1991-Vol27

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UARTO

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QUARTO The Literary Magazine of the School of General Studies Columbia University Volume 27 1991

Submissions Current and recent General Studies students—including nondegree students and students in other branches of Columbia University who are taking Writing Program courses—are en­ couraged to submit to Quarto.

We welcome poetry, fiction, nonfiction, translations, and plays, including excerpts from longer works.

Each submission should be accompanied by a self-addressed, stamped envelope. Please include your name, address, and phone number (optional) on your manuscript.

Manuscripts may be submitted elsewhere while under consider­ ation at Quarto; just notify us of acceptance by another publica­ tion.

Address all submissions and correspondence to: Quarto 615 Lewisohn Hall Columbia University New York, New York 10027

Executive Editors Susan Houston Lynn Goodwin Associate Editors Salii Β. Berg Matthew Lee Burton Edwidge Danticat Denise V. de Joseph Victor Manuel Gonzalez Rachel Haidu Sally Jones Mark Mandrake Brian J. Patch Faculty Advisor Joy Parker Director, Writing Program Alan Ziegler

Quarto is edited by students enrolled in Literary Magazine Editing and Publishing.

All contents © 1991 by Quarto.

All rights are reserved and revert to authors and artists upon publication.

ISSN 0735-6536

Typeset in 10 pt. Palatino.

Design and typography by Victor Manuel Gonzalez.

The editors wish to express their thanks to Dan Drenger, Mary Ruth Strzeszewski, and Alan Ziegler.

r Contents 9 11 13 15 21 22 24 27 31 33 40 53 58 59 61 81 84 92 98 99 100 101

Burnt Sienna by Rebecca Shulman Grandfather by Warren St. John The Moon Woman by Warren St. John The Dreamer by Breena Clarke First Love by Laurie Schaffler Via. by Pascale Roger Nature by James Yuri Severinsky Billy by James Graham Maquis Never Liked to See Anyone Cry

by Njeru Waithaka Stuck by Jennifer Alessi Little Monsters by Rick E. Bruner Auricle by Joyceann Masters Alabama Batter by Daedre Elisabeth Levine Not Beautiful, John by Lisa Davenport The View from Above by Walter B. Levis Song of Nam by M. Soraya Stilo Emergencies by Benji Whalen Hot Buttered Peas by Shawn Tenhoff Burial Ground by Anna Brailovsky Tel Gerisa by Anna Brailovsky Resurrection by Alan Contini Contributors' Notes

The poem on the back cover is Transformation窶認ull Circle by Anna Brailovsky Photographs and drawings on the front cover, the back cover, and pages 6, 20, 52, 60, 80, and 83, are by Bﾃｩatrice Roger.

r REBECCA

Quarto Prize

Burnt Sienna everything. Afraid of the dark, afraid of loud noises, afraid of people who sat next to him on the school bus. He had a turtle-slouch—a long neck and a shell-shaped back.

To protect himself or to hide himself.

Jeremy worked while everyone else played. He built sprawling forts with bleached wood blocks and drew complicated crayon spaceships instead of joining in the dodgeball games. He didn't know how to laugh or to play, but 1 certainly wasn't the one to show him. I always sat out dodgeball; sat on the side and watched. Even then.

When we were in second grade, Jeremy's mother disappeared under hospital machinery beckoning death. No one explained what was happening. One day I was no longer allowed at his house, and Jeremy's drawings of cornflower-blue spaceships and bright red lights metamorphosed into white hospitals and yellowgreen doctors holding silver knives. I watched his pictures appear, listened as he told us how they were cutting the bad pieces out of his mother, how she would be home in a few days, a week, a month. His scowl grew fiercer as he slouched further under his shell-back, his pictures darker and darker until all sixty-four crayons broke from the pressure of his small, seven-year-old fist.

On a Tuesday in April he broke the last two Crayolas, burnt sienna and brick red. He stuffed them back in the ripped, dejected yellow cardboard box and hunched over his unfinished picture.

JEREMY WAS AFRAID OF

THIS YEAR'S QUARTO PRIZE FOR OUTSTANDING LITERARY ACHIEVEMENT IS SHARED BY REBECCA SHULMAN FOR "BURNT SIENNA" AND BREENA CLARKE FOR "THE DREAMER" CHOSEN BY JOY PARKER AND THE EXECUTIVE EDITORS FROM T H E C O N T E N T S OF THIS ISSUE

SHULMAN

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Quarto Burnt-sienna doctors with brick-red knives. I sat across the Httle round table coloring a car with a broken pine-green crayon. The bell rang for recess, and in an instant we were outside watching red rubber balls fly and listening to the shouts of thirty-seven second graders. Jeremy sat next to me on the small muddy hill abutting the blacktop. He bent over, holding his bent legs, and suddenly he was shaking, crying.

1 looked at him, surprised. Second grade boys don't cry in school unless they're hit. Only there was Jeremy, sniffing, shaking, soaking his face with salt tears and then mumbling in a rush of uneven sobs, "My mom's not coming home, my dad told me.

There's too much bad stuff that they can't cut out. 1 won't see her, not ever. Never, never." The last word shook him with an uncontrollable shiver, the kind you get when you're done crying but the tears take a moment to stop, to let you breathe. I said nothing, watching speechless, frozen. Then he left, walked away under his turtle-slouch, leaving behind a lonely piece of paper—his picture of the burnt-sienna doctors he was so scared of, and the brick-red knives that petrified him, taking apart his mother piece by piece.

The next day Jeremy wasn't in school, and the next time I saw him his mother was underground in a black box, at least the parts that they had left her with. And time kept pushing us forward, and we spent the rest of second grade watching dodgeball together. Then third grade, and fourth, and junior high dances, and high school parties. I never mentioned the brown and green April his mother died, or his tears on the playground, or the crayon drawing I left in the mud.

While I wrote stories at Connecticut College, Jeremy jumped out of a window and scattered himself on the pavement, burnt sienna and brick red painted on a Boston sidewalk. The whole sixty-four pack broken, buried. 1 got a phone call at school, and watched the pine-green blurs disappear outside the train window all the way home. I watched the closed black box descend, containing what was left. I cried for the broken life, and all sixty-four broken colors, and for ten-year-old words still left unspoken.

Bloodred and dark black, death is forever. What is left unsaid will remain unsaid, and I am now the sole keeper of certain memories. Sitting in a school yard watching the brick-red dodgeball fly, a child's picture left in the mud. Watch carefully, listen closely, because in the end I am all that is left. \ö\

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W A R R E N ST. JOHN

Grandfather T h e wishing well that graced Your country gates Waited for me as patiently as you Underneath the grey autumn sky, A fluttering curtain given lulls and rolls By the breath of the northwind; The ten-year asparagus looked stronger— It did— And from the smooth-stoned veranda We focused on faraway smoke And counted the cattle head.

While in each strand of your pearl hair I relived the legends of your youth— I did.

Were you that way, too?

And so young?

But I will never inquire Nor read your diaries.

When you leave us.

I will never remap The wood on this farm.

Never slurp the hickory fumes of the pit.

And I will never.

Have never.

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Quarto Gone back to hang my head Into that wishing well, Only to retreat, like a spooked snapper.

At my shiver's beckoning.

At the fear of falling to the center of the earth.

m

The Moon Woman The crescent of your head.

Caught in mid-glisten.

Is boldly blasĂŠ above The flagella of your limbs.

I envy your patience.

Your Promethean boredom And your complacency at the Inconvenience of existence.

Do you frighten at the Two billion eyes witnessing Your gracious decoration Of the deep wall of sky To which you are nailed?

Your fate is more terrible than mine.

You must burn under the stage lights.

In a stale vacuum.

I cannot envy all that nothingness.

For I relish every quiver of these trembling hands.

You are a bride in bloody garb.

Hemmed in a canvas prison

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Quarto To stare through one-way glass At the grave of Peggy Guggenheim.

In a flex of your knee, I lost the wetness of your freshness.

And swallowed the medicine of your aesthetic.

Only to have you shatter like a china plate Into a heap of shimmering moon chips.

BREENA

CLARKE

m

The Dreamer lack of sleep as they feared. The nurses at the hospital gave her sleeping pills when they sent her home. They were careful of the number. They told her husband to watch out—be observant—be the one to control the pills. She never took them. It was never necessary. The psychiatrist asks her if she has trouble sleeping. She shakes her head. He asks her husband. Her husband replies, "No. Quite the contrary. She seems to slip away as soon as her head touches a comfortable surface. Sometimes she falls asleep with her cheek on her hand— on a subway train—on the toilet. Always she slips off when she lies down." The psychiatrist asks if her sleep is troubled. Her husband says, "No." "I don't want to become dysfunctional," she says plainly at the first counseling session with the psychiatrist. She and her husband have each decided to watch the psychiatrist when the other is speaking to gauge his response. He inquires about their comfort and spends the first few moments adjusting the temperature of the air in his small office. His hand lightly touches the box of Kleenex on the edge of the desk, indicating its presence.

Their eyes follow his movements.

He begins the session officially by asking them what happened. Hearing this question, her husband sucks in a deep breath, exhales, and withholds a bit. Poised this way, he listens and watches. He defers to his wife for the telling. The son was hers S H E DOESN'T SUFFER FROM

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Quarto from a first marriage and somehow there is the feehng between them that the greater hurt is hers. The tale is hers and she must tell it if she can.

She hasn't yet failed in the account. She has, thus far, been able to recount it. But her husband waits, ready to tell what he knows and fill in what he's heard her say in case a wave of grief too big to surmount washes over her.

"My son's life slipped accidently into the narrowest of cracks," she says, "a small space between my loving intentions and my ability to protect him. He was alone after school. He decided to take a shower before seeing his new girlfriend. He used the hair dryer in the shower. Doing the two things at once, he was electrocuted."

These two people have cried so much that tears have made ruts down their faces. Both are brown-skinned. He is one shade darker than her pecan color. They don't need to look at their faces to know how many centimeters from eyes to nose, across and down the cheeks, down around the mouth, and off the chin. They know within milliseconds the length of time it will take a tear to fall.

"The seam in the universe that the dead come to when it's their time. Do you understand this concept?" she asks the doctor.

Not wanting to interrupt her he only shakes his head—no. "Their bodies turn, through the agent of some accident, disease, or murderous intention, and they line up in relation to the seam and slip through. I loved my son so much that I went as far in this life as I could go with him. I saw the seam, but I couldn't slip through.

I know it's there. When I dream I go for a visit. You see?"

The psychiatrist does not actually "see," but he feels himself a participant. Listening to this woman is like holding a skein of yarn for his Nana. Often he'd sat on a stool at Nana's knees and listened to her vivid stories with yarn wound around his pudgy hands. It was his responsibility to tilt slightly one way, then the other, while she rolled the wool into a ball. His Nana, whose hands were slim butterflies flitting industriously from homemaking task to task. His Nana, whose dentures were stained and whose breath was stale, whose lips were always smiling. Like Nana's, this woman's voice has texture, color, utility, and beauty and "the telling" unfolds gently, aided by the expressions of her eyes, her hands, her rolling head.

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Breena Clarke "Upon waking, do you remember your dreams as disturbing? the psychiatrist asks in a quiet, unemotional voice. "Upon waking," she replies, "I am disturbed not to be dreaming."

"Do you remember your dreams?"

"Yes." "Will you relate one?"

Her voice is stiff when she answers his direct questions, but she relaxes against the leather lounge and begins to tell a dream.

"1 enter a large, familiar old house whose ownership is unclear and whose address is unknown. I approach the front door and knock. I'm admitted by a person whose face I cannot see. It is not even clear in what city the house is located.

"It is a house of parlors. There is a 'front' parlor where I sit for awhile and talk. I cannot clearly see the faces of the people I'm sitting with and talking to, but they are known to me. We talk happily. Intermittently, I turn toward the room's entranceway and peer out into the hallway. Many people pass by, but I don't know them all. I recognize the faces of a few. I start to rise from the huge wing chair I've sunk into. All of us are sitting low, nearly smothered, in wing chairs. There is a fireplace in this room and we are all positioned toward it. Thus, I must pull myself up and out of the chair in order to look into the hallway. Before I can greet anyone moving down the hall, they have passed from view and earshot.

"Suddenly I decide to rise and follow the tide of people. I struggle to rise from the chair. The lap of my chair sinks lower and lower each time I try to rise. The springs underneath are exposed and tufts of stuffing burst out of the worn arms. I push down heavily on these arms to pull myself out of the sinking chair.

"I manage to reach the hallway and mingle with the crowds of people there. When I walk toward them I can see that they are not simply moving along the hall, but are gathered in groups conversing. People are positioned in twos and threes at junctures and I must navigate the open space. Some people recognize me and greet me. Some others are oblivious, even when I bump squarely into them. The hallway is endless. This house has no boundaries. Walls and windows behave as I expect, but they are multiplied over and over in a swirl of rooms.

"I reach another parlor—a tributary of the main hallway. It is like the first, only it has hassocks, as well as chairs. The chairs are

17

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Quarto of several types: straight-backed, swaybacked, wicker, and easy.

The people in this room seem to be waiting for me because they greet me warmly and with a hint of pique—as if they had been waiting and their patience was wearing thin. My smile is apologetic. There are too many faces in the room and it is difficult for me to know who to greet first. A tall, graceful boy I recognize as my son is sitting in the seat next to the only vacant seat in the room. They have saved this seat for me. 1 realize that all of these people know me and I them. The people around the room sigh as 1 sit down. They smile and turn their faces toward me, yet there is a feeling of pity in their expressions."

"Why do you think these people pity you?" the psychiatrist interrupts. His question hangs alone in the air like autumn's last leaf. Her husband clears his throat. He's annoyed and the evidence is clear from the way his shoulders are drawn up under his ears. She shrugs her shoulders, smiles weakly, and answers, "They know I'll always be sad and that 1 can't stay very long. I'm only visiting in this place.

"My son reaches to hug me as soon as I am settled in my seat.

He holds my hands between his and mine become extremely warm. Oddly, he is able to enfold me in his arms despite a distance between the chairs. We sit together smiling towards the others.

"Unexpected things begin to happen slowly. 1 sink into the comfortable chair and it changes shape beneath me. The squishy cushion becomes stiff and hard and I laugh and sit on the edge. I lean over to my son in the next chair and put my arm around his shoulder. He takes my hand briskly and pulls me off the chair and into the center of the floor. We do an energetic dance which has no set steps. The dance degenerates into laughing and wallowing about on the floor. I feel the walls of my stomach quaking with this laughter."

Her husband breaks in, "Some nights she cries in her sleep.

Some nights she laughs—out loud." The psychiatrist responds with a compassionate grunt.

"I spend the rest of my time in this room. People pass continually along the hallway. We talk and laugh, uproariously."

The three sit quietly for a few moments. She turns to look directly into the psychiatrist's small, round eyes. He would be nondescript outside of this office. He is soft and round from

18

Breena Clarke shoulders to ankles with no definition at his middle. His expression is pleasantly noncommittal. "Is that all that occurs?" he asks.

