Lifestyles of the Poor and Obscure

Lifestyles Of The Poor And Obscure

Selected Short Stories T. K. O’ROURKE

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LIFESTYLES OF THE POOR AND OBSCURE SELECTED SHORT STORIES

By T.K. O’ROURKE

Kraken Press St. Paul, Minnesota

ISBN: 978-1513-1-5136-4244-4

© 2018 by T.K. O’Rourke Mike Finley, editor

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Acknowledgements........................................................................................... 4 TWILIGHT TO THE SPIRIT WORLD......................................................................5 ANIMAL CONTROL IN THE GARDEN OF EDEN................................................. 10 DONNY’S SHORTCUT....................................................................................... 38 THE KILLING TREE............................................................................................ 46 DOG IN THE GARDEN OF GETHSEMANE..........................................................57 THE TROUBLE...................................................................................................61 LIFESTYLES OF THE POOR AND OBSCURE........................................................85 FIELD OF SKULLS.............................................................................................. 90 MERLE’S BRAIN.............................................................................................. 120 AKICHITA........................................................................................................135 SONG OF OSSIAN........................................................................................... 158 ELK RIVER.......................................................................................................166 BURIAL AT MARTY MISSION.......................................................................... 170 XRIXET............................................................................................................179

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Acknowledgements I have gratitude for my thinking woman significant other, Joan Vanhala, for her patience and support,and who gave me the title for this book, for the members of the Minneapolis Writers’ Workshop, and for my editor and friend, Mike Finley, whose literary eye and ear has helped tune mine in realm of prose and poetry, and spiritual outlook. I also thank novelists Vikram Chandra, John Ivan-Palmer, and Mark Helprin for their instruction and critical feedback.

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TWILIGHT TO THE SPIRIT WORLD The sun had set and the bonfire lit. Val Tikannen stood in the vacant lot and searched the faces; she had taken time away from the fight against the garbage burner to organize the vigil. Yesterday evening a drive-by shooter murdered sixteen-year-old Cortez Ironshield. So far, nobody except the killer knew who did it. The local chapter of the Movement of American Natives had set up a drum. The songs spanned the twilight to the spirit world where Cortez was heading. Cortez’s father, Demetrius Ironshield, was there. A black woman, the mom, stood beside Demetrius. She had flown from Chicago. In addition, there was Arty O’Brien, who had quit drinking and now worked as an artist with neighborhood kids when he wasn’t working on the towboats. He was a rough man, with a long black beard. Arty cared about people and community. He worked with her ten-year-old son, Thor. Thor seldom saw his hippy-nomad father.

A teen, Malik Lloyd, helped with the fire. At age twelve, Malik became homeless when his mother became addicted to crack. He slept in the vestibule of his former apartment building until Arty intervened.

It was a village effort, keeping that teenager in school, fed, a roof over his head. He had foster parents now.

Val recognized Detective Little Thunder, investigating Cortez’s murder. He might have skipped being here it except he was born and 5

raised in the neighborhood. Omar Jackson pulled up in his Mercedes with the gold hubcaps. Omar was head of the Minneapolis chapter of the Vice Lords but had changed his path, metamorphosing into a social worker at Kwanza Mercy Center. This became his public face and headquarters. He reached all the child soldiers no matter what militia they belonged. They checked guns at the door when they came for counseling, individual or group. The Minneapolis police hated Omar.

Val noticed Detective Little Thunder and Omar give each other an almost imperceptible nod.

Angel arrived on his bicycle. The first time she met him was when he entered the People of Phillips office and helped set up computers.

He was another gangbanger, good with computers, struggling to do right, but insane. He had PTSD. His ADHD was so bad it he was hard to communicate with. She noticed that Arty and Angel gave each other a familiar nod and a long complicated handshake.

Thor and Holy Dog hung out at the bonfire with Malik. Blond and blue-eyed as a Viking, Thor spoke ebonic brogue. Val’s daughter, thirteen-year-old Freya, hung with Raina. They both wore hoodies to hide their faces. Val grasped the burden well. Better to have been born ugly.

Arty’s boy—Isaac—wasn’t there. At least, father and son spent time together on weekends. Arty was working on getting custody. When Isaac was four and her son five at a big solstice picnic at Bruce Crandall’s farm, she kept an eye on the boys. Isaac put a stick into the flames and started swinging the firebrand. She made him toss the stick on the fire and chatted with him.

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As she thought about this, she observed Arty greet Thor and Holy Dog by name. Holy Dog was the son of Amos, the MAN leader.

Her eyes followed Arty as he left the fire to check in with one of her ex-boyfriends. That guy and Arty had been pals for a long time, done poetry readings together, and screwed the same women.

She clenched her teeth. Former boyfriends and wanna-be boyfriends pressured her, sniffed around to discover if she had money or food or a place they could stay.

I need a rough sober man, she thought, with a heart of gold to run them off. I get with one dirty bastard after another. I like Detective Little Thunder, but he’s married.

Arty shook hands with the ex-boyfriend then headed her way. He pursed his lips and exhaled.

Detective Little Thunder and Omar converged with Arty and Val. The detective pointed his chin at the drum and the fire. “The shooting happened down the block.”

“How could this happen?” said Arty. “Cortez hung at my studio and did homework every night. He pushed shopping carts and bagged groceries at the co-op. But after he organized that meeting confronting Officer Larson for shaking down neighborhood kids for money they earned from afterschool jobs . . .”

“It’s hard to prove,” said Little Thunder.

“Whoever does it is sanctioned by the government,” said Omar.

“Streetcorner dealers don’t fly the cocaine into the country. And the guns are packed alongside the cocaine.”

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Val shook her hair like a lion’s mane. “All I know is our young man who had won a scholarship to West Point was shot in the street.” Val waved her hand in Malik’s direction who poked a long-handled pitchfork into the fire to adjust the wood as it burned. “Look at Malik.

As long as he wears that jacket from the Community Police Office, the cops might not shoot him for being black. A friend of my daughter was shot and paralyzed while walking to school. And the toxic waste in this neighborhood makes kids too crazy to learn or pay attention. The county considers this neighborhood a sacrifice zone, building the garbage burner to dump toxic ash over folks.”

She watched these men shut up. Also, the shortage of men. When the jobs dried up, they lost their dignity, beat their women, and left the neighborhood. Nine single mothers for each man now. The monogamous men were hooked up, so single moms took a stand to fight for the neighborhood. But when a man showed up, out of prison, drug-free and holy, the women wage war with each other the way we do, gossiping and backbiting. My children’s father took advantage of this and stepped out on me while I was pregnant. How could a man understand a woman if he was with more than one? Arty is sober, worked the fires for sweat lodges. He’s working on himself. He’s too honest to be a player but has other girlfriends. Arty might have problems, but at least he pays child support.

Two young men in red berets and MAN jackets passed out candles.

One candle lit the next. Four men sat at a drum and sang an honor song for fallen warriors.

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These are not warriors, thought Val. These are children.

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ANIMAL CONTROL IN THE GARDEN OF EDEN In February, Arty O’Brien decked on the barges on the Lower Mississippi and Illinois rivers. He had dreamed of going to the Yukon Territories since reading Jack London stories as a boy, and now made enough money to make it happen if he remained sober. The general plan was to convert a school bus to a camper, and drive north with his common-law wife Rivka and their nine-month -old boy, Isaac.

The only one on the MALLARD who didn’t drink, at first the crew treated him like a born-again Christian. Boozing or not, Arty knew the most predictable thing about him was his commitment to follow through, no matter how crazy. This led to an FBI record. The other predictable thing about him was his mouth. A chest-long black beard hid scars where buckteeth cut through his lower lip when punched in the face.

After a night building tow in the Saint Louis harbor, the captain steered the towboat under the bridge that overlooked the downtown city park. The crew tied the boat to timberheads along the levee. Arty went belowdecks to the engine room and shut down the diesels.

Next morning the captain called a meeting in the boat galley. The crew sat at the counter as the cook dished out grits and eggs.

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The captain shook black pepper over his grits. “You boys take a weekend for shore leave. Anyone thrown in the drunk tank, I won’t bail you out ‘til Monday morning when we ship up.”

When Arty stepped off the boat onto the levee, the first solid ground he’d set feet on in thirty days, his body rocked as though aboard the boat. The cook had given him a sack of stale buns for the pigeons.

Long hair in a tight braid, he accompanied the other deckhands as they cruised for women in the waterfront park.

In the center of the park stood an arch named GATEWAY TO THE WEST, glimmering gold and tall as a skyscraper. To Arty, it looked like a McDonald’s hamburger symbol, missing half. Bicycle paths and walk paths wound through rose gardens.

One of the deckhands turned to Arty.

“We’re going drinking. If you come with us, please don’t act weird.”

Arty zipped down his fly, pulled out his penis and urinated on the base of the gigantic arch. His pals ditched him as he shook out the last drops of urine and zipped up his fly. A woman trained a finger in his direction. Her husband approached, chest stuck out like a baboon.

“What are you doing?”

Arty faced him. “I’m doing Dadaist performance art, an extension of the 1917 R. Mutt urinal. Any spontaneous action allows me to interface with the superorganism of infinity, accessing parallel dimensions and the intelligence of existence. It’s practical. Most folks think rocks are stupid, or those,” he pointed to a flock of pigeons pecking at crumbs

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scattered in the lawn, “are dumb beasts. Every subatomic particle talks, thinks, acts, loves. ” Mr. Baboon put hands on hips and stood akimbo. “Where do you come from?”

“I come from the river. That’s my girl, wise and tough.” Arty gestured downhill to the MALLARD, tied to cast iron timberheads.

The man surveyed the towboat moored along the levee. Eightypound ratchets stacked on the head deck, steel cable rolled and heaped, deck lines coiled, winch wires hanging from the tow knees.

“You’re a bargeman?”

“Yeup. Be careful, I talk to animals. You animal? I’m half tiger, skinny but with tarry caca, halitosis like the black death. You’d best step back.”

The eyes of Mr. Baboon widened. They examined Arty’s wiry frame and striated muscles in forearms. Eyes fell to the lanyard dangling from Arty’s belt to pocket that carried a serrated rigging knife. He skipped back, taking his woman by the elbow to trot away down the path.

With no companions, Arty felt free as the Silver Surfer, the solitary existential god of Marvel comics who glides through the cosmos on a surfboard. He sat on a park bench and fed pigeons hot dog buns, and recalled a bench like this in Memphis, bottle of Mad Dog in a brown paper bag beside him. That day he looked out on the river through eyelids thickened with nectar alcohol. He’d Isaac now, and promised not to drink anymore.

Pigeons pecked crumbs at Arty’s steel-toed boots. He reached down with a piece of bun. Pigeons took it from his fingers. Arty noticed two 12

police officers on foot striding in his direction. The pigeons flew away.

Arty followed them between buildings of the downtown streets. They guided him to A.Amitin’s used bookstore. There he climbed rolling ladders hooked to the top rail of the bookshelves and found Mircea Eliade’s Shamanism.

He knew the book describing the shaman’s trance that destroyed, on a metaphysical or symbolic level, his bones then replaced them with that of the spirit animal. It sounded like going through DTs or heroin withdrawals. He tucked the book in his armpit. Running fingertips over book spines, his mind lit when he discovered a Canadian edition of the Whole Earth Catalog. It contained a slice about intentional communities in the Yukon Territories and Dawson City. Arty paid for the books, lugged them back to the tramp towboat, and began to read.

Distracted by the flies in the bunkroom, he killed them all except one. Communicating mentally with the last survivor, he spared it when it landed on the freckle on his shoulder.

Aware he wasn’t the only riverman too crazy to live in Babylon, he lived in something he described to Rivka as Rivertime, where families wearing buckskin jackets and coonskin hats drifted by on rafts and keelboats. Bald eagles from lost centuries fed on fish churned up by the propeller flukes of the towboats. Rivermen witnessed sunrise, sunset, and full constellations most nights, stood in right-brain silence of wind and sun on barge covers at the bow, and communicated to the captain with hand-signals. They built tow in pouring rain and blizzards, and climbed seventy feet up ice covered steel rungs in the lock chambers.

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In March, he posted a letter for Rivka with the tender of the Alton, Illinois, lock and dam. Ice beginning to clear, boat and crew tramped upriver with a tow of empty barges for homeport, the Saint Paul Harbor. ~ In Minneapolis, Arty gave Rivka half his wages. That left him a thousand. His pal Ray mentioned a school bus converted to a camper for sale. Ray drove them to look at it. Isaac sucked on Rivka’s teat while they drove.

By the time they arrived, Arty shifted to manic optimism. A 1953 International Harvester, twenty-four feet in length, shimmered robin’s egg blue.

A gray-haired redneck shook hands all-around. “I used it as a mobile hunters’ cabin. Pulled the straight-six, replaced the bellhousing, and dropped in a 345 cubic inch V8.”

“And I bet your wife wants it gone,” said Rivka. She handed Isaac to Arty and climbed aboard.

Arty hugged his nine-month-old son to his chest and shoulder, nose against Isaac’s hair. Inhaling puppy and baby monkey smell, he climbed into the bus behind Rivka.

The kitchen included a new propane stove with oven, a stainless steel sink, and overhead cabinets. A dinette table disassembled to fit snug between bench seats to make a child’s bed. Seats opened for storage. Bunks built into the wall on one side of the bus incorporated drawers. Paneled closets stood opposite.

Arty rocked Isaac as he burped breast milk on his shoulder. He passed the baby back to Rivka. “Can I start it up?”

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The seller shook his head. “It won’t run. Look here.”

They descended the bus steps to the parking pad. The seller pointed to a new looking V8 block, painted red, on a pallet.

“The old engine needs to be pulled and that one put in.”

“How much?” Arty asked.

“Six-hundred for the bus and the rebuilt. The engine cost that much.”

“Five hundred, cash.”

Arty paid him. The seller signed over the title.

“I’ll be back tomorrow to get it.” Of the money earned from working on the barges, he still had five-hundred.

The following day Arty purchased a Triple-A membership for forty dollars. He could con them for up to three tows within a 90-mile radius.

He returned with a crew, loaded the rebuilt engine onto the floor, and used the seller’s house phone to call Triple A. The tow truck delivered the bus to the blacktop parking lot of Seward Café, a collectively run restaurant at Franklin and 22nd Avenue in South Minneapolis. Half the staff volunteered for burger bucks, a local currency good for café meals and sometimes convertible to cash.

Parked in the café lot, they settled into life on the bus. Women with babies visited and shared childcare. Ray dropped by with his daughter Rain, same age as Isaac.

On a typical morning, Arty stretched awake, cuddled Rivka and the baby, and pulled on his jeans.

“I’ve got a counter shift.”

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Burger bucks the size and color of monopoly money lay stacked on the bus dinette table, coffee cup for a paperweight.

“We’ll be in soon,” said Rivka. She and the baby stayed fed and accessed toilets and running water.

We are rich, thought Arty. ~ With help from Rivka, he unbolted the fenders and hood, laid them aside, rented a hoist, disconnected the old engine from the bellhousing, and pulled it. Rental of the hoist came to ten dollars. An entire set of new socket and box wrenches cost three hundred. They dropped in the gleaming red rebuilt, cannibalized the distributor from the old engine and taped labels on the spark plug wires to prevent a mix-up in the firing order of the cylinders. The wrong firing order could break the engine. Arty rebuilt the carburetor, the starter motor, and the generator.

Switching a six-volt battery to 12-volt, his friend Stooky wrapped wires over a ceramic resistor for the bus lights, reducing the juice to seven or eight volts. Arty cranked the engine. When it turned over on the first try, it was the most gorgeous sound he ever heard. And he was flat broke.

Rivka changed Isaac’s Pampers on the dinette table.

“A hippy school bus needs decorations,” she said.

They visited Brother DePaul’s second hand store. Arty toted Isaac on his chest in a child carrier with shoulder straps. Rivka scrounged dozens of National Geographic maps and paid for them.

Back at the bus, Arty mixed white flour and water in a coffee can and then pasted the maps across the outside bulkhead of the school bus.

Rivka sealed the maps with shellac. They kept an eye on Ray’s 16

daughter Rain who just now had Isaac in a café cookpot in the dirt and pretended to boil him.

Rivka stepped back to admire the maps. “Now we’re going somewhere.”

Arty pulled her close, her shoulder under his armpit. “The brakes still need work. They’ll get us to Nicollet Island, but I’m short of cash to finish the job.” Nicollet Island lay above Saint Anthony Falls on the Mississippi River between downtown Minneapolis and Northeast neighborhood.

She raised her eyebrows. “How short?”

“Two hundred to finish. Then we’re on the road.”

Rivka convinced several hippies from the Seward Café to kick in gas money to ride to the Minnesota Rainbow Gathering. It was an easy sell. Only the most elite of hippies went in converted school buses. She turned that money over to him.

Assured of hippy-king status, Arty piloted family and friends in the bus three miles to Nicollet Island. They had seven days before heading north. He estimated that was more than enough time to get the brakes road-ready. ~ The street down the center of Nicollet Island ended at the communal vegetable plot. A gravel lot extended past the garden, bordered by box elders and underbrush. Arty moored the bus on the gravel.

Island Avenue went over the Burlington Northern and Santa Fe railroad tracks. A hobo jungle under the railroad trestle existed since the end of the Civil War. Anarchist children jumped off the bridge 17

where the Mississippi River flowed around the back. Dogs roamed protected from dogcatchers by six Chinese geese. The canopy of ancient elm in the common spread as large as the fourplex Victorian just beyond with lead paint peeling like alligator hide.

The island measured two and a half blocks wide by five blocks long.

Including riverbank, foot trail, hobo jungle, the island measured two and a half blocks wide by five blocks long. ~ Two years earlier Rivka and Arty squatted in an apartment of the fourplex Victorian. They lived across the hall from Jacob Swan and his wife Meridel. The older couple held steady jobs and paid a minimal rent to the Minneapolis Housing Authority. Decent caring folk who could be relied upon, they provided counseling, access to a telephone, and rides to the emergency room. Emergencies included stitches when Arty slashed his hand while skinning the bark off willow poles for a yurt, and Rivka’s miscarriage. As winter approached, Jacob Swan helped him wrap the outer wall of the apartment with lathe and sheet plastic to prevent wind and snow from blowing through gaps in the siding. Someone provided a coal stove. The stove at one time kept railroad workers warm in a caboose. A block away by the railroad tracks, tons of coal free for the taking lay heaped in the cellar of the abandoned cold storage warehouse.

When the temperature dropped to thirty-below zero Fahrenheit, Arty hiked over crusted snow with an ashcan rigged with a tumpline. Two hoboes, Robert Lee McClure and Iowa Blacky, huddled out of the wind on the loading dock of the cold storage. Robert was black and Iowa 18

Blacky was white. Arty invited them for soup and coffee. They helped haul the coal.

Rivka welcomed them. When Robert removed boots and socks to warm his feet, five toes and the outer edge of his right foot had turned white. Two nights earlier he slept with feet too near the campfire and burned a hole in one boot. After that, his foot got wet. When the temperature dropped, the foot froze.

Iowa Blacky watched Rivka pour herbs and powders into a pot of water boiling on the coal stove. “You take good care of my friend. I’m heading to Florida for the orange harvest.” He left chapbooks of his poems.

Robert Lee McClure settled in until March while Rivka soaked his injured foot three times daily in near boiling hot infusions of cayenne, comfrey, and burdock. When Rivka massaged the foot after each soak with vitamin E oil, flesh sloughed off and new skin regenerated over the wound. The herbalist restored blood circulation and reversed gangrene typical to deep frostbite.

Arty swiped the vitamin E oil from his oldest friend Merle’s apartment. Merle helped people. A hustler most his life, before sobering up and becoming a street psychologist he introduced Arty’s mother to his father.

Robert told stories around the stove during the winter nights. The hobo had kicked heroin, ridden freights from Los Angeles to Portland, then across the Northwest to Minneapolis. He picked fruit in Oregon, harvested sugar beets in Northern Minnesota, and busted car batteries

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for recycling at a Washington Avenue junkyard in Minneapolis. He called the diesel engine that tugged the boxcars ‘old dirty-face.’ ~ Riders to the Rainbow Gathering arrived on Nicollet Island. They pitched tents in the gravel and bushes along the abandoned warehouse at one edge of the lot. Hordes of mosquitoes awaited them. In those bushes sat the five-gallon plastic bucket the camp used as a shitter. No one bought toilet paper but plenty of burdocks grew with leaves soft, the size of elephant ears.

The residents of Nicollet Island tolerated the camp and buckets of shit dumped between the rows of peas and lettuces. The hippies would soon go away.

Jacque was among those heading for the Rainbow Gathering. Before Isaac’s conception, Arty, Rivka and Jacque rode boxcars together from the International Survival Gathering in the Black Hills. If Arty was hippy king, then Jacque was champion Knight of the Roundtable. Next came Donny Freeman, the black and dreadlocked performer of African dance. Donny drank too much. Muscled as Baryshnikov and certain of his handsomeness, his ragged left ear displayed tooth marks where someone bit him during a brawl. A cataract scar blinded his left eyeball.

After Donny came Ray whose recent ancestors emigrated from Appalachia. Not a tall man, he could backflip and land catlike on his feet. Ray sometimes brought Rain to the camp.

Arty was the only man of the crew who didn’t drink. Rivka also stayed sober to support and honor his sobriety and their coupleship. ~ 20

Arty attempted to quit drinking many times. In mid-December, eleven months before they conceived Isaac, he woke up laying in vomit on the living room floor at Stooky’s house. They split the rent and sometimes cleaned up the place. Or rather, Rivka cleaned up the place.

Stooky was an alcoholic inventor. Television tubes, vacuum cleaners, and electric motors lay in heaps all over the house.

Rivka stood over Arty, bruised around her shoulders, a knot on the side of her head. In her hands, she held his steel-toe work boots. Arty had blacked out. A film clip of memory returned, of hammering her with those boots.

Beside her stood Merle, long white hair over the shoulders of his polyester sport jacket. He stood six-foot-six and spoke in a resonant baritone. Arty remembered when his hair was red.

“I found you laying in your puke when you were sixteen on 55th Street in Chicago. Here you are again. You could’ve killed her.”

“I’m ready to quit. But I won’t be brainwashed by going to treatment. Unless I can’t quit.”

“She already packed your toothbrush. We’re taking a road trip.”

“How long?”

“As long as it takes to get clean. A week. It’s harder without going into treatment, but your sobriety will be a higher quality if you can do this.”

Arty believed Merle. He showered and changed into clean clothes.

Rivka hugged then pushed him away. “I’m praying for you.”

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As they hit the expressway, Merle said, “If you were older, we’d have to take you to the hospital. Have you ever gone through DTs before?”

“Just the shakes after a long binge.” ~ They drove four days.

Day 1: Arty fasted and drank diluted orange juice. They stopped at night, visiting the home of Merle’s contacts. The first folks were Quakers who lived in the Black Hills, six-hundred miles from Minneapolis. Arty did an hour of yoga. Before lying down to rest, he smoked one hit of light gage cannabis sativa to reduce anxiety. He couldn’t sleep. His hands twitched and trembled. Pain hammered his bones. He popped 600 milligrams of ibuprofen. In the morning, Arty stuck to the diluted orange juice and another hour of yoga. He wasn’t required to visit or socialize. Merle did that, and kept an eye on him.

Day 2: Continued fasting. Merle drove south through Nebraska.

High plains territory, they passed miles of cowboy boots fit over the tops of fence posts. They stopped that evening at the house of a Ponca man—a Native American Church minister—and his wife. Merle had kept in touch with the priest from their days in the Marines. Arty stayed in an octagon cabin behind the house. He stepped inside and looked around—small square windows, linoleum over the floor, a couch along a wall, a woodstove. One framed picture of Christ praying in the garden of Gethsemane hung from a wall. Below it, on the floor, was an altar of sand in a wood frame.

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Arty pulled out his one-hit pipe, put in a pinch of weed, lit it, inhaled, and popped two ibuprofens. Then he did yoga for hours. Dark by the time he went outside to pee, the moon was full. Sweat from his armpits, chest and back soaked his shirt. The bone pain intensified.

Back inside the cabin, he lay on the couch and couldn’t sleep. He got up and popped 800 milligrams of ibuprofen. The shakes reminded him of birth contractions. When Arty closed his eyes, a demon peered back at him. Reptilian scales glistening, it extended bat wings and flicked its tail.

Desperate to remain in control, the demon clawed every molecule of Arty’s body. Arty told himself if women can give birth, then he could expel it.

Next morning before Merle and he hit the road, the minister shook his hand.

“I’ll pray you receive good health and good help. If you stay sober from this full moon to the next, it’ll stick.”

Day 3: Quitting drinking and smoking was the most difficult thing he’d ever done. When Arty quit drinking, he smoked. When Arty quit smoking, he drank again. He failed every time before he knew to give up both, together.

Merle drove southeast to Saint Louis to visit his mother. Arty’s waves of shaking came less frequent. He lay on the couch and slept a little.

Day 4: Driving back to Minneapolis, they stopped in Winona along the Mississippi River and stayed with another of Merle’s contacts.

Merle had grown up there. His second wife, whom Arty knew when he 23

was a boy, worked at the convent up the hill. She came to visit. A former thousand-dollar a night courtesan, she helped bring down members of the Chicago Syndicate. After that, she and Merle married, but his drunken mania ruined it. She’d been the great love of his life.

Merle regretted losing her. While he sobered up after the fiftieth time on the violent ward of the State Hospital, she still drank. There was no possibility of them getting together again.

Arty had quit shaking and sweating. The bone-ache diminished. He did yoga, drank diluted juice, and walked to smoke a bowl.

Upon return to the Twin Cities, he headed to Palmer's Bar on the West Bank, drank beer and smoked cigarettes. The demon sat on the barstool beside him, eyelids sleepy as he lit a Lucky Strike, batwings folded upon his back. He gripped Arty’s arm with a taloned fist until drawing blood.

—Even if you don’t drink, I’m in your head, reminding you what a rotten piece of shit you are. I remember everything that happened during those blackouts. I know you better than you know yourself— Arty returned to Stooky’s house. He moved to the basement away from Rivka, fasted and practiced yoga for another four days, this time without weed. Sobriety stuck.

He figured one thing. Everything in life is art, with eternal and shapeshifting consequences.

Stooky quit drinking too. ~ The brakes worked, sort of, old horseshoe style front and back. But the single-reservoir master cylinder had only a single steel brake line 24

coming from it. If the line leaked, then all four brakes failed. This crashed buses and killed schoolchildren down mountain roads in the old days. Detroit ceased manufacturing single-chambered master cylinders.

Arty bought new steel lines and special ordered a double-reservoir master cylinder with brake line fittings for each chamber. He flared the ends of the brake lines for compression fittings, then lay beneath the bus while bending and lacing lines through the frame to along the back and front axles.

If they didn’t buy groceries, there was just enough money in reserve for gas to the Rainbow Gathering. Arty needed to find a job in order to make it to Dawson City. Maybe work back on the river. That would cancel the run to the Rainbow Gathering and set back the journey to the Yukon Territories until summer of next year. Heading far north in the snow wasn’t an option.

