The Boy with Purple Hair

As soon as Stella opened her front door, she wanted to close it. There stood  her son’s new friend, Kyle, a gangling 14-year-old with stubbly, purple hair, an angular face, and a hostile expression. Beyond him, fog hid whatever route he planned to take.

She wanted to pretend that her son wasn’t home, but he’d start a row if she sent Kyle away. Undecided about whether to fib, she forced her lips to smile.

“Hello, Kyle.”

“Tell Dave I’m here,” Kyle boomed, too loud as always.

“You could say hello.”

Kyle mumbled, “H’lo” and bellowed, “Dave, I’m here, come on.”

Dave dashed to the door. Both boys were shorter than average but otherwise opposites in looks, Dave’s smiling face sweet and handsome, his jeans, shirt, and smooth hair all clean. Kyle was grimy, badly raised, a convict’s nephew, totally different from Dave’s friends in his previous school.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“Away, away to the soccer field,” said Kyle.

Unlikely in fog.

“Really?” she asked.

“Really, really.” Kyle sounded mocking, and she wanted to shove him away and protect her son.

“’Bye, Mom,” Dave said.

Too soon the boys became invisible in moist, heavy air. She trudged upstairs to her computer table, where she needed to concentrate on her work designing theatrical costumes. Worries flooded her mind. Kyle had become a problem soon after her husband’s employer moved the family back to a town they’d left a decade ago. Dave had stopped telling enough about what he did.  He’d tried to hide his newest online purchase, a mask that looked like a real man’s face. If Kyle asked for a costume, she’d create a coyote.

I need a way to separate them, she thought. She and her husband couldn’t afford private schools for their children. They could pay for a summer camp, but too much could happen before then.

Being hearing impaired, Dave and Kyle talked loudly to understand each other. When far enough from other ears,  Dave said, “I got an idea. Let’s go to the cemetery and get eerie videos to post on YouTube.”

“I got another idea. Today’s our chance to explore the Millers’ mansion and learn how a rich scientist lives.” Kyle pointed to a house where only the whitish stone stoop was visible. “Mr. Miller’s a microbiologist, so you’ll find some science stuff. They’re on a trip, and no one’ll spot us going inside, thank you, Mr. Fog.”

“How are you sure that no one’s home?”

“Their car’s been gone and their lights out since Wednesday, and a little kid told me they’re driving to national parks, real far away. Have you ever been inside?”

“No, the Millers are mean grouches.”

“They treated my favorite cousin awful, abysmal, when she worked there.”

“Cheated her out of pay?” Dave asked.

“Yeah, they’re crafty.”

The Millers had paid his cousin Crystal less than they’d promised. They’d fired her and described her as lazy in references. Often moody and sad, she hadn’t found another job; she didn’t divulge how she got money to live on.

“Are we doing a Robin Hood?” Dave asked.

“Today we’re explorers like Marco Polo, or you can be Darwin and learn about the possessions of a scientist.”

Dave could be a lookout while Kyle searched for whatever his 19-year-old cousin’s fence could sell. The cousin had suggested using Dave as an accomplice, starting small; they’d begun with shoplifting chocolate cookies and handing some to a homeless man who huddled under a blanket on a sidewalk; they’d progressed to socks on a “dare.”

“How will we get in, through a window?” Dave asked.

“Just follow me. It’ll be easy.”

“Are you — ”

“Someone’s coming,” said Kyle, whose left ear was better than either of Dave’s ears.

They silenced until after a tall boy strode past them, his boombox blasting band music.

“How did you get the bruise?” Dave asked, staring at Kyle’s cheek.

“Can you see it? My mother’s ex-boyfriend, a slimy worm, he tried to beat me, but he ain’t going to mess with me again. I hate him, I loathe him, I despise him. He knocked my mom against a wall and tried to punch her, and we all fought, and I pummeled him real hard and got rid of him.”

“An evil monster. Did he injure you anywhere besides your cheek?”

“No, it’s not bad. He ain’t never coming back.”

The worst part of the fight had been a flushed face’s sneer when Kyle swayed and toppled, but the brute’s departure was a victory. Mom wouldn’t open a door to him again.

“Tell me if you ever need me to help you,” Dave said.

“Thanks, you’re my best friend. Let’s go.”

They tiptoed behind the two-story, brick house and stopped at the back door. Although cocooned by fog, Kyle felt surprisingly shaky. A few weeks ago, he’d suffered hours of sitting, sweating, in a courthouse, accused of shoplifting a necklace of fake pearls. A witness identified him because of his flamboyant hair. His punishment was fright and the requirement of enduring a warning.

From that experience, he learned to conceal his hair. His heart beating faster at the prospect of his first burglary, he took supplies from his backpack, squeezed a black cap over his head, provided gloves for himself and Dave, and worked on the lock.

“It’s taking too long,” Dave said.

“Shut up. I almost got it,” Kyle replied, embarrassed.

After a few more minutes, he succeeded, and they tiptoed into a gleaming, yellow kitchen with an odor of an ammonia-based cleaning fluid. Everything, from the fancy, brass drawer pulls to the hanging, blue pots looked expensive.

“Look and see if there’s food to give away,” Kyle said. “I bet they eat gourmet stuff.”

Kyle hurried into the dining room, where a breakfront displayed silver plates and bowls that could help pay for a semi-automatic. He slowly, soundlessly opened the breakfront’s glass door. As he touched a plate with an acorn-patterned rim, a warning wail became audible. A police siren.

“Cops, let’s go,” Dave shouted.

“Shut up.”

The siren became louder, coming toward them and for them. Kyle bolted through the kitchen and followed Dave out the door.

“My DNA — I forgot — I bit into an apple,” Dave said, turning back. “I got to get it.”

