Storyman

THE STORYMAN

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THE STORYMAN

The Linnet's Wings 3

Frontispiece, Linen Skies, Logh Bofin, Dromod, 2009, Mari , 3

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All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including, photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, mail the publisher at: thelinnetswings@gmail.com Design @Mari, 2021 isbn: 978-1-9164622-5-0

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Table of Contents Shakespeare Sonnet 98, 8 The Art of Whistleblowing by Stephen Zelnick, 12 The storm begins like this by John C. Mannone, 27 Chance Encounter by Judith A. Lawrence, 29 First Communion by John C. Mannone, 34 Dinner at the Bigelows by Linda Boroff, 37 We Shall Be Warm Again by Tom Sheehan, 45 Vision, Method and Magic Dust by Marie Fitzpatrick, 47 Steamroller by John C. Mannone, 55 Principles of Discovery by Tom Sheehan, 56 Letting go by Bill West, 61 For a Timely Moment by Tom Sheehan, 65 The Burial Detail by Tom Sheehan, 68

Classics

Give All to Love by Ralph Waldo Emerson, 66 Song of Myself by Walt Whitman, 81

Classic Art

Proun by Proun by Lazar Markovich Lissitzky 10 Illustration of a review in, "The Moving Picture World", Date June 1916, Earl Hurd 11 Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch 11 Floating Forms by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy 26 Leuk 5 by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, 26 Paul Hartland Carnival. Composition with two masks by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy 28 Sil I by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, 35 The Dinner Horn by Winslow Homer, 36 The Hearing Forest and the Seeing Field by Hieronymus Bosch 44 Skeleton by Vincent van Gogh 46 Intime message by Wassily Kandinsky 52 The Law of Series by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy 54 The Face" by Walter Gramatté 56 Man with Heart (Self) by Walter Gramatté 59 Skull and Writing Quill by Pieter Claesz 60 Arthur Rackham's Snow White from "Grimm" 63 Truth Rescued by Time, Witnessed by History by Francisco Goya 64 Love Song by the New Moon by Paul Klee 67 Ghost of a Genius by Paul Klee 68

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SONNET 98 From you have I been absent in the spring, When proud-pied April, dressed in all his trim, Hath put a spirit of youth in everything, That heavy Saturn laughed and leaped with him, Yet nor the lays of birds, nor the sweet smell Of different flowers in odor and in hue, Could make me any summer’s story tell, Or from their proud lap pluck them where they grew.

Nor did I wonder at the lily’s white, Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose; They were but sweet, but figures of delight, Drawn after you, you pattern of all those.

Yet seemed it winter still, and, you away, As with your shadow I with these did play.

WILIAAM SHAKESPEARE

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Project for the Affirmation of the New

PR Fab O UN prec erge e : Awa of d ious gg m iting escr ston ade energ iptio es; l from y, a ns t ike a aga hol o su bla te a low m m nk p nd e e d o o n a a ge n c r u t nou waitin usted n g on with its f i ll

Proun by Lazar Markovich Lissitzky El Lissitzky's entire career was laced with the belief that the artist could be an agent for change, later summarized with his edict, "das zielbewußte Schaffen" (goal-oriented creation). Lissitzky, of Lithuanian Jewish оrigin, began his career illustrating Yiddish children's books in an effort to promote Jewish culture in Russia.

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Illustration of a review in, "The Moving Picture World", Date June 1916, Source Internet Archive, Author Earl Hurd

To emphasize only the beautiful seems to me to be like a mathematical system that only concerns itself with positive numbers.

Paul Klee

The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch, Date: 1510 - 1515, Style: Northern Renaissance, Series: The Garden of Earthly Delights, Genre: religious painting, Media: oil, panel, Location: Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain

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The Art of Whistleblowing by

Stephen Zelnick

The Unreal City In “The Wasteland” (1921) T. S. Eliot imagines his London, post WWI: Unreal City, Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many.

Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled, And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.

Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,… (ll. 60-67) Eliot’s city lacks energy and purpose; my city exhibits boundless energy encasing a rotting core. In morning traffic seethe the managers, professionals, service workers, and technicians, hastening to prey upon their neighbors. They serve a damaged social compact. At times, in unbidden glimpses, arises a phantom of guilt and shame. Long ago this was Herman Melville’s theme, but readers could not afford understanding “Bartleby, the Scrivener” without looking dead on at themselves.

This essay is not a review of whistleblowing so much as a gathering of examples to inspire storytellers. Our current art has turned inwards, tracking results of diseased social arrangements, left unexplored.

The Victorian novel excelled at dramatizing the network of economic relations and their human costs.

Dickens’ readers felt the pain resulting from misaligned social codes and lived experience. Fiction writers ascribed blighted emotional life to systemic unreality. Hard Times (1854) exposed a mad social science annexed to industrial aggression. Bleak House (1853) guides readers through London’s dark insanity, giving off sparks on every page, as in the minor figure of Mr. Vholes [see below]. Dickens gave us the Circumlocutions Office, statistics as stutterings, the Court of Chancery, the theory of Barnacles. Consider what follows, then, as a preliminary discussion of fiction suited to our crisis.

[“Mr. Vholes is a very respectable man. He has not a large business, but he is a very respectable man. He is allowed by the greater attorneys who have made good fortunes or are making them to be a most respectable man. He never misses a chance in his practice, which is a mark of respectability. He never takes any pleasure, which is another mark of respectability. He is reserved and serious, which is another mark of respectability. His digestion is impaired, which is highly respectable. And he is making hay of the grass which is flesh, for his three daughters. And his father is dependent on him in the Vale of Taunton.” Bleak House, Chapter 39.]

Ours is the age of the whistle-blower – of law officers oblivious to the damage they do, liars promoting products that kill their kind and degrade nature, soldiers disobeying orders, and so on. So far this drama has been enacted by the celebrated few – Ellsberg, “Deep-Throat”, Serpico, Silkwood, Manning, Snowden, and more recently Vindman and Troye. Look for these quiet riots against decency and order to be breaking out all around us I Media have made some famous; but most are unknown. In the 1960s ■ Peter Buxton (US Health Service) exposed the Tuskegee syphilis experiments; ■ John White, a junior Navy officer, released the Tonkin Gulf report; ■ Perry Felwock publicized NSA surveillance; and, ■ Ernest Fitzgerald revealed huge cost overruns in defense contacts.

A war economy invites whistleblowing, and with exposures come corporate counter-attacks by lawyers, armed with confidentiality agreements and thugs using physical intimidation, even murder.

After Vietnam, truth-tellers targeted the nuclear power industry, a toxic mix of profits, government largess, and plutonium vapors. Silkwood’s case was the most lurid but hardly alone.

■ As early as 1976 the “GE Three” reported carelessness in GE nuclear plants; ■ a decade later Ronald Goldstein exposed hazardous California plants (and flimsy protections for whistleblowers in industry-owned federal courts); ■ In 1987 Roger Wensil reported on-the-job drug abuse in a plutonium plant; ■ In 1988, Samuel Nunn revealed shoddy controls at Duke Power; ■ In 1989, Joseph Macktal exposed poor controls at Halliburton; and ■ In 1990, Vera English found herself on the wrong side of an employee confidentiality agreement while reporting GE nuclear contamination.

We may not recognize these stalwart guardians, who challenged corporate bosses, government, and the legal establishment. They lost their jobs, damaged their careers, faced physical intimidation at work and home, weathered legal assaults, yet made hard decisions and held their ground in the public interest. [pic] [A recent Wikipedia entry (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_whistleblowers) records the increase of exposures in government and industry, and their negligence, fraud, and criminality.]

Whistleblowers harried tobacco, pharmaceuticals, auto safety (Ralph Nader), air and water pollution, and the oil and chemical industries. Big Tobacco hired scientists and physicians to produce bogus reports. Big Pharma peddled dangerous drugs deploying false assurances of safety and effectiveness. Healthcare insurance perfected fraudulent billing. A rumbling began implicating fossil fuels with air pollution. Banking and finance flourished, bankrupting many and rousing a few insiders to cry foul. [pic]

[Images of trustworthy physicians assured us smoking posed no health dangers, despite the term “coffin nails” applied to cigarettes by US soldiers in WWII. Tobacco companies paid real physicians handsomely to testify in public and under oath to “scientific findings” they knew were untrue.]

After 9/11 government poured contracted tortured funds into Bush’s “War on Terrorism”, creating a freefor-all in military procurement and fraudulent accounting ■ Thomas Drake, a brilliant computer analyst, ended up employed at Radio Shack after reporting millions squandered in useless security software;

■ The Iraq invasion produced reports exposing brutal treatment of civilians and of the captured enemy.

We know of journalist Seymour Hersh, but not of Sergeant Frank Ford and Joe Darby who revealed the ugly work of contracted torture; ■ John Kiriakou, a CIA operative revealed the use of water-boarding, and went to prison while those who tormented prisoners and hid the crime prospered. [pic]

[John Kiriakou … prospered.]

We learned of fraud and corruption in healthcare, with Medicare abuse especially widespread: ■ The nation’s largest healthcare firm defrauded Medicare, incurring corporate fines of $17B; ■ Donald McLendon, a senior executive, along with thirty others, exposed the crime; ■ CEO Rick Scott, as punishment, now serves time as Florida’s junior Senator.

Most serious in that decade was abuse in the mortgage industry, and near fatal economic crisis.

■ In 2006, Richard Bowen III attempted to alert Citicorp’s board that 60% of their mortgages were bad.

He was fired. Robert Rubin, head of Citicorp, offered an apology.

Bush’s “War on Terrorism” produced the Patriot Act, empowering government to silence debate and restrict information. Information became “classified” to maintain national security. Obama went further, using the 1917 Espionage Act to criminalize the release of sensitive information and prevent exposing the torment of prisoners in Iraq (Abu Grab), rendition to foreign torture sites, and waterboarding.

■ Manning revealed deadly military force used against civilians, including journalists; ■ Snowden exposed the surveillance state, gathering evidence domestically without warrant; ■ The “Panama Papers” uncovered vast corporate money laundering.

The Trump Administration, brazen and lawless, has invited waves of whistleblowing.

■ Natalie Edwards, US Treasury officer, revealed Russia’s 2016 election tampering, involving Maria Butina, Rick Gates, Paul Manafort, the Russian Embassy; ■ “Anonymous” spot-lighted Trump’s extortion efforts against Ukraine. [pic] [Manning went to prison, where he was tormented with solitary confinement and sexual mistreatment.]

The cruelty of our criminal justice system is protested in street demonstrations and in journalism (Chris Hedges, Angela Davis, et. al.), but the code of silence among police, jailers, prosecutors, local judges, is rarely breached. This vast system assures the United States global leadership in incarceration, with vast numbers employed in projects that rob communities of hope and sanity. What goes on in the minds of these jailers, and what is the cost to their humanity? These interior dramas need imagining.

My local paper, recently, ran an article, not especially featured, on whistleblowing in the police force: “District Attorney’s Office moved to dismiss 14 criminal convictions they deemed tainted by San Jose police officers associated with bigoted social-media reports, the blogger who exposed them has published a new dispatch linking retired and active officers to extremist, transphobic, and Islamophobic posts.” This low volume news signals what we can expect to notice erupting everywhere. The drama of seeing what has been made invisible, measuring the costs of saying something, and then exposing what is despicable is becoming widespread.

II High profile instances are the melting iceberg’s tip. Cars pour into the unreal city every workday conveying thousands who have discarded truth and honor. We participate, often unknowingly, in a broad conspiracy to chisel our neighbors, hoping to provide our families with what others have. We have been conditioned not to notice. A fair test would be to select an honored profession and see whether or not employees make their way by stealth, predation, and self-silencing.

For example, we have known for decades that college admissions privilege the privileged -- legacy admissions for the progeny of esteemed alumni; children of wealthy donors; and now, the offspring of notables, who can arrange for test-takers, false records, and bogus letters of recommendation. However, behind the malefactors stand the administrators who let it happen -- admissions officers and staff – and higher-level officials. All of whom can tell themselves they serve a humane endeavor. Anthony Trollope excelled at exploring such mendacity in 19th C. church administration. [pic]

[Former Bryant University President Ronald K. Machtley made $6,283,616 in 2017. This corporate look has become normal in our universities. Presidents at Belmont College, Johnson-Wales, and Wilmington University earn $5m annually. Highest paid faculty, leaders in Medical and Business schools, earn $1M or more. Regular faculty can be hired at $30k and regularly around $130k a year in the stronger subject areas. At Johnson-Wales and Wilmington, the CEO salary comes in at a ratio of 50-1 to that of faculty, reflecting the corporate model at the most powerful businesses.]

Higher education is big business, raising tuitions each year and demanding increased state support. Faculty members are expensive, especially stars, famed for research or public personalities. In science and medicine, they bring research funding for lab space and equipment, and high-priced personnel. Landing a titan of research provides external funding, often counted in many millions of dollars. Hiring grandees is itself expensive and requires high-price recruiting experts. The University President officiates at convocations and in executive council, but the basketball coach, the Developments team, the science-tech recruitment officers and their stars, and the real-estate, banking, and politically connected Board Members run the show. Big players pay no attention to teaching; they answer to no one on social benefit. Some arrive in chauffeured luxury vehicles, dreaming of spread sheets, business connections, and increasing influence.

They stopped reading and teaching long ago, or knowing anyone who does.

By custom, the teaching corps is the heart of the enterprise, assisting each generation to become good citizens and worthy adults and developing professional abilities and attitudes. There would be no universities without students, even if now their main purpose is to keep the business solvent, amusing themselves in the most expensive away camp ever devised. Families would not assume ruinous debt if they did not believe college led to higher income and a better life. US education sustains the democratic dream, and having children first to college promises families respectability and wealth. Universities cultivate that musty narrative. Universities certify their own performance in educating the young. We expect students are admitted after demonstrating qualifications; they attend classes to enhance their skills; then, professors certify them for a degree … while the professoriate certifies itself under the watchful gaze of no one. [pic] [Banks lend the funds and federal programs guarantee them; universities collect the cash, and no one verifies the product.]

Deans reserve budget for faculty who arrive with funding. Colleges allocate spending for highly skilled Developments Offices to raise cash to attract stars. To afford this, universities cut non-essential faculty.

Transforming a workforce with specialized skills offers few opportunities for savings. The medieval labor structure -- master, journeymen, and apprentice -- serves. In this way, teaching undergraduates falls to irregular faculty (that is, full-time, “faculty” not on tenure track; part-time “faculty” hired by the course; and, lab-assistants and tutors, paid a stipend to support their graduate studies).

This allows deans to operate within their shrinking allocation from the central treasury and relieves stellar faculty from the grinding work of teaching and evaluating undergraduates. Where possible, departments herd students into large lecture halls for faculty presentations, while close-order teaching – grading papers and running discussion sections – is passed along to graduate students. In some situations, second-line faculty serve as lead teachers, carrying heavy loads for a portion of the cost. Typically, they hold doctorates from institutions off the main track or in diminishing fields – useless fields like Philosophy, Political Science, Education Theory, History, Art History, Anthropology, Foreign Language, and English; rather than growth areas like Hotel/Motel Management, Health Records Management, and Criminal Justice. Widespread ignorance gushes from this “practical” compromise.

Tenuous faculty (non-tenured) must demonstrate happy results teaching undergraduates, despite carrying outrageous teaching loads. The easiest way to manage certification is providing high grades for shoddy work.

Universities now graduate many with perfect academic records (4.0 GPAs). Where a “C” grade had been honorable, B+ is now the norm. Outraged and anxious students report A- grades to the Chairman, Dean, or Affirmative Action panel for redress. Tenuous faculty cannot afford this exposure and so submit. In the science areas, many tutors and lab assistants are new to English and lack competence to explain lab procedures or basic mathematics. Undergraduates need this support, but negligence proves useful to research faculty for hiding lab assistants on research grant cost-sheets. [pic]

[Traditional instruction is eroding with COVID-19 challenges, but converting to online instruction had already been underway. Why pay lecturers for addressing large audiences in a lecture hall when they could address thousands online -- digitally recorded, many thousands, year after year? Teams of assistants could field questions and develop algorithms for FAQs with associated answers.]

III In the medical care racket, a hospital aspirin costs several dollars, patient care networks time doctors for speed, and insurance agencies thrive by rejecting claims. Urban hospitals serving impoverished neighborhoods no longer count on a state subsidy that matches the costs of services. As state revenues dwindle, hospitals cover their costs with specialized care only the wealthy can afford. The costs of patching up gun-shot wounds or untended pregnancies has to be balanced by heart-transplant or brain aneurysm specialties, with investments in surgical teams and equipment and in costly sales campaigns in a highly competitive market. There is a premium in recommending surgery as often as possible and in attracting star surgeons to feature in advertising.

