ACE

We discovered the airplane the summer after the Polio had swept through town and left Skeeter Fitch with his paralyzed left leg strapped into a steel brace. On that June morning, Moe—who was called that because his mother cut his black hair in a bowl-cut like Moe Howard, one of the Three Stooges—led us down the dirt road behind our neighborhood, thick woods on one side and barbed-wire fence on the other.

Moe carried a whacking stick, which was just what it sounds like: a long heavy stick he used to whack against trees, fence posts, and other kids who got in his way.

His sidekick, Skeeter, gimped along behind. Skeeter was pale and already filthy, as usual, from rolling on the ground to get away from Moe’s whacking stick. Behind him walked Barry Raines—we called him Brains because he was already taking algebra in some sort of brainiac class at Central High School, even though he was only in eighth grade, like the rest of us.

Except my little brother, Robbie the Runt. Robbie the Runt was a puny little puke of a kid, my parents’ darling, who always got to tag along even though he was three years younger than me. Robbie wasn’t a bad kid—didn’t say much, did what he was told, never complained. He was just there—permanently, eternally there. Wherever I went, I would turn around and bump into the kid and he would give me his goofy grin and just stand there, getting in my way. Robbie the Runt was a smart kid, always reading biographies of George Washington and President Eisenhower and the Wright brothers and about how the Constitution was made. But try to show him how to patch a bicycle tire and he’d look at you like you just landed from Mars.

At the supper table, our dad would always get Robbie to show off what he was reading. Then he would shoot his cuffs—he always wore his office clothes to the supper table—and say to me, “And what are you reading, Marshall?” And he would look at me without blinking through his horn-rimmed glasses and steeple his clean fingers and I would feel about two inches tall. I didn’t read books. Books were hard for me. The letters danced out of reach and the sentences didn’t make a lot of sense unless I went really slow, and then I got bored and started to look out the window or whatever.

But give me a tool, something with weight that you could hold in your hand, a mechanical connection, something that bolted on or screwed in or turned a crank, and I could get lost for hours. I’d rebuilt our lawn mower twice and even tuned the engine in the Buick when Dad was out of town on business and he never noticed.

I had built a whole squadron of airplane models that hung on wires in the bedroom I shared with Robbie the Runt—not the easy plastic models but wooden models that came as blueprints and sheets of balsa wood and linen, and you had to cut the struts and frames and stretch the linen over the wings and fuselage and dope it to make it tight, attach little wires to the ailerons so they moved up and down and to the tail rudder so it cocked left or right. I bought them at the Western Auto with money I saved from my paper route. Mr. Rutledge, the manager, would order them for me special.

At night, lying in bed and listening to my parents argue downstairs, I’d stare up at the airplanes and watch them spin slowly in the breeze sifting in from the open window. The streetlight cast their shadows against the far wall, and I’d imagine flying—soaring and diving and looping all over the sky, my fist curled around the joystick, the wind flying past my face, my brother and all his stupid books far below in a miniature world that didn’t matter. I’d fall asleep watching the shadows dance across the wall. It was beautiful to see and lifted my heart on bad nights when I lay awake fearing that I would never amount to anything, which was a lot of nights. I miss them even now.

So at the supper table, I would just grin stupidly and say to my dad, “Well, the new Archie comic book is a real hoot.” And get sent my room—again—where I could work on my Sopwith Camel or Gypsy Moth.

Beyond the barbed-wire fence lay old man Saylor’s farm. He never raised anything but a few milk cows and horses, who had the run of the pastures and the creek. The pastures were all overgrown with burrs and blackberry bushes, and wherever an oak tree grew the space around it was an island of high, dense bramble thicket, ideal for a fort. Our fort in the woods had been bulldozed over during the winter to make room for more cheapo houses in a new subdivision. Now all the woods was surveyed and marked off with stakes, and by the end of the summer it would all be gone. So we were roaming farther afield, daring for the first time to venture across the barbed wire into unknown territory.

You could see out across the pasture to the creek, the sun already high enough to make us squint. Beyond the creek lay more pastures, more fences. On the rusty barbed wire hung a sign hand-painted in red letters on gray barnwood:

Trespassers wil be persecuted to the fool extend of the LAW

by 2 mongrel DOGS and a 12-gage SHOTGUN

what hain’t loded with sofer cushins

“That don’t mean nothing,” Moe said. “Them dogs been dead for fifty years.” Moe was a raw-boned kid with a head that was too big, his mop of black hair always flopping in his face so that he was constantly slicking it back with his left hand. He’d already done a stint in juvie for breaking into houses, and it was a sure bet he was going back someday soon. His father was a drinker and used to disappear for days on end and sometimes come home in a police car, and none of the grownups ever talked about it—except that Moe was one of the boys we were not allowed to play with.

But old man Saylor had a reputation for being eccentric and mean, and just maybe he had new mongrel dogs. Maybe he replaced the old mongrel dogs every couple of years, like some people replaced their old cars. Once when I was coming back from fishing the creek farther up the dirt road, I had caught a glimpse of one big yellow dog loping along the pasture near the house, and of old Mr. Saylor himself standing on the porch calling his yellow dog home. He was a tall, bony man dressed all in dungarees, with thick white hair and beard, like an Old Testament prophet. In those days the only men in our neighborhood who wore beards were the hobos who wandered in from the B&O railroad tracks. Old Mr. Saylor looked my way and shaded his eyes with a hand, like he was scouting, and I ran all the way home.

Skeeter unlaced the leather straps from his leg brace, stripped it off from his dungarees, and stuffed it behind a bush, the way he always did, so he wouldn’t get it all muddy—or else his old man would whip him with his army belt—then slipped between two strands of wire.

Careful to avoid the cow flop, we humped through the brown grass, already greening up, smelling the humid June air buzzing with flies and sweet with honeysuckle, scratched our way through brambles and crossed the creek on stepping-stones into the pasture farthest from old man Saylor’s house. Beyond this field there was one last fence and a long drop into an abandoned borrow pit, a big sandy-clay hole in the earth where dump trucks used to haul out gravel and sand when they built our subdivision. But they didn’t go there anymore, hadn’t for a long time.

The wind suddenly kicked up out of nowhere—sluicing through a kind of natural funnel between two forested hills over the borrow pit and right into our faces. The grass rustled and hissed, and suddenly the whole pasture seemed to be alive and cooler. The wind lifted my black and orange Orioles cap right off my head and I had to chase it down as it cartwheeled through the high grass.

We crawled on hands and knees through a thicket island into the middle of an open space and inside the shady cave made by a rotten pasture oak and all the brambles, and when we stood up and brushed the grass and leaves off our dungarees and T-shirts, we were staring at a dilapidated barn roofed in rusty tin. There it stood, totally invisible from outside the thicket. We pushed through the double front door and saw it had through-and-through double doors, so you could drive equipment in and out without backing up. The back double doors were closed and locked by a heavy wooden bar.

And smack in the center of the dirt floor stood an old airplane—or what was left of one. A fuselage and wings without an engine, a glider. Just a big box kite really, the wings faded yellow fabric over wooden frames, the ghost of a bright idea, lying there in a shed overgrown with sumac and nettles.

“Too cool!” said Moe, and we swarmed over the glider. On the lower wing was a cradle for a pilot to lie in while flying it. “Out of the clear blue Western sky comes Sky King!” Moe yelled and sprawled onto it and the struts in the wing crunched under his weight.

Brains said, “Get off—you’re too heavy! Jeez, what a fat load.”

Moe got to his feet. His eyes shone with that look a boy’s eyes get when his little brain is hatching a dangerous and stupid idea. He turned to Skeeter. “You thinking what I’m thinking?”

Skeeter grinned. He was always missing teeth. He began flapping his arms. “Wild blue yonder, man,” he said.

The glider was in bad shape, the canvas wings moldy, torn in patches. A couple of struts were warped and some of the braces were cracked. But the shape of the thing was there, a beautifully efficient machine for soaring through the air. I recognized it. I had one just like it hanging from the ceiling of my room: a 1912 Sparrowhawk glider. Two wings, a thin blade of a frame reaching back to a tail section with swallowtail winglets and a curved vertical stabilizer. The little history card that had come with the model kit claimed that the Sparrowhawk had once held the world glider record, soaring for more than an hour off some mountain peak out West. The curved skids on its undercarriage were propped on a kind of wheeled bogie on narrow rusty tracks that disappeared at the back door of the shed—what we now saw was really a hangar.

We had all heard tales of old man Saylor, how he had made his fortune inventing gadgets for the Army, how he used to fly a private plane right off his pasture. How his only son, Cal Junior, was killed in the Big War, when his B-17 was shot down over Germany, and the old man never went off the place again but holed up in the house with his dogs. He built a cabin on the property for his son’s pregnant wife, who died in childbirth, and one night he burned down the cabin on purpose. His twenty-year-old granddaughter, Penny, had just got married last year. It was in the paper. They had the wedding right on the farm and none of us knew anybody who was invited.

But I had never heard about any gliders.

The rusty track, like a miniature railroad, ran to the back doors. On an instinct, I removed the wooden bolt from the back doors and flung one of them open. The breeze rushed in and quivered the wings of the glider. From the open door, I could look down the sloping swale of pasture to a small rise, then a dip to the fence, the point where it dropped off into the borrow pit, and a few hundred yards beyond the pit, I could see green grass. I said, “Looks like he launched it from right back here, into the wind.”

We kicked around in the high grass and discovered the rest of the overgrown steel track that ran down the slope. I walked slowly down the slope and stood at the barbed-wire fence, where a double gate had been fixed at the end of the track and was locked by a rusty chain and padlock, looking out across the borrow pit to the other side. The pit had been carved right out of the pasture, and it lay before me like an open wound—sides scraped and scarred, a hundred feet below, the red clay glistening with pools of stagnant oily water, looking like everything that was missing from my life. The wind was steady on my face. That was why he had launched it from here: the wind. You need wind to generate airspeed over the wings and lift the glider.

The rails ran for maybe a hundred feet to the edge of the pit, about as far as I could throw a baseball.

Moe ran to the fence, jumping up and down with glee, Skeeter and Robbie the Runt close behind. “Jesus H. Christ!” he shouted. “This is going to be the best!”

“That crate ain’t in no shape to fly,” I reminded him. “It’s all rotten.”

Moe grabbed me by the collar of my polo shirt. “Don’t you want to do something great? I mean something really great? That they’d remember forever and tell stories about? Man, oh man! Jesus H. Christ, Marsh, it doesn’t get any cooler than this!”

I said, “It’s all busted up.”

Moe stood toe-to-toe with me, so close I could smell him, sour and rank. “You’re scared. That’s what it is.”

“I ain’t scared.”

“Look at us, Marsh. Take a good look.” He spun slowly around, flapping his arms at the woods, the pasture, the sky. “Where are we going? You think I’m going anywhere?”

“High school,” I said.

Moe snorted. “Yeah, Central High. Home of the losers. You, me, and the gimp here.”

“Brains will do OK.”

“Right. If his old man don’t get transferred again.” Brains had been to four schools in four years. My parents said his dad didn’t get transferred—he just couldn’t hold a job.

“Only one thing an airplane is good for,” Skeeter said.

Robbie the Runt tugged at my wrist. I turned and looked into his squinty eyes. He said quietly, “You can fix it.” His nose was running snot.

“Wipe your nose, Runt.”

He stared at me earnestly, swiped a bare hand across his nose, the little Orioles cap he wore in imitation of mine askew on his crew cut. “You can make it fly.”

I shook him off my arm. “You’re dreaming, Runt. It ain’t a model.” But I could already see it in my mind’s eye: the restored glider, wings bright yellow, holding the sunlight as it slipped down the slope on a greased track, then swept through the open gate and lifted into the sky. I watched it soar across the ugly chasm of the borrow pit, a quick shadow darkening the glassy clay pools far below, then skidding down gently into the high grass on the other side.

And that settled it. A bunch of restless boys with all summer on their hands who don’t mind stealing lumber and canvas and paint can fix up anything.

 

What we didn’t worry about:

It never occurred to us that the Sparrowhawk didn’t belong to us, that we would essentially be stealing it. All of us except Robbie the Runt were already experienced thieves—money from our moms’ pocketbooks, penknives from the Western Auto, Christmas ornaments off lawns.

We didn’t worry about old man Saylor catching us and turning us in to the cops. Nobody had been in that barn in years and years, and from the cover of that thicket surrounding the front of the hangar, we could spot anybody coming literally a mile away.

And we never really considered the possibility that the Sparrowhawk glider wouldn’t fly but instead pitch into the borrow pit and cartwheel into pieces at the bottom. Not out loud, anyways.

But that’s all I thought about.

Skeeter was a great scrounge, and he turned up with two old Boy Scout tents and his mother’s sewing box, to fix the damaged wings. My job was supervising the rebuild. Moe and I stole framing lumber from one of the house-building sites, a few sticks at a time so it wouldn’t be noticed, working at night and dragging the heavy pieces down to the pasture in the dark so we could retrieve them in the morning and haul them the rest of the way with the others helping. Moe stole a can of yellow highway marker paint from his father’s truck.

I cut apart the tents and stitched new patches over the frames. It wasn’t easy—the fabric was stiff and the needles kept breaking off. My hands were all cut and raw from the stitching. And before we could even do that, we had to shave down two-by-fours using handsaws and planes, shaping the pieces to match the ones we were replacing. Then we rabbetted joints and screwed them together, hoping they would hold. The new wings took three whole gallons of paint thinner, the closest we had to dope. Moe came up with a spool of baling wire so we could re-rig the wing and tail supports.

I took the model from our bedroom out to the hangar and kept it there so I could compare it to the full-sized glider and make sure we were doing it right.

One night Dad came into our room to say good night and noticed the empty wire. “Where’s the yellow one?”

“I traded it for a catcher’s mitt,” I lied, hoping he wouldn’t ask to see the mitt.

He said, “I just hope you’re not hanging out with that Moe Gargan character. I hear he’s been caught stealing again. I don’t want you winding up on the police blotter.”

I had no idea what the police blotter was, but that was my father’s favorite warning. I guessed it was some big book at the police station which listed which boys weren’t ever going to amount to anything. You’d go looking for a job ten years from now, and the guy would say, “Can’t hire you, son—your name’s on the police blotter.” Boys whose names were on the police blotter were doomed to sorry, broken lives. Like Moe and Skeeter. And probably me, too. Just a matter of time.

We worked every day, all day, taking time out to wolf down peanut butter sandwiches and cokes for lunch, then starting right back in.

Robbie the Runt and Skeeter acted as lookouts. Moe cleared the track and greased it with two cans of Crisco he stole from the A&P, then cut the chain off the fence gate using bolt cutters he borrowed from his father’s workshop.

Brains did the math: what our takeoff speed had to be, how far the Sparrowhawk would glide on a certain wind velocity, how far it would drop. He set up an anemometer, which he had stolen from the high-school physics lab, to measure the wind velocity. Skeeter contributed a windsock made from one of his mother’s nylon stockings and Moe hung it on an aluminum clothes pole liberated from somebody’s backyard, mounted against one of the fence posts at the edge of the borrow pit.