She continues evenly, "This dream has a shamefaced sister."

The psychiatrist raises his left eyebrow. A frost forms over her husband's face. He is suspicious of the other's heightened interest.

"It is very physical—sexual," she says, covering her mouth with her hand. "I'm ashamed of it."

"Go on. Continue," the psychiatrist says.

"I'm in the house, in the room with the chairs and hassocks.

The other people become fuzzy. Their voices are muffled and I can see only shadowy outlines of their bodies. My son becomes an infant and I'm breast-feeding him. He sucks at my breasts feverishly. The sensation is completely realistic. I am able to experience every pleasurable physical aspect. The feeling of his lips latching onto my nipples and the nipples hardening. The unmistakable feeling of the milk letting down and the working of his jaws. I smell the milk, too. I look down at him in the crook of my arm and the sweat is standing on his brow. I touch the bridge of his nose and watch my flesh surround his little body. Once again he and I are physically joined."

She stops speaking and starts to cry. The tears roll down, drop off her chin and roll down her neck. They break over her breast like pearls from a broken strand. They become a torrent. They fall everywhere—onto the arms of the leather chair—soaking her dress. Her husband and the psychiatrist lift their feet u p from the floor to avoid soaking their shoes. l^

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r LAURIE

SCHAFFLER

First Love iSl othing so easily takes away my breath as when I see a father embrace his daughter, for mine has died, yet died without death.

Let him surround me with his arms and chest, grip my hand, squeeze my knuckles together.

Nothing so easily takes away my breath than that he let go. He could rest his lips on my forehead or stroke my hair.

But he has died. He died without death long ago and still the wounds feel fresh, open, alive. I haven't stopped the tremors; nothing has worked. They take away my breath.

Only dreams are where I find revenge, poems comfort; survival is my power.

Bring him back! He died without death, left me with a hollow, hardened heart that echoes at a touch and trusts no lover.

Nothing so easily takes away my breath than to have lost my father who died without death.

El 21

Pascale Roger

PASCALE

With traumas contrasts with your ongoing up-and-down horses.

Via, wake up, please, don't be like them, I can't have you sleep, It doesn't suit you. You look awful. You haven't embraced love, Mark is waiting for you beside his tea cup at school. He's blue Without you. He can't eat or drink. He needs a change of air

ROGER

Via. Via' s eyes, like almonds, were opal-blue.

One day a man in white diagnosed, "Bad cough. Just sleep."

Her life, a merry-go-round, wooden horses.

Up down, up down, they twirled her in the air While she sprayed laughter on every crowd She met. In her mind she dreamt of making love.

"If I die at sixteen, I want to have experienced love."

You died at fifteen. Via, your body, all blue.

Your brother, over my shoulder, told me in the funeral crowd How he held your hand cause you couldn't sleep.

How you cried cause of flames in your lungs inhaling air.

One after the other your multicolored horses

He needs to get away from the blaring airConditioner where cold thoughts crowd His lonely mind. He's in your favorite blue Why did you pack up your horses?

Why can't you answer? He's calling you "Love."

It makes no sense at all to have you asleep.

Mum keeps telling me you're happy to sleep But I think she's putting on motherly airs.

She's trying to be strong. I crave so much to love Life the way you did, to shine with every crowd I too would meet, that they also have horses Lost under a coat that protects them from blue.

You said so many times, "Love every crowd.

Never sleep, breathe in all the air you can.

Paint your horses blue and get them going up and down. . . . "

m

Stopped going up and down, your merry-go-round's horsePower broke down, wrecking your pieces, and you had not felt love Tingle in your limbs. Did you think about it while choking on air?

While the unknown illness, much more than a bad cough, blued You all over? I hope you found peace in your unconscious sleep When the ambulance drove you away and landed you in the crowd Of emergency rooms, open veins, cracked skulls, the place crowded 22

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James Yuri Severinsky

JAMES YURI

SEVERINSKY

Nature Inspired by Valentina Severinsky, M.D. A N OLD MAN CAME into my office a few weeks ago. He was really old, barely standing, and trembling all over. A very strong odor like car grease and vinegar emanated from him.

An examination revealed diabetes, hypertension, and a host of other problems. I could not help watching his extraordinarily large red ears move as he spoke. Anyway, I prescribed some medicines and sent him home.

Two weeks later the old man returned looking happier, smiling. "I feel better," he said. "I feel much, much better." His ears waved at me cheerfully.

"Good," I said. "Take your medicines and come back in a while."

"Can I ask you something first?" he asked.

"Yes." "I want to get under the covers with my wife," he said, "maybe two times a month. Will it be bad for my health?"

"No harm in getting under the covers."

"Can I also . . . do something . . . sometimes?" he continued more timidly.

I looked at him doubtfully and said, "Go ahead."

"Well . . . my nature isn't working good," he persisted, speaking very quietly, blushing visibly, and avoiding my eyes.

"Can you fix it?"

"What nature?"

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"You know . . . It. .. won't stand."

"Ahh...."

"So, can you fix it, make it stand? I want to make my wife happy," he said, his eyes sparkling suddenly.

"No, I can't fix it." I could not imagine this from a man in his condition—with neurological problems, circulatory problems— but one never knows about these things. "Maybe you should buy your wife something sexy," I suggested.

"I don't think that will help. Can't you give me a shot or some pills?"

"No, no shots for that. Just take it nice and slow and maybe. . . . " "Okay," he said reluctantly. "Could you just talk to my wife?

Tell her it's good for my health, tell her to take it slow and nice.

She is waiting in the hall."

"All right," I said. "Go out to the waiting room."

Waiting in the hall, there was a woman of approximately the same age as he, but much stronger and healthier-looking. She eyed the examination room anxiously. The man waved to her and smiled as he walked out. She stood up to meet me.

"Hello," I said. "I think it's all right for you and your husband to sleep together."

Her eyes opened wide and she turned red. "Is that what he talked to you about?" she said testily, in a rather loud voice.

"Yes." "Ahh, that old fool!" she exclaimed. "Get under the covers he wants, and can't even do anything! Hasn't been able to for years, but always keeps thinking—" She paused to catch her breath.

"Those covers are all he thinks about, keeps looking at them, and at me too, makes movements with his head that make his ears flop around! And how he smells! Have you smelled him?"

"Yes." "So, would you let him into bed with you?" In general, I try not to get under my patients' covers with them.

"I don't know. Maybe if I was his wife," I replied.

"Ah, the old fool!" she interjected. "I've hated him for years, you know."

"But you must have liked him at one time," I said for some reason.

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Quarto "What he talks to a doctor about.... Covers! At his age! Even if his nature did work, I wouldn't let him touch me. You didn't fix it, did you?" she asked with sudden curiosity.

"Fix what?"

"The nature, the nature!" she almost screamed.

"No," I said, "but maybe if you were nice and slow . . . " I did not finish the sentence. "Anyway, I don't think it would be detrimental to your husband's health if you were to sleep together."

She thanked me and turned to go. Abruptly, she grabbed my arm and, looking into my eyes with fearful agitation, whispered, "Is he normal?" Her grip was quite strong, and I pictured the frail little old man in such clutches . . . under vinegar-smelling covers . . . with his swelling crimson ears.

"Ahhh. Yes. There is no harm in—yes, it's natural," I concluded, as decisively as the circumstances permitted.

She looked at me very apprehensively and walked away mumbling and brandishing her plump elbows.

[1]

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r JAMES

GRAHAM

Billy H I S SHOULDERS WERE THIN, but they had a reasonable amount of muscle. His hips were thin too, and often stuck out to the side a bit when he leaned; he was always leaning on something. That night it was on our station wagon's smooth chrome bumper. Billy never worried much about getting dirty. Rust, oil, and other sorts of masculine grimes never intimidated him, as they did me. He was older. More solid. Less easily disturbed. When my brother was twelve, I really thought he was the best-looking kid 1 knew.

He had this chlorine blond hair—the kind that gets bleached out from too much swimming in a pool. And his hair had a way of sweeping to the side, casually covering one eye. Mine didn't do that. Girls liked his eyes; they were green. I personally took his green eyes as proof he was an alien, but could never convince anybody.

The night I remember was an August night. Every star was twinkling hello. That's what Mom always said stars did, twinkle hello. I remember that it was August because Billy had told me that it was the season for comets. I've never been able to find out where he got some of his esoteric information; however, at the age of seven, one questions an older sibling little. Billy was wearing a pale yellow button-down shirt—untucked. An untucked shirt and leaning on a bumper was real cool as far as I was concerned. The only thing that would have been cooler was if he had a cigarette.

But that wasn't going to happen, because my Mom was right

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James Graham

Quarto across the street at the Totton's and she could show u p at any moment. Billy never took unnecessary chances.

It is important to stress that my brother was usually not this subdued when I was in close proximity. Whenever I crossed his path, I was usually ducking his swinging fists. He was excessively vocal in stating that he didn't like me much, at least when other kids were around. But every once in a while—not very often—he was really nice to me. There were times when he'd do stuff like explain a homework problem to me without laughing at the way I drew m's and 's. Or he'd clean up my half of the room when it was my turn to do it. This particular evening was one of those times. I think I was just about to go inside and get a fresh marshmallow when I heard my brother call, "Hey Jimmy." I was sufficiently stunned and turned around cautiously. My brother always hailed me with the names of small animals, usually some type of vermin or insect. The sound of my own name caught me unaware. I gathered all the big words at my verbal command and said, "Yeah?"

"Come here, I want to show you something."

"What?"

"Come here and I'll show you."

"Can't you show me from there?" My repartee was not terribly clever, but I had learned his tricks long ago and was not going to be so quickly duped. I figured that if I walked over, he'd pull some fiendish plot that would either embarrass or pain me.

My tactical move failed.

"No, you're too close to the house," he said. "You have to come over here."

His suggestion did not alleviate my fears. Why would I have to move away from the house? Surely it was because he didn't want anyone else to see the torture he was soon to inflict on me.

"No, that's okay . . . I gotta get a marshmallow. . . . So, it's okay, really.... You don't have to show me anything. I'll just go in now and I'll see ya later, okay?"

"All right, get one for me too and then come here."

It dawned on me that there was no way out of the situation.

Really, I was lucky that he didn't just run over and grab me and do whatever he had planned. I ran inside and back out.

"Here," I said.

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"Thanks." Billy took the marshmallow I gave him. "Come here, look."

It was strange that he thanked me, but what really got my attention was when he placed his hand on my shoulder and knelt down, eye level with me. He held his arm out in front of me and my eye followed its length to a small group of stars that seemed to circle the tip of his finger.

"That's Orion's belt," he said.

I had heard of that before, so I didn't think that he was making this up. Besides, he was always really good in science and things like that. I started to relax. Billy began to chew quietly. I did the same.

"See that, over on the left, just above the Reilly's house?"

I looked, but didn't notice anything different from the constellation we were looking at before.

"See that one light that doesn't blink?"

"Yeah."

"That's Venus. You know it's a planet when the light doesn't flicker."

"Really?"

"Uh-huh, see, it's just a steady light. You see what happens is the planet reflects the sun's light, like the moon does, so it's steady. But the star is like the sun, only it's so far away that it looks like it blinks."

I wasn't making much sense of how this all worked, but when I saw the one light by the Reilly's, it was just like Billy said. My stomach was getting kind of queasy because Billy was being so fun. All I could think was that I wished I had another marshmallow to give him so that he'd keep talking. I didn't, though. I just stood there for a while. Everything was summer still as I looked at the star-stippled sky. There were no loud noises, only a breeze. I could see the Milky Way haze and began to notice the dimensions and curves of the fuzzy aura. Billy told me to look closely at some of the individual stars. I did and saw that some were different colors; one star was blue and another one was bigger and red. He explained that the color depended on how hot the star was burning and compared it to coals in a camp fire. I pieced that part together pretty easily. I kept waiting for him to start to move on, but he kept looking and just scratched his arm from time to time. And then I thought of something.

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Y' Quarto "How far away do you think the stars are, Billy?"

"Well, some say that they're billions of light-years away. No one knows really for sure. But there is something everybody is sure about."

"What's that?"

"That the sky goes on forever and ever."

Of course I had heard the expression before, but I had never really thought about it with much consideration.

"What do you mean forever?"

"You know, on and on. It just doesn't stop."

I remember distinctly that I was looking at him and not the sky when he was talking. He still had his hand on my shoulder and was kind of holding me next to him. And the thing that seemed most important at the moment was not really the idea of eternity, but whether he was telling me, his much younger brother, the real honest-to-goodness truth. He was. I hardly had to think about it at all. I could tell just because he was so matterof-fact about the whole thing. So I lifted my eyes again and looked all over and tried to put the whole thing together. 1 thought of the sky, of the stars, and of forever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever. . . . I licked the last of the marshmallow from my lips and swallowed hard. FOREVER. The sky went on forever. I bumped Billy a little as I stepped back onto his sneaker toe, taking it all in. He moved me gently forward again.

"Wow, that's super far," I said.

"Yeah, uh-huh."

"Boy, that's way far."

"Yeah, pretty far," my brother said.

And then everything in my universe changed; it changed completely. There was no quarrel, no argument, nothing I could say or do about it. And after 1 really got it, and I understood how eternity stretched out black before me, I got a big shiver and Billy held me closer—he held me closer to him, closer to the green, living earth, closer to my home on Shelby Lane. I fell out of the sky and into my big brother Billy. That was a nice thing, him doing that, 1 thought. Real big sky, real nice thing to do.

[1]

30

NjERU

W A I T H A K A

Maquis Never Liked to See Anyone Cry 1 must have been six years old Coming home from nursery school To find Maquis our monster cat Had littered the house of my babies With bits of meat and fur.

Maquis, one year Older and more learned than 1 (although she never went to school) Had sniffed and wedged her mammoth frame Through a hole tearing my rabbits Into shreds.

I stood still, holding The sweet potato vines I'd fetched for them And cried.

Maquis has devoured bigger mice, Said my mother between bursts Of my babyish cry, I knew Maquis had liked my babies all along.

That hairy heap of fat!

My ripped-apart, long-eared things Looked like cloth dolls And I knew I'd kill Maquis.

31

Quarto

I'd kill Maquis, I announced.

Hush! Hush! my mother said Disgusted by my threat.

Crying, I headed straight for my bed But Maquis followed me and wiped My streaming face with her tongue Until I was silently asleep.

JENNIFER

ALESSI

m

Stuck I T WASN'T OUR FAULT, you see. We were doomed from the start— created on splintered picnic tables under zapping bug lamps.

Babies bred on gnawed rattles and coupon specials. Grumbling fathers clomping to construction jobs in red-laced work boots.

Red-handed mothers clipping ripped cloth diapers onto tangled clotheslines. Then our diapers turned to jeans and were still whisked off the clotheslines in the dark, quiet hours as the bugs smacked themselves against the bright iron cages and got stuck like we were.

Little Maria Sicone Ate cold macaroni Turned into a piece of bologna.