After ten-hour days wrenching and adapting fittings, he dug night crawlers from the village garden, plenty where his crew dumped the slop pail. Arty took a bar of soap, fishing pole, and dishwashing bucket to the strand of sand along the channel around the back of the island.

He bathed naked, soaped himself and rinsed, then scrubbed the pots and pans with grit. When finished with dishes, he pulled on his coveralls.

After that, he baited an eagle-claw hook with a night crawler. It squirmed like Christ on the cross.

Forgive me, he prayed to the worm. I know not what I do.

He got a hit on the first cast.

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The fish resisted and fought back. Arty reeled it to shallow water and lifted it out. He’d caught plenty of channel cats but nothing akin to this two-foot long fish with cobalt colored whiskers, fins, back and flanks, in contrast to a belly of turquoise blue. The fished glared with intelligent eyes as bright and cold as opals. Arty placed the fish in the bucket and brought it back to the bus. Rivka came out to see. The fish jumped from the bucket to the dirt where it thrashed.

“You pissed that fish off,” said Rivka. “Look at it. It’s magic. I won’t eat it. Put it back.”

Arty hurried back to the beach to release it.

“You might be magic. I better let you go. Sorry to piss you off.” ~ Robert Lee McClure, Iowa Blacky and other hoboes camped beneath the railroad trestle, a wild place with plenty of catfish. Robert sometimes visited Rivka and told stories over cups of coffee. Iowa dropped by with xeroxed chapbooks of his poetry. They comprised long lyric narratives written in couplets about riding the freight trains, the sights he saw, the work he’d done and the people he met. ~ Toward the end of the first week, a police cruiser wheeled onto the gravel and pulled up near the bus. Two officers, a man and a woman, exited the car and approached.

Arty cooked over three wood-fired hibachis made of coffee cans set up on the dirt. He caught a whiff of the police officers twenty feet away.

The female officer wore perfumed deodorant, and the male wore cologne.

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Jacque, handsome and black-haired, just returned from the bushes where he had shit in the bucket. A cloud of mosquitoes followed him.

They forsook Jacque for the police officers.

Rivka, Isaac straddled on her hip, stepped off the bus. She surveyed the scene. She handed Arty the baby.

“See these maps?” She waved a hand toward the shellacked displays on the bus bulkhead.

“We’re Travelers, but are delayed until the United Parcel Service delivers a master cylinder for the brakes. Then we head to the Yukon Territories.” She fluttered her hands like a Jedi exerting the Force.

The police officers studied the National Geographic maps. Isaac craned his head in Arty’s arms to see.

“This is our next destination,” said Rivka. She placed a finger on Dawson City at the Yukon River. “We are explorers. Allow me to introduce you to. . . Jacque.”

These police officers didn't know the FBI suspected Jacque of bombing the restrooms at FBI headquarters in downtown Minneapolis.

Jacque stood before them, smiling. The officers shook his hand.

“National Geographic,” said Rivka. She fluttered her fingers.

“Jacque like Cousteau.” She quivered her hand one more time.

“Mosquitoes transmit West Nile virus and Dengue fever.”

The mosquitoes, attracted to the perfumed deodorant and cologne, bit the necks and arms of the police officers in their short-sleeved summer uniforms.

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“OK,” said the male cop. “You can stay until you get your brakes fixed.” He swatted his forehead and crushed a mosquito filled with blood.

The female slapped her face and backed away. “Good luck on your journey,” she said.

The officers got inside their air-conditioned squad car and wheeled off. ~ After two weeks, Arty hadn’t finished the brakes. The various hippies abandoned the gravel lot on Nicollet Island and made other arrangements to attend the Minnesota Rainbow Gathering. Donny Freeman stayed behind. Ray never intended to go.

Around that time Donny went dumpster diving. He returned with loaves of stale Wonder Bread and Hostess Doughnuts from the back of Super America and a sack of half-full liquor bottles from behind the Viking bar. That afternoon Arty drank and smoked again.

That week, Billy Huntsman arrived. ~ When Arty saw Billy’s panel van, painted camouflage as trees and cattails, he was afraid. Parked on the street on the other side of the village garden, Billy moved his truck a few yards every day so the police wouldn’t tow him.

Before Arty met Rivka, Billy had been Arty’s private wilderness survival instructor. Billy taught him to build a fire with a bow and drill, skin and butcher a deer, set snares for rabbits, eat city squirrels and pigeons, and add vegetables to pancakes. An expert taxidermist, dog 28

hide throws covered the back of chairs at Billy’s former apartment.

When Arty visited his teacher, they ate catfish and deep-fried snapping turtle eggs. Billy recently acquired a pit bull.

Nice doggy he called it. The dog was thick as a pig with muscular hams.

The next time Arty visited, it was gone.

When Arty pitched a tent in the bushes above the Washington Avenue coal dock, Billy climbed the chain-link fence to visit. They looked over the Mississippi River and talked hunting ethics.

“I eat everything I kill,” said Billy. “That’s my responsibility.”

Arty passed him a tin cup of hot coffee. “If you killed a man, would you eat him?”

Billy took the cup. His eyes stayed on Arty’s eyes. “What do you think?”

What scared Arty the most was that Billy never bullshitted, and always kept his word. He’d a fourth-degree black belt in karate.

One day Arty recognized Billy in a grainy photo in a Minneapolis Tribune article about the robbery of the Farmers and Mechanics bank in downtown Minneapolis. Billy had bicycled away through rush hour traffic. Arty clipped the photo.

The following midday Arty tracked Billy to Whitey’s Tavern on Franklin venue. Whitey—the bartender/owner—and Billy were the only ones there. They talked in low voices. Whitey’s elbows on the bar, he knocked cigar ash in an ashtray. Arty placed the clipping on the bar.

He slid it to Billy.

The bartender held the cigar between his teeth. Arty noticed the Minuteman symbol embroidered over the pocket of the bartender’s 29

polo shirt and realized these men were white supremacists. He should’ve known, with Billy’s talk of Viking women whetting their broadswords on their naked breasts.

People assumed Arty was white, but he came from a Metis family.

The Rhode Island Klu Klux Klan blew up Arty’s family home when he was a boy. Now, passing as a white hippy, Arty stood in his enemies’ camp.

Something else bothered him. Billy once mentioned the loss of his wife, how it devastated his soul. The couple had holed up in a Colorado cave. One day Billy returned from hunting to find his wife ground to hamburger. Billy said he didn’t know if he might’ve done it.

Ground to hamburger. At the time, Arty thought it a figure of speech. ~ Neighborhood cats and dogs on Nicollet Island went missing.

Arty crossed from the gravel lot to the street where Billy parked his van. Billy seemed nowhere around, but Arty noticed Meridel's calico cat inside the van. The cat rubbed up against the windshield. Arty banged on the door of Jacob and Meridel’s apartment. Jacob let him in and called the police. Other neighbors tried opening the camouflage bread truck to release the cat.

Billy, sleeping in the back, woke up. He stood in the street with an air pistol. Police arrived, freed the cat and confiscated the gun. No arrest. That evening Billy parked his van near the railroad trestle. ~

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Rivka sat at the dinette, her arms folded across her chest. Fourteenmonth-old Isaac stood on the bench beside her. He walked and showed four teeth on the top and four on the bottom.

“We have eaten nothing but white flour pancakes and dumpster doughnuts for a week. No eggs, no meat, no cheese. I’m nursing Isaac.

For his sake, quit drinking.”

Arty raised his voice. “What the fuck do you want me to do, woman?

I’ll quit when the booze is gone. I spent the money rebuilding the fucking brakes, and I’m near done. Then I’ll work at the fucking labor pool until we have enough fucking money to move to Dawson City.”

Sure he would lose her if he returned to the barges, Arty now saw dread cross Rivka’s face. She waited for him to blame, throw something, smash the place. Now he hated himself.

A noise, loud as a near lightning strike, interrupted them.

Arty went into a crouch. “That’s a shotgun, close by.”

He shielded Rivka as she carried Isaac. They dashed a half-block to Jacob and Meridel Swan’s apartment. As they ran, the camouflage panel van drove along the road to off the island.

After Jacob called the cops, he and Arty headed toward the railroad trestle where Huntsman last parked. Iowa Blacky scrambled up the escarpment from the river.

“That crazy Billy shot Robert.”

Arty knew it. He and Jacob didn’t go down to the camp.

Iowa Blacky wept. “Crazy Billy claimed this stretch of river is his garden. The fish, the ducks, the weeds belong to him. He wanted us out of here, and he kilt Robert.”

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First, police arrived. Then an ambulance came. After that, a vehicle from the Hennepin County medical examiner pulled up. Residents gathered and watched the EMS team zip Robert into a body bag, strap him to a backboard, and carry it up the escarpment.

Arty watched them load the body bag onto a gurney and into the ambulance. It drove away without siren or flashing lights. The police interviewed Iowa Blacky. No one would claim Robert’s body. No funeral, no memorial except a poem, or a song, if Blacky ever wrote it. ~ Arty was stewed when Ray came over later that day. Rivka phoned him from Meridel’s. Ray drove Rivka and Isaac to her friend’s house in South Minneapolis. After Ray got Rivka moved, he drove back to the island to visit Donny Freeman who’d set up a tent beyond the shit bucket.

Donny hooked a portable radio to a car battery and listened to music.

He and Ray guzzled the last half-full bottles of Cabin Still. It was dusk.

Arty sulked alone in the bus, and listened to the two men arguing.

“Your daughter is a little peckerwood,” said Donny.

“Don’t call my baby a peckerwood.”

“But she is. And she’ll grow up to be a big-ass peckerwood woman.”

“I never called you a nigger. Why you call my baby a peckerwood?”

“Nigger? Now we going to fight, you trash motherfucker.”

“Well let’s go do it in the gravel where we can get it on instead of the bushes.”

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They came out onto the gravel behind the bus. Arty wobbled out to watch.

“All right,” said Ray. “No knives, clubs or biting. If you do I’ll blind your other eye.”

“OK,” said Donny. “No knives, clubs or biting, no eye gouging.”

The two men swung at each other and lost their balance. They grappled and rolled in the gravel, punching each other. When Ray and Donny regained their feet, they toppled into the garden, wrestled in shit from the slop bucket, and fought their way into the street.

A white Ford Econoline van pulled up. Two khaki and brown uniformed men got out. Sheriffs. Ray and Donny stopped fighting and propped themselves up on their arms.

These cops didn’t carry holstered guns.

One officer, hands on hips, shook his head at Donny and Ray. “The neighbors called Animal Control on two stray dogs fighting in the street.”

The other said, “You?” Donny stood and helped Ray to his feet. They both looked down.

“It’s over now,” said Donny.

“Sorry for the trouble,” said Ray. The dogcatchers climbed into the van and drove away.

Donny wiped his fingers on his jersey and sniffed his palm. He wrinkled his nose.

“Let’s wash this shit off."

They went to the river.

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~ Arty quit drinking again.

Three days later a glossy brown UPS van pulled up in the gravel lot.

The driver in brown work clothes delivered the double-reservoir master cylinder. Arty signed for it. When the Nicollet Island three-headed hound showed up to howl at the driver, Arty thought he might be slipping into DTs. The driver’s eyes widened so bloodshot whites showed. “Oh fuck,” he said. He backed into the truck like a turd afraid dogs might eat him, glided the door closed and accelerated away.

Arty slipped the driver’s ballpoint pen into his overall front pocket, crawled under the bus and cussed for three hours, forcing the larger master cylinder into space meant for the smaller single-chambered master cylinder. Task accomplished with bloodied knuckles, Arty decided taking the bus on a run to reach the remnants of the Rainbow Gathering. If accomplished, Rivka would forgive him, and she and Isaac would return.

On the way to Interstate-35W Arty tested the brakes. The bus slowed to a stop. Perfect brake-pressure. Down the on-ramp, Arty shifted gears until merging with traffic at highway speed. In spite of the smell of the camp shit-bucket still perfuming the interior of the bus and sunflowers growing from the ceiling, Arty felt sick but happy.

—We’ll be off the grid, free from motherfucking vampires of Babylon. Breathe clean air, drink lead-free water, build a cabin, live off the land. I’ll be janitor in the Garden of Eden—

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Upon nearing Rush City, fifty miles beyond Minneapolis, the engine started banging. The bus lost acceleration. Arty steered the bus to a rolling stop on the shoulder. A VFW tavern stood on a frontage road on the other side of the pasture. Arty hopped the fence, waded through snakes in the tall grass, and used the tavern landline to call Triple A. Triple A instructed him to wait by the bus. An hour later, a big tow truck arrived.

The driver stepped down from the cab. “Please sign.” He handed him a clipboard with the Triple A order.

Arty reached to his top overall pocket for the ballpoint pen swiped from the UPS driver. He pulled out a fresh sleek turd, glistening in the sunlight. The driver walked around the back of the tow truck. He didn’t see Arty flipping the turd over the pasture fence.

“No pen.” Arty reached behind him and wiped his hand under the tow truck running board.

The driver handed a Bic to him. Arty signed and this time returned the pen. The driver shifted the bus into neutral, hooked it up and hoisted the front end. Still detecting the scent of shit, Arty rode back to Nicollet Island in the passenger seat. The driver returned the bus to the gravel lot.

The next day, sweating, shaking, his nose running, Arty crabbed beneath the engine to remove the oil pan. He discovered an entire piston shattered to tarantulas.

He opened the hood. A tarantula, where the distributer should be, had switched the spark plug wires. The difficult truth occurred like a shadow beneath the surface of the river. Arty switched the wires 35

unbeknownst to himself, conspiring against himself. He’d done it his entire life. As demons laughed, Arty felt their weight squeezing his chest.

He boiled a pot of coffee and sat at the dinette, found cigarette butts and re-rolled loose tobacco in a zigzag paper.

A knock on the bus door. The door was open. Arty didn’t recognize the man. “Come on in,” he said. “Coffee?”

“Sure,” said the stranger. He carried a McDonald’s sack.

Arty studied the stranger. Not a hippy. Short black hair and a trimmed goatee, he wore blue jeans, cobalt leather Cabretta, and looked near the same age as him.

“You been living here all summer,” said the stranger. “Where you going?”

“Going crazy.”

“No doubt. Want to buy a gun?”

Arty raised his eyebrows. “Show me.”

The man put his hand into the paper bag and pulled out a blue steel revolver with a six–inch barrel and ax handle grip. He placed the .45 on the table.

Arty wanted it. A guerilla like Billy Huntsman camped hidden under people’s noses. If the police caught him, they’d send him to Saint Peter Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Arty wondered what would happen if he ran into Billy along the railroad tracks to the West Bank or the Seward Café?

“How much you asking?”

“Fifty dollars. Got another cigarette?”

36

Arty didn’t touch the piece. He thought, Billy wigged out in the Colorado Rockies and ate his wife. When I get to the Arctic Circle, will I go bush crazy and eat my family?

Arty passed the lit hand-rolled. “I don’t even have enough money for a pack.”

The stranger tilted his head a degree. He placed the butt to his lips, inhaled. Smoke mushroomed from gills along his jaw just below his ear.

With blue eyes stark as ice, he studied Arty. He returned the cigarette.

“Alrighty then. You might be magic, so I better let you go.”

The stranger returned the gun to the McDonald’s sack, swigged black coffee and left.

37

DONNY’S SHORTCUT Donny Freeman was an artist, raconteur and dancer, destitute and a drunk. He tatted his hair to thick dreadlocks that flattened into the shape of oak leaves. He smoked weed, but never paid for it. He spoke with a Jamaican accent even though he had never been out of Minnesota. In Donny’s opinion it was better to be broke because then he didn’t spend money on drink. Skin as dark as black coffee, muscled as a field hand, Donny at onetime danced modern African ballet with the Minnesota Dance Company. The art director fired Donny when he showed up for a performance at the Walker Theatre too drunk to do anything but pee on himself as he lay on the stage, his well-muscled ass in the air.

He hung out in the Bohemian Flats Neighborhood in Minneapolis, the punk-beatnik mecca on the west side of the Mississippi River. The University of Minnesota studio arts building stood a few blocks away.

Donny modeled for the life drawing class where he met Ester, a progressive Jewish girl, and took her drinking at the River Rat Tavern.

She carried a 35-millimeter camera, took black and white photos, sometimes had a show, and printed art postcards of her work. Ester always shelled out for the drinks. Even drunk, Donny sustained his Jamaican accent.

One evening in October when the wind skipped brown, red, and yellow maple leaves up the

38

sidewalks, he arrived inebriated to the studio arts building. Donny managed to disrobe and then piss and projectile vomit on the nice students and their sketchpads. He then then fell asleep on the small stage, his well-muscled ass in the air. The art professor fired him.

Donny’s best friend was Arty O’Brien. A white dude of Irish ancestry, Arty had known Donny from before the Jamaican accent.

Arty lived in a storefront studio next to the Veterans of Foreign Wars bingo hall by the Bandbox greasy spoon off Chicago Avenue.

One morning just past midnight, Ester drove Donny to Arty’s storefront, dumped him on the sidewalk, pounded on the door and left Donny forever. Arty, hoping to run into Ester, came out barefooted and bare chested but wearing tight jeans. He kicked through the autumn leaves, and helped Donny inside to sleep it off on the couch. Within the next two days, Donny found new employment at Cash Paid Daily labor pool a few blocks away. He kept his accent.

Donny never rented an apartment. When he crashed at Arty’s storefront studio, pallet wood burning in the woodstove with a wire mesh fence around it, he spoke plain Midwestern English with a Swedish accent and not a trace of southern Ebonics. Arty O’Brien, born and raised on Stoney Island in Chicago, talked blacker than Donny did.

“I have my story down,” said Donny. “There’s a village in Jamaica on the northeast coast called Orange Bay. That’s where Cairo’s family keeps a farm. It has a view of the Caribbean from the foothills of the Blue Mountains, and Swift River flows from those mountains. Caiman alligators inhabit the lower waters to the sea. I haven’t been there yet 39

but know from Cairo’s stories every path, every river, and every stone and conch shell along the beach.”

Cairo was a real Jamaican whose skin matched the color of unsweetened chocolate. Cairo dealt weed and drove tractor-trailer over the road. He was a natural aristocrat. Donny would be if he quit drinking.

Donny rolled a cigarette from a package of Bugler and lit it on the stove. “I grew up in the jungle, lived on breadfruit and mangoes and fish. My gran’fatah escaped slavery and went to the mountains to join the rebellion. When I tell that story I always get pussy.”

Arty knew the last woman to screw Donny was Ester. Arty loved her even though he never slept with her. He’d visit her tiny Bohemian Flats apartment and sip hot tea that smelled of orange peel. Three masonite panels stood floor to ceiling to cordon off an area for a dark room. Her living space walls displayed a series of framed black and white photographs of Donny in various ballet and African dance poses, stark naked, muscled striations gleaming.

Sometimes, Ariel from the room down the hall would visit. She looked Arty over , her eyes dilating like she had smoked Datura, and licked the blue line edging dark red lips like a ripened plum. Arty knew better than to get with Ariel. She seemed ageless. A Rip Van Winkle story circulated in the taverns and coffeehouses that when men emerge from Ariel’s apartment, decades have passed.

“Don’t you think,” said Arty to Donny, “you aren’t being for real with this Jamaican accent?”

40

“I enjoy acting,” said Donny. “It’s part of storytelling in the tradition of the African trickster.”

“What if I started speaking in Irish brogue?”

“I’d respect you,” said Donny. “You’d be honoring your heritage.

You should go to Ireland and live among your people for a while.”

“And I suppose you should go to Jamaica?”

Donny folded his arms across his chest and leaned back. “Why not?

I’m going even if I gotta swim through alligators and sharks.”

“You know there were more Irish penal slaves transported to the Caribbean and the colonies than Africans? Thus the Gaelic accent of Jamaican patois.”

Donny nodded in agreement. “Exactly, perfessor. Living with you, I become Black Irish, like a real Jamaican.” ~ Cash Paid Daily moved Donny from restaurant to restaurant. He washed dishes or cleaned ovens or mopped up after closing. Donny never knew which restaurant he would work at, except it would be on University Avenue.

Winter in Minneapolis began on Halloween with a blizzard resulting in three feet of snow. By Thanksgiving, the temperature dropped to zero degrees Fahrenheit. The Mississippi River froze solid. Two weeks before Christmas, the temperature dropped to twenty-below-zero.

Donny could risk a shortcut to his labor pool job by trotting across the Mississippi. ~

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Arty O’Brien had let Donny move in since he was working, could split the rent and help scrounge pallets to cut into firewood. Arty was an addict too, but went to meetings. His worst addiction was taking care of drunks because his dad had been a drunk and he had taken care of his dad.

Donny often showed up hammered, reciting to Arty from the street, “You are the best-goddamned Irishman who ever lived, and I love you more than any brother.”

Arty would get him inside and to bed.

The real Jamaican, Cairo, would sometimes park his pickup in front of the storefront and come in for a cup of black coffee. He looked around at the books, piles of lumber and parts of musical instruments.

Too cold for cockroaches. At least the dishes were done. Not a woman’s crib.

“Bunk you guys in tat same bed?” he asked.

Donny and Arty threw their shoulders back and looked at Cairo like he was crazy.

Cairo shook his head. “You misunderstand. Slept I and my brother in te same bed.”

“There are two lofts here,” said Donny, indicating the salvage scrap 2 by 4 and plywood structures along the walls.

“You got te Yellow Pages?” said Cairo. “Need I to look up a heater fan for my pickup.”

Arty returned from the bathroom with the phonebook.

Cairo opened to the section and found the pages gone. Torn edges remained at the glued binding.

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Arty gave a sheepish shrug. “Ran out of toilet paper.”

“Mon, never buy toilet paypah. Steal I tem yella napkins from Subway.” He handed the phone book back, and Arty returned it to the bathroom.

“Anutter ting about Orange Bay, Jamaica,” said Cairo. “When my gran’fatah murtered his wife and ran to te Blue Mountains, police tracked him wit' bloodhoun’s. He hole up for a long time. Escaped he te hounds by wai’ting in Priestman River. Hole up he in te caves of John Crow Mountain, runs nawt-ease to sout-west on te ease-side o’ te mountain. Te police shot him, but not before gran’fatah killed two o’ tem. Admire I, my gran’fatah.”

They stood around the woodstove and drank coffee. Arty lifted the lid off the stove and stacked a bundle of pallet wood on the coals. The storefront smelled of wood smoke. The stovepipe entered the chimney where a gas heater used to vent.

After Cairo left, Donny practiced the accent. “A NUTer TING te CAVES of JOHN Crow MOUNTtain

nawt EASE to SOUT wes on te

EASE side O' te MOUNTain, follow UP PRIESTman RIVah, AHTy o’BRIen.” ~ Before Christmas, Cash Paid Daily sent Donny and several Mexicans to a different dishwashing job. Arty, running out of firewood, needed Donny to help scrounge pallets, But Donny didn’t make it home that week. By New Year some folks at River Rat Tavern speculated he had walked drunk across the Mississippi and fell through the ice.

The old weed dealer claimed he saw Donny staggering up the street on 43

Ariel’s arm, and may have disappeared within her one-room at the Bohemian Flats Apartments.

Arty stood by the woodstove, drank coffee and contemplated the fractals of frost layering storefront windows. He had checked in with Ester regarding Ariel. Ester said Donny wasn’t there.

When the phone rang, he picked it up. A woman’s voice yelled over the phone. It was Donny’s mother. She was a Minneapolis public schoolteacher, so mean that Arty pitied the children she taught.

“He didn’t show up for Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year,” she said. “He’s not at the morgue and not in jail. He hasn’t stayed in touch since we quit speaking until he quits drinking.”

“Did you call Cash Paid Daily labor pool?”

“They claim Donny was deported. Why would they do that? He was born when I shit him out at the County Hospital.”

Arty held the phone away from his ear. “He’s been talking about going to Jamaica for a long time. He sounds like a real Jamaican.”

“My son always lied. Did he pack anything?”

“Just the clothes on his back.”

“Donny likely called Immigration and Customs and reported himself.

He’ll get drunk and the Jamaican police will see through his phonyassed baloney and deport him right back.”

“Winter in Minnesota will be over by then.”

“You’d think he’d send a postcard. He didn’t even send a Christmas card.”

“Goodbye Mrs. Freeman.”

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Arty hung up and poured another mug of coffee from the pot on the woodstove. The mail slot clacked, and a single postcard fell among the junk mail in the wastebasket screwed to the inside of the door.

He retrieved the postcard. Blue and yellow painted skiffs pulled up on a white sand beach. On the back a stamp with a portrait of Bob Marley smoking a spliff, postmarked Orange Bay. “Dear Arty, U.S. Immigration and Customs raided the Mandarin Wok where I was busting suds with no identity card. They arrested and deported me to Kingston. I’m living on the beach, smoking ganja and worshipping Ras Teferi. Go to Ireland! Your friend, Donny Africa.”

Within a week, Arty O’Brien practiced an Irish brogue and made love with Ester. From her mattress he reviewed the new line of postcards tacked to the sheetrock, including a black and white photo of Donny’s glistening and muscular buttocks suspended against the sky full of stars.

He rolled out of bed, pulled on his jeans, tucked in his shirt, buckled his belt, put on socks and boots. “Mind me identity card, Ester. I’m heading out to Cash Paid Daily FAR a dishwashin’ job.”

She rolled onto her side, one arm bent to hold her head up. “Don’t roll your R’s too much honey. You sound Scottish.. Send for me when you get to Dublin?”

“Aye,” said Arty.

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THE KILLING TREE 16-year-old Arty flared nostrils to taste the weather. From the limb of the red oak, he scanned swamp and hills swelling beyond the Rhode Island/Connecticut state line. Maple leaves had surged maroon, aspens yellow, red oak russet as the faces of his younger siblings. Arty’s skin beneath his shirt was the color of milky quartz.

He rigged the block and tackle over the limb of the killing tree, chain link snug in the mouth of a steel hook, and then shimmied down the trunk.

His stepdad, Big Hank, balanced on a splintery stepladder. “Fetch the hog,” he said. The black man threaded a rope through the pulleys.

Siblings led by 15-year-old Eileen hauled milk cans of water through the forest from the spring. Their mother, Louise, arranged wood and newspaper for a fire in the stone barbecue pit. A claw-foot bathtub to scald bristles off the hog squatted among the trees. Arty stopped at the shed and grabbed an eight-foot length of clothesline from a nail on the wall.

Suey had roamed the woods over the summer, foraging hornet nests and acorns. Lately, to gain lard, Arty penned the pig along the drystone wall through the timbers.

Suey grunted when he saw Arty. The pig leaned against the gate to get backside scratched.

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Arty clawed through bristles. He tied the rope around the pig’s neck and opened the gate. Suey bucked and frolicked on the path to the killing tree.

Arty slacked the rope.

— He knows. This is Suey Jesus’ last moment alive— Sharpened butcher knife slid in his belt, Big Hank loaded the singleshot .22 rifle. He placed the barrel just above the pig’s eyes and pulled the trigger. Suey collapsed. Big Hank passed the Sears-Roebuck rifle to Arty and leapt on Suey. Man and hog stretched cheek to cheek as he shoved the blade into the pig’s throat. Big Hank’s forearm halfway in the gash, he sawed the knife up and down, the wound huge and gushing blood.