He fumbled the knob, and Kyle had to turn it and shove him inside. While warnings of doom came closer, Kyle waited for that amateur to retrieve evidence. If police caught them, Dave would get off with a warning, maybe probation. And his parents’ scolding, but they’d blame Kyle. For Kyle, confinement, misery, the end of all his plans. People he wanted to impress would avoid him. He’d never again enter a home like Dave’s.

Kyle and Dave had noticed each other during Dave’s first day in their middle school. When he hadn’t answered a question, their English teacher had scoffed, “What are you daydreaming about?” A few kids snickered humiliatingly. Having guessed that Dave needed to read lips, Kyle scribbled, “whom” on a note and passed it over his shoulder.

“The answer is ‘whom,’” Dave said.

The teacher snapped, “Kyle, no more of your tricks. That’s a minus.”

The next day Dave got appropriate revenge by hiding the teacher’s eraser, annoying her and amusing the class. Kyle congratulated him; they agreed on their feelings about their teachers and subjects, wanted to see the same sci-fi movie, and began spending their free time together. He preferred Dave to his previous friends, who’d become more interested in drugs than in him or anyone else.

Blinking and staring at a skirt pattern on the computer screen, Stella wondered how to rescue Dave from Kyle’s influence. Maybe a coach could develop Dave’s skills so he’d get on a team with popular boys. As she touched her fingers to computer keys to begin a search, she heard a siren, which screamed louder, speeding nearer.

Had a neighbor called police? She froze, listening to a wail that stopped near where nasty Mr. Miller lived. He’d shouted rudely at Dave, who might, with Kyle’s influence, try a prank for revenge.

She rushed downstairs, her heart beating faster, and opened a door to fog. No sound except sparrows’ chirps, no way to know what was happening at the Millers’ house. If she ran there, she’d make the police suspicious.

Clutching her phone in case Dave called from a police station, she returned upstairs, her mind groping for solutions — more weekend visits with friends from the old school, another lecture by her husband, a GPS tracker. A misfortune, that her son and Kyle had a disability in common. If Dave would consent to wear a hearing aid, he’d make more friends. If only she hadn’t let him stay, last summer, in the badly managed camp where lightning struck a tree beside him and thunder damaged his ears.

Mom had told her to blame the camp, not herself. The evening before Mom’s heart attack, she’d sounded reassured by Stella’s fib that Dave liked his new school. Twice since then, Mom had appeared in Stella’s sleep, simply looking at her.

“Mom, what should I do about Dave?” Stella whispered.

Dave and Kyle ran together across uneven grass to a low fence, climbed over it, and dropped onto a mushy lawn. They dashed along a cement driveway and, on a sidewalk, slowed to a walk to appear nonchalant.

“That was exciting,” Dave panted. “Maybe a housekeeper was upstairs and heard us.”

“Shut up,” Kyle said. “Give me those back.” He pointed to gloves, took the evidence of intent. and stuffed them into his backpack. “We’ll hide behind that hedge until we’re sure we’re safe.”

They crawled behind bushes and crouched on moist grass only seconds before a car rumbled past.

After waiting many minutes, Kyle stood, shook stiffness out of his legs, and said, “We’ll go to the cemetery now. The cops will be scared to search for us there.”

“Yeah, and we’ll get videos for our alibi,” Dave said. “I hope my grandma’s been enjoying a peaceful snooze and not watching me.”

“You gotta be quiet and go fast.”

After sprinting about a quarter mile, they reached a sign saying Vale of Rest. Tombstones, crosses, and skeletal trees faded in gray air. Oddly, some of the oaks leaned over graves as if trying to shelter them. The scene appeared otherworldly, eerier than Kyle had expected. The moist air muffled sounds until something unseen crackled, maybe a spook behind them.

“Let’s race to the saint’s statue,” Dave said.

“Yeah.”

They tried to run on moist ground. After several paces, Dave stumbled, fell to his hands and knees, and sprang up. Facing a stone cross, he said, “My grandma’s there. I’ll go say hello to her.”

Kyle accompanied him and waited while Dave mumbled, “Hi, Grandma, we all miss you, but you’ll be glad to know, we’re all okay.”

Nearby, a bouquet of gladioli, roses, and lilies adorned a pale tombstone. An opportunity for Dave to steal successfully and become bolder.

Kyle pointed to it. “Go take those for your mom. You said she was mad yesterday because you forgot her birthday.”

“She’ll ask how I bought them when I don’t have any money.”

“Say I lent you some.”

Dave stayed still. “Promise you won’t get a picture of me filching.”

“Do you think I’m stupid?” Kyle asked.

“No, you’re smart. I bet we’ll find flowers for your mom, too.”

“Her? She don’t do nothing for me. She don’t even fix meals for me.”

When he left home that afternoon, she’d been lying, drunk, in a faded nightgown, smelling of sweat and wine, on a filthy sofa.

“I’ll ask my mom to invite you to dinner,” Dave said.

“She don’t like me. Go, collect the flowers so she won’t keep crabbing. I dare you.”

Nearby, in shifting gray, rustles traveled like whispers from underground. Something chilled Kyle’s arms — what? Had a ghost or mere air touched him? Bravery was tested in this cemetery, where the trees were spectral and tombstones vanished in darkness. Even walking felt strange here, their feet squishing as they approached a marble slab with an inscription: Martha Witherwhile, beloved wife and mother, 1945–2012.

“She died a long time ago,” Dave mumbled. “She won’t mind.”

They leaned over lilies and roses, which gave an unusually powerful fragrance. Kyle wondered if a bouquet would improve his bad-tempered mother’s moods, which became more volatile after his stepfather, several months ago, raged away. Now she was so drunk, she wouldn’t know what he did. She cared about him but not enough to get cleaned up at a clinic. He’d been surprised that she woke enough to accompany him to court, where she made an incompetent effort to help him.

Dave grabbed the bouquet and lifted it triumphantly over his head.

“Congrats, you did it,” Kyle said.

