When Ollie found the body in the dumpster what he thought was: That’s George Hill. Somebody killed George Hill and put him in the dumpster, he said out loud. Ollie had driven the garbage truck for twelve years and he knew every dumpster in town. When the police arrived, he explained to them how a lot of people used this one. People from the shops on Main Street, kids wandering through the alley, people from the low woodsided apartment buildings across the way. He explained how he had been coming around the corner into the alley when he saw the white thing dangling out from under the lid and knew, without knowing even now how he knew, that it was a hand. Daniels asked him if he wanted to take the day off, and Ollie said no.

You were friends with George, weren’t you? Daniels asked.

Yeah, said Ollie. I knew George since first grade.

Why don’t you take the rest of the day off, said Daniels.

I’ll finish the route, said Ollie. I’m a bit behind now, a couple hours, I guess. But I shouldn’t run up any overtime because I’ve been fast every day this week so far. Won’t cost you any money.

Daniels made a sour face.

It might help him if you didn’t break his routine, said one of the cops.

Ollie looked at the cop. He was a tall kid with orange hair and a long delicate chin.

I’ll finish the route, Ollie said.

The cop looked back. He had a loose dumb mean smile. He had watery eyes. They looked at each other. Ollie climbed up into the cab and backed out of the alley, driving as he always did, not fast but not slow either, past the bumper of one of the cop cars with eight inches to spare, past the brick of the building on the other side with a foot and a half to spare, out onto the bright snowy street and back into the rhythm of the route. George Hill, he thought. Dead as clay. Someone beat the everloving shit out of him. In a dumpster like a bag of trash. George Hill who gave me his carrot sticks that whole year we were in third grade. Corduroys and the mud smell of the playground. And the sun is sharp on the snow and the wind can cut your head off if you stand up too tall. When they say that the earth spins, maybe this is what they mean. And no one notices. Look at the cars and the snowplow. Janet Henderson going shopping. None of them has noticed.

He did not cry but the raw and awful feeling rose up in him and he felt how far things could be cut back. And if they cut you back too far, what happens? But he was nearly invincible in the truck. In the liquid sound of the engine inside of the cab and the smell of the cheap old vinyl. In how the turn onto St. Clair pulls you towards the door and how there’s the shot between the telephone poles going into the alley there that feels perfect when you line it up right, like some kind of key going into a lock. How the hill behind the college pulls at you going down and the big engine lightens a bit, gets to relax. How the forks slide into the fork slots on the dumpster and how the machine settles in that moment when it begins to lift, like a weightlifter gathering his strength, and how the wheel feels compressed by all the years of your hands, and the three chips in the windshield and the crunch of the snow when you have the window open, and George Hill is dead.

 

*

 

Eric was doing drugs in the apartment with his friends when Ollie got back from work. Ollie joined them. He had a chair where he always sat, a red chair with black designs stitched onto it that reminded him of dragons, dragons and strange hills and some kind of overgrown flowers or vines. There was a whole world in that black on red to be explored. He sat in the chair and whatever drugs they had they shared with him, because he paid the rent and paid Eric’s tuition and Eric was the leader of their little group. And because they all thought Ollie was crazy and would beat the shit out of them. On the weekends and sometimes during the week they would sit around and eat the acid that looked like the plastic framework that had held boardgame pieces together when Ollie was a kid, before the pieces were taken out of that plastic and got lost. The guy who made the acid was a fourth grade teacher. Sometimes when he brought it by he would stand in the hallway and look into the apartment like he was lonely and Ollie would give him the money and he would hand Ollie the pieces of acid wrapped in tinfoil like always and they would stand. If you want to come in, Ollie would think, you should ask. But you never will and so you’ll just give me the drugs and I’ll give you the money and we’ll stand here in the doorway and then you’ll mumble something and go back to your drug stuff and your fourth graders and I’ll go back into my apartment.

When they were high, Eric and his friends had a game they would play where they would text each other pictures of body parts, girls’ or boys’, and try to guess what the part was and who it belonged to. A pink patch of skin holding little pores. Something pale, beginning to wrinkle, with thin downy hair. Ollie didn’t have a phone, so he sat and watched and felt what was happening inside him. Felt himself peeling away from the things his eyes saw or his hands felt. Or they would smoke some speed and go out into the town to find a party and Ollie would sit in his chair until they were gone and then take off his shoes and walk across the carpet to feel it, do slow pushups and feel the heavy stretch of the muscles that connected his chest bone to his arms, work his way like a delicate rock climber from one piece of furniture to the next without ever touching the floor. Feed the fish and watch their nervousness, watch the twitch of their muscles under their scaly skin, scrape the algae from the sides of the tank. Take the turtle from his tank and lie on the floor with that turtle on his chest, looking at that bald face. That green face.

 

*

 

At five his alarm went off and he rose and dressed and went into Eric’s room.

Time to get up, he said.

Jesus fucking fuck, said Eric.

You got class in three hours.

It’s Professor goddamn Marcus. English, and he didn’t give us any work.

You have two classes today and I can pick you up and put you at the table or you can get up yourself.

Fuck you, Ollie, said Eric and Ollie walked over to the bed and Eric swore again and rolled over and thumped heavily down onto the floor. He was still dressed. He crawled past Ollie’s legs into the hallway and then into the bathroom.

You got three minutes in there, said Ollie. And then it’s time to work.

Ollie drank his coffee and ate his breakfast standing, watched Eric’s head nodding up and down over his book. He put down his mug and slapped Eric on the ear.

You know, Ollie, you dumb son of a bitch, I could go live somewhere else.

Ollie slapped him again, hard this time.

Eric picked up his pen and pointed it like a knife at Ollie.

Our great grandfather, said Ollie.

No. Not this morning. There is, literally, some kind of crippled dwarf with a wrecking ball right behind my eyes. Do you know what that feels like? He is beating the shit out of my head with that ball. From the inside. Do you know what that feels like, Ollie?

Our great grandfather, lived in a sod house. He cut the sod out of the ground and stacked it up to make a house.

You dumb moron. He didn’t.

He owned cows, and during the bad times he spent his day cutting the pokers off of cactus and feeding that soft inside stuff to the cows so they wouldn’t die.

Spines. The things on cactus are called spines. And that entire story is bullshit.

He did all of that so I could drive the truck and you could go to college.

The crazy thing is that Dad made that whole goddamn story up one night, to get you off his back. He just made it up, Ollie. What about all the other things he told you? All the things about how Grandma was a gypsy and all that? About how his uncle was a bootlegger?

Truth is in the blood.

What?

Truth is in the blood and you have it and I have it and that’s what our great grandfather did.

I don’t even know what that means, Ollie.

You can live anywhere you want, but if you want to live here you’re going to study. My head feels real bad too. Start taking your notes.

 

*

 

He walked through the darkness to the yard through the falling snow with his hands in his pockets. He didn’t dare let Eric see that he didn’t think that the stories were true either. He didn’t really think that much of anything was true, but he couldn’t let Eric see that. He didn’t dare. He didn’t dare let Eric not do his work. But Eric wasn’t a kid anymore. He only had two and a half years of college left and then he would probably leave.

Ollie walked steadily through the snow. He was not a tall man but he was a very dense one, as if something massive had been compressed by its own internal gravity to form him. A planet, maybe, or a redwood tree. When he was sixteen and their mother was still alive he’d been competing in a pro rodeo event over the Fourth of July and had been kicked in the head by a bronc. The scars were like the stitches on a baseball beneath the stubble of his hair. People believed that he had only been different after the accident but as far as he was concerned that was just a trick of their memory. He had always been the way he was, and he always would be. When he looked at the green face of the turtle on his chest, or at the strange protuberant eyes of the fish, or at Eric lying in his bed or at the face of the horse looking back at him as he was falling in that last instant before the bell rang that single drowning song in his head, he saw how they were all the same as him. And yet none of them was him.

 

*

 

At the yard he remembered George Hill. He stood for a while looking at the snow pouring down around the chain link fence and then went in through the gate. The garage had its smell and its feel but there was something different to it. Or maybe the difference was that there was no difference and there never had been. He punched his card on the old green box, 5:45, and looked up at all the other punch-in times. 5:45. 5:44. 5:45. 5:46. 5:45. 5:45. All the way to the top. Never more than one minute one way or the other. He squinted and then put the card back in its slot and took the keys off the board. He looked over at the windows of the office. Daniels was at his desk and Brian Murphy, the mayor, was sitting in the chair across from him. They were laughing about something, their faces red and wrinkled, like silent plastic laughing faces behind the glass. Murphy came by once a month in the early morning like this, pretending to be doing something other than what he was doing, which was taking a paper bag of money from Daniels.

Nickels and dimes, Daniels had said to Ollie one morning after Murphy had just left, dimes and a nickel. And every time he gets me, it sure does tickle.

And now Ollie saw George Hill’s face again. He touched the memory very carefully, built each detail strongly against the tide of forgetting. He saw him at recess with his green corduroy pants rolled up so they wouldn’t get muddy, white socks and those shoes with the velcro instead of laces. He worked on those details too, as he had worked on all the details of all the memories he had. Standing with his hands in his pockets not playing anything because he was too clumsy, the way the kickball sounded against the brick; Ollie turned and went to the truck, walked around it once to check the tires, climbed in and started the engine. He listened to it while it warmed up and he realized that he probably let it warm up for exactly the same number of minutes every morning. Yes. He didn’t own a watch and there was no clock in the cab, but he was suddenly very sure that if someone timed it they would find out that he let the truck warm up for the exact same amount of time every morning.

There is a burden to caring. It did not matter if no one else felt it because he couldn’t help feeling it. And yet it did matter. And the things he had seen people do. The memories he had worked on over and over again to keep them with him. How Jerry Sanders had driven across the line that time to hit the dog who was limping for the safety of the ditch, how Eric had made that girl show them her pussy that night, how Arden McAfee used to put cigarettes out on the back of his own hand, how Tom Baylor hit his sister into the irrigation ditch with the flat of his shovel, how Miss Muliken used to laugh at George Hill when he couldn’t spell, how Freed Schlessinger knocked that old guy’s teeth out with that bottle in The Long View, how Julia Drayton made fun of Eric until he’d get himself put in detention instead of being in class with her, how Chris and Laura Redtail’s dad used to forget to pick them up after winter basketball practice, how Ollie himself had broken Arden McAfee’s nose and dislocated his shoulder.

He though of George Hill in the dumpster and he worked on each of these memories and more, all of them he could find. If you forget things it’s like they never happened. And if you forget how they feel then you can’t care.

But there was something different now. Something different between George Hill and all the rest. A kind of anger. Because George Hill had never deserved any of it. The rest of us did shitty things to each other always, back and forth. But not George Hill. He didn’t have a mean bone in him, he laughed at the joke even when it was on him, he gave shit away to people if they needed it without ever caring if he needed it more. And now he was gone and the rest of them were left behind to chew on themselves and each other.

 

*

 

And it was when he was thinking about George Hill like this that he crossed the railroad tracks and the headlights found the strange marks in the new snow. A commotion in the whiteness and then some kind of shuffling dragging marks leading away from it, past the old tin shed and into the narrow alley between the shed and the long brick building that held the auto repair place and the welding place. He slowed the truck. The tracks were only a little bit filled in by the snow that was still falling. He stopped when he could see longwise down the alley, but it was too dark to make anything out. He knew what had happened, but his brain was telling him something different. George Hill, he thought, my brain’s trying to tell me that George Hill crawled into that alley. But I know he didn’t, he said out loud. His lips went dry. He knew that George Hill wasn’t in the alley. He opened the door and stood on the metal step and leaned the seat forward, took the long heavy tire iron from the metal clamps on the back wall of the cab. His shadow hung against the whiteness of the falling snow when he walked in front of the headlights. At the opening of the alley he stopped. Please, he said, don’t let it be him. He took a deep breath. He looked up at the blank sky, and the falling snow hit his lashes and made him blink. The feeling passed. The deer was fifteen feet into the alley. He could hear it breathing when he got close. It was exhausted but still tried to drag itself feebly away from him. Its back had been broken. Its back legs lay at strange angles. He could hear it breathing. Its front legs beat softly against the snow and it took great gasps of air. He grabbed one of the points of its antler with his hand and felt the ridges there, the very faint warmth that he did not know if he felt or imagined. He forced the head around and swung the tire iron and felt the impact travel up his arm each time he made contact.

He let the head gently to the ground and walked back out of the alley to the truck, pausing to pick up a handful of snow to clean off the iron. George Hill, he thought, I am still here and you are dead as dirt. He wiped his hand on the heavy canvas of his overalls. In the cab it was warm and quiet and he put his forehead against the steering wheel.

 

*

 

When he got home Eric was asleep. Ollie took off his boots and left them in their spot by the door. He hung his jacket and his overalls in the closet and then took a long shower. He fed the fish and the turtle. He took the turtle out of its tank and it explored the living room while he changed the water in its swimming pool. He watered the plant in the window, and spent some time cleaning the little white bugs off of it with q-tips. He sat in his red and black chair and listened to what was happening in the other apartments. In front of him the dog was awake, chewing something in the kitchen floor. He could hear the rattling sounds. Behind him someone was watching television, the court show they watched almost every afternoon, where people tried to get money from each other in front of the judge. After a while he heard the man who lived beneath them get home from work, slam the front door the way he did sometimes when he was going to pick a fight with his girlfriend. The man slammed another door in his apartment and then the fight started. It was still snowing and the darkness had come back into the world and Ollie listened to the argument until Eric woke up, You’ve never loved me, you only love my money. Tragic, fucking hilarious, because you don’t have any money. Then why don’t you leave? Leave this palace? Why would I? I’ll never leave, I love it here. When Eric woke up Ollie felt relieved, because he had been coming close to something he didn’t want to come close to. They made a frozen pizza and smoked a couple of joints and watched a show about the houses of professional basketball players and then a show about a guy who went around finding the dirtiest jobs in the world and doing them and then a show about celebrities playing practical jokes on each other. The pot dragged on him and all of these shows seemed to take place in a world that was not his, which was of darkness and snow and the bare walls of their apartment. Ollie went to bed and at five his alarm went off and he rose and dressed and went into Eric’s room.

*

 

And he knew there was more coming. He could feel it approaching, from all different directions. There was nothing he could do to stop it. Thursday afternoon towards the end of his route he saw the two Indians in the alley between Biernbaums. They had come down from a reservation in Montana a couple of years ago and could be good people to buy from and Ollie knew George Hill smoked speed with them sometimes. Ollie drove past and saw them sitting stoned and their hands were up on their knees and their hands were beat up and swollen, all four of those hands, one after another sitting up on those four knees. Those hands were like bruised little faces staring at him. One of the Indians was wearing a big silver buckle. George Hill had worn a big silver buckle, his high school championship team roping buckle. It showed two horseman swinging lassos and chasing a calf. Ollie drove and let those things sink into his mind. He backed the truck into place in the shed and walked over to the time cards and he felt the anger in him like a thick taproot. George Hill wouldn’t give up that belt buckle for anything.

Daniels was standing by the time card machine with Jerry when Ollie came up.

End of the week, huh? You must be tired.

But you can come in and drive tomorrow, can’t you, even though it’s your day off?

Ollie looked at them and they had those smiles on their faces.

Jesus christ, I’m joking. You got to stand up for yourself, guy. Don’t let no one fuck with your off-days.

Daniels waited for a minute, but it was obvious that he wasn’t done. Unless it’s me, he said.

Ollie held himself tightly and punched his card and because it was the end of his last work week of the month he took the card and put it in the steel box screwed to the wall that said IN on it. He turned to walk out of the shed.

See you tomorrow then, called Daniels and he and Jerry were both laughing now and Ollie kept walking.

 

*

 

When he got home there were a lot of people over. He took off his boots and went through the people to his room to change and then brought his coat and overalls back out to the closet and went into the kitchen for a drink of water. Eric was at the table with a spoon and a cereal bowl, crushing pills.

Hey there Ollie, how’s the trash business? Eric asked. His eyes were cloudy and there was nothing behind them.

Ollie went to the closet and put on the jacket that he didn’t work in and put on his boots and went back outside. He walked aimlessly at first. Then he began to make a pattern, walking all the way up one ally to the edge of the college campus and then crossing the street and walking down the next alley all the way to the highway and then crossing the street and walking the next alley all the way back to campus. He knew these buildings and these dumpsters. It was not snowing today but simply gray and he walked up and down until it was dark but the walking and the alleys didn’t make him feel comfortable and worn out like they usually did. He didn’t know what he was going to do with his day off tomorrow. Most of them he spent cleaning the apartment and shopping for the week. Sometimes he went to a movie. But right now none of that felt right, and something like fear had begun to build in him. What would he do tomorrow if things still felt this way? What would he do if none of the things he ordinarily did made him feel like they usually did? It was George Hill that was bothering him. He said it aloud. I know what it is. It’s George Hill that’s bothering me. They killed him. He didn’t deserve it. Other people, sure, but not George Hill. He stopped and looked across the highway at the hills. In the summer he liked to walk there, out of town past the fields with their cattle and up into the sagebrush. There was a trickle of water and a few cottonwoods. In the summer it was green and no one ever went back there. Just the cattle sometimes. But now the hills were all gray and the sky was gray and it seemed to Ollie that if you walked in that direction you would never reach anything. Just the grayness. What the hell, he said. What the hell. He pulled his collar up high and turned to walk home.

 

*

 

And at the apartment something was wrong. He knew that as soon as he opened the door. It was quiet and there was no one there but something was wrong. He went through the kitchen without taking off his boots and through the living room. He checked the bathroom and he checked Eric’s room. But the door to his own room was closed.

My mind, he said aloud, standing at the door to his room, is telling me that George Hill is in my room. But he’s not. He stood and looked at the door. There was a small sound from inside. It was a white door, and looking at it he could see very faintly the marks the paintbrush had left. He remembered the night he heard that George Hill had won the team roping high school championship. Ollie had been thrown in the bronc riding qualifiers that fall and had not made the championship. He was drinking a milkshake outside of Diary Queen when Tim Downy came over to the curb where he was sitting and told him that he’d heard that George Hill and Marvin Andersen had won the championship. Ollie had felt the pride go through him like sunlight. He had always liked George Hill, and now George Hill had won something. Ollie remembered how George Hill had always worn corduroys when he was a kid because he wasn’t from a ranch but from Georgia, and how that was funny, and how he spoke with an accent when he was a kid and how he gave Ollie his carrot sticks every day for that whole year. Standing at the door he worked his way through those memories one by one. He built them up fresh. And once, Ollie remembered, once George Hill gave him his socks because Ollie’s smelled terrible and had holes and hadn’t been washed in a long time. They threw Ollie’s in the dumpster and George Hill went home barefoot in his shoes and Ollie went home with socks that felt thick and new even though George Hill had been wearing them all day already. This was a memory he had not worked on in a long time, but here it was again. Funny how that could happen.

He looked at that white door for a long time and then he went into his room. It was dim without the light on and at first he wasn’t seeing right and then his eyes adjusted. There was a baby lying on his bed. It was asleep and had one fist clenched and raised over its head. It gave a small cry and went on sleeping. Ollie stood looking at it.

 

*

 

It was full dark outside. The neighbor next door was watching a show about all the different ways to trick out your car. Paint it. Raise it. Put a flat screen in the dashboard. Ollie sat in a kitchen chair next to the bed, watching the baby. On the floor next to him sat a cereal bowl with milk in it and a square he had cut from a clean teeshirt. The baby seemed to like to sleep with one arm or the other raised above its head with the hand making a fist. Sometimes it lowered one by its waist and raised the other. Sometimes it made sounds. He knew he would probably have to pick it up when it woke.

Then it opened its eyes and rolled them around without moving its head much and began to yowl. He licked his lips. Okay, he said. He got onto his knees beside the bed and made a point out of the center of the swatch of cloth and dipped it into the milk and lowered it to the baby’s mouth. The baby turned its head away and cried harder. He tried again, leaning over the bed on his elbows, but the baby did not want the milk. Then he realized that the smell he had been smelling was from the baby. The baby shit itself, he said. It looked over at the sound of his voice. You have a dirty ass, he told it. He looked at the baby and its diaper and then stood up and went to the little closet in the hall and got a towel. He got scissors from the kitchen and a roll of tape and stood above the crying baby again, trying to get an image in his head. Then he cut the towel in half and cut two round pieces out of the half.

