CATTLE

It was my grandfather’s moist palm on my forehead that I felt when I woke in the dark. And, he was saying something, his breath on me, the scent of rot and saliva.

“Was nothing, boy. No worries.”

His calloused palm scraped my forehead as he ran his arthritic fingers through my hair. He grunted and moaned as he lowered himself to lay beside me on the quilt, squirmed as he took off his boots. In the air was the scent of liquor and sweat.

“No worries. No worries.”

He asked me what I’d seen in my sleep.

“I was dreaming about the cow I saw today,” I said. “Down in the boneyard. The mom cow and the baby.”

“Which one?”

“The one with the baby, where the baby is coming out.”

I heard him scratch his unshaven face.

He turned away. Breathed deeply and began to cough. He cleared his throat and wet his lips. Then, just the sound of the house, the wind brushing against the walls, stirring the grass in the yard, a nighttime sigh that rattled and soaked the window, rattled the door—I imagined what the boneyard looked like, out there in this dark. The bending blades of grass rippling under wind and rain that was now pouring into the hollow and filling it with the stuff that would make the animal bodies disappear with time.

In Waimea the rain is a mist that slants with the wind, and comes in sharp and stinging. That morning, when me and Mom arrived at my grandfather’s property, he told us that the weather was turning, pointed to the clouds coming from the east, and I could already feel bits of wet against my face making my nose itch. He had been sitting on the porch repairing a tarp when we greeted him, and when he stood to go inside, we followed.

January of 1959, I’d met my grandfather for the first time. I was thirteen. We’d made this trip so many times that year, me and Mom every other Saturday. The two-hour bus ride took us north, from Hilo, through every Hamakua sugar town—the Pacific to the east and sugar cane fields to the west. Passed over Honoka’a town as the road curved inland, taking us up into the Honoka’ia Forest, and when we came out the land and the sky opened up big and wide. Views of grassland and cattle replaced the stretch of cane and ocean. Men on horseback wearing flat-crowned hats with wide brims, in the old vaquero style, came alongside the bus, clicking their tongues and pulling on the reins of their horses, whose hooves clacked high, hollow sounds on the road as they trotted to and from town.

My grandfather lived a few miles south of Waimea town, out toward Mauna Kea, on the Pu’u Kapu Plain, on three hundred acres of land he’d gotten in a Department of Hawaiian Homelands lottery, back when it was run by the Federal Government: a ninety-nine-year lease with a 50 percent blood minimum requirement. He’d built a stilted, plantation-style house that sat on a hill near the center of the property. Red dirt in wind, rust-scarred roof, made the once white house tawny. Inside, quilts and blankets lay folded in the corner and a large chest containing clothes and keepsakes was set in another. The dining table was pushed against the wall, beneath the sill of the large picture window that looked out toward the western paddocks. Dusty brown, inside, and scents of lacquer, leather, and manure, the wood mustier when the rainy season came, mustiest that trip in December 1959, the last time I saw my grandfather alive. Me and Mom climbing the steps to the porch, following him through the doorway, smelling it—the lacquer first, the saddles and boots, the mildewed beams of the open ceiling—me and Mom put our bags down near the quilts. He folded the tarp he’d been repairing and placed it in the corner at the door.

Later, when we sat down to lunch, he asked, “Is he doing good in school?” and pointed at me with his chin from the other side of the dining table. At the center was a large pot of beef stew simmering on the portable gas burner. Mom filled my grandfather’s bowl, then mine, then hers, telling him, as she ladled, that I always did well in school.

“It’s that Ha’ole blood where he gets that from. The brains not from us,” he said.

Mom glared at him. She fidgeted with her napkin, wiping her palms over and over again. I imagine that she was searching for the perfect phrasing that would save her from an argument, as had happened during past visits. They were still unable to talk about my father, a marine from Idaho who had been stationed at Camp Tarawa during World War II.   

“That’s not true,” she said. “You’re a smart man.” She reminded him of all the work he’d done on his property, how he’d built it up from nothing.

“Not the same,” he said.

“But, you have Ha’ole blood, too,” I said. “Your last name is a Ha’ole name.”