Arty cradled the rifle and watched.

—So that’s how to kill a man— ~ Halloween was the night of the Church of the Messiah youth group harvest moon hayride. Too dark to take the shortcut through the woods, Arty walked along the blacktop to church. The youth group gathered around the hay wagon. The designated chaperones, Mr. and Mrs. Shippee, sat in the drover seat. They held the reigns for a pair of draft horses in tracers to haul the teenagers around the countryside. Railroad lanterns hung from the side panels of the wagon and on posts up the drover seat.

Arty looked for his date. Dianna, the minister’s daughter, hadn’t arrived yet. It took

47

courage to ask. Dianna was intellectual, dramatic, and said she went by herself weekends to New York City. She claimed she was sexually active and had an abortion but her father didn’t know.

Arty tried to be cool in the face of her frank talk.

He stood beside Cait. She waited for Roy. Roy drove a 1957 Lincoln convertible, robin’s egg blue.

Other teens arrived. Mr. Shippee called out, “All aboard!”

Cait looked up at Arty, smiled sheepish. Arty recognized the pained look in her eyes.

“I guess Roy ain’t coming,” she said.

“Dianna stood me up, too.”

Self-consciousness punched him in the stomach.

Cait took Arty’s hand and tugged him to the wagon. They climbed aboard and crawled beneath the hay. The horses pulled out on the shoulder of the blacktop. The hayrick rolled on rubber pickup truck tires. Horses’ hooves clopped and the hayrick swayed like an infant’s cradle. A few teens stood and held on to the sides of the wagon. Others sat at the end with legs dangling. As Mr. and Mrs. Shippee made the turn onto the gravel topped Cucumber Hill Road, Cait lit a Marlboro and exhaled smoke into Arty’s mouth. Tongues met. Cait sat up, stubbed the cigarette out so as not to catch the hay on fire, and put it back in the box.

Beneath a starry night, a full moon, the horses’ hooves clopped, reminding Arty of the Mother Goose rhyme ‘to market-to-market to buy a fat pig, home-again home-again jiggity jig.’

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The teenagers snuggled in their embrace and kissed. Arty had learned to French kiss in East Boston from Marie. Cait kissed with confidence and put his hands to her breasts. He caressed the soft mounds of flesh, then slid his hands under the back of her sweater and unhooked her bra. He learned that from Marie too. Hands beneath her sweater massaged her flanks, back, belly, breasts and nipples. The adults sat in the drover seat and passed a bottle between them. Arty knew if he put his hands in Cait’s panties she’d moan. Another thing he learned from Marie. So he did not. Cait wriggled and pressed against him, unable to get enough lips and breath and tongue. Mr. and Mrs. Shippee steered the horses on another gravel road, Central Pike, two miles to the blacktop that ran from the center of town. It took two hours before they arrived back at the church on the corner of the highway. Parents waited in cars. Cait kissed Arty goodnight and climbed from the wagon. He waited for Cait to get into her mom’s car before he crawled from beneath the hay and walked home. ~ Arty came home from school to find the shack freezing and the woodstove fire reduced to glowing cinders. Big Hank lay in bed.

The black man’s face ashen, he said, “Could you chop wood and bring it in?”

Arty hunched his shoulders. “Seven younger brothers and sisters, can’t they ever chop too?”

“Look Son you the oldest. I’m sick and can’t.”

Arty went outside. He chopped deadfall he dragged through the woods in September.

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— Why always me slinging brush ax and mattock why always me building corral and fence? Why always me chopping and carrying wood?— He brought in armload after armload and stacked it behind the woodstove, floor to ceiling from wall to wall. When Arty brought in the last armload his stepfather without a word got up, set a chair by the stove for Arty to sit, and then lay back in bed. ~ One night while doing homework at the kitchen table, Arty watched Eileen by the woodstove as she attempted to thread a needle to stitch a button on a blouse.

At the other end of the table, Big Hank disassembled a nickelplated .38 with a mother-of-pearl handle. Squirting oil from a tin of 3in-1 onto a slender bottlebrush, he pressed it through the barrel and each chamber of the cylinder. Big Hank carried the pistol in the pocket of his black leather Cabretta every day in case of a run-in with the local Ku Klux Klan. He paused the project, pushed out the chair, and stood beside Eileen.

“I told you to pull the thread between your teeth before you twist the end.”

He spoke gently, with humor—a side of Big Hank that Arty hadn’t seen for a while.

A creak came from the mattress at the other end of the room where Louise looked up with squinted eyes.

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After Eileen sewed on the button, she withdrew to the trailer part of the shack. Music from her record player, a 45 by Gary Puckett and the Union Gap, scratched the air.

—Young girl, get out of my mind/ My love for you is way out of line. You better to run girl/ You’re much too young girl— ~ Arty was chopping wood when Eileen got home. He had missed Cait over the weekend and hadn’t seen her at school on Monday. Arty swung the ax and stuck it into the chopping log.

“Where is she?”

“Let’s go for a walk.”

They walked the mile-long dirt road from the shack, woods on both sides of them, thin crust of ice over pothole puddles broken where a car drove through it. They went along the woodlot trail and stopped at the big brook. Eileen dug for a cigarette in her purse, found one and lit up.

“Cait went to a kegger with the school football team. She got drunk and gang-raped. The whole town knows.”

Arty clenched teeth, clenched fists, and said nothing.

The next day Cait still had not returned to school, nor the days after that. Not at church either. ~ After hauling milk cans of water from the spring, he reached above the door of the chicken coop and found the k-bar that John Shippee, returned from Vietnam, had gifted to him.

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Every afternoon after school and after chores he practiced aikido rolls, somersaults, and cartwheels as he thunked the blade into the exterior wall of the shack until dark. While spinning on his back in the dirt, legs in the air, he flung that knife and just missed Big Hank stepping around the corner. Big Hank studied his stepson and said nothing as the k-bar vibrated in the heart of a chalk-drawn man. ~ He skipped school Monday morning to hitch to the Providence Public Library. He hitched home in the afternoon. Walking backward on the shoulder of Route 6, he lit a cigarette, opened Kerouac’s On the Road with his left hand, and read. He stabbed out his right thumb. A car pulled to the shoulder and stopped. He caught up with it. It was Miss Monaghan, his English Teacher. He got an erection whenever thinking about her. In her early twenties, she wore miniskirts and nylon stockings with a black thread running up the back. He climbed in the passenger seat. She sped along the shoulder and drifted back onto the highway.

“The school administration has targeted you. I agree with your politics but can’t risk losing my job by letting them know what I think.”

“Targeted?”

“For raising your fist while wearing a black glove during the singing of the National Anthem at the basketball playoffs.”

Arty gazed through the windshield and into the timbers.

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—Mexico City Olympics: Black athletes hung heads in shame and raised fists in solidarity with 500 students machine-gunned by the army.

I’m a student. This could happen to me— Arty shrugged. “State police search me every time I walk or drive along the pike.”

He imagined Miss Monaghan pulling in at the gravel path by the swimming hole, taking the cutoff to the old graveyard and fucking him.

By the time she dropped him off at the end of his dirt road, snow was falling.

Arty quit the rutted track to walk through the forest. He studied snowflakes through the birch grove and on his coat sleeve.

As he neared the brook, he heard a car radio. Then he saw Big Hank’s Belvedere with the Batmobile rear window parked on the woodlot trail, out of sight from the road, Big Hank and Eileen making out in the front seat.

His stomach burning and shoulders tense, Arty cut deeper into the timber and moved unseen beyond them. ~ He felt powerless as he watched Louise grab Eileen by the hair and drag her across the trailer floor. Big Hank was there. Eileen lifted her arms in front of her face to ward off punches. She tried to twist from Louise’s grip, and looked up at Big Hank.

“Please help me,” she cried.

“I can’t,” said Big Hank.

Louise threw Eileen out the door and into the snow.

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The door slammed behind Arty when he stepped out. He guided her through the woods to the spring where he bathed her bruised face and split lip.

“Do I have a black eye?”

He brushed her cheeks with his fingers. “Two black eyes.”

“She caught Big Hank fucking me in the Belvedere in the pull-off down the dirt road.”

“I’m going to kill him.”

Eileen knelt on the snow covered sphagnum moss. “Don’t. It’s my fault. I thought I was in love and had to take care of him.”

“How can it be your fault? How can I not kill him?”

“If you kill him, his children will have no father. And you will go to prison for the rest of your life. You’re not a coward if you let him live.”

Arty didn’t feel sure about that. ~ Arty took the .22 from the closet and a box of long rifle shells. He trudged through snowy woods to a high spot and surveyed the icy road.

He removed one bullet from the box, opened his jackknife, and cut an x into the slug. A poor-man’s dumb-dumb. He slid open the bolt, the only silver color of the gunmetal black barrel, inserted the round then closed the chamber. As Big Hank drove up, Arty lifted the butt to his right shoulder and narrowed his left eye. With his right eye he lined the front site with the v-notch of the rear site and found his stepdad’s face through the windshield. Right index finger upon the trigger and left hand steadying the fore-end, he followed Big Hank’s face the way

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Oswald might have done. He lowered the rifle and walked in his tracks back to the shack.

Big Hank stood beneath the killing tree as Arty emerged from the forest to the frozen mud-ruts of the driveway.

Arty carried the rifle, barrel downward. He pulled back the bolt, opened the chamber and removed the bullet.

“For you,” he said.

Big Hank received the makeshift dumb-dumb it in an opened palm.

Arty observed the left pocket of his stepdad’s black leather Cabretta hanging low with the weight of the .38. ~ Arty walked through the snow in the woods to the church. When he arrived, there was a surprise going-away party for him in the basement.

Louise had organized it. They played albums by The Cream, Jimi Hendrix, and The Young Rascals. Arty danced with Cait, her forehead lined with grief, her lips pressed together. They slow danced to Groovin’, his face in her hair and smelling her sweat that mingled with the scent of Ivory soap. To him it was a good smell.

She put the side of her face to his chest and spoke in a hard voice, quiet enough for only him to hear. “They pulled a train on me.

Everyone in town says it’s my own fault, I’m a whore.”

“You’ll never be a whore.”

They danced with his arms encircling her waist, one palm in the small of her back. Her arms under his wrapped to his shoulders. She clenched her fingernails into his lean muscles.

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The next morning Arty’s Grandad drove from Boston, picked him up and drove to Logan airport. He flew to Chicago to move in with his biological dad. Books filled his suitcase along with journals. On the Boeing 707 he opened up Camus’ The Rebel and began to read. He was sixteen years old. He would never again see Cait. It was 1968.

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DOG IN THE GARDEN OF GETHSEMANE It’s illegal to bury dogs in Minneapolis.

Jim heads for Ho Chi Minh Trail below Franklin Bridge, navigates shattered limestone and drift-logs. Setting the Duluth pack among empty vodka bottles, Jim opens the entrenching tool and chops a grave.

He slides the pitbull from the pack. Jim covers the dog’s grave with a cairn against coyotes.

When homeless, Jim sleeps in his van on the street. Dogs warm him.

When cab business thrives, he rents an apartment, puts a kennel in the yard. Dogs bark and mentally ill roommates pilfer for meth. The landlord evicts Jim and releases pigeons from the coop.

It’s like Da Nang, 1969. The army discharges him. He visits folks in Detroit’s Corktown. Nobody talks. He departs with two homing pigeons from old man Monaghan. ~ Jim parks the cab near Dorothy Day Center. After the free meal, he sips coffee outside. Pigeons land for breadcrumbs.

Jim recognizes brown and white among gray and iridescent blue, red eyes and scarlet feet. Descendants of his homers. ~ He weighs 330 pounds. In Laos he weighed 160. The Montagnards kept gardens, hunted down NVA. Village dogs roamed respected.

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Knees worn out, he tries losing weight, takes meds for Parkinson’s, depression, skin disease. Agent Orange he figures. 90 percent disabled, he gets $1800 a month.

His shrink never walked point, never been on recon, never kept watch covered with mosquitos, never pulled leeches from his anus at zero 100 hours, never cleaned Laotian mud from his M16.

Jim mentions suicide. Shrink prescribes meds. Jim sees a medical doctor, a thirty-something Vietnamese-American woman.

“My last dog died,” he says. “I’m on a waiting list for sober vet housing.”

She reduces meds and writes a script for a therapy dog.

“Apply for section eight.” She adjusts her stethoscope.

“I’m not crazy.” Section eight meant the psych ward for grunts.

“This is non-military. Section eight is subsidized housing, not over 30 percent of your adjusted gross income. Let the social worker fill out the forms. Inhale. Exhale.”

Pig, he thinks. Born on that farm. At seven months the pitbull gorges himself on sow’s afterbirth, hence his name.

When Jim moves into the garage behind the biker commune, Pig protects women cooks at the hippy restaurant. The closing cook grills a burger with mayonnaise on a Kaiser roll. Pig escorts her home. She pays him. Pig returns to the mover’s quilt by the woodstove on the concrete floor. Jim alone fails women. With Pig he’s a whole man, sort of. Pig would protect this woman doctor, daughter of lucky dad. ~

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She’s a bargirl. They fall in love, rent a hooch in Da Nang. In Minneapolis, he attends the Vietnamese Church to search for his lost daughter. He imagines descendants like released homing pigeons.

The preacher reads about Jesus praying in the Garden of Gethsemane. Jim panics. Later he arranges tables and chairs in the basement. Two women bring coffee and cookies. A massage parlor owned them until they paid their debt. They sit one on each side and argue who gets him though he weighs 330 and his legs itch. He met them while driving cab, a red and white Crown-Vic recycled from old squad cars from the third precinct. ~ At night he drives. CB crackles like the radiotelephone he humps on long-range recon in Laotian hills. Six grunts head into the bush with M16s, grenades, M79 that shoots grenades, claymores and ammunition for a week.

He dumps his M16, picks up a Russian made AK from a dead NVA regular. AKs never jam.

They make camp, keep half-assed watch, sleep.

He receives orders to rotate out, a week of R&R in Da Nang. He reads GRUNT FREE PRESS. His patrol killed in action. They made base camp, kept night watch the way they always did, dozing.

How is it, Jim wonders, six armed soldiers from Charlie Company get wasted? Walk the jungle, twigs break underfoot. But a tiger kills them.

Command tries sending Jim back to Charlie Company.

“No way. There’s tigers in the bush!”

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Jim vanishes into Da Nang’s AWOL ghetto. When MPs nab him they put him in Long Bien stockade. ~ Dogs soldier better than men. They warn you before tigers come.

Dogs listen better than therapists. Six dogs warmed Jim while sleeping in his van parked among hill-high heaps of plowed snow on Minneapolis streets.

Men sleep like Jesus’ disciples in the Garden of Gethsemane. Men send you stateside away from your Vietnamese wife and daughter. If I raise her, we’ll go up the mountain and keep dogs to chase monkeys from the garden and warn us when tigers sneak around the goats. My daughter will never work as a bargirl or in a massage parlor on Washington Avenue. She rides a water buffalo and I send her messages by homing pigeon with high swept wings, brown and white feathers among the iridescent blue and gray.

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THE TROUBLE It was the first week of October, the night air cold but no frost. I had logged in at 1800 hours, drove the company truck to deliver crews to towboats and crews back to the wharf barge, then kept on pushing to my Wednesday night meeting in downtown Minneapolis. Hi, I’m Arty, a recovering violent and abusive man. Been doing this so long I’m a facilitator now. We not-so-jokingly refer to the group as Werewolves Anonymous.

Before heading back to the wharf, I stopped by my storefront studio to pick up Star. I live in my studio, moved in after the painter, Frank Bull Buffalo, told me he was moving out and gave me the key. I had survived the previous winter in a hippy school bus camper with a broken engine parked in the weeds of Nicollet Island, on the Mississippi River between downtown Minneapolis and Northeast neighborhood. Offered a month’s back rent to the landlord and lied I was Frank’s roommate. The landlord took the money. I hung Frank’s abandoned paintings of Indians with smallpox scars, then hammered and nailed sleeping lofts from lumber salvaged from dumpsters.

As the only dad on the block, weekend dad at any rate, my son and kids from the tenements across the street hang out and play music on instruments also salvaged or donated, play chess, or paint. Sometimes we smuggle our own popcorn and soda into budget movie theatres.

Star, the 120-pound malamute-Lab, sits in the passenger seat and watches out the window as I drive from Minneapolis to Saint Paul, then 61

to Robert Street and over the bridge. Take the first left into what used to be West Side Flats, the old Yiddish community. Homes and tenements gone, wend the truck through industrial warehouses on our way to the levee, past the main office trailer, and past the heaps of plate steel for welding barges. Pull into the shipyard and park alongside other pickups. Star and I descend the grate steel steps to the wharf barge and head to the break room that’s also my office.

First thing, open the grimy notebook, WHARF LOG written across the cover, and log in time, conditions, and weather: Arrived back 2300 hours. Clear night. Can see stars.

The wharf barge is one quarter the size of a city block, with a sheet metal roof, a machine shop, a warehouse area for coils of line, thirtyfoot boat shafts stacked in a rack, and a ten-thousand gallon waste oil tank. Asphalt surface over plate steel deck, open bay doors look out upon the Mississippi—black beneath the autumn night except for the breaking up of yellow shards of light from the warehouse district of Lowertown across the river. Below Lowertown lays the railroad yard with bluffs above and the bridges of the expressway. The lowland floods every few years. A few towboats moored to the waterfront deck: the TOM THUMB, the MINNEAPOLIS, the ITASCA, the DAN PATCH. Head to the weight bench by the waste oil tank and press my own weight twenty times. Yellow and black ropes cordon off a plywood floor for an illegal fight club where some rivermen gladiate, no gloves, just taped wrists and fists.

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After lifting weights, make rounds along the levee and check barge moorings.

Star lopes ahead. I worry the dog will flush a skunk again. Moorings good. Retie a few. Returned to the breakroom and grab my prayer rug, unroll it flat on the grassy knoll above the wharf, and do yoga. That’s how I quit drinking and smoking. Twelve tailored solar salutations, each primary move containing twenty asanas, three primaries in each of the four directions. Meditate on one of the Twelve Steps for each set of asanas. This time I start out with: I am powerless over my failure to save the world, and life is unmanageable.

A tow of empty barges pushed by the BECKY SUE heads upriver toward the Robert Street Bridge. As the boat comes abreast the wharf, static crackles from its speaker.

“Hey Maharishi, quit milking the clock and make the rounds!”

I move my hand in a long stroke and continue asanas, completing each move and sequence of thinking and self-examination. Healing insanity requires discipline.

Past midnight, there is no visible moon. Roll up the rug and return to the breakroom.

Duluth pack sits on the picnic table. Unpack Olivetti typewriter and manuscript in progress, I Ching, four lunches of scrambled eggs, rice, beans, and nutritional yeast. I quit eating gluten. No wheat, barley, spelt, rye. Oats are okay if not contaminated by other grains. Corn, teff, millet, rice, all okay.

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Read every label. If a food item contains modified food starch or maltodextrin and does not explicitly say it’s corn or tapioca, assume wheat or barley. No more artificial crab legs and most cold cuts.

The first week clean from glutens, headaches disappeared and psoriasis on elbows cleared up. I cast healthy pellets instead of the pencil-thin turds I’d been grunting out for more than a year. The vertigo quit and the chronic stomach aches. My strength doubled.

Went from fifty pushups to a hundred. Realized I had this disease my entire life, and that it had been in remission for years. But during a period of unemployment ten years ago, when Isaac was four and had a bloated stomach and arms skinny as a starving child, we had been eating from a local food shelf. Mostly white bread and cheese.

Bread pudding with raisins and eggs became a staple. This diet triggered the autoimmune response of celiac disease. Neither of us could uptake nutrients, and craved carbs. This turned into a cycle of eating more wheat.

The first thing that blew was the ability to digest lactose. I had picked up free cheese by the block. When a specialist diagnosed Isaac with celiac disease, I knew I had it, inherited from family genetics and passed to my son. With the adjustment in diet, Isaac recovered his health.

Lunches stashed in the small fridge, I leave one out. Roll paper in the Olivetti typewriter and go to work. I’ll break to make rounds and lift weights again. ~

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I’m bench-pressing when the BECKY SUE bumps the wharf at 0300. Log the boat’s arrival, get up and greet the deckhands with Star beside me. Deckhands hook up the wharf’s solid hose to the boat’s fresh water intake for potable water.

The pilot, Claymore, had decked with me over the years. He climbs from the pilothouse and shakes my hand.

We hated each other until I earned a reputation as a brawler, and as a loser. Nothing to be proud of. Besides, I had quit drinking and made it known among crews I was in therapy for domestic violence. I figured telling was a revolutionary act.

I’m back on the bench, doing reps, getting shaky around number nine.

Claymore keeps two fingers under the bar. “Maharishi, compared to the rest of us, you’re a rocket scientist. Why do you still work on the river?”

“Too crazy to be in the regular world. Same as you.”

“Getting any better?”

“Better than I used to be. Gotta keep working my program. Lifting weights, therapy, and faith. Faith alone won’t do it, and therapy alone won’t do it. Signed up for the Domestic Abuse Project. It’s not just about domestic. It’s about how we punch holes in ourselves.”

Claymore goes quiet. He spots me on the tenth rep of 250 pounds and helps set the bar back in the rack. I stand up from the bench and wave arms to flush lactic acid from triceps and pectorals.

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Claymore removes two 25-pound plates off the bar then lies face up on the bench. “I punch holes in myself all night. How long is that program?”

“Twenty-six weeks. Went through it three times, then volunteered at a battered women’s shelter.”

Claymore grunts as he pushes the weight bar. I spot the bar with two fingers of each hand.

“Maharishi, I been trying to get along better with Denise. I quit drink for a year, but now I need to do something like what you’re doing.” His eyes let on that the hounds of his conscience are hunting him through dark woods. I met his wife a few times. Denise is a saint. ~ Thursday, the following night, I resume writing a letter to the philosopher Susan Griffin. I’ve been researching the origins of violence.

The letter turned into a philosophic epistolary in response to her book of essays, CHORUS OF STONES, which is about the destruction of the human soul because of rape. I put the piece away and throw an I Ching reading.

— Truth is within the hull of a boat and floats downriver— Nobody from the group calls. That’s good. No moon in the sky. The full moon is when I receive the most phone calls. The men in the group know I’m available from sunset to sunrise. They phone if they need help to defuse their rage. ~ Friday night at the wharf, a guy from the group calls at about 1800 hours.

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“She and me fighting. She’s blocking the door.”

“If you put a hand on her to move her aside, it’s Fifth Degree Assault. Climb out the window.”

“She always chases me in the car.”

“Head for the railroad tracks. She can’t drive there.” ~ I get the weekend off. I resume writing when I return to the wharf barge on Monday night. Half-moon in the sky, a pal’s wife calls me at 0300 hours.

“Has he hurt you yet?” I could hear him yelling behind her.

“Busted the living room window when he threw a chair “Put him on.”

Her husband takes the phone.

“The bitch is making me crazy.”

“Hey Vernie, it happens. Breathe. Remember, it’s a hallucination.

We can’t control our women, only ourselves. How much damage on one to ten?”

“Feels past ten.”

“Did you rip the phone out of the wall so she can’t call for help?”

“No.” “That makes it a nine so far. Did you hit her?”

“Not yet.”

“That makes it an eight. Cool enough to take a time-out?”

“I have nowhere to go at 3 am, and can’t drive while I’m fucking pissed.”

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“You’re less pissed off now than you were five minutes ago. How about driving the speed limit to the wharf and hanging out? Got a weight bench here.”

“How do I get there?”

“Over the Robert Street Bridge, first left, then first left, then left again. Then you’re at the wharf barge.”

“I’m on my way.”

“Now you’re defused to a seven. That’s good. Tell Maggie where you’re going and that you’ll call before you return. OK?” “OK.” “See you in twenty minutes. Put on classical music while you drive.

Let me talk to Maggie.”

“Arty?”

“Stay on the phone with me until he’s out the door and you see the car pulling away.”

“I can’t get a restraining order. If Vernie is busted for domestic violence, he’ll lose his gun, and can’t be a cop anymore.

“He worked hard.”

She exhales. “He can escalate to where he doesn’t care if other cops shoot him.”

“I know. I’m like that too. Is Vernie out the door?”

“Yes. Are you men ever going to get better?”

“Guys who are violent out of ignorance can get educated, but those of us with PTSD never get better on or own. We need community. But first, you need to be safe. Has he pulled out of the driveway yet?”

“Yes.” 68

“I’ll make sure he calls you. Probably around 6 am. Get some sleep.”

“I don’t know if I can.”

“Heat a glass of milk in the microwave.”

“I’ll do that. Goodnight Arty. Thank you.”

“Goodnight.”

Thirty minutes later, Star howls as Detective Little Thunder clomps down the steps to the wharf.

“So this is where you fight?” He surveys the rope cordoning off the plywood floor while scratching Star behind his ears.

Remove mouthpiece from my shirt pocket and set it on a wooden ledge above the weight bench.

“It’s a way to process violence, so I don’t carry it home with me.”

We bench press, spotting each other as we pyramid, then move to curls, rows, squats. We scream and yell as we push.

When I bench press, I push away the homelessness and poverty I experienced as a child on Stoney Island Avenue in Chicago. I push away the rage and sadistic violence from the battering Baba Yaga mother, push away being raped when I was six. I keep the part when I was five and leading my four-year-old sister and two-year-old brother away from brawling mom and dad. We had rolled sleeping bags and walked up 55th Street to go live with my best friend, Merle. The beatnik chief had introduced my mother to my father. Years later, when he got sober and moved to Saint Paul, he sent me bus fare to join him.

I’d been living on skid row in Atlanta, mentally ill and alcoholic after

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five years of fighting street battles against the cops and watching friends and heroes assassinated during the Revolution. ~ Tuesday night: I’m feeling crazy, so I call Merle. A combat vet who survived the Pacific in World War II then reenlisted and committed atrocities in Korea, he had cracked up.

“Are you sane?” he asks me. “Do you have the papers to prove it?”

Even with the phone scrunched between my shoulder and ear, I shrugged. “Of course not. Do you?”

“Yes, even though I was sent to the hatch fifty times. When they let me go from the Illinois State Hospital the last time, they issued the papers: Certified Sane. They even named a violent ward after me. It’s possible to take responsibility for your insanity.”

My mouth dropped open. “Insanity is my excuse to get away with doing whatever I want.”

“Not anymore. I’ll see you soon.” He hung up.

I’d be dead if it weren’t for Merle. ~ Diesel engines across the river, the train engines in the railroad yards must have the same Cats and Cummings as in the towboats. An engine ships up in the distance. Is that a train ready to hook up or a towboat pulling barges out of a fleet? Then the crash comes. Those are trains. Then the booming of hollow steel as the towboat lands upon a barge or a barge crashes along another barge in the fleet of empties.

A towboat ships down its engine. I can feel it landing at the wharf.

