Natural Traveler Magazine - Quarterly Cultural Magazine - Summer 2020

NATURAL TRAVELER ® M A G A Z I N E V O L .

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From Our Correspondents

Reports on the pandemic’s effects in the heart of New York City, in New Zealand during the “Plague Year,” and in the small Texas town of Hico.

That Last Year at Oloffson’s

It had become a contest. A trio vying for her attention: the glib, game-playing gigolo; the entrepreneur with the fat bankroll . . . and the writer, with little more to offer her beyond the immortality of his words . . .

Photo Essay A Look Inside Cuba

Images of Havana: Street Scenes, Café, Artist Studio, Wall Art.

Jamaica . . . By Canoe?

We asked ourselves, where the hell were the canoes? Simple, Dan told us.

They’re in the back of the van. They’re inflatable.

Losing Phil, Unlike Buck in ‘Call of the

Wild,’ Phil was a lover not a fighter; Reflections from My Porch, No matter the season the beauty is incomparable; The Ghost of 17B, A shape was forming within the mist; Trips, Waaaaht, Fogg’s Horn and more . . .

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“One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of looking at things.”

Henry Miller

© 2020 Natural Traveler LLC 5 Brewster Street Unit 2, No. 204 Glen Cove, New York 11542

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Natural Traveler Magazine ÂŽ Summer 2020 Editor & Publisher Tony Tedeschi Senior Editor Bill Scheller Staff Writers Ginny Craven Aglaia Davis Andrea England David E. Hubler Jay Jacobs Samantha Manuzza Buddy Mays John H. Ostdick Pedro Pereira Frank I. Sillay Kendric W. Taylor Photography Katie Cappeller Karen Dinan Buddy Mays Art Sharafina Teh Webmaster Will Rodriguez

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Table of Contents

Staff Writer’s Letter

Pedro Pereira

Page 5

Contributors

Page 6

Fogg’s Horn: The River Possible

Page 7

Email from the Upper West Side

Aglaia Davis

Page 11

Email from New Zealand

Frank I. Sillay

Page 13

Jamaica . . . By Canoe?

Bill Scheller

Page 15

Reflections from My Porch

Ginny Craven

Page 18

A Small Texas Town Navigates the Storm

John H. Ostdick

Page 20

Losing Phil

David E. Hubler

Page 29

Photo Essay: Cuba

Karen Dinan

Page 33

Poetry: Dead Weight, Woman Working

Samantha Marie

Page 37

Trips: Never Drive in India

Kendric W. Taylor

Page 38

Sharks! . . .?

Frank I. Sillay

Page 40

Waaaaht? Gassed Mule

Malcolm P. Ganz

Page 41

The Ghost of 17B

Jay Jacobs

Page 43

That Last Year at Oloffson’s

Tony Tedeschi

Page 49

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Staff Writer’s Letter Joy in the Time of COVID

By Pedro Pereira

So much of what happens in the world around us is out of our control. Especially in these unsettled times. But when I release the clutch in my newly acquired 1996 BMW Z3 roadster, press the accelerator and push the shifter into gear, I am in control. And that’s a joyful thing.

I bought the roadster, a near classic with under 62,000 miles on the odometer, after persuading my wife, Diane, it’s a good investment. The model is starting to attract collectors and its value is sure to increase. More importantly, I told her it would bring us a bit of joy in navigating the unexpected twists and turns of these uncertain times.

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed all of our lives. It perversely unifies us by making us all susceptible to infection while separating us as we erect protection barriers. Thankfully the isolation isn’t complete. Technology makes it possible to maintain a sense of community through digital communications and remote collaboration tools.

Although we’ve been each forced into our little boxes, we are able to project a digital version of ourselves – through the magic of bits and bytes and lengths of cable and fiber – to colleagues, friends and family. It’s an imperfect way to interact but it’s what we’ve got. Without it, the despondence and isolation born of the pandemic surely would be worse.

There are so many reasons to hate technology. For what it’s done to public discourse. For its misuse in spreading fear, discord and paranoia. For the cyber dangers it has spawned. At any one time, some malevolent actor somewhere is working feverishly to turn it into a weapon.

But here we are, depending on our laptops and smartphones to ensure the thing that makes us fundamentally human – contact with others – remains possible. In uncertain times, technology keeps us human.

They say the pandemic is here to stay – for a while. We may as a species have to learn to live with it, just as we have with influenza, tuberculosis, HIV and other viruses. It’s going to take some time.

That’s out of our control.

Which is why in these times it’s so important to find joy. I like driving. And I’ve been wanting a convertible for a while. So when I saw the online listing for the little BMW clad in British racing green only eight miles away, I had to go take it for a test drive. A few days later, the seller and I reached a deal, and two days after that he graciously delivered it to my driveway.

I foresee many miles behind the wheel with the wind buzzing my ears. All our family’s traveling plans this year have been canceled. It was out of our control. But when I put the top down, get in, turn the key in anticipation of the sensory experience of the four-banger engine roaring to life, I feel somewhat better about living in unsettled times. I relish the joy of something so simple as turning the ignition. That, I can control.

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Contributors This issue we get reports on the pandemic, a half-year in from the far reaches of our realm, Aglaia Davis in the heart of New York City (Page 9), Frank I. Sillay in New Zealand (Page 11) and John H. Ostdick on how people are faring in a small Texas town (Page 18).

Bill Scheller takes us on a canoe ride on a Jamaica river. Jamaica, canoe ride? How it’s done on (Page 13).

Ginny Craven need not venture farther than her back porch in Keswick, Virginia, for an escape from the travails of the wider world (Page 16).

For all those who have gone through the deep sorrow of losing a pet, David E. Hubler remembers the good times of his life with his dog before “Losing Phil” (Page. 27) Although Cuba is not the easiest place for Americans to travel to, our photographer, Karen Dinan, managed to pull it off and we are the beneficiary of her photo spread (Page 31).

Samantha Marie wrestles with loss in her two poems, “Dead Weight” and “Woman Working” (Page 35).

Kendric W. Taylor takes us on a hilarious, seat-grabbing ride in his “Trips” piece, “Never Drive in India (Page 36).

Malcolm P. Ganz explains the attraction of “Gassed Mule” in his “Waaaaht?” column. Don’t ask (Page 39).

Jay Jacobs searches for the boundary between the real and the surreal in his piece, “The Ghost of 17B” (Page 41).

Tony Tedeschi takes us to Haiti as the setting for his short story, “That Last Year at Oloffson’s” (Page 47).

Buddy Mays, our itinerant photographer, who has wandered the world giving us his inimitable perspective on a wide, wide range of subjects, blazes some colorful subjects our way, including wildflowers and butterflies that turn up in the Pacific Northwest where Buddy calls home. They are sprinkled about the issue as colorful endnotes.

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Fogg’s Horn The Miscreant Meanderings Of Our Man Markus I was here because I wanted a real, honest-to-God, made-in-the Amazon blowgun.

I lay on my cot deep in the rain forest listening to the night's overture. Muted thunder rolled ceaselessly across the trackless Amazon Basin. I felt, rather more than heard, the magnificent basso profundo that seemed to enter at the far end of my ear’s spectrum, bump and mutter its way across my tiny form far below, then fade out of range on the other side. I don't recall any lightning; the jungle was very dark, a few lanterns flickering on the wooden duckboards between cabins. Nor was there much rain, an occasional pattering on the canvas roof sending small creatures scurrying off into the bush – not enough even to churn a breeze through the wire mesh walls. This is where “vast” comes from, I thought. Each rumbling chorus seemed to go on for long minutes before subsiding, and then another orchestration swelled, punctuated by sudden thuds that concussed within my chest like a bass drum. It came from nowhere, but seemed everywhere, enveloping me from hundreds of miles in every direction. I listened sleepily for the slither and crash of the food chain devouring itself in the tangled jungle outside, but the night was curiously quiet, animal-ed out by the slow destruction of the ecosystem.

I was here because I wanted a real, honest-to-God, made-in-the Amazon blowgun. There were other reasons of course -- Peru is an ecological masterpiece – three separate ecosystems: desert, rain forest, river. I wanted to experience them all before climate change and man doomed them.

Arriving at the headwater city of Iquitos those many years ago, after a flight north from Lima along the glistening peaks of the Andes, I took time for a three-wheeled taxi tour of this once thriving rubber capital: mostly appliance stores, various emporiums, and splendid, long-legged women in red dresses. Beeping through the rain-washed main plaza, we passed an iron residence Gustav Eiffel had once designed for the 1898 Paris Exposition, which then had been purchased by a local rubber baron, packed up and shipped here from France -- iron sheets, bolts and trusses – across the Atlantic to the mouth of the Amazon, then 2,300 miles upriver and into the tributary that led to this outpost.

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Across the pot-holed boulevard from once majestic mercantile buildings, the riverbank was a jumble of weathered dwellings and chaotic river life -- rickety shacks, food stalls, stray dogs, halfnaked children, marine supply vendors and plank-barrel barrooms. Spilling down the dirt bank they jammed up against a colorful flotilla of junk boats -- banged, battered but still floating. I stepped carefully across several old tubs and clambered my way over the littered deck of a slightly familiar-looking, magnificently filigreed old riverboat -- said to be from the movie “Fitzcarraldo” -before boarding a waiting launch.

As we moved out into the current, a cruise ship idled by across the way: white tablecloths, air conditioning, and fruit cocktail for breakfast. I was headed for the more primitive fare of a jungle camp. A small boat slid past, the fishermen staring at me curiously as they tossed their nets into the brown current. The mid-morning sun grew hotter as I sat in the stern and reflected on how much I enjoyed coming to Peru. Despite political zigzags, there were few other destinations that provided such a feeling of pioneering, of offering one of the last frontiers. Certainly Iquitos gave off an air of a raffish boomtown – oil, gold, rubber – it was still the Wild West. I even enjoyed Lima at times. Generally misty and dismal, on a rare sunny afternoon there was nothing more relaxing than a numbing Pisco Sour on the broad veranda of the Gran Hotel Bolivar, especially when returning to comfort after a journey such as this.

Our launch chugged down the broad expanse of this muddy giant of a river, a mile across at this point, 40 miles at its widest -- our bow slanting to port as we swung toward the fast running tributary that would take us up to the jungle camp. The channel narrowed precipitously as we skirted tiny settlements, the brown hue of the main river turning to green as foliage increasingly hemmed us in from both sides. I looked for basking alligators, anacondas writhing in the branches overhead, the flick of whitewater signaling the legendary piranha, even for splashing river dolphins. Along the riverbanks, houses perched on stilts to cope with the monumental seasonal flooding. All was quiet.

I dozed off and awoke as we glided up to the dock. I tossed my bag ashore and headed for the primitive outdoor bar.

Evening found me lazing in a hammock on the front porch, listening to the screech of parrots echoing across the river. My new friend Baptista, the head guide, stopped by and informed me that in the morning we would go in search of blowguns. He also confided that the employees, whose table I had joined after the evening meal, were calling me "the beer factory" in tribute to my usual intake of evening cervezas. Humbled by the compliment, I stepped off carefully into the jungle darkness along the trail to my cabin.

After breakfast, most of the camp guests departed on hiking or canoe trips, mosquitoes already feasting on their exposed skin. Unable to find my spray can of Cutters repellent, I was told to look for what they called jungle iodine, the bark of a certain tree that protects the Indians from mosquitoes, and is spread on cuts and scrapes. But none was found, so stuffing my pockets with bubble gum for local children, I clambered into the motorized dugout canoe and we set off in the steaming heat for a remote village many miles upriver.

A huge yellow and blue butterfly lighted on my pack as the guide cut the motor and we glided silently along, discussing flora and fauna. I was reflecting about what would happen if we got lost, especially further in, where the jungle was really impenetrable, when a curious “whisk-whisk-whisk”

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sound overhead drew my attention. We looked up as a small aircraft chugged into view, then as it came closer, only a few hundred feet over our head, and I realized incredulously that a briskly pedaling man was powering it.

“How the hell did that get here," I wondered dully, shading my eyes from the direct sun.

The ultra-light aircraft fluttered past over our heads, the pilot briefly waving as he pumped vigorously away. In a remote area, where the mode of transportation is either by foot or hollowedout tree trunk, who would have had the wherewithal, the preposterous nerve to build, much less fly, such a gossamer plaything? Or bring it here, of all places? If the legs tire, or cramp, they would have to land. But where? This is not a good place to find out.

“We’ll stop here,” Baptista broke into my musings, gesturing at a clearing along the bank. “It’s my village."

We climbed a slippery path drying in the hot sun, and emerged onto a level area, cleared of trees and jungle growth, where a church and meeting hall stood, houses on stilts on either side forming an oblong cluster, much like a village green. At one end was a school, soccer nets in place. We wandered about, my companions examining the local handicrafts, accompanied by a horde of children dressed in shorts. I looked for shade. Several young women in white cotton dresses emerged from behind a cabin.

The guide looked over at me: “Your Spanish is primitive, but speak to them. They’ll like it.”

I blurted the first thing that came into my mind: “Hola chicas, estoy desde los Estados Unitos.

Estoy buscando para una esposa,” I said, trying to look my sincere and attractive best.

“I don’t think they took you seriously, about looking for a wife,” Baptista laughed as the group dissolved into bewildered giggles.

“Tell them I am in the Matrimonial Peace Corps,” I said.

They wandered off disinterestedly, shaking their heads and snickering: “¡Que escándelo!”

Despite the team and brand-name tee-shirts they wore, it seemed the people still clung to their old ways. The children had clustered around, fat-faced and dark-haired, friendly, chattering and curious, while the elders gravely told of great tracts of land denuded throughout the basin that would spell the eventual doom of this village, and hundreds like it, all over the Amazon. Strip the rainforest and everything dies sequentially. So much for my authentic blowgun, if I had waited much longer, I thought, much less the lives of these people.

At this point we had to leave, as some real tourists were coming, and the village must change into native costume and look primitive.

Back in the canoe, our guide told us the village where we were headed actually used the deadly weapons, still hunted with them. When we arrived, the people were already dressed for company

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– feathered headbands and grass skirts for the adults, bare bosoms for the women, and bare bottoms for the small children. I looked over the handicrafts: primarily necklaces made from monkey skulls, porcupine quills, and piranha teeth. Irresistible! I haggled a bit, although I am hopeless at it, but the villagers enjoyed it; they’d rather barter than make a sale outright, so we were both happy.

We moved on through the rainforest into a clearing where a rather substantial house perched on stilts. The inhabitants came down to visit, several of the women nursing fat babies, a few of the children trailed by their pet sloth’s knuckling along behind them. The last of my bubble gum was distributed. The path ahead was flooded out, so one of the men offered to take us around close to the next village in his dugout. From where I stood on the bank, the canoe looked like it was under water itself. We crawled aboard carefully – carefully -- and glided over the glassy surface. One of the little girls from the clearing waved until we were out of sight, her childish voice calling “ciao-ciao,” echoing back through the tall palms.

We returned to the village and a demonstration of the uncanny accuracy of the blowguns, some of which stretched up to ten feet long. Dressed picturesquely in their grass skirts, piranha tooth necklaces rattling, the men raised the tubes to their mouths, and with a mighty puff of their cheeks, launched 10-inch-long wooden needles like smart bombs at a kapok tree 50 yards down the clearing: Woof! Thunk!

Oh, man, sold! I didn’t ask what happened if anyone ever went hunting with hiccups.

Soaked in deadly curare, the darts paralyze their victims within seconds. I supposed they had claimed human victims, but hunting nowadays is confined to four-legged prey, like the monkeys high up in the treetops, who, when whacked by one of these jungle dead-eyes, fall helplessly into the dinner pot. We refreshed ourselves with warm pineapple slices, and began the haggling over the blowguns.

A few days later back in Iquitos, I sat at a waterfront bar, feet up on the railing, watching the late afternoon sun turn the sky pink over the river. Sipping a cold beer, I looked out over the incredible expanse of the river. A good place to be, I thought. My blowguns, wrapped in old newspaper and tied securely with heavy twine by people in the village, stood beside me at the table.

Then I shouldered my parcels, hoisted my rucksack and headed up the riverbank on my way to the airport. I had seen the mighty river. I hoped others would be able to see it the same way.