He put the towel on the bed and picked up the baby, with one hand under its shoulders and the other under its legs and carried it gently into the bathtub. The diaper came open just like he’d seen it would, the little tabs pulling away just as he had seen, and the baby’s shit smelled truly potent but he had smelled a lot of things in a lot of dumpsters and it was a girl and it had shit all over it, and Ollie could remember once when he’d shit his pants as a kid and had taken off his underwear and thrown them in the alley and the way his mother had screamed at him when he told her he’d lost them. The memory came at him fast and out of nowhere. Another one that he had not worked on. How the fuck can you lose your underwear, Ollie? He felt his cheeks burning. I lost them because I shit my pants, he said to the baby.

He focused his eyes and then cleaned the baby’s ass, trying to be gentle, and then washed it and dried it with a towel. It wasn’t crying now but was watching him and he saw how strange his hands looked against it, brown and cracked and oversized, clumsy, like he’d never seen them before. The baby lay on the towel on the bathroom floor. It had little blue eyes and tiny fingers and toes. You poor stupid baby, he said. Then he took it into his bedroom again and laid it on top of the scrap of towel he’d cut up and tucked the towel into a diaper shape and taped it closed. The baby cried some more and he tried to feed it some milk and eventually it learned to drink the milk out of the cloth and it cried some more and he carried it out to see the turtle and the fish and it cried some more and then went to sleep. He sat in the chair with the lights off watching it, a faint shadow in the glow of the streetlight.

 

*

 

It was very late when Eric and the girl came in. Ollie heard the door open and heard their stumbling shuffling footsteps and their laughter. He stood and went out of his room and closed the door behind him. They stopped when they saw him. They were stoned or drunk.

How’s business Ollie? Eric asked.

There’s a baby here, said Ollie.

And here I didn’t even know you were pregnant.

I’ve been taking care of it.

Oh, said the girl. It’s like a fairytale. Big old Ollie taking care of my baby.

She giggled and Ollie stepped across the room and hit her. She bounced off the wall with her eyes rolling and whimpered at him and he hit her again. Eric put his hands on Ollie and Ollie threw him aside and stood over the girl. She was bloody. It had felt good to see her fly like that.

There are so many things you don’t want to know about, he said.

Eric said it would be funny, she said through the blood.

You bitch, said Eric. What about all that shit about how you needed just one night for yourself?

Goddamnit, she said, Eric, get him off of me.

Ollie pointed down at her. You never want to know.

The baby’s not going to die, you dumb asshole, said Eric. Not in one night. It’s good for you, too, learning how to take care of it.

They heard the sound of the baby crying in Ollie’s bedroom.

I could kill you, Ollie said to the girl. Easy.

You sick fuck, she yelled up at him. Her face looked like a big ripe plum now.

Go get your fucking kid, Eric told her. We’re getting out of here.

Go fuck yourself, she said.

But she got to her feet, using the doorknob of the closet to help her.

Go get the baby, said Eric. Ollie, I’m leaving. You’re on your own, motherfucker.

Ollie stood in the middle of the room while Eric got a coat out of the closet and put it on and waited for the girl. She came out of the room with the baby.

Your diaper didn’t work, moron, she said. There’s shit all over your bed. She put the baby on the couch and got a towel to wrap it in and then put on her jacket. Ollie watched the baby. It seemed exhausted and lay making a terrible face, looking around. Eric said something that Ollie didn’t hear.

I’m going to sue your ass, the girl said to Ollie.

You have class tomorrow, Ollie said to Eric.

Eric looked at him for a second and then began to laugh.

You have homework.

Jesus christ, said Eric.

Ollie stood in the living room and they took the baby and went out.

 

*

 

It was his day off. Ollie had slept for an hour and gotten up at five and eaten breakfast and done the laundry. He had folded the sheets and towels and folded the hourglass-shaped diaper towel and put it with the rags on the lowest shelf in the closet by the bathroom. He sat in his chair. The apartment was so silent. Outside it was snowing again. Ollie sat and he thought about a lot of things. He worked on a lot of memories. He could have kept the baby and taken care of it. No you couldn’t, he said. He listened to the nothingness around him. He watched the fish and the turtle. They had their own patterns, the fish in the way that they swept in rising coils around the walls of the tank, the turtle who lay for a long time and then moved a little and then lay for a long time more. They had faces and eyes too. He sat in the chair. For lunch he made a sandwich and drank a beer. He watched the snow. There was nothing through the snow, nothing past the snow, nothing above or below it.

 

*

 

The next morning Ollie turned right instead of left coming out of the yard. He drove down 19^th Street to where the town spilled out into the land and then he began to drive up and down the alleys. He did not empty any dumpsters. He drove every alley in town and when he reached the far end he turned and retraced his path, up and down through every alley. It was just getting light when he saw the Indians. It had stopped snowing and the world was an even gray. The snow had sloped itself up gently against every building. The Indians were stoned and sitting next to each other by the kitchen door of The Cumbersome Griddle. They were smoking. It occurred to Ollie as he stopped the truck that they might be brothers. They looked very similar. He climbed out of the cab and stood on the step and leaned the seat forward and took the tire iron from its clamps. He went around the front of the truck.

Where did you get that buckle? he asked the one.

My mother gave it to me, the Indian said.

Tell the truth, said Ollie.

Fuck you, hillbilly, said the other Indian. Their knuckles were raw and broken and their eyes were bloodshot. Ollie lifted the tire iron and, as he stepped forward, between the moment he left the side of the truck and the moment he got to the men, he took each and every memory he had and let them all slip into the grayness and the feeling was like that of setting himself free.

 

*

 

When the cops pulled up to the end of the alley they saw the truck and the bodies and big Ollie standing there with the tire iron. One of the cops was twenty and the other was twenty three. The younger one had grown up here and the other had grown up eighteen miles to the east on a ranch outside of a town that didn’t even have a stoplight. They told Ollie not to move but he began to walk towards them.

Goddamnit, Ollie, you stay right there! the younger one yelled.

He did not stop. Even in the bad early morning light they could see the blood on the tire iron.

We will fire on you! screamed the older cop. We will fire!

He did not stop and one of the cops fired a warning shot, and they said later that they could not remember which one it was, and soon they were both shooting.

When it was over, they leaned against the car of the sheriff who had arrived and passed one of the sheriff’s cigarettes back and forth although neither of them smoked.

Goddamnit, said one.

Shit.

He just kept coming.

I never saw anything like that.

Did you fucking see that? It was like on that show COPS or something. He just wouldn’t stop. Meth or PCP or I don’t know what.

They smoked.

How many times do you think you shot him?

I don’t know. I emptied my clip, but I don’t think I hit him every time.

I was shooting all the fuck over the place.

Yeah. I was like Bang, bang, bang, bang.

He made motions with his hands that didn’t really correspond with shooting, but got the point across. They were quiet for a long time. One of the bodies came out of the alley, being carried in a black plastic bag.

I think I shot him after he was already down, said one of the cops quietly. I guess after he was already dead.

I saw.

I think maybe I shot him more than once when he was like that.

I saw, said the other cop. He looked up at the gray sky. I saw you shoot him, he said. Better safe than sorry.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_11/Romanda.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″]

2
perfect
strangers
leave the bar
& walk the sea wall
arm in arm.
he’s known only
as william
& he stinks
pleasantly of pickles
& gin. i’ll wait
until he enters
my wife.
i’ll wait until
he’s done.
then.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_11/Renfroe.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″]

Michael was almost to the gas station that didn’t sell gas.  They sold out-of-date groceries and cold beer. After that he’d best go see Greenie Blake. Better he explain things than let someone else do it.

Sumerville, North Carolina, had plenty of Blakes and none of them worth a damn. The Blakes formed some foul stitch that ran through the town’s tapestry. Some twist in their DNA made them giants. “Shortie,” the shortest Blake, was 6’3″. The Baptist preacher called them Antediluvian before they quit going. The worst was Greenie Blake. Even the Blakes said so.

Michael’d first met Greenie because of Lucille, who lived across the field in a camper with the dirt drive separating her place and Michael’s family. She was eighteen then, dropout. Lived there for free cause it was Blake land, but they were too lazy to work it, and so leased it to the Cox brothers, except for the small plot with that Fleetwood trailer. Michael watched her. He was sixteen and still in school, and his mom hated her, but he watched Lucille lay out in the front yard or at night backlit in the window only wearing a bra. And he loved her. He watched her that day from his kitchen window as she run over to them, half naked. She asked his mom to be let in, said that her brother was coming for her. Michael was sweating as she started kicking the front door, and his mom screamed at her to go away. Finally, Lucille said that if her brother killed her his mom was to blame. When she let Lucille in, she explained that under no circumstances was she to go outside if her brother Donald showed up. They’d gotten into some kind of fight at the family softball game earlier that day. He called her to tell her he was on his way over to kill her.

Sure enough, his Camaro raised the dust as it shot up the drive. Lucille watched from the kitchen window as her brother threw her belongings out of the camper.She pushed Michael’s mom down to burst from their door yelling at him to stop. Donald ran at her like a bull set to rage over the flapping of her oversized T-shirt and the flash of her legs that had sent Michael mad, too. Donald beat her until the cops came. She collapsed waiting on the ambulance. She didn’t press charges-the Blakes never did. The police took Donald in for drunk and disorderly.

After that, Donald said he wished they’d let him kill her. People later said Greenie heard him say it and went straight to see what he’d done to Lucille. It wasn’t a secret how he felt about his cousin. Michael wasn’t allowed outside when Greenie’s Oldsmobile Cutlass was next door, but he could see the huge man leave that camper and come at that old car like it was what had laid up his cousin, and even as he was backing out, he screamed and beat a fist against the dash. They say he went back home where he hid his granddaddy’s gun. Then he said he was going on over to Donald’s telling everyone who wanted to stop him that he was only going to talk. Otherwise, he sure as hell’d be taking that gun. No one tried to stop him. He killed Lucille’s brother with his bare hands. He put the body in that Camaro Donald loved so much and set it on fire. Instead of running, he pulled up a cracked plastic Adirondack chair to wait for the sirens. For months, people would drive by Donald’s place to see that burnt spot and that broke chair.

Inside the gas station, Michael picked up two Millers and asked for some chew.

“You know Greenie’s back,” the clerk said.

“Going to see him now.”

“You walking?”

“Truck’s overheating.”

“I bet it’s your thermostat.”

“I know what it is. I just ain’t had time to fix it.”

“You think it’s a good idea not to have a quick getaway you going to see Greenie.”

“Probably better not to have a vehicle around at all.”

“Probably right, considering last time.”

Outside, he opened one of the beers to drink as he walked on and put the other in the pocket of his Dickies, but it stuck out because of the pistol he had in there.

—–

Greenie pulled the handle to recline the recliner. Shit, he thought, this is nice. The drink he’d just drunk burned its way down his throat. This was what he wanted to do. Just this. For a while anyway.

But then there was a knock on the door.

“Yeah?” he yelled.

Cocker came in. “You not going to believe this.” Cocker been the only one who’d visited him in prison. “Michael’s on his way to see you. That’s what Doug said anyways.”

“When’s he coming?”

“Now. He’s walking.”

“Why don’t you leave then.”

“Sure, sure. Sure you don’t want me to talk to him?”

“No, I’ll do it.”

Cocker just stood there.

“What?” Greenie asked.

“Nothing.” He stood there.

“Yeah?”

“Nothing’s all.” He finally left.

Greenie got up to get the shotgun.

—–

Greenie’s place was in the bend where the road snaked back on itself almost turning completely around the way it’d come, as if the road had been heading toward the Blakes’ and then thought better of it. The land surrounding was ugly brush and some half-ass pines the Blakes had planted themselves in the hopes of selling them the way they clear cut the hardwood forest that’d been there before. This stretch of road made Michael feel like there weren’t no God.

That old black poodle Greenie’s mom kept chained to the porch growled when Michael come up. After he hollered into the house, a “Come on in” came back. Greenie was set up in the recliner, feet on the floor, and had an old 10 gauge shotgun in his lap. He was oiling the stock. He’d grown a scraggly beard that covered some of his face but left enough out in the open so you knew he was hiding acne scars and plain scars from living. And he wore the overalls he always wore before-people weren’t sure how many pairs he owned, but they were all dirty and about worn see-through in places. Part of the oil he worked into the shotgun dribbled on to the overalls leg. Michael took the beer out and shifted it to his left hand, so he could put his right back in his pocket to feel the pistol grip, though he didn’t think it’d much matter.

“I brought you a beer.”

“That’s kind of you.”

“How was prison?”

“It was nothing.”

“You rehabilitated?”

“Time’s up anyway. And I told them I was sorry.”

“But you ain’t?”

“Nope.”

“Where’s your mom?”

“Run off. I guess she was scared I’d be angry the way she ignored me all those years.”

“Was she right?”

“Yeah, I guess she was.”

“What you figuring on doing?”

“Well, I think this house and land will make amends. Probably get a job. Grow a garden.”

“Sounds nice.”

“Don’t it though?”

“Look, Greenie. You may have heard rumors, but I want you to hear it from me. Lucille and me are together.”

He just kept polishing the gun-a little more furiously, it seemed to Michael. Michael put the beer on the card table beside the recliner that held some other cans and a rum bottle.

“You married then?” Greenie asked.

“Not married, not now anyway. Together.”

“Is it because of your kin? Afraid they wouldn’t come to the wedding?”

Michael didn’t say anything to that.

“Or you afraid hers will?”

“I love her, Greenie.”

“She happy?” Greenie asked.

“Seems so to me.”

“That’s all I want.”

“All right then.”

It took all he had to turn his back on the man, but somehow he made it to the door. When Michael’d got to the porch, Greenie called out, “I hear you two got a kid.”

Michael stopped then but didn’t go back in. When he heard Greenie get up and clomp toward the door, he went down a step or two before turning around. He could hear the poodle growl beneath the porch. Greenie took up that door frame. His head brushing the top even stooped over. His middle was big now, but so were his arms. His face broke into what Michael guessed was a grin. And he held that old shotgun.

“Yeah,” Michael said. “A son.”

“What’s his name?”

“It’s Donnie.”

Greenie seemed to consider that. “You know this gun here is my grandpa’s? Nicest thing I own.” He held it out, pointed down but ready for a pull. “I’m getting it ready for your boy.”

“Why is that?”

“He’s the littlest Blake, isn’t he? Not likely I’ll have any of my own.”

“He’s not a Blake. He’s a Starnes.”

“Now, that don’t sound right to me. You won’t make my cousin honest, but you’ll claim her young-un?”

“He’s mine too.”

“I reckon part of him is. You tell Lucille hey for me.”

“I will.”

—–

Lucille on the couch with the place stinking, the Muppet lunch box she kept it in on the floor beside her, and the TV old-people loud, and Donnie in the papasan playing his Gameboy, and she nodded at him a hello.

Michael turned off the TV. “I told you I don’t want you doing it around him.”

“I was nervous. How’d I know you were even coming back?”

“Donnie, go on to your room.” His son’s thumbs beat away at his game until Michael took it from him. The batteries fell out, the case long gone. “Here, get them up and go to the kitchen and tape it with the masking tape in the junk draw.”

The boy went on.

“So what did he do?” Lucille asked.

“He didn’t do anything. He’s not going to do anything.”

“How do you know?”

“He’s just got out of prison.”

“Greenie don’t give a shit.”

“He’s not going to bother us. That’s why I went to talk to him.”

“I just don’t know,” she said. “You don’t know him. When I was growing up, anybody, and I mean anybody, who picked on me, come back later and apologized. The boys had black eyes and bandaged limbs. But the girls were worse. Like Greenie had his hand around the throat of their kitten. I thought that was how family was.”

She made room for him on the couch. He sat and took her into his lap. She pushed her face into his arm.

“He said he wanted you to be happy. I make you happy, right?”

She nodded into his armpit. “Yeah, but how’s Greenie going to know that.”

He pulled her face up to his and kissed her. “He asked about Donnie.”

He could just as well punched her. “Shit. Oh God, shit.”

“It’s fine. He even seemed like he liked the idea.”

She pushed her head into his armpit and cried.

—–

Greenie came up on them at the creek-he’d tracked the boy for days. His parents had finally let him out of their sight to play with some friends. And here they were at the place where the creek came out of the steep ravine to get fat in the middle of this flat. Donnie’s friends lifted the rocks hunting crawfish while Donnie stayed on the bank with his video game. Greenie watched a while to see if the boy would join in, but the only thing he done was crack open one of the crawfish his friends had put in a pail. The way the boy tore at that thing, he examined it, taking it apart almost mechanically, like to see its clockwork innards. Greenie took note that there weren’t any squeamishness in the way he did it. Something Greenie had been afraid of as he watched the boy the last few days, only seeing him bang out on his game. Greenie’d almost thought the boy wasn’t worth his trouble. Donnie put the crawfish remains back in the bucket for his friends to find unexplained.

Greenie snuck behind them. He put his hand on Donnie’s shoulder-the boy jerked and the two down the bank startled. He could imagine the sight, as big as he was dwarfing Donnie and holding him in one hand and the shotgun in the other.

“You boys, run on,” he told them. And they did, splashing up the water. “Calm down now, Donnie. I know your parents.”

“That’s what a bad stranger would say.”

“I guess they would, wouldn’t they? Well, then. How about you hold my gun? A bad man wouldn’t give you his gun, now would he?”

Donnie seemed to think about it. He finally shook his head no.

“All right then. Put your box down.”

The boy stood and tucked his game away. Greenie held out the shotgun and showed Donnie how to hold it.

“Like this now.”

The boy looked like he was holding glass. But when Greenie told him to grip it like he meant it, the boy clutched and threw it up to his shoulder, a natural-like hunter.

“You’re a real Blake.”

“No sir, I’m a Starnes.”

“That’s just what they call you. Inside you’re Blake.”

“I am?”

“Your mom and I are cousins. That means the two of us, we’re cousins.”

“Nuh uh.”

“Why’s that then?”

“You’re too big.”

“I’m a special cousin.”

“I know all my cousins. Janice, Rutha, Mason,” He counted them on his fingers.

“What about your cousin Brent?”

Donnie shook his head.

“They don’t take you over to Edith’s? To your mother’s mother. Your grandmother’s?”

He shook his head.

“I can tell you’re a Blake. You know how?”

He shook his head.

“I see it in you. I see inside you.”

Donnie looked down at his stomach as if he would be able to see his insides.

“You ever shot a gun?”

“No.”

“So all you do is play on your little box?”

“No.”

“Seems like it to me.”

He shook his head all tiny anger.

“All right then, you want to shoot this?” Greenie touched the 10 gauge, and Donnie nodded.

—–

Those two little friends must’ve went and told because here came Michael, red faced and out of breath. Greenie reached down and took the shotgun from the boy.

Donnie ran to Michael. “Daddy, I shot a gun.” He rolled up his sleeve to show off a baseball-sized bruise.

“Is that right?”

“Boy got to learn sometime,” Greenie said.

“Go up to the house. Your mom’s up there.”

Donnie looked back to Greenie.

“It’s all right. Listen to your dad.”

“You’re damn right it’s all right. Get up there now, Donnie.”

They watched him climb out of the ravine.

“He’d be fine if he got his head out of that box.”

“I don’t want you to talk to him with us not around.”

“You ever take him fishing? I had an uncle took me. We rowed out in Lake Lee. Probably have to have a damned license do that now.”

“Did you hear me?”

“You been brave enough, son.” He breached the barrel. The empty shell he tossed on the ground. “You don’t have to keep on.”

“You’re upsetting Lucille.”

Greenie snapped the barrel back, empty. But with the next movement he slammed the butt of the gun into Michael’s face. He stumbled back till he fell flat. Greenie took a couple steps and kicked him in the side.

“You know what’s bad about prison?” Greenie asked.

Michael tried to roll away, but in a couple long strides, Greenie was on the other side, kicking him again.

“All you fucking know are the goddam movies where they ass rape everybody. You think anybody tried to do that to me?”

Michael shook his head, but Greenie brought his old boot down on it.

“Do you?”

“No.” It was barely there. “No.”

“No, they fucking didn’t. And I didn’t want any of that shit.” His boot was on Michael’s neck. “The worst thing was someone telling me what to do. When to eat, when to sleep, when to shit.”

He bent down, Greenie’s beard felt wet with slobber like he’d gone rabid, the froth from him yelling. “You ever tell me what to do again.” He pressed his boot till something in Michael cracked like a pecan shell. “You going to tell them you fell down.”

Michael tried to nod.

“And I’ll be seeing your boy or Lucille anytime I like. I’ll come over for Sunday dinner if I like.”