A voice comes over the towboat loudspeaker.

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“Wake up, Maharishi!”

It’s Claymore, pilot of the BECKY SUE. I have a stack of barges lines spliced up for them, ready to go. Half as thick as a man’s wrist, thirty-five feet long with a back-spliced eye a yard in diameter, we ever don’t call them ropes. In the maritime they are lines. I’ve got hard rigging for them too, a dozen new ratchets, and a coil of winch cable.

Kelly, the lead man, steps from the deck to the wharf.

Stoney, the deckhand, follows him. Stoney is six-six, with hands as massive as the hooves of a Clydesdale. He used to be a farrier.

Kelly glares at me. “What the fuck you looking at, nigger lover.”

Stoney scoops up the spliced lines. “Kelly belongs to the asshole union. Ignore him.”

Unions. We need one. Been yakking for years about getting us signed up, but we drift from company to company, boat to boat. The harbor crews used to live aboard and work a six-hour watch until the crew for the next watch came on duty. Six-off-six-on twice for twelvehours of every twenty-four.

The boats ran for thirty-days at a time, only stopping for fuel and for the relief crew at the end of the month. Then we went home for thirtydays, usually. Exception: when one of the relief crew didn’t show up, then one of the old crew stays aboard for another month. When we lived on the boat, we even had a cook who prepared three meals a day.

Then the companies cut back. Did it save them money? Now the harbor crews work twelve or fourteen hours straight, get relieved at the end of the watch and go home only to show up twelve hours later. I worked that way for thirteen-years.

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I tilt my head and speak gently. “What’s with you, Kelly? As much as you hate black folks, I can’t get over how you get such tight curly hair. Plus you drive that big Caddy with the fins.”

He bought that old Cadillac from a towboat pilot. A committed racist, Kelly took pride in his ability to do violence. From what I can tell, he grew up hard and never really knew a black person, not even when he was in the US Marines.

Kelly rolls his shoulder back, snarls like a dog. “What you sayin’?”

“Drop it,” says Stoney. “Maharishi, help us get these lines on the head deck.”

We throw coils of lines over our shoulders and heap an organized nest of them on deck.

The barrel ratchets weigh eighty-pounds apiece. We make a brigade and pass them to each other.

After the ratchets come the winch cables. Kelly, a little shorter than me, squats down. Stoney and I tip the coil of wire to his shoulder. Kelly stands with it and walks easily to the boat, crosses the deck and lets the cable fall. Three-hundred pounds. And I might have to fight this motherfucker someday.

Kelly comes from Concord Street in East Saint Paul. He brags about the time he saw a black dude hitchhiking and slowed the vehicle then sped up, slamming the guy with an open car door.

My stepdad, a black man, raised me. I have brown brothers and sisters. The Ku Klux Klan blew up our house when I was a boy.

Captain Claymore has been using the rotary telephone on the wharf.

He returns holding his cup of coffee. A fixture, that cup in his hand, 72

since sobriety. He climbs back up the outer stairs to the pilothouse.

“Turn her loose,” he shouts through the window while running the deck winches from the switch on the pilothouse console. Stoney and Kelly lift the face wires off kevels upon the waterfront deck of the wharf barge and hang them on the shackles welded to the tow knees, then step aboard. The BECKY SUE ships up engines, the boat spins and heads downriver.

I could’ve been a pilot, but prefer working nights on the wharf.

More time to write.

Return to my Olivetti on the break room table. I have rebuilt this typewriter a dozen times in the bowels of engines rooms of towboats tramping the Illinois River through the February ice like the poet Yevtushenko on his mail boat through the Baltic, through lock and dams, on the run from Saint Paul to Savage, resetting springs, adjusting screws, picking hardened ink from the keys, replacing rollers.

It’s Wednesday morning, 0100 hours when the phone on the wall rings. I answer it.

“Wharf barge.”

“Arty, it's Vernie. Do you have a minute?”

I could hear Maggie shouting.

“Did you put a hand on her or break anything?”

“Not yet,” he said.

“Can you drive?’

“I think so.”

“Tell her you’re taking a time-out to visit me at the wharf, and that you’ll call her when you chill. Can you do that?”

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“I can.”

“Do it now and leave. Forget your jacket. Leave the phone off the hook. Drive the speed limit. I’ll see you soon.”

Vernie is telling Maggie he's taking a time-out and coming to see me. He sounds calmer. I hear the door shut click.

Her voice comes over the phone. “Arty?”

“Hi, Maggie. Are you okay?”

“I’m okay. Arty, thank you.”

“I owe you guys. How many times have I called when I was escalated and needed your husband to get me?”

“We all have a lot of trauma, Arty. He’s getting better, not breaking the furniture, not hitting me. He respects me now, even when I’m mad at him.”

Maggie is a social worker, and Vernie is her most significant case.

I’ve about a half-hour before Vernie arrives. Won’t be able to work on that essay. I roll paper into the Olivetti and begin a stream-ofconsciousness exercise that works its way into a dystopian adventure. ~ Thursday: Frost coats the grass on the knoll as I do yoga, body warming with stretches and breathing exercises. The moon is full.

Step one: I am powerless over the addiction to violence, and life can become unmanageable. For instance, I can die, kill somebody, go to prison, or become hospitalized.

Step two: Something other than me will restore my sanity: Community perhaps, or get my ass kicked. Infinite possibilities.

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Step three: Turn my life and will over to the higher power of my understanding. Nature is my higher power. Nature is the ultimate reality and the ultimate lawgiver.

Step four: Take a fearless and searching moral inventory. I like violence. I value non-violence. I fuck with people. I value awakening in others and myself.

Step five: Admit to myself, Nature, and one other being the underlying cause of why I violate my values. Tough one. Because I don’t respect myself? Because I allow others to define me? Because violence is a path to intimacy?

Step six: Prepare to go before Nature with the willingness and intent to manage my violence healthily, without drugs, or antidepressants, or prison, or death, or hospital.

Step seven: Pray to become sane.

Step eight: Amends list: I blamed others. When I haven’t taken a stand and set healthy boundaries, I’ve taken it out on those closest to me—my son, girlfriends, especially myself.

Step nine: Make amends by becoming a better man.

Step ten: Continue taking my inventory, and when wrong, admit it.

Step eleven: Pray and meditate to become more aligned with Nature.

I’m doing it.

Step twelve: I’m awakening and teaching what little I know.

Done with yoga, barges up the levy secure, I’m stretched out on the break room table when a boat bumps the tires strung on cables along the wharf barge. Star is already at the waterfront, wagging his tail and greeting the crew of the BECKY SUE. The clock says 0200. Now that 75

I’m up and logging the boat in, the ITASCA lands at the wharf. That boat has the most physically strong crew in the harbor. All they do is build tow, wiring rafts of fifteen loaded barges together, three barges wide by five barges long, with thirty-five-foot steel cables and barrel ratchets, shackles, chain links, and straps also made of steel cable.

Stoney and Kelly enter the break room to pour themselves cups of coffee. They sit in the chairs around the table.

“So Kelly,” I say, “I’m as Irish as you. Did you know Ireland is the most western island in Europe? A straight sail north from the west coast of Africa is why we have these little noses with big nostrils.

We’re all mulatto like the Maroons of Jamaica. Even have the same accent as the Jamaican Maroons.”

This is all true. At least the dialect part. The black slaves of Jamaica worked in the field beside the first slaves, the Irish, and learned to speak with a Gaelic lilt.

Claymore leans against the doorjamb.

Kelly stands up so suddenly the chair falls backward. “Enough!” He flicks his buck knife open and drives the blade into the table.

Pete, captain of the ITASCA, steps into the break room, his crew behind him. His eyes go from the knife to Kelly, then to me.

“We have time before heading down to the fleets. You boys want my crew to tape your wrists?”

Kelly pulls his knife from the table, folds it closed. He looks at me.

I extend my arms, wrists up. “I’m ready.”

Kelly hands his knife to Stoney. “Hold this for me.” He lifts his chin at me. “I’ve been aching to beat your Maharishi ass for years.”

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I pull my clasp knife from my pants pocket and put it on the table.

“Stoney, take my knife too.”

Claymore pulls the two-inch wide adhesive tape from the first aid kit and wraps my left wrist, and over the edge of my hand, across the palm and over the back. Six wraps. Then he does my right hand. Pete wraps Kelly’s hand the same as mine.

I gesture toward my dog. “Star, stay here. Lay down under the table.”

Star lets out an exhale of dissatisfaction but obeys. I close the break room door.

We walk to our makeshift ring, sheets of plywood over the asphalt floor, barge line on posts as a corral. The crews gather along the edges.

I collect my mouthpiece from the wooden ledge at the weight bench.

It fits between my teeth, and above and below my gums. Kelly might be my match. I have a hard-on.

Kelly removes his mouthpiece from his shirt pocket, yawns, and inserts it between his lips.

I strip off my shirt and tee shirt, fold them, and place them on the weight bench. Kelly takes off his and lays them across a coil of line.

One of the ITASCA deckhands moves the barge line aside so we can step in the ring.

Stoney stands in one corner. He's a referee, sort of.

This isn’t boxing or mixed martial arts. It’s old-fashioned fist fighting. We go at, bare knuckles to each other’s face, lips, nose, eyes.

We clinch.

Stoney's ham-sized hands shove us apart. “Rest for two minutes.”

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We stand in opposite corners. Kelly is shorter but wider across the shoulders. He has no hair on his chest, so it glistens with sweat. He has good abs. I lift weights, so my muscles are thick. We both hit hard.

Back in the fight, I step back. Kelly swings wild. I slide forward and punch him in the side of his head. I shouldn’t do that. A hard knuckle punch to the temple could kill him. We clinch.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper in his ear.

He shoves me back and hits me in the chin. I see lights, but the mouthpiece keeps me from being knocked out. He arches over when I gouge his solar plexus, then uppercut to his chin. He steps back, about to topple. I catch him and clinch again. Hugging.

“I’m sorry too,” he says.

We keep fighting, ducking, no legwork, no dancing, just throwing and taking punches then clinching. Both of us have worked hard in our lives and have endurance. When Las Vegas needs human punching bags to go thirteen rounds, they look for Rivermen.

Stoney steps in and moves us apart. “You guys finished yet?”

I look at Kelly. His eyes will be swollen shut, his lip split. “I’m done?

You?” “Yeah, I’m done.”

“Okay,” says Stoney. “Shake hands.”

We shake hands.

“Man,” I tell Kelly, “please don’t beat my ass again.”

“Maharishi, you could’ve killed me. Let’s wash up and take care of our knuckles.”

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I release Star from the break room and refill his water dish. When Kelly and I clean up, we touch each other’s face, examine bloodengorged eyelids, bruised cheekbones, and split lips. He swabs my swollen fist knuckles with a sponge soaked in rubbing alcohol. I take his hands in mine and examine the broad fist that caught me in the forehead. It hurt him more than it hurt me. The cartilage of one knuckle has split. Now I wash his fists as he had washed mine.

“You know why I was so mad?” he says as I hold his fist. “You talk about white privilege. Maybe it exists, but I never experienced it. I don’t know anybody who has. Maybe you have it.”

Fact: I’m slumming. I could be a towboat pilot, a commercial airline pilot, or a human rights lawyer. Yeah, I’m thinking to myself, I have privilege.

Even crazy and with alcohol and drug addiction, I made a choice not to go the war in Nam. Kelly had no choice. The judge sent him to the draft board instead of prison. Kelly can barely read, so forget college.

The best Kelly can do in life is work on the river.

I turned my back on a prep-school scholarship and on formal education. I’ve been in jail plenty of times for fighting cops, not targeted by cops. I targeted them. If I my skin were dark, they would have shot me outright.

I’m a piss-poor steward of my privilege, unless writing all night until dawn in the maritime tradition of Joe Conrad pans out, that I say something meaningful and people are helped by it.

I’m washing Kelly’s hands, wrapping his injured knuckles. He’s more real than I’ll ever be.

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~ There are things I don’t like about myself but have come to terms with — childhood homelessness, poverty, alcoholism, and violence, even though both of my parents had graduated from the University of Chicago. The Irishman, my biological father, took his formal education and became a bartender and cab driver. He taught me the mechanics of fist fighting from the time I could walk until the divorce, and more when I lived with him for a year as a teenager. Soon after the divorce, my mother, my five-year-old sister and I were raped in a home invasion during the low-intensity conflict of race war in Chicago. It was worse than awful. I have carried a knife since I was six. Despite this, I became sober and worked hard to defuse the chip on my shoulder. Also struggled as an artist and poet, working on strategies that allowed me to earn a living, be a father to Isaac, and to write.

I had worked on the barges on the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers and finally found the perfect night watchman job, two miles upriver from the wharf, beneath Saint Paul’s High Bridge at a different wharfbarge.

Sometimes I could write twelve-hours a night. I composed one of my best chapbooks of poems, a manuscript titled Prayers and Love Poems. Then another one, Street Poems, And another, Mad Jack in the Underworld. I told river stories, became a river celebrity, and appeared in public television productions.

Sometimes a girlfriend would come by, and I’d get laid in the bunkroom or the pilothouse of a towboat that was tied up for the night.

That job brought a renaissance to my life.

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I had a choice of flat-bottomed johnboats, one with a twenty-fivehorsepower Evinrude, and the other with a fifty-horsepower Evinrude, and I took these boats upriver and downriver, rain or shine. When I opened the throttle, those johnboats skipped across the top of the water.

I delivered groceries and boat supplies in one of these boats during Minnesota’s Storm of the Century, August 1988. At 1800 hours, I’d run a johnboat past the houseboat marina and beneath the bridges of downtown St. Paul — the Wabasha Bridge, Robert Street Bridge, and Lafayette Bridge. I’d steer past Holman airfield to the lower harbor and set out fleet lights on the moored barges so nobody would run into them at night.

In the morning I’d taxi a crew in that johnboat, up the Minnesota River to one of the towboats, the MIKE HARRIS or the HARRY HARRIS, and deliver the other crew back to the wharf-barge. I’d splice line and sweep the machine shop.

I’d bring easel and sheets of masonite and paint enough abstracts to have a show in downtown Minneapolis. Sometimes Isaac came to work with me, and I’d read to him and put him to sleep in a bunkroom on a towboat. He was seven-years-old at the time.

I helped another man get a job, to work for me on weekends so I could attend Quaker meeting. I was then and still am committed to learning and practicing nonviolence.

I fall short.

When a coil of line walked away from the wharf, the captain came in one morning and accused me of stealing. I loved this old river druid.

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He was like a father. But while accusing me, he shoved me. I tried every nonviolent conflict resolution trick I knew, even tickling him.

Could I have walked away? Take a time out even if my job was at stake? But work is a matter of life and death, a matter of having a place to live or being homeless, a case of whether I am the provider to my son and resource in my community.

I wanted to resolve this issue with integrity, compassion, and intelligence. When the captain shoved me through the windowpane and onto the wing tanks of the barge, it looked like he might push me off the barge and onto the riff rap, rocks, and roots of the shoreline fifteen feet below. Did he have a gun? Was he going to shoot me? In the space of five seconds I kneed him in the balls, broke his nose, split his lip, and broke his cheekbone. His eyes would be swollen shut for a week, and blacked from the blood bruises. Several of his bloody teeth lay scattered on the office floor.

He called me at home the next day and apologized for picking a fight with me, but I was so shaken up I couldn’t return to work. My self-worth plummeted. A week later I backhanded Isaac and bloodied his nose.

I followed the protocols of the men’s group I belonged to: reported myself to the child protection agency. They said I couldn’t be with my son for six months. He had to spend all his time with his crack-addicted mom.

But I figured something out. Since I was unemployed, I found a job as a youth worker in my son’s neighborhood, the Minneapolis neighborhood known as the West Bank.

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The boys in this program were mostly fatherless. My son could come to these programs. We built teepees and drums, and I fixed kids’ bikes and led bicycle expeditions to the river where we fished.

We jumped into the Mississippi River from the old bridge on the north end of Nicollet Island and let the current take us around the bend to the small sandy beach.

There was another kid that day on Nicollet Island, not one of mine, who jumped off the bridge and began to drown. I jumped in and pulled him to shore. ~ A year later, the man I had found a job for on that wharf-barge admitted to me he took that coil of line. He did not have a clue as to the sequence of events his action triggered.

I remembered extension cords and ladders I had stolen off construction sites when I was a street-person, squatting in abandoned tenements, feeling an entitlement regarding theft. After all, I rationalized, every consumer is a worse thief than I could ever be, considering the effects of colonialism on the cultures whom we plunder for labor and natural resources.

Now I wondered if some poor foreman got blamed for what I stole, got into a fight then lost his job, then beat his wife and lost his family, and his children grew up fatherless and on the streets the way I had.

Though I didn’t steal that coil of line, I never nicked again. Also, I was doing the best I could: thinking, working, practicing sobriety, selfcare, evolving a spiritual life.

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If that man hadn’t stolen that coil of line, and I hadn’t knocked my boss’s teeth out, and I hadn’t hit my son, I might never have worked with street kids, and that other kid would have drowned.

It’s been a decade since I talked to my old captain, but I hope he would tell me I’m glad it worked out that way. It was worth the trouble.

My pal, Kelly, has grown a Lech Walesa mustache and signing rivermen into in the Amalgamated Iron and Steel Workers Union.

Claymore sat with me one morning. “My pastor is going with me to the police station where I’ll turn myself in.”

I got scared.

He saw the look. “Maharishi, Denise is fine. But when I was fourteen I burgled the house of the mayor of my town. I killed him and his wife. Ever since, I see their faces in the night as I pilot a tow down the Minnesota River. You helped me. I want to shake your hand before I go.”

As I’m typing this, Star stretches out at my feet under the breakroom table. He’s almost six-feet long. In a while, I’ll lie on the floor, use his neck and ribs as a pillow, and crash.

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LIFESTYLES OF THE POOR AND OBSCURE I’m laying here with Arty O’Brien. He’s rolled on his side and cuddling me.

Death is a precipice. The edge of a chasm bigger than the Grand Canyon, a renting in the fabric of earth, a great renting in the fabric of life. All the steps leading to the precipice is life.

Arty talks even when he’s cuddling, droning on about race, class.

I saw the Grand Canyon when I lived on a gypsy school bus, traveling with the father of my children.

Now Arty is starting on about the Arabs and North Africans building the slave trade infrastructure hundreds of years before the Dutch, Spaniards, and Portuguese got involved. I look it up on my smart phone. Mauritania, whence the word Moor comes from. An Islamic Republic. Made slavery illegal in 2003.

The father of my children, myself, and two year old Freya returned to Minnesota because I was going to have another baby. After giving birth to Thor at Bruce Crandall’s farm, I met my old man’s other woman. So I dumped him and moved to Minneapolis and slept on the floor of a friend’s house. It wasn’t her house yet. She was a squatter, undetected for five years until the Minneapolis Housing Authority gave the house to her.

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“Poor people,” Arty says, “don’t know how to fix stuff. Lamar wrecked his apartment he tried to paint it. His landlord charged him for the damage instead of giving him a break in the rent.”

“You sound like that redneck Archie Bonkers.”

Arty purses his lips then shakes his brown braids. “I’m lucky,” he says. “My black-Choctaw stepdad was a farmer. He showed me how to hold a paintbrush, how to spackle a hole in the wall and sand it before painting. He showed me how to grip a hammer handle when driving nails, how to use a crosscut saw and a rip saw, a carpenter square, and how to lay shingles. I can contract work without wrecking the project.

Poor folks can’t do that and have no one to show them how. It’s a lack of opportunity. The first person to come along to show them how to cook crack. Then they enslave each other with addiction. Perfect social engineering for the CIA to generate revenue for the illegal wars in Africa and Central America.”

And I suppose the Irish were socially engineered to become corrupt cops. But I don’t tell him that. Yet. “I tell you what,” I say instead.“I give you the title of a book I’m never going to get around to writing. LIFESTYLES OF THE POOR AND OBSCURE.” He wrinkles his forehead. “Damn,” he said. “That’s a great title.”

“It starts out with me and the kids sleeping on a friend’s couch after leaving Bruce Crandall’s farm.”

I first met Arty at the farm. The hay had been cut and raked into piles. The hippies came up from Minneapolis to fork hay in the back of

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the ’49 Chevy wood truck. I was driving, slipped the clutch and stalled the truck. Arty laughed at me.

“Sandra’s couch?”

After moving to town, the kids’ dad took them for a week. I cruised the bars with Sandra. We wound up at the 400 on Cedar Avenue and sat at a table with Arty and other friends. I was too shy to talk. Arty was a famous street poet. Famous on that street anyway. He drank bottled water instead of beer. It was his first week of sobriety.

“That’s right. Thor was one and Freya was four.”

“I remember your barbarian babies. Long blond hair and grubby faces.”

Arty had come over and painted Sandra’s ceiling. I came downstairs, gawped at him and ran back up and hid. That’s all I needed, to get involved with another crazy motherfucker.

“Anyway, I got on AFDC and managed to get a section-eight voucher. I had an offer for housing in a program for single mothers but there were too many rules, so I rented the downstairs apartment from Doug the theatre director. He’d been okayed for section-eight rental.

The apartment had three bedrooms.”

“That seemed pretty safe.”

“Then I worked at Al’s Breakfast in Dinkytown, the one-block shopping district for University of Minnesota students. Used clothes, used books, bars and restaurants. And Al’s was the smallest greasy spoon on the planet. The first job I had there was cleaning up the place.

I took Thor and Freya with me and helped ourselves to sliced ham to make sandwiches.

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Al’s was so tiny that when I worked the counter, customers were in my face all the time. ‘Why do you look so mad’ somebody told me.”

Arty had kept quiet for a long time, still rolled on his side, one arm under my head and the other holding my hand. “I love you,” he said.

He didn’t sound sweet. He said it with conviction.

“I also cleaned houses and worked for Northern Sun Newspaper selling ad space to local businesses. I went door to door up Franklin Avenue, Bloomington Avenue, and Lake Street. That schooled me in grass roots organizing.”

“You were grass roots before that, darling.”

“Then I got this HUD house in a lottery. My dad loaned me the down payment. I paid him one time and didn’t bother paying the rest.

Once upon a time he had agreed to help pay for my college education at the U of Minnesota, but after a month he forgot to send the money. So I dropped out by the end of the first semester, took the money I saved from working and traveled to the Philippines.

I received my Bachelor’s Degree from the School of Hard Knocks, Master’s Degree in AFDC (Aid for Families with Dependent Children) and PhD in the People of Phillips neighborhood organization.

Arty kissed my cheek then snuffled my hair. “I got my PhD too,” he said.

“I know honey. Post Hole Digging.”

I never met anyone who could labor like him. I watched him swing a sledgehammer at an old sidewalk and crack it like and eggshell with three strokes. Arty can do everything, but I have to keep an eye on him in case he has a shack attack by starting a project he won’t finish, 88

leaving it as ghetto as the poor people he dogs since he comes from trailer shack poverty himself.

So now, I stand at the precipice. With death we have no choice. We step off the cliff. With love it’s the same. Only with a wingsuit. I stand at the precipice of love with Arty O’Brien.

Will we have a wingsuit at death’s precipice? We all find out.

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FIELD OF SKULLS On the appointed day in August, the medicine man from Rosebud Reservation arrived at the yurt in the vacant lot next to the Seward Cooperative Café. People gathered within and sat on the ground with backs against the lattice wall. The old man’s helper checked the canvas and covered pinholes of light with blankets. He then set up the old man’s altar. The old man surveyed the congregants. No telling the old man’s age, his face creased as the parched ravines and gullies of his homeland. A cataract clouded one eye. His left ear, split from top to center, flopped sideways. People cupped hands to their ears. He lectured in a soft voice.

“Long-haul prayer is the act of commitment and devotion to a vision.

It can be for healing or wealth or justice or revenge or searching for answers. Prayer begins that work and has consequences. Be careful of what you pray. It will come to pass.”

The helper wrapped a blanket around the old man and then bound him with a rope. The old warlock would carry the prayers into limbo.

The canvas doors drawn closed, space within the yurt pitch black, the helper beat a hand drum and sang poems of the Underworld. Particles of foxfire flashed like shooting stars, more fleeting than the brevity of breath. ~ 90

Corbie sometimes worked as a cook or maintenance man at the collectively run Café. He had assisted an old 12-step hippy to build and set up the yurt. Now, within the yurt, Corbie prayed to meditate upon a field of skulls as Buddha had done when he was young. Perhaps Corbie could become the mooring of sanity for his beloved sixteen-year-old sister, Ophelia, who slipped in and out of schizophrenia. His mind wandered, meditation interrupted by thoughts of Pookie, a playwright and puppeteer. Both twenty years old, they knew each other from Mark of the Fiend Puppet and Mask Theatre. When he could still see the folks in the yurt, he watched Pookie arrive with Hannah, the eighteenyear-old virgin. They sat on the ground opposite him.

—That sanctimonious asshole. I’d bet anything that Pookie will pray for immortality as an artist, and Hannah will pray to meet her husband and to become a mother — His back ached from sitting in one position. Hours passed. The old man’s helper called for someone to open the doors. Light flooded the yurt. The one-eyed wizard sat on the ground before his altar. Beside him, the blanket lay folded with the rope coiled on top. ~ Corbie considered how he and his rival used creativity and enlightenment the way male bowerbirds of New Guinea ornament their lairs with precious baubles and abstract paintings and do elaborate dances as an invitation to coitus.

Corbie envied Pookie for making love with intellectual women, artists and practitioners of yoga. On the other hand, the women that

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Corbie had sex with, intellectual artists or yogis or not, were interested in getting it on with a good-looking young man with a swimmer’s body.

From appearances, Corbie might have come from a bourgeois family. He always had enough to eat. He swam freestyle for the high school swim team, but seldom saw his dad, a traveling salesman and Republican huckster. Saw him even less after his folks’ divorce.

He knew Pookie came from a working class family in Saint Paul and was never on any athletic team. Pookie dressed to cover up his caved-in chest. Corbie hated it when Pookie bragged about his long cock. Maybe that was Pookie’s primary source of self-confidence. Corbie considered his own nose a match to that of Cyrano de Bergerac.

Corbie’s teenage sister, Ophelia, red-haired and freckled as Pippi Longstocking, had ventured out of the community of Minnetonka.

Brave and spontaneous, she made friends at the Hard Times coffeehouse in the Beatnik ghetto known as the West Bank. No schizophrenic episodes for a year, she deemed herself cured.

Maybe prayers from the yurt worked. Corbie knew she was fragile as the moonflower that blooms in moonlight and closes when sunlight touches its petals. ~ In September, a month after the ceremony in the yurt, Pookie received a fifty-thousand dollar arts grant from the Lila Wallace Fund for travel to the Amazon jungle. By October he got Hannah knocked up, married her, and made the down payment on a house in South Minneapolis. In November he left her and the house for three months to live in the rainforest until the remaining grant money ran out.

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Pookie returned in January. He received another grant, this time from the state arts board, under the non-profit umbrella of the Mark of the Fiend.

