Here as a Friend

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Here as a Friend A Collection of Stories by Jason Githens

Graduate Thesis MFA Program for Writers Warren Wilson College January, 2007

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For Nan Nan.

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Contents Buckshot .................................................................................................................................... 5 Blue Topping ........................................................................................................................... 16 The Lawn Mower .................................................................................................................... 38 Migration Point........................................................................................................................ 55 The Beetle Machine................................................................................................................. 69 The Flower Train ..................................................................................................................... 86

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Buckshot By Jason Githens

Pulling the truck off the side of the road, Delmar reached up behind him for his rifle but it wasn‟t there. He‟d dropped it off that morning for a cleaning as he‟d planned on giving it to his son for Christmas. Cursing under his breath, Delmar kept his eyes locked on the big buck whose antlers were hung up in a tangle of barbedwire. Feeling around under the seat through a scattering of Styrofoam cups, empty tobacco tins, and bundles of orange plastic flags, Delmar rooted around for his knife.

He found the hard leather case and pulled it out, never taking his eyes from that terrified deer stuck in the fence.

Stepping from the warm truck out into the December cold, Delmar‟s boots crunched across the shoulder‟s thick gravel. He stopped at the side of the road and watched quiet snow fall and cling to the tops of the tall yellow grass. Across the road, the deer paused briefly in its struggle to stare back at him with its empty black eyes.

“Easy, fellow,” he said, his voice cracking because his throat had gone dry on that long drive home from The Whistle Pit, where he‟d ended up after the company Christmas party. The deer resumed twisting and pulling and grunting as Delmar

6 clumped across the blacktop towards him. It jumped around in a violent thrash, whipping the taut barbed-wire strands into airy twangs.

Delmar would have much preferred to use his gun, but he‟d make do with the knife. He aimed to come at the buck from behind and get the knife into its throat.

That deer was hopelessly stuck. Delmar had once seen his dad do something like this, years ago, for an animal in a similar situation. And his dad had only used a little old pocket knife with a fake pearl inlay, which Delmar still kept in a bowl on the mantle.

Delmar squeezed through the fence thirty feet from the deer, and he could hear the barbed-wire‟s strain in his ears as he worked his large body through the small gap. One of the rusty barbs caught his shirt and ripped it, even getting into the skin, which made Delmar curse out loud because it hurt, and because his wife had bought that shirt for him last Christmas. It had become one of his favorites. He held the torn shirt tail in his hand and wiped the blood from his bulging stomach. He unsheathed his knife and started around behind the writhing deer. Reaching down, Delmar picked some snow off the tops of the tall grass, and ate some to patch up the dryness in his throat. After that, he could almost sing to the deer. “Easy now, fella. Easy now.” Soothed by the snow, his voice had quit cracking, and the large buck had calmed too. “Easy now, fella. Easy.” Delmar could hear the animal‟s heavy and measured breaths blowing out its nose. It tried to turn and face him but couldn‟t get its head around.

Moving in behind the panicked buck, Delmar thought of Kenneth, his youngest son, and the family‟s first to go to college. Kenny was due home that afternoon for Christmas break, and Delmar doubted that his boy got much good venison up there in Rolla; he doubted that his boy ate very well at all given their

7 budget, so this buck would make for a good surprise of fresh steaks for Kenny‟s first Sunday home. Delmar even knew of an old boy, Sticky, over in Stringtown, who for a fifty dollar “tax” would clean this thing out-of-season, no questions asked. Aside from that profit-sharing paper Delmar‟s boss had just handed out, which didn‟t act much like real money until you retired or died, he‟d also given each of them crisp one-hundred dollar bills. Delmar had spent fifty at the The Whistle Pit, and fifty Delmar would give to that boy in Stringtown to clean this deer out-of-season. The rest of the cleaning fees he‟d pay for by giving Sticky all the meat he wanted. Delmar would just have to tell his wife that he had actually gotten him a deer during the season and he‟d had it hung up frozen as a surprise for a special occasion, like Kenny‟s return from school for the holidays. Ginger had a fear of the law—her cousin was a deputy—so Delmar would have to lie about killing this deer out of season. But Ginger also had a taste for venison, and she wouldn‟t press him much once satisfied they were eating fully legal meat.

Still breathing hard, the buck had taken another break from pulling at the fence, and it nibbled on the tops of dead grasses as if trying to think up a better plan.

Delmar came up from behind it, trying to stay exactly on the cattle path as to not to alert the deer. He moved quietly for a man of his size, and he tried to time his breathing with the buck‟s for additional cover. Not ten feet away now, the deer started sniffing the air in alarm, so Delmar held the knife out as his daddy had taught him. He ran at the deer‟s white rump. He left the ground and ended up with his belly on top of the deer‟s bucking back hips, managing to pull himself up by the deer‟s neck until he was holding on like a bareback rider in the rodeo. Hanging on with his big left arm, Delmar freed up his knife hand, but the serrated blade raked across the

8 top strand of barbed wire, snapping it clean. Everything froze for a full second as the deer realized that it was free. The big buck turned and ran parallel to the fence with Delmar still holding onto its back, scared to let go. Those sharp hooves could have cut him into pieces if he were to fall. He let the knife drop away and held on with both arms as the buck found an opening in the fence and took off across the paved two-lane highway, where finally Delmar lost his grip and fell down hard, skinning both elbows right through his shirt. He ended up flat on his back, lying across the yellow no-passing stripes in the road. He heard the deer explode up on into the dry leaves on the other side and disappear into the woods. He sat up and looked for traffic, but the road remained empty and quiet. The snow fell. Thank God no one had just seen that happen.

Delmar walked back and picked up his knife. He examined the fence, holding up the two pieces where he‟d slipped and cut right through the wire, inadvertently freeing the big buck. Leaning forward against a fence post, Delmar looked up into the rolling hills where, somewhere out there, he imagined a deer gathering his buddies to tell them that impossible story.

“Son of a bitch.” He spit and shook his head, watching the snow fall harder around the dead quiet of the hills. Before returning to his truck, Delmar had cut a deep gouge into the fence post with his mid-length hunting knife. He‟d carved his initials, and the number fourteen, which is what he estimated the size of the buck to be, a fourteen pointer.

Freely‟s was still open even though it was past four on a Wednesday, when Wayne, the owner, usually closed early for evening church. Delmar pulled in and

9 picked up a six-pack of Busch. Wayne was watching a college ball-game on a little black and white television that looked like the portal on a submarine and was just about that clear.

“How can you see that thing, Wayne?” Delmar asked, putting the six-pack on the counter and digging in his pocket for the remaining fifty of his holiday bonus.

Remembering that Kenny liked Budweiser, Delmar walked back to the cooler and picked up another six-pack.

“D‟you get into a scuffle up at the bar or something?” Wayne asked, finally turning away from the television during a commercial to see Delmar‟s beat-up condition. “You look all tore up, Delmar.”

Delmar looked down at his cut shirt and the torn sleeves at his elbows. He considered how long he wanted to stand there and listen to that little television squawk, and how loud he wanted to talk so that Wayne, who was hard of hearing, could actually hear the story. So he lied.

“Some ice built up on my running boards,

and when I climbed up I slipped and busted my ass. Shirt caught in the door handle here.” Delmar held up the shirt tail he‟d cut with the buck knife. Then he held up both ripped elbows. “And also I ended up on both elbows right in The Whistle Pit parking lot. Always making the fool.”

“You sure it was only the ice, Delmar?” Wayne smiled, ringing up the beer.

Delmar‟s face turned red and he felt hot under his heavy shirt. “Sure it was.

What do you mean by that?”

“Likely it involved some cold beer too. As in, too much of it.” Wayne laughed exposing his white, false teeth and pink gums.

10 “Well, yes sir,” Delmar laughed back and smacked the counter. “That too.”

He pointed and shook a relieved finger at Wayne. Delmar remembered right then that Wayne was an assistant game warden, and he would have been in a fix had he told his story about almost throating a deer out of season.

“You be careful out there now, Delmar. Roads is getting slick.”

“We‟ll do it,” Delmar nodded, and picked up the beer from the counter. “Oh, my boy Kenny‟s coming in this afternoon. He‟s up there at Rolla studying engineering.”

“That‟s right. I‟d forgotten Kenny had upped and went off to college. Good for him,” Wayne said. “He used to come here and buy those big books, detective stories, dragons, love dramas, all those paperbacks the long haul truckers buy to read on the open road. Actually, truckers quit buying those books when them book-tapes come out. Probably got some around here I could give to Kenny, so you send him out my way, hear? University of Missouri, huh?”

“Yes sir. First in his family smart enough to do it. Lord knows I‟m not. Hell, I try to watch that Jeopardy with Ginger, and can‟t get hardly none of them questions.

You know, that program does nothing but irritate me. That old boy in the suit thinking he‟s got all the answers. Course if I had a card in my hand, I could read off the answers too. Ginger, though, she‟s real good at it. That‟s where Kenny gets them brains. Ginger‟s the smart one of the family. And clean living, Ginger. Kenny too.”

“I hear you there.” The ball game came back from commercial, and Wayne resumed his intense interest and said without looking back up, “Well, tell that wife and boy of yours hello for me.”

11 “We‟ll do it.” Delmar rapped his knuckles on the counter. He scooped the change off the plywood countertop into his palm and thought of something nice that he could get for Ginger with the thirty-nine dollars and change he had left. There was a little glass figurine shop about a mile down the road, but likely they‟d be closed at this hour for Wednesday church. He‟d find her something. It sure would have been nice to have been able to deliver fresh venison for this Sunday‟s dinner, Kenny‟s first time home. Maybe Sticky would have some spare meat in the freezer that Delmar could buy. Only problem was, it would be expensive, and Ginger would know he‟d paid for it from his bonus, and things were tight on account of Kenny being in school.

If only he‟d been more careful with that knife, then he‟d be on his way to Stringtown right now with a fourteen-point buck hidden under a tarp in his pickup. The little bell dinged on Freely‟s door as Delmar walked out. He pulled his collar up against the cold. That snow was really coming down now, and it had dropped a quiet blanket over the low hills. Without any traffic, only the little creek made any noise. Delmar loved the snow. He felt he could crank the heat up in his truck and go to sleep right there until spring. Like a bear.

The snow drifted down easy in the late afternoon but didn‟t threaten the roads much, as it just stuck to the high grass. Delmar whistled along to the radio, unable to take his mind off venison steak. He pulled open one of the beers from the paper bag, popped the top, and drank half of it down in a couple of gulps. The sign to Stringtown caused him to turn his truck in that direction, too sharp, and the roads were slick enough that he fishtailed a bit, but then got it straightened out without even spilling a drop. He let out a little yelp celebrating his maneuver, and turned up the radio, singing along. His youngest boy was coming home for his first winter break,

12 and by God they were going to have fresh venison on Sunday. Delmar pushed the truck up to a shuddering seventy as he checked the clock, and then drove on through the thickening snow to Sticky‟s shop in Stringtown. Delmar‟s elbows had started to ache so he popped open another beer to relax a little.

The beer and the snow made the hills look uncommonly gorgeous even though the Ozark grass was brittle and dead. Cattle dotted the hills, as did some big barns, and the land rippled on out like a sheet on the line. This was pretty country.

Delmar knew folks who‟d driven out to California, Oregon, Colorado, and even up to Niagara Falls, claiming how pretty all that was. But the foothills in this part of the state could stand up to any of that. He turned down the radio and watched the hills fade into the darkening gray horizon. He guessed which way was northwest and he imagined his boy driving home slow from Rolla. His boy had always driven too slow.

He‟d never played ball, or as far as Delmar knew, had never even gotten a speeding ticket. Kenny had never been in fight. He‟d always been too careful, and Delmar, on his fourth beer of the drive, wondered if Kenny had ever really much liked venison at all.

Stringtown was deserted except for a light on in the one place Delmar needed it be on, Sticky’s Wild Meats. Outside the store, antlers piled up high, a perpetual project that Sticky claimed was one day going to be like some arch he‟d seen out in Jackson, Wyoming. Over the years Sticky‟s pile hadn‟t developed into much except a deer junkyard nearly as tall as the shop. It was surrounded by yellow police tape warning away kids from trying to climb on it. Delmar used to bring Kenny over here when he‟d come to buy meat for a holiday, on occasions when he hadn‟t been able to

13 bag his own game, and his boy wouldn‟t go near that pile. He didn‟t even like getting out of the truck, and if he went inside the shop he‟d just stand over by the metal Coca-Cola machine with its door open, sticking his head in making his voice echo.

The boy did like venison. He just didn‟t like seeing what it came from.

Delmar stumbled a little on the gravel before walking in and setting off some door chime that mooed like a cow, which drew Sticky out of the back. He was wearing goggles and had blood all over his apron. Sticky had been doing some lateseason Christmas-turkey butchering for the organic crowd up in the city.

Delmar set the remaining two beers of his six-pack on the counter alongside the Bud he‟d bought for Kenny. “Sticky, I need me some venison steaks, about yea thick.” Delmar held his thumb and finger apart about three inches.

“You won‟t be able to cook or cut into ones but about half that size, Delmar. I will take a cold beer off your hands, though.” Sticky had always seemed skinny for a butcher.

“But you got some, right? You got some venison on hand?” Delmar pulled off his hat and scratched his bald spot.

“Of course I do. I even have a good deal of it moved out of the freezer and thawed in the refrigerator. Half of them deadbeats from the city never came to pick up their venison, and I‟m not in the business of giving away freezer space. So it‟s thawed out, ready to cut and sell. And if it don‟t sell, it‟s going in the trash. So I can make you a good deal, Delmar.”

Delmar smiled, “Sticky, you‟re one of the good ones.” He popped a beer for each of them, and handed the bottle to Sticky, taking a long pull from his own. “My boy‟s coming home from school this evening. His first trip back since he left.”

14 “Is that right?” Sticky responded. “I haven‟t seen that boy since you used to bring him over. I remember he didn‟t never even get out of the truck. Scared of the taxidermy.” Sticky pointed with his thumb to the rows of animal heads hanging behind him.

“Sure, he came in here. He used to stand there and holler into that Coke machine of yours and listen to the echo? Remember that, how he used to holler into that old thing, and listen to his echo? That Kenny, boy. You still got that old cooler?”

Sticky pointed the neck of his beer over to the cooler in the corner.

“You sure do. That there‟s it.” Delmar turned back and scanned the trophy heads lined up behind the counter. He started laughing. “Sticky,” he paused and took a deep breath, “you will not believe what happened to me this afternoon. Even after I tell it, you won‟t believe me. But it‟s the God honest truth.”

After Delmar‟s story about the deer, Sticky had to prop himself up against the counter where the cash register sat, and wipe his eyes with his sleeve. He could hardly breathe as Delmar held up his scabbed and bruised elbows as proof.

“You don‟t mean it,” Sticky squealed and hopped in a little circle.

“God honest truth,” Delmar chuckled once, and then leaned his belly up against the counter unable to breathe from laughing so hard.

“I‟d a won,” Sticky wheezed, “I‟d a won that million dollars from the TV if I‟d had a camera.” They drank two more beers and didn‟t talk for another few minutes as they were busy laughing about Delmar trying to cut that buck from behind and getting dumped in the road.

15 As they finished off the last Bud, Sticky tossed the newspaper-wrapped venison steaks up on the counter. “And you don‟t owe me a thing for these on account of you telling me that story. I tell you, I never laughed so hard in my life.”

After the third try, Delmar got his key into the ignition. It had gotten dark on him, and the snow had started to just cover the roadways. The air had started to smell of winter, of wood-smoke, and families. Ginger would be getting worried about then, so Delmar drove a little faster than he should have, but he knew that road like his own driveway, and within an hour he was squeezing between the reflector lights of their driveway and crunching the gravel to their little brick house. The smoke poured out of the chimney, and Delmar rolled down the window to take in the burning smell of seasoned cedar. Kenny‟s car was there, parked out front, and Delmar reached over, crushing the empty bag the beer had been in. His hand slid down the seat into a little puddle of blood that had dripped through the paper from the venison. With the beer gone, that‟s all he had to welcome Kenny home with. Delmar only wished that the meat had stayed cold, and that it hadn‟t bled right through the paper.

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Blue Topping By Jason Githens

There are two main bridges out of Memphis that cross the Mississippi, and Jacob always took what he called the new bridge. His dad, who built roads, called it the I-40. As he drove, the span‟s shadows shot across his car‟s hood and dashboard.