My grandfather kept his eyes on his bowl. It was a different kind of thing, he said, blowing on a spoonful of stew, slurping at the broth until a single piece of beef remained. It was different, perhaps, because what little Ha’ole blood he did have he could trace back to nineteenth-century New England missionaries. Different, because his Ha’ole ancestors arrived here with a Bible in hand. My father arrived in military dress, carrying a rifle. It was a different kind of thing because, as my grandfather had once told me, my father had seduced my mother, who was too young and stupid to know any better. It was different because I did not meet the blood requirement for the lease, and could never take over the property.   

“We had to put one of the calves down yesterday. The leg broke when was going through the chute and couldn’t do nothing. Cost more money to fix,” my grandfather said.

I waited, but he said nothing more, nothing about the blood and all that, nothing about the noise, the huffing and bleating of the calves, only chewed and swallowed, saying it was a shame and a waste.

I had seen the cattle on branding days. I’d watched the ranchers gather the weaning paddock and drive them to the corral. They ran the calves down the chute and into the squeeze. Cut notches in the ears of the females and castrated the males. Tagged them. Pushed irons bearing my grandfather’s symbol into their hides that sent streams of smoke and a sulfurous stench into the air. The animals bellowed and fought and bled. It wasn’t often on a branding day that my grandfather needed his revolver. But, as he was saying now, through a mouthful of mushed beef, sometimes the calves fought too hard.

“It’s in the corral, still. Need take it down the boneyard today,” he said.

After lunch he cleared the table and took the dishes out to the catchment spigot to wash. I took off my shirt and lay down on the quilt in the corner. Later, my grandfather was back on the porch with the tarp in hand. He sat still, threading and pulling, threading and pulling, having a conversation with himself that took place at the edge of his lips. How his hands vibrated almost imperceptibly as he patched the hole in the canvas. How his elastic-like thumb bent back nearly ninety degrees, gripping the needle. He had the strangest fingers. Always when he spoke. When he’d say important things. How he’d put his hands out in front with the crooked fingers spread wide, kinking wildly at the joints. And curving the hands down toward each other, until the outside edges of the palms touched, he’d make a semicircle motion, as if shaping a bowl out of the air. A way to show what he was saying, perhaps, because he spoke so little.

When he’d finished repairing the tarp, he stood and snapped the dirt and dead grass from its folds, eyed the stitches. He said he was going out, wanted to take care of the dead calf before the weather worsened.

“Can I come, too?” I asked him.

“What for?”

“Help,” I said.

“You don’t know what to do.” He was at the door, slipping into an army green poncho. “Hey,” he called to Mom. “You want him out with the weather like this?”

Mom told me to stop bothering my grandfather. “He’s busy,” she said.

“I’m not bothering him,” I said.

She was at the dining table, her face made up, and she was dabbing plumeria oil on her neck. Her red mu’u mu’u lay across the back of the chair beside the umbrella.

“If he gets sick, not my fault,” my grandfather said. He pulled the hood of the poncho over his head and stepped out onto the porch. “Hurry up, then,” he said to me. “The weather is only getting worse.”

“Go,” Mom said.

Perdy would be waiting for her at the front gate. His property bordered my grandfather’s to the south. A squat and dusty old man, ugly even, Perdy had made it to midlife without marrying, and he intended for Mom to marry him. Mom and my grandfather hadn’t spoken since my birth, but it was at Perdy’s request, late in 1958, that Mom and me made that first trip to Waimea. It had been a little over a year since we received that first letter from my grandfather, asking her if she remembered Perdy, and would she like to meet with him.     

Go.

Mom always said that. When I was small I’d ask her to walk to the ocean at King’s Landing, a distance of several miles. “Go,” she’d say, never asking who I was going with, or what time I’d be back. Growing up, I’d known Mom to be a large woman, a slow woman, whose movements were slight, never more than needed. Once, just after the Andrade kid drowned in a cave upriver, I said I was going swimming up Wailuku.

“Go. Do what you like.”

Even as I heard my grandfather kickstart the Speed Twin outside, and the engine revved over the noise of the weather, the RPMs falling, idling, and then the return of the rattling window, the dripping from the awning, the rain striking the metal roof, Mom seemed no more, no less concerned. She sat at the dining table, holding the mirror out in front, so that when I waved from the doorway, she couldn’t see me. We’d meet her in the morning, as we always did, Sundays on the chapel steps.