Physicians are graded on cost efficiency. Their network tells them “we do not work for you, delivering you patients and providing an office and reduced insurance coverage; you work for us. We calculate your productivity each month and require you to appear for review. Spend more than 12 minutes per patient consultation, and we penalize you for exceeding the proscribed limit. If this is not satisfactory, you should look elsewhere for the business services you cannot do without.” Physicians must comply whether or not it serves the welfare of their customers/clients/patients.

This paradigm isolates specialties, discouraging holistic approaches. You have hip pain and your problem is podiatric? We do knee surgery and handle hip pain that way. Diabetic? We like endocrine solutions and

downplay diet and exercise. Deeply depressed? We have pills for that. Hospital systems attend to patient satisfaction and cost efficiencies. A marketing team designs leaflets to impress customers with the care they purchase, surveys patients after each visit to compile satisfaction scores, and calculates efficiencies to assure income output. At each stage, accountants and market researchers measure cost efficiency. The competition is excruciating, and falling behind spells extinction. [pic]

[[[Pressures have been building and will continue to increase, the prizes going to those who invent new ad campaigns and efficiency controls. Driving to work in the unreal city, schemers dream of rising to the top by tuning the system to higher efficiency whatever the damage.]

COVID-19 has forced employees, normally working with direct access to online networks, to work from home. Call AT&T for customer assistance and you get some harassed “associate” at home, unequipped to meet your need. AT&T, your bank, and your credit card services are billion dollar operations; the pandemic has taught them new ways to force customers to work as employees by operating self-serve systems. With AT&T, customers search through a thicket of loosely interwoven web pages to service their needs.

“Customer support” FAQs answer only the questions some programmer has foreseen and some algorithm has certified as sufficiently frequent. You may leave dissatisfied and indicate that on an exit survey, but the bills keep coming, and you have few alternatives in a near monopoly setting. System designers know the benefits of smiley faces and the savings from DIY subemployment. Some clever conman writes the protocol when AT&T calls with the happy news that your modem is being replaced at double your monthly fee. Conmen sit in traffic devising new ways to fleece us.

These emergency innovations will not be abandoned. Plagues provide opportunities.

[pic] stockfour/Shutterstock.com

Just-In-Time Staffing: Benefits, Definitions, and Best Practices “With the growth of just-in-time staffing, HR leaders can now consider many shades of gray on the spectrum of how work is getting done in modern businesses. In particular, many organizations are benefiting from the flexibility andvalue of just-in-time staffing.” From eLearning Industry, December 2017.]

Some clever manager has made a career mark by mastering the algorithm that makes the “Just in Time” employment plan operable. The time management scheme allows mass employers, like supermarket chains and warehouse operations, to employ workers in response to predicted workflows, measured down to single days and even hours. In the new “gig economy”, this precision forces workers to be on call for partial shifts.

They are contacted only a few days and sometimes a few hours before they are needed. Jobs with steady and dependable employment are now broken down into micro-shifts, paid at low wages, without benefits, and calculated to segments of hours.

How does Kohl’s manage to offer low prices and slash-and-burn sales promotions? At times they seem to pay customers to haul goods away from their stores. Miss a payment, however, and you discover how less is more. The penalty charge is $27 dollars, and this aside from the interest assessed on continued balances.

Some well-dressed bandit has calculated missed payments frequency for a clientele attracted to Kohl’s low prices and demonstrated how the back end of sales justifies prices too good to be true.

IV Go-getters assailing the city’s ramparts include salesmen, urging us to purchase what we don’t need and can’t afford. The films “Glengarry, Glen Ross” by David Mamet (1992) and “The Boiler Room”, with Ben Affleck, give us a taste. Still, the hi-jinx of “Boiler room” seem quaint set against Wells Fargo crimes, involving millions of dollars and multiple tiers of corruption and cruelty. In order to drum up business, Wells Fargo executives proposed enrolling its customer in lines of credit they never requested, imposing service charges and penalties for phantom cash advances. Executives commanded managers and they in turn their salesmen to encumber customers with false accounts. Promotions and job security provided the stomach-churning incentive. Once the scheme was discovered, salesmen paid the price while corporate masters were protected. Called before Congressional scrutiny, Wells Fargo’s CEO, John Stumpf, provided no explanation. Hundreds of employees knew what they were doing and the harm it caused customers in funds, time, and aggravation. Customer complaints disclosed the crime, and customers paid a heavy price. Stumpf suffered a fine, humiliation, and banishment from banking, but kept millions in earnings. Wells Fargo lumbers along its dusty trail as a power in banking and real estate. [pic] [Stumpf’s “Eight is Great” required salesmen to assign eight Wells Fargo products to each customer, whether or not the customer had agreed to or was even aware of the transaction.]

This nest of crime was minor compared to Wall Street’s mortgage scandal, which nearly collapsed the global economy, with criminality requiring the connivance of thousands.

Mortgage mega-firms offered home ownership to families hungering for a home of their own. Salesmen, offering easy payment plans, advanced mortgages to borrowers who had no way to pay them. Mortgage firms, then, packaged bad debts with good and sold these poisoned debt sandwiches in financial markets at deceptive

prices. When the ponderous scheme collapsed, it brought down investment houses, banks, and the debt insurance firms, along with the dreams of heavily indebted home-owners. Honorable people sounded the alarm, but top executives refused to act, silencing those trying to alert them. Honorable people were punished, along with hard-pressed salesmen and managers, while the federal government enlisted top executives, enriched by poisoned profits, to solve problems they created.

Those cars conveying sales and marketing poets, finance and loan wizards, too clever calculators and dissemblers, sharp-tongue and obscene thugs in collection and re-possession, those tens of thousands of hyenas foraging for fresh kills, constitute a sizable portion of the unreal city’s workforce. If playwright David Mamet has it right, the suffering is not limited to their prey but extends to the operatives in “Glengarry Glen Ross”. Mamet is famous for his anger-drenched diatribes, filled with abuse and profanity. His characters trapped in a cockpit, claw mercilessly at one other, with violence directed at themselves as much as at competitors.

Responding to a request to provide his name, the bully sent by the owners says to a salesman he is motivating: “Fuck you! That's my name! You know why, mister? You drove a Hyundai to get here. I drove an eighty-thousand dollar BMW. THAT'S my name. And your name is ‘you're wanting’. You can't play in the man's game, you can't close them - go home and tell your wife your troubles. Because only one thing counts in this life: Get them to sign on the line which is dotted. You hear me, [turning to the other salesmen] you fucking faggots?” [pic] [Mamet added the character Blake, portrayed by Alec Baldwin, to the film version of his play.]

Salesman Ricky Roma (Al Pacino in the film) explains his vision of life: “All train compartments smell vaguely of shit. It gets so you don't mind it. That's the worst thing that I can confess. You know how long it took me to get there? A long time. When you die you're going to regret the things you don't do. You think you're queer? I'm going to tell you something: we're all queer. And then what? If you think there is, go ahead, be that thing. Bad people go to hell? I don't think so. If you think you're a thief? So what? You get befuddled by a middle-class morality? Get shut of it. Shut it out. You cheat on your wife? You did it, live with it. You fuck little girls, so be it. There's an absolute morality? Maybe. You think that, act that way. A hell exists on earth? Yes. I won't live in it. That's me.”

Mamet’s sales office resembles a circle of Dante’s Inferno, monsters chewing on one another’s brains maddened by their own self-contempt. Efforts to justify the damage they do their clients deforms them, and they attack their own. Like Dante, Mamet is a religious writer, depicting the brutality of the unreal city, the artist as whistle-blower, riveting our attention from the distractions that assure us it isn’t so.

V How pervasive is our descent into a world of each against all? Is the society uncovered by Mamet’s art, Congressional investigation, vivid journalism, and brave whistleblowers aberrant or normal? Something “those people” do, or most if not all do? Is the whistleblower’s drama only for Snowden, Vindman, and

Troye, or for me and you? Who among us is not witness to and participant in systemic injustice? And when we ask, in quiet reflection, what we should do, what helps us act bravely and be ready to accept the price, who answers? This is a drama of the last days of empire. [pic]

[The COVID pandemic has revealed a new understanding of “essential work”. The nation’s food supply depends on imported labor, unprotected by health and safety law. Laborers in the fields and meat processing plants work with limited protection against plague. US Congressional representatives are denied access to work sites, and reports leak out only through whistleblowers. To fight devastating fires, states send convicts into infernos at low pay for high danger. Educating the young, caring for the sick, disinfecting workplaces, and such, are left to low-pay, no prestige, and precarious employment. In harsh COVID conditions, employers require nurses testing positive to show up for work. Minorities bear the weight of irregular employment, suffering permanent economic and personal Depression. For us, this is as normal and invisible as was chattel slavery not so long ago. Reality depends upon it.]

Henrik Ibsen’s “Enemy of the People” (1882) exposed the community compact that ties all into the weave of corruption known as reality. In that play, the medical officer assigned to the town’s new health spa discovers the waters are polluted and that illnesses reported in its early operations can be traced to bacteria in the town’s waters. Dr. Stockmann expects his discovery will be greeted with praise by the townspeople, but soon discovers the scandal will destroy the town’s economy. His idealism blinds him to the political impact of his discovery, and he is labelled “an enemy of the people” for speaking out to protect them from spreading disease. Ibsen uses the situation to unearth the compromises that bind the townspeople. The spa will produce income to provide for the poor, relieving the wealthy of that burden; small business will prosper from tourism; land values will increase; a sleepy town will find prominence and its denizens pride and the lift of progress. Dr. Stockmann’s exposure threatens to reveal a problem too costly to repair. He soon enough discovers the costs to himself and his family of telling the truth, arousing his neighbors’ hostility, including that of his brother, the town’s mayor.

Ibsen spots social dynamics that now have become clear. Dr. Stockmann is a rational fellow devoted to science, but he covets fame for his discovery, even play-acting in comic fashion the grand gesture of rejecting public praise. Stockmann hopes his discovery will prove he is a better man than his celebrated brother. His motives muddy, he enters a tarnished alliance with local radicals, who hope to use the discovery against the established order. In exposing a dangerous fact, however, Dr. Stockmann breaks the code of solidarity with his townsmen. As his brother notes, the town benefits from “having a great common interest to unite us – an interest that is in an equally high degree the concern of every right-minded citizen.” But this egalitarianism is a fraud. The rebellious doctor has assaulted an ancient and hierarchical power structure, all matters benefitting large property owners and prominent families. His radical comrades peel away, once their interests are threatened. They stand for progress so long as it does not cost them their jobs and social standing. Dr. Stockmann’s rebellion threatens the remnants of a feudal order. Whistleblowing tears the weave of honored agreeableness and sets the community, with its illusory conventions, against the facts. The community is bound together by political alliances and commercial entanglements. What madman, wielding the truth and concern for the welfare of others, would presume to challenge them?

[pic] [In a town meeting, his pretended confederates oppose Dr. Stockmann. The liberal press has bills to pay and cannot afford offending the town’s social compact.

The Householder’s Association remains silent, too, though later they try to enlist Dr. Stockmann’s agreement in order to quiet the risks of contamination by approving less costly but ineffective remedies.]

Ibsen’s audience is receiving an education in the integuments of power that hold their world together.

Liberals with bills to pay and social esteem to protect are enemies to the truth: “Do you want me to let myself be beaten off the field by public opinion and the compact majority and all that devilry? No, thank you! And what I want to do is so simple and clear and straightforward. I only want to drum into the heads of these curs the fact that the liberals are the most insidious enemies of freedom--that party programs strangle every young and vigorous truth--that considerations of expediency turn morality and justice upside down-and that they will end by making life here unbearable.”

Some view Ibsen’s play as comedy -- Dr. Stockmann, the scientist, too blinded by idealism and pride to suspect the townspeople’s venality. However, Stockmann changes in the course of the play and refuses to buckle to his neighbors’ ridicule. Having discarded all obvious alliances – shopkeepers, politicians, press, bankers, investors, educators, and so on – Stockmann decides to enlist the idealism of the young, the anger of the poor, and the frustration of talented women in a project of education for the truth. The defenders of property, and the liberals who scheme to replace them, are bound in agreement that accumulating goods and garnering power is reality, even when it is poisonous.

Dr. Stockmann, assisted by his wife and daughter, learns to act as a revolutionary. If there are no members of the establishment to build a future founded on truth, he will look elsewhere. When his wife points out that he cannot count on the dreamy idealism of the children of the well-to-do, Dr. Stockmann asks his young sons if they know any street urchins they might enlist for a new kind of schooling: “Don't you know any street urchins--regular ragamuffins--? … Bring me some specimens of them. I am going to experiment with curs, just for once; there may be some exceptional heads among them.” Where previously Dr. Stockmann had touted a Social Darwinist creed distinguishing the better bred from nature’s own, here he turns to the children of the disadvantaged, free from social conditioning, to build a better world. His daughter, recently dismissed for her enlightened views -- by a school mistress who shares her views but cannot say so -- bravely volunteers for the hard road of change.

VI Corruption breeds behind the veil of service to the community. While the town’s residents believe they act for progress and the benefit of all, they serve the meanest and most backward among them and risk the

health and sanity of the great many. In our unreal city, the school principal and those he leads know they serve a failed system, public health officers license infected properties and overlook the decay of water and sewer systems, county engineers certify unsafe roads and bridges, lobbied politicians and their staff overlook dangers to the public. Anand Giridharadas, in Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World (2018) revealed widespread use of public service to cover self-advancement. While Giridharadas focused on the great gifting foundations and celebrated individuals -- the right-wing Koch Brothers and liberal Bill Gates -- the pattern runs through the helping professions, which provide employment and a good living for practitioners while doing little to reach deep-rooted problems.

We have traveled far since Ibsen’s day. We have now to ask about the strain placed upon a society when most if not all its activity is a sham and a danger; when healthcare and education, our food and water, the distractions that relieve our distress, are themselves a further deepening of our distress; when even the most dull among us has grown aware that the whole business is fraudulent, feeding the unreal city and turning us against ourselves and each other. This is the rot of empire, the softening spot on the melon, Joseph Conrad spoke of. “The woods are burning,” bellows Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman, as clear-sighted in his madness as Oedipus and Lear.

The critical moment begging to be dramatized occurs when the truth-teller faces the harsh consequences of whistleblowing. Living with destructive injustice, manipulation, and theft disguised as business as usual saps our vitality and erodes our moral stamina. As Rick Roma’s speech makes clear, you learn to live with it, but only at the cost of your conscience and sanity. The palliative is drink, drugs, sexual excess, luxury shopping, and ceaseless distractions – a recipe for madness for society and for each of us. Or awakened, we may reverse the hideous process by acknowledging and telling the truth at the cost of social isolation, disemployment, and legal and physical harassment. The choice to speak out or remain silent and live with it is the drama of our times. ***

Leuk 5 by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Date: 1946, Style: Dada, Genre: abstract

Art: Floating Forms by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Date: 1945, Style: Dada, Genre: abstract

The storm begins like this by

John C. Mannone

throughout history on this day blood is raining: in 1857 when the Mormons and the Paiutes murder 120 immigrants at Mountain Meadows | | in 1940 Hitler invades Romania | | in 1965 the 1st Cavalry arrives in Qui Nhon, South Vietnam | | on this day, September 11, 2001, soot and buildings fall after Islamic terrorists explode hijacked airplanes inside the heart of America. The smoke of memory clouds a good rain.

Perhaps this will never be an uneventful day | | perhaps this is your birthday | | perhaps there will be a shout, and a blast from a ram’s horn trumpet, were you to storm back on this day, on Rosh Hashanah, rushing in like a mighty wind, a thunderous light. ***

Paul Hartland Carnival. Composition with two masks by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy Date: c.1934, Style: Dada, Genre: photo, Media: photomontage Location: Gemeentemuseum den Haag, Hague, Netherlands

Chance Encounter by

Judith A. Lawrence Uncharted Territories (a collection of short stories) Damn. She did it again--took off food shopping without her list. It was sitting there right next to her keys on the entry table. And still she overlooked it. She was so forgetful lately. Old age was difficult enough without forgetting where she left her teeth and two hours later finding them in the refrigerator.

What was the use of living this long after all?

When Alice turned eighty it seemed as if her thought processes mixed the past and the present in a

prickly ball and spit out a confusing tangle of signals but one thing she wasn’t giving up was driving her car.

Well at least she hadn’t missed that third turn again and was headed in the right direction to Walmart. This time she would write down which parking row she was on and tuck it in her sweater pocket along with her keys that jangled.

