The Cabin's Writers in the Attic Anthology: Detour

DETOUR

writers in the attic

DETOUR

writers in the attic

Selected by BRUCE BALLENGER Edited by JOCELYN ROBERTSON With an introduction by BRUCE BALLENGER

This is a Log Cabin Book, an imprint of THE CABIN 801 South Capitol Boulevard, Boise, Idaho 83702 (208) 331-8000 www.thecabinidaho.org Š 2013 The Cabin All rights reserved.

ISBN 978-1-881850-04-5 Book design by Jocelyn Robertson.

Printed and bound in the USA in an edition of 350 copies.

The Cabin would like to thank Bruce Ballenger, Stacie Rice, Molly Kiesig and Matt Furber.

No part of this publication may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the publisher except in the context of reviews.

CONTENTS Introduction • 1

BYPASS

HEIDI NAYLOR Mack and Natalie Have Gotten Very Comfortable in Idaho • 7 KELLY HARWOOD This is How it Happens • 14

JEANNE M ROGERS Instructions for a Bed Sheet Parachute • 19

ELIZABETH BEAMAN Night Shift • 25

ROUNDABOUT

CHRISTIAN A WINN The Last Summer • 35

JERRI BENSON Concrete Angel • 41 ANNA WILHELM The Process • 47 JEANNETTE THOMAS DIKE Low Tide • 53 MAGGIE KOGER The Lost Sheep • 58

DIVERSION

CHRIS DEVORE Corn • 67 SUSAN SWETNAM The Lost Coast • 73

MICHAEL PHILLEY Tex • 78 JANET SCHLICHT Querencia • 83 JIM SEVERSON The Ride of Shame • 88

ROADBLOCK

ERIC E WALLACE Road Work • 97 CHRISTY G THOMAS Minute • 103 BILL COPE Bridge Out • 109

DEVIATION

CHRISTOPHER WATTS Phoenix • 119 NICOLE SHARP Ithaca • 125

GABRIEL CARDOSO White Noise Vows • 131 MICHAEL PHILLEY El Desvio • 137 ROB HANNON Black Tar: Heaven and Hell • 143

INTRODUCTION Lately, I’ve been getting into arguments with my GPS, who insists, among other things, that it is necessary to drive through, rather than around, Sacramento when we return to Boise from the coast.

Maybe it’s just me, but I’m pretty sure I detect a little irritation in her voice as she says “recalculating” whenever I ignore her directions. Overall, though, I’m grateful for her help with navigation. I am not good at this, often taking a left turn when I should take a right, driving eastbound when it should be west, often following the longer distance between where I am and where I’m going. Writing, of course, is something else entirely. To navigate the world with words is to recalculate all the time.

One of the commonest conversations I have with writing students begins something like this: “I had this idea in my head of what I wanted to say and how I wanted to say it, and I simply couldn’t get it down right.” This is the main reason writers abandon drafts.

They imagine that writing should be a straight shot from where they are to where they’re going, avoiding the inefficiency of detours, much less accidents. But I’m always hoping for accidents. Why else do the hard work of writing if not for the chance that you’ll find out what you didn’t know you knew? If there was a literary GPS, it would lead us right off the cliff every time.

I don’t know it for sure, but I suspect that most of the wonderful stories in this collection began as cars that their authors drove off the road but refused to abandon. Writing often demands this kind of stubborn faith in necessary detours, but so does reading; we learn to expect the unexpected. The Cabin invites you slide 1

into the passenger seat and trust your drivers, some of southern Idaho’s finest writers, as they navigate this year’s theme: Detour.

— BRUCE BALLENGER

2

DETOUR

writers in the attic

BYPASS Thanksgiving was nothing more than a pilgrim-created obstacle in the way of Christmas; a dead bird in the street that forced a brief detour. — AUGUSTEN BURROUGHS

HEIDI NAYLOR

MACK AND NATALIE HAVE GOTTEN VERY COMFORTABLE IN IDAHO Mack’s new atlas was gilt-edged, cloth-bound and hand-sewn; two-hundred creamy pages – must have cost a fortune.

“So lovely,” Natalie said, “the colors intense, like Japanese woodblock prints.”

What he needed was not an atlas but a new truck.

They’d been saving up, keeping the old one running.

They sat at the dining table, in evening light. She rubbed his calf with her stockinged foot. Mack turned the page to an orange peel of the globe.

“Did I ever mention,” he said, “how world maps in Asia are Sino-centric? China on the left, Japan. The Pacific down the middle.”

“That makes sense,” she said. “You see the world from your own perspective.”

Mack had seen the world in Japan. He’d taken the bullet train, the Shinkansen, across the prefectures. He said Japanese were formal, eager, on the same team.

Homogenous. Team Japan.

He’d lived in Germany too, until his money ran out. Bussed tables for a week and scythed a Bavarian wheat field for train fare. He’d stood at the Berlin Wall, when they still had that.

“Let’s see,” he was saying. His finger traveled over the page. “South America. Paraguay.”

“Wellspring’s doing a community water system southeast of Asuncion,” he said.

7

“Tell me again about Wellspring.”

Mack sat back and crossed his ankle over his knee.

“It’s that not-for-profit K works for. Water systems in third-world countries.”

Natalie bit her lip. “Is something up?”

Mack picked at his jeans. “Maybe. I could probably do this project. It’s a design I know.”

She bent over the map. “Near Asuncion.” Some fabric behind her eyes seemed to loosen. “So, you bought this atlas. Why, exactly?”

He exhaled. “I just thought.”

“Mack. Do they pay you to design the system?”

“Sure, honey. But…on-site. They need someone to oversee construction too. They can’t pay much.”

He stood and laid his hands on her shoulders.

There was heat in his touch.

“Pay’s in the experience, the chance to do something that matters. Wouldn’t it be unforgettable? If it goes well, there’ll be other projects.”

“Oh good,” she said. “Nice atlas.”

His hands moved away. “I’d like to come straight out and tell you something, but you make me feel like a sneak.”

She sat back. Jonah was running cross-country.

Ethan, their loner, had joined Chess Club. Michael was learning to read. Evenings, they did the Just So Stories, and she bought stuffed miniature animals, one-by-one, to go with.

“It’s pretty sneaky. Bring home these maps, like we’ll be taking a vacation. Mack, let’s not change the subject.

You think we could move down there, and sell the house? Home-school the kids?”

“Never mind. I might have guessed.”

8

She felt a ringing in her ears. It was Michael’s childhood – the kid she was going to do right by, the one they’d planned for, been able to actually afford – his childhood, shoved aside for some tubercular thirdworld pipe dream.

And then, selfish, pure and straight. She couldn’t even object on her own terms. It was always about the kids. She had no idea if she would want this venture. She was furious with Mack’s certainty about himself.

Her legs felt like paper ribbons.

“Mack, this – heart, ambition, whatever. I’m the heartless one, the practical one. It’s too big for me. A poor country, the politics probably a mess. We have a family, a whole situation here.”

He rested his fingertips on the map. She spoke to the floor. “The kids are doing well. Let’s not mess things up for them.”

Stupid. As though they’d go if the kids were doing badly.

“You go! And come home for a long weekend every few months. Right?” She caught his eye. How annoying to again find his eyes beautiful. But she had to look away, because she’d been bluffing. She knew it and knew he did too.

Before long she heard the clank of a wrench, the soft clatter of wood and metal in the garage. Sometime later, she kissed his brow.

“Come to bed?”

“Soon.”

In the night, he slipped in behind her. His heavy warmth, an embrace. Maybe she was dreaming.

9

The next morning Mack had a trip to a faraway drill site, ten days with a crew; no service. He stood trimming his beard at the mirror. Natalie was behind him in the glass, getting ready for a shower. Mack kept stepping slyly to the right and she hopped along behind him, pulling off her socks.

“Hold still, Mack!” How she hated an unexpected mirror. Too late, she looked up to see something hard come into his eyes.

“A lot of folks are right where they should be.” Soap foam flecked his lips. “Me, for instance.”

“Something about hearing you say that breaks my heart,” she said, from the shower. She could hear him rinsing. He’d take a moment to enjoy the cold water, to cup it over his beard, his closed eyes – so easily, wonderfully pleased.

She wanted to call out, to have him leave with a proper goodbye, ten days is ten days, but she couldn’t do it.

Dressed and made up, she walked to the living room; picked up the newspaper, Ethan’s socks, a coffee cup. Very casually she glanced out the window to check the weather, to make sure – yes, he did it, oh shit – he had in fact driven away. No lovemaking last night, their protective charm, a vaccination. No kiss. She turned to the most necessary tasks of the day.

On the last night he was away, Natalie sat in the captain’s chair, paging through the atlas.

They’d purchased this dining set from a widowed grandmother. Beautiful walnut, three leaves, chairs Natalie re-covered herself. She’d asked if there weren’t two armrest-ed captain chairs, like dining sets in 10

showrooms. “Sugar,” the woman explained, “back in those days there was only one captain.”

Captain Mack. A tiny flower deep inside her pelvis burst, a little sweet explosion. He’d had a motorcycle in college, a tinny Yamaha, whose engine always brought off in her a sexual whirr. He sold it when Jonah was born. The buyer – a kid – came up short, and Mack released the bike anyway. He said: drop by with the money when you can, I’ll hold the title until then.

He never got that money – she’d seen the title, still in its folder – and wouldn’t bring it up even for nostalgia’s sake. Mack didn’t look back.

He looked forward, altered by events and choices, never sidelined. Not jealous or suspicious, one straight shooter. She’d never known anybody less haunted. But Paraguay was to say he wasn’t satisfied with what had become of his life. Their life. Tightness gathered above her eyes.

Was she satisfied herself?

Dangerous question.

She’d arrived someplace comfortable, yet fearful.

Slow-moving, quiescent – the center of a pond, where things are calm, not much is happening. There was a term for this; Mack had used it once, helping a boy with homework. What was it, now? She had it – A low-energy depositional environment. Lord. That was her.

Light softened of its own accord. The moon outside disappeared behind some high, scudding clouds – the same moon Mack could see. Such a bloom of tenderness she felt. He’d been so steady, so decent. She’d overlooked him.

She traced a red line on the cover of the atlas, Next day he’d be driving home.

11

Mack’s truck finally failed. A well-loved pickup with crazy mileage, which expired just east of home.

He worked a salvage deal with a towing company and phoned Natalie to come. She parked ahead on the gravel shoulder. Dusk was coming down.

“Hey, honey,” he said, as she walked back. He kissed her, absurdly nonchalant. “Timing chain I think.”

“Can it be fixed?”

“Not worth the trouble.” He pulled a duffle and a hard hat out of the back and clapped his hand on the hood. She wasn’t even sure he’d cleaned out the glove box.

“Lucky most of the equipment had to stay at the well. I’m going back next week.”

“Driving something better, I guess.” She smiled.

“Maybe something new.”

“Nothing new. But an engine with more kick to it.

That’d be nice.”

Natalie touched his waist and they walked to the car.

Michael was inside, stringing Transformers across the seats.

“Dad,” he said when Mack opened the door. “Want a sip of my soda?”

“Sure.” Mack took a swallow from the can. “What have you got that’s good for a laugh?”

“I don’t know,” said Michael, adjusting a Transformer arm. He grinned and lifted his eyebrows, a flicker of light skittering across his face. “There’s this one about Helen Keller.”

“Yeah? Not the one where she answered the iron.

I’ve heard that one.”

“No, Dad, it’s another one.”

“Let’s have it.”

12

“What’s Helen Keller’s favorite color?”

“I give up. What?”

“Corduroy.”

“Ha!” They took the off-ramp and swung west. Soft conversation. Spectacular sky. Mack’s fingers touching Natalie’s on the console. Working car. First-world.

Home.

So lovely and insufficient.

13

KELLY HARWOOD

THIS IS HOW IT HAPPENS Your husband arrives home from work to find the dog eating a flank steak and potatoes au gratin off the counter and the children watching cartoons in the dark.

You are waiting on the front porch, with a bottle of wine and a thick stack of printed emails, twenty-seven pages to be exact. Correspondence between your husband and a woman named Amber, found in an email account your husband kept secret from you until today, when you found it quite by accident, blinking on the laptop screen. One day, we are in the middle of a life and the next moment, we arrive at its crumbling edge, by force or by choice.

“Tell me about Amber,” you say and her name rolls out of your mouth like a grenade. He falls to his knees right there in the front lawn and looks at you in slow motion anguish, as though he is witnessing a car accident.

“It’s nothing. She’s nothing,” he says.

You point out, “Three years is a long time to spend doing nothing.” Then you laugh and you can’t stop because for the first time in the history of fighting with your husband, you have nothing else to say.

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” he says, and you wonder if sorry has ever meant less to anyone.

And this is the part that nobody tells you. In that moment, you don’t feel angry or sad or numb, not yet.

Just for the moment, you are exhilarated – joyful even.

Not because you suspected he was having an affair, 14

or that you had even thought about it, but because tomorrow will finally look different than yesterday. That sacrificial life of laundry and coupons and carpools just lurched off the track and you feel, for the first time in years maybe, that what you do next will actually matter.

Somehow it doesn’t feel like the end, it feels like the beginning.

Of course, it isn’t really the beginning or the end because matters involving eleven years and three children are never that simple. You wake up the next morning with a hangover. The kids want cereal for breakfast and they can’t find their shoes, and suddenly none of this seems funny anymore. The ambivalence you felt last night has been replaced with fits of anger.

All day, you have imaginary fights with your husband even though he is at work. You keep thinking about the vacuum cleaner he gave you for your birthday last year.

A fucking vacuum cleaner.

You replay the important moments of your life, but also the trivial ones. You wonder for instance, if the night you danced with the locals and made love on the beach in Mexico was that special for both of you, or if the tears he cried on your ten-year anniversary were tears of love or tears of guilt. You wonder if another woman slept in your bed when you took the kids to visit your parents. You ask yourself if there was a moment you should have known.

You hate him of course, but now you are starting to hate yourself. You examine your body like evidence in a murder trial. The V-shaped vein in your forehead makes you look pissed, even when you aren’t upset.

Your breasts, or what remains of them after three kids, fall in resignation against your chest. You should have 15

stayed on that diet. You should have worn the lingerie he bought you instead of the sweatpants. Would it have killed you to get that bikini wax?

The printed emails are hidden under the mattress and you study them when your husband goes to work.

You memorize each sentence. You deduce that Amber must be simple and uneducated by the way she writes ‘U R’ and ‘tonite’ and ‘luv.’ You find her profile on Facebook. Given the math, she was in sixth grade when your son was born. You find out where she works and park outside her office. You do this for days before you finally see her walking to her car on her lunch break.

You follow her to the grocery store and walk behind her in line at the salad bar. She is fatter and less perfect than you imagined; fatter and less perfect than you – and perhaps this should make you feel better, but it only makes you feel worse.

You write a letter to God, because more than being mad at your husband or even yourself, you are mad at God. You always did the right thing. You sacrificed.

You loved your husband even when you didn’t like him.

You gave everything and now look at you –with your wilting breasts, your angry forehead. What happened to karma? God tells you that the point of loving is not to be loved in return. You tell him that’s fucked up and he tells you that you are not without blame. You stopped trying. You stopped caring. The conversation keeps coming back to you, so you stop talking to God and start smoking because it allows you not to think. Not thinking feels good, so you keep smoking. You splurge and buy a carton of cigarettes; American Spirits because they are healthier.

The holidays arrive and out of indecision, or guilt 16

or your desire to please your children, you make believe that everything is good again. You play Bing Crosby, decorate the house, and wake up Christmas morning to presents and laughter and expectations. And just like that, your life begins to look on the surface like nothing ever happened. You haven’t exactly reconciled, but not deciding has created a new normal, one that everyone seems to be settling into quite comfortably. Friends stop asking you how you’re doing. Your husband forgets to grovel. Eventually he gets mad at you for smoking. He doesn’t like the dress you wore last weekend.

One night, you dream about making dinner, but all you find in the refrigerator is plastic fruit and vegetables, the kind sold in toy stores. The pantry is lined with tiny empty boxes of made-up cereal brands.

In the freezer, you find a plastic chicken leg, a rubber steak, and a box of peas that squeaks like a dog toy. You pick up a plum-shaped teacup and it fits like an egg in the palm of your hand. You squeeze your fist around it and the cup shatters, blood drips to the floor. But, when you open your hand, the cup is whole and plum-shaped once again. The blood is gone.

At this point, you are very near the end. The trajectory of the last few months resembles something closer to a scribble than a line; but the true end of your marriage, the vortex of this life spinning down the drain, happens in the silence of your private thoughts as abruptly and irrevocably as a light bulb sputtering into darkness. One moment you can’t imagine your life without this person even if that life sucks. And the next moment, you know that staying is actually killing you one cell at a time.

“I don’t see why you are so angry,” he says, “I’ll 17

be home in a few days.” Your husband is leaving on a weekend trip to visit his college friends – a yearly tradition and the argument begins in the car on your way to the airport.

He’s still talking when you begin to see your life as a huge pattern of coiling time retracing itself over and over again – a thousand trips like this one, more baskets of laundry than you can count, one sagging body part after another, and all the time in the world to wonder if another young girl isn’t smiling in your husband’s direction. What you loved about your marriage and your life is gone, and maybe it never existed. Now your old routines, your dreams for the future, and even the reflection of your own face in the mirror, feel as counterfeit as a kitchen full of rubber steak.

You turn to face him as he opens the car door, “Just go,” you say, “but I want you to know, I’m done.”

You say this not as a threat, but because it is finally and utterly true. You feel exhilarated, joyful even. You have not written the next line, but you can hear its whisper and you can see the blank page in front of you.

“What?” he says. He raises his eyebrows with a shadow of condescension and you know he has no idea.

The filament has snapped, the coil of your lives split haphazardly apart.

One day we are in the middle of a life and the next moment, we arrive at its crumbling edge, by force or by choice. Somehow it doesn’t feel like the end, it feels like the beginning.

18

JEANNE M ROGERS

INSTRUCTIONS FOR A BED SHEET PARACHUTE I can’t say for certain what it was that attracted me to Leif, unless it had something to do with how he flattered me. When he raved about my auburn hair and long legs, I felt like a goddess – at least at the beginning.

That’s why, after being together six months, it hurt so badly when he started breaking up with me on Monday mornings. On the third consecutive Monday, I stopped by his apartment that evening to pickup my clothes, and Tuesday morning, right on schedule, he called saying, “I miss you.”

Dora, my best friend and agent, had reluctantly introduced us at Tacoma’s monthly Art Walk. Dora’s funny. She says something and I crack up, like the time I sent her a greeting card when she was going through a rough patch. See, I buy these cards with Impressionistic paintings on the front and stash them in my desk so that I always have something beautiful to share with friends who are down in the dumps. In all honesty, sometimes I need a lift too. When I mailed one to Dora, she called and said, “People who send greeting cards should expect trouble.” I tell you – she cracks me up.