And I had my blowgun.

Editor’s Note: Photos of Fogg are extremely rare. The partial view above was a moment, captured on a rangefinder camera with no shutter sound, while Fogg’s attention was drawn to demonstrations of blowguns.

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Saks Fifth Avenue, infamously barricaded with chicken wire and guarded by security officers.

Email from the Upper West Side: NYC Now

By Aglaia Davis

This is not the New York I know.

A few months ago, when the City of New York ground to a sudden and stunning halt, I wrote that I loved it more ferociously than before and that “my� City would live to see another day.

That was March. This is July, midsummer, and a very different New York City.

Things have changed since the beginnings of the shutdown. The economic devastation that befell our streets and stores, museums and shows within a few days has now spread and descended to deeper levels. In late May and early June, protests began, and, on a particularly dark day, stores north and south of 34th Street were looted.

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I walked the Avenue of Fifth from 59th Street down to 34th and bore witness to the leftovers. Saks Fifth Avenue was infamously barricaded with chicken wire and guarded by security officers. Macy’s was boarded up from Broadway to 7th Avenue.

The Museum of Natural History, my beloved neighbor, barricaded its front stairs and was secured

by NYPD officers after its statue of Theodore Roosevelt fell under heavy scrutiny and feared attack.

My City had changed. For the first time since my move here in 1994, it had become intolerably hard to live here. The streets were ice cold, at once shivering from the suspiciousness and guardedness of every other pedestrian. Escape was no longer possible within the structures of the Upper West Side — even Central Park had been tinged with bad feeling.

‘ I live in a charmed part of Manhattan . . .’

In Stage II of reopening, you would think it refreshing and encouraging with restaurants serving outside and retail allowing curbside pickup. But it isn’t. The air is heavy, and not from the oppressively humid summer days.

I live in a charmed part of Manhattan, where very little if anything ever happens, and the streets fall quiet at night. It has been a joke for years that the Central Park Precinct of the NYPD had absolutely nothing to do.

I spend my weekends, as always, west of the Hudson. Yes, I am a country girl at heart, and, yes, I have long had the goal of buying a home in New Jersey. But the way I feel now is different. It is the contagion of bad feeling, social unrest and discord. It is shuttered stores and struggling businesses. It is residents who walk around shielded from every other person out of panic.

This is not the New York I know. I have thoughts of fleeing, running to the countryside and watching from afar as it is torn asunder and perhaps pieced together. I ask myself why I am still here, when I have a family that wants me in the countryside of Maine, where life has always been simpler.

And yet I stay. I can no longer explain why. Perhaps it is compulsiveness, my marriage to the routine of life. Perhaps it is fear, my concern about what will be if I actually leave. Perhaps it is apathy, the inability to feel anymore.

Perhaps it is hope, which springs eternal. Perhaps it is the determination that my City will long endure, and in the end arise from the rubble far deeper than the ashes of 9/11 and become reborn.

Only time will tell; and this time, I no longer know the answer.

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Email from New Zealand: Journal of the Plague Year

By Frank I. Sillay

New Zealand has been lauded as a world leader in dealing with the pandemic and as of the end of May there was only one known infection in a population of five million. There had only been one new infection detected in the last couple of weeks, none in the last nine days of May. As a result, restrictions are gradually being eased.

Traffic in the streets is almost back to normal, despite public transport having to operate with less than half the seats available for use. Government departments and many private businesses are operating under a requirement that “if you can do your job from home, that’s what you should do.”

Retail shops are more or less back to normal, except for maintaining six foot spacing between shoppers. The tenant in the shop downstairs from my apartment tells me she’s doing a roaring trade in craft and decorator items. Her only concern is maintaining sufficient stock.

I am trying to do my part in bearing the financial burden by eating out every lunchtime. (This is pure public spiritedness and has nothing to do with laziness.) Part of this process involves keeping a diary of places where I’ve spent more than ten minutes outside of my home, to help in contact tracing, should there be an outbreak of infection. As a result, I have notes of where I’ve eaten every day since restaurants were allowed to open, two weeks ago, and looking at the list, I can recall that on at least five occasions, in various restaurants, I was the only customer during the 1200 to 1300 period. I’m not an expert in the restaurant business, but my instincts tell me that such is not the path to wealth for the small restaurateur.

The suburb where I live and go dining is not at any time heavily populated by office workers, so one would expect that working from home would favour eateries there as opposed to those in downtown Wellington. I am worried about the financial health of the local restaurants and do not understand what forces are at work on them. One possibility is agoraphobia arising out of the stricter periods of the lockdown; a change of habits.

I have been retired for a number of years, so the pandemic disruption has had no effect on my income, but this surely is not true of everybody else who would normally patronize local restaurants.

One of New Zealand’s main earners for many years has been tourism, especially bulk tours from China. Obviously, this money stream disappeared overnight with the closure of the borders and nobody knows if or when it might be restored. Queenstown, in the skiing and sightseeing part of the South Island, has apparently been turned from a boom town into a ghost town. The effects of this are expected to spread right through the economy.

Several of Australia’s states have had good success in stamping out the COVID virus, so there is talk of loosening travel restrictions between the two countries, to offer some support to suffering 13

tourism businesses on both sides of the Tasman Sea, but it’s not hard to see potential problems arising from such a move.

There is a sentiment in support of continuing remote working instead of commuting to urban centers every day, as greenhouse gases and other pollution decreased spectacularly during the earlier shutdown, quite apart from the saving of commuting time. Routine medical consultations have been done almost exclusively over email, or Skype, or some similar medium during the pandemic, and I’m picking this may continue, along with the complete disappearance of cash in favor of electronic funds transfer.

Many are hoping for a return to the status quo ante, once the medical threat recedes, but my money is on something new and unexpected, just don’t ask me what.

Photo by Buddy Mays This Cascade Lily, Lilium Washingtonianum, also known as the Shasta Lily, is one of Oregon’s gifts to early summer hikers in the Cascade Mountains of central Oregon. The flower stalk is often two to three feet high, and the bloom itself is about three inches across. The pine/fir/cedar forests of the northern California and Oregon Cascades are the only place on earth that this particular flower grows.

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Jamaica . . . By Canoe?

By Bill Scheller Photos by Chris Maynard

The First Descent of the Cabarita When Doris Day died last year, and you could click on the online obit in The New York Times to hear her singing “Que Sera Sera,” I thought of the time I went on a press trip to Jamaica.

I know – “The Man Who Knew Too Much,” the Hitchcock film in which she introduced the song, was set in Morocco, not Jamaica. But I’ll explain later.

I used to write for Canoe magazine, and was their go-to guy for stories about places you didn’t usually associate with canoeing. I wrote about descending the length of the Passaic River, through the suburbs The author in Jamaica, 1986 and industrial detritus of northern New Jersey, and about circumnavigating Manhattan Island with an overnight stopover on an abandoned railroad bridge. So when an adventure tourism company headquartered in Kingston offered to take a Canoe writer on a paddling trip in Jamaica, a place neither the magazine people nor I didn’t even know had paddle-worthy rivers, I got the nod.

“Sure,” I said. “And can I take along Chris Maynard, for photography?” Chris was an old friend who had shot the Passaic and Manhattan stories. Canoe checked with the adventure tourism outfit, and they said no problem.

Our host, an umpteenth-generation white Jamaican, picked us up at the airport in Montego Bay. Chris and I had already been sent an itinerary for the trip, which was vague enough for us to imagine day after day of canoeing in the company of other paddle-sport journalists eager to tell North America all about the Jamaican fresh-water alternative to sand and surf. But as the adventure boss – Dan was his name – collected his other invitees from the terminal, we learned that a clown car full of dueling agendas was taking shape, and canoeing was just one of them.

There were nine of us in Dan’s miniscule Nissan van, rattling down the dusty roads south of Mo’ Bay. There was a guy writing a book on adventure travel in the Caribbean, and another doing a study of the Jamaican environment for the Sierra Club magazine. A Midwestern husband-and-wife team were self-described “naturists,” and editors of a guide to places where people can swim in the nude. With me and Chris, Dan, the driver, plus a fellow who loaded and unloaded gear, the tally came to nine. It was a tight fit. And we were all there for different reasons, which Dan tried to indulge in his best disorganized fashion.

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The Sierra Club guy looked at birds and asked questions about hydro projects; he was no trouble.

The adventure guide writer was admirably thorough, in terms of adventure guide writing, which meant he was a pain in the ass in real life. He conducted endless taped interviews with urchins and planters alike, and consistently held us an hour behind whatever was left of our schedule. The naturists – as unlovely a pair as you’d never want to see with no clothes on, and who Chris christened “The Potatoes” – insisted on stopping every time we passed anything bigger than a puddle, so they could strip and jump in. Dan, who dressed every day in a red Speedo and an Aussie bush hat and always carried a machete, took us all in stride. He just kept directing the driver down one rutted back road after another, and feeding the Nissan’s tape deck. The little van became a rolling reggae jukebox, hazed over by clouds of smoke from the big spliffs Dan kept passing around. The only break in the reggae came whenever Chris got Dan to pop in a Stones tape with “Under My Thumb” on it, just to needle Mrs. Potato, a squawky feminist.

Chris and I settled in. At night we drank Red Stripe beer and shots of overproof rum, including, in one joint, a 177-proof version distilled illegally and called “John Crow Batty,” which is what it will drive you. We slept in treehouses, and in the great houses of old sugar plantations.

But we did start to wonder, after the first couple of days, when we were going to go canoeing. In fact, we asked ourselves, where the hell were the canoes? Simple, Dan told us. They’re in the back of the van. They’re inflatable.

Canoe – now Canoe and Kayak – is a purist’s publication, cottoning to inflatables about as much as Bon Appetit does to TV dinners. But you paddle what you have, and make the best of it. Out came the canoes and the air pump that connected to the Nissan joint lighter, off came the Potatoes’ clothes (“canuding,” they called it, God help us), and into the upper reaches of the Cabarita River we all went.

The current was peppy, and paddling was optional. There were rocks here and there, the kind that would have given me the cracked-fiberglass whimwhams back home but here just gave us a balloony bounce, and the whole run was in keeping with the slaphappy blur of consciousness of the past few days. And there was unsought glory in it all: when we beat the other canoes to the take-out at a bridge a few miles downstream, Dan, with his machete slung into his Speedo, came down to the bank and announced that we were the first people ever to canoe that stretch of river.

“Really?” I asked.

“Yes. That was the first descent of the Cabarita between those two points.”

That one record-setter was also the beginning and end of our canoeing. The next day, we were in the suburbs of Kingston, at the company headquarters that was also the house

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Challenging the mighty Cabarita, in a blow-up canoe

where Dan lived. Chris and I unrolled our sleeping bags in our assigned room, ate jerk chicken that Dan’s cook had made, and drifted into the party he threw to wrap things up. The problem with the party, though, was that we had had enough of the Potatoes and the guidebook guy to last us. So we snagged a bottle of 151-proof rum out of the living room and brought it into the kitchen, where we mixed it with a local soda called Grapefruit Smash and shared it with the cook, a big jolly woman who was also an umpteenth-generation Jamaican, though of the other available hue. Not even halfway through the rum and the Smash, she decided to sing. “You remember dat song?” she said, “dat Doris Day sing? I always like dat song – you know how it go – ‘When I was just a little girl, I ask my Mama, what will I be . . .”

I got a ride to the airport with the driver early the next morning. Chris stayed till later in the day, and got his ride from Dan himself. Along the way, Dan told Chris that we had drunk so much rum that we should pay him for it.

Chris didn’t pay.

I wrote a piece for Canoe, a short one.

Somewhere, people may still be reading about where to swim naked in Jamaica.

Que sera, sera.

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Reflections from my Porch

By Ginny Craven

No matter the season – in every moment, the beauty is incomparable.

I never tire of the views of the Virginia countryside; they are the dreams of my childhood, etched into my psyche, as rocks sculpted by rivers. My feet know the way up the mountain paths, and into the cool quiet of the woods. My father graduated from the University of Virginia in 1950. He had lived in Keswick during his time at the university and had developed an abiding love for the Virginia countryside. Fast forward through some years of personal tumult and discord, my father, then in his early 30’s, was in a coveted job in Hollywood, working as a writer/editor for Alfred Hitchcock’s Review Studios. He was living a decidedly glamorous life in Pacific Palisades with his new wife and four children. But, for him, Virginia was always in his heart; he had an almost visceral attachment to the land here – a spirit which I now share. He followed that passion; and, in 1962, he picked up his citified family and moved us from Los Angeles to Charlottesville.

So, I grew up in Keswick and received, almost by osmosis, the same intense love for the beauty of the land here. I spent countless hours exploring the woods and fields, discovering the birds and animals. I walked with my dogs at my side and my pet crow, Peabody, an able air support. I left in my early 20’s, and was gone for 37 years, mostly in Florida, making my own way in business and raising two sons. But, as with my father, Virginia had claimed my soul. Every time I visited from

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the cacophony that is Miami, I walked the same sacred paths of my childhood. It is a comfort to know that, indeed, you can go home again. What magic to sit on the same rock, by the same stream, where I contemplated life as an eight year-old!

Now, I have made my own transition from Miami back to Keswick after decades away. It has been a sanctuary – a respite from the sadness of divorce, and the abject pain of separation from my children. And, it brings me solace in this often terrifying time of social isolation. I am still brought to tears by the tender magnificence of the natural environs. No matter the season – the stark hush of winter, the magical spring as the earth awakens, and explodes into the impossible extravagance of summer, the burnished autumn that basks in the afterglow . . . In every moment, the beauty is incomparable.

Summer . . . so many shades of green.

Yet, the summer . . . ah, the summer . . . One can scarcely imagine that there could be so many shades of green. The buzzards surf the thermals in graceful flight, casting shadows on the sunlit fields. Like Blanche DuBois, they are not suited for the close-up, but they are visions of loveliness as they dip and glide in the sky. Deer step daintily from the wood’s dappled edge, blinking their limpid eyes for their moment in the sun. Occasionally, the tom turkeys will parade to the fore, their fans on full display, pivoting side to side like supermodels. And, where are the girls to admire their splendor? They are hidden in the tall grass, with their babies in tow. How many melodies can I hear from my chaise? The ever-present mantra of cicadas is punctuated by countless bird songs – the often contentious chitter of jeweled hummingbirds, the raucous cries of crows and ravens, the cheerful gabble of finches, and the call and response of couples, crying to their mates.

My sweet old dog pants as he lounges in the shade; his eyes close in dreamy contentment. Life is good. I follow his lead, stretching my toes to the breeze, glad to be sheltering in paradise.

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A Small Texas Town Navigates the Storm Hico felt an almost immediate economic sting.

Story and Photos by John H. Ostdick

Most weekdays and many Saturdays in normal times, a few cars dot the parking spots in downtown Hico, their passengers strolling its quiet sidewalks. Of course, the spring of 2020 was far from normal, for large cities or small highway-stop and getaway destinations across the country.

Ninety minutes southwest of the Dallas-Fort Worth area, this Central Texas town (population 1,341) is known mostly for its contested connection to Billy the Kid and pies from a local café. It has long served as a hiccup for the traffic flowing into Hamilton County and south on US 281 toward the state’s celebrated Hill Country. Prior to the COVID-19 outbreak and the shutdown of most state businesses, that hiccup had experienced some deep breaths of fresh air. Momentum was on its side.

In late March, however, Texas Governor Greg Abbott announced a wide swath of state closings — including restaurants, bars, retail shops, schools, and other businesses classified as non-essential — and urged a stay-at-home policy. Hico faced an almost immediate economic sting.

After all, as many as 10,000 people from across the state have flooded the little town during the third Saturday of May in recent years as more than 100 competitors torch their way through its 20

annual Texas Steak Cookoff and Wine Festival. Amateur backyard chefs from throughout the Southwest (102 of them for the 16th annual event in 2019) compete for cash prizes and bragging rights of cooking the state’s best steak. That’s big-time money that flows into the pockets of town merchants and the local nonprofit groups who organize the event and benefit from the revenue raised.