Four drivers behind her steadily beeped their horns. She stuck out her arm and pointed with her bony fingers to the mileage sign to the right. It said forty miles. She was doing thirty-five. That was good enough. She gave them the finger except her middle finger was locked in a hooked position. She wasn’t sure what a hooked finger indicated.

The lane on the left of her opened up. The cars behind her moved to the left and roared past her as if they were in the Daytona 500 races. The light changed behind her so she had a minute or two to ride undisturbed before the next line of cars caught up. She would make it to her turn in another two blocks. It was usually smooth sailing after that.

She slid a cd into the slot and played a Patsy Cline album skipping to the third song “Crazy” singing at the top of her lungs along with her favorite country western singer.

For years people told her if they closed their eyes when she sang Patsy’s songs it was easy to believe Patsy was right there singing in front of them instead of entertaining folks in heaven.

Every time she listened to Patsy she remembered meeting Fred, the love of her life, at a church dance. The first tune the Jockey played was Patsy’s “Sweet Dreams.”

Fred hurried toward her almost knocking her over in his rush. He had a terrific smile and knew his way around the dance floor. From the get-go they fit each other like peas in a pod and rarely spent a day

apart for almost fifty-six years.

When Fred died Alice felt he was still beside her in his own way. The smell of his after shave lotion still lingered on the clothes hanging in their bedroom closet. She could not bring herself to deposit them at the local thrift store.

She still slept on her side of the bed and spoke to him of her plans for the day while she drank her morning coffee, read the local paper front page news out loud to him, and sometimes while driving in the car she laughed at things she remembered him saying as if he was still sitting there next to her. *** After four spins around the Walmart parking lot she pulled into a spot about twelve cars from the front entrance, jotted down the row number and shoved it in her pocket. She grabbed her bag and stepped out of the car slamming the locked door shut.

On the way into the store a younger woman rushed around her to the row of carts, pulled one out of the line and stopped right in front of Alice in order to answer her cell phone. Alice tapped the thoughtless woman’s heels with her cart at once apologizing, “So sorry, I thought you were moving,” as she steered her cart around her.

Without her list it was necessary to go up and down each isle hoping she would remember what she wrote down. In no time she filled the cart albeit with a few unhealthy items that attracted her sweet tooth.

At the check-out counter she did a fast math count of the items and hoped she didn’t go over her weekly budget. Just ten dollars over her limit, she would need to give up this week’s breakfast at the café.

She headed toward the exit.

The cart checker standing guard in her uniform carefully checked the cart before hers but waved her on. She supposed she didn’t look the part of a thief.

As people were coming in the automatic sliding exit door she shifted to the entrance door only to be confronted with a group of people coming in. Pushing the cart back to the exit door again there was a crowd of people filling the area arguing over which movie to select from Redbox.

“Excuse me,” she said regally.

The group parted with obvious indignation.

As she approached her car Alice dug into her sweater pocket for the slip of paper with the number of the parking row she was parked at and felt for her keys panicking. No keys jingled in her pockets.

By the time she reached her car she sat her pocketbook on the trunk lid, dumped everything from her bag and still no keys. She went to the passenger side of the car and peered in. Sure enough there were the keys dangling from the ignition switch.

“You old fool,” she exploded. “With a cart full of groceries, what are you going to do now?”

A scruffy young man with a ponytail sauntered up to her. “Can you spare some change?”

“I’m afraid not,” she said. “If you can help me get into my car, I have some change in my cup well.”

The young man looked nervously around.

“See. There’s my keys. I left them in the car.” She pointed.

He reached down in his boot and pulled out a Slim Jim. “I might be able to use this,” he said.

Alice was a bit startled that he carried such a tool in his boot but she was in a pickle and had no money to call a locksmith. People were coming and going, not paying attention to them, and her meats and dairy products in the cart were exposed to the very warm Florida weather.

“Yes, please try,” she said.

After a few tries he had it open. He even came around to help her load the food in the trunk. As she closed the trunk he slipped in the driver’s seat. She thought he was removing the change from the cup but it was obvious he was going to drive away with her car.

She quickly slid in the back seat and slammed the door.

“Get out!” He ordered.

“No, I won’t get out,” she replied, her heart rattling in her throat.

“I don’t want to hurt you.”

“Well then don’t. This is my car. It’s an old car. Why on earth would you pick this one to steal?”

“Bad luck and convenience,” he snorted.

“It’s not convenient to me. You’re stealing an old lady’s car and food. What kind of thoughtless young man are you?”

“Lady, I don’t want to hear it. I have no home, job, money or food. I think I’m a bit worse off than you.”

“I doubt that.” You’re not old, sickly, alone, living in a shoebox apartment and having your car and food stolen from you.”

“Sorry about that. But I’m desperate.”

“You’re going to need tires, a battery, likely a starter, and brakes, just so you know.”

“I’ll take my chances.”

“Where are we going?”

“If you promise to keep quiet I’ll drop you off at your house and leave your groceries with you. I’ll need your car for about a month to find a job. If I find a job or a better car before the month is out I’ll park it in front of your place with the key under the mat. What’s your address?”

Alice’s options were limited at the moment so she gave him her address with directions.

Do you live alone?

Alice hesitated. Normally forthright she answered truthfully. “Yes, alone.”

Fifteen minutes later they pulled up in front of her house.

Alice looked around for neighbors but none were out. Usually they were out gossiping. Must be their day off she scoffed. She was hoping someone would see the young man with her in case he decided to oft her.

He helped her with her bags in the trunk easily lugging all six bags at once. She turned the lock in her apartment door and entered half expecting a thud on her noggin from the young man behind her.

As she placed freezer and dairy products in the refrigerator he searched around her apartment, checking drawers and closets for valuables, finding none. Alice had long ago sold her jewelry for rent, food, and gas. Her apartment was full of used furniture with nothing worthwhile to sell.

She thought of running out of her place but was too slow with her bad knees. He would surely catch her before she got out the door.

“Are you satisfied?” She scolded. “Look at the mess you left going through my things.”

“Believe me I was not thrilled to be going through your underwear.”

The young man did a quick check in her freezer. Old people often kept jewelry in their freezer but found nothing there other than freezer burned meat along with the fresh meats she just added.

He was heading out but stopped in the dining area to look at a dessert in a domed cake dish in the center of the table.

“What kind of cake is that?”

“It’s Jewish apple cake. Would you like some?

He raised his eyebrow. “If you don’t mind.”

She placed a mismatched thrift store plate in front of him and cut a generous slice along with a glass of milk.

He ate the cake as if it was his last meal and drank the milk down in one long gulp.

Though she never raised a child watching him eat brought out her motherly instincts.

“Would you like a ham and cheese sandwich?”

He looked toward the door as if he wanted to sprint out. Instead he nodded. “I’ll take it with me and another piece of cake if you can spare it.”

The whistle from the teapot on the stove startled him and he jumped up from his chair.

“I’m having a cup of cranberry tea,” she said. “Would you like to join me?”

“I don’t usually drink tea. I probably wouldn’t like it.”

“Well taste it and see.” She poured two cups.

As he was politely drinking she asked, “Do you have family?”

He reached for the lunch bag she prepared and began eating his sandwich followed with the extra slice of apple cake.

He seemed to be thinking about what to tell her and suddenly responded with a defensive tone. “No. My lousy parents abandoned me when I was six years old. Don’t know what happened to them. I was raised in a boy’s home. It sucked. I ran away when I was fourteen. I’ve made my way doing odd jobs since but haven’t been able to find work lately. Too many job seekers, and not enough jobs in this area, even low-paying jobs.”

Alice nodded. “I’m sorry that you had such a difficult life. But you do realize stealing people’s cars will eventually land you in jail, don’t you?”

“I just know I need a car to find a job. If I was arrested I would at least have a place to live and be fed for a while.”

Alice shook her head. “That’s a stupid thing to say. You would have a record. How’s that going to get you a decent job. How about friends? Do you have friends?”

“A couple, but they’re in worst shape than me and they are heavy into drugs. I don’t do drugs. My crappy parents did drugs all the time.”

“Can I ask you what your name is? My name is Alice.”

“He hesitated. She was thinking he’ll give me a fictitious name.

“Larry,” he said, “short for Lawrence.”

He watched her put the sugar bowl in the refrigerator.

“Why do you keep your sugar in the refrigerator?”

She looked confused at first. “To keep the ants away,” she lied.

“Never knew that. Thought it would make sugar wet and clumpy?”

“Better than the ants,” she replied.

She suddenly realized she left the burner lit on the stove when she poured the tea. She turned her back to him and quickly turned it off.

“I’ve been thinking. What if I offer you a solution?”

“Look lady I don’t want to argue. I just need your car. I promise I’ll return it as soon as I can.”

“Well what if we share it? You don’t have a place to stay. We both already know there’s nothing left to steal so why don’t you just stay here and sleep on the couch. I’ll feed you when I cook and you can use the car to search for a job and find a place to live.”

He looked at her incredulous. “Why would you do that for me?”

“Because I’ve often been accused of being a foolish old lady. Might as well live up to my reputation.

I’ve found in my life that sometimes all one needs is a second chance to straighten out their life. Lord knows yours needs straightening. My deceased husband Fred and I never had children.

I would like to believe that if I had a son who was left on his own and he was in trouble someone would give him a second chance.”

Larry stood and looked down at his worn boots. He seemed to be trying to decide what to do.

“What about neighbors?”

“I’ll explain you’re my nephew from out of state visiting for a while.”

“Can I take the car for now to decide?”

Alice reluctantly nodded yes.

She watched him get in the car and drive off. She usually had a handle on people but this time she was full of uncertainty. At least she wasn’t dead or physically hurt. *** A week passed. She gave up on ever seeing her car again but stubbornly still hadn’t reported it stolen to the police. Something in her did not want to see Larry arrested. The car would not get her more than a couple

hundred dollars from the insurance company at any rate. She could have food delivered for a few extra dollars and take the bus to the doctor’s. She decided to save every dollar she could toward another cheap used car. *** That night she sat on the couch in the living room watching the eleven o’clock news and heard the sound of boots clomping on the porch. There was a sharp knock on her door.

Alarmed, being that it was after ten o’clock at night, she looked out her window and saw her car parked in front.

With a happy heart she flung open her door and there stood Larry holding a couple green trash bags in each arm.

“I really expected you would have called the police as soon as I left last week. Every time I saw a cop car I thought they were after me. After a couple days I figured you didn’t, felt bad, and started thinking about your offer. If you still are up to it I would like to accept. Just want you to know I’m sorry and I’m returning your car regardless.”

Are those your things in those bags?” She asked.

“Yes, it’s all I have.”

“Park them over there in the corner. We’ll see where to fit them tomorrow.”

“Do you have any more of that apple cake?”

“No, but I made a pound cake yesterday? Do you like pound cake?”

“Yes but I never ate home-made pound cake.”

“I have some vanilla ice cream to go with it.”

Larry noted the sugar bowl was on the table.

“I see you took care of the ants,” he said.

“What ants?” She answered.

Larry grinned. “Just messing with you.”

They stayed up into the middle of the night talking about many things, their lives, their beliefs and their disappointments. *** Larry stayed for almost a year. He helped Alice shop, ran errands for her and developed a system for her memory issues by leaving reminder cards in large print around the apartment. At first she objected but grew to like it. Meanwhile Larry gained a much needed twenty pounds from her cooking and baking. He finally got a job, a small apartment near hers and a car. He even met a girl which Alice thoroughly approved of.

Once he moved out Larry came by to check on Alice every day. He worked on her car in spare hours. The following year he drove up with a used green Ford Escort in great condition and presented it to her. In large letters on a banner he wrote for all to see, Thank you Aunt Alice for my secondchance. The neighbors envied her for having such a wonderful nephew. *** Alice continued to drive slowly and irritate other drivers giving them her crooked finger. She still on occasion forgot her keys in the car. Luckily Larry had an extra set. He bought her a heart cameo locket with his phone number in it. She wore it every day and he always came to her rescue when she got in trouble. ### Fin

First Communion by

John C. Mannone

theThewinepriestturned said the wafers are holy, and by a miracle, changed into the body of Christ, just like into blood (but I wouldn’t be getting any of that at seven years old—no matter, after our last supper, Daddy would let me sip a few drops of Dago Red clinging to the glass at the dining room table).

Father Iaia said not to chew, just swallow. I nodded and said I understood. When the time came, in solemn prayer with my hands folded, I inched toward the altar in my white suit. Latin prayers swarmed all around like bees. A buzz from the incense lingering from the censor just increased my anxiety.

As instructed, I opened my mouth to receive the Eucharist (none of us but the priest could touch the wafer lest we die, and then only with his thumb and forefinger!) As he chanted, he slipped the host onto my tongue and I nearly vomited on the spot. How could Christ taste like lactic cardboard? I could not swallow it. I felt it disintegrate into pulp; held it in my mouth until after church. My gag reflex kicked in hard. I couldn’t help it; I was compelled to spit it out on the grass. I thought I was going straight to hell!

My mother called my name with all the Italian melodrama you can imagine asking why, then went to the priest who cleaned it up. I don’t remember much after that, but I don’t think anyone understood my reaction. I think it caused me some post traumatic stress, but a little later Jesus whispered in my ear. He said that it was okay and not to worry; he made it safely inside me. ***

Art: Sil I by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Date: 1933, Style: Constructivism, Genre: abstract

The Dinner Horn by Winslow Homer, Date: 1870, Style: Realism, Genre: genre painting

Dinner at the Bigelows by

Linda Boroff At age sixteen, Tessa Markey learned once and for all that fate would not be thwarted. No matter how elaborate your avoidance strategy or cautious your moves, fate simply bided its time, and then it came for you.

Tessa’s father, a bankrupt contractor with a drinking problem, had separated from Tessa and her mother earlier that year. He had not formally left, but his absences had elongated like a piece of chewing gum stretched, until the connection became a tenuous strand, floated apart, and disappeared. Tessa now lived in a grimy white stucco apartment house in south Santa Monica, the embodiment of last decade’s casual building codes. The place even had a name, “The Spafford,” written with a flourish across the front in once-silver glitter gone gray and dour, like an aged starlet. Beneath the bathroom window, trails of rust descended into the weeds.

The Spafford fronted on Olympic Boulevard. Every morning, Tessa crossed the broad, deadly torrent of rush-hour traffic to catch the city bus to school, expecting at any moment the fatal impact, the helpless trajectory.

The school clerks knew quite well of Mr. Markey’s fondness for pills and liquor. In fact, he had sometimes dropped into the administration office late in the morning, when he had a bit of a package on and felt sociable, on the pretext of checking up on Tessa. The office ladies were tolerant and flirtatious. A handsome man with too-blue eyes and thick sandy hair, Sloan Markey sometimes serenaded the clerks with light opera in his fine, drunken baritone.

“And the sun comes up like thunder, out of China cra-hosss the Bay,” he bellowed, and the clerks applauded, giggling, glancing through the window at the sun across Santa Monica Bay. Tessa would learn of these impromptu concerts via the school grapevine.

After her husband left, Mrs. Markey’s own nervous condition worsened, limiting her to sporadic, part-time work. # “Well, Mom’s in the bucket too,” noted Bea Kinderblut, junior class guidance counsellor, to Connie Lawrie, attendance clerk. “Either we find little Miss Markey an after-school job or she is going to end up on the wrong side of the tracks sure as I’m sitting here.”

“So sad,” said Connie.

“She’s a good girl, really,” said Bea, suppressing a powerful urge to say something truly bitchy.

So the high school job placement office sent Tessa Markey to babysit for the Bigelows’ blonde, precocious children, Ford, age five, and Laureen, eight. Sometimes the parents threw dinner parties on Saturday nights, and Tessa worked as a sort of scullery maid. She also served canapés and refilled water glasses, from the left of the diner only.

The clerks knew right away that they had scored a coup when Ida Bigelow, who had been chronically dissatisfied with her after-school help, suddenly stopped nagging and tattling. The clerks also noticed a change in Tessa, who cut her hair into a smooth bob, hanging longer in front, leaving the back of her neck fashionably exposed. The girl showed a flair for dress too, blossoming out in short, Carnaby Street skirts and patent leather boots.

The Bigelows lived in north Santa Monica near San Vicente, a short geographical distance but a vast social dimension from Tessa’s home. In her mind, Tessa called the Bigelows’ neighborhood “gentle money,” the kind that did not sock you in the eye and steal your breath, as did the houses lording it over Sunset Boulevard farther north. Those homes seemed to hurl Tessa’s own poverty at her, making her cringe and blink. But homes like the Bigelows’, whose owners might be just as rich, were older and smaller, their landscaping relaxed, not stiff and harshly barbered. Evergreen trees shed cones and needles in the Bigelows’ front yard, and palm fronds wafted onto the lawn. The children dug in the shrubbery.