One successful theft that day, anyway, giving Dave more confidence. A gust snatched a few petals from the roses, and raindrops spattered onto grass, an excuse to leave a habitat of the displeased dead.

“Rain,” Kyle said. “Let’s go.”

They ran through light drizzle to Dave’s home, where his mother exclaimed about their wet clothes.

To Kyle, she said coldly, “You can come in and stay until the shower ends.”

He entered a realm of comfort, where an aroma of a baking apple pie made him want to plead, “I’m hungry, can you share some of your dessert with me?” He wished his home had the same healthy air, colorfully upholstered furniture, and shelves filled with books and framed photos of loved ones. A picture of a baby’s face showed how welcome Dave’s birth had been. Several magazines were arrayed on a table of polished wood.

“You’re chilled,” the mother said to Dave. “Go, change your clothes. Would you boys like some hot cider to warm you up?”

“Yes, thank you,” Kyle said.

“Sure,” Dave said. “First, I have a belated birthday gift to present to you.”

She opened her mouth, her expression changing from surprised to pleased. Dave lifted the bouquet from Kyle’s backpack, bowed ceremoniously, and presented it. She accepted it gingerly, avoiding the thorns. Then she looked over Dave’s muddied clothes, her eyebrows rising to a skeptical arch.

“Where did you get these flowers?” she asked.

Kyle wanted to shout, You old hag, why don’t you thank him?

“Uh, I bought them.” Fidgeting, Dave didn’t lie convincingly.

The mother’s smile dropped. “From where, from what shop, where? Tell me.”

“I forget the store’s name.”

“Where was it?”

“Uh, not very far.”

She squinted at Kyle’s cap, which he’d forgotten to remove. Then her bosom heaved a sigh, her narrow shoulders slumped, and she gazed toward a window onto rain that dimmed the light and pounded away all the day’s fun.

Her jaw dropped. “Mom!” She stared as if she saw someone outside. “Mom, I’ve missed you,” she called, her voice strained. “Can you come in? You’re upset. What did Dave do? Why are you pointing at the flowers? Please explain — Mom, come back.”

She turned to Dave. “I saw your grandmother pointing to the flowers and wagging a finger at you for a reproach. I think she followed you from the Vale of Rest.”

You’re pretending, Kyle wanted to shout, but anything he said might make her dislike him even more.

“Dave, did you steal the bouquet?”

Kyle elbowed Dave, trying to communicate, lie.

“I didn’t think anyone would mind,” Dave mumbled.

“That was stealing. The family who bought them wanted them to stay there. You’ll return them as soon as the rain stops.”

“I didn’t see no ghost,” Kyle snapped.

“My mother didn’t come here for you. Dave, your grandmother left her resting place because she doesn’t want you to become a criminal.”

Dave stared at his muddy shoes.

“I’ll tell your father,” she added.

Kyle stepped backward, toward the door. “It was my idea, and I persuaded him because I thought you’d appreciate a gift.”

The mother’s eyes narrowed, and she opened her mouth to blast a condemnation. Obviously, she wanted to order Kyle away forever from his only trusted and respected friend. Away from his only chance to glimpse a clean home and a normal family. Scowling, she craned toward him and squinted at his bruised cheek. Remembering that a floor had banged his face, and he’d physically lost a fight, he smoothed a finger over sore skin where drizzle had rinsed off a pasty concealer.

“What happened to you?” She sounded puzzled.

“A visitor in his house, an evil monster, struck him when he was fighting to defend his mom,” Dave said plaintively.

“That’s a bad bruise,” The mother spoke more gently than before.

“He dyed his hair,” Dave said, “so people won’t notice his bruises.”

The mother’s face saddened. “Has your mother called the police about the abuse?”

“The beast ain’t coming back,” Kyle said.

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah, we’re sure. I got rid of him.”

“His mom lies around and doesn’t do anything,” Dave said. “She doesn’t fix any meals for him, and he gets hungry.”

“I could find a list for her of resources for abused women. Kyle, would you like to stay and have dinner with us? A roast chicken with stuffing and apple pie.”

Was she inviting him to a homemade dinner and pie, accepting him into this home?

“Say yes,” Dave advised.

“Yes, sure, thank you.”

“It’s time for me to turn off the oven, and then we’ll have a talk about the stealing.”

As soon as the kitchen door closed, Kyle whispered to Dave, “You told me she used to act in an amateur theatre group.”

“I think the ghost was real because I felt a spook touch me in the graveyard, and Mom has seen Grandma other times.”

“I guess the dinner invitation is for real.”

“Yeah, we’ll have to tell her we won’t snitch anything again.”

A roast chicken, homemade apple pie, and an opportunity to learn the ways of respected people.

Wanting to sound nonchalant, Kyle said, “I’ll do anything for your mom’s pie.”

Featured image: Red orange / Shutterstock

Thanks for Reaching Out

Grubman sipped his cappuccino, eyeing the café’s youthful crowd with their hair and tattoos and futures. They were as oblivious to life’s lessons as they were to the fat content of their drinks. At least he had that on them. He knew all about defeat.

Across the room, a young woman sat by a window. She wore a navy pea coat. Long red hair dusted her shoulders. The morning light suffused her face with a warm glow.

“She is lovely,” said a resonant male voice. It bore the slight trace of a foreign accent.

“Huh?” He squinted up at the voice and a man’s backlit silhouette.

“May I sit, Mr. Grubman?”

“Groobman,” he corrected, as his pupils whirred to a focus. The man had a close-trimmed beard and skin the color of toast.

“Mr. Groobman,” he said with a slight bow of the head. He had a smooth FM-radio voice, though not from any station in this country. He wore a gray sharkskin suit, its jacket short and tight. Skinny pants stopped short of black-and-white high-tops, as if he’d had a sudden growth spurt. He dragged a chair from an empty table, scraping it along the tile floor.