After a few days of calculating, Brains announced, “I don’t know if it will make it across.”

“What do you mean, you don’t know?” Moe asked him.

“What I said, butt-face.”

Moe smacked him on the head, the way he was always doing to Skeeter. He didn’t do it to me, because I was almost as big as Moe.

“Cut it out!” Brains said. “Look.” He held out a notebook full of equations. Moe and I studied it, like we knew what it said, but for all we knew it could have been a Chinese crossword puzzle. “You don’t get it, do you?”

We just stared at him.

“You’re too heavy.”

“Who is?” Moe demanded.

“You are. And you, too, Marshall. And Skeeter. And me, for that matter. The payload has got to be seventy pounds, max. Sixty would be better.”

Robbie the Runt, as usual, poked his nose in where it didn’t belong. “I’ll do it,” he said brightly. “I can fly. Marsh can show me how.” He was grinning like a moron. “Can’t you, Marsh?”

They all looked at me. For once he was right. For once, a runt was exactly what we needed. “Yeah,” I said. “Sure, Runt.”

 

There are moments in a boy’s life when time stalls and he stands exactly on the verge of who he was and who he is going to be. The light is perfect, a shaft beamed right down from heaven, and even if he is in a crowd, he stands alone. It’s as if a chasm has opened up before him, narrow enough to step across, if he chooses to, and if he is sure-footed. But the chasm is also deep enough to swallow him forever if he stumbles. And if he does not step, the chasm grows wider and wider, till he can no longer step across. All that matters from now on will happen on the other side of that chasm, and he will lose his chance to be part of it.

It is a moment when he must depend wholly on his instincts, his intuition, that little voice inside that will, with the right word, make him a saint or a criminal. He must step across to the rest of his life.

In such a moment I saw Penny Saylor stepping out of the shadows and into the waning sunlight of the summer pasture. I had stayed behind when the other boys went home. For once Robbie the Runt was nowhere around. He’d had to go to the dentist that afternoon to get braces put on his teeth.

She didn’t see me at first. She was wearing cutoff shorts and a white blouse and her head was bowed so that her red hair fell around her face, hiding her eyes. She walked slowly through the high grass straight toward the hangar and stopped when she saw me at the edge of the thicket.

“I thought I saw somebody out here the other day,” she said without looking up.

“We don’t mean no harm,” I said.

“You found the old hangar,” she said and kept walking past me through the new entrance we had hacked out of the thicket till she stood inside the hangar. The Sparrowhawk gleamed like a yellow jewel. She laid a hand on one wing, as if feeling for a pulse. “This thing’s been out here since before I was even born. My grandfather always meant to try to fly it someday.”

“I bet he flew it plenty.”

She turned. “No, his boy died. My father. In the war. He stopped coming out here then.” She walked to the far door and unlatched it, swung it open. “That awful pit wasn’t even here then. It was just sloping pastureland all the way across.” She swept her hand toward the pit and for a moment I saw what she was seeing.

I wondered whether she would tell the old man, spoil everything. From where we were standing, the rails were plain to see and the nylon windsock fluttered in a fitful breeze.

“Tell you the truth? I think he was glad to have an excuse not to fly it. I think it scared him. I think you’d have to be crazy to try to fly a kite like this.”

“I bet it would work,” I said, but all at once my heart didn’t believe it anymore. All this time, I’d been operating under the assumption that we would only be trying to do what had already been done. But he had never flown across any borrow pit. Never flown at all.

Silence hung in the air like mist. You could touch it and feel it clammy on your skin. Then she looked at me. “You know what I just found out?” she said, looking weirdly distracted and calm.

“What?”

“My husband Bill. He’s dead. His car crashed up in Pennsylvania.”

I looked her full in the face and saw then that her green eyes were swollen red, that she must have been wandering around the pasture for hours. I had no idea what to say, so I took her hand in mine and kissed it. She hugged my arm to her breast and cried a little, and I was so close, her soft red hair brushed my face. I’d never been this close to any woman except my mother, and it felt so good I trembled.

“It’s this farm,” she said. “Everything dies here.”

The way she said it chilled me to the bone, but I had no idea what to say back.

She turned abruptly and touched the wing of the glider. “I’m glad you painted it,” she said. “It looks beautiful. It doesn’t look dead anymore.” Then she leaned my way and kissed me quickly on the cheek. “Be a good boy,” she said, “and walk me back to the creek.”

      

Two days later, on a cloudy Saturday, I watched a procession of cars rumble down the dirt lane to the Saylor farm. The funeral reception. The cars came and went in a pall of July dust and when they were gone I slipped into the pasture and made my way out to the hangar just to make sure everything was still there. Inside the hangar, in the dusty light, I listened to the first rain splatter against the tin roof. It was oddly comforting. I carefully climbed onto the pilot’s cradle and closed my eyes, swaying my body left and right to turn the rudder, hearing it swish behind me, tensioning the levers that controlled the wires and moved the ailerons, the way I had coached Robbie. I imagined Penny watching us fly, her red hair unfurled like a banner in the breeze, her face lighting up with wonder at what we were doing.

But I couldn’t hold the daydream. The rain drummed hard on the roof now, and my stomach was all knotted with a terrible conviction. Tomorrow afternoon, we were going to launch my little brother over the side of a cliff and watch him smash to pieces. And that would be the end of the world.

The next day was brilliant and breezy, with high cumulus clouds scudding in from the west. Robbie the Runt set himself in the cradle as he had practiced, grinning though his silver braces. Moe, Brains, and I took up our positions behind each wing and the tail and gently pushed the glider out of the barn into the light.

“You count us down, Robbie,” I said.

“Roger,” he said. I heard him take an exaggerated deep breath and start the countdown at ten. “Three, two, one—blastoff!” he squealed.

We shoved hard, walked, then ran, still pushing, Robbie prone across the wing. The glider slid down the greased rails, picking up speed. At the edge of the meadow we let go and staggered to a halt on the lip of the borrow pit and the plane kept going. We had done it, launched the beautiful Sparrowhawk into the sky, right off the rim of the borrow pit.

I watched the ground slip out from underneath Robbie and he was alone in the empty air, frozen, hands gripping the control wires.

Then the glider stalled and dipped toward the faraway bottom of the pit and the bottom dropped out of my heart. I caught a breathless glimpse of what it would be like to be free of childhood—the thrill of it, and the terror. I could not have said it in those words then, but that does not make it untrue. Most things that mattered then were far beyond my ability to put into sentences.

Robbie lost his hold, or maybe let go on purpose, and he tumbled out of the sky to the muddy-clay flank of the borrow pit and slid all the way to the bottom before he stopped. The yellow Sparrowhawk spun gracelessly in slow agonizing motion into the muddy pool at the bottom and splintered into junk. Robbie lay near it, slathered in mud. His high-top sneakers had come off. He wasn’t moving, and I saw death in his form, and I could not breathe—my whole chest had been sucked empty—then suddenly he twisted and scrabbled to his feet, dancing around in the mud, clapping his hands together and yelling at the sky like a crazy boy. He was all scratched up, filthy as a stray dog, but I never saw him so happy in his life.

      

Moe was right. It was the greatest thing we ever did. There was no keeping it a secret.

I spent the summer grounded, allowed out of the yard only to deliver my paper route. In a few months, my parents sent me to Catholic high school up in the city, to learn some discipline, they said. What I learned instead—at long last—was the mystery of books, how to spin thoughts into sentences and not feel so alone in this world. That turned out to be the happy accident of my life, the one thing I never expected. Moe and Skeeter went to Central High and we lost track of each other. Brains’s dad got transferred again and he left town forever.

The smashed-up Sparrowhawk rotted away at the bottom of the borrow pit, stabbed and broken in the oily water.

The day after the crash, a Wedgewood-blue Ford pickup truck pulled up in front of our house. We were all seated at the supper table, and I could see through the dining room window two figures coming slowly up the front walk. When the doorbell rang, I sprang up and ran to open it. Penny Saylor stood there in a bottle-green dress, her red hair pulled back in a ponytail, her face radiant with grief. Behind her stood a gaunt, bearded man. Her grandfather, old Mr. Saylor. He pointed to me and said abruptly, “This the one?”

Penny shook her head.

“Ah,” he said, pointing a stiff yellow finger at me. “Then you’re a little shit.”

“Yes, sir,” I said, the most honest admission of my life. “That would be me.”

He stared at me a moment longer and wrinkled his nose, as if I were some disgusting creature he had discovered by accident in his barn. “Just don’t grow up to be a bigger shit.”

Penny pointed behind me to Robbie the Runt, who as always was suddenly jostling at my elbow. My father stood in his suit and tie, a dinner napkin still pinned to his collar. “What’s this all about?” He was rattled, caught off-guard, and for an instant I wondered if old man Saylor was going to sock him for letting his wild boys destroy his beautiful 1912 Sparrowhawk glider airplane.

Mr. Saylor ignored him and reached out a hand to Robbie, drew him outside. “So you’re the one,” he said softly and bent down closer to him. “You’re the ace.” He shook his hand theatrically and placed something in it, then he turned without another word and walked back to his truck. Penny glanced back over her shoulder and smiled—at either Robbie or me, I couldn’t be sure.

Later that night, when we were tucked into our narrow beds on opposite sides of our room, with the lights out and the streetlight glancing off the ceiling in a little triangle, Dad came into our bedroom without knocking and threw all the airplane models out the window into the trash can. One by one, he snatched them off their wires and sailed them into the dark, and I think he enjoyed doing it. It was awful to watch. I lay on my bed and stared at nothing and didn’t say anything but just listened. You could hear each one splintering as it hit the steel rim of the trash can. He said not a word, but I could hear him choking on his anger, breathing in heavy chuffs.

And that splintering sound is the same sound I always hear whenever somebody’s dream gets busted.

After he was gone, Robbie called softly, “Marsh?”

“Yeah.”

“I can’t help it if I like reading books. I don’t mean to, you know. Show off.”

“It’s all right,” I told him. “You learn a lot. You know a lot.”

“I don’t know anything. Don’t know as much now as I knew yesterday.”

“Don’t talk stupid.”

It was a hot, humid night, and we lay on our beds uncovered, sweating on the sheets. Those sticky nights always seemed to last forever. Far off, a train rumbled by on the B&O track and let loose a horn blast at the crossing in town.

“Marsh? I’ve got to tell you something.”

“It’s OK, Robbie. Whatever it is.”

“Tonight? It wasn’t the first time I ever saw Penny Saylor.”

“What?” I was up on my elbow staring across the dim light filtered by the wavy curtains. Overhead, the empty wires swayed silently, released from the weight of the airplanes they had once held. The dancing wires made it seem like the ghosts of the airplanes were still dangling there in the breeze.

“I came looking for you that day. When she was crying. I heard you talking to her.”

So I told him my secret. “Old man Saylor never flew that glider. You were the first.”

“I know, Marsh.”

“You don’t get it.” 

“Just ’cause you think it was a certain way doesn’t make it so.”

What could I say to the kid? I had pushed him down that track, launched him toward a big hole in the ground. If I was really honest with myself, I knew that glider would never get off the ground. I knew what I was doing to him. Some part of me, the part that inspired such black anger in my father, wanted to watch it happen—the joyful calamity of it, the greatness of the awful thing. I was pretty low-down, all right.

Robbie said, “I was pretty sure, you know, if anybody could. I was pretty sure you could make it fly.”

“Pretty sure?”

“Well, if it didn’t, the joke would be on you. You’d be on the police blotter forever.”

That sent us both into fits of laughing. Jeez, what a dumb puke. What a stupid runt of a kid brother. We were all on the police blotter forever, now.

All the laughter ran out of us after a while, and I was remembering Penny and how I had walked her to the creek that awful day. What I was seeing on her face was more than plain sorrow. It was the loss of hope. The future taken from her. And for just a few minutes, as I held her hand and guided her along the little path and watched her feet stumble because she was crying too hard to see where she was stepping, I was bigger and stronger and better and older than I would be for many years to come, and at least I could hold onto that to balance out the other.

Then I remembered. “What did he give you? Mr. Saylor?” I looked across to his bed and he held something up. The streetlight glinted off a little pair of silver wings.

“The real deal,” Robbie said, and flipped them across the room. I caught them and was surprised at the solid weight of them in my hand. I tossed them back to Robbie and heard his hand slap around them.

Robbie was a doer after all. He read books not because he wanted to know about Washington and Teddy Roosevelt, but because he wanted to be Teddy Roosevelt, to charge up San Juan Hill. I was the one who watched and never did anything. What did I ever do? The biggest model I ever built nose-dived into the clay pit.

Wreckage, that was all I had ever made. Me. Just a little shit who was probably going to grow up to be a bigger shit. Old Mr. Saylor’s fierce blue eyes held the truth. I kept seeing him, hearing him say it over and over.

Then after a little while I was crying. Robbie said, “You OK, Marsh?”

“Shut up,” I said.

“He didn’t get one of them.”

“What are you talking about?”

Robbie giggled, whispered, “The Sparrowhawk. The model. It’s still out there in the hangar.”

The wires overhead fluttered with their phantom wings. “Go to sleep, Ace.”

The Robert Watson Literary Prize Story TINY LITTLE NOTHING

I stole the doctor’s stethoscope. I pocketed it on my way out of the ER. It was an awful, impulsive thing to do, but I did it anyway. Now the river is screaming across the rocks, maybe asking me something, maybe not.

The Roanoke River is spectacular and gross. My father used to bring us here to skip rocks. He said God made this river and people polluted it. We weren’t allowed to go in.

“It’s dirty,” he said and skipped another flat stone across.

I’d like to press the stethoscope against the water’s surface, find out if the old thing still has a heartbeat, but I know the answer already and settle instead onto a silt-covered rock, just beyond the reaches of the river. I don’t want its dirty fluid fingers touching me. I’m sure it would infect my own newly stitched finger, driving me back to the doctor and his endless questions. “Does it throb or just ache?” I don’t know.

There’s a 3 am show on church radio called Yoga-Jesus. Dennis the Christian Menace hosts the show from a little radio station in the back of a truck stop in Virginia Beach. He’s always saying, “Your body knows what it needs.” I listen to the show when I can’t sleep and want to hear someone else’s voice. “Ask your body,” says the radio man, “what do you need?”

I come to this spot at the river often, always wondering what it is about this place that draws me to it. I ask my body, but she is silent, only present enough these days to remind me that we are no longer on speaking terms.

Whatever brings me here, it isn’t the nasty leftovers forever littering the place, remnants of past strangers who stopped here too. There are beer cans, the occasional used condom, pieces of tires, biggie cups from drive-thrus, and always a stray sock, somehow a different one every time. Today the sock is gray, with yellow stitching at the toe, like some awful promise of brighter days ahead.

     

My mother says everyone has their mountain to climb. Some time ago she suggested that maybe I’ve climbed mine. It was another way of saying maybe I’ve suffered enough.

It’s an absurd notion. After she said it, we laughed.