—–

Greenie started to walk away then. And Michael, his body enough under his control, managed the pistol out of his pocket. But as Greenie took those colossal strides that carried him a challenging distance for a marksman better than Michael, cowardice took hold, made him lower and hide the gun for fear Greenie would turn around and see. It was cowardice that had Michael in the dirt and Greenie silhouetted on the rise, the preacher right, like some kind of last remaining giant that God had forgotten.

—–

“So you fell down?” Lucille asked Michael.

“The ravine, yeah.”

“You have to be kidding me.”

“No. And I’m going to bed. To lay down.”

“How did Greenie take the talking to you gave him?”

“He left before I could.”

“Greenie Blake ran away?”

“It’s not a big deal.”

“He’s alone in the woods with our son and a shotgun, and it’s no big deal?”

“I think we’re being too hard on him. If he wants to see Donnie, I don’t know if it’s the worst thing.”

“Are you going to tell me not to worry about Greenie? You think our son should hang out with the man who murdered his uncle?”

“All he’s ever done is try to protect you.”

She didn’t say nothing in reply, just stood up and spit on him. She walked slow, maybe waiting for him to hit her, back to their bedroom and slammed the door. Michael washed up in the kitchen and played the TV to drink by until he passed out.

—–

“Mom’s been asleep again,” Donnie said, sitting out in the yard when Michael got home from work digging landscaping trenches.

Michael climbed the cinderblock steps two at a time past his son. The room air was thick with a smell like burnt paint thinner doused in urine. He shouted her name, but it sounded silly, and so he quit speaking. Her head arched over the back of the arm of the couch. The Muppet lunch box lay open and all her shit everywhere.  He felt what she’d become, that body that he wanted and wanted when warm and now a cold that crawled up his fingers and burrowed under his skin, and he shivered from his hate of what was left of her. Her eyes were half open as if she watched. Something had dried around her mouth. He didn’t hug her. He didn’t caress her. He didn’t kiss her. Whatever sorrow that should have come to fill the empty spot in his stomach, fear had gotten there first.

“Donnie, Donnie.” He’d forgot his son had come in by his side. What had the boy thought or done being alone with her?

“Was she like this when you got here?”

“No.”

“Why didn’t you go get someone?”

Donnie didn’t say anything.

“Donnie.”

“Yeah?”

“Your mom. She’s gone.”

The boy, without hesitation, reached out to touch her, also not a caress but a probing almost like he would twist her skin. “Like she wasn’t even real,” he said.

Michael looked at his son. What did he mean by that? It didn’t sound sad or any emotion really, just blunt statement. Maybe this was just how kids were with all the electrical pulses floating in the air.

“Go put your good clothes in a bag,” Michael said.

“Sunday clothes.”

“I’ll do it. Go outside. Wait a sec. Instead, go to your room. We’re going on a trip. Take whatever you don’t want to leave behind.”

They didn’t own any luggage-when had they ever went anywhere? They had talked big wedding and Hawaii honeymoon. He got some grocery bags out of an old liquor box they kept them in under the sink. He got what looked like a week’s worth of clothes for him and Donnie. He found the cash he hid from her at the top of the closet with the pistol and bullets.

—–

They drove most of the night to get there. As they left Sumerville, down the piedmont into the sand lands between there and the coast, the road lost all character. Straight and lined with pine, broken only with abandoned buildings and closed stores that could have closed that evening or ten years ago, the road let Michael think about Lucille. All he could think was he wished he’d taken the heavy metal T-shirt she’d worn the day before.

Michael’s mother’d moved away a few years ago-said she couldn’t bear to see her son with “that woman,” but also she’d always talked about retiring to the beach. What she could afford was still forty minutes from the water. A five room shack surrounded by sand-ugly sand, not dream beach sand, this sand could support only shrubs, pine, and trash. A flat little community composed of a gas station and an ABC store, where he stopped to sleep in the car. Donnie was already out. Michael didn’t dare wake his mother.

The manager of the liquor store woke him up tapping on the window. “You can’t park here,” the man said, as if the whole damn place weren’t an empty lot.

Michael knocked on his mom’s door with a bottle of her favorite tequila. Donnie pushed the bottom of a hanging basket full of a fern so that it set the plant to swinging pendulum-style. He got it going violently.

She finally let them in. Michael lied and lied, but she picked and picked until he unraveled. Then she put on some vegetable soup she left over from the night before.

“That’s not really what I want for breakfast,” Michael said.

“Well, too bad. That’s what I got.” She set out some bowls on the table. “I didn’t really want you to bring this to me, but here you are.”

They ate in silence. Donnie kept crumbling up saltines so that his bowl was full of white crumbs. She told him to stop. Michael told him to stop. Donnie didn’t.

—–

Greenie walked into the viewing for Lucille wearing the suit he’d worn at his trial. It no longer fit, the sleeves pulling so that his wrists showed and the pants unbuttoned held up only by his belt. Cocker put a hand on his shoulder, but Greenie shook it off. He ignored the receiving line and went straight for the casket. He cut in front of some regular old fart who gave a glance and made room. Greenie touched Lucille’s cheek, thick with makeup. He stood there blocking progress until Edith came up.

“Greenie,” she said.

“Edith,” he said. She had grown fat while he was gone, as if she were a tree accumulating rings as the years passed.

“Don’t you have somewhere else to be?” she asked.

“Yeah, I do, but I’m here right now.”

“Please leave.”

“I loved her.”

“We all loved her.”

“Is it love if you ain’t got to pay a price?”

“Get out.”

He took from his suit pants a pocketknife. As he opened the blade, natural, in one motion, Edith yelped. Several ushers came, but none made toward him, as afraid as everyone else. He picked apart Lucille’s hairdo, so stupidly not the way she’d have fixed it, until he had several strands, and he cut a lock.

“God help you, Greenie Blake,” said Edith. “Desecrating a body like that.”

He did leave then, with Lucille’s lock nestled in his palm, though, it occurred to him what with the color and the length, it could as well have been Donnie’s. .

—–

Michael rolled up to the Piggly Wiggly after riding around aimless for several dead hours. Michael’s mother sent him out to find a place for him and Donnie to stay because she thought they would be safer, which sounded like she didn’t want them there. He told her he didn’t have the money for that, and she told him to go find a job then. So he was just supposed to go out that morning and find a job and a home easy as all that.

“And oh,” his mom said, “since you’re out, can you stop by and get groceries seeing as you ate or wasted all the food I had around the house.”

Instead he drove to the beach and rode past the waterfront homes on stilts that he remembered as a boy replaced with mansions set on enclosed garages. If it were just him, he could camp on the beach. Stay at the state parks when he had the money. But he decided his mom wouldn’t just put them out, so he went to the store. While he was there, he thought that he was some kind of father. His guilt at not letting his son attend the funeral, for not being there himself started to make his fear seem foolish. But hadn’t he called Cocker and heard that Greenie showed up? Hadn’t Greenie made a scene? Hadn’t he had a knife? Michael was protecting his kid. Michael was protecting himself.

—–

He was just about back with enough groceries to keep his mom quiet. He slowed to pull into the packed sand driveway to the shack when he saw the taillight sticking out from behind the house where someone had parked there not to be so easily seen from the road. That taillight belonged to a Cutlass, Michael was sure, though he’d never taken an inventory of cars and their lights. He drove past the drive and stopped five minutes down the road.

He tried calm. He took deep breaths. Michael weighed it in his mind. He could call the cops, but that meant killing his mother and son if they weren’t already dead. Greenie would sooner burn that house to the ground. Michael’d left his gun in the guest room-not wanting his mother to see it. But what else could he do? Where else could he go? It wasn’t something he could just leave off doing.

—–

He found himself at the door, and he shook so, he wasn’t sure how he would ever turn the knob. But damn if he didn’t. He half expected the blast to come then, ambush. Yet he stood and the door slowly swung in.

It wasn’t till he’d made it through the living /dining room to the open kitchen that Greenie, stitched in a stinking suit too small for him, come out of the hallway shadows.

Greenie told him to take a chair from the table and turn it to face him. The chair made a whining noise against the linoleum. Michael sat feeling like he was about to be interrogated, but he asked the first question. “Where’s Mom?”

Greenie just shrugged. “She never liked me none.”

“Donnie?”

“He’s in the back room playing on his box.”

“You know she did that to herself.”

“I know you let her do that to herself.”

“Or you pushed her to do it?”

Greenie’s eyes that had that mad dog dominance stare went to the floor, as if he were taking some of the responsibility on. But soon enough they were back boring down on Michael.

“You’ll go back to prison,” Michael said.

“You think I care? That it’s about me? Some things are more important than me. Nothing you’d know about.”

“I didn’t have to come here tonight.”

“Really? Where else you going to run off to?”

“I saw your car. I didn’t have to come back.”

“Well, that’s true. I’ll give you that then.”

“You’d do it with the boy in the house?”

“He can take more than you think he can.”

The place was inferno hot, as if Greenie’s bulk were planetary, creating its own humid atmosphere.

“Get done with it then,” Michael said.

Greenie laughed. “Yeah I could do that.” He set the shotgun aside by the threshold to the hall. This show scared Michael more than he’d been. The beast before him stretched, like an athlete getting ready for the sport. As tall as tall, Greenie said, “Yeah, I wanted that. On the way here, God, I dreamed you dead a thousand bloody ways.” He stepped closer. Michael thought about hitting him, trying at least, surprise enough to run. But he’d killed his cousin, his own flesh and blood, with his bare hands. One of those huge hands rested on the top of another kitchen chair and squeezed. Veins rose to ridge his knuckles.

“Change of heart?” Michael asked.

“After. After I thought all them massacres of you, I started to cry. I tell you this because you know how close we are here. I cried the rest of the way down. I haven’t ever cried in my life. It got me so angry I couldn’t stop. I was screaming at myself and crying at the same time.” Greenie put his hands up to his face as if to check to see if he were crying now and didn’t even know it. “Why, Michael, aren’t you crying this very minute?”

“I grieve in my own way,” Michael said.

“Do you now?”

Greenie rolled his jaw back and forth like his mouth was full of chewing tobacco. Why didn’t the floor collapse with the weight of the man?

“You got in her pants,” Greenie said, “but where else?”

There was a sound then from the hallway. The sound of the shotgun being taken up. Donnie, bracing the gun to his shoulder how Greenie must have shown him, aimed.

“Damn if that ain’t a good boy,” Greenie said.

Michael wasn’t sure if he should shout for his son to stop or yell encouragement. In that moment, though, Michael saw his son, saw something in him, something not in his father. His son could do this thing-he could kill Greenie dead right in front of him. Michael saw Donnie as he would be, saw the teen Donnie, saw his face shine and erupt into pustules and scar over as the boy grew giant. Whatever would let him do that wasn’t in Michael, and it would crawl its way out of his future son to fight with the world.

“Donnie,” Michael said, “your cousin’s here to take you home.”

“He is?”

“Yeah, he come to get you. You’re going to go live with him for a time.” Was he saving himself or his son or Greenie? “That all right with you?”

“I guess so. Can I have the gun?”

“He’s going to teach you to shoot some more.”

“That’s right,” Greenie said. “Put the safety on there.”

Donnie did and threw the barrel up to the ceiling to rest on his shoulder, little solider.

Michael said he’d get the boy’s things. When he came back, two grocery bags full, Greenie was helping himself to the goods in the refrigerator.

“For the road,” he said. His dour countenance now lightened in his enthusiastic pilfering for road trip provisions. Greenie’s happiness Michael understood as a creature almost extinct finding another of its kind. The way the giant clapped the boy on the back was just as a beast could only find gentleness for its own young.

They left Michael perched on the porch-Donnie did hug him but raced to the car when Greenie called. The boy was swallowed by the Cutlass. The Blakes drove off, and Michael spit on the ground, damned if he’d be damned with them.

She sneaks up on me when I’m out at night.  I’ll bump into her at the grocery store, or on the subway.  When I’m sitting at a café, supposed to be studying but really staring off into space, she’ll take the seat opposite mine.

Then we’ll lock eyes.  And then we’ll head to my apartment as fast as we can.  Sometimes, she’ll bring her motorcycle and a second helmet.  She’ll unzip her jacket and put it on me, so I can be armored on the ride home.

From the moment our eyes meet to the moment our lips meet to the moment I lead her to my bedroom.  All these moments happen at once whenever I’m with Gracie.  Gracie Lynn. Not her real name.

She never stays until morning, instead leaves me to face the daylight alone and ponder the appointments I blew off to be with her.  I don’t normally take the paper, but after a night with her, I drag myself over to the corner store and pick up a copy of the Times.  To read about Artemis, who never fails to make the front page, top of the fold, after an attack.  Seven victims and counting.

Four were rapists and three child molesters, all out on bail or parole or walking free because they managed to beat the system.  But they’re all guilty because Artemis would never kill an innocent man.

Artemis is the name she chose for herself, the one she signs in blood on the sidewalk next to her victim.  The newspaper always refers to Artemis as a he, and so do the police.  But I know that’s not true.  Artemis was a goddess, and besides, Artemis is Gracie.

It’s the timing that gives her away.  She always attacks after our trysts.  Maybe that’s what gives me my rush.  She has a body fit for killing, long and sinewy, dotted with freckles, scars and tattoos.  She wears her hair just long enough to be acceptably feminine, just past her ears, and that’s how I know she has a day job, not a trust fund and a hulking, empty mansion to return to after nights on the prowl.

We first met in the library, where she was checking out a book on metempsychosis.  It was closing time and past dark and she asked me if I needed a ride home.  And I accepted, because I saw her clutching a motorcycle helmet and knew exactly what kind of ride she meant.  She was the kind of girl I always wanted to be picked up by, not like the anemic vegans I usually end up with, the kind that confuse self-denial with making a difference.

I went with her even though bad girls bring bad luck.  And indeed, one morning she did show up on my doorstep with a bullet in her shoulder.  I wrapped her in bath towels and had her swallow some aspirin as I tried to convince her to go to the emergency room.

She had me call Dr. Martinez, who makes house calls.

We watched cartoons as we waited for him, and held hands.  Because she came to me, I knew she had nobody else.

Dr. Martinez came accompanied by two male nurses.  Bullet removal would cost 10,000 dollars, cash, and that included stitches and opiates.  He would prep Gracie while I fetched the money, but he wouldn’t begin surgery until I returned.

I went to Gracie’s place, finally granted the key to her apartment, finally getting a glimpse into her existence.  She lived in the two-car garage of a live-work loft, motorcycle on the left, mattress on the right.  I paused a moment, then found the toolbox, as instructed.  It contained all of Gracie’s money.  All $200 of it, in bills of various denominations.

It was after banking hours, so I went around to various ATMs, withdrawing the maximum from my account.  I didn’t have enough to cover the procedure, not even close.  When I returned to my apartment, Dr. Martinez had already removed the bullet and stitched Gracie up.  They were chatting in Spanish, as Gracie clutched a half-empty bottle of tequila.  The doctor was a reasonable man after all.

I handed him a thick stack of ragged bills and frowned. “The rest in two days,” he said, and then left.

“We better pay him back,” she said, “He’s a gang doctor.”

Gracie slept the whole day on my couch, then went out at night and mugged a bunch of people.  I didn’t try and stop her.  My life was on the line too.

“Is this what you do for a living?” I asked.

“Only when I have to.”

“Why?” I asked. She didn’t answer.

I made us pancakes as a prelude to serious conversation. “You can’t keep doing things the way you are,” I said.

She shrugged and took two vicodin with her orange juice.

“Move in with me,” I said.

“I’m going back to Mexico.”

“Don’t,” I said.

“Don’t,” she replied.

Gracie had her money by the deadline, plus a little extra, which we split.  She still owed me some and promised to pay me back, but I wasn’t looking to collect.  She zipped up her jacket, which was slightly misshapen from the blood that’d been scrubbed out of it.  I willed her bike not to start, but it did.

A week later, I found an envelope stuffed with bills in my mailbox.  And a note.  It said, “Love, Gracie,” and that’s all.

I didn’t hear from her again for ten years.  She sent me a letter urging me to visit her.  It gave an address in Ciudad Juarez, where she said she was working as a maquiladora.  By day, that is.

I cooked up an excuse to give to my wife Leslie and drove down there by myself.  I didn’t bother removing my wedding ring because I was already four months pregnant.

She lived above a farmacía, the kind that are filled with gringos lining up to get prescription-free Ativan.  I was nervous until I saw her.  She looked the same.

I gave her a moment to adjust to me.  My tank top was tight across my full chest and the beginnings of a belly peeked over the waistband of my baggy jeans.  Her eyes grew wide and she was silent.

“Aren’t you going to kiss me?” I asked.  I used to be the shy one.

She put one hand around my waist and the other under my chin.  She gave me a delicate kiss that was not entirely to my satisfaction.  So I pulled her in closer, kissed her harder.  She led me to her bedroom, finally, after all these years.  It was a sunny room, unlike her garage, though it also had a mattress resting on a bare cement floor.

I undressed for her, proud of my new body and eager to show it off for her.  She was mesmerized and let me know as much.  She was loving in her caresses, if a little too gentle, but I was not too full to take the lead and straddle her.  I braced myself against the wall as she went down on me.

It was only the eighth encounter in the entire history of us.

The first seven times with her were like hits of heroin, or how I imagine heroin, never having tried it.  In between times I could think of her and only her, and it fragmented my life to the extent that it was a good thing she left when she did.  My secret life as her lover was beginning to eclipse the real life I had built for myself before knowing her.

The withdrawal was terrible, accompanied as it was by the notion I would never love again as I did.  Which turned out to be true.  I love Leslie, but she is not my oxygen, and the vow I made to her is superseded by the vow I made to myself, to be with Gracie again, if only for a short while.

“I missed out on a good thing,” she says, after.

My silence is my agreement.  I roll over and touch her shoulder where the bullet wound and stitches left a faded pink scar.

“How’s your arm?”

“It’s not the same,” she answers, “I avoid using it, if I can.”

I sit up and rummage through my duffle, pulling out a wrinkled sundress suited to the southern climate.

“Are you with someone?” I ask.

She blinks.  “How did you know?”

I pull out the box of condoms I spotted wedged between the mattress and the wall.

“Those are my girlfriend’s,” she answers

I raise an eyebrow in disapproval.

“She owns a brothel,” she says.

I exhale loudly.  Maybe this is why Gracie never lingered after sex.  The sweetness has now vanished .  We have skipped straight from the honeymoon to the long held resentments and suspicions of an old married couple.  I feel cheated.  I never got a relationship.  No late-night phone calls.  No dinner and a movie. No lovely middle, just a beginning and an end.  And this is the end, which is why it is important to say goodbye properly.

“Don’t get like that.  It’s a nice place.  They use condoms.  It’s clean.  Better pay than the maquilas and a lot safer too.”  I’m surprised she cares what I think about her situation.  It’s a welcome change of pace.

“Do you work there?” I ask.

“Only as a bouncer, when I’m not busy with my own project.”

“What project is that?”

“I’m looking for the man who killed 400 women and buried them in the desert,” she answers.

“How is that going?”

“I have a few suspects.”

“Where are they?”

“Also buried in the desert.”

She leads me into the kitchen half-dressed and pours me a glass of ice water from a pitcher she keeps in her old refrigerator.  I swallow large gulps and listen to her describe her new mission.

She came looking for a man turned out to not exist.  Because it wasn’t one man responsible for the killings, but several, who knows how many.  She had caught as many as she could, fourteen to date, but still the women disappeared after filling their shifts at the factories.  Killers came from all the over the world to stalk prey in Juarez, Gracie among them.

I have a question for Gracie.  A rude one.  And though I am not entitled to the answer, I ask anyway.

“Were you ever raped?”

“No,” she says, surprising me.  I thought I already knew the answer to this one.  “But my first love was.”

“Did you ever catch the guy?”

“Yes,” she says before pausing, “And no.  Because I see him everywhere.”

She looks at me to gauge my response, but her madness doesn’t scare me, it never did.  I know what it means to lose someone you were meant to find.  You become haunted by their ghost.  But at least Gracie and I were never soul mates.  Her other half is also her villain.  I imagine it’s the same for all superheroes.

“Are you happy?” she asks.  The curiosity is mutual, and it is another way of asking “Why not me?”

Looking at her now, I see what I didn’t before.  Only took me ten years to figure it out.

We are like dogs and wolves. Creatures of the same species that mate but lead separate existences when not in heat.

Being pregnant sometimes feels like being in heat.  My clit is swollen, my breasts are swollen and I have a salty taste in my mouth.  I pull Gracie towards me, so that she might soothe the deep ache in me, and we begin again, this time on the kitchen floor.