The Mark of the Fiend Puppet and Mask Theatre had taken over a former porn movie house, The Faust. A Sicilian World War II hero who still owned massage parlors on Lake Street had operated the movie house. The porn theatre was a relic from the days of the gangster Isadore Blumenfeld, better known as Kid Cann. Pookie used The Faust’s stage to set up storyboards for his jungle piece.

An entourage of artists entered through the alley door. They fluttered from sketch to sketch and examined animistic details of broadtrunked trees, vines, ferns, pods of river dolphins, black caiman alligators, jaguars, butterflies, spider monkeys, tamarins, and a hundred-foot-long snake.

Pookie knew these artists had his back. He had grown up with them.

“I call it YACUMAMA! After the indigenous name of a legendary giant anaconda, the mother spirit of the Amazon River.”

The artists unbolted the encrusted movie house seats from the floor to create workshop space. During stage performances, the audience could sit in folding chairs.

In the ensuing three months, Pookie Rosen’s ensemble recreated the rainforest by melding cardboard sculptures with paint and papier mâché.

They concentrated on hand puppets, Balinese stick puppets, and a 12foot-long by 6-foot-tall shadow screen.

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Pookie argued with the executive director. She wanted pay raises for office staff and more cash for upkeep of building infrastructure. They held onto Pookie’s grant money. ~ Pookie enlisted experienced advocates, among them three women between the ages of thirty-four and thirty-nine. He promised to make these women central to the production.

The three women choreographed a ritual dance. They wore minimal outfits -— reptilian scales down a feminine spine and a webbed and clawed hand; a panther tail; and the bristled appendage of the wild forest sow.

Years as athletic troupers in the Minnesota Modern Dance ensemble, Santeria religious practice and aerobic classes at the YWCA had strengthened and smoothed their thighs and muscular rounded buttocks.

Male and lesbian artists, poets and musicians, lusted after them. This was not the first time the trio danced naked onstage. They had seduced every dreadlocked Jamaican, exotic African, Native American spiritual leader, conga drummer and jazz guitar player in three neighborhoods.

They also eyed daring young outlaw hippies and budding creative geniuses.

Even when the three women donned papier-mâché masks of wood nymphs and demons, it was easy to distinguish one from another.

The pubic hair of Varis was ginger. Her breasts, somewhat long, hung round as honeydew melons with nipples pink as wild rose petals that pointed at a slight angle upward.

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There was Rivka Cohen, escapee from the drama department at Brandeis University. She had converted as pagan to the chagrin of her father, a Shakespeare professor. Rivka’s thighs had thickened from running the Twin Cities marathons. Equipped with muscled shoulders, narrow waist and wide hips, auburn pubic hair along inner loins grew to a point just below her navel. Breasts small and firm with areolae the size of brown eggs, nipples tips budded straight forward.

Lillian Evans, an Iowa farm girl, had received a full scholarship to North-Central Bible College near downtown Minneapolis. She had gotten off the Greyhound, never registered for school and never returned to Iowa. Shedding parents’ Pentecostal beliefs, she practiced Santeria. Raven’s hair licked her shoulders like flame. Long eyelashes framed eyes as blue as the pigment of Renoir’s paintbrush. Large breasts bounced when she danced, areolae the size of chestnut crabapples, nipples a nursing child could not resist. Hips beckoned like a siren’s song. Jet pubic hair in a heart shaped wedge lay in the heart of her almond thighs. Her buttocks an inverted heart, the point met the fractal of heart shaped fat at the small of her back. ~ Pookie headed home at night, opened the fridge, yanked a can of beer from the plastic ring and popped it open. He sat in the darkness sipping his beer in bed beside Hannah.

“I had a long day. The executive director won’t release the funds. I think she doesn’t respect me because I don’t have a college education.”

Hannah rolled away from him. “How come it’s always about you, King Baby? Does it ever occur to you to ask how my day was?”

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It was April. The first spring rains turned to snow. Hannah was seven months pregnant. ~ Pookie needed to speak with an ally regarding the money issue.

Lillian Evans, the Santeria practitioner, always treated him with kindness.

During a break in rehearsal, he approached her.

“Hey Lillian, I need blow steam. It’s not you. Be my counselor for a minute?”

Perspiration beaded on her naked breasts. He tried not to stare at her hand, webbed and clawed. He thought it had been part of her stage costume. It didn’t make her any less gorgeous.

“Sure Pookie. What’s up?”

“I’m fighting with the executive director. She and Hannah are always on my case.”

“Tell you what,” said Lillian. “Bring a rooster to the House of Saints tonight, and I’ll sacrifice it for you.”

“Where do I find a live rooster in the city?”

“West African or Hmong market.” ~ He took University Avenue to the Hmong market. Pens lined up contained pigs, goats, lambs, hens, chickens, ducks, quail and pigeons.

A hen laid an egg and clucked. A white leghorn rooster crowed lustily.

Pookie paid three dollars for it and carried it under his arm to the car.

The rooster perched loose on the shoulders of the passenger seat, looked through the windshield and squirted shit in the backseat.

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Upon parking in front of the House of Saints, Pookie heard the Conga drums. The rooster’s hackles went up when Pookie tried to grab him, and flew pecking and spurring into Pookie’s arms. With rooster underarm again, Pookie entered the church and found Varis and Rivka in attendance.

“Where’s Lillian?”

“She’s the Orisha,” said Varis.

“Up there.” Rivka pointed with her chin.

Lillian, in white dress and white headscarf, danced in a trance. She smoked a thick cigar. Coming out of her trance long enough to approach Pookie, she led him by the elbow to a center altar. The drumming intensified. Lillian took the rooster from Pookie, held it with one arm, grabbed its head and yanked it off with a twist. The head fell to the floor, beak opening and closing, light going from the rooster’s eyes. The decapitated rooster struggled in Lillian’s arms as blood sprayed over her and over Pookie.

When the headless bird quit struggling, she gave it back to Pookie.

He returned home, sponged the back seat, plucked and cleaned the rooster in the backyard, made gentle love to his pregnant wife and then fell asleep.

At The Faust the next day, Pookie resumed work on YACUMAMA! The executive director of Mark of the Fiend emerged from her office and smiled upon the progress of Pookie’s crew, readying for opening night.

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Pookie pressured himself to accomplish as much as he could. It was May. Dandelions flourished in the cracks of the sidewalk. Hannah was eight months pregnant. ~ At The Faust, Corbie traversed the catwalk above stage. He rigged lights, ropes and pulleys to move the set.

The three women who danced naked at rehearsal paid attention to the young man who dangled from the rafters like a giant fox bat.

From Lillian Evans, Corbie learned the secrets of oral sex, his long nose between her labia nuzzled against her clitoris. Lillian’s webbed hand with claws gently raked his back. Her slender tongue flicked in and out of his ear as they made love.

They had two weeks of sex together when Lillian moved on to the creole drummer of a Native American bar band from Franklin Avenue.

Rivka moved on to Corbie. She taught him erotic massage while discussing Shakespeare, recited sonnets, and explained that the skull of Yorick represented an adviser, a talking head in ancient druidic culture.

“Don’t ejaculate yet,” she’d say. “Let the intensity build.”

They slid oiled bodies over one another’s. Iridescent scales extended down Rivka’s back to a small curly tail above her buttocks. It frightened Corbie when they finally came together, Rivka squealing like a feral Siberian sow atop him.

In June, Rivka moved on to the neighborhood activist and painter who kept a storefront studio on Lake Street and ran a youth spoken word program for rough poor children of the mixed-race working class ghetto.

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The third woman, Varis, took over the Corbie project. A yogi with Buddhist leanings, Varis collected animal bones as spirit helpers. Last week, she tracked a barred owl harried by crows through the woods by the riverbank. The crows murdered the owl. Varis gathered the carcass for a bug box. The insects ate the flesh, leaving behind a perfect owl skeleton.

Varis knew Corbie’s story: Willy Loman dad, never there for his son but gave him money. She knew Corbie didn’t care for money. He cared for the sister, Ophelia, a beautiful creative girl who slipped in and out of madness.

There is no protection from reality, she wanted to tell him. Aspiring saints survive by meditation upon a field of skulls. In the meantime, enjoy life until falling before Death’s scythe.

Varis had kept up on young Corbie’s progress in the school of love.

Rivka and Lillian, with cackles and sighs described the details. They spoke of a young man who could become codependent, and that is why they moved on.

Varis spent time with Corbie by candlelight on her futon.

“No skull to meditate upon, no enlightenment for you,” she said.

They went down on each other, she on top, her ass in his face. She came first and stopped sucking him before he ejaculated. She sent Corbie away.

“Don’t come back until you have a human skull. Murder nobody to get one.”

“How can I get a skull without murder?”

“The path will show itself if you are serious like Buddha.”

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~ At The Faust during papier mâché workshop, Pookie Rosen, flour paste and strips of brown paper bag in hand, noticed Corbie looking dejected.

“What’s up?”

Corbie told him everything.

For a twenty-year-old man, Pookie had normal sexual fantasies about the three women. But after what Corbie reveled, he became obsessed. Furthermore, Pookie’s difficulties with The Faust theatre administration continued. He could not talon away the grant money for art supplies, groceries, and a mortgage payment. And the eight-month pregnant Hannah had not screwed him for two weeks.

Later that afternoon, Pookie grimaced and swore while wrestling with cardboard to fabricate a tree trunk. Lillian Evans noticed Pookie’s distress.

She placed her webbed hand upon his wrist. “Tell me,” she said.

Pookie exhaled through his teeth. “I’m not sure the play will open, and I might lose my house.”

Lillian rubbed Pookie’s shoulders. “When we’re done here, come over to my apartment for a glass of wine.”

Pookie had brought over a six-pack of beer, cracked one open and put the remainder in her fridge. Tilting his head back and taking a big glug, he considered what he heard from Corbie. He conjured his most pathetic expression. “My wife never gives me head. I think she believes it’s pornographic and dirty, and politically incorrect.”

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“O poor dear,” said Lillian, tenderness in her voice. “I’ll take care of this. But when your first son is born, you must name him Babalu.”

She unbuckled his belt and pulled his pants to his knees. He experienced elation when her face and chin pressed into his pubic hair.

He came. She held the sperm in her mouth. She stood and kissed him, blowing the sperm between his lips. “Tastes like chocolate, doesn’t it?”

“I don’t think so,” he said. “More like the jalapeños I had for lunch.”

“Remember,” she said. “The first name.” ~ Hannah waited at the door, arms folded on top of her protruding belly.

When Pookie walked in, she started. “Where were you? I’m carrying your baby. You are supposed to be here for me. I can have this baby any time. My lower back aches like hell, and I need a massage.”

Pookie’s carcasses of birds, iguanas and fruit bats hung from the walls. Assorted animal skulls lay in heaps upon shelves beside open sketchbooks filled with designs for more fabulist sets. Gamelan gongs from Bali stacked in a corner, Hannah eyed it all with disgust.

“When will you put your junk away? If I'd the energy, I’d throw it in a dumpster. I need to live in a home, not a dead animal graveyard. They breed more flies than I can kill. How can I have a home-birth in these conditions?” ~ At rehearsal, Pookie took time to counsel with Varis.

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“I’m like you,” the older woman said. “I could never have a domestic relationship with a non-artist. That’s why I left my husband and let him raise the girls.” ~ It was Solstice Eve. On his way to the bonfire at Seward Café, Corbie pedaled his ten-speed past Lakewood Cemetery. He checked out the wrought iron fence and knew he would return for a human cranium, essential for understanding Buddha’s greatest truth.

Out back at the Seward Café, the old hippy who had built the yurt lit the Solstice bonfire. Corbie respected him as an elder and liked him even though the old dude did not drink or get high. Corbie and Varis sat on stumps of elm beside each other. Rotund Hannah reclined on a wooden bench, her head resting in Pookie’s lap. Rivka arrived with her date, the conga drummer with hair as long and unkempt as a lion’s mane. Lillian traveled with Donny Freedman. Born and raised in South Minneapolis, he spoke with a Jamaican patois.

A gallon jug of Carlo Rossi came around. Donny Freedman tilted the jug with both hands and swigged long. The conga drummer sucked a resinous joint, the end glowing, and passed it on. Someone showed up with a gallon zip-lock of fresh psilocybin mushrooms, just harvested from mason jars of mycelium grown in yellow river rice.

Santeria drummers kept a melodic polyrhythmic beat, African and Gaelic. People danced freestyle. One man, a master at movement, danced walking, kneeling, arms up, hands fluttering like the slow beating of wings, head swung back, shoulders gyrating as he conducted the music.

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Rivka, Lillian and Varis joined him.

Corbie had not eaten. He drank some wine. Now, he ate mushrooms.

Past midnight, Corbie left the party and biked to Lakewood Cemetery. Beyond the padlocked wrought iron gates lay a chapel with a domed roof, forty acres of rolling hills, manicured grass, red maple trees, and a savannah of oak and black ash. The cemetery extended from the top of the hill in a solid middle class neighborhood to the park road circling the lake, Mde Wakan Ska. Corbie, tripping pleasantly, could still think. He biked around the cemetery until locating access away from streetlights. He locked the bike to the wrought iron fence. Spans of fence, bolted between limestone pillars and tipped with fleur de lis spear points, stood eightfeet high. The stone pillars provided handholds for climbing.

Corbie carried a backpack. He scaled with ease and dropped to a crouch onto the soft grass. It was quiet with little light pollution.

During Corbie’s momentary pause in physical exertion, the mushrooms came on strong.

A breeze. The trees moved, branches dendrite beings communicating with the air and cosmos. Corbie experienced oneness with earth and grass and infinity.

He beheld the sky, a Van Gogh painting of a starry night but with pastel hues.

With pack upon his back he searched gravestones. Beneath his feet lay a field of skulls, and he intersected with them.

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From his pack he removed a flashlight, flicked it on and followed the beam until sensing a particular gravesite. His palms upon polished and pink-hued granite, he ran fingertips over the carved words.

JASON SIGURDSSON. April 4, 1990–February 17, 2000.

OUR SON PLAYS WITH THE ANGELS.

The boy was less than ten years old when he died. Corbie wondered—did this boy wish for release from the grave? Rejoin the world again and have fun? Catch up on lost childhood? The more Corbie thought on it the more certain he became. The child broadcasted through the dirt his grief of death, and a powerful wish to play again on earth.

Corbie dropped the pack to the grass and removed the entrenching tool. He unfolded the spade from the handle and screwed the metal collar in place. Earth flying behind him, he dug as though the boy was buried alive.

His entrenching tool broke into a void. The wooden coffin had rotted. Corbie kneeled and removed dirt and wood until he touched the corpse with his hands. It had not a white skull as he had imagined.

Dried flesh over cheekbones, child’s teeth bared, the cranium peered at him with dried and shriveled eyes. When Corbie tugged, the skull came loose, along with a collarbone, a shoulder with an arm and hand attached.

Before sunrise, the mushrooms had worn off. Corbie waited behind a pillar near his bike. No traffic. No pedestrians. A porch light switched 104

on across the street. A dog barked. He climbed over, dropped onto the sidewalk and unlocked the bike. He did not notice the man in a bathrobe standing in an open doorway.

Corbie biked to the Seward Café and cached the pack in the pantry.

He had a breakfast shift as short order cook. While he flipped multigrain pancakes, omelets and hash browns, another cook opened the pantry door.

“What’s that stink?”

“My pack. I’ll stash it out back.”

From the top of the pack protruded a small arm and hand, meats desiccated to jerky. The arm separated from the shoulder. It fell out and onto the restaurant floor. Morning customers watched Corbie scoop and shove it in the pack. He hid it in the woodpile.

When Corbie finished the shift, he washed up and then grabbed his pack. He biked to The Faust to sleep in the prop room. When he lay down he recognized the smell of massage oil on the old stage curtain— patchouli and whatever else Rivka used with her lovers. It saturated the fabric he lay upon. He should have just gone to Varis’ place. She had given him the key.

Corbie questioned whether he had done the right thing, seeking enlightenment by robbing a grave for a skull. He fell asleep.

When he woke up in the late afternoon, he biked to Varis’ duplex and let himself in. She had the house from a former husband, mortgage paid, a rental apartment downstairs, and a garage loft converted to a mother-in-law apartment.

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Her place reeked of cat box. Three felines, a calico, a black, and an orange tabby rubbed his leg. Varis sat at the kitchen table and painted lacquer on a Masonite-backed collage of a woman riding a scallop shell pulled by cats across a crater-pitted full moon.

She looked up from her work. “Mission accomplished?”

From his pack, he retrieved the arm with hand attached and set it on the table before her.

She studied it.

He dug deeper and pulled out the head encased in dried brown skin, exposed bone stained with the colors of the earth. The dead boy’s brown hair upon the cranium was still soft, his eyes gray as dried snot, cheekbones prominent and white small teeth.

Varis raised her eyebrows and leaned forward.

He handed it to her.

She held it up, tilted it sideways and peered at it from different angles. She handed it back.

“Consult and pray with this skull. Clean and polish it. Use the bug box if you must.” She pointed with her chin to the wood crate on the counter beneath the dish cabinet where beetles munched flesh off dead animal bones.

“What about us?”

“You have the key. And I made a promise to you.”

On the futon in her bedroom, Varis fucked him from the top, pounding him until she screamed like a panther from the Florida Everglades, her thick furred tail standing straight behind her. ~ 106

YACUMAMA! opened and Hannah was due any moment. Pookie had less time for her. The Faust theatre administration released the grant money. Pookie purchased great PR, radio announcements and printed fliers. That led to a TV interview, and press corps for opening night.

Onstage opening night, the Amazon jungle came to life with smudge pots and dry ice, shrieks of birds and frogs, jaguars and monkeys, chattering of river dolphin and bellowing of alligators. The animal music came to a crescendo when the three women, pubic and armpit hair red, brown and black, webbed hands, scaled and tailed backsides, emerged from the trees and danced.

A week into the show, Hannah’s water broke. A home birth with midwife attending, Pookie prepared to leave The Faust to be beside his wife. Rivka, still naked from the show, accosted him.

“Giving birth is tantric,” she said. “You won’t get laid for a while as Hannah will need to rest, mend and bond with the baby. Come upstairs to the prop room, with me. I will teach you. But you will name your first born son Virgil.”

“I promised Lillian to name him Babalu. His middle name can be Virgil.”

Pookie followed Rivka upstairs to the prop room. They made tantric love, her squealing atop him when they eventually came. Pookie shoved her aside, got dressed and ran five blocks back to his house to attend the home-birth of his first-born. ~

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Varis and Lillian entered the prop room. Lillian tilted her head as Rivka stood. Sperm drained along her inside thighs.

“How was he?” Varis asked.

Rivka smiled, showing teeth. “Pookie Rosen has potential. His cock is nine-inches-long, the girth of a can of beer. I will not let him fuck me in the ass. He doesn’t know he’s big.”

Lillian guffawed with a snort. “Then Hannah is a fool. She was a virgin when they met, and he’s the only man she’s had.”

“Big is nice but not everything,” said Varis. “Corbie isn’t big. But he’s an artist with that nose.”

Rivka and Lillian nodded, sad expression on their faces. ~ A few blocks away, Pookie kneeled nude beside Hannah. He exhaled and inhaled with her as she squatted naked on the quilt-covered futon. On the stove, an enamel pan of boiling water contained a pair of suture scissors. The midwife stacked clean towels, linen sewing thread and curved suture needles on the table.

The contractions came closer. Hannah exhaled hard and pushed until the blood vessels burst in her cheeks. The baby crowned once as Hannah’s vagina stretched, tearing a bit. Hannah caught her breath, exhaled again, and the baby slid into Pookie’s hands.

The amniotic sac slipped out onto the quilt.

“I’ve named him Babalu,” said Pookie, holding the wet baby boy to his chest. Eyes open, the newborn breathed well and did not cry. The midwife clipped the umbilical cord, tied a knot,

and took the infant.

She passed him to Hannah, stretched out and exhausted on the quilt.

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Hannah held him to her left breast where the milk flowed nearest her heart. Babalu nursed.

“I thought we’d name him Daniel,” she said, “after my grandfather.”

“Daniel will be his middle name. Babalu Virgil Daniel Rosen.”

Hannah was not pleased. ~ Corbie heard it on Minnesota Public Radio. Ghouls stole the body of a boy from Lakewood Cemetery. Mr. and Mrs. Sigurdsson pleaded for the return of the stolen remains. The police conducted an investigation.

Corbie asked himself, Am I a ghoul? A monster?

As summer passed into autumn. The splinter of unease grew in Corbie’s mind. He had not gained significant illumination or even pleasure from meditating on the skull of Jason Sigurdsson. He still made love with Varis who counseled and consoled him, she a decade and a half older.

Corbie had turned twenty-one. His sixteen-year-old sister, Ophelia, hung out on the West Bank and sometimes floated near the bend of serious mental illness. Weed made it worse. She needed help but refused to return home to Minnetonka where one required an automobile to get anywhere. In south Minneapolis, she had art, community and bad boyfriends.

His insides jittery, Corbie faced the police investigation concerning the plundered skeletal remains. Detective Little Thunder from the Third Precinct had questioned him and other people, including the Seward Café breakfast cook who worked beside Corbie on the morning he stored the skeleton in the pantry. Detective Little Thunder might even 109

have questioned the customers who saw the arm and hand drop out of the backpack onto the restaurant floor.

Corbie thought, Can I be accountable and accept my Karma? Will Maitreya, Buddha of the Future, help me? Is this what Buddha intends, these difficulties as a path to enlightenment? Are these difficulties the meditation on a field of skulls?

At Varis’s place, Corbie calmed himself, meditating in lotus position with palms together until he felt his pulse. He examined his feeble attempts to help his sister. He apologized to the skull, shoulder, arm and hand. With care, he wrapped the remains in muslin and put it in his backpack. He called Detective Little Thunder and turned himself in. ~ The judge sentenced Corbie to a year in the workhouse. He had the weekend to get organized. It was December. Most of his friends did not know. Just Varis, Pookie Rosen who wished him luck, and the sober old hippy that lit the Solstice fire. Corbie packed a few books. Old dude gave him P. D. Ouspensky’s FOURTH WAY, Gurdjieff’s BEELZEBUB’S TALES TO HIS GRANDSON, and the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous.

On the appointed day, Corbie biked fifteen miles to Adult Corrections in Plymouth.

His cell, on the third tier, measured 68-inches-wide by 94-inchesdeep, with a single four-foot florescent light fixture with a pull switch attached to the ceiling. At the rear of the cell, attached to the wall, a porcelain toilet. No seat. A sink with warm and cold water. Raised 110

edges of the steel bunk kept the 2-inch mattress from sliding around.

Across from the bunk were two wall-mounted steel shelves as desk and bench. He could sit and write.

He kept books on the other shelf, mounted six-feet-high, close to the door of the cell. The cell opened to a four-foot-wide walkway with a metal railing that overlooked the open space. Corbie could not see into other cells, constructed back to back like Lego blocks.

That year in a cell, Corbie learned a different system of meditation.

He read and reread the books. While inside he met pimps, check forgers, welfare fraudsters, DWI’s, perpetrators of domestic violence and petty thieves. He was the only grave robber. When Varis visited him, she brought bad news: Ophelia had been committed to Anoka State Hospital. ~ YACUMAMA! had run six months. Night after night, the theatre filled. The actors were paid.

It was December. Hannah was three months pregnant with child number two.

Varis counseled Pookie on the infinite mutagenesis of creativity.

They became steady lovers. Pookie thought sex with Rivka and Lillian was splendid, but sex with Varis felt more advanced.

“Gentle,” she instructed. “Go easy. And you must name your first born daughter Baba Yaga.”

In June Hannah birthed a girl. When Pookie named her Baba Yaga, Hannah uncovered her husband’s affair with Varis. “How could you let that old skank pick our daughter’s name? You son-of-a–bitch!”

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Pookie considered it a good move when Hannah divorced him. She kept the house and custody of the two children. He received a MacArthur Grant. A famous public television documentarian made a film on the topic of him. ~ The county released Corbie in December, 365 days after the first day of his workhouse sentence. Nobody waited for him in the parking lot. The corrections officer returned wallet, key to Varis’s duplex apartment, and ten-speed bike.

With the obstacles of snowbanks from the plows, icy roads and subzero weather, it took more than half-a-day to traverse the fifteen miles from Plymouth to South Minneapolis.

He pedaled through the streets to Varis’ place. The key in his pocket, he needed warmth, a meal, a change of clothes. He locked the bike, climbed the stairs and opened the door.

She was home. He heard the music, Haitian drums and melodies.

The comforting odor of cat urine. The calico and black rubbed against his leg. Then he saw, on the living room floor, a pair of boots with pointed toes curled upward. Abandonment welled up within, then rage.

Pookie Rosen!

Corbie flung open the bedroom door. The curtains closed, Varis’ clothes on the floor, incense and candles burning, and Pookie’s toes sticking up as Varis rode him, her puma tail arched.

“WHAT IS GOING ON?” “Oh dear,” said Varis.

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Pookie squirmed out from under Varis and grabbed for pants. “What the fuck do you mean what is going on? You’ve been gone a year.

Hannah and I are divorced.”

Varis patted the mattress in a gesture for Corbie to sit beside her. “I thought your release date was next week. I would have picked you up.”

She turned to Pookie, his pants pulled up halfway. “Isn’t that right, Pookie?”

Pookie nodded.

Corbie wanted no part of a ménage à trois. He walked out and biked to Hannah’s. Maybe he could crash on her couch in barter for helping around the house until he found work.

He told Hannah everything, and revealed the teaching received from the older women. Hannah listened. She wanted to retaliate for her exhusband’s unfaithfulness. Corbie and Hannah became lovers through the winter. She did not voice her initial disappointment with the smaller cock size. The kind, handsome and long-nosed Corbie more than made up for it. He watched the children, cooked, cleaned, and cleared snow from the sidewalk. ~ Corbie borrowed Hannah’s Toyota Corolla and drove to Anoka.

When he crossed the frozen Rum River, the hospital and the original three-story brick cottages came into view.

The Anoka-Metro Regional Treatment Center first opened around 1900. In those days people knew it as the State Asylum for the Insane.

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He followed the signs. One read Anoka State Hospital Cemetery.

Covered with three feet of glaze-crusted snow, trees stark against the winter sunset, Corbie saw no standing gravestones.

Not the rich in Lakewood Cemetery, he thought. Everybody here died crazy. That makes them holy.

He pulled into the parking lot. From the outside, it looked like a hospital campus. Corbie entered the lobby and checked in at the desk, shielded with bulletproof glass same as the workhouse. The clerk made him wait. Corbie sat on a bench.

A man in medical scrubs called his name. Corbie met him at an electronic security door. The man appeared in his sixties. Darkened bags under his eyes, he had not shaved for two or three days.

“I tracked Ophelia” said the man, his voice rough from smoking cigarettes. “Found her wandering the third floor. Nobody is up there, and the doors are supposed to stay locked. She claims a ghost opened the door for her. Do not enable her mental illness by believing her. It’s possible for her to take responsibility for her hallucinations, to admit to insanity.”

“Are you a doctor? A psychiatrist?”