“It’s close quarters here,” Arthur said in weak protest. The stranger sat. He placed his lidded cup on the tabletop. A wisp of steam snaked from its pinhole vent. Scribbled on the cup’s side in black marker was the name “Faisal.”

“Do I know you?” Grubman was sure he didn’t know any Faisals, but it seemed like the thing to ask.

“Let’s say we are friends who have not yet met.” He had the silky manner of a luxury car salesman.

“I’ll just say I don’t know you.” The name written on Arthur’s own cup was “Ramon.” He liked to order his coffee under an alias. One day he was Dmitry, the next, Santiago. A touch of intrigue in a humdrum life.

“Faisal al-Rahman bin Hussein.” The man offered his hand. Grubman took it warily, then dropped it fast.

“How do you know my name?”

“It was put forward by a colleague. A man of vision.”

“Put forward?”

“I am not at liberty to say more.”

Grubman arched an eyebrow. He saw Bond do it once in a movie. “Look, I don’t know what you’re selling,” he said, “but I don’t go in for religious stuff.”

“Nor do I. I am not here to proselytize.”

“Two Chabad guys once pulled me into a van and forced me to don phylacteries. I emerged badly shaken.”

The man nodded with sympathy. “As anyone would.”

Grubman shrugged. “They meant well.” He didn’t like making common cause with this guy. A silence fell between them. “So, what’s your pitch?”

“I admire your directness, a quintessential American trait. You, how do they say, cut through the bullshit.”

“It’s been said of me before.” It hadn’t, but he saw it as a new brand he wished to cultivate.

Faisal reached into his jacket, withdrew a small journal and thumbed through it. He stopped at a page and read aloud: “Arthur Grubman. Few friends. No respect from wife and daughter. Thirty-two years an analyst with Greencastle & Franklin. Terminated unceremoniously.”

A Grubman forefinger shot up. “A modest ceremony was held in the break room,” he said. “Just to be accurate.”

The man continued. “And I see that you and your brother have not spoken in five years.” He closed the notebook and returned it to his jacket.

“Walter has country club friends now. He calls himself an equestrian.” In a consoling gesture, Faisal patted Grubman’s forearm, outstretched as it was on the table. Grubman pulled it away. “Where’d you get all this stuff? There are privacy laws, you know.”

“All publicly available intel,” the man said. It pleased Grubman to hear the mundane facts of his life referred to as “intel.” Faisal went on. “Sir, what if instead of contempt, the mention of your name brought only tears of love from your family? What if your former employer bemoaned the day he dismissed you?”

“Sure, in some parallel universe.” Arthur looked across the room. The girl in the pea coat reached behind her head, gathered her ginger hair in one hand, and brought the other around to tie it into a loose topknot.

“I see you as a heroic figure, sir.” Grubman’s mind was elsewhere. It took a moment for it to drift back.

“An invisible hero maybe,” he said. “The world cares not for a man who meets his obligations.” His random phrasing hit a Kennedyesque note.

“The world will care when we bring it to their attention.”

“What are you suggesting — a publicity campaign?”

“More or less.”

“Pick one.”

“I would call it an image makeover.”

Grubman snorted. “My life is a Gulf oil spill. And if it’s money you’re after, my income is fixed.”

“We can work within your budget.”

So, you’re in public relations?”

“More like an event planner.”

“Weddings? Bar Mitzvahs?”

“Our métier is conjuring an environment.”

“Can you put that in English? And not just the French part.”

“We set the stage for a client to act, to take charge. To allow, as it were, his inner hero to emerge. There is nothing like a brave and selfless act to alter one’s public perception.”

“Well that’s not totally out of character for me. Given half a chance, I would always help people. I’m that kind of guy. In the right situation.”

“We shall create the right situation.” He looked around for eavesdroppers, then leaned in, sotto voce: “Do you recall that pilot who fought off a hijacker? Then landed his plane in Jamaica Bay with no loss of life?”

“Sure, who doesn’t? Now that’s a hero.” Faisal turned his palms up and smiled.

“What?” said Arthur. “You did that?”

“Captain Willoughby was in need of an image realignment. His personal life was, what you call, a shit show: gambling, drugs, domestic battery.” He flicked a speck of lint from his lapel.

“Huh. He seemed like such a straight arrow on the news: tall, with that flinty little mustache, so media savvy and confident.”

“Weeks of preparation went into it. Our first client. Everything grew from that. We have learned much since.”

“Jeez. How do you pull a thing like that off?”

“There were many moving parts, a huge task.”

“So, wait, what are you saying? You got some kind of event planned for me? To make me look … heroic?”

“At this point, nothing is worked out. We have an inkling of a concept.”

“What is it?”

He shook his head. “Still in the development stage.”

“Understood. But you can give me a hint, right?”

His face was a mask of regret. “At this point, it is too embryonic.”

“Gimme a ballpark. I can work with a ballpark.”

“I would be doing us both a disservice — ”

“Look, I’ve been there — forced to do a long-range earnings forecast. They tell you they won’t hold you to it, then they hold you. I won’t.”

“I always rehearse a pitch,” said Faisal. “I am reluctant to … wing it.”

“It’s a work in progress, understood. C’mon.”

Faisal sighed as though Arthur had backed him into a corner. “You are a persuasive man, sir. Remember, this is just spit-balling.” A pained expression said it was against his better judgment. He took a breath. As he began to speak, his hands painted a picture. “Times Square. A sunny spring day. Crowded with theatergoers, tourists, children. Unnoticed by all is a man. Nondescript. Run of the mill. He ambles into their midst, drops his backpack on a bench. Sits. Removes his cap. Drinks from a water bottle. Quite normal. Nothing to see here. After a moment, he stands, puts his cap back on. Walks off. He leaves behind his backpack. Arthur Grubman is the only one to witness this.”