Who has suffered enough? What does that even mean?

If it does mean something, it certainly doesn’t apply to me. Unless you’re willing to concede that privilege is a kind of suffering—in which case, yes, perhaps I’ve suffered enough.

I was nineteen when my life imploded and my mother started suggesting that maybe I was climbing my mountain and would reach the summit soon. It was her version of what our rabbi kept saying: “It will pass. It will pass.”

I kept thinking, “Like a kidney stone it will.”

My mother says things get better because they get over. Even life, she says, you live and then you die. Find comfort in that. It gets over.

My priest, like my Catholic grandmother—the one on my dad’s side—does not agree. My priest talks to me about life everlasting and suggests I return to the confessional a bit more regularly than I have, say, ever in the past.

I asked him his thoughts on hope. He called himself “a big fan.” He meant he’s a big fan in the way that someone might be a college football fan, but I can’t stop thinking of him as an actual fan. “I’m a big fan,” he said, and I imagined a fan so much bigger than a ceiling fan, something like the rotor blades of a helicopter—a giant fan facing the sun, big enough to lift off, to fly rescue missions through hurricane winds and save people clinging to trees or already neck deep in the floodwaters.

I’d like to be a fan like that, fly right over those mountains. But I am not. That said, my most recent haircut involved so much of the technique called “feathering” that I would not be surprised if I suddenly became airborne, not like a hope-fan but like a new strain of bird flu.

Of course, everyone’s nice about my haircut. Everyone says they love it.

I hate it. It’s almost exactly the haircut I didn’t ask for. It’s a Richard Gere-inspired voluptuous mullet.

I’ve had this haircut before.

How is that even possible? I guess it’s the go-to haircut for people like me—people with curly-wavy hair and no straightening iron, unassertive types with deer-in-the-headlights eyes, who enter places like Cheap Cuts and anxiously request “something simple, just a trim, really.”

This time I tried. I even took a picture, made eye contact, and said, “This is what I want.”

The hairdresser took one look at me, my frizzy, damaged, vitamin-deficient hair, and said, “You style your hair every day? You gonna straighten it, mousse it, curl it?”

I stared at my feet. “No.”

“Well then, you don’t want that haircut. I know what you want. Come on.”

I imagined she knew something I did not. And even if she didn’t, I told myself, it doesn’t really matter. Hair grows.

I let her do what she wanted.

My mother said I should have said no thanks when the hairdresser said she wouldn’t cut my hair like the picture I gave her, but my mother also said it’s the best haircut I’ve had in years. It’s hard to win sometimes, harder still to know when to trust your own instincts and when to trust someone else’s.

When she started tapering my hair, I could have said, “No. Stop.” But she’d already started and more to the point, what if I’d asked her to stop and she hadn’t? Better then to consent, to say, “I like what you’re doing with those side bangs. It’s like an avalanche of layers.” At least this way I can pretend that I got what I asked for.

People keep telling me to find a hairdresser I trust and stick with that person. But how do you find someone trustworthy, someone who listens? And how many more times will I have to try again?

Most people I know spend big dollars on haircuts. I’m a self-employed clown and a part-time intern. I can’t take their salon suggestions. So I bounce around, trying different haircut places, only ever finding people who give me their go-to, short-in-front pseudo-mullet for women with curly-wavy hair. After this latest adventure, reeling from the horror of my apparent incapacity to communicate with people holding scissors, I decided to cut my own hair.

      

The other day my aunt asked me about any possible love interests and then suggested I start volunteering at the fire station.

“Firemen,” she said. “Right?”

Right. Someone who specializes in putting out fires would be perfect for me. Most firemen are probably a real catch.

“They’re strong and brave. They risk their lives to help people. I’ve never met one I didn’t like,” she said.

She’s probably right. I don’t know. I’m better at picking hairstylists than I am at picking men.

Besides, after the last two bad listeners I loved, I haven’t the nerve to date anyone, so the whole conversation is moot. I’m exaggerating. I’ve dated maybe half a dozen men in the last four years, most of them very briefly. I’m not even sure it ought to be called dating.

And it isn’t true that I loved two of them and it isn’t true that two were bad listeners. I only really loved one, Jake—the one who was on-again-off-again during all those years. That he is also the one who didn’t know how to hear me, or didn’t even try to, is perhaps the part where my story falls apart, where it becomes clear that the violence perpetrated against me is violence I perpetrated against myself. I knew what he was about. And yet somehow I let myself spiral back to him again and again.

We were eighteen when we met. He was still a boy-man and I was so naïve. I managed to keep him at arm’s length for that first year, let intuition guide me in the other direction when he started serenading me with songs like “Steal My Kisses.” Or, I guess that isn’t intuition, I guess it’s common sense. In any event, the sick feeling in my stomach only worsened when he said things like, “I thought if we got drunk and had sex, then we’d be dating.” This after I very specifically did not get drunk and have sex with him.

But year nineteen brought with it a special variety of self loathing, and I sought out that son-of-a-bitch like he was the answer to my prayers.

Only recently have I been able to consider the whole mess with anything resembling honesty, and even now real and imagined memories merge and I can’t always decipher what is and isn’t true.

      

I’m twenty-two years old. I know what I want. It’s way past time to be bold and go for it. That’s what I told myself after this latest thirteen-dollar haircut and a lot too much whiskey. Pixie cut here we come. I heard sharp scissors were a must for cutting hair, so I tried to sharpen mine with a knife sharpener, sliced through my first finger, and ended up in the ER being stitched back together.

At least I have my Halloween costume all figured out. I’ll be Richard Gere for the third year in a row.

I’m kidding. I don’t celebrate Halloween. It’s too scary. I mean, it’s fine for kids, but I don’t understand the adult version. Parties are frightening enough without people in costume. Even a clown, in the wrong hands, can become perverse. And if I never see another drunk man in a priest costume hitting on a sexy kitten for as long as I live, it will be too soon.

I attended a university in a town I call Collegeville, where Halloween is a terror-fest of too many young men in masks tearing through tangled legs in festive fishnet stockings.

I majored in religion. It made a nice counterweight to Collegeville’s corporeal hellhole. My professors recommended outside reading.

“I think you might enjoy Elizabeth Bishop.”

Might I ever. And is that curly-wavy hair on Bishop in her photograph on the Library of America Series edition of her collected works?

I think it is.

 

But those days are over. I’ve graduated, moved on, am making my way in the world, no more school days for me. It’s a quieter pace—the life of a clown—or it would be if my mind would ever stop racing.

Whiskey slows me down, but the ER doctor told me no alcohol while I’m on these little painkillers for my finger. In that way scissoring myself this morning may prove the catalyst for some serious self-improvement.

I’ve been meaning to stop drinking for some time now.

Drunk Tiny is no good to anyone.

That’s my name, by the way, Tiny. It’s a nickname. I like nicknames. They’re friendly and intimate, but not too intimate. Everyone doesn’t need to know my name name. Nicknames offer protection. A desecrated body is one thing, a desecrated name is quite another.

Sober Tiny liked being around people and was good company. And when I wasn’t around people, I found refuge and companionship in books, but not anymore. I can’t calm down long enough to read the first chapter of anything.

These days codes are my company. They speak to me. We sit together, on the edge of my bed when I button the last oversized button on my sequined vest. We listen to the whir of the ceiling fan and invent other meanings for things.

It helps me understand my own history. Because “no” could mean “yes,” if you’re working from a code where opposites represent each other, like a language of contradiction. In that context “stop” could mean “more” and “you’re hurting me” could mean “I like it when you do that.” If you knew that this code was at work, then it would make sense when other people heard only everything you were not saying. Then language might not feel so impotent, so unreliable, so able to betray.

 

Here’s an actual fact: my last clown gig was at an ice skating rink. Davy was turning four. I was the entertainment.

I don’t have children. To overcompensate I sell my balloon-making services to the dull parents of children who will never be mine and who will, more than likely, not care for my one-woman clown act. It’s ironic, and tone driven, and the children don’t get it.

I don’t fault them for it. Most children are very serious. When I was a child my brother and I spent whole afternoons playing Leviathan on the jungle gym in our backyard. Our grandmother’d been reading to us from the Book of Job.

We were little and literal. “Hear the ocean monster roar!” my big brother shouted from the top of the slide. I was the monster. He was Job. The game was for him to try to catch me long enough to tie any one of our brightly colored jump ropes to the back of my corduroy overalls like a leash. We were eight and six. I roared.

“Your life will never be as fine as it is now,” said the bent voice of our neighbor from behind the vine-covered fence separating our yards. “When I was a child I was happy, too.”

It was Mrs. McGregor. I clung to the swing set and my brother dropped rocks down the slide. “You’ll put holes in the slide doing that,” she said. “Is that what you want?” My brother said nothing. He dropped another rock down the slide.

The screen door opened and our mother stood on the back porch calling our names. “Lunch!” she said.

My brother raced down the slide and into the house behind our mother. I ran after them, but the voice on the other side of the fence stopped me. “Someday your mother will die.”

I stood still in the grass, my bare feet unable to carry me farther toward the safety of crustless sandwiches and juice. “That’s right,” said the voice. “Your brother will die, too. I was the youngest once, just like you are. Everyone you love will die.”

“That isn’t true,” I whispered and ran inside.

Children let everything scare them.

In my car, in my clown suit, painting my face in the parking lot of the ice park prior to Davy’s birthday, a child on her way into the party saw me and burst into tears. I hoped the birthday boy’s father would pay me. The fathers give better tips. They ask, “Is this your only job? Have you always been a clown? Is it difficult to make balloon animals?” They say, “That teddy bear you made was impressive.” Then, embarrassed for me and all that talk of balloons, or anxious to demonstrate their own wealth, they overpay.

Inside the ice park, I regretted not having worn long underwear under my striped pants. It was cold. A little fellow—he looked about six—introduced himself to me at the door. “I’m Mark, Davy’s brother,” he said. “My mother’s over there.” He pointed toward a round, beautiful woman hanging streamers around the door between the party room and the ice rink. I started toward her, but the child stopped me.

He wanted a train. I’d never made a balloon train before. I gave a snake wheels and handed it to the child. He thanked me and gestured to my oversized, inflatable clown shoes. He said they were very pretty, but if my feet were really that big, they might not have skates to fit.

The mother wanted me stationed beside the presents. I knew that it would be a busy party, that most of the guests would themselves be three and four years old and, accordingly, would not be successful ice skaters. Instead they would spend the afternoon in the party room with the clown.

Toward the end of the event the ice park manager—a slender man who smelled of cigarette smoke and cologne—commented on my vest. He said he liked it. My clown vest is covered in silver sequins. The buttons are multicolor pompom balls of yarn. “It fits you so nicely,” he said.

A little girl in a dinosaur sweater ran over to me in her socks. Her mother, on a bench by the lockers, called after her to put her shoes on, but then gave up. The child asked for a red dog, big like Clifford. When she left, promising her new dog a piece of birthday cake, the manager asked me if I ever work at adult parties.

He said, “The balloon arts also appeal to an older, more sophisticated audience, yes?”

I told him I worked at a carnival some Girl Scouts sponsored at the senior citizens’ home once.

The manager laughed, said that wasn’t quite what he had in mind. Then he offered me a free fountain drink. He said anything you want, coming right up.

I said thanks anyway.

Then a pair of children came over to me—identical twins. They wanted hats that looked different. When they left, the manager, who seemed to be forever inching closer, said, “You’re good with children.”

I wanted to tell him off. I wanted that party to be over already. And when it was, I waited for Davy’s mother to pay what she owed. The manager kept talking, but I had no more kindness in me, and I stopped listening.

 

The river could lull a person to sleep. Water is sly and dangerous that way. I fell asleep in the bathtub once, years ago. It’s amazing I didn’t drown. When I woke up the water had all drained out of the tub and I was covered with bubbles.

I dreamt sharks were eating me.

My rabbi says dreams are like codes we must learn to decipher.

My mother says I should pay more attention to what I’m doing.

“What do you mean?”

“The coffee, darling, it’s all over you.” That was two days ago. I stopped by her house on my way home from Davy’s birthday party.

She was right. I was missing my own mouth—drinking too quickly, too clumsily, too distractedly, letting the dark liquid dribble onto my striped turtleneck, like a baby without a bib.

“Are you OK?” she said.

Would you believe me if I said I am? If I said it’s nothing? If I asked you to stop time and carry us all in the other direction, could you work that trick? I wondered, white paper napkin to my mouth and then my shirt, cleaning up the coffee.

“You must be tired,” she said.

I must be lost. I told her I needed to go home—change my shirt, take a nap, get some work done. She wrapped up half a pecan pie for me to take home.

When I got to my apartment, I turned on the ceiling fans. I washed the paint off my face. I changed into pajamas. I don’t know why I still put on pajamas. I don’t sleep. I haven’t for weeks. It’s like being strung out on nothing. The good news is I don’t dream anymore. I don’t dream anymore. Dreams are messages from God. We must learn to decipher them. But what about nightmares, I asked my rabbi.

“You must learn to decipher them, too,” said my rabbi. “Do not be afraid,” she said. But I am afraid. “It will pass,” she said.

  

Yesterday morning I went in for an emergency appointment with that psychiatrist my mother is always slipping into conversations. Most recently the conversation went this way:

“Remember Lottie?” said my mother.

“Crazy Lottie?”

My mother said she’s not crazy anymore. Lottie went to see that nice doctor and now she’s co-chair of the Potato Festival. She really got it together. Then my mother said, as though her main point was about the festival and not about the psychiatrist, “If you keep working on your clown routine, you might be able to work at the Potato Festival, too.”

All the clinics have at least one opening for emergency appointments, also known as walk-ins for impulsive types who wouldn’t be able to make and keep an appointment if their life actually did depend on it. There are public service announcements about it on the radio all the time. Thinking of killing yourself? Don’t. Help is here. Stop in at such-and-such clinic at such-and-such time, and someone will be there to listen to you. Then they say it all again in Spanish.

I hope the people at those clinics speak other languages, too. I’m sure a person can be mentally ill in more than two languages. Anyway, I wasn’t thinking of killing myself. I was just feeling a little fiery, a little sleep deprived, and maybe a little depressed.

I filled out the health insurance forms and flipped to the next page in the clipboard packet. I made it through the first few questions—name, weight, occupation. I was honest enough, and I even resisted adding margin notes, for the most part. But the next question I came to was less straightforward.

I went back to the front desk.

“You all done?” the nurse asked from behind the sliding glass window.

“No. I’ve only finished the first part. What’s this questionnaire?”

“It’s a self-assessment,” said the nurse. “It helps the doctor get a sense of where you are.”

“I’m right here.”

“Funny,” said the nurse. “Finish the form.” She closed the window. I tapped on the glass.

“Is it mandatory?”

“You don’t have to fill it out,” said the nurse. “That’s a choice you can make. Of course, it’s a choice we’ll make note of.”