On the back of the cycle the rain and wind hit us like hail. Fog was rolling in from the Saddle, limiting visibility to a few yards in every direction. We dipped and climbed over hills, through grass that was waist high in places and in others, where the cattle were grazing, mowed to the mud. We slowed for the puddles and paddock gates only. Then the speed again, and the pelting wind and rain. The engine beneath me numbing.

Near the corral my grandfather downshifted. Arms tight around his torso, I felt his body ease with the cut of the engine. We coasted, silently closing the distance between us and the carcass. It was a tiny thing, lying on its side. My grandfather unfolded the tarp and laid it over the mud, beside the calf. As I came closer I saw the wound at the center of its forehead, the brown-black blood coagulated around it. Like the other animals who didn’t live long enough to make it to the slaughterhouse, this calf was being taken to the boneyard, a hollow at the western edge of the property, to bloat and stink, to be infested with flies and worms.

I knew the boneyard well. Often I’d play there, alone, among the wasting animals. I wielded femurs against invisible armies and stomped on horned skulls half-buried in the soft soil. I’d be Eisenhower or Patton charging across the battlefield, stabbing the distended bellies until entrails spilled from the wound. Most often, I was William Holden, screaming, Kill the Japs! Kill ’em!, gunning down the enemy with a knotted guava branch. A shot taken to the chest and I’d fall face-first in the grass, grabbing and scratching at my shirt, gurgling, making what I thought were the sounds the dying make.

William Holden.

I remember the first time I saw him. It was in Sabrina. There he was, twenty feet tall on the Palace Theater screen, in Hilo. William Holden as David Larrabee, the playboy in sport jackets and straw hats. And, there was the exotic, redwood smell of the theater’s banisters and seats, a scent that, even in my old age, brings the scenes and music from that picture to mind. The smell also leaves me aching for a ghost.

See, I used to imagine my father to be just like David Larrabee, in looks and temperament. In the dark, on the upper deck of the Palace Theater, I saw my father to be a handsome man, clever-talking, a blond-haired, blue-eyed man with a warm face. I never knew much about him. Mom didn’t know much either. He shipped off and died on Iwo Jima without ever knowing about me.

If she talked about my father, Mom never said much. She always said she was telling everything she knew. That his name was William. That he had blond hair. I get the height and the olive eyes from him. But, the hands are my grandfather’s.

“Hold here,” my grandfather said, squatting beside the calf, the ends of the rope hanging limp from his hands.

I pushed against the knot with my palm and he finished tying it, looping and crossing the rope over the back of my hand, tightening the knot once I’d slipped my fingers out.

“Lift it.”

I lifted one side of the bundled calf as my grandfather further wrapped it with another piece of rope. He hitched it to the back of the cycle. We were going again, the engine rumbling low as we dragged the calf through the mud of the corral, down the hill, parting the tall grass of paddock five and six, down the side of the western hollow, into the boneyard. There, we unwrapped the calf and he folded up the tarp. A few yards away there was a freshly rotting animal lying on its side, whose outline I could barely make out through the fog.

“Where you going?” he said.

“To look.”

I approached the animal from the front. Its milky gray eyes watched me come closer. Tongue hung from the mouth. I tapped it with my shoe. The wet, distended belly and the stench. My body’s tiny convulsions. I lifted my shirt collar over my nose and still, the stench.

“Boy, we go already.”

As I circled the animal I saw something between its hind legs. A rust-colored thing, an organ maybe. But there were no wounds. I kicked at the grass around it, then pulled until I saw a pair of tiny hooves, hind legs that disappeared into the heifer. I had never seen anything like it.

“There’s a baby, too,” I yelled.

“It’s nothing, boy. No worries.”

      

Perhaps it was coincidence that my grandfather told me the story of Ikua Kaleohano that night, after waking me and asking what I’d seen in my sleep. Perhaps the telling of the story was a moment of grace. As we lay there in the dark, perhaps the story of the Kaleohano family represented the ideal, which, for the first time in his life, seemed possible.

His back still turned to me, he began to cough again, though it was much worse this time. I could feel his body convulsing beside me, clenching and releasing. He swallowed what had been loosened in his throat. I heard his lips part.

“The Kaleohano family . . .” he said.

“Who?” I said.