“Times Square? Never go there. Such a zoo with that pedestrian mall.”

“You are there on this day. And you suspect the man was not forgetful. The act seemed deliberate. Sinister. You replay it in your mind. Did you just see what you think you saw?”

“Did I?”

“You did. And, for a moment, you are frozen. A case of cognitive dissonance. You gather your wits. Stir yourself to action. You have seen something and you must say something. You, Arthur Grubman, know you must warn people.”

“Yes, I would do that. That’s me in a nutshell.”

“‘Get away! Get back!’ you yell to the mob, tentative at first. ‘Get back!’ But alas,” his brow furrowed, “this is New York.”

“Sure, they think I’m a screwball. Lunatics in this city are a dime a dozen. A dime, ten dozen.”

“You wave your arms, you point: ‘A bomb! Run!’”

“This is not a test,” I could yell. “This is happening, people!” Arthur was caught up in it.

“Yes, good. Now you have the attention of some. They begin to back away from the bench.”

“Thank God.”

“But not many, and not fast enough.” Grubman slumped. “Some think it is a sick joke. A stunt. Only you comprehend the full gravity of this moment.”

“I can size up a situation faster than most. I don’t get enough credit for that. So, I call the authorities, right?”

“No. There is no time. You must take action. Now.”

“I scream louder, wave my arms … ”

“Yes, that too. But something more drastic is needed.”

“What else can I do? I’m only one man.”

“You run to the knapsack.”

“I do?”

“Yes. And you throw your body over it.”

Arthur looked confused. “Why?”

“Because you are Arthur Grubman. And underneath that hapless exterior is a spine of forged steel.”

“Hapless? Is that how I come off?”

“A turn of phrase, disregard it. Now, people run. But you fear you may have only made a fool of yourself. Most likely the bag is filled with books or clothing.”

“Odds are.”

“Time stands still. An unearthly quiet.”

“False alarm.”

“KABOOM!!” Arthur flew back in his seat. “Huge explosion. BIG. Thick, acrid smoke. Lampposts topple. Billboards shatter. Storefronts, blown to bits. A war zone. At first, silence. Then: screams, crying. The whoop-whoop of car alarms. Police cars. Fire trucks. Shrieking sirens. Homeland Security. Hazmat suits. Rubble is searched, witnesses debriefed. All agree: it is a miracle. The selfless act of one man saved a hundred, maybe more. No tourist, no child is hurt. Your body — something to do with physics — blunted the blast’s full force. It makes news worldwide. There are candlelight vigils. Streets and schools are named after you. The Arthur Grubman International Airport. A Grubman statue is proposed for Broadway. You are an inspiration to humankind in a cold and cynical age. At the White House, Hilda and Tara — that is your wife and daughter?

“Yes.”

“They receive your posthumous Medal of Freedom. Tara’s emotional tribute to her dad logs a hundred million views online!” Faisal was clearly spent, moved by his own tale. “So. What do you think? First impression.”

Grubman stared at him for a long moment.

“What else you got?”

“No. Really? I led with my strongest one.” He seemed crushed by the response. “It was too soon, I knew it. You pushed me into it.” He pouted and studied the clear polish on his manicured nails. In a subdued voice he said: “If you have notes, we can address them.

“I got a note all right, a big one. Look, maybe you have something else? Something more like that pilot who ditched in the bay? The one who lived?”

“This is the problem with an early success. You are always urged to repeat yourself. Succumb and you stagnate creatively.” Faisal sulked for a moment. “Then again. I may have something that involves commercial travel.”

“Great. Now you’re talking.”

“Though I am shocked you passed on Times Square. When I think of the hours our team put in.”

“Look, there were a lot of good things in it, don’t get me wrong. It’s just—well, what’s the other one?”

“All right.” He took a deep breath. “Again, winging it.”

“Understood.”

“Broad strokes.”

“We can fill them in later.”

“Please reserve judgment till the end.”

“Promise.”

Faisal composed himself, and managed to summon a new enthusiasm. “Fade in: The Acela Express from Washington, D.C. With stops in Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York and Boston.”

“Good. I like it. And a train can’t fall out of the sky.”

“Friday afternoon. Packed. Senators, congressmen, lobbyists, all returning home for the weekend. And you, Arthur Grubman, everyman, are onboard as well.”

“Why?”

“Can we address motivation later?”

“A reflex. Sorry.”

“You have just toured the Lincoln Memorial, the Jefferson Memorial, the Washington Monument, our nation’s most patriotic sights.”

“So, you’re an American citizen?”

“Pending. Then, without warning, a figure in black appears in First Class. Ski mask, assault rifle, thousands of rounds of ammunition.”

Grubman’s mood soured. “Is this the same guy from Times Square?”

“You’re killing my rhythm. He may be a lone wolf, or part of a team. He has emerged from the restroom, or down from the roof and between cars. Yes, better. We need to storyboard it. You can see my lack of preparation.”

“Not a problem, continue … ”

“The man fires an explosive round into the ceiling. A fearful hush comes over the car.”

“Can’t he just yell to get their attention? A bullet can ricochet and hurt someone. I mean, as long as we’re staging it.”

Faisal shot Grubman a look. “The passengers are frightened, whimpering. He assures them they will be freed upon arrival in New York.”

“Well, that’s a relief.”

“But no one is fooled. His plan is clear. At Penn Station he will open fire, mowing down hundreds of commuters as well as those present. You can smell the fear. There is weeping, praying.”

“Where do I figure in?”

“You, Arthur Grubman, will have none of it.”

“I might have some of it.”

“No. It is against every fiber of your being. You are a student of history. You know that those who do not learn from it are doomed.”

“Which history specifically?”

“The Munich Agreement, the Hitler-Stalin Pact … other things. You take a deep breath, steel yourself.”

“Don’t know what I can do, I’m unarmed.”