Hugh Bigelow was a vice president of finance for a large movie production house. “I counts the beans for the big boys,” he said. He was a pear-shaped Texan with watery blue eyes and flaxen hair pasted across a reddened dome of skull. His accent was redolent of sagebrush, dogies and lariats, which may have been why Mrs. Bigelow talked over him when company was present.

Ida Bigelow was small and quick, with curly, light brown hair that fell to her shoulders. She came from one of those states that were all jammed into the upper right side of the country and whose names had to be printed out in the Atlantic.

In the Bigelows’ study were framed photos from the past: Mr. Bigelow wore an Army uniform and looked much as he did today. But Mrs. Bigelow fairly leaped from her frame, proud breasts upthrust in a clinging red sweater, a teasing glance lobbed boldly at the camera. Now, two dissatisfied lines cleft the space between Ida’s plucked, arched brows. Her gray eyes held a faraway gaze, as if she felt the tug of her dense, civilized origins.

Here in chaotic Los Angeles, the sun was a rude, intrusive blaze that followed one indoors. Clothing blared out in hot, ill-behaved colors; oranges and hot pinks and chartreuses. Mad Man Muntz bellowed from the television screen, and restaurants actually took the shape of the food they served. # Mrs. Bigelow muted her world within pale gray walls; curtains the color of dried blood brushed wooden floors polished to a hard Yankee gleam. The Bigelows’ house dated back to the twenties, with a recessed loveseat at the living room window.

“That,” said Ida, pointing at the loveseat, “is where John Gilbert betrayed Greta Garbo in 1925 with Renee Adoree. While drunk of course.” She sounded as disgusted as if it had happened that afternoon. ”Oh no,” said Tessa, scanning for telltale stains. A light breeze suddenly brushed her face, the attenuated spirit of tragic, guilty pleasure. ”Well he was just an opportunist, that’s all,” snapped Ida. ”He was,” Tessa said, trying for a point between question and assent. ”But he certainly didn’t deserve what he got. To be ruined that way.” ”No.” ”Louis B. Mayer just had blood in his eye.” ”In his eye?” said Tessa, an unspeakable image crossing her brain.

Mrs. Bigelow’s dinner parties were tightly organized and strenuous. Tessa stood, solid yet kinetic, amid huge clouds of steam from the restaurant-quality dishwasher. Yellow rubber gauntlets reached her elbows.

Her dark hair curled around her flushed face and rivulets of sweat tickled her back.

On dinner days, Tessa arrived early to polish silver and set the table. Mrs. Bigelow owned an astonishing silver service: storms of spoons; forks with two, three, or four tines; knives that progressed in deadliness from blunt little butter commas all the way to scimitars that reflected Tessa’s anxious blue eyes like diabolical mirrors. This, thought Tessa, surveying the banks of silver deployed like soldiers on a battlefield, was true civilization.

Mrs. Bigelow loaned Tessa a black tulle maid’s uniform and helped her pin it in at the sides to fit Tessa’s slender waist. She tied on Tessa the stiff, ruffled apron. Slippery, pale stockings of real silk oozed through the girl’s fingers, secured by a heavy satin garter belt. A white scalloped frill was bobbypinned to Tessa’s head.

When the guests arrived, Tessa greeted them with canapés on a monogrammed silver tray. Mrs. Bigelow herself prepared the cunningly shaped little treats: faux oysters, multitiered whipped cheeses, and crackers that fell into buttery flakes in the mouth. She had attended a famous eastern women’s college where canapé construction had actually been in the curriculum.

“The philosophy was,” said Ida Bigelow, “that some skills must be mastered before being delegated.”

Tessa stood at the oven transferring hot canapés to doilies. Here she was, supposedly beginning her life, but everything seemed as hollow and raw as a construction site. The boys at school were oafish and wild, driven by furious hormones, bloodying one another in sports, in fights. Even the nice ones might turn into barbaric, lustful monsters after a couple of drinks.

But Tessa’s desperation receded a bit at the Bigelows’. She enjoyed taking the Montana Avenue bus after school with the wealthier students, rather than the bus that headed “down” toward Olympic and Pico.

She even pretended in her mind that she lived at the Bigelows’ too, that the children were her half-siblings.

One Saturday night, Mr. Bigelow was gone. In his place at the table sat a man named Warren, handsome in a decadent, pouchy way, with sleek, dark hair combed straight back. Warren wore a gold ring with a large blue stone and insignia that he flashed at every opportunity. The arriving guests all greeted and hugged him without a single hesitation or puzzled look. Whenever Tessa stole a glance at him, he was looking at her.

That night, when Warren drove her home, he pulled over to the curb just below Montana Avenue and turned off the car lights and put his head in his hands.

“Tessa,” he said softly from between his fingers, “It should be contessa.” Tessa blurted a giggle and stopped herself abruptly. “Can I talk frankly to you?” Without waiting for an answer, Warren extended his body across the seat and took Tessa by the shoulders. She saw pursed lips aimed at her and ducked, so that the lips encountered the top of her head. Warren pretended that was what he had meant to do all along.

“My sweet one,” he said, nuzzling her hair.

Tessa tried to open the car door, but Warren reached across and took her hands.

“I really have to get home,” said Tessa.

“Just let me look at you for a moment,” said Warren. “You’re so beautiful I have absolutely flipped over you. I know this is wrong.”

“I . . . have a boyfriend.” Tessa lied.

“Well he’s not worthy of you. May I call you?”

“No. Please.” Tessa pulled and twisted her hands until Warren had to let go.

“Just give me a chance, that’s all I ask.” He groped out his wallet and handed Tessa a card with his name engraved in gold: “Warren Felder” and the words “Equity Investment” and a phone number. “Here’s my card. When you’re ready, call me.”

The next morning at school, Tessa stopped her friend Shannon in the hallway.

“How much did you make last night?” Shannon asked.

“Twenty dollars.” Tessa said. “But something else happened. I don’t know if I can tell you.”

“You can.”

“Don’t think I’m bad, okay?”

“I won’t,” said Shannon.

“Mrs. Bigelow’s husband is gone, and she has a new boyfriend, and he tried to kiss me in the car on the way home. He put his hands on my shoulders and said he wants to call me. He said a bunch of other stuff too, and he gave me his card.” # Shannon took the card Tessa held out and studied it closely. “Wow! What are you going to do?”

Tessa wrinkled up her nose. “I’m not going to talk to him. I’m going to hang up if he calls.”

Shannon rolled her eyes. “You’re so dumb.”

“Why?” “Don’t you know anything?”

“I know I want that old man to leave me alone.”

“He’s in the palm of your hand.”

“Shannon!”

“He’ll buy you stuff, dopey,” said Shannon. “Do you have all the money you need?”

“Well, sort of. “ “No you don’t. Your father is not paying his child support. I don’t even have a father. We need cash.

Get him to give you money, and we can split it.”

“That’s horrible.”

“Oh for heaven’s sake,” said Shannon. “Grow up.” That evening, the girls stole a bottle of wine from Shannon’s mother’s cache and brought it to Tessa’s and drank it while listening to the new Beatles album. The music and the wine gave Tessa an odd, hollow ache. The Beatles and their trendy, impossibly chic world were forever inaccessible to her, the music only a reminder of how puny and inconsequential she was. She dwelt on the peripheries of other peoples’ lives, a parasite of their goals, their dramas, their romances. When Tessa felt Shannon’s hand on her breast, she struck it off.

“Don’t you want to try it?” said Shannon.

“No.” “You might as well. You don’t have a boyfriend.”

“I don’t care,” said Tessa. “I don’t want any of it.”

“Me neither,” said Shannon. “I hate everybody.”

The only change in the Bigelow household now seemed to be the presence of Warren himself. The children, decorous as usual, did not mention the substitution, but they talked more with each other, keeping their eyes on Tessa and quieting abruptly when she approached. Tessa considered reassuring them that her own father too had left, and here she was, just fine. But that was not really true, and besides, what if Mrs. Bigelow found out and accused her of prying or exceeding her place? # Tessa remembered her own mother’s fury at the nosy condolences of their neighbors on Mr. Markey’s departure: “Trolling for details, that bunch of old snoops,” Ellen Markey spoke around her cigarette. Her blonde hair hung lank, with dark, graying roots at the part. “They haven’t had a man since Herbert Hoover was president.” Ellen drew on her cigarette and exhaled without touching it. “And how is her highness Mrs. . .

Bingham is it?”

“Bigelow,” said Tessa.

“I knew it was something like that.”

“She’s fine, I guess.”

“You keep it that way. That job is a gold mine for you.” Ellen dragged on her cigarette and tapped the ash in the sink with a throwing motion. “Everybody’s got something,” she said.

Tessa thought of the suffering that resided behind every door. In her own neighborhood, a fever

seemed to emanate from the windows, from the very crevasses of the sidewalk. At night, shouting and screams pierced the dark; sounds of shattering glass and occasionally gunfire. The homes were flimsy, with cheap siding and fiberglass awnings bolted on cockeyed. The yards were patchy and sparse, littered with battered toys and obsolete engine parts. When Tessa crossed Olympic Boulevard, the cars seemed to roar and moan in anguish, their engines struggling, flatulent.

“I’d just like to know what the hell is going on around here, that’s all,” came Hugh Bigelow’s voice from behind the front door. He yanked open the door and turned away at the sight of Tessa without greeting her, and walked back into the living room. Ida was sitting on John Gilbert’s love seat. She seemed to have grown insubstantial during these last few weeks, as if she were disappearing into the past. The clothes she wore were pale and thin, like ghost draperies.

“Well here I am,” said Tessa with false cheer, hearing her own voice from a great distance. Ida looked at Tessa blankly, as if she were an intruder.

“Oh, Tessa,” she said. “Go ahead and start polishing, and do the creamers extra well this time, could you?”

“I’m telling you, the man is a bum,” said Mr. Bigelow. “I ran his Dun & Bradstreet1 and it made me sick.”

“Since you believe that Dun & Bradstreet sums up a human being, then I suppose it would make you sick.” Ida paused. “You sick man.”

“I sick?” said Hugh, “I am not having the adulterous affair. You are the one betraying your marriage vows for all the world to see.” Mrs. Bigelow looked at her husband’s crimson scalp with bottomless loathing.

“And how you can keep throwing these ridiculous parties to flaunt your shame is beyond me. All I’m saying,” is that either Warren goes, or the children live with me. It is not good for them to be in the midst of . . . of turpitude.”

“They are not.”

“And you so irrational all the time.”

“I am not,” said Ida. “And this household going to rack and ruin,” said Mr. Bigelow.

“It is not!”

“Will you shut up shut up shut up,” he shouted. “Everything I say, you just parrot it back to me. All you do is contradict . . .” Ida Bigelow’s mouth opened to say “I do not,” but no sound came out.

Tessa quietly slid out the cherrywood drawers in the dining room with trembling hands and removed the silver and began to polish. She forgot to do the creamers extra well. Breathing shallowly, she curled her toes in her shoes until they hurt, her thoughts racing in circles.

“I have a ride home tonight,” Tessa told Ida, as the party was breaking up. Waiting until Warren was out of the room, she escaped from the front door into the quiet Santa Monica night. She walked quickly down Seventeenth Street, crossed Wilshire and headed south, ducking into backyards or behind shrubbery if she spotted a car following. Mongrels barked at her. The freeway traffic in the distance sounded so cold and alien it might well have emanated from another solar system. When she arrived home, her heart did not stop pounding for an hour.

Tessa pictured Warren lying naked across the bed, lips pursed, private parts engorged and thrusting, arms reaching. She could not get the picture out of her mind. She wondered if she were going mad. Now she understood why Ida needed to polish her silver and set it out in defined positions and make people sit at her table and choose the right implement at the proper time. At least for a few hours, they would behave and be civilized. But then she . . . and Warren. Tessa shuddered.

“Just tell him hi, you’ve been thinking about what he said, and get him to bring us some booze,” Shannon whispered to Tessa.

“Oh I can’t,” Tessa threw the phone and the business card at Shannon, who picked them up and dialed briskly.

“Hi, is this Warren?” Shannon said. “Hi, Warren, I’m Shannon. I’m a friend of Tessa’s.” There was silence. “Yeah, she’s here, but she’s a big chicken, so you’ll have to talk to me instead. What do I look like?

Well, I’m kind of tall, with green eyes and—is my hair blonde Tessa? No, it’s more like light brown.” There was silence again and Shannon laughed, but low and sexy. “I guess you could say I am,” said Shannon.

Tessa ran to Shannon’s bed and buried her face in the pillow so she could scream.

“Well she’s kind of falling apart right now,” said Shannon, “but we can’t make too much noise because my mother is taking a nap downstairs and if she wakes up, we’ll both catch it.” A pause. “Well you’re a naughty boy, so that makes two of us.” After a while Shannon asked Warren if he would buy the girls some booze. Half an hour later, she met Warren in the alley behind her apartment and returned after fifteen minutes with a pint of vodka.

“That’s all he gave us?” said Tessa.

“Well, it’s better than nothing,” said Shannon. “We’ll get more next time. This was just for starters.”

“What did you have to do for it?”

“Just watch him,” said Shannon. “What a relief.” The girls mixed the vodka with orange juice and drank the whole pint. Afterwards, Tessa went home and threw up.

“Hugh was here yesterday, in defiance of our agreement,” said Mrs. Bigelow the next Saturday, when Tessa arrived. She looked like an angry rodent. “He came in while I was out at Jurgensen’s buying spinach for the canapés. Now I have to do an inventory and find out what he took. I fear that he may become violent.”

Ida flung herself onto a chair, head tossed back. “I’m so confused. These men, battling over me . . .”

“I’m sorry,” said Tessa. But she must try to help Mrs. Bigelow face the truth about Warren. Warren was evil and Shannon was evil, and the whole situation was soon going to spin out of control. “Mrs. Bigelow,” Tessa said, “Warren . . . you should know . . . he tried to kiss me when he took me home. He wanted my phone number.”

Ida Bigelow rose, eyes wide. “What are you saying? I don’t believe you.”

“It’s true. He bothered me. I told him not to call, even though my friend Shannon said I should try to get money, but I would never do that.” Ida seemed to stumble. She grabbed for the back of the chair she had been sitting in.

“Hugh put you up to this, didn’t he? Was it Hugh’s idea that you seduce Warren?”

“No!” Ida reached back and slapped Tessa’s face with all her strength. “Why you filthy little slut. You little whore. I knew something was going on.”

“Mrs. Bigelow, no. I swear to God it was Shannon . . .”

“You get out of this house right now. She spat at Tessa. “The sight of you disgusts me.” She approached again and Tessa cringed away. “Conniving. Tricky. Deceitful tramp. Get out of my sight.”

Tessa turned and ran for the front door, past the open-mouthed children, past John Gilbert’s fateful loveseat and the battalions of silver all lined up, ready to check the vicious primitive lunges and besotted cravings and gluttonous impulses of the world. With a wail, Tessa groped at the front door and opened it and ran out through the yard, feet slipping on the pine needles. She ran down the block of gentle money and into the street without even looking, stumbling and catching herself and staggering again until she fell sprawling at the curb. Sitting up stiffly, she saw the pink scrape on her knee grow bedewed with blood.

Above her, the palm trees held themselves apart, thin and tall and proud. And through their leaves, shining down on her, blinding her, came the damned sun. # The next day, Sunday afternoon, two detectives in business suits and a uniformed policeman came to Tessa’s door with the news that Ida Bigelow had murdered Warren Felder the night before with a kitchen knife as he slept.

“Mr. Bigelow told us that you babysat for the children and did household chores,” said one of the

detectives. He had a bristly head of blond hair and small blue eyes with bags beneath them.

“I . . . did,” said Tessa.

“Do you have any idea why she would have wanted to kill him?”

Tessa stared at the detective. “No,” she said. “They always got along from what I could see.”

“She doesn’t know anything that everybody else doesn’t already,” said Tessa’s mother.

“Let’s let her answer,” said the detective.

“I . . . I only know that Warren . . . Mr. Felder was with Mrs. Bigelow and Mr. Bigelow had left,” said Tessa, looking down.

“Did Mr. Bigelow and Mr. Felder ever have words?”

“No . . . not that I heard.”

“Tessa,” said the detective, “it is possible that you may have to give evidence in a court hearing. We will let you know, if it comes to that.”

“Why don’t you get out of here and let the girl alone,” said Tessa’s mother. “She doesn’t know anything about those people.” The detective looked around the kitchen and saw a bottle of rum on the counter.