Poor little Maria Sicone.

Maria Sicone was a pale-faced girl with thin hair draped across her scalp like curtains on a window pane. A candy necklace strung with chipped, faded tarts always hung around her bony neck. She had a wart on her left knuckle that she'd pick until it bled. Her father had taken off and her mother cleaned our houses.

Christine Sullivan would meet me at the corner, her hair swinging low down her right cheek. Her mother, drunk, had smeared her face with an iron to make sure it was hot.

"How's it feel?" I'd ask.

32

33

y^

Quarto "No big deal," she'd say.

Billy Cardella would race down the street on his BMX bike, Cornish on the handlebars. Glazier trailing on a skateboard hooked with a rope to the frame. "Hey!" they'd yell until Cardella jammed on the brakes and Glazier would smash into the wheel and Cornish would flip onto the pavement.

The five of us would hang out, lighting firecrackers, smashing toads, building a tree fort. And Maria would watch, alone, sitting on her front steps picking a scab, or pressing her face against the black-mesh screen door, or lurking and leering in the bushes.

One hot summer night the Sullivans had a cookout.

Christine's baby brother, Jeremy, rode his plastic green snake across the front yard. His greasy hands flapped in the air as the snake squished and squirmed with his thrusting legs. His head lolled dumbly to one side as he frantically cried, "Inch worm! Inch worm!" to the yellow moon.

A record player was strapped with twine to the porch railing.

The speakers blared, drowning out the crackling burgers, the fighting parents, and the wild children. A song called "Slow Dancing" seemed to make everything sway. But I wasn't dancing.

Billy and I were lying hip-to-hip in the cool grass. He spoke to me sweetly through ketchup-stained lips.

"We're gonna finish that tree fort, girl," he said.

"Ya mean your dad will lend ya the tools?" I asked.

He didn't answer me for a while. He just lay there blinking at the stars, letting the mosquitoes bite into his face. Then he slid over a hand and placed it on my belly. "We're gonna finish that tree fort," he said.

The needle was stuck. "Swaying, swaying, swaying,"—the same word, the same feeling over and over.

"Look out!" Billy hollered and rolled on top of me.

I turned my head and there was Cornish with a garden hose.

"I dare ya, I dare ya," Billy was saying.

Glazier turned the valve and we got soaked. Cornish whipped the hose around and around his head in the air.

"Fix the goddamn record!" some parent yelled.

Billy jumped up and Cornish dropped the hose. I hollered for Christine. She was bending over the grill, spatula in hand, the smoke weaving through her hair and stinging her burned cheek.

34

Jennifer Alessi

Her mother was strutting toward her. "Nah," she said. "I'll catch

up."

I ran to join the others in the woods. Jumping over the stones, dodging the low shadowy branches, I called them each by name.

"Cardella! Cornish! Glazier!"

I heard giggles and chants and snapping twigs. "Where the hell are you!" I yelled.

I followed the deep breaths and dull murmurs to the river that ran behind our houses. And there was Maria Sicone, sitting on the bank, her legs dipped up to the knees in water.

I could faintly hear the record player at the Sullivan's with its needle skipping, skipping, skipping.

Maria glanced at me, her lips stretched into a sad little smile.

"Do they have hotdogs too?" she asked.

"Huh?" I said.

She looked so pathetic as she pulled her white crooked toes from the water and dried them in the crumbled leaves. "At the cookout, at the Sullivan's," she said, pointing a stumpy finger at the dark woods.

Stones clomped to the ground around us. I knew it was the boys, tossing things at me from the skeleton of our tree fort.

"What's it to you?" I said, "what they got or don't got?"

The boys climbed down the tree and Billy began the Sicone cheer. Maria cringed with each syllable. "Stop it!" she cried again and again.

"Shut up!" Cornish hollered. "1 think like this—Glazier's got Chris, Cardella's got you. So I get Maria."

"How's about it?" I said to Maria. "You wanna be Cornish's girl?"

She squished her eyelashes down tight and sucked that warty knuckle of hers like she was drinking up all the blood she could to make her strong.

"How's about it?" said Cornish, squeezing an arm around Maria's waist.

Her lashes moved like spiders, slowly crawling up her eyeball until they tucked far back into her sockets. She bit a grey chip from her candy necklace then focused those wide flylike eyes right on me and asked, "Do ya mean it?"

If I had had my dad's beebee gun I would have shot her eyes out like the hollow milk carton hanging on a tree in my back yard.

35

>r

Quarto

"Yeah," I said.

We were called home. First the cowbell for Billy, then the horn for Cornish, the whistle for Glazier, and the wind chime for me.

Maria's mother had no signal. We left her digging her toes into the dirt.

In the Sullivan's yard, I saw Christine picking up the crumbs wedged between the grooves in the picnic table. Our moms were smoking cigarettes on the porch. The record spun silently under the needle.

"Won't Sicone do that tomorrow?" I asked her.

"Ma wants it done now," she said.

I straddled the bench and blew the neat piles that Christine had collected on the edge of the table onto the ground. 1 handed her a slippery strand of licorice that 1 had tucked inside my jeans pocket. She pinched it between her lips as she made the crumb piles; 1 squeezed mine between my fingers as I sent them twirling over the edge. We pretended we were smoking as Jeremy whizzed around us on his inch worm, his head bobbing to the beat of the flies as they crackled on the hot lamp. I told her about Maria and she smiled.

I woke up to Ms. Sicone's grunting vacuum. It would hum for a minute as the wind sucked steadily up the hose. But then something—a marble, a hair ball—would get stuck in the rollers and make the vacuum grumble until she pulled the plug and it wheezed silent.

"Ma!" I called and ran into the kitchen.

My mother was leaning over the sink, staring at her reflection in the window pane. She gripped one black bobby pin between her front teeth, another she spread between her fingers and pinned back her bangs. An apron was tied around her waist with "Sloppy's Burgers" written on front. A cigarette rested on the edge of the sink burning, burning until another long stalk of grey ashes formed then crumbled into the drain.

"Ya going to work?" 1 said.

"What are ya doing up so early?" she said.

"Her vacuum woke me."

My mother sighed. "I told her to use the Hokey."

I opened the pantry and took out the CoCo Puffs. "And she didn't listen?" I said and pushed my hand deep inside the box, feeling for the prize.

36

Jennifer Alessi

My mother plunged the applicator deep inside her mascara tube. She pulled it out, held the wand to the side of her head, and turned it around and around.

I laughed. She was saying Sicone was crazy.

My mother left for work. As the screen door trapped against the crooked frame, 1 grasped the prize. It was a tattoo of a slenderlegged spider. I licked the back, rubbing it over and over my tongue. 1 pulled the arm of my nightshirt, baring my right shoulder. Turning my head around to see, I carefully placed the tattoo on my blade and pressed my palm down hard.

Sicone waddled in from the living room, singing loudly through fleshy lips—a stupid, garbled, Spanish song, high over the drone of the vacuum. She pressed the nozzle right between my legs. "What ya got there?" she asked.

Without a word, I slowly peeled back the paper.

She shrugged, her chunky shoulders lifting u p her earlobes, her flabby arms flapping back down again. "I'm glad you and Maria are friends," she said. "Being stuck all by yourself all summer can get lonely."

The vacuum began to grumble. Sicone stooped down under the kitchen table and propped the nozzle against a folding chair.

"I hear she's got a sweetheart too," she said.

She scraped a yellowed fingernail through the bristles. And just when she thought I wasn't looking. Sicone snatched that shiny quarter that had fallen from my mother's apron and stuck it in her pocket.

"I saw you," I said.

"Huh?" she said as the vacuum wheezed silent.

"Just because I wasn't listening, doesn't mean I wasn't looking," I sneered, then stomped out of the room with the CoCo Puffs, leaving a trail of brown balls on the freshly-vacuumed floor.

I glanced back; the spider was following me.

Christine met me at the corner. We were both wearing the pink T-shirts we had won last summer at the county fair, right after we'd ridden the ferris wheel. It was a big one with tinkling music and boxes twirling in one direction as the wheel cranked around in another. And when we were edging toward the top, it stopped. But Chris and I were laughing. We knew the boxes would swing with the wheel to the bottom again.

We played the game where you squirt a water pistol at the mouth of a croaking toad. We knew how to win—aim that gun 37

!Γ Quarto

Jennifer Alessi

long before the bell goes off, as the usher's still hassling people to join. Christine's frog reached the top first and set off a buzzer.

Mine got stuck halfway up the pole, so no matter how good my aim, or how fiercely I squirted, the frog sat still, its gaping mouth spilling water.

My dad complained. "That game is fixed!" he yelled. "Fixed!"

My mother touched his arm and gently said, "It's no big deal."

He pushed her away. "It's a quarter, dammit!" he hollered, leaning way over the "do not cross" line, sending the trembling usher sinking back against the T-shirt rack.

"Today's gonna be good," Christine whispered.

1 followed the line of her eyes and began to feel it too. The excitement started somewhere down in my sneakers as my eyes focused on the thick, green layer of trees. But as I squinted, the branches seemed to spread, the bark seemed to peel away, giving me a clear view of our tree fort. 1 saw Glazier hoisting a two-byfour over his head and through the door to Cornish. My Billy was winding up the path, his bronze back bared to the potent sun, swinging the blue tool bag proudly in his hand. I bit my lip.

"Let's go," Christine said and gently tapped my arm.

I thrust my head back as 1 ran, daring to stare at the sharp yellow rays. Birds were aligned, twigs gripped in their mouths, swaying on the fragile branches. I heard Billy's laughter. He called my name and I pressed forward, faster.

The pounding hammers, the zipping saw, the canteens filled with Kool-Aid bursting in the sun all seemed to hiss, "You're gonna do it."

I hooked the bottom of my T-shirt through the collar, making a halter. Kneeling down, 1 greedily scooped a fistful of nails from the brown paper bag and stuffed them in my pocket. I climbed up the crooked planks, grasping the knotted trunk, slapping away the branches, until my head popped through the door.

"You got 'em," I said to Billy.

He said nothing, just reached out his hand and brushed my cheek with his fingers.

Christine and I worked on securing the floor. We gathered the scraps of wood that fell from Billy's saw or that were left over by the boys from building the wall. Christine would fit a scrap, hold it down real tight, and I'd drive the nail home.

38

I could see the ground through the gaps in the floor. Looking down, my eyes would follow the twists in the trunk until they reached the bottom. I'd pound, then peer, then pound until 1 looked down and saw Maria Sicone climbing up our tree.

Her fingers slid on the branches; her legs wobbled on the planks. I felt like spitting, coughing up a big glob that would ooze down her bare scalp.

"Get down from there!" I hollered.

Billy stopped sawing. Glazier and Cornish stopped pounding.

Christine lifted a big board from the floor so they could see.

"Cornish!" Maria yelled, working her way u p the trunk.

Leaves crumbled from the branches and slipped through her hair like the tree itself was spitting at Maria.

"Cornish!"

Glazier dropped a nail through a crack.

"Cornish?"

Billy began the Sicone cheer.

I looked down and couldn't see her. "Quiet!" I said.

We all lay still on the floor with our feet dangling over the edge. I felt a hand poking up at my belly. It was Maria, trying to get inside.

We all hooked hands and feet, covering every board in the floor. Maria poked and groaned until the branch snapped under her feet and she toppled, head first, to the ground.

Though she died there, a lump of blood and cracked bones like a popped wart on the wood's floor, Maria still lives in our neighborhood. Like our tree fort, still left unfinished by the river because the pastor told us it would be "improper" to complete it.

Billy and I talk about it with the Glazier's often, still won­ dering how she could have flipped around in midair and wound up on her head.

Sometimes at night, while clipping my babies' diapers to the clothesline, I think about the crackling flies in the bug lamp—how they have the whole woods to buzz in unharmed, but still they zip around my yard and wind u p dead, burned on my bulb. Poor little Maria Sicone. \ö\

39

Rick E. Bruner

R I C K E.

BRUNER

Little Monsters annoyed Earl King. He annoyed him because he clearly didn't like Earl. Tuesday evening Earl pulled into his driveway and saw the little boy in the tree in his backyard. The boy's father had built him a wooden pen in the tree, and the boy sat there most afternoons about the time Earl came home. The boy sat in the pen, staring at Earl in a torpor, as if he had just halted some cheerful play and was now boycotting all activity until the neighbor-man left his sight.

Earl ran his thumbnail timidly along the Naugahyde upholstery of his dashboard and then looked up and met the eyes of the boy. Earl made an effort to smile and said through the open car window, "Hi Toddy." The boy's expression didn't change.

Earl had sat in his car before for as long as half an hour staring at the boy, but it never seemed to improve the child's impression of him. Earl didn't mind spending the time it took to try again, though. He lit a cigarette. Time was the most veritable luxury a man had. Most people considered time to be precious, but then they'd go ahead and waste it, just like money. That meant it was a luxury. Earl had thought of this many times.

When he finished his cigarette. Earl lit another. Occasionally he let his gaze wander around the boy's backyard. It was a narrow rectangle, piebald with patches of dirt. Along the side opposite Earl's house, a rusty wire fence ran back to a small metal garage, T H E BOY NEXT DOOR

40

which the boy's father had built himself. Just behind the porch of the house was a car body raised on cinder blocks.

Each time Earl looked back to the tree, the boy's untiring stare was still on him. It wasn't a look of fear, as Earl thought might be natural in a shy neighbor-boy. The boy in the tree next door hated Earl, and Earl couldn't understand why. He could not entertain the idea that someone had come to his own neighborhood and poisoned the boy's mind against him because, in fact, there was no person Earl knew of who had reason to suspect him of anything. Earl King may not have been a virtuous man, but he was discreet.

"Evening, Earl."

With a twitch. Earl turned to see the boy's father. Norm, standing on his back porch.

"Still is a hot one," Norm said. He arched his tight ball of a stomach forward toward the setting sun. "Say, why don't you come on up and join me for a brew. Earl?"

Earl hurriedly got out of his car. "Thanks just the same, Norm, but not today."

Norm could be counted on at least once a week to ask Earl to drink a beer with him on his porch. Norm was a ruddy-faced man, younger than Earl—probably not yet forty. Earl supposed, judging by his still strong upper body and thick hair. In the year or so the two men had been neighbors. Earl had never drunk a beer yet with Norm.

"Toddy, cm'ere a minute," Norm said. "Come down here and say good evening to Mr. King."

The boy had sunk to the floorboards of his fort and his eyes barely shone from behind the darkening branches.

Norm picked at his teeth with his thumb. "Funny kid," he said. He turned to Earl and held up his beer can. "Come up and have a cold one. Earl." He looked at the tree again and shook his head. "Damnedest thing, but I think my Toddy's afraid of you.

Earl. Why don't you grab a beer and we'll get him out of that tree, and the three of us can shoot the breeze. Just us boys, eh? What do you say. Earl?"