I returned to my carpet-covered waiting room seat. The self-assessment was like a maze: Do you experience moderate to extreme anger sometimes, frequently, or all of the time? Do you intentionally bring up topics in conversation that you know will be hurtful, embarrassing, and/or offensive? Do you set things on fire for fun? Are you bored by everything? Is your defeatist attitude threatening to dismantle every last molecule of your integrity? Do you look like Richard Gere? Is your soul the picture of anarchy? Does your mind wander? Are you counting the minutes until the great apocalypse? Are you expecting hell and still imagining that it will be better than this? Do you think these questions are unfair or aren’t you concerned with fairness? If you had to define the word justice, could you? Would you? Will you now? What would you say if I said: you’re wrong, that isn’t what justice is at all? If you wanted to strike someone, would you? Have you ever? What if they were hurting you? Would you then? What if they were hurting someone else? But what about nonviolence? What about turning the other cheek? What about the laws of God? Why did you let that man hurt you? Is your soul working? Is that alcohol I smell on your breath? Who are your enemies and how do you love them? Are you listening? Additional space on back.

I thought for a moment and wrote, “No comment.” I turned the questionnaire over and drew. When I finished, I decided that even the pictures were too revealing, too much like telling someone your dreams. I took the questionnaire with me, left the clipboard with the nurse, and when they called my name to be evaluated, I was no longer there.

      

Inspiration disappears sometimes. Clocks stop or keep going. Lethargy creates more of  itself. I want mornings full of wakefulness, even if I rise up screaming. I want passion, hunger for something. And I don’t want the coffee stain just to go away. I want it never to have been there.

I want words to mean something. And even as I say this I recognize that it is people, not words, who can’t be trusted. People wield and forfeit power. A code of opposites could be manipulated and used to deceive as easily as any language. Code or no code, it is perfectly possible for me to say, for example, “I would rather breathe nails than make balloon animals at another child’s birthday party,” and only mean, “I wish I were somewhere else.”

I am only angry some of the time. My soul is not a picture of anything, or it is. My priest contends: an image of the benevolent everything. Perhaps. Let me dream about that tonight. Let the whole heartache of history fold into itself and away from me.

      

My grandmother is whispering, “Everything is connected to everything else.” I am seven.

“Is everyone going to die?” I ask her in a hushed voice, snuggling into her pink sweater, squeezed into her easy chair with her. “The neighbor says everyone will die before I do and then I’ll be all by myself, Grandmamma.” Her body rises and falls as she breathes.

“How old do you think I am?” she asks.

“I don’t know,” I say. “Old?”

She smiles. “Very old,” she says. Many people she has known, loved, are dead. I run my fingers along the arm of the chair. “Am I alone?” she asks, pulling me closer to her.

“No.” I am smiling now.

“And why is that?” she says.

“Because I’m here.”

“That’s right,” she says, tickling me. “You’re here!” I giggle, try to tickle her back. We laugh and laugh. “You will have children and they will have children and they will have children and on and on and on,” she says. “Don’t worry about death. It will come when it comes. Now, let’s make cookies.”

      

I’m twelve, in the stairwell of my grandparents’ home. My mother and grandmother are in the kitchen. “That child’s in a dark mood,” my grandmother says. “What’s gotten into her?”

I want my mother to say it’s nothing. I want her to be sure there’s nothing the matter with me, and I want her to be right.

The dog sees me, barks.

I step into the kitchen, head for the door. My grandmother’s stirring sugar into her coffee. I asked for a cup this morning and was sent outside to play. “You can drink coffee when you’re in college, when you’ll need the energy. No one needs to be caffeinated for middle school.”

My mother says, “What have I told you about eavesdropping?”

“I wasn’t eavesdropping. I’m going on a walk.” I slip past them and slam the door behind me.

      

I am nineteen. I tell Jake to stop, but he doesn’t. This happens over and over and over again, before I wake up wishing I was twelve again, out for an angry walk about something I was only angry about for a few moments or a few days, when I was full of an anger that so quickly passed, or six when it was still possible to roar with all the power of Leviathan, or seven when it still felt true that I would not be alone, just as my grandmother had not been.

That was last night, or I guess it was early this morning—the dream about being nineteen—before I woke up to the mad whirring of the ceiling fan moving stale air in circles above my bed, all ready to forget what I’d been dreaming. But it’s the third day of remembering that being awake is worse.

Awake is I’m a clown at children’s birthday parties, taking too long to unlace my oversized shoes, and the birthday boy is already gone, and the party is over, and then guess what happens.

Go ahead and guess.

I remember I was walking toward the door. And then I remember the ice park manager. I remember his hands on my neck. I remember my spine slamming against the wall of lockers in the party room.

Then I kicked him. I kicked him until he let go. Then I ran.

This morning, too awake to tolerate myself any longer, I got totally hammered on Maker’s Mark, that expensive stuff I’d been saving for a special occasion. Even more than the taste, I like the name—Maker’s Mark.

Did you know that the word for sin can be translated from the Greek as “missing the mark”?

Thoroughly cleansed and cross-eyed, I decided to cut my own hair. But I already told you about that—how I sliced through my first finger trying to sharpen my scissors. I didn’t even get a chance to cut my hair before the bleeding wouldn’t stop and I went to the ER where they wanted to know about the bruises on my neck.

I said, “I’m here about my finger.”

They sewed it up, but then they started asking about the bruises again. Then the doctor said he’d like me to speak with someone. Then he left the room for a moment, probably to get a social worker.

What’s a social worker going to do? Invite the police to slap the wrists of another sexual predator? They’re fucking everywhere.

I left with the stethoscope.

      

In Collegeville all they ever did was send the perpetrators to mandatory counseling. Want to know how much good that did? I’ll tell you.

When I was eighteen, I kept my distance—relatively speaking—from Jake. We had coffee and went for long starlit walks, and I was listening when his words became troubling. When his hands wandered, I sent him packing.

A year later we ran into each other. His rhetoric was sly and new. He apologized for having been “so aggressive” the year before. He said he’d been doing a lot of thinking. If I’d known then that his therapist was feeding him these new lines, I might not have been so easily swayed. On the other hand, I’d had a difficult year, and when I ran into him that time I was looking for trouble.

I found it.

I’d already said yes by the time I realized I wanted to say no. And then I was asleep, and that time he definitely wasn’t listening to me.

And then and then and then.

 

Anyone can say I’m wrong for not tattling on the ice park manager, but who knows what would happen next if I did?

No one knows the future.

I might still report him. I’m not dead yet. He might hurt someone else if I don’t. He might hurt someone else if I do.

I didn’t like being in that hospital. It made me claustrophobic. What if the social worker had been all hands like the ice park manager? I was too tired to kick anyone else off me.

I shouldn’t have stolen the stethoscope. I admit that. But I couldn’t resist the possibility of hearing my own heart beating. I couldn’t resist the ludicrous notion that my body might know what she needs, and that she might be able to tell me.

The Robert Watson Literary Prize Poem ALASKAN CHARTER

Fishing the Kachemak takes

more than a hook in a mouth.

 

When the first catch, weighing

twice a grown man, fights back,

 

the gang of local fishermen

circle up to stop the thrashing.

 

After a club thunk to the head,

gaff to the side, the five men resort

 

to a curb stomp, a filleting knife

to the gill, then someone’s .410.

 

With bloodied shins, you wait

your turn. And then the young fish

 

they assign you suddenly squirms

in your hands like a newborn

 

from the womb, slick and risen

and held. You brace yourself

 

over the gunwale before the fishermen

form a crescent around you,

 

your back to the warm constant

of the gold sun. They hand you a club

 

and say, Don’t be a cunt.

With a fifth strike, the spinal cord

 

snaps, slips through your fist

like the string of a wind-swiped kite—

 

and it’ll be years before you know,

dipped in black waders, you were

 

half in your dark grave already.

THE ASSUMPTION

Relentless as the season itself,

the gleaning, the thresh,

the yellow Vermeer baler

 

grinding in the wake

of the lethal haymow, scything

the dogleg on the Watauga shank

 

of East Tennessee—

clef of ink on the plat.

On a particular August evening,

 

in sacrificial silence,

the first leaf floats from Billings’ maple.

The first buckeye rends nocturnal

 

solitude off the black road crown.

Woolly worms take their interminable

walk into winterclad

 

robes of sooth. Tent worms

sleeve the locust in smoke. In praise

of Stigmata, dogwood berries

 

bleed. The next day, a Friday,

the 15th, the Feast of the Assumption—

the taking up of the Blessed Mother,

 

body and soul, into Heaven—

the families who lease the doctor’s land

hay. Come the gloaming valley,

 

tractors and chuffing baler swoon

aslant the windrows—

well after nightfall, still baling

 

in the bore of a dozen pickup headlamps.

Outlandish bundles: long grass green;

infant asters, fetal blue; Queen Anne’s lace,

 

its impersonator, wild carrot;

gentians; pricked orange

purses of day lilies; and colonies,

 

kingdoms, of snake, vole, dragonfly,

rabbits, whirring ethnographies of insects

—trussed in moonlit whorls

 

of cylindrical blonde brushstroke.

Crows chant high in white sycamores.

The bales gather vibrato.

 

Blue mantles of chaff

in the mist off Linville Creek,

the glorious apparition of fireflies

 

in Our Lady’s tiara, as she rises,

tresses of sorrow, tresses

of praise, from the harvest.

Q-TIP HEADS

Whenever a new hire asks for a look, I take the guy to the kill floor, a place that reeks of sweat and scared animal, manure and blood. Only once this room went over good with the rookie, the time I failed to notice the glow in his eyes like hot bullets.

“Does the line ever stop just because a cow’s still alive?” he asked.

I didn’t answer immediately, then recommended he reapply after taking some classes at Bovine University. Of course, the line doesn’t stop just because an animal’s alive, I just hope the big lug never comes back even if he graduates summa cum laude from Bovine.    

Today my new employee is Jose Raoul Felipe, a refugee. Refugees are the best. They work hard, never complain, and they take home their knives to sharpen until they’re smooth, honed, with no pits. We pull on our Wellingtons, and as we walk through the cutting room, I check to see there’s no warm gleam in his eyes; I see what a brawny man he is, broad-backed, over six feet. I tell him some folks are slaughterhouse workers and some are not.

“And you?” he says.

“I’m Inez Bixley, human resource director, the one who tours new guys around the plant.”

He nods and says gracias. He says he wants to be a belly ripper because they earn the most and he can send money to his family. Not to count my new hires before the end of their first shift, but I sense a steady-Eddie-Felipe in the making. With luck, his refugee friends will apply, too. And won’t that give the manager goose flesh?

I stand beside him, about to recite the manager’s ideology—Animals come here to die, to be eviscerated, decapitated, de-hided, because we are meat eaters, and this is a highly efficient pla—when I see that once again the scofflaws have invaded and retreated, leaving a crew of lacerated tail cutters in their wake.

“Egads!” I say. “Detached fingers cost us anywhere from two to four thousand dollars!”

Felipe waves his hands before his face, says, “Not with my digits,” and runs off the cutting floor. I distribute paper towels to the injured then make my way to the manager’s office to break the news.

 

Stu Gutman is a rough-tough meat plant kind of guy. He built Gutman’s up from a roving slaughterhouse that processed animals on the farm to CEO of Southern Ohio’s biggest abattoir, where thousands of cattle enter single file every day and leave in a revised form. His glass office is located above the picnic line.

From atop his saddle chair, Stu agrees that the scofflaws are odious. “That Animal Liberation Front splinter cell’s nothing but a bunch of leaderless underground terrorists,” he says. Last week, they infiltrated the cutting floor and hid the chain mail aprons and gloves. Each disfigured worker cost us three thousand apiece. A posse of scofflaws insulted one of the knockers, and when he stunned the next cow, he almost lost his balance on the catwalk. There aren’t any windows in this huge building, so scofflaws are either worming up from the blood drains or weaseling in with the cleaning crew at midnight.

Stu thinks the key to foiling scofflaws is to put them to work on the kill floor. I tell him they’ve come close to a few too many kills already. But he says the kill floor is hot, quick, bloody.

“We’ll speed up the line,” he says. “The carcasses’ll ping-pong back and forth across the rail so fast they’ll have to dodge constantly, or they’ll get slammed to the slimy concrete.”

A short time ago, when the scofflaws first began pestering Gutman’s, Stu reached out to them with Take A Scofflaw To Meat Plant Day. He matched scoffers with skinners. With so many new toilers, the cutting line was expected to take up the slack. The liners groaned. Looks flew, slurs catapulted, knives waved, cutters spit, and the scofflaws got the boot.

I came home from Take A Scofflaw To Meat Plant Day with a jagged tear across my knuckles. Father hid the Mercurochrome, saying I earned the septicemia that would cost me my hand. As if I wasn’t irradiated before leaving the plant.

But let’s not perform an amputation over a knuckle gash.

Father said, “Inez, you’re a toady for going along with such monkey business.”

I said, “Why?”

He said, “If you have to ask, you deserve every goof-off malingerer who trashes Gutman’s.”

The next day at Gutman’s, Stu brings up our employment records:

“Dwindlers are on the uptick,” he says. “If you continue hiring oldsters, Inez, we’ll have to slow the line.”  He gives me a pensive look and asks what I plan to do about it.

“Hire their grandkids?”

“Some can barely see or hear. You write them notes, use sign language, but most of the time you’re not making any sense.”

“We’re bleeding hirelings,” I say. “No matter how well I sell them on the job, they quit fifteen minutes after they get on the floor.” I go to jails and halfway houses. I call colleges sometimes, that’s how badly we need people. I hate to say this, but I think the only ones who do this job willingly are those illegal aliens, people who can’t turn the work down. But a while ago, before I got here, immigration came to the plant, found most of the aliens and fined us $90,000. I’d say a third of our workers here now are seniors, runners-up in the gotta-work arena.

But Stu treats the golden-agers lousy. This incident last week convinced me to use some bias reform on him:

Just as my favorite octogenarian, Wes Pie, raised a stun gun to off a cow, Stu yelled, “Step on it, Q-Tip head. Some of us have a beef plant to run.”

The elders cried, “Ageism!”

For days, they wrote “Stu has a little dick,” “Stu’s dick is so big it jerks him off,” and worse graffiti on the walls. And they plugged up the toilets. But Stu isn’t bad, he’s just overwhelmed.

Still, I almost walked out. Then I thought about all the ambulances that come and go all day. Who would spend the night in the emergency room with our forebearers when their hands got crushed, or when they got asphyxiated, because there was no one else to be with them?  I thought about my fondness for the weathered ones. Of course, I love Father and our home and, yes, I know he’s unattended when I work late, but I can’t help myself. I’m smitten by the venerable Wes Pie and his cohorts. I also thought about the upcoming Grilled Chimichurri Sweetbreads Fest and the safety parties I throw every month, how the blood pudding I boil delights Wes Pie, and, well, all the old-timers. I’m like their granddaughter. Sometimes, if they catch a case of trigger finger from making the same hacking motions for hours on end, I’ll take them to the company doctor and then return them to their stations.