Dora and I stood admiring a painting of a girl with chartreuse hair at the Art Walk when Leif walked up holding a double scotch.

“Don’t even think about it,” Dora whispered. “His reputation precedes him.”

Leif offered his right hand.

“Kat, this is Leif. He collects art – for his 19

hypnotherapy office.”

Leif’s face looked youngish and vulnerable. His ears reminded me of Danny H. from elementary school.

Perfectly circular, Danny’s ears stuck out from either side of his head like bread and butter pickles. Kids teased Danny about catching flies with his ears, about using them as fans on hot days.

I avoided staring at Leif’s ears and looked instead at his glacier blue eyes set in porcelain-white skin. His looks scared me, but I talked myself out of worrying.

People can’t help what they look like. Give the guy a chance, I told myself.

When we shook hands, Leif tilted his head slightly to the side and stared intently into my eyes. Mesmerized, I stared back.

“Delighted to meet you, Kat.” He smiled a melodrama villain smile and winked one eye. I stared at his ears, now a bright crimson from the scotch. Set against his navy jacket, they were too much to ignore.

“Your blouse is lovely. It’s changing colors with the fading light of the setting sun.” His carrot red mustache curled up at the corners of his mouth. I felt exquisitely beautiful.

Dora didn’t talk on the drive home. She pulled up in front of my house and said, “Headin’ the wrong way on a one-way street with that one.”

Two days after our meeting, Leif rang the doorbell of my studio, flowers in hand.

“I had to see you. Come with me,” he said.

“I’m painting.”

“Ten minutes.”

On our waterfront walk, Leif wrapped his arm around my waist and said, “Kat. I’m absolutely crazy 20

about you.”

The man had a way with words.

Not long after that walk, we were an item. On Friday night we went out dancing, and I wore a blue sequined dress that I adore because the satin lining feels silky against my skin. It feels like the parachute my dad occasionally threw on the front lawn for my sister and me as kids. We’d roll ourselves up in its slipperiness and pretend to be twin caterpillars asleep in a silk-threaded cocoon.

We were home from dancing and standing in Leif’s bedroom when he kissed me passionately, then skillfully unzipped my dress. Who knew the heaviness of the sequins, combined with the slipperiness of the satin lining, would zoom that little dress straight to the floor?

I love stuff like that.

One second before I leapt into his bed, he whispered, “Wait! I have a surprise.” From his nightstand he reached for a satiny sheet, flew it up into the air and let it float softly down onto the bed, like a christening.

We’d been inseparable for six months when Leif’s cold feet attacks began. He called it quits on three consecutive Mondays, and every consecutive Tuesday he called to say how sorry he was. He missed me.

After our third Reconciliation Tuesday, I left for Chicago to attend an opening of my paintings. Leif called at the last minute to say he couldn’t take me to the airport as promised – a client desperately needed him.

It just so happened that the client was the same twentyfive-year-old woman who called him at home every week, always with an emergency. That’s when I finally got angry. That’s when I decided to break it off with him 21

for good when I returned from Chicago. That’s also when I returned his gift: an exquisite set of glacier blue sheets that matched his eyes. “So that even when I’m not there, you’ll feel like I’m there,” he’d said.

Dora responded bluntly. “I’m watering the plants and bringing in the mail. Seems like I’d be the one to take you to Sea-Tac in the first place.”

On our way to the airport we stopped at Nordstrom.

I wanted to erase any and all reminders of our first night together. Sheets qualified as reminders. In a brown grocery bag tucked under my arm, I carried the glacier blues that Leif had given me on that last Reconciliation Tuesday.

“We don’t return opened linens,” said the chic, young saleswoman.

“Opened. Never used.” I purposely acted like a shrew. I felt pretty bad about it later.

In the parking lot Dora said, “Kat, I know breakups suck.”

“Tell me about it,” I said.

“Promise me you’ll wait – for the real thing.”

“Scout’s honor,” I said, holding my point, middle and ring fingers in the air.

“He’s nothin’ but a side road,” she said.

“Filled with potholes.”

“So, no more Mondays?”

“No more Mondays.”

I felt empty in Chicago. Hollow. That’s how the loneliness felt to me. I cried a lot too. I began having what I called Chicago moments in which I settled down into the sadness of losing myself, yet again, for the wrong man. First a failed twenty-year marriage and now Leif.

22

I was in the middle of a Chicago moment when my hotel phone rang.

“I love you,” he said. “See you at the airport tomorrow.”

I phoned Dora to say I had a ride home from the airport. “Dora? You there?”

“Going for round four, eh?”

“You saw me return the sheets!”

“And now you’re sliding right back into ‘em.”

Leif greeted me at Sea-Tac with roses.

At my place, he arranged the flowers in a vase while I sorted the mail. Hidden in with all the bills lay an ivory linen envelope from my sister. I gasped when I opened the identical Van Gogh card that had comforted me during the three Monday breakups.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Oh, nothing.”

“You relax while I cook us something tasty.” The guy could cook. I’ll give him that much.

I studied the painting of red rooftops along a country lane pointing diagonally toward a bright yellow horizon.

“This pasta primavera will surpass anything you ate in Chicago.”

We feasted, and afterward, while Leif began to set the stage for romance, I feigned jet lag and pretended to fall asleep on the sofa.

The next morning after we drank coffee and ate croissants, we lay in bed lazily thumbing through my decorating magazines – our afterglow ritual. Leif pointed to a Tuscany mansion and said, “I could live there – with my favorite, seductive, twenty-five-year-old to service all my needs.”

23

I got out of bed, walked my naked, forty-six-yearold body to the wicker chair, picked up his neatly folded clothes and dropped them unceremoniously to the floor.

“Go,” I said.

“Call you later – when you’re in a better mood.”

I tiptoed downstairs to watch him back out of the driveway, turned from the door and stubbed my toe on a gift box tucked under the entry table. Dora’s accompanying note – plain and simple: Welcome Home!

Main Road Open.

Under the tissue paper lay exquisitely embossed, white-on-white sheets. Right then and there, I marched upstairs and put them on my bed. Although alone, I didn’t feel lonely any more. I felt at peace and happy to be off the bumpy side road. I even felt beautiful again, all by myself.

After all the confusion stopped and everything became clear, I did a curious thing. I got out the Van Gogh card of red rooftops along the country lane pointing toward the yellow horizon, reached for my favorite pen and wrote a goodbye note to Leif. I smiled really big when I kicked the top sheet up high off the bed and watched it float down onto me.

24

ELIZABETH BEAMAN

NIGHT SHIFT It’s Wednesday at the Starlight. I’m working the night shift. I hear the cooks Nik and Georg talking in the kitchen, Greek and English. It’s too early for the drunks who come in after the bars close. The restaurant’s empty except for Officer Dave, wearing his uniform like a second skin and hunched over his free cup at the counter.

“Hey, Liesl. How about one for the road?” He grabs his cap off the counter.

“Sure. I’ll put it in a paper cup.”

“Why don’t you bring it out to the cruiser and give me a proper goodbye?” His dark eyebrows rise, suggestively.

I give him a look. He knows I’m married.

“Can’t blame me for trying.” He puts on his hat and grabs the coffee. The glass doors shudder behind him.

I’m fresh meat – nineteen, married only five months when Bob was drafted. I’m here to be with him during his last three months stateside. I took leave from my job in Austin, packed the car, drove up to Virginia, Newport News, where he’s in helicopter training for ‘Nam. Rented a cheap furnished apartment, tough to do on ninety dollars a month base pay; the job I get at the Starlight pays three dollars a night, plus tips and meals.

The drunks never tip. I’m in it for the meals. This is 1967, and the town’s full of draftees’ wives like me.

“That cop leave?” Nik brings out my dinner.

“Wow, Nik. Lobster?”

25

“You deserve better.” He returns to the kitchen to let me eat.

Red light pulses through the front windows from the neon star in the parking lot. The sign below it reads: “Op n 24 H urs.” The interior of the restaurant is a cave of dark paneling, dotted with brown oilcloth-covered tables. The kitchen, closed off by swinging porthole doors, shines twin beacons of light through the dusty air of the dining area. I’m sitting at the counter next to the cash register and can see Nik and Georg moving around in the kitchen through the portholes, Georg shaking a meat cleaver to emphasize a point he’s making.

Just after four, Officer Dave returns for another coffee. It’s his right according to the unwritten law of all-night restaurants. It’s been a slow night. “Leaving on a Jet Plane” plays on the radio.

I’m standing at the far end of the counter telling Nik about my new ironing board. “I left mine in Austin, so Bob’s been using the post laundry. Now, I’ll do his fatigues and save money.”

“Where’d you buy it? My wife complains our old one’s no good.”

“I didn’t. My neighbor Maureen said some neighbors moved out, guy’s deployed, and they left things behind. She said we should get ‘em; the landlord would take it all to the dump.” Maureen’s like everyone in our apartment complex, no money, always working the angles.

“How did she know it was okay?”

“She said she talked to the wife – they’re gone for good.”

26

Sunday night, I wasn’t working. Bob was at the barracks. Maureen and I walked over to the back door of the Browns’ old apartment. It was snowing. We carried flashlights and a crowbar.

Maureen jimmied open the painted window. It creaked and moaned, then made a loud crack as it flew open. I looked side to side, but saw no one.

I pushed Maureen through the window and she helped me wriggle in after. The kitchen, where we landed, opened onto the living room. We didn’t need our flashlights. A streetlamp shone through the panes of the front windows, reflecting off the snow swirling outside and drifting under the front door. And there in the middle of the living room, framed by the light, was the ironing board, set up, and a basket piled with linens.

“Hey, I could use the ironing board,” I said.

“Sure. I’ll take the basket.” Maureen checked upstairs. Didn’t find anything.

I folded up the board, carried it out; Maureen took the basket and locked the door behind us, and we sneaked away through the snow with our loot.

Bob, preoccupied when I told him, just said okay.

The landlord would never know.

Officer Dave waves his cup at me. I grab the pot, walk down to his end of the counter, and give him a refill.

“What’s this about an ironing board?”

I’m not sure how much he’s heard, but I’m saved from having to explain by a group of late-nighters swinging through the doors, burly men, high-heeled women with big hair, low necklines.

27

“Later. I’ve got customers.”

Three in the afternoon, I’m at the apartment, and Maureen comes over to borrow our phone. My mother pays for the connection so we can keep in touch. But it’s Maureen who uses it most. She makes long distance calls, says she’ll pay for them, but never has in the two months I’ve known her.

Today, before she makes her call, Maureen tells me, “The Browns came back for their stuff. They claim money was taken.”

“What? I thought you said they weren’t coming back.

Did you see any money?”

She smirks and shakes her head no. “The landlord filed a report with the police.”

I feel a pit grow in my stomach. While she’s on the phone, I move the ironing board upstairs, out of sight.

Maureen hangs up. “Listen, I’m sorry. We made a mistake. There’s nothing we can do now.”

I rub my forehead and sigh. “I think I’ll lie down; I’m getting a headache. Don’t forget about those phone charges, okay?”

“Yeah, sure. I get paid Monday.” Maureen works part-time at a bakery. “I’ll bring the money over,” she says, running out the door.

Saturday morning at the Starlight, a party of twelve arrives, drunker than snot. They can’t decide what they want.

“Let me start y’all with some appetizers.” I bring them a round of drinks; pry the rest of the order out of them.

Officer Dave waves me over. “When you gonna tell 28

me about that ironing board?”

“Can’t talk now.” I leave for the kitchen to put in the order. Officer Dave’s gone when I come out.

When I get off at six, I drive carefully on slick roads back to our apartment, wondering what to do about the ironing board. I hear a siren; look in the rearview to see lights flashing. It’s Officer Dave. He comes alongside my car as I roll down the window, leans in, and clamps his hand on the steering wheel. His breath smells of coffee.

“There you are, missy. You ready to talk about that ironing board?”

“What?”

“There’s been a report. A break-in over at the Hampton Apartments. Isn’t that where you live?”

“Yes.” “Well, maybe you and I got some visiting to do. How about we go over to your place?”

“My husband’s home.” He’s not, but I know what Officer Dave has in mind.

“Okay. Rain check.” He lets go of the steering wheel, walks back to the cruiser.

My legs shake, causing me to jump the accelerator, skid out. But I see him, in the rearview, make a U-turn, go the other way.

When I get home, I’m surprised to see Bob. “I got my orders. I leave for ‘Nam, Friday.”

“Oh, honey.”

“Where you going when Bob leaves?” Georg asks.

I’m in the kitchen with Nik and Georg. “Back to Austin.

Don’t tell that cop, okay?”

The front door gives a jingle and I go to see who it is.

29

“Hello, Liesl. You been avoiding me?” It’s Officer Dave.

“I’ve been working day shift. Training a new waitress for nights.” I nod over at a gaunt woman, not fresh meat, bussing a table.

“When we getting together for that talk?”

“Yeah – how about tomorrow? See you tomorrow.”

The car’s packed, and I don’t want him to see. I keep an eye out all the way home, no Officer Dave.

One last night together, Bob and I make sad love.

Next morning, I drive him to Fort Eustis with his duffel bag, his orders, his neatly-pressed uniform.

“Write,” I tell him.

“I will.”

“Write,” I say again.

It feels like death watching him queue up at the gate.

He doesn’t look back. After he disappears up the ramp, I wave through the windows of the terminal, pretending I see him in a porthole of the transport. I watch it rev up, taxi off.

In a fog, I stumble to the car and head up the peninsula. But I’m crying too hard to stay on the expressway. Have to exit, park on a side street, calm down. A cruiser comes up the street. It looks like Officer Dave, but it passes without stopping. I realize I better get out of there. So, I do, driving non-stop all the way to Tennessee before I quit worrying about Officer Dave and remember Maureen never paid for those calls.

30

ROUNDABOUT Le vrai est trop simple, il faut y arriver toujours par le compliqué.

The truth is too simple: one must always get there by a complicated route.

— GEORGE SAND

CHRISTIAN A WINN

THE LAST SUMMER I met Jack at the river near midday. He was holding, so we found a shadowed spot along the sandy bank, sat to smoke what he had left. It was pretty much dirt weed – stems and dried-out resin – but it helped the hot day ease away. The river was still running high – fast green whorls, whitecaps crashing against deadfall and the rocky island twenty yards offshore. It had been the wettest spring in fifty years, but now summer was full upon us. It hadn’t rained all June.

A hush was on the afternoon, a breeze whispering in the cottonwoods, muting the young families shouting, laughing, wading the shallow inlet across the river. Jack was quiet, too, and we sat and smoked, trying to live in an invisible in-between. It’s what we wanted most right then, to disappear. It was the last summer. Jack would be driving south in August where Camp Pendleton waited.

I’d be flying east to check into a dorm tower in Chapel Hill. It was our last summer together in that city, our last summer as boys, and in moments like this, we kept trying to figure out how to say goodbye.

“Another Wednesday,” Jack said.

“A good day to sit right here.” I took off my shoes, pulled my toes through the warm grey sand.

In May, we’d caught his mom and my dad fucking on Jack’s living room floor. This was when they were both still married, and no one else knew yet – just Jack, me, and them. Though they didn’t know we’d been watching 35

that afternoon, that we’d skipped midday classes to walk through that staid, tree-lined neighborhood where we’d lived our whole lives back to Jack’s and smoke, talk, thumb through his dad’s collection of Oui magazines. Our parents were career people, and we were only children. Skipping had been our Wednesday ritual since Christmas break when Jack started dealing weed and Quaaludes for this college kid named Curtis.

Wednesdays brought the new supply.

That one Wednesday when his mom drove up and the garage door scrolled open, we slipped out the sliding-glass back door. For some reason, though, we didn’t head into the neighborhood, but stood within the juniper bushes to smoke another bowl. From there we had a clear view of the living room, and soon they appeared – his tall, redheaded mom; my shorter, broadshouldered dad – and went at each other on the beige carpet twenty feet from Jack and me. We stared, high enough not to be embarrassed. Shoes came off, buttons popped; Jack’s mother wasn’t wearing panties; my dad ducked his head beneath her yellow-flowered dress; her neck craned, her mouth made sounds that were almost words – primal, gorgeous.

Jack and I still hadn’t figured what to say to each other about all this, though we’d gone back to watch three more Wednesdays. School was done now, and so they must have assumed someone might be around because the last two weeks we’d waited, but there was no show.

“Think they’re in a motel?” Jack said, digging through his baggie. “Or do you think they stopped?”

“What motel?”

36

“Out by the airport.” Jack licked his fingers, stood, walked to the water. “Curtis takes girls out there.”

“I thought he had a house.”

“He says some girls are motel girls, some are house.”

“I guess that’s right,” I said, wondering how you’d figure the difference, or if my dad thought of women that way, or if he was thinking that way this afternoon with Jack’s mom.

“This bag’s dead,” Jack said. “I gotta meet Curtis at three.” He looked at his thin, freckled wrist, then up at the clear sky. “We’ve got a couple hours. He said the new stuff is wicked sticky.”

Curtis lived in a neighborhood of ranch houses near the university, not far from the river – an area where students crashed eight to a house, and where poor married couples or single old men lived. Not quite a slum, but nothing like the restored Victorians our families lived in across town.

When we knocked on Curtis’ door we didn’t get an answer, though people were moving around inside, shushing each other.

“We should give him a minute,” Jack said.

“He’s probably got a house lady over.” I thought about knocking harder, but I’d met Curtis once, and though he didn’t look super badass, I could tell he was someone whose good side you wanted to keep on.

“The supplier,” Jack nodded to a polished green mini-van. “The East LA Mexican chick who motors up twice a month with duffel bags full.”

We walked the bending streets past un-mowed lawns and cracked driveways, everything hollow, like no one 37

lived in these houses at all. College was out for summer, and everyone else must have been at work, or sitting in dim, air-conditioned rooms watching TV. We walked, saying little, watching the heat blur the asphalt and short trees and for-sale cars, all of it looking precisely how I felt. And it seemed Jack and I were turning over the same thing – how to deal with what we knew now of our parents; how to figure our watching; how to add up what our lives might become.

I wanted to put my hand on his shaggy head and say, “Years from now, we’ll know what all this means. We’ll be way gone from here. But, we’ll know.” But that wasn’t quite right, and it was not true, and each time I reached, my hand fell back to my side.

“Remember that woman who got murdered last year?” Jack said, stopping, pointing. “The decapitated ex-wife?”

“Dude threw her head on the roof?”

“This’s where it happened. In that living room. On that carpet. Curtis said there was gore everywhere, and that all afternoon the guy stood at that window covered in it, waiting.”

We stared at the small brick house. It was neatly cared for – roses and fresh bark lining the well-watered lawn. It was the nicest house on the block.

“Curtis told me she kept teasing him about his little dick,” Jack said, smiling sadly. “She had a new man she kept bragging about. Curtis heard ‘em fighting couple of times. Eventually the guy has enough, loses it.

