together.

It 's hot in the house, as hot as outside but without even the excuse of a breeze. He growls something under his breath, grabs a beer and stalks out. She watches him go, then reaches into the retngc:~ and gets a beer of her own. She finds him in the sun-blasted back sagged into a lawn chair with his back to the light. As she sets the down , he takes the last of the beer in like water and cracks the second.

"Christ, it was hot today," he says.

Cement dust has misted his black hair and settled on his skin. are etched in the white powder so he looks mottled when she glimpses out of the corner of her eye.

"Ninety-five, I heard on the radio ," she tells him.

"And hotter up there ."

Twenty miles across rolling farmland they're building a grain It's concrete, one continuous piece, and rises steadily toward its height of one hundred eighty-five feet. He pushes wheelbarrows of across the platform all day and pours each load into a slipform, one another, until his twelve hours are up and he can go home.

"Anything happen today?" she asks. The baby, pointing at a a knob of din or at nothing at all, shrieks in delight and she has to up to be heard over the noise.

He shakes his head .

She can remember a time when he was easy with his words, tell her how the things he worked on were put together. It was one things that first attracted her to him. From his years banging nails learned how houses were built. When he quit that and spent his with the highway commission he told her how roads were stamped eanh, and she could never take the car out again without seeing the

56

noticing if the roadbed was crowned so the water ran off to the gutters out from under the wheels of traffic. But when she asks of work now says little more than he'd rather not think about it during the few hours a day he has to himself.

"The job'll be done in two days, maybe three," he tells her. The baby so long and high he has to stop and she sees a flash of irritation on face . He hardens his voice so she will hear his words. "I talked to Jack he said he won't lay me off ' till the last."

"That's good," is all she says, but the question What then? is hanging the air.

They've rented an old farmhouse after a disagreement with the last AUJI..uv•'u. All they could get. She knows both that they were lucky to find and that it may not last. The owner rents out the acreage to their nearest · bors and there 's no telling what might happen next spring. But if can slip into winter without losing it they can rest easy for a time- if can find work.

"There's talk of another elevator going up around West Libeny in ten days. Nothing else comes up I'll have to take it."

She knows nothing else will come. Nothing more permanent ever up . But she nods and says, "Where's West Libeny? " "Southeast Iowa. A hundred, hundred-fifty miles." " Take the truck? " He mutters an assent, leans out over the ground and spits. " Have to _..........,. ... the head gasket before I can go."

She looks across the flat expanse to a shimmering horizon . The soy•~eatls are a tangle of leaves so close to the ground it's easy to think of the as bare and empty. It's easy to imagine she is the only object to puncthe flatness for miles around. To the south, a blurred stand of poplars the boundary to the neighbors' land, Bill and Marlene.

They're an older couple , still young in their late thirties, but with two grown enough to manage their own meals or get a drink by themor take themselves to the bathroom without Mommy's helping The oldest plays basketball on the junior high team. Already talks about college and how they might pay for it.

She knows she'll never have the conversation with her own husband, she's drawn in by every word. He doesn't like her over there. Doesn 't them. She takes a cenain satisfaction in repeating to him every piece of , every bit of gossip and opinion she can collect on her visits. Some. ..u.u;:. Marlene phones her over, just for coffee and talk. Sometimes she catches herself thinking up a reason to take herself over there. Marlene seems too busy.

57

Once they left the baby with the basketball player so Marlene take her out on the uactor. They made circuits around the outside edge a hay field. She balanced painfully on the seat rim-little more shallow metal bowl never meant to be shared-and watched the razored flat behind them.

After a few sweeps, Marlene had come to a stop and they'd walked into the field, toward the house . It was a twenty-some acre lot and were at the far corner, but it was possible, over the tractor's tireless fing, to hear the baby's tiny squeals through the distance.

Marlene had turned then, after listening a moment, and said, "I' little worried about Ben." She was the only person to use the baby's name. Hearing it made admit to a pain of her own, but before she could confess, her hu:sba:Dii words had filled her mouth, "He's only a baby." Under Marlene's gaze flushed and turned away.

But now is not the time to speak to him of those worries. He his rage and his resistance home every night and she knows with what terness he will erode anything she says. Maybe after this job is done. he goes away to West Libeny.

"Are you listening to me?" he says and she turns to face him matically.

"I guess not."

"No wonder, what with him going on." The baby hammers at ground with the plastic wheels of a toy pick-up. He drops it suddenly crawls toward Daddy's feet, clinging at last to his shoestrings. mouth held wide and utterly motionless flows one piercing note, as ing as fingers on a blackboard.

"Christ," he explodes. "Can't he shut up for even five minutes. scoops the baby off the ground and tosses him, like a bag of cement, his wife's lap. The song is jolted quiet, then a spiraling wail twists the baby's lungs.

"Can't I have even one hour around here without his damn that so unreasonable?"

The baby cries in his mother's lap , head tilted straight up. She him in against her body, rocking him into a quiet kind of torpor. ''I'm a little worried about him," she begins.

"Him?" He takes a long pull from his beer bottle. "He's just well trained, that's all. He yells, you come running. Couldn't easier."

"Marlene's a little worried, too."

He laughs once and she knows she has made a mistake.

58

"She is, is she?" He tilts the bottle and chases the beer with a toss of head. "I'm sorry we can 't all have perfect children, like she does . I'm sorrier we can't all be given a house and a farm like he was ."

"It was passed on."

"Same damn thing. No one's ever given me a cent. Ever."

He swipes at the baby's truck with the heel of his boot and it tumbles kicking up dust. Before she can answer him he has marched back . She sits a minute longer, staring at the blank fields and listening to tuneless mumble of the baby in her arms.

Over dinner, things get a bit better. The baby plays with his food and 't need much attention. Her husband sips beer and tomato juice and tells her how good the casserole is. He is still covered with the white dust of the job site, but his hands and wrists are scrupulously After dinner he leaves his plate and disappears into the bedroom. She the table, rinsing the dishes but not washing them until she hears hiss of his shower fade and then stop. He comes back wearing cutoffs a pair of flip-flops . His hair is wet but already drying.

"The days get awfully long in the house ," she says. "I was thinking I - u u â&#x20AC;˘ u go look for work." She means it as a suggestion, but she knows she just asked his permission.

He pours himself a tall glass of tomato juice and doesn't say a word he sits at the table. " And what about him?"

"I could get a sitter, maybe," she says. "There must be something."

"And how much would that be?"

"I don't know." She keeps her back to him. "If we had just a little there'd be plenty to do."

He snorts into his glass. "Not fuckin' likely."

"As it is, I just sit around here doing nothing. I might as well bring in money."

"The daycare would take it all."

"So what? Long as it doesn't cost us."

"Cause your extra income would put us in a higher tax bracket, that's what. And the taxes come out of my paycheck and we end up making than if you just stayed home. Is that simple enough for you?"

She bites her lip, sponging the stovetop clean with quick strokes. " We pretty much decided to do it this way back when you didn't get abonion." He lowers his voice as if the baby might understand what he "You made the decision. It was all yours and I stayed out of it and got to live by it now. I told you there'd come a time when you might

59

get a little antsy but you didn't want to believe it." He raises his hands in gesture that takes in the house, the family, their way of life, and ........5'.

"You made your bed. We can't change things now."

She rinses the sponge and leaves it in the sink. A vision of Bill Marlene's son, all arms and legs and head feints as he dribbles a..,...,,..... ,•..,... across a concrete pad, comes suddenly to her mind. "I want so11net~• more," she tells him.

He laughs. "Don't we all. There's plenty more I want. ~J;JCl:lllll• money." He twirls the empty glass in his hands.

He rises and swings both arms in a circle, loosening up his snc,wc:x. blades. She knows he is about to get himself a fresh beer and go watch T. "How about if I look for a job that'll cover the daycare and How's that?"

He exhales loudly, like a balloon deflating, and drops his arms to sides with a slap.

"I won' t take one until we're sure it'll bring in more money."

By the set of his jaw she can tell he's picking at his teeth with the of his tongue . The baby gives a tired, outraged squall and she aut,om• cally raises her eyes to the clock. Almost time to put him to bed. God, him go down the ftrst time.

Her husband leans into the fridge and pulls out a bottle. "I enough."

By sheer habit she picks up his empty glass and rinses it clean, ing fiercely. She hears the cupboard doors open and slam to and, as husband moves away, the cellophane pop of a potato chip bag '"'"'n'"' She blinks through the four square panes of a window, eyes aimed unfocused outside. Automatically she swirls water in his glass. It feels ward in her hand and the added surge from the tap peels it from her gers and she watches it break in the sink. Before she can swear, she the baby scream. Her husband curses once.

"What's wrong?"

He stands with his feet planted wide. The bag of chips is in one held out at arms length. The baby tugs at the lashings of his flip-flops.

"He got into the bag while I wasn't looking," he says.

She looks down and a yellow stain on the carpet shows where chips have been ground to bits.

"Oh. Won't take a minute."

She trundles the upright in from the hall closet, unlooping cord as she comes. The baby watches her move closer, cooing and his palms in a welcome. Lines of static disfigure the T.V. picture when vacuum switches on.

60

She steers the upright back and forth over the stain , watching it fade, 路 nothing will erase the oil that has leaked into the rug already. She continually, as if blinking back tears. But some great iron heat is the moisture before anything can leak out.

The baby stretches both arms toward the vacuum , mimicking its with an " Ooo" mixed of spit and loose consonants. He skids over carpet on his stomach, pulling across the distance with his arms until reach out and slap the motor housing with a tiny palm.

Her husband leans sideways over the arm of his overstuffed chair. him away from there."

The baby sags into the hood and presses an ear to the humming plasmatching the howl of machinery with a dull, brainless harmony of his His lips shape a rubbery "0," then fall slack. A stream of drool slides the corner of his mouth and slicks the dull plastic.

The husband claws at the air, then leaps to his feet. " Stop it! Make stop it!" He grasps the baby under each arm and shakes him in the air, 路 into his face. "Why's he so damn queer? What's wrong? What's The dull song breaks. She sees the baby's head wobble and jerk once before she can move. His mouth is a wide tear in his face and his scream sounds like three voices bound into one. The wife jumps in to her husband 's body and pulls the baby out of his arms . Her elbow back in an unrippled arc, stabbing his neck and breastbone once she takes a step away.

"You could kill him doing that," she shouts.

"God damn." He twists and lashes the wall a blow that rattles every of the room . "You're damn lucky."

She runs her palm over every inch of the squalling baby, presses a into the back of his neck . He cries and kicks his feet and she feels the unpinning of a constriction in her chest. She glances up. Her husband rigid against his own anger, face flushed, one hand balled tight , the kneading his shoulder. His knuckles show white against the skin. He that force is lying latent in that simple parabola of her elbow and realization stills his hand . They are somewhere they have never been as if wiping condensation off a window has revealed an alien land. The vacuum howls unattended into the space between them.

"You do that again I'll lay you out." He bends over and quiets the with a savage tug of its cord. "Why can 't you give me a normal for Christ's sake ?"

The baby squeals into her shirt, his hands bunched into tiny fists. well from eyelids pinched to wrinkles. "I told you I was worried 61

about him . Me and Marlene both. Marlene thinks maybe has has a hearing problem. Maybe that's why has has to do things louder than everybody else."

"The only problem he 's got is that you spoil him rotten ." The husband rolls a hand across the top of his head, gulping air.

"He needs to go to the doctor. I have to take him tomorrow."

"All right , all right. Take him then . Jesus." He sinks back into his chair, shaking his head from side to side. "Damn queer."

She walks toward the baby's room, laying her cheek over his head.

Her husband's voice follows her down the hall.

"But don 't spend everything we got. I have to buy that head gasket, remember."

After an aimless sort of grappling he rolls away and she reclaims her side of the bed. The day that has just passed and the promise of the next one sends him to sleep and she doesn't try to keep him awake. She rolls on her side, her back to the center, and tries to match her breathing with his.

In front of her somewhere, in the dark near the metal bookstand, a cn·cket'• chirps in a syncopated beat.

She rises and wraps a robe over her skin. The air is cooler but still humid to be comfortable. She steps out to the back yard and sits in one the chairs. The moon is three-quarters full and drenches the landscape soft white and black. The soybean field is a carpet of boiling shadow only here and there a branch raised up and caught in the light like sonllctl thing trapped in a photographic flash. She sits numbly, awaiting sleep.

The light folds the horizon in a blurred smudge and she thinks she · staring into a photographic negative-a picture of an opposite life. unpoisoned by error. They have the farm and Bill and Marlene play squatter on a rental house. Her children manage for themselves; give her life of her own. She works where she wants. He likes his job. But her eyes shift, an image of her husband standing locked and rigid nrr•"1 '"'"' Her eyes blink rapidly, as if they itch.

Tomorrow she will take the baby in. She knows there will be a problem. It's only a question of degree. She can even keep one eye for "Help Wanted" signs. But she knows a job in the bakery or at newsstand won' t be good enough. Even if she finds something that he will stand in the way, weighing, measuring, his tongue prying at gaps between his teeth until he can think of a good reason to keep her home . She imagines suddenly her elbow's backward sweep into her band's neck. Her face burns, but her lips are twisted in a tight, · smile.

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The idea boils full-grown out of anger. One innocent question, eyes away from the doctor's gaze. " How hard do you have to shake a " She can see the concern in his face, watch the assumptions form in eyes. " What do you mean? " The gears would be rolling, out of her . In two weeks, maybe a month, come the reports, then questions , caseworkers. He can live with the stigma of a branded child abuser for And then it's time to have another talk about work.

Her eyes burn and she has to blink moisture back into them. She southward toward Bill and Marlene's but the landscape is suddenly 1\ULI.unâ&#x20AC;˘.u. Unrecognizable. She is alone in the opaque light .

She tilts her head to take in the sky. In a few months Orion will be ~"'""'J.UJJ:: north and spilling into his new territory, bringing the frost. Winwill take this place from them, too . It always does. It bleeds more from every year. Beneath the cicadas' pulsing hum, she can almost hear options unravelling with a clock-like cruelty.

Something builds out of the dark, gathers in her chest. She is blinkagain, uncontrollably, but this time tears are pressed out to her face they glide down her cheeks. Her breath is steady and unwracked. It's if someone else is crying. She scans to the south, sees the twin poplars at as a smudge of silver in the light. But they look as small and indistinct if they were miles away and made tiny by distance.

It's the second week in August. Already she is waiting for winter.

63

Eve Shelnutt WHERE ARE THE OLD FATES?

He would have gone to live in another part of the country taking his goats and a portrait over which his sad, melancholy eyes would flicker as a fire burned .

Or a viper would have bitten him on the calf and in his delirium he would have said my name first with love and then pity as my mouth drew the poison out.

Instead he unbuttons my blouse.

From what direction does danger come to my house if! can do this and this to your body where the fever sparkles?

And it would have been too long an explanation when mist still lingers on the river.

You must put your arms under your head and think against a nest of fingers.

Ifshe loves two men without a thorn in her heart, she would not want to see them set offtogether on the copse on the blue horses with small blue wings.

64

evening has fallen . A sigh through the streets. I have these houses for a long time . open onto different rooms. will light every corner with a torch.

65

Doug Turner

REPRIEVE

From one side to the other of sidewalk he staggers trying to focus on something on the concrete, some thing that keeps shift ing, won't ho ld still shimmers and dissolves seeps into cracks takes the shapes of faraway con tinents and pools of blood resembling medals he once got or maybe didn't, he can't really remember, he knows he killed lots of guys , at least he thinks he did, he staggers grabs a parking meter for support and sees with some

66

that the

67

Doug Turner

SPACE

much space us in bed we call love don't one we like another fucking loved another wouldn't be space us to park maybe greyhound don' t the space ilike it leaves of to park answers to we never answered

there is so between as we lie after fucking making but we love another one and love if we one there so much between enough a cadillac even a buti mind in fact the space plenty room all the all the questions want

68

K. Coughlin

OARSWOMAN

Born and broken, shimmering like glass on a rainy sidewalk, crushed into bits of blue and yellow and swept aside, washed away in private deluge.

Down the rapids caned, like the shattered stump of a tree, carried in by storm to shore; planed smooth by the master carpenter sea who breaks flawed wood over his knee and sends ships down .

Oarswoman, dipping quiet oars into the river of night, placidly tilling victory from defeat, stroke for stroke, take me as apprentice on this journey of hope you have defined, that in your shimmering hands the past may be truly passed, steered clear of the tangled bracken by the wayside · careful chops that show you have learned in ..,..... n .u •F. to that which makes you strong.

69

Lyn Lifshin AFTER THE WAR

no one talked a bout it until they thought we were asleep and they'd tip toe in talk in hushed tones lampshades made from babies, soap from human fat. A young girl raped as 17 looked on and laughed then they injected her breasts with gas oline and lit a fire

70

ICE

Dull! That's how he described the place, his neighbourhood, and forthought of it. Dull , boring, tiresome. Not that it didn't suit him of the time . ' Herb Humdrum' they called him at the office-even to face , now and then. So, he supposed, he lived in the right area. Con. WASPland. No ethnics, outside of his Yugoslavian next door who'd practically been born here and, Chuck figured, was trying to pass, no blacks, no block parties with dancing in the streets way they were rumored to have in poorer parts of the city, no real fun .

Not that he didn ' t keep an eye out for odd goings-on, things that 't look right. Here's the elderly couple who live on the corner, thinks late at night in front of the television set, motionless, half asleep, wide open, probably watching the late news-that characteristic blue-grey turbid haze fills their front room . Nothing strange there. of course, someone's quietly murdered them (how could such old put up any resistance?), ransacked the place and sat them both in easy chairs in order to look normal and put off suspicion. But next · gramps and grandma are up and about and not just alive but snow, if you please , frisky as kittens and buoyant as ever. So for that theory.

On a Saturday night Chuck is walking home from a film, one of those slasher epics in which most everyone ends up with a hook or meat in his or her skull or has his or her vital parts strewn over an acre or of woodland. Not his first choice of a pic, but he'd seen practically IHvt·n•' r ,,. else in town, certainly everything else worth the effort. As he down the street from the corner, which is busy with traffic, he a quick survey of the living rooms . No peeping tom stuff, mind you healthy curiosity. The homes are old , 1920 models , close to each and to the street, most of their yards are at the rear. At one place is a noisy wild party in progress, the kind Chuck has heard of and before but never been to . Students, he expects. Through the winof what he's previously surmised to be a sitting room, he sees a conthrong of bodies, young most of them , and though it is a cool, early

71

spring night, they have spilled out onto the front porch, chattering and laughing, a few belching grotesquely but in an especially gross and exaggerated way when they spot him, Chuck thinks. Empty beer bottles littCI the front lawn and a flask of Southern Comfort has shattered on the sidewalk . Thoughtless. Typical! Many of the houses are completely dark. Boring. Halfway down the block he surveys a serene dinner party in progress.

Hanqsomely, elegantly dressed people, some in clothes that sparkle faintly in the soft glow, sit around an oval candlelit table in the dining room near the back of the house, visible because there are large open French between it and the darkened front room, engaged in after-meal gossip over cognac and liqueurs, one of the men smoking a cigar and another pipe, two of the women giggling at a shared joke as one of them fingers expensive pearl necklace.

Three houses this side of his own is where he finally sets eyes THEM! He thinks: this is, after all, the reward of constant vigilance.

He must have seen them before, getting into or out of their car, haps walking the dog (do they own one?), painting a wall, putting storm windows. They are in the center of their front room before a window, curtains drawn open-it is as though he were back at the They look about Chuck's own age, thirtyish . He is much bigger than chunkier anyway, somewhere between a heavyweight boxer and a linebacker gone slightly out of shape. Husky and heavily built, but grossly fat . She is waif-like, amazingly thin and tall, though still not as as he , with long mousy blond hair that hangs in wisps to her :sn(JWtJca They are both wearing identical masks , wooden African tribal-type ments with three stark ocher lines running diagonally across each and two horizontal ones painted on the forehead. This much Chuck make out although the light in the room fades and flickers . Perhaps comes from candles or a fireplace, or-considering the rest of what to be taking place before him-a small fire that is about to rage out of trol in the same room, in its very center.