Earl fanned himself with his hat and tried to communicate through his posture an impatience to get inside his house. "I'm sure he's a fine boy. Norm," Earl said. "Really, I'd like to stay out, but I've got a couple of things to attend to."

41

Quarto Inside his kitchen. Earl winced at the truth of those words.

The hamsters. While the boy next door may have troubled Earl, he was nothing compared to the consuming irritation of the hamsters.

Earl stood still and listened to the shrill grinding noise the male rodent made on its exercise wheel. The heat of the evening was inside the small house. Earl took off his heavy-framed glasses and wiped the sweat from his nose. The nearly bare rooms of the house were dimly lit by the orange light of the sunset. The solitary squeaking from the dining room seemed to emphasize the stillness of the house.

Earl put on the teakettle. He saw a note to himself on the counter, a reminder to buy eggs, and he smiled. That morning he had taken two eggs with him to work and dropped them on the floor of the elevator. He had never done that one before. Had someone noticed him, of course, he would have explained it was an accident, that he'd brought them to cook in the microwave for lunch. But nobody ever noticed Earl. He had a vision of two stiletto heels piercing the fleshy yolks. He smiled and turned u p the flame under the teakettle.

He went to the bedroom and hung u p his coat and hat. At work, they teased him for looking old-fashioned. The Florida sun and he were not yet well enough acquainted, however, for him to go out without his hat. But Earl knew they meant it in good humor. As long as they really didn't think ill of him, as long as they had no reason to dislike him, they could say what they wanted about his clothes. He could take a joke. After all, the company had transferred Earl to Bright Beach and promoted him to assistant general clerk, second level, because he was believed to be a sensible, trustworthy employee, not because he dressed in drab, colorless suits, rarely spoke, and ate his lunch alone.

Something caught Earl's attention in the other room. The squeaking had stopped. That was odd. In the two weeks that the hamsters had been in Earl's house, the squeaking had stopped only three or four times. Earl walked into the dining room and lifted off the lid of the metal cracker box where he kept the male hamster. He stared into the dark cage, unable to see the animal for a moment among the torn wads of newspaper and damp wood chips. The exercise wheel, which Earl had made out of a coffee can and a coat hanger, was unoccupied. Then the hamster stirred from

42

r

Rick E. Bruner a dark corner and craned its neck to look up at the intruder. It walked to the middle of the cage and stood on its hind legs, clawing dizzily in the air at Earl, then fell on its back and began to shake spasmodically.

"Hello, little fella," Earl said. "Is something the matter?" He found a pencil and poked gently at the animal with the eraser.

Earl had learned that no matter how gentle or ill or helpless the hamsters appeared, he would never again reach into their cages with his finger. The hamster did not seem to respond now to Earl's pokings. The thing looked like a balled-up sock in need of darning, quivering there in its cage. It was black with spots of grey, its fur mottled and patchy. Its testicles were the size of grapes.

What annoyed Earl most about the hamsters was that he owned them at all. Earl knew perfectly well, after a short visit to see his sister and nephew last year, that hamsters were miserable little animals—smelly, noisy, demanding rodents that do not come when you call them or do tricks or even sit in your lap without biting you. Which is why he bought them as a gift for the secretary.

That was not his normal style, to be so direct, a one-on-one exchange with someone he knew. But it seemed like a perfect opportunity. She hadn't known him very well; she worked mostly with the group down the hall. She was moving, so he would never see her again. Doubtless it would be thought of as just a wellintentioned faux pas by the quiet, dowdy bachelor-man. The women at the office party had cooed delightedly over the fluffy creatures, and that night in bed Earl trembled with delight at the thought of the secretary and her husband driving across the country with the absurd annoyance of the two ratty creatures in their cardboard pet shop box.

It disturbed him enormously to think that somehow the secretary had found his personal address. When he awoke the next morning, there on his porch were the hamsters in the cracker box, the female half dead from the sexual ravages of her partner. An attached note politely explained that, though the secretary appreciated his intentions, she felt that moving them so soon might be disruptive to their development, and that perhaps he should find them a new home.

43

Quarto

Rick E. Bruner

Earl dropped a piece of carrot next to the quivering animal and closed the lid of the box, replacing a brick on top of it. He was pleased that the hamster seemed to be in no mood to exercise for a while. Next to the cracker tin on the table, the female hamster lay asleep in a plastic goldfish bowl. Earl tapped the plastic with the pencil. "Hello, girlie. Are you asleep?"

The hamster raised its head drunkenly and fixed a wobbly stare on Earl. Then, without shifting its position, it bared its long fangs and started gnawing at the plastic wall where it had already established deep grooves from previous work.

"Hey, stop that," Earl said, rapping on the bowl. Then he stepped away from the table. The scraping noise had replaced the rotary screech of the exercise wheel as the only noise in the house.

"Aw, dig away if you like," Earl said. "I'll take care of you before it does you any good."

At work the next morning. Earl stared at the bUnking light on his telephone as if he were studying a map. It amazed him how long some people would remain on hold before hanging up.

Several calls a day were transferred to the assistant general clerk's office from outside customers. If their questions were particularly complicated or important. Earl would be likely to disconnect the line directly or even find the information and answer the question.

But most of the calls he received were trivial, questions to which he knew the answers immediately or simply needed to consult a file within reach, in which case he would invariably say, "Excuse me, I'm going to put you on hold."

The light stopped blinking. Earl went back to stapling the forms in front of him. His thoughts had focused all morning on the hamsters. He had asked for the afternoon off, so he could no longer delay in confronting their disposal. He enjoyed the thought that in flushing them down the toilet they might survive and crawl up out of the sewers into someone else's household, but the process was unthinkably cruel. Drowning was one of Earl's phobias.

This was a black day for Earl. It tormented him to think of himself as responsible for the suffering of any creature. What infuriated him most about the hamsters was not their wretched appearance or irritating behavior, but the fact that their very presence entailed that he would have to be unkind to them. He

44

was sure the female must be pregnant. And after the first fiasco, he didn't dare try to give them away to anyone again. No, much as it distressed him, he decided that, in the most sympathetic, painless manner, he must destroy them.

The forms that Earl was stapling were a general inventory procedure processed weekly through every clerk's office in all the national branches. They were fed en masse into a computer for central analysis in another part of the country. At the top left corner of the form, where Earl was placing his staples, was a bold notice that said, "DO NOT STAPLE FORMS." That notice had appeared on the forms within the year that Earl had been working for this department. Personally, he felt it was an accomplishment.

Earl thought again about the hamsters. He would bring them to the backyard and smash them with a brick.

Back at his house. Earl was in a dark mood. The sun was bright and hot. Wearing his hat and grey suit, he worked with a shovel in the yard. Taking the day off early meant that Earl missed rush hour, which he resented. Every day Earl found therapeutic relaxation in driving very slowly over the Orange Span Bridge, where the traffic narrowed and was easily congested. In the light traffic of this afternoon, motorists were not at all inconvenienced by his slow pace, and passed him without notice.

Since the morning, he had abandoned the idea of using a brick on the hamsters. While it may have been a painless method, having to then address the result of his cruelty in cleaning up the mess seemed emotionally overpowering to him. Instead, he dug a hole more than a foot deep in the yard, and hoped that once he heaped dirt over them, they would be safely out of his mind.

Earl walked back into the house and stood by the sink, appreciating the impression of coolness in the shade. The haunting, endless scraping whispered from the other room. After several minutes. Earl shifted, as if acknowledging an itch on his neck, and slowly proceeded into the dining room.

He lifted the lid off the cracker box and saw the male crouched in a corner. It had not gotten back on the exercise wheel since yesterday, and only by its slight quivering movement could Earl tell that it was still alive.

He bent down to look at the fishbowl. The female was ceaselessly nodding her head, scraping with her teeth against the

45

y

Quarto plastic wall, and he could see by a slight crack in the plastic that she had broken through.

"Damn," he said aloud. He lifted her bowl and turned it upside down above the cracker box. "I wonder if it's him you wanted," Earl said. The female clung excitedly to the mouth of the bowl as wood chips and cloth scraps fell past her, but after a moment of Earl's shaking, she fell. The male remained cowering in the corner for only a few seconds before it stuck its nose up, searching the air, then lunged at the female. The two instantly blurred into a single animal ball of screeching lust. Earl replaced the lid and carried the box outside.

He dropped the still passionate animals into the hole and brought the reeking box to the garbage can by the side of his house. Walking back, he stopped halfway across the yard and wept.

"Hello, Mr. King."

Earl jerked his head up to see his towheaded neighbor-boy standing in Earl's driveway.

"Toddy," Earl said. He looked around and saw no one else.

"What do you want?"

The boy walked toward Earl dejectedly and stopped a few feet from him. He said to his feet, "My daddy says 1 have to play with you."

"What?" Earl said. He hid his face for a moment to brush the streaks of tears from his cheeks. "He said that?" Earl continued.

"Where is he?"

"He ain't here," the boy said, staring back at his own yard.

"He said the next time I see you, I gotta go play with you." He looked up briefly at Earl, then back at his feet.

Earl's face was thoughtful and composed behind his thick glasses. He had no idea what he should say.

After a moment, the boy said, "Do you want to play with me?

Cause if you don't, that's okay with me."

"No, it's not that," Earl said. He glanced at the back of the yard, where little puffs of dust, like smoke signals, rose out of the hole. "It's j u s t . . . why does your father want me to play with you.

Toddy?"

The boy found a stick and was digging the end into the ground. "He thinks I don't like you because you're Jewish. He says I should like you anyways."

46

Rick E. Bruner "I'm not Jewish," Earl said. He took out a handkerchief and swabbed his face.

"That's okay," the boy said. "I'm not prejudice. I know what we could play." He whacked a dandelion with the stick. "We could pretend something. Do you have anything inside to drink?

Do you have soda?"

Earl glanced around to see if any of his other neighbors were in their yards. "I don't think I do," he said.

"That's okay. We could pretend that we are on an expedition.

Or that we're businessmen. I wish I had a dog," Toddy said.

Earl was growing nervous in the heat. He took off his glasses and wiped his face again. "Oh, you do? Why is that?" he said.

"Cause then we could take him for a walk." The boy was pounding the ground with his stick. "My father won't let me have a dog. He doesn't like animals that eat food out of cans. He only lets me have a snake."

Earl nodded. If this could only wait, he thought. He wondered if he should suggest they stand in the shade. "Is that right?" he said.

"Dogs are nice and furry," Toddy said. "I'd like to pet them and clean up after them. I hate snakes. I'd like any kind of pet better than that."

"Uh-huh," Earl said. "Say, Toddy, why don't we step over here into . . ." Earl stopped. With no expression on his face, he looked up into the postcard-blue sky and for the first time found it beautiful. He took off his jacket and stretched his arms. The evaporation of sweat cooled him immediately, and then the appreciable warmth of the afternoon filled him almost with relief.

He said, "Toddy, if you couldn't have a dog, what other kind of pet would you like?"

The boy stopped beating his stick for a moment and looked at Earl. "Oh, any kind, really. So long as it was furry. I hate snakes."

Earl again looked around the neighborhood. Two yards down, a man Earl didn't know got into a car and backed down the driveway. "Gee, that makes me think. Toddy," Earl said. "I was just about to, well, check my rodent traps. I keep them here in the backyard. If I caught some rodents, would you like to have them?

Bunnies are rodents."

Toddy dropped his stick. He looked up at Earl as if the man had just freed him from a slave chain. "I'd love a rodent," he said.

47

Rick E. Bruner

Quarto

bridge—thirty . . . twenty-five—but together with the trucker, he felt tremendous solidarity. The cars behind Earl sounded a chorus of horns. The trucker leaned forward to look down through Earl's windshield. Earl smiled and waved. Twenty miles per hour. What a beautifully relaxing speed.

Near the top of the bridge. Earl finally looked into his rearview mirror. He always saved this pleasure until he had the best view at the highest point of the bridge. What he saw was glorious.

Never before had he held up so much traffic, never had he made such a difference. Cars were lined up bumper-to-bumper all the way to the bottom of the bridge, and then for as much as a half mile back or more they appeared not to be moving at all. Earl stared at his rearview mirror with the same emotional reverence as a veteran looking at a monument to a war he had fought.

At the top of the bridge, the truck shifted gears loudly and began to pick up speed down the hill. Earl, lost in the experience of a glorious fantasy, kept his speed exactly the same, applying his brakes steadily. Cars streamed past him on his right, honking, the drivers hanging out their windows shouting angry epithets. Earl saw in his mirror that the driver of the next car seemed particularly irate, shaking his fist out the open window. Earl turned and smiled at him as he passed. The driver pulled even with Earl, and the man's face suddenly froze and reddened, the shaking fist turned into a waving hand. Earl then recognized the driver as his neighbor. Norm.

This had never happened before. Earl was always anonymous as the driver of the dark green sedan blocking traffic, never Earl King, Norm's neighbor. Earl had been delaying his neighbor purposely, driving slowly in front of him just for spite, while, for all he knew. Norm might have had someplace important to get to.

Earl realized his mouth was open and shut it. He hfted his hand from the wheel to wave at Norm, but the familiar station wagon had already pulled ahead. In the rear window was Toddy's face, smiling radiantly at his new friend.

Earl turned in a daze to look at the next car passing him. The driver of the car was shouting obscenities. He held a revolver out the window and fired twice. Earl felt a burning pain in his collarbone, and then he drove careening off the embankment at the bottom of the bridge.

The man and boy ran joyfully to the back of Earl's yard. "Oh, Boy!" Earl shouted. "Hamsters!"

"Hurray!" Toddy shouted, jumping and clapping his hands.

"Hurray!"

"Don't touch them," Earl said excitedly, pulling the boy's hand away from the hole. "They might bite." The sweat Earl wiped from his face seemed healthful, invigorating. "Now, Toddy, there's one thing you have to promise. You have to promise not to tell anyone where you got these hamsters because, well, because rodent trapping is illegal in Florida. So, not even your mommy or daddy, okay?"

"Okay, 1 promise," Toddy said.

"Good." Earl smiled. "Now you wait here, and I'll go find something for you to put them in."

The rest of that week. Earl's spirits were boundless. His boss complimented him on finishing a report before the weekend. He sat with a group at lunch two days in a row, and someone commented that he was wearing colorful ties and no hat. It was the same life he had always led. Earl thought, just a brighter appearance.

Friday afternoon he enjoyed his drive home. His house no longer stank—it was bright and airy, and he had taken to turning on the radio. He knew that the neighbor-boy would greet him cheerfully from the treehouse.

As he approached the Orange Span Bridge, Earl let up gently on the accelerator. It was a beautiful afternoon and the late sun reflected brilliantly on the wide river. Traffic was heavy with people leaving the city for a sunny weekend at the beach. The cars ahead of Earl gained distance as Earl luxuriated in the view of the golden, sparkling river. Earl shifted to the passing lane. A car behind him honked. As he reached the beginning of the bridge, a tractor trailer pulled up next to Earl in the right lane and inched ahead of him. As they continued the long ascent u p the bridge.