Mikey Smalls finds me at recess. I’m by the back fence, the new one they built after that kid slipped through and got himself drowned in the retention pond. I tend to stick by fences. Keeps things from sneaking up on you.

“You still got a bad uncle?” Mikey asks.

I shake my head. “Not a working man anymore, Mike. I don’t take jobs like that.”

“You gotta make lunch money.”

I flash him my pad of stolen hall passes. “I do. My way.”

Mikey looks over his shoulder, back toward the monkey bars. I can tell he’d rather be there, taking dares, eating worms. Makes me wonder about his angle.

He reaches in his lunchbox and pulls out something the size of his fist, egg-shaped and wrapped in white foil. In bright colored writing are the words ‘Kinder SURPRISE!’

“How the fuck you get this, Mikey?”

He grins, tosses me a second. “Canadian, smuggled over the border. It’s the real thing. Hollow chocolate egg and a toy in the middle.”

Now I know something’s rotten. Mikey doesn’t have these resources. These are harder to get than candy cigarettes, than lead-painted toy soldiers.

“You do a job for me, this is just the start,” Mikey says.

“You got more?”

This time he hands me a Polaroid. It’s a photo of his bedroom, plastic dinosaurs, an X-Men poster, a sea-shell nightlight. But there, middle of his bed, they sit – six cases of chocolate contraband.

I can’t keep the shock off my face, and Mikey basks in it.

“That’s your pay,” he says, and then, cooler than a worm-eater has any right to be, the kid turns on his heels and crosses the gravel playground.

 

* * *

            Playground used to be run by this kid named Turk. Real piece of shit, but he kept things under his thumb nice and neat. But things happen. Orders disorder. For Turk, that meant choking to death on a marble. Things were one way, and now they’re not.

With Turk out of the picture, two fifth-graders, the King and Mr. President, muscled in. After another chat with Mikey Smalls, things start to make more sense. It’s not Mikey who’s hiring me. It’s the King.

Out past the swing sets is a grass hill, and that’s where I find the King. A growth spurt called Fats flanks him on the right. Sitting at his left, reading Judy Blume, is the new girl, Shelby. Strawberry blonde with hair kept out of her eyes by two pink plastic barrettes. The King’s trophy – everybody wants the new girl, but it’s him that got her.

“You came,” he says. Beside him, Fats has an expression like he wants to see how my guts sparkle in the sun. We have us a history, me and Fats. I ignore him.

“Mikey Smalls showed me a picture,” I say. “Had to wonder how a kid like that hits the lottery.”

“Michael’s a good kid,” says the King.

“Mikey’s a swing set scrapper, bad in fights but good for a dare. What do you want with him?”

“You got a bad uncle, is what I hear,” says the King.

Shelby glances up with her eyes, nose still in the book. She’s got a look – almost enough to make me forget my girl Emily, if Emily weren’t the kind to gouge eyes and bite ears.

“Told Mikey, I don’t do that work anymore.”

“No,” says the King, “you’re in hall passes now. Good business if you don’t get caught.”

“Hall pass is a small thing, King. Easy to ditch. Tough to get caught unless there’s a snitch.”

The King raises his face to the sun, breathes in slow. A breeze makes waves in the grass on his hill, and Shelby’s hair.

“Smells like rats to me,” says the King. “You think about that bad uncle. Sometimes the best way to be left alone is to make a compromise, now and then.”

 

* * *

            Bell rings. I head in from recess, head down, thinking on things. Bad uncle’s a distraction trick, like pulling the fire alarm during a convocation. So who does the King need distracted, and why?

Before I can think of an answer, somebody grabs me by the neck and pulls me into the bushes. He keeps a hand over my mouth while everyone else files in. I don’t see his face, but I can smell him. He’s wearing deodorant. Only one kid in Westlake Elementary wears deodorant.

“Hate to do this to a voter,” says Mr. President. “But this is a matter of school security.”

When he’s sure I’m not going to make a run at the door, he lets go. We’re beneath a window and behind the bushes, sitting on a mat of dead leaves and dried out mulch. Mr. President is wearing his customary short-sleeved button-down and clip-on tie. He’s smiling. Mr. President always smiles.

“This is about the King, isn’t it.”

He nods as gravely as he can while wearing a tooth-bearing grin.

“You know we don’t get along,” says Mr. President. “You know our philosophies are different. The King wants to run the playground same as Turk did. Iron fist, fifth-grade enforcers, bullies on his payroll. I’m of the people. You’ll notice I grabbed you myself. I didn’t hire someone else to do it.”

“Sure,” I say. “I noticed.”

“You remember how things used to be. Under Turk, we never could get support for a student council. With him gone, we have a real chance at democracy. But it’s fragile. I’m the first class president, and we could lose everything if the King gets too powerful. I know he’s spoken with you. I know he wants you to work for him.”

“I don’t work for anybody.”

“Self-determination,” says Mr. President. “That’s what I want for my voters. That’s what I want for you.”

He pulls a small box of chocolate chip cookies from his pocket and presses them into my hand.

“These left over from the election?”

His smile wavers. “Excuse me?”

“Seem to remember a lot of kids walking around with these that Tuesday morning. Some people called it a bribe.”

“Campaigning,” he corrects. He’s gritting his teeth now, but goddamned if he’s not still smiling. “You don’t have to like me. You don’t have to like anyone. But you do have to live on this playground. Think about that.”

 

* * *

            On the bus ride home, I give my girl Emily the scoop. She hates when I call her my girl – she says she just wants to hold hands and drink cherry Kool-Aid, not make things official – but she’s loyal as a German Shepherd, with a more vicious bite.

“War’s coming,” she says. Her fingers tickle my palm as she extends them slowly across my hand. “Stay out of it. You pick a side, you’re going to lose.”

“Might not have a choice,” I say. “I don’t pick a side, the whole schoolyard will be after me.”

“You could spend recess in detention,” she says. “Spend it with me.”

I squeeze her hand but don’t answer. She knows lock down makes me crazy. I’d rather be free and in the cross hairs than safe behind a closed classroom door.

Emily gets off at the third stop. Her house. We can’t play together since she started biting. Parents think I’m a bad influence. It’s just as well. Can’t say what she’d do if she saw the strawberry-blonde waiting for me on my front porch.

“You should walk,” says Shelby, moving across the lawn. “Bus takes too damn long.”

“Not safe out there,” I tell her. “Kiddie fiddlers and stray dogs. Kid can get eaten alive.”

She pulls at a piece of gum, stretching it from her teeth with a pair of long pink fingers, slow and sure, before popping it back in her mouth. “Didn’t think you were the kind to get scared.”

“There’s a lot you don’t know about me. But if we’re just here to list my faults, we’ll be here all day, so maybe you should run along home now.”

“I’m good at making friends,” says Shelby. “Perk of being an army brat. You learn how to get along.”

“And when someone avoids you like the cooties?”

Shelby laughs too hard, falls forward so that her hair cascades down her shoulders like liquid gold. “They don’t.”

 

* * *

            I take Shelby to the tree fort out back. It’s safe, and I keep a water gun up there, filled with pepper juice, along with a dozen concrete chunks pulled from the front walk of an abandoned house down the block. Used to run a little business out of here, but I stopped all that. Stopped trying to fix other people’s problems and just handle my own.

Still, having Shelby up there, it starts to feel like old times. A cicada buzzes. Birds sing. If she asked me my hourly rate, I might even tell her. But she’s not here to hire me.

“They say you have a bad uncle,” she says.

“They’re right.”

Shelby shakes her head. “I was hoping not. I was hoping the King was, I don’t know, delusional. He gets these ideas in his head.” She pops a fresh piece of gum in her mouth and chews, anxious. “I don’t think you should do it. Don’t take the job.”

“You think I have a choice? The King’s got Fats working for him. He’s got friends I don’t know about.” I almost say, he’s got you, but I don’t want her thinking I’m scared of her. Something tells me this girl is trouble.

“They need to make a deal,” she says. “The King and Mr. President. Split the playground, fifty-fifty.”

I laugh. She slaps me.

“Nobody hits me like that,” I tell her, grabbing her by the wrist. Her slap-bracelet falls to the ground. “You get one warning.”

“The King will listen to me,” she says. “And Mr. President will listen to you. We can broker a deal.”

“This is how it is,” I tell her. “You’re new. That comes with certain powers. But newness goes away. You get old, get boring, everybody learns your name. New girl comes in, this time from Maine, this time from Florida, and suddenly Royal Oak sounds like Hickville, USA. You might think you’re something special, but I’ve seen a million like you before, and you won’t be the last.”

Shelby rises from the floor, and starts for the ladder. She pauses and looks up at me.

“You might be surprised.”

 

* * *

            Mr. President is making a speech on the merry-go-round when I find him. He stands at the edge, campaign manager pushing him in slow turns at his addresses the small gathering of kids around him. When he sees me in the crowd, he motions for his manager to stop pushing, makes a quick concluding remark (May this henceforth be known as the freedom-go-round!), and dismounts. It still takes him fifteen minutes to make his way through the crowd, shaking hands and kissing baby dolls.

“How’d you like those cookies, champ?”

I hand him the unopened box. His smile twitches.

“So you’ve made your choice,” he says.

“I don’t see that I’ve got one,” I tell him. “You need to broker a deal with the King. Split the playground. We can survive like that. It’s been done before.”

He scoffs. “Don’t quote recess history at me, friend. My older brother was there when the playground was nothing but a collection of fiefdoms. It was barbaric – tribes run by bullies, the lunch money raids, weapons improvised from gym equipment. Is that what you want?”

“Way I see it, I’d rather worry about a war than fight one.”

He tugs at his tie, jerking the top of his shirt down his neck. A bead of sweat makes a track down his throat. “A fledgling democracy needs a cause. I’m in no rush to fight, but a war might bring the people of this playground together.”

“Sure,” I say. “But under who?”

 

* * *

            I’m in the bathroom, finishing up my business with the urinal, when someone grabs me from behind and shoves me into the wall.

I taste blood and as I’m pulled back by two meaty fists I see a dark smudge where my nose smacked tile. A knee drives into my back, sending me sprawling onto the ground. I manage to roll onto my side, and look up to see Fats standing there, eyes dark.

“Been waiting for this.”

Before I can get a word out, he kicks me in the stomach. Breathless, I push off with a sneaker and slide toward the stalls. If I can get in and get the door locked, it might buy me some time. I’m just about under, but when I try to stand a hand grabs me and drags me down. My head smacks the corner of the toilet paper dispenser. I wrap my arms around the john and hope my shoulders don’t pop out of their sockets as he yanks on my legs.

“Get out here,” screams Fats. “Be a fucking man!”

When he yowls and lets go, I assume he’s lost his mind, that Fats has fallen into a berserker rage that will leave me scattered in pieces around the Hallway B bathroom, head rotating slowly in a john clogged with my entrails. The ultimate swirly. But then I hear another sound, a familiar snarl.

Emily.

I ease out slow from under the toilet wall and see Emily, all teeth and nails, knees and elbows, working over Fats. Nobody’s scared to hit Emily – she gave up her exempt status as a girl the first time she drew blood. But scared or not, Fats can’t land a fist. She’s too fast, and too mean, and the way he’s flailing his arms you’d think he was trying to fight off a swarm of bees.

“I think you got him,” I say, trying to keep my voice from shaking.

She takes a chunk out of his cheek and spits something wet at the bathroom floor.

“Emily,” I say. “Hey. I think that’s enough.”

She lets go, drops off him spitting and snarling. Fats is bloodied but still stupid as ever. He takes a swing. Emily ducks low, Big Boy trips and clocks himself on the urinal. The sensor flushes as he crumples on the floor.

“I didn’t touch him,” she says. “He slipped, you saw him.”

I bend over Fats, wary he might be faking, but the kid’s out cold.

“Could’ve left him awake, Em. I need to know why he did this.”

Emily rolls her eyes. “The King sent him. Duh. Fats might be a rabid dog, but he’s a dog on a leash. He wouldn’t do this on his own.”

Hard truth about a fact – believe it or don’t, it doesn’t go away. Emily’s right, and we both know it, and that means the King’s forced my hand. Like it or not, I’m working for Mr. President.

 

* * *

            I forge a bus pass and get dropped off a block north from my house on Fox Street. Just down Fox is a gas station where I do a little business. Today it’s with a bum loitering outside by the dumpster. I give him a twenty filched from my mom’s purse, and a peanut butter sandwich.

“Call this, read this,” I say, giving him a sheet of paper with a phone number and script. I’m no good with cursive, so I’ve printed it as clearly as I can on a sheet of Garfield stationery.

He nods. “The rest tomorrow?”

I show him the other twenty. “The rest tomorrow. Oh, and here.” I hand him a stack of quarters. “Make sure you use the payphone. You can keep any of those you don’t use.”

He nods, raising the money to me like a toast, then shambles toward the gas station to spend his cash, still warm from my pocket.

 

* * *

            I give Mr. President a head’s up at first recess.

“After lunch,” I tell him. “After lunch we’re running the bad uncle.”

He grins, clapping me on the shoulder. Today he’s wearing a new tie, a real one with an actual knot and everything. He bragged that he tied it himself.

“I’m proud of you,” he says. “This is a great thing you’re doing for democracy.”

I brush off his hand, tug on his tie. He thinks it looks sharp – I think it looks like a noose.

“You might want to lose that.”

 

* * *

            Second recess, after lunch. I haven’t eaten a thing. Emily’s in detention – Fats squealed, but said nothing about his attack on me, and neither did Emily. Nobody’s heard from him since, but I figure he’s soaking up his bed rest at home, nursing himself back to health with cartoons and ice cream. Fine by mean. Take out the King’s heavy-hitter and this will all go much more smoothly.

A teacher walks quickly out the cafeteria door, toward the playground. I can tell just by how she’s moving that this is it – the call’s been made. Until they get things figured out with my bad uncle, the school’s going to be on lock down, and in the ensuing chaos of wrangling a playground full of kids into the building the King and Mr. President are going to settle their differences.

The teacher blows her whistle just as I see Fats come out from the tube slide, scabbed and grinning.

The King knows.

I book it double-time to where Mr. President is stationed, on top of the monkey bars so he can watch the show like a general, but an arm grabs me around the neck and pulls me to the gravel.

“No,” says a soft voice.

I roll over and it’s Shelby, straddling me in the dust and pebbles, strawberry blonde hair nearly on my face.

“He knows, doesn’t he?”

She nods.

“It’s going to be a bloodbath, Shelby.”

“For both sides,” she says. “I saw Mr. President recruiting this morning. His secret service is bigger than you think.”

Teachers are snatching kids off the swing sets, chasing them off the slides, corralling them like cattle into the building. But there’s a second current on the playground now, this one flowing like a riptide toward the hill. Mr. President thinks he’s got the upper hand. He doesn’t see Fats waiting at the slide, or the boys gathering behind him. He doesn’t see until too late the heavies moving in on either side of the monkey bars.

“Come on,” says Shelby, “we have to go.”

“Wait,” I say, “hang on.”

But I don’t know why I’m protesting, and so I don’t put up much defense. Mostly I want to know what’s going on – what’s really going on, like how the King got the drop on Mr. President, or why he sent Fats to kick my ass in the bathroom. And then, just as Shelby pulls me around the corner and behind the cafeteria dumpsters, I get it.

The new girl’s got chops.

 

* * *

            “It was you, wasn’t it?”

Shelby cocks her head, like she can’t hear me. The dumpsters smell like rotten chocolate milk and old bologna. “What was?”

“It was you that sent Fats,” I say. “Not the King.”

She starts to smile, then realizes I’m not kidding. “What are you trying to say? Why would I do something like that?”

I pop a piece of strawberry bubble gum and paint her a picture. “You and me, we’re not the same kind of selfish. I want to be left alone, you want something else. Best way to make me pick a side is to show me who’s going to bother me worst. Sicking the King’s goon on me was a pretty good way to do it.”

“But why would I turn you against the King? I’m on his side.”

“I was brokering a peace, but that’s no good to you. King’s territory is already too small for your taste, and peace makes sure it gets no bigger. You got the new girl angle, but that only lasts so long, like I told you before. But you knew that already. You knew you’ve got to act, and act fast, if you want turf, because in a couple months you turn back into a pumpkin and join the rest of us in the patch.”

“I was in favor of peace,” says Shelby. “I didn’t want this.”

“Course you did,” I say. “And you played me just right. Spooked me bad enough I played the bad uncle. Got a bum to call the school, say he was my dad, say my sex offender uncle was on his way to try and pick me up. Poor guy, takes one piss on the back of a bar, he’s on the registry for life.”

“You’re too smart to be left alone,” says Shelby, and I can see she’s ready to drop the act. “You know it. I know it. Even if you got your peace, you think they’d let you alone? You’ve already been their go-between. If they got peace, you’d be stuck in the middle, forever and ever.”

I nod. “Or until middle school.”

The two of us glaze over a second, that future too distant to imagine.

Then Shelby speaks. “I want you. I want you on my side. A guy like you, somebody that gets things done… You’d be very useful.”

I shake my head. “I don’t work for anybody.”

“You should reconsider,” she says. “People that cross me have a tendency to end up taking the big nap.”

“Shelby,” I say, pausing to blow a bubble, “you got no idea how tired I am.”

My Choppers

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are negotiating
with what remains
of my mouth: chew this
slowly, you fool; too sticky,
idiot; asshole,
that side no longer exists…and so on.
Sugar has eaten parts of whole.
The ride of word passion bloodied sanity.
I’ve fucked with the odds; they’ve rendered me
a chalk horse, scratch, even money
to be turned into glue
anytime soon.

This coat hanger of flesh is closer to seventy
than fifty: half a foot of intricate plumbing
and rewiring on my pump, a mouth
full of rot, fingers fattened, gnarled and bent,
eyes blurred with cataracts thick
with liquor and dope hued saturation.

I’ve had a long continuous fist-fight
with death. People were merely pre-lims.
Usually outclassed and not very interesting.
I’ve stuck words
up deaths’ ass more than once.
He was with every woman I’ve ever slept with;
he was between the sheets of every institution
I fell asleep in; every tooth that was pulled
he yanked on; every drunk I’ve ever been on
he found money for; all the senseless mornings
of going to be fired from a job
I didn’t want anyway, he waited,
to put my rage into a my fist,
or vein. A wise and patient man
death is. He’ll have to be.
I’ll fool with him some more.
Death hates Life.
Words are Life. They leap around
like ballerinas in the brain. They make fun
of teeth, and hearts, and pricks, and cunts and balls, and beerbellys,
crooked fingers and phantom limbs; they laugh
at the silly ravings and meanderings of ants;
they are the final hedge against inflation or devaluation
of the soul; they are the salt edged tit;
they provide power
as the game works
on.

Greenwich Village, 2000

The Bathroom at Slugs

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in the far east,
on third, between B&C
was hot. It was over forty years ago
when even taking a piss in there
fucked with your imagination. It smelled
of sex, quinine, morphine, reefer, body odor
and wastes. Before sets, in between, and after
there were lines to get in: singles, often times couples
of the same or different orientation.
There was a kind of understanding: sometimes it took longer
to get hard, or find a vein,
or role and fumble with a stick, and so you waited.
The ones with priority were the musicians. They needed
to do their business and get the hell back. Besides,
in truth, that’s why most of came to Slugs
in the far east village. The other joints
where cats could work ideas into riffs
for weeks or a month or two at a time,
like The Five Spot or Half-Note,
were already dead and gone.

One night late Lee was on the bandstand
blowing hard
sweating into the collar of a stained white shirt,
pin-pricks of dried blood
in the crook of his arm
when his common law entered. She walked up,
opened her purse,
took a gun out,
and shot him dead
during his solo.
She turned, walked calmly back to the bar
and placed a revolver on pock-marked wood
and ordered a drink–scotch, I think. And waited.
Frankie, the bartender, served her without saying a word.

After while people started to breathe, some whispered,
and others went back to the bathroom.
“That no good motherfucka sonofabitch deserved that killin,”
an older chick nearby me said, real quiet,
“that junkie bastard usin her bread for his vein was bad enough,
but his bitch’s vein too, that’s even worser…
someday he be back though, you know dat, hope he learned
his motherfuckin lesson.”
The ambulance came, and so did the cops.
They took out one living and one dead;
which was which I couldn’t say.

I don’t know if Lee ever did come back.
But this I know:
men will be men,
and women women;
that is the task,
and that, my friends,
is the terror.