But I also thought about Father’s bailiwick, his new bathroom —we’ve already picked out the walk-in tub with grab bars, the glow-in-the-dark, raised toilet seat, thermostatic controls on all the faucets to prevent scalding. Then I thought about the debonair Wes Pie some more, his crisp white hair, his crow’s feet, hollowed cheekbones and gauzy pubes sparse enough to count. I crush on Wes Pie the way a co-ed adores her professor emeritus. As The Jungle’s Jurgis Rudkus would say, watching Wes Pie work is like a poem. Ever since I asked him, “Are you married?” and he said, “A little bit,” I lost all sense of the Grand Canyon between our ages and began wanting to rub BENGAY into his cumulative trauma disorders, walk arm in arm with him to bingo after a hard day of slaughtering, confabulate with him about everything—the prisons we ship our meat to, how hide-pulling is his true calling, his teeth money he gambles away. So, like I do every time Stu screws up, I decided to reduce the damage.

Stu agrees we can’t afford to antagonize our employees of advanced years after I tell him, “Last month I hired seventy-three people but eighty-one left, and we both know it takes close to three hundred workers every day to run this place.”

What I don’t say is, There’s a stigma for people who work at Gutman’s, maybe because we process rickety cows and sell the cuts to schools for lunches. Maybe because the plant is always in trouble with the city over the dumb things we do, like dumping blood in the lagoons, like not using chimney filters until the stench is so malodorous that the city fines us then calls in the EPA for an inspection (and still, it stinks), like not resolving our issues with the scofflaws.

“When it comes to our geriatrics, we’ve got to work on acceptance,” I say.

Stu gives me a solemn look and asks what I think we should do.

“Relate better to our aging employees,” I say.

His furry eyebrows hoist. He sniffs.

“To improve the bottom line.”

He rubs his hands. He grins.

I believe an experiential Xtreme Aging workshop will dispel Stu’s myths about the elderly. Stu tells me his relations with the aged are bonnie. But I say I intend to become a voice for inter-generational advocacy in this plant.

  

A week later, I facilitate my first Xtreme Aging training and get a pitiful turnout: Stu and me. Though I have to admire Stu’s pluck when he wears special glasses that distort his vision as he tries to clean cheek meat off a cow’s head. That evening, at home, Father calls me a Dr. Phil wannabe for leading an aging sensitivity session.

I say, “When Stu wore rubber gloves and I taped his fingers to limit his manual dexterity, he understood how Wes Pie feels when he splits a cow’s middle and pulls its intestines out by hand.”

Father asks how Stu liked it when I put corn kernels in his shoes to experience what old feet feel like after the fatty tissue erodes.

I stare at Father, recalling how a bunch of scofflaws had interrupted our meeting, taunting, “No cowboy’d hire these TMBs!” (TMBs= Too Many Birthdays.) Then they wrangled off his jodhpurs and targeted the next cow in the chute. I worry that my attempt at synergism has backfired.

But let’s not harvest a cornfield out of a few kernels.

The next day, Stu brings up the employment records again. And the scofflaws.

“I’m on it,” I say.

 

Wes Pie is the king of code. I call him the Counselor. And he’s good at what he does, which is kill cows, but he also works Saturdays in the office, checking refugees’ cards—he checks every number on every card. Wes Pie was the one who kept immigration from rounding up all the aliens when they busted Gutman’s, saving Stu a load of dough. I ask him who in the pile of current applications would be good at keeping the line up to speed while safeguarding the plant from scofflaws.

“Eh?” he says.

I sit on a bench outside Wes Pie’s locker watching him swap batteries in his hearing aids. “Seems to me,” he says, “this batch of apps are mostly aliens. There is, however, Arnie Zipperstine.”

Under “Additional Comments” Wes had read Arnie’s description of the Iron Man he’d competed in.

“Really?” I say. “When Arnie returned his paperwork, he reminded me of Flaccid-Forefather.”

Stu says to try out Arnie Zipperstine. Arnie’s a deadbeat dad who owes decades of child support, and Stu says that’ll keep him hustling and rustling. Stu’s idea is to let Arnie oversee the picnic line—the conveyor belt that runs between workers who carve meat from the bone. On the picnic line, if meat backs up, it spills on the floor; if scofflaws are lurking, they mince it. And the key to maintaining speed, meeting quota, deterring scofflaws is sharp knives.

“Call Arnie,” Stu says.

The next day, Arnie ascends his saddle chair inside Stu’s glass office.

“Thnkz,” Arnie grunts. He wants to work on the picnic line since it pays top wage.

“Ride that line,” Stu says. “If workers leave a fleck of meat on a bone, chew them out.”

“Cors,” Arnie mumbles in his peculiar abridged discourse.

“Here’s my idea: when picnickers go on breaks, even lunch, you demand they tote their knives along to whet. That’ll keep the line zinging and reduce unnecessary stabbings. And it’ll make disassembling a scofflaw fast, too. I’ll raise you fifty cents an hour.”

“Iwuza scflw.”

I step into the breach. “The redeemed kind,” I say. But I’m thinking, Does Stu plan to de-hide scofflaws, peel and flay them?

“K.”

“Logistics that would make the CIA proud,” Stu says.

 

Why do I live like this? So I can work beside Wes Pie on Saturdays and catch glimpses of him the rest of the week. Also, there’s Father who needs me to care for him and keep him company. I have to be there for him now that Mom’s gone and make sure he never sees the inside of an assisted living home.

I’m reading applications when I’m assaulted by heinous groans coming from the picnic line, though the day shift has already finished. I step into my Wellingtons, rush to the line and find Arnie, buck naked, stretched out on the conveyor belt. The scofflaws have tattooed his flesh: shoulder, flank, rump, loin. Near his crotch soup boner is hand-lettered and beside the words an arrow points to Arnie’s manhood; inked into his upper thigh is meat loafing.

I’m imagining him packaged inside a Styrofoam tray, wrapped in cellophane, priced per pound when Wes Pie happens along.

“Heh-heh,” Wes snickers. He hoists Arnie across his back and I follow the effulgent beacon of his white hair as he walks off toward the company doctor—I swear, Wes Pie makes eighty-three look like the new seventy-nine.

When I tell Stu, he says, “That recidivist was not picnicking with two hands. We were delusional to believe that fossil could inspire butchers and expire truants.”

The thought, That man’s mature as Peter Pan, crosses my mind, and I begin planning another awareness workshop, one that zeroes in on building respectful relationships with the Q—the  elderly—since a senior tsunami is about to swamp America.

We discourage Arnie from reporting his inking to the authorities because the FDA might crash the picnic; we pledge to reinstate him as super after his hieroglyphics fade.

      

Stu calls me into his office and tells me the scofflaws have posted pictures of Arnie, drawn, quartered, and loafing, in all the locker rooms and stations. Not to mention, not stopping the line for live animals has already landed us in the dung pile with the USDA.

I worry Stu will give me the pink slip. Instead, he invites me into his glass office and mounts his saddle chair. I scale mine, too. He pulls a tumbler from his rucksack, pours a Bull Spit-tini, and offers me one.

“Being a slaughterhouse manager’s overrated,” he says.

“Yes,” I say.

“All I want,” he says, “is to crush my competish and run a plant where animals are processed into corned beef brisket, cocktail weenies, precooked pot roasts that’re microwaveable, conversions I cherish.”

“I understand,” I say. I want to make a pitch for hiring more Q-T—oldsters—but the telephone rings. It’s Wes Pie calling from the holding pen to report scofflaws have raided the feedlot and destroyed all the antibiotic-rich corn. We bought that enhanced maize on credit. Over the phone, Stu and I can hear a Tabernacle Choir’s worth of voracious mooing.

“Those felons are cutting into my drinking time,” Stu says. “If I could, I’d press a pneumatic device to their temples and blow ’em, ba-dow-dow.”

He pours many rounds of Spit-tinis that we slug down like champs, until we dismount and flop face-down inside his glass office.

 

When I get up, I feel like ralphing. Stomach lurching, I hope I don’t bump into Vitalmiro on my way to the parking lot. After immigration rounded up all the illegals they could find, Stu hired a lot of them back as independent contractors to clean the plant at night. Vitalmiro doesn’t understand that by hiring him to do the most appalling job in the world, Stu’s protecting him. But after Gutman’s was raided and Vitalmiro began working on the cleaning crew, terrible things happened to him. Since his release from the sanatorium, he’s been trying to get his tying-off-intestines job back.

Tonight, goose-hives prickle down my arms before I see Vitalmiro near my car. I want to press the alarm button but instead ask how he’s feeling. He says he sometimes sneaks into the rending department during the day and climbs inside gut bins to unclog drains with his long arms. His old friends appreciate his help, and he hopes Gutman gets wind of his good deeds and puts him back in intestines.

Vitalmiro doesn’t like me. That’s unfortunate because maybe I could help him recover from the trauma of that wintry night when he was on the roof cleaning grease and blood from the vents. A sudden gust blew him into the dark and he landed in an oak tree. Tonight he’s turning the air blue with his cigar, asking me if I heard about the feedlot and if I recognize, as he does, that the corn decimation is God’s tit-for-tat over Gutman’s crackdown on aliens. He says Gutman’s lost skilled workers, “And who’s filling our shoes?”

I can’t answer his question without intimating the seniors. He doesn’t believe, as I do, that the elderly are our future.

 

At home, Father looks up from his anti-Alzheimer’s word jumble to ramble on about the long hours he waited up for me. As if summoned, Vitalmiro, who has taken to crouching in a corner of my mind, says I’m as hardboiled as Mr. Gutman for slighting Father, while Father criticizes me for having insufficient funds in my account, causing my toilet seat company check to bounce.

I ponder cheering Father up with his favorite joke, “What did one cow say to the other as they were herded into the chute? ‘My only consolation is that by eating us, they’re killing themselves.’”  I ponder blabbing about the scofflaws, but I don’t do that either after he calls me a flunky. As I settle him into his stair-chair lift, I say, “Well, I’m home now.”

“Bosh!” he says. “Not for long.” The zeal of his words makes his pale hair jump.

A blush fans out across my cheeks as I stare at Father’s hand, a cold fish inside my warm palm, and wonder who he thinks is bankrolling whom.

To unwind, I heat beef chuck short ribs in my Dutch oven, zeroing in on Wes Pie’s visionary theory: Meat eaters outlive vegetarians. I’m barbecuing Love Beef Ribs, a token of my affection that I’ll add to my stockpile in the freezer, in preparation for the right moment. I’m braising a platter of myself for Wes to eat.

 

Next day, two Einstein-haired men, certified as the world’s oldest identical twins, apply for jobs: Upton and Overton Synklare. They seem decent enough; their urine’s sparkling, and that’s all that matters. Besides, if I wanted to check references, I couldn’t since the circus where they worked went belly-up. I can use them in the knife recycling room so that’s where I lead them.

We’re cinching our hard hats when I see Wes Pie drive by in a scrap cart. He stops so I introduce him to the Synklares. That evening, Wes Pie phones me at home, which simply sets my sex organs afire, and says the twins might be the ones if we still want help squashing scofflaws.

“I could kiss you!” I say, startling the contractor installing Father’s toilet rail. Father scowls. I smile sheepishly, but he raises his newspaper to conceal his face.

Scuttlebutt has it, Wes tells me, that the Portable Circus fired Up and Over because they refused billing as “Human Cannonballs” in favor of their new act, “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon Warriors.”

He suggests I trap a scofflaw in the knife recycling room with the Synklares and see what happens. I’ve witnessed their thrusts, their vertical and counter cuts. But knowingly lead a scofflaw into danger?  For Wes Pie, anything.

That afternoon, Stu proclaims Up and Over are twice as good as what he had in mind. I tell Stu I worry about skilled swordsmen roaming a plant where everyone carries knives they sharpen many times a day.

Stu says, “Think of it this way. At my slaughterhouse, some things must never die: a speedy line, antibiotics, irradiation. We strike now or the house suffers. Account receivables are atrocious. The bill to replace the enriched corn is mammoth. Fines to EPA, OSHA, USDA, FDA are prodigious. So, Ms. Apropos, you’re erroneous. Call the clones.”

My face flares from low to broil. I call the clones.

 

Two days later, after outfitting Up and Over with Wudang swords and loosing the twins into the factory, I arrange another workshop. Xtreme Aging sessions are starting to catch on. Today’s training is in the offal room, where Vitalmiro was found the night he got blown off the roof. He staggered in there after he came to in a tree and climbed down. But we keep the offal room at forty degrees at night, so he’d have been better off staying in his oak.

Xtreme Aging is a smash: the offal room is stocked with Q-Ti—workers of advanced years—because today is a town-hall-type meeting, a time for seniors to air concerns and offer suggestions for ways others can value our aged workforce.

Pointy-chinned Nadine Linkus, brittle as a pressed flower, has the floor; she proposes reducing the crippling speed of the line, “Because it’s causing our pacemakers to malfunction.”  Fly-away hair barnstorming, she adds, “I want power naps twice a day.”

Nadine gets a round of “Hot diggities!” I join the fray, too, recalling the times Father’s pacemaker has gone haywire when he works himself into a tizzy.

Next, Wes Pie rises and announces he’s in favor of organizing the “Salt and Pepper Jaguars,” whose mission is to resolve wage and promotion issues:

“We are the new wrinkles. We are the dicey ones. We are trying on tomorrow for size. This is our quest.”

With each word, he blooms back into the middle-aged man inside his elderly body, tempting me to shush him.

Our standing ovation gives rise to an agreeable stiffy inside his britches. As I clap, my eyes ignite like rum on a hot skillet.

As Huey Bruser clears his throat to begin, scofflaws emerge from under piles of hides and inside fifty-gallon barrels. They walk among the newborn Jaguars then hold a blade to Huey Bruser’s neck. “Let’s hear your idea, doyen.”

Out of fear, Huey turns mute so the scofflaws drag him away in the direction of the carcass cooler.

“Free Huey!  Power to the people!  The revolution has come!” the grand-persons chant as they march to the cooler, led by Wes Pie. I’ve never had to quell an uprising before, so I hurry to the glass office.

Stu’s drinking a Hairy Heifer-tini and writing a letter to the meat inspectors defending Gutman’s policy of allowing manure in its meats. Not a lot. Besides, irradiation takes care of the feces, cheap and easy. I tell him about Huey.

“We try to reach out to our elderly employees, and the belittlers put them on ice,” Stu says.

“Call 911,” I say.

He calls the cleaning crew.

When we arrive at the offal room, the grands are rolling an inert scofflaw inside a green hide. Up and Over are showing off their Beowulf-esque thrusts and parries to a shivering Huey Bruser. Wes Pie thanks the Synklares for returning Huey unscathed.

“An Elizabeth Barrett Browning moment?” Up asks Over.

Over nods then recites from memory, “And each man stands with his face in the light / Of his own drawn sword, ready to do what a hero can.”

Wes Pie tears up. I squirt a few myself.

Vitalmiro bursts in with his cleaning crew. The Synklares say they’re vamoosing to knife recycling.

Stu looks around then says, “Identical twins? Never saw them.”

Up and Over say, “Over and out.”