“You bolt from your seat and tear up the aisle.”

“Why? Why would I do that? It’s out of character.”

“Not your true character. You are a patriot. You have just paid honor to our martyred presidents: Lincoln, Kennedy. You walked among the alabaster tombs of Arlington. You know there are times when a cause is bigger than one’s self. We call it courage. We call it heroism. You go straight for the gunman.”

Grubman paled. “Can you give me a golf club, or something? Maybe I can whack him with a three-iron.”

“The militant raises his Kalashnikov.”

“No.”

“Squeezes the trigger … ”

“Stop!”

“RATATATATATATATATATAT! RATATATATATATATAT!” Grubman flinched. “Bullets rip into your flesh!”

“Oh, God.”

“A hundred find their mark before you hit the floor! Smoke seeps from your shredded clothing. You bleed out in the aisle.”

“How does this help anyone?”

“Aha. You created a distraction. Two beefy marines on leave see their opening. They jump the evildoer, pummel him, restrain him with belts. I know the perfect men for this, I think they are available. The assassin lies there comatose — but alive.”

“I’m glad he is.”

“Authorities debrief him. Co-conspirators are rounded up. Future tragedy averted. Homeland issues a statement: ‘Without Arthur Grubman’s heroic self-sacrifice, countless innocents would have died.’ It makes news worldwide. There are candlelight vigils. Streets and schools are named after you. The Arthur Grubman International Airport. A statue is proposed for Penn Station. When our two marines receive medals at the White House you, too, are present — in spirit. Our President declares the second Monday of every August Arthur Grubman Memorial Day.”

“Why August?”

“An open month, no national holidays. He hails you as an inspiration to humankind in an otherwise cold and cynical age. Your wife and daughter will live out their long lives with a deep pride — but a pride tinged with profound regret. For they never knew the nobility and selflessness of the father-slash-husband who lived in their midst.” Faisal, exhausted, sat, and flashed Grubman a triumphant look. “Your candid reaction?”

Grubman felt as if he’d been sucked into a tornado and spit out. He was drained of all emotion. “I can’t help but notice a certain recurring theme in these scenarios,” he said with a trace of weariness.

“And that is?”

“I die! I die!” Heads turned in his direction. He didn’t care. “The problem with all these proposals is I get dead. Look, you did a lot of nice work here. Love the whole hero concept. But I don’t need to be that big of a hero.”

“You underestimate the challenge. A big problem needs a big solution.”

“I’m not a pedophile! Not a serial killer! I’m just a guy. I’ve lived a respectable life. Can’t we modify it so I come out alive?” He thought for a moment. “Can I give you a for-instance?”

“I love people telling me how to do my job. Fine, go ahead.”

“All right, picture this. Manhattan. I’m standing at a street corner waiting for the walk signal. To my left, a bus is racing to make it through the intersection before the light turns. Behind me, on the sidewalk, I hear something approaching, something tinny, scraping, and in the corner of my eye I see a kid, maybe six years old, speeding along on a scooter. Not slowing down. He’s about to race off the curb into the path of the bus. A woman yells, “Noah, stop!” He keeps going. Without hesitation, I swing around, grab the kid and swoop him up into my arms. “Whoa, where you goin’, little guy?” I say. His scooter rolls into traffic, crushed under the monster bus wheels. The young mother runs to us. She sobs with gratitude, throws her arms around me. “How can I ever repay you?” A passerby gets it on video. It makes the five o’clock news! What do you think? Hero, but not dead hero.”

Faisal shook his head. “Won’t work.”

“Why not?”

“Too local.”

“It goes viral.”

“Any idea what you are competing with today on the internet? What it takes to break through? Your scenario is cute. You may get some small media buzz. But it has no legs.”

“I don’t need the airport, the statue, the medal.”

“You also won’t get the schadenfreude of your wife and daughter’s guilt and self-recrimination. That’s a big part of it. You want that, right?”

He did. He nodded.

“For that we need your death. Your death is the icing on the cake.”

“All right, let’s turn it up a notch. I’m waiting for a subway. A blind woman comes along, sweeping a white cane before her, feeling her way across the platform. She approaches the edge. And before anyone can stop her, she tumbles onto the tracks. We hear a train thundering toward the station. She’s out cold. People are frozen. But not me! I leap down from the platform. The train is loud, closer. No time. I roll her limp body into that shallow trench between the tracks and dive on top of her. The F Train screams in, five cars roll over us till the brakes hold. Workmen climb under with lights. Commuters on the platform wait and watch. When the two of us crawl out, alive, they’re ecstatic. Jaded New Yorkers cry tears of joy.”

“And I suppose someone gets it on video.”

“Big time. Who doesn’t have a cell phone today? We’ll have lots of coverage. I’m on the 11 o’clock news, the cover of the Post.”

Faisal spoke slowly and patiently as if to a child. “Perhaps you haven’t noticed: there is a high bar for news today. Today you need mass casualties or their potential to even qualify. You need a deceased hero. “

“You keep pushing that. The pilot in Jamaica Bay! Today he’s a living network analyst!”

“Pete Willoughby still had more to contribute, as did his 280 passengers.”

“And I don’t?”

Faisal shrugged. “Not so much.”

“Wrong. I have plenty to give. I’m thinking about volunteer work. Maybe lepers. They don’t get much play these days. And why does everything have to be a terrorist plot? It’s distasteful. There are ways to be a hero without hugging a time bomb.”

“Terrorism hits people where they live, so to speak. Visceral. Besides, I like to stick with a milieu I’m familiar with. They say ‘write what you know.’”

“What do you mean “familiar with”?

“Well, I once lived … on the dark side.”

At first Arthur did not catch his meaning. Then it dawned. “A terrorist? I’m sitting in Starbucks with a terrorist?”