The electronic locks unbolted. Corbie followed the man. The door locked behind them.

“No. I’m a state employee.”

Was that a sneer? Corbie addressed the back of the orderly’s head, shaved to make a balding pattern less noticeable. “Then how can you blame her for her schizophrenia?”

“I’ve worked here over twenty years and have seen everything.”

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Corbie had a hunch this state employee in medical scrubs wouldn’t voluntarily quit his job any more than an abusive cop would give up abusing power or a pedophile priest give up working with children.

Ophelia, seventeen years old, sat at a stainless steel table bolted to the floor, the bench too. Winter light with long shadows fell upon an institutional off-white. Ophelia wore a loose summer shift with no belt.

Flip-flops dangled from her feet. Her red hair needed brushing. She shuffled a shabby deck of cards. Corbie touched her face and wiped a long bead of saliva from the corner of her mouth.

The orderly sat at a desk and drank coffee. He turned the page of thick paperback.

Sister and brother hugged. Corbie wanted to take her outside for a walk, but she didn’t have boots, scarf, or winter coat.

“Let’s sit by the windows,” she said.

They moved to where they could see the trees in a large courtyard, possibly green in the summer. The limbs of the trees too high to climb, crows gathered for the night. At first, a few clustered together, then more, darkening the already overcast sky. Corbie counted them in groups. Thousands keeping each other warm. He listened to the rachitic communication through the closed windows.

She held his hand. “They told me you were coming. They are the familiars of the crazy people. Have you heard of the tunnels?”

“What tunnels?”

“Tunnels underground link the buildings together. I followed the whispering and found the

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tunnels with pipes along the ceilings. They commit suicide by hanging themselves from the pipes. Or they get raped and murdered.”

“Who?” “You know who. Mental patients. I tried to escape but was caught. I tried to escape through the tunnels. I tried to escape suicide.”

His heart broke. He wrapped his arm around her. “Where is your room?”

She squeezed his hand. “Building 8. Next to suicide watch. They kill themselves there too.” She changed her tone, a little more upbeat.

“Things fly around here.”

“Like what?”

“A cup of coffee. A book. Whatever they can lay their paws on.

They throw hard too. The tables are bolted because they’ll flip them over, and the chairs. If you get up from the table someone will throw it at you.”

“Who, you?”

“Noooo! Dead people. Angry dead people.”

“Do you have any friends here?”

“The lady in red.”

“What’s her name?

“Erica. Someone poured gas on her and set her on fire. She showed me the tunnels. She can get me out of here.”

“How long has Erica been here?”

“Longer than anyone, except for the children in the cottages. They keep me awake with their screaming. But if I leave, I won’t hear them anymore. Erica says there is one way out.”

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“How?” “Through the tunnels, silly. Then I can stay with you.”

“That is the best idea.”

“I searched for you but you were in jail.”

“I know.”

“I looked for you at the Hard Time Coffeehouse, and the Seward Café, and The Faust. No Corbie. You flew away.”

“I’m here now.”

“You’ll bust me out of here? Otherwise I have to go into the tunnels.”

When visiting ended, the orderly closed the book, poetry by Charles Bukowski, and led Corbie back through the electronic security door.

“She needs to be on suicide watch,” said Corbie. “She plans to kill herself.”

“Don’t feed into it.”

When Corbie got back to Hannah’s he called his mother first.

“The hospital is understaffed. Ophelia will kill herself unless we get her released.”

When the staff found Ophelia, she had been hanging from a water pipe in the tunnels for three days. ~ The sober old hippy hired Corbie to work construction. He attended a support group at the YWCA for people who lost family members to suicide. So far he stayed clean and saved money.

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When summer arrived, Corbie traveled to Norway where he began a bike trek through Saami country, through Russia, through Mongolia, China, Tibet, Nepal, India and Vietnam.

While biking, he meditated upon everyone he knew who had died and everyone who will die.

When he returned to Minneapolis in the autumn of the following year, he visited the grave of Jason Sigurdsson. Then he visited the grave of his sister. His family had buried her in the plot at far end of the cemetery.

Now, in the earth beneath his feet was his sister’s skull. Corbie recalled the prophecy of the one-eyed Lakota elder who conducted the ceremony in the yurt on Franklin Avenue. Be careful what you pray for.

He had started a handyman business. It is enough to be a simple carpenter, he told himself, And to have good health and good help. This is what I have now. And the anguish of Buddha’s awakening. ~ Pookie had also prayed at the ceremony in the yurt. Now, he writes and directs another production with respect to a wizard who becomes immortal and gains access to everything he desires because of the pact with three jinn’s who have not aged in five thousand years. They prowl The Faust Theatre.

He still fucks the three jinn with their detectable signs of demon: Iridescent scales extend along the length of Rivka’s spine, a small curly tail above her buttocks; Lillian’s webbed hand with claws, tongue of a

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honey bat; Varis’ feline teeth, panther tail, and hidden under long ginger hair, cat ears.

Pookie tours remote corners of the planets, of the Milky Way. His traveling circus features strong men with Down syndrome, juggling clowns, acrobats, men with no legs only torso, heads with no bodies, and exotic dancers performing tales of the underworld.

In one performance in a remote parallel universe long after the end of the Earth, Death appears onstage. Death collects Pookie’s soul into a mason jar. Pookie collapses.

He lies on his side, skin drawn and taut across his teeth, face that of the old medicine man in the yurt, and then a skull.

Victorious Death saunters across the stage and raises the trophy, the nimbus of Pookie’s soul throbbing like fireflies. Demon girl sticks out her foot and trips Death. Death stumbles and drops the jar. The Demon girl seizes it, uncaps the jar and releases the flame that becomes neon green ectoplasm. It floats across the stage, winding its way up Pookie’s nostril as breath. The lights go up. Pookie and his crew make their bows to ovation of particles of foxfire flashing like shooting stars.

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MERLE’S BRAIN Twenty-five years have passed since Merle Kalevala’s suicide.

Nowadays Arty and Sven are friends. When they see each other at the YWCA, one quits working leg extensions on the Nautilus machine; the other places the dumbbells back on the rack. They visit for an hour, discuss books, labor history, union pensions, retirement. Arty doesn’t mention his last conversation with their mentor. ~ Before Merle Kalevala died, Arty rented a storefront on Cedar Avenue in Minneapolis. This was home, public art studio, and a place to write. His son stayed with him on weekends. Full time when the court committed the boy’s mother to lockdown treatment for crack addiction. Arty was the only father on the block. Kids from Cedar Avenue dropped by to play chess or the acoustic musical instruments he salvaged from the alley, including a full set of traps.

Merle lived a block away in a brownstone, rent cheap, just a cut above a flophouse room. On a waiting list for public housing in a seniors’ high-rise, he had applied for section eight. This would cost him a third of his income—a small pension from social security. The wait could take two years. An opening only occurred when someone died.

The old man was Arty’s AA sponsor. He and Arty attended a meeting and afterward drank coffee and recited poetry. They recited for hours, passing back-and-forth Whitman’s LEAVES OF GRASS, James 120

Weldon Johnson’s GOD’S TROMBONE, Carl Sandburg’s THE PEOPLE YES, dirty limericks, and archy and mehitabel. When a limerick struck Merle as particularly nasty, he stuck his feet straight out from the stuffed chair and kicked them up and down while he shook and roared. Then the old man recited Prodigal Son. When he got to the hot-lipped women of Babylon he rolled every syllable, voice pitched like an evangelical preacher but with a Finnish Iron Range accent. Arty learned to recite poetry in this way, but with more urban Ebonic jazz. ~ When Arty visited Merle’s apartment he seldom ran into the other sponsee, Sven. When he ran into Sven, the Swede snubbed him. Sven and Arty were the same age. Sven drove big rig over-the-road, belonged to the Teamsters and the Communist Party. Arty, never a member of the CP, had been a card-carrying member of the IWW. He worked on the towboats in the Saint Paul harbor, or on the wharf as night watchman and utility man.

Sven considered Blarney, the treasure of Gaelic diplomacy and creativity, obnoxious and dishonest, so perceived Arty as a manic, loud-mouthed exaggerator and liar. Arty saw Sven as Minnesota Nice: not straightforward, passive-aggressive, anal retentive and invalidating different thinking to evade the truth.

Arty avoided conscription during the war in Vietnam. The draft board required school administration to turn over names of every male in their senior year. He had attended four different high schools and dropped out before finishing twelfth grade, bamboozling the bureaucracy.

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For Sven’s draft board physical, he ate enough salt to cause a stroke in a less healthy man. They stamped him 4-F, unfit for military duty.

Sven battled riot cops at Berkeley and National Guard at Kent State.

The Guard shot and killed friends who stood beside him. In 1973, the federal marshals let him drive his tractor-trailer through the roadblock at Pine Ridge reservation. They checked the cargo, found palletized canned food, and missed the false forward bulkhead with six crates of Armalites for the Movement. A friend still served a life sentence at a federal prison for killing two federal marshals in a firefight at Wounded Knee.

In Boston, when the feds busted in the door of the church where Doctor Spock led a ceremony for draftees to burn their draft cards, Arty joined a mob flipping marshal cars and setting them on fire. In Chicago, Arty dodged the FBI and the Illinois Bureau of Investigation. He fought cops from the time of the Democratic Convention through the Weatherman Riots and rolled pipe bombs under police cars for a year after a death squad murdered his hero and associate, Fred Hampton.

The New Hampshire Ku Klux Klan blew up Arty’s family home when he was a boy. He calculated he had soldiered for the Movement from the time he was ten years old. He built his first bombs with black powder from an illegal firework factory hidden in the woods.

The old Finlander, Merle Kalevala, gave Arty respect. Merle’s father had been an IWW union organizer in the logging camps and iron mines. Pinkerton goons tarred and feathered him. Merle’s uncles joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in 1936 to fight Franco. ~ 122

The old man’s labor histories included a dance upstairs at the union hall in Duluth.

“Leadbelly played 12-string acoustic guitar and sang. Everybody stomped their feet until the joists sheered and the dance floor fell into the level below.”

Arty sipped boiled coffee from the Skippy peanut butter jar the old man handed him. “Socialism in Northern Minnesota survived Joe McCarthy.”

“That wind off Lake Superior is so cold, the government operatives might have been flung to Siberia,” Merle said. “There is still a Paul Robeson club in Duluth.”

Arty had been there—the Paul Robeson Ballroom, a backstreet bar, meeting place and offices of the local socialists. Sign on the door said CLOSED. Arty played guitar and harmonica. He brought his guitar to his wharf night-watchman job and practiced songs from the IWW Little Red Songbook.

“T-Bone Slim was a Finn. He disappeared from a wharf in New York City where he worked as a tugboat pilot.”

Merle took a last drag from his cigarette then snuffed it. “I knew him from Finn Hall when I was a boy. He learned to steer a tug in the Duluth harbor.” ~ Merle Kalevala attended Arty’s monthly potlucks at the storefront.

Arty invited storytellers and listeners. One of Merle’s poems, They call me Alien, Un-American, had been translated into fourteen languages 123

and read at Prince Albert Hall in London. Merle spun yarns about his shaman grandfather who ran a logging camp and charmed a bear into submission after a cowboy lumberjack lassoed it. He told the story of Vaino the Wino whose penis froze off when he fell asleep while standing to take a piss alongside Carey’s Store in forty-below zero conditions. Vaino kept the shriveled dried thing in a cigarette box until Merle’s shaman grandfather reattached it with sacred water from the Knife River. Only the shaman was drunk and reattached the penis upside-down.

“Now when Vaino had sex,” said Merle, “instead of coming he went.” ~ Two years had passed when, in the autumn, Merle moved a few blocks away. Arty owned a pickup truck. He helped the old man move books, typewriter, couch, bed, chairs, pots, pans, to the senior high rise.

Merle’s new apartment comprised a concrete floor and painted cinderblock walls, galley kitchen, bathroom with toilet and tub. The living room, three times the size of a jail cell, included a window. His bedroom, large enough for a single mattress and bed frame, contained another window flanked by a metal cabinet, clothes dresser on the other side.

Mid-January, Arty called the old man before going to visit. Night came at five o’clock in the afternoon. He made his way behind the Minneapolis Indian Center. It was twenty-below zero. The crust of snow beneath his felt-lined Chippewa boots crunched like broken glass, sparkling in the lamplight of the street. He managed not to break 124

through the crust into the three-feet of snow. Star , a black wolf-sized malamute mutt, ranged ahead of him. Arty had picked up three-dozen White Castle hamburgers, several large orders of fries, and coffee, no sugar because Merle was diabetic. Once inside the building Star stayed at Arty’s side. They rode the elevator to the sixth floor where Arty banged on the door then entered.

Next to the typewriter, a sheet of paper in the roller, the old man had set up the chessboard, black against red. If no willing opponent dropped by, he’d play against himself. The shelves slanted with books from floor to ceiling lined every wall except the kitchen and the bedroom.

Towers of books, some toppled, lay stacked on the floor. A skeleton of a cat with black fur still encasing the tail hung from a cord in front of the window overlooking the expressway. An ashtray served as a paperweight upon a stack of typed pages. Merle smoked Pall Mall, but the ashtray was not overflowing. A galley kitchen, dirty dishes, roaches scuttled in and out of the sink. The old man ate canned food.

Arty and Merle played chess without a word between them. White Castle cartons littered the floor. Star had wolfed his dozen burgers and now stretched out at the old man’s feet. Between chess moves, Merle reached and rubbed the dog’s big-brained head. ~ Merle Kalevala had worked at the scrapyards on Washington Avenue and muscled engine blocks, V-eights and straight-sixes, onto the shearing block. While in his fifth decade, Merle still hiked the Minnesota River trails from Pike Island below Fort Snelling to Savage.

Young Arty recalled he had a difficult time keeping up with the old 125

man on the twenty-mile trek, slogging across slues and scrambling over deadfall through the woods to circumvent bends in the river. They came to a giant cottonwood hollow enough for a man to stand up in, pitched camp nearby and stayed overnight to fish.

As Merle entered his sixth decade, a lifetime of manual labor caused osteoarthritis in his back, neck, and shoulders. The pain unmanageable, he could no longer hike or spend time in the woods. To sit in a chair hurt his back and neck. Reading had been a favorite lifelong pastime.

He quit because bending his head over a book resulted in blinding headaches. A woman friend from AA had studied therapeutic massage, another studied chiropractic medicine. They offered treatment free. He tried them. It did not work. The pain never diminished. His outlook shifted. He used to sit on a park bench and feed peanuts to the squirrels.

The effort hurt, sitting on the park bench, holding his head up, and getting his socks and pants on almost impossible. It hurt to type, so he quit writing. Writing had defined him.

“If the VA won’t use laser to remove the calcium spurs on my neck vertebrae, I’ll kill myself.”

Arty furrowed his brow. “How?” “I have my dad’s shotgun.” The old man took a drag from a Pall Mall and knocked the ash into an empty diet coke can.

Arty noticed the shotgun, walnut stock, barrels up in the corner where two bookshelves met.

“How about heading north of Duluth in January for a sauna? Chop a hole in the ice of the French River and take a dip. Drink a quart of muscatel then fall asleep in the snow and die of hypothermia.”

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Merle’s body shook as he laughed. He caught his breath. “Now that has dignity. Anishinabek around Lake Superior call Finns Bemaadizid madodoowiin, or People Who Sweat. Madoodoo is the Anishinabek sweat lodge.” ~ Another year had passed. In August, Arty returned from a Sundance in South Dakota. He had cut firewood, hauled rocks in the bed of his pickup, gathered boughs for shade, borrowed and built outhouses and tended the fire, day and night, for sweat lodges the past four years. At last, he received a sacred pipe from the medicine man, and just completed his first year as a Sun Dancer. He fasted four days and nights without food and water on the hill and then four more days of the same while dancing in the sun. For him, it concerned sobriety and overcoming his own violence. He didn’t imagine he could help anybody but himself. Regardless, he prayed for everybody he ever knew. Folks still died of cancer and addiction. But he was becoming a better father and possibly a better man.

Visionary rituals fascinated Merle. Arty dialed the old pagan on the telephone from the storefront. No answer. Called him again later. Still no answer. Called the next day. No answer. Dialed Sonny, an artist who often took Merle to her land up north. She hadn’t talked to the old man for two days either. Her ex-husband Dave had a key and was heading to over to the old man’s apartment.

An hour later she called back.

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“Dave found him. Merle killed himself. The coroner took the body and the shotgun. Dave needs you to help him. Could you pick up cleaning supplies? It’s bad.”

Arty had scrubbed entire engine rooms and galleys of towboats. He drove his pickup to the corner store and purchased two pairs of latex gloves, a plastic mop bucket, Pine-Sol, a large sponge, and then headed to the high rise. He met Dave in the lobby. They rode the elevator together. When Arty entered the apartment, the smell triggered an adrenal-cortisone rush. He handed Dave a pair of latex gloves.

Dave pulled them on. With his chin he pointed to the bedroom.

Arty entered the bedroom. Merle Kalevala’s brains had dripped or fallen from the wall and ceiling onto the single mattress, soaked with blood. The coroner crew had removed the body but left the gore that had splattered across the wall and the doors of the metal cabinet.

Arty sang Sun Dance songs in Lakota to calm himself. Maybe Merle’s spirit was still in the room. The song might calm him too. He returned to the kitchen and filled a plastic bucket with warm water and Pine-Sol. Dave just stood there.

Pine turpentine odor mixed with the scent of blood as Arty scrubbed the cabinet in the bedroom. The other bouquet was shit. The soapy water turned pink. He opened the cabinet doors. Stacked within were notebooks and typewritten pages, hardcover journals and accordion folders.

“Hey Dave, we gotta do something with his manuscripts.”

“There’s a trunk here.”

“What’s in it?”

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“Clothes. I’ll stuff them in a contractor bag.”

Dave hauled the emptied trunk into the bedroom. It was an old trunk with an arched lid and brass hinges. The two men filled it with Kalevala’s manuscripts. Together they carried it to the living room.

Arty found a can of Yuban coffee with a plastic lid. He emptied the coffee into a contractor bag reserved for garbage. In the bedroom, he gathered what remained of Merle’s head, brains and blood and skull fragments, into the coffee can. No teeth. The old man’s dentures soaked in a jar in the bathroom. The two men scrubbed the wall and ceiling, then covered the mattress with a contractor bag at each end.

They hauled the mattress to Arty’s truck. Next, they carried contractor bags filled with the bloody blankets and sheets, the Yuban can containing Merle’s brains, the trunk of manuscripts, the books, the typewriter and chess set, and the cat skeleton. They heaped everything else in the building's garbage dumpster: pots and pans, the clothes, the bed frame, the chairs and table, the couch. ~ That night at the wharf, Arty made the rounds with Star . While viewing the river, the lights of the warehouses of lower town Saint Paul reflected in the jet blackness, it occurred to him he might have had a hand in Merle Kalevala’s suicide. The old man told him of the shotgun and swore to kill himself if he couldn’t get the VA to remove the calcium spears along his neck vertebrae. Then the VA sent him home without laser surgery. The doctors prescribed ibuprofen. It became excruciating for the old man to read. He could no longer sit on a park bench and feed the squirrels. But the love of his life, the Cree poet 129

Maggie Smith with her long silver braids, visited him often after her husband died. There was hope. Arty hadn’t intervened to sustain that hope. He let Merle kill himself. A young radical Jewish folk/rock singer co-starred in a play with the old man and adored him. Folks loved and needed Merle. Arty had, spring of that year, flown to Scotland to receive the Working Class Poetry Award. No money, but a trophy in a glass case at the Robert Burns club. He owed it to coaching from the old man. Still, nobody could lessen Merle Kalevala’s physical suffering nor loosen the talons of despair. ~ Folks gathered for a memorial service at the Cremation Society on Nicollet Avenue. The Jewish songstress sang Can’t Help Falling In Love. Arty recited a poem likening Merle to Cathbad the Druid. Sven recited Merle’s poem They Call Me Alien, Un-American. A shoebox containing a plastic bag of ashes sat on a small table with Merle’s framed photograph surrounded by carnations. Merle’s sister and niece received the shoebox. Afterward, people followed Arty’s pickup truck to the coal dock beneath the Washington Avenue Bridge, and to the sand beach just beyond it within sight of lower Saint Anthony lock and dam. Sven and Dave had stacked a dozen pallets there. They helped Arty unload the bloody mattress, blankets, and sheets and piled them on top of the pallets. Arty placed the Yuban can with Merle’s brains on top and lit the tinder. As the flames stretched upward, poets, communists, recovering alcoholics and old sweethearts played guitar, sang, and recited poetry.

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When police drove up to check out the fire, they accepted Arty’s explanation and left. ~ Merle Kalevala’s confessions and disappointments: I have a bastard in the Philippines.

I loved only one woman in my life: the Cree poet Maggie Smith.

She married another man, but I still hope.

When I emigrated from the Iron Range, I stayed at Meridel Le Sueur’s boarding house.

Loners club: The first person to talk gets thrown out.

If you tell me the Communist Party was totalitarian, I agree.

I’m an anarchist now.

Folks I knew who quit the CP couldn’t find something as intense to substitute so became Roman Catholics.

Organized religion: I consider myself an atheist.

When I was a boy, every Solstice we built a bonfire of driftwood on the sand on the south shore of Lake Superior.

Finn Hall in Duluth has an IWW symbol carved into the door lintel.

We recited poetry, put on performances, and organized The People’s University.

In 1952, I found a berth as a merchant seaman on an ore boat, got the job through the Seafarers International Union. Figured I had my life together to become a writer in the tradition of Joseph Conrad. But when we made the locks at Sault Ste. Marie, a platoon of coastguard came aboard and marched me off the freighter. Several men armed with

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carbines flanked both sides of me. All that for a Finn and a member of the IWW. Governments rise and fall, but the secret police always stay.

If you want to recognize snitches within the Movement, look for somebody with a sick family member who needs money for hospital bills.

Look for somebody with a felony dangling over him like Damocles sword.

Have compassion.

The ‘Golden Years’? It’s a bunch of crap. There are no golden years. ~ A quarter century has passed since Merle Kalevala’s suicide.

Haunted, haunted by failure many times a day. He should have intervened and stopped the old man from killing himself. He should have gotten sober sooner and gone to college. He should have let that other girlfriend tell him. He refused to listen to her. Had he gotten her pregnant? What happened to her after that? A cabdriver he knew said she was turning tricks on Hennepin Avenue. And he should have been a better father. If he had stayed with his son’s mother she might not have become a crack addict, but the anger management program he attended required he separate from her. Then after a year without a relationship, he hooked up with another woman. These are his thoughts when alone.

Once a week he and Val walk their dogs on the trails along the Minnesota River or the path by the bass ponds in the National Wildlife Refuge ten miles from Minneapolis. She had long given away Star’s sibling, Comet. Comet had run in the street until injured by a car. Val 132

nursed the dog and then gave it to a rural biker couple who could handle a big untamed dog.

Arty recalls when he left the key of his storefront in the door, and someone had opened it. Star snarled and charged, protecting the door that opened to the sidewalk, rushing anybody who walked past. A rookie cop shot Star fourteen times without killing him. Arty paid for the surgery because the noble mutt had earned the money by guarding the wharf at night while Arty slept on the break room table. At first, Arty blamed other people. Somebody should have called animal control instead of the cops. But Star was almost a wolf in temperament and size.

He weighed 120 pounds. Arty leaving the keys in the door did not differ from unlocking the door and leaving a loaded Glock on the table.

He made a mistake that had consequences. That is nature. So far, he lived with it.

They run into Sven and his wife on the trail around the bass ponds.

Arty had never met Sven’s wife, and Sven had never met Arty’s wife. Both women look intelligent and beautiful without makeup.

“Val and I went to the Finn Festival at the Weyerhaeuser Auditorium. A Finnish Intellectual and presenter read They Call Me Alien, Un-American.”

“I always miss him,” says Sven.

“I could have stopped him. He told me he had his father’s shotgun and would kill himself if the VA failed him.”

“It wasn’t his father’s,” says Sven. “I took Merle to a gun shop and helped him pick out that shotgun. Did I do the wrong thing?” ~ 133

When Arty and Star moved in with Val, her teenage daughter by accident stepped on the dog’s police-shot leg, the one held with screws, bone-pins, and wire. Star tried to kill her and might have succeeded except that Val was there. She tackled the dog. Star became calm and apologetic.

Arty borrowed a .32 Berretta, drove Star to a friend’s farm, and let him visit the horses. While the dog explored the pasture, Arty dug a grave. He placed Star’s favorite stick and ball in the hole and called the dog. Star jumped into the hole. Arty shot him in the back of the head.

The dog lay down and twitched. Arty shot him again. The dog was still.

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AKICHITA The first year in the Minneapolis Police Department, officer Little Thunder teamed with an older cop. In April, they rotated to night watch.

One Wednesday night after 11 p.m., there were no reports of muggings or spousal abuse, and no shoplifters at the Super America. Gangbangers had not staked turf yet and the weather too cool for the crack dealers to work a corner.

The older cop rode shotgun and sipped coffee. Little Thunder steered the cruiser along 18th Avenue. They caught up with a black teen, male, breath visible in the night air as he sauntered up the sidewalk.

“Well, Chief,” said the older cop. “What have we got here? Curfew violation?”

Little Thunder looked at his partner askance. Later, if he found time, he’d tell him again why this old cracker had no right to call him chief.

Little Thunder pulled the cruiser ahead and shined the spotlight. The youth froze, eyes wide as a jacklighted deer. Then he bolted. Little Thunder stopped the car. He and the older cop exited with guns drawn and chased the youth into the alley. The older cop took a combat stance and fired nine times. Little Thunder didn’t see the kid’s weapon. When they approached the youth, their flashlights reflected the blood that pooled in the middle of the alley. Little Thunder stepped over an 135

unopened liter bottle of Mountain Dew. He squatted and placed two fingers on youth’s throat.

“He’s dead.”

“It was an accident. It happens all the time,” said the old cop. He kicked aside the Mountain Dew. A crumbled bandana in hand, he scanned the length of the alley, crouched and removed a snub-nosed revolver from his ankle holster. “Learn from me, Rookie. Always have a drop-gun handy. No serial numbers.”

He wiped the gun and placed it in the kid’s hand.

Lights turned on in backyards. A black woman screamed that her son had just gone to the Super America for a bottle of pop.

The old cop radioed for backup as angry neighbors gathered.

He turned to Little Thunder. “When you write the report, remember we aren’t Boy Scouts.”

A week later, the police union released a press release. After a thorough investigation, internal affairs determined that the patrol officers were just doing their job. They suggested that police might need different training to respond in nonlethal ways to an armed youth.

As it stood now, police officers shoot to kill when they perceive a threat.

Little Thunder attended a meeting behind closed doors at the Third Precinct station.

“We have to appear remorseful and still control the narrative,” the head of internal affairs told Little Thunder. “Your partner takes retirement with a year severance pay, and you get busted to foot patrol for three months on Franklin Avenue.”