He had told me many stories, always in the dark, late, and only after drinking. He’d wake me to talk and slur through stories about all the beautiful women he’d been with, or a dead friend that he missed—most were dead—or a time when his father gave him lickens. If I fell asleep he’d nudge me so he could continue. He talked about the burial caves in Kawaihai. The haunted forest down Mud Lane. But mostly, he talked about families. Who was from which family. About so-and-so, who had married into another family. The tempers of families, the looks of others.

“The Kaleohano family, from Kona side. You know them, yeah? You Hilo, boy, so you don’t know. They the ones get one hundred acres up Hualalai. They get fifty or sixty head Hereford pipi.”

He paused. Wanted me to say something.

“You know, one of the boys plays ball for Konawaena. Real fast.”

He waited. Groaned.

“Get one story about the Kaleohanos. Long time ago had one guy named Ikua Kaleohano. He was the one first got that one hundred acres. How he got the money, who knows? Ikua had one wife and one baby on the way, but both the baby and the wife went make during the birth. Ikua, this guy, his heart was broken. That’s what the old-timers say. He came real religious after that, the kind where you pray every day, and every time you talk to the guy, all he like do is talk about God. He still worked the land. Started laying fence lines. Bought couple head cattle. The whole time he was praying. They said he was praying for his wife and his baby and he was praying for himself too, that could fix his heart.

“You try ask the old-timers about Ikua. They going tell you he was a little bit crazy. People stopped talking to him, they stopped seeing him. He never came down Waimea side anymore. For years and years nobody saw him. Then, he started coming town again. He was going around telling people he had one new son. Could describe the boy and all. From his ehu-color hair all the way down to the big toe, which was long and skinny. Ikua was telling everybody that the boy was one miracle from God, ’cause he was praying so long. The people said to him, Ikua, you get one baby but no wife, no woman, how can?

“He said he met one woman one night, up on his property. She had dark skin and gray hair, he said. She stayed with him. He said she went fix his heart. She had his baby, too. New baby. The next day she was gone, disappeared.”

My grandfather nudged me with his shoulder and asked if I was still awake, ’cause he didn’t want to be talking to no one.

“Is that real?” I asked.

“Plenty people think was one lie, but how can? Where the baby came from, then? Some people think was Pele. Me, I don’t know.”

“Where’s the boy? Is he still alive?”

“He grew up. Took over the land when Ikua went make, short time later. He too, went make in his thirties. Thrown from a mule on the trail down to Honokane’iki. All the Kaleohanos come from that line. Real talented family, the Kaleohanos. Good ranchers. I think people believe the story more now after they seen how special that family is.”

My grandfather ran his hand through my hair once more. Overhead, the roof rattled, the window, too. The rain had picked up and its patter against the house was like radio static. Then, all at once, the noise stopped, as if the weather were between breaths. I fell asleep to the sound of my grandfather snoring.

      

He died later that month.

He would not be there when we moved into Perdy’s house a few weeks later. He would not see the wedding. He would never know that after years of trying Mom and Perdy could not have children. He would not have to watch his property pieced and parceled to new ranchers.

When we found his body it was face-down near the corral, bloated and stiff, the purple skin blistering. Flies crowded around the open sores and crawled along the flaking skin of the lips, in and out of the mouth. The face was unrecognizable. I remember thinking this wasn’t anyone I knew. Wasn’t anyone. Just something my grandfather had left behind. When I saw the rigid, bent wrists and the curling fingers only then did I feel afraid. Mom wouldn’t look. She covered her face and started toward the house.

Later that day, I wrapped what was left of my grandfather in the tarp and dragged the bundle out of the corral and up the hill. I leaned back and pulled, pushed with my legs, squatted low to push off again. I was facing the western paddocks as I dragged his body along the ridge of a hill, toward the house, as I strained and sweated to pull it over rocks and dirt, through thick grass. The western paddocks lay stretched out before me, the boneyard in the shadow of the hollow.

EXPLODED VIEW

While he slept, I read my father’s books,

brought home from the furnace,

traced the diagrams—channels, ladles of iron,

 

oxygen lances—trying to follow

the metal’s path, to follow the work

that took him each night into the dark,

 

flame to the coal’s dark, the dark

gone bright while the rest of us slept.

The door closed like a storybook . . .