Greenwich Village, 2007

No Mistake

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The way back home
is not always
the easiest.
Poe’s fall
was not
luck.

Coney Island, 1969

Haagen-Dazs is the Only Pussy I Like to Lick Now

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You don’t have to worry
about freshness
or taste; it is youthful,
unlined, uncreased, unencumbered;
it’s not etched
by experience
and so its face
doesn’t snarl
or bite
from wounds inflicted
by those whose hands
and head and cock
had got there before
and staked claim.

The Dazs tells you nothing
about parents
and boyfriends
and ex-husbands
planted or not; there’s no mention
of friends
who’ve betrayed them
or who ask
for more
than they give;
there are no jobs
and no bosses
who grab their ass
or their time
and in so doing
stake claim
to your time
hearing their little betrayals
after a day filled with your own.
There’s no risk
of syphilis, chlamydia,
yeast
or urinary infections;
no pounds they have to shed;
nowhere they
have to be.
They do not care
what you’ve eaten
before you get to them,
nor what it is you’re watching
as you wait
for them to soften or
that you’re already soft
for that matter.

At my age
I do not care for arguments,
only to stay alive
a little while longer
to catch some more grace
from the gods. I still need
something
to soothe
and morphine and booze
demand too much
of my time
and money.

At one time
I was in love
with the chase,
the battle
of wits,
the jousting
in new mirrors
in strange bathrooms
where the souls
of women are hung
and displayed.
I loved the conquest
and sometimes love
that lasted as long
as two people
having compatible neurosis
would let it.

But now I like my love
measured
in pints
that are easily
replaceable.
If I got five bucks,
or ten,
and I usually do,
I can pull a pint or two
off the frozen shelf
and take it home with me.
I will not have to hear
about the day,
about the kids,
about the disappointments
or the disillusions.
And I will not have to hear
about all the things,
many many things,
different things each day,
I’m not doing.
But could do.
If only
I cared–which I usually never did.
I just put them
in the freezer. And there
they’ll wait
until my need becomes desire
and I’ll strip them bare
and devour them
with a cultivated
style.

Older men
have their ways.

Greenwich Village, 2011

Reincarnation

For K
[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_11/Savage5.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″]

I’d like to come back as song,
(this song)
(any song)
inside you
and feel
as you sing
me…

Greenwich Village, 2011

Looking For Prey

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I’ve got one day
a week
to get out
of my lair
and into the jungle
to line up the prey
I’ll devour
over the next six days.
In-between
is spent
working for the hole
I shit in.
I’m an animal
of the worst sort–
old, trapped,
but still needing
to go on.

It’s gotten warm
on this savannah,
and so I sit
among all the fleeter creatures,
legs, knees and shoulders arthritic,
teeth are long and mostly gone,
heart, though quite diseased, resting
for the next quick pump, the next challenge.
I look at them all,
the female and male:
young ones, old ones, fat ones, thin ones,
ass’ pert or like Montana mules,
I measure them,
gauge the distance;
only one out of a thousand
looks like it would make a good meal,
but the old beast must shop
at any store that’s closest, must make do
with meat that’s available,
no matter the cut and damn
the cost.

Most who pass
give me not a second thought;
they do not see the madness
in my eyes, or the hunger,
certainly not the desperation.
I’ve not gotten this old
by showing my cards,
only playing my hand.

A little girl decides to stop
and plop down
on the sidewalk near me;
her mother tries to yank her up
by an arm; her father looks on
seemingly helpless.
The little girl’s face
is dirty, smudged with her last
snack. Her defiant blue eyes
find mine. We look at each other
locked in a fine standoff.
The girl’s forefinger is stuck
so far up her nose
that barely her knuckle shows.
The mother looks at me,
and yanks harder.
She tells the father
to grab the other arm
which he does.
The little girl drags her feet
and looks over her shoulder
at me. Unfortunately,
I don’t have another decade
to wait for her.
Excuse me,
a gentle voice said,
may I sit in this seat?
I swivel my head
right into the eyes
of an eight-five year old.
By all means,
please, I reply.
I watch as she places
her three-pronged cane
into a space that allows her
to settle safely.
My mouth
waters.

Greenwich Village, 2012

There’s So Much Shit

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to shovel out of.
It’s best to learn early
whose shit is whose.
Not that there’s much
you can do about it;
either you deal with it
or not. Every which way
has its consequences:
try to avoid it,
navigate around
or through it, or
pretending it’s not yours
on the natural
or pharmaceutical,
usually nurtures more
of a mess and stink.
But, by all means,
try
each and every twist.

If you’re reading this
you’re already
up to your neck
in it. Please,
don’t stop,
dig a little
deeper.

Greenwich Village, 2012

Some time ago in the Wazirate, an Arab city-state similar to the others along the Persian Gulf, a tribeless nomad named Ali al-Mutawakkil began tying brass cooking pots to his feet and went out into the spectral sand swirling under the moon and vandalized the bulldozers and the rollers and the trucks belonging to a company commissioned to build a paved road through the desert. As a great tracker he knew the importance of not leaving footprints.

Ali al-Mutawakkil was not the herald of an organized rebellion. He objected to the road only because his son, Musa, an excitable and unsettled soul who loathed the nomadic life, would see it as a pathway to abandoning the desert. Already Musa talked about going to the Wazirate’s northern coast and living in a hut along the water. What nomad talked like that? If Ali allowed the river of asphalt to harden no amount of patriarchal exclamation would contain Musa — the road would be a black flint constantly enlivening the embers of escape.

Ali’s surreptitious campaign had been going on for months and he had ground the construction to a halt. He considered the secrecy dishonorable and unmanly but he had heard too many stories of other nomads losing their sons to the world, to jobs in oil, to working in shops. A humble nomad father forced to follow his child into the capital, pitching his goat-hair tentlike a squatterin the frontyard of his child’s brick home, wandering through the alleys like a fool, the sky blocked by antennae and the ground all cement — No! Ali was animated by an altogether different image. To sit in the solid thereness of the night, face to face with his son, the stars phosphorous above them, the fire flickering between them, bodies glowing silver from the back, gold in front. Nothing more.

At any other time, Ali’s actions would have garnered significant attention from the Wazir, who, in competition with the Kuwaitis, Bahrainis, Qataris, and Emiratis, was eager to see his country criss-crossed with highways. But over the past few months, a man, or something more baleful, referred to as the Son of Dajjal, had been terrorizing the coastal villages. It raped women, killed men, burnt camels, and could not be found — because no one had seen its face, because it walked without leaving tracks, and because it knew how to hide even from the low-flying planes the British sent out. Pursuing the marauder  consumed most of the Wazir’s energies. And Ali gained reprieve.

One winter morning, Ali went to visit the mercurial underground spring in an oasis called the Hollows. He always liked coming here. It was a place where the sting of the sand was reduced by the palms that had put their heads together and there was enough shade that it was not considered foolish to momentarily rebel against the autocracy of the sun.

Ali was sitting with his back against the bark, itching himself, when Musa came yelling. Slender and slight and halting, he was brimful of nervous anxiety. His headdress was askew and his sensitive cheeks were burnt by the cold air.

“Americans!” he gasped. “Real Americans, two of them! And a third man, an Arab!”

Ali stood up and dusted himself. Though he had heard things about Americans — their victories in the Great War, their destruction of Japan, their attempt to emboss their flag upon the moon — he had never met one in person. Unlike the British, who had been around the Gulf ever since they displaced the Portuguese, and the Frenchmen and Danes who came by to study wind patterns and the evolution of Nabatean poetry, the Americans seemed to have been making an imprint in the Gulf without ever showing themselves. It was as if they followed the model of authority first established by the Almighty.

By the time the meeting occurred the day was beginning to turn warm and Ali removed the dark blue robe he wore over his white dishdasha. Musa stood near him, frail as a pellucid princess, wondering what his father would do.

There were indeed three men. The leader was a gaunt white cowboy, older, with an ostrich neck, wearing a wide brimmed white hat and sunglasses, a denim shirt and loose fitting slacks. He was called Thornton the Third.

The other American was squat and dark-skinned, with apparently oriental features, like a Mongol, a face that was more square than any Ali had ever seen. He wore a cap and had long black hair braided down to his buttocks — the braid was looped once around the neck like a chain. Despite the glass-like sheen permeating the air he wore no sunglasses and squinted little. Such imperviousness suggested a desert upbringing, certainly one that was at ease with the sun. His name was Shadow Wolf.

The third man was their Bahraini guide. One of the sophisticated cosmopolitan sorts that sat at the cafes in Muharraq, discussed the maqamat of classical music with oud players and debated the merits of the mini-skirt over the abaya. He was actually wearing a golden-hemmed bisht under his outer robe! He gave a name but Ali forgot it as quickly, recalling only that it suggested a Persian background.

Thornton the Third preferred to speak bluntly. He said it was a habit caused by a life of sending telegrams.

“I am told that you once found a thief after having seen his sandal prints two years earlier in a completely different town.”

“This is true,” Ali bowed.

“I represent a construction Company whose task it is to connect the western oil fields to the eastern coast. And the Company is behind schedule. They have brought me here to remedy this situation.”

The Bahraini was not a good translator, relying on colloquial words instead of the pure Arabic of the bedouin, eliciting disdainful glances from Ali.

“Yes, I have seen their machines,” Ali replied. “Very big. But they don’t do much, I hear.” He couldn’t resist a smile.

“These machines are American built. They mastered Saudi sand. They built the highway to the oil fields in the Empty Quarter. Yet Wazirati sand makes them sick. They keep breaking. And when they aren’t broken they lose fuel. Or a foreman runs off in fright. It is odd all that is happening here. Don’t you think?”

“Maybe it’s the Son of Dajjal.”

“He’s referring to a killer stalking these lands,” said the Bahraini, in explanation. “Son of the anti-Christ.”

Thornton raised a hand. “The conditions for the appearance of the anti-Christ are not yet satisfied.”

“It must be the jinn then,” Ali offered. “There is a holy man around. But I warn you, he fears the jinn more than me.”

He laughed. “You see this man?” He put his arm around his companion. “He is what you call a Red Indian. He is the greatest tracker of our nation. He suspects my problem is a vandal in the desert. What do you say to that?”

Ali looked into the eyes of the Red Indian. The hazel orbs contained something that other men, even Waziratis, had begun to lose. The kind of eyes that thrived in the desert, which saw all, classified what they saw, and most importantly, never forgot. And he felt a flicker of brotherhood. This was the sort of man that his father had been. The sort of man he wished to forge Musa into.

“So then have him track. See if he can find your culprit.”

“He has already begun. But I wanted to come to you to see if you wanted to provide assistance. Because we are not familiar with the lay of the land like you.”

Ali inhaled.

“This is nothing personal, ya Amrikan. But I do not serve a foreigner. God willing, you will find your culprit. Now please, go with God.”

“We can offer you money. Bags.”

“Bags will just weigh me down.”

Thornton the Third nodded and tipped his hat, backing away to take a dip of snuff. The Red Indian, however, took a step toward Ali, chin pointing up, looking into his eyes, his breath slow as a stallion in the morning. A singular finger unrolled from his fist and pointed at Ali.

“Every man leaves a trail,” he said, translated by the Bahraini.

The three men walked back to their truck and were gone in a sweep of dust. But the phlegmatic Red Indian left Ali frozen. He considered the possibility that the Americans already knew who he was and what he had done and this request for assistance was just a sordid game they were playing, for amusement, or out of boredom, or because they were wicked and enjoyed torture.

Ali  wished to run back to his tent, sift through the singular chest and find there the triple barrel Turkish flintlock with its etched floral scrolls and raised sighting rib — the weapon that his father had taken off an Ottoman lord. He could load it and chase down the Americans and fill them with pellets of poison. But Ali al-Mutawakkil was a peaceful man, more influenced by the serenity of the desert moon than the aggression of its sun, and he didn’t have the mettle for such an act. And besides, the Wazir was close to all westerners. He would not be merciful to someone who harmed his allies.

Without saying a word Ali trekked back to the tent with Musa and tended to his animals — the goat, the camel, the saluki dog. Their silent companionship, without question, without threat, let him recapture the rhythm of his breath.

For the next few days Ali expanded a frond fence that some earlier visitor to the Hollows had put up. It was a useless thing to work on a barricade in the desert, he knew, but it was something to occupy him, like making love to a wife, or whittling wood.

One by one he pulled out the gray and grizzled fronds that had withered over time and drove into the ground, like he was planting a row of flags, the greener ones that Musa had cut. As he worked, his eyes continued turning west, far in the distance, where the asphalt made its inexorable advance. He imagined the black line spiraling toward him; right here in the oasis, going straight through his body, the unbreakable stone spear of an invincible tribe.

“Why do you oppose the road?” Musa crouched next to him. “Most of our people already use trucks — a road is only another thing.”

Ali didn’t express the fear in his heart. “If this country is overrun by roads then the trade of the tracker will die. Do you know what will become of us? We will be used for sport. They will take us in trucks in the wilderness and make us chase the footprints of ostriches and oryxes and gazelles. And when they were finished they would lock us in giant game preserves to spend the year cultivating the animals so they could come back and kill them.”

It grew cold in the evening. The sky was lined with wispy clouds that made its surface appear withered and chapped. The wind blew hard. Not the repetitive onomatopoeias of the summer, more a howl with no beginning. Musa clicked his tongue at the lazy dromedary, trying to persuade it to change the angle of its body, so the wind wouldn’t extinguish the orange fire. The boy’s face showed a mixture of frustration and hunger. He used a pan and flipped a confection of ground locust.

Ali ate the crunchy gruel and retreated deep inside the tent. As receptive as his body was, he couldn’t persuade the scorpion of sleep to sting him. He remained lying on the braised carpet, brushing his hand over the sedu weaving. Then he went outside and squatted upon the sand, picking his teeth, looking out into the west. He could just see the American wolf in the darkness, with his nose to the ground, his finger pointed here, right here, where Ali al-Mutawakkil slept with his son, his everything. The wolf was right. Every man left a trail, even one that wore boots of brass.

He was about to stand up when he heard robes fluttering in the hard wind. He hunkered down, lying on his stomach, opening his earhole pulling down on the lobe. There were other minute sounds: the frothy breath of a camel ridden hard, the clicking of a cantene, the ping of a metal buckle against another, the clatter of wood.

Then, like a rose blooming, a fire was lit, and in the milky glow Ali could see the rider’s form, a tall man with his face completely covered. He wore a belt with a twine-handle knife in it and most curiously, he wore heavy cloth padding over his shoes, that made it appear that he was walking on stumps. The rider unpacked a blanket on the back of his camel and out rolled the shirtless corpse of an African pearl-diver. The victim’s face was twisted in an unfinished plea and the sharkbone clamp that divers used to help them hold their breath punctured his nose.

Ali shifted in place. He didn’t have a weapon with him. He began scraping at the cold sand with his elbows and burrowed down. He prayed that Musa wouldn’t wake up and come looking for him.

Ali remained under the sand blanket until morning, watching the masked man until he put out the fire.

Once the sun was up and Ali was certain the rider was gone he got up and went back to his tent. He hid all morning, forbidding Musa to stray out of the fence they had erected.  He felt cold and shivered and drank countless cups of darkbrew.

“I saw the Son of Dajjal.”

Musa didn’t react. “In a dream?”

“It wasn’t a dream,” Ali replied. “No, I do not dream since your mother died. It was real.”

“Is he as cruel as they say?”

Ali nodded. Then he scrambled, on his knees, towards the chest containing the Turkish pistol and pulled it out, feeling its long cold bore. He put it in Musa’s hand, who cradled it like a loaf of bread. Angered by the meek handling of the weapon Ali tore it back.

“He doesn’t leave any footprints,” Ali said.

“How come?”

“He pads his feet.”

Father and son went to the abandoned campsite. The ash, the upturned stone, the roots of spineless caper — Ali al-Mutawakkil memorized everything. Here was the sinuous, serpentine imprint made where the killer had lain. There was the bump in the sand where the diver was buried. Ali squatted where the camel had shat and observed the animal’s prints.

They stayed at the site until the shadows lengthened. Perhaps there was a reason the Almighty had put him in proximity with such a man, like a test, the periodic examination that the world conducted.

“I am tired of eating lizard,” Ali said as they trekked back to the tent. The afternoon was warm and he suspected there were plenty of boustard out there, or stone curlews, perhaps even an oryx. “Every day lizard, every day preserved dates.”

He restored the pistol to its rightful place in the chest — it wasn’t for killing game — and led the camel out to the front of the tent where he put padding on its hump, followed by the wooden saddle, wool tassles hanging from its edges. When it was ready, the camel lowered its neck, and Ali leapt onto its back. Then Ali called Musa who came over carrying the big saluki in his arms. Ali took the dog and put it on his lap so it could conserve its energy for the hunt’s endgame.

Ali had ridden about two fahrast when he spotted a hare’s tracks. He followed them for some time, toward a rocky outcropping sitting on the sand like a callous on a hand.

The hare knew it was being followed and hopped towards a heavy bush. Ali circled around a few times, patting the saluki to get him excited, and then rushed at the bush with the camel. The panicked hare came out of its sanctuary and ran up a dune. With a throaty cry Ali speared the saluki down. The dog landed in a leap, then with three more, a blur of black, was on top of the hare.

The hare was roasted, with the fur, on the open fire, and was eaten with the days old khbz. Its head, with the eyes burnt in the sockets, was kicked to the side. As they ate a gust of wind splashed sand onto the surface of the tent and the particles made the sound of soft rain. The camels in the dark groaned something and the saluki poked his nose at a lizard . Calm secreted out of Ali’s pores and ran into the cooling sand where it rasped and was snapped up by jerboas.

Afterward, as Ali drank mint tea, Musa recited an ode by Shanfara, and swept the front of the tent with a palm frond. When he was finished he turned the frond’s pointy end to the sky and hurled it into the dark.

“The wolf is a dog!” Ali declared out loud. “The white man is hunting me with his dog.”

“How can you be sure?” Musa asked.

“Because all men play the same game.”

*

            Father and son separated at dawn. Ali took the camel and the goat; Musa the saluki. The sun cast weak pink gauze over their farewell. The tent was left, along with their belongings, in the oasis, where it could be recovered if they returned, or picked up by another if they didn’t.

Watching his son go, alone, for the first time in the desert, Ali’s heart was proud like a flag rippling against the sky — but it was also heavy as if a pearl diver had taken it into the seabed and crammed it in an oyster. He turned, brought the camel to its feet, and stroked the head of the goat, accidentally calling it Musa.

He made a final pass through the encampment of the Son of Dajjal, upturned a few stones, said a prayer for the diver, and rode away.

The day, despite its chill, was dusty. He covered his nose and mouth and lowered his head. The wind was as plaintive as it had been all winter. The sun came out; but it was a miniscule disc of white. Ali soaked what little heat it released. As he sweated in his robes he was reminded of other journeys he had made. Vagrant men, thieving men, bad men, men that had thought themselves above pursuit, had been caught, because in the end they were just men and all men left tracks in the desert. He raised his head now and touched his animal companions, imparting some of his vigor to them. They responded by quickening their pace.

It was not long before the ground hardened under his feet. Camel thorn appeared at greater frequency and then there was stiff-leaved sedge, cropped by the mouth of grazing animals. Both the camel and the goat swung their heads down to nip on the shrub. He let them eat. And he hoped that Musa had stopped to take a bite of the preserved dates Ali had put in the boy’s pocket.

Soon Ali could smell saline humidity in the air. Far in the distance he saw a pair of trucks coming out of the desert, headed downslope, men in the back bouncing on the great bumps in the dirt path. He shrank down behind a bush so he wouldn’t be spotted.

A short while later he came into an area like a dry marsh . The soil was soft and chalky with warm crystals sitting on the surface. Tiny branchlets with blue-green leaves snagged against his clothes.

He walked into a rich patch of vegetation, his hand running over the feathery tamarisk some called asla and others ethl. Here he released the goat. And the animal, shocked by the abundance of foliage after the years spent in the aridity of the desert, danced and hopped in gratitude, before running away. Another member of his tribe sent off. It was just he and the camel now.

By late afternoon Ali arrived at the edge of a coastal village called Rim Ram.The huts in the village were of mud and plank and branch and frond. Each house had some kind of protection from the evil eye hanging out front. A group of laughing women came out of the village and headed toward a phalanx of primrose. They were young, virgins mostly , curly hair pulled to the front of their bodies to cover their bosoms, and cloth caps on their heads. They sat on the slope on their full thighs and thick hips and yanked the clumps out with their wide palmed hands adorned with orange henna, getting to the plant’s dark red roots, which produced a powdery dust they would later use as blush, as lipstick. Ali remembered that whenever his wife returned from the coast she used to leave red kisses on his thighs. He hoped one day Musa would get to experience such joys as well.