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Vernie couldn’t tell his wife what happened. When she pressed, he punched her in the eye, knocking her across the living room and over the coffee table. Was he becoming like the assholes he saw growing up and the asshole abusers he arrested? He lifted his wife to her feet, kissed and held her, and promised never to do it again. He led her into the bedroom. Their lovemaking close and more intense than ever before, she cried when she came. He considered this a good thing. The next day while he was at work, she packed a suitcase, took the car to her mother’s house in Bemidji, and filed for a divorce.

He thought about it. It could have been worse. He could have killed her, or she might have gotten an order for protection and cause the confiscation of his guns. No gun, no job. ~ Vernie Little Thunder never forgot why he became a Minneapolis cop. He was in Vietnam in 1968, the year his 14-year-old sister rode the Jefferson Lines bus to visit relatives on Rosebud Reservation. On the return trip, gangsters from the Minneapolis Syndicate kidnapped her from the bus depot. She turned tricks in New York City for three years.

When she escaped, age 17, it was too late. Vernie returned stateside to find her drinking Listerine. That winter she froze to death under a 29th Avenue railroad bridge in South Minneapolis.

During three months of walking a beat on Franklin Avenue, officer Little Thunder met 13- and 14-year-old girls, Native American and black and white, trafficked by a pimp his former partner had protected.

The old cop claimed the pimp provided information. He would shake down the pimp and try to split the cash with Vernie. When Vernie 137

refused the cash, the old cop narrowed his eyes. Vernie took the money.

His life depended on it. He jammed it in his pocket like a pile of cheshli, excrement. How many other cops were pimps? Did cops protect the pimps who kidnapped his sister from the bus depot downtown? Did they murder his sister’s soul? He gleaned relief, not working besides that old bastard anymore.

At first, Little Thunder felt powerless to rescue the girls without the pimp testifying against him for taking the payoff. Then he made plans to meet the pimp for another payoff behind Link’s Bar near closing time. A dumpster in the alley provided cover. As Little Thunder waited in the deep shadow away from the light over the back door of the bar, his holster unsnapped, the three girls walked up. They were to meet the pimp and turn over their trick money.

Little Thunder stepped into the light. One girl gulped. The other one said his name.

He waved the girls away. “Head to the Chef Café. Do not look back.”

The greasy spoon stayed open long after the bars closed.

A Cadillac glided through the alley. It stopped near the dumpster where Little Thunder stood. The Cadillac window rolled open. Little Thunder followed the formula from his dirty former partner. Scan around. No witnesses. One hand took the money. The other hand shot the pimp in the head. Little Thunder planted a drop-gun then radioed for backup on the walkie-talkie. ~

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Another reason he became a cop. He flew choppers for the 123rd Aviation Battalion, 23rd Infantry Division. On March 16, 1968, while flying Long Range Recon in a three-seater Raven, chief warrant officer Hugh Thompson spotted an infantry division shooting civilians in the village below. A hundred dead children lay along the road. The soldiers of Charlie Company pinioned young women and girls and gang-raped them. Thompson ordered the Raven to land in the middle of Mai Lai. To Vernon, it looked like the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee.

Hundreds of women and old people and children and babies lay dead in heaps, in ditches. Thompson ordered Little Thunder to keep the 30 caliber guns trained on the Charlie Company while he radioed for help.

Charlie Company stood down. ~ During June, the final month of officer Little Thunder’s foot patrol, the Native American Indian Center hosted a powwow in the gym. Part of Little Thunder’s job included preventing drunks from entering the building. People drank outside on the baseball field. He checked on them.

A giant among the group of drinkers wore Grass Dancer regalia. An eagle feather extended upward from the porcupine hair roach upon his head. His tunic and pants red and smoky green, a numbered tag swung from a beaded wrist gauntlet. Beaded apron over the front and back of pants, leather bands with bells strapped around each knee jingled as he turned toward the police officer.

“You scouting for Custer, Chief?” It was Bobby Randall, six-footsix, long black hair in two braids. A veteran of the American Indian 139

Movement takeovers of the BIA building in D.C., Alcatraz Island, and the 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee.

“I’m visiting old friends. How are you, Bobby? How’s Maggie?” He kept quiet regarding Samson, the murdered brother. A.I.M. believed the FBI had a hand in it.

“Maggie has a master’s degree. She’s a psychologist and a county social worker. You’ll find her inside, dancing women’s traditional.”

Little Thunder and the drinkers shared cigarettes. He thought about Maggie. They both graduated from Roosevelt High School. He remembered a political brainiac, intense and sober. He liked her. She liked him. They had never dated.

Bobby took a swig of Mad Dog then handed the pint to Little Thunder. Little Thunder took a sip. Sweet as syrup. Eighteen percent alcohol.

“Any clues on that serial killer?” Bobby’s concern was genuine.

“I haven’t heard a thing.” Little Thunder handed the bottle back.

“He’s killed eight women now. All friends of mine.”

Little Thunder looked him in the eye. “Friends of mine too.”

Bobby pointed to the Indian Center with his lips. “Grass Dance in thirty minutes. I’ll win the thousand dollars.”

And go on a drunk. “Good luck, Bobby.”

Little Thunder shook Bobby Randall’s hand and headed inside to make the rounds.

A women’s dance had ended. The arena announcer called out numbers. Three women received a hundred dollar runner-up prize money, among them, Maggie Randall.

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Yes. She’s handsome. I’m not good enough for her.

People left the bleachers for Indian tacos and coffee. The announcer called for the adult Grass Dancers to gather.

“You fellas decide among yourselves. Choose your drum and choose your song.”

Each drum group had set up folding chairs around the perimeter of the dance arena. The dancers huddled together for a minute and then moved to their dancing positions. Little Thunder watched Bobby Randall cross the gym floor, bells shaking, and place money on the chosen drum. He gave an old man a pack of tobacco, Bugler hand roll.

The old man shook Bobby’s hand. Little Thunder recognized the old wino from the streets.

The men danced, stopping when the drum stopped and then beginning as the drum started again. They bobbed and weaved like prizefighters. Some swung a forward foot back and forth before a step.

Others, the older men, just walked and moved shoulders. Bobby Randall did a cubist side move, a drunken stumble then recovery.

Little Thunder wanted to dance but owned no regalia. He grew up thinking sweat lodge ceremonies were superstitious nonsense. An atheist before and after Vietnam, he concluded that the impoverishment of his people came from superstition and ignorance. Had he adopted white hubris? Cop hubris?

Little Thunder grasped what to do. He made the rounds, waited for an opportunity. He found the old man sitting in the bleachers and sipping a paper cup of black coffee.

The old man looked up at him. “What I do this time?”

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Little Thunder handed him a pack of Lucky Strike.

The old man lifted the tobacco to the four directions and the sky and the earth. He slid the tobacco into his shirt pocket and studied Little Thunder.

He leaned forward. “Akichita are supposed to Grass Dance.”

“How do I get regalia?”

“Come to my house. Sit at the drum. Learn the songs and the dance steps. You’ll drum and dance with children because that’s what you are, learning how to walk. And you’ll learn how to pray.”

“Not interested in prayer.”

“Too late. You gave me tobacco. That’s the same as baptism.”

So Vernon Little Thunder committed. In the old man’s living room, he sat in a folding chair alongside three boys less than 10-years- old.

Little Thunder held a drumstick for the first time, a fiberglass rod sheathed in leather at both ends. His rhythm off, the boys laughed and struck the drum harder, more sudden as the song called for. They sang like coyotes, half screaming half crying in a fashion that reminded him of heavy metal vocals. The old man would sing a line of abstract scat music, and the grandsons picked it up the first time.

The old man sipped black coffee between songs. “You’ll never be as good as these children, but you’ll catch on. And then you can teach your grandchildren someday.”

Vernon understood little of the Lakota and Chippewa cultures because grandparents hadn’t raised him. His entire generation suffered from this.

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A sewing machine sat on the old man’s dining room table. Scraps of cloth and detritus of thread on a grimy rug, the old man sewed star quilts and powwow regalia. He stayed sober until completing the projects.

Once a month, when the old man received his Social Security check, he went on a drunk. Officer Little Thunder found the old man on sprawled on the sidewalk on Franklin Avenue. Stretching the old man out on the back seat of the squad car, he’d get him home. He would never put a drunk in the trunk of his car again, a bad habit from other Minneapolis patrol officers. ~ And he became a cop because a serial killer stalked the bars on Franklin Avenue. Vernie wanted justice for the murdered women. The neighborhood got involved. The American Indian Movement emerged from dormancy, patrolled the street and gave women rides home after bars closed.

It was June 25, the 110th anniversary of the Battle of Greasy Grass.

With a serial killer on the loose, the precinct captain allowed Little Thunder back in a police cruiser. He didn’t have a partner. And after his divorce, he had quit drinking. He was sharper, more patient, a better hunter, a better predator. Better at violence. He patrolled alone and tested his advantage over peers who nicknamed him Chief.

—I am a failure as a husband. I am a failure as a man. I am a failure as a police officer. I have no Kola. I am a lone wolf. A lone wolf is a sick wolf. How do I quit hating on myself?—

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Fingertips of left palm on the steering wheel, the right hand rested on his Glock. Light combat gloves, raised rubber nodes over the surface, covered only knuckles and fist.

Could he live up to the legacy of his great-grandfather had fought beside Sitting Bull, Rain in the Face, American Horse? And the most important Sioux war chief, the greatest man who ever lived, Crazy Horse. Crazy Horse was equal to Christ. Great-grandfather Little Thunder and Crazy Horse were Kolas, best friends, soul friendship. A man has one friend like this in his life. Akichita wiped out the Seventh Cavalry and scalped Custer. That trophy still hangs on somebodies wall, maybe somebody he knows.

His chest sweated beneath the flak vest beneath the short-sleeved uniform shirt. Head shaved, wraparound shades hooked above ears, he pulled the cruiser up on a corner dealer at 27th Street and Bloomington.

Little Thunder emerged from the cruiser with gun drawn, safety on.

The dealer placed palms on the car roof. Little Thunder removed a wad of cash as thick as a National Geographic, a Glock 9mm handgun, same model as the one he held, but with serial numbers filed off, and zip-lock bags of crack. 3.8 grams for $100 each.

The dealer sat in the back seat, hands cuffed behind.

“You’re a thief too,” said Little Thunder. “Use a gun in a robbery; you go up a long time. You can get arrested three times for burglary before doing hard time as long as you don’t have a gun. And with mandatory sentencing, you’ll go up longer for dealing crack in a vulnerable neighborhood.”

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“Right,” said the dealer. “Give me an honest job for more than minimum wage so I can pay rent and buy groceries. Besides, who owns the planes that bring the coke and handguns? They’re packed in the same shipment.”

Little Thunder knew as well as anybody on the street. The CIA raised hard currency for illegal wars against indigenous people anywhere there was something to steal: oil, minerals, slave labor. Fuck it.

He slapped the knob-cover fist-glove into his open palm.

“I’ll take you in the alley and bust your jaw instead of killing you.

You’ll be sucking food with a straw for a year.”

“Whatcha want? I’m paying off the cops.”

“Not enough. You work for me now. Turn around.”

Dealer twisted sideways. Little Thunder reached over the seat and removed the cuffs. He licked his thumb and counted the bills. Three thousand total. “You make this on Sundays too?”

“More on Sunday.”

Little Thunder returned half. “I want a five-grand a week.”

“The dude will whack me if I don’t bring him his cut. Just shoot me now.”

“What can you do for me?”

“I can give you the guy who might be killing those Indian women.”

“I’m listening.”

“He’s a white guy in an old pickup truck. Rust. Two-tone Ford. He pulls up with a bitch and scores an eight ball. I’ve seen her on the street,

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then her picture on the news. I say to my partner I sold an eight ball to that gal.”

“More ’bout the white guy.”

“He hauled tools in the back of the truck. Stepladder, hammers. I always look in case there’s something worth stealing.”

“Regular customer?”

“Couple of times a week.”

Little Thunder returned the rest of the money “When he comes back, get his license plate. Which cops you paying?”

“If I told you, they’d kill me faster than the dude I’m slinging for.”

“Greedy dirty bastards. I’ll drive you a few blocks and let you walk.”

“My piece?”

“I’m keeping that.” ~ Vernie came from long line of Akichita ,a ten-thousand-year-old league of police officers delegated by the tribe to enforce rule of law.

Part conservation officer, part infantry and light cavalry, the Akichita pursued white trappers encroaching on Lakota game areas. Warning the trappers never worked. The only recourse was to kill and scalp. Cartels of trappers and pioneers thought themselves entitled to encroach, push alcohol, murder the indigenous inhabitants, and traffic the women.

The same now. Little Thunder knew that truck. It belonged to Jimmy Glass, a handyman who dated Cheryl Morrison, an older single mom, mixed-blood Chippewa-Irish from Elliot Park neighborhood.

And Jimmy drank at Link’s Bar. 146

Cheryl, poor like everybody else on her block, volunteered as the receptionist in the neighborhood revitalization offices. She hoped to get hired.

The pickup was parked in front of the storefront offices. For sale sign on the back window. Little Thunder got out of the squad and inspected the truck bed. Carpenter tools. Bloody women’s clothes. He touched nothing and radioed the downtown precinct station.

When he entered the neighborhood offices, Cheryl, stout, whitehaired, sat at the front desk.

“Hey Vernie,” she said. “What can I do for you?”

“Hubert’s truck out front?”

“He’s out back fixing the downspout.”

Little Thunder found the man, grey-haired and gaunt as a farmer. He balanced on a stepladder with a screw gun, fastening the lower downspout to the section above it. The yard, surrounded by the backside of brick garages permitted no exit.

“Hubert, I’ve got to take you in.”

The man tossed the screw gun onto the ground and descended. Little Thunder cuffed him and guided him through the offices to the street.

Cheryl’s mouth dropped open. Her eyebrows knit and the corner of her eyes drew downward.

Hubert Glass faced her. “I don’t get what I did.”

Little Thunder looked over Hubert’s shoulder. “I’ll interview you later, Cheryl.” He escorted his prisoner through the front door.

“You got the wrong man,” said Hubert.

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“Wrong man for what?” Officer Vernon Little Thunder pushed the prisoner’s head low and put him in the back seat.

Another squad arrived. The forensic team examined the pickup. ~ He had the right man. Six months later, Little Thunder breezed the detective exam and

received a higher pay grade. He had his own

stable of street informants and ignored other cops confiscating cash from black youths. The cops assumed that if the youth did not have a check stub to justify the money, it came from selling drugs.

At a community meeting at the Elliot Park building, teenage Cortez Ironshield confronted the police for shaking down black teens with jobs. One night he was shot in the face on the street. Questions lurked in detective Little Thunder’s mind. Was the shooter on a bicycle or walking or driving a car? There were no witnesses.

An honest police officer mentioned the need to investigate the police.

When an assassin strolled into the Pizza Shack on Lake Street, shot the officer and bicycled away, other police officers at the Pizza Shack did not pursue him.

Little Thunder considered that getting out of the police force was like exiting a street gang. One was as likely to die for quitting the police as quitting the Crypts, Bloods, Native Mob or the Serbian Mob. ~ He never forgot he was Sicanġu, People of the Burnt high. How do you forget when your last name is Little Thunder? How could O’Malley forget he was Irish, or Svenson a Swede? O’Malley went to

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the Irish Fair, Svenson went to the State Fair, and Little Thunder went to pow-wows.

His father had served as a US Marine in the South Pacific during World War II. Stationed in Japan at the end of the war, Orville Little Thunder visited Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He told Vernon, “We have plenty of blood on our hands, son.” ~ It took a year, but he was ready. He traveled in a caravan to the powwow in Winnebago, Nebraska. The old man and the drum group in a van, Little Thunder followed with a new pickup towing a pop-up.

Plenty of beds.

When he danced, he felt fearless. Aside from the roach feather, he wore no feathers. His outfit comprised of an orange tunic with white fringe from the shoulders representing the hair of a buffalo. The tunic hung over breeches with beaded belt and side tabs, armbands, cuffs.

Beadwork decorated the front apron. Several colors of ribbons sewn in V-shape swayed like grass from the back apron. The apron ends hung loose for three feet. The beading of his headband and moccasins matched. He wore soft-soled moccasins with bells around his ankle.

Numbered card tagged to his shoulder, he didn’t place. He hadn’t expected to. He was just proud to dance.

Maggie Randall came up to him. “When did you start dancing?”

She wore a buckskin dress fully beaded on the shoulder, a fringed shawl over one arm, beaded purse in hand, a numbered card tagged to the middle of her back.

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“Not soon enough.” He scrunched his shoulders and pressed his lips together.

“Better late than never. Are you still a police officer? Wife?

Children?”

“Divorced, no children. Made detective. You still a social worker for the county?”

“I’m the director of the ICWA office out of the Indian Center and have a private practice for Native American children.”

“Do you locate good foster families?”

“It’s comparable to navigating the United Nations. Each tribe has its own bureaucracy.”

“I meet a lot of children in the street who could benefit. Used to pick them up and take them to juvenile detention. They had nowhere else to go.”

The announcer called the women for the Ladies’ Buckskin Dance.

“That’s me,” she said. “Walk with me to the entry?”

He watched the women dance. Slow and poised, they circled the drum. The women rocked and bent their knees as they dipped to the beat. Maggie’s fringed sleeves swayed in tempo. The movements were slight, resembling wind through prairie grass and wildflowers. ~ Vernie and Maggie courted each other.

He hesitated to make a commitment.

“Why?” she asked.

“Growing up, I thought domestic violence was normal. Every husband beat up his wife. Swedes, Irish, Finns, and Indians all did it.

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My old man beat me with a belt until my backside turned black and blue. In the showers after gym, we boys compared bruises across buttocks and thighs. Everyone took beatings and didn’t cry. My work is violent. The violence is an addiction. I’ll carry it into a relationship.”

“What about anger management groups? Your own therapist?”

“No cop admits to this violence. It’s our way. If I own up to having a personal problem or have an order for protection slapped on me for domestic violence, I’d have to quit working.”

“If you can’t discuss it with anyone, then you are isolated. Isolation leads to suicide.”

He’d considered it several times a day as long as he could remember.

“I know cops who have killed themselves.”

Maggie put her arm around his waist and pulled him against her. He averted his eyes.

“Look at me,” she said.

He wouldn’t. He didn’t want her to see his terror.

She took his chin and turned his face to her face. “I realize what I’m getting into. I’m a social worker, you’re a cop. Our culture has been resisting five-hundred-years of genocide and colonialism. How many teenagers committed suicide on Pine Ridge this year? At Red Lake? If we give up, the bad guys win. I will never give up, and I will never give up on you.”

Vernon Little Thunder lowered his head. He wasn’t so sure. ~ A few years passed. The old man stayed sober. His friend and helper, Vernon Little Thunder, delivered him to juvenile detention to discuss 151

culture and language. with Native American teens. The old man felt that loss of culture caused addiction and self-destruction. If young people learned a song, got on the drum, danced, attended sweat lodge, learned the ceremonies of relative making, throwing of the ball, hambleycha — if they immersed themselves, they might survive.

It was October when his favorite grandson chauffeured him to the neighborhood on the other side of the expressway. They looked at the ceremonial lodge erected last week in the vacant lot next to the Seward Café. The hippies called it a yurt. Covered with salvaged green-waxed canvass, stitched together on a treadle sewing machine, it spread over 25 feet in diameter. The old man decided the yurt was the perfect place for yuwipi ceremony. People could pray and he would deliver the prayers into the underworld.

He turned to his grandson.

“Get tobacco from the gas station and ask the maker of this lodge if we can use it.” ~ Maggie and her husband, Vernon Little Thunder, stood outside the yurt on the afternoon of the ceremony. They had already stepped inside and studied the bent willow poles that fit into the crown as big as a wagon wheel, and the latticework wall.

Maggie looped an arm through Vernie’s. “Somebody put their heart into this,” she said.

“Detective Little Thunder?”

Who is this? She felt Vernie tense his muscles.

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A muscular and bearded barbarian stood before them. A criminal biker seeking revenge? Maggie retained her poise as her husband sized up the man. She felt him relax.

“Arty O’Brien? I wasn’t aware you took part in ceremony.”

“It’s my first time. A young fella gave me tobacco and asked if his granddad could use the yurt.”

Vernie surveyed the lodge. “You built this?”

“Yep. A sobriety project. ” Vernon introduced Maggie to Arty.

Arty tilted his head toward her. “I used to drink and fight. Mr. Little Thunder arrested me more than once. I’ve been clean and sober for the last six years. ” She reminded herself, everybody is here for a reason. She shook his hand. “It’s a fine gift to your village, Mr. O’Brien. Thank you for this prayer lodge. I will pray for you.” ~ When the prayers traveled around in the pitch dark, Vernon Little Thunder recognized the voice of Arty O’Brien.

“Bless the men in the anger management group. Bless us with success in overcoming our violence to our families and to our community. Thank you for another day of sobriety. Help me be a better man. Help me make the world a better place.”

After the ceremony, Little Thunder talked with Arty. They sat together away from others. ~

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Arty O’Brien arrived early at the sweat lodge behind Saint Luke’s church to build the fire. He wheelbarrowed old ash out of the fire pit and dumped it in the woods. On hands and knees inside the sweat lodge, he removed the used rocks. The ones that had lost their temper, that crumbled and flaked, he put in the wheelbarrow. Ones that seemed dense he recycled to heat again. He laid two logs north and south and built a platform on top and stacked 38 stones upon the platform, a pinch of tobacco on each one for the 38 men hanged in Mankato during the Dakota uprising. Wood stacked in a cone around the platform, he stuffed bark and twigs as tinder. He held another pinch of tobacco in his closed palm before letting the flakes fall to the firewood. With a Bic lighter, he ignited the birch bark between the logs. A crew had earlier stacked cordwood against the back brick wall of the church. He rolled out several logs for seats. Next, he returned the rake and maul to the shed and brought out the pitchfork and a folding chair. He poked the pitchfork in the ground and placed the folding chair to the right of the sweat lodge door.

Other men pulled up in the gravel parking lot. They filed through the trees into the clearing by the fire. Each carried a towel and sweat trunks. These men came from the anger management group. Some of the men attended voluntarily, others court appointed. They each shook Arty’s hand and chose a stump. Vernon Little Thunder arrived with the old man. ~ When detective Little Thunder picked up the old man from his house in South Minneapolis, he gave him a package of Drum tobacco.

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He needed the old man’s ear on a serious matter. The old man nodded.

They shook hands.

Instead of taking the expressway, Little Thunder drove up Lake Street, past Mde Maka Ska, formerly known as Lake Calhoun, and up Minnetonka Boulevard to Wayzata. Butterflies churned around in his stomach.

“Waziata,” said the old man. “Folks translate that as North, but it means the place of the pines.”

Little Thunder drove through Saint Louis Park. When he reached Hopkins, it looked more rural, a farm store by the roadside. He had admitted to no one what he was about to say.

“My great-grandfather delivered Crazy Horse to Camp Robinson for the reward. The Akichita had fought long enough. The buffalo gone, families starved. My relative could buy cows with the reward. When Lakotas hear my name, they become quiet.”

They passed the Babe Ruth baseball field. Teams of youths in baseball uniforms swarmed the diamond.

“I’m familiar with this story but I couldn’t tell you. You had to come to it yourself. First thing: We call Crazy Horse by his Lakota name, Tashunka Witco. Your great-grandfather was not the only one who wanted money to buy cows. The wife of Tasunka Witco, Nellie Brown Eyes Woman, convinced him to surrender. And Little Big Man, a veteran of Greasy Grass, entered through the gates of Camp Robinson beside Tasunka Witco and pinned his arms to let the soldier bayonet him.”

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“How do I live with the self-hatred? It’s as if I did it. Every day is almost impossible. I always want to hurt myself, or worse, hurt somebody else.”

They crossed beneath the Interstate 494 Bridge.

The old man rolled himself a smoke. It dangled from his lower lip.

He had not lit it yet.

“Every day is difficult for us. Our shame is that our own people did this. But you and I are talking. Our culture will regenerate if we atone.

Restorative justice is part of our culture.”

“Restorative justice?”

They crossed Minnehaha Creek where it ribboned through a broad marsh on its way to the Mississippi River.

“There is a ceremony that takes place when the chokecherries turn black. In that arena, you will drag buffalo skulls in front of your Oyate, your nation. We will respect you for it.” He blew loose tobacco from his tongue. “Any of our relatives who had knowledge of the conspiracy and didn’t intervene, they murdered that leader. When we witness you atone for your ancestor, other families will open up about it. We will recover our sanity and our nation.”

The old man lit his smoke and cracked the window open.

Little Thunder considered the proposition. It was a four-year commitment. He would drag buffalo skulls each of those years. He would drag skulls for the black youth his partner killed, for his first wife he battered, and for the women and children murdered at Mai Lai and Wounded Knee. If it helps the people, He’d do it for as many years

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as it takes. But not for the pimp he shot behind Link’s Bar. That was done within the code of war. And he was Akichita.

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SONG OF OSSIAN Duke Ossian stood where the parking lot met the alley behind the Salvation Army on Lake Street in Minneapolis. When the Mercedes with gold hubcaps rolled up, Duke tilted his head with chin upward.

The driver side window of the Mercedes rolled down. Dante’s hornrimmed sunglasses mirrored Duke’s face.

Dante spoke in a South Chicago accent “You pay by dealing Mexican smack. It ain’t addictive. Smoke it straight up from a piece of tinfoil and inhale through a plastic straw, or mix it with weed. Mix it in a blender with powdered milk and then snort it. Teach clients how.”

Duke regretted his decision to join the Native Gangster Disciples.

He had needed protection during a stint in juvenile detention, so made an alliance with someone who could vouch for him. The NGDs were beholden to the Black Gangster Disciples.

Dante spread his hands, palms light skinned. “Homey, Native girls make the best whores. Get the bitches strung out and put them to work.

She’ll make you rich. Sell me the hoe. I have trailers full of young hoes in the oil fields of North Dakota.”

Duke knew high school students who turned tricks in the alley or climbed into cars on the corner of 17th and Lake Street. He knew girls who disappeared.

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He shook his head. “First you say it’s not fucking addictive, now we get girls hooked to control them. You come from slaves. Why make more slaves?”

Dante waved his hand. “There are only two types of people. Slaves or slavers. I ain’t no slave.” He pressed a ziplock bag into Duke’s palms. “Sell these.”

Duke stared at the bag. It contained a hundred pieces of flat aluminum foil of black tar heroin. He would never sell scag. Not after his mother died from drinking on top of methadone.

Duke needed to get out. His dad had gone blind from diabetes. Or maybe syphilis. He didn’t know. Now his dad worked at the School for the Blind across the street from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Blind was the best thing that happened to him. Clean and sober, his old man taught other blind people to navigate the city, ride the bus, and go grocery shopping.

He thought, How could my old man help me? I didn’t have a choice.

Native Mob or the Native Gangster Disciples.

One associate quit the gang and attended church. Gangbangers shouting NATIVE MOB! shot the associate and put him in a wheelchair for the rest of his life.