She comes home one day, dude knocks her out, stuffs something up inside her, cuts off her head. He did the worst thing for the best reason, that’s what Curtis says.”

I stared, trying to imagine the backside of that red38

painted front door, or my breath against that window.

Sweat raced down my spine.

As we rounded deeper into the neighborhood, the smell of dry straw and creosote all around, a little retarded girl ran up behind us, the only person we’d seen all afternoon. She was probably twelve, wearing a dirty, flower-print sundress and leather sandals. She grinned in that happy, vacant way, murmuring oblong words. A thin bruise smudged her neck below the right ear. Jack and I shrugged, kept on in silence, and she followed. I asked her name, and she shrugged, too. Jack asked where she lived, and she skipped in circles along the sidewalk.

“How hard is it to cut off a human head?” I reached across my neck. “There’s a lot of stuff in there.”

“With the right tools it can’t be hard.” Jack felt his neck, too.

Behind us the girl screamed happily, ran up to take our hands, and we walked with her between us. She mumbled an indecipherable diatribe explaining she was having the best day of her life. At first this seemed sad, but soon enough it became hopeful.

At a pause I said, “Did you know my dad likes his mom?”

The girl nodded, yes, as did Jack. “And they do it,” I said. “Know what do it means?”

She stuck out her tongue. Jack poked a finger into his nose. She shook her head, groaning.

“If you really watch,” Jack said. “When two people do it, they make faces and noises like you.”

“Maybe you were born to do it,” I said, though this sounded wrong, and a little sick, and made me wonder who this girl could ever end up with. She’d live her 39

whole life in this neighborhood, alone, in that happy head.

Jack blurted a throaty, retarded-sounding, “Fuck me, Dale! Put it in my dirty place!”

“You’re a filthy bird, Francis.”

“Go! Take this trash out, Dale!” Jack squinted, crooked his jaw, his face joyous.

I thrust my hips. “Give it, Francis! Take it, Francis!”

We eased along in silence for fifteen or twenty paces, our sneakers crackling the asphalt gravel. I looked over the girl, to Jack, but he held his head low, only grinning into his chest. What more was there to say?

Then in a burst, “Give!” the girl yelled, her mouth a red, round O. “Take!”

Jack and I bent at the waist, laughing like we never would again, unable to catch our breath as the girl squeezed tighter, fingers slick with sweat, as the girl shut her eyes, groaning, pursing her lips, trying to speak.

But, she couldn’t figure this out, she couldn’t bring those words back, or any words at all, so she let us go and ran slowly into the bright, hot day, her arms spread like wings.

40

JERRI BENSON

CONCRETE ANGEL “It’s just a small detour,” Peyton said to her husband hours before in their Jeep. After miles of sand and sage brush, seeing the green sign, “Las Vegas 32 miles,” offered Peyton an out, at least for the night. “Come on, Dad will still be dying of pancreatic cancer tomorrow,” she said, smiling, not meaning the smile, it was her coping mechanism. Peyton’s husband was patient with her, played along.

Forty-five minutes later, he checked them into the tropical themed Flamingo. The hotel smelt like rancid coconut and cigarette smoke. As her husband tried to talk over the crowd noise and slot machines to the tall man behind the reception desk, Peyton wandered off without him.

Peyton, a middle-aged mother from Boise, was drunk and getting drunker. She avoided her husband’s desperate calls after he noticed she wasn’t behind him.

He looked for her, while she tried to blow off a little regret in Vegas.

On a skywalk overlooking the Bellagio’s fountain, she stood on her tip-toes to see over the concrete barrier. Between the passing masses, Peyton watched a small group of men in dark business suits and loosened ties wolf-whistling at two leggy blondes in matching white-feathered bikinis and glittered heels posing in front of the placid water. The men’s vulgarity made her want to do something childish, like spit on them.

Two hours, two days, two weeks, that’s what the 41

doctor said her dad had left, that was two weeks ago, just before Thanksgiving. Peyton didn’t know what she would say to him. They hadn’t spoken in five years, not since her parent’s divorce. “Your mother stole my money for you,” he said. “I’ll pay you back,” Peyton pleaded.

“Didn’t think I would find out, did you?” he asked.

She hadn’t answered. What he said was true.

She turned, leaned her back against the skywalk wall and pulled out the bottle of vodka she had tucked inside her lime-jean jacket. Peyton went to drink and instead, splashed the now tasteless liquor down her chin, wiped it with the back of her hand, and chuckled.

She swirled the bottle, trying to regain her cool and watched the clear liquid at the bottom. Peyton thought she could see a faint reflection of herself being pulled and distorted at the center. She’d been drinking since late that morning.

A horn honked below, which set off a chain reaction from the other cars. The hum from the crowds of people vibrated. The bright towers of Paris and largecaped men on billboard signs closed in on Peyton.

Her image twisted in the bottle into broad familiar features, a large pocked nose – a bristled chin.

“Seventeen and pregnant,” Peyton’s father said.

“I’m not paying for your mistake. I should have known you’d do this to me. I want you out.” Peyton didn’t tell him what she wanted that day in her parent’s kitchen.

She didn’t tell him she was scared or that she loved him.

All she could say was, “I’m sorry.” For the next twentyeight years she was only allowed to visit on holidays. Her mother never forgave him and took the risk he would kick her out too. Peyton tucked the bottle back in her jacket to silence it.

42

Behind her, “Sleigh Ride” blared from the fountain’s speakers and the swoosh of bright water burst from the small pond. The skywalk reeked of car exhaust, booze and piss. An elderly couple walked past her, arm in arm, wearing matching red windbreakers. The man looked at Peyton, then the poorly-concealed bottle and frowned.

“Asshole,” Peyton murmured, wobbling a little.

Others didn’t look at her, like she was invisible, or they just didn’t have the space in their lives to allow her to exist, even if for a brief moment.

Instead of heading to Arizona to watch her father die, Peyton watched half-dressed young women, drunken men, and couples of all ages headed in one direction or the other – to casinos, music shows, and strip clubs.

The crowd on the other side of the skywalk parted; the vulgar suits Peyton wanted to spit on stumbled off the up escalator.

“Fuck you,” a small suit said to one of the others.

“You’re such a pussy,” a bigger suit taunted, giving the smaller suit a shove.

“Knock it off,” a bald suit said, moving between the two other men.

“I’m sick and tired of his bullshit,” the smaller suit said as the group of men continued towards where Peyton stood.

“Come on little man, you think you’re so tough,” the big suit said, pulling off his jacket.

“What are you staring at you fucking bitch,” the small suit yelled at Peyton.

“Fuck you little man,” Peyton said, thinking she was being funny.

43

“Fat bitch!” small suit replied.

Peyton went for the bottle under her coat, but it slipped, dropped, making a high pitched pop as it shattered at her feet. The bigger suit shoved the smaller one towards Peyton. She changed directions so he would miss her and stepped on a shard of glass, not feeling it at first as it sliced through her flip-flop, until she took her next step and it lodged into the arch of her foot.

She felt pressure before the hot pain. Suits went flying by her until one slammed into her back. Peyton didn’t hear the thud when she hit the ground. She did hear the collective gasp of the people around her and tasted metal on the back of her tongue.

Peyton lay on the concrete, still warm from the day, drunk, but in no real physical pain, yet. A small crowd gathered around her. She heard the clicks of the nudie cards, as the men scraped them together, advertising sex. Piles of the cards littered the strip. She saw a summer day and a blue plastic pool with neon fish on a dandelion littered front lawn. There was a little girl who lived across the street from her as a kid. She had long blonde hair and wore a white and yellow-spotted bathing suit. Peyton, still wearing her childish pudge was envious of her friend’s lean body and how she expertly posed with her hand on her hip while Peyton’s father pretended to take pictures of her, clicking his tongue.

“That’s beautiful, Michelle, smile sweetheart, you’re a star.”

Peyton tried to emulate the poses she saw in her father’s Playboys she’d found in a small chest under his side of the bed, but she could only remember what they wrote in the centerfold. How the naked women liked to 44

“walk barefoot in the sand, enjoy pizza by the slice, and to slow dance to Air Supply in the cool night breeze.”

“I love hamburgers just like my daddy and I like it when he takes pictures of me,” Peyton said. Her father looked at her oddly, confused. He scratched his chin, and then went back to staring at Michelle. Peyton tried more poses, but none of them worked.

She heard her phone ring in her pants pocket. It was probably just her husband still looking for her, he could be annoyingly attentive. Or, maybe it was her mom, checking up on her again. Peyton wouldn’t find out until hours later in the hotel room, her body sore and bandaged, sitting at the small table, staring out the window at the pink flamingo statues around the pool, listening to her husband snore, the call was from her brother.

“Hey sis, I’ve been trying to get a hold of you all day.

Shit. I don’t want to have to do this, but he’s agitated, you know how he gets. I’m sorry. Dad doesn’t want you to come.”

But, in that moment, on the skywalk, instead of answering her phone, Peyton gazed up at the muddy sky, the stars washed out by the lights on the strip. A thickbrowed man appeared above her, leaned over until she felt his moist breath on her face, it smelt like yeast and strawberry gum, “Are you happy?” she thought the browed man asked in her father’s rough voice, “Are you happy?” Peyton replied.

She closed her eyes and remembered two feet of snow on Easter Eve. She wandered through a small house in pink snow gear, peeking in each door to see if anyone was awake. Golf was on the television in the living room. The crowd was applauding politely. Her 45

dad slept in his recliner, an arm across his bare pot belly, a hand on his red- bearded cheek. The grass skirt of the hula girl tattooed on his chest appeared to sway a little as he breathed. Peyton wanted to crawl into his lap, but she knew better.

Outside she found an undisturbed patch of fresh snow, perfect for a snow angel. With her eyes closed and her mouth open she felt the cool flakes on her tongue.

Scissoring her arms and legs she smiled at herself, for herself, happy, happy, happy, she sang.

46

ANNA WILHELM

THE PROCESS A week or two before death, the skin begins to lose circulation and the nail beds and fingertips turn a purple-blue. At least that’s what I’ve read. What I noticed is that his skin got softer with each passing day.

It was constantly coated in a layer of oil that felt like beeswax.

For the years running up to Don’s death, all the corners in his house turned to the crumbled dust of abused sheetrock and caved-in door frames. Don was ninety-two years old and his Hoveround, a motorized wheelchair, had run into the edges of every doorway and corner countless times.

Four years before Three weeks after graduating high school, I moved to Boise, Idaho. Within a month, I was hired to get Don breakfast and lunch and keep the loneliness at bay. His wife, Evelyn, had died in a house-fire a month after 9/11, five years before.

All I knew from Don was that he couldn’t carry her out. What I knew from his children was that she only ever cooked on high (most of their meals were charred), she was a school teacher back when they couldn’t be married and still keep their jobs (it’s why she reached thirty before settling down with a younger man), and she was kind and compassionate and put up with having an obsessive compulsive husband and six children without ever complaining. Don never even said her name.

47

I was eighteen and had decided within a month that I would stay with him until the end.

Five Months Before For the last day, blood had discolored the urine in his catheter to burgundy before even that stopped flowing. A nurse pulled blood clots through catheter tubes, and his body quaked. His skin turned pale and damp with sweat.

The first night, the nurse got me a blow-up mattress. I hoped that if he died from this, it would be with me so none of his kids would have to see it. Six months after I was hired, he told me that he thought of me as another daughter, and I thought of him as a grandfather, more distant than a father but closer than just another patient.

That night, my attempts at sleep were disrupted by cries of “get it off” or “help me hold this,” as he swatted away imaginary bugs or worked on something in his woodshop. He had been hallucinating on and off all day. I was relieved that his make-believe woodworking seemed to be going well. Three years before, he had nearly cut off his thumb under my watch, slicing it from tip to base.

Two Months Before At noon, I found him with his head hung over the breakfast Andrea, another live in care-giver, had made for him hours before. If his spine hadn’t been fused together at the neck, his chin would be resting against his chest. His fork rattled against his plate, as I set my hand on his shoulder and squeezed.

Every morning, Andrea or I would spend hours 48

coaxing him to eat and take his pills. Three hours later and the food would be unfinished. He would expect it to be put in the fridge and would scold us if the food left on his plate was thrown-away.

I glanced at the head of hair that was full four years before. He could no longer spend time working in the woodshop that had turned his shirts and pants into a smattering of soft material and crusty glue patches. Instead, he spent that time lying on the couch, slowly pulling the hair out of the top of his head and inspecting his fingers for debris. He now had a bald patch on the top of his head, a byproduct of OCD with no outlet. I ran my fingers through the hair around it.

“I was beginning to think you’d moved out,” Don said in a voice that had aged without weakening. I heard this nearly every day.

I raised my voice, “You can’t get rid of me that easy, mister.”

We had visited the hospital a half dozen times in the last six months, each time for an infection worse than the one before. He was ninety-two, and I didn’t think he would hit ninety-three. There was nothing he could do to get rid of me.

The rattle of his fork increased while he pushed food onto it, the silence as the fork ascended broken by the occasional bellow of a cow in the pasture. As soon as his mouth was full, his head descended, my hand resting on his shoulder.

One Month Before The doctors said he had six weeks. He didn’t quite make it five. Once he had been given permission, he died without battle.

49

The year before, I had started nannying his greatgrandkids as a second job. Often over his last six months, I brought them to Don’s. The last month, we kept the visits to a minimum, but every time they came, he would sit up straighter and call them by the nicknames he gave them as babies.

Kielty, the eight-year-old he called Kettle, was especially good with him. She let him reach out and tug on her hair just a little too hard and smile up at him like it didn’t hurt. The ever present smell of urine and vinegar didn’t even earn a wrinkle of her nose.

William, the six-year-old he called Billy Boy, would head straight for the toy box. I directed him to Papa Berger and told him to say hello. Eventually, Papa Berger would be a legend for him in the way Evelyn was for Kielty. He would have little mementos, a pocket watch and a lockbox from the woodshop, among other things. There was a little sister on the way that wouldn’t even have that.

Brody, the oldest at twelve and the only greatgrandchild without a nickname (he was the first and thus easier to remember by name), didn’t say a word.

The Week Before He no longer reacted to his children’s greetings. I sang old hymns I couldn’t remember the words to into the quiet. I couldn’t raise my voice loud enough to hit the proper notes, a shock to anyone who hears me sing around the house and across mostly vacant parking lots.

“Diane doesn’t think he knows who we are,” Kathy, his daughter, told me. She said this in a tone seeking reassurance.

“Does it matter?” I asked. “I think that, even if he 50

doesn’t, he knows that the people standing over him love him.” His hand was wrapped around mine, clenched hard enough that I wondered if I would find bruises later.

Kathy tried to smile, but the areas under her eyes were purple and her hands trembled.

I looked out into the cow pasture where a onebedroom house sat, its roof collapsing and the wood turned gray with age. The cows wandered in and out for shelter. There was a time when Don lived there with Evelyn and their six kids. I imagined them all cramped together in one room, overheated, and wondered about the perspective of love.

Three Days Before “Do you think not being able to sit with him makes me a bad person?” Diane asked.

“You know someone is with him.” I ran my thumb over his farmer’s knuckles, still brown with sun and age spots but smooth.

The summer before, we had decided no one should help him onto his tractor. One day, I found him sitting in the dirt next to it, surrounded by bees that would send him into anaphylaxis if they stung. When I got him back into his Hoveround, he could barely lift his head, but he held onto my hand and said, “So are you gonna help me onto the tractor now?”

Diane interrupted my memory. “I’ll take over awhile,” she said.

I squeezed his hand and got a harsher squeeze in return, “You don’t have to.” In the way that she couldn’t stand to be near him for long, I hated to be away.

She nodded, “Yes, I do.”

51

The Morning Of “It’s time, if you want to say goodbye,” Cheryl, Don’s eldest daughter, said from where she was hovering over me. I had just lain down a couple hours before.

I stood beside Don’s bed and placed my hand on his cool shoulder. He was taking rattling breaths. The gaps between them spaced further and further. It felt like only moments after his last breath that his skin turned to plastic.

After The day after his funeral, I sat in a classroom full of other students. Some of them had lost someone recently and others had never felt this hollow feeling just below their ribcage, the haze in their mind that forestalled emotion. I couldn’t point either out. It was a classroom full of people going on with their days, and I was one of them.

52

JEANNETTE THOMAS DIKE

LOW TIDE The man at the shell shop wore brown loafers and a bright green tie. His sleeves were rolled up at the elbows – as well they should have been in this heat – mother would later say. Rita stooped over a bucket of bleach water fishing out sand dollars the size of quarters. Every time she righted herself she’d either be watching his brown hands picking through her postcard rack or my sand-caked feet dragging in the whole outside.

He didn’t belong here. The oystermen had all left and the colored had their own beach, their own stores, probably their own shell shop. I wasn’t supposed to be here either. Momma sent me to the grocers for aloe and ice cream.

The chill of Momma’s Neapolitan felt good against the crook of my arm but my knees ached from the saltwater and the scraping. And that’s why girls have no business sliding, Martha Jo, Momma would say. Better a story about baseball than letting on I’d been crawling around underneath the stilted beach houses again, shelling in the pitch-black before-morning with Daddy’s flashlight and a bread bag.

“Mister, you need something?” Rita called, holding two flesh-colored conchs at her shoulders like weights and eyeing him as if he might ask for more than he deserved.

“Yes’m,” the man said brightly, “All these cards a nickel?” A short they is was all she could manage before turning her back and setting the conchs on a high shelf behind her.

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“Hmm,” The man nodded, putting the card carefully back in place. A good thing because Rita got all bent out of shape when the oranges ended up on top of the flag of Florida or when you couldn’t see the seahorses because someone’d left the fishing boat square on top of them.

“Can I help you Martha Jo?” “Just looking,” I answered and took myself over to the row of co-cola crates along the wall. I shifted the damp paper bag in my arms.

If I could do it all day I would – stand over those rows of co-cola crates that was keeping what Daddy called “them beach baubles” from mixing together – piles of olives, conch, dried seahorses, alphabet shells.

I’d already found most of everything – but then nothing of some things. Kept what I did find in mason jars along my bedroom windowsill. I dreamed of the others…held my breath every time I turned over a piece of driftwood or fished through the jellied tangles of crud and kelp that came after a storm.

This morning I’d come close. My heart pounded as I sunk to my ankles and scolded myself for not taking the harder shoreline – it had spikes along its side like a rooster’s comb that faded from red to rust at its tips. It waited patiently for me as the ocean spilled all around it and only rolled back and forth on itself as the stronger waves tried to suck it free. I could almost touch it when the water got hold of us both, knocking me over and dragging it under. And that was the end of that.