He is wearing a sickeningly loud Hawaiian shirt full of flowers greens, oranges, blues and purples and silver chains about his thick she a pale tunic that resembles a Roman toga and no jewelry. They though they could have met at a prankish fraternity house party, involved in a sinister occult pagan ritual, then quarreled, then then .... He is bent intently over her, poised with a purpose, she arched backward in sheer terror, in futile defence. There are thick rich lops of blood on the front of her toga, a pool of the stuff must be accumulating at her feet now. The tip of the grotesquely large bread he holds in his right hand is dark in patches, has evidently been 72

inflict the wounds and is poised to do more damage , fatal damage . She struggles , exhausted, but only just barely. How can she still be standing?

Where does she find the strength? He is sweating with the effort of battle.

Chuck imagines droplets of the assailant's perspiration mixed with the poor woman's blood to form a runny liquefied mess. It is almost curtain tune.

What to do? For as long as he can remember, Chuck has craved the thrill of excitement on the street, his street, and here it is a few feet from his very own place and though his heart is pounding and racing frantically he just stands transfixed, gazing at and through the window, in panic. If he runs home and calls the police it will be too late. Definitely. He could pitch a rock through the glass and the assailant may flinch momentarily, she escape, and (God knows!) the lunatic might come for him. Yet how weak she looks! Though he can guess the price of intervention, Chuck makes a crazy wild dash up the steps to their front door which , to his surprise, is unlocked and even a little ajar.

* * * * * * * * *

" Fix you another drink? " asks Bill.

"For sure , I could use it," Chuck replies. "What's in it, anyway? " "Rum punch-ron ponche they call it down there. Sounds like someone describing a fat Ron. Sonja and I discovered it in the Dominican Republic. The DR. Packs a wallop. Made from genuine Dominican rum too, hundred and fifty proof. Doesn't cost but a few pesos down there."

Bill disappears into the kitchen to make another round .

Sonja and Chuck are left sitting in comfy armchairs in front of the fueplace, the radiant warmth of which has given her face a rosy cherubic glow, new life, made her less cadaveric. She dabs the half dried lumps of catsup from her dress front with the corner of a fluffy kaleidoscopic beach towel that says 'California.' She is the picture of tranquility.

"So you live just down the street?"

"Three houses away, towards the corner. The quiet corner without the traffic."

"Renting?"

"My own place. Mine and the bank's." " Well, darling, as I was saying . .. we've seen you walk past. Looked like you might be some fun. Weren't sure just where you lived, we're hardly ever here, figured it must be nearby. Thought we'd like to meet up with you . Simple."

Sonja has stopped dabbing, even though nasty spots remain on her tunic, has started to smoke cigarettes and brush her long dishevelled hair which, on closer inspection in a better light, turns out to be lustrous rather

73

than mousy, positively stunning from the proper perspective. Chuck can hardly look away. Bill returns to pass out the beverages, still sweating. His shirt, now open almost to the navel, is soaked and grabs at his chest and belly. He has made a snack, a pile of Ritz crackers topped with diet mayonnaise, tuna from a tin and wild bramble jelly. Becalmed by the first ron ponche, Chuck settles into his second. " I suppose having me in for a cup of coffee would have been too .. . straightforward?' ' "We've tried it before. With others , in other places, I mean," says Bill.

"Never works for long, darling. Must start things with a bang, don't you agree Billy? " "Too simple," adds Bill while he kneels down on one knee close in front of Chuck as if about to spring a proposal of marriage . "See, we've had an adventure together now, the three of us. Something shared , a critical moment. We're son of involved in a way that could never've happened if we'd sat down over tea or chatted across the back fence about the weather. Understand?" " Think of it as an icebreaker, dear," says Sonja. " You married?" " Single. Divorced." " But naturally you're still good buddies?" " Mortal enemies is more like it. Happened not too long ago. And you?"

"Still good friends," Sonja answers with a smile and Bill makes a confirmatory move to stand by her, hold her hand.

"Married and not," says Bill. "Got hitched in the DR by a witch doctor or something in the hills near Puerto Plata. Turns out it's not legal, least ways not here though it sure seemed plenty official when we did it.

Plenty of pomp and circumstance, a big celebration after with people we'd only just met at this resort, pig roasting on a spit, you name it. License, blood test, the works, eh honey? " She nods in agreement. " So we never bothered doing it over again, couldn't see the point." " Children?" asks Sonja. " No."

"Us neither." Chuck is not surprised , feels relieved.

"You look like you haven't been here long." Apart from the rwo puffy grey armchairs in which Sonja and Chuck sit, the room contains precious little and most of it randomly distributed in boxes of various sizes, odd parts of things poking their way out of cardboard containers. The only trappings of 'lived- in' are gigantic framed posters on the garishly papered

74

One advertises the opening of a private sculpture gallery in San another shows a photo of an expensive European spons car, its ~~~a~renra body gleaming like a windex-polished mirror, a third one celethe victories of a midwestern American college football team. '' But look as though you've been around."

"On account of Billy's work," says Sonja, who now smokes one giant cigarette after another, clipping them feverishly in and out of a torshell holder, and is a gulp or so away from the bottom of her second

~r•ou•~.,....v,

"Rasslin' ," says Bill.

"Rasslin' ?" says Chuck.

"Pro rasslin', yup, that's what I used to do."

"You mean like the stuff on 1V Saturday afternoons?"

"The same, Chuck m ' boy. Can't say's but I was one of the best , too. ln.:stwavs when they' d let me whup the bejesus out of one of them young Presto, he pulls a glossy though tarnished black and white publicstill from one of the half empty boxes. Chuck thinks: what else of their archives lies buried in the boxes? There stands Bill against the thick , sponing less paunch and a more smoothly rounded shoulder muscle he now displays, dressed in wrestling tights, a black leather vest with ,.,....,.....,and cowboy hat, a thin checkered bandana about his neck and a three-day growth of beard. Mean.

"The Bandito, they called me. Kinda looked Mexican."

"But you've quit that?"

"Had to. Too rough."

"It's a show for the plebs, of course darling," says Sonja, stabbing her IP!I.... r .. ,.,,.,. into a motel ashtray while attacking a cracker, crumbs falling on chin , "but the crowds are bloodthirsty just the same. Dominicans and were the worst, weren't they Bill, tell him."

"The worst, honey. Had me a match in Amarillo one night. The Banwas a real nasty dude, see. Bad guy. Could 've guessed that from the . They send me in with this cleancut masked kid they bill as the Ranger. Too much! I'm supposed to lose anyway. The guy gets carried slams me on the cement floor outside the ring and dislocates my I"'IVu•u'-'• damn near kills me. Meantime the crowd's yelling, screaming for kid to punish me some more, which the bastard commences doing . when I decide to call it quits. That very night. Cheers. Anybody for three? Drinks, I mean."

Through all this Chuck seeks an accent, a hint of origins, a clue.

"Offhand, I'd guess you're the only ex-rassler on the street, maybe

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even the neighbourhood, the city. You've come here to settle down?"

Chuck hands him the glass, feeling just far enough shan of woozy to risk another lethal dosage. Home is down the block, he can crawl. " Only if things work out, darling," says Sonja. "We're overdue for some real peace and quiet ."

"If nothin ' else comes along in the way of a job, I'm still good for a vicious choke hold or two," says Bill and before Chuck knows it Bill has jumped up and slipped behind him and gripped his neck in a vice formed by the crook of his still powerful left arm. All in one deft move. Chuck is either too drunk or having too fine a time to care that he can hardly catch a decent breath, that his chair is tipping dangerously backward, that an accidental or reflex kick of his left foot has sent the plate of crackers flying and frying into the fireplace. While Sonja cackles away and damn near chokes on her drink. " Friends?" asks Bill as he releases the deadly hold and helps Chuck to his wobbly feet . " Friends . .." Chuck replies, " .. . only if I live to survive another evening."

He thinks : what fun, what total terrific fun .

* * * * * * * *

Over the ensuing weeks Bill and Sonja and their new pal Chuck from down the block have dinner together four times and Sunday brunch each weekend. Twice dinner is at Bill and Sonja's place, on a makeshift dining room table which is really a fold-up poker table that they've dragged along from city to city to city. There is a disposable red paper tablecloth, saved from a Christmas somewhere else. They call the food they prepare most of the time Tex-Mex, something Chuck has heard of but never before tasted and finds to his liking but is so spicy hot that he washes it down with beer after beer-Bill tells him when you drink brew with this kind of food it is cerveza and not beer. One time Chuck treats them to a trendy new Italian pasta place downtown where you can hardly see the tables for the ferns.

Bill tries to buy a tourist poster pushing the charms of Portofmo, one place they admit never having been. In fact , Bill and Sonja confess, they're not panial to any ponion of Europe at all, it just doesn 't have the pull of the Caribbean, South America, maybe the South Pacific. Doesn't come close, even for all its damned castles and cathedrals. Once they barbecue steaks on the deck in back of Chuck's house, almost setting the place on fire .

Chuck discovers that Sonja works as an office temp and, for two evenings a week since she used to be a model, at a fancy dress boutique at a tacky shopping mall in one of the suburbs. Bill has tried selling real estate and cars and flogging insurance door-to-door but figures he needs some-

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thing more physical to help him get rid of the spare tire that grows around his waist. " Gotta get back into fighting shape," he says to Chuck after they've both become swiftly winded one balmy evening while tossing a football back and forth on the street. Mostly, they seem to survive off their savings from Bill's brief career as The Bandito. They have lived on the street now for almost three months. On every visit to their house, Chuck notices the same half- empty boxes with junk strewn about and doubts that they will ever unpack, secretly wonders whether one day he 'll knock on their front door and find them gone , their place abandoned . He never asks about their plans and once in a while doubts that they have many. What the hell, who needs 'em?

The visits happen often (too often?) and Chuck senses a reluctance on Bill and Sonja's part to come to his place. Why? When they get together it is mostly all jokes and laughs and that seems just fine . Chuck says exactly what he's thinking. Sonja tosses around her 'darling's' and usually wears something outrageous from her trendy shop-"something I just threw together, darling" -rainbow colored garments which Chuck at first suspects, and then grows certain, she has stolen. Some of them, at least.

Booze flows. Bill tosses the drinks back with abandon like nobody's business and can sure hold his liquor, thinks Chuck, can he ever. He warns Bill that he's at risk for starting to look like a real Ron Paunchy and Bill at fust gets angry (though of course Chuck can never tell if it's for real or just put on; this time he suspects, for a second , that it's real) then laughs, says he can put the pounds on and take them off as easily as changing the thermostat for the furnace, that it's part of being a jock, then makes a huge fist and pounds himself full force six or seven times in the gut. "Solid, solid ..." he shouts as his pale face reddens a little and he turns the fist towards Chuck. "Let's see if you can take it, guy. . .." Bill, all serious now definitely, makes a motion as if to drive his clenched knuckles into Chuck's midsection and stops just short, laughing. " Didn't think so . Nope , didn' t think so. What a pussy!"

It all seems great fun , more fun than Chuck can ever remember having, ever, and he worries: how and when will it end? And how and when will he tell Sonja and Bill these things? That there is no divorce, no ex, not even a girlfriend (surely they'd guessed that much) , no mortgage with the bank (he rents the house from an old retired couple across town). Small lies, tiny white ones, but what on earth possessed him to tell them? They just slipped out. That was it. Here were Bill and Sonja, exotic , even a little bizarre-yes-flitting around the world and playing games with life, living on the fringes like no one, certainly no couple, he'd known before, and here was he, Chuck, telling fibs so as to not seem totally common-

77

place, banal beyond retrieval. But when it comes to the business of lies, Chuck thinks more deeply and logically now, who are Bill and Sonja to point the finger? Who indeed? She a thief more than likely. He with cock and bull stories about wrestling. The photograph could be a fake , staged, the kind of thing you'd do at the carnival when it came through, but for whose benefit? And Dominican witch doctors? Who lives like this? WHO? Going about from city to city, place to place, like Gypsies. Probably, thinb Chuck and soon convinces himself of the validity of his hypothesis, one step ahead of the law. Especially Sonja. Maybe Bill was after all a harmless superannuated jock full of pranks.

Then it stops.

Chuck, thinking about it, cannot remember who called whom, Bill and Sonja him or he them, but there was a phone conversation. Brief.

Rather formal , polite , not like they most often behaved when together, and he talked to them as though it was long distance trans-Atlantic instead of down the block, and both of them had to get in their minute before the elapsed time made it too expensive. Sonja came on last. Was it arranged thus? He wonders.

"We'll see you around then ."

"Dinner one day next week perhaps? Or stop by for a drink." " Next week perhaps. Not before though, we're busy. In a swirl, you know how it is." A swirl!

But there is no date set , no plans are formulated, and the next and the next after that pass without so much as a meeting or a call. ing. Before Chuck knows it, a month has passed, then two. Still ..v,.....,..,.: (Was it Bill or Sonja?) He sees them from a distance now and then, there no way to avoid it, but even on such occasions they don't see him or tend they don't, and Chuck thinks: why make an effon? and so acts same way. (It was Sonja more than likely. Chuck wonders that he trusted the bitch, she having so much of the criminal type about chain-smoking and tossing back liquor like some cheap gangster's Sluttish ways, really. But why this power over Bill, and how?)

Chuck starts to purposefully avoid wallcing past their place, begins to look seedy and unkempt (no surprise!) and this at least Chuck that yes, the pair are still in residence . He walks instead in a tous way around the block to get to the local liquor store and .., ...1~._........_ and to have dinner sometimes at the greasy burger or pizza or food joints nearby. One Saturday morning he turns on the television set find pro wrestling and, sure enough, there is Bill. Only now he is not Bandito in his leather cowboy outfit and hat, but instead, is made to a mask that covers his face (but no mistaking the chunky body, it is Bill

78

and act panicularly vicious. Or is the vicious pan Bill himself? He beats up on a muscular blond kid who looks like a college football player out trying to make some spending money, until the boy's face is bleeding, though it appears to be a rather harmless nosebleed. Even so, things seem to get out of hand . It is not one of those glossy neon-lit wrestling shows full of sequins and glitter that originate in huge arenas in New York or Los Angeles but an amateurish local production made right in the studio and the young fellow doesn't seem to know quite what has hit him . Bill wins the match in about five sweaty minutes. After the commercial there is an interview and Bill continues, in the middle of deep wheezing, to play the meany, cussing and spitting and pointing a gloved finger repeatedly towards the camera while he screams that no snotty-nosed punk like the one he just clobbered is fit to be in the ring with him, and where's the real competition in this territory anyway? The interviewer has to cut Bill's tirade shon, at which point Chuck thinks Bill is about to decompensate, play-acting pretty well to suggest he's on the brink. Chuck wonders: how much do they pay Bill for this? Is Sonja somewhere in the thinly populated studio audience? Does this mean Bill and Sonja are in town for a spell, perhaps for good? What might the neighbors think if they suspected they lived next door to the masked marauder?

Is it curiosity or forgetfulness that makes Chuck walk past Bill and Sonja's one evening, late, for a look, nothing more? Bill is at the window, staring out into the moonless black night, silhouetted by the flicker of the faint fireplace light Chuck so well remembers, yet seemingly unaware of Chuck as he stands on the sidewalk just off their lawn looking into the window. They stand thus in silent opposition for a minute before an automobile horn stanles Chuck into moving away. The occupants of the car, a sleazy- looking American- made jalopy with peeling paint, are a couple-a man and woman, the same age- who have come for Bill and Sonja. Chuck sees this as he looks back while walking slowly away, sees Bill and Sonja climb into the rear-seat while Bill makes some noisy rude physical joke with the man behind the steering wheel and ends up by punching him on the shoulder. Typical Bill! A social occasion then, though you wouldn't know it by looking at Sonja's stone-somber face , and of course she's puffing on a smoke. Probably her hundredth today.

But when Bill and Sonja appear at Chuck's front door a week later on a bleak, rainy night carrying a liter of Dominican rum as a peace offering and push past him in their crudely brash way, taking over the kitchen for the purpose of constructing a giant submarine sandwich (Chuck at first had wondered about the uncut loaf of French bread poking out of Sonja 's shopping bag) and mixing unusually strong rum punches, then plop

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themselves down in the living room acting like they are here to stay, it is as if there had been no gaps, none at all. Before Chuck can blink, Bill, still wearing his fedora and Foster Grant wrap-arounds , has turned up the stereo into hyperblast and is gyrating out of control around the room, his rain-soaked hair and clothes shedding drops onto the carpet as though he were a dog just back from a swim in the muddiest pond. He tries to engage Sonja in the dance and she finally capitulates, though it is clear she would much rather sit and drink and smoke. T.1ey are a contrast, this pair, thinks Chuck, she somehow still immaculate despite the frantic activity, practically beatific despite herself, with a pale glow that radiates from the thin face like a halo. Then each of them grabs Chuck by a hand and he spins around with them to cut-after-cut of the ancient Rolling Stones album, his heart racing as the needle skips across the record madly, until it stops .

"So how've you been , asshole? " Bill wants to know as he throws himself down on the floor next to Chuck in his finest easy chair, giggling like a little boy.

Chuck says "Fine" but he means to say: Lonely, miserable, hellish once in a while even, depressed sometimes, I've missed you, dear God, yes, you both with your lunatic ways and strange and suspicious pastimes and weird, dubious careers. "How about you?"

Now the big news of the evening comes out, and it even explains the visit: Sonja is pregnant, has a bun in the oven as Bill puts it, as Bill put it. Chuck had suspected as much when he first saw her. There is a small and rather still shapeless abdominal bubble that is out of keeping with rest of her sleek feline body, but justifies the glow like a halo. They look and act pleased enough about it. Chuck thinks: for God's sake, shouldn't she be cutting back on the cigarettes and the booze? Bill mentions that 路 might be twins, they'll know for sure in a week or two after the ultrasound, and says wouldn't that be a handful! Chuck can see them both cooing the crib in some drunken haze, playing their damned games, one or another of their rituals, frightening the poor thing or things to death.

"Well, that is news indeed," says Chuck, "cause for celebration, I' say" and sets out, wobbly from the rum, for the kitchen to fetch some that's been lying around for a month or so in the fridge waiting for a He picks it up and grabs three dusty flutes from a cupboard and back, thinking now that there is a serious problem with his mechanisms focusing both eyes simultaneously-is it the rum or something in the And then he sees, as he walks into the front room , that they are standing quite still and quite close together, wearing their masks, masks from their first night together.

"We'll need a godfather of course, at least it or they will darling,

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says Sonja and then , as if reading Chuck's mind , " ... well not the traditional kind of course, not the kind based on religions and churches and things. Not at all darling, we want you just as a back-up in case something happens to us both, something dreadful, and who knows that it so easily might , what with the way we do carry on . Besides , you'll be there to give him things, gifts , advice, to spoil him , spoil her.. .. " Chuck can see it now, he as the one moderating influence in the poor creature's life, buying it books and toy microscopes and telescopes, educational things that Bill and Sonja would hardly think of or care about.

"Not a godfather that you become at a church christening, Chuck dear, but we have our own traditions just the same. Take this, darling," and Chuck sees, though just barely, that she is holding out to him a mask identical to theirs. Bill is quiet through all this, though Chuck can detect his breath deflected from the inner surface of the mask with remarkable clarity and wonders at this peculiar sparing of his sense of hearing in the face of the general collapse of his other faculties . For all in all, he feels quite potted.

Still, he takes the tribal adornment in the spirit with which it is surely given , the spirit that permeates all of the few gifts that come from Bill and Sonja. He puts it on . It feels right. It fits quite nicely, though the thing stifles and confines. Is there a potion, a magical thing smeared along its inner wall that has started to dear his senses? For they are becoming quite lucid. Still, there is not seeing out of the mask, no slits for the eyes though Chuck could swear he had noticed them on Bill and Sonja's. Could almost swear, anyway.