Jacob crossed the river and descended over the wide floodplain on the Arkansas side merging onto I-55, the same trip home he‟d made countless times during college.

Having just graduated, and perhaps making this drive for the last time, he forced significance into the normally small details of the route. He paid closer attention to the nuances of the drive, like the mile markers peppered with buckshot, and the overpass graffiti full of misspelled love. With each year of college he‟d become more disconnected from these expressions of the people he‟d once known, the plains rednecks among whom he‟d once numbered himself.

At the Holland exit, Jacob left the interstate and continued on towards his hometown through a series of switchbacks and lost byways, which cut through fields of cotton, milo, soybeans and rice. The sun hadn‟t even started to set and already the farm bugs were popping against his windshield. Heat rippled from the country blacktop, and the fields ran past him like giant legs. Along the side of the two lane road random dogs missing large swaths of fur panted and watched as if waiting for rides. Jacob scanned

17 the stations on the radio, unable to drop anchor out there in the flatlands of farms and trailer homes and aluminum-siding churches.

Near the end of highway fifty-three, close to home, construction slowed traffic and Jacob watched one of his dad‟s road crews in the distance through the heat and dust. Their day was over, and they were all lighting cigarettes and pulling beer from a cooler. Jacob had always enjoyed that part. What he hated was walking alongside a motor-grader ten hours a day in one-hundred degree heat as a blue-top spotter, which was the only job his dad would ever give him. The surveyors would pound blue stakes into the dirt, and Jacob would follow alongside Charlie on the motor-grader, signaling to him when they‟d unearthed one of those markers, which meant they‟d hit grade.

And then they‟d do it again. It went on for miles, a whole summer‟s worth of that.

As Jacob waited for traffic to move, he looked down at the cap and tassel in his passenger seat. He‟d beaten the odds coming out of this town. He‟d graduated from college, fourteenth in his class. If not for this contract with his dad he‟d be heading West, or to Europe for the summer before starting law school next fall. He‟d not have been stuck in construction traffic in Southeast Missouri. Anything with air conditioning sounded better. Jacob watched the crew. They just stood there in that wet heat talking, leaning against the grader‟s tire, chugging Busch or High Life and tossing the cans on the ground. They were the people who shot road signs with guns and spray-painted overpass love letters to their girls on Valentine‟s Day. Driving past, Jacob recognized Charlie and his distended belly; he could see Martin talking with flailing arms. There was someone new though, whom Jacob could not recognize at all.

18 Jacob and his mom sat waiting in their new kitchen for his dad to get home.

Jacob looked around at the posters of actual artwork framed in gold frames, too thick and gaudy. It made him sad that his parents likely didn‟t even know the names of the artists who‟d painted the originals. His mom had probably just liked the colors. Track lighting ran around the new appliances, which didn‟t seem to Jacob a style that would survive much longer. A girlfriend he‟d had briefly at school, just before graduation, laughed about track lighting, as she knew about things like that. Jacob and his mom watched the news on the small television kitchen with the sound low, and she discreetly touched the steaks every couple of minutes to make sure they hadn‟t gone too cold.

Jacob had spent most of growing up watching his mom fret over the food‟s temperature, hoping his dad would be on time for dinner.

They both heard his dad‟s truck door shut, followed by his whistle as he came into the house. “Hey there, Jake.” Jacob stood up and shook his dad‟s hand.

“Welcome home, Son,” his dad said as they all sat back down. His mom began forking steaks onto their plates. “We‟re proud of you, Jake,” his dad told him, “that was a nice graduation ceremony. Just about the right length if you ask me.” His dad had a soft spot for efficiency.

His parents had expanded the kitchen, and its size enhanced the echoes of silverware on plates making the space feel emptier. “I saw one of your crews out there today, when I was driving in on fifty-three,” Jacob said, “Charlie, and Martin.” Jacob chewed the tough meat and looked up, “And someone I didn‟t know too. Who‟s the new guy?” Jacob could hear faintly from the back bedroom television a game-show so subdued that no one could have been winning.

19 “He‟s from your class, I think.” Jacob‟s dad scanned the table and grabbed the ketchup.

“No, he‟s not,” his mom corrected. “He graduated with Jimmy. He‟s four years older than Jake.” She rolled her eyes at Jacob and shook her head. Jimmy was Jacob‟s older brother who lived up in Alaska and worked on the pipeline.

“His name‟s Sok,” his dad went on, “he‟s one of those Cambodian brothers.

You remember them don‟t you, those Cambodian boys?”

Sok and his two brothers had shown up in town Jacob‟s first year of elementary school. They were refugees, who somehow had ended up in Southeast Missouri living with a Baptist family out on PP highway. They‟d gone to school with Jacob and his brothers. Jacob still remembered the grade school teachers making their classes do projects about Cambodia to better understand the boys‟ culture. There had, however, been no mention at that time of Pol Pot or death camps.

“Yeah, I remember them. I haven‟t thought about them for years.”

“Boy, that Sok‟s strong, and a good worker. It‟s his first summer, and Charlie‟s already got him operating the roller. Best of all, he‟s reliable, which is getting harder and harder to find.”

“It‟s the meth they‟re doing around here is why you can‟t find anybody who‟ll work,” his mom said, looking at something on the wall behind Jacob‟s head.

“Yeah? Has it gotten worse?” Jacob looked at his mom looking past him.

“It‟s awful. And speaking of Sok, his brother was in the police reports last week for possession of drugs,” his mom said as she picked at her face, still looking past her son.

20 “Annie, Jesus. That‟s enough.” Jacob‟s dad hit the table hard with his big fist and the plates jumped. “He passed the drug test I gave him. Charlie would know if he was doing that stuff.” His dad exhaled and shook his head.

“Oh, that doesn‟t prove anything, a drug test?” his mom laughed, removing her eyes from that spot on the wall and looking at her potato. “And I didn‟t say him anyway, I said his brother.”

They finished the steaks, and Jacob‟s dad picked the last charred curl of fat from the serving tray and slurped it from his fingers with his lips. After wiping his hands, he pushed his plate aside and slid in front of him the stack of papers that had been there throughout dinner. They were each semester‟s college bills marked and stacked in reverse-chronological order, with the final semester‟s on top. His dad always did this.

These bills were props that showed up on the dinner table every year on the first night Jacob spent back home from school. His dad put on his reading glasses and flipped through them.

“Tuition went up every year. Lucky for you, summers never got any longer.”

He smiled at his unintentional joke and then got down to business. “I‟m going to put you on Charlie‟s crew again. I got the bridge crew down in Arkansas, which would be too far for you to have to drive every day, I figure.” He looked up from the papers at Jacob. He probably had that written down on the final bill and underlined twice— 6/01/95, Jacob graduates, 6/02/95 Jacob starts on Charlie’s crew.

The next morning the house was quiet except for the drone of the air conditioner. Despite the cool room Jacob could imagine in the backyard the heat that was already gathering. The cheap smell of Folgers drifted into Jacob‟s room from the

21 kitchen. He got up without being told and put on the stiff, stained jeans and once-white shirt his mom had laid out for him. The clothing had captured the cold of the house and pressed cool into his skin as Jacob squeezed into his blue collar costume. He rode with his dad to the shop and went with him up to the office, which still had its orange carpet and perpetual smell of blueprints and ink. His dad turned on NPR, and a quiet but assured voice read out the previous day‟s farm report. Pork bellies were up. Rice and soybeans were down. Everything else had stayed pretty much the same.

“Have a seat,” Jacob‟s dad offered. “Charlie won‟t be here for little bit.”

Jacob sat in the soft orange chair across from his dad‟s big desk. He leaned forward and rolled a miniature tractor across the wood. These had been toys that he‟d never been allowed to play with as a kid, and Jacob still found the die-cast tractors fascinating. Behind his dad on the wall hung a picture of the destroyer his dad had served on in the early days of Vietnam, and next to that a world map stamped into a copper tin.

“Dad, do you remember about Sok and his brothers from the papers, all that they went through to get here? I still can‟t believe they ended here.” Jacob rolled a tractor back and forth on the desk as he spoke.

Jake‟s dad looked up from his day planner where he was writing the day‟s schedule in tidy script. He looked back at the map Jacob was staring at. “To be honest I hadn‟t thought about that. I don‟t think many folks do anymore. Sok seems about as American as can be.” In college Jacob had majored in international studies, and places like Cambodia had assumed a realness he‟d been unable to ascribe to them in high school. Back in high school Sok might as well have come from some fantasy world of a science fiction book; Jacob couldn‟t quite grasp back then how far away or exactly

22 what Cambodia was even though the teachers, when the refugees arrived, had done their best to explain it all. Now he understood with brutal clarity Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. He had an awful vision of what Sok had been through as a child; he had a more enlightened and educated vision than anyone in this soybean farm outpost on the edge of the state‟s bootheel could possibly have.

“It‟s absurd that happened. One-point seven million people died. And what‟s even more infuriating is that we bombed the Khmer Rouge into power. What a waste.

More bombs than we even dropped on Japan. Six-hundred thousand civilians killed by B-52s, not to mention the genocide it resulted in.” Jacob thought of the war photography exhibit he‟d gone to with his Asian Studies class. They had photos of Khmer Rouge prisoners, just as their blindfolds had come off for the first time. No age dominated, as the prisoners ranged from skinny kids to starving old men and women.

Their eyes all looked the same, empty and terrified, each telling the photograph‟s viewer the off-camera terror the prisoners themselves were staring at. There was one picture Jacob could not forget—a young boy, with the blindfold around his neck, holding a tattered doll and smiling up at his captors.

Jacob‟s dad stopped writing and closed the cover on his notebook. He rubbed his eyes. “Jake.” He leaned forward in his chair. “You‟re a smart kid. You did good in college and your mom and I are proud of you. But you have to be careful throwing that kind of blame around. That ship back there in the picture, the one I was on,” his dad pointed with his thumb behind him, “we directed some of those bombers. We provided their coordinates. None of us knew where they were going. And to be honest we didn‟t want to know, and I still don‟t. Maybe they all hit Vietcong, maybe some missed. But like it or not that tiny buffer between us on that boat, and the government—about where

23 those planes were going—makes it so I can still sleep all right. Just be careful using what you learned. Think about it first. I‟m not saying those books or teachers of yours are wrong, but it will help you in life to at least consider how real live people get through things.” Jacob did not look up. He had more facts but didn‟t use them. The woman on the radio started a dispassionate story about the falling price of heartland soybeans.

Charlie‟s truck crunched on the gravel outside. He blew his horn three times, and Jacob and his dad walked quiet down the steps together to meet him. Outside, remnant mosquitoes buzzed around surprised by the faint light of sunrise and Jacob slapped them from his arms and wiped the bloody carcasses on his jeans.

“College boy,” Charlie said as he got out of his truck flicking a cigarette off to the side and then coughing once. “How come you don‟t look no smarter?” Charlie laughed. They shook hands. Charlie had hands like stone, calloused and cracked and rough. He‟d been a Golden Gloves boxer when he was young, but Jacob had never seen Charlie hurt anyone, though he imagined, even in his sixties, he still could if he wanted to. That was one thing Jacob liked about the crew. The solidarity and protection. He never felt safer than when nestled in among these solid men. Nothing bad, Jacob felt, would ever happen to him while in their custody.

“We got our blue topper back,” Jacob‟s dad said to Charlie as he rummaged around in the bed of Charlie‟s truck re-arranging things.

“How have you been?” Jacob asked Charlie.

“You know what, Jake?” Charlie paused and looked around as if making sure no one was around, “I still got that dick-do disease.” Charlie‟s favorite joke, which still made Jacob laugh. “My stomach still sticks out further than my dick do.” Charlie

24 laughed himself into coughing, and lit another cigarette. “Good to have you back with us, Jake.”

Over the years the sun had sculpted Charlie‟s face. His nose was rough, and red veins streaked across its tip like tiny threads of lightning. Hair sprouted from his nose and ears, and curly gray-black hair covered his head underneath a mesh John Deere cap. His forearms bulged and both hosted some faint tattoos that had turned into nearformless smudges of ink. They climbed into the truck and headed off. To Jacob, Charlie had always looked like a rugged Ned Beatty though no one else could really see it.

Martin and Sok waited. They leaned against the huge rear-wheel of the scraper, Martin smoking, Sok staring out at the adjacent soybean fields, not looking up as Charlie and Jacob approached. He‟d gotten big, Sok. His arms bulged from a crisp white t-shirt. A dagger tattoo shot distinct down his smooth skin from under a sleeve.

Sok‟s hair shone, straight and black, and his nose pressed flat against his face as Jacob remembered. His body was wound tight with crafted muscles. Sok walked over and Jacob noticed the intensity in Sok‟s brown eyes. He‟d never noticed that before. One of Sok‟s front teeth was chipped and formed a sharp angle. His skin, however, was flawless. “I‟m Sok.” He extended his hand and Jacob took it. They both squeezed tight, but Jacob let go first.

“I remember you from school,” Jacob smiled at him. Sok nodded but didn‟t smile back. “It‟s good to see you. It‟s been a long time.” Jacob reached to pat Sok on the shoulder. “It‟s good to have you on board.”

25 Sok looked down at Jacob‟s new Redwing boots and then briefly into his eyes.

He clicked his tongue and bobbed his head. “Thanks,” he finally said before turning and walking away.

“There he is,” Martin Jenkins yelled, coming from behind the tractor zipping his pants, and putting out his cigarette on the grader‟s huge tire. “The little college fuck.” Martin congratulated Jacob on his graduating, and then he and Sok scrambled to their machines. In diesel blasts of heat and smoke, with the rumbling of engines as if from some NASCAR race, the day started. Sok drove off on his roller, following Martin and the Terex scraper—a solitary figure against the sunrise, Sok on his machine.

He leaned sideways in the orange light, and rolled away into the dust like a soldier off to the front lines.

That left Charlie and Jacob and the Caterpillar motor-grader sharing the spot vacated by engine noise. “Like your old man said, I guess you‟ll be spotting blue tops for me, Jake. With you back helping, we‟ll be done more than twice as fast as me fussing around by myself.” Charlie climbed up into the tractor with more grace than should have been possible for someone his size and age. The grader‟s engine drowned out all other sounds as Jacob followed alongside the machine, pointing out the blue-top stakes as Charlie planed down the road in single efficient passes of the grader‟s huge blade. Jacob knew Charlie could do this without his spotting. Charlie could do this with his eyes closed.

When they broke for water, Charlie shut off the grader‟s motor, and the road got quiet; Jacob felt numb and his ears were plugged up from the scraper‟s diesel-drone.

“You never even miss a stake, not a one,” Jacob told Charlie though both their ears were ringing and useless.

26 Lighting his cigarette and keeping it between his lips, not touching it with his hands, Charlie smiled through his Indian corn teeth. He poured water on his head and diverted it from the cigarette in his mouth by guiding the water down his face through careful movements of his thick neck.

“You‟re right on top of each one. You never miss a stake,” Jacob repeated.

“Damn right.” Charlie pulled the cigarette from his mouth. He rubbed his belly, “Charlie Harris don‟t ever miss a steak. Really though, I‟m just getting lucky today, Jake. You‟re a good luck charm.”

Jacob smiled. He filled up his fourth cup of water and considered how good cold water tasted when it came from a yellow cooler in a thin paper cone. Nothing tasted or felt better than that.

“Let‟s get down to the holler down there before we take our dinner break.”

Charlie pointed down the road with his cigarette. He adjusted his belt. Charlie looked into Jacob‟s eyes and shook at him the nub that had once been an index finger. “You just keep doing how you‟re doing, hear me? Just keep doing what your doing there, Jake.”

As they rolled down toward the hollow, the blade dipping into the packed dirt and bringing the road to grade with computer precision, Charlie would look down to get the okay from Jacob. Then he‟d wink back and give a thumbs-up before re-focusing with a hawk‟s intensity on the next section. They had a rhythm. Charlie made Jacob feel okay even through the monotonous job.

Jacob watched the blade hit each stake. Robotically he signaled “okay” with thumb and middle finger and they moved on. When he‟d first started working on the road crew before his first year of high school, when a summer job had been novel and

27 liberating, Jacob would grab unused blue top stakes from the bed of Charlie‟s truck.

He‟d chew on them like giant toothpicks. They were as big around as his wrists were at that age. Jacob had liked the components of construction work. He liked the diesel smells of the equipment and eating from the blue Igloo, sandwiches his mom made him. His favorite job had been riding on the water truck tacking down the roadsides after they‟d been seeded and strawed. Enough water shot up from the loose joint of the water cannon that it kept him cool the whole day.