“Them ain’t from around here you know. Them shells.” The man’s eyes peeked at me through the spaces the postcards weren’t. Rita shook her head at him the way mommas do when daddies give you ice cream too 54

late at night. Tourists are still strangers, Martha Jo, even if they don’t have the good sense to act like it when they ain’t at home, I heard Momma say and I went back to my looking.

“How ‘bout this one? This good?” the man called a bit louder and offered the postcard over to me. It was of a red-shorted boy digging sand castles. Bright orange letters, F-L-O-R-I-D-A, leaned across the blue sky. He slipped the boy into his shirt pocket. “Told her I’d get down here some day, my granddaughter, but she didn’t believe me.” Rita had her hands at her hips. “Just cause I’ve never been south of Detroit!”

I followed the corner of his smile up to his eyes – yellowed around their edges like the pages of an old book. “Now don’t you go spending too much time looking for all of these,” he began again, picking up a chalky green turban, “you’d have to swim all the way from here to Indian Ocean for this one!”

He put the shell in my hand and walked to the counter. I watched him lay nickels out alongside the stack of postcards he’d chosen like seeds he’d been saving for just the right weather. Rita sorted through the coins quickly and pushed one back to him. “You gave me too much,” she said stiffly.

“Thank you, ma’am,” he said, taking it and tucking his cards away. “There a card you’d like miss?” he asked, turning to me and offering the coin. I shook my head.

Scanning the shells, they seemed cheap to me now, and I felt like I lost much more in that moment than I had ever found.

“Next time then,” he said with a smile.

He was outside now in the bright setting sun, and the smell of the sand and tar brought the old man 55

images long tucked away. His daddy, back from the bay, sitting beside him on the bed with a bag of shells and a shoe full of sand. Another week and he’d be gone again by morning…that’s how it was to be the child of an oysterman and the son of a sailor.

His daddy had sent him shells from around the world. When he was young he knew all their names, dreamt of all the places they’d come from, waited eagerly for the next battered package to arrive. Only the next one that came was what was left of his father and the wonder was over.

As he grew up he’d fought the demons those without daddies did (and there were many among him). But he’d finally found the peace and freedom that time and age allow. He felt driven to trace back his days on Earth and relive the moments that defined his life’s journey.

“Girl, I got something to show you,” he said, stepping into the door frame. “You too,” he called to Rita who only came out in case he was up to no good.

“You bothered ‘cause I said them shells inside ain’t special?” he asked me. Momma said even a blind man could tell when I was brooding. He bent at his knees and scooped at the ground. “They ain’t the prettiest” he laughed as he held up a handful of crushed oyster shell and emptied the other in his pants pocket. “But they is the strongest. Did you know that?”

There were so many oysters in the bay, mounds and mounds along the side of the shore. Made perfect sense to the men working the roads back then to lay them down like they did. But that’s all they were to me until then. Just ground.

“First thing daddy brought back to me from his 56

workin.’ Its insides were so shiny. Angels made it in heaven, he said. I kept that thing in my pocket all summer; sure I had treasure not no one else had ever seen.” The old man smiled the way remembering good things can make a person do. “Can’t recall exactly when I found out they really ain’t treasure. Not that kind, anyhow. Was let down, too,” he said to me gently.

Rita left, reminding me Momma’s ice cream was melting and she had no time to talk about the road we all trampled. He and I stayed on though, talking ‘bout his daddy and how his last letter came the day after they buried that box.

“Said he and some fellas found a fort built out of nothing but oyster shells – asked me if I still had my first one.” So strong they kept out the cannonballs his daddy told him. “Cannonballs!” The old man said again. Be strong, his daddy wrote. But young men don’t get strong until after they get good and mad first, the old man told me. “Threw all them cheap oysters out with the trash.”

He had a bus to get back to and Momma’s Neapolitan surely couldn’t wait either. Told me to be careful getting home and not to stop trying to find what I was looking for. No matter what a foolish old man like him said.

I don’t look much for shells anymore. I mostly just walk. And think. About how sometimes you let the water reach across your toes and other times, if you ain’t looking, it might knock you clean over. And how we’re all really just what’s left after life’s storms – the bits and the baubles, the kelp and the crud. And if you can’t find something to treasure in all that, you aren’t looking hard enough. Or maybe you just have a ways further to go.

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MAGGIE KOGER

THE LOST SHEEP A fascination with back roads and two-lane tracks that used to be roads excited my dad. In the 1950s the population of the Owyhee’s had dwindled to ranchers and their cattle, sheepherders and their charges, and a few bands of wild horses. Only one of these groups paid taxes, and road maintenance fell short of posting Detour signs. On the trip my dad had planned for us that Sunday we would pass a Road Closed sign as well as a Cross At Your Own Risk warning in front of an old wooden bridge. But still, what could possibly stop a new four-wheel drive Jeep with its winch and toolbox, a stronghold for the axe, a shovel, and some chain?

When we loaded up that fall morning in the Jeep wagon, we looked a lot like any other family of five outfitted for a picnic excursion. We didn’t own the Willys, but Dad had permission from his sales manager to drive it on Sundays. He could use our rambles into the Owyhee’s as evidence for praising the vehicle as a fine family automobile. Many a rancher cherished the hope of buying a new Jeep wagon, and Dad’s testimony could help persuade the wife.

Dad loved the Jeep about as much as a man could love a machine, and he found that asking about this road or that bridge when he stopped by a rancher’s place helped him strike up a lively conversation with an eye to selling a Jeep or a tractor or two. A good Sunday drive involved a lot of researching the condition of the route and confirming that some intrepid traveler had been 58

able to “get through” a particular loop. If forced by an impassable washout or a rock slide to turn back partway, it was important to only be a reasonable distance from home so that the driver wouldn’t end up with an angry wife riding shotgun and hungry children crying in the back.

Although we had been on similar trips a few times that year, we had no idea that this particular journey would take a turn into a life-saving adventure. I was ten and ready for a day of kicking sagebrush to roust out grasshoppers and lizards. My sisters and I enjoyed this freedom from Sunday school, although it would come as a bit of a shock to learn how biblical lessons could apply in the wilds of the Owyhee’s. Our “memory verses” often reminded us that children and sheep occupied similar roles on earth, so I understood that a good shepherd is a savior who keeps his flock together.

But more importantly, I was to learn that it’s not a good idea to get yourself lost from the fold. Or in the way of eagles.

Most of the roads we traveled on the desert plateau consisted of narrow dirt lanes with ribbons of grass running down the middle. A trail of dust rolled skyward behind us as we jounced along at a good speed. But there were more extreme challenges in the rugged terrain of the mountains where steep inclines threatened to strip the Jeep’s gears or brakes. Sometimes we’d have to lug rocks and branches to fill washouts so that they’d support this or that tire. When erosion left small boulders blocking the road, we’d wrap a chain around them and rev the Jeep’s engine to winch them out of the way. Once we even forded a creek where the remnants of a flash flood had swelled it up so much that 59

the Jeep floated!

The old roads followed tracks left by pioneers searching for a new home and trails left by pack mules carting supplies to hungry miners. Along these “thoroughfares” the ghosts of the past made their appearance. In Silver City alone, the Catholic Church nestled into the hillside, the Masonic meeting hall stretched over the creek, and the cemetery coddled the bones of the town gentry as well as the ne’er-do-wells.

More remotely, boulder-locked entrances to closed mines lay surrounded by tumble-down dwellings and heaps of refuse waiting to be investigated. History, legend, and fantasy mingled in these treasure troves.

The vast stretch of the Owyhee’s also offered “thunder eggs,” drab, round hunks of rock formed in lava flows with amethysts, garnets, and other gems inside. Some places you could find agates worked loose by erosion and scattered on top of the ground. As if these weren’t enough to give a rock hound a heavenly time, there were chunks of petrified wood the size of tree stumps to be harvested and hauled home. In pursuit of such treasures we sometimes took hundredmile round trips to places like War Eagle, Delamar, and Leslie Gulch.

The Sunday of the lost sheep came about when Dad aimed to take us on a nice drive through Succor Creek Canyon with only one “aside” into a box canyon. When we reached the turnoff, we passed the Road Closed sign and came to a dilapidated bridge. Dad stopped the Jeep, got out his pocket notebook, and stood counting the remaining poles supporting the wooden structure.

Meanwhile, I started kicking in a prairie dog hole at the side of the road and nearly tripped over a broken60

down Cross At Your Own Risk sign. When Dad decided that the bridge would handle the weight of the Jeep and its occupants, he invited us all to get in, but I was too scared. He finally let me walk behind the car, even though he knew I’d have been safer in the Jeep than on foot if the bridge buckled.

The crossing brought us into a small canyon with a spring in the middle surrounded by a cluster of willows and green grass – green being a rare but welcome sight in such dry country. Stern basalt cliffs, the same as the ones that Succor Creek Canyon is noted for, lined the edges. Dad had planned to take an old trail up over the ridge to get out of the canyon and back down to the main road, until he saw the turkey vultures. Circling far overhead, the black birds had clearly congregated where a carcass – or a potential carcass – would afford them a good meal.

As the scavengers above kept watch, Dad used his field glasses to scan the sides of the cliff. Voilà! A ewe and her two lambs crouched at the base. We raced upward through the broken shale, its shards cutting into our ankles. The rocks clattered and slid as we struggled forward; making noise enough to spook any lizards hanging out nearby, but for once I completely forgot about lizards.

The ewe’s foot had caught in a crevice, trapping her. The lambs tried to hide beneath her belly as we approached, butting her sides and bleating in terror.

Even worse, one of the ewe’s eyes dangled from a string of tissue – she’d been attacked. Ah, but not by a carrion feeder! A predator, probably a golden eagle, had swooped down and clawed her. “Eagles go for the eyes first,” Dad said. The farm animals I knew about at home 61

all ate from troughs or pans. I’d never witnessed the way some wild animals made their living by killing other animals, and I formed a new respect for eagles on the spot.

We girls fetched ropes from the toolbox in the Jeep and Dad and Mom tied the ewe after pulling her foot loose from its basalt prison. They trussed her rodeostyle, cinching two front legs and a hind one together.

Down she came and into the back of the Jeep. My sisters held the lambs until Dad lifted them in. We found an abandoned pan and gave the animals water from the spring before quenching our own thirst with well water from the canvas bag on the front of the Jeep.

Then, for the first time I could remember, we turned around and headed for home, trekking back the same way we had come. The lamb riding in my lap kicked and bleated so much I hardly noticed our trip back across the wooden bridge. The rest of Succor Creek Canyon would have to wait for another day; we even forgot about eating our picnic, and we kept the windows down the rest of the trip on account of the sheep smell.

The ewe died on the way home. We bottle-fed the lambs and later sent their wool to a mill, receiving the warmest blankets we ever owned in return. In the long run, I believe my lifelong interest in the avian race began that day, as well as a heartfelt understanding of the need for staying with the flock, herd, or other sheltering company. I still didn’t see our family as much different from a lot of others that scouted the Owyhee’s, except that in ours, one little girl would treasure a story about a detour for years to come.

62

DIVERSION The driver asked me if I would mind another brief detour, this time to a tombstone salesroom across the street from the cemetery. I wasn’t a Bokononist then, so I agreed with some peevishness. As a Bokononist, of course, I would have agreed gaily to go anywhere anyone suggested. As Bokonon says: ‘Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.’ — KURT VONNEGUT

CHRIS DEVORE

CORN Had to be he was lying to himself. He’d sworn off these archetypal moments, these milestones, these benchmarks, these pedestrian emotions. His life’s work had been dodging them – with what he thought of as finesse – in order to live a unique story, a narrative worth repeating. When wham, he’s back in his parents’ house with his wife and four kids. He’s 38.

He’s racked up a rigorous schedule over the weekend, which includes an alumni baseball game on Friday, a 20-year-reunion kick-off at A.J.’s on Saturday night, and a family picnic on Sunday at Carl Miller Park. He wouldn’t even be here if it weren’t for the baseball. He’d endure just about anything for this word and its various synonyms – love, regret, hope. Baseball is somehow cousin to just about everything, with the possible exception of clichés and adverbs.

He’s back home in Mountain Home, Idaho, and ever since he left Tacoma, it’s just been a blur. He’s unraveled by how he’s misplaced twenty years of maturity like one misplaces a book, or a word in an intense conversation.

He’s been pointing out landmarks between the rows of corn, his first of many mistakes. He’s been quizzing his kids about his own history – even the baby. He’s been reliving sports moments as the shortstop, qb, and tenth man, non-shooting guard of the Tigers. In a matter of hours, he’s turned his life from a sentimental documentary to an after-school special.

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Now that it’s over, he’s not sure he can un-shuck the corn, or figure out why it was so important that everyone love him. The cape was off, and somehow he’d become the runner, the courier, the herald, the prophet. His message: The time for regret is nigh.

He knocked on the door of his parents’ house, but a narrator was saying it was his triumphant return.

His father yelled for them to come in. He realized too late that his wife was still working the children out of their seats. He was sweeping through the kitchen when the irritation hit him that those kids were ringing the doorbell over and over.

– Dad, what’s your beer situation?

– The situation is: get it yourself.

The implication, conscious or unconscious, was, get two.

He’s greeted by the old hunting dog, Shelby, who’s obviously lost a step. With just a pat on the head, he makes it past into the garage, where the second fridge lives. He has to open the twelve-pack of XX Amber, realizing it was bought for the occasion, but it’s still Dad’s favorite brand, not his. After the first drink, he’s ready for hugs.

– Don’t throw that sweetie.

He was still getting used to grandpa voice.

It was Friday, early afternoon. His longish black hair was hanging out the sides of his Tiger’s hat and if he doesn’t hit a baseball or get to Mark Anthony’s for a beer and cigar with the boys soon, everyone will regret it. His wife refers to these moments as his hungry grumpies, a designation nearly universally applied to food, sports, writing, Scrabble, you name it. Anything he has a strong 68

appetite for. She says, – Watch out he’s got the hungry grumpies or whispers,

– You’ve got’em, settle. Be civ.

Somehow this memory still tastes like green olives filled with garlic and jalapeños.

The smoke he was walking through wasn’t a prop but it felt like it. There were five of them on the couch – bankers, bakers, and butchers with close-cropped beards. They slowly evolved into people he recognized, his old teammates.

– Look at this. I never thought I’d be the skinny one.

– You’re not, he said

– You gonna sit with us and have a beer or do you have some church something to go to?

– When’d you guys all get here?

– We live here, chubby.

– At least the full face makes your ears look normal.

He wished the laughter was also a prop, and that just this once he’d stuck to his New-Year’s resolution.

– Slow down guys. We’ve got a game tonight.

– We used to be legends. Now you’re just fat.

The field, press box, and concession were so much nicer. During innie-outtie, he just couldn’t seem to reach the balls he thought he should. The half-hearted fungos, which produced as many line-drives as groundballs, weren’t helping.

After a pop-up just past the infield, but still subject to the infield-fly rule, he leaned against the dugout and looked over at his wife corralling the kids. Maybe they 69

weren’t paying attention. This was supposed to be —

– You were always good to my boy. You used to be a vacuum, Mr. Automatic.

After the game, he played catch with his son and two daughters, while his wife held the baby and conversationally fended for herself.

– Baseball’s great, but when do I get to play softball?

– Softball’s not it. Softball’s what you do when you can’t play baseball anymore. Softball’s a punishment, a time-out, a spankin’.

– You like it.

– I love it.

– But it’s not baseball.

– When I grow up I’m going to move back here and live with Grandma and Grandpa, Dad.

– What about me?

– You can come with if you want.

A.J.’s Restaurant and Lounge felt like a faithful friend, and by faithful he mostly meant mute. He was just getting used to his new faith, so it was no time to experiment. There was purpose behind everyone’s nervous smile. To the person – teammate, old flame, near stranger – they asked about college baseball and his plans to be a preacher or a missionary, as they eyed the beer in his hand.

Sockeye Dagger Falls IPA, he wanted to tell them.

Why couldn’t they realize it had been twenty years?

Quite possibly worse was that any explanation of “what he was up to these days” could take ten minutes and get him off script. There was freelance this, part-time that, editor of these, and board member/volunteer of such70

and-such. He sometimes even used words like coach and MVP and owner, which was unfortunate. But soon it was a game, and he took a drink every time someone asked about his past or his present or his future.

He was up front answering trivia questions. He was singing a Neil Diamond duet not realizing his microphone was off. He was dancing Gangnam Style.

It wasn’t so bad. These were maybe the greatest friends he had ever had. He loved them with the intensity of a thousand suns. He wanted to tell his wife, but he wasn’t sure – He was back in the middle of what had become a dance floor for the faithful few.

– Jesus loves beer!

– I was a little off my game, he would tell his wife later.

They had brought taco salad. He was hugging her and hoping his wife had no idea who “her” was. It wasn’t that he had ever loved her. It was just one camping trip, summer after their freshman year at PLU. Her desire and curvy body had somehow convinced him that she personified all his regret, all his adolescent angst, all that would be closed to him if he kept on the current path, which certainly led to marriage and babies in the baby carriage. He hadn’t loved her. He had loved all of them. He wished there were many words for love, not just many definitions.

He looked at his wife. She was shaking her head, indicating what he thought was certain knowledge that he’s an idiot.

On the ride back he was still telling stories the length of two Americanos with extra shots. It was a 71

mixture of triumph and regret and caffeine behind the tightly-held wheel. It was lily-white energy. He was on top of the world. He was tearfully confessional. He was creating several dimensions for himself based on successes, cities, and possible sweethearts.

– That’s enough!

He wasn’t sure who – if anyone – said it.

His wife, she was the ultimate Hungry Grumpy.

So he was back to corn. They often had corn for dinner. He needed corn to pay the mortgage. He had a corn on his toe. He wanted to be known as stuffed full of corn, but he didn’t want people to look at his life and only see corn.

72

SUSAN SWETNAM

THE LOST COAST “This country looks like Scotland,” we told each other as we crossed the grassy uplands stretching toward the sea. We picked our way on the rambling two-lane over ridges, down into gullies past tumble-down farm sheds, sensing the approach of the great drop-off ahead.

To the south, the King Range reared straight up from the surf, 4,000’ in three miles. Psychedelic-yellow Scotch broom illuminated the hillsides; redbuds glowed pink.

Then, abruptly, not Scotland at all, but Redwoods, shafts of sunlight filtering through the heavy canopy, the verdant ground teeming with ferns.

“Check the map,” Ford had said an hour before, as we stopped for gas on Highway 101. “I think we’re pretty near something I’ve always wanted to see. And that was how we came to the Lost Coast for the first time, turning aside from our spring break trajectory toward Napa Valley, heading for a very different kind of place.

The highway fell away, down a great vertiginous cleft to Cape Mendocino, the westernmost point in California.

We turned south at the thundering waves, along with literal edge of the sea. Cows grazed in salty grass on the inland side, nestled under the plateau’s ramparts. A bull rolled on his back in spring bliss, raising clouds of butterflies.