When the stainless steel blade of the incredibly thin and magnificently sharp knife passes for the first time between his ribs and through the left ventricle of his heart , creating the start of a thick red puddle at his feet, he hears only the slippery swoosh of metal against juicy flesh and feels a sadness without boundaries but no pain, none at all.

Yet he sees nothing.

81

Dirk van Nouhuys

SHELLS

The drought-resistant shrubs formed an environment of green, thin leaves, gray desert trunks among them and the red trunks of the mesquite.

Barbara took off her dark glasses, walked up a concrete path that led through a grey-green tunnel from the bright sun on the driveway to the green twilight of the front porch. The door and the wall were enameled white paint shining grey-green . Barbara rang the bell. Nothing happened.

In the middle of the door was a tiny eye-spy lens. She was trying to 路 if she wished the front of her house were so concealed. Her hus Mark, often expressed anger that their house was so exposed to o~;sers-ov..

She walked along the porch to peek in the living room window.

It was the house of her friend, Laura Shahoskoy. Between them, bara had the force of investigation; she was like a detective, whereas had the force of stasis. In other respects, among other people, Barbara too. She was an ordinary married woman, compared to her sister, who a professional tennis player, living from hand to mouth on the edge of erty and glory, hotel rooms, one-night lovers. But when Barbara and were together it was Barbara who would say, "Let's go try the new shop ..." or "Let's try to figure out how to," whereas it was Laura would say, "I know a place that .. ." or "I have always thought . ..."

The drapes were open and she could look in. It was a dark room tile floors, carpeted with dark Oriental rugs, and light reflected the floor-to- ceiling glass to the glarey pool and patio beyond. The looked neat and empty. Barbara walked down to the other end of porch , where a small window looked into the garage . Both cars were She took her pen and little notebook from her purse to write Laura a but touched her eyelids with it instead. When she was a little girl she kept a notebook like this when she played spy. Barbara walked back to opposite end of the porch and looked into the thick of the mesquite oleander. Thirty feet away she could dimly catch the wall of the .....路.,....,.. ing property, covered with years of old leaves. She walked back to driveway and then up the path of the garbage man and the meter The white-painted board fence, dusty grey from the unwatered earth,

82

latch, which she undid. The path led around to the blinding light of the and the patio. Barbara put on her dark glasses and called out, "Hello!" No sound answered. Yet , she felt welcome. She went to the slidglass patio doors and tried them. They did not open. She walked to the door and it opened freely. She entered a brightly lit yellow kitchen • •r...r .. she had often had coffee with Laura. She walked quietly through it. stuck her head in the laundry room and saw several large yellow plastic tanks, collected by Laura's husband, Karl, through his work, and adapted for cloths baskets. The living room was large, twenty by thirty-five feet.

All the uphill wall was glass, facing the patio, swimming pool, and rising shrubbery beyond. Reflections from the pensive water sketched shaky light strokes in the beamed ceiling.

The reflected light suggested a small church in a Mediterranean country during the sleep of afternoon, but oh no, this was Karl's country, always at work. She entered his study, which opened off the end of the living room . This room was littered with models of strange shelters like an archaeologist's dream . Barbara had a dim notion that Laura's husband did something to do with planning military construction. Cardboard models, mostly half-finished. A blackboard housed several unfinished drawings, not square like the construction drawings Mark sometimes brought home, but lumpy clouds ballooned out with portent and misted with dust.

Mechanical devices that Karl brought home thinking to redeem them with · ·ve uses. Parts of airplanes, plastic products of indecipherable inten. This is the shit of the technical world, of the world of design. It was as Karl had left his mind here for those who would recognize it, and Barbara felt a little thrill of penetration. A clerestory lit this room from the LIU\,Il~•~u::, and the play of light was reflected here, too, at this time of day.

Suddenly the light shook; Barbara felt as if she had heard a sound.

She wanted to go out and see if someone were walking in the patio . . . but no, it subsided. On the street side was a window that faced into the mesquite; dusty, green light barely entered. On the other walls were two doors next to each other. One led to a bathroom, the other through a short hall to the master bedroom. She went through into the bedroom. It was a large room done in white; white , wall-to-wall tufted carpeting, which sheltered the large bed in the middle of the space, head to the wall. The bed was unmade on one side where Laura had slept. Laura had told Barbara that this was the one room that she had designed; the information had surprised Barbara. The room did not seem like her. Laura had asked what sort of a room Barbara would have accepted as hers? Barbara had been stumped for a moment and said, "Well, something like blue forgetme-nots or rosebuds and earth colors and wool textures mixed." " That 83

sounds very hard to pull off," Laura had said, " I'm not surprised I didn try it."

A stack of hard-cover books stood beside the bed. Barbara went and scanned the backs. There were eight. Five were mystery novels, Agatha Christie and two that she did not recognize: one Dorothy and one Mickey Spillane. One was a historical romance, "The Wake of Red Witch." Two were about marriage, "How Marriage Works," and " the Domain of Couples." Barbara found these a little distasteful. Mark told her to read such a book, and she had refused . On Karl's side of bed were a stack of technical books on systems engineering, copies of ular Science and Popular Mechanics, and some pieces of paper with handwriting and sketches on them. She judged by the paper that they, the chalkboard, were not recent.

She went into the bathroom. It included a large sunken tub and a shower with a glass door. She opened the glass door and observed nn.,..,,_ on three sides and the ceiling. Well, that was interesting. Barbara was member of a baby sitting co-op. Whenever she sat, she took an '""'.."''n... of the house, the decor, and the owners' lives. She paid most attention the interior decoration, the paint and the surfaces, rough plaster, fabric, slick enamel, but she also always checked carefully the chest. If the surfaces were the eyes of a house, the medicine cabinet was heart. She had not at this moment thought of her survey of the ...........J.,....111 residence like her inventory of the co-op houses because she stood in a ferent relation to Laura. The women in the baby sitting co-op were she knew only on the surface.

She opened the cabinet. A rolls razor, a shaving brush, a bowl of ing soap with the emblem of a college fraternity occupied the top shelf objects in a still life. She smiled at Karl a little derisively; it was his love mechanical things. He was a little lovable. Mark used an elecuic razor. was always talking about the stinging cool fluids that went with it. On next shelf down was a sealed canon of rubbers. Barbara wondered that man like Karl had not chosen a more modern method of corltr~tce]ptu>n She wondered if that was why they had so many children, and smiled herself. Maybe that was love of gadgets, too. She returned to the U<-'-'""'u and looked in the drawer of a bedside table on Laura's side. It was with recipes. She looked in the second drawer, which, was ftlled with packages and notes on the garden. She half bent to look in the drawer, but somehow at this moment was embarrassed and went around Karl's side. His top drawer was filled with small, many- colored of plastic pipe. The second drawer contained an open box of rubbers, watches, two wrist and one pocket, and a pad of engineering paper

84.

dusty sketches. Satisfied on this score, Barbara went back to Laura's drawer. It housed a little green, locked metal box. Barbara lifted box and shook it. No sound , but from its weight and the uneven distriofbalance in volume , she did not think it was empty. Well, she told I'm not so into prying I need to worry about this, and returned it its place. She went back to the bathroom. The rest of the cabinet cona modest assortment of minor medications: skin cream , topical dis.u~=ct:mt and topical pain killers, aspirin, Contact, Cutex. On the next was a tube of Prell shampoo and a kit of pale brown eye makeup with lot of grey in it. Avon Wild Hazel. Barbara had not realized Laura wore makeup, but of course she did. How had she missed it? Barbara had a of anger. She did not like women who wore eye makeup. But on _...u.... it was different. Of course there was a slightly haunted quality to her by using that subtle brown, like her skin tone, she slyly admitted it. â&#x20AC;˘ liwrt,., picked up the kit and fingered some of the cream around her eyes, to reproduce Laura's subtlety. Barbara did not normally use eye _...........u..., and did it badly. Her eyes looked back at her through flakes, as a eye through a painted, peeling wall. She took a Kleenex out of own pocket, removed the color, and returned the Kleenex to her â&#x20AC;˘ JIOC.Icet On a separate shelf that no one seemed to own, were Ex- Lax, Vasa' and Di- Gel. There was only one prescription drug, a strong antihistamine prescribed to Karl for hay fever.

She closed the bathroom door, wondered a moment if it had been ~losc:d, decided Laura would not care, walked back through the short hall Karl's study, walked back through the living room where the light on ceiling was now more blue-green. A stairway climbed the opposite wall at the opposite end of the living room. Three children 's rooms were on the inside of his hall, one at the end over the garage, and a bathroom at the other end. The three bedrooms were over the laundry room and against the rising hillside. They overlooked the patio with the swimming pool.

She had seen the room of the ten-year- old, when she'd come to pick up her son. She skipped it and went into the middle room with the door nearest the stairs, Marguerite's room. Barbara had never met her. Pictures filled the room. The wall opposite the door was covered, every square inch, either with photographic posters or actual color photos. A red sunset poster filled the center, a young teenage girl lying face down on the beach, her face in the sand, her legs up behind her, silhouetted against the sun, a red bikini, in red letters at the bottom, "Jus' Tell Me Your Own Story" and the call letters of a radio station. Barbara considered what she had to look forward to , and wondered how Mark would take a daughter like that.

85

With an uneasy smile and a bit of blame on her, she decided. The rest of the photographs were almost all of young women, or men of scattered ages. None showed any member of the family but her. A rather narrow single bed with a thick mattress; on the dresser only three objects. The whole room painted in black and white, apan from the posters; it was almost a decorator effect. Bold, rigid, bright. She looked carefully at each item of provocative clothing neatly hung in a closet or neatly stacked in bureau drawers . She found a cache of marijuana. She was sorely tempted to take some. But there was not a great deal there ... if she took enough to really know if it affected her, Marguerite might notice. What would happen then? Marguerite would suspect her siblings or her mother. She went back to the hall and looked at the doors. Who was Bluebeard for her? Mark?

But Mark had no dead wives, nor did he want to show her or anyone the rooms of his soul. Anger kept them out. Yet Bluebeard did not want to show his room. Mark, there is a black, wrapped mummy somewhere.

Barbara walked to the end of the hall and opened the door there. On the wall opposite the door she saw a clerestory view of the base of a bush and, beyond that, glimpsed a flat, semi-wild garden area on a terrace up the hill. This room was all athletics. Two trophies dominated the dresser, a small gilt bat and a small gilt basketball. No pictures of handsome men or women, no sense of particular other people. The cloths were as neat as Marguerite's, but no color and no drugs. Nothing in this room that hinted at a future home with people; it was a dormitory room. Mark must have had a room like this, except swimming . . . what could you hang up for swimming? Gilt trunks?

She went to the middle room, which belonged to Sophie, the oldest girl. Her window looked over the pool. The room was littered with clothes.

Barbara closed the door; the back was covered with photographs and posters, all black and white. The largest was of an old Indian drilling or lighting a fire with a bow drill. Most of the other photographs were of Indians or of Polynesians caught in their ways of life. One photo showed Karl and a little girl who must have been Sophie herself in a woods. Sophie was holding a tent pole and Karl had a heavy hammer and was about to whack it; Laura, her back partly cut away by the edge of the picture, stood a little off, watching with a puzzled expression. It made Barbara feel she had been pretending to be Laura. She should do this in her own house sometime, survey it as if she were a stranger but yet knowing herself, seeing with her own eyes, escape herself, her house , in her house, her self.

If Sophie came in while Barbara was surveying her room she would not be offended , she would clear a space for herself and her guest and say something. Yes, she would say in a modest friendly voice, just repressing

86

trace of a giggle, those are the so-and-so and they are doing the such....,,-,,..Ll. ceremony. Barbara cleared a space on the bed . She sat on tht.

If she were Goldilocks she would sleep in this bed . She stood .

Barbara entered the upstairs bathroom and examined each item on shelves and under the sink and in the bathtub: medicine, makeup, ~·J•uu .... , soap . Then she wandered back downstairs, feeling stuffed.

•a.uuv.,. as an afterthought she recalled the hint of an upper terrace garden had seen from the clerestory in Karl Jr.'s room. She wondered about the !Drc:occ:ur:tatl·.on of their house with clerestories; they wanted light without or being seen. Perhaps the vegetable garden was up there. She had a that if it was, she would learn something else about Laura.

She walked around the pool and found a path leading up through the of mesquite, oleander, and ceonothus. After a moment she cmc~rg(:d. She stood still. Before her was a clearing with no building visi, as if in a scrub forest. At her feet was a vegetable garden . Beyond it a cleared, hard-packed space around a pole with a basketball hoop at top. Laura was sitting cross-legged at the foot of the pole, wearing a over jeans as she often did, looking at her a little oddly. Her clothes dirty as if she had been gardening, or even rolling in the dust like hen.

"Hi." "Hi," Laura said , after a moment's pause. "Come over here.'' ''I'm not disturbing you?" Barbara asked. She began to walk around vegetables toward her friend.

"Well, I didn't expect to see you but, perhaps I did? " Laura said.

When she got around the vegetables, Barbara could see on the that Laura or someone had drawn in the dust concentric half cirlike the concentric shells of the Hollywood Bowl.

"What are you doing?" Barbara asked .

"Have you heard of LSD?" Laura asked. Barbara's express10n ~u~~;u . "Well, I've taken it.''

Barbara felt strange and a little afraid . She had thought such drugs interesting and attractive when she read about them , but seeing ~IJu'"'"'u'" she knew on them was very unsettling.

"Are you all right?" she asked.

"Basically I'm well, although I don't know why," Laura said. " But are some problems on the surface.''

"How am I to take that?" Barbara said.

"You are not to worry," Laura said. "I have looked into the vegetable and seen what will grow there; there are some very worrisome

87

things there, but now . .. look," she pointed at the rainbow lines her on the dust. "I am the American people, see, go west young course empire, to the parched deserts, oceans white with foam, distrust and frozen graveyards-see, our walls are dust, have you ever noticed are no stone walls in Los Angeles?"

"Yes," Barbara said.

"Good girl," Laura said.

"Have you taken it before? " she asked.

"Yes, twice."

"Where did you ever get it?" ''From Sophie, Barbara. I know what I'm doing. I thought you understand? Don't you understand? " Laura looked up at her with expression of puzzled cheerfulness.

"I think I do ," Barbara said.

"These are sea shells I like. West Coast beach shells. These are shells of my life," Laura said. She pointed at one not near her but not the edge. Barbara saw that they had not been drawn casually.

"That is the level, say, of my children's schools and their 路 where we met. Beyond that are the organizations I belong to, and shopping, and farther out . .." Barbara saw a single dotted line afar ". . . the letter I write monthly to my mother, and beyond that, could see it, is my mother showing it to her friends. And here," 路 to a line inside of where she'd started, "is what I do for my children, here," she pointed to the next line, "is my life with Karl, and here," pointed to the inmost circle, "is the house I made and keep for them. here am 1." She said that without making any gesture. Then she raised face to Barbara. "Do you have shells like that?"

"I suppose I do. I think of them as things I do."

"And the tragedy of it is," Laura said, "they are all for someone None of it is mine." She gestured to the circles with the flat of her "It's all something I do for someone else."

"It's your house too ," Barbara protested.

Laura shook her head, "No, I do it for them. Like a painting."

Barbara sat down beside her.

"Well, I do it pretty well, you see," Laura said, gesturing toward shrub forest and the invisible house below and the world beyond that.

"You do it well," Barbara said.

"But that is not the worst part," Laura said.

Barbara did not know what to say. She felt embarrassed. It was an fashioned emotion.

"The worst part is I am ashamed," Laura's face flushed.

88

"Because it's not for you?"

Laura nodded , her face bright pink, holding back tears. "Someone, , each person," she said haltingly, " ought to do something for ." She began to cry. The two women embraced. Barbara felt again and a little disgusted, but she held on. ''I'm so ashamed of ,"Laura said , chanted, several times , crying, holding on to Barbara. should have something for themselves." Barbara began to be someone might ftnd them . " I feel better," she said, almost asking. " Maybe you'd bettertrytostand up," Barbarasaid.

"That's a good idea," Laura said. "I've been sitting here long enough." two women stood. "My, it's bright," Laura said. Barbara looked at her The pupils were great dark pools. Barbara sucked on her lip.

"I'd like to go swimming," Laura said. "Would you like to go swiml've wished I could do it before, but I have always been alone and I IUV'"tt::'" it would be just a little dangerous. You have lifeguard training." felt Laura wanted to be cared for.

They began walking toward the path down the hill. "I don' t have a ¡ ,"Barbara said, "and yours wouldn 't ftt me. Maybe Sophie's."

"You don 't need a suit! " Laura said. " No one can see. Or maybe," continued, "you don't want to go in. You could sit by the edge."

"No, I want to go in ," Barbara said.

They reached the edge of the pool. It was now half filled with .,~â&#x20AC;˘1 n""", but the play oflight was still going on on the half near the house.

"Look at that, it's beautiful," Laura said. " Isn't it beautiful to you " She turned to Barbara.

"It's pretty," Barbara said.

Laura walked to that side of the pool, took off her clothes, threw them , exposing herself as a plain , solidly built woman of early middle age, little heavy, not tan or shapely. Laura sat on the edge and then slipped in. could see her moving under water in the play of light, her hair ",....,.,n.,. around her head. She quickly emerged and took the edge of the in her hand . She looked at Barbara undressing. " You'll love it," she "it's Heaven." Barbara dived in from the edge. The warm water was pleasant. She began to do gentle laps of inside strokes, watching her play in the shallow end with the light, dipping underwater, emergand dipping again . If people show you what they are ashamed of, then is no loneliness. She had to go home and meet her children and ftx . Did Laura have plans ? When would she "come down" ? Would the sober her up? At this moment, Sophie, the daughter with the messy , appeared from inside the house.

89

"Hi, Mom, how are you? Who's your friend?" she said. Apparently she did not remember meeting Barbara. ''I'm having a lovely time, come in," Laura said. " Do you really want me to?" Sophie asked. " Sure, come on," Laura said. Barbara began to wonder if any other people in Laura's family knew. She doubted it. When Sophie slipped into the water she felt panly relieved of her charge. She turned her back to them doing the next lap. She wished Mark had built them a pool.

90

Ronald Smits THE WHALE-ROCKS

Larger than the whales, we wonder where these rocks came from and why they settled here.

Were they carried by the creek that cuts its way down to the Allegheny?

Did the Ice Age glaciers push them from some nonhern plain to leave them on this moraine?

Whatever the source of these rocks, they seem beached, for they are oceanic , mammalian, whale-like .

I look for flukes and eyes; I touch the skin of the larger ones .

They invite my touching and climbing, and entering into the cavern between walls of massive flesh rising impressively from the forest floor.

Like whales that ride the waves, they have traveled the wave- ridges, Blue, Kittatinny, Tuscarora, Allegheny, rolling down the side of one ridge and up the other.

Up and over and down , down, wave after wave, ridge after ridge, Kittatinny and Allegheny, until coming to rest here in this great resting place of the great whale-rocks.

Where I come to worship with you.

91

Fritz Hamilton WHEN IT'S RAINING DOGS &

rammg & I'm supposed to

walk the parks & streets of San Francisco passing out flyers & stapling them everywhere to stimulate the multitudes into DOGFOOD!

a discussion of which to be conducted at the marketing research firm of my employ 40 easy minutes enlightening the dogfood industry thus transforming the entire marketing dog food process you a champion of hungry dogs throughout the world (for which you're paid a whopping $20 for your wisdom)

92

but it's raining & I cannot leave my rooms to find you & I'm standing in my window with an armful of flyers as beneath me a sick skinny mutt staggers shivering through the rain to collapse before my door whimpering " Kal- Can Alpo "

93

Kevin Pehlan and Bill U'Ren

IN THE NUDE

I met her some time after I took the job as a nude model. She was an amateur artist, and I was broke.

* * * * * * * * * If you've never done it, I should probably tell you that it doesn't pay very well and is a lousy way to meet people. It 's an immediate gratification type of job, half the money before and the rest when the modeling's done.