 

While he worked, the furnace flamed

in dream, and I tried to follow

through the swarm of yellowjackets,

 

hot wings of iron, but they were just

outlines in my dream, dream,

not iron, not fire in the dark—just spray

 

from one rare story I tried to follow.

I tried to follow, but even he

didn’t want to go, not even

 

in story, the blanks in the books’

diagrams all ash, all flame. All silence,

he seemed to say. But silence

 

is a furnace, too, where work

disappears, where breath is turned

to iron. And night is a furnace, too,

 

where sleep, where dark are burned away

like words until the books are blank,

and there’s nothing left to follow.

 

I tried, listening as he eased the stairs,

clicked the door, then drove away,

his engine lost in the trains’ low drone,

 

strained to hear him turning,

ten miles away, pages in the book of iron,

the story he told by not telling,

 

the dark in which the furnace always rests.

So, the furnace is a father, too,

whose story you cannot follow,

 

a shadow sitting loud in the dark,

while the quiet hardens in his lungs,

 

and the father is a story, too,

you cannot follow,

a book fed slowly to the fire,

 

a fire, worked, at last,

to two black tongues of iron.

MAYFLOWER

—For John Earl Reese, a 16-year-old, shot by Klansmen

through the window of a café in Mayflower, Texas,

where he was dancing, October 22, 1955.

 

                       Before the bird’s song

                       you hear its quiet

 

                       which becomes part of the song

                       and lives on after,

 

                       struck notes bright

                       in silence

 

                       as the room’s damp—

                       wallpaper and wall

 

                       muffling the high cicadas’

                       whine, mumbling

 

                       talk from another room—

                       hangs like the thought

 

                       of a roof in the midst of rain

                       long after the joists

 

                       have been brought down.

                       So the quiet

 

                       syllables crowded

                       full-throats once the talkers

 

                       have gone away,

                       and a young man’s voice

 

                       becomes a young man’s

                       silence, all

 

                       he did not say,

                       which nothing keeps

 

                       saying in the empty room

                       between the pines

 

                       that hold the quiet

                       of the song he cannot sing,

 

                       the sound of a room

                       without sound

 

                       in the middle of what

                       anyone can hear.

WHEN THE WATER RISES

During supper in the dining car the former Queen of the Lettuce Festival wanted to know if the world was ending.

“Now, listen,” she said. “You can tell us—we’re not the kind that panics. We just want to be ready, that’s all.” She nudged her husband beside her. “Isn’t that right?” she said, then said it again.

“Oh, yes,” said her husband. “We are calm, cool, and collected.” He had the red nose of a drinker and giggled to himself as he ate his salad.

She wasn’t talking to me. I was traveling alone and hadn’t shaved in four days. I’d learned that a young man traveling alone doesn’t get asked questions. He makes people nervous.

She was talking to the man sitting beside me, a middle-aged man in a clean blue polo shirt who had introduced himself as David. He was a geologist.

The Queen tapped a golden fingernail on the tabletop. Her nail polish was the same color as the rims of her glasses and the watch on her wrist. “Tell me,” she said, “I hear about these glaciers melting in Alaska and California. Is this true? We want to be ready, you know, when the water rises.”

The husband paused in his eating to bang down a fist on the table. “Always be prepared!” he cried. His wine glass shivered. He speared a cherry tomato on his fork and grinned at it.   

The Queen turned to him. “Howard,” she said. She gave him a stern look through her gold-rimmed glasses. “We’re talking.” She turned back to David the geologist:  “Excuse him,” she said. “He used to be a Boy Scout.”

“Eagle Scout,” said Howard. “Once a Scout, always a Scout.” He put down his fork and picked up the wrapper the Queen’s straw had been in. “Watch,” he said, and winked at me. “Hitch knot!” he said and twisted the wrapper into a pretzel before it tore in half. He looked disappointed. “Oh,” he said. And after a moment, “I seem to have forgotten.” I handed him mine and he thanked me.

David the geologist resettled the napkin in his lap. “Actually,” he said, “there’s a glacier on Mt. Rainier that’s growing. I was up there last month.”

“Oh, dear,” said the Queen. “What does that mean?”

“Hard to say,” he said, “but you never hear about the growing ones. They’re not sensational enough.”

“Oh, dear,” the Queen repeated. “I wonder if they’ll make us extinct someday.”   