“God,” Ford drew a deep breath, “This is incredible.” We stopped to inhale the ocean’s pounding, to absorb the utter stillness of the air. We’d long been connoisseurs of obscure Intermountain West outbacks 73

– Ibupah Peak, the Black Rock Desert, the Big Southern Butte, the Big Horn Crags. But this country felt more remote than any of them, more isolated.

And it grew wilder as the road wound to visit rivercanyon hamlets – Petrolia, Honeydew – then again rose thousands of feet to traverse a long ridge. After thirty years in Idaho I’d thought myself hardened to mountain roads. But the gravel and potholed blacktop of the King Range, often a single lane switch backing with stair-step steepness, edged by airy drop-offs, reminded me of how it felt to grip the car’s seat.

No signs warned of the approaching grade to the absolute end of the road, Shelter Cove, and that was probably a good thing. Far below, scattered houses clung to loaf-shaped peaks as in Chinese paintings, morphing in and out of view as we wound down the vast canyon.

Tiny strips of green lawn edging the coast grew larger, then we could hear the pounding once again.

“What can we do to live here?” We’d driven straight to the little park at the seawall’s edge, right through the clusters of houses, by the rudimentary landing strip, the golf course, the handful of shops and mom and pop motels. But we hadn’t yet seen another human being.

“Enchanted” is a word that makes me wince when applied to places. But it was the only word to describe Shelter Cove that March day.

We didn’t have enough sense to do what we should have done: cancel the dash south and set up our tent in the campground behind us. We were young then, and determined to go where we’d said we’d go.

At least we had enough sense to buy a guidebook in the general store. As we barreled south the next day, I read Ford descriptions of the eighty miles of hiking trails 74

we’d just abandoned. “The Lost Coast Trail – that’s what we should do,” he insisted. “Twenty-five miles of beach hiking, no access but each end – how amazing would that be?” We fantasized about other hikes, too – the King Crest trail, King Peak itself. What a spring break we’d have: exploring 60,000 acres of mountains cloaked in dark stands of Douglas Fir, sudden groves of Redwoods where the mist lingered on the brightest days. “New country’s always good,” Ford said.

But somehow other plans intervened, and by the time we returned to the Lost Coast, on our last spring break together, the prostate cancer had forever canceled all possibility of day hikes, much less uncharted exploration. That visit, too, was an impulse, for we were bound for San Francisco, but I caught Ford looking intently west as we passed the turn-off and insisted on one sunset, at least, in this place at the end of the world.

We nearly missed the moment, for Ford was driving more slowly by then. By the time we reached the park, the red ball was in the process of drowning itself in thundering waves.

It took a long time to walk back up hill to the little house I’d reserved from a highway telephone. We lingered beside a garden of calla lilies, luminous in the rising moon, and touched them in silent delight. Then, just as wordlessly, my husband wrapped me in his arms.

What energy he possessed was gone before I put dinner on the table. “I’m sorry,” he said, tears standing in his eyes. “So much trouble. But all I want to do is sleep.”

I reassured him, stowed the untouched food in the refrigerator, and turned off the lights. Then I sat for a long time on the stoop, drinking the wine I’d opened 75

for us, looking toward the calla garden and the tiny, empty campground, and the sea.

But sacred places have compelling gravity, and eight years after Ford’s death I returned to the Lost Coast, alone.

This time I was the one who negotiated the road I’d never imagined I could drive. The greater challenge, though, lay ahead: when I’d booked a little house in Shelter Cove for spring break, I hadn’t realized it was the same one.

Panic thus, in the driveway. But dark was falling.

And I had work to do for the next five days – writing with a deadline much too close. And I felt, suddenly, the ache of Ford’s longing for this thrice-lost coast. So I stayed.

I wrote the next day and the next, there in that pretty room with its view of the sea, thinking of how he could write no more, telling myself I was writing for both of us. One afternoon I blinked myself awake from many hours of words flowing, of problems solving themselves, to realize that the light was fading.

On other days I explored, daring myself to fight down apprehension as I was fighting down loneliness, fancying that Ford just might be able still to see this wild landscape with my eyes. I drove logging roads to a trailhead and climbed King Peak on a lowering day when the path shone with mud, its roots and rocks slippery, its hemming trees dark. No place, objectively, for a solitary woman in her fifties. When I emerged onto the open summit and a hawk soared above, though, I knew I’d been right to come.

How could anyone ever really know this country?

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The vastness below me made me gasp: the maze of canyons and cliffs, the declivities black with trees and brush. Once off trail here, a person could disappear forever. And the place’s mysteries lay not merely on the surface – out below the sea, at a spot I fancied I could see, three tectonic plates intersected in an unimaginable epicenter of dormant power.

The next day I hiked north up the Lost Coast trail, slogging through cobbles and black sand that made my ten-mile out-and-back seem like twenty. This was hardly the untraveled beach we’d imagined. Six backpacking parties began on their own spring break traverses, a pair of young women trudged with kayaks strapped to their backs. With little of my own to carry, though, I outpaced them all and chose the sea’s pounding for company. And the rocks bristling with Cormorants. And the skimming Murres. And the deer that came down to dabble in the tide pools and the tiny little bear that fled up a brushy creek. And the bone-deep, inexplicable joy.

On the last night, I returned from sunset pilgrimage past the calla garden, now punctuated with deep blue shrub rosemary, and sat again on the stoop with a glass of wine.

We’d been naive to think we could learn the Lost Coast in a week…or a lifetime. All the secret places I’d glimpsed in the past few days simply beckoned on into remoter mysteries, extended paths.

Maybe we would get to come back around, I fancied, lifting my glass. Maybe, just maybe, we might have another crack at all this.

Then Ford’s voice sounded in my head – so definitively, so cheerfully that I startled, and then laughed aloud, there alone in the moonlight.

77 “New country’s always good,” he said.

MICHAEL PHILLEY

TEX It is two hours before sunrise, their breath vapors illuminated by the porch light. They make their way to the station wagon parked out front and scrape windows glazed with ice. Tires crackle against frozen snow as the ’53 Mercury lumbers onto a road shrouded by early morning fog. The temperature is near zero, yet Tex opens his window a crack before lighting a Lucky Strike.

A plume of smoke leaves his lips and curls over the glass into the darkness. While Tex drives, the boy pounds a baseball back and forth into his new mitt – a Christmas present – the leather smelling strong and burnished with linseed oil. By spring the pocket will be deep and molded to the boy’s left palm, and he imagines snaring hard grounders and intercepting long fly balls.

Tex takes a final drag from his cigarette and flicks it out the window. They turn a corner and the Mercury’s headlights reveal the two story brick walls of the bakery.

Christmas lights still frame the garage entrance, giving the heavy metal door a reddish green hue. Tex says, “Mickey, you’d better ditch that mitt under the seat. I’ll need your arms and hands free to work the shelves.” He parks the car, and as they walk to the garage he tugs on the visor of his hat. The boy’s father in uniform – felt trousers, jacket and military style hat – all blue, with “Tex” embroidered above the front pocket of the jacket and “Sunbeam Bread” decaled on the hat.

The garage houses at least twenty bread delivery trucks. They are painted bright yellow and blue and 78

each side displays a smiling girl with curly golden locks, holding a loaf of Sunbeam Bread. Upstairs, on the second level, machinery drones, and the sweet, thick aroma of freshly baked bread wafts down to where the fleet of trucks sits idle, their engines still silent.

The truck drivers start arriving and workday banter begins. “Hey, Tex, how did an ugly cuss like you turn out this good-looking kid?” “Tex, can I book your assistant for tomorrow’s run?” Fidgeting, the boy sees Phil, a thick black mustache jutting from his upper lip. He is embarrassed because Phil knows the trouble between Tex and the boy’s mother. Phil and Arlene dropped by the day after Christmas and witnessed yet another argument. The boy’s mother was in tears and went with Arlene for a drive. Tex and Phil watched an afternoon football game on TV, not saying anything the entire time their wives were out. That’s when the boy started pounding the baseball into his new mitt.

Tex walks over to a large delivery board mounted on the wall and pulls a clipboard from a peg. It’s time to load the truck. He brings a dolly from inside the truck and they head for the bread stacks. They make several dolly runs to load what seems like an endless number of cardboard sleeves – open at the ends, each sleeve containing a dozen loaves of Sunbeam white bread, the loaves wrapped in waxy white paper, and on each side a smiling girl with golden locks exclaiming, “Perfect for Sandwiches!”

The boy’s job is to carry the cardboard sleeves three or four at a time and help place them in rows along the inclined plywood shelves inside the truck. After the white bread, they load several sleeves of darker wheat bread, and then some specialty breads – buttermilk, 79

rye, and potato. After the breads, they load the buns and pastries. When they’ve finished, Tex tears open a package of jelly-filled doughnuts and says, “Eat up, Mickey, there’s more work ahead.” He climbs onto the driver’s seat, starts the engine, grips and turns the big steering wheel that looks just like the one on the bus the boy rides to school. The boy sits shotgun on a cushioned ledge above a shallow stairwell and landing board.

Without seatbelts, their bodies twist and toss as the truck comes down a ramp and settles onto the street. The boy likes riding high, looking down at the world and waving at the cars passing by.

The sun rises as they make their first stops – a Piggly Wiggly supermarket on the south edge of town, the 24hour diner down by the river, a corner grocery across from a park and ball field. The boy likes the quiet of early morning, the spaciousness and texture of a waking world. Tex carries the inventory clipboard and calls out for the boy to bring in bread and bakery items to restock the shelves. They settle into a rhythm as the day wears on, and the boy feels elated and important to be doing a man’s work.

At a small food market, a paperboy wearing his high school letter jacket brings in a bundle of the Rockford Morning Star. The headline reads, “Ike Healthy For Second Term.” A radio plays in a back room; Elvis Presley is singing “Don’t Be Cruel.” The boy has seen Elvis perform on TV – the Ed Sullivan show. “Jailhouse Rock,” is showing at the Coronado Theater downtown.

By noon they’ve finished the rounds. Sitting in the truck, they eat Spam sandwiches drenched in mayonnaise. On the way back to the bakery, Tex stops the truck at a roadside bar in a rough section of town.

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There is no bread to deliver and the bar isn’t yet open.

Tex asks the boy to wait in the truck. Through a window the boy sees him talking with someone inside. After a few minutes Tex opens the door, walks toward the truck, pauses and turns as a slender woman wearing a red cocktail dress appears in the doorway. She smiles and waves. Tex says something to her that the boy can’t make out, then climbs into the driver’s seat.

They drive along in silence for several minutes. The boy wants to ask his father about the woman back at the bar, but he feels he already knows what isn’t being said.

He is not yet thirteen, his innocence still there for all to see. But he is becoming aware that the world can change quickly, that things are not always what they seem, that love between a man and a women can gradually slip away despite their best intentions.

They come to an intersection where there is heavy construction. Traffic is being routed onto a rough graveled road where a makeshift detour sign points the way between two rows of plastic cones. Tex looks straight ahead at the sign for a moment until someone honks behind him. He steers the truck onto the gravel, then pulls over to the side and stops. He removes his glasses and rubs his eyes. The boy has never seen his father cry.

Back at the bakery, several drivers have arrived and are beginning their checkout. They sit on stools by large raised tables arranged along a wall. All are smoking, filling large round ashtrays with stubbed out butts. A veil of cigarette smoke hovers just below the ceiling. Tex and the boy mount stools at an end table and soon Tex is adding numbers in his small black account book. He asks the boy to double-check the figures, just as he often does at home. The boy is happy to do this for his father; 81

he looks at the columns of numbers and practices doing the math in his head. He finds a mistake, makes the correction, and shows Tex what he has done. Tex says, “Good job, Mickey. Let’s go home.”

Tex left Mickey’s mother two weeks later, soon after the boy’s thirteenth birthday. The pocket of Mickey’s mitt had deepened by then, yet he continued to pound a baseball into it, as if shaping the mitt gave him something to hold on to.

It has been half a century since Tex left, and in all those years the boy – now a man – saw Tex only a few times. Once, more than two decades ago, Tex parked his trailer home in front of Mickey’s house in Virginia and rang the doorbell. His thinning white hair was styled in small curls that made him look younger than 68. He told Mickey that Bush should bomb the hell out of Iraq.

His third wife, Bernice, gave Mickey’s wife a houseplant.

Tex lifted Mickey’s daughter, and then his son, onto his shoulders and carried them around the living room.

Tex died 14 years later. His stepdaughter called from Arizona to say his heart had finally given out. The last time they talked on the phone, Mickey reminded Tex about the bakery and helping him with his work.

There was a long pause as if Tex was trying to recall something. Then he said that he appreciated that Mickey remembered. As they ended the call, Tex said to Mickey that he loved him. It wasn’t easy, but Mickey told his father that he loved him too.

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JANET SCHLICHT

QUERENCIA Like all seductions, the path that curves away from the main road is fraught with both promise and peril.

When that detour also contrives to intersect in some way with the sacred stories of the past, a bit of extra caution may be in order. We sought no confrontation with the past, though; only the merest re-acquaintance. And so, lulled perhaps by the fine autumn day, we proceeded on our little jaunt. My mother held in her hand a scrap of paper with an address on it, and I turned the car off Interstate 5 toward Dark Hollow Road.

I should interject here that our family – I will put this in the mildest of terms – we were never really storytellers. I know that there are families that gather around under big oak trees on limpid summer afternoons, aunts and uncles and cousins, sipping lemonade and recalling tales of the past. In place of robust tales of love and hardship, our family seemed to have settled for a ragged and scanty collection of story fragments. Mostly, you had to put things together in your own mind, and there was never any knowing whether you came up with something like the truth.

That is at least part of what makes the story of the peach orchard such a treasure. It was one of the only stories that we told about ourselves. Like a precious gem sewn inside an old coat, we could take it out and admire its shine. Embedded in the story was the acknowledgement that “these are the people we come from.” This repertory of one seemed to be ample for us.

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Perhaps we simply did not need as much from our past as other people did.

And so, it was the peach orchard and the landscape of memory within it that drew us that day, further along Dark Hollow Road to the turn onto Vawter Road. The scrap of paper in my mother’s hand seemed to guide the way like a beacon. I think we both revisited the story as the road wound ahead of us. My grandparents had embarked on a daring adventure when they were both in their late fifties, and it began, as far as we know, with a letter. “Dear Phoebe,” Henry wrote in his careful hand, “I have found a place up here in Oregon. It is not much now. There is no plumbing or electricity, and the house is really just a shack. But I can build us a real home while we work the land and sell the peaches. It is truly beautiful up here, and the big sky opens wide over the orchard. Please say you will come with me.”

I imagine the still point of time when she opened that letter in her graceful Kansas City home, and what must have gone through her mind as she considered leaving behind all that was familiar for the rugged and uncertain. Whatever doubts or anxieties she may have had were not passed down to posterity. She said yes to Henry. She said goodbye to comfortable routines and set her mind to be happy and productive while inhabiting a hovel and Henry’s dream. As a family narrative, the aura of adventure and perseverance and capability has powerful resonance.

Once every year, my mother trundled my sister and me on the train across the country to this place of my grandfather’s dream in Oregon. Black and white photos document the years spent on the peach orchard.

Here is my grandfather, hammering nails into the bare 84

framework of their house. And here my grandmother, harvesting baskets of sweet peaches under the watchful eye of Becky, their good old English Spaniel. And now my sister and me, wearing our babushkas over our heads, picking blackberries in the bramble bushes. It is not these moments recorded on film that I carry with me. I treasure the photos, but the abiding memory of the orchard is a moment, or many moments amalgamated in memory to one, in my grandmother’s kitchen, the light low and diffuse, with dust motes slipping along the streams of sunlight coming through the windows. My grandmother wears a floral dress, a white apron with a ruffle, and sensible shoes. She stands at the counter with a fresh peach in her hand, and she peels the skin free and gives me a sweet and juicy slice of the fruit.

The dream that was the orchard came crashing down when, as the received story goes, a neighbor left the irrigation water on all night, killing off Henry and Phoebe’s trees. Devastated by the loss, Henry suffered a stroke and died soon after. He is buried in the nearby cemetery. Though I believe my grandmother had come to love her life there, it was too much for her to manage on her own, so she returned to what must have been a somewhat staid city life. It was a sad end to all their hopes, to be sure. Yet the very sadness of their loss became an integral fragment of the story. They had succeeded for many years against the odds. They had made a life for themselves from nothing.

It was with this whole story freshly conjured in our minds that we turned onto Vawter Road and found number 1248. None of the surroundings were familiar to me; I had been so young the last time I was there.

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For my mother though, there was clearly an evocation of all the times she had been there before; her own life no doubt sped in fast forward before her eyes. She looked around and recalled this neighbor and that, and we imagined the peach trees standing healthy and strong, though they were, of course, no longer there. We could have gotten back in the car just then; our modest mission to see the old place had been accomplished.

Instead, we knocked on the door of Henry and Phoebe’s house. The owner answered. His manner hovered between indifference and hostility. He remembered my grandfather. He had only one terse comment. “Yeah, he was the guy who left his own water on all night and destroyed his orchard.”

The stranger standing on the threshold of my grandfather’s house, the one built by his own hands, had just colonized our cherished family story with a new and unsettling truth (was it the truth?). I suppose he could not have known, and would not have had reason to think, that he was pulling on the thread that would unravel the rich tapestry of our history, so carefully woven and tended over these many years. I glanced over at my mother, vicariously sensing the devastating heartbreak his words might cause for her, one generation closer to the story than I was. She seemed abraded, wounded, diminished, part of her buttressing loosed by a sudden wind. The day, benign and pleasant only moments ago, now seemed inhospitable, even ominous. We made our way back to the main road. We never spoke of this moment again, as if our silence might somehow allow us to knit the story back into its original shape.

I saved the scrap of paper. I would say I don’t know 86

why, but in a way, I think I do. It reminds me that the detour we took those years ago does not negate or detract from our story. It is still the story of vigorous people working the land, of people ready to take on the next challenge offered by life, and it is still the story that whispers “this is who we are.” There is a Spanish word that has no exact translation in English. Querencia describes a place where one feels safe, a place from which one’s strength of character is drawn, a place where one feels at home. It is the place where you are your most authentic self. It comes from the verb “quere,” which means to desire, to want. Barry Lopez defined it as “a place in which we know exactly who we are; the place from which we speak our deepest beliefs.” The memories of those warm moments in that kitchen have such transcendence for me, and I believe it is because the peach orchard became our querencia.

And so, on September mornings when I rise early, and the house is still wrapped in the quiet of the night, I walk into my kitchen that is redolent with the aroma of ripening peaches. I close my eyes. I am back in my grandmother’s kitchen. In a moment of timeless ritual, and surrounded by what I now recognize as a most abiding love, I take a peach slice from her hand.

It is a moment of shared intimacy and extraordinary abundance which no words have the power either to amplify or to diminish.