A lot of junkies take the job cause it's an easy way to get a quick ft.x. Me? I do it because it gives me the security of having some cash in my pocket, enough to stop by Dino's for dinner, enough to leave Mina a nice tip.

Mina approved of my nude modeling.

My mother didn't. "If this thing gets out you might never be elected president."

* * * * * * *

*

*

Getting ftred from a $3.35 an hour job can be quite difficult, but impossible. I had recently done it on a couple of occasions.

* * * * * *

* * *

I'd struck four poses at twenty minutes a piece, and it was uâ&#x20AC;˘~cu.â&#x20AC;˘.uu~., I asked her if she wanted to get a bite to eat across the street at Ted 's. looked around and then said " No." I asked her again , and she said " No" again .

At least she was consistent.

I threw my clothes on and told her that I'd be over there at a booth she changed her mind.

*

* *

*

* * * * *

She showed up about the same time as my pancakes. It was a $1. all-you-can-eat pancake special. With less than thirteen minutes left the break, it would be a challenge to eat my money's worth. I was game.

Sybil approved, and ordered the same.

When time was up, I'd gotten down a total of six buttermilk, 94

and two-and-a-half nutcakes. Sybil had eaten five. All

* * * * * * * * * Lana's drawing was of me as a centaur. I don't know why, but I wasn't happy about having my lower half turned into a horse. Thinking about now, it might not be a bad thing.

* * * * * * * * * Before I took the job posing, I was working as a pin boy in the bowlalley that time forgot. It had to be the last one in America that didn't an automatic pin setter, ball return or any of that. It was a decent job, ...v ... ~::... I didn't have to deal with irate customers or any other hells that along with working retail. Just walk in and get to work. Set the pins up, the ball back, repeat.

The problem was that it paid minimum and was a tough workout for Saturday night. I could sweat off four pounds in six hours and go home only eighteen something.

My last night on the job, Mrs. O'Callahan came in with a group of .,...........,~. They didn't play, they just watched, which to me is a scary conSure, regular fans at the alley did exist, but most of them were who hung out , hoping to 路see Earl Petty bowl a 300. He'd done it before. I was working his lane , and at the end everyone bought me _...........~.as ifl'd contributed somehow.

Anyway, I was sure Mrs. O'Callahan didn't know who Earl Petty was.

She ordered a round of white wine spritzers and sat back for some bowling. I'd already put in about three hours and had stripped down to my tank top. Some high school kids with fake ID's were on my lane and they were going pretty fast. Compared to Mitch, who was working a group of business types next to me, I was turning pins over at twice the speed. We were both making the same money.

Mrs. O'Callahan was pretty decent looking. Did I say that yet? Well, she was. She was wearing a skirt and had her red hair clipped back. It looked good.

When I took a break to towel off, she followed me into the locker room . Twenty minutes later, the boss came in and caught us on the floor.

He told me to get back to work. Two hours later, when the rush was over and I'd finished waxing all the lanes, he called me into his office and fired me.

Mrs. O 'Callahan said the least she could do was get me a job at her school.

95

* * * * * * * * * A guy in the back of the class refused to let me see his picture. He said it was "private."

* * * * * * * * * Ten thousand was what I used to answer. " How much would it take to get you to pose nude?"

Ten thousand always seemed to be the standard response. Grammar school, high school, college. It never varied, nobody seemed to be too concerned about inflation.

Ten thousand. Everyone always had a price.

* * * * * * * * * I saw another picture. It was one by a guy up front, a guy using oils.

He was short and skinny, something I think he was trying to hide. He had four layers of clothing on, including two turtlenecks. I mentioned that he might be a bit overdressed for the occasion. 路 His picture was nice. Interesting and colorful. For some reason, though, his drawing didn't look much like me. The subject was shorter, thinner and bald , but nude, nonetheless .

* * * * * * * * * When I got out to my car, Sybil was waiting there , unfazed by the hail.

I offered her a ride home, but she would walk. She said the hail was "quite romantic." I was unsure what that meant.

I did accept her invitation to go out the next night, though. I could pick her up at work.

"Planned Parenthood? Yeah, I know where that is."

* * * *

* * * * *

Work for me has always fallen into two categories. You either sell body or you sell your brain, whichever you can find a buyer for. Maybe oversimplify. Either way, I try to keep my body in shape and hope that offers keep coming in.

* * * * *

* * * *

Annie was doing son of a pastel watercolor. I wasn't sure about use of pastels for me. It seemed kind of wimpy. My legs were lime My hair was polar blue. My chest was rose. Bits of yellow and gold rounded my cock.

96

* * * * * * * * * I was sitting in the attic watching Sesame Street on my nine inch Dlat:K-an<I-VIfntlce. A long time ago, I'd bought it for twenty-five bucks some guys outside the Oakland Coliseum. Batteries included.

Grover was talking to Kermit about cooperation. Their dilemma was a broken wagon with a missing wheel. The wagon had the letter "G" written on its side.

I liked Sesame Street. It had no commercials.

* * * * * *

* * *

The phonebook was missing the page with Planned Parenthood. I'd torn it out awhile ago, and now, most likely, it was still riding around in the backseat of my old Skylark. Whoever's driving the thing probably doesn't even know they have access to the clinic right at their fingenips.

I guess this was a bad habit of mine. I always tore the address out of the phonebook whenever I was going anywhere.

Or I'd be in the car and forget where I was going and pull over to a payphone. You could track my path all over town by the missing pages.

And a lot of times I'd get to a phone booth and be fucked cause I had been there before. That's what was happening with this Planned Parenthood thing.

* * * * * * * * * Another picture stunned me a bit. The girl hadn't drawn me as I looked, but as I was.

* * * * * * * * * I was the only guy in the waiting room at the clinic, yet I didn't feel quite as uncomfonable as I once might have. A lot of girls came and left as I waited there. I tried to make conversation, but it didn't seem like anyone was in the mood.

I picked up a copy of the Weekly World News and read. It was true, all Cro-Magnon men used to look like Elvis. A two-pan anicle. I would be sure to tune in next week.

* * * * * * * * * Sometime after eight, the receptionist called my name, and told me to head down the hallway and into room twelve. When I got there, I opened up the door and found Sybil sitting alone on the paper-lined examining bed.

97

Small bloodstains decorated her white lab coat. She looked tired. ''I'm really sorry." she said. Then there was a pause, and it felt like she was almost gonna cry. " God. Why do things like this always happen to me? " she said, but not to me.

I sat down on the bed next to her, and kind of put my arm around her. For a second, it felt like we were old friends, or at least like we were both from the same hometown.

She said that they'd scheduled more abortions than usual, and on of it they were short-handed. I babbled on about going out tomorrow, another night , and she agreed. " It would be more convenient." I think said. "I have to work a three-hour session in the morning, anyway."

There was another little pause, and then she apologized again, got and left.

* * * * * * * * * On the way home, I noticed that the lights were still on at Dino's, so stopped in for a bite to eat. Except for Mina and the cook, Neil, the was empty.

Mina set me a place at my favorite booth in the corner near the and ordered a special without my having to ask. She knew how to things like that. Maybe she did it because it was her job, maybe not. way, I appreciated it more than she knew.

When she dropped off my order, she sat down for a minute to She asked me how everything was going, and I said , " Alright." I her, and she said the same.

98

· B. Sherman IMPOSSIBLE TASK

Conceptually, the thing was finished : a Great Project conscientiously to completion. I had only to lock the last rungs into place. The are of a rough finish-smooth enough to avoid splinters but coarse ,owo,, ..,.u to inspire callouses. And callouses are as important as balance.

I was working on the ladder when my brother, Harry, walked in . Harry next door in the old family estate and is a wizard with electronics. to the family's home appliance and hardware empire, Harry is the 1• m1•entor of many useful and time-saving kitchen devices though, since his left him, he'd given up kitchen tools altogether. He had been working on an escalator.

"I can 't see where you think you 'll go with the ladder, Jake," said " It's outmoded, slow, too tiring to climb. The simple fact that it one to go both up and down is an a pnon· admission of failure. The on the other hand, is a self-contained unit of success. The stairs coming around and collapse on the way down. It allows passage only upward ."

Harry insisted on showing me the generator and portable power source he 'd devised in the event of a power failure . Last summer, Harry confided, he had indeed been stuck for several days and had to walk down .

"But even then, it worked fine as a staircase-safer and less awkward than the ladder."

I pointed out that the escalator is not portable, that it has little demand outside of department stores and terminals. Harry developed a slight shake.

"You can' t go on living in the past," Harry warned. ll'u.l'"n.u

Harry's warnings were not lost on me. The secrets to my ladders are locked into my computer. Every detail of engineering, each vector of stress, wind velocity or air traffic control patterns in my area all factor into plans. I love to key in the construction graphics; green lines arc and around themselves into rungs, rungs pivot, align themselves and to the huge tapering sidebar on the left of the screen. The right99

hand sidebar appears as a green whirling propeller blade, slows and fiu itself against the open ends of the rungs. Slowly, as if turning against immense force , the rungs rotate and lock into place.

I had almost finished my seventh and final ladder. When I began task, I'd hoped to complete it in a matter of days, without theory, from ingenuity of memory and inspiration, with only the vision of the top drive me onwards.

Mter the failure of my first model, I set out methodically to a ladder of an entirely new pattern. In my first four attempts, each ---...- .... examples of engineering, I had conceived of the ladder as a mere .,..,.,,. ...t.. line avenue to the top. By then, I had already coupled callouses to vision the foundations of my work. But it was not until I understood that all ders actually form a triangle, completed by the ground and the against which they lean, that my work became truly inspired. What to the ladder against? I needed a third element. And so it came to be that triad of my success was Balance, based on Callouses, leaned against own Vision.

My workroom back then was a madhouse of wood scraps and tools. Sawdust covered everything in a fine powder until I had to what lay beneath the soft yellow lumps. One day I simply removed whole clutter from the two-car garage leaving only my grandfather's tools. The rusting Volkswagen Superbeetle had sat on the street throughout the first year. When Cliff left the hardware store, he had by to ask me whether I'd reconsider my decision to stay in Windsor, less, without prospects, blackballed in the Windsor hardward world Harry's passion for power.

"Jake," said Cliff. "It's a new world through that tunnel. You in America, land of opportunity, offering her fat treats of success to hungry for new life." " Cliff, you are a man who will go as far as you can envision in world. Take the Volkswagen . It moves in the wrong direction for me."

Cliff could have stayed. Harry'd begged him to stay but so11nento. with me out of the business there was no longer any challenge to the Cliff had referee'd the constant battles between Harry and me. Until fired me. I admit it was Harry's hardnosed business sense that kept store running after our father's death. Harry singlehandedly wiped out half-dozen smaller hardware stores-price-gouging, firing off a series anonymous letters to consumer groups and manufacturers complaining our competitor's business practices, even threatening to withdraw all newspaper ads if a smaller store was given ad space in the Sports 100

What Harry missed was the bigger picture-that it was the era of the department store and the international hardware chain stores and that without imaginative expansion we would be crushed as others clambered over our corpse on their way to the top. I knew that to survive, hardware had to expand into new uncharted areas, outrageous publicity stunts had to be arranged, do-it-yourselfers had to be transformed into visionary architects as they crossed the store's threshold.

Cliff mediated the arguments between us, coaxing Harry into timid trials of my ideas, throwing the heavy obstacles of test marketing and cash flow into the path of my runaway imagination, claiming only Harry's rdentless attention to the little problems that could clear the way for new ideas.

It was from Cliff that I learned Balance. From Harry, Callouses.

I set to work on my fifth model, the first of the new style ladders, a toothpick construction upon which I experimented with base-to-height ratios. My work was interrupted by a phone call from my agent.

"Jake? Sid. Listen, sweetheart, you know we've been running those 1V spots on the UL-3 Deluxe of yours. We got the True Value people crying for them as an exclusive. They've gotten market reports on the mail orders for that baby and they're creaming their jeans over it. Meanwhile, we got a warehouse full of hardware and a bunch of ex-postal workers fiddling with themselves all day long and we're starting to get letters. I mean, Jake , we're starting to get lots of letters. These True Value suits, they want it bad . I say we sell it out right now . Hang on to 10% royalties. Demand your name on it. Jake Isaacson 's UL-3 Deluxe. How's that sound?"

"Hello, Sid." "What about it ,Jake? Shit or get off the pot."

"What about Harry?"

"Screw, Harry. I offered it to him like you said. Hey, I pitched it hard .

Wasn' t he my client first? Hell, Harry buys it, I stick you boys for my commission coming and going. Harry doesn't know from market reporrs anymore, you got him so screwed up. He 's not touching anything you make, you know that. You could build a staircase to Heaven, Harry wouldn't take the indoor I outdoor carpet order.''

I began to tell him of the new model, its purity of form, its idea of self-fulfilling prophecy of success.

"Jake, theories I can' t eat. Right now I gotta talk to my broker and I thought I'd do you a favour.''

Royalties from the UL-3 Deluxe, an ultralight hinged model that could be folded and unfolded in a nearly limitless number of ways, were 101

beginning to flow in. Did I still think it wise to invest it in the family hardware chain stock? He, said Sid, had given up on Harry completely. He was ready to resign as Harry's agent. His ten percent of my ladder was going straight into chemical lasers. He'd kept an option open for me. I declined.

When I returned to the workroom, I found Harry's son, Chris, holding the shattered fragment of my prototype in his hands. Tears welled in his eyes.

"Uncle Jake! Oh gosh, I'm sorry, Uncle Jake. I was just going to play with the hamsters. I didn't even see the model. I'll ... I'll fix it. I can glue it, maybe."

"That's all right, Chris. It was only a model. Models are only there for guidance. I've learned all I need to know from it."

"No, no. That's not right. I crunched it, I've got to make good. Hey, this a new base/height ratio, Uncle Jake?"

I let him work out the damages, recording the readings off the gauges on the hamsters' treadmill and gathering materia.ls for my next model.

With the 4119 popsicle sticks he brought me, I successfully employed glue and molded-lock rung suspension. The hamsters easily climbed freedom on the new ladder. Chris could not understand why I let escape. Why had I kept them in cages if I was going to let them go? vation, I told him, but the word meant nothing to him. And he could grasp the necessity of letting them stay free.

"They've always lived in cages. They don't know how to get food where to sleep. They'll die out here."

I told him about the Terrible Price of Freedom. He did not stand. Nevenheless, I did not allow him to hunt down the hamsters the starving beasts had gnawed through the rungs of my next .......,<=â&#x20AC;˘-~ three-quarter-sized balsa wood ladder with sliding side extenders pending). They looked horrible, skeletal, covered with dust and blood, but with an unmistakable gleam of rugged individualism in beady eyes. The next day, they had escaped again . It was the Taste of Wild, I explained to Chris. He said he thought he understood.

I began work on the sixth of my ladders-a full-scale model. Construction went easily. The designs perfected in earlier all worked in harmony. The ladder grew quickly under the efficient ony of my hands. There is no boredom in this work. Each rung presents own challenge, bringing to my fingers its own history of growth. In a each length of wood is limited by its monality, stretching no funher ward than a few hundred feet at best. With every roll of the wrist 102

lathe, the wood absorbs more purpose from me than nature could pasinstill in it.

As the sixth ladder neared completion, I left my workroom to notify my agent. There were plans to be made. He wanted me to address the paduating class of Harvard Business School from one thousand feet up . At 1500 feet, beyond the height of the Sears Tower, I was to pause to give him time to solicit endorsements. At 1850 feet, just past the top of the CN Tower in Toronto, he was sure that the heads of most industrialized governments would want to present me with honors . When I returned, Beth was there with an axe. She paused briefly on my arrival to catch her breath, then continued, at a slow steady pace to destroy my ladder.

Beth is Harry's wife. She is an authority on natural food cooking and a wonderful baker. Harry, she says, has gone too far. With Harry's New York contacts, they were about to open a little shop on Madison Avenue selling natural foods and Harry's kitchen devices when Harry developed this obsession with a Great Project. He was neglecting his work. Moreover, their son, Chris, is fixated on the same strange ideas and has been sending hamsters to their death in hot-air balloons. But, Harry has gone too far. This morning he secretly blended thirty packets of yeast into her whole wheat dough, hoping to create a bread that rose completely out of the pan when baked. The dough exploded. It's all over between them, Beth says, and resumes chopping. What drove me to construct these ladders? Where could I go?

I told her of the top, the vistas, the panoramic sweep, the sense of power and its very real effects. A pebble dropped from the vast height can demolish entire buildings below. I strive for the top. The plateaus do not interest me .

"The top," said Beth, "is always one step above wherever you are.

You have set yourself an impossible task. No wonder Harry's projects all fail. He accuses me of hating his ambition, of sneering at his failures.

Frankly, I don't care anymore . Ow! Chopping like this can give you callouses."

"Allow me," I said. "I need the callouses." I began hacking apart the remnants of my ladder. "There is, as you say, always a step above . Nevertheless, I aim for the top."

"Then what are you doing destroying your own work? What do you get out of it? " "Callouses," I said, "and a sense of balance."

We continued to reduce the ladder to splinters.

Beth asked, "Jake, may I use your kitchen?"

"Certainly, but there is sawdust in the stove."

103

"Gas or electric?"

Beth moved in , dragging armloads of Harry's kitchen devices through the sawdust. She began work on the first of her bread books the next morning, conducting experiments in the clutter of my kitchen . Strangely, the sawdust seemed to provide a remarkable flavour and consistency to the bread. When the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced the value of fiber in the diet, Beth sold the recipe to a major bread company, naming me co-author. I still get monthly checks from them.

Harry was absorbed in a Great Project, deeply engrossed in a new solution.

There is a sense of panic to Harry's work. The slow, careful progress of my ladder upsets him. He works in spuns, in great turmoil, devising quicker, easier systems. Harry explains the advantage of each new system to me . I am not drawn to them, believing rather in the clean quality of my chosen manner of ascent.

Here is a partial list of Harry's abandoned projects: The Hot-Air Balloon, The Rocket Pack, The Spring Shoes, Wings of feathers , glue, and chicken wire. Wings, I'd told Harry, arc not his medium.

Harry asked about Cliff. Cliff, I told him , had reported much with the outcome of his Great Project-an elevator. It was a beautiful elevator, with fine wood inlay and manual brass controls. I told Harry that elevator worked wonderfully and that for pure upward mobility and omy of motion it could not be beat but it suffered from an even greater eral permanence than the escalator. One had to choose a building and with it for life. Cliff, I told Harry, had negotiated with Detroit's sance Center. The representative from the Renaissance Center said had plenty of fine elevators already. However, they could always use a of Cliffs drive and caliber. The representative offered to run him up in of their elevators to the restaurant on top. They had a beautiful lunch Cliff decided to go to work for them as a motivations man. The was out on the stairs where Cliff had left it. I had been dissembling inlay work for my final rungs.

Harry was absorbed in a Great Project and his eyes blazed with fires of inspiration. He said he thought he'd solved the mobility ...~v,..........

If wheels were placed along the base of the escalator and the return rolled over like a caterpillar tread , the whole mechanism could be like a tank. Harry left in a hurry.

Harry's son will be a great builder in his day. He understands the for careful planning-that to begin at all means to envision the end.

104

"How long now?" he asked.

"Soon," I answered and turned the rung smoothly.

"How soon ?" said Chris. "Today?"

I dipped my left- hand slightly, briefly leaving the wood motionless against the whirring lathe, forming the notch that locks the rung in place.

"It looks done," said Chris. "I mean, you about ran out of space for rungs."

"We set it up today."

"Where?"

"Right here ," I said. ''I'll get my stuff," said Chris and turned to leave. " You can 't come," I told him. "It's designed for me alone."

"Once you 're halfway to the top, how can you stop me from following?''

I showed him the rotating unlocking molding that loosens the rungs after they have been climbed. He understoods . I knew he would. " What are you gonna lean it on?" he asked . " Nothing."

"You're gonna set it straight up and down in the ground?"

I nodded . " How you gonna stop it from falling over? " "Balance."

I convinced Harry to lower the gun barrel. With one enormous shudder all the failures resolved themselves in his spine. He straightened, dropped the gun, gulped down air to strengthen his voice.

