Fireflies of the Dusk

FIREFLIES OF THE DUSK, a novella

 

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I will write songs against you,

enemies of my people; I will pelt you
with the winged seeds of the dandelion
I will marshal against you
the fireflies of the dusk.

 

- Charles Reznikoff

 

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For SL,  the one I never caught; and Cassandra, the one I let fly away.

 

 

 

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THE PRISONER

 

August, 1977

 

 

i.

 

The wind clinked and clattered along the rows of mailboxes, whistled through the dank tunnel under the road, a hot wind cooled by the water. Malia squatted by the side of the stream and caught polliwogs, her legs smooth and brown, dirt on the seat of her white denim shorts, pebbles stuck to her knees. Noah Crowley would rather sit and watch the Puerto Rican girl than go with David and Kirk upstream, under the tunnel, looking for snappers. Noah watched a yellow-jacket hover over his knee. He could feel the wind of its wings fluttering, its little legs dangling. It sat down finally and promptly stung him, and up he jumped with curses too strong for fourteen years. Malia swung about, big black eyes in alarm, lashes long and thick, teeth white. Noah stamped around in the dirt, then in the mud, gathering creek water to splash on his knee. Red and swollen. The little bastard.

 

David and Kirk hollered from somewhere past the tunnel, somewhere not too far from the tiny stretch of trees and the mown grass where Tottle's yard began. It was maybe fifty feet from the line of trees to the trailer. Tottle sat in his old chair under a lamp, Lord Weary's Castle laid tent-wise across his legs. "Esthetique Du Mal" the night before. Different scribbler. He scratched his beard and thought of Pompeii. Unearthed, one of its ancient walls blessed with a portrait that continued to haunt him. A beautiful girl with a book, buried by the blind caprice of Nature. Hostility unequaled by even the worst of men. The universe is cold and eternal and eternally hostile. No good can stay in it. Nothing gold can stay. If man had done a single thing of worth, it was that he had tried to foist an unnatural order onto the world. If there were things worth living for, one was love, the other such futile struggles for order. He heard the shouts behind his head, the little yawps of pink life. The hot wind came down and angels and demons wrestled, dressed in fallen leaves and grass mulch. His mother told him it was angels and demons wrestling. Dirt and dust flung against aluminum siding, rattled porches, flipped plastic kiddy-pools by coiled garden hoses. Summer and everything sticky. The old machine huffed and puffed in the window. Tottle smeared an Oreo, sliding the top along the bottom, then ate the top and then the bottom. His fingers ached, swollen, trigger-fingers, shot joints, but his heart was still beating. That was a miracle. So much poison, so much hatred, so much sorrow, so much regret. Brown teeth caked with black, sweet white icing in the cup of his tongue.

 

Malia stood and swept the pebbles from her knees. A tall girl for one so young, brown and sleek and wiry. She walked off, heading for the tunnel. David, said Noah Crowley. Damn David, freckled David, big David. Off she went, her buttocks small and round and hard. Once he found them together at Big Fort. Not really together, not together that way. Just at Big Fort, all by themselves. He came up the ladder and into the hole and they said hello. They had a radio in there, rugs dragged in, up through the hole in the boards, some food in a Styrofoam cooler. He was glad when Rudy came only a short while later. It was better then. Rudy had cigarettes. Noah liked to smoke. One day you'll start a fire and burn the whole thing down, she said, a young woman of principle, waving her hand at her nose. You could see her bra beneath the white shirt. Noah tried not to look but it was hard. Damn David. Rudy wanted to go fishing. Noah went along with him. So there they were at Big Fort by themselves again.

 

Tottle came out of a shallow sleep. It sounded like they were in the yard. He was too tired to get up. They get closer I'll go scowl at them. Fifty-three I look like seventy, takes one good scowl and a few words and broken teeth caked with black. Cheerios for breakfast, Oreos for lunch. He was astonished by his ability to live. God didn't want him or the devil either, which his mother said about her father, who lingered till ninety-nine. Didn't want Miss Dodge either. Why don't the two of them get hitched, Old Tottle and Miss Dodge, they were made for each other. Priscilla Tottle. Sounded like some urchin out of Dickens. He wondered what she looked like as a young woman. Tall and lean and wispy and yellow hair like Goldilocks. Tits like crab apples, so hard they snapped when you bit into them. He took Lord Weary and sat him atop Stevens who sat atop Tennyson. Dust gathered on the bindings at the bottom, some Virgil, some Catullus. He had forgotten where his own went. Used to keep them at hand. Clippings taped in sad albums, blocks of verses in small type, cross-rhymed crap with bridges and fields and mountains, ghosts of Washington's soldiers haunting the woods. He ate another Oreo.

 

Malia went across the creek, one foot here, the other there, choosing each boulder, her eyes alert and smart. Noah stood in the dirt. Soon the sun would be down behind the mountains. He went along where Malia went, her brown legs and black-stubbled calves, blue veins underneath, lighter blue behind the knee-joint, golden fuzz on the back of her thighs. Her mom cooked rice and beans in heavy pots. Red beans and white rice. There was chicken and tortillas and soup. Dominga Santiago, Malia Santiago. Your mouth made pleasant shapes. She always smelled like cooking oil, like her mamma's apron. Double-wide, in the middle of the park. Her father was on the radio. He was half-white, leaned towards fat, black beard, and a voice like in the movies. He was very pleasant, very friendly. She looked like her mama, thank heavens. Some said she didn't come from the big man with the big voice, but from somebody in the woodpile. The woodpile seemed like a good place to be. You stayed in the woodpile and you came out of it in the morning when the smell of exhaust was dispelled across the still cool air. When the sound of the engines drifted away and the birds came back. You came out of the woodpile and slipped like a ghost into the narrow houses, into the wives who walked in their underwear, whose kitchens smelled like fried eggs. Then you went back to the woodpile and entered into legend. 

 

Kirk took a stick and stuck it into the snake's mouth, straightening the snake. Nothing more strange than a straight snake. He whacked the weird thing against a tree. The snake was like a garden hose, stiff from neglect. Malia squealed in pleasure or displeasure. Along Noah came, sore-kneed. The sun was lowering in the sky. Tottle heard the young girl's screech. Up he stood and black crumbs dribbled to the floor, the trampled carpet. He smelled his own sweat, his chocolate breath. He needed a cigarette. Tottle opened the front door and crackled down the wooden steps. His boot-heels clacked on the short cement walk. Around the front of the trailer he could see them in the clump of trees. The screeching girl and the two big ones, and the one he called Dishevelled Star. Out he came from the fringe of trees, head up his ass, into the yard.

 

"Stay the goddamn hell off my property," Tottle snapped. It was as much a surprise to the old man as it was to the boy. He rarely heard his own voice. Barely knew he had one. He bared his teeth like a bluffing dog among bigger dogs, an old motel sign with a few letters missing. Dishevelled Star scuttled back into the trees. Out came one of the big ones. Carrot top. His folks were Jehovah's Witnesses. Witnessed here and witnessed there with their little books. Behind him the leggy girl. Dominga's baby girl. People thought he didn't know anything. Christ they built this park around me.

 

"What do you got to go yelling for, Tottle?" he said. Green stick in his hand. Achilles and his girl behind him. Good boy.

 

"I'll yell if I damm well please, now get off my yard!" Achilles and his green stick stood their ground. Tottle came around fast and after a few steps Achilles went back into the trees, the girl pulling his arm. What was the name of the girl they stole from Agamemnon? Made him cry because he'd lost her? More than likely she'd had legs like that. He was sweating when he got back in the house. Now he smelled himself worse. In the shower he thought of the bottle of Clorox in the cupboard under the sink. It was black under his feet. He sang donna immobile then come back to sorrento, croaking under the water. That was the life. Gondolier in the swishing canal, pushing your pole along the muddy bottom, tenth-rate Verdi and bobbing Adam's apple. Doris Day stuffed in her summer dress. He muttered over the Bridge of Sighs, closed his eyes and dreamed of dead men, trapped without the Amontillado, heretics, beware the cosmic policemen, living-dead in a hole in the ground, black blacker than infinite space, black close and cold and deadly black. Crazy sick sons of bitches. He thought of his mother, thumb rubbing along the sweaty beads, Mary's little sparrow breasts, blue and white, flying nun, over the rooftops, Poppins' umbrella, chimney smoke, Blakean boys in shoe-polish, dancing for God on Heaven's green hills. He pulled himself back and put his face into the water. The heat stayed in the summer so you had more time. In the winter it fizzled out quick and you stepped into the brutal cold. Tottle opened his mouth and gobbled the clean water. He swallowed the water and rinsed the sugar from his tongue.

 

Dominga went across the tiles, slippers scraping softly. She stood in the doorway, behind the screen, hands in her apron pockets, head cocked slightly to watch the ice-cream truck as it sallied up the road. Its tiny tune spread wide like a spell and kids came into the sun as it fell and their hands were clammy with coins. She wondered where Malia was, her tomboy. Martin slept in the back room. Tottle stepped out of the shower and padded his bony limbs. Miss Dodge poured herself a tulip glass full of Martini and Rossi. Robert Montanya pushed the buttons of his brand new television. Frank Sebesta banged his head on the opened hood of his '72 Skylark and cursed. His two nippers ran out of the house with a bang and headed for the truck that now stopped in the middle of the road. Twins. Alan and Alicia. Alicia bought a red white and blue rocket and Alan a toasted almond. Jim O'Shea was sitting astride his candyapple-red Kawasaki, kicking and kicking until it finally started.

 

Malia came up the walk and asked Dominga for fifty cents so she could get herself and David some ice cream. "You can't buy for one and not the others, hija," said Dominga, always practical. This bothered Malia. Dominga gave her two dollars and Malia bought something for Kirk and David and Noah. Noah watched Malia with her lemon Italian ice. She licked the frozen sugar. She was always close to David. Her wooden spoon hacked the surface, broke off splinters sweet and cold and shoveled them into her mouth. Kirk went off. Now there was no use. The top scoop of Noah's soft-serve plopped onto the road. It melted fast and the newly-poured gravel made him think of raisins. It seemed to symbolize everything. Soon the tires coming and going would push the gravel into the tar and the road would be smooth, but until then you could pleasantly hear the cars coming slowly up the road, tires crunching in the gravel, biting into it, spitting it out, pushing it into the tar. They slowed over the speed bumps. One time Noah had his head up his ass as he pedaled along and hit one of them at a good clip, then spilled over the handle-bars. He may have passed out for a spell. Jim O'Shea was picking him up, picked up the bike, then the coins that had fallen from his pockets. "You alright, partner? That was a good spill." It was nice of Jim to come out of his sixty-footer. Partner. Must have seen him out the window and come quickly. Nice of him to pick everything up, very carefully too, making sure he got every penny, his blue eyes scanning the gravel. Noah was ashamed, not of having fallen, but of being at the other end of such kindness. Acts of kindness would embarrass him for the rest of his days. Thirty-nine cents. Three dimes, a nickel, and four pennies. He wandered off in the direction Kirk had gone, up the road, up the steep slope to the top of the park where it was darker, cooler, because of the trees.

 

When it was almost dark, Tottle went into the yard. Red-haired Achilles had dropped the green stick before retreating into the line of trees. The eremite toed the object with the tip of his boot, saw it was a snake that had met a grisly end. Stars and beasts were hostile, boys more hostile still. Sharp little teeth like fish-bones. Round-eyed and poisonless. One of the tragedies of life was that most boys would never grow up. What was in the book the pretty girl held? Had she some hopeless passion for a merchant, a gladiator? At what corner in the city, in front of what shop, might one see her in passing? Vico del Labirinto? Via dell' Abbondanza? On her way to oblivion. He wandered through the trimmed grass. Eddie Barnes, five dollars every other Saturday. We impose order on the world. Be it blocks of verse, arithmetic, cut grass. He walked the circuit of his property, picked up debris, wind-blown bits of plastic, leaves that distracted the eye like garbage, accidentally bent the knuckle of his left thumb and growled at the pain, forced it straight again. Back inside he chewed three aspirins. Behind screens in closed porches adults played cards, Gin Rummy, Hearts, Poker. In cool grass kids caught fireflies. Cigarette-ends like fireflies, brightening red. Middle of the park was town center: double-wides with majestic fronts, like battleships, faced the road and faced each other. Behind were bigger sheds, in front, newer cars. Older kids went behind the sheds, under the moonlight. See it sticking out in the dark. Tottle lived in a small silver trailer on the right side of the road as you came in from the highway past the mailboxes which were also on the right side. You crossed a little bridge, if it was a bridge, over a tunnel through which the creek ran, or stream, depending on your mood. Creek was apt somehow, brought to mind hot summers, Americana, freckles, flannel, an epoch. Stream was somehow too big. Stream could be anywhere. Tottle's house was set back further from the road and more apart from its neighbor than the other houses, and it faced the road at a different angle. You lived in a trailer it was your house, you didn't call it your trailer. People with trailers that went somewhere could call them trailers. Out in front of the house, though quite a ways from it, sat the squat truck: a '66 Chevy mostly gone to rust. He hardly ever drove it and on the front driver's side the tire was flat. Not that he hadn't noticed, he just wasn't going anywhere. When he did get out it was late at night and mostly to the gas station on the corner to get cigarettes, cola, Oreos, maybe sandwiches, cans of soup, beef-jerky. It wasn't much that held the man together. And when he kicked off, whenever, he didn't care. Here was a man without attachments. Had a sister somewhere, Indiana or someplace. Tottle lived on disability, could hardly move his fingers. A ladybug walked across Lord Weary's Castle. He gave her a name: Penelope. The girl who waited.

 

Raymond and his brother Jon were having a seance. They lived at the top of the park where it leveled out after a steep grade. It was steep enough you could sled down the hill when it snowed. On the level part at the top of the hill there were more trees, and houses sat there among the trees facing one another. Raymond was big and loud and believed everything he heard. His little brother Jon believed everything Raymond heard. Kirk joined them and Noah came up after Kirk. They pitched a tent in the yard and inside the tent you sat around the Ouija board and tried to talk to the spirits. Noah wasn't sure he believed in spirits but Kirk was sure there were no such things. Kirk was a skeptic. A naturalist, a killer of snakes. Raymond and Jon put their fingers on the pointer and it slid around the flimsy board, spelling out words. First it spelled gibberish, then words. They had summoned a spirit named Donny Bixty who worked in a diamond mine in the thirtees. Donny had done terrible things and was wandering about in the aether hoping to confess and receive a pardon from God and thereby enter Heaven. Donny was tall and skinny and always smiled. What are the terrible things you have done, O tell us O spirit. O. Noah felt the hair on his arms stand up. O spirit. Come to us. He says that he killed a little child and buried its body deep in the ground. A diamond no one would ever dig up. Noah could see him in his mind, a man who was on the outside kind. He whistles when he comes, camp-town races. Long arms, long hands. He whistles when he comes and when he's not whistling he's smiling. Diamond Donny Bixty.

 

When Donny comes to you at night

when you're in your bed and wrapped up tight

you will hear him whistling in the dark

 

Suddenly Raymond drew his hands from the pointer and his body shook, his mouth open. He seemed for real until he leapt at Noah with a scream. The three of them laughed. It was easy to scare Noah because he could imagine things more vividly than the others. It was hard to be afraid of some hazy nothing in your head.

 

Noreen brought a plate of fried potatoes she had cooked herself. Raymond and Jon were a bit older but Noreen was close to Noah's age. The cubed potatoes were hot and crisp and covered with oil and pepper. Everyone agreed they were delicious and Noreen was the little mother holding out the plate. Noah looked up and saw something in her nose. A pretty girl with braided hair the color of copper and a slight spray of freckles, smooth white neck and tiny ridges on the collarbone. She was dressed in her pee-jays, powder blue and soft against her fulminant figure. It was too bad, that something in her nose. Noreen handed around the plate but held onto it. The pointer sat on the flimsy board doing nothing, quiet as a church mouse. Noah wondered why mice that lived in churches were any quieter than your garden variety mice. He pictured a little white mouse amid candles and stained glass, dressed like a priest. Noreen was dead in front of him, her backside a foot and a half away from the end of his nose. It was cramped in the tent. He ate his peppered potatoes and had boyish thoughts. When she went away Kirk claimed that if he'd had Noreen for a sister, why, he just might have to start thinking the wrong way about her. Raymond and Jon went into an hysterical fit of revulsion which was an act but not a dishonest one. Kirk had no sisters so he wouldn't get it. Noah had two sisters and he got it fine.

 

David and Malia were behind the shed. Malia let David give her a kiss but pushed his hand away when it went to one of her breasts through her shirt in the dark. Noah was heading back down the road because Kung-Fu was starting. It was dark now and Noah had a good sense of the time. He imagined people leaping at him from the shadows and him giving each of them a good solid barefoot whipping in slow motion. Malia's lips were dry and her skin was like something supernatural, softer and more smooth than anything he could have imagined. A mosquito bit him in the back of the neck.

 

Don't.

 

Elisheva Crowley made popcorn. The beautiful woman raised her eyes when the screen door swung open. Cane was using his bare forearms to lift a heavy pot from the fire and move it to one side, and the music was playing loud from the little black and white. When Noah sat on the floor Cane fell into the snow and cooled the burning on his arms. Bernie Crowley backed his truck out over the gravel and headed for the Catbird Seat.

 

Tottle put Lord Weary aside and shook his head to rid his brain of iambs. Ka-thump ka-thump ka-thump ka-thump ka-thump - standard issue black boots, the angels of God who will not rifle your desk nor ransack your secret notebooks, for He has your number already, has noted and listed your rebellion, been privy to your numerous seditions and betrayals. Final takeover, eternal police state. Wallet in hand he went out in the dark and up the road, to the smell of gasoline in a pool of light. A truck rolled slowly past. He made a ding as he crossed the threshold. Bernie stopped to fill up. Tottle made casual note of the red Dodge with its bully tires and the blue-eyed barfly standing tall by the side of it. He pitied him quietly but resolutely and went to the goody aisle. His sweet tooth ached. Balls of cake with sugar frosting topped with coconut, Vienna Fingers, three cans of Chef Boyardee meat-ravioli and sauce, a big bottle of root beer, Parliament cigarettes. The man at the register always wanted to talk. Goddamn Jets? Sure, Goddamn Jets. He ran his tongue gently into the pit at the back of his mouth. Can't chew on that side. One in the front broken too. Too much sugar and before that booze. Bad for the teeth. On the way back he smelled the creek, wet mud and slippery skin, scales. He stuck his blind hand into the mailbox. No news is good news, but not forever. Gnats and mosquitos buzzed in the starlit air. His clothes stuck to his skinny frame.

 

 

 

 

ii.

 

Noah walked barefoot along a road that ran straight as a compass needle through nothing but dirt and scant weeds to either side. He knew at some point the outskirts of a town would take shape in the distance. He carried a wooden flute a young girl had given him. Once in a while he put the instrument to his lips and tried to play a note, but nothing came out except the wind he breathed into it, stifled and useless. He was thirsty and needed the toilet. Now he was moving through the woods which were dark not because it was night-time but because of the thickness of the trees and the leaves intertwined overhead. He seemed to be heading in the opposite direction. The flute in his hand became a canteen. The canteen was too light and Noah realized it had been leaking. When he tried to take a drink there was nothing but the dry cap and a coppery taste, the smell of canvas. He made it to the railroad track and headed off to the right. Home was to the right, and never the left. He knew this intuitively. Right was the way, was rightly called right, left was sinister, the left hand of God, the devil, the wilderness. For a time he stepped onto the rail and walked as if on a balance beam, one foot in front of the other, his arms to either side. To the left the sides of the mountain were supported with giant buttresses of concrete. You could walk clear to the top of them and look back down. It was harder to go back to the ground. The rail began to vibrate and soon he could hear the train coming. Behind him the track drew back in a slow curve and disappeared behind the mountain. Trains hardly ever came. Noah got off the rail and slowly the train slid along. Around the curve of the track it crawled. As it came by at last it took on speed. Car after car rattled past. Corrugated metal with large block letters stenciled across. The darkness was coming. It was always dark or getting darker, later and later, and Noah far from home. The train was long, an endless parade of rectangular cars, pulled along the steel rails. Noah needed to piss, so he stood alongside the track and pissed. On and on it streamed forth, hot from his belly, darkening the rocky ground. When he was finished he had to piss. He was thirsty. He walked along and finally the caboose passed in front of him. Malia stood at the foot of the train, gazing off in the other direction. David was behind her, and David was looking at Noah. The two faces dwindled into the gloomy distance. The pain in his belly was fierce, his thirst maddening. He came to a grove of trees and noted little green apples hanging from the branches. It was daytime. To his right the highway hummed and there was the high metal fence he had climbed over. He was close to home. He stood in green grass and the earth was cold to his bare feet. All around him lay wind-fallen apples, some rotten, some still perfect and smooth. Noah walked to a tree and picked an apple from a low branch. He took a bite and the meat of the fruit was dull and tasteless. Back over the fence, he thought, across the road and home. The fence stretched for unseen miles to the right and left of him, seventy-eighty feet high, and as he gazed upward it loomed over and started to fall backward. Backward he went, with the giant fence on top of him. The weight of it will surely kill me, he thought, with perfect clarity. So this is what it's like to die.