87

JIM SEVERSON

THE RIDE OF SHAME The distance of the Ride of Shame is exactly one mile. It’s straight south on 13th Street, from Resseguie to River. I don’t recall how much time the Ride of Shame took. It felt endless, a lifetime. Eternal. Or maybe three quarters of an hour when you consider all the stops for sadness, memories and contemplation. A long time for a short bike ride.

This ride is no Tour de France. No peloton, no stages…or so I think at the beginning. There’s a single rider, me, with a sizeable backpack, a daypack strapped to the handlebars, and a bicycle rack loaded with a stack of luggage secured to my rear rack by three or four bungee cords. When I’m on the bike, the stack is nearly as tall as me. At the end of this ride, for the first time in my life, I’ll take up residence in a homeless shelter.

Almost anyone who’s lived in Boise for any length of time knows the location: River and 13th. It’s alternatively known as the Rescue Mission (or “the Mission”), the River of Life (or ROL), or simply, the men’s shelter. Formerly, Community House. Look for the big neon “Boise Rescue Mission Jesus Saves” sign on the corner of the otherwise non-descript building. That is the terminus of what I’ve come to know as the Ride of Shame.

Okay, the shortish backstory: I lost my job in the summer of 2011. With the ongoing economic downturn and a crappy resume that accomplished little more than highlighting 15 years of underemployment (my BA and 88

military experience having long gone to waste as things that enhanced my employability); I was unable to obtain even the same kind of unskilled part-time job I’d just lost.

With income from nearly weekly yard sales and the few odd jobs I managed to procure, I maintained the rent on my cluttered North End studio until midNovember. The yard sales were effective in removing the clutter but only delayed my impending homelessness. I hoped for some small miracle, an unexpected job offer or permission to “rough it” in someone’s backyard shed.

Again, mere wishful thinking and delay, an excuse to procrastinate.

Recognizing my need to postpone the inevitable, a friend generously offered to “lend” me a spare room in his 13th Street apartment for a month. We agreed upon a day shortly after Christmas as departure day, no matter what. No more procrastinating, no more waiting for small miracles, no more paralysis arising from the fact I’d never been homeless before.

I’d use that month to contemplate my sad situation, to gather intelligence on life at the River of Life (When was check-in? When was lunch? How’s a Buddhistleaning long-hair going to fare in a building run by a Christian organization?), and most importantly, to finish the job of culling and packing. I couldn’t afford rental storage and had only been able to arrange to keep a tarpful of possessions out of sight behind a former neighbor’s garage. One last load of possessions went to the local auction, and I brought what remained of my still-too-much “must-haves” to my friend’s apartment.

December was as relaxed as it could be under the circumstances. My friend gave me as much privacy as 89

possible and extended many small kindnesses. Another kind soul agreed to let me store a bicycle cart full of possessions on their property. I gave myself over fully to a life of contemplation.

It’s odd to me now that the idea of shame never entered my thoughts in contemplating my inevitable future. The humiliation of job loss, of the end of tenancy, those were nothing. I’d changed jobs, addresses, and times were hard for many people. I got that. But until I’d embarked upon the short journey, this Ride of Shame, I did not realize how deeply this feeling would impact me. It caught me completely off guard.

The day arrives. It’s a weekday, so my friend has left for work; there is no one to see me off. I leave the key in the agreed upon place and mount up, which is a little more difficult than usual, since I can’t simply swing my leg over the bicycle’s rear tire. All the belongings I can carry, shoulder-high once I get on the seat, are strapped on the rear bike rack.

The numbness starts unexpectedly with the first pedal stroke. I try to recall when, during my half century plus on the planet, when I’ve experienced such a raw, abject feeling. Failure. I don’t even know what this feeling is yet, only that it’s very pervasive. It comes with full body numbness. Mentally, I’m in quicksand, and they say that struggling is the worst thing to do in such conditions. Don’t resist, pay attention. This may be a learning opportunity; be at one with it.

The journey of a thousand miles may begin with a single step; my one mile bike ride to an unknown 90

future starts with the first push of the pedal. With that first push, the ruthless, pit-in-the-stomach, physically uncomfortable shame begins. Even before I get past the silent and dark brick school, closed for Christmas break, and festively decorated neighborhood houses, random thoughts fill my ride; I briefly envision happy families in warm rooms. For me, that was not a pleasant contemplation. I keep moving.

Straight down 13th is not exactly the scenic route, and I stopped frequently, whenever the “scene” of a particular building or street corner invokes a memory.

Each stop becomes a detour of sorts. I’m not in a hurry to arrive at the Mission. I stop at the corner of Fort Street, then cross Fort Street, past homes, apartments, offices. I ride out of the North End. It turns out shame has three stages: Fort to State, State to Main, and Main to River.

There’s the donut shop on State where I’d often bought coffee, pastries. 13th becomes one-way after crossing State, so I get on the sidewalk to avoid riding the wrong way down a one way street. I stop to contemplate “wrong way.” I’d been going the wrong way for some time now, which is how I arrived at this spot in my life. I cross Jefferson, stop at the intersection with Bannock by the Greyhound station, experience the happy memory of my arrival in Boise 4 years ago. A lump forms in my throat and metastasizes into a deep and profound hollowness in the pit of my stomach.

Are we there yet? Just kidding. I’d rather not know.

I cross Idaho Street, the Idaho Power building (my last utility bill payment really is in the mail), Main Street past an excellent bike shop, Grove, Front, back to two-way traffic. I find the shame warming; it’s cold out 91

but I am numb to it. I pedal slowly, approach Myrtle.

Only a block to go. You might think I’d want to get this uncomfortable experience over with, but I proceed slowly, further delaying the inevitable. I pass the guy flying a sign on the corner, cross Myrtle, ride past large, balconied apartments on the left, older houses on the right, pedaling even slower now, timing my arrival at the shelter for the 4 pm check-in time. Slowly the shelter, a three story building on the corner of River and 13th, looms on my right. I go around back, lock my bike to a rack, and get in line for my first shelter check-in.

It’s official now; I’m here, I’m homeless. No more detours. The Ride of Shame is over. A new experience, shelter life begins. Wariness replaces shame.

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ROADBLOCK Time does not give one much leeway: it thrusts us forward from behind, blows us through the narrow tunnel of the present into the future. But space is broad, teeming with possibilities, positions, intersections, passages, detours, U-turns, dead-ends, one-way streets. Too many possibilities, indeed. — SUSAN SONTAG

ERIC E WALLACE

ROAD WORK Dez had been given the finger twice this morning, though his shift was barely underway.

By now he was used to getting the finger. Used to assholes like the Lexus jerk and his vicious back spray of gravel. Used to idiots like the cell-phoning bitch with her scary one-handed turn. Used to fuming, red-faced pricks slewing into abrupt 180s.

Take it out on the flagman.

Rude and angry drivers were getting to be the norm.

Well, fuck ‘em. Who were they to look down on him?

Remington said to write such people up, but how the hell do you read license plates when you’re dodging rocks or diving aside? How do you remember numbers when your blood pressure’s demanding a coronary?

“Get their number and we’ll do a number on them,” said Remington, who loved inventing turns of phrase.

As bosses went, Remington was okay. For one thing, he was adamant about making sure relief arrived on time.

“There’s nothing badder than an anxious bladder,” he’d say. Dez couldn’t agree more.

In his former job – his ‘real’ job, as he thought of it – junior execs had their own washroom, separate from the plebes. Dez had risen to that gratifying perk just months before the layoff slaughter. Now he had access to a stifling Port-a-Can in the boonies.

Despite the big comedown, despite the lurching redirection in his life, Dez at least had a job. He knew 97

he was lucky. Most of his traumatized colleagues were still hungry.

On Bloodbath Friday, Dez was smart enough not to waste time handwringing and whining. While others cried their way to neighborhood bars, Dez grit his teeth and drove to the unemployment office, to fill out forms. A sagging bulletin board advised of a flagger certification course. Dez plunged in, passed, snagged an opening, and here he was, stopgap. Stopgap with a stop sign.

He’d traded his silk-blend suits and hand-painted ties for an angry red hardhat, a smoldering orange vest and what Remington called combat boots. “Out here, we make war, not love.”

Dez answered a question from a peeved SUV driver, resisted the urge to punch him out, and returned to his reverie. One thing about this job was that it let him think, almost meditate. There never was time for that in the corporate madhouse. Here, between bursts of traffic, he could contemplate at length.

This morning, he fretted about rent and support payments. Everything was really tight. He worried about his daughter. Annie was suffering. How do you deal with divorce at age six? His ex didn’t help much, engrossed with her new boyfriend. Dez had taken his vows seriously, assumed a lifelong partnership, and whoa! Knocked off course just seven years in. Blindsided. When he thought of Jen cheating with that sleaze ball lawyer, his chest constricted.

A convoy of vehicles appeared. His radio crackled.

“Got a pause. Keep ‘em coming, big boy.” That was Madge, up the road. Single mother, chubby, flirtatious.

He sent the cars, trying not to return driver scowls.

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“Last one’s the blue Fusion,” he said into his radio.

Madge acknowledged cheerfully. “Atta way, McGuire!”

Dez wondered if there was such a thing as walkietalkie sex. He hadn’t made love in so long, even FM hanky-panky might be pretty good. On the other hand, why encourage Madge? Their only common ground was being down on their luck, stuck here flagging. How the fuck can she still smile so much?

The air stank of diesel. The sun scorched. A pickup horn savaged his eardrums. Insect bites irritated his face. Sweat and grime chafed his neck. His left foot throbbed. His right hip ached. This was not why he’d earned an MBA. Up rolled his relief in a battle-scarred minivan.

“Ready to go smoke a joint, Desmond?” Porky leaned out the window and coughed a laugh. “Your fairy godfather’s here.” Porky’s face looked like the desert floor after a gully washer. He was the skinniest person Dez had ever seen. A lifer.

A lifer flagman. Is this where I’m heading? Shit.

Dez took a merciful pee in the Port-a-Can, yanked off his oppressive hardhat, slouched in his Chevy beater, wondered who got his BMW. He nibbled a PowerBar fortified with dust and checked the cellphone he could barely afford.

No messages. Employers ignored him. How many resumes out? He’d lost count.

He wanted to call Annie, but she’d be in school.

Were they teaching her about real life?

Why spoil what innocence remained after she’d watched her parents battle? Forget ‘Stop, Drop and Roll’. It’s ‘Fight, Scream and Split’.

Follow your dreams, and life rewards you with a stop 99

sign.

During his time off, when he wasn’t trying to reassure Annie or squabbling with Jen, Dez searched for jobs, reworked resumes, rewrote cover letters.

Nothing. There was more action in the sour sludge in his thermos.

Sun ablaze, the days dragged on. Construction vehicles creaked, clattered and roared. Traffic sputtered, complained. Drivers glared, checked their watches. Dez stood at his station, sweated, rotated his pole. Slow.

Stop. Slow. Stop. For companions he had grit, bugs and exhaust fumes.

And he had his thoughts. They were often negative, frequently morose. But he felt something useful trying to rise.

He remembered flagger safety training. He wondered if he could have been more alert in his prior life. Never turn your back. Always have an escape route.

Don’t be fearful, but allow for possibilities. Including change.

Monday, he zoned out behind sunglasses, pondering betrayal and illusions. A broken backhoe, traffic trapped, engines off. Flies buzzed, settled.

Some instinct made him stare inside a shiny black Caddy. Its owner, a silver-haired CEO type, had been apoplectic when forced to stop. He’d yammered heatedly at his cell.

Now something seemed wrong about his silhouette.

Dez strode to the car; saw the slumped figure, yanked open the door. The guy sagged. Ashen blue face.

No apparent breathing.

Dez grabbed the walkie-talkie.

“This is Dez. Call 911, get an ambulance. Driver 100

heart attack. And send another flagger.”

He released the shoulder harness, slid the man to the ground and began CPR as best he could remember it. He kept the sequence going until the EMTs took over.

After the ambulance sirened off, it was back to the job, his heart racing the rest of the day.

Weeks later, grudging thanks from the man, recovering. A certificate of achievement, unframed. An official handshake, clammy.

What Dez mostly recalled of the incident, he realized with amusement, was that he’d worried about getting mud on the $900 suit.

Dez began to develop an ironic inner voice, found he could again laugh at himself.

He rediscovered his sense of humor. He joshed with Remington, teased Madge on the two-way, and enjoyed real laughs with Porky, who turned out to be an interesting character, not only a genius at sneaky on-the-job smoking but a master of the fretless guitar, happy with his job, and very much in charge of his life.

Not a loser at all.

Talk about misreading a guy. I’m a snob, Dez realized.

A fucking snob.

He began to understand that flagging gave him authority. He felt more in command than he’d ever been. Traffic stopped when he raised his hand. Moved when he turned his paddle. Despite driver ire and disdain, he was boss. Even cop cars had to pay him mind, sitting there idling, docile, panting, tongues out, waiting for their master’s favorable signal. The boss.

“I’ve been watching you, McGuire.” Remington handed Dez his pay packet. The trailer reeked of creosote. “You gotta smile more. A smile goes a mile.”

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He held up his hand.

“But aside from that, you got something. You’re hitting a rhythm out there. You got grace, man. Keep it up.”

Grace. Not a word Dez connected with himself. But it was there, in more ways than one.

He’d developed almost-balletic moves when he turned his paddle. Pivoted like a matador and twirled the pole with flair. Ole! Instead of the finger, drivers gave him the thumbs up.

“You’re a class act, Dez,” said Madge, going offshift. She’d brought by some homemade fudge. No flirtation. Genuine feeling. The fudge tasted great.

Dez started enjoying his work. He defused disgruntled drivers with poise and humor. He smiled at bad weather, kept stray dogs safe, gracefully adapted to revised procedures and difficult locations.

He took command of his thoughts, directing them like traffic. He brainstormed ideas for opening a business, ideas for retraining. And, most important, ideas for working amicably with Jen to help Annie feel loved and secure.

He knew he wouldn’t be a flagman forever – though that notion no longer seemed nightmarish – and he loved being able to leave his work at work, his eighty dollar neckties in the closet.

Life wasn’t easier. It was just different. Change wasn’t his enemy. He could deal with it. He thought often of a maxim from good old Remington. “You’ll really swing once you learn you’re king. King of your road.”

102

CHRISTY G THOMAS

MINUTE Susan delicately pinned up a last strand of hair into the cluster of rosettes at the back of her head. After so many years and so many mornings, she could finish her hair in less than twenty minutes.

At precisely 7:15, she sat at her kitchen table, scraping up the last bits of one poached egg, one slice of dry rye toast, and one-half cup of cottage cheese.

Eyed her watch. Checked it against her ear to make sure it was still ticking.

Patted her carefully lined lips. Smudges of dusty mauve speckled her napkin.

“Well,” she sighed to the wallpaper, “time to get going.”

She locked up her two bedroom cottage. Turned the key – one, two, three times, a shiny clutch under her arm.

One-two-three-one-two-three – she numbered her waltzing pace, metronome legs swinging down the walkway.

“Daisy” – her ‘88 Plymouth Horizon, powder blue – waited in the driveway like a sleeping housecat curled up in the morning light. Daisy had been in Susan’s life since high school, and as she started its engine, she smiled at the car’s predictable purr.

“If there is one thing I’ve learned,” she glanced back and forth between the road in front of her and the rearview mirror, “is to take things in stride and overwhelming grace. I’d like to thank the few who 103

believed in me. And for the many who did not, you can all rot. In Hell.”

She cackled, teasing her bangs back into their proper place.

Fifteen minutes to work and fifteen minutes coming home from work. Always practicing her acceptance speech or a Today Show interview.

For what?

Nothing in particular.

But Susan simply knew that someday someone would give her an award for something.

Don’t I deserve it?

She conscientiously observed the world through glass filters. Her windshield, television, computer screen, sunglasses.

She always tuned in. Always made sure to set her DVR to the appropriate times and stations, content to snuff out life with the push of a button. She was just as good, if not better, than the people she saw on screen.

Actors, reality stars, faces in the news.

Although, Susan hoped that no one would skip past her one minute of electric-candy fame.

But no one would miss that anyway, now would they?

Everyone would be so entranced by what she had done that they wouldn’t dare miss her moment with the world.

Maybe I’ll write a novel. Perhaps I’ll take up painting.

She smiled into the rearview, picked at her front teeth, and dislodged a stray curdle of cottage cheese.

“There, better.”

Stereo tuned to her favorite morning talk program, she wound through traffic at comfortable pace, maintaining the posted speed limit while also staying out 104

of everyone else’s way. She imagined herself careening through the perilous roadways in her mind.

“Meanwhile, in Sudan, UN workers continue attempts at…” the program blared to the world’s deaf ears.

All deaf but Susan.

If I could only find the time, I would do something about that business in Africa.

The announcer continued his story.

“What a shame,” she whispered, shaking her head.

“Damn shame. I mean darn shame.”

Daisy puttered down the road, back window framed in bumper stickers for every cause that made up her relations. Ribbons for awareness and canned sayings shouting in sun-bleached colors – all littering the window. A tiny square was left in the middle through which she could still view traffic. Others could look and see her if they tried, and she could also see them if only she would turn around and look.

Down Chicago Lane she cruised with the hill’s grade, taking her normal route.

What she saw in her rearview mirror was anything but routine. A chiseled jaw was hunkered over handlebars. His head seemed to hover right over her newest bumper sticker that read: “Mrs. Baggins.”

He gave her thumbs up.

She waved back.

“What a strange man,” she muttered. Turning back to her own image in the rearview mirror, she checked her bangs and lipstick, but ignored her blushing cheeks.

Of all the bizarre – She hit the brakes.

Daisy fishtailed on the damp asphalt and came to a 105

halt.

“Good night!” she spouted at the near fowl-versuscar collision. A cluster of ducklings had meandered through the congested lane.

Impatient honking surrounded the two-door hatchback. But Susan took a moment to check herself to make sure she was okay. Her clutch had flown off the passenger seat and into the wheel well. She leaned as far as she could to reach for it, awkwardly unbuckling her seat belt to close the final few inches between her fingertips and the cream and gold case.

Tap-ta-tap-tap. “Excuse me, ma’am?”

“Wh-what the –” Scrambling upright, Susan came face-to-face with a stout woman tapping at her driver’s side window. The woman’s snout was an inch from the glass, her breath intermittently fogging up the window.

The woman turned away and yelled to an unseen person, “She’s okay!”

Then Susan remembered.

The ducklings!

She swung the door open, managing to nail the woman in the kneecaps. After muttering an apology, Susan slid from her car, carefully stalking toward the ducklings that still waddled in the road. She crouched down as best as she could in her pencil skirt, arms widespread to shoo the fluffs of yellow and brown to safety.

“Ohhhhh, little duckies!” She swung her arms and upper body like a gigantic duck-repelling satellite dish.