Duke didn’t want to die like a dog in the street, gunned down by rivals. The street telegraph said a gang of Cambodians had hidden out in the clothes racks at the gun store on the corner of Bloomington Avenue and Lake Street and burgled an arsenal. Duke decided to find Rithipol. He had grown up with the Khmer in the Bohemian Flats projects.

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~ “Nobody wants this monkey metal,” said Rithipol. He extended his left hand and rubbed thumb and forefinger. “Fifty slave masters.”

Duke balanced the worn looking Savage .32 in his palm. The pistol, six-and-a-half-inches long, extended over his fingers. Despite rust that flecked the original bluing, he read the patent date stamped into the barrel: 1905, Utica, New York. The gun came with one nine-round magazine and carried one in the chamber. His hand around the crosshatched grip, a Sioux looking chief with a headdress embossed on the handle, he flipped the safety up with his thumb and tried to pull the trigger. The safety worked. He flipped the safety lever downward and then dry-fired. Clack-clack-clack-clack.

Duke unfolded five ten-dollar bills from his wallet. For another ten dollars, he bought a cardboard box of .32 caliber rounds. He slipped the bullets into the left pocket of his leather jacket. The pistol fitted snug in the right pocket.

He caught the number-nine bus up Cedar Avenue and got off by the credit union. Duke had the Bohemian Flats apartment to himself. Blind Jimmy had left to move in with a blind girlfriend.

Duke emptied the cartridges upon the table. Blue neon lights, from the flaunted ass of the Blue Baboon on top of the tavern of the same name, flashed through the window and into the room. His dad once told him that on Rosebud Indian Reservation, nobody owned a thirty-aughtsix to hunt deer. Most households kept lever action .22s. They sliced an X through the slugs to get a better kill with the smaller caliber bullet.

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Duke counted out ten cartridges and stood them in a row. From his pants pocket, he pulled a folding knife with a four-inch blade and opened it. Pressing the edge across the head of a cartridge, he tapped the blade with the gun barrel, then sliced across the first cut. Dumdums.

Even at a few paces where a headshot wasn’t possible, a shot to the torso, and the bullet explodes.

With his thumb, Duke pressed the cartridges into the magazine and then clipped it into the grip. The small round could blow off the back of someone’s head. He regretted not joining the Native Mob. Even though they were Anishinabeeg and not Lakota, they had a code he respected.

Their Ogema, chief, dictated no hitting women, deal drugs but use no drugs or alcohol, and take part in meting out punishment. Violations, like leaving the gang or talking to police, included beatings and death.

The Native Mob controlled the meth, crack, and ecstasy trade on the reservations in Minnesota. Better them than the Native Gangster Disciples, or the Mexican Mafia, or the Russians.

Duke fingered the bullet scar just below his right clavicle where a Native Mobster had wounded him. He tucked the .32 behind his back beltline, concealed by a black T-shirt. ~ To attend Sinte Gleska University on Rosebud Reservation, Raina had moved to a trailer on tribal land at the outskirts of the town of Mission. Her dad wired her money to pay the rent. Her goal was to get a degree in early childhood education and the Lakota language.

From her trailer door, she viewed an expanse of range with lone trees and steep hills in the distance. She imagined wooly mammoths 161

and giant bison wandering these highland steppes that stretched from Missouri to Alberta. The Lakota language was as old as the mammoths and covered the same vastness.

Even though she was half Sicangu Sioux and half hillbilly Irish, she had a tribal enrollment ID because her mother had been born and raised

by Ghost Hawk Creek. In the 1950s during the Termination and Relocation Act, her family abdicated communal tribal land for enough money to buy a station wagon to drive to Minneapolis.

When Raina was five, her mother had died of a heroin overdose. Her dad did his best to raise her. He had enrolled her in the Golden Eagles program at the Minneapolis American Indian Center. She played basketball and learned traditional dance. In the evening, the MAIC van would drop her off in front of Bohemian Flats apartments.

Her senior year at South High School, she sometimes ran into Duke.

He wore the white t-shirt, black denim jeans, and black oversized baseball cap with the white brim of the Native Gangster Disciples.

They were at war with the Native Mob, who wore red t-shirts, black denim trousers, and red brimmed baseball caps. The Native Mob had been around since the Relocation Act. Raina furrowed her brow when she spoke to him. “When are you quitting this gangster life? Come with me to Rosebud and register for tribal college.� ~ Raina returned from class at Sinte Gleska University. The town of Mission was hot, dusty, and there was no nightlife. The Rosebud Casino was ten miles down the blacktop, but she did not gamble. She 162

had bought food for the week from Bowie’s well-stocked grocery store.

From the Dollar Store, she picked up toothpaste, peroxide, tampons, and toilet paper.

Raina rolled up the windows of her rusty Corolla to keep out the dust from the gravel road. When she pulled in front of the trailer, Duke was sitting on the front step.

“I hitched. Can I move in?”

She felt flushed with joy. “Help carry groceries. Let’s scramble up a dozen eggs and a block of cheese.”

Raina connected him with the tribal school board who gave him a job driving the small school bus. He could take the vehicle home at night.

She helped him fill out FAFSA paperwork for Pell Grants. Duke considered majoring in Lakota history. His great-grandfather, Tashunka Duta, Red Horse, had recorded the battle of Greasy Grass in pictographs on buffalo hides. Those pictographs were on display at the Smithsonian.

“I’m so proud of you,” she said.

He hugged her. “I couldn’t do this without your help. You saved my life.”

Duke left to do his school bus run.

She drank another cup of coffee and cracked the books to write a paper on the developmental stages in children. She contemplated Duke.

He was the brother she never had.

A car pulled up in the gravel. Raina looked out the window. It was a Mercedes with gold hubcaps.

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~ When Duke returned to the trailer, with dread he recognized Dante’s car. He parked the van and entered the trailer.

Dante sat on the bed beside Raina. He held a Pakistani-made hunting knife, blade twelve inches long, with a curved horn handle. The whites of his eyes had turned yellow from dope. With his other hand, he twisted a hank of her black hair and lifted her head. Raina was passed out, stripped to her floral pattern panties.

“What the fuck are you doing, Dante? You get that knife at a pawn shop on Lake Street?”

Dante held the blade to her face. “You owe me for my dope. Check out her hipbones and tits. You been chopping this pussy. Then you know how much she’s worth. It squares your debt.” He hoisted her to her feet.

Duke stepped aside as Dante guided her across the floor, descend the steps, cross the dirt to the Mercedes, and load her into the back seat.

Duke followed them. He reached under his shirttail. The rusty .32 in hand, his thumb released the safety.

Striations behind Dante’s nostrils turned his face to a snarl. “You gonna shoot me with that antique pea shooter?”

“Just hurt you. I don’t want to kill you.”

“I’ll have a crew from Rapid City to deal with you. They told me you were here.”

The pop. Dante stared down at his right leg.

“You motherfucker! You might as well shoot BBs.” He took one pace toward Duke.

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Duke observed the blood drenching Dante’s right trouser leg.

“I think I killed you. I didn’t mean too.”

“What the fuck did you shoot me with?

“Dumdum.”

Dante sat on the ground. “Call an ambulance.”

“This isn’t Minneapolis. This is the rez. It takes an hour for EMTs to get here.”

“Call anyway.”

Duke pulled out his Nokia and pressed the keys for 911. He talked for a minute, pressed end call, and slipped the phone into his pants pocket.

Dante had leaned forward from where he sat. At least a gallon of blood had pooled in the red dust.

Duke stepped over Dante to pull Raina from the Mercedes. With one hand under her arm and breast, he helped her stand. They went into the trailer where he dressed her in jeans and a sweatshirt. He made fresh coffee and lifted the mug to her lips.

Duke was gone by the time the police arrived.

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ELK RIVER Arty O’Brien drove Jimmy Ossian to see his son at the Elk River Federal Prison.

“I hate it when somebody grabs my arm to help me cross the street,” said Jimmy.

Arty steered the Ford Ranger into Super America. “We’re pulled up in front of the entrance door.”

Jimmy unclipped a seat belt and climbed out. He opened the side window of the topper and retrieved his white-stick from the truck bed.

The stick was as long as a pool cue but more slender, with a flat metal disk at the bottom end. Jimmy swung the stick in an arc along the floor and made it to the ATM machine.

“Here’s my debit card. Get a hundred and twenty dollars and take twenty for gas.”

Arty tapped the numbers across the screen. The machine rumbled and whirred, spitting out six twenties. Arty took one and handed over rest. They made their way back to the pickup. Jimmy lifted the side window of the topper and placed his stick in the truck bed.

Arty held the map in his hand as he drove. He had printed it from a Google website. Sherburne County Jail and Elk River Federal Prison were down the road. They were the same facility. The jail rented twohundred and fifty beds to the federal prison system. They housed 166

inmates from fifty states. Arty moored the truck as close as possible to the lobby entrance.

“Remember to leave your knife in the truck,” said Jimmy.

“Oh yeah.” Arty unbuckled his belt, removed the Buck knife and sheath, and then passed it to Jimmy. From his coin pocket, he removed the smaller jackknife, the Old Timer with a small Bowie blade, a fruittree grafting blade, and a hoof blade.

Jimmy weighed the knives in his hand. “What else?”

“Right. I forgot.”

From his mid-thigh pocket, he removed vice-grips with a screwdriver and folding Leatherman-style blade.

“You can’t fool me,” said Jimmy. “You have one more.”

“Fuck you and your x-ray vision, man.” Arty pulled out his wallet and opened it. From the credit card folder he removed a black ceramic knife, sharper than a razor and stronger than steel that folded to the same size and shape of a credit card.

Jimmy cached them in the glove compartment.

They exited the cab. Jimmy reached in the bed and found his stick.

He slid the tip across the sidewalk, located the curb as a guide, and made it to the entry. Arty followed inside.

At the glassed-in counter, Arty produced his driver's license while Jimmy brought out his State of Minnesota ID. “Copy the address and birthday,” said Jimmy. “When you’re done I'll tell you my social security number.”

Ballpoint in hand, Arty filled out the form.

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Next, they crossed the lobby to a kiosk with a computer touch screen like an ATM. Arty read the choices. ‘Add Money to an Inmate’s Commissary Account.’

“David Anthony Ossian. Date of Birth: 04-16-1980. Federal prison ID: XXXXX.” Arty fumbled twice before he got it right.

“Now deposit one hundred dollars in his commissary account.”

“Done.”

“Now insert the money.”

Arty fed the bills one at a time into the slot, the machine beeping and whirring. Across the screen: $4.00 Transaction Fee. $96.00 in Account. Transaction completed.

The two men turned and faced rows of kiosks with visitor screens in the secured area. Institutional carpet covered the floor.

Arty calculated steps. “There’s a lounge in front of us with sofas and stuffed chairs. We have to go around it.”

“I’m listening.”

“Go right six feet then left to get around the obstacle course.”

Jimmy pivoted right and took two paces, then pivoted left. Arty walked beside him. They navigated to kiosk fourteen, the designated screen. Jimmy tapped his stick on the chair leg and sat down. The screen in front of him was blank. He couldn’t see it anyway. Then the screen came on.

“Hey Dad. Hello Mr. O’Brien.”

“Hello, Duke. I’ll leave you guys to it.”

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Arty returned to the couches, found a Fur, Fish and Game magazine and perused an article about hunting grizzlies with a compound bow and broad tip arrows.

The visit took an hour. Jimmy stood up and pushed the chair back into place. Arty walked beside him once again to describe the terrain of couches. They left the building and drove I-94 to Minneapolis.

Jimmy turned to Arty. Arty remembered when Jimmy’s eyes were brown. Now metallic gray, his eyes had sunken into sockets.

“If he pleads guilty, it might be manslaughter,” said Jimmy. “He’ll get twenty years instead of life. He said he didn’t mean to kill the guy, just shoot him in the leg. But Duke fucked up and looked guilty when he ran.”

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BURIAL AT MARTY MISSION Shelia Red Horse had survived for seventy years despite poverty, mission school, death of her adult son, alcoholism, diabetes, a mastectomy and heart disease. Now, on Yankee Doodle Road in Eagan, Minnesota, a garage door opens and the funeral director rolls out a gurney with the corrugated cardboard box 12 inches high by 24 inches wide by 7 feet long, containing her corpse.

Arty backs his Ranger into the driveway. His wife, Val, sits beside him, bundle of silver sage on her lap. On the shared armrest, a certificate held fast to a Masonite clipboard gives Arty permission to carry Shelia from Minnesota over the South Dakota state line and to the Yankton Reservation.

Through the open driver’s side window, he hears leopard frogs bellow in the marsh by the Black Dog power plant.

Arty and the funeral director work together sliding the box into the pickup bed. The head end of the box rests on the open tailgate. Arty uses orange ratcheting straps hooked to the bumper to secure Shelia from dumping onto the blacktop once they get on the road. With callused palms and engine grease under his nails, he gives the director the clipboard. The director signs the certificate and hands it back.

From the bundle of sage on her lap, Val pulls loose a stem, strips leaves in one movement, 170

rolls them in her palms to a ball, and places it in the blue shell from the Minnesota River. Arty pulls the cigarette lighter from his jeans coin pocket that holds Shelia’s Native American Sobriety medallion and lights the sage, blowing out the flame so an ember burns. Thick smoke spirals, sharp and antiseptic. Someone who does not know the ritual might mistake the smell for pungent marijuana. With an eagle feather as a fan, he smudges Shelia’s box, Val, and drops pinches of tobacco on the blacktop.

Val talks to the box. “We’re taking you to Marty Mission, smart lady. I’m sure you’ll kick up a fuss as always. We got your back.”

An old family friend drives Shelia’s two grandchildren, an eightyear-old boy and ten-year-old girl, to the rez for the funeral. The big sister, seventeen-year-old Juno, and her gangbanger boyfriend Marvin, ride along.

Arty and Val live across the street from Marvin. Drunk, Marvin busted the side window of Arty’s pickup and stole a gym bag stuffed with a dirty towel and socks. Sober, Marvin and cohorts spray-painted NGD, acronym for Native Gangster Disciples, on Arty’s fence, which Arty painted over before the city fined him. And the guns. Either the rival Serranos or Native Mob, drove by and unloaded 20 rounds from an Uzi at the house where Marvin stayed. When NGDs shot back, they hit Val and Arty’s home and chipped the brickwork. Arty wonders if he can reach these guys through the summer arts programs. He leads tipibuilding workshops at the Minneapolis American Indian Center. He hopes to put together a woodcutting crew for the sweat lodge. His back aches so much he takes 800 milligrams of ibuprofen every night. Even 171

sitting in a truck seat is a pain in the ass, the cost of manual labor from the time he could stand up and walk. Nonetheless, at sixty, no one swings an ax better than he does. Those boys could learn something.

As Arty and Val drive south on I-35, Val reads the certificate.

“We better watch out,” she says. “The person responsible for transporting a body is to never let it out of his sight. Somebody sees an unattended box hanging off a tailgate, they’ll steal it.”

“Tie a ribbon on it. When somebody snatches her at the truck stop, he’ll die of fright when he opens the package.”

“The curse of Shelia Red Horse.”

“She sure could curse.”

At the truck stop in Albert Lee, they stop to piss and get gas. Arty pays for chips and vitamin water, keeping his eye on the pickup bed.

Before getting in the cab, he checks the ratchet straps and takes up slack.

They get off I-90 to US 81, a hundred-mile stretch along the Missouri River. When they roll through the city of Yankton, Val points to a levee boat landing.

“Custer and the Seventh Calvary got off the steamboat here.”

Val worked as former interim director at the Native American College on Lake Street in Minneapolis. She knows Dakota diaspora and the history of the Seven Council Fires of Seven Nations that formed the army that hacked Custer to pieces at the Battle of the Greasy Grass.

She continued. “Shelia’s grandfather, Red Horse, painted a picture of the camps on Little Big Horn River.”

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Arty recalls the illustration on a buffalo hide. It hangs in the Smithsonian. Tipis marked with the symbols of the nation it belonged—Oglala, Miniconjou, Dakota, Sicangu, Arapaho, Cheyenne, Brule. Shelia’s Grandfather, Red Horse, fought beside Sitting Bull, He Dog, Crazy Horse, American Horse and Rain in the Face. They were Knights of the Round Table. A queen lay in a cardboard box in the back of Arty’s truck.

As they drive past the city park, Val points out the window at the statue of a white man with sword and pistol on his hip, astride a horse.

“That’s the plaque and statue of Custer.”

Arty imagines he’ll count coup on the way back with a string of black and white tobacco ties, 38 for the Dakota men hanged in Mankato before relocation of the Dakota Nation.

Even though it’s against the law for Dakotas to live in Minnesota, Shelia Red Horse returned. She counted coup by gardening at the site of the old concentration camp at Fort Snelling where a prison guard sired her grandmother.

Beyond the town of Yankton, Arty and Val find SD-50, a two-lane blacktop. They pull into a filling station and top off the gas with ethanol. Temperature in the nineties, the air smells of pig shit. Val and Arty make their way into an air-conditioned Denny’s restaurant. They take a booth seat at a window.

Val looks up from the menu and nods her chin toward the bed of the Ranger. Shelia’s box sits in full sun. “You think that funeral director pumped her full of formaldehyde?”

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Arty raises his eyebrows. “I sure hope so.” He couldn’t be sure.

There was no money exchanged. Did Shelia’s tribe pay the director?

She puts on glasses to read the menu. “Let’s order before flies crawl inside the box.”

When they climb back into the Ranger, a dozen flies buzz around their faces. As Arty drives, Val opens the passenger side window to shoo them from the cab. The odor of pig shit wafts into the truck. Arty cracks his window too. ~ They pull up to the funeral home in Wagner by six that evening.

There, relatives, negotiating for a real coffin, refuse the roller straps and hearse. They’ll carry the coffin in a flatbed of a firewood truck and use towropes when it comes time to lower Shelia into the ground.

The relatives lay Shelia’s body out in the nice coffin at the indoor basketball court next to the tribal offices. Everyone keeps vigil for three more nights and days. The drum group sings Wakan Tanka Tunkasila.

Sage burns nonstop in a river shell, its strong smelling smoke keeping flies away. Plainclothes nuns arrive and sing as a choir. A white Baptist preacher sneaks in and stands beside her open coffin. Even though he never met her, he gestures to dead Shelia and preaches on the wages of sin. The nuns try to drown him out with their choir. Singers beat the drum harder and raise a high plains’ harmony.

Marvin stands over 6 feet, on the thick side, no whiskers and with acne scars pitting both cheeks. He wears gangbanger colors—Native Pride baseball cap over eyebrows and duckbill pointed sideways, oversized white T-shirt and black denims, the top between mid-thigh 174

and knee, blue boxer trunks and size 14 sneakers. He keeps a dozen children coloring at the foldout table.

Grandmothers roast chickens and boil potatoes in the kitchen. They reheat grease in the deep fryer for fry bread. Marvin mixes powdered lemonade with water in the cooler. An institutional coffeepot brews coffee. A breadbasket filled with loose cigarettes sits next to foam cups.

Aunties and grandmothers shear their hair and lay it in the coffin beside Shelia. Val places a bundle of sage between her folded hands. A light gauzy cloth covers her face to keep away the flies. A star quilt drapes the lower half of the coffin. Her body smells of ripening in anticipation of Earth.

The last day, the relatives load Shelia and her coffin in the bed of a bigger pickup, and drive slow to Marty Mission. People exit vehicles and go inside the Catholic cathedral. Before the altar, a buckskinned statue of Holy Mother with beatific smile, infant Christ cradled in left arm, faces the congregation. Val pulls at Arty’s sleeve and points upward. Stone pillars and arches hold up a ceiling mural of indigenous designs and spirit animals.

From the lectern, a red-nosed priest improvises a homily how Shelia drank her last glass of wine then lay down to eternal sleep. Arty clutches Shelia’s Native American sobriety medal in his left palm. He touches Val’s hand and mutters.

She tilts her head to hear him better. “What?”

“That wino priest is full of shit.”

Val squeezes his forearm. “I’ll take care of this.” She stands up and cuts the priest’s sermon short.

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“Shelia Red Horse taught Native Studies at Metro State University, co-authored several books, helped set up the Heart of the Earth Survival School, and adopted her two grandchildren. In over 30 years, Shelia Red Horse had not a sip of alcohol nor did she believe in a Christian God.” Val’s voice echoes among the pillars. The congregation, Shelia’s nieces, nephews, grandson by her first marriage, great grandchildren and cousins, keep eyes on Val. “In the sacristy of this church, priests molested her when she was a girl. Nuns tortured her at the mission school around back. Shelia escaped and ran many times, always captured and returned until she no longer spoke or remembered the language of her parents and grandparents. She planned to be buried here to haunt the perpetrators and bear witness. And she died poor. Her two adopted children heard every horror of this place and now see it with their own eyes.”

Val looks around the congregation. The relatives, lips pursed, nod their heads. The priest, face blanched, says nothing else. ~ At Marty Mission cemetery, within walking distance of the church, grandsons and nephews dig the grave in Dakota Earth. They burn sage in the blue clamshell to smudge those who come to mourn. No carved headstone, just fieldstones from under a yellow pine. The nuns chatter among themselves in the shade of one of those pines. The priest finishes smoking a Marlboro, drops it to the dried grass and crushes the butt beneath his heel.

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Arty studies the eight-year-old boy and ten-year-old girl. They stand with Marvin and Juno. Juno behaves with adult dignity even though she’s been shacking with Marvin since she quit high school a year ago.

Arty worries because the war in his neighborhood, where the Native Mob outguns the Native Gangster Disciples, spills into his yard. Native Mobsters executed a boy in a 28th Street alley—the boy on his knees with a bullet to the back of his head for trying to quit the gang. A goliath NGD picked up a young Native Mob wannabee by shoulder and hip and tossed him off the 18th Avenue Bridge onto the paved bike path. Val knows these young men and boys from her neighborhood restorative justice program. Arty suspects Marvin in his size 14s threw the boy off the bridge. Marvin might live through the summer if he joins the drum group at the Minneapolis American Indian Center.

A young man asks Marvin to grab the end of a towrope and help lower Shelia into the grave. The priest recites the Lord’s Prayer and everyone recites with him. The nineteen-year-old nephew who sat at the drum in the gym now sings in a tenor a Dakota song that honors grandmothers. Each mourner places a shovelful of earth and a handful of tobacco on the casket.

A relative offers a cigarette to Arty. They know he practices the Sundance with the Sicangu on Rosebud Reservation.

Arty recalls himself as a schoolboy, a stolen cigarette lighting the fuse of a Black Cat firecracker shoved in a leopard frog’s throat. The next frog utters a small cry. The boy awakens too late to snuff the fuse, guts across nose and chin.

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The relatives ask Arty to sing the Wiping of the Tears and another song for when someone stands alone on the hill and faces infinity.

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XRIXET Xrixet the Heyoka may be the devil and a maniac, but he is also a saint. Do not apply for his job. Knock on his door long enough, he will answer. The first job the devil gives you is to learn to live with your insanity, same as God does.

During ceremony, Xrixet gets away with what nobody else can do.

He is contrary. While Sun Dancers stay in camp during four days of purification, they cannot drink water. Xrixet drinks water. While Sun Dancers are in the arbor sundancing, fasting and still not drinking water, Xrixet is up at the chief’s trailer, eating and drinking and watching TV. He also carves pipes including the pipe buried beneath the holy tree in the arena. All very sacred.

The dancers abstain from sex during the purification and the Sun Dance. Once the Sun Dance begins, they are not even supposed to touch each other. Xrixet, on the other hand, is the handsomest most charming brown-skinned man. Even married women imagine lewd and lusty encounters on the beach or the woods or in a room at the Antelope Motel.

Xrixet disappears during Sun Dance rounds. The Sun Dancers move shoulders and feet to the sacred songs of the singers and the Lakota nation's heartbeat in the beating of the drums. Each dancer in one spot, they move feet or high step, depending on ability, like running on a treadmill. Eyes do not waver in their focus on the sacred tree with its 179

ribbons of red cloth and thousands of tobacco ties shimmying in the wind. Ropes for the business of piercing, one end tied high up the trunk, hang coiled at the bitter end so as not to touch the earth.

Beyond the arbor, the melody of the lark and soft laughter of the cuckoo, buzzy whine of the outhouse flies, and from the camp oh oh yes yes yes of the woman Xrixet is screwing in her pup tent. Xrixet makes the rounds. He will especially screw the famous girlfriend of the bossy Sun Dance leader.

It is all a test, says Xrixet. If your heart is pure, nothing can distract you from the business of prayer. The devil is always out here he says, distracting you from this business, so my job is to screw your wife or girlfriend, and to eat and drink in front of you while you fast four days, and thirst.

But on the third day, during the water round, Xrixet shows up dressed like a ten-dollar whore in short-shorts, fishnet stockings and a low-cut pink bodice, face painted black and white. The devil dances widdershins and pauses in front of each one of the sacred Sun Dancers.

Gyrating hips and ass, he tempts them with a bucket of cold fresh water, ladling it onto toes while your lips are cracked and your tongue a cake of dried buffalo dung. He chomps ice-cold watermelon, kissing black seed between his lips, lights a Cuban cigar and blows smoke in your face and all the time you must focus on the sacred tree, not even look at him. Then he pulls from his panties a Penthouse pinup and recites into your ear, Russian women, Russian women.

Upon completing the circle, Xrixet dodges the leaders as they chase him around the arena.

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This year he climbs the sacred tree, pulls out a can of lighter fluid and the lighter. Before immolating himself and the tree, a Sun Dance leader pulls him down. Xrixet escapes. Another leader tackles him.

They take the devil to the tree and he prays like any man as the leaders pierce him in the back with skewers whittled of chokecherry wood.

They loop the rope harness over the pegs, and he dances backward, stretching his rope taut. He returns to the tree and dances away four times until he tears the skewers from his flesh.

The devil dances beside us and goes home to his wife and children.

We face our flaws. Exposed to sunlight, we mend every shard of the shattered urn with gold and blood from boughs of the sacred tree, rejoined as wide and deep as nature, as wide and deep as the human soul.

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About T.K. O’Rourke Thomas Kevin O'Rourke: A retired barge worker and common laborer, he is recipient and finalist of the Scottish Open Poetry Competition, KVP Jack Kerouac Award, the National John Gouveia Outermost Poetry Award, and the John Keats Soul-Maker Sonnet Award. Kevin’s stories have been nominated for 2018 BEST AMERICAN SHORT FICTION anthology, short-listed for AGNI award, three times for GLIMMERTRAIN, and a story selected by Irish writer, Jamie O'Connell, for LONG STORY, SHORT Literary Journal.

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“O'Rourke's writing, after several exposures, brings forth a state of mind that has a distinctive stamp upon it: Postmodern warrior, one whose Troy, with its attendant triumphs and tragedies, is internal, with the external battleground being the “off-grid free zone” with its own codes and sense of polis.” - John Ivan-Palmer, author of MOTELS OF BURNING MADNESS “Fine prose and a worthy project.” - Mark Helprin, author of WINTER’S TALE “Noble.” - Vikram Chandra, author of SACRED GAMES “A heavyweight.” - Etheridge Knight “The Melville of the Mississippi River.” - Kevin Kling

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