“Nice all-American home,” he said loudly to the other detective. # When the attendance clerks called Tessa in that Monday, she was sure that she was in trouble, but Bea Kinderblut, the bitchy one, got up from her desk and put her arms around Tessa. After a moment, Mrs. Lawrie the obese attendance clerk, joined her. Tessa nearly suffocated under the weight of all that administrative compassion.

“Tessa, we’re so very sorry,” said Bea. “It’s such a tragedy that your nice job had to go and end like that,” said Mrs. Lawrie.

“Are you sure,” said Bea, “that you never saw it coming?”

“I . . . never saw it coming,” said Tessa.

“Leave her alone,” said Connie Lawrie.

“Oh I think she knows a little more than she’s letting on,” said Bea. But she dropped the subject.

Ida Bigelow was eventually charged with involuntary manslaughter in the death of Warren Felder and given five years probation. Mr. Bigelow took Ida back, and Tessa learned that the family had moved to Texas.

Under the pressure of uncomfortable silences and dropped gazes, the friendship between Tessa and Shannon soon disintegrated. But Tessa was not surprised when rumors began to circulate that she had been the reason Mrs. Bigelow had murdered her lover.

Tessa began to picture Warren lying naked across the bed, the upper part of his torso hanging over the side, a puddle of dark blood spreading out on the shiny floor, a silver steak scimitar protruding from his chest.

Those steak knives were as keen as razors and always made shreds of the polish cloth. “No!” Tessa would cry, with a shudder, whenever this vision invaded her mind. She would quickly try to substitute the image of Warren, still bold and intact, reaching out from his fate to kiss the top of her head in the car. ### 1 The

Dun & Bradstreet Corporation is an American company that provides commercial data, analytics, and insights for businesses.

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The Hearing Forest and the Seeing Field by Hieronymus Bosch, Date: c.1500, Style: Northern Renaissance, Genre: religious painting, Media: pen, wood, Location: Kupferstichkabinett Berlin, Berlin, Germany

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We Shall Be Warm Again by

Tom Sheehan I. The pear tree, bent beside the house, has angry skin, wears many years’ bruises, the applied rod, frenzies of a whip, manacle marks where my brother’s chain fall held the brute mobile, a ’37 Ford engine, as he faltered through the mechanics of July.

In the smashed fist of upper limbs one moon of October, afraid my breath was seen, that an aura glowed my tell-tale place, I soft-chimed my belfry hideaway, saw chums as mice scatter in shadow. In winter it contorts whistles.

II. I’ve seen Septembers boiling like an olla stew, whipped by Caribbean madness up the coast from Hatteras, but promising only kindling. Its roots are like best friends, summons servers, tax collectors. All my years, it has dared dread December its bidding, worn alien icy crowns sometimes diamond-bright into spring’s heart.

III. You’ve never known this: in a high fork, sun-bleached, pruned by the hard seasons, your name is another bruise, letters clumped bulgy as toads pretending they will leap. I was fourteen at the carving, feel the knife’s handle yet within my hand, the single breast, hear your windy name sighing through the splatter of leaves, vespers of youth.

IV. Oh, Love, when hearth fire strikes into the names of these limbs, we shall be warm again. ###

45

Vision, Method and Magic Dust by

Marie Fitzpatrick Once upon a time on a wet Saturday afternoon, I said to my granddaughters who were all born in the last 14 years, “In a land far away, a young lady bit into a poisoned apple and fell down into a deathlike sleep only to be awakened by a kiss from a Prince, but! can YOU guess the show?” Their voices blended as they outstripped each other to shout, “Snow White, Nanny, it's Snow White.”

It’s 80 + years since the first screening of "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" and it still holds its own when compared to some of the most beautiful and entertaining work that one ever thought to see produced and brought to life on the big screen. But then talent, story, beauty and art when combined with great direction are a win-win, and during his reign as a film producer Walt Disney, won 22 Oscars from 59 nominations, andwas presentedwith 2 Golden Globe SpecialAchievement Awards. His name is the most recognizable out of the handful of animators that helped build the industry that included such luminaries, as Max and Dave Fleischer, Earl Hurd and J.R. Bray. # J.R. Bray and Earl Hurd were filing patent application on the CellAnimation Process, in 1914 when 13 year old Walt. the fourth son born to Elias and Flora Disney, was attending McKinley High school in Chicago, and the following year when he was taking night courses at the Art Institute of Chicago, Max and Dave Fleisher were filing similar applications for the Rotoscope. 3 It was 1917, before the Americans joined the Great War. Walt's three older brothers immediately joined up to fight. Impressed by their fervour and eager to experience an adventure, and fight for his country Walt applied to join the navy, to follow in the footsteps of his older brother, Roy, but his application was refused on age grounds, for at 16 he was deemed too young, however he persisted in his dream of adventure and together with his friend Russell Maas, he applied to join the Canadian armed forces—his father Elias had been born in the Province of Canada in 1859. But once again they had a setback when Russell failed the eye test, and because they wanted to stay together they decided that the Red Cross might not be as particular, however while they were accepted they still needed their parent’s signature. When Walt’s parents found out, his father, refused to sign the document stating that he would not sign his son's death warrant, but his mother Flora agreed to help, and she altered his DOB to add a year to his age. She had found his suitcase half packed and knew if he were like his older brothers he'd go with or without their permission, so she also signed the necessary documents in both names. # The boys found themselves in Camp Scott, the Red Cross Training Facility, that was situated in the south side of Chicago. But with all his manoeuvring to get out to war torn Europe, the war would be over

by the time he made it; in Camp Scott he caught the Spanish flu that was running rampant across the world and while Russell got his orders to leave for the campaign Walt was sent home to recuperate, both his sister, Ruth, and mother were also ill with flu, but Flora nursed them back to health and he returned to his training base and enlisted in September 1918, just in time for the signing of the Armistice on 11th of November. 2 However, though the battles had been fought and arms decommissioned, the Red Cross still needed men to drive ambulances in Europe and on Nov 18 he was awoken at 3.30 AM and told to get ready to go, he was one of 50 being sent out and he arrived in France the day before his 17th birthday.

A young lad driving ambulances, and later dignitaries around the countryside; drawing cartoons for his brother's in arms on the back of canteen menus; meeting up in Paris with his best friend Russell, finding a puppy and naming it Carey, after his favourite Chicago cartoonist and working with his art; always working with his art whether it was in the back of an ambulance or in a canteen—there was always a caricature falling out of his pencil. And while the boys rambled through the Paris' streets they built castles in the air as they dreamed of going home to build a raft and float down the Mississippi like Huckleberry Finn . #

It would be October 19th, nearly a year later, before he set foot on American soil again, and when he returned his brother Roy got him a job in Kansas, at "Pesmen-Rubin Commercial Art Studio" and whilst working there he met UB Iwerks, and shortly afterwards he joined "Kansas City Film Ad Company," where he made commercials based on cutout animation.

Walt got a taste for the business and decided to venture out on his own, hiring Iwerks, Frank Harman and a small bevy of artists to work on his "Laugh-O-Grams." It was successful and it was here that he created the first of his "Alice Comedies." However the business saw him out the door, bankrupted, and it was then that he made the decision to move to California to join his brother Roy. # Arriving in Los Angles in 1923, Walt quickly found his feet and together with Ub Iwerks and Roy created a new working space from where he set out to market and sell the pilot of the “Alice Comedies” series to distributors: Shortly afterwards, it was picked up by "Winkler Pictures" who were based in New York The success of this initial project and a few others allowed him to reinvest in studios, artists and staff, and also to experiment with the genre.

The "Alice Comedies" lasted 4 years, they were an interaction between a young girl and an animated cat—it was an idea that Disney successfully revisited again in 1965, when he produced “Mary Poppins” and released it through “Walt Disney Productions” and again in 1988 when the company made “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” which was released by the Disney’s “Touchstone Pictures.” However, in 1927 Disney felt that the series had run its course and he decided to move the studio focus to a full time animated series and he created "Oswald the Lucky Rabbit."

Walt made 26 of the "Oswald" cartoons, but when he tried to get additional money from his distributor for a second run, he discovered that the distributor had gone behind his back and signed up almost all of his animators hoping to make the cartoons in his own studio for less money, and without the Disney input. On reading the small print in his contract Walt realized that he had inadvertently signed off the rights of the series to the distributor. # On that train journey back from that meeting in New York would he have appreciated the cliché that says that "every cloud has a silver lining," or would he have preferred the one that declares that "a person

makes their own luck," because it was while travelling back to California with his wife, Lillian, and considering bankruptcy a second time out that he pondered on his circumstances, and while wondering how he was gonna break the news to his team he drew a picture of a mouse, called him "Mortimer," showed it to his wife, who immediately said the name was too depressing and urged him to run with Mickey instead.

He did, and the rest is history, though it was on his third attempt when he added synchronized sound to his Mickey Mouse cartoon that he hit bedrock and "Steamboat Willie"opened to rave reviews at the Colony Theater, in New York, on November 18, 1928. # PIC

Is it always in a time of hardship that the world experiences great change?

The post war feel good cycle ended

Seabiscuit became a symbol of hope to many Americans during the Great Depression.

Seabiscuit and Red Pollard: Down and out in Detroit in 1936, Pollard was hired by horse trainer Tom Smith to ride Charles S. Howard's Seabiscuit. The team's first stakes win came in the 1936 Governor's Handicap. '

with the stock market crash in 1929 that saw the advent of the Great Depression,4 which introduced a timeline of little luxury and great loss in a country where no work meant no income, and a huge percentage of the population lived within a pay cheque of homelessness.

They were tough times, times for looking within, boot strap days; many years later after celebrating much success Disney was asked by an interviewer what he considered to be his best achievement and he supposedly answered that it was holding onto his business and keeping it in the family name.

During the depressed 30s Disney continued his trend of forward motion and forward thinking, and always with great design ethic. And as the studio work gelled, he started to plan the first full length animated feature film and he sent out an instruction to his staff: his photographers, illustrators, musicians, cell painters, artists and project managers to get ready to go to work on the "Snow White" project. And over the following 3 years more than 750 artists completed over 2 million sketches and within the industry his critics nicknamed the Snow White work, "Disney's Folly." #

6 years earlier, in 1931, "Frankenstein" and "Dracula" had been released to great reviews, and monsters were dissected, and writers, actors and directors celebrated, and in that decade some of the best story that was ever celebrated was brought to the big screen: ‘"Of Mice and Men," "Mr Smith Goes to

In 1919, some 52 editorial cartoonists supplied their self-portraits for a feature in the Literary Digest Multiple Authors, Wikicommons PD

Washington," "Wuthering Heights," "‘Bringing Up Baby," but now it was the turn of the illustrator, the storyman and the artist to take their turn in the spotlight. The turn of the Imagineering Departments. The illustrators who experimented until they found the way and means to produce an illusion that made handdrawn cartoon characters adhere to the basic Law of Physics, and the cell painters and inkers who worked on the assembly line to colour the final product.

However this was not your regular industrial factory assembly line—the type that was established in the Industrial Revolution. Large amounts of output had to be generated and rendered, and the girls worked hard, but these assembly lines were inspired by the classics, and supported by the men The Twelve Principles of Animation are a shoo-in and women who loved story, colour and to a good story. They underpin all motion work. They best design. And every fairy-tale were first introduced by animators Ollie Johnston and grandmother knows that it's a well-known Frank Thomas in their book: "The Illusion of Life: fact that when hearts and souls converge to Disney Animation,"that was first released in 1981. Once lift a project magic occurs. There’s a Walt these basic steps are followed by the artist. the character Disney quote in the first chapter of the comes alive whether one is working in 2D, or Illusion of Life Disney Animation 6 it very 3D(CGI).They add believability and movement, cleverly states that: “Animation can explain personality and enchantment, fun and story. They are the whatever the mind of man can conceive.” method behind the illusion and an understanding of their There is another essay to be found in that function is recommended for any would be artist or comment! writer, for to be brought to life a line will always need a # squash and stretch, without that small shove in the right direction it just remains a stick figure. And an audience I don’t know if discovering how to reaction will need to be tugged; it will want to see make a skeleton wear a physical form was Grumpy stamp his foot, or hear the dwarfs hold their greeted with great excitement in the halls breaths before that big sneeze, or hear an audience soft government or academia, but on the day sighhhh as they sense a zephyr lift off the suitor’s fluttering of the film was released it made a big eyelashes before the kiss in the cartoon love scene. And difference to the artists, writers, musicians, the story background setting will appeal to the senses, it and everyone else who were involved in the might be so beautiful that when horror enters it will be project, who were striving to draw life into recognized immediately by its contrast.

The Disney team dealt with and created more than form and connect with an audience in an emotive way. the Law of Physics ever assumed or appreciated; his And when "Snow White and the teams considered emotional and character appeal. and Seven Dwarfs" 5 first premièred at the together they developed the principles to standardize the Carthay Circle Theatre, in Los Angeles, on process. And with that standardization a line was crossed December 21, 1937, what a contrast! it and a third star was placed in the heavens as a new art created for cinema goers, who, if they had form was born.

Two years later in 1939, Max Fleishers’ adaptation not been affected by the crash and its aftereffect would have known someone who of "Gulliver's Travels" would light up screens and "The was: What a sensational surprise it was Wizard of Oz" based on Frank L Baums ‘Wonderful when the Disney team took them into the Wizard of Oz’ children’s book, (1900) would stir hearts. world of the imagination, where handAnd all this in the same year that "Gone With the Wind" premièred: it was a great era, the best of the best of times, drawn characters smoothly transitioned from paper to screen in light filled strokes, for actors, producers, directors and cinema goers. to bring the fairy tales to life, to allow the child within to venture into a world of princes and princesses and kings and queens-where good always won the day, and where nature blessed all with amazing vistas.

1n 1937, a second Disney star was placed in the heavens when an audience started a love affair with the illustrators' line, and a springboard was created and from there the studios continued to grow and create

more beautiful work.

#

Walter Elias Disney was an American entrepreneur, animator, writer, voice actor, and film producer. He was responsible for bringing the first full length animated film to life on the big screen. He died at the relatively young age of 65.

A pioneer of the American animation industry. Several of his films have been included in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress.

“I appliedstreaks andblobs of colors onto the canvas with a palette knife, andI made them sing with allthe intensity I could…”

“Color provokes a psychic vibration. Color hides a power stillunknown but real, which acts on every part of the human body.”~ Wassily Kandinsky

###

PS: "Remember you're the one who can fillthe worldwith sunshine." — Snow White, Snow White andthe Seven Dwarfs PPS:

While beauty and story was being created and explered in California, in Europe books were being burned, and death and terror orchestrated. WW2 was in the offing and European artists under the direction of Walter Gropius 8 of Bauhaus (Weimar) fame were working towards a vision that promoted an inclusive society. Artists of the calibre of Paul Klee, Johannes Itten, Josef Albers, Herbert Bayer, László Moholy-Nagy, Otto Bartning and Wassily Kandinsky, and Ed Lissitsky were all exploring voice through color, design, music, literature, architecture and more: These men were reimagining the old world methods, however in the real world, it appears to take longer to bring vision into form.

Fin

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Page 51, Skeleton by Vincent van Gogh, Date: c.1886; Paris, France , Style: Post-Impressionism, Genre: sketch and study, Media: pencil, paper, Location: Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands 1:

(Price, T, viewed, Dec. 2019, https://www.waltdisney.org/blog/over-there-walt-disneys-world-war-iadventure)2 2:

3:

(Max Fleisher, 1930, Dizzy Dishes, https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=h3H24IjYg8g , viewed Dec. 2019) (History. Com Editors, 2009, Great Depression History, https://www.history.com/ topics/greatdepression/great-depression-history , viewed Dec. 2019.)