“Gooooooo… yeeeeeesss…”

The ducklings quacked and fluttered away from her, furtively glancing back with each step. Still, the mother duck was not in sight. Susan steered them from her lane 106

and across the stalled oncoming traffic. The ducklings veered toward the station wagon at the front of the pack.

“No, no, no!” she leapt before the ducks’ path.

“This way. That’s right. Good. Just a little bit farther.”

The troupe came to the sidewalk’s edge, heads bobbing in confusion until Susan gave one final swing of her arms, frightening the ducks up to safety.

“There!” Susan proudly crossed her arms.

Where is their mother? She craned her neck to check down the road, but there was no luck. At the other side of the road she found her answer. A smudge of brown feathers in front of her car’s bumper.

“Oh, goodness!” She slapped her hand against her face.

What to do, what to do?

On the one hand, she would definitely be late for work if she took the orphaned ducklings to Feathered Friends on the other side of town. Then there was the other option, leaving the ducklings to fend for themselves and hope that someone else could help them out.

I can’t leave them. Even if she had to nurse the ducklings herself, she would make sure they did not come to the same fate as their mother.

At least not on her watch.

According to her watch, she was already going to be late for work as it was.

Need something to transport them in. She marched toward her car, remembering the box of books in her trunk that she kept forgetting to take to the Goodwill.

Traffic remained at a standstill.

Maybe they’re also worried about the little ducklings? It’s nice to know there are still some decent people in the world.

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“Ma’am?” The woman who had been at Susan’s window stepped in front of her. “You better not go back there right now.”

She snapped at the rosy-cheeked barrier. “How else am I supposed to carry those sweet little things to Feathered Friends?”

She imagined the feel-good news story about her rescue of the ducklings on Chicago Lane. Tonight at six.

With dreamy anchorman – Roger Wickshire. But that would have to wait until after the cardboard box and a final check of her face in the mirror.

As the woman stood speechless, Susan shoved past her to the back of her car. People huddled around her rear bumper. They glanced at Susan – some in disgust and others with sadness.

So I killed the mother when I wasn’t looking, but that doesn’t mean I’m a horrible person. Accidents happen, right? Susan continued to justify as she approached the fidgeting group.

“Excuse me!” she growled at the first person she met.

“I think it would be best –” the man began, but he stopped as Susan wedged past him.

“Can’t everyone just get out of my –” The crowd parted before she could finish. She saw the group’s concern splayed on the damp asphalt.

His helmet askew. His bike twisted.

Susan hovered over her life’s one minute.

108

BILL COPE

BRIDGE OUT “What do you suppose they made in there?”

“What who made in where?”

“There. Where else?” They were alone on this road, Gary and Jenna – a narrow lane-and-a-half with swampy grassland crowding the wet pavement on the right so closely that Jenna could have reached out and plucked a handful of the blades as they drove past. On their left, to where she impatiently flipped her hand, was a brick wall, maybe twenty-feet high and a quarter-mile long, reds ranging from dried blood to splotchy rust. Vines clung to much of the face. There were no windows, no architectural features of any sort but for an occasional wooden loading dock, rotting into the weeds that had reclaimed a dirt access road. In places, ragged holes had been slammed through the brick by the fist of age and deterioration. The vines poured into these breaches as though this was exactly what they’d been waiting for.

“How would I know, Jen? Confederate flags?

Cotton bales? Hobbles and chains? Whatever it was, they haven’t made it there for a damn long time.”

“It can’t be that old. It’s so big. They didn’t have factories so big in those days, did they? And is that what they call kudzu? It’s everywhere.”

“Jen, this is your part of the country, not mine. Why ask me?”

She turned away, sat forward and fumed in her seat.

“Jesus, Gary! To get you to talk. You haven’t said more than five words since we turned off that other 109

road. Even before that. I can’t stand this.”

In an indeterminable distance, the road curved lazily into the woods that pressed against the left berm beyond the disintegrating building. Above them, above the scarred roadbed, above the thick grey scrub and kudzu coverlet by what seemed to be mere inches, an unbroken ceiling of muddy clouds promised to dump another torrent of suffocating rain with each breath, each tense heartbeat from inside the rental car.

“Besides, this isn’t my country anymore than it’s yours. Is it my fault Dad wanted to be buried where he was born? Quit blaming me for being here. You could have skipped out on this”…she hesitated, pulled at the skin of her neck, knowing what she would say next, would peel the scab off a wound that never healed, wishing she could stop, regretting that she was going to say it anyway”…Just like you’ve skipped out on everything else that had to do with my family. Since the beginning.”

“I’m so damn sick of that. And if you’re so done with me, what does it matter? I’m here now, aren’t I?” For all the time it took to enter deeply into the gloom of the trees, they were silent. Every few hundred yards, another shack or trailer squatted within a littered yard. From under blankets of insatiable plant life peeked gap-toothed grills, broken taillights, rotted tires of abandoned cars and smashed windshields of discarded trucks. These woods still glistened from the last deluge. The two saw not another soul.

Finally, Gary erupted. “How goddamn far is this detour? We should have come out of it, somewhere.”

“We should have stopped and asked somewhere.”

“Like where? The only place that looked like it 110

might have a human being inside was that nasty ass bait shop just after the detour sign. And then, there was no reason to think we had to ask anybody about anything, was there?”

For miles through this dim tunnel of trees they couldn’t name, roadside brush they could barely see through, and turbid clouds they had never known the like of at home in their high and dry state, the couple lapsed back into wordless fidgeting. Droplets the size of June bugs spattered on the windshield, not from rain but from the sullen leaves hanging over the road. Gary let the wipers run on a slow delay, not quite fast enough to keep the windshield cleared. Jenna glimpsed what she thought was another warning barricade tipped flat into a tulle sump at the side of the road, but what lettering she saw appeared as nothing but watery distortion.

“So? Are you going to tell them while we’re down here?”

“My family?”

“Yes. Your family. About us? After the funeral, maybe? Before we fly back?”

Jenna again pulled the skin of her throat, grown loose with middle age. For days, she had pictured her mother making this same anxious gesture, something both of them had always done when disturbed, when uncertain, when afraid. “I don’t know. I haven’t figured that out yet.”

“You shouldn’t. Not now, anyway. If you still give a damn about my opinion anymore, I think you sh...Jeezzus Kur-izzz…”

Gary had topped what he’d misjudged to be an insignificant rise not with his eyes on the road, but on his wife. She saw the steeper drop on the down side 111

and the orange-yellow “Bridge Out” barricade before he did, and he reacted to the sudden panic on her face, her desperate grab at the dash, before he even knew what he was about to hit. With both feet on the brake, he avoided slamming into the barrier, but could not avoid running the car off the break where the pavement ended. They heard, they felt in their spines, the oil pan and transmission scrape over slabs of torn asphalt and rocks as big as the skulls of horses.

The car bogged down to a stop twenty feet beyond the barricade and twenty yards from the bank of a roiled and black river, made swollen and swift from heavy rain. A trestle bridge, weak with rust and neglect, had collapsed into the stream on their side, but still dangled from the opposite bank, the submerged end leaving a wake in the turbulence that soon disappeared in the rolling waters.

“Shhhhhit,” Gary hissed. Jenna held onto the dash as though she expected more. The car’s engine had died.

Even with the windows up they could hear the gurgle of the river spilling over kudzu-heavy trees that had toppled into the flow.

When enough deep breaths had been taken, Gary open his door and put a foot out into sucking red mud.

“What…where are you going?” his wife asked.

“I don’t know. To stand up. I’m about to cramp.”

Gary unsnapped his seat belt and uncurled his body from the little car. The door wouldn’t open any wider than half way, and the corner plowed a furrow into the mud getting even that far. Using islands of fragmented asphalt to keep his shoes from further ruination, he stepped like a child jumping hopscotch to the front end of the car. “We’re in it up to the bumper.”

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Jenna put a leg out and stood. “Does your phone work?” She stayed put, with one arm on the roof and the other draped over the open door.

“Somebody moved that detour barrier, Jen. It has to be what happened. That’s why we’re here. Somebody did this to us.”

“What do you mean? Intentionally?” She remembered the other barricade a quarter mile back, half submerged in a brown pool of roadside runoff. “Who would…I mean, why would…”

The rumble of the truck reached them before the sight of it. It came over the rise slowly, this pickup truck as big as such trucks come. The tires alone were as tall as most women. The windows were tinted to impenetrable and the paint was patchy, as though the vehicle was shedding its skin. It stopped well short of the jagged edge of torn pavement, and watched, still growling. Had it topped the rise anywhere near to the speed Gary had, it would have landed on top of them and their little egg of a rental.

But it didn’t top the rise anywhere near to the speed Gary had.

“Jesus, Gary. Does your phone work?” Jenna pinched the skin on her neck without knowing her hand had gone there.

“It’s inside. In there. In there. With the other stuff.

Get it.” Jenna could not remember ever seeing her husband seem so impotent. His face would not hold still. His hand trembled as he pointed past the wipers, still sweeping across the glass, into the car. It made her even more afraid. “Get it,” he repeated.

Two men dropped out of the truck and walked with no hurry in their step to the pavement’s end.

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One grinned as though he’d seen all of this before.

The other wasn’t grinning. Jenna could hear gravel crunching under their boots.

The grinner said, “Looks like you folks got yourselves a little trouble.”

The face of her father came to her, along with the unwanted advice he had volunteered so many years past.

You’re making a mistake, girl. It’s the wrong way to go. Then the burble and purr of the black river blurred the image and washed the words away.

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DEVIATION Be on guard. The road widens, and many of the detours are seductive. — DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

CHRISTOPHER WATTS

PHOENIX My mother died when I was seventeen and every third Thursday of the month since, a letter from her comes in the mail. At first I was surprised, pissed actually, thinking it was someone’s idea of a joke. When it turned out not to be, I thought it would end up as some sappy gesture she cooked up on her death to help me remember her and heal. As if the remedy to a gunshot wound was a Band-Aid rolled in thumbtacks.

I guess that ended up being the problem, they didn’t just remind me of her, they wouldn’t stop. Month after month, year after year and after seven years they haven’t faltered.

Mostly she complains about the weather in Phoenix.

An anomaly I can’t begin to understand since she was born in Delaware, lived in Massachusetts most of her life, and died in Minnesota. From what I know, she never visited the Southwest. Maybe it was a dream of hers, maybe she used to sit in bed crying, holding a post card from the Grand Canyon that said “Heaven’s Playground Wishes You Well!!” while my father stumbled out the door and my brother and me cowered in the corner to lick our wounds. I suppose I don’t really remember.

“It’s too hot!” she cries in the letters. Time after time, “It’s too god damned hot!!”

She asks me questions in the letters. More questions than she ever asked me when she was alive. Back then we talked on the phone once every six months, and most 119

of the time she just needed money, no care in the world about me. After death something changed. The letters asked, “How are you? How’s your brother? Does he stay out of trouble? Do you stay out of trouble? Have you met a nice girl? What’s her name? Do you remember your father?” Questions I have no way of answering, the envelopes always have only the proper postage and my address. They come to me, but I don’t know where from. For how unusual this sounds to others, I’ve come to accept that they come from everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Why chase ghosts? Why chase what you never had and never had you? I read through them once or twice each time and throw them in a drawer in my office.

My most recent letter was unusual. It arrived as the others have; a crisp white envelope that smells like her perfume. I cracked it open along the end and blew into it, the wisps of old cigarettes and her hair curled up into my face. I opened it expecting the same one page, flowingly hand-written letter, but instead found something less and yet more. “I need you Jonny Angel,” she says followed by the address from a suburb in the southeast of Phoenix.

So what do I do? She called me the same name she did when I was small and she would rock me to sleep before dragging herself to the bathroom to clean the blood and junk out of her nose. She’s my mother. She’s my mother and she needs me. I go.

I call my work for the time off, it’s a computer integration firm nestled near the Puget Sound. They don’t seem to care much, it’s a dead end job for me where the glass ceiling presses down harder every day and I stopped fighting because what was the point. I 120

lock my studio apartment up tight as a tomb and hit the road.

I drive southeast out of Seattle and over the mountains, bobbing through speck towns in places and bright lights in others. The first day I’m driving for seventeen hours and thirty-seven minutes. I had planned on driving straight through, but I pull off and stay in the closest town, which of course with journeys like this, is Las Vegas. I’ve never been much of a gambler but I tell myself, “Loosen up! Don’t be a pussy!” Words of encouragement that help me pull my worn down Toyota into the neon lights of the Showtime Hotel and Casino.

The room’s nice. It’s plain, but good for me. It has what I need without the bullshit of what I don’t. That hint of pure oxygen in the air is tantalizing; tantalizing in the way that you recognize it from a bleak, white hospital room, but also from the grittiness of nature at the same time. I like that smell, it’s clean. I sit in my room watching TV until the phone rings.

“Hello.”

“Mr. Lansing? This is the front desk.” A soft male voice.

“Yes?” “This is quite irregular sir, but someone just dropped off three hundred dollars in chips and requested that whatever guest was staying in room 712 be given them.”

“Who would do that?”

“I’m not sure sir; it was left on the desk in some sort of plush bag with a note attached.”

I agree to claim the bag. I’m cautious, not stupid.

The hotel lobby is thinning out as the heart of night 121

approaches; the “normal” people have already retired to their rooms while the clacking of dice and shattering of small fortunes and dreams echoes from the casino floor.

It’s a woman now at the desk as I approach, she has a beautiful smile and I feel self-conscious of my own teeth when looking at hers. I sign a claim sheet and show my room card, and eventually I’m handed a small purple sack. The feel is immediately recognizable. I’m angry.

It’s the velvet purple sack for Crown Royal, my father’s whiskey. I remember them being strung across the carpet like toys in a good kid’s house, and my brother and I played with them as if they were such, hiding rocks and bark in them, pretending to be jewel thieves.

Thieves that could have a new life anywhere they wanted with their loot.

I make my way to the casino floor and spend three hours bouncing back and forth from blackjack to roulette. On my third trip to the blackjack table its 2:30 in the morning and a woman sits at the far end of the table. Her hair is violent red and from where I’m sitting she has eyes black and hollow like a shark. I play a few hands in silence, she slides to me.

“I’m Lana.” Her words a slick razor.

“Jon.” “Just passing through, Jon?” “I am,” I say. “I’m making my way to Phoenix.”

“I’m heading east, Savannah, if I can make it. What’s in Phoenix? Wife and kids?”

“What’s in Savannah? Sweat and tobacco?” She laughs out loud. “I suppose I might be chasing my childhood.” I tell her.

“The chase can be the best part. You want to join me for a drink?”

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We sit at the bar for most of the night. She tells me about growing up in Georgia and how her family had a sprawlingly beautiful farm. Sweetest peaches in the state, she says. She misses it. Tomorrow she’ll hop on a bus and get out of here. She’ll leave broken Vegas in the rearview forever. She wants to sit on the white beaches, suck on peaches, and watch the Atlantic roll in and out.

She flashes her eyes and flaps her lashes and through the seething haze of watered down liquor, I think I love her.

She asks if I have a room. I do.

All the way up the elevator we kiss. She sucks on my neck, nibbles my ear and bites my lip. I push myself hard against her and before I notice we are tumbling down the hall, breaking through my room door, and sprawling on the bed. I almost miss that our clothes come off. She tells me things no woman ever has. Talks like the women in porn and by the end I’m thrusting on top of her and she whispers, “Cum in me.” I do.

An hour later I wake up to see her slinking through the shadows, so close to them she might not actually be there. She sees I’m awake, but I say nothing. From the floor she scoops up her clothes and the rich velvet bag I dropped on the way in. As she opens the door a stream of light splashes across her face and I think she winks at me, and then is gone.

In the morning I check out from the hotel, have the valet pull the car around, and head back into the morning dessert. Gliding into Phoenix I feel lead in my gut. I’m unsure of what is waiting for me at the tiny, hand-written address. Maybe a long-lost aunt or the same ghost who left the purple bag, or maybe so rightfully it is my mother reincarnated as a cactus. Who knows? I don’t. But as I lose myself into what might be, 123

I find my eyes wandering eastward, dreaming of peaches and the Atlantic.

124

NICOLE SHARP

ITHACA “I’m looking for Ithaca.”

“What?” he asked.

“Nothing,” I said.

We started walking again, the rain light enough; not bothering us, well, it didn’t bother me. I continued walking; he followed because he had to, he needed someone to cook and clean for him. He was trying to be nice right now.

“Did I tell you about the girl I met on the plane?”

“I’m not signing those papers.” He said.

“You will.” I said. He had to, it was the reason I came back here.

“You don’t really want to divorce me.” He dismissed me.

“She told me about Ithaca, said she was looking for it. She was one of those smart girls, really smart. She worked in a museum or something like that. She was smart.”

“I don’t care.” He said, his voice following me.

“I know. She said that Ithaca is what we’re all looking for. A...it stood for something. A big word, I forget. But she said that some of us want to get there, to Ithaca, before everyone else, but when you get there first, you’re not happy, and then...I forget. She was smart.”

“Not like you.” He scoffed but I stopped listening to him belittle me a long time ago.

It was good he was reverting to his old ways; it would 125

make it easier to sign the papers. I could do this. I could leave him.

We had gone outside to take a walk and were drifting down the street, on the current of past memories, in the rain.

I told her about him, on the plane, told her about how he was. She asked if there had ever been any good memories. I stopped and looked around at the neighborhood I had called home. The driveway where he tried to run me over when he was drunk; the house where we fought; those were the neighbors who saved my life after he had thrown a beer bottle at my head.

And this road was the one we drove down in the middle of the night when I miscarried and he reluctantly took me to the hospital; the whole time telling me it was my fault I was losing his child.

I told her no. No good memories.

This walk was a stupid thing for me to agree to. We needed to go back. I needed to just get him to sign the papers.

I had told her, the girl on the plane, I would sign the papers and go. That seemed to give me strength enough. She was smart, but she didn’t treat me like I was stupid. Other people did that, but not her. I told her I would get the papers signed and leave right after. I could do that. I could walk away once and for all.

No need to wallow on the battlefield of what had once been. She said that. Don’t stay on the battlefield.

Get in your boat, set your sails and go.

“Stop the shit, we both know you’re coming home.”

He said.

“You hit me. A lot. Then you threatened me with a gun.” I stated more for myself than him.

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“I apologized.” He shrugged.

“She didn’t treat me like I was stupid. She talked to me like I was smart. She used big words, a few of them I didn’t understand. I didn’t know people could talk like that every day. Some guy had just broken up with her; some idiot had broken her heart. You wonder why a guy would be that stupid. She probably would have made him the most amazing man in the world. You know?

She was one of those girls, who could make a man bigger than life.”

“You made me bigger than life.” The twang was deep and sexy, the one that I had a hard time resisting. I had no problem resisting now. She said there would be obstacles along the way. But you just keep sailing. Isn’t that what she said?

“No, I was stupid and I gave you too much control over me.”

“You liked it.” He grinned. The asshole grinned.