“Oh, we’ll all be extinct someday,” David the geologist said. “We’ll die off, but the earth will go on. Something else will replace us. Maybe the insects, maybe the birds. But something will.”

“Awful,” the Queen said. “What an awful thing to think about.” She sat back and looked out the window. We were passing through the wide fields of eastern Montana. It was August and they were full of alfalfa and cutter bees and the hot evening sunlight.

A waiter came by and cleared away our dirty plates as the train swung into a long curve. He swayed with it perfectly and didn’t miss a step. When he returned, Howard said he was ready for some apple pie.

“I bet it’ll be the insects,” the Queen said at last. “There’s so many of them.”

“Could be,” said David the geologist. “Wouldn’t surprise me at all.”

“Me, neither,” said the Queen. She was quiet for a moment and touched her white hair lightly with a hand. “I just hope it’s not flies,” she said. “I don’t like flies.”

The waiter brought Howard’s apple pie and we fell into a silence as we concentrated on our food and the doom of the world. I didn’t think it would be the insects. I didn’t think it would be the birds, either. I had a feeling it would be something else entirely, something worse. But I didn’t say anything. It wasn’t worth fighting over and I’d already lost one fight that week.   

Two days before in Chicago, Lucy told me we weren’t working anymore. We were moving apart, she said.

“How are we doing that?” I asked. We were sitting under a black umbrella at an outdoor café. The Chicago River flowed beside us and two gulls clattered over it.

“I don’t know,” she said. She shrugged and sipped dark soda through a straw. It was hard to hear her. It was rush hour and the traffic was a loud wind that redoubled off all the buildings. I pulled my chair closer to the table.

“It’s like I’m going east,” she said, “and you’re going west.” I frowned and leaned toward her. The traffic light had changed and a horn sounded as she spoke. “We’re just going in different directions, you know?” There were cardboard coasters on the table and she pushed two of them apart with her fingertips.

“That’s not true,” I said.

“Vance,” she said. She tried to smile, but instead she tipped her head to the side and took another sip of soda. When she did, her hair slid over itself like grain. It was shorter and lighter. I’d seen this the moment I got off the train and it worried me somewhere deep.

I’d mentioned it that afternoon on the platform. After we’d kissed hello I said she’d done something to her hair. Yes, she said. She had looked at me steadily. She’d gotten it cut, she said, and lightened, too. She’d told me this on the phone, she said. Didn’t I remember?  Oh right, I said, she had. She hadn’t.

She wanted to know if I liked it. I didn’t. No, I wanted to say, are you kidding me? but I was thinking instead, thinking of how it was when we were both still in Shelby and we’d put food and beer in my truck on Friday afternoons after school and drive west through Cut Bank and on up to Glacier, where we’d hike until we found a good spot near water we could swim in before dinner. We’d sit against rocks and drink the beer while the stars came out above the lodgepoles and the spruce and the katydids began to tick and clatter in the brush; sometimes we’d hear the hoot of an owl and then Lucy’d make her eyes big and put her face close to mine and hoot at me until I’d kiss her to make her stop and she’d be laughing too hard to kiss me back. Later, in the tent I’d pull her down on top of me and her hair was so long and thick that when it covered my face I couldn’t see a thing or really even breathe, but I’d hold her there like that after we’d finished, the darkness beneath her hair so complete that nothing came in at all, not the starlight or the cricketsong or the damp smell of mud curving up from Rose Creek—even our breathing seemed to have gone someplace far away where it sat and waited quietly.    

It was that stillness, I decided one night after a year with her had passed, it was that stillness that people must mean when they called something love.

“I can go east,” I said, though I knew it wasn’t true. I already didn’t like the city. It made my stomach heavy. In my suitcase back at her apartment was my return ticket to Shelby, and that’s where I wanted to be.   

“Vance,” she said again. “No, you can’t.” She reached across the table and took my hand for a moment and squeezed it.

“Then you can come back west,” I said. I felt a little desperate, a little dizzy.

“I can’t do that, either,” she said. She didn’t take my hand this time. Instead I felt the firm pressure of the world pushing back at me. “I like this city,” she said. “I like my job and I like going out at night and dancing. I like all these people and all the noise. I’m happy here.”

I sat back in my chair and asked if there was someone else. She smiled sadly at me and said no, there wasn’t, and I believed her. I believed there was no one else, but there was still the city and that was still too much.

That night I lay in the dark on Lucy’s couch and tried to fall asleep. Yellow light came in through the blinds and I could smell her perfume in the seams of the cushions. Outside there were people calling to each other and laughing and airplanes rose and landed somewhere near. I covered my eyes with one hand and tried to think of one good thing. Then I tried to think of nothing at all. In the end I sat up and waited for dawn and wondered once or twice if I might get sick and if I could be quiet about it.

When it was light enough I took a taxi to the station while Lucy still slept. I took a seat in coach, then moved to the observation car and watched the flat land and the thin rivers slide past until evening came and I started to feel hungry again. I didn’t have much money, but I decided I deserved a good meal the way a soldier deserves a good meal after a battle, so I got a ticket for the dining car where they seated me with the Queen and her husband and David the geologist.

The Queen wanted to know if David the geologist was married. He wasn’t.

“Why not?” she said. She pointed at him with a shining fingernail. “Look how smart you are. How many men know about the end of the world?”

“Oh,” said David the geologist. He held up a hand, but he was smiling. “Please,” he said.

“Any girl would be lucky to have you,” the Queen said. She looked at the neat points of his collared shirt as she said this. I saw her glance at my hands. They were folded together.

“Well, it’s not for lack of trying,” said David the geologist. “I’ve met some nice women, but they never seem to stick around.”

Howard had finished his apple pie and took up my straw wrapper. He worked feverishly at it for a few moments, looping and relooping it. “Double surgeon!” he said at last and held up his work. He gave it one last tug and it tore in half. He smiled sadly as before. “Alas,” he said, “this trout has escaped.”

“Stop it,” said the Queen. She took the wrapper from his hands. “Now, listen,” she said to David the geologist. “Howard and I met thirty-two years ago at the Lettuce Festival in Santa Cruz. I was crowned queen and he was my king. It was a wonderful place to fall in love. You never know how it will happen.”

“That’s a beautiful story,” said the geologist. “Maybe I should go to a Lettuce Festival.” He laughed a little, then stopped.

“I would very much recommend it,” the Queen said. “Wouldn’t you, dear?” She nudged Howard and he grinned.

“Yes,” he said, “go. Go!” He giggled again and gave me his rosy grin. I could see where a touch of apple still clung to a tooth.

“Maybe I will, too,” I said, and the Queen and David the geologist looked at me. I went on:  “I think I might like that.”

There was a long moment and I was aware of someone in the car striking a dish too hard with a glass and then laughing. “Yes,” the Queen said finally. She looked at me through her gold-rimmed glasses and frowned a little. “It’s quite an experience.”

I felt the blood rush to my face. I picked up the pieces of Howard’s straw wrappers and rolled them into little pellets between my thumb and index finger. I arranged them like a stone circle around a crumb while the waiter brought the check.

Outside, the mountains pushed up on the horizon and the light grew long and late, making deep shadows in the dells. I held on to the edge of the table with one hand as the grade rose slowly.

DUSTY FIELD, DOG BARKING

When I try to see my mother in this world,

standing in a dusty field, confused

and taking tentative steps like a child—

 

when I try to see her there, after

she’s climbed out of the car she’d driven

over the shallow ditch miles from home—

 

when I try to see her there, wondering

why she’s not at the store or home,

maybe wondering where her son is—

 

when I try to see her there,

I can hear nothing

but small birds in high branches

 

and the distant barking of a dog

at the edge of an unseen fence.

He’s heard the wheels’ thump, creak

 

of old shocks, maybe the horn. He’s barking

at what he can’t see. When I try to see

my mother there, I hear the barks

 

becoming fainter, more intermittent

as the dog begins to understand

that nothing’s happened, no one’s coming.

The Amon Liner Poetry Award Poem NOVEMBER

The pumpkin face sags

like a chemo patient’s,

 

spots down the temples,

weighted, sloping cheeks.

 

Pockets in long black coats

fill with elegies. Everything

 

that was is entropied and organized;

Mother is dead and the world

 

travels its tethered arc.

The farmers carve new rectangles

 

in the soil, each plot

a blank face in the earth’s geometry.

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.