Ali entered the town through the gated entrance so he could study the footprints and tracks and other curiosities. Before seeing the Shaykh he stopped by the stable and studied the through the horses and the camels.

The old Shaykh, an acquaintance, lived in a small whitewashed cottage. He sat on the floor, in a room arrayed by cushions and carpets, aware that he was the custodian of very little. In a corner was a coffee table a British political agent had given him as a bribe decades ago. Now the only audience he received were wives and daughters . And the occasional nomad.

After paying his respects Ali told the Shaykh that the Son of Dajjal was in his village. The Shaykhleapt up and seized the curved ceremonial khanjar hanging on the wall.

“Who? By the Almighty in whose hand is my soul…”

Ali spoke slowly, excavating the memories he had gathered.

“You must arrest a tall man with an injury to his eye, who arrived here two nights ago, on a white camel with no tail, which is also blind in one eye. That man is the Son of Dajjal. He has just buried a pearl-fisher in the desert and has come here to claim more victims.”

The Shaykh immediately set his men out to the home of an Abyssinian crone with whom such a man was staying. When seven scimitars were put to the man’s neck he quickly acknowledged that he was the killer. A great number of takbirat rang out in the afternoon. And even the furthest fisherman on the water heard the cries and pulled their nets.

The Shaykh took the entire matter quite seriously. After all, it was the first proper opportunity for law enforcement since he had sentenced a fornicator to throw herself into a well enjambed with spears.

The killer, his feet bound, was thrown into a pit dug out in the center of the village, near the well, with a cover made of crossed spears placed over the hole. A pair of fleet riders were sent to the Wazir in the capital so he could come and execute this man by his own hand.

As evening descended and the Shaykh finished the administrative matters he paid the killer a visit. He took Ali along because he wanted to share with the villagers the story of how the notorious killer had been caught.

“O devil,” the Shaykh spat at the killer in the pit. “You must be forced to recognize how the Almighty arranged for you to be captured!”

The killer was strangely contrite. He sat in a crouch like a beaten wife and looked up, shielding his face from the occasional stone a child threw down.

“So tell us, ya Ali al-Mutawakkil, the nose of the Almighty,” the Shaykh turned, “how it was that you tracked this killer, when even the birds of the British could not see him, when the Wazir’s best soldiers couldn’t find him, when all the prayers of grieving mothers were not…” He went on for some time.

Ali looked to the crowd with a pleased face — the children seated, the men forming a rank, the women in the back. He nodded in appreciation because they recognized him. And, more importantly, because they valued his trade.

“O people, what had prevented this killer from being captured was that every one who tracked him tried to find his footprints. But this man didn’t leave any footprints — because he wrapped his feet in padding. Therefore, I tried another approach. I began at the campsite he abandoned and followed his camel. And I listened to the desert tell me about his camel. I determined that his camel was tail-less based on the position of its droppings in relation to its rear footprints. I determined the camel had to be one-eyed because it grazed on desert thorn in a lopsided manner. And I determined that his camel was an albino because the lore of firasaah informed me how to read lineage in the footprints of all creation. Then I came here to Rim Ram which is the closest village to the campsite, and checked if such a camel was grazing here. I was fortunate that I spotted the albino camel, and so I alerted your Shaykh.”

“Subhanallah!” shouted the crowd. And it was apparent that the killer was cowed as well, as he slunk into the shaded part of the pit and wouldn’t come out even when the children hit him with stones.

“But you also identified the man!” the Shaykh exhorted. “How did you determine his appearance?”

“Ah, yes,” Ali smiled; now speaking in a singsong voice. “I determined that he was one-eyed because I saw the smear of a finger on an upturned stone near his campsite. The smear tasted of spineless caper. As every housewife knows caper root is used to treat injuries to the eye.”

“With all those signs you had no need of footprints!” the Shaykh said. “It was as if the killer was begging to be caught!”

The people came and congratulated Ali and then set off to prepare a feast. Already there were entreaties for him to take the hands of certain women in marriage. Ali bowed and nodded at the crush of generosity and goodwill.

When, finally, Ali was alone above the pit he knelt and threw a stone at the criminal. Ali’s face was hard now, severe, like petrified wood.

“What would you do for your freedom?”

Thinking it to be a taunt the man said nothing.

“Answer me!” Ali threw another stone. “What will you do for your freedom?”

“Anything,” said the man, standing up, turning his head to look at Ali with his good eye. “I would do anything.”

“Dig yourself a foothold then,” Ali whispered. “I will come back for you.”

The feast lasted late into the night and the drums beat long and the men danced the samri. Ali retired early and waited for the celebration to end. He snuck out of the Shaykh’s house and looked to the sky. The moon was bright, and the stars, as a collective, were equally luminous.

He went to the stable and found his camel, leading it out with one hand clamped over its mouth. He came into the village, passing behind and around mud huts, listening for the snores of the men and the slumbering sighs of the women. In one house he heard the soft recitation of the Quran, followed by the prayer that newlyweds made before their communion. Continuing on, his nose filled with the slightly acrid scent of burnt oil, and the odd fish rotting in a woven basket. He picked his way through hulls and rudders and broken oars , and made his way to the pit.

Without pumping his arms, in a slight crouch, he ran and got on his stomach at the lip of the pit. A dull stone was used to gain the prisoner’s attention and then he lowered the rope, flicking his wrist so it danced like a snake, allowing for the prisoner to find it in the dark.

“Get up, man. I am springing you.”

The killer looked up. His teeth chattered from the cold that seeped up from below ground. He took a hold of the rope and stood up; ready to place his foot onto the holds he’d dug.

Ali gave a tug of confirmation and brought the camel back with little clicks of his tongue. Then, in one swift motion, he looped the rope around his forearm and leapt on the camel’s back, digging his feet down and tying the rope around the animal’s shoulders. There was a surge of flesh; the hump nearly sliding out from under his knees.

Even on a bad day the camel could pull a thousand pounds. The killer came flying out of the pit, landing with a thud. He was yanked all the way out of the village. Ali didn’t bother stopping because the dragging body would erase any of his camel’s residual prints, making it impossible for them to be tracked. To some it might even seem that the prisoner had escaped and abducted the man that captured him and was now hauling his body around the desert.

When they reached the marsh Ali allowed the killer to come to his feet and dust himself. The front of his clothes were bloody; but it was nothing some aloe oil couldn’t address. Ali circled the camel, the Turkish pistol pointed, and nodded toward the slope leading further into the reeds and rushes.

Once deep inside the foliage Ali hobbled the camel and the killer both, built a fire, and found the goat he had left behind. It was well fattened now and its udders were full. He drank all the milk. Next he slaughtered the animal, cut the legs and put them to roast. He sat with one leg in each hang, licking at the molten fat, staring at the killer.

“They will come after you,” said the prisoner.

“So be it.”

“Why have you done this?”

Ali finished eating. Then he got up and untied the killer’s hands and let him go at the leftovers, the furry flesh. The killer reached for a knife and cut out the animal’s liver and made a kabob of it. Ali kept the Turkish pistol pointed. Every now and again his sticky thumb rubbed over the hammer.

“I have never killed a man,” Ali said, letting the implication hang in the air.

The killer stopped licking the flat of the now liverless blade and hung it over the fire, watching it heat up. Ali realized his error and gestured for the knife to be tossed aside. The killer complied and raised both hands reassuringly high.

“You wouldn’t spring me to shoot me.”

“How many men have you killed?”

“More than there are stars.”

“Put out the fire.”

The killer took a large stone and used it to stamp the flame down. A few embers scorched his face and arms and he hit his forearms as if he was killing mosquitos. Ali took the moment to look at the infinite numerosity above. But his eyes turned to the moon. It looked red and hot like the knife heated in the fire. With a deep breath he lowered the hammer on his pistol and handed it over.

A smile spread across the killer’s face. He snapped the pistol with both hands and stroked it obscenely. Then he stood up and turned it towards Ali.

“That was stupid.”

Ali spoke in a voice as sharp as the edge of the moon. “I caught a man that couldn’t be caught. And then I freed him. Then I fed him. Then I armed him. He is in my debt. He is my dog. Mine to command. .”

The killer became quiet and walked about the campsite pounding his forehead with the pistol handle. His bad eye twitched. He directed the gun at Ali many times, only to pull it back and grunt.

“If I do this, will that earn me my freedom?”

“I can’t speak for the Wazir,” Ali replied. “But if you succeed I will not come after you.”

“And this weapon?”

“Yours.”

The killer holstered the weapon and bowed. Then he moved to pick up the saddle.

The pair left the goat for the scavengers and headed up the coast towards a beach at the northernmost rim of the Wazirate. To prevent the killer from tiring before his task Ali put him on the camel.

They pulled up on a rocky ledge under a clump of twisted acacias from where they could see a pristine waterside expanse below. The waves were more pronounced here in comparison to Rim Ram and made the sound of a woman telling a baby to hush. The foam was the color of milk. A hard wind came from the Gulf, like the breath of an exhausted mother. It ruffled their robes up there on the ledge and swept away doubt and fear.

Ali put his hand on the killer’s arm and pointed. All the way up the beach, just beneath a rocky outcropping, there was a small structure. A hut that some grifter had built there a long time ago. It was the hut that Musa dreamt of converting into a home for himself. A rock wall loomed above and around the hut.

“Go in there and wait for him to come.”

“That’s all?”

Ali took a deep breath. He felt barbarous speaking murder in such a pre-meditative, pre-emptive manner, like he was some sort of heartless American.

“Go.”

The two men shook hands and the killer headed down the rocks, the weapons in his belt, arms out to balance himself, skidding and nearly falling upon the moss.

Ali watched him descend and then, wiping away his tracks, retreated back to the clump of acacias where he had first stopped. Then he knelt the camel and sat next to it, for warmth, for assurance, eagerly watching the south side of the beach for Musa.

He waited , repeatedly losing himself in the unchanging octaves of the waves. The dark sky seemed so immense to him, greater and more imperious than anything he had ever seen. He understood why his ancestors always located the Almighty in the sky and not, despite their own distinguished majesties, in the desert or in the Gulf.

Then the yelp of the saluki rang true and clear. The barking dog ran on the beach, full of energy, jumping into the waves and hopping playfully. It was closely followed by Musa. Yes, it was him. He walked in a line, head down, like he had a purpose, his steps sure, his neck stretching and compressing like that of a loping camel. In the bluish light Musa didn’t look like a boy. He was a ponderous white-robed angel, trailing behind him tracks that were deep and unmistakably his. A man — one that created a path for others to follow.

Musa walked straight toward the hut, his pace increasing at the sight of the structure. He made sure to take his steps all the way to the door of the hut and then leapt onto the rock and began climbing up as fast as he could.

Ali imagined his son’s fingers going into the mossy grooves, his feet knifing into the stone, ligaments hurting, . He accumulated in his mouth the entirety of his will and resolve and prayer and exhaled it toward his son.

Musa slipped many times. Once Ali was certain he wouldn’t get up. As the sun came out and spat steam upon the Gulf, which became more agitated in response, the day broke out in full. And just then, with one powerful leap, Musa reached the top, up and over. Ali slurred praise to everything in his sight. The sun, the sky, the water, the rock.

Shadow Wolf showed up just a few moments later. He came up the south side of the beach, following the tracks Musa had sprinkled for him. He wore denim and a leather vest, carrying a light rifle in his hand. He walked with the assurance of a hunter that knows he has quarried his prey, that all he has to do is go find the skulking creature and finish the job. He continued his unrelenting march forward, to the hut where he would find the vandal. With each step the American took Ali felt more panic. In the sunlight, with the seagulls standing on the roof and uttering their obscenities, the cubic hut appeared so laughable to him, so flimsy. What had made him think the hut was an appropriate place to lay a trap? Just one vagrant wave would knock it down, or one heavy gust of wind. And then all would be exposed.

Yet it remained standing, and soon Shadow Wolf was upon it, sniffing around it, seeing the footprints leading in.

The American walked in a low crouch and went straight to the door.

And just as soon as he went in, like the crack of a distant thunder, a single shot rang in the land. It reverberated against the rock wall, dispersing the seagulls in a panicked chorus, echoing up and down the stunning beach like the call of a thing too big for the world. Everything held still; it seemed even the waves stopped rushing.

Ali stood up and waved to his son in the distance, whowas already running this way, whooping and hollering, uttering takbirat to the Almighty.

Ali grasped Musa in the crook of an arm, almost taking him down with the force of his love. The boy, his face hot as fire, scarred by the burning wind he had walked through, raised his father up on the camel as if putting a bride into a howdah and led him away, back to the Hollows, telling him exactly how he had drawn the American tracker out and through the invisible pathways between the sands. They reached home in less than a day, unfurled their goat-hair tent, and laid out the sedu carpet onto the sand and made a feast of clarified butter and aged dates. Then Ali drank tea and Musa sang Shanfara. Nothing more.

I push the massive wooden door of the church. It’s easier to open than I expect. It looks like it’s been there for a hundred years, but it doesn’t squeak. I walk in unnoticed. My steps are as light as my combat boots will allow. I stand in the corner and breathe in the familiar smells of wood and incense. Tonight, after all these years, I am drawn back here. Tonight, the eve of tomorrow, this place pulls me, like a trigger.

I can see them sitting solemnly in their pews, but they can’t see me. There are shadowy crevices, statues and columns to hide a stranger. Their ears are full of the priest’s words and their eyes are fixed on the altar. No light comes through the stained-glass windows and the pattern of my dress matches the angles and colours. I’m invisible as I move along the wall to the side of the church

The priest reads, “The wages of sin is death…”

I watch the congregation. They all have the same smug look. The confident look of certainty. The wages of sin is death. I repeat the phrase to myself but can’t find the truth in it.

The wages of life is death would be truer. We all die. We all end up as lifeless sacks of flesh.

Life, I remind myself, is slow suicide. This thought makes me smile. It’s not that I want to die, but I feel better knowing everyone will. Everyone in this room, comfortable in their knowledge, comfortable in their faith, is going to die.

Death is the equalizer.

“The gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

The congregation does the sign of the cross in unison and says “Amen.”

The priest talks about Jesus’ message of peace and love and my mind wanders. Jesus was a true revolutionary.

I’m collecting water from the oasis. Behind me I hear him saying, “Love your neighbours as you love yourself.”

I pause and listen for a moment. “Love, too, your enemies. Pray for those who persecute you.”

I stop listening and pick up my water pitcher. As I turn to leave I glance at this strange man who expects me to love the people who kill and pray for those who oppress. He catches my gaze and smiles. I quickly walk away and am not far along the pebbly path home when I hear soft footsteps behind me. They are light, as if the feet are barely touching the ground.

“Can I help you carry your water?” He’s walking next to me now.

Men don’t carry water. It’s woman’s work. But it would not be the strangest thing this strange man has been seen to do. I give him the pitchers. “Try not to spill any.”

He smiles . I turn my gaze to my feet and watch dust clouds form around my steps.

“I heard you talking back there. You really know how to pull a crowd.”

“I saw you listening.”

“I was…until you suggested that I love my enemies.” Jesus opens his mouth to respond, but I continue. “How will they ever respect us if we reward their brutality with love?”

“It’s you who gets the reward,” he says. “Hate destroys the vessel that carries it sooner than the object it’s aimed at. They kill you from the outside and your hate kills you from the inside.”

“Will love protect me from their weapons, from their taxes, their bigotry? Will love keep me and my family alive?”

“No, love will keep you happy. Death comes to us all.”

Death is the equalizer. We all end up as sacks of bones.

We arrive at my home and I welcome him inside. I offer him my softest cushion in the corner that gets the most breeze. I bring him tea and dates.

“You’re very kind,” he says. “If we all treated each other the way you are treating me, everything in this world would be different.”

“But if the rich shared with the poor, they’d no longer be rich.”

Jesus nods as he chews a date. “There would be no concept of rich and poor if we all loved our neighbours as we loved ourselves. There would be no ‘mine’ or yours’, only ‘ours.’. Our neighbours would no longer be our competitors. There would be no need to fight for land and keep our food locked away. There is enough of everything in this world for everyone to have as much as they need.”

“Sit with me.” He makes room for me on the cushion. I sit and am close enough to see the flecks of gold in his dark eyes, to smell the heat on his skin. I am close enough to see the tangles in his long hair, the grains of sand in his eyebrows.

Because I can’t help myself, I reach out and touch his face. I run my hand slowly over his cheek, his jaw-line. My fingertips trace the long, curved bridge of his nose, they linger at his lips. He takes my wrist and gently kisses my fingers. His other hand moves up my robe. As he pushes me gently onto my back I think about how the stones flung at my naked body would feel if we were caught.

The choir starts to sing and I am back in this world. At the front of the church, centred behind the altar hangs a life-sized crucifix. There is Jesus, blood at his wrists, blood on his feet. His head bowed.

The only man I could ever love, killed between two thieves.

Death, the equalizer.

The congregation rises for communion. They line up to eat the body of Christ. I feel the dampness in my panties as I walk out the door. I’d prefer to take Jesus into my body another way.

There is life in this part of town. Here, where people live in houses and feel secure enough to raise a family. There are cars in driveways, trees in backyards. There are schools and pharmacies. No broken windows, no trash on the street. The sweetness of night jasmine floats in the air, the scent of hope .

I turn a corner. Monstrously tall buildings scrape at the sky, blocking out the stars and the moon. During the day these are offices, these are factories. Promises of a bearable future for those who work hard. At night they are locked up tight. Steel covers the doors, the windows – protection against the rocks and bats of the proletariat. These buildings look as abandoned as the people who sleep propped up against their foundations. There are gunshots and sirens. Screams. There air smells of smoke and piss.

I walk down an alley still thinking of Jesus and peace and love. If we fight violence with violence only violence wins. I push this thought into the back of my mind as I rap on a metal, grafittied door. Two quick knocks, pause, three quick knocks. I wait. Inside, someone knocks twice. I knock twice in response. There is the screech of metal moving across rusty metal the lock opens – there are six of them.

“Greetings, sister.”

I walk into the dim room. Cigarette smoke billows and wafts and looks exactly like incense, but it’s not as sweet. The paint is peeling from the walls in almost perfectly geometric lines revealing the layers of colors that preceded it. It could almost look like art, if not so filthy. “Peace, brother. How’s everything going?”

“Just going over final details.”

People are filling bottles with liquid. Others load bullets into guns. Around a table a group studies a map. Charlie looks up and sees me, waves me over. I walk closer and see that it’s a map of the city. Red lines and arrows lead to the parliament building.

“Group A meets here,” Charlie says, pointing at the map. “Group B will be over here. Group C is here. Follow your designated routes. Meet at Parliament just as the ministers are entering, and attack. An equal amount of explosives and guns in each group. They’ll be surrounded. There’ll be no escape.”

We’ve been planning for over a year. I’ve carved the details into my mind. I listen again anyway.

“There are nine safe houses scattered around the city. Those who survive can hide out at any of them as long as we need .”

Those who survive. He says it with such ease. I look around the table. Everyone has the same smug look. That confident look of certainty.

All roads lead to death, I remind myself. I can waste away slowly, suffocating under oppression, or I can offer my life to the Revolution.

Charlie recites his favourite Che Guevara quote, “Whenever death may surprise us, let it be welcome if our battle cry has reached even one receptive ear and another hand reaches out to take up our arms.” We all place a fist over our heart and say in unison, “Freedom, now.”

I’m in a jungle. Soft, dewy ground. More trees than I’ve ever seen in my life. Sun twinkles through the leaves. I hear gunshots and throw myself into the dirt. I reach for the rifle on my back and wait until I see their legs directly in front of me. Aim upwards and splatter their uniforms with blood. Four soldiers fall in a heap.

Behind me, someone says, “You have good aim, comrade.”

I roll over, ready to fire. He pushes my rifle aside and offers me a hand. I reach for it and he pulls me to my feet. His curly hair flutters beneath his beret. There is an inferno in his eyes and my cheeks grow hot.

“You’ve been shot,” he says.

Immediately, I feel the white-hot pain, like lightning stabbing my shoulder. There is a bloody hole that only adrenaline kept me from noticing before.