Good, I thought, grin asshole. It brought hatred and anger. Leaving him was not going to be a problem.

“How many times did you cheat on me?” That was how to take away his power. With the past.

“Just once.” He said.

That I knew of, I thought. “For nine months.”

He shrugged in reply.

Enough time to have a child. I turned and began walking back home. Back to his house. His house.

I don’t live here anymore. I don’t want to live here anymore. It was just a place I stopped for a while.

Drugged by what I thought was love. Just keep sailing.

You can do anything you want. She said that too. She didn’t treat me like I was stupid.

“I gotta go.” Just get him to sign the papers and 127

leave.

“Where?” He asked.

“Ithaca.”

“You got some guy you’re dating? You’re gonna go screw him now?”

“Maybe. Maybe I just gotta go.” Don’t antagonize the bear; I’m almost out of here.

“But that’s where you gotta go, isn’t it? Cause you got a date with some guy you’re gonna hop into bed with just to get back at me.”

“You’re going to sign the papers when we get back to your house.”

Not mine. Not ours. Yours.

“What if I don’t sign them?”

“You will.” I kept my head high as I walked, he shuffled behind me. He would sign.

“I showed her my tattoo; I told her it was my eighteen-year-old mistake. I told her you were my twenty-two-year-old mistake. I told her you were my five-year mistake. She asked me why I had stayed with you so long.”

I hadn’t known how to answer her. She told me about Ithaca.

“It’s getting late. I gotta go.” I said instead. Papers and leave. Get back on the boat.

She had said Ithaca was a magical place, a person’s own heaven, the place everybody is looking for. She said that every step a person takes is toward their own Ithaca.

Each journeyman is on route to their own personal finish lines. She talked a lot about the journey. I showed her my tattoo, told her strange stories all the time my voice awkwardly wavered, annoyingly. I told her that my mom was worried about me coming here alone; I told 128

her that I chose the wrong kind of people to hang out with. I asked her what Ithaca meant, she didn’t laugh.

She told me it was an island in Greece. I asked her if she’d been there, and she laughed, not at me, I don’t think. She laughed and said she would get there one day; that it was one of the places on her list to visit.

I told her about him. She told me about her own ‘him’.

“You’re not going to divorce me.” He said cocky. I could leave him.

“If I don’t, you can’t marry Connie.”

“Who said I wanted to marry her?”

“You did when you kicked me out of the house; you told me you wanted to marry Connie. You wanted a real woman who could take care of you.”

The sun was setting. Luckily, there wasn’t anything spectacular about it. I needed to leave before all the daylight was gone.

“I didn’t mean it.” He shrugged.

“Anyway.” Just sign the papers.

She walked away like a princess. When we left at the airport, as she said bye, she walked with a lot of class. She said she thought she was clumsy, said she did everything wrong. I told her she was smart, but she just laughed. I wondered if her ‘him’ had taken the good things away from her. The things she thought were good about herself.

She was smart.

Oh yeah, if I’m so smart, what was I doing with that guy? That’s what she had said when I told her she was smart. She laughed, but it was the kind of laugh girls give when they’re heartbroken.

I told her it was nice meeting her and wished her 129

luck and she wished me luck. I wanted to ask her so many more questions. I didn’t have time and we both had other planes to catch. I watched her walk away.

“What will do you when you get home?” I asked; kind of yelled it at her.

She smiled when she turned back toward me. “I’ll keep looking for Ithaca.” She smiled.

Me too, I thought.

“I gotta go, I’m lookin’ for Ithaca.” A breeze bushed my hair back from my face just then. The kind of breeze that was perfect for leaving. I was sure of it.

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GABRIEL CARDOSO

WHITE NOISE VOWS Painful, super-heated words had dissolved into single-syllable remarks and then silence. One of them had turned the stereo down to a level just above mute, and the sounds of the flapping windshield wipers and the snow tires crunching through fresh powder were too repetitive to be considered anything but white noise.

White noise to match the cold, white blanket that was steadily covering the hibernating, mountain landscape.

Charlie was hunched over the steering wheel like an ossified nursing home resident, rather than a young man seemingly just past his prime, trying his best to peer through the pelting snow and continue their dangerous, two-and-a-half-hour drive home. His wife Hazel sat in the passenger seat, staring out the side window, lost in her own microburst of frozen thoughts.

“Why did you even tell me at all?” he asked with a shake of his head and a pained snicker at his own expense. He didn’t bother looking at her. He just kept his eyes locked on the faint set of tire tracks he was following faithfully to keep them on the road and out of the ravine. “Obviously you have a complete fool for a husband. You could’ve gotten away with it forever.”

“Please don’t do that. You know I don’t feel that way.”

“No, I don’t know anything about the way you feel actually.”

“What do you want me to say, Charlie? What do you need me to say to you that I haven’t already said?”

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Hazel shifted in her seat uncomfortably. Her brow was pinched and visibly vibrating with emotion. Her eyes were discernibly red and damp, even in the low light of the car’s interior.

“I don’t know,” he admitted truthfully, at a loss for an answer to his own question. “Nothing I have to tell you to say. Nothing you shouldn’t have already said.”

Another five minutes of silence. Another two miles of mostly buried road. They rounded a corner and were bombarded by the bright, flashing lights of a police cruiser parked at the bottom of the final, eleven-mile stretch that led to the summit pass. Stabs of red and blue color caromed off the pine trees huddled on each side of the pavement.

“No, come on,” bemoaned Charlie as he tapped the brakes and coasted forward cautiously, already knowing what was unfolding. “Not tonight.” The pass’s orangeand-white-striped traffic gates had been manually lowered into place, blocking the route forward. The road was in the process of being closed.

A snow-covered policeman waved them down, and Charlie reached to lower his window so he could talk to the man. Hazel beat him to the punch; she thrusts open her car door and stepped out to plead with the officer. Frigid, blustery air rushed into the car and made Charlie shiver so hard that his teeth chattered. “Please let us through,” she begged. “You don’t understand the kind of night we’ve had.”

“No, you don’t understand, lady,” responded the officer. “There’s been an avalanche. Nobody’s getting through for a week probably. You folks will have to turn around.”

Hazel got back in the car and dolefully settled into 132

her seat. She was slow to close the door, perhaps briefly debating running pell-mell into the wintery woods.

Fresh tears queued up behind her eyelids as she looked at her husband. Charlie was staring forward blankly, rubbing his forehead in consternation. “What should we do now?” she asked him quietly.

Charlie put the car into gear and cranked the steering wheel. “We turn around, Hazel. What other choice do we have?”

They drove back to Boise like strangers. Hazel turned up the stereo volume so he wouldn’t hear her crying, but one of the lines or melodies made him angry enough to jab the power button like a pugilist. “I don’t like our songs anymore,” he said with a cracked and swollen voice. “He’s ruined them for me. Something else I’ll have to thank him for.”

“If you’re going to hate someone, it should be me,” she said dejectedly.

“Don’t think that I don’t.”

“You haven’t threatened to kill me.”

“I didn’t threaten to kill him, I promised to. Big difference.”

“He’s not the one who made vows to you. I am.”

“Yeah, but he didn’t give me nine and a half good years first. He’s a complete stranger, and he had no right to change my life for me.”

“I told you, I put an end to it.”

“Mmm-hmm. And yet he keeps emailing you. Pretty strange behavior over something that’s over, so you’ll have to forgive me for not believing a word that comes out of your mouth.”

Hours of diligent, white-knuckled driving later, and they reached the outer limits of Boise. “You can drop 133

me off at my parents’ house,” she informed him.

“Gladly.”

The traffic and neon lights of the capitol city made Charlie feel even more isolated. He looked longingly at the passing cars and imagined the drivers and passengers inside them living happy, carefree lives in complete contrast to his own. He felt abandoned and betrayed and enshrouded by fog in a world that was sunny for every other citizen.

He turned into her parents’ subdivision. His heart started racing, sensing an end to something that he wasn’t prepared to ever give up, a garden he’d vowed to tend until one of their deaths made him stop. His foot was prideful though and refused to quit pressing down on the gas pedal.

A white, two-story house came into view – a normally warm and welcoming residence where he’d spent nearly a decade’s worth of happy Thanksgivings and Christmas mornings since their wedding on a crisp September Friday. He was silently thrashing in the deep end of his own panicky thoughts when Hazel put a firm, yet shaking, hand on his knee. “Keep driving, Charlie.

Please.” He hated himself for taking some small degree of satisfaction in her cascading tears.

“What for?” he asked, practically starving for her to give him the right reason.

“I don’t know yet. Just please do it.”

Charlie circled the block three times before either of them figured out what to say next. “We had a pretty good run for awhile, didn’t we?” he asked rhetorically.

A cluster of good memories swam into his thoughts and made him both cringe and smile with nostalgia.

“I wouldn’t give back a second of it,” she said.

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“But you did, Hazel. You gave it all back. You let me go.” He pulled to a stop in front of her parents’ house.

The motor chugged and nearly quit, but Charlie gave it a little gas and managed to keep it running.

“I know I did. I know. And now I’m scared that I’ve made the biggest mistake I’ll ever make in my life.

Please, Charlie. Just keep driving. I can take over if you’re tired. Please. Let’s take the long way home, baby.

Let’s go home.”

Charlie didn’t respond for a long, drawn-out minute, unable to make a decision. Pride screamed at him to kick her out of the car, throw her belongings on the snowy lawn, and drive away. Deep, unending love bellowed at him to do the opposite.

“Please, Charlie. I’m not ready for this to be over.

We can be good again. I want that. I believe that about us.”

Charlie closed his eyes in potentially bottomless thought, and then he took a chance: a swan dive and a sink or swim splash off the most daunting precipice of his life. He put the car into gear and applied a feather’s weight of pressure to the gas pedal, tentatively opting to roll forward into an unknown future with the best person he’d found in his life. Still. Forever. Despite everything.

They stopped at a bustling truck stop – its cheerful lights twinkling in the snowstorm – loaded up on gasoline and stale coffee and overly-sweet donuts, and then they buckled their seat belts and drove the long way home, talking about old times mostly. They arrived at their half-frozen cabin just after dawn. Charlie brought in an armload of split logs and sparked a crackling blaze in the wood-burning stove while Hazel retreated to 135

the bathroom. He was waiting with a towel when she stepped out of the shower, steam rising from her naked body. She hesitated on the bath mat and burst into a fresh ocean spray of tears, shaking her head at either the towel or the extension of kindness on his part.

“Come here, love,” he said, meaning it fully.

“I’m sorry,” she sobbed.

“I know you are, Hazel. Come here, beautiful. We’re home now.”

She eschewed the towel and dried herself in his embrace instead. And the tenderest, springtime part of Charlie’s heart turned to permafrost when, for the first time in their long romance, he caught himself wondering if he was the man she was actually squeezing in return.

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MICHAEL PHILLEY

EL DESVIO Gabriela…Gabriela! Hurry, the sun is rising! My mother’s voice can pierce mud walls. She stops calling and I can hear the murmur of the river. It is Sunday, the procession about to begin. I rise from my straw mat, step into a tattered dress, slip on sandals that once belonged to an older sister. Soon my mother and I are descending a steep path, together with people of our village, to a sandy riverbank. We stand there wrapped with blankets in the chill of daybreak. Across the river, early sunlight glints against sandstone cliffs. Minutes pass before a deep notch in the sandstone—the very one we have been watching – catches the light. Will this be the time? Will she appear? I hear prayers being whispered. My mother drops to her knees and clasps her hands. I keep my eyes fixed on the notch, my heart beating in unison with other hearts, each heart full of longing for the holy.

My mother left this earth blessed not to know what would become of me. Mercifully, she would not worry while I was fleeing – pregnant and unmarried – with Emilio to the North. I rejoice in her innocence of not knowing the hardships we faced, our ungodly thirst as we crossed the parched land in the shadow of the mountains. We would walk all night, hearing the howls of coyotes and fearing that we would step on scorpions or rattlesnakes. The faith that my mother instilled in me began to vanish like vapor rising from the lakes of salt. But I wanted desperately for my child to be born in 137

America, and for that reason, we survived.

It is a blessing that my mother cannot see how afraid I am. I worry that Emilio – already six years in prison – will never be released. I dread the day when it will be discovered that I am – how do you say it – undocumented. I have heard stories of mothers and fathers separated from their children, sent back to wherever they have come from, without a second thought by the authorities. This terrifies me. I could not live without Isabel, my precious daughter who carries my mother’s name.

“Isabel, let me show you a beautiful book.” She is not yet eight, but already Isabel is a good reader, one of the best students at her school. Each evening she reads aloud to me from one of the storybooks that I bring home from the thrift store. Tonight I place in her hands a large book with a shiny cover. It cost more than I wanted to pay, but how could I resist buying it? Inside the book are many wonderful drawings and photographs of the tiny birds that my people in Mexico call chupaflor, the flower sippers.

The evening is unbearably hot in our cramped trailer. We place a foam mattress outside on the gravel and sprawl on our bellies under the light. Moths flutter back and forth and cast flickering shadows, and some pop and sizzle against the heat of the naked bulb.

“Look, Mama,” says Isabel, “they can fly backwards.”

For a moment, I fail to understand until I realize Isabel is looking at a photograph in the book. She reads to me, page after page. There are maps showing the long journeys called migrations, each tiny bird flying alone for hundreds, even thousands of miles across mountains 138

and seas. Sometimes a violent storm will sweep the almost weightless body to an unknown destination never before reached by its species. My head cannot hold all that I learn.

Gabriela…Gabriela. Look, there, on the cliff! My mother’s voice, distant like an echo. We wait by the river, watching the dark sandstone for the sign of a miracle.

I roll over in bed and reach out to touch Isabel who is sleeping soundly.

I dream that Emilio and I have grown wings and feathers. We are flying to the north, over tall mountains and across barren deserts, to the United States of America. We are very tired, so starved and thin that our bones stick out from our bodies. But we go on.

In America we will make our nest, and our little bird will be born where there are broad fields of flowers, all teeming with nectar.

Then in slow motion, Emilio, his arms and legs no longer feathered, walking into the 7-ll with Ramirez and Manuel. They have been drinking heavily at midday, out of work for months. Emilio doesn’t realize what is about to happen. Ramirez pulls a gun from his pocket, points it at the woman behind the counter while Manuel empties the cash drawer into a cloth bag. A man enters from the back room, carrying a shotgun. Ramirez shouts, puta madre, shoots wildly, one bullet destroys the man’s face. The woman screams. Emilio turns and runs.

Isabel cries from her crib.

I have confessed my fears to Señora Maggie. She lived as a child in Mexico with her missionary parents, and she remembers how she helped the concinar to mash the 139

corn that would be made into flour for tortillas. She is over 80-years-old, yet her eyes still sparkle like agates.

She takes delight in speaking my native tongue as I bend over to wipe spilled food from the front of her blouse. Muchas gracias, she says, and her smile follows me as I gather plates and glasses from her table. There are many old people in Spring Creek Senior Living, where I work. I feel sad that they are here, living apart from their sons and daughters and their grandchildren. Señora Maggie has outlived her husband and two sons, and she says I am the daughter she always wanted. Every Sunday afternoon I wheel her to the Bingo game she loves to play. She wins often, and she is known by everyone here as the Bingo Queen. Once I saw her slam her hand on the Bingo cards and mumble the words that Ramirez shouts in my dream.

I have yet to visit Emilio in all the time he has been in prison. In the few letters I have received, he warns me that it is too dangerous – the security guards will ask me for documentation, and it will be discovered that I am here illegally. Emilio himself came with me to this country without papers, and I do not understand why the authorities have refused to deport him to Mexico. I think perhaps it is because they will not take the risk that he would be set free.

There have been no letters for many months. I no longer have the patience to listen to Emilio’s warnings.

Señora Maggie knows my heart is heavy, and she has come up with an idea. Her plan is a little crazy, but Señora Maggie says to not try is to live a life of regret.

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Señora Maggie’s eyes flash with anger. “Of course

that’s me in the photo! Can’t you read? Margaret Branna O’Leary! Why should it matter that my driver’s license has expired? Can’t you see I’m confined to a wheelchair?”

The security officer asks more questions. Outside in the visitor’s parking lot the driver of the Spring Creek Senior Living van paces and smokes a cigarette. Inside the van several of Señora Maggie’s elderly companions look in astonishment at the prison walls and guard tower.

Señora Maggie convinces the security officer that I am her attendant; I am needed to push the wheelchair and serve as a translator. We are here to see Emilio Francesco Garrido who, Señora Maggie explains, once was her gardener.

At last we are allowed to see Emilio. He sits in dim light behind a glass panel. He is too thin – the orange prison suit looks many sizes too big for him. Someone standing behind the panel switches on an overhead light. For several seconds I am unable to breathe. A strangling sound swells from the back of my throat.

Señora Maggie grips my hand.

The purple-red scar runs from Emilio’s missing left eye and crosses the bridge of his nose. But it does not stop there. It travels down his cheek and along his jaw until it disappears above his neck. His right eye looks straight ahead at me. It does not waiver or blink. I hear Emilio’s voice, barely a whisper, “You should not have come.”

It is Sunday and Isabel is excited to be where I work. Everyone makes a fuss over her and tells me she is beautiful. At the Bingo game, Isabel stands beside Señora 141

Maggie and watches intently as the old woman stamps the black numbers on her Bingo cards, one after one, with a purple marker. Señora Maggie’s eyes suddenly narrow, and she leans from her wheelchair to pull Isabel closer to her. Que suertudo, I hear her say. “What good luck, one more number.”

I pray it will appear.

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ROB HANNON

BLACK TAR: HEAVEN AND HELL Less than a year after I left the high-desert, sunblessed sagebrush steppe of the Wood River Valley in central Idaho, and returned on a Northwest detour to that somber, sodden metropolis, Seattle, my demons cornered, diminished and conquered, they sprang back to life with a startling ferocity far greater than before.

Pulled into the inexorable undertow, I began to haunt the downtown underworld near the Pike Place Market, my personal Hades, Pike Street my river Styx. To waylay the creeping sickness rotting my soul, I made daily-atleast-excursions to the Southwest corner of Third and Pike.

It was Sparky’s corner, and his gang-my gang by extension-would ‘take care’ of any encroachers intent on marketing their goods from ‘his’ spot. Sparky sold the finest heroin in King County. His connection, Lee Ping, brought the junk straight from the Golden Triangle of Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam.

Black tar so rich and pure that after plunging one deftlycooked, well-aimed shot through the festering scabs on my forearm, the dreadful opium poppy’s residue would stream and steam and scream through my veins and capillaries, and I could shout, anywhere, anytime, as I wandered, like a stultified, addicted Odysseus trying in vain to get back home to safety, with the Sirens’ enchanting, tone-perfect lyrics luring me back every day to the rocky, soul-destroying shores, “I’m in Heaven, I’m in Heaven, I’m in…Hell.”

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