After their last blue top before the bend, Charlie jammed the grader into neutral and lowered the blade to keep the machine from rolling. He stood up with the engine still running. He placed his cigarette near the fly on his jeans and looked down at his belly. He faked alarm and wiggled the smoke. He shouted down to Jacob, “Goddamn dick-do disease got me.” Charlie coughed and smiled. Jacob laughed through the sunscorched pink on his cheeks.

They pulled under a shade tree for lunch, and Sok and Martin drove down from the other end of the road to join them. With the machines quiet, Jacob could hear the distant tractors working surrounding fields. He could hear the random chatter of birds.

And planes from the municipal airport zipped their sounds across the sky as the men loudly chewed their sandwiches. Jacob couldn‟t get comfortable on the ground, and he felt sick from the sun so he ate little and watched the three men who sat three across on a log with Charlie in the middle. Sok explained to Martin why he‟d added nitrous to his car and how fast he could go from zero to sixty now. They talked about the Cardinals and said they needed to get up there to a game some time, but they complained about the drive, which was a good three hours, though Sok said he could make it in two and called Charlie an old man and Martin a girl. They all laughed at

28 that. After forcing one bite from the cooler-cold ham sandwich, Jacob gave up and offered his food to the crew.

Charlie had been doing this for thirty years, and Martin seven. This was Sok‟s first but he seemed to fit in, and he seemed comfortable. Jacob felt sorry for the men as he watched them rustle around in his cooler and eat his food and talk about what the Cardinals‟ playoff pitching-rotation should be if they made it that far. Martin picked up a rock and showed Sok how a knuckleball worked, and then wished out loud that the Cardinals had signed a knuckleballer.

“But then you‟d need a catcher who could catch him, so you‟d have to find one of those too,” Charlie explained. “I would like to get up to a game this year.”

These men‟s lives would spin around inside the invisible fence of this region, bounded by Memphis to the south and St. Louis to the north, until they woke in bed dead or until something killed them. Jacob thought of the air-conditioned, marblefloored halls of law school, and the way that massive library smelled. He thought of the world he planned to travel and see. Martin and Charlie would be fine here. This life was likely all they needed. But Jacob felt Sok had been robbed of something, as if he didn‟t even remember or care to think about where he‟d come from or what he‟d been through. Jacob watched Sok eat and savor some peanut candy he‟d found in Jacob‟s cooler, and wondered if Sok would ever want to talk about what it had been like, or if he even remembered.

Before they broke from lunch, Martin and Charlie picked slow paths into the woods after simultaneously declaring they needed to take dumps. Sok and Jacob remained in the shade, together and alone.

29 “You played football with my brother Jim.” Jacob turned his head to Sok who was still eating the chocolate covered peanuts, but spitting the nuts out on the ground.

“Yeah. Your brother—he was a good teammate. I liked him.”

“So, how are your brothers doing?”

“Little A, he‟s in some trouble. Rangsey works for Briggs on the floor. He‟s got two little babies now.” Sok cracked little sticks between his fingers and looked down at his boots. Sweat dripped from his straight black hair onto his jeans.

“How long have you been here now? Lived here I mean.” Jacob focused his eyes on the huge air valve of the scraper‟s tire.

“I don‟t know. A long time.” Sok counted on his fingers. “Fifteen years.

Man.” He squinted into the sun.

“Ever think about leaving?”

Sok turned his head slow at the flatness of every direction. “There‟s nowhere to go. There aren‟t many jobs here, but still we all found pretty good ones. Our family is here.”

“I remember when you guys first came.”

“Yeah.”

“You know, I took a class last semester,” Jacob tossed a dirt clod against the grader‟s wheel. “We studied Cambodia.” Jacob cocked his head to pickup the intonation of Sok‟s response, to gauge his interest.

“Yeah.” Sok snapped twigs and spit peanuts fast onto the ground but didn‟t look up at Jacob. Sok looked into the woods where Charlie and Martin had disappeared and then up at a passing plane.

30 “Do you think you‟ll ever go back? It‟s better over there now.” Jacob looked over at Sok who continued tracking with his brown eyes a plane. He had a small stubble of a beard on his chin, long black hairs that bent in the breeze.

Sok leaned forward on his knees and a breeze blew in gentle waves through the trees‟ summer leaves. Another plane buzzed far off. A dog barked once and split the heat. Sok seemed to be nodding, or rocking. Jacob couldn‟t tell. Sok stood up and said, “What do you think, man? I don‟t really want to talk about that, okay?” He dusted off the back of his jeans and climbed up on his roller. He didn‟t look back.

Jacob looked at nine wet peanuts in the dirt.

The road began to take form. Jacob followed alongside Charlie in a numb, daily lockstep with the huge machine. His skin got dark. He lost the college beer weight.

Few days were interrupted by rain so they marched on and made the road. As the summer progressed, the crew worked more often on the same end of the bypass and they always had lunch together. At noon they‟d stop and eat under that same patch of shade provided by a small grove of poplars, which grew around an ancient rusted Packard.

After lunch one Friday in July, Martin finished Jacob‟s sandwich and got to talking about the river party Jacob‟s dad was going to have for the men. “So your daddy said he‟s having a fish fry out at your river house at the end of the summer.

That‟ll be real nice. Said he‟d put his boat in for us. I‟d like to try that wakeboarding.”

“If I ever take over,” Jacob replied, “I‟ll have a cookout and buy beer every Friday for all of you.” Jacob wadded up the wrapper from the sandwich his mother had made him and tossed it in his dinner bucket.

31 “Could you take over tomorrow then?” Charlie asked, raising a big eyebrow.

“After I see the world a little, I may come back to the company,” Jacob replied, his words measured and serious. On his elbows, he leaned back against the slight slope of the roadside ditch. “Then we‟ll see about getting those barbecues started.” Jacob smiled at the crew.

“I‟ll be dead of cancer by then.” Charlie laughed and lit a cigarette.

“You‟d really do that, have a barbecue each Friday?” Martin asked, after looking for a couple of minutes like he‟d been imagining such a thing coming true.

“You bet, Martin. And I‟d make you a foreman. And Sok too.” Jacob regretted that as he said it.

Sok laughed and shook his head, and the men laughed with him. Charlie got up to pee and tapped Jacob‟s head as he walked by. “You‟d make a fine boss, Jake, for somebody. Someday.” After the brief shared laugh, and as Charlie walked away, they all just sat around quiet, smoking, and looking past the machinery out into the long rows of the soybean field. The water tower extended up in the distance, and it had something new spray-painted on it, but no one could make out what it said. Trying to guess at least got them thinking about something else, but that soon turned into engine talk and baseball and Jacob had nothing to offer on those subjects.

Sok got moved to the bridge crew for a couple of weeks, and Martin, Charlie and Jacob struggled through lunch for things to talk about. Jacob tried to explain the fraternity system to the guys, and they tried to get him interested in baseball. As those conversations went nowhere, that left only Sok for discussion, and the men didn‟t much want to talk about him either.

32 “It‟s just that it seems so strange to me that he ended up here, in this town,” Jacob explained over lunch. “It‟s strange that he‟s stuck here too.”

“I don‟t see that he‟s stuck here,” Charlie observed.

“But he doesn‟t even seem to want to go back, at all, or even talk about it. I think it would help him if he would just talk about it.”

“Look, Jake,” Charlie‟s shoulders slouched as he looked up in the air for words, “I know it‟s an interesting subject, that boy‟s life. I remember the stories in the papers too, probably better than you do. Now I know from working with him that he‟s tried the best he can, aside from obviously being born foreign, to become nothing but American. And if that‟s what he wants to be, you can‟t go digging into places that hurt that boy.”

“I just don‟t think you can forget where you‟re from like that. I mean, don‟t you think your roots are important? He should want to know more about where he‟s from. I wonder if those Baptists that adopted him convinced him otherwise. You don‟t just want to forget all about where you‟re from like that, you don‟t.”

Charlie, sitting on the log, leaned forward on his knees and looked at the ground. Martin started laughing. He pointed his cigarette at Jacob. “Now that‟s funny coming from you, Jake.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“It‟s just funny, hearing you talk about forgetting where you‟re from. I‟ve never seen folks more ready to head off somewhere else than you.”

Charlie stood up, dusted off his ass, and ordered Jacob and Martin to work on different ends of the road.

33 The first day Sok came back, they all gathered around Charlie‟s truck after work and drank cheap beer from cans. Jacob watched Sok blend in with the men, and listened to Sok speak, noticing how much his slight accent had been subsumed by the construction-work voice. Sok told them a story about jumping into the creek to get the foreman‟s dinner bucket, which had fallen off into the creek under the bridge deck he‟d been tying rebar on for the past couple of weeks.

“I knew that water had snakes in it.” Sok winced. “But I didn‟t know they were poisonous. I didn‟t know about water moccasins. But when I got out with Parrot‟s lunch box, and everyone was looking out me like I was crazy, they told me. And I didn‟t tell them that I didn‟t know the snakes were poisonous. I just shrugged.” Sok laughed in the high pitched way that he did. Martin slapped Sok on the back and fished him out another beer. Sok walked with a slight strut that Jacob had never seen before, to the edge of the road where he tossed his half full beer far into the adjacent field. He grunted when he threw it, and then he yelped a little, before coming back to the men‟s circle.

“I heard Parrot Owens talking about that at the shop. He thinks you‟re some kind of brave. But I won‟t tell that asshole the truth, ever. That‟s a good one, Sok,” Martin lit a cigarette and laughed, snapping his lighter closed on the grader tire. He handed the cold beer he‟d pulled from the cooler to Sok, who opened and drank in fast and loud gulps.

Jacob drank fast his fourth beer, which made his head light. He crumpled the can, threw it on the ground where they piled up beer cans, and grabbed from the cooler another one.

“Damn, Jake, slow down,” Martin said as he handed Jacob his fifth beer.

34 “I‟m fine, Martin,” Jacob said looking right into Martin‟s eye as he popped the beer tab. A little foam sprayed in Martin‟s direction, and Martin laughed but stopped when Jacob didn‟t laugh with him. This was their life out here—stories and beer— and that‟s it, Jacob thought. And Sok had become just like them. Didn‟t he ever think about where he‟d come from? Did he wonder about his own culture? Did he even know about the food? Jacob looked at the three of them as they all eyed him from their perch on the truck‟s open tailgate. They moved slowly into one of their baseball talks without bothering to include him.

Jacob leaned against the grader tire and chugged his beer. He dropped the empty can in the dirt and said, staring at Sok, “I‟m sure you‟ve seen worse than snakes though, huh, Sok?” He‟d interrupted some inane conversation the men were having about how homeruns killed rallies, and they looked at him surprised, sitting dumbly on the truck bed dangling their legs. “I can‟t even imagine what it must have been like to have to leave your country the way you did. To end up here. I can‟t imagine. Those snakes must have been nothing compared to that, huh?”

Sok stared at him. The beer in his hand shook. Charlie stood up and walked toward Jacob, stopping halfway between Jacob and the truck. His face had a serious look, like a mask. It didn‟t look like the Charlie most people knew. The humor had been tucked away. “Jake.” Charlie shook his head.

“It‟s just a question, Charlie.” Jacob leaned to the side to look around Charlie, at Sok. Sok crushed the can in his hand. Martin held Sok‟s arm. “It‟s just a question.”

“Jake that‟s enough with the questions all right, son?”

35 On the twenty-seventh day without rain, in late July, and with the road‟s grade carved and complete, ready for its first coat of black tar, Jacob walked down the shadeless road picking up roots and sticks. The sun played with the humidity and entertained itself by rippling waves on the road. Only single engine planes from the nearby airport produced sound and then only in distant buzzes. One month was left, and then he‟d be in his new apartment in St. Louis, starting law school at Washington University. Jacob imagined each root he threw as a test he‟d taken or a book he‟d bought as an undergraduate. They piled up in the roadside ditch, his education becoming mounds of discarded sticks. The debt was almost paid. Jacob had gotten financial aid for law school; he did not want to be a twenty-five year old lawyer out there hopping blue tops.

Far enough from the crew to not be seen, he put on headphones, which they weren‟t supposed to use, and picked root wads to a drum solo so endless that it seemed devoid of hope.

Jacob didn‟t see the roller until it passed a foot from his right side and left him in a choke of dust. The dirt and fumes burned his eyes as the sun seemed to drift away and leave the road in darkness. Jacob looked up to the silhouette of Sok on the machine. He didn‟t slow the roller down; Sok didn‟t even look back. Jacob licked dust from his teeth and spit out sticky globs of mud. He gripped tight the heavy stick in his hand. Jacob squeezed and launched the branch. It rotated end over end through the dust cloud. It passed between the earth and the dust-choked sun as a black sliver. It fell, from the sky, into an impossible thump against Sok‟s head. Jacob had only meant to hit the tractor, yet impossibly he‟d hit Sok, who writhed and held the back of his head with both hands as he stopped the machine. Sok emitted a sustained howl, which

36 caused the hairs to stand up on Jacob‟s neck and generated in Jacob an instant nausea of fear.

Jacob turned to run towards Charlie‟s truck, which he could see just around the curve in the road. He couldn‟t work his legs into a run. Running meant guilt, so Jacob walked fast away from the roller, which he heard idling behind him. Jacob scrambled for an explanation, but none came to mind. He heard footsteps and turned as Sok‟s punch caught him in the mouth. Jacob took two steps back before his knees gave and dropped him to the ground. The blood in his mouth, made thick by dust and textured with a piece of tooth, had a metallic taste, as if Jacob was sucking on a small rusty screw. It somehow didn‟t seem as hot out, down in the dirt like that. Jacob shivered.

The boot went deep into his stomach and Jacob felt he would vomit up his lunch, but he kept it down. It had been a good sandwich his mom had made him that day, pimento cheese, and he kept it down.

Jacob curled up in the road‟s dirt and covered his head as he waited for it to be over. He heard a truck pull up and slide to a hard stop. A door opened and didn‟t slam.

A terrific heave of grunts, and a shuffle of boots. Charlie yelled, “What is going on?

No. You stop. You stop. You . . . stop. You go on home. Get. Goddammit.” Charlie yelled at Sok like a dog. Don‟t do that, Jacob thought. Don‟t do that, Charlie. It‟s okay. Another shuffle of boots, Sok howled, but Charlie maintained control. Jacob could not even open his eyes. He thought he would cry but he didn‟t, at first. Jacob trembled and waited for Charlie to help him up.

With Sok gone Jacob finally opened his eyes. The sun pounded white. Tears came. There were no sounds. Jacob wanted to wipe his eyes of tears and dirt, but his sleeves and hands were too covered in dust to touch his own face. Jacob could hear

37 Charlie breathing hard. He heard him flick open his lighter. Jacob could smell the butane and then the tobacco smoke. A distant car started, and its tires squealed on the pavement. That left the only sound of Charlie‟s heavy breathing after regular puffs on his cigarette. Jacob couldn‟t move and he listened to the crunch of gravel under Charlie‟s boots as they moved toward him. “Jacob,” Charlie finally asked his voice thin and light as if made of smoke, “you all right, son?” Charlie leaned over and helped Jacob up. He held the cigarette in his lips as he wiped the muck from Jake‟s eyes with oily thumbs. As Jacob‟s eyes were cleared, he could see Charlie‟s face up close.

Charlie‟s hat had come off, and his cheeks and eyes were red. He did not even attempt to smile.

“It‟s over, son,” Charlie told Jacob without removing the cigarette from his lips, “Let‟s get some water on those cuts.” Charlie shuffled towards his truck, stopping once to pop his back. Charlie filled a cone with water, and without turning around to face him, he waited for Jacob to come get it.

38

The Lawn Mower By Jason Githens

Cody hated doing the Doctor‟s lawn. Its blue and ryegrass blend made for dense turf that always stalled his equipment and not an hour into the job the heavy grass had locked up his new commercial-grade mower. Cody had the machine wheeled over into the back lot‟s only shade, a narrow respite provided by the estate‟s granite patio. Up until the past spring, there had been several elder oaks gracing the back lot with cover, but their twisted trunks and limbs had intimidated the Doctor‟s new wife, so she‟d had them all removed. From the shade Cody looked out across the massive yard, which was only a quarter mowed. He listened to a megaphone crackle from the nearby football field as the coach barked out drills for summer practice.