Earl occupied his attention reading the advertisement for fresh fish on the side of the giant truck. Several cars behind him honked.

Earl could see by a slight lurch of the truck that the driver had down-shifted and was slowing his pace. Together, Earl and the truck were blocking all passing traffic. The truck slowed a little more, and Earl adjusted his speed accordingly. Slower. Slower.

Alone, Earl had never had the nerve to drive this slowly on the 48

L

49

Quarto

Rick E. Bruner

Two weeks later. Earl and Norm were reclining in lounge chairs in Norm's backyard drinking beers. Earl was wearing a Hawaiian shirt and sunglasses, one arm in a sling and his leg in a cast, raised up on a stool. Toddy waved cheerfully to them from his tree fort and they both waved back, smiling.

Earl and Norm had been keeping company like this almost every day since the accident. Earl was enormously grateful for Norm and his wife's kindness. He felt that if it weren't for Norm, he might not have made it through those first painful days out of the hospital. More than that, he truly enjoyed Norm's c o m p a n y Norm, who, because of labor negotiations at the shipping company where he worked, was nearly always at home these days.

"I guess that's just the way society works," Earl said, continuing the same conversation they had held nearly uninterrupted since the accident. He went on, "I got to tell you, Norm, it amazes me. To think that a person could do such a thing and get away with it. And not just that, but do it at all—shamelessly, bald-faced in front of witnesses, look another person in the eye and cause him to suffer. I tell you I could never do it. Norm. To intentionally cause another person agony, to let him see your face and then fade back into the crowd—I could never do it."

Norm took a sip of his beer. "Yeah," he said. "And you with car trouble. Life's not fair, Earl."

Earl nodded and took a sip of his beer. "I'll tell you. Norm.

This experience has changed my hfe. It's made me think about things, you know, about myself. In my life, there are some things I've done, thoughtless little things, trifles really." He paused to enjoy the cool trickle of a drop of sweat rolling down his chest.

"But things that maybe affected other people's lives."

Norm assented with a grunt and sipped his beer. "We've all done that. Earl."

"Yeah," the older man said, "But I'm a changed man. That's all I mean to say."

Toddy, who had been playing a private game in his tree, ran squealing with laughter past the men into the house.

"Great kid," Earl said.

Norm nodded and sipped on his beer. After a moment. Norm said, "You know. Earl, we got sort of a funny problem in our house."

"Oh, yeah? What's that?"

"Well, compared to all your troubles it seems like nothing.

Honestly. But it's eating away at Judy and me."

"Well, I'd like to hear about it, if talking will help," Earl said.

"It's foolish really," Norm continued. "It's these hamsters.

Toddy came across a couple of these little rodents, you know, like mice. He won't say where he got them—says he found them in a hole."

Earl nodded sympathetically and sipped his beer.

"They're driving me crazy. I don't like animals as a rule, like dogs or something, that expect you to feed them. Animals should live in the wild and hunt their own food. But these hamsters are worse than you could imagine. They're filthy and noisy and act like wicked beasts. The female, of course, she's pregnant when Toddy gets them, because the two are constantly, you know, doing it, whenever they are together. So when she's having her babies. Toddy and Judy and I are all there watching, because we think it might be educational for the boy, learning where babies come from and all. She delivers a litter of nine, and before we can say a word, she eats every one of them before our eyes." Norm closed his eyes and shuddered, both men sip their beer silently.

"I'll tell you what I did," Norm continued in a hushed voice.

"Toddy has this snake, you know—now that's the kind of animal I can stand. I swear. Earl, I was at the end of my tether with these things. So I figured that snakes eat mice, right? So 1 took the little black one, and I dropped it in the cage with the snake."

"No," said Earl, sounding shocked.

"Don't worry. Within ten seconds, it turned the snake into a bloody rag. They're little monsters. But, Toddy—the kid loves them no matter what. I tell you. Earl, I can't take much more of it."

His head was trembling at the thought.

"I'm sorry. Earl," Norm said. "Compared to what you've been through, this must sound like a joke."

"No, not at all. Norm," Earl said, placing his good hand on Norm's shoulder. He was satisfied by the depth of his own compassion. And he smiled at another pleasure, whose origin he couldn't quite distinguish. 'T'm glad you told me. I understand completely."

[Q]

50

51

•Pi*

JOYCEANN

MASTERS

Auricle I T HAS JUST RAINED. It is around five in the afternoon—cool air streams through my car windows and everything fills with a golden glow. It is the light of autumn, which seeps into every living and dead thing that makes you want to stay.

I rub my changing stomach, run my hand over my forehead, brush my hair away. I look at my face quickly and see not my twenty-five-year-old'-face, which I think should be somehow changed and older, but the face of my past as I head east towards Brookfield and out for my trip to Jefferson City. I look back for an instant. It is the way even the darkest thing can be washed gold, with maybe just a yellow highlight or a glint, but it is changed somehow and the next time you see blackened bark you will not look at it quite the same way. .. .

When I was eleven, I sat in bed one evening listening to a strange sound coming from over the hill on the northwest side of our house. Coming from old Diehl's place. I sat there looking at the land, the deep speckle of October sunbeams shooting across the whitening grass and in through my windows with dust dancing—seemingly just across those beams of light. From my room I could see around the house on three sides. The wailing sound seemed so loud as to come from the sky. An awful, animal sound. Cow-like. That deep-bellied sound of death. I was certain.

I lay imagining Diehl executing them.

53

Joyceann Masters

Quarto

I remember commotion. A house full of the smells of my older sisters. Constant movement, fluttering, obsession with hair spray, breasts, false eyelashes, dime store perfume. Boyfriends. Music.

My father always finding the right joke for the right guy. My mother—pretty, dark hair cropped close to her angular features.

Curvy body, better than those of her daughters. My parents weren't just parents. They weren't just watchers of my sisters and their boyfriends, they were participants cutting watermelons into baskets and filling them with fruit and gin.

I watched the parties, the kisses, the laughter, sometimes overhearing those things that seemed so precious—the "come on, let's do it tonight behind the shed," "wanna go down to Mary's grave," "and I had on my new purple lace panties and he got them caught in his old snaggle tooth." Sometimes one of my sis­ ters' boyfriends would get drunk and pay me a quarter to comb his hair or rub his back. Sometimes I'd even receive a sloppy kiss.

But mostly I watched, waiting for the seven, eight, ten, and twelve years separating my sisters from me to wash away so I would have my chance.

The wailing sound came to me. There was no party that evening. No one else seemed to be bothered by the sound. My sisters were downstairs arguing with Mom, fighting over a piece of turquoise paisley material. My father was at work or just out.

It was near five p.m. and the evening sky was melting gold and the wailing cries seemed to float to me on that golden sky, to roll closer, blanket me.

I climbed out a window and onto the low side of the roof and hopped down. The breeze swayed my hair. I could feel the ends touching my waist. One of my sisters once told me it wasn't proper to have hair longer than a third of your body but I liked the chill it gave me as it swayed across my spine and the way the world looked as the long black strands blew across my face. I felt a slight chill as I walked down our path. The grass was short and dry, speckled with colorless blades. Fields were barren and plowed. Everyone was hoping to have rain before a frost set in.

The wailing floated over the hill as I crested from the other side.

Diehl's place was just down and to the right. You could see his barn from the end of our drive. He was an old man with a big fat nose, large veins spreading out around it. He'd been here since forever. Someone who had always been old. He had a son just

I remembered the cow we once had, the one named after me, Dolores. She had bad luck, that cow. One thing after the next. A stillbirth, an infection, a terrible fall in her stall, and finally death.

My parents took her to be butchered before she could go and kill herself on her own. She had never produced more than forty-five gallons of milk a week which, to some people, is considered earning only half her keep. I wonder if, when something dead was born from her, it left her somehow as changed as a woman, or some women, might be. If she could no longer go on in the same way—providing a family with only half of what they expected from h e r . . . .

I believed certain things when I was eleven. I remember seeing girlfriends dump the few dolls they had at age ten. I had my own but I asked them to give me the dolls anyway. It made me feel strange thinking that friends were moving on to a new stage before the dolls had even had time to grow worn and old, or just look used. I took them home and set them up at the foot of my bed. I believed that the minute you gave up your dolls there was no turning back. You would never again feel young or silly, ΐ don't know, but you would never again feel the same. So I didn't give up my dolls on my own. One day while I was at school my mother gave them all to a younger cousin. I found my belief hadn't been completely right. I was able to continue to feel silly and run across the still grass, hunt imagined treasures, but yes, something was different. I'd become aware of being a child, of having only a certain amount of time left, of growing away from who you had once been and heading toward something you couldn't possibly know in advance.

On the evening I heard the wailing sound, I felt that feeling of heading away. I'd never seen an animal slaughtered. Something about that sound made me go. I stood up imagining men with hatchets or axes chopping the heads off the animals. It was hor­ rible to imagine the animals lining up, seeing the one before them go to its death but, until then, I had thought it better to imagine than to actually know.

As I drive I remember my parents of that time, before they had turned grey and searching for some meaning to all the days past that had brought them to their moment of doubting—of measuring what each had brought the other and coming up short.

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Quarto over in Shelby but he never came by to visit more than once or twice a year. You'd see this huge shiny white Cadillac with shark fins rising over the hill and settling in front of the barn. I loved to watch that car gliding over the dirt road like a cloud.

I approached the dirt path, two lines cutting through waisthigh weeds, and stopped. Diehl had a large barn, worn colorless boards with light glowing through the cracks. A giant maple sat next to it. 1 used to imagine someone being hanged from that tree, its thick, blistered branches not even bending from the weight.

The sound of the wailing felt like it was inside of me. Something bouncing, ricocheting against my ribs, pushing, trying to burst through my skin. 1 felt 1 had to stop him. 1 moved forward.

1 stood beside the barn, heard hooves knocking the floor boards, heard Diehl's voice, "Damn you wait up." The light began to fade into a line of red tree tops, just hitting the dark bark in a few places. The sky was at its most beautiful, its last moments of sunlight still in it, the gold melding red with the trees, the earth, everything folding into itself and growing dark.

When he executed them, 1 wondered if he cut their heads off in one swift blow, or must he struggle with the neck? How does an old man have that much strength? 1 stood before the large open doors. A bright light bulb dangled from a beam. There was a dark, rusty smell. The smell of blood, I imagined. The cows were safely in their stalls. Some with legs tucked under their resting bodies.

Where were all the heads? Where were the dead? Diehl had his back to me. He held a small object which caught the light and shone silver. Diehl was with a black bull. Other bulls were penned up. The smell of piss-soaked straw mixed with the rusty scent. 1 looked for gallons of spilled blood but saw none. Diehl reached under the bull with the silver object. The wailing cry came again, like it was something inside of me, something trying to be born.

The bull's body shuddered, thick black hide rising, ears flapping.

I tried to turn away, but as 1 did I fell against the wall. My breathing came fast as Diehl turned to me laughing, the dangling light bulb shining bright across his veined face. In one motion he threw something which splat against my chest and fell, smearing blood. 1 looked down to see the bull's testicles by my feet.

Joyceann Masters loudly begged attention, death would only whisper. In the face of either, I was helpless.

The breeze fills the car completely now. I breathe in. Diehl's place has disappeared behind me. I've never made this drive without someone else's company. With my left hand I rub my swollen breasts. The evening grows closer to me. I want to close my eyes and listen for a heartbeat. I want it to drown my thoughts and make me turn back, lie, say to someone—I don't still live in my parents' home, I'm not still a single woman in the middle of nowhere. But the lies die on my lips. There is no one to tell. I've got things in the wrong order. I should have been married long ago. I want to go back, want to touch my parents, see them in the kitchen cutting melon into pretty little shapes, watch the house fill with red lamps swaying as my sisters and their boyfriends once again appear. But that is long gone. My parents had grown tired, out of that stage before it was my time. I never ventured very far.

Finally, I didn't have to. I want to admit it, get it over with, say 'Tve made a bad choice." He was someone I never bared my soul to. Someone I've never even seen in clear daylight. He was just someone, after many someones. Someone in a dirty car with doors rusting and leather seat peeling in my hands, my body thrust into the moment like lightning....

I close my eyes for a second. There. The heartbeat sounds.

Faintly at first. I touch my stomach. Hear it with my hands. I pull under a tree and look around. In my pocket sits a piece of paper with a name, an address. A recommendation from a former patient. A friend of a friend of a friend.

Above me the late sun fills leaves with red and gold, the colors of autumn. Change, moving away from one thing without commitment to the next. I find myself running to rid myself of part of myself, of the heart beating in my womb, a heart no bigger than a grain of sand, yet beating louder and harder. Stopping my

own.

fĂŠ]

The light had faded. I raced through the weeds and out to the road. I tore my sweatshirt off, glancing back towards the giant maple and the piercing sound not of death, but pain. Life. If life

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mmm

D A E D R E

E L I S A B E T H

L I S A

L E V I N E

Not Beautiful, John

Alabama Batter Charlotte is sweating to provide for God's insatiable hunger And the batter is frying and the chicken smells just like Alabama batter in the rain That writers are supposed to like so much because The rain is creative too When you've got the nicest smile it's a shame to Frown all the time but that's what happens as a cause Of unexpected visits from the bogeyman Who isn't allowed by law to come into my mind when I'm doing such a good job of adjusting Superstition and perfection are purely fictitious But then again also are happy endings and we all still Wish for those things hoping in our blatant ignorance for Something that will never happen At seventeen you're way too young and if you ask me I know you didn't but if you ask me Seventeen is the unlucky number in this society

Not beautiful, John Not beautiful, John Beauty is not what you see You poor man, you poor thing You're not what you want to be You're simple, plain, arrogant, trim, no athlete, no music man Imagination hides from you.

Avoids you all it can.

Not beautiful, John No beauty is you Beauty inherent a thing.

Not combed in hair, spelt out in words.

But beautiful butterfly wing!

Not beautiful, John Not beautiful, John No looking glass is you It paints you dark No fire, no spark.

Not spiff, no spank, no hue.

Not beautiful John Not beautiful John Not beautiful John You're you.

m 58

D A V E N

59

PORT

[Γ~

r W A L T E R Β.

LEVIS

An excerpt from

The View from Above TIME: THE

MID-1980S.

Setting: An apartment on Chicago's North Side, sparsely furnished in the manner of graduate students. A few potted plants and a long row of bookshelves line one wall. The shelves are crude, made of bricks and wooden planks.

Characters: JOEY—an aspiring writer, twenty-nine years old; a "seeker" and stu­ dent of New Age religions.

MARLA—JOEY's lover, also twenty-nine years old. A broadcast jour­ nalist.

SAUL—JOEY's brother, slightly older. A radical activist who's been living in Nicaragua.

Synopsis: Two brothers are in love with the same woman. The younger brother is a student of yoga and Jungian psychology. When the older brother is injured in a bomb blast at a radio station in Nicaragua he returns home to Chicago, where he must face his brother living with the woman he still loves.