"It's done, huh? Chris told me it was."

I looked at the ladder. I shrugged. " I've had an offer," said Harry. "From Bloomingdale's."

"The escalator?"

"No." A sigh. " Kitchen devices. It was very generous."

"Wonderful," I said. " I offered them a package deal of the inventions and the escalator." " And ?"

"They threatened to withdraw their offer. I told them I'd throw in the escalator free . They said their insurance wouldn't cover it."

A long silence. I waited.

"I've accepted their offer. I'm leaving the escalator for you. You've got everything else. My wife, my kid, the majority stock in my business." " About Chris . . .." 路 "He wants to go with you. He's got everything packed."

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"I told him he couldn't go."

"Yeah, he knows he can't but that doesn' t change what he He's been dreaming of it for the last year. Even shattered dreams leave de pieces scattered around. I'm still making mental notes on the "'"'"'"'"..w You always find some little hitch in my plans, something to foul up idea. I'd pace all night 'til I'd solved it, then have you shoot holes in it next morning. Meanwhile, you would add another twenty, thirty rungs your ladder. Well, it's done. You've beaten me. You've set l<;\..uuu'uiU back a hundred years. Go, please. The top is yours. If you stayed, knows what we'd be reduced to-stone knives and leather thongs." laughed a short sharp cackle and fell suddenly silent, eyeing fallen gun. " Nothing to keep you here," said Harry. "Although Chris appreciate hearing from you. He was always with me, you know, en<:ourq ing me to try for the top ."

Harry may have looked up at me for confirmation but I didn't There were a lot of last- minute adjustments to make.

Who knows what amoeba lay crushed by the base rails of my 1aaae1路~ what might have mutated from it, dragged itself through the litter of post-nuclear Windsor future , and stood erect at last to reach upward me? I was leaving now. I placed a foot upon the bottom rung and felt energy surge through my legs .

I measured my progress in what slid away from me as I climbed. smells of human sweat, deep-fat fryers, rotting vegetation, car Round pasty faces tilted upward in curiosity, the pinballing traffic, smoke- stained skyline rising like foothills into Detroit. Sounds. cheering; later, the helicopters and planes, roaring, droning, then lost in the winds that rushed about me). The sense of progress. urge to look back.

I was almost at the top. I was clutching the final rungs when a weariness overcame me. I laid my head against the cool, strong rungs in the waning light of day, I watched a steady stream of angels 4.>\..'l.ll"LIII and descending my ladder.

r t

e t'

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From my ninth to twelfth years, funny books were the most important of my life. Before I moved from Pocatello, Timmy Fludd and I used to and swap funny books, borrow and beg funny books, dream and over funny books. Morning, noon, and in bed with a flashlight , we .,,,,,.,.n our preadolescent minds with funny book fantasies. Ten cents and universe was ours. On the wings of funny books, we escaped the over' small-minded boundaries of fact for the miniature, visionary landof panel-drawn fiction.

A funny book baron, I squirrelled away hundreds of much-read books under my bed and in my closet, but I had to bow before the funny book-crammed orange crates in Timmy's backyard clubHis old man called the shed a goddamn fire hazard , and threatened load the crates on his Chevie pickup and take them out to the Blackfoot 路 reservation. But he never did.

Timmy collected all kinds of comics-detective, horror, science fie' you name it-but he liked best any story about a moldy, hacked-up rising out of a grave to pursue half-naked, big-boobed females. My books were more rigorously supervised by my parents-by my at least . So my favorites were Donald Duck's disrespectful and nephews, Huey, Duey, and Louie , and Loony Tunes and ClasIIIustrated, but I also collected Roy Rogers and Gene Autry comics and murky adventures as Bonita Granville and the Mystery ofthe Hidden I admit it: I wasn't a very critical reader. I enjoyed Little Lulu and .u11u!rma路n equally. The strange drawings and bizarre incidents in even the ordinary comics filled my mind with half-understood ideas and fanthat stretched my imagination to new and unexpected borders. Now, when I strain , it's hard to remember those years between nine and as anything more than one great orgy of funny books.

Timmy Fludd and I met every afternoon and on weekends in his lop, orange, crate-lined shed, losing ourselves in the two-dimensional book world. One summer, in the field above my house, we started nail together-under the influence of Flash Gordon, Ally Oop, and 1UW'L. . . . . .

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Inter-Gallactic Comtcs-scrap lumber, flattened tin cans, and chicken wire to make our own rocketship. We didn't actually build much more than a lopsided skeleton of that rocketship, but we didn' t doubt that if we had finished the thing it would've carried us to the remains of the planet Krypton, and beyond.

Then, suddenly, I was catapulted from elementary school into the perilous shuffling of junior high. No longer one teacher to love or hate and outsmart, but six each day. At the same time, our tiny household W2S invaded by a stinking, chaos-producing infant. Family expenses rose, so that any cash I could weedle out for funny books plummeted. Finally, my father disappeared for two weeks, and when he returned he announced that we were moving to California.

Bitterly, I bequeathed my funny books to Timmy, not even selecting a few favorites to take with me . Now, he had, without question, the fantastic funny book hoard in the universe. We met, one last time, in clubhouse, surrounded by his funny books and mine. I realized vaguely that I was leaving behind the single closest friend I'd ever Comic books had pushed real people to the edges of my existence.

To shut me up during the uip, my father bought me a special tur••nl"u. five cent Archie's Annual. It might hae been the beginning of a new lection , but reading in the back seat of our second-hand Plymouth me vomit all over Archie and his gang.

In San Jose, I remembered my collection with nostalgic wonder, the new school, the new neighborhood-built in the remains of a orchard (green skins from ripening walnuts dropping on parked cars eating their paint)-and the new household with the screaming, baby brother, disuacted me. And , as my parents didn't let me forget, tiny duplex apanment was no place to store a swelling funny book library. dreamed of past funny book orgies, of the glorious, dingy, funny lined clubhouse, but now I didn't notice the funny books I read, sometimes read the same one over again without realizing it. Life · funny books seemed unreal. When I wasn't busy with chores or work , I slept.

My Dad decided that I wasn' t making friends in our new hotnetoWI Too many funny books, he said. Get your ass out and make friends, ordered. You've got to make the first move. They're waiting for you show that you want to be friends .

Who? I wondered. Jughead? Archie? Huey, Duey, and Louie?

I didn' t know any kids outside of my classes (our u ... ,,~uuv•.uu.~ seemed to be populat~d exclusively by pregnant women and "'n' '"'o" drooling toddlers) and the guys who swung through the school's 111

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in their narrow-belted, low-slung trousers and high-combed hair had been buddies in grammar school, and took no notice of newcomers.

But Mike MacKendrick, who sat in homeroom and three classes with at Wilma B. GreenmantleJunior High, was a possibility. Once, I cophis math problems, and another time he borrowed my sentence diaAnd he lived near me, in a trailer coun. Mike was popular, but I ' t think he could be too rich if he lived in a house trailer. Some of the in my classes wore expensive sweaters with the school colors and talked buying cars when they were sixteen, and Ronny Ewan had already been Europe with his parents. They wouldn't want to be friends with a boy lived in a sixty dollar- a-month, three-and-a-half room duplex apanand couldn't afford a sweater.

So I asked Mike to go bicycle riding with me on a Saturday near the of September, and he said, Hell, why not? He'd show me some places d never find on my own.

Early Saturday morning, I fled my baby brother's whining and my droning, marathon quarrel, and biked down Blossom Hill Road the Idle Wheels Trailer Coun. Mike's blue trailer, smaller and older the ship-like mobile homes around it, didn' t stand among miniature walls, or rows of neatly plotted plants, but was surrounded by conblocks, a broken wheelbarrow, Mike 's bicycle, rain-warped cardboard filled with old whiskey and vodka bottles, and piles of salvaged

"Shhshh!" someone said, through the tiny louvered window beside door. "You'll wake him up."

"What?"

"Just be quiet, or you'll find out."

I heard muffled noises inside the trailer and then the peeling blue opened. Mike balanced a drooling jelly-filled glazed donut in one and carried a faded green sweatshin in the other.

"Okay," he whispered. But before he could close the door, a voice 路 "Where're you going?" "Bike riding," said Mike. "Bike riding?" ii""""""'.u'....,..""" the hoarse voice .

Mike turned again to come out, but I heard banging inside , and then father stood beside him, gritty-eyed, the filthy bottom half of a pair of pajamas hanging so low beneath his spongy gut that dark tangles of hair coiled over them . His skin was as white as a fish's belly, except his muscular forearms and unshaven face and neck, which were tanned red.

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"I though you was gonna help me, today. With the new place." " Can't," said Mike .

He jumped down the two concrete steps and grabbed his bike. He had eaten his jelly donut and pulled on his sweatshirt while talking to his oldman.

"You'd better be careful or you're gonna be sorry," called his dad as we rode away.

Was Mike MacKendrick's father a drunk? (My old man wasn't a drunk, my mother had explained to me many times. He only drank so much wine because he was tired after the day's work.) That was pretty exciting if, besides being motherless, Mike had a drunk for an old man. In funny books, only gangsters were boozers, and they came to bad ends. I was twelve-going-on-thirteen and knew that real life was different, but this was the ftrst time I'd seen real life. (What I lived had nothing to do with real life.) I admired Mike for living real life.

Mike and I pedaled downtown , messed around for a while in the Cycle Shop, glanced at funny books and peered at nudie magazines in Walgreen's until we were chased away by a pregnant clerk with bad skin, and then rode through a neighborhood I'd never dared venture into -part Mexican and part Black, with unpaved alleys and broken fences . The Magdalena Street area made the newspaper every weekend with its knifrngs and shootings.

We shouted to make echoes as we dipped under three overpasses. stopped at a grammar school playground and, impressed with ourselves how good we were, pushed some little kids on the swings. We bicycled to hillside park, and hurled flat stones into the shallow river snaking along 路 edge. Then we crashed through the tangled bushes covering the banks, and found a place to ford the water.

Abandoning the park, we rode along the bright railroad tracks ning parallel to the stream. Bikes and motorcycles had rutted the beside the tracks. The dusty trail twisted around low hills where had dug into the dull brown earth, creating artificial gullies and hills. In one of the hollows, I glimpsed half-a-dozen or more hidden huts. " That's where the bums live," whispered Mike.

On other battered, manmade hills, we watched boys and men race bikes and motorcycles down steep, deeply-cut dirt trails. Then, we lowed a narrow path on top of a rough dirt dike that descended on creek side to a secluded dump of rusty beer cans, crushed cigarette and discarded pop bottles. I heard kids shouting and a moment later in and around the murky water below us, half- a- dozen summer-ra.nnt~:~ boys. Some of them splashed around naked, others wore droopy 110

pants. Most of them were too busy shoving each other into the water to notice us, but a couple of older kids, smoking on the bank, gestured obscenely.

"We don't want to go down there," said Mike .

We turned our bicycles around and rode back to the bulldozercreated mountains. " Let's race down," he said-a statement, not a dare. " Okay," I said, pushing my old bike behind him up the steep hill.

I could still hear laughing boys calling to each other down by the creek. The sun beat on my head and heat radiated from the dry, dusty earth. I would've traded my bike for a cherry coke, or even a 7-Up. To my inexperienced gaze, the top of the dirt hill towered higher than Mt. Whitney, and the wheel-scarred slope had been transformed into a dangerous, dizzying runway, dropping from the crumbling edge into a sudden, dusty void. Other boys , ignoring us, took off from the top. A barefoot colored kid in torn blue jeans on a beat-up Schwinn shouted "Bombs away!" and shoved off, streaking, like somebody in a funny book.

I almost could see the quickly sketched lines arching in the air behind him.

Two-thirds of the way down, he struck a hidden bump, and his britches left the bicycle seat. He hollered wildly, the old bike appearing to fly through the air before bouncing at the bottom.

Mike and I were alone on the hill.

"Go ahead ," I told Mike. He nodded and left me with dirt in my face. I climbed on my second-hand Sears bike, balanced on the narrow, ridged crack, and, with "Geronimo!" in my dusty throat, pushed off. For an instant , I was Batman and Robin, Superman, and Captain Marvel squeezed into one super hero. I lost control about halfway down.

When the bike hit the bump , it flew and so did I. Over the rusty handlebars I sailed, through the sunspeckled dust, into some purple weeds.

When I opened my eyes , a blurry leaf was the first thing I saw, proof that I still lived .

Mike and I examined my bike.

"Hell, we can walk back," he said. "You ever gone over that trestle over there?"

We climbed onto the railroad tracks, pushed our bikes past the bums' shanties and across the trestle to the highway.

"You ever seen any bums here?" I asked Mike .

"Sure," he said. "They' re dirty and they drink. They smell."

When I left Mike at his trailer, a three year-old Buick Skylark passed me; Mike's father, in a suitcoat and tie, sat behind the steering wheel.

Maybe he wasn't a drunk, after all.

111

I bought a Walt Disney funny book and read it on the way horne. A hot wind panted behind me and tears of frustration stood in my exhausted eyes. I tore up the Walt Disney Comics, scattering its pieces over the street.

Mike MacKendrick and I didn't become great buddies, though we still swapped homework papers. My father and mother yelled at me for mangling my bike and ripping the knee of my jeans.

The next Saturday, I walked alone out to the park, a bologna sandwich stuffed into one hip pocket and a Batman and Robin funny book in the other.

I lay on the dandelion-thick grass, munched the sandwich , and read about the Joker and the Bat Cave. I watched older boys playing football, two younger girls with an ugly yellow dog, and a family on a picnic. A little boy learning to walk tottered from his father to his mother and each time, they made cenain that his faultering steps carried him to arms.

Then, I followed the dusty trail that Mike had shown me the before. Wandering across the bridge and along the train tracks, I felt as belonged to nobody but myself, and nobody belonged to me. The seethed with excited green and red and yellow grasshoppers.

The sun glared on the dirt hillside, annd reflected off the tin roofs in the gully between the scarred hills. I remembered my talking about when the police had burned out the bums. I wondered many times the police had burnt the huts, and how many times the had rebuilt them. Did human beings really live in those ao.uncJuse-sua structures with tin roofs and orange crate sides? Even Timmy's clu was stronger than they were.

A shadowed face floated above a cardboard wall tattooed with labels, a roughly made pipe stuck in its cracked jaw. Another ghostly lay silent in the din, its body hidden in a pile of rubbish that may been a home. A rag-swathed arm motioned to me, and I ran away.

Tarzan pursued by the headhunters, I fled across the gopher pocked fields, past bulldozed hills, toward the river-edge jungle. No or motorcycles catapulted down the dirt runways today, no engines or death-defying shrieks shattered the heavy, expectant mood the afternoon, but laughter rose like steam from the creek. I broke the brush and peered between the dusty trees down on the splendor of the swimming hole. Half-a-dozen boys, maybe the same I'd seen the week before, were scattered on the damp bank and in water. One naked brown-skinned boy climbed halfway up a tree that grew over the creek, threw his skinny arms over his head, shot by an unseen enemy, fell backwards into the black water.

112

I slid down the hillside in a cloud of pale dust.

"How's the water?"

"Colder'n a witch's tit," said a boy who looked old enough to be in high school. A strange, exotic odor rose from the dark green pool.

"Why don't you go in?" asked one of them. "Don' t just stand there with your finger up your nose."

A mongrel yapped in the bushes nearby, driving away a many-legged jungle beast. I decided, What the hell? Tarzan afraid of water?

Some of the guys had stripped naked, others wore wet jockey shorts that hung like wrinkled gray skin on their hard little rumps. I didn' t want to get my underwear wet, so I went in naked.

"You gonna stand there all day? jump, for Chrisake! " The icy water hit my buttocks like a slap from a great cold hand. I paddled back to the shore, climbed out, and danced up and down on the sloping bank, leaving a circular pattern of wet prints in the dirt . Mter a few minutes, I felt warmer.

"A fish!" yelled a short, fat kid. I bent over the stream to look and felt a foot flat in the middle of my back. Black water blinded me, filling my mouth and nostrils. I bobbed up, choking, gagging, nearly weeping.

"Don't let the fishy eat your weenie!" called a boy.

I crawled ashore, obscenities floating among scummy laughter. " Hey, look," said one of the boys.

"He's here again," said another boy, in a low voice.

I scooped the water from my face, and saw a thin old man leaning against a bicycle. His soft, white face quivered under a colorless baseball cap; his sport shirt and Chinos were a faded dull gray, and his cracked blue canvas shoes exposed dirty toes. He smiled, watching the boys swimming and drying in the sun.

"How's the water boys?" asked the old man .

His false teeth were tiny and perfect, like the teeth of a small child. A pink-white hand gestured to the pool, suddenly shadowed beneath trees and shrubs.

"Lousy," said the biggest boy.

"Yeah-cold," said another kid .

I decided that I was dry enough , and started to dress. Some of the other boys also began to pull their clothes over their damp bodies.

"I used to swim a lot when I was a boy," said the old man, to no one in particular. Now, everybody was dressing. It was late, or seemed late. The sky was clouding. "I used to swim bareball, too. It's the best way."

Everyone ignored the old man . His soft face slowly contorted into a wrinkled smile. A couple of boys pushed their bikes up the broken path to 113

the road. I finished typing my shoes , checked to make sure that nothing had fallen out of my pockets, and climbed up the ridge .

"Bye," said the old man, gently motioning for me to return, it seemed, as he waved. His liquid eyes slobbered over me.

"G' bye ," I murmured, and stumbled away.

The road breathed under my shoes. As I ran past the hobo jungle, I couldn't shield my gaze from the blank faces and eyes scattered like signs among the cardboard boxes and corrugated tin walls. I ran past bicycle runways, across the concrete WPA bridge, and reached home just in time to wash for dinner.

All during the meal, I wondered if my mother and father could teD that I had been swimming in the creek. I took a good bath that night, before going to bed; if my parents noticed, they said nothing.

The following Saturday was the first weekend in October and, as the change in months had decreed lousy weather, the air was cold, · gray clouds hovering on the horizon like threatening armies. My was still in the repair shop. After lunch, I told my mother I was going see a friend , and walked to the park. I didn't take any funny with me.

I sat on the uncut grass for a while, but it was damp. A barefoot with her hair in a Dutch cut led two small barefoot children past me. I surprised that anyone would be barefoot on the first Saturday in "-''-'LVU"'-111 The girl's beltless dress shifted around her slender body as she ran with two little kids.

I crossed the concrete bridge, passed the rough, manmade •uv..... ,......,. which nobody raced down this day, and finally reached the shanties by train tracks. I felt as if I had stepped onto another planet. Could the tures who lived in those tiny lean-to's be human? The cardboard was ing and collapsing because of the dampness of the past several · Soon, winter would hit . Where would these men go? This, I .........,~.. myself, was real, three- dimensional life.

I could envision the bums hitching rides on trains south for the ter, following the seasons just as rich people did . Nobody told these smelly men what to do . They could lie around all day, stay up all smoke and drink, waste their lives. My parents said I had to make thing of myself, or I'd end up. a no-good bum. Staring at the decava~ shanties, I felt both attracted and repelled by the prospect.

An awful, hacking cough from behind one of the shanties made jump, and I fled to the rim of the hill beside the creek.

No voices rose from the swimming hole. Tennis shoes and bare had left a rich texture of prints on the deserted bank among bicycle

114

tracks and cigarette butts and torn matchbooks. I walked to the creek's edge and surveyed the cloudy, greenish water. Pop bottles and beercans floated in the thick scum. I couldn't imagine myself swimming in that muck. I was trying to remember exactly what had happened the Saturday before , when I heard dry leaves snap behind me.

"Hi." I turned quickly, although I recognized the voice. It was as flabby and pale as the old man. " 'Lo," I said, and the old man smiled. He leaned on his tapehandlebars, staring at me.

"How's it look?" he asked.

"Cold," I said. "And dirty."

A grin oozed onto his smooth, pink face . I zipped my jacket, as if to that the water was cold. His blunt gaze made me dizzy; I backed from the creek, fearing that I might topple into the stagnant, greenblack slop.