Che puts his arm around me and leads me to the river. He sits me on the grass and leans in close. He smells of cigar smoke, gunpowder and sweat. I let him unbutton my shirt. Let him pull it off my shoulder. He’s careful and gentle as he tears the cloth from my wound. My breath quickens when he unstraps a knife from his leg.

He strokes my head with his hand. “This won’t hurt more than getting shot,” he says.

I close my eyes tight, take a deep breath and try to convince myself to believe him. I nod, take a deep breath and close my eyes. I feel the cold blade pierce my wound and hold back my scream as the knife tip wiggles beneath the bullet. Hishands are deft; a quick flick and I feel the pressure against my muscle and bone released. Che takes a flask from his pocket, unscrews the top and offers it to me. I swallow two mouthfuls and hand it back to him. He splashes some rum onto my shoulder and I gasp.

“You’ll live.” He smiles and I almost forget that I just killed four people. “Victory is soon,” he says, “Soon we will be free.”

I prop myself up with my good arm. “I know. I can feel it. Soon there will be no more killing.”

“Yes, the killing is the worst part. But it’s necessary. There is no other way.” He takes off his beret and rubs his head vigourously. “We die every day because of them. Even if they don’t put guns to our heads they kill us with greed, with selfishness. Until they realize that they bleed as we do, they will not treat us as equals.”

He looks at himself in the river. I sidle next to him. My reflection joins his. I run my fingers through his hair, over his cheeks.

“Victory is soon,” I say. “Soon, there will be no more dying.”

He turns his fiery gaze to me and I start to look away before I combust. He holds my chin and forces my eyes into his.

“Victory over oppression, yes. The war will end, but no one can free himself from death. He presses lips to my mouth and curls his tongue around mine. With a light tug my shirt falls to the grass.

Charlie puts his arm around my shoulders. “Tomorrow’s the day, baby. ”

I look up at Charlie and smile, “Yeah, baby. Tomorrow the revolution begins. Freedom, now.”

I wonder what dying feels like.

He quotes Che again, “Better to die standing than live on your knees.”

Death the equalizer. The only man I could ever love, hunted down in the bush, like a wild boar.

In our apartment Charlie stumble through piles of books, bottles and t-shirts and tear at each others clothes. I am desperate to feel him in me, desperate to have my body filled with something other than the images of cruelty and violence.

Charlie is on top of me, inside of me, and I try not to think that this may be the last time . I feel him sliding back and forth but my mind is in tomorrow, with dead politicians. I try not to think about their children. They won’t be the first to lose their father. Won’t be the last. Their wives won’t be the first widows. Won’t be the last.

I concentrate on Charlie’s breath. His groans tell me he is about to burst. My orgasm hides herself deep inside me, beyond his reach. I grab the back of his head and pull him in to kiss me. His face morphs into Jesus’ and we are at a desert oasis. I dig my fingernails into his skin and pull him deeper. My orgasm peaks her head out of her hiding place. I look Jesus in the eye and he morphs into Che. Sand changes to grass. We are in the jungle. Che flips me onto my stomach and pulls me to my knees. My cheek slides against the dirt.

Then, they are both there and my bed is like a battlefield, or a mass grave. We are a squirming, sweaty knot of arms and legs and tongues. They grab and pull me. Flick my most sensitive parts, slip into my moist places. They bite the soft flesh of my stomach and legs. I want them both inside of me, moving and living. But there’s not enough room. They can’t both fit.

My orgasm retreats and I whimper.

I close my eyes. I’m not in the desert, not in the jungle, not in the city. This is not a bed, a battle, or a grave. I do not look at Charlie, nor do I long for Jesus or Che. There is no oppression. No revolution. Just the tremors between my legs, the throbbing in my stomach.

Then, the explosion, like a mushroom cloud from my belly, a blaze of white behind my eyelids.

As the dust settles, there is only quiet. My head is light with its lack of words and images. If not for my machine gun heart, my breath like a hurricane, my blood like a tidal wave, I’d think that I were dead.

 

This was back when we still hadn’t figured out the key to living forever, back when all the dumb schmucks about to check out down on Earth would pay to have their minds warehoused in the chitinous skin of those giant low-grav shrimp and lobsters they’d let loose on the moon, in all the new oceans that happened when the craters filled up with industrial rain.

Back in the stupid days, I mean.

I was right in the thick of it.

See this scar, right here?

It’s from then. Not from a giant claw or some antennae whipping back and forth like you’d think, either.

It’s from a dame.

And before you jump on my case for calling her that, dial back to then if you can. Everybody was financing family crests, becoming instantly royalty. Dukes, princesses, counts, a few kings, an emperor or two, and ‘dame,’ that shuffles in there somewhere, I’m not just real sure where. Maybe it’s like a knight?

Guys who’ve been reduced to p.i. work late in life, well. There weren’t a lot of princes among us, I guess you could say. Mostly mongrels, if you want the truth, and even in that pack, I wasn’t top dog.

My office was the storage room above a bar. When I could make it upstairs at closing time, it was also my bedroom. When I couldn’t make it down, it was my cell. You get the picture. These weren’t exactly my gravy days.

But then your mom walked in.

She carried her breasts before her like a platter of cookies, I swear. Just looking up and seeing her, I was ten years old again. But growing fast.

As for how she found me, your guess is as good as mine. I’d guess she lucked onto me in the Directory. For all I know, one of those gadgets she had lacquered into her fingernails could find a midpoint between Discretion and Gullibility, then associate a name with it.

Rock Turner, p.i.

At your service, ma’am.

I’d say your mom was all legs, except for her breasts.

It’s been a clean two years since that day, but I’m guessing that if she walked through this door, I’d forget what I was saying all over again.

Just like then.

I was on the phone with a former client, trying to leverage another payment, even considering taking payments toward that payment, but when your mom sat down on the other side my desk, I hung up as gently as I could.

“What can I do you for?” I asked.

She settled into this tall chair I had back then, crossed her legs like she’d just flunked out of leg-crossing school. At least the one for ladies.

I would have lit her cigarette for her, except for the bans. Everybody was afraid of lighting the atmosphere on fire again. What they were really afraid of was that smokers would be the only ones able to breathe fire, the only ones to come out the other side, but still, you could get fined, and, since they’d taxed smokes to hell and back, I’d quit carrying my lighter.

Until now, though, until I needed a good reason to lean forward, change my point of view, I hadn’t much regretted it.

“My husband,” she said. Because it had been highlighted in her script, probably. Because she’d seen all the old watchies, knew what was expected of her here.

I didn’t care. Not that she was lying to me, and not that she was married. Really, the first, the deceit and how easy it seemed to come to her, it was what was making the marriage not so important at the moment.

Anyway, I won’t bore you with the rest of what she’d made up to bait me in. It was the usual sob-story of being cheated on, a prisoner in her own house, victim of the fairy tale, all that. She even worked her own mom in somewhere, but then, towards the end, we got to the important part: her husband had checked out.

She didn’t want to find him because she loved him, but because the house detectives were closing in on her, she was pretty sure.

You might not remember that, though, right? ‘Check out?’ It wasn’t the technical term, was just what you said about somebody when they’d called the Service. Had one of their bots come out, attach that thing to your head. The SoulSucker.

Everybody remembers them.

Ten minutes with a SoulSucker and the most important parts of you were in storage thee hundred K away, had become a kind of transparent amoeba or bacteria in a giant lobster’s shell. You were part of its armor, now. You were in storage.

As for the tech on that, I’m probably the wrong detective to ask. Far as I could follow, with crustaceans, we’d always thought they were native to earth. Cockroaches of the sea, all that. Good for dinner and date, just creepy the rest of the time. But, turned out, they were creepier than we’d ever thought. They weren’t from earth at all, had just drifted down some millions of years ago. And, the only reason they were all small and puny, it was our sludgy gravity, shaping them. Keeping them down.

I mean, yeah, on the moon they still had that buggy look, don’t get me wrong. But they were monster-huge, and their proportions were just different enough to make you nervous, and, lo and behold, get enough of them in the same heavy-water tank like you’ve got on the moon, and bam, them suckers can lock together like puzzles. Not to make some even bigger lobster or shrimp, but . . . nobody really knew. Some natural part of their life cycle, or were they huddling up to plot against us?

You could take a sub, pry them apart, but they’d just fall away dead, and those ones that fell away, none of the other lobsters or crabs would eat them. It was like they were poisoned, or fallen soldiers.

Like I said: creepy as hell.

Still, we’re pretty smart monkeys down here on earth sometimes. We tested the water and when they all locked arms like that, got their mental space orgy on, it released something into the water that changed the other lobsters that were still solo, waiting their turn.

It changed them so we could use them like storage devices.

And that’s where your dad was, evidently.

In one of a hundred and twenty-two giant lobsters in uncharted lakes on the moon.

The rub, though, it was that somebody had put him there.

He hadn’t made the call himself.

Somebody’d dropped a serious dime on him. My job was to roll it off.

The blast to get me lunarside was the usual thing.

I softened it with four hours at the bar-two on earth, two on the moon, all the drinks there swirling with calcium so that you’d have grit in your mouth after tying one on proper.

Like I care about a little chalkmouth.

I wiped my lips and found myself a captain. Not the one your mom had hired, because I do have a few self-preservation instincts, mind.

The guy I found was a girl. She carried a laser bullwhip on each hip. I didn’t ask what for.

Hand in hand like she’d claimed me for the night, we made our way out to her ship and she took us across to the Sea of Tranquility.

All the seas kept the same names they’d had when they were just craters. Like I say, these were the stupid times.

As for why we knew to go there and not to any of the others, it was that the investigation into your mom, it was only three days old, meaning your dad couldn’t have checked out more than four days ago. So-I didn’t get my license for nothing-of course he’d still be in the Sea of Tranquility. It was the staging area, was where the sensors monitored whether your personality was going to synch up with your shrimp or not.

If not, no big deal, they could move you to a crab, and if that wasn’t love at first insertion, then they’d just load you onto one of the krill. On earth, they were a joke, were nothing, but in low-grav, they were zeppelins, floating through the new seas. They were gods, dwarfing any of the lobsters or crabs. Who knew, right?

Anyway, the first week out of your body, they liked to keep tabs, just to report back to the family on earth: “Papa Walter’s loving it up here! He’s in the third right-side leg of a snow crab forty feet tall! He’ll be ready for whenever you decide to download him!”

You know the racket.

To this day, no one’s ever been properly downloaded.

Evidently that same chemical or whatever the lobster huddles infect the water up there with, it’s like mind-glue for any consciousness that comes into contact with a crustacean and then stays there long enough for the eggheads to solve death.

Mated for life, yeah?

I don’t need to tell you.

Anyway, this is where I get to say it: The Sea was angry, and so was I.

Nice, yeah?

It’s no joke, either. The trick with water on the moon, it’s that just barely lowering your ship into the water, that creates a wave, right? No big deal on earth. On the moon it’s not either. At first.

Those round craters, though, something about their specific curve, they magnify the ripple, pass it back and forth a few times in low-grav, so that, next time you see it, it’s a swell, kind of rocks you back and forth, makes you reach for the rail.

They didn’t let these craters fill all the way up, though. They didn’t want the monster lobsters crawling from lake to lake. Hard to track that way.

So, these swells, they just crash into what for them’s a wall, then come back harder, and harder, until, about eight minutes after you set down, you’re staring down a tidal wave. One with giant red antenna whipping back and forth in it.

Your mom, she wasn’t paying me near enough.

The captain I’d hired, Lorenga, she’d tapped into the Service’s monitors, of course, knew which lobster had the most recent rider, but we were only just figuring out what depth it was when I looked up into a wall of water balancing above us like in a Japanese painting, where the falling edge of the water’s all curled in and dripping foam.

Lorenga felt my silence, turned around.

Or-okay, not exactly silence. But I wasn’t screaming either. This is back when I still carried one of those dicta-wills, that you could talk into, change on the fly.

I was willing my remains to your mom. Just so she’d have to pony up for transport, sterilization, interment.

It would about equal my bill, I figured. And, it wouldn’t be going to me, but she’d paying it anyway.

I’ve tried being not petty. It’s not all it’s cracked up to be.

But then, that wave already changing the temperature of the thin, manufactured air around us, Lorenga slid her two whips off, lit them with a harsh crack.

I didn’t even have time to step back to the wheelhouse.

She slashed forward, using them in sequence, and cut us a hole through that wave.

The ship rose under us, but she’d cut tall enough that we barely had to duck.

Afterwards, I was laughing.

She looked to me just long for me to see the complete lack of humor in her eyes, just long enough for me to wonder if she had been manufactured, if she still had to charge up at night.

And then a thick red feeler wrapped around my waist, pulled me into the water.

Your dad’s lobster?

It had found us.

Because I hadn’t thought ahead to get fitted with gills-I could have billed your mom for it, even-I had to try thrashing and screaming and drowning, finally biting into that meaty feeler.

It didn’t care even a little.

We were diving, diving.

Above me I was pretty sure I could see Lorenga’s twin whips, but then a snow crab ghosted in above the lobster, its spidery legs so graceful that, right before I passed out, I think I probably smiled.

Above us, I’m sure the surface of the water was calming back down.

I came to with my head stuffed up into an air-filled divot that had been chipped into some underhang in the crater.

It was barely big enough for my head.

I pushed down from it but all around me there was just water, all lit up that eerie way you get when the atmosphere’s thin and unreliable.

I came up for air, gulped it down, got a lungful so I could look around some more.

A giant crab was scuttling down the wall to me. It had just surfaced. There were still bubbles of air roiling off its skin.

Working delicately with its hind legs, it delivered three of those bubbles up past my neck, into my headhole.

The air was warm and musty, and I loved it, breathed it all the way down to my toes.

When the crab left, I pushed down again, my hands keeping my place, and looked around.

All along this underhang were other people. Just bodies and legs. And arms.

This was the refrigerator. We were in storage, and not the good kind. We were what the krill had been on earth. We were those little pieces of meat drifting down from the unfiltered sunlight. Perfect little pieces of meat.

I gulped, held, and looked below me.

The floor of the sea was crunchy with crustaceans. All crawling over each other, looking, from this distance, just normal-sized.

Way in the distance was a giant, impossible disk. One of the huddles I’d heard about.

What were they doing?

I wanted to laugh, I guess. I needed a drink.

I shoved my head back up into its new home, breathed deep.

So this was it, then.

Rock Turner flies to the moon, goes for a swim with the pretty bugs, doesn’t come back up.

I imagined the headline: New Show Announced! Your Participation is Vital!

Nothing about me, yeah.

Like your mom was going to report me missing and dead?

I kicked just to try to stay warm. Watched that giant snow crab move past.

And then it came back to where it had been. Like it was running from something.

Lorenga.

She was underwater, had both whips going, some kind of powered flippers on her feet.

She cut the tip of one of the crab’s legs off. The meat was flaky, white, perfect.

I coughed, almost breathed water, had to go up for another drink of air.

When I came back, found her, she was on the crab’s head, one of her whips severing an eyestalk, her mouth open in rage, her last few bubbles screaming up and up.

At which point your dad entered the scene

The thing about using space lobsters as storage devices for people’s minds is that it wasn’t an entirely known process. Then or now. I don’t know why we ever thought it made sense.

My suspicion-this is now, not then-it’s that the eggheads didn’t really care about putting grandpa on ice until some later date. No, what they wanted to do was infiltrate those huddles. My guess is they were all holding their scientific breath, waiting for a storage lobster to join a huddle. At which point they’d harvest the person they’d put there, wake them up, see what was what.

Meaning maybe that mind-glue sticking people to their lobsters, it was a defense mechanism, yeah?

That’s not my case, though.

Pay me to care, I’ll try. Don’t pay me, and-well, you’ll see.

As far as storage went, anyway, putting somebody almost dead into the exoskeleton of a giant crustacean, that crustacean, it didn’t really seem to mind. It was like having a barnacle or something, I guess. An itch in a place it could never quite scratch.

Try to stuff somebody in who’s all the way alive, though, and, yeah, one of those barnacles, it’s going to be more than an itch.

Instead of just hanging on, existing, your dad had fought to the top of his lobster, was at the reins now.

His giant lobster-he, him-cut up through the water like, I don’t know. Like some monster born in the depths of the universe, some monster from when the stars were young, some monster that had cut across millions of light years for just this showdown.

With his big claws, he snipped off one of the snow crab’s legs. Then another.

The snow crab reeled back, mute, offended, and Lorenga took its other eyestalk then dropped her whips, started doing that full body shudder of somebody who’s finally got to drown.

Your dad pinched her delicately in his claw, kicked hard for the surface, and, even now, I would give whatever it took to have been on the shore right then. To see this giant claw burst through the water, a limp woman in its grip, a thousand dusty galaxies as backdrop.

Using his claws as no lobster ever had, then, he climbed the crater’s wall, left Lorenga coughing on the rim of a cliff.

And then he came back for me.

Evidently-this is just from something one of the eggheads said, it’s not like me and your dad talked or anything-evidently your mom’s scent had still been on me. When I’d dipped into the water, it had shot all through the sea, had woke your dad up from his long sleep.

And he woke up mad, let me tell you.

He knew who’d put him there.

Not ten minutes later, he nipped my foot with his claw, pulled me down from my headshaped hole.

Instead of saving me like he had Lorenga, though, he pulled me into his maw of a mouth, swallowed me whole.

If you’ve never been inside a giant space lobster, well. I don’t recommend it.

He climbed the crater wall again, stepped around Lorenga-I’ve never seen Lorenga again-perched on the cliff’s edge. Then he used what he’d found in the lobster’s backbrain: potential. Old programming.

From the side, I’m guessing his giant lobster body must have looked like a dragonfly. At least when those massive, delicate wings unfolded from his shell, flapped to get dry.

We lifted up, up, batting hard against the thin air-inside the stomach was dry, which made no sense to me-and then made history.

Instead of taking a transport or a tube back to Earth, your dad flew us there under his own power.

My eardrums burst from the pressure and I clawed at my ankles deep enough to bleed, but I was awake the whole time. And screaming.

That’s not where this scar comes from, though.

That’d be your mom’s handiwork.

After we cut through earth’s puny defenses-they were all for ships and transports, not for flying lobsters with laser eyes and killer claws-we burned through the atmosphere, your father’s wings turning to ash with us five miles up.

We made a crater when we landed, and this crater, I crawled up from it all by myself, had no clue that, on the moon, the krill had risen to witness your dad lighting off for the territories.

Right about the time we were crashing down, the monster crabs and lobsters and shrimp were piling onto their huddled brothers and sisters.

Until then, we thought the way they’d locked arms, one behind the next, it didn’t matter much.

They were a disc, though.

The krill drifted into place below them, started glowing with power. They were the engine, apparently. The battery.

As one, twelve discs broke the surface of the lunar seas, their backs thick with giant space lobsters, with delicate interstellar crabs, and then they turned away from earth. Never to come back.

People wept, reached to the sky for these creatures they’d never known to worship. The usual story.

Like I cared.

There were endorsement deals, talk shows, new digs for a while. My name was even on a toothbrush.

Everything dies, though.

Except me.

Evidently, the unregulated pressures inside a mentally-hijacked space lobster’s stomach, especially when that space lobster’s taking on its interstellar dragonfly form, they’re unique and transformative, to say the least.

And then there was the chemical wash part of that ride, and the exposure to cosmic rays, and whatever else nobody’s been able to replicate, especially since all our gods have abandoned us.

What did it all add up to?

I had died in transit. I was still dead. All my measurable life processes were flatlined, but it didn’t matter. I walked up out of that crater on my own, smiled for the cameras, winked at this one cute little number in the front now.

And, when that parade was all over months later, I went to see the queen.

Your mom.

“You,” she said, standing in the doorway, her voice sharp enough to draw blood.

I handed her my bill.

She laughed, wouldn’t take it.

“I don’t traffic with the dead,” she said.

“People pay for this bite,” I told her, snapping my teeth to show.

“And does it work?” she said.

I found somewhere else to look.

We figured out how to live forever, sure. Just be dead, but walking around.

Now that there are no more space lobsters left to hitch rides in, though-well. I’ll be at your funeral. I’ll be at all your funerals.

“You were supposed to bring him back alive, anyway,” she said, her hand to the door like she had no time for this.

“Bring him back so you could kill him again?” I asked.

My skin by then was pretty decayed, I guess, so it was hard to get a good smirk going. But I tried.

It made your mom’s hand reach up to her own face. For the wrinkles she’d pancaked over.

They’re showing even more now, aren’t they?

Good.

“You can’t prove I put him up there,” she said, smoking a cigarette she’d lit herself. The atmosphere somehow not turning to fire.