What was missing in 2020

About midday on a 2019 cookoff Saturday, Hico’s stone-building downtown offered a friendly mix of aromatic cooker smoke on the wind. There was a tempting array of appetizers from street-lined shade canopies, musical groups of various ilk (including polka and wandering mariachis), artisan vendors, local shopping, craft beer, and Texas wine tasting.

The town of Carlton (population 70) lies 10 miles to the southwest. Its Carlton Volunteer Fire Department serves nearby Hamilton, Erath, and Comanche counties. On that day, its volunteers stoked fires as they manned a food station inside the cookout’s eastern boundaries.

A stream of visitors ($10 a shot for a feeding-frenzy-rights bracelet) snatched up delicate, halved egg rolls, one filled with cream cheese and jalapeno and another with caramelized onions that tasted like baked apples.

A boisterous Danny Kennedy engaged visitors popping the appetizers into their mouths as he bounded forward from the deep fryers in the rear of the booth and proclaimed: “Make sure you come back soon. I’m just about to start my swine hides [pork skins]. You don’t want to miss them.”

Navigating the downtown streets was akin to a lazy-river ride sans inner tube, floating from one savory stop to another. Everything vied for attention, in bite-size nirvana or served in small boats.

Still sizzling bits of steak teased of grander, heftier portions to come for those with dinner tickets.

Jalapeno poppers. Smoked sausage. Small pulled-pork sandwiches. Bacon-wrapped cheesy potato (Team Poncho & Lefty $1,000 category winner in 2019). Peanut butter and jalapeno on a cracker.

Mudbug boil with corn, potato, and sausage. Delicate bacon-wrapped cream cheese bites.

For the novelty seeker, there were cast iron brands and deer-antler-handled kitchen tools. Essential oils. Farm equipment. Or a good shade hat.

The Boatner family, from nearby Hamilton, has been a mainstay on the festival and market circuit for more than 20 years, offering various “Nanny’s Best” products from the family goat farm and, in recent years, adding hats and the wonderfully named “All Gut, No Butt” suspender line.

Yancy Boatner has worn hats since his mother Sharon first sent him outdoors as a child to do chores. One day he returned with an altered lid, which he had soaked in a water trough and shaped to his liking. Soon, people in town took notice.

“Whenever he went to town, people always asked him to put special creases in their hats,” his mother says. “So we started selling the hats with custom creases at weekend events.”

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The hat-bending Boatner is normally a weekend warrior, traveling to summer statewide events, selling lids with custom creases. He works primarily with hats woven from Guatemalan palm leaf, which is durable, conducive to shaping, provides a good shade block, and is water resistant — just what you need in Texas.

Hico Steak Cookout Dyl-Pickle Smokers of Garland, jalapeno and peanut butter on Ritz crackers

During the 2019 Hico festival, he worked one such raw hat for a young girl, who watched with her mother and little sister. He dropped the lid into a water basin, creating a hat soup and making the hat pliable for shaping.

“If you get a grass hat wet, they will dissolve and deteriorate,” he explains. “By exposing the weave pattern of a fiber hat to water, the fibers relax and I can start manipulating it. Think of it as the Play-Doh of the hat world. As the hat dries, it seals the shape.”

Boatner found the right shape for mother and child, added a custom hat band, and closed the sale.

All hats, no festivals

This summer’s precautionary shutdown of state festivals put the brakes on the Boatner hat business. “Besides that, with the virus, people aren’t going to try on hats that they don’t know whose head they have been on previously,” family patriarch Arvel said in mid-June.

In many cases, the family has had problems retrieving the deposit funds the Boatners put down to reserve booth space at various events across the state. The family’s farming efforts, focused on goat’s milk and related products, “are paying the bills,” Arvel said.

“We are staying in, and wearing masks whenever we need to go out. Until we have a cure of some kind, that’s just the way it is,” he said.

Each year, the Texas Steak Cookoff weekend festivities climax with a competitors-prepared evening steak dinner (for $25 more) and the cookoff winners announcement. (In 2019, Templebased J&J Cookers earned the top steak award and $3,500 prize money. The Kerr Cattle team nabbed the “People’s Choice” award, serving an impressive 317 steaks in two hours.)

Canceling the festival leaves a big hole. The streets of Hico were lonely the third week of May this year, with businesses still shuttered. Highway traffic between Austin to the south and the DallasFort Worth area to the northeast had dwindled between March and May.

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As with most communities within the state, Hico adapted. Restaurants started offering curbside pickup and deliveries for their local customers. In contrast to COVID-19 outbreaks in large Texas cities and even some of their surrounding counties, Hico was relatively untouched (as of the state’s phased reopening in May, it had no cases in the town, only three in the county, and no deaths), which led to some dissent about the state restrictions, locals admit, and added to the frustration about economic opportunities lost.

As state businesses started reopening in late May and early June, locals reported seeing a steady flow of weekend getaway drivers fleeing Dallas (100 miles), Fort Worth (80 miles), and even the Austin area (135 miles).

Reinventing an old-town feel

The town, rebuilt in mandated stone at the turn of the century after a fire consumed most of its downtown, represents an intriguing blend of the old and the reinvented.

Recent renovation of several downtown buildings has improved the number of rooms available.

The Bosque River RV Park (21 spaces) in the City Park and the Off The Vine RV Park outside of town (featuring five vintage trailers among its 24 hook-up sites) provide camping possibilities.

Guest property options have increased. One such example, the Old Rock House, located just a few blocks from downtown, is a restored 1874 abode nestled in a 100-year-old live oak grove. The Old Rock offers three well-appointed bedrooms and two baths. Guest perks include breakfast coupons at the pie-centric Koffee Kup Family Restaurant (it bakes as many as 100 a day), and a surprisingly good tasting session at Texan-turned-Californian-and-back Phil Lopez’ Silver Spur Vineyard & Winery downtown.

Hico also surprises in the quality, if not the range, of food options. The Chop House at the restored Midland Hotel serves a bonafide chicken fried steak. Eis (German for ice cream) serves what may be the best pimiento cheese sandwich in the land, on jalapeno sourdough that is distinctively sweet and hot. And, of course, the Koffee Kup provides daily repasts for locals, highway travelers, and hunters coming and going.

Early on a pre-COVID Friday afternoon, a here-again, gone-again breeze lightened a stroll through Hico City Park, about 50 acres that include playgrounds, a horseshoe pit, and disk golf course.

The smell of freshly cut fields lingered in the air. High upon the front wall of converted grain silos, a sign hawked “Poultry & Eggs,” a vestige of days gone by. The Texas Central Line (part of the Katy Railroad) used to run through here when Hico was the Hamilton County rail shipping center.

Dave Bradley was out front working amid the thick aroma of wood putty he was applying to some restored window frames. Bradley and his wife, Kathy, opened the Siloville Climbing Gym in 2015. (“Even a bad day of climbing is better than the best day at work.”) They restored the four abandoned grain silos, which haven’t been used to store wheat, rye, or oats since the 1970s, drilling hundreds of holes in the walls and then building the climbing anchor holds.

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Climbing was available inside (the interior space is 16-feet-by-66-feet) and out. The cash-only access is by appointment, or during open climbing on Saturdays. The site has obstacle, ninja, and zipline courses as well.

“While many people might think that they need tremendous strength to climb a silo, climbing is foremost a thinking sport,” Bradley said at the time. “You need to process, ‘How do I want to move?’”

Siloville Climbing did not qualify as an essential business under the Texas shutdown, and was only able to reopen, with distancing restrictions, in late May. They missed the two or three weeks of brisk business they usually do during spring break.

Two Clay Birds, a place where customers come to eat and visit a spell with Holly Stahnke.

“We have four places to climb on the outside, and we are using the two farthest spots to allow distancing,” Kathy explained in mid-June. She has not restarted a Thursday local kids’ climbing course because distancing with kids is virtually impossible.

“People are calling from Austin, Waco, and Fort Worth to check about prices and make appointments,” she said.

The town that depends heavily on tourism dollars seems to be doing pretty well despite the prolonged shutdown, Kathy said. “The city’s Economic Development Corp. [a state-legislated nonprofit development entity that promotes the creation of new and expanded industry and manufacturing activity within a municipality and its vicinity] has supplied local business with grants to help them survive.”

The town also announced in May that all residents who pay their water bill would get a $50 gift card that could be used at businesses in town.

In the best of times, casual moves are de rigueur here. A typical warm Hico afternoon is a tad somnolent, yet some earnest, industrious folks thrive.

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Kevin and Holly Stahnke are such folk. Originally from Stephenville, they spent several years fighting Austin traffic before bringing their family here in 2016 to help “make the town funky,” Kevin said pre-COVID at the counter of their Two Clay Birds Garden Market.

The Stahnke crew (Holly is chief renovator) converted a 100-year-old structure that formerly housed an auto parts store into what they envision as an ag-tourism destination. On US 281 past the turn for the Hill Country, in normal times the market may be frequented by DFW-area folks who have become fans, farmers from surrounding counties, or locals enjoying one of Kevin’s hearty, healthy lunches, savoring his artisan bread or on-site roasted coffee, or buying fresh produce. Pre-COVID, all were encouraged “to sit a spell,” and share old family recipes if they like.

The Stahnkes see more of their customers becoming more aware of making their own goods and being more self-sufficient.

The Stahnkes raise chickens and harvest what they grow organically from non-GMO seed on their nearby farm. The healthy lunches, such as pork posole with corn muffins or tomato pie, and baby arugula salad, have built a loyal following. Fresh-from-the-oven, bacon-filled sourdough and pecancrusted cinnamon rolls were display-case temptresses. Texas honeys, organic teas, spices, vintage cast iron cookware, hand-forged garden tools, all-natural soil supplements, and other nostalgic farm-to-table items lined the market’s shelves.

“From the 1950s to 1980s, we as a society lost a generation of cooks to conveniences offered through mixes and processed foods,” Kevin said. He and Holly wanted a more-connected, moreorganic, way of living — for themselves and their five children.

“I’m a big fan of the slow-food movement because it gives me an excuse to be slow,” he said, chuckling. “My theory is to prepare Southern comfort food with a little more quality ingredients and care. And then, I get out of the way.”

The Stahnkes, whose eldest daughter had experienced a life-threatening virus earlier in her life, closed their doors a week prior to the state mandate. For some time, they had operated an honor system porch food bin of weekend leftovers on Mondays. People would select their goods and leave payment in a jar on the porch.

During the shutdown, they adapted their operation to a full-time porch honor system, adding an invoice option for customers. When panic buying left grocery stores short on goods, Kevin said.

“We were the only place that had bread for a good three weeks in three counties here.”

“Kevin went from making three batches of breads a week to four batches a day,” Holly said in midJune. “He was coming home exhausted at night.”

They had some supply issues (their usual source of base ingredients in nearby Stephenville dried up), and for a spell had to shift their flour orders to a Waco mill, which made it necessary for Kevin to adjust his bread recipes. He would call an order three days in advance and drive the 120mile round trip to Waco to pick up 600 pounds of flour at a time. That would be enough flour for

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three weeks. He eventually found a distributor who could deliver his preferred King Arthur bread flour mix at 200 to 300 pounds at a time.

The expanded porch system has worked incredibly well for Two Clay Birds, so much so that Holly said they are talking about revising their formula going forward.

“We’ve got the opportunity to reinvent the way we do things,” she said.

Chocolatier Kevin Wenzel addresses a tour at his Hico studio.

On one Pre-COVID day, local renowned chocolatier Kevin Wenzel and his daughter Olivia dropped in to Two Clay Birds for a tomato pie and some bread for the family lunch. Wenzel had been doing some attic work at home. Olivia was along to make sure their food haul included Stahnke’s delectable cinnamon rolls. Banter ensued between the two Kevins.

Wenzel, who grew up working at his family’s The Dutchman Hidden Valley Country Store in nearby Hamilton (the elk and beef jerky are outstanding), is a small-town success story. Since 1996, travelers have devoured the artist/chocolatier’s world-class chocolate treats (Wiseman House Chocolates) in photographer Rufus Frank Wiseman’s historical house here. Wenzel normally also does chocolate classes in his downtown production studio.

Wiseman House shut down in March, offering free shipping for online sales for a while, a cost that eliminates its profit margin. Like a lot of merchants in town, he was giving stuff away rather than have it go bad, to nursing homes and other dependent-living places.

“We did very well for Easter, in that we sold a lot of product,” Wenzel said in mid-June. “We had a big loss in the first few months [of the shutdown] — $20,000, and haven’t quite made it all back yet.”

The Wiseman House introduced Curbside Chocolate Service during the shutdown and at the first of May opened at 50 percent capacity. Big online Mother’s Day product demand helped its bottom line recover.

Wenzel reports that Austin-Dallas traffic has recovered to pre-COVID levels, and Wiseman House has really done well since. He has a small chocolate lesson class in July, but won’t be offering any studio tours for the rest of the year.

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“We’ve been in business 24 years, and have been through 9-11 and the 2008 financial crisis, and we knew that people like chocolate in good times and bad,” he said. “It is something that they will not do without. You know, when times are rough, it’s alcohol, cheese, and chocolate.”

The chocolatier expects some Hico businesses to refine their operations post-pandemic. “Some of our downtown stores have an online presence, and others had struggled to do so pre-COVID,” he said. “I think those people will think long and hard about better developing their online product offerings.”

Hico, perhaps, remains best known for its contested claim on Billy the Kid. While Fort Sumner, New Mexico has long held that lawman Pat Garret killed the young outlaw there in 1881, Hico cast its lot with a longtime local, best known as Brushy Bill Roberts. Late in his life, Roberts maintained that he was Billy the Kid Museum, opened in Hico in 1987.

Billy and had escaped into Mexico.

He later ended up in Texas as Roberts, dying in the streets of Hico, not from a rain of bullets, but a heart attack in his 90s.

The saga has provided fodder for various books and publications, movies, and the television show Unsolved Mysteries. There is no doubt, however, within the walls of the Billy the Kid Museum.

“Billy the Kid is Hico’s number one attraction (about 9,000 annually),” said museum director Sue Land, standing behind the museum’s front counter one stormy Friday in February. “People come here from all over. We even have a great international traveler count. It’s extremely popular with Australians; they love the Billy the Kid legend.”

Land recites a litany of reasons why Roberts was the Kid, fortified by a stack of Pennsylvania writer Daniel A. Edwards’ 2014 Billy the Kid: An Autobiography. Land explains that Edwards

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compared the life of Billy the Kid and what Roberts related about it in specific detail, explored testimony of folks who knew both characters, and analyzed photographs of Billy the Kid and Roberts before concluding that the man who died in Hico in 1950 was indeed Billy.

Edwards, who lives in a Philadelphia suburb, began pursuing the Billy the Kid story as the “Brushy Bill” saga in early 2014.

“If Brushy Bill was not Billy the Kid, he must have been at the Kid’s elbow when some of these things happened,” Edwards declares in his book.

The man with the book strides in

In 2015, Edwards strode into the Hico museum and shared his many supporting views on the identity of said Brushy Bill. “We had never laid eyes on him before,” Land says. “He introduced himself, and gave us a copy of his book.”

Originally from Houston, Land moved here with family members in 2007 to raise cattle. The operation never proved successful enough. She started volunteering at the museum to fill her days.

By 2009, she became director of the fledgling museum, helping put it on firm ground.

The museum in recent years has broadened its scope to include some other historical sections, both military- and Hico-related. But Billy is its bell cow. People from all over the world hear about it and make their way to Hico.

Land laughed as she recalled “one gentleman visitor — I thought was a Texan because he was dressed like a drugstore cowboy, but he was from the UK.” Land asked him why he had come all that distance to Hico to learn about Kid, who had such a reputation as a killer, a bad guy.

According to Land, he replied, “ I played Billy the Kid when I was a boy. I love the history of Billy the Kid. I’m not rooting for that killer. I’m rooting for the 14-year-old.”

In mid-June, Land struggled to talk over the roar of motorcycles pulling away from the museum, which had been reopened the first of the month.

“It was heart-wrenching for us to shut down,” she said. “We all adjusted and did what we had to.

Some of the local merchants have developed their internet sales to a point where they have done all right through all of this. The local restaurants shifted to curb service and local delivery service.