I knew he wasn't one of the bums from the shanties by the tracks. I ' t suppose that they would own bikes or have such perfect false teeth . was just an ordinary old man .

He balanced his bike against a scrawny birch tree, and shuffled over me. "Yeah," he said. "It don't look too clean." Then he did a thing. He unzipped his trousers and urinated into the water. He the yellow stream high in the air, displaying his pale private parts. sighed with exaggerated relief and tucked himself away, saying, obody'll be swimming in there any more this year."

I started to walk up the dusty hill. I wished I hadn't come to this , I wished that Mike had never brought me here, I wished that I still in Pocatello and could hide among my funny books.

"Don't go," said the old man.

"It's cold."

"You're cold?" he whispered, coming over and flopping his pink and hand on my shoulder. And then he did what seemed to me an even ~....,....... thing: he rested his other hand on my behind. I jumped and bled away from him.

"Scare you?" he said. " No. I gotta be going."

He sidled up to me. "Just because you can't swim is no reason to ," he said. And he put his big, flabby pink and white hand on the of my pants.

His pale eyes held me a moment, in a state of suspended animation, a y grin quivering on his thin lips. Then, I broke free and started to

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shout that I would tell my father, the police, everybody. But I remem that I was alone with him, except for the bums in the hobo jungle on other side of the crumbling hill. I backed away, looking at his tired and veiny hands, at his worn, pleading expression, and then ran up path , past the bulldozed hills and collapsing shanties.

"Come back next week," he cried after me.

I tripped in a weed-choked gopher hole, and sprawled on my face, high- pitched cry pursuing me: "Next week!"

Picking myself up, not stopping to inspect my scratches, I hurled ward, across the tracks, through fields of grasshoppers, until I reached park.

I collapsed on the spongy grass, panting and nearly crying. The was wet and prickly on my cheeks and closed eyes. Then, as I gulped at cold water from the public fountain , I saw a bird with no tail tea1thc~ attacked by three other birds. They flew crazily in front of me, almost ting me in the face . It didn't seem right that those birds should attack other one because it had lost its tail feathers . I watched them pecking the miserable little freak until it disappeared into the thorny bushes.

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Susan Ashbury

WHEN WE WALKED PAST THE DeANDREA

I remember you said

his Manet: Dejeuner Sur L'Herbe is the piece you would imagine in your home.

I thought of Mary Cassatt's mothers, her children, Rodin's hands, his Balzac.

You prefer a lovely woman naked, alone on a silk slip, sharing a murky garden with two construction workers or, I am never sure, house painters, white puddles splashed like ejaculate on their hands.

I wanted, finally, to know who each was looking at.

Years later, I still cannot make out the connections between them, but remember as a child once coming upon you nude, waiting on your bed for my father.

You were a memory, graceful and promising as dusk, shimmering from my father's eyes, ciphering my face in his dreams.

117

Louis Phillips SOME SOURCES OF THE CHINESE TRADITION

"In our society, there is indeed the phenomenon That men are not treated as men" Proclaimed Deputy Director Zhou Yang.

I opened my hean to the Ministry of Propaganda For I want so much to be treated as a man.

I am racing thru my life and Not getting anywhere.

I might as well be anything but myself, A slave to whatever animal produces money, Returning to a garden that is no garden, Returning to a house that is no house.

How many times must the sun rise and Set before we realize that new poets do not say What needs to be sd.

Thus, we journey further and funher Into the history of rage, Not keeping track Of those we have uprooted, All the way back to Chin 1- Hsin Who in his founh letter to K'ang Yu-wei about barbarians sd: "Men's minds are corrupted by utilitarianism."

Barbarians once again are buying our land for profit While the poor sleep in cardboard boxes.

Damn the rich Who contaminate everything they touch.

Someone in the back alley Is playing an accordion, Imponed no doubt, Like lives we never asked for, Waits piping an ancient march.

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has been sd that a Buddha alone understands another Buddha, does anyone truly believe have any hope at all of becoming another Buddha?

God, I am equal to the cacophony of wind aJll,,.~••r,· at the outer ring of leaves. . I shall set sail an island off the coast of China I shall live and stand mute, life scalded with Rlc~v(~n , Earth, and Humanity.

119

Debbie Lee Wesselmann

FLIGHT

Robin rolled three marbles in the palm of her hand. Red, green, blue with clear. Was that a color? "Mommy?"

"What?" Marta was in the closet, balanced on her elbows. She lv~:~o;:;UJ• out a handful of papers, a sock, and something hard which Robin couldn see, but which she hoped was a coin.

"I want a candy bar. Can we go to the drug store?" She kicked at papers.

Mana threw out a pink curler that skittered across the hardwood uvv•·•• " You can walk there yourself. It's only three blocks." She backed out of closet on her hands and knees. "These people were slobs."

"I don't want to go by myself." She stuffed the marbles deep in pocket. "I'm afraid."

Mana rolled over into a sitting position. " You don' t have to be That's why we moved here, silly. This little town is as safe as they get. stay on this side of the road ." She reached out and stroked Robin's with her fingenips. "Maybe you'll meet a friend before school starts. give me a hug."

Robin buried her face in Marta's hair, hugging her head before ing her arms to her shoulders. She leaned a little too far, felt the floor out from under her sneakers, and the two of them toppled over, taugmng•• with Robin flat against Mana .

"You are silly," Marta laughed . "Now get going . There's a dollar in my wallet."

This was how he drew the young girl to him . He didn't bewitch no, that would be magic, and he possessed none of that. Instead, showed her the power of his vision . She clutched her crinkled bill stood high on the balls of her feet to pay for the candy. He stood oenllnq• her, to one side, hunched slightly on old knees, carrying a newspaper and bottle of aspirin. She spun and lost her balance with a small cry.

He tottered with the weight of the impact, marveling at her ~uuun1 " Whoa there!" he cried, laughing lightly at the back of his throat.

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there." He held her at arm's distance to steady her. Under hair the color of copper, her eyes danced, such a pale blue they were almost white. He traveled into her eyes, past the irises, funneling into the dark depths of her pupils, spinning beyond that to the core of her being, and saw the purity of her desires, the curiosity, the drive to stand singly.

"Oh," she said, her fingers twittering at the corners of her mouth.

"Sorry."

He met her thereafter on his walks: she, under an oak collecting brown acorns, drawing with bright chalk on the sidewalk, perched on the library's granite steps with a thin book open in her lap. On their fourth encounter, he told her, "You are a girl who likes stories."

She blinked. "Maybe." She twirled a bent twig between her fingers. ''I'm full of stories, old and new. Wonderful ones." Shielding his eyes, he scanned the street abandoned in the brutal heat. " One day there will be a girl like you with diamonds in her hair. She will have your eyes and your chin, and your arching neck. She lived a long time ago, but she will be back, riding on the back on an eagle. She lived in a time of sorcerors and fairies, evil and a small speck of good . Of course, she was a princess with a soul of pure rainbow, though she did not know it. You might believe that she had a thousand friends, but everyone around her had seeds of evil in them, and didn't love her, because they were blinded. Do you know of her? " The girl shook her head with the glitter of her scattering everywhere , adhering to the dryness of his skin. ''I live on the block behind this one, on the other side of the meadow.

Number thirty. If you come visit, I'll tell you about her. Why, she could even be you." He embraced her eyes with his own, and, in this manner, told her how he had seen clear to the pit of her, and that he understood her not only completely but with empathy.

On the day she came to him, he pressed himself between the gutter and a conical evergreen that towered to the top of the house. He folded himself into an endless wrinkle, skin draping over skin over skin.

"Mister?" she called from the brick walkway. "Are you okay? It's Robin."

He smiled calmly, feeling his dry lips part to expose his teeth. ''I'm fine, little one. Just resting . Could use a glass of lemonade, though.

Would you like to join me? " She tilted her head suspiciously, studying first him and then peering uuâ&#x20AC;˘Ju~:::u the screen to the dark interior of the house. Her foot, clad in l'llllca~â&#x20AC;˘crs, rocked a loose brick until the moss surrounding it broke off into an emerald clump.

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" I won' t bite," he said as he moved towards the entrance. " But I' not going to press you to come in ."

And then he wove threads of adventure into her crystal eyes. At his words, his wisdom, had ears.

The fence had the lean of a man walking against wind, though the was still. A scant palmful of rot crumbled into Robin's father's hand as pulled the slats towards him. In his fist , the particles exploded with tion. Two beetles with coal-black shells scuttled between his around the back of his hand, one scampering into the thick hair on back of his arm. "Shit! " Kevin ran backwards. A cloud of yellow路 rose from the lawn where they had been feasting on crab apples sotten1ed by the sun. He spun on the balls of his feet, swatting. Damn bugs, thought , feeding on decay, sour garbage, feces hot and dried on the ment, and him. He stood, panting, hoping that his wife would come of the coolness of the house to soothe him with her large, dry hands. A scampered down his breastbone , and he cried out, yanking his tee-snm away with both hands. However, it had only been a trickle of which settled quietly into his navel. " Marta?" he called. She didn't care about insects. She could hold fence and its beetles upright for him. "Marta!"

Only the buzz of locusts high in the trees answered him. A crab dropped from a tree behind the fence, hit the wood with a plonk, and tled down the incline into his yard , coming to rest with the fifty or so sweetly bruised fruits . The yellow jackets rose, hovered, and '"'""'""""'"'"''路...

An irritability spread through him like fire following a network of and he thought of how much he hated this house, with all its parts: the fence, the patchy plaster, the floorboards moaning ............,,VU'III the basement walls weeping with moisture. When he had first seen house, he had thought that it was a grand Colonial; he had not expected many renovauons.

Kevin sidestepped the pile of apples and returned to the back of the fence with a hammer and several nails in his pocket, and three of lumber under his arm. He wiped his forehead with his upper arm clambering through the gap in the fence to get to the backside. lirun1t1DI his head level with his angled shoulders, he pushed the fence upright; was as tall as he. His mind worked hard not to imagine hoards of gers multiplying under his fingertips.

Wedging a two-by- four between the fence and the earth , he up the fence, hastily hammering side supports with the remaining He stood back, elated with his handiness, and, with squinted eyes,

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at the upright line of the fence. A little sag ten feet from the corner, but nothing another suppon couldn't ftx .

As he stood there, his left arm supponing his right elbow, his hand under his chin, his head nodding to his inner voice, he happened to glance away to the fteld separating their row of houses and the ones behind. At the far end, he saw the unmistakable ftgure of his seven-year old daughter: that dome of orange hair, those long, slender legs which appeared rooted to her ribs, the flippant bounce in her gait as she emerged from the tall grasses. What was Robin doing over there?

"Robin!" She shouldn't have crossed where snakes might lurk, or . ,.,n,. â&#x20AC;˘.,. groundhog holes might snap a reedy ankle. "Robin!"

She appeared not to hear him. Helplessly, he watched her march out the fteld and between two houses, vanishing. As far as he knew, she had reason to trample that far from home. He didn't like the idea at all, of her going someplace he didn't know about, and he intended to find out what Mana knew. He pivoted to return to the yard, but the fence now repaired, blocked his way. Cursing, he swung his hammer against a low branch of the crab apple tree. Amid falling apples, he trotted along the perimeter of the barrier until he reached the front, where he could cross over.

Robin's head was full of feathers, full of orange firelight , full of mines glistening with rubies and death, and rooms so dark you couldn' t be sure to remember to breathe. Her fingers danced on her thighs like nimble spirits, and, once, she did forget to breathe, but then only for a second. She listened, not with her ears, but with her body, hearing words as if her pores had individually swallowed them and digested them into blood, bones, frail tissue.

"Then what?" she gasped.

He leaned back into the shadows, his concave face barred with faint light pressing between the blinds. The chair on which he rested creaked, like his old voice. "She knew the futility of resisting. Her fingers stretched out against the wall, growing longer and thinner until they were mere cracks against the coal. And she saw that they had turned to diamonds.

Her legs bulged into thick pillars of quanz, her face flattened into a hole of rubies. Her chest , which had once held breath but now held only crystal, broke wide open into a geode of a thousand minerals. The walls wept with joy as this woman would change no more."

"And the eagle? " Her small hands wrapped around the rounded edge of the stool.

"The eagle circled higher and higher above the mountain until he 123

become a mere dark speck against the sun. His shriek of triumph echoed over the valley, and the woman's family knew that it was over, that the eagle had saved their daughter. That somehow, somewhere, she had become a goddess."

A goddess of jewels.

Marta sang in a thin, off- key voice that she knew sounded better to her ears than it did to others. She hit a note that jarred even her sensibilities, but she glossed the difficulty with a burst of enthusiasm, rendering the offending sound moot with a cascade of louder, more vivacious tones as she folded a peach-colored towel into a perfect rectangle.

She faintly heard her name called. Leaning over the bed and the loose mass of unfolded laundry, she looked out the window to see Kevin in the corner of the yard, swatting at the air: insects again. She snapped her head back with the hope that he had not seen her. Of course he wanted help with the fence , but she was not leaving her one air-conditioned room to listen to him scream and curse. So much better if he believed that she couldn' t hear.

With two fingers, she retrieved a crackling sock from the pile. When she could not immediately find a match, she tossed it back. She hated this new house and its homogeneous neighbors. This New England town with Colonial monsters lined up behind hundred year old maples, oaks, and stark white birches: pretty, yes, but as static as the suffocating heat. She hurled a pair ofJockey underwear across the room and lifted her chin defiantly as the garment slid down the length of the wallpaper.

The wallpaper: a tired floral with faded pink roses and seams brown like tea stains. Yellow where there once was ivory, ivory where there once was yellow. And a slight curl just as the top of the door frame where swore he couldn't see, but Marta awoke to its sight each morning. She trotted into the bathroom to find the wallpaper stripper she had bought.

As she dribbled the stripper into the pail of cool water, listening the steady blub blub, she peered out the window. Her second story · allowed her to see beyond their yard, beyond the old fence and the bery lining the back of it, and into the field behind the house where trampled dry grass towards the houses on the other side. Her daughter a path only a foot or so wide that wiggled unpredictably through meadow. Robin tottered slightly, over uneven ground, but her nrn••n-towards the opposite end did not falter. At last the girl was exploring, ing adventure in her small way, asserting herself.

Mana dipped the sponge into the solution and rubbed it gently the paper. The water felt cool, even against her air-conditioned skin.

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again, she began to sing, though she sang notes only and not words. To spend time while waiting for the stripper to dissolve the paste, she imagined a new arrangement for their furniture: the bed up there under the window so she might listen to the tree frogs next spring, the dresser there where the mirror would not reflect the evening sun so precisely, the chest there, the rocker in that corner instead of that one.

Just as she pulled the first strip down , the front door slammed. " Mana! " Kevin yelled from the base of the stairs. " Robin's gone across the field!"

Alone, he fumbled with the knobs on the stove until they fell off neatly into his palms. He swept the wood halls with long strokes that stiffened his arms. With his thin voice, he called out to her, expecting to hear her airy laugh but hearing only the faint scratching of rodents in the attic.

His speck, the girl , whom he had so carefully sifted clean of coarser grit, had alighted on his hean and then had soared away to leave him with a curious purposelessness, vision without an eye.

He sat down then, in a corner, facing the darkest shadows in the room. With his mind, so brittle now, so stiff, yet alive with yearning, he reached out to her where she rested among powder-scented dolls, her eyelids gently pulled over the crystal underneath, her hand twitching lightly against the lace of her gown . His hand, steady now, touched the warm nape of her neck. She staned; a tiny gasp escaped from her tight lips. He caressed her, and her eyes snapped open.

Yes , yes, a student, a mind, a creation.

"Come," he whispered. His voice sounded like fine sandpaper, gritty but gentle. ''And I will swallow you whole.''

A pile of dimpled peas lay under the pressure of Robin's fork . ''I'm never going to change," she announced.

Kevin stifled a laugh by studying the last slice of london broil. " Now tell me more about this man," Mana said "The one you went to visit." " He's old, and he told me stories.'' Robin squashed the peas with her fork with a mean twist of her wrist.

Kevin pursed his lips at the sight of the peas oozing through the tines.

"Don't play with your food . How old? What's his name? " "Very, very old. Maybe a hundred. I don't know." She pushed her palms against the edge of the table, and her chair slid back a few inches with a shudder. "Can I be excused?" " Eat your peas," Mana told her.

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Kevin reached under the table to pull Robin's chair back to the table.

He succeeded in bringing only one side closer, so she sat askew in front them, with her brow stubbornly folded over her eyes. " His name?"

"Mr. Sez, or something. He doesn't have a wife. She died forever ago.

He has a collection of butterflies. At first I thought they were pretty, but they were pretty yucky." She smiled at her cleverness. "He trusts me to hold the small cases."

"This hundred year old man. So he invited you inside his house? " Her eyes flitted between them several times before she answered. "He was thirsty, so we went in for lemonade. He made mine sweeter."

"I thought we told you not to accept anything from strangers," Kevin said.

"He wasn't a stranger. I talk to him all the time . On the street. Mr. Sez. Simon Sez." She buried her chin in her shoulder, smiling coy.

Marta took a deep breath that rose in her chest with great effon. splayed her hands on the table and steadied her gaze on Robin. "Did did he touch you?"

Robin's face scrunched up in obvious confusion. "I don't Maybe. I mean, maybe I bumped into him, but I didn' t mean to." straightened. Her eyes widened with alarm. "Why?" Kevin folded his paper napkin into a neat square, smiling ............UJ,R relieved at his daughter's naive reaction . He would let Marta handle one, since she brought up the subject.

"Well," Marta said slowly. "It's just that you shouldn 't let touch you."

"He wasn't sick or anything." " Well, that's good. Now, gobble up those peas and we'll got out ice cream."

Kevin watched his daughter as she scooped up the mashed peas slipped them into her mouth. Sometimes, he could not believe that had helped create this delicate girl, this child so similar to both her and therefore so distinct.

"Well," Marta said. " You shouldn' t go back by yourself."

"I'm still not going to change," Robin said as she slid off the side her chair. "Nobody can make me."

Robin laid his hand in her palm: cool, dry skin as light as a breath.

"Go ahead , if you want to," he told her.

She gently pinched a deep crease on the back of his hand and lifted high, marveling at its looseness, it softness, its willingness to part so

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from the bone. As she released her grasp, the skin remained peaked for a moment, exactly where she had left it, before sliding, slowly, back into place. She wanted to laugh at this magic , but the steadiness of his bronze face told her otherwise.

"You see?" he said. "This is death. Soon my skin will fly off my bones."

As Marta watered the geraniums on the front porch, she heard a rustling in the shrubbery at the side of the house. She cocked her head to listen, the water still dribbling from the spout of the water can, but when she heard nothing more, she continued drenching the soil. With two fingers, she snipped off a dried cluster of flowers that had faded from red to pink and tossed the refuse over the edge of the steps. She then embraced one porcelain pot with both arms, stooping a little with her legs apart, and jerked it a quarter turn.

As she rotated the second pot, she heard the rustling again . "Kevin?" she called, even though she knew he was fixing a shelf in the pantry.

"Robin?''

She rounded the corner and paned the evergreens, revealing a pair of dirty kneecaps. She withdrew one hand, bringing it to her cheek, before recognizing the pale face of her daughter. Robin stood with one sneaker lifted and pressed against the concrete of the foundation, her head against the clapboard, her eyes squeezed so tightly shut that they creased at the corners like those of an old woman. Her closed lips were drawn tightly against her teeth in a horrible, pained grimace.

"Robin! What are you doing?"

Robin allowed her eyes to open into fine slits. "Trying to keep myself the same."

"Get out of there! You'll ruin the plants."

"No." Robin scrunched her eyes shut again.

Marta reached through the greenery and wrapped her fingers around a bony arm. " I said get out of there!" She yanked , propelling Robin out of the bushes.

Robin faced her in the yard. A pink scratch from a branch blazed on her cheek. "I hate you," she said in a steady, low voice that frightened

Marta.

"You don' t hate me," Marta said with a small laugh, though it was forced.