61

Quarto

Walter Β. Levis

As she struggles to reconcile her feelings about the two men, the two brothers struggle to reconcile themselves to their own conflicting con­ ceptions of the meaning of masculinity.

(He points to his head.)

JOEY. The shrapnel is just lodged in there?

SAUL. I say it's been a hell of a long time.

JOEY. What are you talking about?

SAUL. Not exactly lodged—these tiny slivers sort of float around the blood vessels in my skull.

SAUL. Can I be crude?

JOEY. Sounds terrible.

JOEY. (Ambivalent.) Sure.

SAUL. Headaches, that's all. They didn't have enough technology down there—just a fluoroscope. The slivers are barely visible.

SAUL. I say it's been a hell of a long time since I've gotten laid.

That's what I'm saying.

JOEY. (Shaken.) I see.

JOEY. When are you supposed to have this surgery?

SAUL. I mean, I'll live. Sex isn't like food and water, but—

SAUL. As soon as possible, they said. But I can live with the headaches. (He raises his whiskey and takes a swallow.) Who doesn't have headaches?

(Saul massages his neck.)

JOEY. What about your leg?

JOEY. Right.

SAUL. Oh, this is already much better. Just a hairline fracture.

(Saul continues to rub his head and massage his neck.)

JOEY. How did it happen, Saul?

JOEY. Saul, you OK? SAUL. Just these goddamn headaches.

SAUL. A bomb at a radio station—they're frequent targets. 1 was getting ready to go on the air—did I tell you I've been doing some reporting down there?

JOEY. You want some aspirin?

JOEY. Yes.

SAUL. (Still rubbing.) No, the problem is they didn't get it all out.

SAUL. Anyway, all of a sudden, Whammo! Just like the cartoons, I saw stars—flashes of different colors. Nobody knows—even now—whose bomb it was. I had to piece the story together from what other people told me. All I know is that one minute I was fiddling with my microphone, and the next minute—Kaboom. It's unbelievable down there, Joey, really unbelievable. You ought to check it out. Would open your eyes to some things.

JOEY. What?

SAUL. The shrapnel, tiny slivers—they couldn't get it all.

JOEY. What does that mean?

SAUL. I need more surgery.

JOEY. (Stung.) Thanks, Saul, but I like to think that my eyes are already open.

62

63

Y

Quarto

Walter Β. Levis

SAUL. I didn't mean it like that.

SAUL. Four years you've been living together?

JOEY. Sure you did, just like that crack about not being on the political map.

JOEY. Yeah, we moved in here right after you left.

SAUL. Don't be so sensitive, Joey.

SAUL. That's r i g h t . . . At the start of Reagan's second term—I remember now. "Clap if you're a contra."

JOEY. Am I overreacting? Temperamental, oversensitive, gifted

{Saul laughs, then takes a swallow of his drink.)

Joey?

SAUL. All I meant is that the politics down there are fascinating.

That's where the future of Marxism lies.

SAUL. {Finally.) Remember how Mamelah used to say, "So tell me, Boychick, wh't new . . . ?"

JOEY. {Softening.) I remember.

JOEY. Really? Great! If I see Marx, I'll tell him.

(Saul has pulled out a pouch of tobacco and rolling papers.)

SAUL. The link between Latin America's liberation theology and Marxism could mark a shift as powerful as the Lutheran Refor­ mation because it is based on— JOEY. Saul, not now, please.

SAUL. Wow, mamelah . . . boychick . . . I haven't used a Yiddish word in—well, fighting the wrong war, I guess. But it feels good, you know, rolls nicely off the tongue here. (He raises his glass.)

Feels good to be home, Joey, sweet home Chicago {he laughs)— where the Windy City women, man, they sure are fine. . . . At least I hope so! {Laughs again.) Lacheiheml {They both drink, joey raising his carton of juice.)

SAUL. (Continuing.) So tell me, Boychick .. . wh't new?

SAUL. {Detached.) Sure.

JOEY. Nothing, really. Same old thing. Staring at my navel, aligning myself with the powers of the universe, eating a lot of Chinese food.

{Saul rolls his cigarette.)

SAUL. So what has it been, Joey, one . . . two years?

SAUL. You're writing?

JOEY. Three-and-a-half.

JOEY. Yeah, writing and meditating—practicing a lot of yoga.

SAUL. No . . .

SAUL. What are you doing these days for money?

JOEY. Yeah—with a few letters sprinkled in.

JOEY. Working at a bookstore.

SAUL. I'll be damned—three-and-a-half years . .. Are you sure?

SAUL. H m m . . .. And your own work—anything published?

JOEY. Positive. Maria and I have our four-year, living-together anniversary this January.

64

JOEY. No.

65

r

Quarto

Walter B. Levis

SAUL. Nothing?

JOEY. I guess so. But she's a real person, Saul, with her own needs and wants and problems and all the rest. She's not here just to keep my creative juices flowing.

JOEY. Zero. My claim to fame remains the Ilhnois Young Poets award, "given each year to a graduating senior who shows outstanding promise for a hterary career. . . . " Oink, oink, oink.

SAUL. You get many writer's blocks?

JOEY. Not really. I get writer's doubts.

SAUL. I remember that award.

SAUL. Doubts—like what?

JOEY. I'm carving out a niche for myself in literary history as America's most prolific unpublished writer. (He laughs.)

JOEY. Not doubts, exactly. Questions—one big question.

SAUL. Well, commercial success isn't everything.

SAUL. What is it?

JOEY. Better not be. 1 have a couple thousand pages of the novel and a bunch of essays upstairs.

JOEY. The question?

SAUL. Yes.

SAUL. Upstairs?

JOEY. Well, it's not really a writer's question. It's everyone's.

JOEY. The attic—my writing room.

SAUL. Aaah! A universal question!

SAUL. You write every day?

JOEY. Yes. A universal question. The universal question, so big and so frightening that we practically never take it seriously.

JOEY. Just about, yes.

(Pause. Saul gives all his attention to putting the final touches on rolling his cigarette.)

(Pause.)

SAUL. Must be nice to have Maria around when you're writing.

SAUL. Enough already, the suspense is killing me. What's the question?

JOEY. What do you mean?

JOEY. (Quietly.) Funny to tell you about it. You of all people.

SAUL. I've always thought I'd be able to write if I were in a good, serious relationship with a woman.

(Pause.)

SAUL. Why?

JOEY. The elusive Muse.

JOEY. Forget it.

SAUL. That's right, but if I were in a relationship—well, Maria inspires you, doesn't she?

66

SAUL. Come on—what's the question?

67

f^~ Quarto

Walter B. Levis

JOEY. The question is. Am I doing what I should truly be doing with my life?

JOEY. {Hesitant.) Yes, almost every day.

(Saul laughs.)

SAUL. Hard to imagine.

JOEY. Or, 1 guess if you're older you might put it. Have I done what I should truly have done with my life?

JOEY. She's not as serious about it, I'd say, as I am.

SAUL. But she is into it?

SAUL. Big question, that's a big question.

JOEY. Yes. JOEY. I've dreamt about it, too. I've dreamt that total strangers ask me, "Are you doing what you should be doing with your life?" and I tell them . . . {Pause. Joey leans closer to Saul.) I tell them I could answer the question if I were you.

SAUL. Those crazy positions and breathing and the vegetarian diet?

SAUL. If you were me?

JOEY. That's not really the essence of what it means to practice yoga.

JOEY. That's what the dream says. I could answer the question if I were you.

SAUL. But she does it. And she did quit smoking and drinking?

JOEY. Yes, basically.

(Saul remains still, then pours himself another drink.)

SAUL. Amazing . . . I'll be goddamned. She must look terrific.

SAUL. Mind if I smoke?

JOEY. {Startled.) What?

JOEY. {Ambivalent.) No. SAUL. Healthy, I mean—that yoga is damn good for you, isn't it? {Saul lights up.)

JOEY. Yes. SAUL. {After taking a long, deep drag.) So Maria really quit smoking?

SAUL. The body is the temple of the soul. ..

JOEY. Yes.

JOEY. Sort of the slogan, yes. You ought to try it sometime.

{Pause.)

SAUL. Me?

JOEY. Listen, Saul, maybe I shouldn't have told you that dream.

I don't mean to make you uncomfortable.

JOEY. Sure.

SAUL. I'm stiff as a pipe.

SAUL. {Waving him off.) Forget it, forget it. I'm not uncomfortable.

It's just a dream. But let me ask you something, does Maria do yoga with you?

JOEY. Doesn't matter.

L

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Walter B. Levis

Quarto SAUL. I'm not sure.

SAUL. Those pretzel positions?

JOEY. Didn't the doctor say— JOEY. I could show you asanas for beginners.

SAUL. What d'you call it?

SAUL. (Interrupting.) He said I should have the surgery as soon as possible.

JOEY. Asanas—means, like, pose.

JOEY. So . . .

SAUL. Is that what Maria does?

SAUL. Forget it.

JOEY. Yes.

JOEY. What do you mean—forget it. Where are you going to have the surgery done?

SAUL. I can't believe it. She gets all twisted u p in those pretzel positions?

SAUL. I don't know.

JOEY. That's not exactly what it's all about.

JOEY. Do you have the names of any surgeons?

SAUL. Does she chant and have a mantra and all that?

SAUL. No.

JOEY. No, not yet—

JOEY. Well, what are you—

SAUL. What do you mean, "not yet?" You guys have a guru?

SAUL. (Cutting him off.) For chrissakes!

JOEY. No—well, sort of. We have a teacher.

(Saul grabs his crutches and hobbles to his duffel bag.)

SAUL. Do you have to get to a certain stage before the teacher gives you a mantra?

JOEY. What are you doing?

(Without answering, Saul unzips his bag and takes out his wallet, then hobbles back to the couch. He pulls out the wallet, counts his cash, and drops it on the coffee table, then he empties the change from his pockets.)

JOEY. Not exactly.

SAUL. Does Maria like this teacher?

JOEY. I don't know, Saul. You'd have to ask her. But as soon as you're feeling up to it, I'll show you some simple poses and you can see what it's like for yourself. When are you having this surgery?

SAUL. Three hundred twenty-three dollars and seventy-eight cents is all the money I have.

JOEY. And you don't have any health insurance?

SAUL. No, I don't have any health insurance. I was hoping to borrow some money from you, Joey.

(Pause.)

JOEY. I don't have any, Saul. (Pause.) Maybe Maria— 70

71

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Walter Β. Levis

SAUL. (Cutting him off.) She's got money?

JOEY. It's two in the morning.

JOEY. Well, her father . . .

SAUL. I know.

(Saul smiles, then shakes his head.)

JOEY. Who's getting off work at two in the morning?

SAUL. I should have known.

SAUL. I don't think you ever met her. Someone I used to know.

JOEY. What do you mean?

JOEY. In Chicago?

SAUL. Another one of my stupid ideas—that you'd be able to help me.

SAUL. Yes, when I drove a cab.

JOEY. She works on Rush Street?

(Saul gathers his cash and change.)

SAUL. Yes. JOEY. I can make money. What does the surgery cost? A few thousand dollars?

JOEY. Is she the one who . . . uh . ..

SAUL. How can you make money?

SAUL. A dancer.

JOEY. I'll teach tennis.

JOEY. I thought she did massage.

SAUL. Don't worry about it, Joe. I'll figure something out.

SAUL. She does. (Saul rubs his neck.) That's what I need right now—if nothing else. At least a massage.

(Saul stands up and reaches for his crutches and his jacket.)

JOEY. Have you two kept in touch?

SAUL. I'll be back later.

SAUL. A little. (Saul smiles.) Enough, I hope.

JOEY. I want to help you, Saul.

SAUL. Forget it. You don't have any money. Don't worry about it. It was stupid of me to ask.

(Saul goes to the door, but before he opens it Maria enters wearing a robe.)

MARLA. I thought I heard voices.

(Saul starts toward the door.)

(Pause.)

JOEY. Where are you going?

SAUL. (Playfully.) You must have been dreaming.

SAUL. A friend of mind is getting off work just about now, I think.

72

MARLA. (Entering further, restrained.) Hello, Saul.

73

Quarto

Walter Β. Levis

SAUL. Are you going to make a wounded man crawl to you, or are you going to come over here and give me a hug?

JOEY. {To Maria.) Are you coming?

(Mark hesitates, then goes to him. Joey exits.)

MARLA. {Firmly.) Yes—in a minute. I just want to visit for a minute with Saul.

MARLA. Good to see you—God, we were worried. {She turns and notices Joey has left the room.) We just got the letter tonight. We were out of town.

SAUL. I hope you don't mind my barging in like this.

MARLA. Oh, no—of course not. Are—are you okay?

SAUL. Yes, fine. {Motioning to the headband.) Knocked some sense into me. Makes me see how stupid I was . ..

MARLA. Stupid?

JOEY. Right, sure. W e l l . . . welcome home, Saul. (He shakes Saul's hand awkwardly.) And I'm going to help you work this out. Really, we can work it out.

MARLA. Work what out?

SAUL. Oh, you know Joey—he's always trying to work some­ thing out. {To Joey.) Forget it, kid, don't worry about a thing. {Joey starts to exit, then stops and turns around.)

JOEY. Hey, Saul, don't call me "kid," okay?

SAUL. To cut myself off from you. {Maria smiles uneasily, then tucks her robe under her chin and turns away. She takes a deep breath.)

MARLA. That tobacco smells good.

SAUL. Take it easy, Joey. It's just a figure of speech.

JOEY. Yeah, I guess you're right. {Joey nods and tries to smile, then exits.) {During this exchange, Maria has picked up Saul's bottle of whiskey and is looking at the label when Saul turns to her.)

SAUL. I'll roll you one.

MARLA. No, no—I shouldn't.

SAUL. Help yourself, Maria.

{Joey reenters carrying blankets and a pillow.)

JOEY. You'll probably be more comfortable here than upstairs in the attic. The cot up there is that crummy old one that used to be on Mom's porch. {Joey sets the blankets down, then everyone is silent.)

JOEY. W e l l . . . I guess I'll go to bed. {Pause.)

MARLA. No thanks, I shouldn't. {She sets the bottle down.) Were you on your way out?

SAUL. Yeah.

MARLA. At this time of night?

SAUL. Yeah, a friend of mine's getting off work—but I'd rather talk with you.

MARLA. {Nervous.) It's been a long time, hasn't it.

74

75

^ Walter B. Levis

Quarto

SAUL. {Interrupting.) A couple of happy lovers having a happy hfe here in this happy country?

SAUL. Tell me all.

MARLA. (Laughing.) Sure, Saul.

MARLA. What's that supposed to mean?

SAUL. No, really. I want to know.

SAUL. Have I overstepped my boundaries?

(Saul takes off his jacket and sits down on the couch. Maria remains standing.)

SAUL. I want to know what you do with every minute of your day—what makes you angry, sad, happy, scared—I want to know how your sex life is, and what goes through your mind in the morning while you're brushing your teeth . ..

MARLA. You're still nuts aren't you? And a goddamn flirt.