The loss of the annual steak cookout, which brings in a huge amount of money for our stores and traffic into the museum, was quite a financial shock. But people are not ready to fly places yet, and are getting out in their cars on the weekends. Thing are looking up. We’ve even had some guests from Canada already.”

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Flora and Phil

Losing Phil

By David E. Hubler

Unlike Buck in ‘Call of the Wild,’ Phil was a lover not a fighter.

We lost Phil a little more than a year ago now. Well, “lost” isn’t the right word because we’ll never really lose him. We talk about him fairly often especially when the topic of smart dogs comes up.

No, Phil would never rank near the top in that category. Nor would he ever win any awards for athleticism; he couldn't catch a Frisbee to save his life. But he was fleet afoot! He was like the shy kid in school who did okay, no great scholar, but everyone liked him.

We adopted him soon after the death of Phil Rizzuto, my favorite Yankee ballplayer when I was growing up. Of course, the immediate urge was to name him Scooter, the nickname that Rizzuto carried with him throughout his life. And that would’ve been appropriate for the year-old mixed breed beagle we took home from the BREW folks (Beagle Rescue, Education and Welfare). He did scoot around the house.

But the timing was just awful. Another Scooter -- Scooter Libby, one of Vice President Dick Cheney’s lawyer pals -- had just been indicted on five counts of involvement in the disclosure of the name of an undercover CIA case officer, a federal no-no. Libby was subsequently convicted on four counts (one count of obstruction of justice, two counts of perjury, and one count of making a false statement) and had become a disgraced household name. So Scooter was out.

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By default, Phil was it. We were both happy with the choice. I got to pay homage to a boyhood idol and my wife, Becky had an uncle named Phil and often insisted that our Phil was named after him. NOT!

Dog of the Devil or Call of the Wild?

From the start, Phil was a handful. I nicknamed him El Perro del Diablo. Early on he slipped his leash and ran into the large park across the street from our home. I had the devil of a time catching him. Maybe that’s when he fell in love with that park for the rest of his life. His beagle traits were in full exposure during that flight for freedom. He paid no attention to my repeated calls for him and when I finally caught up with him he was in the midst of a group of picnickers trying to succeed in dining with them. If it hadn’t have been for the barbeque, I might never have caught him. A beagle’s -- even a half-beagle’s ---- unquenchable appetite did him in. That would not be the last time he bolted. And he was fast, too.

When Phil got to be a teenager (in dog years), Becky decided he needed a companion. So Flora, another rescue beagle, came into our lives. From the first days Flora ruled over poor Phil like Cinderella's wicked stepmother. He’d never confronted a true alpha dog before and he quickly learned to tread carefully around her.

Despite his domestication over the next several years, Phil was endowed with an innate wanderlust.

Jack London portrayed it beautifully in The Call of the Wild. His greatest escape came in the autumn of 2012. If Phil had one fear -- besides missing a meal -- it was thunder. He would begin to shake and pant uncontrollably long before we heard the first faint rumble. And he would continue to shake while the heavens rattled and rolled. Nothing could cure him of his fear, not canine tranquilizers, cuddling or even swaddling blankets or dog tee shirts. He panted like it was his last breath. This time the thunder was accompanied by very heavy rain and wind.

Sometime earlier we had acquired two dog tee shirts with the New York Yankees logo on them for their Halloween costumes, a small for his new sidekick and frequent nemesis, purebred beagle Flora, and a medium for Phil. We put the shirts on them in the hopes that Phil’s tight tee would comfort him and he’d stop shaking and panting. No way. Before bedtime, I leashed them and led them onto the covered carport so they could relieve themselves. No way. Flora just stood around looking at the rain while Phil got his shaking into fourth gear.

Reluctantly, and fearing an awakening to puddles on the carpet, I went to bed, and so did they -Flora at the far end of the bed and Phil choosing the bathroom to continue his convulsion-like quivering. Sometime around one a.m., Phil decided it was time to go, and Flora -- thinking she might miss out on something to eat -- followed along. The dog whisperer beside me in the bed said, “It’s raining so hard, they don’t need leashes, they’ll stay in the carport.”

Wrong! As soon as I opened the door, the two of them bolted out into “the dark and stormy night” (Thank you, Edward Bulwer-Lytton). Together they flew down the street and I rushed upstairs to dress and grab my car keys. I drove up and down our cul-de-sac several times calling out their names, hoping to pull off an auditory miracle -- loud enough for them to hear me over the cracks of thunder but not loud enough to wake the neighbors. No response.

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So I widened my search, moving out into the nearby streets. The rains pelted the car so forcefully the wipers could not keep up. I felt as if I was driving in a hurricane. Which I was, actually -Hurricane Sandy, one of the worst storms ever to strike the East Coast. The longer I drove around without finding them, the more I feared that they had run off into the park, Phil's Shangri-la. Flora, being a newbie, would certainly have followed.

The main problem with the park is that it is large, wooded and unfenced. Also, it is bounded on two sides by heavily trafficked main roads. If they got there, they could be lost for good . . . or worse.

Finally I spotted Flora, still as a statue alone on someone's front lawn. When I opened the door, she eagerly jumped in shaking her rain-soaked, tee-shirt clad body mostly on me. I headed home, figuring I’d get her indoors and then resume my search for Phil. A bird, rather a dog in hand . . . et cetera.

Whither the Wet Tee Shirt?

But when I pulled into the driveway there was Phil sitting on the front steps, about as wet as any animal could be, and that includes otters, sea lions and seals. However, Phil was naked, his Yankees tee shirt gone. So how did Phil strip off a tee shirt that had half sleeves covering his front legs? And in the midst of a Category 3 hurricane no less? Anyone who’s ever had to take off wet clothes knows how difficult that can be. Even though I drove around the neighborhood several times again the next morning when the storm had subsided, I never did find that tee shirt. It’s a Houdini mystery that Phil took to his grave.

Perhaps it was the storm, or maybe Phil’s growing maturity, but the few times afterward when he slipped out of his leash he remained nearby, just strolled through the neighbors’ yards sniffing and occasionally leaving behind an unwelcomed gift.

However, Phil’s love for the park never lessened. All I had to say was “Walkees!” and he would spin around like a whirling dervish, then hop on the chair so I could attach his leash. It was a joy to behold his obvious enthusiasm. Each day he would take his walk through the park with Flora and me, his step never slackening from a healthy, happy dog stride, his tail going like a metronome.

Of course, he had some health issues, some natural, some canine complicit. He had to have his teeth cleaned a couple of times, an unpleasant experience even with anesthesia. He also had a cancerous growth removed from his jaw that required special surgery. That cost him some teeth and his winning smile, and us a hefty vet bill. But he never moaned or groaned about it. And because it was along one side of his jaw, it was not often visible.

If he got too close to Flora’s food dish, or maybe even just eyed it, he got a couple of warning barks and an occasional nip from her. But the worst came in his beloved park when, contrary to county ordinance, an unleashed dog came at Phil and took a good bite of one ear. Blood flowed like the final scenes of “Scarface.” Becky rushed him to the animal hospital near us, where he was patched

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up and awarded with a “collar of shame” so he couldn’t scratch the wound. He took the whole experience in stride, this time too, never seeming in pain or whimpering.

Phil was a lover not a fighter. Unlike Buck in “Call of the Wild,” Phil never really had to wage war in the animal kingdom. Except once, when he and Flora “treed” a frightened raccoon, often a carrier of rabies, in a corner where our chimney met the adjacent wall of the house. Becky and I called and called them, hoping they’d get off the carport and let the raccoon run off. But they seemed to be really enjoying having the upper hand.

A raccoon problem They barked and the raccoon bared its teeth and hissed. So with their innate beagle instinct never to pay attention to human instructions when they were on their own, nothing -- not even the arrival of the Animal Control officer – could get them to cease and desist. His net wasn’t long enough to bag the varmint and he wouldn’t shoot it for fear of a bullet ricocheting off the brick and hitting one of us, him in particular I think. In truth, Animal Control was a misnomer; Animal Watch would’ve been closer to the truth, especially after a second officer came by a little later and mimicked his buddy’s inaction. If they had sped up their actions a bit it would’ve made a terrific Max Sennett silent comedy.

Finally Phil and friend got tired of tormenting the raccoon and hopped off the carport roof. At the suggestion of the second Animal Control officer -- after handing us county orders to keep them quarantined in “jail in the house” for 30 days we were told -- ordered is a better word -- to get them checked out at the vet. Which we promptly did. No visible wounds was the diagnosis, ergo no rabies infection, most likely.

When we returned from their county-ordered checkup it looked like the raccoon was gone. But later that evening while we were sitting in the living room enjoying our ritual libation, the raccoon appeared in the glass door. He (or she) looked in, as if to check to see that we were okay, and then scampered off across the fence into our neighbor's yard. Phil, too tired from his adventure, was sound asleep in one of the many dog beds strewn about the house for their -- literal -- creature comforts. Flora was in another room, probably on a full-sized bed.

The end came mercifully fast for Phil. Like many dogs at the end of their lives, he slowed down, sometimes left most of his food, sometimes all of it. He was too weak even to climb into the car for what turned out to be his last visit to the animal hospital. So when the vet -- who always enjoyed Phil’s company, getting down on the floor to meet Phil eye to eye -- came in with the results of the tests and x-rays, there was only one way to go. By that time Phil was lying on a blanket on the stepon scale, only his eyes were able to move following us as we paced and cried. I looked down at him, he looked up at me and I could swear his eyes were saying, "Do it, please. I’m ready."

Even now a year or so later, my eyes tear up as I write this. We took Phil’s collar and dog tags and buried them at the base of a tree in his beloved park. He would be happy and would no doubt whirl around one more time.

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A Look Inside Cuba Images of Havana Street Scenes, CafĂŠ, Artist Studio, Wall Art

By Karen Dinan

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Deadweight

By Samantha Marie

In ten days, it’ll be three months since you left.

I wish you cheated.

At least you lied about how much time we’d have.

I wish I hated you.

At least you don’t answer to prove you don’t care.

I wonder when I’ll see the date and not count how many days it has been.

When I’ll let go of the rope you used to climb. I am tired of the weight.

Woman Working My head remains a construction site.

The worker is depressed.

Hammering misery, screwing pain into the walls being built in the house I did not ask for.

I hang pictures of real smiles in the deep blue hallway to distract from the crumbling foundation.

I use music to silence the knocking of his name on the loose frame of the front door I’ll hide behind, so I won’t have to see his face.

I am stuck inside, loving the person I fell in love with But he doesn’t live here anymore. He isn’t him anymore.

Just me with my memories.

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TRIP

S o o o

Never Drive in India

By Kendric W. Taylor

Wreckage from horrific traffic pileups appears with regularity, like mile markers.

I’ve gotten behind the wheel in Buenos Aires, where obeying traffic rules is regarded as unmanly, steered regally on the wrong side of the road all over the UK (OK, I almost hit a bus in a roundabout in Leeds), tooted merrily down the Champs-Élysées, even crossed the US and half of Canada in my F150, but I never drove in India: never drive in India.

Twice I’ve been to that magical place, the first in 1969, when I learned almost immediately that crossing any road meant taking your life in your hands; much less actually driving on one.

On my next visit, part of a cruise of the Far East, although much had changed, much had not: a rapidly growing industrial and technological base paired with an air quality among the world’s most polluted: probably topping the list each fall when farmers burn the crop waste as they have for centuries. India was still a work in progress, too often still with its fabulous dichotomies -inefficiency wedded to the unfathomable.

On that first visit, I waited one afternoon at a traffic crossing in Bombay (Mumbai), dressed for an appointment – business suit, shirt and tie, briefcase, etc. Next to me at the curb stood a completely naked man with long wild hair, totally covered in gray ash from head to bare toes. A Holy Man. The sidewalk crowd checked me out curiously, but paid him no heed at all. He at least had a purpose familiar to them.

Now, back these many years later, out on the open road in journeying from Delhi to Agra, I’m sharing a private car with Marshall, a travel journalist; a grandee of the printed page, a man at home anywhere. Last evening, returning from the rail yards, where we dined aboard India’s most luxurious train, the Maharaja’s Express, the taxi actually hit a cow, of all things -- a stunning accomplishment in a land where the animal is considered sacred. The spindly bovine sprang embarrassedly to its feet and limped off; no doubt longing for the good old days when being sacred really meant something.

The roads are India’s commercial and social lifeblood, arteries stretched across deserts and rice paddies, down valleys and between mountains. The two-lane blacktop pulses with chaotic activity,

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punctuated with frantically honking horns, blaring truck claxons and burping motor scooters; passing through towns and cities where the thoroughfares teem with cascades of dinging bicycle bells and rasping motor scooters. Bobbing along on this current are jittering mongrels, foraging pigs, wandering cows and swaying camels. Water buffalo, donkeys and oxen plod by, hauling mountainously piled carts stuffed with every imaginable cargo, the waves of human bipeds parting for them, the men carrying equally gigantic bundles of everything from kitchen wares to grain. A long line of blue farm tractors bounce merrily past, part of an American aid program, their paint glinting fresh, the seats still plastic-wrapped for shipping, their two-wheel trailers already jammed with passengers heading for the outlying villages.

Marshall has begun to refer to our driver as Uncle Vito, a close approximation of his actual name.

He is convinced Uncle is a wheelman for an American crime family, here in India to hone his road skills on the world’s foremost obstacle course. Marshall points to the great respect extended to Uncle by other drivers for his heroic disregard of traffic regulations and the way he forces oncoming traffic off the road, and for the depraved indifference he displays to the future of his passengers. He is careful about electricity however, often driving at night with lights out, to save on the battery.

Now, Uncle edges us up nervously behind a gaily-painted truck, its tailgate cautioning: “Use dipper at night.” A friendly tip to the thirsty road traveler? No – only a plea to blink lights to pass. A line of immobile trucks comes into view, stretching for miles, the cab occupants practically taken root, suspended in time, waiting in the heat, queued for a single filling station so far ahead it’s out of sight, waiting for precious diesel fuel that likely will run out simultaneously with their arrival.

Wreckage from horrific traffic pileups appears with regularity, like mile markers. The bystanders though are more interested in staring at us as we go by, than the carnage at their feet. We are in the real countryside now, our shadow racing across the glinting surface of the green paddies, brown mountains in the distance rising through the blue haze. Our tires scatter rice from the roadside, spread out to dry by locals. A brightly painted bus roars past, crammed inside and out with riders.

I cringe in horror as a smiling passenger, clinging by fingernails to the back of the swaying vehicle, turns to wave. Already we have killed two dogs and a small pig. Vultures hack at an animal’s carcass in a ditch. A disabled vehicle looms ahead. The engine sways from a jury-rigged A-frame; tools, parts, nuts and bolts are spread across the tarmac while the driver and his repair crew snooze in the shade. Up ahead, women scatter cow dung patties on the shoulder to dry in the sun for fuel.

We pass slowly through the outskirts of a city, convoyed by ugly Tampos -- noxious three-wheel mini-cabs jammed with passengers far beyond any reasonable capacities. We halt for a long line of camels to sway past, huge thickets of wood balanced precariously on their humps. We turn after the last of them, following the caravan out into the desert, through flat, endless space, the red sunset glowing through the arches of small temples sitting off in the fields, Far out in the desert state of Rajasthan, our car sits at a rail crossing. Uncle Vito chats up ahead with his fellow drivers. A line of village foot traffic passes the window. A tall woman sweeps by, her colorful sari flashing, a large, flat stone balanced stately atop her head. Marshall immediately thrusts his head out the window: “I have to know,” he inquires impulsively. “That rock on your head, what’s it for?”

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I smile ironically. We are out in the middle of nowhere. She won’t understand him, much less what he’s talking about, or even care. Solemnly, she peers in the window: “Grinding meal.”

Marshall settles back into his seat, nodding mystically.

“How did you know she’d answer?” I ask. “How did you know?”

“It’s India.”

Sharks ! . . . ?

Forty years or so ago, I acquired a cheap hardback book from about 100 years previous. It purported to be the memoirs of a French sailor who had spent some years in the 17th century as a pirate. I was never convinced of the authenticity of the story, but it was very entertaining. I have long since lost the book, and forgotten its title and author, but I do remember one story from it, though I am unwilling to vouch for its veracity.