 

 

Tottle took the withered hand of the blind man and put it to his mouth. His lips were drawn back. The blind man smiled as his fingers discovered the wide gap and the jagged piece of broken tooth, but he was unconvinced. What else can I show him. He took the hand again and ran it along the knots of his shoulder-length hair, thin, brittle and lusterless, like weeds. The blind man kept smiling and shaking his head. When he spoke it was a language he didn't understand. Clipped, quick consonants, the gibberish of the overseers. Outside the hut it rained. Cold drops dripped through the roof. Someone was smoking a cigar. The acrid smell of the smoke was like the peaked breast of a girl: it made his bones ache. Twenty-one and my teeth broken, my hair a matted nest. How long have I been here. Tottle and the blind man watched a family through a breach in the wall, for now they were outside, looking in. The man was blind but he could see. They spoke in the same clipped consonants. He was starving. A roast on the table, bottle of white wine, pitcher of water, bread. The floor was covered with leaves, the walls were thatched with sticks. The man of the house was smoking. Captain Black drowned out the bitter cigar with its cloying sweetness. Helicopters droned overhead. Tottle ran across the snow, the choppers not far behind and low to the ground. Half-frozen locks drizzled from his cap and flew in the wind behind him. His beard was clotted with ice. How did this happen. Farther and farther north he ran. The land was white and smooth but he ran hard in his boots. Low hills appeared where a blood-red sun sank slowly and broke on a pointed crest. Red light spilled like the yoke of an egg and glimmered across the snow. The sails of a giant ship bellied in the farthest reaches of his sight, slowly moving left to right across the icy water. Tottle ran to the left. I'm an innocent man, he cried, for Christ's sake. What have I done? His Maker was after him. The face of a dead mouse flashed in his memory. What have I done that you wouldn't have? Its spine broken in the sprung trap. He stood at the edge of the white cliff. Poor Tom babbled in the rain. Far down below the water broke white on the rocks.

 

 

 

iii.

 

He sat under the porch, out of the heat. If he sat like an Indian he could have some headroom. He watched his mother's legs descend the wooden steps. Off she walked to the station-wagon, got in, and drove off, green kerchief on her head and horn-rimmed sunglasses. She looked like a movie star. He positioned his men in the dirt, aiming their rifles at unseen enemies off in the long grass. He made little hills of dirt and it was a comfort to situate certain men behind the little hills where they could talk and talk. He placed them so they faced one another at a comfortable angle, a bit of space between them. It loosened the knots in his stomach, to see them safe behind the little hills, quietly talking. His father called in sick to work and was probably sleeping. Rachel went shopping and took Joanna with her. The sun was sitting at the top of the sky, blazing. Japanese beetles hummed through the damp air, clacked off the sides of trailers and sheds. Dandelions shot up wherever the eye wandered. Jim O'Shea buzzed along the back road on his bike, tearing up the dirt and spitting out rocks. If he craned his neck, Noah could see the girl who stood watching him. Who's peeking out. Everyone knows it's Windy. The songs went through his head. The words stuck while the music fell out the way it came. Jeremiah was a bullfrog. Along came Rudy. Rudy was too big to sit comfortably under the porch. He told him a nigger family was moving in, the first nigger family in the park. Soon we'll have loads of niggers, he told him. Isn't it bad enough we have the spicks? He and Rudy went to Big Fort. Noah was thinking about the black family. He didn't like the words that came out of Rudy's mouth, words like bits of chewed meat that stunk from being packed in the pit of a rotten tooth. But those words were easy to spit out and they made people feel better. At Big Fort they smoked cigarettes. Long ones, no filters. Noah picked tobacco from his lips and listened as Rudy went on about the niggers. He wondered if Rudy, whose parents came on a ship from Sicily, knew that Elisheva was Jewish, that he was a half-Jew. No doubt he had a beef against the Jews. He tuned Rudy out and noted the small canvas chair they had pushed up through the hole, Malia's chair, where her ass went. Noah felt his body respond to his thoughts, felt his heart beat faster. Damn David. Freckles and red hair, no less. Noah began to explain things and Rudy called him a nigger-lover. The Italians built this country, and what have the niggers done, besides fill the prisons? He heard voices and then David and Malia and Kirk were coming up through the hole. Malia complained about the smoke, waving her little hand by her nose. Rudy left and took his cigarettes with him, but not on account of the Puerto Rican girl and her sensitive nose. He was angry at the nigger-lover. Malia took her seat and David sat on an up-ended paint-bucket beside her, and Kirk sat cross-legged on the floor. Even with his butt lower down David was a head higher than Malia, and he put his hand on her knee. Her skin was smooth and brown. She was visibly conscious of the hand at her knee, a gesture of possession. She wore red tennis shorts that ran high on her legs and a black concert T, the name of the group pushed out across the swell of her breasts. Noah's brain was addled with youthful lust and boyish thoughts. Kirk took the bag he had brought in and withdrew a glossy magazine, which David instantly reached for with an exclamation. Kirk yanked it out of David's hand with a playful scowl. Lemme see. Kirk flipped through the magazine and Noah could smell the new, clean pages. Where did he get it. Kirk showed him one of the pictures and Malia let her disapproval be known. How disgusting, she said. Now David took the magazine and he showed it to Malia, and though she was disgusted she looked at the pictures. So disgusting, she said. What's disgusting about a woman's body, David wanted to know. You have the same thing. Malia rolled her eyes and crossed her arms. Her black eyes landed on Noah's and his heart hammered. She smiled and shook her head as if to say, look at these pigs, it's nice of you not to be a pig, not to be normal like them.

 

Some time later Eddie Barnes came up through the hole. Eddie was a small, dark-haired kid with even more freckles than David. It seemed his entire face was one freckle in which a face was trying to appear. Eddie was unhappy because his father's company had offered him a job in Port Jervis and he and his family would be moving in a few weeks. Eddie said the job of mowing Tottle's yard was up for grabs if anyone present felt like doing it. It was five dollars every other week, and the yard wasn't that big. It was a lark, he said. Noah remembered the old man's voice as he chased him out of his precious yard. Oh he's alright, Eddie said, he yells at me too. He don't mean nothing by it. Noah wondered if he could do it. He imagined telling Bernie he was going to take a job, and Bernie would be glad about it. There's more to life than those damn books, you need to get out and use those muscles, you want to be a man or soft and lazy like a girl? No-one in present company seemed interested, and so Noah told Eddie he would try it. It would be nice to have some money in addition to his allowance. It's a lark, Eddie said, the yard ain't that big, but he's particular, that's for sure. For once, Noah was pleased with himself. He looked at Malia. Malia was looking at David.

 

 

Tottle awoke at noon and began the struggle to rise out of bed. His head and body ached. The mattress was shot and he slept in the middle where it dipped like a saddle. The sheets were dingy and stank of smoke. He went first to the living room to adjust the machine in the window. It was hot and stagnant in the house. He would be glad when the summer was over, though Winter brought its own troubles. The cold was bad for his joints, his fingers would ache in the morning, he could hardly move them. In the tiny kitchen he fixed a pot of coffee and opened a can of ravioli. What day was it. It was Tuesday, he decided. With his coffee - sweetened with three heaping spoonfuls of brown sugar - and the ravioli, Tottle repaired to the chair under the lamp. The curtains were all drawn, and he switched on the lamp. He preferred electric light to natural light. The sun was one of his enemies, a necessary evil. Edison earned more respect from him than Jehovah. It was easy for Jehovah, who simply uttered a few words and presto. Edison had to work at it. Edison had to think. Edison had no magic. Tottle thought of his previous thought and thought more about it. Surely Jehovah said no words. To whom would He be speaking? Words were the result of a desire to communicate. When you had magic, and furthermore when you were by yourself, words had no use. Then again, of what were Jehovah's thoughts composed if not words? Tottle tried to imagine thoughts without words, and found, of course, that it was impossible. But when you're God anything is possible, which, as it happens, is a privilege shared by many a fanciful creature. He took up Lord Weary's Castle and placed his glasses at the end of his nose. It was pleasant to have a book open in one's lap, but one wasn't forced to read it. He gazed over the top of his glasses at the little television which was never turned off, and saw two beautiful people speaking to one another at close proximity. People would never speak in such a fashion, not even if they were intimate. It simply wasn't done. These two, a woman and a man, were not more than eight inches apart. They stared into each other's eyes and spoke into each other's mouth, and shared the same breath. The woman's eyes ticked back and forth, from one eye to the other, and the man's eyes did the same, left right, left right, left right. The eyes were fascinating to watch, and more fascinating presently than anything Robert Lowell had to say. Maximus Poems was next, dug out of the pile. The woman's eyes were large and preternaturally blue, the lashes long and thick. Her lips were glossy, and behind them darted the wet pink tongue behind porcelain-white teeth. On and on it went, one face and then the other, lips moving. The sound was off. On and on they spoke. Tottle turned Lord Weary upside down in his lap and ate a ravioli. He washed it down with the super-sweetened coffee. When they kissed finally Tottle turned Lord Weary over and ran his eyes along a few lines. His heart tumbled in his narrow chest. The palpitations came more and more. Every time they struck he would sit and wait for oblivion. I don't care, I'm ready. There was no history of heart disease in his family, and everyone lived a long time. Too damn long. Coffee, cigarettes, thirty odd years of booze, he was trying like hell to shorten his sentence. He thought of his grandfather and could not imagine enduring another forty years. It would be absurd. Kids dying of cancer, bald-headed and smiles on their faces, and people were plodding along into their ninetees. He ate ravioli and felt as selfish and indolent as a sultan, recumbent among cushions and half-naked concubines. He thought of the girl on the wall in Pompeii. There was no justice in the world, as much as man had tried to create it. A knock at the door wakened him some time later. For a moment he sat still, anticipating anxiously the non-occurrence of the next knock. His heart banged and then beat slower. The silence was precious. Its value at present accrued geometrically. At last there fell the second knock, this one more insistent.

 

"Get lost!" he shouted, with all his effort.

 

"It's me, Eddie Barnes," came the faint reply.

 

It was Mottleface, and who was this, Dishevelled Star, who was his own worst enemy. Tottle looked at the young faces, one ogling him and the other turned away, up the road. He had to exert himself because the garbage truck had come sneezing.

 

"What!"

 

Eddie explained. His father had been transfered and he was moving to Port Jervis in a week. This was Noah Crowley and if it was alright he could do the yard, if it was alright. "I don't give a damn, come Saturday, twice a month," he looked at the smaller child. Tottle recognized, sadly, the coy glimmer of unorganized intelligence. He told him the mower was in the shed. "Come Saturday, it's unlocked. You get paid when you're finished." Tottle looked at the boy, expecting some prattle. Noah nodded and gazed anxiously at the shed. Then he gazed at the grass, taking in the open spaces, the narrow places. Then Tottle was back behind the door. Noah was glad to be free from his craggy brows. Eddie walked to the shed and Noah followed. The shed was covered with rust and the door made a painful cacophony as it opened. There, among a few spare garden tools and the mower, sat stacks of books. He had never seen so many outside a library. Some stacks went as high as his shoulder. Eddie was showing him the mower. You pull this here, you attach the bag here, here's where you put the gas. Noah was looking at the books. You need gas you run up to Shell but you gotta get the money from Tottle, unless you want to pay for it yourself. Most the time he gets it himself but he forgets too. You have to knock loud he's half-deaf. And you gotta wait. Noah was having second thoughts, but then Bernie seemed proud of him, he had to now. That night he had a dream.

 

He was mowing Tottle's yard, pushing the red mower, making straight rows, it was no sweat. He went up a slight rise and at the top the yard stretched wide to either side and there were trees all over. It was hard to get the mower up the rise, which was more of a hill. It was a hill, after all. Up and up it went. There were cans in the grass. He had to go around the cans, their jagged tops sticking out. The grass got longer and wilder higher up. The mower couldn't cut through that kind of wilderness. He tried to turn the mower off but couldn't find the switch. The engine roared. He looked down. Tottle's trailer was far away, nearly hidden in tall grass among the trees. Goddamn Eddie. He was stuck. The mower roared and roared.

 

iv.

 

When next Saturday came Noah went down the road to Tottle's. The old man had still not repaired the flat tire. He went to the shed, his stomach nervous. He started to get the mower out and was distracted by the books. Noah had taken to books at an early age, but these were not the kind he liked to read. He looked at the battered spines of old hardcovers and didn't recognize most of the names. Voltaire, Goethe, Milton, Wordsworth, Kant, Sophocles, Hardy, Melville. He stood for a long time in the old shed until a shadow fell across him. With a start he flipped around, a fat musty book in his hand. Tottle stood there in his knee high boots, an old pair of jeans and a flannel shirt, despite the heat, smoking a cigarette.

 

"What the hell are you doing?"

 

Noah put the book back where it was and took hold of the mower. Tottle cleared his throat. "That's a good book. That's why it's on top," he said, "You like books or you just looking for smut?"

 

Noah didn't know what the last word meant. "I like books."

 

"You go ahead and take what interests you. Moby-Dick has to come back, though. You planning on doing the yard or what?"

 

"Yeah, I..."

 

"Well get to it," Tottle said gruffly, and went back to the trailer.

 

Noah surprised himself by doing an adequate job of the mowing. He stood on the tiny porch and waited until Tottle made it to the door. Maybe the lines were a little crooked. It was a long while and he knocked again. The door felt flimsy and hollow. The sweat felt good on him, like a new style of clothing. Tottle arrived at the door a few moments after the second knock. "Alright, hold your horses," he said. He squinted into the detested sunlight. He came out and the porch was so small Noah went down to one of the steps. Tottle surveyed his property. In fact he liked to call it his property but it wasn't. "It's a bit of a mess. You left some spots. See there?" Noah followed the crooked finger with its long nail. There was some grass sticking up here and there which he hadn't noticed. "You ever mowed a yard before?"

 

"No."

 

"Honest boy," Tottle said. "You know, most people are full of shit."

 

"I know," Noah said. Tottle was quiet for a moment. It looked to Noah as if there were some genuine humanity in the old hermit. Everyone said he was just an old buzzard who hated everything and everybody.

 

"Next time get it right or I'll find somebody else. Come get a glass of lemonade and I'll get you your money," Tottle said, and turned to go back inside. "Don't worry I don't eat kids your age. You're too big to stick in the oven."

 

Noah smiled, and followed the old man into the house. It was cold inside the little trailer. There were books all over. The kitchen table was nothing more than a repository for books. Tottle plunked a large plastic cup on the counter and told him to help himself. There was not much in the refrigerator. A few bottles of cola, carton of milk, candy bars, half-empty cans of chili, corned-beef hash, Chef Boyardee, with plastic spoons sticking out of them. He took out a pitcher of lemonade and poured it into the plastic cup. There was an old black and white photo taped to the front of the refrigerator, a clean-shaven soldier in uniform. Upon close inspection Noah realized that the soldier was Tottle himself. Tottle went down the narrow hall and came back several minutes later. He handed the boy a five dollar bill. It was the first time Noah had earned any money, and the feeling was exhilarating. The lemonade tasted good. "Come and sit, finish your lemonade," Tottle said, and Noah followed him into the living room. Noah sat on an old couch and Tottle in his reading chair. There was a stack of books on the little table beside it, and an ancient lamp that cast a pleasant light. It was dark in the trailer, and all the windows were closed up tight. The television was on, a little black and white with tinfoil on the rabbit-ears.

 

"Nobody's been in here," Noah said, reflecting, drinking his lemonade.

 

"I been in here," Tottle replied.

 

"No, I mean us kids."

 

"Eddie was in here."

 

"Oh." There was a long silence. Tottle seemed uneasy. In fact, he was ready for the boy to leave. Then the boy opened his mouth again. "That picture, it's of you?"

 

"Mm."

 

"I didn't know you were in the army," Noah said. The old man certainly didn't look like an ex-soldier.

 

"Got drafted," Tottle said. "Didn't want to be. You finished with that lemonade yet? I'm tired of flapping my gums."

 

"Sure," Noah said, and thanked the man. Tottle had a book open in front of him when he left.

 

 

v.

 

Sunday was a busy day. People got dressed in their finest and piled into station-wagons and went to church. It was a hot morning. Bernie went fishing on Burns Pond with his fellow heathens Ed Hess and Frank Sebesta, but it was more an excuse to get drunk than to catch fish. Rachel took Joanna to church, a non-denominational affair all the way in Monroe. If there was any sense trying to put religion in Joanna, Noah could not see it. His little sister was retarded. Eli was Jewish by birth but had no religion to speak of, and Sunday was usually a chance to spend time with his mother. He asked if she knew he was doing Tottle's yard now that Eddie was moving to Port Jervis. She was on the sofa looking at people playing golf. The soft, whispered voices, the green grass, had a calming effect on her. At the mention of that name her eyes took on a more present aspect. "No, I didn't hear. That's good, Noah. It'll be a chance to save up some money."

 

"Yeah," Noah said, and sat alongside her on the couch. He took the five dollar bill from his pocket and looked at President Lincoln. "He ain't so bad. You know he was in the army?"

 

"Yes, I did. There's a lot more to that man than people think. He was working and saving money to go to college when he got drafted. He wanted to be a teacher."

 

Noah's eyes grew wide. Tottle, a teacher? From what he heard the old man worked in a factory all his life, up until he couldn't work anymore, in fact the same factory where Eli had worked for a number of years as an office clerk. His mom's eyes grew distant. Her bare feet were up on the coffee table, and Noah glanced at the breadth of her hips, the smoothness of her long legs coming out of the white cotton shorts she had on. Her toenails were painted red and the paint was flaking off. "How come he didn't become a teacher? How long was he in the army?"

 

"Something happened when he got out," Eli said, "Something that turned him sour."

 

"What was it that happened?"

 

"Noah, I don't feel like talking. I'm tired and I don't feel good," Eli said, and her hand landed on top of his imploringly. She squeezed it and that was the end of the conversation.

 

 

 

When the good people returned from church he and Rudy walked across the wide field into the woods. Once in the cover of trees they smoked a cigarette. They heard Jim O'Shea's bike tearing up the dirt as it buzzed across the field. Rudy wanted to know if he inhaled. Or did he just blow it back out. You have to inhale or you're not smoking. It hurt his throat when he sucked the smoke in, and coughed. They walked until they came to an embankment where Rudy dug with a stick for old bottles. Sometimes you could find one whole. Noah stood at the top of the embankment and looked down the path that went deeper into the woods. You walked along about a mile and into a clearing where the Endicott house stood, what remained of it. Noah wanted to go to the Endicott house. It burned a century before but was vacant for another fifty years before that. People said Washington slept there. It was funny how Washington managed to sleep in so many places. Washington was a local god, and nothing short. Bernie said he could crack a walnut between two fingers, that he was as strong as his horse, which was also a god, a white horse-god. People said the Endicott house was haunted, but people said any old house was haunted. The house had been nearly burnt down, the inside was gutted. You walked up and down the stairs that somehow survived the burning, and you wondered if Washington stepped here, right here, where my foot is. In which of the rooms had he slept, and what bed might accommodate his godly length? Rudy found a small blue bottle filled with dirt, its glass milky and swirled. His father had gotten a few dollars from collectors. He walked up the embankment and told Noah to hold it and don't drop it. Jim O'Shea came rattling along the path, the sound opening up under the trees as he came closer, and he edged off the path, holding the bottle. Rudy looked too, nails black with soft dirt and moist dirt like clay. The bike roared past, it was good of him to pick up all the pennies, partner. He was handsome, his bike his stallion and him a gallant knight with long yellow hair streaming away from under the helmet, which was why he got the girls. Rudy wanted to know why he never went to church, and they smoked another cigarette. Rudy and his whole family, five sisters, all Catholics. Don't you believe or what? Noah said he believed and he said his folks didn't go. Rachel went and sometimes he went with her. Elisheva said you don't have to go to a building some men made to commune with God, that any place was a church, that many who sat in church on Sunday were Unbelievers deep inside or knew that God existed the way they knew there were seven continents, an item of knowledge passed down from generation to generation which was a fact and not an article of faith and that with such people there was no point bringing up the matter since the matter was settled, like the colors in the spectrum, like south east north and west. He put Rudy in that group, for when Rudy asked don't you believe, what he meant was don't you believe two plus two is four. Rudy didn't want to go to the Endicott house, he said if you don't go to church there is a room in Hell with your name on the door, and he smiled, as if the idea gave him pleasure.

 

Tottle woke and glanced at the clock, the spot in the back of his neck aflame with fresh pain, his hands like stiff claws. In his mind the things he needed to do were out of order, start the coffee, make the bed, shower, piss, and which to do first kept him abed for several minutes. At last with a herculean effort he sat on the side of the bed and saw the light straining against the curtains, trying to steal in to the little room at the back of the house, and if there was a girl in the bed and he John Donne there was a poem there, a charm against the sunlight. One day he would put black tape, big black strips of it, across the windows, or paint them black. Tottle the vampyre. One day. But then he would have to fix the flat because there was no black tape or paint up at the Shell, and he was all thumbs. Would Dishevelled Star be able to fix it. With his head so far up his ass, most likely not. In the back of the truck was a repair kit. Tottle sat on the side of the bed and reached for his boots. Somehow they made you feel like a man, to walk in your boots and make an important clack in the little hall. He liked to walk up the road to the Shell in his boots, clacking on the pavement, at least before they poured the fresh gravel, and this played hell on the clacking as well as the ankles. It would be better when the tires pushed it all flat again and next summer you'd have the tar bubbles the kids would poke with sticks and pop, being the little destroyers they were. It was the boys, mostly, who liked to wreck things. The girls, they wrecked in the abstract. They shattered fancies and feelings, not objects. Boys broke things, windows, even each other's noses. Things could be fixed. It was one of them most likely popped the tire. Little bastards. And off they went on a Sunday morning, he reckoned after several minutes, to make their peace with the Big Destroyer, Wrecker of cities and worlds, Jehovah Himself, who made fire and brimstone, who brought rain and pestilence and the emerods. And there they sat on their emerods and begged to be preserved whole in the end and not destroyed, not cast into the unmaking fire. He stood in the kitchen and put the boots on the floor. Can't shower in your boots. He tried to start the coffee, measuring with a tablespoon, but had to piss. Stopped midway, spilling black crumbs on the counter-top, he went to the john. He sat like a woman to piss. Why stand there and piss in your own house when you could sit. You're out in the woods with your friends you stand, but in your house you can sit. Back to the kitchen he finished the coffee and its sweet smell took over the house, its bubbling a fine music. On television men ran into one another. A little war for pleasure's sake on a holy afternoon. Running and crashing with big shoulders and shiny helmets. The team in white held hands as they huddled and at the end the eyes raised toward heaven, for certainly God is on our side. He stood in the living room with his boots in hand and watched the play. An unanswered prayer, for a man in black stole the ball from the air and ran with it clear to the other side, the men in white scrambling after him. He slammed it down on the cleat-cut grass, and a little tuft went flying. This was God's feminine side, His mysterious side, at least to the men in white. To the men in black He was the God of Warriors, the God of Winners. He looked with longing at the stack of books on the table under the lamp. In time, he thought, and padded off to the bathroom. He sang under the water.