SAUL. 1 think the line is, "still crazy after all these years"—{Pause.)

And I'm not flirting . . . that would be a waste of e n e r g y . . . . Talk to me.

MARLA. {Laughs nervously.) Well, things are great, actually. I'm incredibly busy these days—directing a news show for a Polish radio station. And I'm also doing a lot of community organizing on women's issues—economic empowerment, as well as, of course, the abortion question. What a time to be on the forefront of that one! With the Reaganization of the federal courts, the states are being forced to turn to their own general assembly and constitution in a way they haven't done in decades!—which means local, grassroots organizations can have an enormous impact. {Stopping herself.) Listen to me, 1 sound like I'm campaigning, don't 1? {She laughs.) {Pause. Saul has taken out his tobacco pouch and begun to roll another cigarette.)

MARLA. I don't think I like your tone.

SAUL. I asked about my boundaries?

MARLA. {Firm.) You're right on the edge.

SAUL. Well, here 1 go, Maria, I'm going to cross the line right now—spend it all, go for broke, this m o m e n t . . . 1 still love you.

MARLA. What are you saying . . .

SAUL. {Flatly.) I love you, 1 love you, I love you .. .

MARLA. Stop it.

SAUL. 1 want you, I want you, I want you.

MARLA. You're out of line, Saul. This isn't funny.

SAUL. {Quickly.) Would it be better to keep it to myself?

MARLA. Yes. SAUL. No way, Maria. Here it is, right out loud, where both of us can hear what a scum bag bastard I am. {Slowly.) I am still in love with you. {Maria is silent. Saul lights his cigarette.)

SAUL. You and Joey happy together?

SAUL. Sure you don't want me to roll you one?

MARLA. Happy? That's an empty word, Saul. You know how 1 feel about that word, I've always—

76

MARLA. {Nervously.) I don't think you should stay here, Saul.

77

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Walter Β. Levis

Quarto

SAUL. I've got no place else to go.

MARLA. You can't come back here and make a play for me like this.

(He releases her wrist and turns away, limping back to the couch. He sits, then covers his ears and squeezes his head between his hands. After a moment, he sighs heavily.)

MARLA. (Rubbing her wrist.) What is it?

SAUL. I'm not making a play for you. I'm just telling you how I feel.

MARLA. I'm not a prize that you win for going off to war. You can't add me to your collection of medals . ..

SAUL. {Cutting her off.) I don't have any fucking collection, Maria.

I don't have any medals or prizes or even a goddamn souvenir . . . . (He gets up and hobbles to her on one crutch.) But I don't expect anything from you. I'm not that dumb . . .

(Saul remains silent. He squeezes his head more tightly and rocks back and forth.)

MARLA. You're head hurt?

(Saul doesn't answer.)

MARLA. (Still rubbing her wrist.) Saul, you want some aspirin?

(After a silence.)

(He keeps rocking, breathing more heavily. Maria steps closer but stops when she is several feet from the couch.)

MARLA. You don't even know me.

MARLA. Saul?

SAUL. I know you .. .

(He lets go of his head and looks up. Then he grabs his jacket and crutches. He hobbles past Maria and goes to the door.)

MARLA. Not anymore.

Saul. (As he opens the door.) I'm sorry, Maria, if I hurt your wrist.

SAUL. Oh, you've changed—is that it?

(He exits. Maria stands there, still rubbing her wrist as the lights go down. Chick Corea's "Return to Forever" fades in.) [o]

MARLA. Yes. SAUL. Now you do yoga? You have a new diet and exercise re­ gime—loose limbs and legumes . ..

MARLA. (Firm.) Shut up, Saul. All you have is some idea in your head of who I am. And that's what you're in love with—your own idea. You don't know me, Saul. This is a fantasy—your . . .

(Saul grabs her wrist and squeezes tightly.)

SAUL. Listen to me. You can reject me or ignore me or hate me— but don't say my feelings aren't real.

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79

τ M.

S O R A ΥΑ

Song of Nam -Master, make me a mask give me a new disguise a pair of wings so I can fly above the silken skyline I've blown away a neighbor's ashes to the wind dumped a baby in the river dragons green pursue me leaping up and up the stairwell bloodied tongues on fire shadows white with little eyes lurk in seedy dens of smoke yet have no fear, I'm born to kill.

Father is a coolie mother cleans a sweatshop pirates raped my sister in the high seas we sleep in crowded prison cells with strangers an elder brother walks with me under the neon lights to spread the yellow peril we glide beneath the dark moon

81

S T I L O

Quarto of our memories mourn the loss of distar\t whispers of the land of morning dream of helmets in a rice field make me a mask I'm ready for another kill behind the dimming street lamp butterfly knives are aiming for my guiltless heart yet have no fear I'm born to kill born to kill born to kill.

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•^. Τ

^>lf Benji Whalen

BENJI

WHALEN

Emergencies 1 WAS SLEEPING A LOT, those days. I kept the curtains rolled down and in the mornings when I woke up I'd roll over and force myself back to sleep. I held my eyes closed and lay still until I couldn't stand it.

While 1 ate my Raisin Bran, I listened to my downstairs neighbors, Everett and Stacey, yell away. It wasn't always an argument. Stacey just had a loud personality and Everett would yell back just to keep up with her.

I had started to spend some time with Everett. During the fall I had talked with him out on the front steps and now, in the winter, he came upstairs. Big Paul, he called me. He visited as much to get away from Stacey as to see me, but I didn't take any insult from that. Stacey was pregnant and home all the time and she could wear on a person.

Everett had been a fireman. Or I should say, he was a fireman, but he had fallen through a burnt-out attic over in Williston and wrenched his back. Since then he had drawn disability. He walked and sat fine, but he said he had torn many tiny ligaments that acted up only in certain positions, like climbing a ladder or swinging an axe. He wasn't so large as I'd pictured firemen to be and his hair was going thin. He didn't shave every day and he said that was because his disability got him feeling depressed at times.

He cheered up after I let him convince me to buy a used Bearcat Scanner he had seen in the paper. The Bearcat picked u p 84

all the communication frequencies and with it we could hear every emergency in the county. Not that there was too much action—Everett said when he had lived down in Boston the scanner had just about overloaded. Everett always found something to say about a call and if it was a fire he got out of his seat and went to the window as if he were thinking of running off to it. Depending on the fire he could tell me what companies from what town would respond and what sort of equipment they would be using.

Neither of us had a car at the time, so we stayed put. Everett said there was no reason for him to have one, living right in town and being injured like he was, and me, 1 just had a thing about cars.

Everett started coming u p the same time each day, which forced me to get out of bed by noon. It felt better to have to get up at a certain time. Sometimes 1 even got u p earlier just because I had the notion. In the afternoons we had beers, Genessee mostly, but only enough to pass the time. Everett heard it from Stacey whenever he had too much and 1 was set on keeping a clear head.

When Stacey wanted Everett back downstairs she hollered his name up through the floor. He'd yell back that he'd come down whenever he felt like it, and then shake his head and smile to me, fiddling with his beer cap. But then he'd check the clock and it was always about ten minutes later when he'd leave.

Everett was a natural talker and 1 was content enough to be on the other end. I'm not the prying type. But Everett let me know all his private facts on his own. His dad died in Korea and his mother had accidentally shot herself with one of his old pistols. 1 said, how terrible, but Everett said he was young enough to not remember much of it, so the whole affair wasn't so tragic as people would think. After all, he had grown u p and become a fireman and led a decent life. Still he had a real fear of guns and that was something I made sure never to mention.

After sharing a thing like that it was natural for Everett to want to know my story. 1 told him I had been left some money in a will and I was taking a vacation to look at the business situation in Burlington. Which was true enough. But I wasn't like Everett, so far as 1 couldn't just spill out every trouble I'd ever been through. I could go over things in my head, but hearing any of my troubles out loud made me shaky and 1 ended up feeling worse than before. That was just the way I worked.

I stayed away from cars because 1 blamed them for a lot. The year before, 1 had been driving my Aunt Dore in her old Chevy 85

'^^

Quarto

Benji Whalen

Citation. There was a hard summer rain going, which was fine with me because I liked the sight of the water hitting the hood and the comfortable feeling of staying dry in all that rain. My aunt wanted to go to Shopper's Village, the outdoor mall we went to on Wednesdays when she could get her Senior Citizens discount. 1 parked the car and got out in the rain to take the wheelchair from the trunk. Aunt Dore wasn't a cripple, but she had bad veins in the back of her legs and she couldn't be expected to walk through all those stores. That afternoon we went to Zayre's, Ames, Ethan Allen Furniture, and Woolworth's. I wheeled her down all the aisles she wanted and stopped when she pointed her thin arm out at an item.

Dore was short for Dorene and I had always lived in her little house outside of Rutland. There were times when my mother stayed with us, but 1 had never lived with just her. It was my aunt and my mother or just my aunt. When 1 was a baby my mother hadn't had enough responsibility and Aunt Dore took over. She had a good secretary job in the granite quarry office and was able to buy nice things for the house. There were more chairs than you could ever sit in and miniature statues on all the tables. Aunt Dore had a special liking for little owl statues and there were so many she had to spend most of her time dusting them.

I had a room to myself. After high school my aunt said 1 could stay there until I found myself a good line of work. I tried service stations and restaurant jobs, but either me or the boss would lose patience, and then Aunt Dore said I could stay until I got married.

But I'd always been shy around everyone but her, and on my thirty-fifth birthday she took me out to Lum's and said, in a nice way, that it looked like we were stuck with each other.

So what happened that Wednesday was the end of many things. After all her looking Aunt Dore had only bought a few tenpacks of Wrigley gum and it was time to get back home for lunch.

The rain had thinned and there was a bit of fog settling down.

From the parking lot there were quite a few exits onto the highway and it's awful to think of now, but 1 thought I'd take the one without a traffic light to get out quicker. The road wasn't so busy that time of the day. I checked my side, naturally, and when Aunt Dore said fine her way, I didn't look around her to doublecheck—maybe so as not to insult her vision—I just drove. Then we were hit and screeching sideways.

86

At the hospital they were kind and quick to tell me I hadn't done anything wrong. I had a broken arm and a sprained neck and for the days they kept me in the hospital bed, I did as well as you could expect. They gave me big pills and movies for the VCR. Nothing had sunk in and that was fine with me. But when they said I was able to leave and a hospital aide drove me home, then I was in trouble. There was no one in the house but me. I stayed in my room and walked down to Mister Donut and Burger King for meals.

She had said there was nothing coming her way, but it was the sort of event where you blame yourself one way or the other.

That was when I started with all my sleeping. But after a month I found a little go in me and thought it would be an idea to leave and see how it felt in another town where no one knew me and maybe I could find work that suited me. Aunt Dore had left me all her bank money, close to $9,000, and 1 took that check up to Burlington. Burlington was the biggest town in the state and I had heard things happened there.

It had been a few months since I'd found the apartment and I was still giving myself time to get used to the area. I had gotten to the point where 1 would nod to the owner and the cashier at Steve's Market and was familiar with all the radio stations, but I knew I wasn't quite ready to go out into the workplace. I never told Everett any of my personal details, but it seemed like he sensed we had something in common anyway. Once he pointed out that we held our beer bottles the same, lifting the pinky off while we drank. We're two of a kind, Everett said.

The winter had turned colder and one day in February the snow fell from morning through the afternoon. The snow made the day very bright when you looked out. Toward dusk we heard a fire call for an apartment house on River Street, which was on our side of town. When we heard the extra calls for police and ambulances we knew it was quite a fire. What a day to get burnt out of your house, Everett said. You're right there, I answered.

We heard the address repeated. That's just past the Sunoco, Everett said raising an eyebrow. I got my hat and boots and we were on our way. The snow was wet and Everett packed a snowball. He missed the telephone pole he tossed it at. I laughed.

87

Quarto but then I missed too. We threw some more, but then we caught sight of the flashing hghts farther down and I felt a Httle silly.

The house was yellow and could have been a hundred years old. It was like most of the houses on Champlain Street, wide and sagging places that might have been built for just one rich family but had four or five poor ones living in them now. The snow was still falling thick, but the flames jumped out the top windows and lapped toward the roof. Two of the firemen, in heavy orange coats, were heading around back, but the rest stood across the street and watched the water shooting from the hose into the windows.

This is the encirclement phase, Everett told me. It goes evaluate, encircle, enter, and extinguish. The four E's. Some of the neighbors standing nearby heard Everett and were as impressed as I was. I thought the firemen might recognize him, but Everett said his town's company hadn't been called, and you always saw new faces anyway. A lot of turnover, he said.

By one of the police cars there was what looked to be one of the families from the building. A short fat girl with a baby against her shoulder had her arm up around a goofy-looking guy. He was in a jungle camouflage T-shirt, long bony arms bare in the cold, and his eyes fixed on the top floor. The little wife, or maybe she was just his girlfriend, was shaking her head and saying things, but he barely took notice. Word spread around that he had been smoking in bed. That took all the pity out of Everett. Guess he's learned a lesson today, Everett said, laying around all afternoon.

I wasn't so hard. I said it must be something awful, to watch and know everything you own is inside with the flames.

The fire got to the roof, but then it settled. Some of the neighbors hooted when the flames disappeared from the win­ dows. There was only a stream of dark smoke then and the fire­ men filed up the steps into the building. Even from the street, above the noise of the engines, you could hear the firemen breaking and smashing what-all inside. Disassembling smolder­ ing material, Everett announced. Some of those things got tossed out the windows—wooden chairs, sofa cushions, pillows, rugs, and a black chunk of melted records. The skinny husband ap­ proached the records and nudged at them with his sneaker until a grey-haired policeman pulled him back. There's nothing to do now, the officer said.

τ

Benji Whalen But the sounds from the apartment got to the husband. When the clanging and sphntering had gone on a good while, he sprinted into the house. The officer jogged after him, but the kid had gotten upstairs and was letting the firemen hear it. Calling them every name around. We heard the firemen telhng the po­ liceman to get him down. Nothing worth saving now anyways, Everett said, shaking his head. The fat girl had turned away and was rubbing her forehead against her baby.

They kept the kid husband in a police cruiser until all the work was done. We watched to see if he would try anything else, but soon the firemen filed out, loaded up the trucks, and the fire was over. By then we were some of the few still standing by.

When we walked back home it was near dark and you only saw the falling snow under the streetlights. The fire had taken a long time.

Stacey had to yell u p twice for Everett that night while we talked over the day. The sweet smoke smell was still on our jackets and pants and Everett made a pencil drawing of the apartment house, to map out the fire. He took his time to make straight lines down the sides and put in all the windows and lines for the clapboard. Then he marked a few X's where the fire might have caught. Then he went wild, scratching flames all across the top of the page until he'd drawn a little inferno twice as big as the house. He said, it was really something, how fast disaster struck.