The author and several of his shipmates had been put ashore on a small island in the Caribbean for the purpose of gathering firewood, or water, or some other necessity. Once their task had been completed, they were free to entertain themselves for the rest of the afternoon, and our hero decided that he’d like a refreshing swim.

He didn’t see any of the locals in the water, so he looked around and found an elderly native sitting in the shade of a palm tree, mending fishing nets, and asked him if there were sharks in the area.

“Lots of sharks along here, but none around the river mouth.”

He thanked his informant and went the 100 yards or so to the river mouth. There he enjoyed a satisfying swim. After he came out, he began wondering why the sharks avoided the river mouth.

Retracing his steps along the beach, he saw the old man still there, so he put the question to him.

“Sharks afraid of the crocodiles!”

– Frank I. Sillay

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Waaaaht?

Gassed Mule

By Malcolm P. Ganz

Uncle Johnny ascended to that exalted title by the simple expedient of marrying my mother’s sister Florence. They lived in Savannah, Georgia. Where she was a schoolteacher and he was a railroad man in various capacities with the Savannah and Atlanta (S&A) Railroad. He was a laconic, humorous character, who enjoyed hunting wild turkeys, and I liked his style.

The two families would often go on a summer holiday together, usually on the coast, in or near Savannah, and involving swimming, fishing, crabbing, and card playing.

When Thanksgiving weekend rolled around, the Savannah tribe would often stay with us in Atlanta, and on the big day, another half dozen local members of the extended family would usually turn up for a feast of epic proportions.

On one such day, as sisters and sisters-in-law buzzed around the kitchen like a swarm of agitated bees, and heavenly cooking smells pervaded the neighbourhood, my preteen powers of restraint were at the breaking point. “When are they going to be finished?” I wailed to Uncle Johnny, “I’m SO hungry!”

He laughed and said “You don’t know what it is to be hungry. Let’s go for a walk, and I’ll tell you about it.”

As the oldest of several brothers, Johnny would often be left in charge when their father was away from the farm for a few hours. On the final occasion that this happened, his instructions were that there was to be no recreational riding of the mule, as a big day of work was scheduled for the next day. Well, you know what happened. The mule got two weeks’ worth of exercise that day, and

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Uncle Johnny had his manifold sins and wickednesses explained to him in detail. Verbally and physically.

Upon reviewing his options, he decided that he had talents that were not being exploited to his advantage, so he left home and joined the U.S. Army. The next thing he knew, he was in France, representing Uncle Sam’s interests in a dispute with Kaiser Wilhelm.

“The roads were no good to begin with, just dirt farm tracks, and it had been raining since before we had arrived, like a cow pissing on a flat rock, so we hadn’t been resupplied for weeks. We had a reasonable supply of ammunition, and that’s all the big shots cared about. We had been down to two pieces of hardtack a day for more than a week, and what with digging out trenches where the mud was washing into them, we were not far from beginning to feel sorry for ourselves.

“All of a sudden, early one morning, there was a gas attack; Gas shells dropping all around us. The sound was different. They didn’t arrive with the same bang as the high explosive shells. It took us by surprise, and it was touch and go, getting our gas masks on in time. There were artillery mules penned up in an enclosure not far behind our trenches, and the fellows who were responsible for putting the gas masks on the mules hadn’t gotten there in time. As the gas was clearing, we could see that a number of the mules had been killed.

“Well, the natural thing to expect after a gas attack was a visit from the Germans, but at least half of us were up out of the trench, bayonets in hand and busy butchering gassed mules. By the time we got back, the rest of the boys had fires going, and we were busy cooking mule steaks.

“If Saint Peter stops me at the gate and asks me what was the best meal I ever had, I won’t hesitate a heartbeat. I’ll tell him ‘Gassed Mule’” I had to admit, this story allowed me to consider the concept of “hungry” in a whole new light.

With a four-inch wingspan, bright lemon coloration, and slender tails, the Western Tiger Swallowtail butterfly, Papilio rutulus, is one of the most common, and beautiful, butterflies in the American West. Swallowtail tails, most of them shaped like slender necks, are an evolutionary diversionary feature meant to draw predators, such as birds, away from vital head and torso areas.

Photo by Buddy Mays

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The Ghost of 17B

By Jay Jacobs

. . . Science could never explain what happened next.

A shape was forming within the mist.

I’ve had a love affair with the Catskill Mountains for as long as I can remember. The very first memory that I can recall was of me as a toddler playing with a toy helicopter in a field of fresh cut green grass, and the vast canopy of cloudless, eggshell blue sky above me. My father helped me hold the handle of the little toy, and together we would wind it up and then press the little button that would launch the plastic propeller high above us, after which I would run and chase it just to do it all over again. There were lots of kids and adults there that day, and many more to come in those early days in the mountains.

As a teenager, I spent many days hiking and camping in the Catskills, and at the prompting of friends that had homes there, I made the migration from Queens to Sullivan County and found various odd jobs.

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Anyone who’s ever spent any time in the Catskills will be familiar with their rugged beauty and pristine splendor. The mountains aren’t as tall nor jagged as the awe-inspiring expanse of the Rocky Mountains or the legendary peaks of Switzerland, but instead undulate gently in soft green tree-covered hills and valleys, cut here and there by the many rivers, streams, lakes and waterfalls that make up the watershed. There are numerous roads that rise, dip, and cut through the living mountains, and when you look up from the lower elevations, you can often see a high peak disappear in heavy gray mist. The effect can be quite striking, as parts of the peak appear and disappear at the whim of the winds. I’ve driven those roads a good part of my life, and at twilight this can be eerie and disconcerting, playing strange tricks of shadow and perspective on a driver. Motorists will often brake suddenly to avoid hitting what seems to be a solid mass of fog, often of suggestive shape, that suddenly appears out of nowhere. I’d wager that such sights may have contributed to the local myths, superstitions, and folklore which have arisen around the Catskills, but I have no doubt that they have been at least partly responsible for more than a few motor vehicle fatalities.

Now in my sixty-eighth year, I remember back when I was a boy of 10 or 11 when my friends and I would get permission to camp out overnight in the woods. Of course we were supervised by an adult, but one thing that stands out in my mind was sitting huddled in our sleeping bags around the campfire listening to the mandatory ghost stories. As I got older, I took an interest in the folklore of the Catskill region, and found that for hundreds of years stories have circulated concerning the supernatural nature of these ancient mountains. Most people are familiar with Washington Irving's “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle,” and there are others, less widely known, that can send shivers up your spine. Having been stranded on a lonely mountain road at night, I know that it takes a brave soul to willingly venture into the Catskill woods alone after twilight.

Sometimes it seems as if the moldy, ancient, gnarled trees are capable of reaching out a branch to trip you up, or worse, to inflict bodily injury. I suppose most people would simply chalk up such an incident to a passing gust of wind, or just plain clumsiness. But there are others who will swear that something of a more malevolent nature is at work.

Will ‘o the wisps, fairy lights

I can recall talking to local folk who have seen glowing lights commonly called “will ‘o the wisps” flitting between the trees or hovering over marshy areas at night time. And it’s true that over the years, some people who have been foolish enough to chase these “fairy lights” have ended up lost in the woods, injured or even drowned in the pursuit. In the mid 1990s, I was out walking an isolated dirt road one night with a family member when we both saw something we couldn’t explain, and which, to this day, she refuses to talk about. A luminous, pulsating orange globe was lazily drifting above the treetops. It made no sound, but seemed to be moving deliberately as if looking for something. It was during this encounter I remembered that 25 years before, I had seen a similar thing with a friend. At that time, we stood on the porch watching in amazement as it floated high above the treetops until it disappeared from sight. After it had vanished, we looked incredulously at each other and simultaneously blurted out “we saw one!”

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In those days, the heyday of the big resort hotels was waning. Nonetheless, they were still doing enough business for me to find work. I not only got a job bussing in the dining hall, but they gave me a room in one of the buildings, which housed the live-in staff, and I got meals to boot. My room was on the top floor of an old building called, of all things, the “white house,” although it was about the size and shape of a subway car. The room featured a semi-circle of five windows at the far end with a spectacular western view. My second shift in the dining room didn’t start until around eight o’clock in the evening, so I often got to see the sunset. On clear days I would often sit and stare out those windows to watch bizarre cloud formations forming out of thin air at odd angles, which would appear and disappear seemingly at random. A friend of mine who also saw them called them “the fingers,” but I thought they looked more like enormous cigars. Later, I found out that they had been reported for decades, and were the subject of short articles in the local papers.

The more time you spend in the Catskills, the more you’re prone to see or hear odd things. Of course it doesn’t happen to everyone, but for some reason, these mountains seem to be a “hot spot,” perhaps a kind of land-locked Bermuda Triangle. Once, my girlfriend (at the time) and I were taking a walk in a field behind her house when we heard several voices just at the threshold of hearing. They were too indistinct to make out what was being said, but for some reason, we both got a chill when we heard them. We were also perplexed because the house was in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by farmland. The sound was strangely hollow with no specific point of origin, as if the voices were disembodied. In doing a little research, I found our experience was not unprecedented. There is a similar phenomenon called the “Lake George Vortex,” where the source of the sounds are impossible to pinpoint, as they seem to come from everywhere, and nowhere and seldom linger for long.

Most people are of the opinion that these curiosities and can easily be explained. The fairy lights are said to be caused by phosphorescent swamp gas or a form of St. Elmo’s Fire; the cigar clouds, just unusual air currents; the disembodied voices merely a trick of acoustics, an echo perhaps from somewhere distant. Most people I know dismiss these incidents lightly, merely regarding them as entertaining reading in their Sunday newspaper supplement. But people who have lived in these mountains for generations don’t regard them quite so frivolously. Some choose to look upon such occurrences with tacit resignation and acceptance, preferring not to talk about them, as if by doing so, an unknown and unexpected personal misfortune may occur, often expressed as, “better not to tempt providence.”

I’ve heard that on certain nights when you can’t see your hand in front of your face, some people keep their lights burning through the night, and only turn them off well after dawn. Perhaps the reason, as one report, circulating for well over a century, has it that the sound of heavy footsteps can sometimes be heard clattering upon the roof of farmhouses, cabins and isolated lodges on moonless, starless nights. Frightened, puzzled residents equipped with flashlights, lanterns and even outdoor floodlights have never been able to catch a culprit in the act, and no footprints, or means of getting onto the roof have ever been found.

Another rather benign, but equally odd occurrence has come to be known as the “shimmering ripples.” Similar in appearance to the heat waves that rise off a car hood on a hot summer’s day, they have been witnessed over the years by numerous people while simply sitting inside their

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homes. The ripples appear randomly within the home and last for only a second or two. They are usually seen as a shimmering distortion forming in thin air and always in a horizontal position.

Occasionally, a “presence,” usually of a departed family member, is associated with the event.

Residents of New York City, looking for a weekend getaway in summer, stay at bed and breakfasts, or rent private homes here. While they may or may not be aware of the inexplicable ghostly phenomena of the Catskills, they are not shielded from their effects. There was the young, childless couple who rented a house built in the late 1800s for a two-week stay, but left after only one day and night because they heard the sound of children playing with a bouncing rubber ball, and running about in the attic. But there was nothing up there except old furniture and cobwebs.

Then there was the fly fisherman who thought he discovered a “honey hole” deep in the woods teeming with fish, but couldn’t shake the feeling that he was being watched. When he felt the hair on the back of his neck suddenly stand up, he grabbed his gear and raced back to his car. As he drove off, he saw all the trees behind him being whipped about by a sudden strong wind that was gaining on him, as if trying to catch up with the car, even though every tree around that lake stood completely motionless, unaffected by the same gusts; with not so much as a leaf stirring.

And then, sometimes, things get personal. This part of the story is difficult for me to tell because no one wants to be held up to ridicule for claiming they “saw a ghost.” But it happened to me, and come what may, now that I’m old enough to not give a damn what people think, I just feel the need to tell it.

On one particular stretch of 17B

In late May of 1974, on a stretch of state route 17B in Sullivan County, an incident occurred that has never been satisfactorily explained either by science or parapsychology. While 17B is the road that leads to the little town of Bethel, where the Woodstock Music and Art Fair was held in 1969, the place where this incident occurred is farther west, past the turnoff that led to the festival site.

Out of respect for the local people who make their home there, its exact location will not be revealed, so as to prevent the area from being sought out by amateur ghost hunters, thrill seekers, and the merely curious who may chance to read this.

I had lived and worked in Sullivan County for several years, but at the time of the incident I had just moved across the Delaware river to neighboring Pennsylvania. The day broke warm and sunny, so I rode my motorcycle to the New York side to go boating and water skiing with friends. I had an enjoyable day, but dusk was fast turning to night, so I said my goodbyes, hopped on the bike, and took off from the lake heading west down 17B. There are many steep hills and deep valleys in the Catskills, and one particular stretch of 17B is so long that it can take several minutes to go from the summit to the bottom of the valley, and then back up to the top of the next rise. I had crested the peak of the hill and was making my way down.

The chilly, still air hung like a damp shroud over everything, making the steady drone of my Yamaha seem intrusive as it split the dense silence of the night. There were no other vehicles to be seen in either direction, but that’s not unusual for any stretch of country road almost anywhere.

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I could see a fog slowly starting to make its way across the road from the sodden, grassy area on the south side towards the north shoulder. The moisture in the air gave a faint, eerie luminescence to the fog, as the water droplets reflected the last of the waning daylight.

The mist crept slowly and steadily across the road like a living thing, stretching out clammy hands in probing tendrils and swirling spirals. As the motorcycle droned on hypnotically, I fell into a sort of tunnel-vision, trance-like state. Trees, road signs, farms, houses, mile markers, and virtually everything around me began fading from my immediate perception until only me, the bike, and the rolling gray mist existed. As the motorcycle steadily ate up the distance, the fog came into greater focus. Something about it didn’t appear right to me, but I wasn’t close enough yet to see what it was. The incline of the hill was so steep that I wasn’t able to see where the fog met the road until I was about halfway down. But when my line of sight leveled out enough to provide a clear view, I got a chill at what I saw.

Horror movie fantasy come to life

The curtain of moisture crept steadily across the two lanes, swirling and roiling then falling like drizzle under a streetlamp, yet remarkably, it never reached the road. Abruptly vanishing as if hitting an unseen barrier, a foot high layer of dry air separated the mist and the road. I suppose that from a scientific point of view you could argue that the disparity was caused by differing pressure systems of warm and cold air converging, or abnormal air current flow. Although such theories may be plausible from a logical standpoint, you could never convince me that what I saw next had anything to do with science.

A shape was forming within the mist.

There are some things the mind cannot process at first, so it goes into a state of denial until the truth of the situation becomes an indisputable fact. For a brief moment, my mind had to deny what I was seeing, because a thing like that can’t be reconciled with reality; this was a horror movie fantasy come to life. But there couldn’t be any doubt.

Floating a foot above the roadway was the unmistakable figure of a woman. Surrounded by the swirling mist, the apparition was hovering upright, slowly drifting across the road from north to south, opposite the direction the mist was moving. She was clothed in garments of the late Victorian era, her full length dress puffed out at the back with a bustle and just the hint of a bow. I couldn’t see her shoes, because the dress flattened abruptly at the point where the mist disappeared, as if that was the line of demarcation between our world and hers. Her arms hung casually by her sides, elbows slightly bent. The sleeves puffed out coming off the shoulders, tapering at the elbows to the wrist, but her hands were hidden by a muff carried at waist level. She cut an elegant figure, even-featured, her hair done up in a tight bun atop her head, the hint of a collar at a long and graceful throat. The overall appearance reminded me of an old cameo of an attractive young woman from the mid to late 19th century. She floated serenely and silently, drifting in that same, unchanging stand up posture toward the middle of the road.