 

At Big Fort Malia and Kirk came up through the hole in the floor, Malia coming first and Kirk having the view being he was a gentleman who put so much stock in such formalities, and Malia with her long legs and short-pants perhaps completely out of the know. But where was David. Apparently Big David had been grounded for a week, for what, Malia did not say. Instantly he extinguished his cigarette, though Rudy kept on smoking. The Puerto Ricans were going to take over the country but they were not going to take over Big Fort. She could wave her hand by her nose all she wanted. Noah looked at her brown legs and silently reveled in the absence of David. Probably Rudy resented his being so captivated by Malia, who smelled faintly of flour and cooking oil, but Kirk said once she was the cat's pajamas, and he thought of cats in plaid flannel, tucked neatly into little beds. Why do you want to go with David for anyway, Rudy wanted to know. He's a Jehovah's and you're a Catholic. You ought to go with a Catholic. Malia insisted with a smirk that she and David were not going together, but how that explained their always being together no-one present could figure out. Girls, it was Kirk's theory, always lie. They are a pack of liars. Malia said that wasn't so, but Kirk said it was a lie. He says he kissed you, so there you have it. Malia said she didn't let David kiss her, he just did it, but she stopped him. Noah was credulous and happy to know that Malia and David were not going together, that it merely appeared that way, and who cared what Kirk had to say. Every time her eyes landed on him he felt a twinge in his belly. He wanted to tell her she was pretty but he could never work up the nerve. So pretty, with her big black eyes and brown skin. It was possible she knew already and so it didn't need to be said, but that gave you no satisfaction, you wanted her knowing but partly because you said it. Noah was embarrassed because of his feelings for her, and this was something unnatural which would never leave him, an unfortunate mistake. Now she was flirting with Kirk, and while this was more reasonable since Kirk was more handsome than David it was no less painful. Kirk took out the magazine and Malia crossed her arms, watching him haughtily as he looked at the glossy pictures, a smirk puckering one side of her mouth. She was trying not to smile. When he went home to eat, Eli was gone and Rachel was fixing supper. Joanna smiled at him from her usual place at the table, happy as always to see him. She was coloring in a coloring book and singing to herself. If she can sing why can't she talk. Bernie was at the head of the table and he smelled of beer. He was drinking a can of beer and looking at his watch. Where the hell'd she go. Goddamn Sunday. When his mother did get home there would be a fight. They would go to their room in the back and the door would close and they would fling insults at one another. Then the door would fly open and one of them would go back out. It was heaven when Bernie did, and hell when Eli did. That's what we get for letting them drive, he said, and looked at his only son, blue eyes sparkling. Rachel said nothing. Joanna hummed. Goddamn Sunday.

 

 

vi.

 

He hoped against all hope that he would not want to talk. He wondered if he would talk, as he pushed the mower, surer now of his lines, always looking over his shoulder. This Saturday had come fast. This day had come too fast. It was hot and the air was thick. The little beasts, the tiny dragons, they came in by hook or crook and died in the artificial winter. Little red pustules on his arms and legs, sometimes they broke open and bled. He sat with Maximus and thought of the sea, which he had merely leaped over. Melville's gallery of seamen. On that island it was all around but unfelt and unseen, made the sense of disconnection more absolute. He went over and over the cut swaths, deaf in the buzz of the motor. He thought of the books in the shed, the smell of paper and ink always a comfort. Soon enough the sound stopped and the rattling in the shed. The little intrepid knock. Tottle sat with his book a tent in his lap, half a Vienna Finger with its soft matt of sugar halfway to his mouth. He waited a moment, free until the next knock. They thought he couldn't hear. Soon enough it came and he lumbered to the door, uneasy on his legs. He had a dizzy spell, palpitations. On the tiny porch he surveyed the plot over which he was lord and master, like Ahab in the forecastle, wherever that was. He blinked into the detested light, his lips lazily chewing, savoring the cloying sugar. The boy's face was agape with hope. Tottle felt a surge of affection. "It's better, but still not great," he said, "Maybe next time I'll have a decent goddamn yard."

 

Noah squinted at the yard. It looked fine to him. He turned into the trailer and left the door aswing. Noah came in and closed it carefully. It was very cold. Tottle clacked in his boots across the kitchen tiles, softly plodded down the hall. How could he afford the electric bill? Back he came and gave him the five dollar note. They sat in the living room, same as last time. Tottle looked at his book. The television showed some old film, men in uniform dancing and singing. The sound was off. A beautiful girl was passed from hand to hand, twirling like a ballerina. A muscle car growled up the road, spitting gravel. Tottle looked into the middle distance. "I want you to get me some black tape. Bring me some next time I'll give you the money."

 

"Black tape?"

 

"That's right, thick black tape. I want to do the windows." The boy shrugged, gave assent, but weakly. He didn't expect to see the tape. Why would somebody tape their windows, he thought? "Your dad's got some, I imagine."

 

Noah drank his lemonade. He cleared his throat. "My mom said you were going to be a teacher."

 

Tottle looked at him. His eyes grew wide. He thought of her as he remembered her, tall and slender and beautiful. Elisheva, the name was a poem in itself. "That's right," he said, "but I don't feel like talking about it if that's what you got in mind." He reveled in his bad English, like a pig in the mud. He smeared a Vienna Finger, ate the less sugared side first. Even while he chewed he fetched a cigarette from the rumpled pack in his shirt pocket. Maybe the smoke would run the kid off. He didn't know that Noah liked to smoke.

 

"I was just wondering how come you didn't." Noah said. He had half the lemonade left. He studied the plastic cup as if it were a thing of great interest. Tottle let out a long breath and ignited the cigarette. He replaced Maximus with a small tin ashtray.

 

"Why do you want to know?"

 

"I don't know, just do," Noah said. The boy reminded him of Elisheva. Sad he didn't get her good looks, but there was something around the eyes, the way he threw his hair back, even the way he walked, Elisheva.

 

"When I got home after the war ended things happened in such a way I lost faith in the idea of teaching people anything. There didn't seem much point to it anymore."

 

"What things happened?" the boy persisted.

 

Tottle exhaled again, and the smoke was sucked out of the air by the machine that rattled in the window. "You know I used more words in these five minutes than I did in the last ten years. You ever have times when you don't feel like talking?"

 

"Yeah, a lot," Noah said, and he smiled.

 

"Well that's how I feel all the time," Tottle said. "Now I ask you, what kind of teacher would that make? Somebody who don't feel like talking?"

 

Noah shrugged. Tottle smoked. Noah wanted to smoke but didn't feel like telling that he smoked. It was as if time had slowed down and Noah enjoyed the feeling. It was cold and quiet except for the rattle of the machine. It was two people conscious in the same room and time was slowing down. "Out in the shed there's a book by a man named Thoreau. He knew all about that feeling, of just wanting to keep your damn trap shut. You seen anything in there that interests you yet?"

 

"Sure, a bunch of them," Noah said.

 

"You go on and take what you like, but if you take Moby-Dick it has to come back. I don't care if you keep the others."

 

"That your favorite book?"

 

"Yes it is," Tottle said. "That's why it's on top."

 

"How come it's your favorite?" Noah asked.

 

"That question requires a long answer," Tottle said, but he seemed, despite his protests to the contrary, to be willing to give just that. "You know, not many people thought much of that book when it was published. Nowadays it's the greatest thing since holes in cheese, but everybody seems to have a different opinion as to why. That's part of what makes it great. It makes people think, and there's nothing better than something that makes people think. People need to do more thinking. Maybe you should just read the book yourself instead of listening to me talk about it?"

 

"Okay, I'll read it," Noah said. I don't read too fast, though. I might need to keep it for a while."

 

"That's fine. I don't read fast either."

 

After a long pause, Noah asked, "How come you don't keep that book it in here?"

 

Tottle liked the question. "Because it belongs out there, on top of the others. If you look how I got them situated, you see there's an order to it. Moby's on top of American novels. Shakespeare's on top of English poets, like that. Some people would prefer a different kind of order, like putting the biggest ones on the bottom. I got Shakespeare on top even though he's got the biggest book. Makes the stack look kind of funny, but it's a funny I can live with better than if he was on the bottom. That make any sense to you?"

 

"Sure," Noah said, and he thought of his army men under the porch. It was important, where you put them.

 

Tottle went on, "What looks like a mess to some people is order to others. I was almost married to a girl who thought my books made a room look messy. She wanted to put them in a book case and arrange them alphabetically, like a goddamn library. I told her I liked them just the way they were, a pile here and a pile there, and each pile having its own logic to it."

 

"Almost married?"

 

"That's right, almost. Escaped by the skin of my teeth."

 

"What happened?"

 

"Oh call me Ishmael, for goodness' sake," Tottle said. He took a pull from the cigarette, "We were incompatible, and it wasn't just the books. She was my sweetheart before the war and when I got out she kept on being my sweetheart until things went foul. We discovered certain things about each other. To make short of long, she was upset at the prospect of leaving our as yet unconceived children outside a state of grace. She was angry with me for thinking an infant didn't need to be forgiven for being born."

 

Tottle harrumphed and squashed the cigarette. When it was clear Noah didn't understand, he continued, "I told her I wouldn't let any child of mine be baptized. The argument came a few weeks before we were set to tie the knot. Before that I didn't know how important all that stuff was to her. Not long after we split I agreed to talk to a writer from a magazine who was doing a big article on prisoners of war who had come back home. As luck would have it, this writer had the same difficulty with the truth that Clare had, only he was a real bastard with a sense of Christian duty. Sometime after I spoke with him his magazine came out, and what do you know, not a mention of Robert Edward Tottle in the whole damn thing, despite two hours of conversation and him scribbling in his notebook all the while.

 

"Same as Clare was upset because I saw no reason to hold an infant guilty of anything for which they needed to be forgiven, straight out of the chute no less, this character was upset because I would not follow his lead and praise God for coming through the war alive. If I did that, I explained to him, then I would have to blame God for sending me there in the first place. He couldn't see that part of the equation. It wasn't God who got me in the war, it was the evil men across the ocean. Then I asked him why the evil men didn't get him into the war, and he said it was because he was the father of two girls and the last of his line. And I wanted to know if God had a hand in causing his children to be girls and thereby sparing him service in the war. Well, he supposed that might very well be. When things happen to our advantage, I said to him, we give God the credit, but when bad things happen to us, it's not his fault. As a for-instance I mentioned all the men who never came home, the ones who were captured like I was and stuck in some stinking camp like I was but who starved to death or got killed by some pitiless bastards for sport. How selfish did a man need to be in order to feel thankful to God for being saved when thousands of men were being tortured and starved and were dying like flies? The magazine man refused to see things from my perspective, and wished like hell I would see things from his, that God works in mysterious ways. So I put the question to him, why in the hell would God save a non-believer like me and let believers like Joey Sorrelli and Paddy Mulligan die of starvation? Maybe so you would find faith in him and tell your story to others when you got home, he says. Well isn't that a sweet deal for Joey and Paddy, to die with their ribs sticking out of their bodies just so I could turn believer and evangelize. Joey and Paddy are in a better place now, he says, and I said they were in a better place before they got yanked into the goddamn war where the plan was they'd get captured and suffer for a few months and die in agony just so there would be one more loud-mouth preacher in the world. All of which went for nothing, as it happened, since I didn't convert and was even less a believer than before. A fact which ought to make you consider things and feel contrite, he says.

 

"Did God have a hand in the Bomb, I asked him. He blinks and says he supposed to some extent yes. Notice God had no hand in starting the war but he might have had one in ending it, and end it he did, boy oh boy. So many people evaporated, women and children, all innocent, in one fell swoop of his loving arm. Let's just hope those little ones were baptized, I said. Something told me the magazine man didn't give a damn if those little ones were baptized or not, and something also told me he might have wished they weren't. People like that one don't believe in innocence. You can't be a person on earth and be innocent, because you are guilty by birth, you are guilty for what you are, not what you do. It's a damn shame to be a person, it's so shameful everybody needs to be anointed with a drop of magic water fresh out of the womb before they can get on with the business of living, to be washed clean of the slime of being a human being, to be made acceptable to the one who caused us to be covered in slime to begin with, by making us weak and vulnerable, by making us imperfect.

 

"The magazine man decided one man's story wasn't worth the telling because it didn't go in accord with the others. So you believe all those men's lives were sacrificed in vain, he asked me, for no reason. I said since when is the idea of human dignity and rights not worth fighting for. It wasn't Jesus we were fighting for, I suggested, since Jesus was the master of the universe and could fight his own battles just fine, it was in defense of human dignity and human rights, the right to liberty, to right to think for yourself. Show me anywhere in your Book, I said, where you are asked to think for yourself, where thinking itself is described as a virtue or even mentioned, for Christ sake. He said we wouldn't have our freedom if it weren't for God, who blessed certain people with foresight and caused this country to be founded. I asked him for his definition of freedom. How free are you when you have one ultimate choice in your life, to believe on a creed and live in bliss forever or disbelieve and spend forever in a fiery torment. Where is the freedom to opt out? Thanks, I'll take neither, just let me die and lie in the ground. That isn't an option, but you are free to choose, and a wise man chooses the path of righteousness and eternal life. Then he tells me some Christians don't believe in Hell. We aren't like you think, he tells me, and in defense of his creed he begins to tell me the number of variations of this very creed, how some believe this and some believe that, you need only confess that Christ is the savior and that is that. Well how is one to know what is correct and what isn't. And he says you just have to believe what you believe and have faith, and that to some God gives revelations, and I asked him what stripe he was, and it turns out he was a Calvinist. Ah, good Lord, I said, and I asked him point blank, do all who die in infancy go to Heaven, and he said, no, not all of them. At which point I showed him the door."

 

Tottle sat quiet for a moment, and Noah drew inward. He had known similar feelings, had thought similar thoughts, but there was more to his separation from the world than the old man had let on about. Or perhaps he thought that there should have been. The muscle car that rumbled up the road only a few minutes before was now returning from whence it came. Noah could hear the sounds of another mower whining a few lots over. Again, as if reading the boy's mind, Tottle began to talk again, and as he spoke he turned the pages of his book absently, his eyes scanning shallowly across the scattered words.

 

"A stronger person would have told Clare and Magazine Man to shove it. He would have made his peace at once with the both of them and carried on. But I'm not the strongest person in the world and besides, there were other problems. When I lost the desire to become a teacher I found that I had little desire for much of anything. I wanted to write of my experience in the war, of my time as a prisoner of the Japanese, who were the worst bastards you can imagine. If it weren't for the Bomb I'd have died there. They didn't give a fig about the Geneva Convention. They were committing atrocities, outlandish acts of cruelty. I was lucky, and I thanked God, whom I called good fortune, in my own way, in a way that Magazine Man wouldn't have understood and which he damn sure wouldn't have approved of.

 

"Anyway I was writing but not having any luck, except for a few poems here and there, newspapers mostly. I couldn't write about the war or my experiences overseas. I tried but couldn't get it right. Others were doing it and getting it right, and I couldn't do it. Time passed and I decided to forget it instead. I decided to forget about Clare and Magazine Man too. I went to work, and the work I did required little of me. I got lazy, and I drank too much. When I tried to write it never worked, and my confidence was shot. I didn't have enough desire to do it, I didn't have the will. No-one's destined for great things, Noah, there are only those who have the desire to achieve greatness and those who don't. Ability's one thing, and will is another. Some people get lucky, but by and large you need more than that. And you have precious little time, a handful of years, a wink of consciousness between eternities.

 

"I've said before that religion is the art of self-contempt, but I've held myself in greater contempt than most religious people, and mine is contempt without hope, without salvation. I've tried to find a reason for the way my life panned out, but there isn't any, except that it's most likely what I wanted all along. I've tried to attribute blame where I felt it belonged, but it never stuck on anyone or anything except myself. There's no such thing as fate, Noah. You can do what you damn well please, even if that means sitting in the dark with a few battered books at your elbow and watching yourself get old. All things considered, I live a grand and easy life. Take a look at the world around you, not just people here, but people all over the world, and not just people, but all living things. Nature is hostile. It's hostile, cruel, and ugly."

 

Noah's eyebrows came together. Tottle raised his. "Funny thing, a goddamn poet saying a thing like that? Maybe I'm no poet after all, but it's true. It's like I was telling you before. It's the easiest truth to observe in this life but it seems to be the hardest for people to come to grips with. Why is that? People are nature's oddballs, Noah. People have worked a fabulous miracle in the world. They've taken nature's laws and replaced them with their own, they've invented ideas like morality and justice, and they've made laws in accordance with those ideas, or at least they've done a fair job of trying. Nature doesn't traffic in morality or justice. Nature is ugly and harsh and revels in it, it's sticky with blood and stinks of rot and death. Man's definition of evil is precisely a description of the natural world. Brute force and brute self-interest, exploitation of resources, might makes right, survival of the strong at the expense of the weak, and all without remorse. My problem with religion is not that people wish to believe in a creator god who is the author of goodness and justice, what gets my goat is that the gods people have found fit to worship are somehow exempt from having to be good or just.

 

"Might makes right is the definition of evil as it applies to a man, but as it applies to a god it becomes the fountainhead of goodness and justice. Self-love and egomania are grievous sins as they apply to a man, but as attributes of a god they are virtues. If a man demanded worship and a lifetime of unquestioning devotion of his own children, he'd be called a monster, and rightly so, but when a god makes the same demand he is praised beyond measure. When a man swears to wreak vengeance on those who have slighted or hurt him, and when he becomes single-mindedly committed to carrying out that oath, he is considered obsessed, even insane, but when a god does the very same thing we fall into a hush and contemplate his glory and his righteousness. But people object, they say God is far greater than man, he is to a man as a man to a flea, a thousand times more so, and this is supposed to explain things. But think about it Noah, would you, or could you, be angry with a flea if it caused you an itch? If another boy struck you, you would feel the desire to make it even, but if a little child struck you, the desire would be far less, or it wouldn't exist. But God created the world, he created you, and he disposes with his creatures as he damn well pleases, so they tell me, but that's backwards, and more terribly backwards than anything else, because we love our children, we love them more and cherish them more because we made them. And yet some of the greatest religious sermons are nothing if not explicit reminders of how unworthy we are of God's love. God the father, no less.

 

"We saw that the natural world was hostile, and we banded together and discovered a way to best it, to survive and prosper on our own terms, under our own laws, but while we did that we dragged our primitive gods along with us and set them up in our midst, the gods we prayed to in the caves and the hovels and the mud-huts, the gods we called upon to protect us from the wind and rain, from disease and famine, from the bad men among us. Even while we discovered ways to keep out the wind and the rain, to lessen the occurrence of disease and famine, to weed out the evil among us and set it apart, and while we prospered because of those efforts, we refused to leave the gods behind, to let them return to the hostile world they came from. Not only that, we committed a grand reversal. We attributed to those ancient spirits, those phantoms that sprang out of ignorance and fear, all the virtues we had cultivated in ourselves, and we made them the creators of those virtues and ourselves merely the benefactors of them. In essence, we worshiped the very thing we were struggling against: nature, because the gods were nature incarnate, brute force and raw power dressed in angelic light, might makes right in action.

 

"But it's not just the religious who've got it backwards. The hippies have it in their heads that civilization is a botch and advocate for a return to nature, a return to the hovels and the mud huts, a return to our tribal roots. Let's grow our hair and live in squalor under the open skies, let's have an end to industry, to government, to business and commerce, to all the finer things in life. Let's get rid of the orchestras and beat on stretched animal skins with sticks. These people fully accept the hostility that operates in the natural world, and yet they regard man's hostility as an aberration. Man is a cancer in the world, an abomination. In either case it amounts to the same thing: a deep-rooted hatred of humanity itself.

 

"Don't take what I'm saying the wrong way, Noah. I don't mean to tell you that mankind is inherently good, the way nature is inherently hostile. That's not it. Man is an animal, same as the others. We're a part of nature, we came from it and live in it, and despite the good we've done we've also committed great evils. We have intelligence, which most animals lack, and intelligence is the author of evil, the only one. A mindless animal does what it does because it has no choice. What is does and how it lives isn't right or wrong in the sense that we mean when we talk about right and wrong. When I say the natural world is pure hostility, I'm speaking from a perspective that recognizes an alternative to hostility. Nature doesn't recognize an alternative to the way it operates.

 

"Some hyaenas take down a gazelle, then a lion comes along and steals the kill, no questions asked. The hyaenas don't stand around complaining about how unfair it is of the lion to claim their kill, and the lion has no qualms of conscience. Nothing wrong has happened, no injustice, not an ounce of what we mean when we use the word evil. It's simply the way things are. What makes humanity a little different is that while we are no doubt hostile to the core, being part of the natural world, we have also envisioned an alternative to hostility, we've created notions of right and wrong, justice, morality, compassion, those things I mentioned before; but as a consequence we set ourselves up for judgment when we fail to live up to the those notions, and judgment comes from the left and the right. God is simply one means of rendering judgment against ourselves. God is the embodiment of all the ideals we strive for. God is perfect, and the perfection of those ideals we in fact discovered lives in Him and in Him alone. The irony is, those ideals were never perfect, are not perfect, cannot be perfect. We judge ourselves against an impossibility, instead of simply doing the best we can and appreciating the efforts we make. The slightest failure to attain perfection is called a sin, but sin is nothing more than nature asserting itself as the single absolute, the single reality.