Cody flipped the mower over and started picking clumps of grass from the jammed blade; he breathed in the sticky air, which had fused with the mower‟s sweet gasoline fumes. As he yanked on the jammed blade and mouthed silent cuss words, he felt sweat drip into his sun-cracked lips. It stung. He gritted his teeth, which hurt because of a loose filling that he‟d left unfixed all summer. Having invested all of his summer‟s profits into that new mower, Cody couldn‟t afford the dentist‟s rates.

His girlfriend Theresa had given up on understanding Cody‟s plan. She‟d supported him when he quit college ball, when he couldn‟t make the grades. She‟d

39 moved back with him from Jonesboro after he dropped out of school. Without complaining she‟d continued on with nursing school at the local community college instead of at Arkansas State‟s four year program where she‟d had a full scholarship and ranked high in her class. She‟d even helped him design the signs for his landscaping business when he‟d first come up with the idea. But she‟d run out of patience. Cody figured she was tired of being broke.

“Are you planning on mowing lawns the rest of your whole life?” she‟d stormed out to ask when Cody had pulled up to the house the previous week with the new mower in the back of his pickup.

“Theresa, it‟s a landscaping business. Requires capital spenditures.”

“Capital what? Cody, it‟s mowing lawns is what it is. Period.” Theresa had run off again to her mom‟s place just across the state line in Pocahontas, and he hadn‟t heard from her since, though she‟d called and hung up on him a couple of times.

He‟d bought that mower mainly for his best customer, for the Doctor‟s thick and huge yard, which had always tortured the taffy and glass muscles in Cody‟s back.

Earlier that summer, Cody had pleaded with the Doctor to take a look at his back, which was really causing him to wince even when he coughed, or wiped sweat from his forehead with his shirt sleeve.

“Cody, you don‟t ignore scoliosis this bad. You‟re what, twenty two? Now it‟s almost too late for simple exercises. Surgery might not even do much but aggravate it further. Didn‟t your folks or at least your coach get you checked out, son?” The Doctor had run his big thumb down Cody‟s curving spine, over and over in awe. No one had ever told Cody his back wasn‟t growing right. But he‟d never told

40 anyone how much it hurt him either. So to the Doctor‟s prognosis, he‟d only shrugged. He didn‟t have insurance to do much about it, and Cody could tough out most anything.

Cody freed the blade and turned the mower back over. He ripped the cord, which made his back burn and throb so much that it scared him even to breathe too deep. The mower wouldn‟t start. He yanked and yanked that cord, but nothing. It was nearly noon. That night the Doctor and his new wife were having their annual summer party, which required a perfect lawn. Cody kicked the mower and cussed a bit too loud, and his voice echoed across the endless surface of the granite patio.

The screen door opened, and Cody heard ice cubes rattling in a glass. He heard the Doctor sigh deeply and yawn, which was followed by the plastic pops of the doctor‟s old joints as he stretched. Cody heard him shuffle across the patio and stand above where Cody had squeezed himself and the mower. The Doctor wore a white robe and Cody could see, looking up, not four feet over his head, the doctor‟s pink part surrounded by bushy white hair, dangling from the depths of the robe. It looked like some animal remnant that had floated downstream from a hunting camp, tangled up in the milk threads of a trout line. Cody focused harder on the mower, pretending not to have noticed the Doctor at all.

“Troubles, Cody?” the Doctor yelled down in his thick Southern accent, which came and went depending on the occasion. Talking to Cody was generally an occasion for the Doctor to lay it on thick. The ice rattled. Cody would not look up, but he could picture the Doctor‟s puffed up white hair, that beard, those big hands that delivered babies and played the piano and had confirmed just how messed up Cody‟s lower back was. In a different era, the Doctor would have commanded sailing

41 ships, or run a plantation. His presence alone made Cody‟s stomach roll, and the Doctor‟s voice had a way of bending back Cody‟s ears.

“Just stuck a little, the blade.” Cody had turned the mower back over, and he made a show of rotating the blade as if he knew exactly what he was doing. He did not work well when someone, anyone, looked over his shoulder. It made him want to start smoking all over again when people did that. And the Doctor had told him his back would not feel any better as long he continued to smoke.

“New equipment, looks like. John Deere. Nothing runs like a Deere.” The Doctor laughed and coughed.

“First time I‟ve had her out,” Cody replied without looking up.

“And she‟s stalled already?”

“She‟s locked up good.”

Scattered birds sang through the heavy morning. A single engine plane flew over, and both Cody and the Doctor watched it bank and turn and disappear. After an excited and inspirational flurry, the megaphone stopped and football practice ended.

“Cody, you still going with that pretty black girl?”

“Theresa?” Cody stopped working and looked up. “More or less.” His heart jumped around loose in his chest as he stopped working the mower‟s blade, and looked up into the summer glare at the Doctor. He thought about Theresa‟s face and how when she got really focused on something, like mending a plant, or reading a recipe, her tongue would stick out just a little. “Why do you ask?” Cody finally inquired of the Doctor.

The Doctor squatted down on his old knees, and pulled a blade of grass from the rose bed, flicking it out with a clump of dirt into the yard. “No reason, really.

42 Just making conversation is all.” The Doctor took a loud sip and the ice cubes rattled lighter, fast getting small in the heat. “Guests start coming in at six,” the Doctor stood up. “The front‟s not even started yet, Cody.”

“I know, Doc.” Cody restrained his voice. The Doctor could turn fast on a verbal slight. He could get nasty. Cody looked for cables to pull off and clean, but this mower was too sleek to expose anything obvious for Cody to work on so he looked for screws to loosen but couldn‟t find any of those either. Everything required a special tool. So he just kept picking at the grass and spinning the blade. “Likely I‟ll run it back up to Grand‟s to exchange it. It‟s not but a few hours old, and it‟s already shot. Likely that‟s what I‟ll do.”

The plane circled back around for another pass, and they both watched again until it disappeared into a solitary thunderhead.

“Well,” the Doctor spoke loudly, “the wife called me from her walkabout phone from up there at the store. Said it was Mad Max crowded, as she likes to say.

Said the exchange line was so long she decided not to return the radio we bought that quit working. She‟s just going to buy another one, and we‟ll pitch the broken one, I guess.”

“Doc,” Cody wiped the his forehead with his sleeve, “I‟ll take care of this like you pay me to do.”

“You might want to use the manual mower out in the shed. The push one.”

The Doctor held his drink out to the direction of the new shed, which had been built as an exact miniature replica of the house.

“Thanks for offering, but that would take me a week, and I‟ve only got „til six.

I‟ll get it all done.”

43 The Doctor gulped his drink and spit an ice cube into the yard. He exhaled a loud sigh.

“It sure looks different with those trees gone doesn‟t it? I guess I‟ll never get used to it.” As the Doctor walked back towards the screen door he said back over his shoulder, “Folks start coming at six, Cody. Six o‟clock this evening.”

Cody loaded the mower into his pickup and drove up to Grand‟s. Taking back roads because his tags were expired, he passed his small rental house with its sagging roof and tall grass. Theresa‟s car had not come back, so Cody drove by her best friend Linda‟s place, but her car wasn‟t parked over there either. Usually she didn‟t stay gone this long. He leaned over the wheel to take some pressure off of his back, and he drove on to Grand‟s, wishing he‟d called back when Theresa had hung up on him one of those times. He knew better than to ignore her reaching out. She could get serious about leaving when he didn‟t call her back at her mom‟s. And they had that big swimming tournament down there too, which meant a lot of boys in town cruising the strip. If not for the Doctor‟s yard, Cody would have pointed the truck south right then and headed on across the Arkansas border. Instead though, he found a parking spot at the end of Grand‟s lot. Due to the big summer sale, he had to park some three hundred yards from the front door, across a sea of blacktop that rippled heat. Not even the plastic parking-lot flags rustled, with no breeze to rustle them.

Cody pushed the mower inside the door, and the air conditioning hit him as if God had heard Cody‟s prayers.

“Quit on me,” he told the old man at the door who wore a blue vest with various buttons pinned to it, from the myriad clubs he belonged to.

44 “Go on back to Exchanges then if you have your receipt.” The old man waved him past, but as Cody got the mower moving the man held up his hand.

“Whoa. Smells like gasoline coming from there?” The man leaned down to look, as if unsure what exactly it was that Cody was bringing into the store.

“It‟s a mower. It runs on gas. And it‟s broke,” Cody explained, stopping only out of respect for the man‟s age and title. Normally he‟d just push past a minor deterrence like that when the clock ticked up against a deadline. But Cody knew the greeter; he‟d even sat next to him at the letterman awards dinner three years ago up at the old Grecian Steak House. The old greeter had shoved gristle into narrow plastic silverware bags that night and told Cody with a wink that he always took something home to his cats. The old man‟s mind had started slipping back then and hadn‟t gotten any better. The greeter used to sell insurance to local churches. Cody looked at the man‟s vacant brown eyes and felt bad for him so he stopped without making it an ordeal.

“I‟m real sorry, fella,” the man explained, “but you can‟t bring gasoline into the store.” The old man held firm. He pointed to a sign behind him that had various animated catastrophes circled and lined out with red. “I‟m real sorry, son.”

“I‟ll just run out and dump the gas. If I dump the gas, then we don‟t have a problem, right?”

“Now you‟re catching on, fella.” The old man patted Cody firm on the shoulder, sticking his tongue a little past his lips, and trying to wink but blinking both eyes instead.

Cody had a feeling that the old man could pull off all sorts of subtle nastiness by hiding it with that sagging face and that mind that he may or may not have been

45 losing. Turning the mower around, Cody eased towards the door, but moved on to Exchanges when the old man became enthralled with a fat toddler leaving with his mother, mom and son each holding cheeseburgers from the food court, the mother laughing at the old man trying to pull the sandwich from the little boy‟s grip. He‟d stuff it in a little plastic bag if you didn‟t watch him. With the distraction, Cody escaped. He‟d lost forty-five minutes on the Doctor‟s lawn, and the line was long enough to make his stomach hurt.

Cody lined up. He counted twelve people in front of him, and just one woman working the desk. Cody sized up the people in line, wondering who‟d give him the most trouble if he cut. He looked at their items. No one would lose a job if a GI Joe fighter jet didn‟t get returned, or a silver toaster, or a stack of plastic dishes in rainbow colors. No one would lose the biggest job they had, the one that kept them in a truck and a rental home, if they didn‟t get their frizz-free hair dryer, or kiwiflavored shampoo returned. Cody had work to do. He had a job. He rolled the mower back and forth from nerves, and inadvertently bumped the woman‟s ankle in front of him. She whipped her head back to glare at him, and raised her ankle up to rub it with her hand. She turned back mumbling something about having “a bad ankle,” and that Cody needed to “pay some more attention to his self.”

“Ma‟am, I‟m real sorry,” Cody replied. She didn‟t respond. “Ma‟am, I really am sorry,” he said louder. A voiceless song played from high up in the store‟s rafters.

Cody could smell fresh doughnuts being brought out from the bakery. Something in aisle sixteen had just gone on sale, a voice announced. A kid screamed, a man yelled, and then the store rolled back over into its comfortable hum. The woman continued to ignore Cody, shaking her head, muttering in an indignant cadence, pulling three

46 times her fat foot from pink sandals to examine the ankle, which didn‟t even have a mark. Cody clinched his teeth through the pain of his loose filling. His heart pounded. He rolled the mower back and forth faster. “Did you not hear me say I‟m sorry?” Cody asked loud enough for the folks in line to look back, four people deep.

Her neck turned red, but still she rocked back and forth, refusing to respond or turn around. He clipped her ankle with the mower again, harder, but not intentionally.

Nerves made him push that mower back and forth and her ankle had slid back in its way.

She turned back then but didn‟t look at him. She had tears in her eyes and she hopmeped on one foot, her entire body rippling under a loose pink outfit. She howled up to the rafters, “There‟s gas in that thing. He‟s brung gas into the store. There‟s children in here. He‟s harassing people with this equipment.” The whole time she hopped around, holding her ankle, pointing with her free hand at the mower, and refusing to look at it or at Cody.

Through his clenched teeth Cody shook his head at the woman, and muttered, “No, no, no, no.” Veins popped out in his neck. He could feel them. He wanted to throw her to the ground. She continued to hop around and whimper and the line began circling around Cody and the mower. The woman at the counter struggled to make her walkie-talkie work. The store was finally paying him some attention. She hopped and whimpered until Cody, quaking, finally screamed, “Shut up. Just shut up.

You ain‟t hurt!”

From the rafters, a voiceless Country Road chimed through its artificial notes, and for a brief moment commerce stopped. Cody rolled the mower out the exit as behind him the store resumed slowly its flow. He heard the woman squealing about

47 how they needed to call the, “Po-leece.” No one followed him. Surely they all knew it was an accident. And they can‟t let you not return a lawnmower just for hollering at some hysterical lady dressed all in pink, so all he needed to do was dump the gas and they‟d take it back, no question. Cody knew of some stripped land behind the store where he could dump the gas. He thought of the small stream that ran back there. He used to wade in that stream years and years ago as a boy.

Cody pushed the mower across the store‟s endless front, past a machine pushing hundreds of shopping carts, and past a quarter-operated carousel spinning zombie-like kids in slow circles. One kid hollered over and over that he wanted to ride the fish, that he hated riding the tiger every time. Cody passed stacks of plastic pools and imagined one out in his yard, filled with cold water, a beer-stocked cooler within arm‟s reach.

Looking back towards the door, he could see that no one had followed him. A police cruiser circled the lot slowly but then headed out to the traffic light on sixtyseven. From the same exit Cody had fled, he saw the Doctor‟s young wife emerge, deeply tanned and dressed in all white, wearing a big sun hat. She was leading a procession of bag boys out to her car, three carts, all full of stuff for the party, mostly unprepared meats. How many people came to that thing? How much could they all eat? Cody counted out on his hand the hours he had left to finish their yard. It was going to be really close, so he stopped at a payphone to call his buddy Chess.

“Chess. Boy, I‟m glad I got you. I‟m doing the Doctor‟s yard today and my new John Deere quit on me. I was wondering if you could do me a huge favor and go over with your mower and start on the front while I get this one exchanged up at Grand‟s?” Cody had followed Chess‟s blocks to a team rushing record their senior

48 year, three years ago, and Cody still liked to think he could count on his former left tackle.

“Cardinals game‟s on, Code. It‟s tied in the eighth.”

“Well, after the game?” Cody stayed calm. Even as big and tough as Chess was, raised voices hurt his feelings, which was why he hadn‟t been able to make it in college ball as those coaches were always screaming at him. If Chess started responding sure, sure, it meant I will not respond to you for several days until I feel okay about you hollering at me. Encouraging Chess had always proven a delicate matter.

“After the game, sure. I guess, but--” Chess paused.

“I‟ll split the money with you, dude. Down the middle split for a quarter of the work. It‟s the Doctor‟s place. They have that big ass party of theirs tonight. It‟s real good money.”

Chess ate some chips, which crunched through the payphone‟s receiver.

“After the game, I‟ll load up and head over,” he said with his mouth full.

Cody stopped himself from saying can’t you just go now and listen to the game on the radio? Instead he said to his old teammate, “I got to dump this gas so they‟ll exchange this broke mower, and then I‟ll head back and start working too.

You‟ll go on over right after the game then, right after?”

“Code—I said I would, right after the game.”

“I‟ll see you there then, okay?”

A long pause followed, and Cody heard the crowd cheering over the phone on the TV. Chess finally said, “Edmonds about hit one out. About three foot short.

49 Damn.” Chess took a long drink of something and burped into the phone. “Sure, Code, you know I‟ll help however I can.”

Cody hung up, forcing himself to have faith that Chess would come through like he used to every Friday night during high school. Counting on Chess anymore though was like hoping your prayers were actually going somewhere and being listened to. Only at least with Chess you had a chance. And with that chance, Cody could keep his heart and nerves under control. He pushed the mower faster to get it to the back, to dump that gas, to finish the job he‟d been paid to do. His legs hurt. His back. When do most people start feeling that old and worn out?

When Cody turned the corner, a young black kid in uniform stood leaning up against the wall. As Cody‟s eyes adjusted to the different light on that side of Grand‟s, he could tell the guard was big in the neck and arms; his biceps were accentuated by the rolled up sleeves of his uniform. A blue hat squeezed onto the guard‟s head, and big sunglasses sat on his wide nose. The guard pulled the sunglasses off and wiped them clean with his pants pocket. He rolled a toothpick back and forth in his mouth, and walked up to Cody. The guard positioned himself in such a way that the mower was not to go any further. “I know you.” The guard shook his finger, and smiled. “You‟re Cody Banks. I know you.”