4:

5:

( Abrams, Jacqueling Wil, 2008, WALT DISNEY'S SNOW WHITE & THE SEVEN DWARFS Trademark Details https://trademarks.justia.com/755/44/walt- disney-s-snow-white-the-seven75544254.html, viewed, Dec., 2019) The Illusiton of Life (Thomas F and Johnston O, 1981)

6:

https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/news/2012/5/edvard- munchs-the-scream-fetches-worldrecord-price-at-auction-41487/, viewed Dec., 2019) 7:

8:

http://architecture-history.org/schools/BAUHAUS.html (viewed, apr, 2021) #

Facing Page Art: Intime message by Wassily Kandinsky, Date: 1942; Paris, France , Style: Abstract ArtGenre: abstract, Media: cardboard, tempera, Location: Georges Pompidou Center, Paris, France

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53

Art: The Law of Series by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Date: 1925, Style: Dada, Genre: symbolic painting

Steamroller by

John C. Mannone

byComing home from school, I was afraid to cross the street when a steamroller was parked the curb. Even though there was no one in the driver’s seat, just an empty plastic container with a bunch of levers sticking up. I feared the steel monster would roar to life as I crossed the street—my smooth loafers slipping during my hurried run, that it would pave me into the asphalt (maybe like I saw on Saturday morning cartoons—Brutus behind the wheel, Popeye managing a can of spinach under the coaltar, or Wiley Coyote getting done-in by the Roadrunner, on gooey asphalt in the hot southwestern desert). Yes, I’d run, not walk across the street, my pride be damned, I’d rather clutch the embarrasment just to survive. I’d stoop to whatever it took to make it on the Baltimore streets with its managerie of monsters: a Mac truck at the light—its grillwork, shiny teeth; headlamps, eyes set to glare; beneath its hood, a throaty roar; or that dinosaur crane with its claw-bucket ready to shovel me into the corner, scoop me up. Would I worry if a kid from my third grade class saw me cower? Okay, I would and I’d be wearing a mask to school the very next day, if I didn’t skip instead (and play hookie at the local Benjamin Franklin Five & Dime, where I’d drink sodas and read Dell’s Science Fiction and Superman comic books). It would be my agony of defeat. I couldn’t tell my father, or my mother either, but I probably should have. A couple of years later, when I was ten and should’ve known better, I let a tall creaking oak tree (in my own back yard) one winter night scare the shit out of me. I swear it was worse than that giant mantis I saw at the Ambassador Theater in Gynn Oak Junction. This oak had an evil sense about it. I could feel it. Moonlight exposed its splinter-teeth and the wind carried its taunts to me. I confessed my fear to my mother. She was kind, and understanding, she didn’t berate me, but did try to use a little bit logic to convince me that I was okay. She could’ve said I was imagining it, or worse, that I was beeing stared down by an exotic unicorn from Transylvania, or some other crap like that, but thank God she didn’t. Joking around with me in those impressionable years would not have been very good for my psychological development. Anyway, these days I’m a grown-ass man; nowadays whenever I cross the street and one of those steamroller things tries to scare me, I just raise my bat, a Brooklyn Basher, which I shake at it, cuss it out real good, and tell it to leave me the f-alone. ***

Principles of Discovery by

Tom Sheehan

Etching from the series "The Face" by Walter Gramatté, Date: 1924, Style: Expressionism, Genre: portrait, Media: etching

Charlie Banes found out his real name was Feather in Hat, son of the great chief of the Shoshone tribe, One Blue Hat and son of a woman rescued by him when she was a very young girl and kept at his side until she was of marriage age of 17 when they celebrated their joining, a night of noise and fire at the tribal location in the Memory Hills, which had six names in its last two centuries.

In the meantime, young Charlie Banes was found by a husband and wife out in the hills looking for their lost dog, Barrier, who had chased off a coyote sniffing too close to a small child, apparently lost from his tribe. He was dressed like a young king.

“Why’s he all duded up, Charlie?” Mollie Banes asker her husband.

“From what it looks to me, I’d say he’s a son of a chief. The only chief around here is One Blue Hat, a Shoshone great one, which tells me we ought to get out of here with the kid now and hope Barrier makes it on his own.”

For many months, they kept their secret, passing off little Charlie as her own proper son. Thus it was that Charlie didn’t know about his real father, and One Blue Hat didn’t know about his own son. But in some manner, each had a feeling for the other after many discussions and settlements out of the ordinary.

So, began the life of the current sheriff of Elmo Falls, a small after-thought of a town near the edge of the Memory Hills, its closets full of those secrets. Young Banes, plied with noble blood and a natural yearn for fair practice among people, started early by breaking up saloon fights, settling land disputes, even running a crooked card player clean out of town, handing out the gambler’s money to the most needing folks and earning a name and a reputation that grew in accordance with his nature.

His name was the only name mentioned when town fathers decided a sheriff was needed, and, at 18, was appointed sheriff and a badge pinned on his chest. His career started with a bang, as they say, when another traveling card player pulled a gun on him and Charlie shot him dead in the dust of Elmo Falls’ lone road in and out of town, on which tales began to move to local hinter lands about the young sheriff, drawing its own curious crowd of peek-a-boos and other interested parties.

When Kit Winsdor was killed from behind by a sniper, Charlie chased after the sniper for 30-40 miles and brought him back, strapped onto his horse, for a legal hanging, the young sheriff’s reputation of Elmo Falls swiveled upwards for miles atop miles of western towns, drawing decent folks as well as the curious folk, some wanting to share in the infamy one way or another.

None of those new folks, and hardly any of the original settlers, knew Charlie Banes was the son of One Blue Hat, still the head of the Shoshone tribe, and its only spokesman, and who continued to wear the hat of a fallen officer of an army regiment stationed in the territory.

As it soon showed, One Blue Hat knew many things about the young sheriff; how straight he was, diligent, quick to act, dispensing an artful and truthful justice in all his decisions. Some of us call it favoritism, or jealousy, or, even in some quarters, as “Don’t step on his toes no way if you can help it, and be damned quick about it, lest it cost you more than you bargained for in the first place.”

But jealousy often settles on acceptance from the outset as we see in some cases of hostility, rivalry and discord, or its absolute opposites. But nothing of this nature ever rose up between our young sheriff and the Shoshone chief; respect, instead, rising to heady appreciation for each other, and never a whisper

from the beginning, like, from the supposed mother, Mollie Baines, ‘Mum’ being the word on her mind, and tickling her no end.

When a wandering murderer by name of Tree Adamly killed a Shoshone brave at the edge of Elmo Falls, a favored nephew of One Blue Hat, the prairie seemed to burst into fire, an old war coming back to life. One Blue Hat saw Sheriff Charlie Baines get on his trail, catch up to him, bind him in ropes and bring him so bound, not to the jail in Elmo Falls, but delivered him to One Blue Hat, it precluded the re-ignition of an old war, a highly favored result for both our main characters on the open prairie.

One Blue Hat held a trial on the open prairie, strangers and passers-by allowed to watch the proceedings, until Tree Adamly was convicted of murder and hanged by his feet until he died, that horrible death, enough pain to pay back the family’s loss by Shoshone standards.

Charlie Baines watched it all from start to end, mesmerized by a sense of familiarity with things so done and so counted.

Still, in spite of these conditions and activities, both principles. Charlie and One Blue Hat, managed to accept the outcomes to the guilty, Charlie at length saying, “It served him right,” and One Blue Hat saying, “We are paid once more for these sour impositions.” They each continued to learn and accept what satisfied the other, highlighting it for broadcast on the wind, for deep sharing all around.

Father and son, we see, getting closer to the truth, closer to sharing, no matter the spread of grass between them, the thousand years or more of contentions, results, messages left on stone etchings, carried in the air of social broadcast; “D’you hear about the new hanging out on the grass?” ###

Man with Heart (Self) by Walter Gramatté, Date: 1918, Style: Expressionism, Genre: self-portrait

Still Life. Skull and Writing Quill by Pieter Claesz, Date: 1628, Style: Baroque, Genre: vanitas Location: Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met), New York City, NY, US

Letting go

by Bill West

Dad died and left things that spoke to his life.

Brushes canvas and paint quills and copybooks chisels fluters and sweeps.

My hoard of these treasures filled our house and left no room for me.

He's gone you said these things, no longer his.

I stored them away paintings diaries histories high in the attic.

Years passed before I climbed the attic stair.

Mice had made nests raised young and died.

While wind and rain and leaves blew in decay and spiders' webs wound round that melted and stained putrefaction.

Small catechisms that said he was truly dead.

Arthur Rackham; was one of the leading illustrators in British Book Illustraion from 1890 until the end of the WW1, his work on the "Snow White Grimm Fairy Tale" inspired the work of the Disney illustrators and artists who created the first animated feature file in 1937.

Rackham won a gold medal at the Milan International Exhibition in 1906 and another one at the Barcelona International Exposition in 1912. His works were included in numerous exhibitions, including one at the Louvre in Paris in 1914.

Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs from Grimm's Fairy Tales

Truth Rescued by Time, Witnessed by History by Francisco Goya, Date: 1812 - 1814, Style: Romanticism, Genre: allegorical painting, Media: oil, canvas, Location: Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, Sweden

For a Timely Moment by

Tom Sheehan Apprehensive, she pushed open the door to take a final look, to check Earth as far as she could see, to measure, to see if gods she held were less than perfect. This was her world. Terror she found was in the measurement, in the time she had spent exploring dividend’s possibilities, market’s surge, a late movie thought more boisterous than life itself, someone’s divorce, chicanery and outright theft, and an election all too soon winked at. It came at her, swift thought: our feet are caught in place: we are sucked into loam and hardpan and left for all of this rock; we are locked up tighter than grip of stable Earth’s 17-degree axis. Escape is not here, or atonement for us. She kept saying “we,” kept herself aligned in that rare and human confederacy. There was assessment and agreement not known about; at that moment, in one halfheld breath, hoe in hand, eyes gone to marble, a gaunt Filipino suddenly apprehends a minor shift in Earth’s crust. It is the awed way she would know a tilt at a pinball machine. Beyond him, her, momentous Krakatoa, an island yet, proves to be imaginative again at the foot of history, and is no longer breathless.

And deeper yet, farther away, thought to be buried out there in fluffed accountabilities of Time, one long horse-tailed, red-eyed, incomputable comet picks up a little bit of left hand English, just for the hell of it. ###

Give All to Love Give all to love; Obey thy heart; Friends, kindred, days, Estate, good-fame, Plans, credit and the Muse,— Nothing refuse. ’T is a brave master; Let it have scope: Follow it utterly, Hope beyond hope: High and more high It dives into noon, With wing unspent, Untold intent: But it is a god, Knows its own path And the outlets of the sky.

It was never for the mean; It requireth courage stout.

Souls above doubt, Valor unbending, It will reward,— They shall return More than they were, And ever ascending.

Leave all for love; Yet, hear me, yet, One word more thy heart behoved, One pulse more of firm endeavor,— Keep thee to-day, To-morrow, forever, Free as an Arab Of thy beloved.

66

Art: Love Song by the New Moon by Paul Klee, Date: 1939, Style: Surrealism, Period: Late Works, Genre: genre painting Cling with life to the maid; But when the surprise, First vague shadow of surmise Flits across her bosom young, Of a joy apart from thee, Free be she, fancy-free; Nor thou detain her vesture’s hem, Nor the palest rose she flung From her summer diadem.

Though thou loved her as thyself, As a self of purer clay, Though her parting dims the day, Stealing grace from all alive; Heartily know, When half-gods go, The gods arrive.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

67

The Burial Detail by

Tom Sheehan

Ghost of a Genius by Paul Klee, Date: 1922, Style: Surrealism, Expressionism

Compulsive excitement filled Sergeant Charlie Twohig, down to his toes. Ledo, at this end of the Burma Road, was not a scavenger’s post with a limited amount of personnel; it was an army metropolis burgeoning even in the darkness with a kind of stateside activity. The muffled sound of a laboring engine crawled out of a nearby valley, sounding as if it were under wraps, promising more engines up the line with the sometimes slow hum of war. From the edge of night he heard the tom-tom of a hammer beating on sheet metal. Night guards, bent on their watches and patrols, loomed as hulking giants working thick shadows.

The heat, floating down out of another valley, at first did not seem to bother Charlie Twohig. Noise and activity meant people and people meant money and money meant gambling. The long haul from North Africa had been worth the trouble; the pigeons, his resolute mind said, were ready for the taking.

Into his bunk he crawled and felt a slight but not new discomfort. His throat was dry and he needed a drink and an itching sensation began to crawl on his hands with the purchase of a seven-day itch. His heart, he swore, was pumping faster than ever and he convinced himself it was more of the excitement. A strange heat was sublimely making way in his body.

Private Jake Breda twisted in the bunk above him. Twohig wanted to talk. “Hey, Jake, you awake?”

“Yuh, Sarge.”

“You ever been really excited, Jake? I mean so bad you got sick from it.”

“Sure, when I got married.

“Right at the altar?”

“Hell, no, Sarge. When I closed the door behind me at the motel. What have you got to be so excited about?”

“I’m in a streak, Jake. I never felt this way in my life. It ain’t I won so much, but I haven’t lost since that blackjack game in Ceylon.”

“What’s it feel like? I never felt really different when I was winning. Never parleyed much to begin with, so can’t tell by me.”

“Jake, I swear my hands are sweating for a deck of cards right now. Hell, I wished it was morning. I wish it was tomorrow already. I swear I’m going to win big, so big it’s burning a hole right through me.

Breda dropped a hand down the side of the bunk. “Give me a smoke, will you, Sarge.” Twohig was for the moment a suddenly accessible sergeant.

“Sure, Jake, keep the deck. God, I’m burning with excitement. I wish I didn’t have to sleep at all.

Tomorrow I’m going to line me up some real good ones. Blackjack, that’s what it’s going to be. Black jack. I can’t lose. I can’t lose. Tomorrow, all day, it’ll be twenty-one, twenty-one, twenty-one. I’m in the groove.”

He fell asleep dreaming of getting hit and hit and hit with aces and deuces and treys and coming up twenty-one every time out of the gate. He did not see a king or queen all night. Twenty-one, twenty-one, twenty-one.

Parts of the journey that brought him here to Ledo, at the end of the world in upheaval, clamor everywhere, came across his memory with unusual clarity, with unusual color. He didn’t think much about Ohio, and only knew the new uneasiness in him as irregular. Odds be damned!

Weeks earlier they had been at sea. Sergeant Charlie Twohig, long, lean and dark, with a mysterious ailment, as yet unknown to him, threatening to work its way into his consciousness, leaned against a metal bulkhead of a lead LST and felt the heat sinking into his back, blacksmith’s iron if anything. The perspiration falling off his brow he had long been aware of and continually tried to dismiss its presence by constantly shuffling a deck of cards, a veritable extension of his hands…fingers, hands, cards, money, they were partners forever.

Behind him where he gazed the uncoupled train of LSTs moved with a cumbersome plodding out of the Suez Canal and into the searing brightness of the Red Sea. The indignant, hot and worried cargo was a company of Graves Registration men that, already in the first flush of dawn, felt the slamming of solar heat, the huge and imponderable hammer of it. To a man they had heard and believed the waters before them boiled under an hour of sun. There was much evidence about them: with explosive quickness of a flare the

sun had popped up over Asia and dark welts were maps on their fatigues. It was impossible to sit still and let sweat crawl a horde of ants over the skin, yet it was just as difficult to move about on the boats or find a piece of shade. And the worst was yet to come. It was like a sore throbbing elsewhere.

Behind them the flat oblique shadows of the LSTs lay on the waters of the Red Sea; ahead of them was half the company’s final target, India and Burma and the dead. The other two platoons, under Captain Redmond, were to continue on to China. At both ends of the Burma Road the dead needed to be buried.

Corporal Tally Biggs sat beside Charlie Twohig and eyed the deck of cards. He said, his head at a condescending angle, “You know, Twig, if I never saw you with out a deck of cards I’d of thought you were naked.” Biggs pronounced naked as if it were nekid, and he had the ungracious habit of speaking with little lip movement, watching guard perhaps on any commitment. An inconsistent green in his eyes likewise operated under a controlled guise. Biggs was not easy to like, and found few fast friends, if any at all, in the ranks of comrades.

“Hell,” Twohig said with his Midwestern drawl, “if I didn’t have a deck of cards to fondle, you know I’d be bare ass. You wanna cut low card for a buck?” If it was not the sun lighting up his eyes, it was the thought of a gamble, of odds being folded up in someone’s camp and might as well be his.

Biggs read him clearly. “No siree!” he said. “Not for three cuts to your one. I owe you up to my ass now and I ain’t getting in any deeper.” Always he’d worried about making some outward sign of the cowardice lodged within his thin frame. It made his voice soft and entreating as he said, “Twig, couldn’t we get torpedoed out here? Christ, but we’re moving slow, ain’t we? Couldn’t they up and stick a fish right in us?”

“Torpedoes is for boats, not for these little lake-crossing barges. What you really got to worry about is getting strafed by some Heinkel or Junkers or a Stuka, or maybe getting dive-bombed when you ain’t got your life belt on.” Twohig loved to pull the string that tied Biggs’ guts together. “Cut!” He held the deck out. The blue bicycles of the top card caught the sun.