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On some level, I knew that both of us were moving toward a mutual destiny that must be played out to its conclusion, but what that outcome might be was beyond my understanding. And to say I was terrified, fearful of what that conclusion might be, would be an understatement. I felt like a deer in the headlights. I couldn’t stop the motorcycle or slow it down to save my life--literally--so strong was the spell that held me. With only a matter of seconds before I’d be alongside her, my pounding heart felt as if it would burst out of my chest. Then, just before contact, a sudden thought flashed through my mind: the wash of air as I passed was going to blow her away like a puff of smoke in a gale. The thought kept repeating in my head like a skipped record as I roared by, close enough to reach out a hand and touch her. But while the mist surrounding her blew every which way, as if a fan had suddenly been switched on, she remained undisturbed and unchanged, simply continuing to drift in her slow, stately manner towards the south shoulder as if the laws of physics didn’t apply to her; as if nothing at all had happened.

In passing her, I had reached the bottom of the valley and was now on the uphill ascent. I was fixated on watching her in my rear view mirrors, not even bothering to look at the road ahead, completely heedless of any danger. When I felt the road level out at the top of the hill, I snapped out of my trance and turned to look back. Slowly, like taffy being stretched and pulled, she began to dissipate and lose her form, merging with the thickening fog until nothing more of her remained.

The memory of the encounter has not dimmed at all for me since that night; I can still picture her clearly in my mind. But life of course goes on. A few years after the encounter, I settled down and married, raised a family and settled into a normal life. But I’ve never been able to get her out of my mind, and have forever been haunted by her memory. You see, unlike the vast mass of doubting humanity who live in prosaic, non-threatening comfort, I know.

Over the years I’ve been back to the exact spot where the sighting took place, but she has never again materialized. As the decades passed, I wondered if I had gotten aspects of my memory wrong. Or perhaps the conditions when I’d returned weren’t precisely right for her to reappear.

From the little that is known about wraiths, ghosts and spirits, they rarely can be relied upon to show up on schedule. Nonetheless, I’ve been left with the feeling that there will come a time when conditions are right, when chance finds me again on that same stretch of road, and I’ll meet up once again with the ghost of 17B.

Palettes of color, Lorquin’s Admiral butterflies, Limenitis lorquini, look like bright, red, white, orange, and black flying flowers as they patrol the countryside in search of mates, They are also friendly critters, often alighting on hats or shoulders as hikers pass through their territory.

Photo by Buddy Mays

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That Last Year at Oloffson’s

By Tony Tedeschi

It had become a contest. A trio vying for her attention: the glib, game-playing gigolo; the entrepreneur with the fat bankroll . . . and the writer, with little more to offer her beyond the immortality of his words . . .

The first time I’d seen Gabby at the Grand Hotel Oloffson, I had come to Haiti for the annual pre-Lenten carnival with a good friend of mine who ran a successful advertising and public relations agency in Miami. Tom was mixing some business with a lot of pleasure. We had gone to college together. While we’d both had aspirations about being writers, Tom had decided to make writing pay. Now he had the money to play. He’d been winning at the casino in the Royal Haitian and giving it back to the ladies every night, Dominican women working the clubs for men who preferred their dark-eyed, light-chocolate-skinned, Latin look. Tom was one of those extremely gregarious personalities who usually found a way to command the center of any gathering.

I’d been doing ongoing research for the Haiti section I wrote in a Caribbean travel guide. I’d also managed to convince a European news service to give me an assignment on the carnival and the Haitian cultural experience. I’d given up on trying to keep up with Tom, so I stayed behind, each night, to sort through my notes. The lingering sounds of the music from the street bands knifing 49

through the tamarind trees in the garden on my side of the hotel played counterpoint to the solitude of my room, with its terrace overlooking the lights of Port-au-Prince at the base of the hill.

It was the early 1980s. I’d been writing travel articles for more than a decade by then and had some impressive exposure in the better travel magazines. When the editors for a new Caribbean travel guide were recruiting writers for the various sections, I’d sought and won the Dominican assignment. All the other assignments went rapidly, except for Haiti, the most impoverished country in the Western Hemisphere, with the added onus as a hotspot for the spread of HIV/AIDS. As a result, no one wanted to write the Haiti section in the guidebook. Since Haiti occupied the western portion of the island of Hispaniola, which it shared with the Dominican Republic, the guidebook editor assigned the country to me, despite my protests. “It’s the same island,” he’d said. “It’s not like I can just drive over there,” I countered. “They hate each other.

Hell, Dominican Independence Day marks the date the country freed itself from Haitian rule. I’d have to fly from the DR back to either Miami or New York to get back there.” “You want to write for us or not?” he countered. I took the assignment. Thus, my journeys there became a deep dive into loneliness. Even the better hotels had few rooms occupied. Dinner at the better restaurants were often just me and perhaps one or two other patrons present. I dreaded going to the country.

Except for the Grand Hotel Oloffson. Named for the Norwegian ship captain who had converted it from an ornate Victorian property built for a former president of Haiti, the hotel was operated by a surly expat New Yorker, who had a sign on his desk which read, “The Customer Is Always Wrong.” Nonetheless, the guestbook of those who had stayed there read like an A-list of celebrities and socialites. The guests who were deemed worthy had one of the accommodations named after him or her, according to the proprietor’s opinion of their worthiness, from the commodious Sir John Gielgud Suite to Chambre Mick Jagger, the smallest room in the hotel.

Given its notoriety among the celebrated, Oloffson’s became a place frequented by a cast of pretenders to status, characters out of a novel by Graham Greene, a short story by Somerset Maugham, or even one by Hemingway. So, each time I stayed there, I passed my depressively lonely nights before going to bed, writing exercises in fiction, inspired by my observations of, and strange encounters with, the bizarre characters who stayed there, some of whom were regulars during carnival time. This time, Tom was one of the colorful characters livening things up, a significant element in my personal entertainment. And then, there was Gabby.

Tom, of course, was the one who broke the ice with Gabby. He and I had been dining at the restaurant on the veranda, when she came up the stone steps from street level, walked by our table, then through the adjacent doorway and sat in one of the love seats positioned about the room in front of the bar. She was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt, with a long-sleeve cotton sweater draped over her shoulders. She was a young woman with a thin build and she walked with a wonderful lack of pretense, moving between the tables on the veranda with the delicate step of a show horse. From our table, I could see her sitting beneath a ceiling fan and playing with a swizzle stick she’d found lying on the table in front of her. A waiter came by, but she waved him off, then shouted something at him in French as he walked away. He returned, dragging a large, black dog by one of its front paws. When the dog saw Gabby, it freed its paw from the waiter’s grasp, then padded over to the young woman and placed its chin in one of her hands. She stroked the dog

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behind an ear for a while, then it curled up at her feet, nudging her hand, every now and then, for another soothing stroke or two.

She was sitting in silence. I wondered what she was doing there without food or drink, or companionship – save for the beast at her feet – just staring blankly into space. Tom’s antennae had gone up immediately. I must say she caught your eye, her white skin and ash-blonde hair contrasting the dark corners of the room like a bed sheet flapping in the moonlight. Tom was not much company, once he’d seen her. He’d had quite a few bottles of Prestige and was beginning to get loud, but Tom was an engaging man even when he’d had a lot of beer. He had a killer smile and a disarming sense of humor and people forgave him a lot for that. He waited for me to finish my sentence, then got up and started toward the archway.

“Tom,” I said, “wait a minute,” but he ignored me. I was sure he was going to create some kind of commotion, and the young woman didn’t look like she went well with that kind of scene, so I followed him inside.

Gabby looked, at first, as if she wanted to alert the dog. There was a stern look of annoyance in the set of her jaw, a look that announced we had invaded her territory and she was not about to give up her seat, irrespective of the assault on her space. The downward curve at the corners of her mouth became more pronounced as Tom sat down in a sofa opposite, Gabby’s pale, blue-gray eyes darkening just a shade. Although she looked like she knew how to deal with interruptions, I was sure she’d never met anyone like Tom before. I sat alongside him to mediate, keeping a wary eye on the dog, but it seemed dead to the world.

“Come here often?” Tom inquired.

I blurted out a laugh.

She obviously considered the come-on not even worthy of a response because she chose to ignore it. Instead, she slipped off her sandals, pulled her legs up under her on the sofa and looked off in the opposite direction – as if neither of us existed – toward the bar, where a heavy-set man in white shirt and slacks was conversing with a young man in a beautifully tailored business suit. The heavyset man was gesturing animatedly with a thick cigar held between two stiffened fingers.

“Let’s go back to our table, Tom,” I said, watching the girl, who made not the slightest attempt to acknowledge our presence. “It’s clear the young woman doesn’t want to be disturbed.” I put my hand on Tom’s arm, but he ignored it and after a few moments, I withdrew it, awkwardly.

The young woman turned back in our direction. “I’m sure you have something you want to say to me,” she opened, “so please get to it, then –” “Nope,” Tom cut her off.

A waiter had approached our tense trio.

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“I’d offer to buy you a drink,” Tom said, never taking his eyes from hers, which, likewise, remained locked on his, “but I’m not sure what the age limit is down here.”

“There is none,” she said.

“Nonetheless, I’d suggest a virgin colada,” he replied. His face lit into that all-encompassing smile, which could take a blowtorch to a glacier.

She couldn’t hold back the quiver of a smile.

“Barbancourt, neat,” she said to the waiter. “Put it on my tab. These gentlemen will be ordering separately.”

I raised my eyebrows, impressed with her choice of the country’s world class rum, never to be polluted by even so much as an ice cube. Tom added rows of piano teeth to his smile and ordered two bottles of Prestige for us. He continued to stare at Gabby as if by doing so he could penetrate the shield she’d raised between us. “I’m just trying to make conversation,” he said in her direction, “break the ice, so to speak . . . be sociable.”

Gabby, however, was back to watching the bar, where the man in white now began to cast concerned looks our way. He was shifting his weight from leg to leg, nervously. Finally he made a wave of his hand to excuse himself and began to drain his drink.

“The man about to interrupt our little ‘conversation’ is my stepfather,” Gabby said, turning suddenly toward Tom. “He owns pieces of several businesses down here that supply goods for his businesses in New York. The handsome one in the suit is his local banker here. My stepfather owns him, as well.”

Gabby’s stepfather left the banker and approached. “. . . Yes,” Gabby said to Tom, as the man drew near, “I’d be happy to join you at casino, tonight.

Let me go change. I’ll only be a few minutes.”

The man in white watched, disapprovingly, a dark, angry look on his face, as she got up and started in the direction of the staircase near the front desk. Then, almost as an afterthought, she stopped and, turning ever-so-slightly back toward us, said, “gentlemen, this is Harry Gordon, my stepfather.”

“Gabrielle,” he countered, but she had already turned away, slipped the sweater from both her shoulders, and as a continuation of the same motion, flung it over her left shoulder and started up the stairs, once again setting in motion the wonderfully orchestrated movement of her walk.

Tom smiled. “A pleasure,” he said. “I’d love to stay and chat, but I must be off to change as well.

It seems I have a date for the casino.”

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I was astonished by the turn of events. But things like that happened to Tom. For my part, however, I didn’t want to mop up with Harry, so I excused myself, as well, and headed for my room to transcribe my thoughts.

He stood at the craps table, making his point, roll after roll, until he feigned boredom and said he had a date with a deck of cards. She had positioned herself at the far end of the table, not needing to see the numbers on the ivories; she a figure in white ivory far more intriguing than the compliant cubes. At the blackjack table, her hand rested upon his shoulder, fingers occasionally feathering his neck. When the one-eyed jack peaked from behind the ace, he swept up his winnings, tossed a chip toward the dealer, and headed for exit, she gripping his arm, her head nestled against his shoulder. . . * * * * * I flew to the north coast, before dawn the next morning, to interview an archaeologist who had made some important discoveries concerning the early voyages of Columbus. Throughout the day, however, my thoughts were often loose in space, tracking Tom and Gabby and what it must be like to force an encounter with a beautiful young woman and have it resolve the way that one had worked out for Tom. I was envious, of course, jealous really, and anxious for dinner and the chance to talk with him about it, but he had not answered the messages I’d left for him all day, was not in his room when I returned to the hotel, and was not available at dinnertime. I dined without him, which allowed for my scribbled observations of the play unfolding about me.

Katherine, the art dealer from Philadelphia, was chatting with Magy who was from Paris and designed sweaters, which sold for hundreds of dollars, but cost only a few dollars to make in Haiti.

Katherine and Magy were always together . . . At a small table by the doorway to the veranda, a young woman was trying very hard to be noticed by everyone but her male companion, who was quite a bit older. I’d overheard one of the other guests say he was a lawyer from “down south somewhere. Very influential.” His companion crossed and uncrossed her legs, each time displaying seductive flashes of hidden recesses . . . A table of scrabble players was paying token attention to the game, but seemed quite engrossed in the pronouncements of a heavy-set man from New York who was in the import/export business. He held a cigarette as if it were a pointer, in a right hand heavy with gold bracelets, while, between puffs, he spoke with the tone of voice of someone who is an authority on everything. His wife, in an apricot print dress, sat alongside and looked bored . . . At another table, a middle-aged woman, in a tropical dress far too formfitting for her excess weight, was talking with two homosexual men who spoke about nothing but the theatre.

Six businessmen from Texas were talking and talking and talking business . . . Pickins’ slim this evening.

I closed my notebook, signed my check and headed back to my room.

When I came down for a nightcap, several hours later, I spotted Tom and Gabby seated at a large round table in a far corner of the veranda. This time they were already dressed for a night on the

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town and I decided that despite the size of the table they had chosen, they would probably want to be alone. When Tom saw me, however, he waved me over.

“Where the hell have you been?” he asked. “I’ve been calling your room all day.”

“I’ve been at Cap-Hatién. You knew that. I left you messages.” I lowered myself into a chair.

Gabby was in the midst of one of her snifters of Barbancourt and looked up only to nod as I sat down. “It was really fascinating,” I continued. “The guy I interviewed had broken pottery and other artifacts from a farmer’s field that he thinks may indicate it is the site of the settlement Columbus founded after he wrecked the Santa Maria on Christmas Eve –” “Look, we had a hell of a night, last night,” he interrupted, “and I was thinking you should join us, tonight.”

I was surprised at the invitation, given my already established reluctance to carouse around with him and the added wrinkle of the female companion. I looked over at Gabby, but she just sipped at her drink.

“How’d it go at roulette?” I asked, to avoid answering.

“Lost a couple hundred,” he answered. “Listen, do you want to go or don’t you? Time’s afleeting. You can play the slots, or just watch.”

“I don’t know,” I said, feeling foolishly irresolute. “I’ve got a lot of notes to transcribe.”

“Transcribe, damnscribe. Look, why don’t you get the hell out of that room for a night?” he persisted. “Besides, you meet some real characters out there. Not dusty old archaeologists.”

Anger shot through me. I resented his disparaging my work and, now, making me look like some sort of wimp in front of the young woman. I was about to loose some of my bile upon him when Harry Gordon came through the archway, cast an eye about the dining area, then headed straight for us.

“Act two,” Tom said, when he saw Harry coming.

The stepfather went directly over to the girl and said, “Gabrielle, it’s time for you to go to your room.”

I almost laughed at that. Then, I could see from Harry’s expression that he wasn’t kidding, that he wasn’t mincing words and that tonight he wasn’t going to be outmaneuvered.

Tom looked up at the older man and was about to tell him where to get off when Gabby, her head bowed, spoke without raising her head. “Tom and I are just talking, Daddy,” she said, with just a bit of flutter in her voice, like a child who had been caught misbehaving. “I’ll just be few minutes more.”

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“A few minutes more?” Tom echoed, now staring at the top of her downcast head with a perplexed look on his face.

Harry was unmoved. “It’s time,” he insisted.

He was a man of coarse beginnings, I could see that. His demeanor and his diction had been tainted and no matter how he tried to affect an appearance of breeding, he’d been marked for life.

Gabby raised her head, her face had assumed a pouty-mouthed expression that was oddly infantile and, at the same time, incredibly seductive. I could see by the prune-like expression on Tom’s face that he was wrestling with the ridiculousness of a young woman, past the age of consent, a woman who had stayed out to the wee smalls with him at the casino the night before, being ordered to her room by an elder. He also must have been trying to deal with the folly of a man his age having to ask an ersatz parent if his stepdaughter could come out and play. The building tension was resolved when Gabby excused herself, got up from her chair and left the table. Harry headed off in the opposite direction, his chin stuck out in front of him almost parallel to the ground, the look on his face in perfect accord with the smug son-of-a-bitch to whom it belonged.