Cody studied the boy‟s face. The kid had his jersey number, Cody‟s old twenty-eight, pinned to his collar. Only a sophomore and this kid Owen Jenkins was already setting records, with people already guessing he would end up at Nebraska, Oklahoma or maybe even Texas. Cody had seen the kid play when he and Chess had attended a single game last year. Cody had sat quiet in the bleachers next to Chess watching Jenkins rush almost untouched for two hundred and fifty yards. At one

50 point one of the booster club members leaned forward to pat Cody on the shoulder.

“He‟s sure doing your old number proud, Cody.” He and Chess left before the game ended, and had never gone to another one. They never even talked about football anymore. But there was no doubt this kid had serious talent, and Cody smiled a little at being recognized by him.

“Jenkins right? I know you too. Saw you play in that Dexter game last season.”

“We open with them again this year. You coming?”

“I hardly doubt it. Too busy working.” Cody resumed pushing the mower and tried to skirt Jenkins.

Jenkins moved to the side, blocking Cody‟s path, persisting his stupid smile, and rolling the toothpick from side to side in his wide mouth. “Where you going with that equipment, Banks?”

“Cody. My name‟s Cody.”

The walkie-talkie crackled with the voice of the woman from the Return and Exchange desk. “You find him, Owen?” the voice asked. Jenkins turned down the volume, and waved off the woman‟s voice with his big hands. “Bitch is crazy.” As he looked at Cody, his eyes darted from side to side as if he were waiting for a hole to open up in the offensive line. Those eyes moved back and forth so much Cody looked behind him expecting to be surrounded by a whole SWAT team, but nobody at all was back there. That‟s just how Jenkins‟s eyes did. Jenkins stepped back and looked Cody up and down. “What are you doing man? What are you doing out here in this hot-as-hell parking lot with some broke-ass mower?”

51 “I‟m just taking it back to my truck.” Cody attempted to roll the mower around Jenkins. But Jenkins sidestepped and blocked him.

“Where‟d you park? I‟ll help you load it up.” That goddamn toothpick rolled back and forth from one side of those white teeth to the other. “Mules players always help each other out. And look here,” Jenkins pointed to his collar, “I wear your old number.” He smiled big showing all his teeth.

Through the kid‟s sunglasses, Cody could see his own reflection. His hard, square jaw had softened. His hair rested like bundles of fine, wet thread against his head. Squinting into the sun he could see how bad his eyes were starting to wrinkle, and he was not even twenty two yet. Cody heard his mom‟s voice talking in his head.

“You come from a long line of men, your father included, who lived too hard and flamed out too fast. Don‟t you do that too, son. You go out and be better than all them,” Cody‟s mom had told him the night of graduation when they were celebrating by splitting a case of Bud on the trailer‟s back porch. It was probably the nicest thing she‟d ever told him, and it wasn‟t so much the words but how soft they‟d come out.

But then she started talking about how the first thing Cody needed to do to help himself was “stop dating that colored girl. Those people are not of the right temperament for a Banks man.” That‟s when he‟d thrown a half-empty beer at his mom‟s head and just missed and driven off. She screamed at him to never come back until he was done with that black girl. And he hadn‟t gone back to his mom‟s house since. In three years. They talked on the phone during the holidays, but always ended up in a fight when Theresa‟s name came up.

“Truck‟s back there,” Cody said lowering his eyes from Jenkins‟s sunglasses, and pointing towards the back of the lot. “And I don‟t need no help.” Jenkins moved

52 out of the way enough to show he believed him. They walked together away from the main parking lot, the heat pounding on the blacktop. Cody could see sweat pouring from under Jenkins‟s hat, little streams that wouldn‟t quit. They‟d only walked several feet when Jenkins asked again, “Shit, man, where‟d you park anyway?”

Cody didn‟t answer. He kept pushing the mower, as fast as he could go. His back felt on the verge of spasm and lock up but Cody pushed on. Theresa was always telling him, “How long you think you can go on doing this work? You‟re not getting any younger, Cody. Your back is a mess. The Doctor even told you that.”

“You still come to games much?” Jenkins looked over at Cody as they walked together, slower.

“I don‟t. Don‟t have the time to,” Cody answered not looking over.

“Summer practice is a bitch, especially when you got to work a job too.

Mama‟s on disability, and it ain‟t enough. Even my little brother Terrell‟s got a job cleaning up neighbor‟s houses. He ain‟t but twelve years old. And I got practice, school come fall, and this damn job.”

“World‟s a hard place. I got a back that‟s about wore out, and have a landscaping business that demands about sixty hours a week, which I do all myself.

Now that‟s work.” Cody paused and looked at Jenkins‟s nametag, flipping it with his finger. “That‟s real work.” Cody snickered.

“Oh this ain‟t my life, this job. Shit. I just hope I don‟t never get hurt. I‟m about the only chance my family got.”

“Yeah, maybe so.” Cody resumed pushing the mower, his lower back on fire.

They walked about ten more feet before Jenkins laughed, “Where in the hell are you going, man?” Like it was all some huge joke.

53 Cody picked up his pace and Jenkins matched his stride. Suddenly, Jenkins reached down and grabbed the mower‟s handle, stopping cold its momentum. The sudden resistance jarred Cody‟s spine, which bit on a strand of nerves that sent an electric jolt down through his toes. It seemed to keep shooting right out through his shoes. Cody released the mower, and walked away holding his back gasping through the pain. He screamed, “Fuck.” And then, “Do you have any fucking idea?” Cody squeezed both hands around his back trying to hold himself in one piece. The white light of Midwest July pounded into his head as it poured through his eyes past swells of tears. The light crisscrossed Cody‟s brain and joined in with the party of spastic bolts shooting up and down his back. His entire body threatened to come apart in pieces. He was drowning in pain, and couldn‟t even think right. He felt like nothing more than a pulsating mass of muscle and bone, as the electricity of nerves inside his body shot through, even shaking his lips. Jenkins was trying to speak to him, Cody faintly realized. Jenkins was asking if he was okay. Jenkins pulled the walkie-talkie out, and like the nervous kid that he was yelled into its staticy void for help. “We need some help. North side. We need some help. North side. ASAP.” White heat and a million volts. Jenkins touched Cody‟s shoulder. “Banks, I‟m sorry. Are you okay? Banks!” His words were only echoes.

Cody felt like he was falling over. He felt like he was jumping off a bridge into the deep part of a river. He had never known pain like this. And his lips trembled. They trembled and said with sobbing affect, “Jenkins, you know you‟ll never be nothing big, right? It‟s so easy for you now, but it won‟t last. You don‟t work at it like you have to. Jenkins,” Cody looked into the kid‟s sunglasses, his voice quivering, “you‟re just a, you‟re nothing but a . . .” Cody didn‟t finish. He looked

54 down at the label on the mower and ran his tongue across his lips. Everything around them stopped. The parking lot became a moonscape on which pure heat lived. The pain in Codyâ€&#x;s back felt like it part of the world they all lived in, pain everyone shared. Only two people existed in that world, at that moment. The walkie-talkie hummed out a long stream of white noise as if to prove they were completely alone in some hopeless place.

55

Migration Point By Jason Githens

Though Julianaâ€&#x;s cells attacked follicles as if her hair was a disease, she felt fine on the inside. With her thumb she popped repeatedly the neck of her wetsuit while eyeing the distant rocks. Shuffling backwards, she intuitively kept her toes just clear of the rising tide. The afternoon light had faded fast, and a March wind whistled in off the north Pacific, spinning what little hair she had left into sparse tangles. She rocked on her toes and timed the waves, as she prepared for a cold sprint into the sea for her daily swim to those massive basalt rocks where puffins nested. Whenever she had daylight and didnâ€&#x;t have school, Juliana would swim out to watch those birds dive for silver herring. Out there, surrounded by the exploding force of the Pacific, she could almost stop thinking about going bald at sixteen.

Backing up several feet, to the edge of where the sand still packed in hard and firm, Juliana took deep breaths into her hands. She bobbed in time with the breaking waves. Finally, she pumped her legs, and her feet padded across the hard sand towards the surf. She dove over one wave and landed flat on the following swell, where she swam out with strong strokes before submerging and pushing herself into the Pacificâ€&#x;s deep silence. On the inside she was fine. Everything worked. Her

56 blood and muscles pumped and flowed and powered her slender body that whipped through the water as if it belonged there.

Surfacing for air, Juliana looked down at thin strands of her hair as it floated free around her shoulders then drifted away with some kelp. She didn‟t reach up to determine from where on her head the hair had escaped; she‟d stopped doing that months ago. Now she just wanted it to be over. Dropping back beneath the waves, she pushed on towards her rock-side perch.

A harbor seal slithered into the water as Juliana neared the haystack rock, which rose like an unfinished cathedral from the sea. The oily seal passed close to her and sniffed the air before slipping beneath the water to get to wherever it needed to go. Juliana dipped back beneath the water and split a school of herring on her final push.

The roost‟s surface still seemed warm, as if the seal had left it that way, but really it was a trick of the neoprene suit and Juliana‟s own body heat. On that shelf, she pulled her knees into her chest and watched a dark band of gray clouds graze over the top of the rock, and then slam into the coast range. A mist slowly enveloped the ancient pines until just a sliver of green remained between the clouds and the oceanside village of Migration Point.

Its tidy downtown looked quaint from that distance; the ocean‟s haze masked the boarded-up windows. The sharp red exterior of her dad‟s diner popped out amidst the earth tones of the other structures, and wisps of smoke rose from its chimney as her dad prepared smoked meats for that coming Sunday‟s dinner. He was putting on a benefit to help the logging families. The pine beetle had returned and again shut down the mill. The dinner‟s attendees would mostly be local families just scraping

57 by, with little to offer for the pay-what-you-can meals her dad was cooking up. But calling it “charity” would have hurt them worse. Juliana knew it was just her dad‟s way of paying back the town that had embraced them when they‟d first moved there after Juliana‟s mom died years ago, and then continued their unquestioning support when Juliana‟s hair started falling out and the doctors couldn‟t make it stop. She watched the smoke and could just smell precious hints of rosemary, apple wood, and tenderloin. Around her the puffins plunged in for their own meals of fish and shot back out of the sea taking food high up the rock to their nesting young.

Swimming back close to shore, Juliana allowed a wave to take her onto the beach, which pushed her skidding across the hard sand. She stopped near the feet of a boy wearing shredded jeans. As she looked down, spitting salt water, she noted his filthy toes, which were gripping the ground as if he might wash away. Juliana lifted herself up. From her kneeling position she leaned back on her heels. She wiped a thin strand of hair from her eyes, and it came off in her hand. After trying to shake it off she rubbed her hand along the sand until the hair finally peeled off on the ground.

She jerked her hand back close to her body and let out a tiny squeal. She said shit over and over, continuing to shake her hand at the wrist.

“You out surfing?” the boy asked, looking past her. Juliana suddenly remembered he was there, and she grabbed her right hand with her left to stop its frantic movement.

Juliana couldn‟t look up into the boy‟s eyes because she didn‟t have her hat on and without her hat she didn‟t risk eye contact. Everyone‟s expressions always twisted up in stupid pity like they thought she was dying or something. She hated

58 that look. She hated trying to explain. But the boy had already seen her terrible disappearing hair. He already knew something was wrong with her. He probably wondered if she was some undead thing washed up from the sea. At least if she didn‟t look up, she wouldn‟t have to see that look and respond to it.

“Just swimming,” Juliana finally replied, pointing behind her towards the haystack rock. She stood up, and reached a couple of times for her head, but resisted touching it. After a few seconds of silence, she stood and walked past the frail boy, who didn‟t look up, over to her things. She fumbled around in a backpack before pulling out a sock hat and slipping it on, running her fingers around its elastic band to sweep her thin hair under cover.

The boy had followed her over, and when she turned to see him too close, she jumped, yet he seemed so frail and thin and small that she was not afraid of him, just startled. His shoulders were so narrow they could hardly hold up the boy‟s black tshirt, and his arms hung long with little definition. When they finally locked eyes, she noticed his pupils were dilated so deep and black and vacant that it was hard to tell that his eyes were actually green. Juliana figured he couldn‟t be more than sixteen from the way his limbs swayed in lanky discomfort from his body, though studying closer, she saw that his face revealed craterous pock marks and sunken cheeks, which gave him that same bewildered expression of the toothless old men who frequented the diner. Long curly hair weighed down by the wet salt air unfurled down his face and stopped just over his eyes. It flowed over his ears and framed his angular face with a sad mane. He trembled and twitched so unpredictably that he looked like an old film missing some of its frames. Looking at the boy, Juliana thought of those billboards that lined coastal roads, the ones that showed the haunted

59 looks of people crippled by meth addiction. Was he one of those? Did he have a “before” shot, or had he always looked this way, haggard and scared?

“They call me Childress,” he managed to say through a mouth so dry Juliana could hear the sound of his tongue. Behind them the waves grew higher and louder from the wind of a storm. With the wind brushing across and into the unfastened neck of her wetsuit, Juliana shivered, but the boy seemed oblivious to the cold, his spastic twitches unconnected to weather. “There‟s supposed to be some sort of free dinner thing here,” he said pointing to the town square, which sagged just behind them up the ratty boardwalk. Juliana could smell her father‟s diner as he prepared his smoked meats, but the boy had trouble breathing through his chapped and cracked nose, so she doubted that he could smell a thing.

“Where did you come in from? Who are you with?” Juliana crossed her arms over her chest and squeezed. Just looking at the boy made her cold.

“I ain‟t with nobody. I‟m just traveling down the coast and saw the signs for pay-what-you-can dinner here. And what I can pay is nothing. But I‟d sure like to eat.”

“The meal‟s not until Sunday.” Juliana put her backpack on and backed up in shuffling steps, the same way she retreated from the tide before running in. Even the smallest wave could break that boy in two. From the under drooping collar of his shirt, Juliana could see exposed and well-defined collar bones pushing out against bleached skin.

“Sunday? What‟s today?” The boy almost cried.

“It‟s only Wednesday.”

60 “I haven‟t eaten in days.” He trembled and almost cried but stopped himself by biting his lip and squeezing his arms in a self-embrace. Kicking at the sand, he looked at her chin as a small strand of Juliana‟s hair blew across her face and caught in her lips, which she spit out and tucked, in a quick motion, back into the sock hat.

An old picket fence that had no discernible point rattled beside them and the boy watched it rock in the breeze.

“Why is that here? That‟s the most pointless fence I‟ve ever seen.” The boy stepped over and shook one of its wooden slats, trying to pull it up out of the sand, groaning and failing to extract it. Finally he kicked it, still unable to break or remove the slat. “It‟s in there pretty deep, but it doesn‟t do a thing. This is like something my dad would have built. Something pointless like this. He‟s crazy, my dad. He drove his truck into our kitchen where I used to live because the sink wouldn‟t stop dripping. Only thing was Mom was standing at that sink when he did it. She can‟t walk anymore, but they still live together, trying to take care of each other after the „accident.‟ I couldn‟t take it, those two, so I‟m looking for a place to settle on my own.” Then he patted his pants pocket, regained his blank face, and as if he‟d felt in his pocket some important appointment, he turned and walked fast down the beach.

He pulled out a lighter, flicked it several times, and then began to trot as if he had just learned how to run. “Hey,” Juliana shouted. “Hey.” Then she said in a low voice, “I could at least have given you something to eat.”

Juliana backed up to the rotting boardwalk, turning to walk up its hollow planks towards town and onto the diner. She looked back just once, and the boy had turned from the beach and disappeared where Juliana knew there to be a small cave.

Perhaps later she would send her dad out with a warm plate.

61 Walking in the empty street, Juliana studied the shells embedded in the concrete. From guests at the diner sheâ€&#x;d heard that the major coastal concrete company used to take their sand right from the nearby dunes. Like most things that seem in endless supply, the dunes eventually disappeared and ended up preserved only as concrete on coastal town-streets. Old gas streetlights that worked only sporadically lined the street, rusting and not currently illuminating anything, and boards covered the windows of the small downtown grocery store, two family restaurants that had once featured endless buffets, and other businesses that didnâ€&#x;t even leave behind signs for Juliana to determine what they used to do. The post office had moved up the coast to Freeport. The town was dying.