Stu turns over the wrapped up scofflaw to the aliens. To Vitalmiro, he says in a low voice, “When the chlorine fog rolls in tonight, grind ’im.”

I’m an ear-witness.

      

The skinny spreads about the Synklares, and for over a week the scofflaws are on the lam. As much as I hesitate to admit this, a bit of ennui sets in until a new hire, using an ice pick grip, slashes a worker’s white coat and makes off with a tub of knives.

Stu orders a search—“Leave no bone unturned,” he says, but the interloper bolts.

“No one’s hurt. Get back to work,” Stu says.

Up and Over, dressed like samurai and carrying katanas on their backs, arrive, fuming.

“Just how dangerous is the ice pick grip?” I say.

“That grip, if implemented with a double-edged knife, the pommel capped with the thumb, can slice a slaughterhouse worker into ground meat in no time.”

Stu’s eyes bulge. “You guys are the virtuosos. Security’s your baby.”  He invites the twins back to his glass office to saddle up and knock down some Ox Horn-tinis, extra dirty, but the Synklares tell Stu they must remain pure so they can interact with the matrix of the world.

I go to my office, mount the saddle chair Stu special ordered for me, close my eyes, and recite Elizabeth Barrett Browning lines.

When I dismount, there’s a barrel at my door with asthmatic gasps coming from inside. A Post-it is stuck on the lid:

This scofflaw won’t be ice picking anymore wage earners. Send katanas. Upton and Overton, The Working Stiffs’ Warriors.

A last-breath gurgle comes from inside the barrel, so I call Stu. 

He says, “Grind the guy then smack a pooh-pooh label on ’im.”

“I’m reporting this to OSHA.”

“The twins deep-sixed the other scofflaw, why not chuck this one, too?”

“But Stu, Up and Over discarded a scofflaw over a ripped coat.”

“Your new hire bullied my workman with a saber,” Stu says.

“Plastic cutlery.”

“You’re getting too big for your Wellingtons.”

“I’m a little confused,” I say.

“My point, exactly. Listen, until these ridiculers take a hike, morality has to take a walk. Now, junk that belittler and good riddance.”  He hangs up.

Lord, give me virtue, just not yet.

Since I don’t believe in cremation, I can’t grind the scofflaw, so I muscle the barrel to the cure room and write “specialty cuts” on the outside. I’m dumping the last of the dry cure, nailing the lid, when Vitalmiro enters through the spice room. He says while he likes to see a human resource director take an interest in production, I’m taking it too far.

“I believe a woman’s place is on the cleaning crew.”  He laughs.

“Some say, if I wasn’t a alien, I might be a stunner by now.”  

He tells me during the last salmonella outbreak, chlorine vapor dissolved his paper mask and his body broke out in blisters. He rasps and hawks. He turns purple. I wonder if he’s contaminated with bovine spongiform encephalopathy.

On my way back to my desk, I see Vitalmiro enter the glass office, find Stu’s tumbler, take many gulps, let himself out, and disappear.

      

As I drive home, I worry about Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, or mad cow. I obsess over barrels of cured tongue, unsmoked and smoked, raw, hewn, corned. At a yield sign, I meditate on casks of pickled tongue seasoned with onions and herbs. I turn a cold shoulder to the motorists bombarding me with foul epithets.    

At home, I want to divulge my conundrum to Father, but I’m afraid he’ll repudiate me. While dredging the brisket in flour and searing it on each side on medium-high, I recite Stu’s safety ideologue: Stop E. coli—treat meat like you’d eat it yourself.

For what it’s worth, salting a stiff scofflaw and storing him in the cure room is not the same as extermination. I didn’t slay the new hire. I didn’t requisition the barrel’s delivery.

I choke off those thoughts:  You abettor, henchwoman, consort. You need carnage rehab.

I place the brisket fat side up in a roasting pan and wonder, If I give regular penilinctus to the correction officer, will I earn extra visit time with Wes Pie? Then I pledge to muzzle myself and risk going to the pokey if we get nabbed.

When it comes to the witness protection plan, I’m pro-choice.

      

The day of the Grilled Chimichurri Sweetbreads Fest finally arrives. Our flier reads:

Chimichurri, sweetbreads, and a sweet good time. Help us set a world record for the most sweetbreads sold for a good cause [us] in a single day. Dance the Stanky Legg all night long.

It features a picture of our ultimate Big Taste Grill that’s twenty feet by seventy feet. Big Taste can satisfy thousands of sweetbread lovers per hour.

As with all offal, sweetbreads must be fresh, so while the Sweet Miss Beauty Pageant is going on, I’m rinsing, draining, patting dry batch after batch of thymus glands when, without warning, Father shows up. He’s miffed because the reps from Bathroom Solutions failed to keep their appointment.

To cheer Father up, I suggest he enjoy the pageant, but he insists on tossing the glands with oil then threading them onto skewers. I begin blending parsley and cilantro, cumin and paprika with lime juice, my unmitigated supremo chimichurri recipe.

A tent has been raised outside the fabrication room so that later on fest-goers can order custom cuts. But when scofflaws charge from that tent, I call on my inner Kentucky and yell, “Knife-up!” A pair of rapiers zing by, and the ubiquitous Up and Over come dueling from the hide room. One waves an epee, the other a foil. A scoff drops.

I press myself to the fab room’s wall; Father, wedged beside me, suddenly collapses. I fall to my knees and press a fist to my mouth. His cowlick over his forehead salutes me like a raised middle finger. He says, “In my life, I’ve been a lot of things—hoity-toity, a pedicurist—but I have never been so abused. Ever.”      

Another scofflaw sprawls as the Synklares throw their bodies forward in a running attack, chanting, “Ninja!” They retreat to the knife recycling room, but not before traumatizing scads of scoffs.

Vitalmiro arrives and, along with his crew, drags the most maimed off the property. The scofflaws they leave behind cry out, “Allah!” “Abba!”  “Yahweh!”

 

I help Father saddle-up in my office and go see Stu.

“We have to turn in Up and Over to the law,” I say.

“You want some prison guard playing booty check with you?  You want shank-making for a hobby?”

“They could’ve smote Father.”

“No one killed your father. If you snitch on the twins, you might as well give your liberty a big wet one for ‘auf Wiedersehen.’”

I turn scarlet.

Stu says, “Let’s make truth a low priority just now and make cashing in—I mean, redeeming our twins—of utmost urgency.”

He pours us each a Cow’s Ass-tini and offers a toast.

“To prosperity and restored peace at Gutman’s.”

We clink and drink. Now Wes Pie is at the door, glum with tragic news. The folks who emerged from the tent weren’t scofflaws but some early fest-goers who jumped the gun special- ordering heart sweetbreads for take-home because hearts have a creamier texture than throat sweets.

Stu, our GM of the meat industry, says, “This is a serious challenge.”

      

In my office, Father paws with his Hush Puppy at blood splatters on the floor. “From my Wellingtons,” I lie, pointing to where the boots are stashed behind the door.

Then I tell him everything.

He says, “How can you possibly work for such a despicable killer?”

My face ignites into fire. “I lost my way,” I say.

“Think you can find your way home?” he says.

I mount my saddle chair, watching Father gather himself, feeling torn between doing what Stu wants and putting the full courtship press on Wes Pie. When Father slams my office door behind him, the bang of it wakes me up. All I want is coitus with Wes Pie.

      

At home, I’m barely inside the door when Father appears and holds out a packed suitcase.

“After you serve supper,” he says, “I want you to leave. Gutman’s is all you care about. I could’ve been killed.”  He hands me an apron and says, “Work starts on the bathroom tomorrow. I’ll be in Vegas for the duration.”

He writes his PO Box where I’m to send him checks.

I’m scraping dirty dishes over the garbage pail when my cell phone rings, but it’s not Wes Pie.

“Come to my office,” Stu says. “So I can update you.”

Dreadful Stu’s drinking a Sweetbread-tini straight from his tumbler.

“OSHA’s shutting us down. Tongues wagged about our skirmishes.”

“Father kicked me out,” I say. “He’s changing the locks, installing security.”

“Did you hear me?  Gutman’s is closing. Temporarily.”

Then he says, “Find an apartment. I’ll hide there until things cool off.”

When I don’t reply, he says he’s taking back my saddle chair.

I wonder, Where’s a bolt stunner when I need one?  But I’ve got to stay out of lockup so I can abscond with Wes Pie. As I make my way back to my car, I see Vitalmiro on the roof, cleaning vents. I watch him slip, right himself, slip some more, then the wind picks up and he sails off, into the void. After drying my tears, I observe the Synklares as they joust from the knife recycling room, big smirks circling their chops, revenge like a gang of scofflaws in their eyes. When I realize it’s Stu they’re after, not me, my relief is so great I could yodel. In a moment, the three are framed within the walls of the glass office, fencing—Hamlet, Claudius, Laertes —I think, until Stu threatens, “Stab me with your sabers, I’ll shoot you with my .38.”

I recall the day Stu hired me, how he clapped my back in congratulations, how he poured me a Steer Rump-tini, and how, back then, I thought I’d be able to take care of any employees’ problems by writing safety policies to make sure things went smooth. But my job’s mostly about getting bodies in here to do work no one wants to do. With the exception of Wes Pie.

Overhead, the glass office rattles as the combatants lunge and plunge, so primitive a means of settling any disagreement. Downtown, Wes Pie speculates on bingo. Inside my suitcase, frozen Love Beef Ribs, wrapped in my chimichurri recipes, defrost, loosen up, relax in anticipation of Wes Pie’s tender lips.

Under the locker-room showerhead, I peroxide my dark hair then slip into red patent leather mules for my sugar pie bettor to ogle. I make my way to Bingo Casino, imagining mysterium tremendum et fascinans Pie kisses after Wes turns his good ear to hear my beguiling whisper, each syllable a jalapeño over Tabasco sauce:  You’re my Big Taste, Wes Pie, I’m your burning coal—all I want, given the chance, is to sear, sizzle, slow-smoke your beef kebabs from now until forever.

IN PRAISE OF MULTITUDES

When I say you are, you is more

than one. The English language knows

I am looking at a river, a string of rail cars,

 

a field of what’s wild. When I say

hold on, the road will turn to gravel;

your muscles won’t soften. When I say

 

you are calluses against cast iron,

the shut bedroom door, I am looking

through the keyhole. You are pacing past

 

my only light, looking out closed

windows. It’s cold: could you hurry up?

When I say the bottle’s open;

 

go pour a glass, you slide the black bottoms

of your feet into the kitchen. My dusty floor

might stick to your feet when I say

 

let’s dance. When I say hush, the crickets

thicken. Home isn’t where you leave it.

When I say you are, God knows

 

one isn’t enough: that hope

gleans heaven here and there

like a girl gone to gather.

THE WEATHER DOWN HERE

                                                                              —Washington, NC

A quick stop at Food Lion for beer & whole wheat buns,

then Hog Heaven for pints of barbecue, baked beans,

 

& slaw. Idling in the take-out lane, I’m taken

by gangrenous clouds closing fast from the east.

 

In Beaufort County, storms are upon us in minutes; roiling

cells shear through the skillet-flat fields of tobacco & cotton.

 

In lightning’s flicker, the family plots of farmers appear

visited by God. They startle me like you do, dear, like

 

cumulonimbus on the horizon. Come gather after; slip

your hand into my pocket & kiss my sunburned neck.

 

Recite with me again the capricious

                                               nature of our Carolina weather.

The Robert Watson Literary Prize Story HEARTBREAK GRASS

There was a man who lived in my district and this man had gone South to fight the Americans and when he came back a year and a half later he had no arms, no legs, and he was blind.

I called him Uncle, like us youngsters would address our seniors. Uncle Chung was thirty-one when he returned home as a quadruple amputee. A blind war veteran. I was eighteen and about to be drafted to join those destined for the South. When I saw Uncle Chung the first time I knew why many boys my age grew alarmed of being drafted into the army. Uncle Chung used to work as a machinist. He was once a big man. But the first time I saw him, limbless, he looked to me more like a freak I saw years later in the South, a country boy burned by napalm, so far gone he looked during nighttime like a glowworm, and his father would charge each neighborhood kid ten xu to come into the house to watch the human mutant.

I saw Uncle Chung on a day the herbalist I worked for sent me over to the man’s house with the medicine. The medicine. Always the medicine. And the wife. Each time Uncle Chung’s wife came to the shop to consult with the herbalist, I would hang back from leaving, sometimes to run an errand, so I could listen to her melodious voice and steal glances at her while trying to look busy in the shop. She was perhaps in her mid-twenties but looked older with the way she rolled her hair up and tucked it into a bun, so when she turned her head you could see the long curving nape of her neck. White or pale blue was the color of the blouse she wore. Just white or pale blue. And always the first customer in when the shop had just opened. The early morning light would cast a pallor on her face, and her ink-black eyebrows only made her face paler. Yet despite the anemic white of the undernourished, the unwell look, she was pretty. The city was full of women her age and older. Now and then you saw men—many had gone South and most of them never returned.

One rainy morning I went to their house with the herbal medicine. Down an alley through the standing water floating with trash to a stucco-yellow matchbox dwelling in a housing project. Its green door was left ajar. Stepping in I heard a man’s singing voice:

If I were a dove

I’d be a snow-white dove.

Spring and then summer.

The flowers, the flowers, the flowers.

You say aren’t they pretty

And I say

Aren’t they really.

I looked down at a man sitting on a pallet. The gruff voice stopped, the man turned his face toward the door. His skin, his eyeballs were yellow, the mucus yellow. I couldn’t tell if he was blind, but I could tell those eyes had the look of fake eyes you put in stuffed animals. But his song about the pretty flowers struck me. What would he see now but his own disturbed memories? He kept nodding—I wasn’t sure if he had any control of it—and he had a large head matted with tousled black hair that covered his ears and the collar of his shirt. The old olive-colored army shirt, with its long sleeves cut off, revealed the stumpy ends of his severed arms. You could see the rotten-wood brown of the flesh—what was left of his upper arms.

I told him I brought him the medicine and as I spoke I looked at his full wiry beard. If his wife refused to shave it for him, I thought, it’d one day hang down to his neck. Then his torso. He must have been a big man, aside from his large head, for the only part left of him filled out his army shirt. His torso was as thick as a boar. He wiggled on his rump. “Make me a pipe,” he said as if he knew me, or I were someone he used to boss around.

I stood eyeing him, a squat hunk of meat sitting on two slabs of flesh called thighs. What looked like his shorts were a pair of army trousers shorn at the knees.

“Don’t stand there!” he snapped at me, his voice as viscous as if spoken through a mouthful of glutinous rice.

“I brought you your medicine, Uncle,” I said and bent to put the herb packet next to a water pipe that sat before him. It was a long bamboo pipe in old yellow, and near the end with the bowl to receive the tobacco, the yellow had become stained with black smoke. The pipe stood on an angle, harnessed by a wide bamboo strip that went around the trunk and came down to rest on the ground like a mortar tube on its bipod.

“Make the pipe,” he said. “Then you can go.”

I just shook my head at his authoritative voice.