“Please, use your indoor voice.” He looked around nervously. “Former terrorist. The preferred term is ‘jihadist.’ My nom de guerre was Abu Jamal. Perhaps you saw my wanted poster?”

“You don’t dress like any jihadist I know.”

“Former. Former. Can’t a man have a second act?”

“I’m glad you saw the error of your ways.”

“To be honest, it was no way to make a living. Sleeping in safe houses, on the sofas of confederates, waiting, always waiting. It is a young man’s game. One soon learns that blowing up a shopping mall is not going to fix the world.”

“I could’ve told you that. That could’ve been my heroic act. Stopping you.”

“I wanted a future, a family, a permanent cell phone number.” He nodded to his iPhone 12 on the table. “For five years I lived in this country, in a cramped flat, eating fast food, waiting to be activated. I watched as men half as clever got rich. I saw the American Dream in action. I grew intrigued by capitalism and a free market. I thought: why not me?” He buffed a smudge on the crystal of his Rolex with the opposite sleeve. “I hit on an idea, one that could only work in this great, generous country. It was this: Why not take the terrorist template and turn it on its head? Repurpose it. Monetize it.”

“This is a real Horatio Alger story.”

“Instead of the suicide bomber as hero to his cause, why not sell the hero rights?”

“That’s where I come in — the shmuck who drowns in a pool of his own blood.”

“Everything has its trade-offs, Mr. Grubman. We need your death to underline the virtue of your life. Be honest. Your passing would not be a big loss.”

“It would to me. I’m not a bad guy. I contributed. I kept Greencastle & Franklin within its fiscal limits for thirty-two years. I married, fathered a daughter.”

Faisal shrugged. “On the world stage? A bit player in a non-speaking role. But in death, ah, in death you could shine. There you could step to the footlights. Think of your grandchildren picnicking in Arthur Grubman Park. Imagine their pride.”

“Grandchildren? Have you met my daughter? A real sour puss.”

“Look, some do better in death. Take Lincoln. In life, a dour, awkward man. Size 14 shoes. His countrymen called him a monkey. In death? Ten thousand biographies, a billion pennies, a Town Car! Who knows what you could accomplish dead.” He clasped his hands together on the table and leaned forward. “Your choice is simple, Mr. Grubman. Do you want to be a live zero or a dead hero?”

“But death is the end. Finito. As long as I’m alive, I have a chance to turn things around.”

“You had decades to do that. Get real, sir. I offer you a chance to stop being a passive observer of your own life.”

“By ending it?”

“I call it proactive.”

“But doesn’t a modest life have worth? Mine is precious to me. I enjoy the little things: a fresh cup of coffee, a walk in the park, a limited crime series on cable. An unimportant life, I guess, but why throw it away? You know what they say: you only live once.”

“They also say, ‘When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.’ Speaking of which, may I ask, were you planning on burial or cremation?”

“Burial. Near my parents.”

“A mistake. Nothing is sadder than an unvisited, untended grave. Weeds, a weathered gravestone defiled by graffiti. . .”

“You’re a real ego booster.”

“Imagine, if you will, the gravesite of Arthur Grubman, national hero. Think of his memorial. Grubman’s Tomb. Built with millions in small contributions: two dollars, five dollars. The People’s Tomb. A fountain, an eternal flame. An eternal fountain! Tour buses at the curb. That Grubman will never be alone. Crowds will flock to him. His resting place will be a modern Mecca.”

“I won’t have a moment’s peace.”

“Your family will cry over you on Christmas and Father’s Day!”

“I only wish I were there to enjoy it.”

“Who is to say? Do we really know what happens after we are gone? In any case, you can enjoy it now. You can savor it now.”

So, Grubman tried it on for size. In his mind’s eye he saw Hilda and Tara trudging up a snowy slope to his crypt, a bitter wind slapping at their cheeks, if-onlys spinning in their heads. A busload of tourists part as the two women step forward to lay a holiday wreath. They bow their heads in prayer before his monument — simple, understated, solid granite, like the man himself. And engraved thereon: “The world cares not for a man who meets his obligations.”

Faisal slid a business card across the table. It was black and made of a hard laminate. A phone number in silver foil numerals seemed to float above it like a hologram.

As Grubman walked home from Starbucks, he weighed the pluses and minuses and weighed them again. His takeaway was the same. When you got down to it, it was better to be Arthur Grubman alive than Gandhi, Salk or Jackie Robinson dead. Sure, those guys have their triumphs, a toehold in history, the gratitude of mankind. But Arthur Grubman, alive, can walk into Mulligan’s for a beer. Life, he thought, still has the edge.

Grubman fumbled with his keys. He placed his computer bag on the console table in the foyer. He heard a familiar voice and the laughter of women. He turned and walked into the living room.

“There he is! The man of leisure.” Walter was sprawled on the couch. He held a tumbler of amber liquid in his bronzed hand. He was dressed as Grubman had last seen him, in dungarees, scuffed cowboy boots, a western shirt with pearl snaps. A tan felt Stetson on his head.

“What brings you in from Tombstone?” said Grubman to his brother.

“Starting already?” said Walter. He looked at Hilda and Tara on the loveseat. “See how he starts?”

“Don’t start, Arthur,” said Hilda.

“He’s from Teaneck. Who dresses like that from Teaneck?”

“What do you care how I dress?”

“You want to chase your brother away for another five years?”

“I can try.”

“I was in town for a meeting, Art. I thought I’d make the gesture.”

“He made the gesture, Arthur.”

“The problem with you is,” said Walter, “you’re a grievance collector.”

“Me? Live and let live is my motto.”

“He’s got an enemies list, Uncle Walter,” said Tara.

“Another country heard from,” said her father.

“As I was saying to the girls,” said Walter, “you ought to come to Colorado and see our spread. We’ll saddle you up.”

“Not my thing, Tex.”

“I can just picture him on the open prairie,” said Tara.