After removing her wetsuit in a small storage room that was attached to the diner, Juliana looked at her sleek, muscled body through her reflection in the dark glass. She pulled off her cap and stared at her reflected nakedness, which was so covered in goose bumps it looked as if she had been recently plucked. Aside from a few remnant strands that hung from her head like thread, she was completely hairless and smooth. Swimming had given her entire body smooth-muscle definition, which she flexed and admired in the glass. Trembling, she got into a warm fleece outfit and found her dad in the kitchen, where she told him about the boy on the beach. He agreed that they needed to find him, and take him some food.

In March on the Oregon coast it gets dark early. At four-thirty and between the front-end of a storm, which threatened rain, and the fast-waning sunlight, Juliana and her father had a hard time finding the entrance to the beach-side cave. Neither had brought a flashlight. She carried the plate of food because she knew the path

62 better than her dad did, and crossing the small stream that runs out to the ocean, he‟d slipped and nearly dropped warm spaghetti onto the rocks.

“He went back to the cave. He was seriously starving, I think.”

“He‟s probably on something.”

“Sometimes people just need help. It‟s not always because they‟re on something. He said some things about his family. It sounded awful. His dad ran over his mom or something.”

“I never heard about anything like that. And if it happened on the coast, that story would have made it to the diner by now. And if he‟s on something, who knows if anything he says is true. You know the lies that meth makes people tell. The deeper they get into it, the worse they think their lives used to be.”

“You know, his pupils were huge. You might be right. But still. People think I‟m sick but I‟m not. Not really. Not like they think I‟m sick.”

“Everyone around here, and that crystal meth,” her dad hissed getting himself worked up again about the local drug of choice.

“Maybe he really is just hungry. I don‟t think he has anyone to go to. He seemed like, I don‟t know, that just my speaking to him was the nicest thing anyone had done for him in a long time.”

“You know, I don‟t get the attraction to those drugs that won‟t let you sleep. I love sleeping. That wouldn‟t be my cup of tea.”

“Yeah, I can see you on meth, Dad. That‟s so disturbing to imagine. You already look creepy enough because you hardly ever shave.”

“I might have to try it that stuff. Do you smoke it, or inject it, or eat it, or what?”

63 Juliana ignored him. They reached the cave and she pulled her sock hat down tight. A coastal wind blew hard as if it were being sucked into the cave, and Juliana moved into the heavy breeze setting the plate down at its edge, just where the basaltrimmed opening swallowed the meager evening light.

“What, are you setting down bait?” her dad asked as Juliana stood by the plate just at the edge of the cave.

She turned and gave him a sharp look. “Hello,” she shouted into the cave, which returned nothing but her own deepened voice. “Childress?” she yelled. A chemical sweet smell emerged from the cave but the wind fast destroyed it. “I‟ll leave this food. Spaghetti. It‟s covered. It‟ll stay warm for a while.” Her dad was leaning down writing with a stick in the soft sand, Boy, Eat! And Don’t Do Drugs.

Juliana waved for her dad to stop writing in the sand but he continued anyway.

Hearing nothing from the cave, they walked away and she erased her dad‟s words with her bare foot.

“It‟ll be like Christmas if that food is gone in the morning,” he said, patting his daughter on the back as they walked along the beach.

“What are you talking about?” she asked, cocking her head and catching a glimpse of the afternoon‟s last light in his stubble.

“Like Christmas,” he replied, looking down, “when the cookies are gone the next day.” Juliana used to make those cookies with her mom. Her dad, as Santa, would eat them. When her mom died years ago so did those cookies and so did Santa. But her dad had always taught her to be hopeful and had never wavered in that belief himself. Only Juliana swimming by herself made his face show fear, but he‟d even gotten better at stifling that. She could swim through anything, and he knew

64 that. She let him help her up onto the crumbling boardwalk and they walked side by side over thousands of embedded shells.

Just four people came in for breakfast on Thursday morning, and they all talked about the beetle machine being brought back in to save the trees. The machine had had success before and Juliana knew both the professor and his son from their previous visits to save the local, infected forests. She hated the machine and its deep bass notes that would pound incessantly for months and drive out everything from seals to elk. And she worried about the professor‟s son Kyle seeing her like this.

Juliana ran food and her dad made the four meals as slowly and carefully as he could, knowing that he wouldn‟t have anything to do but clean until an equally slow lunch arrived. They were both tired of cleaning, and preparing for a rush that never seemed to come. Juliana disappeared into the storage room and slipped her wetsuit on after the last customer had given up lingering over his coffee, trying to convince himself that the professor and his beetle machine could come in and save the town. Juliana‟s dad believed that nature should be left to its own devices, which wasn‟t a popular sentiment around there. But the loggers put up with his opinions because they liked arguing, and they liked her dad, and they felt better pissed off at something other than those goddamn beetles and their own suspended livelihoods.

Every week though, one or two desperate men or women slipped into the release of meth, and every week at least one of those people became a big topic at the diner.

Most recently a man who used to be the saw-house foreman was rumored to have slipped off the meth deep-end and had ended up in the hospital dead on arrival. That boy from the beach did not fit into any of these portraits; Childress stood out to

65 Juliana as a three-dimensional figure against all of this town‟s generic sadness. He seemed to her that he could be fixed.

At the beach the boy was not out there, but the empty dinner plate had been set near the spot where Juliana had first met him yesterday. The tops of some letters and an arrow pointing to the plate were scrawled into the sand, but they‟d been rendered unreadable by the tide.

“It‟s supposed to say next time no meat. Water got it though. The waves took my words.” The boy didn‟t come close. He remained standing twenty feet away, and he shouted to her holding up his hands. “Next time no goddamn meat,” he reiterated stabbing the air with his finger. Even from a distance she could tell his spastic tics were under control this morning. His anger instead came out in words. Juliana felt for the water with her foot and backed into it. She leaned over, picked up the plate, and tossed it away from the incoming tide without taking her eyes off of the boy. He pantomimed her gesture back at her and screwed up his face. He pulled back his hair with both hands to make himself look bald. He danced around doing his own interpretation of femininity, then kicked the sand and nearly fell down.

Juliana trotted over and picked up the plate, throwing it like a disc towards the boy, putting so much into the toss that she nearly fell down. The white plate arced high to the right and sailed back down towards to the beach just a sliver in the sky, where it smashed against a drift log near the boy. It exploded into a million crystalline shards. He turned, shaking his head. He picked something from his hair and studied the remnant, then began walking fast in her direction. Breaking into an awkward run he looked absurd enough as to seem almost harmless, if not for all of his primal howling.

66 Juliana grabbed hard the sand with her toes. She reached down for a fist-sized rock, which had washed up on shore, and rolled it around in her hand. His running slowed as he approached and ten feet away he stopped, and leaned over with his hands on his knees. “What‟s wrong with you?” He yelled out over the crashing waves, and pulled at his own hair with both hands. “Are you, like, from another planet?” the boy laughed and put his arms out in front of him, walking robotically forward towards Juliana.

Juliana drew back the rock. “Stop there or I‟ll break your skinny face in with this rock. I‟m serious.” Her words came out fierce, but had cracked just a little at “rock.”

The boy charged. She hurled the rock and just missed, but stood her ground.

When he was close enough for her to smell his rancid breath, she turned and used his own momentum to shove him to the sea. He tumbled into a wave, which shoved him back towards the shore, where he flailed and bawled.

From his knees, where the cold Pacific covered him to his waist, he looked up at her and cried, “What is wrong with you?”

“What‟s wrong with me?” Juliana pulled off her sock hat quickly and felt more hair come off with it. She tossed it at him. It bounced off his right shoulder and into the water where it bobbed, a sharp red against the sea‟s gray-green. “I have alopecia,” she ran her hands over her head, feeling no hair left at all, “and except for that there‟s nothing wrong with me. What‟s wrong with you?” She wanted to wade out and kick his dumb smile and hold his head under until he turned into someone else.

67 “How can you stand this water?” Childress asked, standing up and taking heavy steps to the dry sand. Sagging and soaked from the sea, his clothes seemed to be melting away, and underneath them the boy‟s frame seemed even more skeletal and frail.

Juliana considered the smooth, rounded muscles under her wetsuit, and felt a sudden and intense pride for her own body. Clinching her teeth, she took an aggressive step towards him, and he stepped back clumsily. He was afraid of her.

“Of course it‟s cold,” she finally replied, folding her arms in tight against her body.

“That‟s why I wear this.” She looked down at her wetsuit.

“But why do you go out there at all? What do you see out there in that freezing, damn ocean?” His teeth clicked, as he squeezed himself tight and dripped water.

Looking out at the haystack rock, Juliana watched the puffins dive and the seals plunge from their perch into the sea, only to climb back up and do it again. The waves broke hard against the beach, and beyond the breakers the northern Pacific bobbed in deep and heavy gray swells. “From that rock,” she pointed, “there‟s a little ledge where I can sit. The seals use it. The puffins seem to rain right past you. And there are tide pools, with anemones and on the edges, millions of mussels clinging tight. I can see fish swirl below me. In that little space there are a thousand forms of life and none seem to care that I‟m there. And swimming out there, when your head is just at the level of water, and you‟re rising and falling with the sea, everything looks different. Even this town seems hopeful from that angle, and that distance.

Floating in the swells gives everything contours that you‟ll never see from land.” She

68 cocked her head and looked at him. “So, what do you do Childress, how do you live like you do?” She held her arms out towards him, her palms up, open in question.

Continuing to shake, Childress considered her question. “I get by.”

“What do you mean by that? Seriously, Childress, look at yourself!”

Shifting fast from confused, to angry, and finally into a visible sadness, he shrugged and his voice cracked as he said, “I don‟t have anybody. I really don‟t.

Some days I want to try, but most days I just want to be numb. I‟m always so cold.”

He tried to smile in his defiant way but tears formed in his eyes.

“Let‟s get you something to eat. And some dry clothes.” Juliana reached out and grabbed his hand, pulling him away from the water until reluctantly he started moving and they walked, Childress in tow behind Juliana, across the thick damp sand towards the flickering gaslights of the town square.

69

The Beetle Machine By Jason Githens

Kyle loosened his stare on the diner‟s salt shaker so it formed two images, and then he‟d re-focus the container back into a single object, timing the illusion‟s rhythm precisely to the distant bass notes of his dad‟s beetle machine. Two shakers. One shaker. Two. One. His dad‟s invention, the beetle machine, worked by bellowing deep sound waves into a pine tree until the burrowing beetles relented and fled their hosts, the trees. Without the machine, the beetles would suck until the conifers went dry and dead and useless. Without the machine, entire logging towns would shrivel up and die from the loss of their money crop. From deep in the forest the machine thumped at a strand of white pines. In that letter, Kyle‟s dad had said white pines were the predominant victims. Juliana sat across from Kyle and stared at the table too. Likely she was just watching the grains bounce. Kyle doubted she was mired in rhythmic focusing and un-focusing of vision. He doubted that anyone else did the peculiar tricks that he did with his eyes.

“That sound, it still kind of lulls you into a trance,” Juliana said, not looking up as rain tapped the window. Kyle saw her muddled reflection in the table, converging and separating, just like the salt shaker. “When it stops, it feels weird even to breathe,” Juliana added. They had known each other since Kyle used to

70 travel here with his mother and father whenever an infestation broke out. Kyle and his parents had done time with the machine in Michigan, Nova Scotia, Costa Rica, Florida. They had lived in Vancouver, but were never really there. So many contracts scattered them around the continent, so many had brought them right back here, to this isolated outpost of old growth forest, this edge of continent, this tiny town on the Oregon coast, where most houses had signs in their yards with various permutations on the theme, “I love wood.” These towns loved his dad too, and the machine, when the beetles fled, but they‟d been stubborn here in the soft wood of those coastal white pines. They were not responding.

“And he really hasn‟t come down, at all, in over a month?” Kyle asked, looking up but past Juliana. He saw his face in the glass, or at least its outline. It was filling out from the slim oval it had always been. He‟d start college next fall, and Kyle puffed his cheeks to imagine how fat his face might get in time.

“The machine hasn‟t even stopped in a month. So no, we haven‟t seen your dad at all. It‟s weird, Kyle. My dad‟s been up there. He says everything seems fine.

He said that your dad is just having trouble finding the right frequency for this strain of beetle. Down here, things are getting desperate. Some people are moving. Others just drink a lot. There‟s been some meth use too. Kyle, I just—I don‟t know.”

Juliana stretched her arms out across the table and salt stuck to her pale skin. She didn‟t finish her thought, but Kyle knew Juliana didn‟t really support the machine.

She loved the quiet of the coast, everything working in some natural order, and the machine, she felt, skewed all of that. Juliana could not understand saving the trees just so they could be cut down for the mill. Also, declining populations in the local seal population had been pinned to the machine, but without any real proof. The

71 problem with the seals could just as easily have been caused by rising ocean temperatures. The EPA had been on the machine‟s trail since Kyle‟s dad started extracting beetles, but no direct cause of environmental harm had ever been proven.

“His letter seemed nervous. He‟s always been such a hard ass—his words didn‟t seem to fit the letter. Too many adjectives maybe. Too much hope. Or hopelessness.” In that letter Kyle had received at the academy, there was nothing overtly wrong. But the tone seemed so off that Kyle had taken a bus to the coast. He was still wearing his blue academy jacket, and its buttons would rattle on the diner table when he leaned in close. Everyone else from his school was knee deep in spring break booze, at the various mountain cabins owned by students‟ families.

Behind Juliana‟s head Kyle watched a long brown pine-beetle circle the painted “C” on the café window. A truck pulled up and idled. Its headlights went out. The beetle continued to circumvent the letter. The truck door slammed. The beetle stopped. A hard thud against the window caused Juliana to jump and grab her chest, and cut the air with a rare curse. She turned to face the sound, and Kyle watched Juliana‟s reflection of disgust as a gloved hand ground the beetle into the glass and left a smear of oily innards, antennae, and legs. The man, wearing a deer hunter hat with both flaps up, opened a clenched-teeth smile, and then howled into the air. He looked at Kyle, winked, and tapped softly two more times at the window.

“Nut job.” Juliana turned back to Kyle, holding herself together by squeezing her small white hands into one, with tight and locked fingers that made her hands go even whiter than normal from lack of blood flow.

The man entered the café and laughed softly, speaking quietly to the waitress and finding a seat on the opposite side of the diner. Juliana‟s dad came out of the

72 back and stared at the man. “Charlie,” he said. “Please don‟t hit the windows like that.” The man apologized, and he didn‟t materialize into the loud aggressor who had appeared at the window; the diner regained its silence, and aside from the beetle machine‟s thumping, and silverware tapping diners‟ plates, Kyle could only hear Juliana‟s scared-rabbit breaths.

Juliana dropped Kyle at his dad‟s cabin, a mile out of the small town of Migration Point, where they‟d eaten at the diner owned by Juliana‟s father. They‟d fumbled over each other before, when they were younger, poking and touching and grabbing hands. Tickling. It had been three years since he‟d seen her but they wrote letters. They sent pictures. Juliana was a year younger than Kyle, and a year ago she‟d started losing her hair, a late onset of alopecia. Now she was bald nearly everywhere. She took it gracefully, and it hurt Kyle that she did that. He didn‟t believe that she really didn‟t care. She even claimed that she was evolving right past everyone else, that she was planning on returning to the sea to start a magnificent new species. Kyle would have felt better had she been more angry, which would have meant she was fighting back. At least they could have seen more specialists about what could be done. It felt so odd to touch her now. When she‟d picked him up at the bus station, he‟d hugged her tight and kissed her on the head like he always did, but before she had always had that blond, salty hair. That most recent kiss had felt like kissing the thigh of a baby, or something else soft and unnatural. In three years she‟d changed in so many beautiful ways, all of which were undone by her condition.

73 “I‟m going to crash early tonight so I can get up and hike in. Are you still coming with me tomorrow?” Kyle asked. Juliana glowed under the yellow dome light of the car. With hair she would be something, really something.

“I‟ll pick you up for breakfast early, at like seven?”

“I‟ll walk to the diner. I like the walk down the beach from here to town.

You may not know this, but we don‟t have an ocean in Idaho.”

“At least not yet,” Juliana smiled. Her eyes were surrounded by faint wrinkles. Those eyes had been rubbed often.

They hugged. Kyle shut the door and waved goodbye, as Juliana pulled from the driveway in her careful way. She was always careful and gentle about everything, as if she didn‟t want to create any ripples in the world. Kyle stood in front of the sagging Victorian rental house and watched the car wind its way back to the town, where everyone slept soundly to the reassuring beats of the machine. Kyle felt the notes in his chest, in the rattling of his jacket buttons. He turned towards the house and looked up into the coastal range, trying to determine where, based on the machine‟s beats, his dad was. He looked for a fire, for the source of the notes. But the sound waves were rootless. They could come from anywhere. Kyle sat on the steps of the cabin and shivered as he looked out across the dune and into the quiet darkness of the Pacific. The machine did not relent in its mission.