 

"The fact that men lie and cheat and steal, wage monstrous wars against one another, and commit every kind of atrocity, and all despite the recognition of goodness and morality,  is proof to some, perhaps to most, that we are a failure. Some view the state of humanity not as proof that man has failed, but that his noble ideals have failed, are not real, are nothing more than pipe-dreams and fantasies, and they believe that because somewhere along the line they became convinced that those ideals, to be worth anything at all, had to be perfected, when in fact they can never be. This view is what drives religious folks as well as the hippies: this idea that imperfection is proof of total corruption. My problem with the God idea, Noah, is that it puts man in a no-win situation. God is absolute, and the ideals he embodies become absolute. Our failure to attain perfection becomes our worst attribute, when in fact the very conception of the ideals God is supposed to embody is without doubt our greatest legacy. The best in us is held as the worst in us.  What I believe is that God is an invention, the symbol of the perfection, or the perfectibility, of our concepts of goodness and morality. I'm not angry with God for making man imperfect and holding that fault against him, I'm angry at man for asking himself to achieve the impossible, and for holding every person at fault for the inability to achieve it."

 

Noah looked at Tottle for a few seconds, waiting for him to continue, then he said, "My friend Rudy says God doesn't blame us for not being perfect. He says God forgives us."

 

"Ah," said Tottle, and his eyes narrowed, "Rudy Beneventano. Well, yes, that's what they like to tell one another, but they seem to forget what constitutes God's forgiveness, or they don't like to dwell on it, or maybe they don't understand it."

 

Noah raised his brows. Tottle went on, "Every Christian seems to know that Jesus Christ died for their sins. They love to repeat it over and over. But what does it really mean? Why did Jesus have to die for our sins? Why should anyone die for someone else's shortcomings? If you look at it shallowly, what Jesus did was an act of exceptional generosity and love, but if you dig a little deeper, if you allow yourself to think about it, what have you got?"

 

Noah shrugged, "Rudy says Jesus did it because he loves us, because he wants us to be with him in Heaven."

 

"Sure, which also means to keep us out of Hell, a place God made for the eternal punishment of any and all who do not accept or believe the deal he worked out for us, with Jesus as the Saviour. Some folks believe that Hell is a place for evil, for the Devil and demons and bad people of every stripe, but it's not for that. Forget about the Devil for now. Let's just talk about what kind of people go to Hell. Do you believe that bad people go to Hell, and good people go to Heaven?"

 

Noah felt bullied for a moment, and grimaced, "I don't know if I believe all of that, Mr. Tottle, I was just saying what Rudy said."

 

Tottle was leaning forward now, the book closed in his lap, and his big knuckles were white upon it. "I know, I shouldn't have put the question like that. Let's say Heaven and Hell are real places. According to what we know about such places, would good people go to Heaven and bad people go to Hell? Does that seem about right?"

 

"Sure, I guess," Noah said.

 

"Well, that isn't the way it is. What it boils down to is faith. Faith or the lack of it is the thing that determines our fate. Christians talk a good deal about right and wrong, good and evil, but at bottom there is one simple fact: God is good, and man is evil. Man can never be good, try as he might, because of Original Sin. A couple of people disobeyed God a long time ago and because of this single act every person conceived is corrupted. Man can never be good. The only thing he can do is believe. He has to believe that he is corrupt and that he's a sinner, through and through. On top of that every man has to believe that Jesus Christ, the son of God, the physical embodiment of God according to some, was tortured and killed as a means of paying for his own imperfections, not Christ's, but his own weakness, his own human nature. If God truly forgave us for our sins there would be no need for atonement, no need for Jesus to hang on a cross and suffer for us. Our sins are paid for, not forgiven. That's what atonement means. Christ pays the price of our sins by enduring the punishments we ought to have suffered ourselves. You see? There is no forgiveness, just a bizarre transferal of penalty from one to another, from all to one. Your hope of being spared an eternity of damnation doesn't depend on your being forgiven, it depends on your ability to believe that what certain men put on paper thousands of years ago constitutes reality. You are to believe that an ancient story is the truth, and your failure to believe will result in your damnation. Short of this belief, being a good or bad person is irrelevant. Bad people who believe the ancient story go to Heaven, and good people who cannot believe go to Hell. Notice I said cannot, not will not. We can only believe things that we find believable. We can't force ourselves to believe in something that doesn't make sense to us. Of course some good people believe and some bad people do not believe; what's important to remember is that goodness and badness is irrelevant. The act of faith is your salvation, and very little else. But what exactly is it that you are asked to place your faith in, Noah? That God, the creator of the universe, is incapable of truly forgiving his creations for their imperfections. Incapable or unwilling, or both. If God could truly forgive man for his sins, there would be no need for the atonement on the cross. The crucifix is a constant reminder that God cannot or will not forgive you for your failure to attain perfection, that one person was made to suffer inconceivably because you had the audacity to slide from your mother's body and be born into the world. You, Noah. You are the reason that innocent man was nailed to a cross two thousand years ago. It's your fault, Noah. And your only escape from being damned rests entirely on your capacity to hold yourself guilty of Christ's blood and pain, to accept that your imperfection sentenced him to his fate long before you were born, that your fallibility, your humanity, imposes upon you the responsibility for his torture and death. The failure to acknowledge this monstrous truth will result in your being damned forever.

 

"But goodness and badness comes in degrees, and what I'm describing is only one form of faith. Even if there is a God I feel comfortable in saying that Christianity, as it is commonly accepted, cannot have any acquaintance with reality. For what possible purpose does Hell exist? For what possible reason would God need to condemn human beings to an eternity of pain and suffering? People don't know what they're talking about when they talk about eternity, or they refuse to give it serious thought. An eternity of torment is unconscionable, even for the worst of people. That some people can find it in their souls to truly believe there's anything remotely like justice in the idea of Hell is disturbing, even revolting. Some Christians don't believe in Hell, and I have no problem with those people. Some people believe in salvation through works, and not faith alone, and with those people I have no serious quarrel, although I don't agree with them. But no matter what type of religious faith, you're dealing with the belief that man is sick by nature, that man is guilty by nature, that there's something inherently wrong with being human.

 

"Unfortunately for me, I decided the best way to deal with people who believe such things was to ignore them, to set myself apart from them. There are much better things I could have done."

 

"You can still do them," Noah suggested.

 

"Sure," said Tottle, "But I won't. I'm not like Ahab, the captain of the whaling vessel from Moby-Dick. He never gave up. He set himself to a task and died trying to see it through; but then again, I'm a lot like Ahab, because I've let things that happened in my life get me angry and bitter. I obsess over those things, like what happened with Clare and Magazine Man, like being a prisoner of war, but my obsession is passive and inhibiting, whereas Ahab's was active and compelling. I'm not a strong person, Noah, I'm a weakling. Whatever you do, don't be like me.

 

Noah said, "Maybe you just want to be alone. Maybe there's nothing wrong with that."

 

Tottle gave a passing thought to his mailbox. He turned the book over in his lap, "Could be."

 

 

 

*

 

Noah finished his lemonade. Tottle sat looking at the boy and seeing his mother. For the past decade he had seen nothing of Elisheva save for a few glimpses here and there. As he looked at Noah the old man recognized something else, something he had grown accustomed to seeing many years ago, something he no longer had the heart to look at. When it was obvious Tottle didn't want to talk any more, Noah folded his five dollar bill and left, closing the flimsy door quietly behind him. He went to the shed and looked over the stacks of books. He picked up Moby-Dick and enjoyed the heft of it in his hands. Putting it under his arm, he headed off up the road.

 

 

 

*

 

 

 

THE OTHER

 

 

April, 1985

 

He pushed the bin with its loud wheels stifled in the noise of the great machines, the big oily monsters that spat out bits and pieces of things that held the world together. If he took his time it would be an hour before he could roll the bin outside and smoke a cigarette with the ancient black guardian of the incinerator. He saw the gray light that seeped in from the windows along the sides of the building. There were two buildings. He worked in one and never stepped foot in the other. It would be a mystery to him forever, what went on in the other building, the enigmatic twin. He took a smaller bin to collect the garbage in the front office, a labyrinth where flimsy walls that stopped well-short of the ceiling marked off squares and rectangles where well-dressed people did their work. Ash-trays that were always full were emptied, little pails and cans, and bigger bins stuffed with reams of paper. Pounds and pounds of paper with indecipherable information, numbers, the bizarre language of business. In the little bathrooms he changed the hand-towels and toilet paper. Later he would clean the toilets. So you're Elisheva's boy, they said when he had hired on nearly four years ago. Eli hadn't worked there for several years, but the men remembered her well. Smoke rose from the little cells over top of the flimsy walls. You don't have to fill the sanitary napkins, they told him. One of the girls will do that. While he worked, he thought about the story he had begun the previous evening.

 

 

It was a box in the dirt, a low, flat-roofed, coffin-shaped box at the edge of some town in the dusty middle of America where the states stood on their feet, jammed together, elbows in. Nearby, the long trains would come and they rattled on and on. Skinny trees stood here and there in little groups, and pale green blotches of grass. Bees bounced among small yellow flowers. The sign by the side of the road had a letter missing. We pulled in and without much ado agreed on two rooms, one for him and one for me and her. He said he would pay me when we got somewhere and he could get on his feet. The wind blew through her hair when I went to the office, and she tracked him as he wandered off along the front of the building. I gave the money to a kind-faced black women behind the desk and took two keys in return. I told her I wanted the rooms well-separated, so he got fourteen and she and I took six. He was at the end of the box. Once settled we drove into town and found a diner. She wondered why we didn't just get a room in town. I told her I liked the old box on the edge of town, that it called out to me. We were sweating and tired of driving. He said it looked like some place in a film, a place where terrible things happen. I couldn't stand the way he looked at me, the way she did, always looking for mistakes. He was nearly as pretty as she was, and I figured they belonged together. I sat on one side and they on the other, she at the window where her big black eyes watched the sun slip down behind the stunted hills in the distance. I smoked a cigarette. I should have taken a shower first, she said, pulling the front of her shirt. When we get back I'm gonna go in the pool. I hadn't seen the pool. Being a woman she had taken full stock of the place. I was surprised there was a pool

 

 

Sometimes it snowed in May but that was especially rare, though it usually snowed in April. The biggest downfall he remembered had been only a few days ago. He slipped and slid his way to work through the blazing white drifts. Today the power was down, because a semi had smashed into a pole somewhere down the highway. He sat by himself in a corner atop a barrell and smoked at leisure. The tall foreman came along with his bent-over stride, smoke 'em if you got 'em, he called out in the dark. In two hours the lights popped on, the machines hummed, and everyone complained, except the lurching foreman and his dangling tie who was happy as a gospel singer, clapping them on. He went into the bathroom and locked the stall. On top of one of the lockers he found a magazine. He tore out several pages and stuck them through the hole in his coat pocket, folded up, against his back. Shocking the secret assholes blaring like carnations, supple thighs defined in stocking-tops. He would sit in this stall every morning for a long time, then make his way out to collect the garbage. At first break the whistle screamed and people filed into the cafeteria. The tables were clear and clean, by his hand. Enormous black women called him sugar and cooed over him collectively. A skinny Hispanic girl stood in line, a couple dollar bills folded in her skinny fingers. She had begun working at the plant in March, and he was convinced that no girl existed anywhere on the planet more beautiful than she. What was different about this girl was that she looked at him. 

 

It was pleasant to walk home when the work day was over. He lived about two miles from the factory. He walked along the highway. People from work used to stop to offer him a lift. Noah had always politely refused, insisting that he lived close. For several minutes after such an occasion he would be embarrassed, not that he was twenty-two and didn't drive, but because he had refused an act of kindness. He was glad that no-one stopped anymore. He liked to walk. During one particular stretch, not far from the center of town, there were rows of delapidated houses on both sides of the street. Broken-down cars, half-rusted away, rested on blocks. Little sheds that leaned every which way were scattered behind the houses. Some houses had two storeys, and he wondered what went on behind the little windows on the upper levels. Some of the houses had shops on the lower floors, and families lived above them. Today he heard children laughing as he went by one of the two-storey houses. It was tall and narrow and needed a fresh coat of paint. Out of the flimsy screen-door a troop of children shot with a flurry of laughing and shouting. They went running around the side of the house. Calling something in Spanish, out she came, the screen-door rattling. Her face was bright and vivid, her large eyes radiating an energetic warmth. Cooking smells emanated from the house, the smell of oil and corn and flour. Her hair was flying, unrestrained. He had never seen her this way, and for a moment he failed to recognize her. He was passing directly in front of the house and as soon as she came out she recognized him. She stopped suddenly, and swept her hair out of her eyes. She lifted one hand shyly, reticently, and waved. Noah's heart gave an uneasy thump. He slowed and returned the wave. She smiled, exhibiting her white teeth. She was dressed in a small sleeveless t-shirt and spacious white shorts. He glanced at her legs, skinny and brown and smooth. The children were calling out from the back of the house, "Sofia!" "Donde esta?" the young lady called, and began to run. The children heard her voice and ran screaming out of sight. Later, he began another story:

 

 

The door whacks shut and she runs around the side of the house. The house between us. Kids laugh and she chases them. I go to the left. From the right she comes around and the door whacks shut. Thumping on the floorboards, the stairs. The windows shake and the sills shimmer, covered with laughter. Outside the sun high, and hot. Somewhere near, the little breasts, soft and delicate. I go across the street and my heart racing. Overhead the gray clouds swoop, vast like battleships. Feet in sandals fleet and long and slender little calves, the muscles tense, flex, go up and down. Tiny tenebrous hairs a hard, scratchy stubble. I can't catch her. I reach for the blue-veined wrist, the big bone-knob. She looks to the side, her face in profile. She can't see me. The rain comes like a blanket, hard on the roof. Go and get the kids and bring them in. When she goes out the rain stops, and the game begins...

 

But that didn't quite catch it, and for the next two years he would fail to catch it. At night the dreams would come and they would catch it, but upon awakening he could not recall them long enough to get it down. One afternoon he lingered and waited before beginning the long walk home. He saw her coming and squatted down by the side of the building. Out she came and went across the parking lot to an old pick-up. The driver was a much older man, her father, or grandfather. Off she went. When the truck went past, she leaned forward to look at him through the driver's side window, her hair blowing wild, her fingers pulling at it. Always going away was the meat of the thing. Some brief attention paid, then a complete dismissal, a cold neglect. In the dreams that's what it was, but in reality it was merely a going away. Just tell her, Eli had suggested. You go right up to her and introduce yourself. There's nothing to it. You make it too complicated, when it isn't at all. But it was easy for her. He looked at the heavy curve of her breast against the front of her blouse.

 

Hello my name is Noah. Hi, I'm Noah. The noise of the machines crushed his voice. She watched his lips move. All that hair tied up inside the standard issue cap. The little breasts packed and hidden away like nuts and bolts and screws. But he had seen them, even from across the road. When she ran they bobbled. The long skinny legs in hiding also, but not the smell. It was the same smell that came from the ramshackle houses along the side of the highway, but with it the fruityberry scent of cheap perfume. He found more ways to pass by, different ways to say it. How are you? Hi, how are you? But he never spoke the words. How to do it without appearing lecherous, wanton, fleshy? He was ashamed, and this shame was a curse, a pox on his happiness. A secular priest with a garbage bin. That wasn't it. What was it the poet Blake wrote about those who desire and act not? It wasn't a virtue, this crippling embarrassment, but a pestilence. And what was virtuous about a priest? He came from the rear first, but there was nothing to see but the smock that covered her to the back of her knees. Then he came from the front. She would see him coming and a tiny pocked recess would form in the middle of her cheek, on one side. You could stick your finger into it. He felt his desire rising like steam from freshly baked bread, imagined the stink of it floating to the high ceiling. Sometimes when she smiled in a certain way one of her upper teeth pressed into the flesh of her bottom lip. The closer he came the harder his heart beat. Up the black eyes came, then down, the shuttered windows of the soul. And what was it like, her soul? His being drawn to her was entirely physical. Perhaps she was evil inside, a dimpled, cherub-faced demon who would bring nothing but ruin and havoc. It didn't matter, was the thing. When he'd heard her voice that single time, calling out those two Spanish words, they were not as he had imagined. The new voice changed her into someone else. She was a chimera, in any case, a wet-wristed Arcadian nymph, a fleeting shadow.

 

 

the ghost-face took shape in the narrow wedge between the curtains which were held to either side with hooked loops made of the same material as the curtains, and the curtains were a yellowish color, or white yellowing with age, mildew, whatever it was that could change something from white to yellow, or off-white or cream to egg-shade. At night it was easier for him to stand and watch, to keep vigil on the tall, narrow house, from across the street, out of the pools of lamplight that made weak circles on the sidewalk. A strange man came up the street and after a quiet knock was admitted into the low-lit house and he could see a table, a stove, potted plants. And Savenna was up the flight of well-trodden stairs and down the shag-carpeted corridor, and to her the strange man walked with his heart pattering beneath his raincoat, though it was not raining and a full moon held court in the sky with its attendant stars where a few thin black clouds straggled impotently. An ancient Ford wobbled along with its headlamps pushing a wedge of limp light, its engine chugging and coughing. When it passed he took the opera-glass from his longcoat and stared though it at the ghost-face in the window, but the face was gone and in its place the soft amber of the gaslight glowed against the dirty glass and the warm space behind the glass where she was

 

 

Rachel was at the kitchen table looking at the drawing her beau had unrolled. He weighted the top curling edges of the drawing with one of Bernie's old ashtrays and a half-filled glass and held the bottom edges flat to the table with his hands. Noah's sister mooned at the complicated lines of the drawing and the young man glanced at the little faux-silver crucifix that dangled in the soft gap between her breasts. The young man was eschewing the things of the world, he said, and storing up riches in Heaven, though what was meant by such a declaration was beyond Noah's ken, for certainly the young man had eschewed not a single scrap of what the world had to offer, while Noah, the chaste atheist ashamed of his lust, had truly surrendered the things of this world and hoped for nothing in the hereafter, which was nothing anyway. Rachel was worried for her soul and the soul of Joanna, who was socked away in another state, but she was not worried for the souls of Elisheva and Noah, and the latter got himself a root beer and thought about Savenna, and decided that more than likely she was a girl who sold her body and yet felt certain of her virtue. But how far could he go, and would it appease his desire for the other, the concrete opposite of his slender little abstraction, the dark-skinned, black-eyed hypocrite. That was the thing, he thought, casting a glance at Rachel who was now cooing in astonishment at what she could scarcely understand, and she was using them the same way Eli her mother did, to draw the eye, to keep the attention fixed. He wondered what it was you had that worked in a similiar fashion if you were a man, and he could think of nothing but money. Of course he had no money and nothing else to bargain with, to draw the eye of the girl he loved. Where was Eli. Since Bernie's eviction several months prior she was catting in a manner that alarmed and shamed him, using Bernie's word because it seemed to catch it. At least Savenna had the sense to put a price on it, he thought, thinking of her. Rachel stood up and now she was behind the chair her beau sat in, looking across the table at Noah with her small white hands at the man's shoulders, testing their breadth and solidity, as if he were a human reflection of the buildings he conceived of, or, more correctly, their template. Look at this man I have, a Christian, soon we'll be gone and it will be you and Eli by yourselves. The idea filled him with dread.

 

She leaned and rested on her elbow and the light summer dress was hitched above her hips, and the strange man came from behind. He pawed at her breast still hidden behind the flimsy printed cotton, and it had the elusive quality of a fish in the water squirming, slippery. Her face was placid as the man toiled awkwardly, also on an elbow. His eyes were lowered, trying to see, but while he strained he could only see her back parts. She merely waited, and it was easy to keep that one leg up and out of the way. She could have read from a book, if one were handy, even in the dull gaslight. The other, a much younger man, came up the street and asked in the half-open doorway, where is she. She's busy. You ought to come back later. The older girl took the flowers and fit their long stems into the top of a filmy glass vase half-filled with cloudy water, and cast him a worried look. You ought to come back later

 

He filled the mop bucket and fit the mophead into the handle and dipped the mop into the water. He wants the floors clean but all I have are dirty mops, so the water is half mud by the time I get to the front. His first day the man with the rolled-up shirtsleeves and the patronizing smile shook his head and told him to go and get clean water, so back he went. The man showed him how to do it then, like I learned in the navy, he said, that smile stuck to his face. Black, greasy hair and thick glasses. So he mopped navy-style and off the man went and soon the front office people arrived and tromped down the half-wet tiles tracking mud and slush from the melting snow, and the man told him to do it over. And that was how it went. Why not just let me come an hour early and get it done before the people start coming in. But that was how it went. It took an hour plus to collect the garbage, and about halfway through he would see her. He could go one way and come by the front or the other way and come from the rear. She would hear the wheels even in the din of the machines and turn her head to watch him coming, all that hair piled neatly in its blue bonnet. Her lips would stretch on one side of her face and her cheek would make its deep dimple, almost like a smirk. Up the dark eyes went, and back down. When he got past he would feel them on his back, but there was no way to push a garbage bin with dignity, so he would go to the front and pull it instead. Earlier, he had set up the yellow cones by the ladies bathroom and propped open the door. A stall opened and out she came to the sound of the toilet flushing, her face surprised and burnt dark with blood. She gave her hands a quick wash and pulled the paper towel as if angrily, and swept past him, and he looked away. She had the smell of the ramshackle houses on the side of the highway, hot oil and corn, mixed with the cinnamon-sharp tinge of perfume. He mopped the floor, going from side to side instead of navy-style, and peered at the stall from which she had emerged only a moment before, and it seemed bright with her presence. His heart pattered as he had contemplated, only for a moment, the possibility of entering and so taking something from her. Out by the incinerator the old black man sang and laughed as Noah handed him the heavy stacks of green and white paper. He seemed baked to a cinder from the fire he faced every day for some thirty years, his skin like a raisin, hands black as oblivion.