She passed the cigarette to me and I breathed deep, couldn’t even begin to feel it charring my lungs.

“That he came back is proof,” I said, blowing smoke. “If earth’s gravity hadn’t found him again, he’d have snipped you in half.”

“You don’t like me very much, do you?” she said.

“You sent me to the moon to die,” I told her, just like I’d rehearsed on the drive over. “Just to tell the house detectives you’d given it an honest effort. You’d even have a receipt to enter into evidence.”

“I don’t need a receipt anymore.”

“I could tell them what you did.”

“You’d trade your version of fame in for that? You’d just be a passenger then. A victim. It would be my husband’s revenge that made you like you are. Not your own . . . what did you call it?”

“They were putting words in my mouth.”

“We needed a hero.”
“Needed,” I said.

“Very past tense,” she agreed, and then I felt that tap on my shoulder I always feel about this time in a case.

This time it was a pair of giant, vatgrown butlers.

The one on the left came at me with a hot katana.

It flashed out of nowhere, split me from my cheek, here, down to my armpit-is the feed picking this up?

Here, I’ll lean in.

Yeah, pretty ragged.

Turns out when you’re dead, though, they can just sew you right back together.

Anyway, in case I go infectious at some point, can make everybody else live forever just like me, the Service keeps agents in the bar, now. So I won’t go getting cut in half anymore.

That doesn’t mean I’ve forgot, though.

That first time your mom strutted in? I was on the phone, collecting a payment.

That’s what this recording is about.

If I did it live, I’m sure they’d find a way to stop me. And, I would be leaving this on your mom’s machine, but she won’t accept my calls anymore.

With me, though, you always pay. One way or another.

Here, let me . . . recognize this?

Yeah, you do.

Cute little crawfish. Been keeping it in a tank under my desk all this time.

Oh-I mean him, not ‘it.’

When I crawled up from that crater your dad made falling from the heavens, I’d crawled up alone, yeah. But now I had a rider. In my pocket.

Gravity had found your father again, just like I told everybody.

In low-grav, with the stars as backdrop, he was a monster, a giant, a space god.

Here on earth, well. As you can see.

Was that a rocket in my pocket or was I just glad to see your mom again?

The first.

Take a transport up, open the airlock, let Daddy here float out, and, bam, instant spaceship. Immortality. Eternity awaits. Live forever, madame.

Or don’t.

Funny thing about this is, I don’t even really need to eat anymore, right?

But-here goes, here goes, into the hangar-I can still chew, as you can see.

Legs and all, baby.

Nice, good. Tastes like hope. No, no. Tastes like justice.

So, if you need my services again, you can find me in the Directory, I expect. I’ll be filed under Dead, probably.

Dead and Loving It.

Bye now.

“Aunt Marge. That you up there on the porch?”

Quickly raising the car window against the spew of cold air, Jerzy Fields looked around warily,  then parked on the street. Her aunt’s driveway was more mud and potholes than asphalt, and she’d wrecked at least one pair of shoes and a tire parking there. Auntie had stopped driving last year so there was little reason to attend to it.

“Who else?” Marge said, her voice muffled by the Happy Meal binoculars held up to her eyes. Pointing the glasses at her niece as she came up the walk, she said. “You gettin old, girl. Look more like your mama every day. Add a little more coffee to the cream and I’m lookin’ at my sister.”

Seated on a balding raffia chair, Aunt Marge was wearing a raggedy, elbow-less lilac sweater and a faded Tigers baseball cap. The curly auburn wig under the hat was slightly askew, giving her a loopy look. The electric heater sitting on the porch rail shone orange-its cord pulled tight through an open window.

“What are you doin’ out here on the porch on a cold day like this?” Jerzy said. “Can’t be no more than forty degrees.” She shivered to illustrate.

“Watchin’ for those boys,” Marge answered, training her eyes on the street again. “Saw ’em come by before I was even done with my Sugar Pops. Drove by a second time when I was fixin’ up this heater.” She nodded toward the orange glow. “They up to no good. Uh huh.”

“Those boys been harassin’ you, Auntie?” Jerzy stamped her feet, trying to warm up.

Marge shook her head. “They jus’ doin’ what they do, which is no-good trashy ghetto stuff. Driving too slow to be passing through. They lookin’ for something all right.” Several clucking sounds followed this observation. “Not sure what yet.”

A baseball bat sat next to her chair. There was also an old cot with a broken leg propped up against the porch railing, and a rusty old grill with a layer of mummified charcoal from who knew when.

“Planning on livin’ out here?” Jerzy said, examining the cord. “Look here, this cord is frayed, Auntie. You gonna set your house on fire.”

“Better get me a new one then, Jerzy. If I don’t watch the street, who will?”

There were only six houses on a street that once held twenty. So why the interest from these boys in a car, Jerzy wondered? Was one of the houses selling crack? And she’d seen some skanky girls ’round the corner on John R just now. Looked like a ho stroll was in progress with their uniforms of high heels, short skirts, bare midriffs, dirty fur jackets.

Jerzy was abruptly overtaken by the desire to have both a cigarette and a drink. It came over her lightning quick sometimes. She’d sworn off both years ago, but the old lady sitting in front of her in her broken-down house on this God-forsaken street brought back that craving-the itch only certain things could scratch. Bad things. She steeled herself by thinking about how much money such weaknesses took from a pocket. And ‘the human cost’ as they called it at the meetings. Maybe it was time to go to one.

Girding herself, she said, “Look, Auntie. I’m gonna check things out inside the house while I’m here. See what needs doin’. Make me a list.” Jerzy had about a dozen other things to do on her day off, but this one took priority. There was no one else to see to Aunt Marge since Jerzy’s mother died.

Marge nodded slightly and continued watching the street. Good Lord, her teeth weren’t in her mouth, and Jerzy hoped she hadn’t lost or broken the plate. Medicare didn’t give a good god-damn about your teeth after a point.

Inside, the house was neat enough but nearly as cold as outside. The half-eaten bowl of Corn Pops sat on the kitchen table next to a cup of half-drunk coffee. Thankfully, Auntie’s dentures sat there too, looking ready to take on the cereal. Jerzy rinsed out all three items, and then made the bed. She pushed a blanket up against the crack in the window, but fixing it would have to wait. A basket of clothes sat at the bottom of the bed. Auntie appeared to be out of toilet paper, and the food in the fridge seemed past the sell-by date. She tossed a few of the worst offenders into a garbage bag, setting it by the door.

Next she checked the thermostat. Set at eighty degrees but reading fifty, the furnace must be broken. Downstairs in the cellar, the octopus looked to be eighty years old, occupying most of the room. Water puddled in two spots on the concrete floor. The water heater might be broken or perhaps it was the ancient washer a few feet away that explained the unwashed clothes. How much would a new furnace and water heater cost? Auntie was looking at several thousand dollars to set things right.

She climbed the stairs, going back outside. “You got a furnace man, Aunt Marge? Your house is fairly freezin’.”

Her aunt screwed up her face. “Thought it seemed a bit brisk. Well, just call up Detroit Edison. They’ll fire it up.”

“It’s called DTE now, Auntie. And I don’t think they can fix it. You probably need a new one.”  She picked up her aunt’s hand when she didn’t answer. Pure ice. She made a quick decision. “Better come along home with me. We’ll call us some help from my house. Get you nice and warmed up.”

“You know I can’t do that, girl. Who’ll watch the street?”

Her aunt’s head continued to swivel back and forth, her lips set. Jerzy wanted that drink more than ever as she pulled her aunt to her feet. Two fingers of Jim Beam on the rocks would put some backbone into her. Did Marge’s eyes look funny? Her mother died from Alzheimer’s five years back. Did Aunt Marge have it now too? Did it run in families or just plain run?

“Be easy, Auntie. I’ll get someone over here lickety-split. You’ll be home in a day or two. Soon as we get some of this stuff sorted out.”

“Still got that cable television over at your house? Channel with all those movies?”

Jerzy nodded. Auntie’s unwillingness to leave her watch on the porch suddenly vanished, and the two women went inside to pack an overnight bag.

“Think I need my Sunday dress?” Marge asked, headed for the closet. Her mood had picked up now that a vacation was in the offing. She shuffled through the wire hangers, pausing to remove a few items. “Like me in this?” she said, holding up a Red Wings jersey she’d found at a flea market last year. “‘Bout the warmest thing, I got.”

Jerzy grabbed it and threw it in the bag. Sunday was five days from now. James would go Nam on her if Auntie stayed with them more than a night or two. He didn’t like outsiders in his house. Something about using his precious commode, no doubt.

“I want a direct shot when I need it,” he had told her countless times. “Don’t need to be findin’ some stranger lockin’ my doors.” Jerzy was lucky he let her share it.

“I’ll come back and get you a dress if you need one.”

A lady from the Jesus Tabernacle congregation picked Marge up every Sunday. Ladies in bright flowered dresses filling every pew with the rare rooster crowing his bass. Only black women wore hats to church nowadays, Jerzy thought, noticing several sitting on the closet shelf. Peacock colors. She had kept two of her mother’s.

As they pulled away from the curb, Marge looked back at the house. The binoculars still hung from her neck but she’d forgotten about them. “All by myself,” she said. “That’s how I always done it.”

Jerzy reached over and patted her knee.

Marge had come to Detroit from Alabama in 1959, working off and on in upholstery installation at automobile plants for 40 years. Never married, never had kids. Made a decent living when she wasn’t laid off and bought her house on Robichaud Street when the neighborhood was still respectable. Neat houses with mowed lawns, a porch on each one.  Marge’s sister, Mildred-Jerzy’s mother-was her only kin in Michigan. Now Jerzy and Jerzy’s brother, Rufus, were it. And Rufus was hardcore. Not even good for lickin a stamp.

James was standing in the doorway when they pulled up, the mail in his hands. He looked at the two of them as if he’d never seen them before, his lips a grim line. Shaking his head, he turned and went inside his house, sitting down on the corduroy ottoman to lace his boots. James worked for the city, spending most of his time in the city’s sewers. The city called him an engineer but he was really a handyman, trying to keep those ancient pipes from leaking, holding back the flood. He’d probably circled Detroit with duct tape ten times over.

“What’s this all about?” he asked now, eyeing Marge with something close to repugnance.  “Why we havin company on a Tuesday?” He’d never much cared for Marge, who kowtowed to no man. James liked his women docile whenever possible.

“Auntie’s furnace is broke,” Jerzy told him, ushering the old woman past him and onto a seat. The woman sank down, sighing loudly. “She’ll just be with us a few days,” she told him in a low voice. “Think you got time to take a look at it?”

He shook his head. “Already late. And I don’t know a damn thing about furnaces.” He looked over at Marge, who was dozing already. “You aiming to be a nursemaid, Jerzy? Looks like that’s what she needs. You best start thinkin’ about the future. What you’re gonna do with her.”

“Just for a few days,” she repeated. “I hadda drag her out here. She’ll be beggin’ to go home by tomorrow.”

James rolled his eyes. “Tell me that on Saturday.”

Proving James right, Aunt Marge had a head cold the next morning. A run on furnace repairs due to the early cold weather kept her house too chilly to return to.

“A day or two,” the woman at Friendly Furnace told Jerzy.

“Just stay here and rest yourself,” Jerzy said, handing Marge a cup of bouillon. She hadn’t even known they still made those cubes until Marge sent her out for some. And they’d been sitting in the store a while, she thought, as she struggled to remove the foil from it.

“Only thing tastes good on a cold,” Marge said, watching. “Don’t care much if it’s beef or chicken, but no vegetable ones, please.” She made a face.

“Feelin’ wack, are you?” Jerzy asked, noticing the pile of tissues piling up and wondering if she needed some latex gloves. Picking the pile up with another tissue, she put them in the trash can.

“Why you gotta use that ghetto talk?” her aunt asked. “So hard to say sick like a civilized person?”

“Are you feeling sick?” Jerzy said, biting her tongue.

Her aunt nodded. “But I better get over to my house anyway. Can’t stop thinkin’ ‘bout those boys ridin’ around like they was. Can’t be a good thing-no neighborhood watch on my street.”

“I’ll look in on my way into work. You be okay here alone?”

“Always has been.” Marge smiled. “And I got me that good movie channel now.”

At first, Jerzy thought a fire had ravaged her aunt’s house because she barely recognized it as she pulled up to the curb. The decorative iron door on the front was missing as were the bars on the windows. In fact, the window panes themselves were gone. The rain gutters had been removed along with the blue aluminum siding. The metal fence that enclosed the property had been ripped from the ground, leaving nasty flakes of metal sprayed across the lawn like sparks from a fire. Auntie’s little red bible lay on the grass, its pages fluttering crazily in the stiff wind. Jerzy picked it up and stuck it in her purse. Piles of goods lay everywhere; she picked her way through trying not to burst into tears.

Inside the house, anything useful to the culprits had vanished, and the rest of it was destroyed. If she didn’t know her aunt’s sweetness, Jerzy’d swear it was a grudge crime. Every article of clothing lay on the floor. Every can of food had been tossed. The bedroom was impassable, and pieces of paper, bills probably, were blowing out the empty windows. There was not a single item that hadn’t been stolen, tossed, or vandalized. Even the electric meter was missing from the wall. When she tried to turn a lamp on, she realized the bulbs had been unscrewed. A few lamps were even missing their finials.

Jerzy sank into the one upright chair, caught her breath, grabbed the cell from her pocket, and dialed 911. Two hours went by before a squad car pulled up. Two hours when she’d scarcely moved. She’d started to call James, her brother, Rufus, a friend, but coming up with the words she’d use to describe the house’s state was too much.

When the squad car pulled up, she started to protest the long wait. “Look, Ma’am,” the cop said patiently, “priority goes to crimes in progress. This one’s ’bout over.” He looked around. “Long over. Scrapped her place but good.” He almost seemed to admire the thoroughness of the job.

“Scrapped?” She’d heard the word before but couldn’t put a meaning on it.

“Scrappers come by and take anything they can sell. Metal stuff mostly,” he added. “That’s why they didn’t bother with the food or clothes. Every empty or foreclosed house in the city is scrapped sooner or later ‘less you put a guard on it.”

She knew this-but it was something that happened to other people. Not Aunt Marge.

“This wasn’t no empty house, Officer. Only been a day. One day!”

“Means nothing to the people did this. You think we’re talking about human beings with a soul? Empty is empty to them.” He walked around, taking an inventory of what was clearly missing. “She have insurance?”

Jerzy didn’t know.

“Probably not. It’s hard to get insurance in this neighborhood.”

Something else struck her then. “I bet they took all her cards. You know, social security, health, I.D, driver’s license, bank card. Maybe they buried out there.” She waved a hand toward the heap of trash covering the lawn. “How will I get her some money? How will she prove she’s Marge Lennox?”

“We got people who can tell you ’bout that. Victim’s rights.” He handed her a card. “If they haven’t cut those jobs yet. City’s broke case you didn’t know it.”

The cops wanted to talk to her aunt right away.

“In a day or two,” she promised.

 

A day later, Marge sat on a milk crate in her front yard. “Must be some stranger’s house. “Don’t know nothin’ about it. I’ll tell you this though. I’m not going in there.”

James stood next to her, scratching his head. “You need to start making a list, Marge.” He turned to Jerzy. “Maybe we can hire someone to put things right.”

“It looks different ’cause they took down the sidin, Auntie,” Jerzy explained, ignoring him. “They took anything they could sell to a scrap yard. That’s what the policeman said.”

“Not even one window left. Couldn’t they use the door?”

“They sell glass too.”

“Damn, those are nasty people.” Tears were falling now.

“Maybe they needed money to buy food.” This didn’t sound convincing even to Jerzy.

“Now they got what they need, they won’t be back,” James said. “Nothing to worry yourself about. You’ll be home in a few days.”

That was all he could think about, Jerzy thought with disgust.

“Those boys weren’t homeless. I saw their big-assed car cruisin’ this street. Saw the fancy jackets they had on. Gang jackets, I think.” She looked at Jerzy. “I told you I hadda watch the street.” She wiped her face with her sleeve.  James and Jerzy helped her to the car.

Over the next few days, Marge steadfastly refused to enter the house, continuing to deny it was hers. “I would never paint my house that hinky yellah.”

“The blue siding covered that yellow paint,” Jerzy argued weakly. “Maybe from a time before you even bought the house.

“She needs to file a report,” the cop said when she dialed his cell.

“A report means you think you can find her missin’ stuff then, huh?” she asked him. “Gonna pour all your resources into a search for those scrappers.” He didn’t answer her.

A few days later, Jerzy came home from work to an empty house. In the morning, she hadn’t been able to get Auntie out of bed, but now she was gone. Also missing was her lilac sweater and the Tigers’s cap. It wasn’t even 30 degrees outside and Jerzy wondered if she still had her pajamas on under the sweater. Dear Lord.

“Where you think she is?” she asked James over the phone. “She don’t know this neighborhood for beans.”

“She got a screw missin’,” he said. “Can’t take care of herself and this seals it. She has to go into a home. Like your mama,” he added.

Jerzy drove back and forth to Robichaud Street for hours. She called the police around two and social service at three. Neither seemed overly interested in sending out a car until more time had passed. James, on his part, continued wrapping his tape around city sewers.

At first, she didn’t see her aunt sitting on the porch since it was nearly dusk. Marge’d dragged the milk carton up from the front lawn and her head could barely be seen from the street.

“Them jokers did a job on my house,” she told Jerzy after her niece climbed the steps. “Took a hack saw to the furnace, but it was too tough for ’em.” She nodded with satisfaction. “That old boiler  put up a fight.”

“Aren’t you freezin’ out here?” Jerzy asked, looking for something to throw over her. “Where you been all day, Auntie? I almost had the cops after you.”

“I hadda take a bus over here. And I got all scrambled ’bout which one. Routes have changed since my day.” She shrugged. “Bus was nice and warm though. Think I went back and forth a few times.” She stood up. “Let’s get me home. I’m done with 423 Robichaud. I just sat my own-what they call it-wake. ”

James would just have to tolerate a visitor for a few more days, Jerzy thought. They could hardly throw the woman out on the street, and it was unclear what social services could do for them. There was no reason Auntie couldn’t live with them except for James’ stubbornness. She wasn’t nearly as addled as Mama had been.

As they drove down the street, Marge let out a scream. Jerzy slammed on the brakes.

“Lookity right there, Jerzy. That brother is usin’ my iron door for a table.”

Jerzy saw it too. A barbecue grill smoking meat stood right behind it. The door had been fitted with a piece of glass to make a table.”Probably my window glass too. I am decoratin’ homes across the hood. Never thought I’d see such a thing in this world.” Auntie was almost laughing. Then she was crying again.

“These people are too mean to live. What they call it-scrappin’. I’d like to take them to the junkyard.” She paused. “I never want to see this street again.”

“We’ll find you a new place, Auntie. You have money in the bank. We just need to get to it.”

“No, I’m leavin’ this city, girl. Going back to Alabama. Can’t be worse there. I got a cousin will take me in when I got my monies straightened out.”

“Can’t she stay with us, James?” Jerzy begged him that night. “She’s no trouble at all.”

“Your mama stayed here for months before she went to that home-don’t you remember it. Calling me Horace and tryin’ to hold my hand.” He shivered. “Then it was your junkie brother trying to kick the habit. Ha! Bringin’ all kinds of people to my stoop, sittin’ in this very room with those goddamned forties in his lap.” He grimaced. “A man needs some privacy, Jerzy. She don’t wanna stay here anyhow. Let her put this behind.”

It fell into place surprisingly quickly once Jerzy gained access to her aunt’s accounts. Within a month, they were standing at the Greyhound Bus Station on Howard Street, Marge having refused to fly. “Too old to learn that trick now.”

“I’ll send the rest of your stuff down there next week,” Jerzy promised as the man lifted her aunt’s two grippes into the baggage hold. Not that there was much salvageable from Robichaud Street.

“Just you, Ma’am,” the driver asked Marge, turning around.

“All by myself,” Marge told him with a trace of the old pride in her voice.

“She transfers to the Birmingham bus in Nashville,” Jerzy told him, handing the ticket over.

“I know that, girl,” Marge said. “Make the trip every couple years, don’t I?

On the ride back home, a helicopter loomed over the freeway, almost causing Jerzy to steer into a Hondo Accord. The helicopter pulled a sign saying “Moby’s Scrapyard in Hamtramck. Best prices in town.”

Might as well pull a second sign with the addresses of ladies away for the night.