"I never wanted to move here! Nobody knows me. And I can do whatever I want."

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Marta felt her throat tighten. "Not if I tell you not to, young lady."

"I don't listen to anyone." With heavy, deliberate steps, Robin walked away from Marta, her head erect and stiff.

"You don't go back to see that old man! That's final. Do you hear me?" Marta yelled, but Robin did not answer.

A vague fear which had been washing through Marta solidified: a panel of glass had wedged between them so that they could move side-byside but could not touch. She could only watch the spindly legs of her daughter as they carried her farther and farther away.

They sat spine to spine on the sofa, their feet buried under the cushions. Her back pressed his into an upright board of sinew and bone.

"You must hear my words, and not see them," he told her. " The eagle had feathers of soft gold and talons of silver. When he spread his wings, a great warmth cloaked the world. And when he slept, it was as cold as a winter of darkness. He saw with eyes that extended around corners, traveled miles, magnified a single speck so that it swelled into a world. With this extraordinary vision, he saw the story of a young girl enfold. This girl, Unial, lived among the evil people, though her heart pure and able to accomplish great acts. Her parents saw this goodness despised it; they told her that she was under their power, that her heart small and hard like a pebble. The villagers told her that she was doomed a paltry existence."

"But she wasn't, was she?" she asked, pressed hard against his her head throw back between his shoulder blades. " The eagle n ."'".u ..... her."

"Not yet, little one. The eagle was a long way off." He pointed to shaft of light coming from the window at their sides, where dust uuuu•"'~ the air. "See that dust dancing in the sun? Can you imagine that one those panicles is our Unial?"

"Yes," she whispered. "That one, the quick one. And then what pened?"

Kevin caught Robin brushing glittered nail polish on her 1u~lll\JIUII seven-year old nails. At dinner, he watched her eyebrows crumple in centration as she ate, each bite seemingly as important as life · Another day, she rummaged through her closets to remove all her toys scattered them in a circle around her before settling into what Kevin · preted as a trance.

"Hey, you, anyone home? " he asked several times, not even r,.r,,.•v•"' a blink or a tension of muscles in her arched neck.

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He approached Marta one morning as they stood alone in the kitchen with their fingers hooked on their coffee mugs. "What's happening to her? " Marta lowered her eyes to her coffee. Her lips parted and she swallowed quickly as though she had something to say, but then she placed her mug on the counter. Without meeting his gaze, she left the room with small, hurried steps.

That night, when Robin said goodnight, Kevin insisted on tucking her in.

"I don't want you to do that anymore," she told him . She wrapped the lower edge of her nightgown around one hand.

"But I've always done it before. I thought you wanted to stay the same forever." Nasty, he thought , using her words against her, but he needed powerful weapons.

In her doorway, Robin swirled to face him, her small fists on the hips she had not yet developed. "Tell me a story, then. You used to do that, too."

With his hands on her shoulders, he spun her around to guide her to bed. " Okay, okay. Once upon a time there was a little girl Red Riding Hood-" " No, no!" she shouted. "Tell me the one about the eagle." She hopped on top of the bed , bounced twice, and pulled the sheet up to her neck.

"The eagle?" Kevin searched his memory for a story about an eagle, not remembering having told her one. He looked to her for help and saw on her face a tiny, tight smile. So, she wanted to play with him . "What story about the eagle?"

"I'll tell it to you." She wiggled herself to an upright position against the headboard. "There was a magical eagle who knew what was good and bad. He stole good people and left the bad."

"Why would he do that? " " To have the good for himself. You see , the world was an evil place.

He wanted to rescue them. He wanted to take them high away from the evil and make them into something good. He changed them into jewels and mountains and trees that reached as high as the clouds. That way, the bad people couldn' t make them bad like themselves." She lifted her chin high as if to say there would be no dispute. " Is that the story?" Kevin adjusted his weight on the edge of the bed.

Somehow, the bed seemed too small to hold even Robin .

"No. There are trillions of stories about the eagle. Someday, he will come and save me." With that said, she pulled the sheet over her head .

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"Save you from what?" " From you!" she shrieked, exposing her rosy face to him, all smiles.

She burrowed under the covers until her head hit the tight sheets at base of the bed.

From her playfulness, Kevin could not discern if she thought evil, or if she merely teased him. However, he chose to believe the " Oh , yeah? " he said as he wiggled his fingers at her sides.

She yelped as his fingers met her ribs. Laughing and gasping, tumbled for a few minutes until Robin's breathlessness convinced Kevin stop the game.

"Okay," he said. "Time for bed."

When he rose to leave, he saw Marta in the doorway, her arms and her weight on one leg. He clasped her hand in his as they shoulders touching, towards their room.

Kevin dreamed of falling fences , of crushing crab apples ............. ,,....,. of blades of grass reaching up to his ankles like spidery fingers. Of bold and sturdy, wrapping her warm arms around his neck. Her kisses ing binh to tiny beetles that scurried under his chin to find nesting inside his pores. His face exploding with the birth of the next "'"'"'"...._ shiny wings and antennae and mandibles with the strength of iron He: hunched and quivering, feeble, unable to lift a hand to cover his The beetles humming about his ears, crawling in, growing, bursting And their wings separated into segments and became feathers ............,.,. into beaks. The eagles descended with their talons flexed like crossD<)'II Kevin looked at Robin who stood next to him, who, though his .........,.IJ,.,. smiled toothlessly.

Kevin drew a putty knife against the spackle, listening for his Robin had left minutes before, stealthily, barely dosing the door her. He wondered: will we ever have her back? Her insistence that would remain the same changed her more radically than he had thought possible.

Mana waited half-hidden behind the cunains; she imagined Robin were to appear, as she expected, and to glance up at her mother, would see a figure half-woman, half-cotton print. Would she prefer woman of the tiny peach flowers on a field of pale blue? Before the formation in her daughter, Marta would have laughed at such but now she seriously contemplated the workings of Robin's mind .

At the corner of the field, a crop of red hair broke through the ing leaves separating them. It appeared and then disappeared

'-ULII'-LLII

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moments, a blink of time ; however, Marta recognized, at least, the physical sight of her daughter. " Kevin! She's crossing now! " By the time Mana pounded down the stairs and raced to the kitchen, Kevin was already at the back door, his fingers fiddling with the latch to the screen. Together, they hurried out. When they reached the fence, Kevin intenwined his fingers to make a step for her. He then, with a grunt, hoisted himself after her.

They landed in the field with some disorientation, nether having considered crossing before this moment . Mana was dizzy with the rich smell of flowering grasses, the openness stretching before her, and hum of grasshoppers at her feet. Their overwhelming chore weakened them, Marta in her knees and Kevin in his chest, where he felt a taut resistance to each breath. Already, Robin had trudged through the grass in a diagonal but straightforward line halfway to the other side. " She' ll see us," Mana said.

Kevin shook his head . "She doesn't see anything these days." A dark movement in the sky distracted him, and he tilted his head back. A dark blot in the sky circled high above the field, soaring and dropping in the winds. "An eagle," he said.

Marta squinted. "Don' t be paranoid. Of course it's not an eagle. It's a hawk." She watched as the bird, closer now, tipped unsteadily. "Or a turkey vulture. Come on . We'll lose her."

The heat wound invisible hands around his throat, tightening and squeezing his windpipe into a flattened tube. He reached back for the arm of a wicker chair. As he sank into the dusty cushions , a dizziness cast silver glitter into his eyes. He no longer perspired as he had when young; he imagined that his pores now blew forth a powdery residue which clung like dust to his skin. He thought, I could live a thousand lives and none would be as intolerable as this moment .

When the girl appeared from between the houses, he peeled back the heat, breathing more easily now. He formed stories and recalled visions as she stomped up his porch steps.

His child, his glory.

Kevin and Mana crouched beneath the window, in among the pachysandra that swayed around their ankles. The flaking white pain of the sill came off in their hands. Despite the heat, the window was only panially open. The room into which they spied was sparsely furnished: two crude wooden stools, a piano with a single photograph placed on top, a torn rag rug, a couch the color and texture of oatmeal. They could not see beyond

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the one room, because of the interior darkness. Robin perched on a stool while the old man circled around her, talking in a voice so low that only individual words, scattered phrases , came through the window.

Kevin brushed his palms against his thighs. "Why doesn't he have any lights on?" " Shh." She pressed her hand on his knees, trying to get him to crouch lower.

Kevin wondered why Robin came to this man, this scrawny old man with his hook nose. A faintly sour scent came from the small window open路 ing: why didn't Robin fear this smell , as Kevin would have at her age , as he did now? She didn't laugh at the way the old man's trousers bunched under his belt, the way his spine curved like a poorly forged sickle , the way his trembling hands could not catch each other. Kevin watched the old man as he circled her, and saw that he had completely captured Robin's attenuon.

Marta, too , saw. The smoothness of the man's technique chilled her; he had placed Robin high on a stool, the center of attention , and around her, spinning her head, disorienting her. His hands snapped in front of her face like striking snakes and kept her alert. The darkness of room enhanced the power of whatever he told her, for, as Marta knew well, a child's mind was susceptible to words spoken in the dark.

"He's just an old man," Kevin whispered.

"No, he's not," Marta told him .

The old man left the room . Robin turned her head to gaze out window, and her parents ducked below the sill. Kevin stretched his out in the pachysandra, his back against the gritty foundation, breathed as lightly as he dared. Marta pressed her chin to her knees. several minutes, they slowly raised their heads.

The old man had returned and was lighting several candles that had evidently just placed around the room , as neither Kevin nor Marta noticed them before. The candles cast the room into a flickering, light broken by deep shadows. He spread a blanket on the smoothing its corners with his palms, while Robin watched attentively.

"Come," they heard the old man utter.

Robin slipped off the stool and sat cross-legged in the middle of blanket. Marta tensed, thinking: if he lays a hand on her I will rip him pieces. However, the old man stood back, his hips against one of the as Robin gathered the blanket around her, its corners pulled over shoulders.

"What are they doing?" Kevin asked.

"I don't know, but I'm going to find out." Marta backed away 132

the window, and, with Kevin dose behind, she climbed the porch steps in a single stride . She knocked on the wooden frame of the screen door.

"Robin?"

They waited for a few seconds before Kevin yanked the door open, yelling, "Robin!"

In the parlor, they found the old man alone, in the middle of the room, surrounded by the scent of melted paraffin .

"Where is she?" Mana asked.

The old man shrugged, and offered his empty palms.

"We saw her here," Kevin said. "We know she's in the house." He looked behind the couch. "Tell us or we'll call the police."

The old man's smile wilted into a loose frown. His eyes darted nervously between Marta and Kevin. "She said she doesn't want to see you."

"I don't care!" Mana nearly screamed. "Where's my daughter?" She lunged at him , grasping his thin arms, shaking him so that his head mapped back and forth.

"Stop." The closet door in the corner opened with the squeak of corroded hinges . Robin walked out, the blanket draped over her head and around her body so that only her nose caught the light. "Leave him alone."

"You're coming home. Now." Kevin strode across the room but Robin dodged him. ''I'm never coming home," she said. " I'm waiting for the eagle to come and get me. I'm waiting to become a goddess."

"She is safe here," the old man told them in a gentle, lulling voice.

With the back of his hand, he wiped a drop of saliva from his lips.

"A goddess!" She flapped her arms under the blanket. "I don't have parents any longer."

Kevin and Mana felt the steely edge of her words, though it was the content steadiness of the man, the way the corners of his mouth curled into a faint smile, that frightened them the most, as if he had tucked the ideas into Robin's head and had hidden them in an intricate box, sure of their safety. His motives were so cloudy and so inexplicable that Kevin and Mana could not attack them.

Marta lunged for Robin's arm , and Robin , cocooned in her fantasy, did not have time to pull away. She writhed and scratched, her legs striking out against her mother's shins, but Marta held her tightly. She did not care how bruised her daughter's arm would be the following day, only that it was firm in her grasp . "Home, young lady," she said.

"No!" Robin screeched. With her heel, she struck the stool; it toppled and then spun on a wobbly axis, finally careening into the wall.

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"She is not allowed back here," Kevin told the old man, and, for the first time, he saw a flicker of uncenainty in the bloodshot eyes. The mao fumbled for the piano behind him, hitting ivory keys with dissonance, before lowering himself onto the bench.

Robin collapsed her legs, forcing Mana to drag her away. Kevin lifted her by the other arm, and together they removed her.

On the porch, panting, Marta said, "You are never, ever to come here. Do you hear me?" The sunlight cast bleached spaces across the the stairs, Robin's face. They stood still, waiting for Robin's ->rL¡n,.url â&#x20AC;˘.-ti ..... ment.

"No! " she said, twisting. She wiggled free and ran down the flanked by old houses, skittering between shadows and laughing in a VOICe .

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Michael Simpson HAPPY NEW YEAR

The moon speaks to me from your face the white scent of roses

air singing coolly almost blue the heat of your sighing eyes I have cut my lips on the edge of time speaking starlight forever upon bronze mountains the green touch of grass I have come to know the blood full of sunlight mingling with roses

a song grows in your throat gent!y folding the moon's sleep

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Kathryn Takara ELEGY

Leslie lost left lately no more lingering the dream trickles no more Little girl grown up too fast gone to the stars unfathomable tyrannical life too hard to cradle your bewilderment Leslie left writhing I flailing I fighting violence drugs in a frozen alley overpowered, beaten dropped to her knees left alone to die on blood-stained asphalt Crying "Mamma" Lost to those lingering in reflectionpools of red memory

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gone omw-s;on: skin crumpled in grit ~~nwn ...,., in blood of crazed fury ,.,.,.,orPr,,. wildness avenged

, worn paper thin, like a specter late the dried holes in your arms/feet/legs

your mnocence your impotent search PiiUllJ.I.ll;;u your seed, inflicting death

left lonely pain a quiet realm of loving death. days all closed the last chapter a treasured book Another woman I child victimized Cenified dead .

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Brien Hallett

PROUD MONSTER: A SEARCH FOR HUMANITY Ian MacMillan Proud Monster North Point Press, 1987 One must begin with the obvious. Ian MacMillan's Proud Monster is an excellent, well-written book, containing remarkably taut, vital, nononsense prose. And, then move on to the less obvious. Just what kind of a book is it? How should one read it? What role does war play in the work?

And, most mystifying and intriguing of all, what holds the book together?

As with all great literature, the dictates of a familiar form do not constrain MacMillan's Proud Monster nor do they hold his creation together in any obvious, traditional way. Indeed, Proud Monster possesses only two of the four traditional unities-those of time and place. The unities of action and persona are lost among the seventy disparate tales depicting the five hundred or so victims who populate MacMillan's war.

On the other hand, the stories are not odds- and-ends that MacMillan has accumulated in a drawer over the years and finally brought together to produce another book. They possess too great a coherence to be a collection. In part, the coherence comes from the unities of time and place. In pan as well, it results from the rhythm of the seasons, which follow in regular succession from the autumn of 1939 to the summer of 1945 as one turns the pages of the book. And, in part, it derives from the book's alleged topic-war.

But perhaps the ostensible topic of Proud Monster-wac-is the key that unlocks the book's secret. For, what MacMillan has written is seventy splinters of shrapnel or, to be more technologically modern, seventy fragments of shrapnel. Each splinter or fragment is complete and whole unto itself but still a part of something else, a something that has exploded and burst apart. MacMillan, much the same as a good ordinance man would, has found seventy of the ten thousand splinters that whistled into the air, not many, but enough to tell him that the shell was from a German 88 mm, and not a Soviet 120 mm or an American 105 mm. Hence, to continue the metaphor so as to describe what kind of a book MacMillan written, Proud Monster is an incompletely reconstructed shell. It is charge of explosive surrounded by the lives of the several hundreds of lions of people on the Eastern Front during World War II that has 138

apan into an indefinite number of splinters, only seventy of which have been recovered.

Since "incompletely reconstructed shell" is not a standard literary form, several problems immediately arise. First, there is the problem of deciding how to read the fragments. From front to back works very well, but with only seventy splinters on hand, one soon wonders whether MacMillan's reconstruction of the shell is the only correct one. As a first alternative, one could trust to luck, picking up and putting down the fragments at random. That is, one could open the book wherever, read a fragment or two, make a tick in the margin so as not to repeat oneself, then close the book and begin the process all over again. Or, as a second alternative, the book could come equipped with a good index-a table of contents would be totally out of place since we are dealing with fragments after all , not chapters. One could select key words and reconstruct the splinters into an indefinite number of shells, putting together, for example, all the splinters that had to do with Poles, or children, or only the first person narrative-a voice I found much more effective than the third person narratives, although admittedly third person narrative is harder to write.

Curiously, either of these alternative ways to reconstruct the shell would work, and work very well. Both are highly recommended. However, to indulge in either of them is to miss the substance of the book. For, it is only when the splinters are read in sequence, whereby the first two splinters come first to establish the staning point and the last two fragments come last to establish closure, that the substance of MacMillan's incompletely reconstructed shell becomes apparent, a conclusion I came to several days after having experimented with the alternatives.

But how can one speak of the substance of an exploded shell? An exploded shell leaves fragments to be sure, but there is no substance.

Clearly, there is a paradox in the making. However, let us phrase the question in a more accessible manner, and ask, "What is the status or role of war in MacMillan's book?"

On the surface, war is essential. For example, Proud Monster, the dust jacket informs us, is the title of Goya's eighty-first etching in his Disasters of War series. From this allusion, one is inclined to conclude that MacMillan's "seventy prose miniatures" are droplets of distilled truth about war collected from the monster's "regurgitating maw." Perhaps. But if this be a book about war, it is an unusual war book. First, Proud Monster completely ignores the essence of war, the larger political and military context, and instead focuses upon the accidental or incidental, upon a single, significant, illuminating instant in the lives of the five hundred or so people 139

who constitute his fragments. Thus, if his book be about war, MacMillan has confused the part with the whole, seventy splinters with the whole shell. Second, although a half dozen of the stories concern preparations for combat or lulls in the combat or fleeing from combat, only two concern themselves directly with combat, the first and the twenty-sixth. Oddly enough, these two are the only stories that are directly linked, the one an ironic counterpoint to the other.

In the first, "First Engagement," a troop of Polish Lancers ambush a section of German tanks during the Fall of 1939. Their charge is of course a futile gesture from another age. The tank's machine guns mow the horses down in short order. After the skirmish, an old Polish trooper, Jasiu, observes ominously, " ... this is not like 1920. This is different," while a young German tanker, Richter, exalts, "It [his tank] is a beautiful device, a great invention .. .. This is magic, magic!" In the second, "What Snow Does," a section of German tanks is immobilized outside of Stalingrad during the winter of 1943 because their lubricating oil has frozen. Bundled up against the cold and talking aimlessly, the Germans feel a rumble through the frozen ground . Then out of the white mist the Soviet cavalry sweeps through, sabers slashing, carbines shooting, before the Germans can man their weapons. "They are using cavalry. We haven't a chance . . . . My God, cavalry. Of course. The oil in horses doesn't congeal."

Ivory, poetic justice, a comment on the futility of war? No doubt all of these. But what of the other sixty-eight fragments? None of them fits easily into this counterpart. It is as if combat is no longer the focus of war in MacMillan's book, since his two combat splinters could easily have been deleted without disturbing the fabric of his work. Indeed, not only is combat irrelevant but the Second World War itself is irrelevant, a mere accident of time and place. Excluding the two combat fragments, all the other stories could have been placed in other settings. For example, a large number of the fragments are set in death camps, which are surely a unique feature of the Eastern Front during World War II. However, while the details of the setting would of course have to change, both the essential action and the meditations upon human nature and the human condition that result could easily have been reproduced in other items and other places. For instance, the splinters that depend upon starvation could have been set during a famine or after a shipwreck, while those that depend upon slaughtering thousands could have been set during a buffalo hunt or during the extermination of the Carib Indians or of the Tasmanian Aborigmes.