 

 

 

 

*

 

 

THE VIADUCT

 

 

August, 1989

 

 

i.

 

Birds on the power lines, as if waiting for a bus. A strip of pavement with yellow dashes, a wide-swept path through listless fields. Sometimes the weeds were as high as your collar. Or they were low-down and scraggly, like some bum’s beard, so you could look out and catch a flash of sunlight playing off some weathervane or silo. Noah Crowley liked to lay down in the middle of the road - his body almost as long as a single bright yellow dash - and spread his arms and legs wide. Today he lay on the pavement and watched the clouds march slowly across the sky. It was quiet but you could hear the birds on the fat wire, the rustling of critters in the weeds, even the faint croak of a bullfrog from the creek that wound its way parallel to the road about a half mile off. Noah thought if he tried hard enough he would see shapes in the clouds, shapes that would take the form of a giraffe, an elephant, or an aircraft carrier. Instead he saw the diaphanous silk robe his mother would sometimes wear in the morning after she woke up. On those happier days she would open all the windows wide so that when she walked through the house her robe would billow around her like she was some sexy prophet from the Old Testament. Elisheva, the young man whispered, and the wind carried his voice far away behind him.

 

 

He walked along the creek’s edge and enjoyed the shade. Bees hummed around his ankles, but his father always said if you leave them alone they will leave you alone. Just mind your own business and remember God didn’t create the world just for spoiled little brats. By and large this was true but once in a while you got stung anyway. Maybe you walked too close to a nest of yellow-jackets. Those little bastards would sting you just for fun and they didn’t get their guts ripped out in the process. Hell of a thing if you were a honeybee and could only sting somebody once. When he got home he looked through the screen door. One of the things that sticks in your memory is the constant whack… whack… of screen doors closing. She was in the back room. There was a shiny car parked out front, half in the gravel, half on the pale green grass. So Noah went back the way he had come, except this time he took a turn and went into town. He sat on a redwood bench and thought of the word Jewess. It was a sexy word, sibilant and well-rounded. What was it made you marry a Jewess? He remembered hearing someone ask his father that question when he was little. He was busy watching the people go by, or just looking across the street. The door of Greenbaum’s grocery was propped open with an old paint bucket filled with garden tools. It was hot and sticky. Greenbaum’s was about to go under because A&P had opened a store further downtown. Falk Greenbaum had a bald head and an enormous round belly, and his apron was always filthy. Since he rarely got any business he spent most of his time sweeping the sidewalk in front of the store. Most of the time the words wouldn’t come but the images, they came in multitudes. Maybe the pictures in his brain were taking up too much room, were elbowing the words out one by one, and soon there would be a dead silence along with a maddening cavalcade of breasts, rumps, taut bellies, inviolate coffee-and-cream- colored thighs. Could you make a poem out of images in your brain without words?

 

 

On the cover of a paperback beside me as I write looms a giant white tail, a whale’s tail. The painting is minimalist and achromatic, with only that white tail - which the more I look at it is more of a pale gray - and the deep jet of the sea-water broken by the whale which is almost entirely upside down. The sky is a pallid gray only slightly darker than the whale’s tail, and under that is a grayer gray wherein the eyes and nose of a mad seaman are sketched almost adolescently, and the eyes are intensely aimed at the reader, not the tail of the white whale. Off in the gray distance is the gray prow of a ship and a white curve denoting a rail, as white or as pale gray as the tail of the whale and curving at a right angle to the lower part of the whale’s body. A stick figure in dusky gray holds his harpoon high and it’s apparent that his efforts will be in vain. I finished that book and had a love affair with it. There are no women in that grand old tale of a whale. Just a bunch of salty seaman and plenty semen. And do you know something? That famous beast, that great Leviathan of the briny deeps, he doesn’t make his entrance until a few pages from the end. He’s like an obstetrician who comes into the birthing room after the nurses have done all the work, when they’re bloody up to the armpits, when the smell of birth is strong in the air, when the wet seal-pup head is crowned at the crack of its earthly dawn. And here he comes, armed with his gloves, his breath rich from a good dinner, and dons his welder’s mask to catch the wee waif and announce its arrival to the relieved onlookers. I never came out that way and it’s something I deeply regret. I was cut out, wrenched from the guts, like a tumor. I never made that forgotten first passage through the unbarren straits of Mother. I think sometimes this makes me second-rate. I was not breast-fed neither. Ripped from the innards and formula-fed: a fake. I am faking life. I’m a fake. Don’t believe a word I tell you.

 

 

Noah stopped and listened to the crickets outside and the crickets inside: those tiny violins. In the back of the double-wide was something gravid - that moved. Out through the window the sky was a dark mauve. A helicopter rattled overhead, threshing under the first faint stars that peaked out from beneath their pinkish-cotton coverlets of cloud. Cherubim eyes, Seraphim sword-glints, belly-diamonds of Dominations. Headlights broomed their gold fronds across the blinds. The insistent sound wouldn’t stop. Just relax, it’s only a little prick. Outside, Bernie and his boozy mates would smack gnats, a horseshoe’s toss from the open bedroom window. Schlitz and Black Label, clouds of Camel smoke nearly stagnant, a mockery of haloes. For we traffic in mockery. Grotesque last supper, lower case. Tom dick and harry, black-fingered, oil and metal pungent, throw it in the back of the truck. Yes that’s my El Camino. Give us the numbers. Orange hats and camouflage. Canned meat and small fires on the mountain. The road winds upward among the pines. Did you ever open those coffee-table books? Did you learn the arcane language of boating? Boom vang and jib? A big and manly world without the numbers. We need the numbers, we menfolk. We heap like us height and width, length and breadth. We heap like much cubic centimeter, quarter inch, six eight-cylinder, good torque. Dog and woodchuck. Axe. How much? How fast? How far? How heavy? How big? - she was givin me all she had she was puttin up a good fight she been a long time in the water he was a long time on that mountain at rack it was iss many and my gun it had iss much and it come time, it come time r numbers had to meet and I would win and he would go down Big Daddy Big Buck he fuckt ‘em all didn’t he walked around slow and fuckt ‘em all look at at rack how many is at I got eight under the bonnet trumps my three under the fly - It isn’t that the faggoty one is any better, not hardly. What’s worse, a faggot who likes faggoty boys or a faggoty boy who likes girls? Hard to say ainit. Noah leaned back in his chair. There was still that weight in the back of the house. Hunert twunny maybe. Your home is a house if your house is home. He thought of red stockings tacked to paper hearthstones, the fuzzy white ruff around the tree meaning snow, and tiny porcelain figurines: dog and cat, deer, wolf, coyote. He knew his father was stronger, much stronger, than he ever would or could be. He had worked hard. He had killed in the gloom of pre-dawn and lugged home meat, white-wrapped. He had drank from the icy streams that trickled down the chin of the conifer-bearded mountain. His hands were hard and rough. Hard and white- blistered on the bowstring, dead-on too, feathers clumped in the bull’s eye. What have you got to give her, he thought, and cracked his knuckles. A big white void with black sprayed on? That will look good on her. Atta boiiy. -

 

 

 

Elisheva tall behind the coppice watches silver water

wink at twilight, galleons trim with many a swift and flashing oar,

silver sails and azure turns to misty orange floating fire

 

 

Need a rhyme for water. Daughter. Slaughter. You live in a house with wheels that never move, you swim in plastic kiddy-pools, you play games, await commands, stand idle in grass cut down by cowlicked boys in striped pull-overs, ask mother-may-I, wait for the green light, two steps forward, chubby girls with green-stained knees play Mommy in cardboard forts, and once in a while you kiss them, smell the breath of the other, taste the wild salt-flavor of skin, push out tongues that burrow like moles, slippery moles, blind kisses out behind the sheds, grasshoppers in the straw, cloverleaf and honeysuckle, buttercup under your chin, see if you shine, daisy petals plucked like cricket legs, beautiful wreckage, pretty mutilation. The fat girl picked you up and slung you over her shoulder like a sack of flour. Your face came down against her behind and you still remember the smell of shit. The fat boy picked you up and threw you to the ground. You landed on your back and suddenly forgot the whole business of breathing: how to do it escaped you quick, like a dandelion seed through an open window. You couldn’t take any sort of revenge. You could only lie still and listen to that hyena laughter, that idiot cackle coughing out of his face like a rotten smell. Noah stubbed his cigarette out and hit the side of his head with the butt of his hand. Sometimes when the words wouldn’t come he began to hear the wind inside his skull, the wind that pushed things apart, mixed things up, made a big mess of everything. He closed his eyes tight and tried to ignore the sounds coming from the back of the house. He wanted to be in somebody else’s bad novel, somewhere dark and cold where people could live in the same old manse and never see one another for months, something fat and windy and full of grizzle like interlocutor and hyperborean, a place where zinnias bloom and azaleas blossom, where people named Algernon come calling and wait in purgatorial rooms designed especially for people like Algernon who are accustomed to waiting, a place where people eat cucumber sandwiches, where no one has to pick up the dirty plates. Noah slips in, pours himself into a divan, lights a faggoty French cigarette, speaks round and sweet wet words like Keats: soft and luxuriant words, silk and velvet words that drop smartly from the lip like opulent and panoply, a hipless girl in a lucent summer dress, her voice lucid and liquescent, her breasts the size of sugar bowls topped with strawberries. Somehow the ’sinuous’ curling smooth Parisian smoke is rich and flower-pungent: acrid is anathema. Noah wants to bend the whippet over the end of the furniture. He lacks class. Noah had read of the old city so many times it often felt as if certain descriptive passages were memories rather than impressions communicated by an author. He could see Miller’s Paris and Baudelaire’s Paris. Or he thought he could. There was something about empty and ancient birdcages, whorey old hotels. What was it? Finally the sound coming from the back of the house came to a stop. Noah put his hands back in front of him:

 

 

A Dream of Suburbia: It was a dark and act 1 scene 1. Curtain opens to a sticky day in August. Clothes feel like cotton candy dipped in olive oil. Smells of cut grass, gasoline, White Linen perfume, clean laundry, shriveled stockings hanging like strips of bacon, delicates. Boy, Sister, Mother, and Sister are playing a game of badminton. Boy and Sister play against Sister and Mother. A garbage truck stinks by, squealing, sneezing and farting like Nobodaddy, for it is Thursday, nobody’s day, garbage day. Mexican youth jumps down from rear of truck, casts furtive glances toward Mother, Sister and Sister sporting on the trim suburban green. Muscled pythons flex as into the hungry maw of the truck he slings the broken cradle, recliner, bags of yard-guts, and secret garbage of all thirty-one flavors, admires the secret breasts and buttocks, secretly covets Boy whose luck, charm or guile has got him in the catbird seat albeit he is a pauper and a fool. Scene 2. Saturday afternoon. Fire hydrant. Smells of popped caps on the sidewalk, grilled burgers and franks, correct yellow mustard, napkins, potato salad with black olives, paint, sound of hammers, soft forty from upstairs bedroom windows, thresh of water, smells of chlorine, Coppertone, sunscreen, fluorescent pinks and dazzling aquamarines snug in the cracks of smooth-bellied girls. Back and forth the shuttlecock. Aristotle shuffles thoughtfully down the garden path, under the trees, trailing his acolytes, thoughts spill in silver threads out of his phizzog, out the top of his head like a million money-shots, holds his finger up as if to check which way the wind is blowing. Curtain.

 

 

The dark stranger opened the back door of the double-wide and exited quietly. Noah heard the pristine hum of the BMW rise softly above the crickets endless sawing. Then came his least favorite sound: the crackle and pop of radials moving slowly across gravel. From a purely aesthetic point of view this was tragic since the sound had an aural beauty to it which was like nothing else; but for Noah the sound was fraught with unpleasantness. It was the sound of his father returning from the bar, drunk and venomous; it was the sound of his own mysterious rivals stealing back into the dark from whence they came. These were difficult times. The young man didn’t know what to do. He heard his mother go into the kitchen. She was looking for something to eat. She wasn’t trying to be quiet because she knew he was awake. He was a night-owl like she was. If he went to see her she would be at the stove, probably frying an egg. He would smell the sex on her. It would be in her long dark hair, on her white skin, even on her breath when she sang to herself. Noah heard her humming as she walked into the bathroom across the hall. She used the toilet first and then stepped into the shower. He heard the yip of the distant coyote, the banging of the immaterial signpost, the swirling, fragmenting wind in the chocolate hills. He went out of his room and into the hallway. The bathroom door was half-open. The shower-doors were old and rattled like the devil in chains when you barely touched them. Behind their milky film Elisheva stood under the water like a starlet in one of those jungle movies from the misty olde days. Treasure in the cave under the volcano, jungle drums, broken bi-planes, silly safari hats. Noah loved to make lists in his head. Waxed mustaches, upper-class English accents, platinum blondes, broken heels, dirty dresses, pampered bottoms in soiled khaki. Secret pool and waterfall. In this pool you will fall in love and hear love’s madness beat its primitive tattoo, always something beating its damned tattoo. Totem. Green leaves giving the Queen’s-hand- wave. Gilligan and Skipper too. Shiny with sweat the determined leader leads his rag-tag band of treasure hunters through deep jungle wherein the boa constrictor and python sibilantly slither, wherein the colorful zygodactyl chitters and chatters away, where vines depend from hooks placed at various points along the ceiling. He is large and fearless under his hat and his serpentine penis will certainly navigate the dark and humid environs of the starlet’s cunt whose nasal complaints yammer always from the far left where a chimpanzee fancies her golden hair and plays with the buttons of her shirt. The volcano burps and vomits like a suicidal derelict somewhere off in the distance, beyond the cheaply painted backdrop. Our leader marches on while deep in his skillful pocket lies folded and tea-stained the always accurate map. His sexy brain his own Rosetta stone, he has broken the complicated code, aided with compass, protractor and magic utility knife. Noah stood for only a second or two, then headed back to the kitchen.

 

 

“If you want to be a writer,” Eli told her son later that morning, “You have to take risks. You need guts. Look at Henry Miller. He went to Paris with nothing, just to write. You can’t just sit here in the middle of nowhere and write the great American novel. You need to get out and live.” Noah ate his scrambled eggs with bolonga and Velveeta, pushed a glob of egg around the white plate with flowery green trim. Eli was never a good cook. Like Noah, she took little care about what she ate, ate only when she was hungry, and ate what was available. Cooking was a nuisance. To be a cook, that would be a miserable job. People had their damned opinions. Every palate was different. You could never make everyone happy. Eli stood at the sink and washed her plate, her silverware, her olive-green coffee cup. Noah watched her and wondered if she took any real interest in his writing. She had never asked to read anything he had written. What would she think if she had, if she discovered that he had made her the subject of his novel-in-the-making? Eli dried her hands and the next minute she was on the telephone. She wandered through the living room and held the cradle and dial piece in her hand. The sea-green cord was like a tightly-coiled sash between her breasts. Back and forth she walked the rusty carpet, talking softly into the mouthpiece. Some assignation or other? Noah tried not to listen. He peered out the window at the trailer next door. It reminded him of a giant silver bullet, or a zeppelin. It was round, like a submarine in dry-dock. In the small stretch of sun-bleached grass between the two abodes was an ancient contraption half-consumed with rust, teetering in the wind, from which a few garments hung, fastened there with red plastic clothespins. A small white bucket containing similar clips had tumbled over, spilling the colorful gadgets like a child’s toys. There were no wooden ones in the lot. All things must pass. He looked further up the black paved road, saw last evening’s rain shimmering in the potholes. Off to the left about fifty yards away, in front of one of the older double wides, the one with gaudy pink trim where the current park manager and his evil Dalmatian now resided, stood an old mulberry tree. It was under that tree that Noah experienced his first appreciation of a woman’s breasts. A heavy-set woman used to come and hold a kind of Sunday school there for kids, in the shade of that tree. One summer day the woman was wearing a rather low cut dress, and as she read from her Bible Noah stared at the crack between her breasts and was fascinated by it. He couldn’t have been much more than eight or nine. He distinctly remembered wanting to stick his finger in it.

 

 

In the supernatural pitch swim vast flotillas of creatures: centaurs, basilisks, white chickens, birch trees, the palpable thinghood of enamel and click that set in line with one another live forever in the tongue’s cup, the brain dipping its silver ladle. Last night I was like a madman again, angered by the cancerous sickness that keens in my head when I turn my eyes and hear the hiss of consciousness leaning into the abyss, a nanosecond of bright sound. Sleep has a sound, before I forget. Hide the carving knife

 

 

 

ii.

 

You’ve reached a respectable age when nostalgia becomes history. When memories are like curious pictures in a book. I can see myself in my striped pull-over and short-pants, sitting quietly in the spacious backseat of a green car, freckle-faced and somewhat grim looking, as if I already knew what life held in store for me. I was the diplomatic middle-child, my place the hump in the center of the bench. These were the California days, stucco and starfish, squat, single-storied houses, colossal emptiness of potential stretching into invisibility behind the house of the kid with too much breakfast cereal. Chalk on the pavement denoted yard-lines. I was fast, I was good at catching and throwing. But I was too small. I spat like paper from a straw, greased monkey with pigskin bundle, my talisman. Up north was a bay I remember so dimly the memory has taken on the quality of fiction. Hitchcock. Birds all over the pealing buildings: firehouse, library, post office. These are birds of pure abstraction, or animate ghosts trapped in film. The colors are washed out, my ordinary shit-brown eyes are nearly a sexy gray. I was not a bad looking kid. Always so damned serious. Torn from the viscera, covered in blood, designed to suffocate in amniotic fluid, a mistake. Now that I’ve said that how can I convince you, mon frere, that I believe joy to be our natural state, that most of our pain is artifice, a crude and pathetic facade wrought of our own weakness and self-deception. You won’t believe me because you have been trained like a sea lion to balance the ball of good faith on your nose, to sit still and take it like a good reader, to let the grand lies filter down through the top of your head where they proceed to bully the blithe emotions, kick them out through your sucker-punched ears. The heroes of sword and pen have buried your birthright of happiness. They have christened you under a noisome deluge of blood and history, piled atop your innocent head the worshiped banalities of neurosis, complaint, vacuous philosophical pontification, the messy and stupid struggle toward Socialization. The shores of well-being, those pink and pungent curtains, drift away behind you. You lose the smell, the sensation of birth and welcome, the cold, bright light of the first morning. The poets fit you in chains and fatuous critics polish the tearing cuffs. O Christ, your wrists bleed. The sea of humanity is throbbing red, an emergency.

 

 

 

She had been through a slew of lovers, only a few of whom had become her boy-friend. There would be no second husband. The only time he had seen her bare breasts was when he had taken a frying pan off the stove and cracked it over his filthy Bengal’s cap. He had torn her blouse, torn her brassiere straight off. He was still clutching it when they came to rescue him. He hadn’t seen him since, though occasionally he still got a letter. He was committed to getting bad ideas out of his head. You can’t trust them. They have the cunt, the tool they use to destroy you. With her cunt she stakes her claim, with its smell she reigns, queen-bitch. Stay single, and remember the law of the jungle. The real law, not the one they taught you in school. The cunt is the law. It makes the law and you live the law, or you spend your life on the outside looking in. Your house is a big cunt to keep you warm. Your clothes are a cunt. You’re either clothed and sheltered or you’re naked and freezing your sorry hide. Never trust a cunt. The cunt wants to keep you warm and still so it has time to chew you up and swallow you down. It’s a trick. A trick that makes you throw your life away, a trick that keeps you hypnotized, its stink is like a drug that makes you sick without it. But just take a good hard look at that thing, boy. It’s the ugliest damn thing you ever saw. A big smelly hole. An open wound, a sore. It’s hideous, and it stinks. Don’t go queer, boy, just be smart. Be a lion-tamer when you get in the cage with some cunt. Take a belt of bourbon or something, get her over and done with. For the love of Pete, don’t fall in love. Love is another lie. A worse drug, a bigger pill. Its okay you knocked me over the head, I understand she’s your Mama. I’m proud of you even. I know you don’t believe me. Have a good life if you can. Forget books, though. That’s your jew side. And I’m not just some redneck bigot, fuck I married a jew. It’s just true, that’s all. Plus, writers are faggots mostly. They write because they’re afraid of the real world. They hide in their rooms and expect people to take care of them. And you know what, most of them you can see they’re messed up in the head because they’re mostly commies who don’t want to work. Now how screwed up is that. Don’t let your mama read this, kiddo. I’ll have to get another sermon again. Man can’t even talk to his kid anymore, and they say I’m such a prick. Hope you’re happy.

 

 

Every once in a while she would introduce one of them to him. He would look at him down the slope of his nose, sizing up the doe-eyed half-Jew, wondering perhaps how good of a hook he had. They were always on their best behavior. As she got older she shied away from the tool-belts and went for the suits. The tool-belts, she finally realized, had little to offer apart from sweat that stank of beer in the morning and some jolly-good schtupping. She wasn’t interested in money and never had been. She was beautiful, a dark-haired Sheba from the mid-west who outshone any woman who had the eggs to stand beside her. But she couldn’t care less about rich men. She was a sucker for blue eyes and hairy forearms, bear-paws and tight jeans. Silly girl. A little grease under the fingernail, someone who looked at his Hallmark card upside down, on purpose, who poked fun at him when he heard Strauss’s Zarathustra dribbling from under his bedroom door, who called such sounds “opera”. There was one who looked like a movie star and she was crushing so hard she sounded like a vacuous teenager on the telephone. It turned out the repair shop he owned was suckering people, replacing broken parts with used parts, inventing mechanical problems and repairing said problems, conducting every sort of preventive maintenance on cars that didn’t need it, swapping brand new parts from brand new vehicles with older parts, or broken parts, thereby causing real problems which they could then make right again, with the original part, if they were feeling pangs of agape, or with an older part that still functioned, somewhat. Now there was a new one, the invisible man. He had money. He drove a pricey car and frilled her with sparkly baubles. He didn’t smoke or drink. He needed a reason to dislike him, but was hard-pressed to discover one. He found this bothersome. She was different. Something was not the same. Something was out of the ordinary. She looked better, healthier, ruddier. Was this happiness hoisting its petard? If so then all bets were off. How could his heroine be happy? What kind of Great American Novel would that make? Someone else would have to write it.