From then on we listened to the scanner, especially for calls in town. I picked up a map of Burlington at the Chamber of Com­ merce and we spread it out on my kitchen table. When a report came on, Everett would point to the location and say if it was walking distance. There were other fires, including a chimney fire right on our block, but most often there was only smoke and broken glass and nothing to worry about. The firemen and paramedics got to know our faces, and though they couldn't ex­ actly say hello, they acknowledged us, and I think in the long run they liked knowing some of us appreciated their work. We got to a few car accidents, too. In the ones where the drivers were all bloodied, I felt safer watching them knowing I would be walking home. Each step felt solid and fine on the pavement.

Stacey had her baby at the end of March and they named it Violet, after a relative. Everett would bring the little thing up for a minute, but not often. I heard the baby more than I ever saw it.

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Benji Whalen

Quarto Everett started looking worn out and I joked him about it, called him "Dad." After so much time with Everett, I had a thought or two about becoming a fireman myself. Not seriously at first, but as the weeks passed and we went to more fires, and I listened to Everett tell about the fires he'd been through, I thought maybe I could be cut out for it. I liked the coats and helmets and the idea of saving Uves.

I got u p at nine o'clock one morning and walked down to the public library. I passed through the stacks of books for a while, until a man librarian helped me out. He led me to a manual of public service jobs, but said he was almost sure I'd need to go by the fire station and ask for their particular procedures. 1 didn't make it inside the firehouse that morning, but at least 1 knew where it was and what needed to be done to get the ball rolling.

I could picture Everett, well again, and me with the same fire company. Everett was a bit smarter than me but was smaller, and he made me feel like I could do whatever he had done.

When it wasn't raining in the spring, you could prop open the windows and Everett and I watched the days get longer. Everett stayed later then and one bright evening Stacey gave up hollering and came right up to my door. There was no reason to keep a door locked there, and so before I could get up Stacey had banged once and then swung the door open. Since the baby she had narrowed, but she was still tall and had football shoulders. So's this what you guys do all day, she boomed.

We had our beers and were looking over the map for a burglary that had just come on the scanner. Which wasn't new for us, but now it all felt different. Everett had told me Stacey always made you feel you'd been caught at something. And that's how it was. I stood up while she peeked into my bedroom and looked over the walls. She'd never been up in my place. I'd never been down in hers. We'd never really said more than a hello, but I was polite enough to ask if she wanted a beer and she said fine, good idea.

Stacey twisted off her bottle cap and leaned against the kitchen sink. Everett lowered the brim of his ball cap and looked down at his hands. What's the map for, Stacey demanded. I started my answer and the Bearcat crackled. Stacey turned on it.

Not that thing, she said. This is all you guys do u p here, she went on, sit with that scanner and drink beers.

90

She was glaring down on Everett. Then she went for me. Guy, you're a sorry one, she said. You're a bad influence. I've got a baby to feed. 1 need a husband who earns some money. And you got him blowing what he has bringing beer to your little parties.

He needs to work, all right? Stacey gulped her beer.

Everett stayed to himself. But he's injured, I said, pointing across to him.

Injured? she laughed, and now Everett was looking up to me, asking something with his eyes, but I didn't know what.

From the fire over in Williston, I finished.

Stacey set her beer down hard on the counter and some foamed out the top. When was thisl she said, egging me on with her hands.

Everett was standing u p to go now and Stacey was leaning over me. From when he was still a fireman, I said.

Stacey kneeled on the floor in her deep laugh and Everett closed the door behind him. When she was done with her bit, she slapped my knee and got u p for her beer. She said, no, Everett's never been a fireman. His brother was. But Everett's never been a frigging thing, she said, and took her beer and left. I hated the way she laughed.

During the next couple weeks 1 figured Everett might come back up to explain. 1 was ready to listen, but he stayed down at their place. I still heard Stacey and the baby downstairs and, only faintly now, caught Everett's replies. 1 kept the map out and the Bearcat going. I started sleeping in again, but for a while I was always up by noon to set two beers out on the table. I sat in my chair until his beer got warm and then 1 poured it down the drain. \รถ\

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τ

Shawn Tenhoff Excerpt from Dialogues with the Old Man, by journalist Tom Edmunds:

SHAWN

TEN HOFF

Hot Buttered Peas 1 HE OLD MAN WAS dying. When the news got around town, people drove out to his ranch house to hear his last words. It took longer than expected and some people went home while others slept in their cars or staked out tents on the Old Man's front lawn.

The townspeople weren't allowed in the Old Man's bedroom, so they milled around in the living room or pressed their faces to the glass of his bedroom window. Inside, the Old Man was spread out under crisp white sheets, his pale, skull-like face sunk deep into a pillow. Gathered around the bed were the mayor, town officials, a few celebrities, the Old Man's disciples, and a media crew to record the event. They watched the Old Man sleep quietly.

After a while he awoke and lifted his head to look around. He opened his mouth. He was going to speak. The people leaned closer to hear.

"Out," he rasped. "Everyone out." His hand lifted from his side and flapped twice in a gesture of dismissal. "I want to be alone!" he barked suddenly with fierce energy, sitting upright.

Everyone leaped back except the cameraman, who had been trained to keep still in moments like this.

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Question: Sir, you and your organization have made a lot of claims. Let me ask you frankly: Can you really heal human be­ ings?

Answer: Listen, kid. There are really no human beings to be healed. If I, the Old Man, have no objective existence, of course no one else exists either! So, neither the Old Man nor other human beings have objective existence.

Question: Excuse me, sir, but to be quite honest that doesn't make any sense.

Answer: (to his disciples) Where'd you find this guy?

The Old Man fell back onto the bed and closed his eyes, ex­ hausted from his outburst of the moment before. The people gathered around the bed held their breath, afraid he would die without saying any final words.

"Is there anything we can get for you?" one of the Old Man's disciples asked, leaning forward cautiously.

After a pause the Old Man opened his eyes and rasped, "Yes. Yes, there is something I want."

The townspeople, in gratitude for all the attention and wealth the Old Man's fame had brought to the town, gave him a house.

It was a large ranch house with a sundeck, a swimming pool, and a plush front yard with sculpted shrubs and a personal gardener.

The Old Man thanked the town and said: "This is certainly better than my mobile home."

The Old Man didn't use the swimming pool, but he rested on the sundeck often, reading detective novels or books on home improvement.

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- ^

Quarto

Shawn Tenhoff

Question: Sir, you've claimed that you possess the—I'm quoting—"seven characteristic signs of a prophet and—" Answer: Wait a minute. I don't remember claiming that.

Question: I'm quoting, sir, from the promotional brochure that the town issues to— Answer: Promotional brochure? You mean you read that?

Hear that, boys? He read all about me in the brochure!

(The Old Man and his disciples laugh.)

"I want peas," the Old Man said. "Hot buttered peas, with lots of salt."

The people gathered around the bed turned to the Old Man's personal physician, who shook his head grimly but said: "I can't see any harm now."

Someone was sent to tell the Old Man's cook to prepare the peas.

The Old Man had grown a beard. It was a grey, square, fluffy beard. The town officials held a meeting to discuss the matter.

They agreed that the idea of a beard was a good thing, adding dignity to the Old Man's appearance. But somehow the beard looked odd on the Old Man's long thin face.

"It makes him look like a bum," said the Mayor.

"Or a prospector," added one of the town officials.

They voted unanimously to have the beard removed. When they told the Old Man, he became furious and locked himself in his ranch house for two days. On the third day he came out. His beard was shaved.

Peas were out of season, so the Old Man's cook had to content himself with the frozen kind. He poured the frosty peas from a clear plastic bag into boiling water. He stirred them. When they were soft, he drained the water and set the peas on a large china plate. Then he buttered and salted the peas liberally.

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Question: How, according to you, sir, does one go about obtaining enlightenment?

Answer: First, you can't "obtain" it. And all this talk, it's got nothing to do with enlightenment. You want a box for everything, but the universe, kid, isn't square or round, big or small, long or short. Look, the great religions of the world, they're just soap bubbles. Wisdom and holiness are just streaks of lightning. You understand me? No. Never mind. Next question.

The Old Man lay back, resting. The people gathered around watched closely the fragile rising and falling of his breath under the crisp white sheets.

The townspeople had grown concerned about the Old Man. He still brought a healthy tourist trade and a good deal of media attention to the town, but there were contenders who had begun to take away some of the attention heaped upon the Old Man. There was a sibyl in Portland, Oregon, who was accurately predicting the outcome of local elections. In Arizona numerous healers had appeared, and then, of course, there was the Oracle of Bakersfield. The town officials pleaded with the Old Man to perform at least one supernatural act or to heal a celebrity, as he had done in the past, but the Old Man was either unwilling or unable. When it became known that the Old Man was finally succumbing to a terminal disease, the community became hopeful: It was well-known that wise old men, at the moment of death, often left important last words, and it was hoped that the Old Man would give a final piece of wisdom before he departed.

The cook, bearing a plate of hot buttered peas, pushed through the crowded living room.

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Quarto

Shawn Ten hoff

Question: It's been argued that much of what you say is "mystical double-talk" that can't be proven, and that you are, essentially, a charlatan taking this town and all of your followers for everything they're worth. How do you respond to these charges?

Answer: Well now, that, kid, is something I'll answer. Hell yes, I'm a charlatan! And so're you. And this interview here, it's all part of a big goddamn circus. That's all. Next question.

He was going to speak! The room was silent except for recording equipment being snapped on. The people drew nearer to the bed, listening.

"Those were good peas," the Old Man said. \Q\

The cook entered the bedroom and set the plate down on a table beside the Old Man's bed. The Old Man, smelling the peas, stirred, sat up, and smiled weakly down upon the plate. As the gathered people watched, he began spooning up mouthfuls of steaming peas into his mouth.

Question: Sir, if there was one final remark that you could leave with your followers, what would it be?

Answer: (The Old Man remains silent.)

Question: Sir? Sir, we had an arrangement. You've refused to discuss your past, your philosophy, and I'm simply— Answer: (to his disciples) Boys, help this guy to find the door.

Question: But sir, we— Answer: Get him the hell out of here. The tape too.

(The interview is terminated.)

Halfway through the plate of peas, the Old Man had a coughing fit. The Old Man's personal physician stepped forward, but the fit subsided. Everyone could see that the Old Man was close to the end. He finished the peas and dropped his spoon onto the plate. He licked his lips and cleared his throat.

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ANNA

BRAILOVSKY

Burial Ground

Tel Gerisa

who remembers what Indian secrets were in the earth thrown out to make room for america, inc.

T h e sun gets loud early here screaming angry yellow before breakfast.

if we hadn't dug so deep maybe the old leather man who recycles cans for his dinner and sleeps on the street could feel them through the concrete like the princess and the pea

But the moon never goes down laughing all the while a silver whisper.

m

beneath him the subway rumbles

m

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ALAN

CONTINI

CONTRIBUTORS'

Resurrection half-painted, half-finished half-standing, half-hating half-loving, half-seeing knowing nothing at all I have a whole life yet half is wasted half my sleeping-hours are restless half my waking-hours are dreams there must be resurrection or the other-half will die li

NOTES

Jennifer Alessi is an English major in her final year at Columbia College. She plans to attend a graduate writing program, thanks to the loving support of her family. She would like to thank Lucy Rosenthal for all her help and guidance.

Anna Brailovsky, a Soviet emigre who has lived in New York City since 1979, is a 1991 graduate of Barnard College and has studied poetry with David Ignatow and Micholas Christopher.

She continues to pursue writing as much as her time allows.

Rick E. Bruner graduated from General Studies is May 1990. He now works in Budapest, where he and others have founded an English-based newspaper.

Breena Clarke, a native of Washington, D. C , is assistant to the chief of correspondents at Time Magazine. She is a creative writing non-degree student in the Writing Program at Columbia.

Alan Contini received the 1990 Jess Cloud Memorial Prize for his poem "That was Us," which appeared in Quarto 26. His play Positive/Negative, about "love, AIDS, and family," was performed at the Alma Shapiro Center at Columbia University. Alan died of AIDS on February 12,1991, at the age of 38.

Lisa Davenport has been writing since the age of twelve. She has studied fiction with Michael Stephens and poetry with David Ignatow. She is a Leo with Aquarius rising.

James Graham, a recent General Studies graduate, is presently working in media relations at I.B.M.

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Contributors' Notes

Quarto Daedre Elisabeth Levine is a senior at Barnard College. This is her first appearance in Quarto. Daedre is currently working on her first novel.

Walter B. Levis, a native of Chicago, now lives in New York City.

His previous work appeared in The Bridge. He is currently at work on a novel.

Joyceann Masters' work has been seen in The Ohio Journal, NEBO, The Allegheny Review, and other publications. She is extremely pleased to be a part of this issue of Quarto, and thanks the Colunnbia Writing Program for encouraging her to write.

BĂŠatrice Roger was born in Paris and brought u p in Australia until the age of eleven. She is currently studying graphic arts in Paris at I'ESAG. Raised in France and Australia, Pascale Roger is the recipient of the 1991 Jess Cloud Memorial Prize in Poetry. She is an undergraduate at the School of General Studies and is currently working on a manuscript. She would like to thank Nicholas Christopher, Austin Flint, and Alan Ziegler for their continuous support.

The most important thing Laurie Schaf fier has learned while at General Studies is to say, "I am a writer." She is currently enrolled in a joint program with General Studies and the School of the Arts, studying both poetry and nonfiction. She was the winner of the 1990 Aurthur Ford Poetry Prize, and also won the 1990 Scene Night Contest. This is her second appearance in Quarto.

M. Soraya Stilo studied at the London School of Economics and was a journalist before she turned to poetry as a higher form of expression and self-discovery. She scrapes a living as a free-lance editor.

Shawn Tenhoff graduated from the Writing Program in May 1991. He is a recipient of the Bennett Cerf Prize.

Njeru Waithaka was born in the Central Province of Kenya, and is majoring in Literature-Writing and Political Science. He won the George Woodberry Poetry Award in 1989, the Stephen Ades Fellowship, and the Academy of American Poets Prize. He has previously published poetry in Quarto 26, Slant Magazine, and the Snake Nation Review.

Benji Whalen is graduating from Columbia College in the spring.

In the past year he studied with D. J. Austin and Nicholas Christopher.

The editors of Quarto would also like to note the advances made in desktop publishing that have allowed us, for the first time, to not only edit and arrange the magazine, but to oversee every step of design and production short of the actual printing. Personal computer typesetting is causing a revolution in printed media, which we are proud to be a part of.

James Yuri Severinsky is a medical student who aspires to be a philosopher.

Rebecca Shulman is a sophomore at Columbia University. She is majoring in English and Psychology. "Burnt Sienna" is her first published work.

Warren St. John is a Columbia College senior and has studied poetry with Collette Inez.

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TRANSFORMATION—

Κ; . i ri i

a man in the street surprising in my place of escape sheltered from you bv distance it recognized me at once and was persuaded to try me on the man took no notice the hat left with me safely hidden behind its brim forgetting the hat was yours returning was triumphantly secure soon you beckoned to your perfidious hat which abandoned me promptly before your shielded head I stand naked -Anna Braikwsky