“Don’t you know how to light a pipe? Boy?”

“I do, Uncle.”

“Then light my damned pipe. And get out!”

Light your own bong! But I stopped short of ridiculing him. I didn’t pity him. At first sight, he struck me as freakish. An overbearing freak. Then I thought I’d better set the tone for myself.

“You’ll see a lot of me, Uncle,” I said to him politely, “as long as you need Chinese medicine. And I don’t take orders. Not from strangers.”

“You a prince?” His voice twanged. “Some sort of a pampered shit?”

“If I were, Uncle, I wouldn’t be here bringing you this measly medicine.”

“Did your pa teach you manners? Or is he too busy making drugs?”

“My ma and pa died a long time ago.”

“So you’re an orphan. No wonder.”

“I can behave, Uncle.”

My calm voice had him lost for a moment. He rotated his jaw then said, “How old are you?”

“Eighteen, Uncle.”

“You be joining the army soon, eh?”

“Right. The way things are.”

“You know what I did for a living before the war?”

“What did you do, Uncle?”

“I was a foreman in a machine shop.”

I thought of lathes and mills. Those shops must be busy during wartime. Hearing nothing from me, he leaned his head to one side as if to determine in his mind where I was. “In the army I was a senior sergeant,” he said. That fit him, I thought. Some were domineering just by their nature. He went on, “Used to do all the things myself. My woman didn’t need to lift a finger. Now, now, the world’s turned upside down. Man has to beg from a woman’s hand. When you’re down and out, you’re worse than a mutt. I can’t even piss or shit unless she lets me.”

His voice was flat. In it I sensed no self-pity. Like he was telling me about the weather. I thought of walking out but I changed my mind. I could see the pipe’s bowl had no tobacco. “Where’s your set, Uncle?” I asked him.

“Look around,” he said tonelessly. “Set shaped like a persimmon.”

The bare room had two metal chairs. Under one chair sat a lidded pot. It looked like his toilet pot. The only piece of furniture was a black-wood cupboard. The ornate flowers embossed on the cupboard’s doors gave it a vintage feel. It must have belonged to his once-proud past before the war ruined him.

“Can’t find it?” he said, keeping his head still as if to listen for a sign of my presence. “Used to have things everywhere around here. But she’s done sold most of them over the years. Now you can hear the echo of your voice.”

Through a thin flowered curtain that sectioned off the inside of the house, I saw a bamboo cot draped with a mosquito net. The net hadn’t been rolled up. I went through the curtain looking around. A gas stove sat against the yellow-painted wall next to a standalone narrow cabinet, its black-wood glass doors opaque with smoke and dust. On the wall were hung rattan baskets dyed plum red and peach yellow. A wooden table sat in the center of the room, and on the table I saw the persimmon-shaped caddy painted coal black.

The caddy made of fruitwood had a keyhole. I brought it to him. It was locked. I told him.

“Damn woman,” he said.

“She kept the key?”

“Damn she did.”

“She forgot?”

“That woman? Never. Never forgot anything.”

“Well, Uncle,” I chuckled. “What’s with the key anyway? Even if she’s left it for you, I mean.”

“I’ve got help.” He jerked his chin toward the entrance. “Door’s always open.”

“Your neighbors?”

“Them louts. Sit at the door every day. Gawking and giggling.”

“Ah. Kids. They help you, Uncle?”

“Some do. Some I have to bribe.”

I wondered what he bribed them with. “Where’s she now?”

“Out. Business.”

I shook the herb packet for him to hear. “What’s this medicine for, Uncle?”

“Stabilize the yin and yang in my body. That’s what your pa, eh, the herbalist said.”

“Your yin and yang?”

“This body,” he said, pressing his chin to his chest to make a point, “still has a piece of shrapnel in a lung. The metal junk messes up the balance of yin and yang. So I heard.”

“How’s that?”

“I puke blood whenever it gets bone chilly.”

“They didn’t take it out of your lung?”

“If they could, it wouldn’t be in my lung now, eh?”

I ignored his rude remark and looked around. The slatted side door opened into a common garden. Rain was falling steadily on the leaves of herbs and vegetables and the morning light glinted on the rain-wet leaves. I knelt on one knee, looked at the water pipe, then at him.  “You smoke often, Uncle?”

“Often as she lets me.” He grinned a crooked grin then yawned. I could smell his rancid breath. I tapped the caddy, thinking, until he cocked his head to listen to the noise. “I can make a pipe for you, Uncle,” I said. “But I’d have to pry the lock open.”

“I don’t give a damn about the lock. But I know what she’d do if the lock is busted.”

“What then?”

He let his head nod again, like he was following his thoughts. “Once I lay here in my piss and shit the whole damn day till she decided to clean me up. Otherwise the house would stink and that’d ruin her dinner.”

“What started it?”

“Like I told you. I only piss or shit when she lets me.”

“So she wanted to condition you, didn’t she?”

“You’re wrong, boy.” He frowned. “I mean, young man, she was talking business with this man in the alley. Talk. Talk. I yelled to her. Damn did I yell. Then everything burst out of me. When she came back in I doubt she bothered to look at me. Then when the smell couldn’t be ignored for heaven’s sake, she just left the house.”

Listening, I recalled her to my mind and still I couldn’t reconcile what I just heard with what I’d carried inside me ever since I saw her. He wiggled on his rump and the nylon sheet that covered the pallet squished. “If I can have me a drink,” he said. “Hell, if I can have me some rice liquor.”

“Where does she keep it, Uncle?”

“That woman won’t waste money on that kind of stuff.” He wrinkled his nose, snorting a few times to clear it. “We’d been drinking, me and some old friends. They brought a bottle with them and after they left I began having chills and shaking like a dog. She came in and saw the mess of cigarette butts and ashes and unwashed cups and started yelling at me. I cursed her, so she sat me up and screamed in my face, and it was then I threw up. I believe I just let it gush out all over her blouse.”

“You vomited on her? Why?”

“To spite her? I’m not sure. She emptied the bottle into the drain. That’s far worse than hearing her curse me or let me rot on my own.”

“I’ll get you some liquor the next time, Uncle.”

“I have no money on me. To pay you.”

“I know.”

“I’d appreciate it, young man. You drink?”

“A little.”

“That won’t hurt. You going into the army soon. So. I used to get high while we stayed for months in the jungles. Ever heard of dog roses?”

“They told me. Them wild roses that crave blood to bloom?”

“Hogwash.” He blew his nose with a loud snort. “But them wild roses have a subdued fragrance, not as strong as garden roses. And their leaves when crushed have a delicious smell. We cut up their fruits too and add them to the tobacco. Them rose hips give an added authentic kick when you’re high.”

His mouth hung open with an amused smile as he stared into space. Those eyes made me think of yellow marbles. Quietly I looked at his limbless torso, the wiry beard that covered half of his face, and a thought hit me: how would I carry on if I ever became like him? This man seemed to survive the way a creeper did, by latching on to living things nearby. He wanted to live.

 

I went back to Uncle Chung’s house a few days later. This time the herb packet I brought contained finely cut leaves of yellow jasmine. When the herbalist wrapped them up, I asked him what they were for. For hemorrhoids, he said. For external swelling and pain. But never take them orally, he said. It’s fatal. I asked if the wife knew about it and he nodded. She didn’t want the ointment, he said. She wanted the leaves and the seed pods. Much later when I was fighting in the South I would occasionally come upon this vine in the jungles. At first glance you could mistake it for honeysuckle. Then I found out that the vine—any part of it from its root to its leaves and flowers and fruits—was toxic if taken by the mouth. I also learned the words the Americans called it: heartbreak grass.

I bought half a liter of rice liquor in a bottle. Uncle Chung was lying on the pallet, sleeping on his side like a big baby. I woke him and helped him sit up. He kept squirming.

“Hemorrhoids bothering you, Uncle?” I asked him.

“Like hangnails,” he said. “Just a nuisance. You said you’ve got the spirits?”

“I bought half a liter.”

“Let me smell it.”

I opened the bottle and held it under his nose. He leaned forward to have a full whiff of it and nearly toppled. I held him up. He grunted, his face contorted into a painful scowl. The hemorrhoid must be bad enough, I thought.

“You want to lie down, Uncle?”

“What for? Wish I had arms to hug this bottle here. Eh?”

I found a cup and poured him some of the clear-colored spirit and brought the rim of the cup to his lips. He sniffed, then inhaled deeply, his nostrils flaring. He held the drink in his mouth and kept nodding. Then he thrust his head toward the cup, said, “Give me.” He made a loud sucking sound, lifting his chin in a great effort to imbibe the liquor. The spilled liquor dripped from his beard.

“A smoke, Uncle?”

“Got no key to that caddy.” He burped. “You know that.”

“I got you cigarettes. Here.”

As I lit and puffed on a cigarette for him, he sniffed like a mouse. “You’re a prince, young man,” he said, and his lips curled up into a wide grin. “If I die tonight, I won’t regret a damn bit.”

I plugged the cigarette between his lips and let him drag on it like he was out of oxygen. When the ash curled and broke, I caught it in my palm and went to the door and let the rain wash it from my hand.

“We need some sun.” I sat back down. “To air things out.”

“Rainy day like this, you just want to sit and sip liquor and cuddle up with a pipe. Eh?” He tilted his torso to one side and I could tell that he wanted to ease the pressure on his hemorrhoids.

“This stuff for your hemorrhoids,” I said as I jiggled the herb packet, “has it helped?”

“What?” His dead-fish eyes looked blindly at me.

I gave him another shot of rice liquor and he took a healthy sip from it. Then huffing he said, “Something like . . . opium. Might help.”

“Opium? You can’t afford it, Uncle.” I lit another cigarette and put it between his lips. “You said it helps? Against pain?”

“Kills pain. When I was all busted up by a mìn cóc, they gave me opium. Damn. It worked.”

“What’s mìn cóc?”

He described it. Leaping Frog mine. Gruesome destruction. The kind of mine that jumps up when triggered and explodes two, three feet above the ground. Severs your legs and worst of all maims your genitals. Bouncing Betty. That was the name I later learned from the Americans.

I asked him if he lost his limbs from a Bouncing Betty, and he said yes, nodding and snorting. Smoke from his cigarette didn’t bother him, his dead eyes open unblinkingly, as he asked me, “Which would you rather lose: both of your legs or your penis?” I couldn’t help chuckling and said that I would never ask myself such a question, for it was a warped sense of morbidity that should have no place in a sane mind. He chewed on the cigarette butt leisurely and said, “Soon you’ll ask yourself such when you start having phobia of losing your body parts.” I told him I never treated one part of my body more favorably than another. If it happened, I’d live with it. One older guy in the army said the same thing to me, years later when I was in the South, that your body parts are like your children and you don’t favor one over another. Now, out of curiosity, I asked if he still had his penis and he laughed, spitting out the cigarette, and the ash was scattered on the nylon sheet. I brushed off the ash and waited until he stopped cackling and put the cigarette back between his lips. He shook his head, so I took the cigarette out and he said, chortling, “Still with me, young man. My treasure is. So I don’t have to pee through a tube. And am still a man. That’s what it’s good for. Don’t ask me about my woman though. I don’t blame her.” I mused on his remark as he asked for another sip. Afterward he said there was this thing called “crotch cup,” which had gained popularity in the South among men in his unit and others. It started out when this guy custom-made a triangle cup-shaped piece that he cut out of an artillery shell, and through its three sides, he drilled holes to run three twines and looped them around his torso to hold the piece in place against his crotch. He became the butt of every joke told among fellow soldiers. Then when more and more men fell victim to Bouncing Betty mines, many having been cut below the waist, their genitals pulverized, blown and stuck to their faces in pieces of skin and hair, they grew so paranoid they started finding ways to protect their manhood—and their lineage. The crotch cup became their holy answer. As I tried to absorb the horror of  the war’s realness, twinged with the painful knowledge that I too would soon be a part of that reality, he told me he chose not to wear a crotch cup because it was unwieldy and uncomfortable. Then, snickering, he said some fellows in his unit at one point decided to take a break from wearing the crotch cups, and the next thing that hit them was Bouncing Betty mines. What he never could forget was the crotch pieces of the army trousers all shredded and glued to fragments of white bones, unrecognizable lumps of the genitals found on the ground, some still with skin, some with hair. Without sight now, he said, he imagined those scenes day and night. I listened and decided to take a sip of liquor. I wasn’t afraid, but the gloomy pictures he painted for me to see had affected my mood.

 

For more than a month I had not visited Uncle Chung and neither had I seen his wife coming to the herbal store for prescriptions. One late morning when the weather had cleared up, I went to his house. The door was closed but wasn’t locked.

Inside the house, dim and cool, there was a moistness in the air. It was tinged with a fermented sourness of liquor that had been spilled. On the pallet scattered with clumps of cooked rice, Uncle Chung was lying facedown, the seat of his cutoffs damp-looking. Just as I sat down on my heels, his voice came up, “That you, young man?”

“You awake, Uncle?”

“No. I never sleep,” he said with a deep-throated chuckle. “Just airing out my rump.”

“Wet your shorts?” I peered through the curtain. “Where is she?”

“Be back in the afternoon. She closed the door, didn’t she? Should have left it open for fresh air.”

“It smells in here, Uncle. Want me to open it?”

“Well, don’t chance it. She closed it for a reason.”

“What?”

“Bunch of them kids were coming here this morning. Some were new, I could tell. So she yelled at them, ‘You want to peep at him? Do you? How about pay him? That’s right. Pay him and I’ll let you ogle at him, pet him. Long as you like.’ They just broke off and ran.”

I eyed the stain on his buttocks. “She meant it, didn’t she?”

“It came out of her mouth. So.”

I thought of her. Just briefly. The pretty face. The pleasant voice. “Want to sit up, Uncle?”

He twisted his head toward my side. “My back. Can you scratch it?”

I pushed up his army shirt, paused and brushed off pellets of rice stuck to his back. A warm, sweaty smell rose from his body, and for one brief moment I stared at his back, its bare flesh speckled with black moles like someone had sprinkled raisins on it. His voice drifted sleepily, “She kept telling me . . . those black moles I was born with were flies . . . flies . . . crushed into my skin.”

As I scratched him, he squirmed. His stomach groaned. I wondered if he had eaten since the night before. “Get a towel in there . . .” he said. “Check the kettle. Might have some hot water in it. That’ll take the itch away.”

I found a dish towel hung between the rattan baskets. I reheated the water in the kettle and wet the towel and wrung it as steam wafted up. I saw a bowl with some cooked rice left in it, sitting on the table. A few cubes of fermented tofu lay on top of the rice. Next to the bowl was a glass with some water. But it wasn’t water when I sniffed it. Liquor. I took the bowl and the glass with me and came back out. The hot towel seemed to help him feel better against the itch after I had scrubbed his back until it turned raw red.

“That damn monkey meat,” he slurred.

“What monkey meat?”

“She brought back some monkey meat yesterday. I ate some.”