 

 

Among the condiment jars, flies like flung gauze caromed off ears instantly attacked by hands. The blue mayonnaise top upside down, a slippery rink of infection, green-bellied they genuflected, occupied a curve with a certain civility and purpose which could not be said of the Irish brothers who, each of them on the cusp of wet-brain, stood erect and exchanged anecdotes until the sun went down flaring on ancient, floridly signatured trains, broken windows, netless hoops. The Jews blended well with the fighting Irish and the beautiful Spanish, although the officious Germans kept to themselves. The American experiment was a resounding success. At least in the park where there were no dogs, no glass, just plenty hootch in aluminum cylinders, ready as bombs, or bullets. Lots of pissing in squat green buildings where young warriors discovered homosexuality in terse and unmetrical quatrains, plenty rimes for cock, automatic appeal of the diamond-shaped cunt, yawning and hirsute, absurdly distended breasts with tumescent nipples and areolae described in scratched absences of paint, for the woman is first and foremost an emptiness, a flesh-bordered vacuity, electric cock-socket. Even her crudely etched mouth, a passive O without a tongue, toothless and soft. Further along the wall the backless asses, legs like spindles supporting corpulent wonders of breadth and symmetry, fashioned only in the puerile brain. The fuck-you finger, tribal warnings and prophecy, vauntings of the territorial hunter, in spite of the silly utopian, the lyrical dreamer. Because even these are sources of joy, survival the fountainhead of happiness. The strong thrive and the weak compose their saccharine elegies, dribble over us all their sticky effusions. Noah smoked and walked to work, calling those images up from memory. Bronx, Queens, New York, twelve or thirteen. Now a factory porter, there was but one spiritually redemptive aspect: the wizened, black-skinned incinerator operator. No one knew how old this man was, nor in fact whether this man was a man. Noah couldn’t remember his name, just that it was something androgynous, possibly Frenchified: Creole? You couldn’t understand him. His face alight with flame he would speak and sing, and it seemed to Noah that he was triumphantly happy, that his joy was pure and pristine, that there stood the human soul in all of its life-burnt perfection. It was the concept of consummation made blazingly concrete, though that has the cart before the horse. Into the hole went all that was useless, spent, unnecessary, all that was imperfect, all the abortions, all the mistakes. Noah went through the office and emptied ash-trays, dust past use, into the mobile hole, out to the final hole: ashes to ashes. Rubber wheels on white tiles, a labyrinth of cubicles, men and women busy at God knows what, reams of perforated paper, cryptic information, statistics, more and more numbers. It was pleasant to go outside in the wintertime to scrub the windows between the trimmed hedges and the edifice itself, girdled with glass, aflame with sunlight. At night the lights were blue. Soft hum of machinery, endless production, nuts bolts rivets fasteners nails and screws. The world builds and unbuilds itself. Dust to dust. We come out of the hole and we go back into it, with all of our trappings and accouterments sewn back into the black tarp of oblivion, sewn deftly and utterly with the blackest of thread, by the blackest of hands. God of the black deeps, Her hands are black.

 

 

I’m going to state my case outright, even if that means throwing shadows on the wall to amuse myself. Someone had it all worked out a long time ago. It’s true - and don’t presume to doubt it for one moment - a man is capable of recognizing himself for the walking corpse that he is. When this happens the logical result is madness, inevitable self-destruction. You might take the poet’s advice and change your life, change it absolutely, though very few have done it. Usually it is too late, you have loitered far beyond the middle of life’s road, and there is no sage to guide you. You will slog through Hell, and the golden bough will elude you in perpetuity. You will abandon all hope. No Orphean lute will flutter its melancholic lament. You will march inexorably on and on into the darkness. Tragically, there are those who are forced to remain among the quick, being unable to participate willingly in the destruction of another. For these wretched souls there is Purgatory, life as a means of preserving life in another and nothing more. But this middle ground, this grayish interim between life and death, can be nothing if not mercifully brief. In this limbo, music squats like an old maid in the whorl of your ear, poetry incants with the insouciance of an undertaker, and love sits like a ghastly bird inside your head, an intolerable pressure, a thing of beauty once now utterly changed, an absurdity. In this half-life grief turns concrete, takes on weight, stands on your shoulders and screws its thumbs into your eyes. You do not mourn for the dead, but for the living. A child laughs and you grieve for the child, intimate as you are with the separation that has already begun, that has put leagues of desolation between the child and yourself. Its ebullient laughter comes as if across a barren sea of still water. In the child’s embrace you step away from yourself, ashamed and incompetent, your arms broken, love perched fat in the hollow of your skull like a black swan. You waken, stung with drought, and words patter on the obscene light like raindrops. Some are white raindrops, impossible and invisible raindrops, some are black, filthy, or clumsy. Grief has crawled in through your mouth and you can barely contain it. Your skin stretches, your throat is stuffed full with it. Grief shines through your skin. Curled and black, it moves like a giant fetus.

 

 

Doctor I have a swarm in my head, a pain in my throat, and it hurts when I remember sweet music. I roll my eyes and I hear myself sleeping. Something tells me this is madness. I have visions. Faces come out of the fireworks, legs moving in the kaleidoscope, no one I recognize. I wanted to kill him. I am sometimes so afraid that God will cause me to see something unspeakable I open my eyes in alarm and the shapes and patterns flit off to the left and right, leaving in the median the darkness with its folds, shadows, arcs of magenta, different shapes, different patterns, the ones I know to be made of the fabric of my world. Sometimes I am terrified that God will unmask and show me what it is I drive before me like oil-blackened snow and trail behind me like a little boy who wants nothing but a bit of attention, a tousle of his hair, before bed. This is the only way to conceive of God’s power. The power to hurt is the only power, and where love is absent this power is absent. Everything else is brute force, bloody bravado dressed in arms. All true power is feminine. Why tell me I have learned this from him, when it will do me no good. I have made my confession, my black electric testament, snarled like a wet dog with flocculent teeth. I can’t retreat any further. I hear the klaxons, the bright penny-whistles, clown music. I heard it said there was someone in the woodpile, some faery-father whose face was a wax melon, soft and malleable, with a Shylock nose. I would be splitting with joy to embrace him, feel him burst open and splatter his stringy pulp and tiddlywink seeds. I would kneel and drink up my heritage, fatten with culture, the genuine article at last. Ani ohev otach, Elisheva. But this will not be. I have been given my sentence, delivered into the Pentagram surrounded by harpies, erinyes, one-eyed white owls who sit heavily in the gaunt trees like cement angels, the stink of ironworks, copper, molten lead, sulfur and saltpeter of history, the image of a boy with curls in his hair and horns in his head, for I have been supine in belly-rest, in peace, daubed with ointments and tinct with ungents, anointed in peace, Adonis in myrrh and frankincense. Weakened by comfort and promise, cowed by strength, I sallied down the garden path, where steeped in love I shook like a dog and went dryly, stupidly into sorrow. There are no holes in my hands, no red and affluent gap beneath my girlish ribs, no women weep for me. Look for me in the eye of the rat, O Man in the middle, champion of the sick, the child, and the fool, requiescat in pace.

 

 

Noah walked along the side of the road, then dipped into the cornfield. You walked as straight as you could until you came to another road, then took a steep embankment down to the water. It sounded easy but if you weren’t careful you could wind up far down the creek, butt up against Saintsbury Mills. He and his friends would make up stories about the old town. It seemed like nobody lived there but some people still did. They would buy cigarettes in a decrepit little country store that had long-defunct gas pumps out front, all covered with rust. The only people they ever saw were old folks, or raggedy kids with dirty faces and dirty clothes. Noah thought it was odd that seeing those kids made him feel so well off. He had lived in mobile homes all his life, but would sometimes feel as pampered and spoiled as a prince. Despite his self-imposed solitude, his generally bleak outlook on his own particular, individual soul, Noah tried to keep things in perspective. He had it good, and he knew it. His circumstances could have been far worse. There were multitudes of people whose suffering was a matter of routine, for whom survival was something one had to keep at the forefront of one’s mind every single day. Noah was not only surviving, he was plump and pink with vigorous life, flushed with its roseate bloom. But he was a man now and men had other needs. Not needs as in things one couldn’t survive without, but needs which, if neglected long enough, made survival less gratifying, and even brought the entire purpose of survival itself into question. He was conscious of the fact that he was now at a turning point, and he also knew that no matter which way he turned the circumstances of his life would be largely at the mercy of his own will. For as much as Noah spoke with God, he was an infidel, and as much as he fancied standing toe to toe with the mighty Jehovah Herself, Noah knew that he was shadow-boxing, tilting at windmills. He thought of Job as he crossed the creek and headed north. God was playing with him, trying to discover what he was made of, and God had an outrageous sense of humor. Noah’s shoes were soaked because he couldn’t leap from stone to stone the way he used to. His shoes and socks were saturated and heavy as he plodded through the woods. The skinny trees seemed too few, too far apart. They made him think of a Sunday social with a gathering of gaunt old ladies who stood separate from one another and minded their own business because each of them knew some damning little secret about all of the others. Each with her powder-blue hat and white gloves, sipping Orchestra tea from a bleached white cup that made a tiny porcelain clink as it settled back into its matching saucer. No murmur of conversation, just clinking, sipping, swallowing. Noah felt as if he had sponges for shoes. He wondered if Eli was wondering about him. He wasn’t one to gad about. He looked up and saw Phoebus with his fiery horses galloping down the darkening curve of the sky. It was hard to waste time. It was as if Time resented you for it and slowed down accordingly. He had gone a’ maying, wandered hopefully through the green Spring, lost hope. He gathered at the maypole, all by himself. The maypole stuck up out of the green grass like a colossal penis. Colorful ribbons and streamers of silk dangled like broken spider webs. Noah pulled them out one by one, let them float listlessly to the grass, so that the maypole was smooth and bare. The girls were sitting on the bleachers in their pleated skirts and pink tennis shoes, their white socks going all the way up to their knees which were pressed tightly together. Noah took hold of the maypole and spun around and around. The girls were talking quietly. Noah spun faster and faster. Their breasts pushed out the front of their sweaters like sugar-cones. You could hang your coat and tie on them. Their knees were pink, and there were pink circles on their cheeks. Noah could see only one side of their faces because they were looking down the open field, away from him. Some tall and muscular boys were running into one another. With each meaty crash came a gasp from the girls who observed them so intently their knuckles were white where they held onto the seats below them, as if in their excitement they thought they might tumble over at any moment. Hardly realizing he was in the center of the field, Noah spun around and around the maypole. Colorful ribbons and streamers lay all over the grass. They reminded Noah of girls’ underwear: red, blue, pink, yellow, white, but no black. Black was the color of seduction, and what girl in her right mind would wish to seduce Noah? He spun around and around. The muscular boys in their grass-stained armor moved painfully down the field. The girls in the bleachers chewed their lips and held their knees even more tightly together as if for fear they would suddenly fly apart like sprung mouse-traps. As the crashing and galloping knights stamped and battled ever further down the field, a bright, fleshy musk grew stronger and stronger in the slippery Spring air. It made Noah’s nose flare wide. He spun around and around, and there were blisters on his hand. He shouted something, something discordant and incoherent even to his own ears, but the sound of his voice was impotent under the approaching din of violent, pubescent war. Now the girls were up to their feet, pumping their arms in the air, shouting for their champions, their flinty breasts pointed triumphantly toward the sky. The cloying smell was nauseating. He didn’t know the smell because he had never smelled it. He wasn’t destined to come out that way. He was a mistake. He tried to shout those words aloud but all that came out of his mouth was a flood of nasal-toned gibberish. He was like one of those chattering, gibbering ghouls out of Lovecraft. The melee grew closer and closer. Noah could smell the stink of their sweat. It blended with the other strange stink and made a malodorous marriage of stinks. But even worse than that was the loud, ripe stench of fear that billowed offensively from his own skin. Noah cursed God with the helplessly thin and ridiculous folderol that dribbled faintly out of his lips as that pack of brawling and beautiful giants was upon him at last and trampled him into the ground. Shredded under those heavy, butchering cleats, Noah could hear the squeals of shrill applause coming from the bleachers. As he lay dying he noticed his hand was still wrapped tightly around the maypole.

 

 

Approximately a mile from home he found the remains of a fort that he and his friends had built and made use of daily for the duration of one particular summer. The structure had been composed of boards and aluminum siding hauled in from a nearby garbage dump. On the floor they had put an old cerise-colored rug. The rug was still there, but time and the weather had knocked the walls and the ceiling down on top of it. Noah moved the junk away and sat cross-legged on the rug. They had erected the fort in a corner where two stone fences came together. For as long as he could remember, Noah felt a much greater sense of comfort when he was in such a corner. His bed always had to be in the corner of his room. Eli would argue with him but he would insist. He was paranoid and suspicious even at a young age. He found it hard, however, to take any comfort in the familiar corner he occupied at present, because he had just deceased, and was silently composing his eulogy. Here lies Noah Joshua Crowley, an abortion who lived to the remarkable age of twenty-six. The very first thing Noah did was try to murder his own mother, Elisheva Crowley. Luckily, the physician on hand was there to frustrate the little demon’s heinous designs. Noah was the middle-child of three. His older sister Rachel inherited her mother’s good looks and married an architect’s assistant, then moved far away to some square state out west. His younger sister Joanna is autistic and lives in a dreary institution in Ohio. Noah kept in touch with both of his sisters, though only one of them ever returned his letters. Joanna’s letters had no words, just pictures which were intended to make Noah happy. Sometimes they worked, sometimes they didn’t. The older sister couldn’t stand Noah. This was something the two siblings had in common. At an early age Noah developed an interest in books which was to stay with him for the rest of his days, despite the fact that books caused him to become even more morose than he already was. Noah’s father was wise and saw that books were destroying his only male offspring. Bernard Calvin Crowley was a dashing young man who stole Elisheva’s heart away with only the twinkle of his pale blue eyes and the copper rivets in his Levi’s jeans. Unfortunately, Bernard had a weakness for beer which he couldn’t quite grab aholt of. He had no interest in mind-altering substances of any kind, apart from beer. He rarely drank hard liquor. Noah remembered seeing the beer cans stacked on the coffee table in the morning. If empty beer cans were currency, why then the Crowleys would have been the richest family in the world. Noah couldn’t stand the taste of beer, though he drank a good deal of it. Noah was prepared to hold a grudge against beer for his entire life. He despised the stink, the piss-yellow hue. But one day his friend Troy Van Buren talked him into drinking some. Troy wanted Noah to see what he was missing out on. Troy told Noah one day that if he drank a can of Shafer he would give him one of his dirty magazines. That was all Noah had to hear, but by the time he got down to the bottom of that can of Shafer, Noah was already losing interest in the dirty magazine. It seemed silly and frivolous to him. His brain got wider and a little light spilled out over the flotsam and jetsam of his thoughts, a bleak and ugly slag-heap of self-judgment, self-contempt, and self-pity. In a moment of epiphany, Noah finally understood something about his father. If Bernie had been there Noah would have given him a big snotty hug. Noah had another beer and was singing and laughing in the screen porch outside Troy’s trailer. He forgot all about the magazine. It was like he heard Bernie tell Ed Hess that night, you seen one pussy you seen ‘em all. Troy was a black kid, much taller and tougher than Noah. Nobody ever fucked around with him. In school, he probably got more respect than any other student. A lot of girls liked him, and one time Troy got thrashed by somebody even bigger and stronger than he was because was fooling around with the other’s guy’s little sister. That bothered Troy a great deal. Not so much because some bigot thrashed him, but because he got thrashed plain and simple. Noah considered Troy his best friend. Troy played guitar in a band and could pick the strings with his teeth like Jimi Hendrix. Last Noah heard Troy was married and working for Con-Ed. Not much happened with Noah. It was hard to write a eulogy for someone to whom nothing much happened.

 

 

He sat with his legs crossed and listened to the pips and chirrups of birds, the wind in the leaves, a melody from Bizet becoming his own inside his busy head, taking the raw material the artist provided and formulating a thousand variations, his strings sweeping up to the grandest heights until the sound was almost invisible, a sheet of glass stretched taut and thin, on the verge of shattering, then groaning downward into obscene depths where the music was the dark earth itself, mother and colossal tomb, rotund with fertility, gravid with corpses. The sun lowered, broke itself on the sharp edges of leaves like a soft egg. Striped with its sanguine pigment like an Indian brave, Noah went into battle. He heard sleep approaching, its intermittent, staccato hiss. He let the melody fluttering through his skull become twisted and grotesque, percussive, tribal. Reds and umbers of flutes and bassoons, the pastoral oboes and clarinets, fled like beaten children. Huzzahs of trumpets and French horns compelled by the saturnine discordance of cellos. Insectile soldiers, crawling and seething aboard fetid galleons. Men with wings of black henbane, eyes like flies.

 

 

Noah was able, through long practice, to hover in the hazy median between slumber and wakefulness, to keep a modicum of control over the thoughts and images that occurred to him while falling asleep, so that he didn’t fall in any real sense so much as gradually descend as if on a flight of shifting stairs, marking each step along the way, making sharp distinctions between what he saw and heard, determining what was volitional and what was not. In the afternoon, after work, he would lie in bed, hands folded across his belly, head slightly raised on the pillow. His hands would go numb while he remained alert to the sounds coming in through the window. A conversation outside would be incorporated into the dialogue of some exotic dream-play, the sounds of children shouting and laughing fostered contexts which were vastly different from the ones which produced them, and within which anything was possible. As he sank deeper below the undulating surface, the peaked and valleyed demarcation between sleep and consciousness, he would hear the screen door open and bang shut; he would hear Eli’s voice, and Rachel’s, and Joanna’s indecipherable humming. His mother would call his name out, he would hear the sound of shopping bags being rifled, closet doors being opened and closed. He was hungry and he would smell supper cooking, and his mother was calling his name again, calling him to come and eat. Noah would attempt to break the spell he had woven over himself, the confining web within which he had become voluntarily - though now unwillingly - imprisoned. He would try to move his arms, open his eyes, to waken, because he knew he was asleep. He knew that his family were not at home, that he was alone in the house. He became terrified. What might happen if one of them should come down the narrow hallway? He had to free himself, because whatever came to him would not be someone he dearly loved. He was conscious of his position on the bed, the closets to the left, the large windows to the right. The voices clamored in the kitchen, laughing, calling his name. The smell of cooking was agonizingly sweet. He felt the emptiness in his stomach, as well as the poignant hollow in his heart which he could feel shaking the bed underneath him. He couldn’t move, though he could feel his muscles trying to respond to the commands his brain was screaming out, but it was his brain that kept him paralyzed. Then he heard Joanna’s mysterious hum coming slowly down the hallway, some sweet melody she had made up for her own amusement. She was coming to fetch him for supper. God no. He heard the sound of her shoes as she came across the threshold of his open bedroom door. Noah struggled like a lunatic in a straightjacket. He was close to breaking free. He could feel it in his muscles, which were coiled and ready to spring. His heart pounded as he felt Joanna come close. He could smell her, hear the rustle of her summer dress amplified a thousand times. But she wasn’t there. They couldn’t take care of her. She had become too much trouble. But she was coming to wake her beloved brother. She always smiled when she saw him. Noah always thought how tragic it was, how ridiculous, that the only person in his life of whose love he was certain had been sent away from him. Whenever he thought of Joanna he wanted to do himself some harm. He might pinch his skin until it broke, or bring the butt of his hand against his temple so hard he would see stars. But the most awful thing of all was the sound of her voice when she bent over his sleeping body and said very clearly, but in the most hateful voice imaginable, Noah, wake up! You fucking little prick, wake up! It was as if his mind had led him to a precipice and dangled him over the edge, let him see the rocks and the foamy breakers far below, the jagged edges where his body would break in pieces like a porcelain figurine. He would waken at last, those horrible words echoing loudly in his ears, the palpable presence of her body, her inviolate body, the rancid smell of sour milk on her breath, her impossible witch-face, white eyes, crimson lips, black teeth.

 

 

Boy it seems to me you want to blame everyone and everything because you can’t get your life together. All you need do is like I told you already, forget books, forget writing. Learn a trade or get a job somewhere and let them see what you can do, like I did. You won’t get overlooked. I know you got a brain in your head. You know it. You got it good, besides. Nobody’s kicking you out just yet, but you’ve had plenty time. The best thing is Eli likes to have somebody around. What woman wants to live by herself? Nobody, except maybe some old spinster like Miss Dodge, you remember that one? Who could forget a nasty old cunt like that. Her problem was she never had a man around. Now I know what your Mama would say to that and I don’t need to hear it. You still letting her read my letters? I think you’re old enough now you should see that isn’t doing either of us any good. Don’t let her run your life. I made that mistake, hell lots of fellows did. Tell the truth, I think she wants to keep you around. She knows she’s got at least one man she can control. She needs that. You want to be kissing her big ass all your life or you want to get out and see what living is all about? Shit, you need to see what I’m telling you is true. Soon you’ll be thirty and no woman will have enough respect for you to give you so much as a piece of ass. Then what? Oh, your book, I forgot. You let me know when it comes out so I can show all my friends. Come on, boy, you know I’m just giving you some shit. I’m your Dad and I am only trying to help. I just want you to be happy, and I know the way you’re going isn’t going to make that happen. Try and see things from my side, that’s all. Imagine how tough this is for me, because you think I’m a bastard. Trust me, if you possibly can boy, those times I pushed her around a little, she was making a fool of me and the whole family. Some other man and she’d have got it much worse. Maybe it aint never right to get rough with a woman but sometimes a man has to wonder. She’s no princess, Noah. You’ll see what I mean. Or maybe you know already. Write me back when you can.