Yet, having said this, one must immediately observe how essential war in general, and the Second World War in particular, is to MacMillan's 140

enterprise. The Second World War is essential because, as we have already noted, it provides a unity of time and place; a familiar rhythm of the everreturning cycle of the seasons, a unified and reassuring coherence. War in general is essential , fust , because it pulls the incidental tales together. It provides a setting in which his imagination is free to invent. With complete plausibility, he is able to juxtapose the most startlingly incongruous elements. For example, two pubescent Ukrainian youths are hiding in the bushes along a road at dusk waiting for a German column to pass so that they may cross the road to their homes. Bored watching the endless convoy, the boy innocently tries to seduce the girl who defends her honor by rebuking him sharply and reminding him that it is a sin. As it so happens, in front of this playful couple, there is a dead soldier, perhaps Soviet, possibly German, who is forced up from the mud every time a truck, tank or halftrack drives over him.

The effect is powerful. Yet, it could easily have been reproduced in another setting but, if MacMillan had used another time and place here, he would have had to use different times and different places for each, or at least most , of his other seventy fragments . In doing so, he would have lost the specific " substance" of Proud Monster, transforming it from an incompletely reconstructed German 88 shell into a pocket full of splinters gathered here and there from an odd assonment of shells. In a word, he would have lost the coherence and unity that binds the book together. For, the Second World War in panicular, and war in general, not only opens up a plain as broad as the Ukrainian steppe upon which MacMillan may easily and plausibly create, quite literally, any situation he can imagine, but it creates the unity and coherence that Aristotle recommends to all authors .

Still, to continue the paradox, this unity and coherence is not created by the war itself, which is ultimately accidental and peripheral, but rather by the conjunction of time and place and the opponunities thus created.

The "substance" of each fragment is the experience of the people who find themselves thrown together in the same place at the same time. In this respect, these fragments differ in no way from any other fragment of human experience. All the war does, because it is an extreme human condition, is to produce two accidental affects. First, it compresses the natural rhythms of normal human experience. Within the span of six shon years, nothing happens that could not have happened at another time or another place over the course of a thousand lifetimes, but, because of the war, everything occurs suddenly, all at once. Second, war acts to highlight and intensify each experience, taking both the latent horrors and the potential joys of each encounter, revealing them plainly, and making them manifest 141

-the brutality and the inhumanity, the beauty and the love, the casual slaughtering and the tentative celebration of life.

Thus, to pursue the paradox, the essential "substance " of Proud Monster is the accidents of time and place and the opportunities that result. It is that exploded shell, that historical accident known as the human experience, or the human condition, or the human community, to repeat Augustine's definition of community. Ultimately, this is what holds the book together. The rhythm of the eternally returning seasons as they mark the history of man and men. During each instant of that history, the accidents of time and place force people together, providing them with an opponunity to display either their humanity or their inhumanity. Whichever they display, it then provides the circumstances for the next instant of history. And so on down through time, down through the regenerations of the seasons.

Unable to encompass all of human history in one hundred fony pages , MacMillan has taken only seventy of the splinters that were thrown off when a German 88 shell exploded in a certain place at a cenain time and provided us with an incomplete reconstruction of that shell. Consequently, to resolve the paradox, the Second World War is only a facilitating accident. Essential, but ultimately accidental. MacMillan could have recovered the same experiences by tracing the history of a Near Eastern tell, or Machu Picchu, the lost city of the Inca, detailing from each layer of rubble a significant incident in the lives of the people who happened to live there at the time. The atmospherics would of course be different, trading in the sharp zing of hot Krupp steel for the round clunk of cold pottery, but the essence would be the same. The shards would tell of life and death and much that happens in between, of the tender and the macabre, of innocence and sophistication, of resignation to one's fate because that is how the world works, of incomprehension over one's fate because one '-'"•u~•• , believe that the world works that way. But most especially, the shards, Mac· Millan's shards at any rate , would tell about humanity and · · and how the two are inseparable; for, one of the most haunting aspects his work is that the most unimaginable inhumanity is always the · for self-knowledge, for a more profound understanding of "life."

Finally, not only does Proud Monster exhibit a profound sympathy man at his most inhumane, but MacMillan has also moved well n ...•~nn,,. not only other war novels, which confine themselves narrowly to either fury of combat or the chaos of a shattered civil society, but, more to point, to both Modernism and Post Modernism. For, having eschewed · suspect reality of traditional narrative novels and forsaken the alienation of fractured Modern and Post Modern representations, 142

Ian has pierced through both the accidents and the essence of our existence alike to discover, not merely the loose fragments, as an early Modernist would, but the rigid ogival structure of the exploded shell itself.

Thus, by using both the linear time of history as his rails and the cyclical time of the ever-returning seasons as his ties, he provides his Proud Monster with a rigid structure that takes it somewhere. The journey begins in WESTERN POLAND, FALL 1939 and ends in MESSINGHAUSEN, GERMANY, SUMMER 1945 and in between these two dates the history of the German people is told, not all of it, only small, significant fragments much as the Hebrew Bible does . And, it is a mark of MacMillan 's artistry that neither this historical structure nor any single dominant character is evident as one reads through the book.

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Celeste Somono

BAGWIS

My name is Celeste Somono. I am married and have three children. live in a squatter area of Manila. I work as a Community Organizer I Pastoral Worker in a program called the Basic Christian Community Program, Malate Catholic Church. I concentrate on the squatter areas , vâ&#x20AC;˘E1........,,,5 suppon for women who work in the bars.

One project organizes women around a community-based health program . In it, women can develop leadership among themselves while building a self-reliant, self-nourishing organization.

The Philippines is a rich country, rich in its natural resources, and it can feed the fifty-four million people of our country. But, because of the unjust distribution of wealth, seventy percent of the population is living below poverty level and the result is the growing number of women prostitutes in the Philippines.

The land in the Philippines is only owned by a few big landlords, big businessmen and foreign capitalists.

Who owns the bars where women have to work? A lot are foreign people from Europe, Australia, America, Japan, Saudi Arabia .. . and by Filipinos. These last ones are the poorer.

Why this kind of business? Prostitution in the Philippines has reached an epidemic proportion. It is calculated that there are eight hundred thousand prostitutes in the Philippines, the majority of which are in Manila and around the American military bases.

In the Manila area, prostitution has developed because of tourism.

Tourism was created mainly to satisfy the economic need for foreign exchange. The Philippines was promoted abroad, first-class hotels were built, and Filipinas became a part of the tourism deal.

Philippine sex tours were developed for men in countries like Japan.

Even here in Hawaii somebody is distributing material about sex tours in the Philippines for men who want "the vacation of their dreams," and a new girl every day of their trip.

Around the American military bases, prostitution grows. It is sustained by the continual presence of military men who need some "Rest

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and Recreation." There are nine hundred fifty bars, clubs, hotels, motels, etc., twenty-one thousand registered prostitutes , plus another eight thousand unregistered and three thousand part-time prostitutes (some of them children).

Why are these women in this business? The majority of these women come from remote areas of the Philippines where life is very hard. People do not have land to cultivate and they cannot produce enough food for their families. (Men working for landlords earn only one dollar a day. Usually all the family works, but only the man gets paid.)

Recruiters from Manila, who know the situation very well, go to these provinces to recruit girls, attracting them with prospects of a good job in Manila. The recruiters advance the girls expense money for the trip. These girls, with no experience and with no education, think that this is the only way to help their families, so they go. In Manila, they are put into bars and soon they find that they are trapped. The recruiter has sold them to the bar owner to whom they must pay back the expense . They have to do what the bar owner tells them . They cannot leave because they do not know anyone in Manila. They cannot go back where they came from with no money. So they have to survive. They will never tell their families what has happened to them. They send money home, and lie about their job because they feel ashamed .

Our work among these women is to become close to them so they can start talking and open themselves up. After a while, women started to tell about their lives and their problems. They have a very low self-esteem.

Society makes them feel outcast, rejected. (Even the men who use them make them feel that way.) They have no protection. Prostitution is illegal in the Philippines while, at the same time, the bar owners are organized in an association registered in the Exchange Commission. Being illegal, they do not have any rights: no sick leave, no maternity leave, no rights if they are raped by their customers. They are harassed by police and military men who can have girls at any time for free. They do not have any education about how to protect themselves from getting pregnant. Contraceptives in the Philippines are legal for married couples, but not for single women .

Plus, all these things are expensive.

Because of these problems, we opened a drop- in center called Bagwis.

Th~ center offers space for women to meet and discuss common issues and problems. It offers leadership training, education on health, women's rights, labour rights, social awareness, religious information , counselling, and free medical and legal help.

We are not taking the women out of the bars . They can be replaced easily and we do not have alternatives to offer them , but we would like to

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educate the women to the point where they will make a decision to protest against an unjust structure that has forced them to be prostitutes. Prostitution is only the symptom of an unjust system that keeps seventy percent the Filipino people below poveny level , while foreign investors, multinational corporations and U.S. military presence take away the wealth of ow country as well as our rights to make decisions on our own self-determination. The root cause of this problem lies in this oppressive system which needs to be changed. There are twenty thousand child prostitutes in the Philippines. The Filipino women and children are the victims of a structure which exploits them. We are asking in the name of these women and children and in the name of all the Filipino people to help us change this situation. Thank you.

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Notes on Contributors

Susan Ashbury is currently Poetry Editor of The Louisville Review, published by the University of Louisville where she is enrolled in Poetry Workshops as a postbaccalaureate student. Her poems have appeared in The Louisville Review and Kentucky Poetry Review.

Priscilla Atkins lives in Honolulu where she teaches in the Poets in the Schools program, and is a graduate student at the University of Hawaii.

Jay A. Blumenthal, who holds a doctorate in English from Drew University, is a director of marketing for McGraw-Hill in New York City. His poetry has appeared in Interim, The Cumberland Poetry Review, Graham House Review, The Literary Review, and The Wormwood Review, among others. Old Wlzys and Former Goods, his first book of poetry, is fonhcoming from Heliotrope Press.

D. Castleman is a humble truckdriver living in a redwood grove in Mill Valley, California, and is healthily contemptuous ofkings.

Sussy Chako, originally from Hong Kong, lives in Brooklyn, New York, and completed an M.F.A. in fiction at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She is presently working on a novel tided Wlzh Kiu about the overseas Chinese experience. Her stories, published under the name S. Komala, are as follows : "The Yellow Line" (BBC World Service Short Story Program, English and Chinese broadcast , 1981185; Radio Hong Kong, 1982 ; Short Story International, 1981); "The Sea Islands" (Imprint, Hong Kong 1979); "The Purple Lady" (Asiaweek Short Story Collection, 1983 ); "Apollo Kissed Me" (Fiction Cincinnati, 1986); and "Pineapple Upside Down Bird" (Cincinnati Conference of Women Writing Contest, Honorable Mention, 1986). lbrtin Charlot has been an artist in Hawaii for more than twenty years. His murals can be found on Oahu at the Kahala Mall, in Waikiki, Kaneohe, and Aiea, and on Kauai and Maui. He is the author and illustrator of Once Upon a Fishook and Sunnyside Up (both, Island Heritage Press, 1972).

K. Conners is a graduate of the University of Hawaii at Manoa Depanment of English.

Coughlin has done everything once and keeps returning to write. He lives and works in Nonhern California, and is married with one child.

Shiva Damon's previous entry in Hawaii Review-"Growing Up in No Tirne" - appeared in The Best American Short Ston路es 1977. He has several stories fonhcoming in future issues of The Mystic Muse, and his recent reprints include The Ploughshares Reader: New Fiction for the Eighties and Svetova Literatura (Prague, Czechoslovakia). "The Dream Stone" received an Honorable Mention in the 1988 Honolulu Magazine fiction contest.

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Matt Duarte is a student at Leeward Community College in Pearl City, Hawaii.

Mary Eiser is a graduate student in English at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

Dion Farquhar's fiction and poetry have appeared in Visions, Cream City · Wi!st Wind Review, Boundary 2, Sulfur, Exquisite Corpse, and Crazyquilt. teaches political theory in New York University's adult degree program.

Robert Funge has poems forthcoming in The Literary Review, Bellingham Cumberland Poetry Review, New York Quarterly, and others. His first The Lie the Lamb Knows, is available from Spoon River Poetry Press. Two collections are looking for publishers.

Greg German, after farming for several years in the northcentral region of received his B.A. and B.S. degrees from Kansas State University. Currently, teaches high school English and coaches basketball at Junction City, Kansas. has had poems in Poet Lore, Kansas Quarterly, Negative Capability, The Alaska Quarterly, The A. J.D. Review, Permafrost, ZONE 3, Light Year and several others.

Brien Hallett teaches composition at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

Fritz Hamilton has been hustling to get by for the past two decades as a nru•r-·• mover, dishwasher, doorman, hotel desk clerk, etc.-and has placed recently in Queen's Quarterly, Kansas Quarterly, Dog River Review, wales, and Poetry Australia. His 7th book of poems has just come out Minotaur Press. He has had recent poetry acceptances from New York terly, Poetry Australia, Poetry wales, Kansas Quarterly, Queen 's Uuart.m.,;.

Antigonish Review, Gryphon, and The Fiddle head.

Lyn Lifshin is finishing her authobiography for Contemporary Authors and ing for the spring issue of New York Quarterly which will feature an u·1terv1C'1 with her. Also due very soon is Not Made of Glass, a documentary on her. books include Raw Opals, Rubbed Silk, Many Madonnas, Red Hair and jesuit, walking Point, and she hopes out soon Reading Lips.

Ruth McLaughlin lives in Great Falls, Montana.

Willis Oshiro is a student at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and lives in Hawaii.

Kevin Phelan lives in Los Angeles, California. He collaborates with Bill U'Ren short fiction .

Louis Phillips' one-act play, Lzfeguard, was recently published by Chimera nections. His poems have appeared in Hawati Review, Epoch, The South /ina Review, and in many other publications. Mr. Phillips teaches creative ing at The School of Visual Arts in New York City.

Bruce Douglas Reeves published his first novel, The Night Action, in ............... ..

(New American Library, 1966) and paperback (Signet Books, 1967). It published in Great Britain (hardcover, Andre Deutsh, 1967; paperback, flower Books , 1969) and Germany (hardcover, Droemer Knaur, 1969; .............,,""~ reprint, Deutsche Buch Gameinschaft, 1972). Warner Brothers bought movie rights. His second novel, Man on Fire, was published as a paperback inal (Pyramid Books, 1970). And his third novel, Street Smarts, was

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published in both hardcover (Beaufon Books , 1981) and paperback (Ace Books .

1982). He has just finished a new novel, Freedom to Breathe. In addition, he has published several genre novels under pseudonyms. His stories and anicles appeared in Playboy, California Living, Gem, Easyn"der, The Mendocino Review, The Swallow's Tail, Pulpsmith, Prelude to Fantasy, The Express, Runner's World, The Berkeley Barb, and The High Plains Literary Review. He received an Honorable Mention in Honolulu Magazine's 1984 short story contest.

Kristopher Saknussemm's work has appeared in ten countries in publications like the Hudson Review, 2Pius2, The Internationalist, the New England Review, Bread/oaf Quarterly, Dreamworks, Gargoyle, Long Shot, Meanjin, Calzfornia Quarterly, Black Ice, and Prairie Schooner. He has won Australia's National Shorr Fiction Prize, a Stegman International Writing Fellowship, and (currently) a Commonwealth Literary Arts Grant. The stories published here are from a collection in progress entitled Because ofFood, ~ 'II Be Back .

Eve Shelnutt is the author of three collections of short stories, all published by Black Sparrow Press, and of rwo collections of poetry, Air & Salt (Carnegie Mellon Press, 1983) and Recital in a Pnvate Home (Carnegie Mellon Press, 1989).

She teaches in the writing program at Ohio Universiry, and is the author of The Writing Room: Keys to the Craft ofFiction and Poetry, to be published in April 1989 by Longstreet Press.

Martin B. Sherman is a graduate of the University of Michigan, worked for the Ringling Brothers Circus as a clown, wrote research materials for CBS in New York, and worked in the wine business in Chicago and San Francisco. His work has appeared in Dandelion, City Paper, Nit & Wit, and The Dinosaur Review, with another story accepted for publication in Ne~st Review.

Paul N. Silas is currently an inmate at a Federal prison. He chooses to use this name while incarcerated. In earlier years, he published under another name in a number of journals with national reputations.

Michael Simpson is originally from Oregon, has an M.F.A. in creative writing, and is an East-West Center grantee working on a Ph.D. in American Studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He has published rwo books of poetry.

Ronald Smits teaches at Indiana University of Pennsylvania and lives in Ford City, Pennsylvania. He is a Vietnam veteran and a graduate of Rutgers University.

Celeste Somono lives in Manila, Philippines. Her essay "Bagwis" first appeared in the j ournal ofthe Women's Support Group, W/Ji'anae Coast, Hawai 'i.

Kathryn Takara has published poems in Rain Bird, Ramrod, Hawaii Review, Chaminade Literary Review, and others. She is currently working on her doctorate in Political Science at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

Doug Turner has had poems in Hawaii Review, Antigonish Review, Poetry Toronto, Altadena Review, Blue Unicorn, NewsArt, Pulpsmith, Event, Malahat Review, Permafrost, Prism International, Green's Magazine, University of Windsor Review, W/Jscana Review, W/Jves, and Ne~st Review. He lives in Quesnel, British Columbia.

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Bill U'Ren has collaborated with Kevin Phelan on short fiction.

Masami Usui was born and brought up in Japan. She is now writing her Ph.D. sertation on Virginia Woolf at Michigan State University.

Dirk van Nouhuys has published several translations, made with his father, short stories of the Flemish writer Jos Vandeloo, and in September 1986, through a grant from the New York Council for the Arts, Sachem published a volume with two of his short novels, which was reviewed f.~..·~r~h•· in the New York Times. He has also published his own short fiction in S.H. Y. (Hydra, Greece, Vol. 4, No. 1, Spring 1977), Buffalo Spree (Buffalo, NY, mer 1978), The Alchemist (La Salle, Quebes, Canada, Vol. 1, No. S, 1980), Global Tapestry (Blackburn, Lancaster, England, No. 10, January 1981), The Fault (Hayward, CA, No. 6, April1977), and Lactuca (Suffern, NY, No.9, February 1988).

Harry V. Vinters was born in northern Canada and has lived in Los Angeles, fornia, since 1985. He presently teaches at the University of California at Angeles.

Robert Welshons is a recent graduate of the University of Washington's writing program and now teaches English at a Seattle area community This is his second publication.

Debbie Lee Wesselmann's fiction has appeared in several journals, including sissippi Review, The Crescent Review, and Alaska Quarterly Review. She has stories forthcoming in Other Voices and The Literary Review. She lives Greenville, Rhode Island.

Valerie Wieland is a freelance journalist, photographer, and writer in Peoria, nois. She has had poetry published in Cape CodLtfe, HIS, and others.

Marsha Womongold is featured in the 22nd edition of Who's Who in the She has been a journalist since 1967 and a freelance writer since 1988. She is author of Pornography: License to Kill (1978) and, with others, Fight (1983). She was the facilitator of the Inanna Poetry Workshop, from 1977 to 1983, and co-facilitator of the Pleasant Street Writing ou:l!illu.IIO.I Cambridge, from 1986 to 1988.

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Fiction by Sussy Chako Philip Shiva Damon Ruth McLaughlin Willis Oshiro Kevin Phelan & Bill U'Ren Bruce Douglas Reeves Kristopher Saknussemm Martin B. Sherman ~ Dirk van Nouhuys ~ Harry V. Vinters Robert Welshons Debbie Lee Valerie Wieland

Poetry by Susan Ash bury Priscilla Atkins Jay A. Blumenthal D . Castleman K. Coughlin Matt Duarte Mary Eiser Dion Farquhar Robert Funge Greg German Fritz Hamilton Lyn Lifshin Louis Phillips Eve Shelnutt Paul N . Silas Michael Simpson Ronald Smits Kathryn Takara Doug Turner Masami Usui Marsha Womongold

Nonfiction by Brien Hallett Celeste Somono Artwork by Martin Charlot Amy K. Conners

$4.00