A thin line of smoke from his thick cigar, trailed behind him like the tail of a kite.

I just sat there, unable to erase the pouty-mouthed expression she had assumed, which had imprinted itself, indelibly, in some ineradicable corner of my brain. For Tom, as good as the turn of events had been the night before, they had instead turned badly this night. He told me she had related to him over drinks last night that she had been coming to Oloffson’s every year, for the preLenten carnival since her stepfather first took her and her mother to Haiti for the festivities when Gabby was sixteen. Harry Gordon had married Gabby’s mother when Gabby was thirteen. Harry became a widower three years later, when the family curse of ovarian cancer claimed Gabby’s mother at the age of thirty-eight. When Tom asked, only half-heartedly, if I had the energy to hit a few spots with him, I declined, sure that he would take out his frustrations on alcohol and loose women and I wanted no part of either. Instead, I was relieved to return to my room and my work.

I sat scribbling and crossing out for more than an hour, not pleased with anything that was forthcoming. I needed to send my thoughts to some other place. That would require some inspiration, perhaps some assistance. I headed downstairs to the bar. The crowd had thinned out appreciably, so I asked the bartender to pour me a double Barbancourt in a snifter and returned to my room to write.

The artificial light from the courtyard was strained through the fan-shaped pattern of slats above the louvered windows, casting a seersucker shadow across the ceiling. The design held her attention. Now and then, the abstract geometry of the striped light was interrupted by the blurred movement of a bat darting about its roost, under the eaves near one of spires on the roof, just above her window. She lay naked beneath the sheet, motionless except for the tiny oscillations of her right index finger between her lips; silent except for the barely perceptible sucking sounds the action made. In the near-silence, she awaited the sound of metal against metal at the door.

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Once again, the flight of a bat interrupted her thoughts and she lay for a moment, trying to clear her mind. He was taking his time tonight. It was to punish her. She deserved it. She had toyed with him and that always made him angry. She liked to play games, and, when she did, he always made her pay. But she always played again. It excited her.

She peeled back the sheet and exposed herself to the window light, aware that her body was different, just slightly – a matter of almost imperceptible degree – but it possessed the subtle perfection of line, color, texture, tone, and the hint of movements yet to come that made men crazy with lust. She followed the curve of her chest beyond the plain of her abdomen and fixed for a moment on the patch of hair, sometimes matted and protective, now fluffed and thin, scant as dry meadow grass in autumn. There was the smell, the faint, musky odor of a small mammal, a scent that would lure the wild beasts of the jungle. She was vulnerable, defenseless against the brutishness that would bend her. For a moment there was only the fear, then the frenzy to save herself, then the sound of metal against metal. Then a human sound. She pulled the sheet back over her, molded it to the contours of her form, and emptied her mind, watching once again the mystic shadows on the ancient ceiling . . .

Tom joined me for breakfast the following morning, was relating how he had grown bored with nightlife the previous night. I read his words as an unexpressed admission that it was no longer any fun without his attractive accoutrement. Gabby and Harry approached the front desk dressed to depart. A bellhop rolled up, pushing a cart loaded with their luggage. Gabby surveyed the room, looked briefly in our direction, but made no sign of recognition. They were soon descending the stone steps to street level with the bellhop rolling their bags down a ramp to join them. With our final cups of coffee, Tom said he was cutting his trip short and heading back to Miami, effectively leaving my remaining days a return to a deep dive of loneliness barely brightened by the dim flickers of my writing.

* * * * * I was back the following year. Harry Gordon was there as well, but this time sans Gabby. I introduced myself and could see by his blank expression that he was searching for some sign of recognition. I convinced him that I had met him and Gabby under benign circumstances so he would not connect me to Tom. I told him I was writing articles about Haiti and he immediately offered to buy me a drink. When I accepted, he launched into an endless stream of promotional bullshit about his various retail businesses, talking on and on about “the superb craftsmanship down here,” not a word about the dirt poor wages he was paying for it all. After enduring this for a couple of rounds of drinks, I felt secure in inquiring about Gabby. He eyed me suspiciously for a moment, but I’d assumed the blank expression I’d perfected over the years to set at ease those from whom I needed to gather vital information. After a sip of his drink, he told me Gabby had married a businessman, ten years her senior and moved to Boston. He said he saw little of her, even though she was carrying a child. From the tone and context of his words, it was clear that husband and stepfather did not get along. Harry had lost all of his well-practiced smiles when he spoke of Gabby.

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My stories on the Haitian carnival sold well, so returning each year to cover the carnival and update the Haiti section to the guidebook became somewhat of a ritual. I saw Harry again the following year, searching him out simply to get my annual fix on Gabby. He told me she’d had a baby boy, but he still had not seen the child. The following year, he informed me that she had gotten a divorce and that her husband had disappeared with another woman, even younger than Gabby. Her ex had left behind their son and attempted no further contact with Gabby or the boy.

Harry said Gabby was having no luck getting child support payments. I wanted to ask why he didn’t spend some of his wealth on his step-grandson, but again, Harry had no smiles when he spoke of Gabby.

The following year there was no sign of Harry. What little pleasure I could muster during my trip to Haiti once again was reduced to my nocturnal scribblings on the characters I met or had the opportunity to observe at Oloffson’s and the fictional lives I assigned to each. By then, I had assumed Gabby had moved far down the road to whatever outcomes life had in store for her.

Then, I saw her that last year at Oloffson’s.

I had been in Haiti for a week, writing a number of pieces on archaeology, the cultural scene and the deteriorating political situation. My first night at my regular base camp in Port-au-Prince, I strutted into the bar area at Oloffson’s and ordered a scotch and soda, then swung around to survey the room. Many of the regulars had returned, a good number of them those who’d been coming here, this time of year, year after year. Then I noticed a hint of blond hair sticking above the back of a high-backed armchair, facing away from the bar. It sent a shiver through me. I took my drink and wandered, as casually as I could project, around to the front of the chair, where I did my best impression of a restrained double take. She was wearing a soft green cotton dress, with a scoop neck and sleeves that extended halfway down her biceps. Her left leg was crossed atop her right knee, resting there with the kind of delicacy that she defined for me.

“Gabby?” I said trying to project the feeling that we were old friends who had just bumped into each other. “It’s been forever. How are you?”

I had doubts she would even remember me as one of the many bit-part players in her life.

However, she studied me a moment then nodded and asked would I like to sit down. I asked if I could buy her a drink. She nodded. I motioned for the waiter and she ordered a Barbancourt. I took a seat in an armchair alongside and we made meaningless small talk about our lives since last we’d seen each other. The conversation was halting and odd, punctuated with stretches of awkward silence, since we’d hadn’t had any real interaction even during the times we’d met years before.

Nonetheless, she seemed to want to talk, irrespective of how little common ground we shared. She told me she had come to Haiti to put some distance between herself and reality, although that had been difficult because her resources had thinned out considerably. She said Harry had died of a coronary just before Christmas the year prior. She’d found out from Harry’s daughter by his first marriage, several weeks after the funeral. He’d left her nothing in his will. That she seemed to want to continue the conversation ventured into directionless small talk, most of it about the places she had worked in lower level management positions. When that topic wore thin, we lapsed into

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another awkward silence. This time it was broken when she asked me if I’d seen Tom. I said not in many months, that we did not see that much of each other anymore. The look of anticipation that had tightened her face when she’d asked the question, dissipated with my answer. I couldn’t help staring at her and noticing that she had acquired some signs of aging. She was only in her late twenties and she had traces of lines in her face.

“I think you are a beautiful woman, Gabby,” I said. It just erupted out of some need I suddenly had to express my unexpressed concern about her having aged. Then I felt very foolish for having said it. I wanted to completely divert the effect of the foolish comment by saying, “and you’ve got some destructive fascination with a drunken gigolo, years after you should have outgrown him,” but I didn’t, of course, and that just made what I had said sound out of context and silly. She didn’t react. I’m not even sure she was paying attention.

“Do you talk to him?” she asked, almost reflexively.

“How do you mean?”

She didn’t answer, her gaze lowering to the table before her, where she was threading and unthreading her fingers. Again, one of the awkward silences, then she let loose a sigh. “I should go and check on Robert,” she said finally, convinced, I guess, that I had no further useful information.

“Don’t you have one of the hotel’s sitters?” I asked.

She didn’t answer, again adrift in some far-off corner with her thoughts. We simply didn’t communicate well. I tried too hard. I have never been comfortable around beautiful women, never comfortable with silence, the two causes of discomfort often occurring in tandem. I could see she was wrestling with something and she would talk to me about it when she was ready. I could conjure no way of drawing it out. In a last ditch attempt to continue the conversation, I asked her if I could buy her dinner. That seemed to bring her down from the ether. She nodded.

“Let me go check on Robert and tell the sitter I’ll be back up after dinner,” she said. We rose from our chairs, she headed for the staircase to her room and I sat back down. I took a sip of my drink and returned to my obsessive inventory of the crowd of regulars who were now filling the room.

An old man, who walked with difficulty and smoked like a chimney, ordered a scotch on the rocks in a tall frosted glass. “Just one shot,” he said sternly, and loudly, to the bartender. “No more doubles.” He kept looking over his shoulder as if a wife swinging a rolling pin would rush into the room just minutes behind him. The young bartender measured the single shot for the old man, held it up so the old man could see, and poured it into the tall frosted glass where it got lost in all that ice. He placed the glass, with a flourish, in front of the old bastard . . . The table of scrabble players was there, of course, once again paying token attention to the game and, once again, fully engrossed in the pronouncements of the heavy-set man from New York who was in the import/export business, he gesturing with his cigarette as if it were a pointer, in some sort of business presentation.

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The big black dog huffed around the corner from where it had been sleeping behind the bar, raised its head and sniffed the air, as if wondering what had happened to the scent of Gabby.

Apparently now devoid of any good reason to stay, the dog padded off and disappeared behind the swinging doors to the kitchen.

Writing about the interplay around the room was less than fulfilling, especially now that Gabby had reentered the drama. I was thinking about Tom the night we’d first met Gabby. At dinner, he’d been so loud and he used a vulgarity at least once each sentence. I was a bit put off and wondered whether the manager might come by and ask us to quiet down. But I loved Tom’s joie de vivre and I didn’t care.

There was a trio entertaining the diners, that evening, with a young singer who seemed barely past his middle teens. Tom and the boy joked back and forth, then the boy sang a couple of songs Tom had requested. Tom told him his voice was too deep and that he should have been castrated when he was eleven, but the boy didn’t understand. Tom made some vulgar gestures to try to demonstrate and it was making me uncomfortable, so I asked the boy to sing “La Vie.” He nodded and rejoined the band. They had an acoustic guitar, a conga drum and a pair of maracas which the boy/leader shook part of the time, then feigned singing into one of them as if it were a mic. The boy played the guitar a while, then passed it to one of the other players without missing a beat. When they’d finished a half-dozen songs, Tom gave the leader ten dollars American, an enormous tip, which the boy immediately pocketed. Tom objected to his keeping it for himself until the boy convinced him he really was the leader and would share the tip with the other two musicians at the end of the night. So Tom, in his pidgin French, told the others he’d given the boy twenty dollars, laughed loudly, and was pointing at the boy with his bottle of Prestige and nodding his head. When he sat back down, he saw Gabby go by and take her seat on the sofa by the bar and his interest in the music was gone.

She returned as I was finishing a second scotch and soda.

The maitre d’ ushered us out onto the veranda where he seated Gabby in a high-backed wicker chair parallel to the concrete balustrade along the veranda and showed me to a seat at right angles to her. The same trio was in a far corner playing the same renditions of the same songs I’d been hearing there for years. The leader looked as if he were now into his early twenties and had grown a moustache to make sure people noticed he’d matured. His voice seemed more strained than in the past, his delivery, for the most part, that of someone bored with his work.

On the waiter’s recommendation, we each ordered sea bass, which Gabby barely touched using the tines of her fork to pick out fish bones before spearing the tiniest morsels to put in her mouth.

I ordered a bottle of Gran Cru French Chablis in deference to our choice of entrées, but she left half of the one glass the waiter had poured for her. Conversation was just awkward fits and starts, although I was getting more brazen with each glass of wine. By the end of the meal, she had repositioned herself facing the balustrade and stared out into the night. She was agitated about something and made no attempt to mask her edginess. She seemed to want me to come after it.

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A tiny lizard ran along balustrade, then leapt to an adjacent bougainvillea. I noted Gabby’s eyes following it from where she was resting her arm on the stone railing to where the lizard had leapt over my shoulder. We made eye contact for a moment, then she lowered hers. “Does he ever speak of me?” she asked.

I held my answer a moment, while I debated asking, “who?” Suddenly it became clear that she had come to Haiti, this same Lenten time of year, in hopes of meeting Tom. But Tom had stopped coming with me years before and had moved onto other adventures. “Yes,” I said for no good reason, “of course.”

Again, she made eye contact – again, a glancing blow – then looked down at her plate and played with the black rice she had barely touched.

The bandleader, who was working the tables for tips, had made it as far as ours. As he prepared to go into his sales pitch, I could see that he recognized me. Then his eyes brightened and he asked where my friend was, “the loud one.”

“From five years ago?” I replied.

“Yes,” he said, “the loud, good-looking one.”

“With the fat wallet,” I answered back.

He laughed.

I took out two dollars and asked him to play “La Vie.” “Ah, yes,” he said, nodding his head, then rejoined the band and took up one of the guitars.

“La Vie,” Gabby sighed, still fooling with the rice in her plate.

“Oh, come on, Gabby,” I said. “You’re not going to tell me something like your life is already behind you, are you?”

“Huh?” she said, a bit abruptly, as if my aggressive comment had caught her by surprise. Actually, it caught me by surprise. She had raised her eyebrows and wrinkled her lips like an old woman. A gust of wind blew across the veranda and folded a lock of her blond hair across her forehead. It held there for a moment, then fell back into position alongside her left ear. She stared at me, her eyes boring into mine. “You don’t know the whole story,” she said.

Surprise, I thought. I never know the whole story, unless, of course, I write it myself.

“The whole story?” I said, finally. “Why, Gabby, how mysterious.” I guess the sarcastic tone to my voice was driven by the admission that I came here every year to find her and, now that I had, it left me disoriented. I don’t know. I do know that she didn’t like the sarcasm.

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She started to say something, then stopped.

I kept going. “Gabby,” I said, “you seem determined to portray yourself as something tragic and it just won’t play.”

“Please,” she said, “don’t get literary.”

“Hey,” I said, “it’s what I do.”

She smirked, then fell silent again.

Behind her, in the distance, lightning flashed in horizontal bands of white across the sky. I could smell the rain on the wind, which had picked up and was blowing in directly across the veranda.

The clean fresh smell of the wet air filled my nostrils, then the wind was scented with the fruit blossoms of the tropics and then the cores and rinds rotting in the street in front of the hotel.

“He came to my room that night,” she said.

“Who?” I asked. “What are you talking about?”

“Harry. The night I met Tom.” “And me.”

She looked at me quizzically.

“The night you met Tom and me.”

She shook her head momentarily, then went on. “I sat up and asked what he wanted, but he didn’t say anything. He just came over to me.”

It began to rain. The first big drops making loud strikes against the eave above the veranda and kicking up a musty smell from the concrete steps just beyond our table. She seemed annoyed by the interruption.

“He was very drunk,” she continued. “His body was like a dead weight. I thought he had died that night.” She stopped and looked at me for a moment. Again, she seemed to be waiting for something to sink in behind the glassy eyes I presented.

She sighed. “I got out from under him –” She stopped abruptly.

I guess now I was staring at her.

“I thought about going downstairs and sitting on the veranda . . .” Her words trailed off.

“But, instead, you went to Tom’s room,” I said with an edge.

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“Yes.” Her voice was flat.

“The bastard,” I said. “The lousy bastard.” I’d said it loudly, my drunkenness fully taking hold.

The young man from the band stopped singing. He came over and asked if there were something else I wanted the band to play.

I said no.

He asked if I wanted an encore of “La Vie.” I said, “hell no!”

He left us.