 

 

There was a staircase that lead down into the dreamworld, and he had taken those stairs a thousand times. Not that they were always the same, and they were not picturesque, a series of smooth stone platforms draped in wisps of cloud that moved like white cats, a broad curve gradually lowering, becoming narrower, down through the sky. In fact these stairs were small, so small you had to be careful where you placed your foot lest you skipped a step and went tumbling ass over tea-kettle. Mouldering stone, pocked and broken, slippery with all the rich, negative life that blossomed in decrepitude and decay, the earthy stink of Mother Nature in all her dark, devouring grandeur, her fulminant, destructive mildews, molds, fungi. It was down these dank and slippery stairs that Noah’s dream-traveling soul descended, almost nightly, deeper and deeper into the unclean, the unknown, the webby lair of the fattened King Rat, the corpulent Black Widow. He was akin to all that was subterranean, satanic, doused in the loamy musk of death, blind, serpentine, with his pink cumberbund, the conquerer worm and night-crawler. His was the inverted cathedral, the clotted basilica, apsis hollowed from crests of sunken mountains. Sitting there in the woods, his palms skyward, his unfit body a mockery of the lean and homeless Christ as well as an impotent mimickry of the Buddha, Noah felt the breath of the wood-spirits flutter across his wrists, heard the tell-tale crack of the Green Man’s foot across a dead stick, Jack, lord of lepidopteran hosts, toadstools and skunk cabbage. He sat quiet until the sun was nearly at the top of the distant hills, miles past his happy home and hearth. In the middle of his chest he felt an ache, the muted but ever present gnawing of grief that slowly consumed him. It was all he could do to keep the grief subdued. It throbbed and grew like an ulcer. He grieved for Eli, for Joanna, for his unborn children, his unwritten poems, for every dream sewn back into the wet earth, for every hope stamped with the heel of indifference and neglect. He sat on the ground to grieve, not to pray. And grief was a selfish act, the most selfish act of all. In this selfishness he wallowed with unspeakable greed. The absurd Madonna of grief, swollen with abortions, stuffed fat with her feast.

 

 

 

iii.

 

 

Ah yes, ’tis the rover’s life for me,

the open road before my wandering feet,

the ruffled white breast of the sea,

like Christ, my brother, who walked the waters of Galilee.

 

 

He walked down the middle of the road and thought of the birds at Killingworth, some cruel parson or other lopping the heads of wayside lilies with his cane. It went something like that. Americana. All the old godfathers with silver beards. Whitman queer, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, as if anyone with a name like that could possibly avoid writing verses, Whittier, and all of them good and ugly, no wonder they took to books. He went straight down the road, the oblong houses to either side, like shoe-boxes or coffins. Up at the top of the hill the idiot brothers, the tree that was split straight down the middle by a lightning-bolt, spartan woods taking over past the last trailer where someone lived who had two of the same name, like Augustine Augustine. Some mother or father with a sickness - to do something like that to your own child for selfish reasons. Alas, poor Carol Christmas, Virginia West, the legendary Richard Long. He didn’t see the car. It was just beginning to get dark. The sky had that orangy saffron glow, not a breeze in the trees, almost family hour, everyone huddled around the television set. It was still hot. He had been in his clothes all day. He was tired and heavy bored. He had no inner resources. A heavy bear walked with him, saintly motorcyclists, lilacs in a dooryard. They hang the good men on the trees. A jet whined thinly overhead, its lights just beginning to twinkle as the sky darkened. He felt a mild pressure building, saw her small white wrist in his oily hand, his other raising the back of her shirt, now look at ‘at. You want to get yourself a girl with a big ass like at. She had brandy in a cloudy wine glass. You mark my words. You won’t regret it. Her denim shorts showing the back of her legs patterned by a cheap deck-chair. The sound of his hand patting her back pockets. Look at ‘at. Smacking the tight denim. Her fingernails dark red, long, slender fingers, skinny wrists. She was in the wrong story. Somebody had to come and get her out. A green dragonfly coasted along like a crop-duster. Blue lanterns now everywhere, up and down both sides of the road. Lightning bugs turning on and off, the fireflies of the dusk. The house was dark. The light over the door was on. He stood in the dull orange pool of it, felt runnels of sweat trickling down his skin. Somebody was shouting up the road, somebody got knocked in the back of the head. There was nobody home. It was like one of those bad dreams. Would he even recognize the place. Would the key fit. He went in. The air-conditioner rattled in the living room window. It felt cold. It felt drained, like a condemned building. There was no personality here. This was the smell of Limbo. He went into the kitchen, down the hall, to his bedroom. The room at the back of the house was dark, the door flung wide, the last glimmer of sunset on the unmade bed. Now he turned around angrily and made sure to flip every light-switch on. His eyes darted frenetically all about him. She hadn’t even bothered to leave him a note. “Where have you been? I’ve been worried sick? Mr. X and I have gone out searching for you…” Nothing. But he was not one to wander about. He always told her where he was going. This was not like him. How frustrating it was, to do something so unlike yourself yet nobody takes notice. The dogs didn’t even bark at him. He was invisible.

 

 

The trestle stretched for nearly a mile, connecting one hill with another. Below crept listless grassy spaces, cornfields, the rolling emptiness, frogs and newts and loamy clods of curious tactile infancy, tall weeds, pungent earth, dank stones, pink worms of childhood, faraway mountains mantled in mist, the decorous stoles of exhaust and smoke, pinks and mauves of sober twilights, saffrons of sunsets, mothers and cigarettes, Captain Black, vanilla ice cream, furniture steeped in lemon oil, domestic paintings, green cups, impeccably trimmed hedges, rural cottages, Falstaffs in barrels, cuckolding wives of Windsor. But somewhere the dots fail to connect. Green, the color of fiction, brings me to the same places, but out of nowhere. Green is go. Equals motion, growth. Backwards, forwards. Off in the distance the straight track becomes a compass needle, disappears into the wooded hill. The drowsy mill-town sleeps, draws its silk web over its green shoulder. The train whistles, shrieks into the velvet cunt of the mountain. Albion’s little sister, the pastoral old maid, Americana, land of water towers, drunks and suicides, only to throw a curve ball mind you because in all temerity I love this land is my land. East of Eden. You fly overhead you can’t touch it, the vast mathematics of space, takes time to get through. I was born in a pocket beside a mountain hard by our Lordly Hudson, soldiers buried around my circumcised prick, muskets, cannon, sacred ground. Iroquois. Don’t tread on me. You stand toe to toe with this giant he bring heap trouble on you and quick Joe, we got heap big fire here don’t fuck with it, make peace with it, or maybe we give you big purple herman, that mushroom death-noogie. Steve wanted to climb the water tower you could see in the distance, climb up and jump off, because he had this pain in his head, stuck like a frozen knife. Freckles and red hair, like some lost Walton in overalls. He took a longer stride and before long I could see his sloping shoulders dwindling along the side of the track. Too much of a pussy, I turned back. Down the hiking trail and into the cornfield, a blushing Pussy, carnation red, my shame a scarlet explosion, dead man, under the viaduct.

 

 

Christ, naked on the queer tree, my fingers count your ribs, find one missing, the mystery of Eve, the sky is darkening, blood-flow, clouds rolling over your dreaming head, your eyes sealed in prayer, blood coming, the stink of it, copper and salt my Lord, belly-valley sunken, pauper. Slick black rat and crook-tailed tom, they come to pick your bones, my brother, my sad Lord, take me for I forsake me, forget me. Ashes in Gehenna. Bald hook in the freezing water, cold candle in the inverted cathedral.

 

 

In the darkness he took cautious steps down well-known roads, past farms, to both sides the ancient stone fences constructed by burly men who said things like good birch trees make good fences, ugly men who married women with heavenly rumps as big as table-tops, who broke ice with their elbows, drove lop-sided carriages through cold New England pre-dawn darkness. Not much of a drinking man, he clasped the bottle of straight Kentucky bourbon and planned an over-nite bash on the iron bridge. Four aspirin tablets in a keep-safe pocket. Always be prepared. He remembered his three weeks as a cub scout, so proud of the blue uniform, the crisp, thick manual. He forgot everything he learned. His mind was an attic. He kept only what he needed, dropped everything else down through the hole in the ceiling. Triangle of light and Irish lace. An old album stuffed with pictures, crazy Jewish rituals, everyone wearing glasses. In another box his father’s glossy pornography, page after page of the very thing against which he seemed to hold so much contempt, the yawning meat-flower, the incidental anus always in shot, like some forgotten cousin. It was true he wasn’t exactly the spit and image. Eli slept around, even then. Why do they call it sleeping? Who was it sired him upon his beloved mother? He would look through the albums she kept, eyes peeled for the face that looked back at him from life’s daily mirrors. He was passing the farm, could smell the wafty cow dung hung aloft the dingle starry. A long stretch, straight, maybe a half-mile. The older kids would race under the oak trees. He wondered, was there ever a day when one didn’t face ones’ self in a mirror? He didn’t think so. Civilization, if it was anything, was the constant presence of mirrors. The absence of mirrors marked the life of a barbarian. Money meant more mirrors. Cameras were the dream of mirrors, the single-minded enterprise of mirrors. Fame was the condition of always standing in front of ones’ self, the Utopia, the Shanrgri-la of mirrors. Humility was not possible in the presence of mirrors. Monks, therefore, have no mirrors. Priests have mirrors but never recognize themselves in the glass. This is the purpose of the collar, he thought, to draw the attention of the priests’ eyes while he dresses himself. For this reason he must shave fully dressed, he thought. This is why Jewish rabbis wear beards, he thought. They do not wish to shave because they do not wish to be tempted by the mirror, which is a necessary evil, like the cunt. The cunt and the mirror are unclean. Extrapolating on this idea, he imagined Hell as a house of mirrors, and in every mirror a cunt. The cunt reflected and multiplied ad infinitum, bringing madness and eternal suffering. No one in Hell knows where the original cunt is located, for it must originate somewhere. A disembodied cunt, a cunt unto itself, the Cunt as Platonic Idea. The only pastime in Hell is the quest for the Cunt which can only be seen as a pattern of light on smooth glass (forgetting for now a plausible Hell for ladies, a slow march over the soft spines of men). Mirrors are broken as a matter of course in Hell, and are instantly replaced by obsequious demons in white uniforms, though the splinters and fragments of each shattered mirror remain on the floor of Hell’s massive circus tent. Always in the background, the dissonant strains of the carousel, a carousel with headless horses ridden by silent young girls with white eyes and black teeth. Behind each of the girls sits a filthy carnie under a wilting cap, his hands at her nubile breasts, his tongue lolling over stumps of yellow teeth. Each of the girls has a message for those who are condemned. She is on the verge of a cry but remains silent, and is always trotting away. The damned are given this vision as a gift. A reminder of impotent love, grief, and infinite sickness. He walked on through the growing darkness. The smell of cow-shit was sweet.

 

 

To him it was the essential symbol of imagination’s defiance, straight line, iron fuck-you finger at Nature Herself, mammoth-bosomed Jehovah Whose silver hair was spread in flame across the infinite void. Spirals, seashells, delicate filigrees, snowflakes, rock-loaves in ovals, all this was wondrous work, O Allah, O Siva, but the straight line, connector of Here and There, geometer’s wet dream, pristine prick in abstract, the I, is upright, is Man. Noah was blest with this vision under the viaduct, the perfect simplicity of it all, zeroes and ones, marriage of cock and cunt. God is the hole, the black abyss, the Nothing given will and character, the passive receptor of all action, the womb immeasurable. The gravest of errors, the genesis of every cruelty, of every vice dressed in bloody good intentions, was the failure to identify God as female. Evil itself was the masculine God, obscene power, the merciless thrust of the boy-God beyond reproach. He saw the giant pilings, massive engineering, stalwart and inviolate a hundred years. He had never seen anything so beautiful. Hunert feet high, its ostentatious linear push across space, it fucked the sky. The green hills to either end, metal and wood deep in soft loam. Straight and level. Like nothing out of God’s womb. He opened the bottle and took his first burning tipple of bourbon, it shot through his head like an electric shock. It was beautiful and horrible, the taste of a knife, the taste of a star, the taste of stone and earth and oil, the scent of metal and fire, the scent of factory machines. He began his ascent, up the hiking trail. It was night now but he knew the way. He remembered going behind his father, up the side of the green hill, the smell of his oiled rifle, the crack of his long gun, the heat of the black barrel, black lashes almost feminine over the sea-blue dead-eye, tense meat of his shoulder, Ballantine cans knocked pell-mell, their emptiness exposed, torn open, fucked silly and flowered with bullet-rape. They looked pretty, lying among the red and orange leaves like sleeping concubines. He remembered taking the rifle in his soft girlish hands, wishing with all his nuts that he could do it, that he could send one of those sexy vessels flying, tear its fragile ribs outward, give it those sharp and dangerous tendrils and petals. Kill it lovely and dead. But his bullet always zipped awry, those best laid plans, and what could be worse than those blue eyes, those long-lashed, sea-blue eyes, sapped of their brightness and bald with disappointment? I’m sorry father for I have sinned. I have aimed the slender cock and misfired. I am red with my sin, Oh father. He stopped and took another pull. There was a sweetness underneath, stung wicked like burnt cinnamon through your nose, third maybe fourth belt. Forth. Onwards. Rode the six-bloody-hundred. Always poems in his head. Boys with their pink dicks sticking out, screaming, clash of bayonets, cock-fight, big sticky mess. He walked, climbing. He rode, rising from the valley of life. He climbed.

 

 

It wasn’t a long climb. Strange that I remember running down the path, a nimble jack and quick, without so much as a turned ankle, but hardly anything of going the other way. When I was older we slid under the highway, through concrete tunnels where cold water trickled, leaves piled along the sides in shapeless muck and decay. We were drunk, so we stopped to sing, our voices richened in the dank rebounding air. Naturally I sounded marvelous. Then into the woods, up the foot of the sprawling mountain. These are fall or winter memories. In summer I went alone one morning and swam naked in the clear pool. Drunk on some pink blush. In winter you put the beer in the water. You made a fire and held some girl’s knitted glove, some Irish girl a friend of yours was squeezing. You always wanted what you couldn’t have. Could it have been that all of them were in some way forbidden? That you were meant to preserve your virginity? Preserve it for what, for Chrissake? What good is a chaste atheist? One evening I broke down and despite the ameliorating caress of alcohol I left in tears, found my way home through the dark so thick I couldn’t see my boots. The snow hadn’t quite made it down through the trees. Deciduous but a handful of conifers. In the afternoon you could find a sequestered nook and have a good wank. At home you didn’t lock the door, except the shitter. My friend caught up so we zig-zagged in the snow out in front of the factory. Blue lights. Electric light was far better than moonlight. He had crazy Nazi plans, was one whose tongue didn’t reject that bisyllabic turdlet, nigger. His dad had steins. Heap big $teins for big beer. Big money. Last I heard he worked some shit job and liked girls to pee on him. Couldn’t slight him for that seeing as there are mirrors. Mirrors keep you honest. Once you got to the top it was thirty maybe forty feet to the viaduct. A few steps and bang, trees blossomed underneath you, the world tilted, squatted down, became manageable. Even in the dark the greens of earth, of life, of everything, the very concept of greenness itself, saturated you. Green is go. Means you are alive. We would walk fifty maybe sevenny feet until down below the road swerved between our legs, horizontal cock of purpose and motion, intersecting at right angles, the iron bridge and the country road, masculine cross, reticent male agreement. Direction is knowledge is power. But true power is ethereal. Power is Mother earth, gravid Madonna, that constant pull. You give in or you lose. You come to terms with Her. You can’t get around Her, so you put your heads together and put some distance between the bitch and yourself. So now we have planes and bridges. It isn’t the road that kills you, it’s the power that pulls you down.

 

 

 

iv.

 

He walked along in the darkness and stepped gingerly onto the old wooden catwalk on the right side of the track. The male stink of bourbon, the masculine power of the old iron bridge, urged him on, more and more. He was like a toddler taking its first tentative steps into a body of unfamiliar water, outside the borders of the bath with its laughing dragon that spat water from its belly, colored block letters that stuck to the wall, Mama teasing some cunting drunk out in the yellow grass. Quickly he saw the paper walls, the blue flames of oil lamps, silk kimono and ghastly white paint, sharp tits and strange fucking in pen and ink drawings, ornate borders of thick pages, thumb-printed, a punky smell coming up from the paper, vasty vaginas and cocks like horses, with the issue of horses. O King James, we sick fucks. Lot drunk and the dutiful daughters. 'Splain, Lucy, but you can’t. Crazy dangerous you talk of God that way, silly priest. You and your purity, chasing hard-pleated holes of boys. Look in the mirror, pluck the beam from your eye, straighten your collar and apologize. He could see the trees floating underneath, between the gaps. Bourbon made the wood harder, the leaves softer, the vaginal half-mile to the road a sweet warm cloud-pudding. Something about bridges. Hart Crane threw himself overboard, but he had done it by God, made two fingers stretch enough and consummate, joined the Old and the New in his cosmic iambic manifesto. What was it he saw in the churning water? What was it he felt in the salty air behind him? All angels are terrifying. Rilke. And Caravaggio, he knew, he made the angel float so pretty Matthew was mortified. Scared shitless, pale, a wreck beneath the eyes that see through walls, see inside your skull, bring low-talk back to the Black Queen. Peter licks his index, a clash of colossal keys. A lock that will never open. Titanium-cum-platinum eyelet, sewn against you. He took a few more steps. It was so dark he was afraid he’d stumble on the rail and get tossed over the side. Act two. Scene One. 1987. Palisades, rocks, Lordly Hudson slinks along. Windy, cold maybe September. No white snot-swords hung yet from the lip of the mountain. You would reach out and grab an end, just pull, gently, easy, like making a cricket a tri-ped. Someone said they grow them back, or that’s daddy-longlegs. It doesn’t matter. You climbed up the rocks and scratched your name on the first face you came to, like a clock’s face, flat. So people would see it, humming up the tarmac. And your sweetheart, her secret name. But there were too many and besides you had the hands of a governess, au pair too delicate, turning pages, dollop of warm milk on tender blue veins. It was here you parked to watch the fireworks. Everyone clapping, beer-tabs, drunken holiday with tanks. Vans and happy Americans. Military sprawl, straight lines, rooftops in alignment, waiting for the Big General. The clouds would part and the Big General, nobody made Him cut His hair, not that one. That brass too fucking big, that one. Out of His face light would burst like arrows, golden fantail, aurora incarnate. Everybody hit the ground.

 

 

There was always some joker standing down in the look-out with his hand to his forehead, gazing up into the sunlight, a cigarette between two fingers of his free hand. He would cry Jump and Noah would laugh. The spider crawled up the rocks. Stacy loves David. I love you Sofia. Mi Volvo es muy mal. I don’t want to die, for Christ’s sake. He moved along and finally reached the first cut-out. If you happened to be on the trestle when a train came you might be able to get to one of those. There were a few, he couldn’t remember how many. Some extra space if you were the type that needed it. Comfy capital U in the straight line of the railing. The bottle was nearly half-empty. He sat down with legs crossed and set the bottle down in front of him. Sacred tea-colored altar, it caught the moonlight and flickered. It was good to feel the wind in your hair. Nearly thirty now he had little of it. He wished suddenly that he’d remembered his glasses. It was nothing in the daytime but when it was dark his senses were muted, the stars overhead were misty dollops of brightness, clumped and cluttered, they slipped behind the clouds that moved like giant ships. He wondered if it would rain. The air was cool and thick, but he couldn’t smell it. White-tail shifted softly down in the fields. He was facing the track, his back to the railing. Everyone just drifted off. Paired off and drifted away, made babies, made money. Once motorbikes butchered the dirt, back and forth across the open field, yammered like buzz-saws. Flat-black gas tank, name painted over, higher than the top of his head, rubber missing on the pedals, jagged metal straight through Johnny’s ankle, leg burning under the exhaust pipe. Not far away from the Sunday school tree. Ugly maids all in a row, the oblong boxes of the poor and the not-so-poor. He had a pot to piss in. Son of the penny-wise, he squandered time. You couldn’t save it up, you couldn’t roll it up and sock it away in a drawer, couldn’t invest it, couldn’t say be fruitful and multiply, you could only spend it, watch the skein grow thinner and thinner. A paper kite, caught in the updraft, the little boy pays out more string, more string, his face a freckled cherry of excitement, it fades to a blur, gets colder, darker, up through the clouds, the boy disappears. On the other side of the board the Black Queen eats your pawns, storms your castles, decapitates your horses, ignores the plaintive prayers of your churchmen, turns your white squares into black squares, puts you back inside.