Kyle woke early to the steady rhythm echoing down from the hills.

Somewhere a faucet dripped. The house reeked of cedar, and the quilt Kyle had buried himself under was crushing, heavy, like a protective x-ray vest. He‟d had dreams of being under water, and the blanket‟s weight explained those dreams. In his

74 dad‟s room there was one framed picture of the family, with Kyle sitting up high on the machine, and his mom and dad sitting on the tracked wheels that allowed the machine, which was the size of small metal storage shed, to be moved around the forest. They would helicopter it in. The family used to work together to get it positioned, to get camp set up. Now his dad did everything alone. Kyle‟s mom had taken her son from that life years ago, when they left to pick up machine parts and never came back. That is no way to raise a child, his mom had kept saying as they drove without stopping to her sister‟s house in Boise. Kyle was not sure who she was trying to convince.

Kyle grabbed the only jacket he‟d brought, his formal blazer from the academy, and left the house. He crossed the road and the thick dune to the sea.

Walking on the deep sand of the dune felt like running did in a dream, when you just can‟t move fast enough to get away. Past the dune, Kyle walked on the edge of the Pacific, down hard-packed sand towards Migration Point. He slowed but didn‟t stop as he passed the body of a small, dead seal decorated with an old pair of sunglasses and several strings of green and purple plastic beads. Someone had placed a beer in the sand next to the seal‟s stiff and open mouth. The waves crashed hard, and ocean spray dusted the seal‟s large sunglasses. At a bus stop he‟d seen an Oregon beach covered in seals, and now only this dead one. Certain groups called these occurrences technology-induced displacements, and blamed the machine. Not just the beetles fled from its sounds, they claimed. The damn thing chased off everything. For that no one had real proof. They don‟t have proof of anything.

Massive rocks shaped like haystacks stuck out from the sea. From the largest rock, covered in moss and pummeled at its base by tall, gray waves, hundreds of

75 puffins clung, some plunging on occasion headlong into the sea, emerging minutes later with rows of small fish flashing silver in their struggle.

The low tide exposed iridescent sea anemones in cold tide-pools. Fifty to fifty-five degree water was ideal, no more than brief stints at seventy-five, only in summer, only when the sun showed up. His dad knew about these things, and he‟d taught Kyle. Kyle poked at a blobby anemone and watched it open and close around his finger. He continued towards town, past tangles of kelp that looked like garden hoses or enormous leeks. A rusted cog, big as a Chevette, Japanese markings, halfburied in the brown sand. Rusty chains curled around the beach, ship‟s intestines.

Finger-chunks of coral, pink and white, like holiday desserts.

The wind raced unchallenged over the Pacific and into the coast, rattling the buttons on Kyle‟s jacket and reducing the machine‟s thumps to inconsequential notes deep in the hills. He still could not tell where the sounds were coming from. Kyle looked into the fog-shrouded coastal range for a tendril of smoke, or a beacon of campfire light, but he could see no sign of his dad.

Kyle entered the small town‟s main square from the beach by climbing over a crumbling boardwalk of rotten gray wood. The main square was tidy but dead. A logging town shut down by the pine beetle had no reason to get up early. Kyle found Salvatore‟s Café, and inside there were plenty of tables. Sitting in the same booth he‟d shared with Juliana the night before, Kyle listened to the diner clinks of forks on plates and low conversations of the few people eating breakfast. Soft rain tapped and clung to the diner‟s windows as Kyle sipped coffee, thinking of his dad already up for a couple of hours, and out hanging those chrome extraction-monitors on select trees.

He would have already had his three eggs, soggy bacon, and oil-thick coffee. He

76 would be wearing his blue rain gear, and the mist would be gathering in his beard, making it look like damp, brown moss. He would have wiped his eyeglasses of water with the cloth he kept tucked in the breast pocket of his rain jacket—he would have wiped them off more than twenty times by now. His dad had always refused contact lenses or that surgery. Even when they would be in the dry cabin, his dad would remove and wipe off his reading glasses several times during dinner.

“You like this booth.” Juliana slid into the bench across from Kyle. She wore a light scarf around her head, which was damp from the rain. The blue in it made Juliana‟s eyes snap with their own pine green. When she took off the scarf, Kyle noticed for the first time the blue veins marbling across her white head like permanent lightning in a white sky. He couldn‟t look right at her head. He couldn‟t turn away.

“Where have you been?” Kyle asked her. “You‟re soaked.”

“I walked down to the seal caves. I count the seals every day, and keep track of the numbers, the new ones, the ones that leave, that die. Someone has to pay attention.”

Kyle felt a stab at the machine. “There‟s a lot involved with those fluctuations. It‟s not the machine.”

She looked up at him and cocked her head. “I didn‟t say there was, Kyle.”

Her tone hurt him. He couldn‟t argue with her because she hadn‟t blamed the machine. But he knew what she‟d meant. Everyone blamed the machine, and his dad. Everything that disappeared was his dad‟s fault.

“I‟m not hungry, really. Do you want to just head up?” Kyle couldn‟t stop himself once he went down a road of self-pity. He would follow to its end, and he

77 hated that about himself. He had turned down such a road with Juliana‟s allegations about the machine.

“We should eat, Kyle. It‟s on the house.” She tried to lighten the world.

“You go ahead. I‟m going to go on.” Kyle was unresponsive to lightening.

“Kyle, you don‟t even know where you‟re going.”

“I can find him. I know how to find him.”

“Just wait. Kyle. Eat.” Kyle stood up and walked out of the diner. He fought back tears for himself, for how he‟d acted, and how he couldn‟t get out of that rut once in it. He looked back at Juliana and hoped she‟d follow him. And he hoped she wouldn‟t. She just stared down at the table with her head in her hands, and Kyle walked past the diner, through the main square, across the coastal highway and into the shelter of some Douglas Firs.

He waited for a ride. He had no idea how you were supposed to hitchhike and held out his thumb weakly until the absurdity of it all hit him and he tucked his thumb away, and walked to the rental cabin. He buried himself under the heavy quilt without getting undressed or even taking off his shoes. Suffocating under the heavy blanket and surrounded by the cabin‟s intense cedar smells, Kyle imagined that he was encased in a tree, as he listened to the thumping in the hills. He drifted towards the safety of sleep.

“Are you under there?” he heard Juliana‟s voice, like a song. She tapped his head, and having the necessary distance from his previous mood, Kyle could finally laugh at his own behavior. She peeled the heavy quilt back and he looked up at her upside-down head, which made her seem even more alien, odder, and lovelier.

78 “Come on. I brought your breakfast. Eat, and let‟s go. And don‟t ever walk away from me like that.” Kyle nodded, and then her face softened as she let it all go. He would have thanked her if he‟d known how.

Juliana drove them to the base of the coastal range through a cold rain that seemed about to turn into snow. The wipers squeaked but did little else, and eventually Juliana pulled up to the trailhead. The cold air smelled like a preamble to snow. From the trunk Juliana pulled out some gloves and a hat. She held them out to Kyle. “You‟re going to freeze in that jacket. Didn‟t you bring anything warm?”

“I didn‟t know it would be like this.” He put on the yellow hat and the gloves, which were hulking and gray.

Juliana moved up the trail in easy steps, and Kyle felt his stride ponderous, too eager. Yet when he tried to adjust and move like Juliana that felt wrong too. So he labored. These woods no longer felt right to Kyle. Juliana waited at each switchback and adjusted her wool hat as if there was something irreparably wrong with it. They moved through a wet haze that sat heavily in the space between the tall Douglas firs; the trees‟ canopies dissolved up into the gray fog, and only their thick-barked trunks could be seen from the trail. At the top of the hill, Juliana waited again; she shared her water with Kyle who drank it down in loud gulps between heavy breaths. In the distance the machine thumped its steady beats.

Juliana pointed down to the valley. They had climbed above the fog, and below them clouds jutted from the ocean into the valleys. “What was it like growing up out here, in the forests, I mean?” Juliana asked him as they sat to rest, both looking down into the valley.

79 Kyle shrugged and took a long sip of water. “At the time, it was all I knew.

Out here, right now, it smells like my bedroom. Some kids at school talk about certain bell tones reminding them of ice cream trucks, and of their childhoods. To others, the cafeteria making cinnamon roles reminds them of holidays at home. To me it‟s always been trees. The damp rot of pine.”

“But what was it like? Did you enjoy it? It‟s so weird to me.”

“I didn‟t know anything different, really. I felt safe. I‟ve always liked being alone. Until my mom had had enough and took me with her to live in that Boise suburb, I didn‟t know anything different. I thought we were heroes. It made me sick being away from that machine. But my aunt bought me a bike—they distracted me with amenities like movies and buffets and eventually the academy. But I knew I‟d come back. I hiked a lot at school, but the pines were drier. This is more home to me. This wetness. But I don‟t remember it being so cold.”

“You get used to the wet cold. It takes some time, but you get used to it.”

“I don‟t know if I‟ll ever be used to it like I was though. It feels familiar . . . but different.” Kyle leaned into Juliana. They looked together down into the magnificent convergence of land and sea. The taller rocks stuck from the ocean above the low fog. Puffins swirled like spots just over the fog‟s distant gray. “I‟m scared a little. About seeing him.”

She looked into his eyes. “I know.”

Juliana helped him up, and they hiked on. Kyle looked through the trees where the rain was mixing with snow and falling through the fog. His pulse sped up, and he picked up again the sound of the machine, which matched closely the rate of his heart.

80 His parents had educated him out here, from books, the same way they do in schools, but he knew things other kids, particularly those at the academy, would never know. His life had formed in the woods, on trails like this, on which he now found himself breathing hard and not knowing which one led to his dad. He used to know those things. He cocked his head and listened to the sound and tried to determine exactly which path they‟d take to find him. And Kyle wondered what he would do.

From the condition of the trees, ravaged by beetles, it all looked hopeless. From the frantic changes in the rhythms of the machine, the constant fluctuations, Kyle knew his dad was desperate. Kyle knew that he‟d succumbed to the woods however hopeless his mission had become. What would his dad even look like? Kyle imagined his father twisting the machine‟s dial, scanning, like someone searching for a baseball game on AM radio. That thought frightened Kyle. He imagined a tangled beard, and a soaked figure walking around the machine with a stick. Some madman.

The machine‟s beats seemed more distant as they walked.

“He‟s this way?” Kyle asked, with his voice cracking. “Are you sure?”

“We‟re not far now.”

As they moved down the trail, back into the lingering cloud, the trees grew smaller. Rusted signs indicated the re-planted forest‟s age: Planted in 1972; Planted in 1979; Planted in 1983. Smaller and smaller the trees became, the Douglas firs giving way to still-healthy and uninfected lodgepole pines, with their squat trunks supporting thin bulbous heads of branches and needles. From a distance the lodgepole pines resembled the severed tips of giant cotton swabs.

Juliana stopped in the middle of the trail and held her hand up to Kyle, who was lagging several yards behind. A family of elk crossed the trail between them,

81 and the large male stopped to guard the crossing as the smaller female moved past with a young calf. The bull‟s large antlers stuck high from a triangular head; they were wrapped in spring fuzz and looked like lichen-covered branches. With his wide black nose the bull sniffed the air as his family crossed the path in a calm silence, moving with an impossible quiet given their mass. Their white rumps disappeared into the trees as the male stared at Kyle for a few seconds before turning towards the woods where his tall antlers sunk like a fin into the sea of trailside green. Kyle and Juliana both watched until the elk were long out of sight, and they both cocked their heads to listen but heard nothing; it seemed the large animals had only briefly even existed. Juliana covered her mouth with both hands and bounced a little with quiet excitement. They continued. For the first time since arriving Kyle couldn‟t hear the thumping of the machine, and he felt the creep of panic.

I’m losing some battles here, but not the war, his dad had written in the letter.

We’re getting small rates of extraction, but not as much as we need to save the trees’ ability to drink. It’s hard doing all of this alone. It’s hard being alone and listening to yourself breathing all the time. Juliana and Kyle crossed a basalt outcropping of ancient black rock, and she raised her head to a massive graveyard of needle-less pines across the narrow stream; the trees were silhouetted against the white fog with a blackness that made them look burned. As Kyle approached Juliana, his eyes fixed on the trees as if they posed some threat, snow began to fall in larger flakes like thick ash. Continuing across the stream, Kyle slipped in and soaked both of his shoes.

Juliana never missed a stone, though. Waiting for Kyle to wring out his socks, Juliana held out her glove and watched the tiny flakes as they accumulated.

82 “This looks like where I imagine we go when we die,” Juliana said, as she ate the small palm-full of snow she‟d gathered on her glove. Kyle looked around and wondered if perhaps they weren‟t dead. Perhaps they‟d slipped on the steep hike down, and they were wandering on the edge of oblivion, waiting for that boat that took you wherever it was it took you. He‟d never felt a place sit so heavy, so heavy that it was hard to get up once he had his cold wet shoes back in place on his feet.

Not even when he had lived out in woods like these had they felt like this.

As they hiked on up the trail, a steep ridge, the machine‟s sounds resumed and intensified. Kyle worked sticky spit in his mouth. He stopped Juliana and steered her to an infested tree. “I want to show you something.” Kyle led Juliana to a tree that stood alone. He moved them through the tall sword ferns to the base of the dead Western pine. The forest started to sway and creak as the wind picked up and swirled the dots of snowflakes. Conical knobs of hard sap dotted the tree‟s dead bark where it had tried to excrete the beetles by pushing back with sticky sap. I’ve been thinking a lot about patterns lately, those concentric, blue circles the beetles carve into the trees, just under the bark. I’ve been capturing those patterns with paper and charcoal. I think they might be letters spelling something out to us all. Don’t worry, I don’t really think that, but it’s a nice way to think of it don’t you agree?

Kyle removed his gloves and peeled away a swath of bark. Juliana put her hand on his shoulder and leaned forward watching him work. As the gray bark flaked off without resisting, the blue stain of beetle-infected wood emerged. When Kyle had enough bark removed he pointed out to Juliana the complex patterns the beetles left in the wood‟s surface. He took her hand, removed her gloves and ran her fingers over the shallow crevasses that resembled crop circles.

83 He released her hands, and she continued to run her fingers slowly over the patterns. Kyle stepped back from the tree. He said, “These always amazed me the most. I‟d spend hours peeling back the bark and running charcoal over paper to collect these designs. I still have them. I sketch them in my notebooks. I always thought they must mean something, but I have no idea why the beetles make these.

Neither does my dad.”

“It‟s beautiful,” Juliana replied. “Really.” She turned around to Kyle and held out her hand for her glove. She looked at him differently than she usually did.

She looked as if she bowed just slightly at the waist, in a greeting, or in gratitude. At least empathy, and maybe respect.

“It‟s the one part I always think about. I dream about these.”

The snow and wind picked up, and Juliana eyed the trail that wound up the valley‟s other side. She looked at Kyle. The machine thumped. “Are you ready?

It‟s just over this next ridge.” Kyle took a breath and nodded and they moved deeper into the sound.

They walked in slow steps up the trail, Kyle falling behind Juliana by several feet. The machine penetrated him now. He could feel it in his lungs. The waves were less sound now than they were a tangible pressure, a pounding force. Juliana turned to say something but realized words were useless this close to the machine.

How had his family had conversations mired in these sound waves? As Kyle pondered that question, he realized they hadn‟t ever talked much, really. Aside from his classes with his mom, in the tent they set up beyond the machine‟s deafening circle, they hadn‟t talked about much at all. They‟d devoted everything to the machine, to the mission. And as they approached the ridge, Kyle couldn‟t remember

84 the last conversation he‟d had with his father verbally, and not in a letter. He scrambled to put together an accurate picture in his head so that seeing the man wouldn‟t be so intimidating. It would be good to see you. When I’m done with this job, I’ll come to your school. I have so many stories to tell you about this place.

They crested the ridge, and Juliana pointed down. Kyle saw the dying smoke of a campfire, and behind that, the massive silver machine. Given the noise, Kyle could communicate with Juliana only through hand signals. He shrugged because he didn‟t see his dad. Kyle moved nearly running down the hill towards the machine.

He slowed to look at all the trash strewn in the yellow grass, covered partially by the light snow. Food cans, and jerky wrappers. Conical paper cups. Pages of magazines, soaked and torn paperback books.