He tried to turn onto his back. With my help he rolled over. It struck me when I looked down at him. His left cheek had a cut and several scratches. Red, raw, they looked fresh. Since I last saw him he had lost much weight. I could tell from the hollowness in his cheeks and from the slackness given by his shirt. “Let me sit you up,” I said. He let me pull him up, grunting. An ammoniac smell hung about his face. I winced. “Your face, Uncle,” I said, “smells of piss.” His nostrils twitched. “Yeah. From my head to my butt, eh?” His beard, longer now, felt like a woolly wad when I wiped his face. “Woman’s piss,” he said and shook his head.

“What?”

“She pissed on me.” He grinned as if amused while I felt disgusted. “I had a seizure last night. That came after I ate some monkey meat. Good thing I didn’t die, ’cause I woke up and she was sitting on my face and watered me with her holy water. For heaven’s sake I felt all cold sober after that.”

I told him perhaps her quick thinking might have bailed him out of danger. He nodded. For the first time I noticed in his jet-black hair the gray hair had started showing through here and there. I could hear his stomach growl again. “I brought you leftovers—rice and liquor,” I said. He asked me to dump the leftover liquor into the rice. Obliging him, I stirred the concoction, the sickly yellow tofu cubes going round and round with the rice clumps, a tart smell of stale liquor and tofu hung about. I spoon-fed him. He slurped and swallowed. He didn’t even chew. I asked him how he could eat anything like this, and he spat out some rice and said, “There comes a time when you’d eat anything given you. In the South once we had no salt for weeks so we ate ash. Not a bad substitute.” He hiccupped. “Be adaptable, young man.”

“Where’d she get the monkey meat from?” I asked him.

“From a baby monkey, fallen off a tree and drowned in a flood. Well, she and this guy were up across the Viet-Sino border on opium runs. They got caught in a flood and had to eat bamboo rats.”

I recalled the man he mentioned coming to the alley and talking with her. “What if she gets caught by the border police?”

“I’d know when that day comes.”

He told me she had given him the black pellets of opium whenever he had a bout of pain—the hemorrhoids, the lungs. The pains would go away. Since then the seizures had come more than once. If she was home, she would give him liquor that seemed to blunt the fit and, sometimes with much liquor, he would fall asleep.

“I cursed her for giving me the monkey meat,” he said. “She yelled at me, ‘You’re a dunghill. A dunghill for me to risk my life just to earn some cash to keep all your perverted sicknesses at bay.’” He raised his brows, his eyeballs like still yellow marbles. “That woman has a sharp tongue. But she spoke the truth. Said, ‘Who’s going to make all your pains disappear? Doctors? Your crummy pension? That? That goes out the window in no time just to pay the helpers to clean up your filth and buy you liquor so your opium fits won’t kill you. Monkey meat, hanh? Last time you crashed, was it monkey meat? Or was it opium? I’m an expert now on how to kill your obscene pains when you convulse on the floor like a leech, your eyeballs roll into your head, your mouth foams like baking soda. And next time when you bang your head, find a sharp corner. Hanh?’”

It dawned on me about his facial cuts. “You banged your head? During a seizure?”

“Broke her cactus pot and got their spines all over my face.”

As I put the empty bowl away, the fermented sourness made my nose twitch. He cleared his throat, his sticky voice becoming raspy as he told me he had done his part around the house, and yet she never appreciated it. When it did not rain for days, he twice managed to crawl out to her vegetable patch and urinated on the spinach, the purslane, the fish mint. He could tell by their smells. And she could tell of what he had done sometimes by the sight of the cigarette butts lying among the patch. The fish mint leaves would smell repugnant when she chewed them, then she would spit them out and daub the paste on his forehead. He would curse, shake, to get rid of the slimy gob and she said, “You get what’s coming to you. It smells like your piss, doesn’t it?”  She loved her garden patch. Nights when it rained, the air moist and cool, he could hear raindrops pinging on the cement steps and the moistness in the air seeped through his skin. He liked the rain, for he knew rain would soak the soil in the vegetable patches. At first light the soupmint’s downy hair would spark red, the crab’s claw herb would glisten, the thyme, the basil would be gorged with moisture. He could tell that one of her pet plants, the yellow jasmine vine, was coming out in clusters. She’d watered it every morning from the time she brought home the seeds, allowing the pods to dry first before breaking them open, and nursed the seeds with much watering until one morning he could smell something fragrant and that was the first time it flowered. He might hear her cheerful voice, for a change, when she plucked them at dawn.

   

I didn’t visit Uncle Chung for a while until one morning I saw his wife coming into our herbal store. She was wearing a white blouse and a red scarf around her neck, and the red was redder than hibiscus. She asked for a cough prescription. The herbalist asked her if Uncle Chung was having a cold or flu and if he had a whooping cough. She smiled, said it was for a sore throat. I could hear someone coughing outside the store. A man was smoking a cigarette, standing on the sidewalk with his hands in his pants pockets. Lean, dark-skinned, he was about Uncle Chung’s age. His slicked-back hair was shiny with pomade. He glanced toward the store, coughed, and spat. When she met his gaze she smiled. She had that fresh smile that showed her white teeth. Even, glistening.

I thought of that smile when I went to see Uncle Chung afterward. He wasn’t on the pallet. Him sitting or lying on that pallet had been a fixture in my mind. That gave me pause. I went through the curtain and saw him crawling like a caterpillar toward a corner of the room where the bathing quarter stood behind accordian panels. He bumped a chair, stopped, wiggling his head as if to get his bearings. I called out to him.

“Young man?” he cocked his head back, his hair so long now it looked like a black mane.

“Why’re you in here?” I went to him.

“Water.”

“Water? Where?”

“Where she bathes.”

There were no pails, not even a cup, in there. Her black pantaloons were the only item hanging on a string from wall to wall. I could see water still dripping from the pantaloons’ legs. Before I said anything to him, he gave a dry chuckle. “That’s my water.” I pictured him worming his way to where he could catch the dripping water with his mouth.

It took a while before I could move him back out onto his own pallet. Though he said he hated water, he drank some from the kettle, which I poured directly into his mouth. He asked for a cigarette. I told him I was out of cigarettes and promised him when I got money I’d buy him a pack and some liquor. I brought the black caddy to the pallet.

“I’ll make you a pipe, Uncle,” I said, tapping the caddy.

“It’s locked. You know it.”

“I’m going to break the lock.” I thought of her, her smile to the man she had been with, and I could feel my resentment.

“Go ahead.” He grinned.

Surprised by his encouragement, I clucked my tongue as I twisted the blade of my pocketknife inside the keyhole until I felt it snap. “I saw her at the store,” I said to him casually, folding the pocketknife.

“She breezed out of here this morning and I swear I could smell perfume.” He tried to clear his throat, for his voice suddenly sounded strained. “Make the pipe. I need it.”

Inside the caddy a jackfruit leaf lay on top of the tobacco. The leaf was no longer fresh, the blade having gone a dark yellow. He listened to my movements and mumbled something about the leaf left in there to keep the tobacco fresh. Without it when you smoke, he said, the tobacco lacking moisture would burn dry in the throat. He asked me what she wore. I told him. Then remembering her red scarf I told him that too. “Damn,” he said. As I lit the pipe he brought his lips to the opening of the pipe, paused and said, “I remember her wearing that scarf, that red scarf, only once in her life. On the day we got married.” He took a heavy drag, the water in the pipe singing merrily, and then he tipped up his face and blew a cloud of smoke toward the ceiling. “Wish I had eyes to see that scarf on her this morning. Damn it. Was she with somebody?” I told him she was, adding that he must be her business partner. Uncle Chung grunted with a twisted grin at the words I used. I could sense his muted pain and at the same time my still simmering displeasure toward her. “But my woman. Oh my woman. Whenever she bathes in there, I still feel that urge just to caress her full calves. Know what they remind me of, young man? The wax gourds. Those fleshy ripened gourds to sink your teeth in.” He stopped snickering and drew a healthy drag, kept the smoke in his mouth as long as he could and his eyes became slits in his own bliss. I repacked fresh tobacco in the bowl, thinking wishfully of a rice liquor bottle, because I wanted to get drunk, very drunk, with him. I took one big drag with the fresh tobacco, my head buoyed, tingling, as he slurred his words, “Know something else, young man? In the South when they amputated my limbs they said, ‘Don’t cry now, Sarge.’ You know why? We got no anesthesia. So I had someone press her picture on my eyes and I imagined her in that red scarf and I sucked in the pain until her picture shrank with the pain and I passed out.” He nodded his head up and down like on a spring, said he understood her and even felt grateful to her still being with him. Chuckling, he told me the night before a female cat was yowling in heat as it wandered off the garden and into their house and his wife left her cot to come out, turned on the light and saw the cat push its bottom against his stumped leg, rubbing and purring, and his wife said, “Look at it, oh will you look at it,” and he said, “She’s horny. Aren’t women like that when the moon is full?” and she just howled, “How can I sleep with its obscene squealing? Now, now will you look at its obscene way of showing itself?” He said, “How obscene?” She told him that the cat was lying down, twitching its tail and then flinging it to the side and there it was: the pink slit of its genitalia, pink and swollen. Before going back to her cot, she said she was going to stuff the cat’s mouth with lá ngón, the yellow jasmine leaves, if it didn’t stop yowling. He made a snorting sound as he laughed, said it took a long time before things got quieted down, the cat now gone, but the sound of her cot creaking beyond the curtain kept him awake into the night.

Now he blew the smoke out of the corner of his mouth and a light breeze coming through the front door carried the smoke toward the back door. I saw a pot on the doorsill, a tall wooden stake rising from its bottom, and around the stake twined the yellow jasmine vine. Uncle Chung’s wife’s pet plant. I could tell by its pretty yellow flowers.

  The next morning a boy from Uncle Chung’s alley ran into our store and asked the herbalist to come quickly to Uncle Chung’s house. The herbalist was like a doctor in our district, where western medicine and its physicians weren’t trustworthy. I went with him, the boy running ahead of us before we could ask him. Inside the house I saw Uncle Chung lying facedown by the back door where the pot of yellow jasmine sat. It took me but one look to see that he had plucked nearly all the fresh leaves of the vine and some of them were in his mouth still and some of them lay scattered over the doorsill. White foam coated his mouth and his head full of long black hair lolled to one side, and in the morning light I could see the gash and the scratches on his cheek.

I knelt down, looking at his eyes, still open like yellow marbles. I ran my hand over them, and the eyes stayed open. Like dolls’ eyes.

 

A year later I left the North to go South to fight the Americans.

Many of my friends had gone South. Nobody had heard anything from them since. I asked people why none of them ever came back, and they shushed me. Most of them my age tattooed their arms with four words, “Born North Die South.” Like it would boost their morale. Most of them died—true to their tattoos—and there was no news sent home. You can’t win the war with damaged morale suffered by the people at home. The messengers of death weren’t telegrams, but the returning wounded who eventually reached the unfortunate families with the tragic news.

The first day on the way South on the Hồ Chí Minh Trail I saw camouflaged trucks heading North. It was raining. Rain fell on our nylon raincoats, fell on the open beds of the trucks. We stopped, exchanged greeting words. I saw human bodies, alive and packed under the cover in mottled shades of green and brown. The wounded. Some had no legs. Some burned by napalm so severely they looked leperous. Rain dripped on their limbless bodies as they slept. After the trucks came the stretchers. Sticks, bamboo slapped together. Lying on them were the blind. Some had no faces. We couldn’t greet them. They couldn’t see us. They all moved past us, huffing and puffing. Rain-smeared sallow faces. Malaria-wrecked skin. They were all bones. So they headed home. Up North. I looked at them. I wasn’t afraid. Just queasy. We stood off the muddy trail, letting them pass.

I thought of heartbreak grass. One day, I thought, someone going South on this trail would look at me heading North. I might not then have a face. Or limbs.

The thought was like a thief hiding itself in my head to steal away slivers of joy once lived. I bowed my head. Inside I cried and thought of all the mothers whose lives ebb and flow with hopes that their sons would someday be found, what’s left of them, so they can hold them again, with the limbs intact, like they did on the day their sons were born.

The Robert Watson Literary Prize Poem THE DOGS OF MONGOLIA

1.

 

Dog pawing the awnings of restaurants in Ulaanbaatar

where the State Department store hawks dog dreams

to businessmen who cast shadows like pit mines

deep enough for dog bodies to fall asleep inside. Oh dog

roped to the old Soviet pillar, roped to an oil drum

full of vodka. Dog roped to a car husk, head stuck

through the radiator & staring at the dead metal flywheel,

mill-wheel. Dog snared by flight, mired in fetal freedom

on a staircase to the first world, feral & chained by fur

to the cracked rib cage of hunger. Three dogs in a garbage pile

near the temple shed. Dog tongue licking the sacred horse skull,

licking the wounded shaman’s hand, the land. Dog head stuck

inside a mayonnaise jar beneath the deep bellow of Asian sky,

stuck to a body beneath a season of ice, stuck to a cup

of goat milk souring on midwinter’s fatal white cloth.

 

2.

 

God, you are an old trick in reverse; pick a horse-head fiddle

backward until scales shed like fur. Run until your hooves

turn to pads and the plateaus of your teeth

peak into canines; run until you run

the hills into camel backs and your four legs

blacken, bloody as the first newborn colt of Spring.

 

On the broken fire escape, dog. In a pile of dogs

on the burnt black factory floor,

dog. Dead in a winter field, frozenblooded, dog.

Blown into myth, howling into the ice wind

from the edge of legend to be born

again from the foggy womb of the hoodoo, dog.

 

3.

 

However the sky falls, we were there, and we were not dogs.

On horseback in the wide-mouthed valley, the immensity

above us, like some lost faith, threatening rain, we passed

dog after dog guarding the hashas and flocks. They chewed

 

sheep into shin bones, chewed the sinew cords

from the ger poles, the legs from wrestling statues—

 

they coughed up prophecy, swallowed the long winter

where gods walk on knees, kept falling asleep

in the wild wind-swept scruff of steppe. Or

 

that part can’t be true—those dogs never slept.

I still see them, in full sprint across the blue khadag of the sky,

their matted fur turning slowly to snow.

SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT [1977]

A golden eagle landing on a midnight Trans Am.

Its big-blocked, American, eight-cylinder thunder

and lead-lined cloud of exhaust fumes mixed

with burning tire tread. That smuggler’s smile fueled

by a bootlegger’s truth: there’s public good detouring

pedantic rules. Kojak with a Kodak, choke and puke,

I got my 10 in the wind, your ass is grass and I’m gonna mow it. 

How vengeance pursued beyond reason’s jurisdiction

cuffs you to failure and ridicule. Ahead, missing bridges

only a desperado’s bravado can cross, roadblocks

evaded through the sanctuary of strangers. A wedding

in search of a bride. That you too can hitchhike from

unsatisfied’s altar when the Bandit arrives in tight jeans

with a ten-gallon lid he only removes for the one thing

he looks for in every pretty woman. And you’ll be free

if you can lose yourself in relentless movement, if you

can see carnations in the carnage of police cruisers

littering the future he cultivates in fame’s name.