“My fan club,” said Grubman.

“You know what Ronnie Reagan said,” said Walter. “‘There’s nothing better for the inside of a man than the outside of a horse.’”

“Reagan. You used to loathe Reagan.”

“I woke up,” said Walter. He sucked the last bit of liquid from his glass. “If you want to give your money to the rabble, go ahead.”

“Why don’t I refresh that for you,” said Hilda. She scooped up his glass with an eagerness Grubman had never seen.

“You did one smart thing, Art. You found the right girl here and stuck by her.” He winked at Hilda.

“Yes, and I’m the stuckee,” she said. The two in-laws laughed. Hilda dropped ice into the glass and topped it off with Grubman’s best scotch. She handed it back to her brother-in-law, who raised it in toast: “Stay positive, test negative.’ He downed a huge gulp. “By the way, I want to extend an invitation.”

“An invitation? Sounds exciting,” said Hilda.

“To the grand opening of the Walter and Mae-Ling Grubman Cancer Pavilion at Aspen Valley Hospital. It’s important to give back,” he said. “We’re only here for a short time.”

“Seems like you’ve been here for hours.”

“Arthur!” said Hilda.

“I’m kidding him.”

“Don’t hold it against Walter that he made something of his life.”

“And I didn’t?”

“Hey, kids, don’t get in a row over me.”

She looked at her husband. “You let life happen to you, Arthur. You never aimed high, took a risk or followed a passion. And who you were is who you still are.”

Grubman reeled. His shoulders sagged. Humiliated, he lowered his head and thrust his hands deep into his pockets. There, his right hand felt a hard, plastic business card. He ran his thumb lightly over its edge.

“Truth be told, Art” said Walter, “you found a safe little corner for yourself and spent thirty years in a defensive crouch.”

Grubman beheld the contempt of his wife, daughter, and brother. He stroked the card in his pocket. As he pressed his thumb down onto it, its sharp point dug deep, deep into his skin.

Featured image: Daroff advertisement, The Saturday Evening Post, December 6, 1958

Six Things You Didn’t Know About To Kill a Mockingbird

Harper Lee’s classic novel To Kill a Mockingbird went on sale 60 years ago this week. The two-part structure of the novel deals with the Alabama childhood of Jean Louise “Scout” Finch and the challenging case taken on by her lawyer father, Atticus. It’s one of the most widely-read books in the United States and a staple of middle and high school curricula. In honor of the six decades that the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel has been a cultural touchstone, here are six things you didn’t know about To Kill a Mockingbird, its writer, and the award-winning film.

1. The First Draft Is an Entirely Different Book

Lee lived in New York City in the 1950s, working in reservations for British Overseas Airways. Her childhood friend, the writer Truman Capote (more on him later), connected her with an agent in 1956. Lee’s friends supported her for a year so that she could write her book; the novel, Go Set a Watchman, sold to the publisher J. B. Lippincott Company. Editor Tay Hohoff felt the book had promise but also that it needed more work. For over two –and –a half years, she worked with Lee to transform Watchman into the book that would be To Kill a Mockingbird. In a twist that could only happen for a book as famous as Mockingbird, that first draft, Go Set a Watchman, was released as its own book in 2015. HarperCollins, who published Watchman, faced harsh criticism from several quarters for marketing that positioned the book like a sequel rather than a first draft; they drew additional fire for the perception that Lee had been manipulated into allowing the release just a few weeks after the death of her primary caregiver, her sister Alice.

2. Harper Lee, Truman Capote, and Kansas

Truman Capote wasn’t just Lee’s childhood friend; he was the inspiration for the character Dill in Mockingbird. In 1959, as Lee waited for the publication of the novel the following year, she went with Capote to Kansas on a research trip. Capote was pursuing an article on the murder of a farming family, the Clutters. The article eventually grew into Capote’s seminal work, the 1966 book In Cold Blood. Over the years, that trip has taken on an almost mythic status in the literary world. It’s been depicted in two films: Infamous, based on George Plimpton’s book Truman Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances, and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career and starring Toby Jones as Capote and Sandra Bullock as Lee; and Capote, based on Gerald Clarke’s biography of the same name and starring Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Catherine Keener. The trip was also depicted in the acclaimed graphic novel Capote in Kansas by writer Ande Parks and artist Chris Samnee.

3. Lee Received Presidential Material

Harper Lee Receives the Presidential Medal of Freedom. (Uploaded to YouTube by C-SPAN)

It’s not unusual for writers to be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom or the National Medal of Arts. It’s very unusual to receive both on the strength of one book. For 55 years, Lee had only one novel published (and some argue the validity of Watchman as a novel at all, given its odd draft status). However, it’s a tribute to the impact of the book that Lee received the Medal of Freedom from George W. Bush in 2007 and the Medal of Arts from Barrack Obama in 2010.

4. The Novel Continues to Face Challenges

Despite the novel’s iconic status, it remains one of the most challenged by various groups that want it removed from school curricula or public libraries. It was the seventh most-challenged book as recently as 2017, according to the American Library Association. As early as 1966, the book received challenges on the basis of content related to rape. Despite the anti-racism messaging prevalent in the book, it’s been challenged for containing racial epithets. Mockingbird also draws fire for its inclusion of profanity not related to race.

5. Atticus Finch Set a High Bar

The trailer for To Kill a Mockingbird. (Uploaded to YouTube by Movieclips Classic Trailers)

Atticus Finch has been praised as a both a literary hero and, as portrayed by Gregory Peck, a hero of film as well. Peck won an Academy Award for his work in the 1962 film. The American Film Institute’s 2003 list, “100 Heroes & Villains” named Finch as the greatest hero in American movies. In 1993, DC Comics writer and artist Dan Jurgens used a scene in Superman #81 to cement the notion that the adaptation of the novel is Clark Kent’s (and therefore Superman’s) favorite movie. