URSUS

Today I walked the road from end to end.

If you want to know, yes, I looked

 

for bears. My whole adult life I’ve looked.

Before sex, there was not a bear. And

 

so on. While I walked, planes came through

the valley, two together, antique, I think.

 

My thoughts went to air show.

Crop duster. Forest fire. First flight.

 

I don’t know where you are.

 

So now I’ll say I hated and loved the time

the young barista gave you your receipt

 

with her number on the back. I was

right there, like another customer,

 

a book bag. Just this morning,

the man up the road told me

 

a story: one evening he sat alone

in the yard with his book and sensed

 

in the quiet a presence—what he took

to be his wife sneaking up. He waited.

 

Finally he turned to see sleeping on the grass

behind his chair a large bear. I could

 

have wept. Tonight the roar coming on

is one plane, nothing in chase or warning

 

or relief, nothing but the late sun

and everything’s invitation to face it.

PATIENCE

Between the kiddy park the town closed for repairs after recent

flooding and the new three story senior center, there’s a piss

poor wooded area in the bow of a runoff creek where teenagers

go at night to drink and smoke but during the day is always

empty. I can walk my dog off leash there and when he shits

I never have to clean it up. It’s hardly woods at all so much

as tall bushes, weeds, and a few dead trees swallowed up in

dead or dying vines, some thick as the trunks they’ve twisted

up and strangled, a stranded understory shrinking into itself

while the town goes on subdividing all around it in a meiosis

of cement, blacktop, concrete, steel, and glass. One time, I got

there early before rush hour. Sunlight passing level through a

prism of leaves broke into variegated greens I had no name

for. The air, it seemed, had come alive with green gradations

and degrees, a green kaleidoscope the sun had summoned, that

quivered with a chilly symbolism I could feel but not decipher. 

At my feet, across the emerald moss shell of a log disintegrated

nearly into dirt, a single ant was clambering into and out of

melded bands of darker and lighter green, over tufts of moss,

which when I looked closer I could see were woven of paler

tufts, and those tufts too of even paler and shorter ones, none

of which so much as bent under the ant as it went where it was

going, where it would get to, no matter what, as if it were the

ant articulation of the green shades moving over it as it moved

down the crumbling log into the weeds among the crushed

and rusted beer cans, shreds of cellophane, and dog shit. Little

hoplite genius of a place of unfathomable patience with all

time to accomplish what its tiny ant heart, if it had a heart, was

beating for.

LETTER TO MATTHEW OLZMANN FROM A FLYING SAUCER

Listen son, when we shine this tractor beam on you,

you need to hold still. Not that stillness, son,

is something that can be “held,” but that’s your language,

not ours. What we’re saying, son,

is you keep skipping like a stone across a pond and we need

that to stop. What we’re saying, son, is let the light

bring you home. Never mind the way

the tractor beam incinerates all it touches.

We’re pretty certain this is safe. It’s gonna work. Trust us.

There are things in your skull, son,

that do not belong to you, thoughts you can’t explain,

songs you’ve never heard, colors you have no name for.

We’re not saying you’re special, son. We just needed a place

to store our luggage and now we’ve got to extricate

that luggage and we need to extricate it all intact.

Think of the light as all the problems you need to face.

You’re afraid of being alone in the world? You’re afraid

that when the light shines on you, you’re going

to be exposed and everyone will laugh? You’re afraid

that you’ll never be moderately competent? You need

to deal with that, son, and now is your big chance.

We’re saying step into the light, son.

Never mind that you’ve doubted

whether or not the light is real. What is doubt, son,

when you have a chance to be hauled into the sky?

IN THE NEALE, NEAR CONG

The thing is I am not

like a wood pigeon

with a white collar

and gray head that looks to be green,

a tail that wants to be a pheasant

loping from branch to scarred branch.

 

We looked from the road

the kid who became my grandmother

took from church a century ago,

a few kilometers of her eye-level

being on the top of stone walls

and the mountains to the southwest,

Galway, Mayo, out past Cong,

mountain and sea-bucked places.

 

The old place we saw decades ago

had gotten overgrown, with a family

running a terrier kennel

in the habitable half now.

It was noisy. There was a baby in back.

 

The mountains are green folds

of a sofa, whose television viewing

is the sea, wildly carved by it.

The living room is the whole scenario.

 

All day here

looking for cairns

in featureless field

rectangled with stone

after featureless field,

each a different width

or length, from above

not a pattern

but improvisation,

 

it was that crazy feeling

of abstraction,

irritation, sunbaked.

 

I was ready to go all day.

WHEN THE GIRL BECOMES THE BEAR

There’s no terror like the terror

of the sensory-deprivation tank

(because you supply your own terror).

It will not be the men who kill me,

it will be the women

                         who hate the men.

When they cannot kill the bear, they blame

the trees.

I am limb-sawed, uprooted.

A mute stump.

The bear still roams—his eyes shine,

his coat smooth as if freshly groomed.

(By whom?)

In the tank, I blink and blink

                                     into dead air.

I think, If only I could be the bear for them.

Listen,

if you meet a bear

            who whispers, Kill me,

you will know my voice.

The Robert Watson Literary Prize Story JURY OF MATRONS

My mother came from a family of relentless and intransigent women. One of her grandmothers—as Aunt Faye relished telling it—hatcheted saloons alongside Carrie Nation; the other operated the speakeasy where Joe Majczek and Ted Marcinkiewicz allegedly shot a Chicago traffic cop in 1932. (“You’ve probably seen the movie version,” Aunt Faye crowed to friends. “Call Northside 777. June Havoc—you remember June Havoc, don’t you?—has a bit part as my Granny Bess. Not credited, but still!”)  My mother’s mother, Ida, fought alongside the Loyalists in Spain and later guided anti-Vichy partisans over the Pyrenees, albeit with limited success. So when my own mother deposited my bassinet in her aunt’s parlor in Powick Bridge, a fruitless suburb of Hartford, Connecticut, and flew off to liberate Guatemala from Yanquis, she followed well-tread if reckless footsteps, and when she “disappeared” during the worst of that nation’s “White Terror”—a named target of Colonel Arana’s death brigades—the US State Department offered Aunt Faye the diplomatic equivalent of a shrug.

Fast forward fifteen years: that’s a long about way of explaining how I ended up at my grandaunt’s home, a perpetually flummoxed adolescent boy sharing a roof (and a cast-iron clawfoot bathtub) with three inscrutable women, when my mother’s baby sister, Marcella, passed through on route from a halfway house in Springfield to the coast. “I’m going to save the Pregnant Pirette from the soldering iron, so help me,” she announced to Aunt Faye. “And I’m taking Ginny’s kid with me.”

Marcella wore her tawny hair in cornrows tufted with cowry shells; her harem skirt flowed from a belt garnished with artificial daisies—but even in her thirties, our visitor looked too battle-worn for Hippiedom. (Try to picture Mrs. Khrushchev dressed as Bo Derek.)  She dropped a carpetbag lacquered with political pins onto the front porch like a conquistador planting a flag.

“Like hell you are,” replied my grandaunt, arms akimbo in the doorway.

I watched from the foyer. I was an animal carcass, pierced with a pair of bullet holes, at the mercy of two rival huntresses.

 

When I’d first gone to live with Aunt Faye, she was alone in the house. She’d once had a husband, a fellow named Tate, but like most of the men in our family, he’d drifted from history into mist, leaving behind only his surname. (All I knew of my own father, Len Kuritsky, was that he’d asphyxiated on a chicken bone at a music festival in California several weeks after my birth.)  At some point, long before I entered the scene, Aunt Faye had staffed the reference desk at the Powick Bridge Public Library, and pushing seventy, she carried with her an atmosphere of dusty encyclopedias. We had lots of visitors in those days: a klatch of female relations whose precise perch on the family tree wasn’t worth locating. Even Marcella had stayed overnight once, but left in a huff before breakfast, incensed that Aunt Faye had stipulated a separate bed downstairs for her niece’s boyfriend. Four years later, a widowed girlhood friend of my grandaunt’s—the aptly named Edie Coffin—moved permanently into the same chamber. (To this day, I don’t know whether Aunt Faye and “Cousin” Edie were lovers, or had once been lovers, or were merely faithful late-life companions.)  The third female in our estrogen-perfumed Cape Codder, Cindy Jane, arrived only four months before Marcella. She was a genuine cousin—the sixteen-year-old, cashew-shaped, eggplant-hued spawn of two heroin junkies, one of them loosely descended from Granny Bess. Aunt Faye had again opened her doors to the family’s jetsam.   

So that’s how the household stood at the outset of the battle royal. Marcella had just completed a ninety-nine-day stint in the Hampden County lockup for pepper-spraying a guard during protests against expanding an air force base, so she had more than three months of pent-up zeal to launch on behalf of her mission. It was a Saturday in July—a lazy, torrid afternoon—and although we’d been summarily banished to the yard seconds after Marcella’s arrival, both Cindy Jane and I eavesdropped from below the kitchen window. The heavy scent of “Cousin” Edie’s heliotrope and sweet alyssum cloyed our nostrils.

“I’m sorry, dear,” said Aunt Faye. “I am glad to see you’re well—and you’re always welcome in this house, provided you abide by the house rules. That being said, I cannot have you showing up here like the Pied Piper of Hamelin and leading that boy into trouble.”

“Nobody is leading anyone into trouble, Faye. I’m teaching the boy the value of direct action, of bearing witness. Doesn’t it bother you the slightest bit that they’re going to guillotine the Pregnant Pirette on a whim?”

“I doubt they’re doing anything on a whim,” replied Aunt Faye. “In the first place, you act like it’s a human being they’re harming. They’re dismantling a statue, for heaven’s sake. A rusted old iron statue that nobody—at least nobody other than you—gives a slap about. It’s not as though you’re trying to save an ancient redwood or some natural wonder—”

“It’s a feminist icon—”

“Do let me finish, dear. As far as I’m concerned, I think it’s a wise choice they’re making, razing all those blighted motels and creating a preserve. And so too, I might add, does every progressive thinker and environmental scientist in this state.”

“Not every—”   

“Almost every one. Your problem, Marcella, if you’d like my unsolicited opinion—and even if you don’t—is that you’re always looking for causes.” Once Aunt Faye dipped into her speak-in-full-paragraphs mode, there was no turning back. “I’m not saying the world is a perfectly just place, but it’s not the gulag, either. Even without a revolution, we have running water, and three solid meals a day, and the right to vote and speak our minds, and to make pests of ourselves in public places. Maybe you could try being thankful for a change. In any event, the bottom line is that you’re welcome to drive down to East Sedley and make a nuisance of yourself all you’d like—get yourself arrested again, if you have your heart set on it—but I have custody of that boy, and he’s not getting wrapped up in your shenanigans.”

Marcella responded with a sigh—almost a groan—that seemingly contained all of the frustrations of Woodstock and Selma and Kent State drawn into one breath. “What planet do you live on, Faye Tate? Do you really believe all that Norman Rockwell shit about the right to speak your mind? Jesus-fucking-Christ!  That statue is a landmark. A piece of my childhood. She was practically my best friend. Have you forgotten how I’d stuff pillows under my nightgown and go down to the beach at night to help her defend our motel from marauders while you and that bald lady friend of yours got sloshed on cocktails?”

“Betty Miniver was not bald; she had alopecia. Nor did either of us ever ‘get sloshed,’ as you call it. That’s simply not what your childhood was like.”

“Maybe you weren’t sober enough to remember.”

“Enough, young lady,” said Aunt Faye. “Now put your bag in the upstairs guest room and I’ll make you some cucumber sandwiches to tide you over until supper.”

Cindy Jane poked my flank and whispered, “Crazy how they’re fighting over you, isn’t it?”

That was before I’d decided whether I found Cindy Jane attractive enough to kiss. “I guess,” I agreed—not too committal.

“You know what? I bet Marcella isn’t your aunt at all,” said Cindy Jane, her warm breath only inches from my neck. “I bet she’s really your mother.”

 

Aunt Faye called us into the house again before Cindy Jane could elaborate, so it wasn’t until nearly midnight that she pressed her point. We’d tiptoed downstairs—lungs held past Edie’s bedroom—and then through the cellar door into the yard, where the previous owner had wedged a tree house into a colossal black walnut. Nearly every weekend night since school let out, the pair of us had been meeting atop those pinewood boards, his-and-hers milk crate stools roosted a thirty-foot climb above the lawn by rope ladder, squandering time and whetting lust. The truth was that I couldn’t imagine kissing Cindy Jane without my eyes clenched shut—she had caterpillar brows and a knob of baby fat under her chin—but I weighed a scrawny one-hundred-thirty pounds in my tennis shoes, and other girls hadn’t lined up outside my door. (The only girl I’d ever asked out, strawberry-haired Angie Swenson, responded to me much as the State Department had responded to Aunt Faye.)  So I faced the teenage loser’s ultimate dilemma: pine after girls like Angie until fate shifted the tides, or make out with my cousin. A bush in hand or a bird in flight, as they say. I reassured myself that Cindy Jane and I shared only a fraction of DNA.

Don’t get me wrong: Cindy Jane hadn’t exactly been offering up her lips for the taking. Yet I sensed that if I mustered the courage to ask, I might receive what I wasn’t sure I actually wanted. In the meantime, while the more popular 98% of Dean Acheson High School’s tenth-grade class bonded at sleep-away camps in the Berkshires—a concept as spendthrift to Aunt Faye as store-pitted cherries—we engaged in a lopsided flirtation, a pas de deux rendered all the more alluring by its concealment. (I must have been in my late thirties myself—as old as Marcella was then—when I realized that Aunt Faye had known of our nocturnal trysts all along, although I’m still unsure whether she was hoping to encourage a “romance” between us.)  Cindy Jane had pinched a coconut-scented candle while babysitting for a neighbor and had smuggled it into the tree house. The flame danced off her pajama top, illuminating her bounteous breasts.

“C’mon, Pete,” insisted Cindy Jane. “You can’t really think it’s a coincidence they’re both tugging on you like a wishbone. Did you notice how Marcella didn’t mention your so-called mother at all in her story about the pirate statue? Not even once.”

“Why would she?”

“Because your mother must have been there with her and Faye in East Sedley? And if she wasn’t, where was she while Faye and her bald gal pal were getting sloppy?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Someplace else.”

“And don’t you think it’s weird that they don’t have any of your mother’s stuff around this house? Not even newspaper clippings? They have a basement full of Marcella’s junk—Marcella’s punching bag and Marcella’s talking Barbie and Marcella’s Go-Go the Burro—a whole damn shrine to one niece—and nothing of your mom’s except a couple of snapshots that could be anybody.”  Cindy Jane adjusted the candle to shield it from the draft. “I mean, there are ten times more photos of my own deadbeat mama in Faye’s albums than of your mother, and my mama is like a billionth cousin two zillion times removed.”

“Mom only lived here a few years,” I argued. “She was already a teenager when grandma died. Marcella grew up here.”

“Whatever.”  Cindy Jane folded her arms across her chest. “I’m telling you that woman they claim is your mother is a cover story. Maybe she was a family friend—or a distant relative of some sort—if she even existed at all. Marcella is your mother.”

I suppose my orphan ears were primed for my cousin’s charge because I found my resistance waning. “I don’t get it. Why would they lie?”

“Who knows? Marcella probably couldn’t manage both a baby and a revolution, so she abandoned you here, and in return for raising you, Faye made her promise not to tell . . .”  Cindy Jane inched her milk crate closer to mine. “Women used to do that all the time, grandmothers pretending they were mothers and mothers pretending they were sisters. Don’t be so fucking naïve, Pete. That’s how the world works.”

You’re thinking her theory sounds like the plot of a Dickens novel—and a bad one at that—that no marginally sane teenage boy could ever embrace such a tale. All I can say is that it’s different if you’ve grown up without a mother, if you sobbed yourself to sleep countless nights over a woman you don’t even remember, if you’ve spent your whole childhood fantasizing that a two-line cable from Guatemala was sent in error. “Marcella is too young to be my mother anyway,” I said, serving up one last defensive salvo.

“Bullshit. How old is she? Thirty-eight? Thirty-nine? You do the math,” said Cindy Jane. “I was certainly old enough to have a baby at thirteen.”

This reference to her own sexual maturity galvanized the atmosphere in the tree house. Cindy Jane glanced down at her knees, her chubby knees that I suddenly imagined spreading with my palms. I felt the tips of my ears ablaze.

“Do you really think she’s my mother?”  I asked—mostly to fill the shadows with words. “How can you be so sure?”

Cindy Jane looked pensive, as though victim to an internal struggle. Outside, raccoons scampered in the undergrowth. The electric lantern on Mrs. Sewell’s porch cast a hostile beam onto “Cousin” Edie’s strawberry patch.

“I’ll make you a deal. Tell me I’m pretty and I’ll tell you a secret.”

This was not the first time, nor the last, that Cindy Jane bartered for compliments.

I tried to meet her demand without lying, but that seemed an insurmountable challenge. “You’re my cousin,” I said. “Of course I think you’re pretty.”

Cindy Jane weighed my answer—deciding whether to be flattered or insulted. “Okay, thank you,” she finally said. “So I’m going to share this with you, but swear you won’t tell a soul.”

I swore—right hand raised like in a courthouse: “May the Red Sox finish dead last for a hundred seasons if I tell.” A barn owl shrieked in the darkness, mocking my oath.

“You’d better not say a word,” my cousin warned. She leaned forward, her lips only inches from mine. I smelled the cinnamon gum on her breath. “When I was two or three years old, Marcella stayed with my parents in Berkeley. I can’t recall much about the visit, but I do remember one thing for certain—she wasn’t alone. She came with a baby.”

Cindy Jane curled her lips into a tooth-crammed grin. Never have I seen another human being appear as self-assured as she did following her revelation.

“That doesn’t prove anything,” I said. My body, quavering violently, cried otherwise.

 

The next morning, while Aunt Faye griddled waffles, Marcella corralled me into the parlor and shared the saga of the Pregnant Pirette, preparing me for the Tuesday morning rally I’d been barred from attending. “You’d be surprised how many female buccaneers there were in their heyday . . . Anne Bonny, Mary Read, Rachel Wall,” she explained. “Jacquotte Delahaye, who faked her own death.” While she spoke, I scrutinized her face, trying to read a likeness to my own drab features. I smoldered to ask her point-blank: Are you my mother? But I didn’t dare—suspecting she would lie, but also fearful of upsetting my own fantasy. Soon “Cousin” Edie settled into the damask-upholstered armchair opposite the bay windows, as she did every morning, stripping us of any vestige of privacy.

Marcella didn’t even acknowledge Edie’s arrival. She asked me: “Do you know what happened to female buccaneers when they were caught?”  

I delved deep into my piratical knowledge, most of it gleaned from Treasure Island and Peter Pan. “They walked the plank?”

“Close. They hanged,” answered Marcella. “Unless they were pregnant.”

Edie flashed a frown in our direction but said nothing. In the foyer, the grandfather clock knelled a joyless eight o’clock.

“If the baby inside them was old enough for people to feel—a stage called quickening—then they were spared the gallows until they gave birth . . . And often, by then, they’d managed to escape or obtain a pardon.”

I studied Marcella’s cheeks, her jawline. We shared a chiseled nose—distinctive on her, I suppose, but too large for my narrow skull. I resembled her more, I decided, than the soft-featured brunette who appeared sporadically in Aunt Faye’s albums. Edie lit a cigarette—Virginia Slims—filling the parlor with the heady cologne of tobacco.

“So they had groups of women whose job it was to decide which pirettes were actually pregnant and which were lying,” continued Marcella. “These were called juries of matrons . . .”

I sensed a lethal presence in the room and looked up to find Aunt Faye, armored in plaid apron and oven mitts, scowling at her niece. “It’s time you stopped filling that boy’s mind with claptrap,” she declared. “What does he care about lady pirates?”

“I’m teaching him about the world,” retorted Marcella. She turned to me and added, “A pirette takes what she wants. Unlike many modern women.”

That was too much for my grandaunt. “The world can fix its own problems. You’d be better off figuring out what you’re going to do with your life, don’t you think?”

“I’m already doing something with my life.”

They stood facing each other—the woman who’d raised me and the woman who might have birthed me—like eighteenth-century musketeers in hostile formation. Cindy Jane had stationed herself at the top of the stairs to survey the battlefield.

“I’d like to have a word with you in private, Marcella,” said Aunt Faye.

Marcella refused to make eye contact. “If you have anything you want to say to me, you can say it right here. I don’t have any secrets.”

“Well I have secrets. Plenty of them. And while you’re eating my food and sleeping on my bedding, young lady, you’ll just as soon give me a moment of your time.”

The innuendo about secrets was not lost on me. Cindy Jane beamed knowingly.

Marcella didn’t say a word, but she slowly—at the pace of a molasses-dipped tortoise—climbed off the sofa and trailed Aunt Faye into the kitchen. The heavy oak door swung shut behind them, muffling the ensuing row. “I have an idea,” suggested Edie Coffin. “Why don’t we three play a round of pinochle?” Any hope of overhearing the conflagration in the next room was soon drowned out by the widow’s squeals of “Aces abound!” and “Nine of trump!” Cindy Jane and I conducted an entire conversation with our facial muscles.

Secretly, I hoped for a revelation—like King Solomon offering to split the baby in half—that would expose my mother’s true identity. Instead, a subdued Marcella eventually pushed open the swinging door with streaks of eyeliner trailing below her orbits.

“We’ve reached a compromise, Peter,” she announced. “Faye has agreed to let me take you to see the Pregnant Pirette tomorrow. But then I’ll bring you back here and I’ll go to Tuesday’s demonstration alone.”

Aunt Faye emerged from the kitchen. “And the other half?”

Marcella’s voice tensed up. “I’ve agreed that she can come with us.”

 

One advantage of having Aunt Faye accompany us was that we could drive her Oldsmobile directly to the coast, rather than calling a cab to take us to the bus station. Around ten o’clock the next morning, we piled into that oversized vehicle—my grandaunt behind the wheel, a cooler of turkey sandwiches and fruit punch in the trunk—and headed toward Long Island Sound. Edie stayed home to look after the house. “What do I want with pirates?” she asked. (I’m honestly not sure if Edie Coffin stepped foot from that property even once between the day she moved in and Aunt Faye’s funeral; my grandaunt’s will left her the place, in trust, and when I visited Edie in her final years, the widow’s sole goal was surviving until the mint issued the last of its fifty-state commemorative quarters, which she collected like relics.)  Cindy Jane also had to remain in Powick Bridge, much to her consternation, because Aunt Faye declared, “I can’t be responsible for looking after two wild children at once.”  That Marcella was so desperate to show me the statue, but obviously less vested in my cousin, struck us both as telling.

A skilled driver could reach East Sedley from Powick Bridge in under ninety minutes. Aunt Faye managed the trip in slightly over three hours. She refused to leave the right-hand lane, even when we found ourselves behind a trailer hauling cement pylons, and she stopped at every public restroom in southern Connecticut. While we drove, Marcella furthered my education in the field of female piracy. I entered a panorama of cross-dressing bandits and swashbuckling maidens who fed English admirals to sharks. Marcella possessed a gift for elucidating the underlying political implications of the most innocuous-seeming yarns. “Often a considerable time passed between when these women were apprehended and when they arrived on shore to plead the belly,” she said. “So a class of professional ‘baby getters’ seized the opportunity. These were able seamen in the Royal Navy who’d knock up accused women for a small share of their pirate’s loot—or even for amusement.”  I found myself both fascinated by this revelation and mortified that Marcella had shared it.

“Don’t you think that’s enough?” asked Aunt Faye.

“I don’t see the point of sheltering him,” snapped Marcella. “He should have some idea of what women have gone through to get where we are.”

“Not all women were pirates,” said Aunt Faye.

I sensed the two of them were engaged in a complex emotional ballet, employing military stratagems of Napoleonic proportions, tactics that made the pas de deux between me and Cindy Jane look like an amateur checkers match. In some ways, I felt irrelevant to the entire struggle—a pawn, an afterthought—and then the notion hit me that maybe I was an afterthought. If Marcella could be my mother, why couldn’t Faye be her mother? Suddenly, all of the enigmatic twists of my childhood yielded their mystery.

“Ginny would want him to know,” said Marcella.

“I don’t doubt she would,” answered Aunt Faye. “But Ginny’s not here.”

My grandaunt’s words sounded more like a warning than a statement.

After that, we drove in silence until we reached the coast.

East Sedley did not live up to my hopes. The resort had once been a summer retreat for upper-middle-class New Englanders—WASPy physicians and insurance executives who wished to avoid the nouveau riche Jews, like my father, who’d “taken over” Watch Hill and Nantucket. By the early 1980s, the town center consisted of a shuttered movie house, a flyblown post office, and a post-and-beam library open three mornings each week. Of the two-dozen motels that had lined the beach from the marina to the Rhode Island border, only one—the Captain’s Deck—remained operational. All of the others, including the Vengeful Scrod, where my family had summered, and the adjacent Jolly Roger, whose beachfront harbored the Pregnant Pirette, had been commandeered by the state in eminent domain proceedings.

Aunt Faye eased the Oldsmobile into the gravel lot opposite the remnants of the Jolly Roger. The letters V-CAN-Y welcomed us in unlit neon. Beyond a chainlink fence rose the steel shoulders and bulging metallic tummy of the Pirette. Rigging cascaded down her back in a knotty mane. A corrugated patch covered her left eye. The fabric shielding her breasts had long since peeled away, exposing two jagged-edged cones. Nearby, a Caterpillar bulldozer lurked in a pit of sand, temporarily deserted, awaiting its turn at the Pirette.

Marcella hiked through the litter-strewn no man’s land between the road and the construction site, kicking aside the orange traffic cones and yellow police tape that walled off the public from the padlocked gate. She cupped the lock for a moment, then let it fall against the meshwork with a clatter. Overhead, terns and herring gulls circled for prey.

I let the sea breeze fill my lungs with salt.

“Satisfied?” asked Aunt Faye.

Marcella glowered at her. “Very.”

The pair of them certainly interacted like mother and daughter.

 

Our outing sounded all the more uneventful when I shared the details with Cindy Jane later that evening while Aunt Faye and Cousin Edie prepared supper. I described Marcella’s failed effort to scale the fence, her dustup with my grandaunt, the numerous times she declared that my mother would have wanted me to see the Pirette. I related our brief detour to a specialty knitting shop in Branford, east of New Haven, where Aunt Faye picked up a ball of merino yarn for her next quilt. “If I’m gallivanting halfway to the moon,” she said, “I might as well make good use of the gasoline.”  I complained to Cindy Jane of the gargantuan mosquitos that guarded the statue. I pointedly omitted my theory of multiple generations of family deception. Once we’d been summoned to the dining room, nobody made mention of the excursion at all.

A truce had settled over the household. Aunt Faye acknowledged that there “was no harm” in my seeing a historic landmark like the Pirette, which she conceded “could be considered a feminist icon” from a certain perspective. Marcella made a point of including Edie Coffin in the conversation, asking after her tea roses and her stamp collection. Cindy Jane scrawled the words Are you my mother? on her napkin and slid it onto my lap. By the time Aunt Faye served the apple cobbler, we were actually laughing like a family.

That night, I dreamed that I’d accompanied my mom to the Guatemalan Highlands. We trekked from village to village, organizing the K’iche’ people for revolt. Somehow, I was both an infant and a teenager at the same time, just as my companion was both the brunette from Aunt Faye’s photos and Marcella, so when the death squads finally caught up with our band—while my mother was away, spying on nearby quarry—I pretended to be a sleeping child and managed to survive the ensuing massacre. I balled up my limbs, frozen, until my mom returned to the bloodbath and shook me awake. She kept shaking me, so I opened my eyes, and there stood Marcella, in my dimly lit bedroom, a finger over her lips. At her urging, I dressed rapidly and followed her downstairs. The grandfather clock in the foyer read 4:00 am.

Marcella didn’t have to tell me where we were going. As soon as I saw her retrieve the keys to Aunt Faye’s Oldsmobile from the wall hook in the kitchen, I understood that we were headed back to the coast to help rescue the Pregnant Pirette.

“It’s raining,” whispered Marcella. “Do you have a jacket?”

Her words sounded maternal, not auntly. No teenage boy has ever been so thrilled to be told to bundle up. I retrieved my windbreaker from the hall closet.

Route 89 extended clear as an airport runway in the predawn. Steam rose off the asphalt. We crossed the Powick River and gusts rattled the chassis of the Oldsmobile. Marcella drove at twice the speed of my grandaunt, peeling turns and passing buses on the right. She’d flipped the radio to a folk station and the car filled with the sounds of The Original Caste commemorating “One Tin Soldier.” I dozed to the rhythms of the highway. When I woke again, we were already on the outskirts of East Sedley.

“Good, you’re up,” said Marcella.

She stopped for carryout coffee at a ramshackle café.

“How do you like yours?” she asked.

I didn’t. But I hoped to sound mature. “Black,” I said. 

She poured cream and sugar into her own cup.

“If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem,” said Marcella. It wasn’t until my second semester at Yale that I realized the quote was Eldridge Cleaver’s, not hers. “Faye is part of the problem. Ginny would want you to be part of the solution.”

“Aunt Faye tries her best,” I said.

“I know that,” Marcella said. “But sometimes that’s not good enough.”

We climbed back into the car and soon pulled up in front of the Jolly Roger. Several of the demonstrators had already arrived, including an elderly woman with a bolt cutter. Also on hand was a morbidly obese man in his sixties, the brother of the sculptor. Next a lesbian couple arrived, then an unkempt family of six. By daybreak, other protestors—mostly women, mostly over forty—had arrived with placards that read Saws Off My Belly, the rallying cry of the Pirette preservation movement, but also Close Yankee Power and Save Narragansett Bay and Reagan = War Criminal. One activist distributed fliers demanding immediate pardons for Eddie Conway and Leonard Peltier. Another, whose outfit reminded me of Danny Kaye channeling a court jester, connected the statue’s fate to the plight of Palestine and Tibet. At full deployment, the campaigners numbered about thirty.

I hoped that Marcella might introduce me as her son, but she didn’t. “This is my nephew, Peter,” she said—and each time she said “nephew,” I felt disowned. My nose and chin grew raw from the spray-brined air.

The construction crew arrived around nine o’clock—a half-dozen sun-scarred men in coveralls and hard hats. I’d anticipated warfare, but the demolition team appeared largely indifferent to the disruption. They got paid, it seemed, either way. Only their foreman expressed any displeasure. “This here is private property,” he shouted over the protesters’ off-key chorus of “We Shall Overcome.” “I’m going to have to call the authorities. You’re leaving me no choice.”

He returned ten minutes later and said, “Please, be reasonable. Look, people, you’re going to get yourselves in trouble. I’m warning you.”

Our ragtag band sang louder. Marcella squeezed my forearm.

“Your mother would be so proud,” she said. “We’re going to win.”

I trusted her. “Do you really think so?”

“Of course I do. The momentum is on our side. And so is justice. Once they realize what the Pregnant Pirette means to us—as women, as human beings—they’ll back down.”

We were still singing when the squad cars arrived. New London County Sheriff. Two officers in each. They approached us, communicating in their own dialect of nods and gestures, and I feared they might break out stun grenades or tear gas canisters, like the military police had done when Marcella refused to leave the air force base. To my amazement, one of them asked—in a voice firm, but not unkind—“Are you Peter Kuritsky?”

I honestly don’t remember what I answered, or even if I answered at all. I have only the vaguest recollection of climbing into the rear seat of the cruiser, followed by Marcella, who apologized to the other demonstrators before departing. “A misunderstanding,” she pleaded. “We’ll be back as soon as we sort this all out.”  Today, I imagine she’d have been arrested for kidnapping, but those were laxer times. All the authorities wanted to do—and the senior officer explained this patiently, between Marcella’s threats—was to return us both to Powick Bridge, where Aunt Faye waited at the station house. “If it’s a misunderstanding, ma’am,” he said, “the local police will sort it out for you.” Yet when the vehicle’s door shut behind us, the clink sounded like the closing of a prison cell. East Sedley retreated into the past.

I watched the cops in the front of the cruiser, but they were ignoring us. My window of opportunity was closing: if I wanted to know the truth, this was the moment. I counted to ten and played all my cards. “Marcella, can I ask you a question about the time you visited Cindy Jane’s parents in Berkeley?”

Marcella turned toward me. Surprised. Puzzled. “What?”

I didn’t need to hear anything more. I already knew the truth—I could see it in her confusion—and I fought back my tears. Not only was Marcella not my mother, I understood, or Aunt Faye my grandmother, but the Pregnant Pirette would soon land in a scrapheap, and no lifetime of tides would unite me with Angie Swenson, and no matter how many times you watch Call Northside 777, you won’t see the actress June Havoc in an uncredited role as my great-grandmother because she doesn’t appear in the film. Not at all.

 

“She really called the police?” said Cindy Jane. “Wow! That’s crazy.”

Although it was a weeknight, we’d rendezvoused in the tree house. Marcella was long gone and another eight years would elapse before we heard from her again: a Get Well card that arrived—too late—after Aunt Faye’s second stroke. My grandaunt had offered to pay for a taxi since her Oldsmobile remained behind in East Sedley, but Marcella insisted on hitchhiking to the train station. Outside, a cold front had left a damp nip in the summer air. Fireflies pulsed in the yard below; a whippoorwill wailed. My wrists and ankles itched from where I’d been nibbled by mosquitos.

“Did you get to ask her whether she’s really your mother?” asked Cindy Jane.

“Why bother?” I replied. “She’d lie either way.”

I let Cindy Jane absorb my indifference. She looked wounded.

“Let’s talk about something else,” I suggested, seizing the advantage.

Cindy Jane’s voice turned coy. “Like what?”

My eyes casually raked over her flannel-covered legs, her cleavage.

“I have an idea,” I said. “Let’s not talk at all. Let’s kiss.”     

My audacity surprised even me—as though I were the first teenager ever to ask for a kiss.

“I’ll make you a deal,” offered Cindy Jane, as though she’d had the words stockpiled. “If you tell me you love me and you’ll be my boyfriend, I’ll kiss you.”

So I told her the lies she asked for—and then I leaned into her with my eyes clenched, ready to start making my way in the world.

The Robert Watson Literary Prize Story WAR RUGS

CYNOCEPHALI, a community of Monsters, (having, as their name (κυνός κεφαλή) implies, the head of a dog, but in all other respects resembling man,) who are described at some length by Ctesias, (ap. Photium, 72, de Indicis.) This author says that the Cynocephali bark a language which is understood by each other; that their teeth are longer, and their nails both longer and rounder than those of dogs; that their complexions are black, and that they occupy a tract of country in the mountains as far as the Indus. In their general dealings and institutes they are eminently just, (δίκαιοι πάνυ).

—Encyclopaedia Metropolitana, 1845

 

The Dogfaced girl sits with her red-furred muzzle pressed against the window of the van. The sidewalks of this neighborhood are empty, and the houses are brick, built in the image of their owners’ skulls—flat and clenched. If she holds still, she can hear all the TVs, spilling their caustic wash of anger and bubbling jingles. As has become their pattern, Alcibiades and Themistius drop her off last out of the whole Squad. They pull over at the end of a cul-de-sac adorned with flouncing flags and perfumed olive trees. Themistius, a puggy Dogface with a patch of black around his eye, turns to her from the driver seat as she tucks her nail file into her folder of sales brochures. She stares down at the one long fingernail on her left pinkie—pointed and polished black, winking one tiny fleck of lapis.

“You gotta be careful out there today,” Themistius says. “Don’t play games. They call hubby, you bounce. They tell you, ‘Wait right here,’ you bounce. They start asking questions, you bounce. Got me?”

The Dogfaced girl nods at him and slides open the van’s door. The early summer heat flashes up to meet her with tarmac and grass clippings.

Alcibiades, an Occidental—a “normal,” a Buttonhead—sitting shotgun, turns to him and says, “Give the girl some latitude. She’s not some bimbo like that Eris was. She knows what’s up. Right, Zylina?”

Three weeks ago, when she first signed on to the Squad, Zylina couldn’t tell which one of them was in charge. Their titles didn’t help. Alcibiades is called “Squad Captain,” and Themistius, “Squad Chief.” They’re both older than anyone else in the van. She’s guessing thirty, maybe thirty-five. But she’s beginning to see that Alcibiades is the one who pulls the strings. Themistius is just there to give all these Dogfaced kids some kind of hope that if they work real hard, maybe one day they can do the driving. Fucking Buttonheads.

But she softens a little, looking up at smiling Alcibiades, with his pretty eyebrows, nubby nose, and those stupid little ears, curled and naked. Sometimes she wishes she had ears like that. Ones that didn’t work so hard.

“Yeah, I got it. I’m just gonna run the script,” she says.

“Sure,” Alcibiades says. “You’re gonna work that uniform, though.”

She wiggles a bit, swaying her khaki skirt as she steps down from the van, half hoping Alcibiades is watching her ass. The sun licks the bare skin of her limbs and the fur on her face. There’s grapey mountain laurel in the air. She feels like howling—like her mother told her not to.

 

She knows the first house of the day is a no-sale straight off when the man comes to the door gawking from underneath a ball cap that says PROUD. Some TV voice, somewhere in the back of the house, is getting heated about the government. The man’s joints—his knee and hip—rasp in a broken way. He tilts against the jamb, holding a crackling Diet Coke. She should have turned away when she saw the marble-look statue of a sniper kneeling in the front lawn, aiming a scoped rifle at the road.

Most of the people who answer the door have probably never seen a Dogface in person before, and the sight of her is usually a shock at first. But there’s something almost accustomed about the way this man looks at her.

Zylina shakes off the uneasiness of the moment and runs through her usual routine.

 

SCENE: “A TOUGH CUSTOMER” OR “HELP ME,
HERMES WITH YOUR SILVER TONGUE”

A gorgeous yet approachable young DOGFACED GIRL stands in the colonnaded doorway to a large home. She grasps a sales flyer in her hand. A PROUD MAN stares her down from inside the house.

PROUD MAN

You selling something?

DOGFACED GIRL

Well, I’m a disadvantaged student competing in a contest, sir.

PROUD MAN

Uh-huh.

DOGFACED GIRL

If I earn more than five hundred points a day, then I win a scholarship for my first year of college.

PROUD MAN

That right.

He empties his Diet Coke down his throat with a toilet
gurgle.

DOGFACED GIRL

Every person I sign up for a subscription from this list is worth fifty points.

PROUD MAN

Not interested.

A sour sweat rises from him. He lifts his hat to reveal his ears, which had been hidden beneath the band. They are scarred, almost melted looking flaps of flesh. There is a scar, too, running down the side of his neck.

DOGFACED GIRL

She clears her throat and pushes her shoulder blades together. Her red polo uniform shirt stretches against her chest—a piece of salesmanship she has perfected.

They’re all Occidental publications, sir. You can own the words at the very foundation of our society.

She points to a list of titles on her sales brochure.

This subscription, for example, is Notions of Justice and Freedom, and this one is The Tradition of Reason. You can cancel at any time.

The SCARRED MAN winks at her and shuts the door in her
face.

SCARRED MAN

From behind the door.

Arf-arf.

A SNIPER STATUE scopes DOGFACED GIRL
from his blind in a bed of irises.

END SCENE

 

She could have been more persistent, like Alcibiades is always telling her to be, but she knows not to push her luck with a guy like this. She’s smarter than Eris was, and she wants them to know it. She’s not going to end up in jail like that dumb bitch.

The next few houses on the cul-de-sac are a bust. Either there’s no answer, or people close the door in her face. One woman, foggy with the stank of wet socks, tells her to “go chew a bone.” Real fucking clever, lady.

She walks back out the main road, meandering through the neighborhood. She’s looking for some kind of house—the type of place that looks a little like a worn patch in the bottom of a shoe. Some kind of place you could poke your little finger through if you pushed it with the point of your nail.

She sees one of the boys from the Squad walking toward her— the one everyone calls “Q.” He’s a tall and disheveled blond, with a long muzzle. Handsome in his way and not afraid to use his looks to make a sale—effective but crude. He struts toward her with his muscled chest pushed out.

“Yo,” he says, pushing his polo sleeves over his puffy biceps. “You moving big dollars over there?”

“I didn’t even try,” she lies. “Looks dead.” She’s taunting him.

“Shit, you don’t even know dead. I’m gonna go crush that. Watch.”

He smells like too much Cool Water and blueberry Swishers. “What about you?”
“Nah,” he says, “that whole end is a bunch of tightwad trolls.

One lady tells me she wants me to meet her Chihuahua. I swear to God, they just set us up to fail. I mean, where the fuck even are we, though?”

“I don’t know,” Zylina says, as Q heads back toward the house with the sniper in the yard.

Since she jumped in the van in the Target parking lot back home, they’ve been in a new city every day. They must have driven through the grease-yellow dust of three states, stopping in each one to knock on identical doors and run identical pitches on identical Buttonheads. If Zylina is lucky, she sells two hundred bucks worth of books and keeps half, minus her share of gas money and the motel. Now that Eris is gone, at least she gets her own room, even if she has to pay for it.

It’s not really that Alcibiades and Themistius want them to fail—at the end of the day, they’ve got to get their cut, too—they just have a pretty limited idea of who makes a good mark. But Zylina is figuring that out.

See, the way they think is: catch a few stay-at-home moms with more dollars than sense. These ladies don’t know that their orders for a Book of the Month aren’t likely to get filled anytime soon and don’t really care. They don’t read anyway. Maybe they like the idea of the books looking good on a shelf someday. It’s fifty bucks they were going to spend on more yoga pants.

The stay-at-home women are fooled because they don’t try not to be. They trust a good-looking kid in a uniform, even if that kid is a Dogface. Sometimes, especially if the kid is a Dogface, because then they’re doing good for a goddamn change. This kid wants to go to college! She wants to be like us! Even better: Doing Good came right to their door. They don’t even have to mute the TV.

But the angle that Alcibiades and Themistius are missing is the folks who don’t get fooled but will pay you anyway. Zylina’s seen it before: a woman who looks at you like she knows just who you are—a full-of-shit kid trying to get enough money for beer, somebody headed anywhere but college. This kind of person, they side-eye you as they hand you money and give you a smirk that says “enjoy all that while it lasts.” There’s something cynical but honest about that, Zylina thinks. The whole world is thirsty for a good frozen-vodka shot of truth.

 

Wandering a few blocks back toward the interstate, Zylina spots an apartment complex. Outside the gate to the parking lot, the shaggy bark of palm trunks shreds in the hot wind. Through the iron bars of the complex gate, the basin of a sputtering obelisk- shaped fountain is collecting hunks of mulch and a few gas station cups. The wind carries cheap incense and the kind of spicy food you leave cooking all day so it’s falling apart by dinner. She’s been living on boxes of defrosted waffles and energy drinks.

She waits for someone to come punch in the gate code. Themistius is always telling the Squad not to go looking for their own leads. “We’ll pick the doors. You just knock,” he tells them. And this was part of Eris’ problem, she started trying to pick doors—the heaviest doors, the richest ones. That and she started trying to rob motherfuckers.

But Zylina is more clever than Eris ever was. She’s not trying to trade up. She’s trying to trade down—looking for someone who recognizes her.

After a while, Zylina realizes that she could be waiting for hours for someone to drive up to the gate. Fuck it. She walks up to the split in the gate and pushes at the two sides. At first, she thinks they might not budge, and truthfully—for a second—she’s relieved. But then, the gate begins to slide. It opens just enough that she can squeeze through, and she slams it shut behind her.

Where the sidewalks of the posh neighborhood were totally abandoned, here in the apartments, she sees people drifting on the cracked pathways. An old man pushes a shopping cart full of laundry past her, leaving a whiff of musky dryer sheets. Two kids who ought to be in school boot a balding soccer ball off a wall, the smack ricocheting across the courtyard.

On the face of every building, balconies are cluttered with charcoal grills, disintegrating cardboard boxes, and pots of limp petunias. There’s even a legless sparring dummy like the one her cousin used to throttle, his shirt off in her parents’ driveway. The dummy’s head juts through the bars of the balcony like a snared animal.

On one balcony she sees an old woman sitting in a folding lawn chair, like her mother used to do, eyes closed against the sun. The woman wears a crepey dress in a bright pattern of diamonds. Zylina walks up the stairway of the woman’s building to the third floor. She approaches the door of the apartment that she thinks belongs to the woman. Zylina takes a breath and then presses the bell.

There’s buzzing inside, then the sliding of French doors, the rattle of plastic blinds, slippered feet shuffling on linoleum, a chain lock and deadbolt, a hand on the knob.

When the door opens, she sees the small woman standing there, smiling her chunky gray teeth, her ears half-covered in a loofa of gray curls.

“Can I help you, young lady?” she asks Zylina.

Zylina runs through the script Themistius insisted she memorize her first day in the van, the freeway exits flipping past her, becoming strange.

GOOD [MORNING/AFTERNOON/OTHER]! . . . I’M COMPETING IN AN EXCITING CONTEST, [SIR/MA’AM/OTHER] . . . THE OPPORTUNITY TO ADVANCE MY EDUCATION! . . . OVERCOMING CHALLENGES AND FULFILLING MY DREAMS! THE STRUGGLE OF BEING A MINORITY IN AN OCCIDENTAL WORLD . . . TO SUPPORT ME AND MY FAMILY BACK IN [HOMETOWN]!

When Zylina gets to the end of the script, and finishes showing the old woman the brochure of books that could be shipped to her on a monthly basis at a limited-time discounted rate, the woman asks, “Wouldn’t you like to come in for a cup of tea?”

This is not part of the scene.

“I don’t know, ma’am,” Zylina says. “I got a lot of houses I’m supposed to visit this morning.”

“You said you have to sell five hundred dollars a day to meet your goal? For the scholarship?”

“Uh, yeah,” Zylina says. The number is made up. Shit, lady, the scholarship is made up. They’re supposed to make as much money as they can, but nobody ever makes the goal. Q sold three hundred a few days ago and he celebrated by smoking everybody up at the motel that night.

“Well, I’d love to look over your brochure, sweetie,” the old woman tells her. “I’m sure I can find something. You just come in and sit for a while.”

Zylina tries to keep the satisfied surprise from her eyes, but she feels her ears stand straight with the shock.

Themistius would tell her this was a trap and she should get out of there. Tell her it’s against company policy. Themistius would remind her that this is what Eris did, going into customers’ houses where she wasn’t told to go, waiting until they went into the other room to get the slice of cake, the glass of lemonade, and then grabbing their purses or phones off the table and running out the door. When you play that game, you never know when the person you try to fool turns the tables and you end up arrested. But Zylina was just trying to run up her commissions. What was this woman going to do? Call the cops for accepting her invitation?

“OK,” Zylina says, handing her a brochure. “I guess I can pop in. For a quick minute.”

“Wonderful.”

Inside: traces of garlic, essential oils, ashed-out incense, and maybe, underneath that, some lingering stink from a cat a few years dead and cremated. A radio still plays out on the balcony. Zylina can hear the noodly guitars of classic rock radio coming through the glass—the kind her father used to sing along to with his improbable English: “The girl with col-li-ding soap eyes!”

The old woman pulls out a chair for her at a dinged-up kitchen table and wobbles over to the sink to fill a copper kettle that looks a little like the one Zylina’s mother kept on the stove at home.

“Do you mind if I ask a personal question?” the woman asks, like someone who doesn’t care if you mind or not.

“Whatever,” Zylina says.

“How long have you been doing this? Selling these books, I mean. Door to door?”

“It’s got to be almost three weeks, I guess.”

“That’s not such a long time away yet.” The woman puts some spoonfuls of tea into the basket of the kettle and turns on the stove, which ticks until the burner ignites. The gas is sharp in Zylina’s nose.

“It’s the longest that I’ve been away, but I don’t miss it much, really. Maybe you think that’s mean of me?”

“When I was young, all I wanted in the world was to get away from my parents. I thought they were just dreadful,” the woman says, turning back to Zylina. “My father was a banker.”

“My parents are pretty chill,” Zylina says, trying to gauge the woman’s response—how pathetic is enough to win her sympathy, but not so much that she seems like a lost cause? “But you know, they don’t know what it’s like for me in my town.”

“Of course they don’t.” The woman’s face softens with pity.

“They lost their shit, though, when I told them I dropped out of school.”

“School isn’t for everyone,” the woman says, angling an eyebrow.

“I guess,” Zylina says. “The kids didn’t talk to me, which is stupid because I’m the one who should be afraid of them.” She’s still not sure if she’s pegged this woman right. Just to be sure, she adds: “This is why I’m working so hard, ma’am. So that I can go back to school and make something out of my life.”

“Of course, it’s not so different around here,” the woman says. “You might have noticed. Or anywhere, I suppose.”

“But I don’t live here,” Zylina says. “I’m just moving through.”

The kettle spittles into the flame on the stove, and the woman rises to attend to it. While she fixes the tea with milk and sugar, Zylina looks around the small apartment.

What she first thought were just paintings hanging on the walls are instead framed weavings—red, blue, and yellow thread knotted into the shapes of bomber jets with wide wings and bulbous heads, or tanks with blocky treads. One repeats a pattern of grenades like crystalline green eggs. Another spreads an array of interlocking rifles. Zylina makes out beautiful missiles, intricate choppers, elegant borders of flame. Tea splashes into one cup, then the other.

The woman returns to the table and sets a teacup down in front of Zylina. The steam is too rich and hot, but she laps at it daintily.

“It’s good?” the woman asks, raising her white eyebrows.

“Sure. Thanks,” Zylina says. The woman looks disappointed at her reaction, and she pushes through her poofy hair to grasp the back of her neck. The pose uncovers her ear, the shape of a wave- beaten shell. A silver crescent earring, dripping with beads, hangs from it like a snail trying to escape.

“What are those?” Zylina says. “The pictures on the wall.”

“Yes,” the woman says, a smile wriggling her fleshy lips. “I thought you might find those familiar. They’re Cynocephalian.” She enunciates the term with careful precision.

Zylina has never actually seen that name used outside school or printed on her refugee card:

FEMALE, CYNOCEPHALIC

“Dogheaded,” her father had explained. “The only way their misshapen mouths can name us.”

“You collect them?” Zylina asks.

“When I could,” the woman says. “I don’t travel so much anymore.”

“So you’ve been there? To my—my parents’ country?”

“The first time I went was over twenty years ago, now. It was a much different place then, as I’m sure they’ve told you. The weapons were still there and the soldiers, but it was very peaceful for a little while. And with the most beautiful people! I wanted to swallow the whole place up and take it back with me in my belly. The last time was probably just before you came here. Just before the first bombings. Well, you know how it was then.”

“I don’t remember it either way,” Zylina tells her. This doesn’t make her sad to think, though she’s sure that this woman thinks she should be feeling some kind of way.

“So you don’t want to go back there someday?”

“No, ma’am. I’m going to California.”

“To go to school?”

“Well, maybe school. Maybe not. My parents told me I had to get a job or move out. So, I did both. I don’t really have a, like, long-term plan, but California is as west as you can go, so I’m going there. I’m getting lit and watching the sunset. Have you seen how purple the sunset is in California? The sunset there is like grape jelly. As soon as the van stops in California, I’m not getting back on.”

There’s something weird about the way the woman is staring at her hands as she rocks the tea cup. It could be that she really believed Zylina was going to be majoring in drama next year at USC, or some shit. Or it could be she’s just happy that Zylina didn’t bullshit her.

“The van?” the woman asks.

“Yeah. You know it drives us around—the Squad that I sell with. These two guys, they drive us and let us off. We take orders, get back on, and they drive us somewhere else.”

The woman’s eyes are fixed on Zylina’s hands, the same way she’s seen Alcibiades staring at her body—some stifled appetite. It seems like she is looking at her fingernail—the long one on her pinkie.

“Sounds kind of exciting,” the woman says. “Living on the open road.”

“I don’t know about that.” Zylina skims her nail along the rim of the cup, testing her.

“When you’re older, you’ll see. Life gets so dull so fast.”

“Thanks for the tea,” Zylina says, standing and fanning her fingers on the table for the woman to get one more look. “So, did you want to buy a subscription?”

“I’m still not totally certain,” the woman says. She puts her hand on Zylina’s, pressing down just hard enough to hold her palm to the wood.

“I thought you were going to order the books.” Zylina looks at the woman’s steamed-over gray eyes. She tries to show her disappointment. “Two full subscriptions you said.”

“Yes,” the woman says, “I was just wondering . . . Would you indulge me?”

“Ma’am?”

“Your fingernail. I was wondering if you would let me take your fingernail.”

Zylina moves to her practiced expression of alarm. It’s the kind of face she gave her parents the moment they told her that she had to leave the house. It didn’t stop them from kicking her out, but she’s pretty sure that it convinced her father to give her the fistful of twenties from his sock drawer before she left.

“I’d be willing to pay for it, of course. And it would grow back.”

“You gotta understand, ma’am, having been to my country, how important that is to my culture.”

Whatever that meant now. Her mother had taught her how to file the nail into a long point, how to lacquer it with polishes that she had kept in tiny crystal pots (now replaced with drugstore gunk), how to open doors and jars without breaking its fragile point, how to brandish it when she was pissed-off with someone. Her mother told her that it was supposed to remind her of the claws the Buttonheads thought all the Dogfaces had—a lie that told her something true.

She never really thought about it much, except that taking care of it made her mother happy even if the kids in school said it made her look like a cokehead. Since she had left, she kept it looking clean more out of habit than anything else.

“You can sign me up for three of your subscriptions,” the woman says with a sharp nod.

“But my mother . . .” Zylina says. “If I ever go home . . .”

“Alright,” the woman says, “I have eight hundred dollars. That’s enough for your five subscription quota with a little left over. You can write that down on your sheet however you’d like.” She winks, unzips a little nylon fanny pack and digs out a neat stack of Benjis.

Zylina makes a slow show of her agreement, taking a deep breath and holding out her hand. The woman tells her to sit still while she gets a pair of scissors.

Zylina listens to the sliding of drawers and the clatter of shuffling through the detritus contained in them—plastic, metal, glass. She stands quietly and walks to the far wall of the room. The framed weavings of the guns and grenades stare back at her. Zylina lifts the edge of one of the frames to look at all the tiny knots of silk, each one the trick of fingers like her own. She thinks of the Dogfaced women pulling hooks, combs, and needles, their own jeweled false-claws kissing the threads as they work. If she had a place to put it, she’d nab this thing—this work—right off the wall. She lets the frame back down, drifts back to the table, and sits down.

The actual cutting is quick. The woman’s hands shudder and the tip of her little Buttonhead tongue presses her upper lip. The stainless blades snip through the nail, and it drops like a breath into a linen napkin cradled in the woman’s palm. Before she places it in a small cedar box, the woman holds it over the tip of her own finger, as if auditioning some prosthesis of spirit.

The woman thanks her and then presses a wad of bills into Zylina’s hand. The money is heavy and damp. Zylina counts out five hundred for the books, three hundred for the nail. She wonders if the woman always keeps so much money on hand. If there is more. If it would be easy to take. She thinks of Eris—how good it must have felt to give in to this curiosity.

“You keep yourself safe,” the woman says as they approach the door.

“Don’t worry about me, ma’am,” Zylina says, looking the woman in the eyes. “There’s plenty of other people to worry about.”

She hurries down the apartment building stairs and strides through the complex back toward the gate. The loss of the nail is such a small change, but without it she feels at once camouflaged and somehow more exposed. The kids kicking the soccer ball do not stop as she crosses the courtyard, and the old man with his laundry cart, who must be coming back with another load, does not lift his head as she passes him in the parking lot. Still there is an alarming sense of lightness. When she gets back to the neighborhood where Alcibiades and Themistius dropped her off, she avoids the other kids in the Squad. There are dandelions growing in the seams of the sidewalks. Zylina spends the last hour kicking off their heads.

 

That night, they stay in a Budget Inn a few miles down the interstate. The pool is open, but the water is filmed with leaves and oily scum. By eleven, nearly everyone is drunk and back in their rooms. Zylina is still stretched out in a plastic chaise with a pool towel wrapped around her knees. Alcibiades is there, too, and they are watching the boy called Q, who sits shirtless with his feet swishing in the water. One of the other boys sits next to him glancing between the smoldering blunt in his fingers and Q’s chest, which flexes, covered in goosebumps. Zylina wraps the towel tighter.

“Damn, you crushed it today, huh?” Alcibiades says, lifting a tallboy of Bud to his lips.

“I guess,” Zylina says. She keeps running her thumb over the rough edge of her pinkie nail.

“Must be working that uniform, like I said.”

“Hell yeah. All the stay-at-home moms drooling at my titties in this shirt,” Zylina says, squeezing her arms together and giving a shimmy.

Alcibiades laughs a little too hard at this, and she goes quiet looking at him. He shows his square teeth and his little nostrils flare. He really is good-looking for a Buttonhead. At least that’s what she thinks right now. She finds herself staring at his ears again. They are soft, delicate, bare—nothing like her own, which stand and point without her choice, covered in coarse red fur.

“Seriously, though,” he says, scrunching his eyebrows and looking into her eyes.

“Seriously, what?”

“I saw you wandering off today. You went into those apartments. You went inside one, with some little old lady, and you didn’t come out for, like, a half-hour. And then when you did, you walked away pretty quick, huh?”

Zylina looks away from him, back toward the pool, where Q and the other boy lean together, licking each other’s faces.

“You don’t even know that was me,” she says, trying to keep her eyes from going wide and her ears from pricking.

“You get a good look around here?” Alcibiades says. “Not a lot of Dogface girls in red polo shirts.”

Across the pool, the boys’ feet are still dangling in the dirty chlorine. They grope at each other’s arms, their waistbands.

“Look,” Alcibiades says, “the folks at the corporate office have been pretty concerned since what happened to Eris. So, maybe you were lost. Maybe I can write down on my report to corporate that I saw you were lost and you stopped to ask directions.”

“Yeah, OK,” Zylina says, “I was lost.”

“Alright. Maybe I’ll write that then. You know, corporate doesn’t want me to have to call the cops on anyone else.”

“You called the cops on Eris?”

“I had to. She was gonna get us shut down. But you know, you’re smarter than that. And I like you.”

“I like you, too,” Zylina says, and there’s a part of her that means it. Maybe the same part that is feeling grateful that Alcibiades hasn’t called the cops on her, or the part of her that’s flattered that he looks at her, even now, like he’s hungry for something. She’s worried that it’s the part of her that can’t see a way out of this. She’s picking at the rough edge of her missing pinkie nail. It feels like a scab.

“I’m glad,” he says. “I think that’s going to make things easier.”

She can’t look at him. The boys are leaving the pool, leaning their slick bodies together. She stares down at the towel. The loops in the cotton remind her of the weavings in the old woman’s house with the pictures of the weapons in them. She wonders if the people who made them thought they were just recording what they saw—if they were trying to write history in those rugs. If they were trying to tell her something.

She feels Alcibiades’ fingers on her jaw. His touch is gentle but strong. He lifts her head to look up at him as he slides next to her. “Look,” he says. “You are a really good Squad member. And I think you’re so beautiful and smart.” He smiles almost shyly at her. “You got such soulful eyes.”

“Thanks,” she says. She realizes she is holding her breath.

“And I really like this.” He uses the tip of his thumb to point to his own tongue resting on his lower lip. She realizes that he’s talking about her tongue and feels her ears prickling.

Nervously, she leans in toward his mouth. Cardboardy beer sours his breath. She’s never kissed an Occidental before. She’s never even thought about how it would work. But as she gets close to his mouth, Alcibiades puts his hand on her shoulder and turns away.

“I didn’t mean like that,” he says.

“I’m sorry,” Zylina says. She covers her eyes—half with embarrassment, half with relief.

“It’s just,” he says, “I’ve never been with a

bitch

before.”

The word, coming out of this Buttonhead’s mouth, strikes her.

“Oh,” she says.

“Hey,” Alcibiades says. “Let’s try this.” He reaches down and unbuckles his belt. She hears the soft tinkling of the buckle and then the scratch of his zipper. When he reaches for the fur on the back of her head, she doesn’t need to look down. She can smell him. Bad beer and the ripeness of a man. Her fingernail is still gone, but on the tip of her tongue she can feel the points of her teeth.

“Wait,” Zylina says, tilting her head down to look at him. “I want to tell you what we do . . . back in my country.”

Alcibiades leans toward her and she pushes her muzzle toward his soft, dumb ear. She hears the heave of his breathing, his thudding pulse, the hungry click of his mouth. And beyond that, the hum of the interstate, a gust that just picked up, sizzling dirt against the motel windows.

Before she bites down and tugs back, ripping the cartilage from the pale skin behind his temple, she licks the warm, soft lobe of it, sending electricity down his neck and spine. It is an unspeakable gift.

All he can manage in return is a scream.

 

Zylina is still holding on to the ear as she walks into the sulfurous light of a Valero parking lot. She wipes the thickening blood from her lips with the corner of the pool towel and fingers the folds of flesh cupped in her palm. In the store, she spots a rack of red, white, and blue T-shirts that say PROUD in blocky letters across the chest. In the bathroom, she takes off the uniform polo and changes into the T-shirt. In the mirror, she sees herself—long fox-red face, black nose, ears that tremor, even now, at every noise. She holds up Alcibiades’ ragged ear to the side of her head, covering her own. It’s a bad fit.

“Understand?” she says to herself through the ear. Then wraps it in the polo and throws it in the trash.

She pays for the T-shirt, an energy drink, and a bag of snack mix with banana chips. The lady at the counter clucks her tongue when Zylina asks which direction she needs to go to get to California, but then points left along the interstate. On the access road, Zylina stands with her thumb out, the pool towel wrapped around her bare arms. In the dark, it is impossible to see the little streaks of blood staining it at the edges.

A box truck rolls to a stop in front of her. A driver, whose face she cannot yet see, leans over the cab and pushes open the door. She breathes in, preparing to ask how far the driver is going. It is a bargain she can make in her own voice.

Zylina reaches through the neck of her new shirt and thumbs the hundred-dollar bills stuffed into her bra. Those people who wove guns into their rugs—maybe they weren’t sending her a message but a cure.

 

MOTHER’S LOVE, A SOCRATIC DIALOGUE.
PERSONS OF THE DIALOGUE: Zylina. Mother.

SCENE:—In Exile.

 

MOTHER. I am telling you to stay because I love you.
ZYLINA. Well, your love is a little fucking hard sometimes.
MO. Is it?
ZY. Yes. Your love is like cinderblocks under some ragged-ass pillow.
MO. What should my love be like? Tell me that, Zylina. How should I love?
ZY. I don’t know, Mom. Maybe don’t be so mad at me for leaving?
MO. I’m not mad, I’m disappointed.
ZY. Did you get that from a TV show?
MO. Probably yes, but does that make it false?
ZY. Does it make it corny?
MO. You should do what I have done: Give up your home and career to bring your child out of war and poverty.
Work hard for not enough money only to watch your child reject the opportunity she has been given! Then
tell me you think about my texture. Then tell me who is cinderblocks and who is ragged-ass.
ZY. Ohmygod.
MO. Your grades are good. You have one year left. Why would you not go to college and make a way for yourself
in the world?
ZY. What makes you think that that’s what’s good for me if it’s not what I want?
MO. It’s because I love you.
ZY. Why do you keep saying that?
MO. I say what’s true. I don’t have to prove my love to you.
ZY. You could try.
MO. Tell me: How do I prove? Do you want me to bleed for you? Give me the knife. I bleed for you every day.
ZY. Stop. You’re so extra. Just tell me one time—one time you loved me normally like a mother.
MO. Yes, I’ll tell you. When you were just a baby, three children died in one year from scorpion stings. The nearest hospital was a half-day’s drive away. Your father’s car might not have even made it so far. But the herbalist in our village started using a big horse’s needle to inject the children with scorpion venom. He told everybody that with the venom already in their veins, the scorpions would stay away. It had been thinned—almost harmless. Still, it was a very difficult choice.
ZY. What? Did you do that to me?
MO. Of course. You were fevered for three days. That needle is still inside my heart. But you were never stung by a scorpion. I was always a good mother to you.
ZY. Mom, that’s insane.
MO. No. Not getting you the cure would have been insane.
ZY. That’s not even scientific.
MO. I’m not proving scientifically. You want to know how I love you, and I am telling you. Perhaps my love is needle-love, but how else can it protect you?
ZY. Do you even hear yourself? Why can’t you just be a normal mother? Do you actually believe you can protect people just by feeding them a little piece of what’s trying to hurt them?
MO. Why shouldn’t I believe? You’re still here, aren’t you?

The Robert Watson Literary Prize Poem SERTRALINE

Object permanence: something my dog doesn’t think
I possess. She sits on the ball when she no longer wants

to participate. I wish to one day hold that kind of boldness.
Near us, a heron puffs his chest, wades knee-deep into

the marsh. What is more than one heron called? I never learned
that one. A flamboyance of flamingos, watch of nightingales,

bouquet of pheasants. My mother is somewhere, probably
working or maybe driving to the store. She likes to shop the sales.

We used to have the same birthmark, right over our left hip.
Hers: gone. Mine: bleeds. I look for deeper water. The dog likes

to float. Isn’t that how witches were tested in Salem? Something
about floating, something about weighing the same as a duck.

To keep still, I imagine the oil-sheen of a mallard in the dog’s
mouth, my mother’s hand in mine. It’s a siege, a siege of herons.

CROCUSES

 

 For Stuart Dischell

After nearly hacking them down

while mowing my back lawn,

I think of Rimbaud aroused

by their purples and greens

as they spiked between

the stones of the Rue de Buci,

barbarous among the modernity.

DIXIE WHISTLE

“Breaker, breaker one-seven for anyone coming this way. Mama Bear sleeps in the shadow of a Coca-Cola sign just past the mile marker two-six on I-20. She looks hungry. This is a public service announcement.”

Ma laughs. “Where’d you come up with that?”

And then the radio bursts: “That’s a ten-four. This is Sandstorm.”

A lady trucker. Candy squeals at getting a response, and her mother, in the driver’s seat, laughs with her.

“I didn’t think that thing worked,” Ma says.

The responses blast into the car.

“Mud Hut, copy here, much obliged.”

“Snapper, copy.”

“Y’all shittin me? Did a chipmunk just chew the wire?”

Sandstorm comes back on and says, “Now, Bronc, you watch that silver tongue around the child. What’s your handle, sweetheart?”

Candy hasn’t thought of a handle.

“Don’t look at me,” Ma tells her.

They pass the shopping plaza with the name that makes her think of paper cups. WINN-DIXIE. The radio in the car says whistler. “You can call me Dixie Whistle,” she says into the microphone.

“What’s your wrapper there, Miss Whistle?”

“My what?”

“Your wrapper’s your ride, Dixie Whistle. What you’re toodlin around in.”

Ma says, “Don’t you dare.”

“Blue Monte Carlo,” Candy says.

Their wrapper is really a maroon Dart, not new but new to them, with a black vinyl roof. Ma saved up six hundred dollars and the nice mister with the German shepherd said he’d toss in the CB unit for free rather than disconnect the antenna.

“Belongs to my pa.”

“Well ain’t you a helpful angel there, Dixie Whistle. You let your Pa Whistle know how obliged we are for the sniffaroo.”

Ma says, off-button, “I heard her.”

 

It’s a Burger King night. They get it through the window and Candy sneaks fries from the warm bag on her lap. For an extra ninety-nine cents they get an Empire Strikes Back drinking glass. Now they only need Lando to complete the set of four. They had a Lando earlier, but there was no time to pack him before they left.

In Aunt Vicki’s living room they watch Tic Tac Dough and Candy guesses right on a question about Colorado. She has a quiz on the capitals in a week.

“Aren’t you a smarty,” Aunt Vicki says. She takes a sip of Dr. Pepper.

“Top of her class,” Ma says.

“Show-off,” Maxine says from the floor.

Then a question comes up about the capital of Connecticut, which Candy knows because that’s where they used to live—where Pa still lives—before they got away. The screaming under the kitchen lights. The silver beer stacked in the Frigidaire Frost-Free Refrigerator-Freezer. Fruit magnets holding up her spelling tests. The Greyhound bus over the mountains.

Candy gets another question right, and Aunt Vicki points to Maxine. “This one could take a lesson,” she says.
Maxine sticks out her tongue at Candy.

Candy holds her hands over her ears when they play The Mean Dragon because the roar always startles her. Her intuition kicks in. She knows the Dragon is hidden behind Number Eight. The contestant’s smiling husband is sitting in the front row holding up four fingers so the woman says, “My husband says Number Four, Wink, so I’ll have to go with Number Four!” And then there’s the reveal, Candy pressing her ears with her fingers—wubba, wubba, ching!—two hundred dollars.

Then the woman goes on her own and picks Number Eight for their eight-year-old son, and she and her smiling husband are not going to Puerto Vallarta.

“You ought to be on this show, Candy-babe,” Ma says with a playful kick. “You win us a bunch of money and me and Vicki can quit working at Uptons.”

 

The apartment is too small for the four of them, but Ma says it’s only temporary until she can save enough for her and Candy to get their own place down here. For now, Candy sleeps on a cot in Maxine’s room and Ma gets Aunt Vicki’s couch. Ma made it sound like fun.

When Candy was little and Aunt Vicki and Maxine would come north to visit, she and Maxine would play, but Maxine’s got boyfriends now, wears tank tops and has boobs, and is hardly ever home. Some nights she’s out until it’s darker than Candy would ever be allowed to be out and a car with a revving engine peels away right as Maxine comes in the front door. And then when Aunt Vicki and Ma go out at night, it’s Maxine who stays with Candy and even though sometimes they still play it doesn’t feel the same, like Maxine is waiting things out.

For that first week or so it was like having a sister all of a sudden. Going around her room, Maxine plucked things on the fly for Candy to have: a couple of dolls, a stack of books, a few kiddie T-shirts that weren’t going to fit Maxine anymore. “Since y’all just left with the clothes on your backs,” she said.

Maxine had her own radio, like the one in Ma’s car, on the shelf next to her hi-fi, and she turned it on one night when Ma and Aunt Vicki had gone out. Maxine taught Candy the slang, some of which Candy knew already from watching B.J. and the Bear.

There was a low hiss, then a squawk of voices would spit from the speaker, and a line of red lights would glow all the way to the end.

Maxine picked up the microphone, held the button. The voices on the other end flirted back: howdy and kind.

 

The new box of Honeycombs includes a miniature aluminum license plate. It reads sky high in embossed capital letters and has an outline in the shape of Montana. Candy now has five plates in her collection and, more importantly, once she is finished with the box, she can mail two dollars and two box tops to the Post Cereal Company of Battle Creek, Michigan, to obtain the complete set of plates for the year 1980.

It’s Saturday morning and Ma and Aunt Vicki have left for their daylong shift at Uptons. Maxine is nowhere to be found. Before she left, Ma said it’s supposed to be a nice day, Candy-babe, you ought to go out on your bike and see if you can make yourself a friend. Except Ma forgot that Candy’s bike, as far as she knows, is still propped against the wall in their garage in Connecticut next to the Ford Granada. The used bike that Aunt Vicki found at a tag sale the day after Ma and Candy moved in may have been a nice gesture and all, but it is not her bike.

“Don’t know if I like you being cooped up here all alone,” Ma said. “Just remember your key, okay?”

“I will.”

“And if the phone rings?”

“Don’t pick up.”

“That’s a girl.”

Candy eats two bowls of Honeycombs and watches The Super Globetrotters and Fat Albert until she hears sirens coming from the interstate. She goes to Maxine’s room and turns the receiver to the state police channel.

Maxine told her that the local bacon sits on the S-curve past the Pizza Hut, where the speed limit is 35, and sets traps for the out-of-state haulers before the staties can get a chance.

Also, Channel 19 is the truckers’ channel, but around Atlanta they take it to 17 when they think they’re being sniffed. So many smugglers down in these parts, Maxine says, beer and whiskey for cheap.

A voice comes on: “Can I get a run on a Kentucky trailer, Romeo Romeo three-six. Kid says he’s en route to Tallahassee.”

A little while later: “That’s a squeaker in front of you, twenty-four.”

“No kidding. He’s barely out of the package.”

“I’m sure he went over at least one line, Officer.”

Candy turns back to Channel 17. She picks up the microphone.

“Breaker, breaker one-seven, calling out to Sandstorm. This is Dixie Whistle. You out there, Sandstorm? Snapper? Bronco? I’m here with a troop scoop.”

The line fritzes, whistles. They are probably out of range.

 

“Ask me another one.”

Ma is dressed for the evening, her eyelids silvered. They are waiting for Aunt Vicki and Maxine, who have gone out for chicken in a bucket. Ma puts down her cigarette, picks up the flash cards, shuffles, and draws. “Idaho,” she says.

Candy remembers Idaho as the state in the corner of the map that looks like a graham cracker with a bite taken out. She plays with the syllables. “Idaho. Eyed-a-hoe. I dun-no, Idaho. Des Moines?”

“Nope.”

She wonders if Sandstorm has been to Idaho. In Candy’s ten years and nine months on earth, she has only been to Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Georgia, and the states the Greyhound bus passed through in between. Mark Yetter had been to nineteen states and in class he pointed to each of them on the pull-down map.

“I give up.”

“Boys,” Ma says.

“Boys?”

Ma flips the card. B-O-I-S-E.

“Ask me another.”

“You sure you studied these, Candy-babe?”

“I’m studying now, aren’t I?”

Ma drags her cigarette and draws another card.

 

Maxine brought out her Hardy Boys game for her and Candy to play. But after Ma and Aunt Vicki go out, Maxine tells Candy that Jeff will be coming over. The game remains in its tape-cornered box on the kitchen table.

“You can meet him,” Maxine says, “but then you need to leave.”

Candy wonders if she’ll look like Maxine when she’s fifteen. After Ma and Aunt Vicki are gone, Maxine takes off her sweater to reveal a pretty red polka-dotted short-sleeved top. She puts on lipstick and mascara in the bathroom. She talks to the mirror, watches her lips move as she calls out to Candy that she doesn’t want any chicken, doesn’t eat anything fried anymore.

 

“Breaker one-seven, Dixie Whistle in her cave. Bronco? Sandstorm? You out there?”

“Well, good evenin, girlie.”

“Hi, Sandstorm! What’s your twenty?”

“I’m about twenty-five minutes outside the circle. Lookin forward to a knock back at the ol choke and puke with Bronco and Snapper, I’m gatherin they’ve started without me. Do you believe that, honey?”

Jeff had come in through the back door. He looked older than fifteen. Maxine’s polka dots rode up as she stood tiptoe in the kitchen to lock her arms around his neck. Candy watched the flutter of the boy’s hand down Maxine’s back, grazing her butt, settling at the hold of her hip.

Maxine suggested to Candy that she pour herself a glass of soda pop and take some chicken and biscuits into the bedroom.

The bones sit gnawed on the grease-spotted paper plate on the bedroom floor.

 

On Monday, Candy comes home with a 96 on her state capitals quiz, and Ma hugs her hard and says they ought to celebrate and go out to Pizza Hut, but Candy asks if they can go to the diner instead.

“What diner is that?”

“Near the Winn-Dixie.”

Ma holds her cigarette without lighting it and glances up to the ceiling like she does when she’s doing math in her head. “I don’t know of any diner there, Candy-babe.”

Over the newspaper at the kitchen table, Aunt Vicki says, “Honey, are you talking about the truck stop?”

Candy hadn’t expected her aunt or her mother to know anything about the place.

“I’ve heard the burgers are really good there,” Candy says.

Aunt Vicki chuckles, with Ma following, like there’s a joke flitting between them that Candy wouldn’t get. Ma says, “Not sure we’d be welcome there, Candy-babe. That’s kind of like waltzing into someone else’s church. What made you think of that place?”

 

Over pepperoni slices and sodas, Candy is confused as to why the talk seems to be about grown-up things when she and her near-perfect knowledge of state capitals are supposedly the reason they are out celebrating at Pizza Hut. Some guy named Philip keeps coming up.

“Who’s Philip?” Maxine asks.

“Nobody,” Ma says.

But then Aunt Vicki says, “Just a troublemaker who preys on unsuspecting women.”

“What?” Candy says.

Aunt Vicki looks across the table at Candy. “Your mom has an admirer, dear.”

“I want to hear more,” Maxine says.

“Where’d you meet him?”

“He works with us at Uptons. Vicki knows him.”

“He sells sportswear and comes over every day to talk to your mother,” Aunt Vicki says.
Maxine asks, “Is he cute?”

Ma shrugs, but then Aunt Vicki elbows her and says, “That’s not what you told me in the car!”

“He’s sweet, Vic!”

Aunt Vicki cups her hand around her mouth and whispers to Candy: “She thinks he’s quite handsome.”

Later, sitting on the edge of Candy’s cot, Ma says, “You know, it’s been a while since I’ve gone out with anybody, Candy-babe. You know how you’ve had trouble making friends? We’ve been down here long enough and sometimes when you’re a grown-up, you like having another grown-up around to listen to you. You get what I mean?”

 

Candy creeps down the hallway and peers into the living room. She hears whispers, giggles, shushes. She detects an odor like after gym class.

Ma was done up a little nicer tonight, in a dress that Candy hadn’t seen before. She could smell perfume behind Ma’s ears when they hugged goodbye.

This time, dinner is beef teriyaki and rice, straight out of the carton, with chopsticks. Maxine was wearing a tank top under her sweater and wriggled off her jeans in favor of a short skirt, full ensemble like in between scenes for a play.

Jeff didn’t bother to say hello.

Now the only light in the room comes from the seawater flicker of the TV, which illuminates Jeff’s shirtless torso on top of her cousin. Maxine’s nail-polished fingers run up and down his back.

Candy hops lightly back to the bedroom and closes the door. She puts on her sneakers, then her jacket. The window opens wide enough for her to pass through and she trusts herself to make the leap to the grass. The air is cool and since it’s already dark and past the time she would ever be allowed to be out, it feels like she doesn’t need to rush.

 

It’s five hundred and sixty-seven miles to Atlanta from Columbus, Ohio, where Sandstorm departed in her Kenworth earlier that morning hooked onto a tankerful of phosphoric acid. (“It’s stuff that goes in your Coca-Cola,” she explained over the wires.) From what Sandstorm told Candy, she can expect an eight-hour haul plus or minus the weekend traffic on Interstate 75. Then a knock back at the Choke with Mud Hut and Snapper and whoever hasn’t run their rig off into a ditch.

Aunt Vicki and Maxine’s house is close enough to the interstate that Candy can follow the railroad tracks with a flashlight and not get lost. The tracks go right over the highway. Cars whoosh beneath her, white headlights on one side turning into red taillights going out the other. She sings to herself to make the time pass and soon appearing over the horizon is the glowing sign for the Winn-Dixie and then the diner, which Aunt Vicki called a truck stop though it doesn’t seem to have a name other than D-I-N-E-R.

She hops down the grass slope and under the dusk ambles across the parking lot, past people leaning against cars, cigarettes blazing in their fingers. Women in skirts that end above their knees stand in a row like they’re waiting for rides. They let their glances linger on Candy as she walks, the way most adults seem to now, like she’s a curiosity and maybe a threat but surely someone else’s problem. She thinks of diners like Mel’s Diner on Alice or the silver ones shaped like trolley cars, but what she sees when she enters this one is like something closer to a Howard Johnson’s if they dimmed the lights and kicked out all the kids. No one is eating. A half-dozen folks at the bar laugh over mugs and saucers, and the haze is rank with cigarette smoke and burnt coffee.

The only women in the place are a couple of waitresses with their heads down, folding napkins or sorting silverware into trays, except for one woman who sits at the counter in a line of flannel and denim and mesh hats, swirling a cup of coffee and whispering to the man next to her.

Candy takes a chance. She walks past the sign that says PLEASE WAIT TO BE SEATED, winding through the tables unnoticed until she has positioned herself directly behind the woman.

A voice like a mouse in this hangar: “Hi.”

And then: “Excuse me.”

The woman doesn’t hear Candy, but one of the men does and then it’s the men turning around with their hats and grins, missing her at first, growly and confused. Then they look down and meet her eyes. Candy senses these men looking at her in a new way, from the bottom up.

“The fuck’s this going on?” one says. “Carlo, this your date here?”

The explosion of laughter causes the woman to turn around and get a load of the fuss. She stops laughing when Candy locks her gaze.

“Are you Sandstorm?”

The rest of the laughter drops.

“Who’s askin, may I ask?”

“It’s me,” Candy says. “Don’t you recognize my voice?”

The woman smiles, a half-smile like she’s waiting for the rest of the reveal. Sandstorm looks around for an adult assigned to this charge and when she doesn’t see one says, “Oh, honey. Oh, sweetie. You the one been givin me tips on the radio, ain’t you?”

“I knew you’d be here! I found you!”

“You sure did find me.” The woman’s eyes slide left to right and back. “Guess it ain’t hard to find me. When I’m not in my rig I’m usually here with these . . . knucklebones.” She opens her hand to the rest of the counter. “Snapper, Bronco, Mud Hut? You fellas know our girl Dixie Whistle.”

 

Lighting a cigarette outside the restaurant, Sandstorm says, “You ain’t really no Dixie, are you?”

Even by the glow of the flame, Sandstorm looks younger than Candy had envisioned from the voice that rasped through the radio. Her hair feathers out from the mesh of her STP cap and is the kind of reddish brown the Crayola company calls mahogany. She wears jeans and a man’s gray flannel shirt buttoned halfway up and underneath that flannel Candy can see a T-shirt with a design in red, white, and blue.

In the diner, Sandstorm bought Candy a Coca-Cola, which Candy sips from a glass bottle that feels cold and substantial in her hand.

“My real name’s Candace. My ma calls me Candy-babe.”

Sandstorm pockets her lighter. “No, I mean, you don’t talk like no Dixie. I heard that little voice squeakin over the radio and didn’t know where I was. You oughta call yourself Penny-Whistle. Cause you don’t sound a thing like Dixie.”

“Who gave you the name Sandstorm?” Candy asks.

Sandstorm blows a stream of smoke upward the same way Ma does when she’s trying to remember something. “So long ago, I don’t recall who it was. When you start out, they give you a handle. My real name’s Sandy, see. All the other truckers were men, and none of them were used to seein a lady blowin past them in a rig. I guess I made them go blind.”

“Hey, we rhyme!” Candy says.

“How’s that?”

“Candy and Sandy.”

Sandstorm laughs and says, “Well how about that! I didn’t even notice. You must be good in school.”

Candy shrugs. She was hoping for something else, anything but school. “I don’t like my school. I’m new there. They don’t like me.”

“They probably don’t like you cause you’re so smart. Make them feel slow, they’ll make you feel bad for it. That’s how it always happens. Ain’t your fault they can’t catch up to you.” Sandstorm takes a drag off her cigarette, leans her head back like she’s looking for something in the stars. “Try bein a girl who decides she wants to drive a truck for a living. People sayin there’s something wrong with you that you don’t wanna stick around and bake cookies and all that. I mean your teachers, friends, parents—all those people who were sayin before to follow your dreams, we love you, we believe in you, then you tell them your dream and it’s like a switch and they’re tryin to convince you you’re wrong in the head. I told myself, they’re all scared I might end up in a better place than them. Not long before you learn it ain’t worth wastin your time worryin about what people think. Like what these kids in your school think of you. They ain’t gonna change their minds, so make them think there’s something they don’t know.”

Then Sandstorm says, “You didn’t grow up around these parts, huh?”

Candy shakes her head. “We moved here from Connecticut. Ma and me.”

“Your ma know you’re out here this late, Candace?” Sandstorm shakes down her sleeve and holds her lighter over her watch and squints at the time. “Jesus, out after midnight, and you’re just a baby.”

“I’m almost eleven,” Candy says.

“Not that I’d really know, but that’s still gotta be too late for a kiddo your age. You sneak out or something?”
Candy doesn’t respond to this. Instead she asks, “Have you ever been to Idaho?”

“Idaho?” She exhales smoke. “Shit, sweetie, I been everywhere. Just like the song. Couldn’t tell you the last time I had a haul up there, though. It was probably beautiful. I really don’t remember.”

 

Candy knew she was in trouble when she saw Maxine’s window closed. She thought she could sneak around through the back of the house but that’s where Ma turned out to be. Aunt Vicky and Maxine were not in the apartment.

“Where the hell were you?” Ma had the yellow telephone from the hall with her, the cord stretched so taut around the corner the loops were flattened out of it. “I come home and it’s well after midnight and you’re not in your room, and some kid I’ve never seen before is on top of Maxine! I’d like an explanation!”

“His name is Jeff.”

“Whose name is Jeff?”

“Maxine’s boyfriend.”

“Maxine is going to have a baby of her own to take care of at the rate she’s going. Where were you?”

“I was at the diner.”

“What diner?”

The answer that pops into her head—the one she has the presence of mind not to say—is the one with the big sign that says D-I-N-E-R.  She tries to think of a better answer when the radio calls from Maxine’s room:

“Breaker one-seven, breaker one-seven. This is Sandstorm calling out to Dixie Whistle. You back in your cave, Candy? Please give a holler.”

Ma hears the voice and looks around like it must have come out of one of the heating vents in the floor. She follows the voice to Maxine’s room. The radio squawks again and that’s when she sees the receiver light up, hears the hums fading in and out.

“Who have you been talking to, Candace Marie?”

“Sandstorm looking for a twenty on Dixie Whistle. Last seen at the Atlanta choke and puke. Anyone out there see Dixie back in her cave, please holler.”

“Sounds like you have yourself a following there, Dixie,” Ma says. She walks over and unhooks the microphone and swallows before she puts it to her mouth.

“This is Ma Whistle. Who is this?”

“I do beg your pardon, ma’am, this is Sandstorm callin out for Dixie Whistle. Lookin for a twenty on a girl about eleven years old, jeans and a green jacket with red stripes on her sneakers. She left the I-20 diner about forty-five minutes ago.”

Ma thinks of what she wants to say, with no idea what kind of rabbit hears these things, what the protocol is. She holds the button. “I appreciate your concern, Miss Sandstorm. Young Dixie is indeed back in her cave, and I think it’s safe to say she will not be leaving that cave for a good long time. This is Ma Whistle, over and out.”

It takes Ma a couple minutes to figure out which cord leads to where, but when the breath of the radio goes out and the red light is off she goes a step further and yanks the unit from the shelf, microphone dangling on its cord, bouncing and trailing along the carpet. She takes it into the living room, and Candy doesn’t follow her to see what she does with it but imagines that it involves one of Aunt Vicki’s cabinets that she was warned never to open.

Ma stomps back into the bedroom and pulls Candy around by both of her shoulders. Ma’s eyes are wet, the silver streaking down her cheeks. They haven’t been wet like this since Ma and Candy left Connecticut when her eyes were wet all of the time.

“Those are not your friends, baby. You hear me? Those voices out there? Those are strangers. You don’t know where they’re coming from, you don’t know where they’re going. You don’t know what they have to lose. I know you haven’t been finding friends easy down here but you can’t just pull them out of nowhere like that! They will use you up!”

 

The air has a new, unfriendly quiet, absent the crackle. Saturday, during her mother’s shift, Candy goes out on the bike that Aunt Vicki brought home. She has rubber-banded her Georgia license plate (peachy) to the rear frame beneath the banana seat. A couple of years ago it might have been a perfect size bike for her, but now her knees reach higher than the handlebars and she can only ride it to the 7-Eleven so many times. She finds some kids playing Wiffle ball in a schoolyard and doesn’t have the breath for words when they stop and turn around to ask her just what does she think she’s staring at.

At school they ask why she talks so weird. Why her skin’s so pale. She asked her mother what “reckon” meant, since that’s all people say they do down here is reckon, and when Ma didn’t know Candy looked the word up herself in the paperback dictionary that Aunt Vicki kept beneath the TV with the JC Penney catalogs, but all it said was something about paying the money you owe.

On her bike, the neighborhood feels small, and she tries to work out how likely it is she’ll run into the kids from her class. Fifth grade in Georgia feels like what fourth grade did in Connecticut, only down here all the girls except Candy already wear makeup and chew so much gum. They had already read the books for this year at Candy’s old school, so she gets bored and tries to answer the teacher’s questions without sounding like she knows it all, but they already know she knows it all.

Even Maxine doesn’t want her around now that she’s grounded for being caught with Jeff and blames Candy for her getting in trouble. Candy doesn’t see how it’s her fault; she was all ready to play Hardy Boys. If having a boy like you means getting painted up and squished on the couch and never being able to eat any of the food you like, then Candy wonders just what’s so special about the whole thing, but she doubts that Maxine knows, either.

 

Candy gets to meet Philip when he shows up early on moving day in his red pickup truck. His work-gloved hands grip the boxes that Candy packed herself, filled with the books and clothes that Maxine gave her, as well as her license plates. In work boots, he clomps up the stairs, three flights past the apartment of the new landlady, Mrs. Bergendahl, whose Jack Russell terrier barks and scratches on the other side of the door every time they pass.

This time Candy gets her own room, with a real bed and a real closet. Even though it’s only a couple of miles from where Aunt Vicki and Maxine live, for Candy the move means a transfer to yet another school, more explaining and pretending. There were no friends to say goodbye to this time, at least.

Philip sets the boxes down gently in her room, where her bed has been already assembled and made. He looks at the bare yellow walls with his hands on his hips like a frontiersman and says, “I guess we’ve got work to do, huh?”

 

Soon Philip is eating Burger King with them when they watch Tic Tac Dough, letting Candy know how impressed he is when she identifies Pennsylvania as the Keystone State. He is there again on the weekends, watching Georgia Tech basketball in the living room with Ma leaning into him, the two of them cheering when a Tech player scores even though Ma has never cared for basketball in her life.

As he settles in, Philip looks for ways he can help. He adjusts the handlebars on Candy’s not-really-hers bike so her knees don’t hit them when she pedals. He is comically bad at mini-golf and worse at Monopoly and doesn’t seem to care when he loses, which doesn’t make it as much fun as it should be when Candy wins. Candy wonders when she’ll see the rest of him. She hasn’t heard what it sounds like when he yells, hasn’t seen him smash a beer bottle into brown shards of glass. What he’s like when he doesn’t get what he wants.

The CB radio is gone from the Dart. Philip turned out to have a friend who was willing to buy it for forty dollars. It doesn’t matter because Ma had shut the unit off long ago and, anyway, they hardly ride in the Dart anymore; when they go out, it’s often the three of them packed in a row in the cab of Philip’s truck with Candy on the hump, the radio playing the twangy music they like down here that Ma was never into before she met Philip but suddenly she knows the words to, sings along to sometimes.

 

Summer arrives; a thicker haze descends. They don’t keep the public library open for long during the day, or else Candy would spend more time there. Tan boys with armpit hair howl at her out the windows of their cars, rev loudly at red lights.

At the 7-Eleven, Candy and Maxine buy cigarettes with their Twizzlers and Cokes. The boy clerk behind the counter likes Maxine and doesn’t care that she and Candy are underage.

They’re on the front steps of Aunt Vicki’s building. It’s a work shift for Ma and Aunt Vicki, but Philip was watching TV in his shorts like he was part of the upholstery. Then, out of the blue, Maxine called and told her to ride her bike over.

“Your friend,” Maxine says, lighting a Virginia Slim. “Sandstorm? Been askin after you.” She holds the flame out for Candy, who drags slowly, little suck-puffs until the fire takes. She expects to cough and is surprised when she doesn’t.

“You get your CB back?”
“Nope,” Maxine says. “Thanks to you. We listen in Jeff’s truck. He had to get a special kind of license and so he did and now he’s drivin all over the state for Brother Kane.”

Candy tries to flick ash like she has flicked it all her life. “I thought you were forbidden?”

“Not like Mama ever knows where I am. And know what else? Once I get me a job I won’t be goin back to school in the fall. Me and Jeff gotta save.”

“You havin a baby, Maxine?”

Maxine takes a long, drawn-out sip on her Coke bottle as she considers the question. She finishes the bottle, then peers at Candy through the green glass like it’s a telescope. “No, Candy. I’m not having a baby. Not so in the dark I don’t know that.” She sets down the bottle firmly on the wooden step. “Get me out of this shit town first.”

“So what did Sandstorm say?”

“Guess she wanted to know where her tips had gone. Checks in from the diner every Saturday. She misses you.”

Back at home, with the window open in her room, nighttime brings new sounds. After the TV is clicked off at the end of The Waltons, Candy hears the scratch of slippers around the kitchen, then Ma’s whispers entwined with Philip’s in a way that Candy has come to know means he’ll still be there in the morning. She senses Ma stopping at the door to her room where Candy pretends to sleep as though she’s been asleep for hours. Some nights, back in Connecticut, Ma would sleep in Candy’s bed, Candy curling into her and feeling Ma’s muscles and breathing in the cigarette smoke from her nightgown. But that doesn’t happen anymore, and with Philip around it’s never just the two of them anyway, and the last couple of times when Candy tried to curl with Ma on the couch Ma told her that she was getting too big to be doing this.

 

The rigs, parked in columns, look more immense up close than when they pass on the highway. From one end, the trailers stretch all the way to the dark horizon and on their panels scream letters as tall as buildings. The white-lettered tires come up to Candy’s head and behind them, warm engines tick as they cool down. The cabs slumber like animals that roared moments before: the Kenworths have angry, spread-out cat faces; the Peterbilts have square, doglike snouts; and all over there is chrome, reflecting the pink and blue neon of the diner and giving the sense that it would shock Candy if she touched it.

And the license plates: rusted, grimy, larger versions of the ones she collects from the Honeycomb boxes. Here she finds plates representing the states she has never come close to seeing in real life, from the half of the map where everything is bigger and shaped like a rectangle. Wyoming, the silhouette of a man riding a bucking bronco. AMERICA’S DAIRYLAND. LAND OF ENCHANTMENT.

Men in denim spill out of the diner, laughing, finishing off drinks and jokes. Squinting to light cigarettes. They talk up the ladies who have been waiting patiently for their rides like they were the last time she was here. Candy slips into the space between two rigs. The one she stands alongside casts a triangular black shadow where she can crouch without being seen. Her eyes adjust well enough to make out the code lettering on the tanker trailer and the diamond-shaped placard indicating that whatever swishes around inside could scorch rocks.

On the mudflaps: Petunia Pig in a cowgirl outfit. And then, on the driver’s side door of a navy blue Kenworth cab, in fine gold script: Sandstorm.

 

When the men have left with the women, Candy pulls herself up onto the metal treaded stair and slots her fingers into the handle and tugs open the door. She has to jump back down off the step so it can swing open wide enough for her to climb in.

The inside of the cab is warm like the inside of a hat. Candy sits in the driver’s seat, padded with blankets for a boost. There is duct-tape on the corners where the vinyl is torn. The windshield is like a movie screen. Her hands on the steering wheel are tiny; there’s sweat on the grips. The CB squawks to life and sprays out vulgarities, calls for a sign, then falls back to a hush.

A curtain divides the front of the rig from the sleeping compartment in the back. Candy draws it open. In the blue light, she can see that Sandstorm has furnished it like a tiny apartment: the outline of a mattress on the floor, pillows, a portable TV with an antenna telescoped out. A stack of magazines. There is a mirror mounted on the rear inside wall and photos slotted in corners of the frame.

Candy slides onto the mattress and closes the curtain behind her. She rolls over and backs herself up against the far wall and brings up her knees and listens to the voices rolling around outside, the motors hopping to a start and pulling out. Horns quick-tooting see ya later. She’s left a crack in the curtain where she can see the roof of the diner and the black sky above it and is nestled very comfortably when the door to the cab swings open and Sandstorm lugs herself in and exhales.

The ignition turns and, with it, the earth and everything inside the cab rumbles. Candy feels the vibrations beneath her legs. Sandstorm eases out, the truck like a lion awakening and stretching. Sandstorm needs both arms to turn the wheel around just to get the rig onto the service road and then tugs at the rope-horn a couple times and waves and hollers out at the people left in the lot. Then it’s a wait for an opening and a tricky, slow merge and the engine flattens to a murmur.

The only parts of Sandstorm that Candy can see are her baseball cap and her flannel sleeve, the only sound she hears an occasional clearing of the throat, else when a sass blasts over the CB and Sandstorm chuckles but doesn’t pick up the mic. Every so often, the red taillights of a car float past in the left lane. Candy’s legs begin to cramp, and she silently shifts into the position in which she’ll eventually fall asleep. Sandstorm whistles to herself to stay awake and it’s all Candy can do not to hum along.