Kyle looked around into the woods, now so close to the machine he had to cover his ears. He didn‟t see his dad anywhere. Juliana, several feet behind him, pressed her hands to her ears. She winced. The sound was hurting her. What no one understands, or has ever understood is that I can’t stop. I have lives that are counting on me to win. Kyle, some people will always despise you. Even when you’re trying to help. Kyle walked up to the machine‟s controls and typed in the shutdown code that he‟d never forgotten. After a gasp the machine stopped and the silence left a hole in the woods. He could breathe again, but he couldn‟t hear a thing.

Juliana held her arms over her head and flexed her fingers three times, a wave, gratitude? Deaf from sound, Kyle looked out into the quiet void of forest. Nothing rustled, nothing moved, and he couldn‟t have heard anything anyway. He walked in a wide circle around the machine and looked into the woods for his dad.

85 Completing the circle, Kyle came back around to Juliana who had drifted closer to the machine. The valley wind rocked the trees and kicked up intense bursts of pine. Juliana cocked her head and looked to the sky, which spit faster its snow.

She yelled something and laughed, but Kyle‟s ears weren‟t working. He watched the man emerge from behind Juliana, from the darkness of the trees. She couldn‟t see him. She looked at Kyle and smiled and pointed to her ears and shrugged. Kyle watched the man, now sure it was his dad; he covered his mouth with his hand; he bent slightly forward at the waist to better see. His eyes went wide and he shook his head. Watching him, Juliana dropped her smile, and covered her mouth. She turned to look behind her, and Kyle saw Juliana jump. Together they watched his dad‟s emergence from the woods. Slowly, Kyle‟s dad lowered the rifle, and cocked his head. He looked confused. His rat-beard mouth formed Kyle‟s name but his son couldn‟t hear. Wider and wider his dad‟s mouth shouted Kyle‟s name, but still deafened by the machine, Kyle couldn‟t hear him. He couldn‟t hear his dad‟s voice as it called to him over and over and over in the dissipating valley light between those flakes of intensifying snow.

86

The Flower Train By Jason Githens

Buried in boxes and drawers at Dupree‟s Pearl District condo were instructional books on various topics such as mountain biking, beer making, Pacific coast sea life, film noir, perfecting screenplays, writing short stories, windsurfing, and Buddhism. Looking for an old videotape he‟d made several years before in Destin, Florida with his college fraternity brothers, he‟d found a small piece of stretched canvas with some smears of green and blue paint, some crusty oil tubes, and the definitive instructional book in the subject by a James Rapineaux. Already loosened from having a few wheat beers alone, Dupree sat down at his dining room table and cried into his hands, imagining that he was looking at someone else’s sad failures and ridiculous dreams. He couldn‟t string together any numbers on the phone worth calling, and everyone he knew back East was in bed, or married. Oregon had seemed like a great idea three years ago, and he still always bragged about the light rail, which he did take every day to work, but other than his job and condo, a few serviceable friends, and a trail of forgettable relationships, Dupree couldn‟t wrap his arms around anything and hold on.

Sitting at the table and avoiding his reflection in its green-tinted glass, Dupree tried not to think about all those books buried around his place. He couldn‟t even sell or give them away. That would instantly reveal to the recipient Dupree‟s weaknesses

87 and his irrelevance on the topic. No one ever sold a book on tying climbing knots because they‟d perfected them all. No paddler had ever sold, or given away a book of tide tables because he‟d memorized them. They sold them because they were quitters.

And with each one of these books Dupree had ordered off the internet, he had honestly envisioned himself perfecting that particular activity, becoming great at it, even being someone other people asked his advice on. But he never got much past reading the first couple of pages, or flipping through the pictures in the middle section, before finding it all too complex and challenging and giving up or just forgetting all about it.

Riding home from work on the train the next day, Dupree flipped through the weekly alternative paper and mostly skimmed the entertainment and active-life offerings because each reminded him of a trail he‟d never fly down on a bike, or a painting he‟d never understand. Sometimes at work Dupree would still slip up and interject himself into a conversation about climbing, or skiing, or clamming, or, birding, with I used to . . . which would result in him flailing miserably when pressed for more details or worse, getting himself invited to join Joe or Scott or David or Mitch and Cam on their next kayaking trip through the San Juan Islands / snowboarding trip to Mount Hood / windsurfing trip to the Columbia River Gorge.

Rain tapped the glass and distorted the shapes of lights out the train‟s windows as a February wind whistled past. Slowing for some new construction near Dupree‟s neighborhood, the train‟s sudden deceleration made some people short step or lean, but Dupree knew instinctively it was coming and he braced himself. Outside the adjacent window, orange light from a welder‟s torch sprayed just as the train‟s interior lights dimmed. Dupree saw his faint reflection in the glass with the orange

88 sparks surrounding his head, and he imagined that he was being created, etched out from that black glass. Thoughts like those, Dupree always wanted write down; they were imaginative and good, but he never remembered to carry a pen, and he could never remember them after stopping at the bar on the way home. Dupree could be creative; he could make people laugh genuinely, but his consistency was such that he rarely made it past the first spark. As with his previous girlfriend, once Dupree had exhausted his store of canned thoughts and opinions, there was nothing left. He hated being so shallow, but didn‟t know how to be anything else.

Flipping to the next section in the entertainment paper, Dupree looked at the advertisement for a gallery opening, and some of the sculptures shown on the page truly caused him to look closely. They really did something to him, and he folded the paper tight to that section as he got off the train, noting that the gallery was near his condo and the opening was this coming weekend.

He stood under the yellow streetlight tucked just out of the rain under an awning as he looked at the address in the paper, realizing he was standing right in front of the gallery. But it was dark and looked closed. Even though the gala opening wasn‟t until tomorrow, he‟d imagined it would still be open. Surely they had to keep it running the week before to work out the kinks. Pressing his face close to the glass, Dupree could see someone moving inside and he pulled back quickly and turned to walk. The door clicked open and the gallery‟s sweet, new scent caught Dupree‟s nose. He was still holding the advertisement open in his hand with the address exposed in the faint light.

89 “Can I help you?” the woman asked without any noticeable tone, as she opened the door a small crack.

Dupree held up the advertisement. “Just looking. I thought maybe you were already open.”

The woman loosened visibly in the light and smiled, opening the door a bit wider. Short black hair hung just to her shoulders, and her eyes were a deep blue even in the faint light. Everything about her seemed so proportionate and sharp that she could have been a sculpture herself. “Now why would we advertise a gallery opening for Friday if we were already open?” she asked in a voice just jaunty enough that Dupree knew for sure she was being sarcastic.

“That‟s a great question. I thought maybe you had to practice or something before the big day.” He pointed the rolled up paper at her.

“Honestly, there‟s not much to practice. We just turn on the lights and hope people buy things. Well, I hope they buy things. Minter‟s the sculptor. He just wants them to love him.”

“Well,” Dupree pantomimed pushing the buttons on a card machine, “wouldn‟t you need to test the card machine, and stuff?” Dupree had attempted a joke. She hadn‟t gotten it.

“We know that part works. Trust me.”

“Sorry.” Dupree could see on the clean glass the nose print he‟d left behind.

“I just thought it looked cool. Your stuff, I mean. The artist‟s stuff. Minter‟s.”

She flipped on the lights with a device in her hand, and the gallery came to life, revealing, through the illuminated glass, pieces much bigger and ornate than Dupree imagined they would be from the pictures in the weekly. They all looked like

90 metal representations of street scenes throughout Portland, the dark corners, the things most people turn away from. Sitting behind the gallery‟s main window, a large sculpture of bent metal showed a man with a pained face relieving himself in an alley beneath bent and ominous buildings, which looked like those of the Portland skyline.

Another showed a couple nervously kissing in the corner of a bar Dupree thought he‟d been to. The Veritable Quandary perhaps.

“Does that help?” She put her fist up against her cheek, but Dupree had trouble reading her expression as she had become somewhat lost in the gallery‟s backlit glow. He truly loved what he could see of the pieces, but didn‟t know how to say that without sounding ignorant about sculpture, or art in general.

Dupree walked closer to the glass, “They‟re great. They really are.” He stopped from moving his face any further forward just before his nose smudged the glass again. Inside the window and over to the left he saw a train sculpted as if it were in screaming motion, and it left in its boxcar-wake fields of precisely sculpted but colorless flowers. “I love that one, the train.” Dupree pointed.

“The Flower Train. I like that one a lot too.” Both of them looked at the train sculpture in silence for several seconds. “You know,” the woman said looking up at Dupree and leaning against the door frame, “the opening is by invitation only. But . . .,” she reached down by the door and waved a flyer out towards Dupree. “Now you‟re invited.”

He looked down at the flyer and ran his finger across the letters, which was how he always read things. “Thank you,” Dupree said. “Really, thank you so much.”

“No, thank you—for being interested. That‟s what it‟s all about really.”

91 “Can I—“ Dupree stopped. “Can I buy you a drink or something? This really is so nice of you.”

“Where are you from? You have the tiniest hint of an accent.” She held her hand out and pinched her thumb and index finger close together.

“Missouri, originally. I‟ve actually tried to bury that accent.” Dupree looked down.

“You shouldn‟t. It‟s got a nice bounce to it. Around here no one sounds like they‟re from anywhere. You should let it go. And seriously—come by tomorrow.

For the free beer and wine, if nothing else.” She closed the door and locked it. The dimming lights of the gallery faded, and Dupree remained for a couple of seconds in the rain before turning to walk back towards his condo.

Dupree caught his stooped reflection as he passed the restaurant windows of the gentrifying neighborhood. He‟d not heard the term before—gentrify—but someone at work had used it to define the neighborhood in which Dupree lived.

Dupree soaked up the emotional implications of others and made them his own.

Reacting at first defensively, he‟d transition without knowing it, passing right by his old amorphous opinion on things into the firm convictions of those around him.

From a college girlfriend he‟d transcended his family‟s conservative values, and become liberal, though without her anymore he didn‟t know how to defend his positions, and usually he just sulked or reacted with frantic incoherence when challenged.

Crossing the road, he thought about the girl at the gallery. Those eyes!

Dupree threaded through tightly packed waves of people all off to dinner in one of the starched new restaurants. Looking down, Dupree watched the rain water flow down

92 the indentation in the new pavement, under which the old train tracks ran, and he thought about that screaming train in the gallery window. In the lobby of his condo, they had pictures of this neighborhood when it was old and gritty, and Dupree imagined, as he walked, the heavy box cars that used to make these tight turns, where the couplings likely severed fingers and arms and legs. His building still had its original name on its red bricks, The Far East Seed Company, and Dupree thought of the trains that used to pull in and load up. Perhaps they had carried exotic Asian seeds to the wealthy families in the East. In the rain Dupree made up a story about those seeds falling out of the rattling boxcars alongside the rails, in the arid high desert of eastern Oregon, where they grew into hedgerows along the tracks. Children of those desert towns would make long trips each spring to collect the flowers, and they‟d bring them back for festivals, which, because of the flower harvest, were spring celebrations no longer constrained by muted desert colors and the dominating smell of sage. It was a nice story, and one that Dupree hoped he could remember to share with the woman he‟d met at the gallery. He had to arrive with something at the opening. Perhaps a story about that train and its seeds would be enough. Besides, it matched the sculpture; Dupree‟s idea told the sculpture‟s story, and considering that he rubbed his cold hands together excited about his discovery.

Dupree walked on through the wet streets, and he added details and characters to his story about the Flower Train. Walking along the trolley line, Dupree passed newly installed bike racks all in whimsical shapes, which he recognized from the gallery‟s flyer—these bent metal bars shaped liked ducks, the Portland skyline, and those old bikes with the huge front wheels were all creations of Minter Voigt. Even though Dupree didn‟t know sculpture, he thought those racks to be pure blight,

93 uninspired, and simply a way for the artist to make money. They were cheap adornments that made Dupree laugh and shake his head. If he were a writer, he‟d never use cheap tricks like that.

The next morning Dupree left his condo, boarded the train, and thought the entire day about what he was going to wear to the gallery opening. From his computer he ignored the work he had to do, and looked online for photos of galleries, trying to discern what it was he needed to wear. Settling on a collared shirt underneath a wool sweater, Dupree waited until four o‟clock and snuck out the back door to walk to the train. Empty at that time, too early for most people to begin heading home, Dupree re-thought his outfit the entire trip.

In the expansive mirror of his bathroom, Dupree stared at himself. The bathroom had two sinks, and he realized as he checked out his clothing that he never used the sink on the right-hand side. It was perfectly clean, and he didn‟t even remember if he‟d ever turned it on. Deciding that since it was part of his mortgage he should test it, Dupree turned on the hot water, which came out and got warm then scalding, fast. His reflection disappeared into the condensation on the mirror and Dupree left the condo having never really decided whether he was wearing the right ensemble for a gallery opening. Walking along the wet streets he considered his story about the exotic seeds and spent the entire walk to the gallery trying to piece it back together. It seemed ridiculous though, so he dropped the whole thing. Dupree‟s thoughts and ideas rarely survived a rotation of the planet before he looked back on them all as absurd, and he even turned a block before the gallery to start back towards home before deciding that he really did want see that woman again.

94 Squeezing into the crowded gallery, Dupree made his way to the wine and beer table, where a stiff old man asked for his invitation, which he handed over.

Gravitating towards the train sculpture, Dupree bumped pods of patrons who were engrossed in conversation. He got a couple of looks but mostly they ignored him.

Standing by the train sculpture, Dupree began to feel the wine and again his story about the Flower Train seemed sweet and made some sense. It could be shared with the woman he‟d met last night. She‟d like it. Dupree looked for her and finally saw her standing next to a tall, serious man in a black turtleneck. Dupree recognized him from the flyer as the sculptor. A small gathering of fans surrounded him, and he answered their questions with slow and serious gestures. Finally, the woman saw Dupree from across the room and gave him a little wave, and he waved back while working his way to the wine table for additional liquid courage. They converged back in front of The Flower Train.

“You made it! I‟m so glad,” she said as she grabbed his shoulders. “Someone normal,” she whispered, looking around and rolling her eyes. “Someone my age.”

“Quite a turnout,” Dupree said looking around, and speaking up over the room‟s drone. “Has this one sold yet?” Dupree pointed to the train while finishing his third glass of wine.

“No, it hasn‟t” “What‟s it about? Or what does it mean, I guess should ask. What inspired it?”

“What‟s it mean to you?” she asked, and took a sip of her wine.

Dupree thought for a moment, and pieced together the story he‟d thought of the night before. “I think it could almost be the beginning of a children‟s book,”

95 Dupree started. He explained the flowers, and how the children grew up waiting on the spring train and its overflowing seeds as if it were all a rite of passage. They‟d play games with each other on gathering day, and they‟d develop crushes they‟d dream about until the next spring‟s Flower Train event. But one day the seed factory would close, and the trains would stop, and the children would all wonder why the flowers had ceased to grow. Two of the kids, Scott and Claire, who came from different desert towns but saw each other once a year trackside for the flower gathering would fall in love, but when the flowers stopped growing they were no longer allowed the trip by their parents and they lost each other. “That‟s about the best I can do. Maybe Scott and Claire make their way to Portland to find out what happened, and reunite there. Or maybe they just stop caring. That‟s probably the more realistic ending—they just stop caring and forget about it all.”

Claire looked at him. Her cheeks had reddened either from the story or the wine. “I love it. That is such a great story. Seriously.” She placed her hand up to her mouth and held it there. Dupree wondered if she might even start crying, but she didn‟t. She dropped her hand from her mouth and held the wine glass with both hands. “But they have to reunite in Portland. They have to figure out what happened.”

Dupree ran his hand softly across the billowing metal smoke coming off of The Flower Train. “Well,” his voice cracked and Dupree had to clear his throat.

“Well, I still have to finish the ending. I go to the Low Brow Lounge every Saturday.

You know it?”

“I do,” the woman smiled.

“I will have that ending ready by tomorrow night.”

96 She pointed over to the sculptor and shook her head. “I can‟t. I‟m sorry.”

“Oh. Well, that‟s where you can find out how this story ends. If you‟re ever interested.” Dupree couldn‟t make eye contact after that for fear she might see embarrassment exploding from his cheeks, or the watery pain in his eyes; so looking down, he thanked her for the invitation and the wine, and then he left, still feeling proud of his story. He walked in the drizzling rain, and considered the plight of The Flower Train children. He‟d write this one down. This would be something he‟d finish.