Biggs, aware of Twohig’s constant taunts, had spent much of the night dwelling on the idea of swimming in the cauldron of the Red Sea. He hated fish and he hated blood and he didn’t know how to swim in the first place. “I ain’t cutting, Twig! Not three to one I ain’t cutting.” The deep green of his eyes had retreated to a thin, watery green and he moved his wrist to mop away sweat lingering at the edges of his eyes. “I don’t care how hot it gets, I ain’t getting nowhere out of this belt. All’s I can do is keep my head from going under if we was to get thrown in the drink.”

Twohig moved one shoulder away from the bulkhead and a wisp of air was sucked in behind his back. “Life belts are no good against sharks, Tally. They’re the real butchers of the sea. They tell me sharks can amputate a leg quicker’n a doctor can with an electric saw. Cut!” The blue bicycles again.

“Ain’t no sharks in these waters! Nothing lives in these waters, nothing at all!”

“Don’t be stupid, Biggs. I suppose you never heard of the balance of power. You must be pretty dumb not to know about that.”

“What the hell’s that got to do with sharks? That’s only about countries lining up against each other in bunches to keep out of war. And I ain’t cutting!” Slowly he shook his head at Twohig and smiled a treacherously deceptive smile.

“Yuh, and it’s all about little ones getting eaten by big ones. It keeps order in things like they don’t need traffic cops or anything. They just go on and anything small in the way of big ones gets eaten up.

Maybe they do have traffic cops here. I’d guess that’s what you’d call sharks. They eat up their share of smaller fish and anything foreign that gets in the water, and you know what, Biggs?”

“What?”

“If you was to fall in the water when we got dive bombed, you’d be foreign. Cut!” The bicycles were rolling.

The deck of cards was there in front of him, the rolling stock. “Trey of spades!” Sweat ran over

Biggs’ face but he smiled that thin despicable smile of a caricatured rat.

“Deuce. You owe!” Upward in Twohig’s sweaty hand the two of hearts lay and a thin blotch of pink was evident on the white of the card.

Angrily, Biggs said, “You’re a lousy gambler, sergeant. I’m the only guy in the whole outfit you can beat.” Great desire to punch the sergeant rushed on him, but he knew he’d probably get thrown over the side if he hit him. “Someday I’ll beat your ass, but good,” and he could see his fists smashing away at Twohig’s face the way Henry Armstrong could, or the way Harry Greb used to throw them in the barrooms in New Orleans when he was training for fights. His father always said Harry Greb was a real, real tiger, standing in the middle of a bar and yelling out, “I’m Harry Greb and I can kick the crap out of any man in here,” and going ahead and doing it, his training routine.

Twohig tired of Biggs and wanted to move on to new entertainment. In front of him Captain Redmond’s big ears were fire red and sweat was a shadow that covered his whole shirt. Beneath the captain’s arms it seemed darker still, dark like patches on tire tubes. Twohig was willing to bet the captain was wearing a tie. With the deck clutched in his hand he moved his left shoulder and saw steam come up from behind his back. With his left foot he nudged the fruit crate Redmond was sitting on.

Redmond turned around and looked at him. The knot on his tie was still tied under the oversized larynx, his eyes were bulging as though the sockets had loosened their properties and the oversized lower lip was more a piece of extra flesh than an integral part of his mouth. Twohig did not like the captain, not from the outset; he was ugly and a phony to boot. Why didn’t the man wear his glasses outside the orderly room? If he only knew how much they improved his appearance.

“Sorry, Captain. Guess I need to stretch a bit.” Twohig loved to play games with him as much as with Tally Biggs. Biggs’ money he liked, but the captain was more fun and he relished the idea of toying with an officer. The idea of the India/Burma assignment caused him some minor dread, and it was lucky, he thought, that the captain was going on to China with the first two platoons.

Twohig the gambler knew what the captain would say, knew him like a book he did. Would he never get tired of mouthing the same pet phrases?

That’s quite all right, sergeant. We all of us need some stretching, but the road ahead is a long one and we must make the best of it.”

It was Redmond clear as a phony bell. Just another echo. Christ, if that ain’t just like him, thought Twohig. He can’t talk without any of them damn sickening words…we all of us, as if he really belonged; the road ahead…make the best of it. Just another broken record from officer country.

A licorice sensation ran through Charlie Twohig, and a fluttering joy swam in his head. It was game time: “What is the road ahead, sir? We all of us heard some scuttlebutt back there,” he said, pointing over his shoulder back to the African horizon now a low cloud on the rim of the sea, “but I’m sure we could do with some reviewing.” It was not a successful attempt, though he had chosen his words carefully. The homely bastard had hardly blinked his eyes.

When the sergeant had kicked his box, Captain Redmond had been deep thought about his gambling non-com. Inside his shirt pocket, probably now soaked from the sweat, was a letter from Twohig’s wife. There would be no need of reading it again for he had memorized its contents. It was evident she was a more intelligent person than Twohig, though hardly as devious, and he had read between the lines the love she had for the mad gambler. As for himself, he had never had, owned or partaken of a woman for any extended period of time, though he knew how deep the hooks of a good, true love went.

The thought that he might help this woman had built a new spirit in him, but he was destined to go to China after the split-up in Ceylon. A deep desire prompted him to do what he could. It would make him feel good inside, this call beyond duty.

“We break at Ceylon, Sergeant. First and second platoons go with me to China. Third and fourth go with Lieutenants Tozzi and Milano to Diamond Harbor at Calcutta.”

The Guinea Brigade, thought Twohig. If we could ever get to Rome or Naples, they might get

something done for us. What the hell use are two damn Guineas out in India? They might as well be on the moon.

“What’s our course after Calcutta, sir?” Twohig was irritated. What the hell made Redmond think he was so damn smart. Anybody who ever read anything knows about Diamond Harbor. Damn the sweat! It was making him blink as it ran into his eyes and he’d be damned if he ever wanted an officer to think he was forced to blink when stared down.

Though he sweated profusely, he did not mind the heat. For a long time, he had conditioned himself to do without comfort and had forced himself into extreme exposures, both of the body and of the mind. For eighteen months he had been without a woman and he was still able to think of them with great sensitivity and imagination. Even among the married men of his command, no other could say the same. When his time came (he felt the slight rocking of the craft as a warning of a growing need), he would really enjoy his fling. Searching for a woman would be an adventure. Of course, his looks would hold off some women, but they would be arrogant and unworthy. A man had more to offer than looks.

When he looked at Twohig he wondered what his wife looked like. Somehow he had formed a picture of her; big of bust and hip, blonde hair, blue eyes, skin like buttermilk, and tremendously good in bed. That she was intelligent was unquestioned. That had been divined from her letter. Her use of negatives was clue enough, and the way she slid into comfortable alliterations made him think of her reading poetry on a morning porch by the sea or a wide lake, by herself.

The dark, brooding eyes of Twohig were focused on him. Realizing the contempt behind them, Redmond exerted his station. It would never do to let Twohig know he was either aware of his intentions or that he was reacting to an enlisted man’s barbs. “From Calcutta, the Black Hole, you’ll go to Dacca, Tripura, Silchar, bypass the Khasi Hills, to Sylhet and on to the far corner of Assam, ending up at Ledo.

His eyes were locked onto Twohig’s eyes.

Smart-ass! I read Kipling, too. Does he think no one but him ever read? “Do we go near CoochBehar, sir?” That ought to stir his almighty ass.

“I don’t believe so, Sergeant. From my recollection of the map I think Cooch-Behar is in the western part of Assam.” Maybe the interrogating sergeant would take the hint and not push it any more.

He’d be able to spell correctly more Indian names than Twohig could think of: Dibrugarh, Sadiya, Tinsukia, Sibsagar, Mahiganj, and he’d even throw in Saikoa-ghat for a plum. The map of Assam and Burma burned in his mind just as clearly as the letter from Twohig’s wife. At the moment he had the incredible feeling of being unable to separate them.

“Begging your pardon, sir.” Twohig said, as he felt an irking sensation swim through his body, “but I’m willing to bet that Cooch-Behar is…”

Redmond cut him off. “I’m not a betting man, Sergeant, as we all must know by this time.” His hand waved in the air as if brushing the whole episode away. “It really isn’t too all important.” The letter was important and he wanted to get his mind back to it. Introducing Tozzi and Milano to its contents was a thought that had not previously entered his mind. As the craft rocked the little wings of memory started to flutter in his groin, and he was aware of a slight sense of hopelessness for the whole situation. Neither Tozzi nor Milano, both seemingly good young officers though as yet untried, could hardly begin to understand the woman who had written the letter. She loved with a deep and abiding love.

Well, maybe they could see that, but the rest would be a mystery to them and the fact that she could be good in bed would never enter their indecent young minds. It would only be time and chance that would force him to reveal the letter, to enlist their aid, but that bore on the unthinkable. Besides, it would deprive him of aiding her all by himself. She had written to him, the company commander. It was strictly his responsibility.

The train of squat craft were now riding easily over a sea of slow, even swells and the sexual impact of their motion made Redmond think about finding a girl among the Ceylonese before he headed off to China. Ceylon seemed much more romantic than China. He pictured a mysterious dark-eyed beauty

standing above him. Her subtle undulations would match the motion of the sea.

Except for the oppressive heat and an occasional alarm when an aircraft came into sight over the flat, hot sea, the trip to Ceylon was routine. Neither submarine nor surface craft threatened them and Twohig managed to bite into Tally Biggs’ bankroll for thirty-two dollars. Captain Redmond fidgeted and sweat the whole way, as did his command, but he was frustrated in devising a plan to aid Sara Twohig.

The woman was well worth assisting and he couldn’t help but think that her bed, in the privacy of darkness, was lonely and pathetic, and certainly bore amends.

The big excitement at the harbor on the northern tip of Ceylon was neither a big blackjack game for Twohig, nor Redmond’s seduction of a beautiful and young Ceylonese secretary on the second night.

The excitement was Captain John Tracker who met them when they landed. He, and not Redmond, was to go on to China because headquarters found out that he had lived there for five years when a boy.

Redmond could not have been more pleased. Even while he was making love to the olive secretary with hair as black as midnight and a scent about her that moved soft wings in his nostrils, he was thinking about Sara Twohig in that lonely bed in Ohio.

On the last day of June, with the monsoons in season, the –nth Graves Registration Company split into two sections of two platoons each, and the section headed for Ledo in Assam, with Redmond in command, left Ceylon at twilight and moved out into the Bay of Bengal. This side of Africa they had buried their first dead, one of their own, Corporal Eddie Akins, who had followed a girl away from the compound on the fourth day. The next day his body was discovered by a patrol, stripped, slashed, and impaled on a crude bamboo rack tied to a tree. Thousands of burials, and many of them much dirtier than Akins’, lay ahead of them, they knew to a man. Redmond struck Akins’ name from the company roster.

At dark the bright constant stars shone as fragmentary neon in the sky and occasionally a piece of that same substance shot across that black overhead in the slightest of arcs. Water slapped quietly at the craft, the tide rolled easily under them, and the whole night took on the pallor of mystery and injustice.

Twohig thought about his big blackjack game, Biggs shivered in the heat as he remembered Akins hung up on the bamboo rack, and Redmond entertained pictures of Twohig’s wife alone in her bed, thinking of her not wasting any more time. The rest, Tozzi and Milano included, tried to envision a quiet retreat high in the mountains near Ledo where nobody died and nobody cared.

Diamond Harbor revealed little of eastern romance and Redmond thought it particularly dirty and mismanaged. Every conceivable size, shape and description of sea-going vessel was clustered in and around the harbor in immense confusion. Commercial and enterprising Calcutta was full of hunger and he had no idea how human bones with no flesh on them were able to stand together. The one night his command spent in Calcutta, and the one night Redmond dared not approach a woman for fear of disease, he stood under the arches of Chowringee.

The abominable pageant before his eyes turned his stomach. Starvation was all around him; destitution, ulcerous and malodorous, was everywhere in every eye he saw. It was a slice from an unbelievable movie come for the taking. The war, somehow, seemed cleaner and more just, and he found himself anxious to get to it, to its fragmentation and incendiaries, to its riotously free blood and its depths of concussion, to its burial plots and impermanent markers.

The long trip from Newport News to North Africa, across the Mediterranean, down the Canal, across the Red Sea (bypassing Bombay where originally, they were to have debarked but which had been changed by some big shot sitting at a desk) to Ceylon, up the Bay of Bengal and into Calcutta, had taken two months. For a long time it had seemed as if he did not have a command. Anxiety to get to Ledo and set up his post worked on him and he was excited and grateful when they left Calcutta after such a brief stay.

By wide gauge and narrow-gauge railway, they traveled inland. The country was rugged, and moving out of Bengal and into Assam it became more rugged as were the people of Khasi, Naga and

Lushai Hills, looking as if they could wage a war on their own. At any minute, the dark eyes, the dark faces, the ready scabbards!

Box-boarded and nearly vacuumed of breathable air the rickety trains moved on, perhaps to stay a day and a half in one place while repairs were being made, or stocking materials in another. It was a long journey and it brought them to the lap of the war with each unsure mile of travel. Biggs shivered. Twohig gambled. Redmond kept at a distant seduction, the blonde hair and flared hips and the white thighs at conjunction with his peripheral vision, the voice making itself heard in the deepest night beside the lake, the moon more than promise.

Twohig’s luck had suddenly and dramatically changed with the big blackjack game in Ceylon. He could not lose. And to those to whom he had previously lost much of his money could not keep themselves from playing. Only Biggs sat the games out, irritated by Twohig’s luck, hoping it would end suddenly in one cut for the whole pie. Little did he realize that Twohig, when he was taunting him and taking his money, was the only one in the whole command who paid any attention to him. The bastard, he hoped, would die or go broke. In one hand dead of cards. It would be worth the sight.

The intolerable heat of July in northern India sat in the cars of the old train like a curse and some of the troops slowly realized that the Red Sea really had not been too bad. What they did not know, of course, was that a march was in front of them, A long, back-breaking march when the tracks disappeared at the foot of a hill, an omen of the end of civilization.

Redmond spent his time talking to Tozzi and Milano, instructing them about Hindus and Moslems and the hill tribesmen they would be posted among. He wanted his command to work without incident among the native populace. Slowly blossoming in him was an inveterate fear of the wild and unspoiled hill tribesmen, some of whom he might have to exert authority over. That in such a diverse command of nearly one hundred men two people should have the same basic fear was not implausible.

Biggs hated Negroes, Indians, foreigners, immigrants, mulattos, Catholics and Jews. He hated them and he feared them, and in the eyes of the natives along their route of travel he suspected, with some cause, a smoldering hatred of himself. Even against the most decrepit looking amongst them, Biggs feared he might not be able to protect himself.

The –nth Graves Registration Company, cut in half, walked the last sixty-two miles to Ledo, the beginning of the Burma Road. During the long, agonizing march, Twohig continued to bet and continued to win. He flipped coins, he bet on the most ludicrous things that only chance governed, and he won. A provincial legend was growing in the ranks. He was becoming as big as the war.

All the while Redmond wanted to read Sara Twohig’s letter again and again but he was afraid to take it from his pocket, afraid it might fall into the gambler’s hands. The return address on the top of the letter was burned into his brain: 8017 River Drive, Conneaut, Ohio. For a moment he could not recall if the address was really on the face of the envelope. That thought upset him. Surely the mail clerk would have noticed it. Redmond suddenly realized he knew Sara Twohig as well as any man and she could never be so stupid. So elated was he with this declaration that he was tempted sorely to pull out the letter and read it. But caution again denied him the opportunity.

And Charlie Twohig continued to move among the ranks looking for something to gamble on, letting the legend grow.

From the time they left the train, Ledo proved to be four days away. They pitched camp at the first call of dusk each day and many of them fell exhausted to their sleep. Most slept, but Twohig dwelled in the luxury of his changed luck, Biggs thought about dying and getting stuck like Akins was, and Redmond went through a ritual of promising Sara Twohig all the help she needed. When he did sleep, the ugly, toadish-looking commander dreamed often about Ohio, a little town against the side of the lake, a

voice smoldering in the darkness.

The nights were wide and black without any light on the horizon and legions of stars moved majestically overhead. No less than the insensitive Biggs, who twice volunteered for interior guard duty because he was afraid of getting stabbed in his sleep, moaned under the imperial beauty.

It was in the midst of the tall darkness of the third night, when the company was pitched in the foothills of the Naga Hills, that Redmond found his answer for Sara’s letter. It would take some doing on his part to set it up and it would also take, as the main ingredient of his scheme, a particular type of individual he had no doubt was on the roster of every outfit in this man’s army. The next move was to find that man. Surely, without telling Tozzi and Milano any details, he could enlist them in this pursuit.

Strangely, as if he had succeeded already, a surge of joy swam in his blood and he leaned back against a tree on the side of a hill and lit a cigarette.