 

 

It was so dark you were sure he couldn’t see you. He came down the track, walking on one of the rails like a kid, and doing a bad job because he was drunk. The barrel of his rifle caught a lace of starlight. It twinkled on the black steel. When you were curled up inside you were given signs and hints, and one would think some courage too but the terror was too severe. Only the most hideous things happened. He was talking to himself, his cap tilted and askew. You were thinking as you always were, and revelations blared like trumpets through your head. He was a boy again, balancing half-assed on the silver rail, only a few feet from the other side of the iron bridge where there was nothing but the gray hulks of nearby mountains and a free-fall. Hunting at night. Down on the dirt road under the trees his truck still ticked, squat on its bully tires. He talked to himself, cursed when his boot slipped from the rail, caught at the heel, nearly spilled him over. He was a big man, big forearms, big veins, big blue-eyed gunman. Revelations. He could kill you with no effort, squeeze your soft fairy arms until they burst, shake the teeth out of your head, splinter your ribs with the butt of his free hand. Never-mind the gun. He didn’t need the gun. Might even smile and give it to you, circle a target on his chest, show you his heart. You were in deep because this wasn’t him, he loved you in his way. He never stumbled when he was drunk. This wasn’t him. Still he came along the track and you sat quiet in the cut-out, barely breathing, heart punching behind your ribs. Tell-tale Heart. Christ, the stories, always, words, poems, they cluttered the attic like stiff shirts. Amontillado, fear that you could taste hot on your tongue, to be buried alive. You could smell the beer. He slipped off the rail and laughed. Tits like her mother already. You could feel something drop, something hot, it melted inside, like you were about to make a mess in your pants. Echoes from topside, up where the grass was green, where the lights were always on. In your brain a thousand thoughts, each one sharp as a knife-edge, the knife he swept along the oiled stone. Bottle of Schlitz, piss-yellow, warm under the kitchen light. Eli was out somewhere. Joanna was in her room. He wore a watch on the arm that swept the hunting knife and those crazy blue eyes would tick back and forth, that tiny gold hand would tick. If he stopped you could hear it, a splinter of sound, like faraway glass cracking. He came down the track. The closer he came the taller he grew. He was seveneight feet. Dark, corded arms pushed through the turned-up sleeves, massive chest like a G.I. Joe. His breath was hot like the breath of a horse. You remembered the stable, the six horses your friend looked after. Don’t get behind em. You’ll get your ribs cracked like toothpicks. Old pictures in frames lay around in neglect, though some were mounted on the walls. Fast, sleek horses, ribbons, smell of horseshit. It was like that. He stamped up close as big as a horse, his breath steamed from his nostrils. He was ten feet tall. Big belt buckle and black jeans. No more camouflage. The gun was some military eyesore, he wore it on his shoulder two hunert pound easy. He was so close you knew he knew, and you were about to shit yourself. Like in second grade when the girls pinched their noses and you waited outside for Mama. The teacher stroked your hair. She said it was okay. You remember the smell of her perfume most of all. It reminded you of strawberries and cinnamon. You wished it would drown the stink. Joanna was in her room. You could smell her on him. The yellow-flower scent of her hair, her soft, clammy hands, crayons and construction paper. She made a boy who was supposed to be you. It was folded away in your wallet. She had red marks on her wrists. One good kick and over he’d go, dead man flying, dead weight dropping. The hulk of him falling through the night sky. You knew exactly where you were, that all you had to do was move, lift your head, fight to the surface and gasp for breath. But She had you sewn in good with her black thread, that Good Mother. She held your wrists, pinned your arms to your sides, kept your slobbering chin to your collar. I want to keep you from this, She would tell you, don’t look up.

 

 

Back out on the water, seagulls flapping, breaking up the sunlight, albatross, get your albatross, he stoppeth one of three, quatrains and quintains, salt. Moby was a girl. Deep down she swam, in the blue-black twilight, big mouth and big hips. Everything is such a secret. Don’t tell a soul. Hush. Keep it mum. You didn’t look up so now you look down. Asleep in the back room, glad to be rid of the goyim. Lying sideways in her underwear, legs drawn up. She could show some class, he would say. Goddamn cunt. Soft words into the telephone, tiny sibilant saxophones, tinny miniature horns running through the wire. It’s a fishy cycle, beer stink over bruised knuckles, hot engine, you can’t remember who struck first, you just keep swinging. It’s a doggy-dog world, kid. As if I could care less. Full of piss and vinegar. You could hardly keep from laughing. What’s she looking for she can’t get from me is all I’m saying. Don’t get married, old joke about Eve pissing in the ocean. Moby stayed down deep, smooth and white, softly sailing. Far from the ugly sailing men. If you want to be happy, marry an ugly woman. Make ugly kids. Jesus, it stings. You rarely saw them together, for they were truly separated. You pored through the old family albums, that one at Big Boy’s and she was telling him he looked like Wyatt Earp with his black hat, you took that one yourself with your new Polaroid. And the ones Uncle Peter took when you all went rafting. His sleeves rolled all the way up past his tattoo, hands sure on the black oar, white water, Rachel blanched and frightened, Joanna, so young and frail and happy. She couldn’t talk but she could sing. Not words, just raw emotions, they came up from her throat as bright as dandelions, and sometimes hard, like cymbals. Your head would get knocked back as if someone had hit you square. She never drew blood, just sea-water from your drifting head. One time Eli told you everyone had an angel in their life. Sometimes they’re invisible, sometimes they’re in the form of a person, sometimes even an animal. You wondered if Rusty the angel-fish was somebody’s angel. Could be, she laughed, and was gone again. Down into the deeps. Trouble with you is you got her made out like some princess in some castle but I’m telling you straight she aint no angel you’ll see mark my words. Truth is, they are the ones at get you trapped, at’s how it works. And you get made out like some ogre and she gets a pass on all her catting around. Game is fuckin rigged, you’ll see what I’m telling you is the God’s honest truth. He looked at his watch, then back to the hunting knife. You were at the other end of the table, watching him sharpen the blade. Nine-thirty, ten-thirty. Your eyes went back and forth, looking for Moby but all you got were homely sailors, a seaman’s handbook, whaler’s manual. You knew that Moby had to be a girl. None of those pirate-types were heroes, not a one. She was the hero, fashionably late, fashionably mysterious. She’ll be late for her own funeral, you watch. I hope she gets a flat tire then see if I answer the goddamn phone. Jesus H. Christ boy you’re gonna go blind. Need to get your nose out of them books and see the world. You know animals don’t look up? Think about it. Hey I read Tom Sawyer all the way through and you know something else, she hasn’t ever read a book all the way through. She can give you lots of names, though, sure. She picks them up in magazines, is all. Ask her, she’ll tell you. She saves all her bullshit for me. Finally he tromped off to the couch. You looked for Moby and you waited.

 

 

Rather than kick the fucker over he went overboard, backwards like a diver, into the sky. He heard that you wouldn’t hit the ground, that you would startle yourself awake at the very thought which occurred as soon as you began to drop toward the indeterminate, unreachable terminus. His experience had shown this to be true too many times to doubt it, and yet sometimes he fell far enough to wonder. He was in the ocean, deep down, in a bubble of pure fancy, not some Chambered Nautilus but far removed, a pair of dry eyes in the dark. How many times had his dreams taken this form? This dream within a dream? He wasn’t in the water, but taking it in through the camera’s eye, an observer, a watcher, a double-voyeur. How do you put this down, he would think to himself, how do you get this across? If he was some rich Frenchman with a lot of time and a lot of brains, how would he accomplish it? Some of his worst nightmares were not ones in which he was really involved, but which took place, instead, on film. A dream horror-show. He knew the bad parts inside and out, the ones that made him cover his face and his ears until they were over. But in the dream he couldn’t hide his face and was forced to watch. In his first waking thoughts the fear was pure and powerful, but most of the time, as the day dragged on, he couldn’t remember what it was that had frightened him, even though he remembered the images, the silly scenes that began to be understood for the nonsense they were. But there were other times when the images he had witnessed, not as a participant, but as an aloof observer, retained their queer power and became even more frightening during extended moments of conscious memory and reflection. When he fell back into the air, into the dark ocean, he took his place in that theater again. He could never distinguish the change from dreamer to dream-watcher, it was too fluid and seamless. It was as if his unconscious mind had known too well that he couldn’t possibly endure the things he was about to see, and thus changed the nature of the dream as a matter of self-preservation. Sub-conscious, non-volitional cowardice, mixed with a macabre imagination and a morbid curiosity. As he plunged ever deeper into the water, he wondered what he would do if the lights of the vessel went out. This was something too horrible to confront even in a dream, and so he was spared a true concern and was left with the masochistic sympathy of a disconnected viewer. He wasn’t in the vessel. The vessel existed on film. A technological copy of reality within a mental imitation of reality. He couldn’t retreat any further. And in this manner he faced his fears in the safety of two removes. The things he saw in the depths of the water were not members of any bestiary with which he was familiar: they were unthinkable, cross-bred abominations, gigantic, deformed miscegenations which only a pathologically morose and timorous mind could fabricate. One would appear in the gloomy distance, aquatic, amphibian, serpentine, colossal, black, hideous, only to be dwarfed to absurdity by something even more grotesque; and this would go on and on, and he was mortified as well as impressed by each gradation of power, as if these creatures were gods but gods without names, without souls, ancient, rapacious organisms that had the virtually infinite expanse of a fabulous and impossible sea in which to grow. He would narrate to himself, realizing as if once and for all the true nature of his weakness and impotence. Moby was nowhere to be seen, for surely in such hostile depths she was whitebait, a flabby nothing in the monstrous pitch. And yet in his waking moments these dream-visions possessed a certain validity, for he knew that in the great void, where mammoth galaxies spun like tiny starfish in the Pacific ocean, there no doubt existed living things which no human mind could fathom, entities of enormous mass and power, a true conception of which even the most enlightened earthly fancy could never hope to attain. In a sense, his dream visions constituted, despite all their vivid, imaginative coloring, an ongoing reminder of the pure and unmitigated hostility of the natural world.

 

 

It ran in a straight line over the creek it was named for, but I don’t remember the creek. I remember the creek but not as seen from the bridge. We fished in the creek, went rafting down it, under the trees. I can’t get it into my head, not even with the help of a map. Maps have always confused me, made things more difficult, just as something like a schematic, which is supposed to make things easier, will only frustrate me until I want some item or other to break, to shatter into a thousand meaningless nothings which no-one could put back together. Diagrams, these are his enemies. I can think in the abstract very proficiently at times, he thought, but I cannot truly see in the dark, as some can. There was one afternoon, Troy and he were stoned out of their minds, walking down one of the back-roads, trees along both sides, cicadas making their monstrous hiss. He would hear them break under his shoes, with every step it seemed, because they fell out of the trees like dead leaves. A truck came by and stopped so Troy went up. The driver asked him how do you get someplace or other and apparently he had come the wrong way because the first thing he did was point in the other direction, behind us. Troy was blotto, his eyes sewn all over with tiny red thread, but he went on and on, giving the driver directions. On and On went Troy, and the driver was nodding along. On and on it went, and the driver was listening. Time is a straight plantation, as some poet said once, but at this particular juncture, it wasn’t. Time was a long slope, an incline that sharpened gradually, and the harder it was to take a step the slower Time went, even though at the top of the slope was the beginning of the next minute and the end of the present one, just the same as it always was, is. While Troy was talking, I walked along up the slope, he thought to himself, and as Troy talked he noticed the ice under his feet, and there was no fence or anything to steady yourself with or to let you pull and pull. I stood there for a good long while scratching my head, listening to the gibberish falling out of Troy’s mouth, and after a while I realized that I was in one of those warped moments, that this particular moment was especially fat and slothful, that the glint of azure I saw at the end of the slope was impossibly far away, though I knew I would get there eventually, and in the same amount of real time it always took, despite appearances. Troy went on and on, and on and on. And the driver was either very polite or a mad genius who drove a truck as a cover for his real existence as a secret agent. When Troy was finished at last the driver went off, and in the same direction he had been heading, if memory serves; and he was laughing already and he and Noah laughed until tears were rolling down their cheeks. The poor bastard, he’s really lost now. Did you hear that? Did you hear what I was saying? What the hell was I saying? But I think, he thought, to this day that, in all probability, Troy had given good directions, if a bit thorough and hyper-detailed, and that the driver had to keep going the wrong way at least for a bit further anyway, since he couldn’t turn that big rig around on that narrow back road, and that Time was a straight plantation same as it always is, was, is. It’s just that you’re lousy at taking directions, and Troy, despite his mentally-altered condition, was in fact quite good at giving them, and the driver, being that driving was his profession, was good at taking directions. Its also true that the bridge spans the creek it was named for, whether you can remember seeing it from above or from underneath, even though you’ve all but stricken it from the fuzzy brown and green map you keep folded wrong inside your head.

 

 

A short ways past the first cut-out where he had fallen asleep he was over the road that wound its way through the fields and the little rolling hills. It was too dark to see the road but he stood against the railing and after a while a car came by so he knew he was in the right place. If it was windy he might end up over in the cornfield, or in the weedy fields along the other side. In either case he’d be dead so it wouldn’t matter. No, it wasn’t that, he was just thinking. One afternoon he and Troy took an empty plastic milk container, a gallon container with a handle, and filled it with dirt and rocks. They stood in the same spot and dropped it, and when it hit the road it exploded and the dirt and the rocks went everywhere. It took a long time to hit the ground. Troy was the one who dropped it. Noah was always the accomplice, the second fiddle, side-kick. When they went back down again they saw bits of plastic all over the road, the red cap, and larger pieces. Troy told him the story of the girl who had jumped off one night and landed on her feet so that her leg bones shot straight up through her shoulders. It was probably an urban legend and never happened, or a suburban legend anyway. No one remembered what the girl’s name was. Some people said there had been a high school party up on the trestle and that she was the victim of a broken heart, or she got too drunk, or was messed-up on something else and thought she could fly. Or maybe someone pushed her. Noah didn’t think it was a true story, just something to scare kids out of climbing up there and hanging over the old rail. Some kids didn’t go up the mountain on the hiking trail, they climbed up the damn bridge itself, up those giant iron legs, like spiders. You never actually saw someone going up that way, though. Strange how people you only talked about were the ones with all the courage, how girls with no names were the ones who died in the worst ways. Troy never talked about killing himself but Steve did. Steve’s parents started a business selling flowers out of a big greenhouse. Steve hated his father for some reason Noah could never quite figure out. He thinks possibly Steve was his step-son, though if that were the case Steve only mentioned it in passing and didn’t dwell on it. I think Steve didn’t care much for the fact that his mom, who had long blonde hair and was pretty, had taken so much to his dad, whether he was a step-dad or the real McCoy. Maybe Steve just wanted for his father to be his step-father. I told him, Noah was thinking as he stood there with his bottle of bourbon still half-full, you have to love your father. He said no, he didn’t, and he didn’t. We sat on some flat rocks that made a path down from the front door of his house to the driveway. He was picking something up and dropping it, contemplating gravity, the invisible God who lived deep in the ground and in the sky. He pointed to the water tower that was about a mile off. I could see it shimmering in the sunlight, like it was underwater, because of the heat. Steve told Noah, he said, I climbed up to the top of it lots of times already. One day I’m gonna climb up and jump off, because that’s how much I hate him. The last I heard of Steve he was into partying and I never heard of him doing a dive off that water tower. For Noah, everything seemed to center on the viaduct, and he had never been to the water tower. It would remain the same to him until his dying day: a shimmering gray object in the distance which represented height and the abandonment of hope. And up on top of it, where there must have been some space for a person to stand or walk, Steve would always be there, like the blind priest who guarded the gates of Hell in that old movie, his eyes white as he looked off into the open air, remembering the greenness and the brownness, the bucolic hills and trees and the dipping power-lines. He never jumps, he just stands there, a sentry at his post. Noah had his back to Steve as he watched the headlights go between his legs, under the boards with gaps between them, and out the other side. Wouldn’t it be something if the rail gave out and I went ass over teakettle, down to the road. People would be sure that I did it on purpose, that I had come up here to get drunk and throw myself off, he thought to himself. How many accidental deaths had been called suicides? Probably millions, all time considered. Sure, it was suicide. He was miserable. Did nothing but sit in his room. No friends. No girl. Lousy job. At was it alright. He gained his balance and stood up straight, then went off down the catwalk, looking for the creek.

 

 

Break the mirrors, all of them, because they show you the things that make you angry, your face first, not anyone you recognize though it could be you’ve seen this one before, partially obscured by the hood of his harborcoat, under a lamppost whose flower of light was streaked with slanted rain, a railway station you never saw but went to in a story, an old book in hardcover, gray, with illustrations, a collection of stories whose primary intent was to frighten, and it worked. A secret place and a small boy running an impossible errand, and what was the most horrifying thing, not the living trees, the killing trees, but the mother who sent him into the night despite his fear, the old witch, toss her into the river and see if she floats, that selfish hag. He moved along the catwalk. The moon sat up on the edge of the world, loomed silver over the water tower. Bad dreams in the sleepy mill-town, Lizzie Borden and boarded windows. Invisible, he followed through whistling corridors, dank passageways. Courtesans in grease-paint crawled along the ceiling. He was home, for this was a place of shattered windows, mirrors covered in perpetual mourning, blind eyes in the sick room, burning oils in the death-chamber, grand bouquets and cerements, cracked and tilted sandstone dreams. Put down the numbers. We need the numbers. How many, how long? So long. He took another belt and felt it burn in the cup of his tongue, then up through his head like ammonia. Wake up. She must be wondering where you are, her little lambkin, Thel afloat in the wormy furrows, scattering blessings, soft breasts heaving in sorrow. We have to find the goddamn creek. We fished in its filmy pools, Dad in his waders angling where she picked up speed, Joanna with her rod bent, string tight and quivering, bobber tugged underneath. Pickerel or sunfish, he slogged back with a laugh and helped her bring it in. And when it hung there, spinning and sparkling with the sun on its scales, threshing in the deadly air, she wailed like a victim herself until he let it go, and she was happy again. We’ve had those moments, and we remember. They tell us to make them again, they won’t come knocking. But we don’t believe. We close the door on the Witnesses, we laugh at the white-sleeved Mormons. We tell them we have no faith, and they don’t believe it. Faith kills, he told them. The following week they would return, clean, handsome, and pink with faith. He was drunk. Even when he and Troy sat under the overpass with a bottle of Ezra Brooks he had not gotten so drunk, when Troy told him what it was like to be inside a girl. He still sought out the secret places, the deadly places, soft atheist with his Sabbath cross, verses in his head and lust in his heart. Even if it were right there under you it’s too far down you wouldn’t hear it. The trains don’t come so late. They come in the daytime. One day we saw a man pissing off the side of the caboose. He yanked it back in and wet himself when he saw Eli and the girls waving from the edge of the woods. Eli shouted and laughed, wanted to see it again. He shouted something obscene. At one point the wind was still. He thought he heard cicadas in the trees below, but it wasn’t their time. Crickets and katydids. He saw the blur of lights in town, a few miles off. He pretended they were Chinese lanterns. Or some sci-fi military installation. Lights overhead between the stars, alternating left and right. Shiny domes and one-eyed overseers, blinking machines, they drifted past the water tower, came up slowly over the mountains. Dad was already heading up the hunting trail. Goddamn cunt. Loaded pistol on his hip, wide-brimmed hat disappearing under the wet leaves. Joanna walked along the straight track, picked up an old iron rail-spike, brown with rust, heavy in her hand. You need a wooden stake to kill the monster, or a silver bullet, some kind of witchery, some magic, some talisman. My father leads me through corridors of stone, past the covered mirrors, under the white-faced harpies. My father cheated the Black Queen. He hides from her and lives inside her, eternal parasite. There are no mirrors here, he tells me, and we fly down to the water. He smiles and he lies. No one will look for you, he tells me, don’t look down

 

 

 

*

 

 

THE PRETEND

 

September, 1989

 

 

 

no-we

 

*

 

they said to pretend to say to you so that you would remember. do you remember?

 

 

*

 

i remember no-we do you remember? they said to pretend to say that we will see you soon in the better place and not be afraid. they said that i should not be afraid because you dont come to see me in this place again because you are not here but in the better place and that i will see you soon. they said to pretend to say to tell him that soon he will remember and he will forget the bad things from the time before. do you remember?

 

*

they said to pretend to say of the good things from the before time so that you will remember. do you remember? i remember the happy place in the time before where there was fast water and we were in a boat and i sang to the angels in the sky and the sky and the water were the same and it was like flying upside down on the sky and i laughed, do you remember? and ray my other one was afraid and anty and unk were there and ma and day and you no-we. do you remember? the water was fast and it was like flying upsidedown on the sky. so why was ray afraid? and day laughed in the good way and not the bad way and ma was there and her arms were around me and you were there and it was the best place.

 

*

i remember the sad place when we went there and ray my other one said it was a good place but it made me sad. And ma could not go there and you were not there no-we why could ma not go and if not then how could it be a good place? but ray my other one took me there and we prayed to God and Jesus and the angels in the sky and that made me feel that it was a better place when i pretended the angels in the sky like that day in the place in the boat on the fast water when i laughed and it was like flying upsidedown on the sky and i pretended that i was an angel. but in the sad place in the rock house there were coloring book windows that were sad and the faces were sad in the windows. so why did ray my other one say that it was a happy place? maybe she was saying in the wrong way and not in the right way and when I pretended that it made me sad. i am glad you never went there no-we because it was a sad place and ray my other one said that in the grass outside of the rock house there were people sleeping in the ground and it made me afraid but she said that they were sleeping and only waiting to go to the best place with God and Jesus and the angels on the day that he came to wake them. i pretended  no-we but i was still afraid and i was sad for the people sleeping in the ground outside the rock house. but ray said no jo-gee they are the good people the people in the ground and that they are not bad and she said not to be sad or afraid and that they would hear the angels marching on the day when God and Jesus and the angels came to wake them. they are good not bad and it is happy she said see jo-gee but I was afraid.

 

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they said to pretend to say about the time we went to the little house inside the big house when it was time to take me to a better place because i would be happy in the better place, do you remember? i remember day and ma and ray my other one and you no-we in the car and it was sad but it was supposed to happy but it was sad. and day was saying in the good way and not in the bad way and that was not the way it was in the time before and i pretended to say to you that i was sad and you pretended too and you pretended to say jo-gee jo-gee dont be sad we are all of us everyone of us here forever and ever with you forever jo-gee so never be sad be happy, do you remember? i remember that day in the car. it was a long time and then the houses were alone again like on the way to the happy place where we went on the boat on the water and it was like flying on the sky upsidedown like the angels and i pretended that i was an angel and that i could fly and sing and sing upsidedown on the sky. but it wasnt a better place no-we. it wasnt it wasnt i knew it i did know it wasnt a better place but a sad place no-we. why did i have to go to that far away place where the people were saying and saying and i was afraid and sad no-we? like the houses that were alone and far away on that day in the car. no-we? do you remember? they said to pretend to say again about the little house inside the big house where we went to sleep on the way to the better place because it was a good place and a happy place and they said to pretend to say about it again so that you hear and that you will remember.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Finis 4.16.2012