The rain had gotten very heavy now. Each gust of wind blew wet across her face and mine, but I didn’t care. The candle on our table flickered but did not go out. A waiter came by and asked if we’d like him to move the table. I said no, without so much as a glance in Gabby’s direction.

When the waiter left, shaking his head, I thought about making a cutting comment, but turned back to Gabby instead. She was playing with a paper napkin, tearing it into shreds.

“You know, it all sounds very terrible, Gabby,” I said. “It’s enough to drive a young woman to marry a successful businessman, ten years older than her and move to Boston.”

“What?” she said. Her eyebrows furrowed and she seemed confused.

“Your husband. Your baby.”

She let out a laugh, shook her head. “Who told you that?”

“About your husband and your son?”

She nodded.

“Why . . . Harry,” I replied, “a couple of years ago.”

She just snickered.

Oh my God, I thought. Harry, you bastard. You lousy bastard. Then I thought, how bizarre.

There was Tom bouncing around from place to place with no direction, except a quest with no objective. Harry, the filthy bastard was dead of a chest-crushing heart attack. Here was poor old me, with my directionless slingshot life. And there was Gabby, the object of all our interests, fucked over by her stepfather and toting around their bastard son. Shit, she wasn’t above the fray.

She could drift about a room with her light-footed gait, cop a pose in a high-back wicker chair, sip a Barbancourt and gaze off into space thinking her beautiful thoughts. But when you got inside,

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when you stripped away the wrapping, she was as fucked up as the rest of us. More. Damn, I got a perverse satisfaction in knowing that. I let out a laugh and shook my head. “I’m sorry, Gabby,” I said. “I guess I don’t know the whole story. I’m sure it’s all very sad, so sad.”

“You’re being cruel,” she said, once again concentrating on shredding the napkin.

“That’s because you want me to be cruel to you, Gabby,” I said. “Tonight, you want cruel.”

Now, she was wadding the napkin shreds into little balls. “You don’t have to be cruel,” she replied. There was no emotion in her voice. It was part of a setting that had grown so strange. My reaction to the flatness in her demeanor now was, that somehow she had managed to get me to reveal who I was. This was supposed to be all about her . . . but now the story was about me.

Somehow, she had managed to expose me as the lead character in my own story and definitely not a sympathetic one.. I felt bested, out-plotted. Suddenly, I felt . . . angry.

Two women went by us to the stone steps. A waiter held an umbrella over their heads. One woman was holding the other by the arm. They disappeared down the steps.

“What should I have done?” Gabby asked.

Shit, this whole exercise was really getting to me. I let out a sigh of exasperation. The alcohol had, earlier, emboldened me, but now I felt the difference in our alcohol levels was advantage Gabby and she was playing me. I watched her a moment longer, rolling the pieces of napkin into little spheres and lining them up like tiny cannonballs on the table in front of her.

“About that night?” I said, finally. “Or about life in general?” The edge in my voice remained.

A blast of rain blew in again, across the veranda, spraying the left side of her face, which glistened yellow in the candlelight. Her hair seemed darker now, wet against her head. She kept her eyes on her fingers, wadding the little napkin balls. Then, she looked up at me. “You don’t have to be cruel,” she said, yet again. It was maddening the way she kept stabbing me with that same dagger.

She brushed a wet lock across her forehead with those thin, white fingers. Her nails had only chips of polish left on them, but that looked like the default position for her nails now, the way things were supposed to be: Gabby, put together at any point in time like an abstract painting. I shook my head. She lapsed back into silence.

Suddenly, there was some yelling behind me. I turned to see one of the waiters had burst through the double doors from the kitchen, pulling the black dog by one leg and shouting at it in Creole.

Gabby jumped up. “Stop it!” she shouted, rising from her chair. “Arrête ça!”

He ignored her, dragging the dog along the veranda, all the time shouting in Creole, the dog yelping. When they were at the edge of the staircase, the waiter kicked the dog down the steps and out into the rain.

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“You bastard!” she shouted, “batard!” But the waiter was already heading back to the kitchen, his back to her, ignoring her shouts.

“Oh, sit down, Gabby,” I said. “It’s only a dog. He’ll be all right.”

“I love animals,” she said. She looked very angry, standing there stiff as a billboard, gripping the wicker chair as if she wanted to shred it like the napkins. “They shouldn’t be treated like that.”

“And people?” I asked.

“People should know better,” she shot back.

I asked her to sit down again, but she wouldn’t. She shouted something in French at the waiter, now standing near a table to present a check. He ignored her, lingering a moment at the table before going back into the kitchen. “An-i-mal!” she shouted.

“I thought you loved animals,” I said as she sat back down.

The comment regained her attention. “You’re very nasty tonight,” she said.

“Hah!” I laughed.

She froze me with those ice-blue eyes. It was the way she’d looked at Tom that first night, before he sat down to talk to her. It stopped me cold.

“You were always with your damn notebook and pen,” she said sliding, as if by protest, back down into the chair. “I didn’t want to disturb you.”

“So you disturbed Tom instead?”

“Your light was on. I knew you were working.” There was something aggressive in her eyes now.

I felt on the defensive, vulnerable.

“How did you know he wasn’t?” I said, trying to stay aggressive.

“I didn’t, but I was hopeful.”

I shook my head and stared at her.

She stared back at me, the freeze look was back. Clearly, she didn’t like me fighting back. Then her face grew more relaxed.

“He helped me,” she said.

I shook my head. I had all to do to keep from laughing, but suddenly, I was no longer comfortable with antagonizing her. “I record things,” I said.

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“What?”

“My pen, my notebook? I record things.”

“Why?” she snapped. It was more a show of anger than a question. I had managed to reroute the conversation, once more, from the subject she really wanted to address.

“I always have,” I answered, nonetheless.

“What does it do for you?” She was again on offense, pressing me now.

“I write stories. I sell them.”

“So you do it for what you can get out of it.” She was sounding almost prosecutorial.

“It’s how I earn my living. People ply their trades to earn money. And,” I added with an affected smile, “I like it. I like what I do.”

“It’s an invasion of privacy,” she said curtly. She was getting back at me. She had a path she could pursue. I guess she needed to do that. But, I had a feeling, now, that I didn’t have much to lose here. That made me feel confident.

“Privacy?” I said. “Don’t be absurd. People aren’t confiding in me. I observe them, draw my own conclusions, change things around until they are where I like them. I make them my own.”

She was staring at me now like I was some kind of criminal, confessing to my crimes. “When I’m writing fiction,” I added. “When I’m on a journalistic assignment –” “You make other people’s lives your own? Then you lie about what you see? You’re using people.”

“Don’t be naïve, Gabby,” I retorted. “Everyone uses other people.” Harry, I wanted to add, then Tom. But I decided not to go down those trails.

“Not everyone,” she said, emphatically.

I could see she was waiting for me to accuse her of using people, so I didn’t. “Most of what I do is me,” I said, instead. “It’s my interpretation. It’s really me getting out what’s inside of me.”

“Oh that’s so egotistical,” she snapped. “You’re judging people.”

“I’m creating characters,” I said. For some reason, I liked that answer. I felt I was regaining some measure of control.

She would have none of it. “You’re passing judgment,” she repeated. “You’re saying this man is like this, that woman is like that. And you don’t like your characters. I can tell by the way you’re

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talking. You like them so little you amplify what you see as their flaws. Then, you wish them ill.

You want them to fall. So you make them fall.”

“Since when did you become an authority on my work,” I answered, struggling for the floor again, but she continued to talk over me.

“And you hardly ever talk to anyone. I’ve watched you. You’re sucking people into your world and having them act the way you want them to.”

She took a breath.

“Tell me, Gabby,” I said, seizing the opening. “Tell me you don’t have opinions about the people around this room.”

She didn’t answer right away. Instead she picked up about a half-dozen of the little paper balls and rolled them around in her hand, then spilled them out onto the table. She watched them intently for a few seconds, as if she were a seer reading something in the way they fell. Then, she looked up at me. “Your opinion is immoral,” she said. “You put it down on paper. You record your lies.

And you do it with some warped sense that you’re creating your version of history.”

“History?” I answered quizzically. The notion brought a smile to my face. “History? Where the hell did that come from?”

We both fell silent until she said, finally, “look, I’ve got to go check on Robert.”

“Sure.” I took a sip of what was left to my wine. It was warm and I could taste the dry chemical flavor of the potassium in the dregs. “You do that.”

She left and I was sure that was that. Hell, I didn’t need her for entertainment. The show was going on all around me. I took out my recently maligned notebook and began.

The Grand Hotel Oloffson looked down on Rue de la Guerre in Port-au-Prince like a military dictator addressing a crowd. Oloffson’s was civilization shielded by its tall palms and hibiscus from the teeming jungle on the other side of its garden wall. Out the gate, black women walked with a whole day’s back-breaking labors in the broken wicker baskets balanced upon their heads. They washed their children in the rain-water runoff along the sides of the road. Men chased you down the street trying to guide you somewhere, direct you anywhere, for a few coins. The people drank water from rusty pipes poking from random holes in the stone walls of the city. Out there, dogs were skinny as rats, scrounging for food scraps the people didn’t get to first. But, despite its predominantly American clientele, Oloffson’s wasn’t some kind of America in absentia. The people who came here, the same time each year, came here to escape America, to say and do things here they couldn’t do back there. God only knew what that decrepit old man who kept explaining to the bartender how to pour just enough scotch over the ice in his tumbler, what the hell he was doing here . . .

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The import/export man was holding court, speaking at length and with great authority about some subject I was sure he didn’t know a damn thing about. But they listened to him, his gallery, as if it were gospel. I had a feeling they had to. Even his wife was envious. But, the import/export man’s place at the podium had been purchased not earned, attention to him demanded not accorded, and his wife was the reaper of what he sowed, useless in her own right . . . Katherine, the art dealer, was all smiles, the impresario of furniture store art for those who had recently acquired taste. Magy’s smiles were more reserved, perhaps ‘refined’ was a better word. She was the descendant of ancestors who had had the good taste to stay in Europe. Magy was what Katherine aspired to be but could never become, because Katherine had not been born French . . . The gay men were still talking theatre. They were the sexual vogue du jour, insisting on the right to be treated mainstream, while at the same time deploring the ordinary performances on life’s stage of the ordinary. They were at their scrabble game tonight with two old ladies who thoroughly enjoyed the repartee . . . The six businessmen from Texas laughed and drank and smoked and talked the numbers. They were big business today, taking it right out of the mouths of tomorrow . . . The old man from Massachusetts looked like death having to answer for the life it had led. And Gabby . . .

Gabby . . . she had given me hope that she was free, that someone like her had to be free. But there she was, a captive of Harry’s resources, bought and paid for by him, and chasing after whomever among the Toms of the world wanted to play for a night. Maybe free without a frame of reference was madness. Maybe free didn’t have a language. Maybe it was just another kind of loneliness. I thought for a moment about her young son. She’d hardly mentioned him. I wondered what role he was to play . . . Me? I was the kind of person who would always fall for the Gabbys of the world, but would never have the courage to risk committing myself to rejection.

Had Harry married her mother just to get at Gabby? Harry, now he was a pragmatist. Harry was a businessman’s businessman. Harry was? Pure evil. Tom? He was a doer. He had had her, then gotten away, scott free.

She returned. I didn’t expect it. I was blindsided. She rejoined me at the table.

“Well,” she said, “what’s the verdict?”

“The verdict?”

She swept her hand across the room. “On them. Who are they all? What is the meaning of all their lives?”

The brief intermission hadn’t washed any of the acid from her tongue. I looked at her and just shook my head.

“Tell me,” she asked, as she sat down, “have you ever written anything about me?”

The question caught me off guard. I suppose I should have seen it coming at some point, but it was, for me, an unexpected change in direction.

“No,” I answered, feebly.

“Hah!” she blurted. “I don’t believe you.”

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She was right, of course, and she knew it.

I groped for a better answer. “Nothing I’m happy with,” I said, again lamely. Although that was the truth. I hated everything I’d written about her. And I could see, now, by the quizzical expression on her face, that she felt I could be telling the truth.

I started to laugh. I don’t know why, I just did. Maybe I wanted to make her angry. Well, I accomplished that. Her look turned very hard.

“I don’t like you,” she said.

“Oh, come on, Gabby,” I sputtered. “You sound like a child.”

“No,” she said, “I don’t like you – really.”

“You’re being silly,” I said, now regaining my composure.

She got up.

“Oh, sit down,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“Good night,” she answered. “I’m going back to my room.”

“No,” I said, now a note of insistence in my voice, actually a touch of panic. “I’m sorry. Please sit down. I’m trying to understand, but there seems so little common ground.”

She said nothing but hoisted her purse strap over her shoulder and turned from the table.

“No,” I repeated. I stood up and grabbed her arm. “Don’t go. Don’t go back to your room.”

She pulled her arm free and stepped back from me. I reached for her across the table, but she stepped backward another step toward the stone staircase. I stretched to reach her but lost my footing on the wet tiles. My outstretched arm hit her shoulder and she fell backwards onto the stone staircase, sliding on her side down the three steps to the landing, where the staircase forked left and right. I’d fallen across the table, knocked over a coffee cup and shattered the water glass that was in front of me.

“Oh, my God,” I said, with the import of what I’d done finally registering on me. I felt like such a fool.

Two waiters ran to her.

I righted myself and went immediately to the edge of the stairs to help, but the waiters assisting her to her feet were in my way.

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“Gabby,” I said, the word clutching in my throat, then breaking free for another instant, “Gabby.”

God, I loved the sound of her name.

The waiters were assisting her back up the stairs. I could see now that she’d skinned her left knee and her dress was soaked and mud-stained. Otherwise, she seemed to be all right. She was going to be all right. Like new. Like . . . new.

They led her by me. She wouldn’t look at me. Not even the angry look. She just stared straight ahead. She wasn’t saying anything, not making a sound. Not even a whimper of pain.

“Gabby,” I said, this time my voice barely above a whisper. I was horrified. Horrified . . .

Wasn’t I?

. . . Hell no, he’d done it on purpose. Strike out at the enemy, anyone who disrespected him.

“Gabby,” I said, again my voice barely above a whisper. But the waiters continued to lead her away from me.

I started after them, but one of them turned and came over to me. “Monsieur,” he said, “we think you should go to your room.”

“What?!” I retorted, then I realized I’d said it loudly. Well, who gives a fuck?

“What?!” he repeated more aggressively.

They’d gotten Gabby to the stairs by the front desk, leading to the rooms on the second floor. I started in their direction once again, but the waiter came over again and put a hand on my shoulder. “Monsieur,” he said, but this time he just let stand the word.

He turned on the waiter, who had a smile on his face, all teeth, the smile they’d taught him to use at a time like this. He thought about hitting the waiter, but that would have been ridiculously aggressive. The waiter would never strike back. He knew that.

I stood there for a few minutes and I guess I looked as if I was going to hit the waiter because the man in the import/export business came up to me and said, “Sir, don’t you think enough is enough?”

He glared at the intruder.

I started to respond, to tell him to back off. Then I thought about saying something clever like: “Do you import or export, you son of a bitch, you can’t have it both ways.”

I looked around the room . . .

He saw the others waiting in anticipation to see what he was going to do next.

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It was so ridiculous the way they all were staring at me, expecting me to do God knows what, to strike out in frustration, secure in the knowledge that the frustration of unfulfilled dreams would always be a part of the life I led. “Why don’t you and your friends just . . .” I was searching for some biting rejoinder but the unfinished sentence just hung there.

He continued to glare at the man in the import/export business. “Why don’t you and your friends just go to hell,” he said. “You can lead the way.”

The import/export man stared at me a moment, his eyes probing deep into mine, then his features seemed to drain of any muscular tension. He just shook his head and turned back toward his entourage.

Why don’t you all just go to hell . . . I’m sure they’ll show you right in.”

“Why don’t you all . . .”

Photo by Buddy Mays Offering oglers a spray of large and vivid orange-red or purple flowers, the Wood Lily, Lilium philadelphicum, is among Mother Nature’s most exquisite creations. Found throughout the United States from the Pacific Northwest to Appalachia (and throughout much of Canada), the dust from this lovely bloom, strangely enough, is toxic, and often deadly, to cats if ingested.

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