The night, with ease, he found particularly beautiful. It was high and wide and quiet, and he was alone. A fragrance of Ceylon twisted in his nostrils. The girl who had cried Tai! Tai! in his ear had been well worth the wait. Against the tree he slept without dreaming about Ohio.

They arrived at the bamboo city of Ledo near dusk on the fourth day of hiking. Twohig was seven hundred and twenty dollars richer than when they had hit Ceylon. Biggs was near complete exhaustion.

His changeable green eyes were red and burning and he was thankful the sun had disappeared behind a hill. Tozzi and Milano, both whose feet were raw and blistered and who listened with odd attention to the captain’s strange request, had special missions to perform. Redmond could hardly wait to have his command post set up. He hadn’t worn his glasses since the company had left North Africa, except to sneak secret looks at Sara’s letter.

Business as usual, he thought, was at hand.

That business was burials. Several times a day formality would be the key word, a touch of the civilized world that was otherwise non-existent about them. Formality meant full dress uniforms, bearers, firing squads and Taps. It was the saddest part of war, the departure, but, like the fighting and the dying, Redmond knew it would become routine. Familiarity, he thought, bred callousness, not contempt.

Anyway, you hardly knew the man you had to bury.

At Ledo the accommodations were just as Redmond envisioned. They were assigned to a small compound of bamboo huts; one for the orderly room, one for officer’s quarters, three for the men, and one for himself. Though there was no tap water and no air conditioning, he had read enough about India and the northern heat to have installed on his hut the thick mesh screens that were called khus-khus tattie.

Woven from the fragrant khus-khus grass the screens were placed over both door and window and kept moist by having water thrown over them. When the wind blew through the mesh, it would carry moisture into the room and sometimes reduce the temperature inside by as much as ten degrees.

To perform the wetting-down operation Redmond hired a small native boy, Azard Phanitar, who looked strangely Mongolian and not unlike some American Indians he had seen. Azard was a scrawny but faithful twelve-year old who performed similar duties for other officers. He liked the particularly ugly officer who had approached him and did not look as American as the others.

Lt. Peter Milano returned an hour after their arrival in Ledo. The man the captain wanted was in a nearby outfit. No contact had been made by Milano, but of the man’s qualification there was no dispute.

All along Redmond had known that Milano would find his man sooner than Tozzi. Hadn’t Milano taken nine years to get his college degree? It was one of the reasons that Redmond liked Milano the better of the two. He was a plodder, not a flash in the pan as was Tozzi, and not a ninety-day wonder at that.

Redmond knew he could trust him without question.

Redmond had his glasses on. He looked different and talked differently. “You’re sure, aren’t you, Pete?” It was the first time he had ever called the lieutenant Pete.

“No question about it, captain. He’s the kind of guy you’re looking for. I could have checked him

out more, sir, if I knew what you had in mind.”

“Now, now, Pete, time enough for that. How about having a drink with me. I have a bottle right here.

The office looks quite proper, doesn’t it? It’s about time we had a sense of uniformity around us. Kind of nice to get back to work, wouldn’t you say?” His smile came over the full lips. The bottle was Ballantine Scotch.

While they talked the rest of the company was getting situated. Twohig, having dumped his gear in the farthest corner of a hut most distant from the orderly room, and escaping Biggs by doing so, set out to increase his capital. Lady Luck sat on his shoulder and he wanted her there for the long ride, trying not to let her change her fickle mind. Biggs, having lost his chance to bunk near the only man in the outfit who paid him any mind, sought out the newest man, Private Kranske, and bunked beside him. Kranske only nodded when Biggs said, “Mind?” when he dropped his gear. Kranske only nodded. Biggs had no talent at all in wearing his corporal stripes. The outfit, down to the last man, often wondered in what kind of outfit Biggs’ stripes had been earned.

Dawn kicked open the door of a furnace, but Twohig, as soon as he had set his section in motion, sat down to his first blackjack game since Ceylon. He won and he won big. No one could touch him. The aces fell on kings and queens, on tens and jacks; treys fell on nines paired. Invincible he felt and took great risks.

But he continued to win. Even when his eyes became blurry and he was not sure sometimes what cards lay face down in front of him, he could not lose. Pain, the sole intruder, came like slivers or small arrows in the back of his neck. He thought it was anxiety and believed it to be a sign of the big streak. Fate or Lady Luck had kissed him a big French kiss and he dare not put it aside.

“Hit me again.” A five to make it three of a kind. “Kick it once more.” There couldn’t be a face card in the whole deck. Trey for eighteen. “Again.” The big one for nineteen. Not enough. “Kick.” Big deuce. “All mine, man. All mine.”

On and on he went for a whole week and walked like a banker from one game to the next. Redmond had tabs on him the whole time and even had an idea that Twohig’s winnings were as astronomical as reputed to be. But Redmond, with incredible foresight and the great deal of knowledge gleaned from Sara’s letter, sat and waited.

The one thing he did not know was Charlie Twohig was seriously ill. But not even Charlie Twohig knew that. Luck and hot blood, Twohig believed, went together like two fat people dancing, uncomfortable but together.

When at the end of the brutal days, Twohig lay soaking in his bunk and strange formations were working in his blood, Captain Redmond thought about Sara Twohig and how her mail would soon improve.

Those first nights, when the demon of heat struck at him in wholesale measure, Redmond dreamed he stood over Sara Twohig and smiled down at her. There was no end to the good that a man could do for a woman.

Business came. The dead and the dying, like lost legions in a forest of night, called with frightening rapidity. The range of the –nth Graves Registration Company was far and wide and it was not uncommon to see one of their number climb into a jeep with a rubber bag, a shovel and a record book and set off for a long trip. At times it was a fighter pilot that had flown his craft into the side of a mountain. Other times it was the pilot and co-pilot of a larger craft that had crashed with a planeload of coolies when the engines failed over the hot Indian hills. The company dressed and undressed daily, served as bearers, marked records in triplicate, played Taps, lowered chilled bodies into permanent and semi-permanent graves, and otherwise found their roles in the global war that raged wildly around them.

But Charlie Twohig goldbricked.

“Captain,” Lt. Tozzi said, his voice hardly masking his hatred of Twohig, “it’s a friggin’ shame if we let Twohig continue the way he is. Hasn’t done a day’s work since we hit this place. Everybody thinks he’s

got it made and we’re a bunch of dummies.”

Redmond sat back in his chair, heard the splash of water on the khus-khus tattie, waved his hand as if he were brushing off flies. “He’s all mine, Lieutenant. Twohig’s all mine! He’s one problem in this company that I’ll deal with in my own way.” The mysterious grin was again on the ugly face and Tozzi thought he looked more like a sneak thief each day. Redmond was hiding something from him and it was not right. He was, after all, his right hand man, as he considered himself.

Redmond saw the hurt-puppy look on Tozzi’s face. “Rest easy, Lieutenant, Twohig’s in the best possible hands,” and his sly grin further agitated the young officer. All the young lieutenant needed was a parting word.

“Luck, Lieutenant, is not what makes the world go around. You remember that. Luck is for the birds, as they say.” His large over-exposed eyes stared into his empty glass and a malicious joy swam in them.

Again Tozzi thought Redmond the ugliest man in the world. On quick heels the young officer turned and left the orderly room Luck! Luck! Luck! Redmond could not hate any other word in the language as much as Luck. Luck did not bring the good pilots over the Hump. It was guts and ingenuity. And Luck did not bring his women to him. Far more important was his ability to discover what they really wanted from a man. What they wanted, he gave them, and he patted the letter in his breast pocket. Without ever meeting Sara Twohig, he knew what she wanted. He reminded himself to make a note that Tozzi should never be recommended for a command of his own.

In the middle of their third week in Ledo and when the heat was fiercer than ever before, Charlie Twohig’s streak was still intact. GIs from all over came to see him play and went away with awe and disbelief riding on their faces. None of them noticed that the big winner Charlie Twohig was a pathological museum operating on the compulsion of sheer distress because time might be running out on him. None of them, or Charlie, knew the germs and microbes gathering force in him were bent on his annihilation.

Infantrymen passing to or from the front lines through Ledo envied him and believed he of all men had it made. A legend was continuing to build and they carried it to the lap of the war with the usual hyperbolic descriptions. Neither did the nights and the impenetrable darkness swimming like dark thick webs cramp his style or his luck.

Merrill’s Marauders, henchmen of intrigue and sudden hits and compelling bravery, had passed between the tea plantations where the company was located (in the darkness like Sicilian vespers being replayed). They had their own challenger who dropped half his platoon’s money into Twohig’s hands, then passed silently on to a Burmese destiny.

And Redmond waited. Little disturbed him. The war floated around like a host of discernible balloons in a wind that did not touch him directly. Sara Twohig was in his blood as strong as the unseen enemies were in her husband’s blood. Even the appearance of the legendary Doctor Gordon Seagraves, with his corps of nurses and native doctors, failed to attract his attention. Redmond just knew that the war was cleaner and more just than it appeared to eyes other than his.

In their sixth week in Ledo, Twohig lost his first game. The tall sergeant, a stranger to Graves Registration, announced himself to the gambler at dusk of the eventful day. His name was Paul Cask and he was thin as a weed with a potential of fibrous energy latent about him. He had a high forehead and the thin lines of his eyes almost merged above a sharp nose. Those who watched him play swore he hardly drew a breath, saw his lack of expression, saw the steady, quick hands at the cards.

Now it was that goldbricking Charlie Twohig, fully aware of the aliens in his body, did not allow himself a visit to the aid station. Fate needed such small impetus to alter her choices.

“How come you ain’t been by before, Cask?”

“Busy.” Cask had Biggs’ habit, barely moving his lips when he spoke. Twohig had not liked him from the start.

“Been winning?”

“Some. We have turns.” Cask was cold and emotionless. Twohig knew the contrast, for the fever was on him once more. The pain of it was in little digs at the back of his neck and thousands of pygmy spears pierced his kin. For the first time in a long while he thought about Ohio and being captured in Sara’s arms. It all seemed so far away, so unreal, as if it had never existed at all. Azard Phanitar, the scrawny little houseboy, sat in a far corner and stared at him. In his young but knowing mind he was aware that Twohig was a battleground of unseen but powerful forces. Too often he had seen the eyes of the foreigners when the sickness came. He did not know how to tell the big money man. He was only a boy, after all, and this was a man’s war.

Cask won steadily and a violent hatred toward him built in Twohig. “What’s your job, Cask?”

“I’m in the motor pool.”

“Know what my job is?” Twohig’s eyes were burning and he thought he was back on the Red Sea. “No.” “G.R., that’s Graves registration. We bury guys. Sometimes in just a raincoat when a bunch of guys get hit in one place and we can’t get them to a cemetery in the rear. Know how we identify the bodies?”

“Dog tags.” Cask’s eyes had not even moved. He looked like an Aztec statue.

“How we use them is the trick. Know the one with the groove in the edge?”

“Yuh. Know it.”

Twohig’s eyes were redder and far more irritating. “That one’s the clincher.” He laughed forcibly. “We stick the groove between two of the top teeth, and then know what? we kick his damn jaw shut!”

Cask stood up. “I’ll be back tomorrow when you feel like playing instead of talking.” Spinning on his heels, he left quickly.

Twohig kicked the table over after he had gone. “Just who in the hell does he think he is!”

Biggs, on the sidelines, knew a moment of joy. “Tall and mean, Twig. Just tall and mean and cool as hell, all’s he is.”

“Just keep your damn mouth shut, Biggs. I’m going to spend the night planning your day tomorrow.”

Azard Phanitar, in the far corner, knew only too well how Twohig was going to spend his night.

A half dozen times Cask came back and he continued to win. The games went from blackjack to fivecard draw to stud poker. Twohig went into a panic and the word spread and the infantry grinned and said, “When your number’s up, you can’t do much about it.” Twohig was but another fatality of the war. His bankroll was being tapped by Cask. When he could, he got into other games and won, but Cask alone had the evil eye on him. Twohig was unable to refuse him a game.

Cask became the fulcrum, the point of balance, and when Twohig won, there came Cask quietly and coolly to take his money.

The sicker Twohig became, the harder he fought the disease. And the more he won from other hands, the more Cask took from him. Never a fist was raised at their table, but Twohig would scream at his opponent. “If you ever die out there, you son of a bitch, I hope you rot and never get a grave.”

“Don’t you want to kick my jaw shut, Twig?” The cold face without expression looked back at Twohig with complete disregard.

For nearly two months Twohig fought his disease and Cask. At times he had no knowledge of how he fared, so immense his hatred and the compulsion to win. Around him war was a great unknown that did not involve him, and Sara had long ceased to be. She had never been real. It was only a dream. Reality was a deck of cards and a man named Cask who never flinched and never held back.

And one night the war came for real. Lt. Tozzi, so often on the sidelines talking to Corporal Biggs, came into Twohig’s hut and said, “Sergeant, we just got a call. A man went over the rim in a jeep at Ketchi. I think it’s about time you had a mission. You’ve been goldbricking enough.”

“Hell, Lieutenant, I ain’t feeling too good. I think I’ll have to go on Sick Call in the morning.”

“You’ll take this trip, Sergeant, and that’s an order.” Tozzi was unable to mask his hatred of the sergeant.

“I’m sick, I tell you! I ought to go on Sick Call right now.” Now it was he knew the pain as a fierce and frightening enemy.

Tozzi could not hold it back. “You go out there and get him, Twohig, and bring him in. It’s your friend Cask.”

The gambler leaped from his bunk. “I ain’t going nowhere on the face of this earth to get that bastard!

He can rot for all I care.” His face was in Tozzi’s face and colored with hate. No one could make him go out there and bring in that rotten bastard.

Biggs broke the game wide open as he leaped off his bunk. Tozzi could not hold him back. The rat began to scream. “Big gambler! Big stupid gambler! Don’t you know who the hell Cask is? He’s a real pro.

The old man sicced him on you! Your old lady’s broke and the old man sicced him on you.”

“Shut up, Biggs, before I kill you!” Now the pain came with weird intensities and fully known in his head. The needles behind his eyes began to jab! … jab! … jab!

Biggs had been targeting long enough, Hadn’t he been played for a sucker as long as he could remember. “You got taken, big gambler. You got taken! Can’t you see it? You got taken. Cask’s all pro. The old man picked him out. Your old lady wrote to him.”

Who wrote to who? What was he talking about? “Who wrote?”

“Your old lady. She wrote to Redmond.” His old lady? Sara? How long ago was she…how far away?

What was Biggs saying? Sara, Sara so good in bed, what’s happening? His eyes were killing him and the rat Biggs stood in front of him staring into his eyes. The pain was shattering behind his eyes.

“She wouldn’t do that to me…she wouldn’t. I don‘t believe you. So help me, Biggs, I’m going to kill you.” He stepped toward him and Tozzi saw murder in Twohig’s eyes.

“It’s true, Twohig. Your wife wrote to the captain and he arranged the whole thing. He knew you couldn’t beat Cask all the time. He’s been sending the money home to your wife, every dime that Cask won.”

Charlie Twohig lay down in his bunk and the fever and the pain leaped at him and he thought he could never stand it through another night.

After midnight, with an insane idea in his mind, Charlie Twohig the gambler took a rubber bag and a shovel and climbed into a jeep. Next day a patrol found them, Cask and his retriever, on the side of a hill.

Twohig had gotten the body halfway up the hill. The entrenching shovel was stuck in the ground and Cask’s body was pushed against it so it couldn’t roll down the hill. Twohig lay on top of the body and the fever and the dreams were gone.

Redmond at first was disturbed. He had no idea that Twohig was sick. Then he realized: it was his piece de resistance. He had helped. She would be grateful and receive him properly. He went to sleep dreaming about Ohio, the lake, the smoldering voice, only after he realized luck truly did exist. ###

80

Song of Myself

I have said that the soul is not more than the body, And I have said that the body is not more than the soul, And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one’s self is, And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud, And I or you pocketless of a dime may purchase the pick of the earth, And to glance with an eye or show a bean in its pod confounds the learning of all times, And there is no trade or employment but the young man following it may become a hero, And there is no object so soft but it makes a hub for the wheel’d universe, And I say to any man or woman, Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes.

And I say to mankind, Be not curious about God, For I who am curious about each am not curious about God, (No array of terms can say how much I am at peace about God and about death.)

I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least, Nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself.

Why should I wish to see God better than this day?

I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then, In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass, I find letters from God dropt in the street, and every one is sign’d by God’s name, And I leave them where they are, for I know that wheresoe’er I go, Others will punctually come for ever and ever.

Walt Whitman

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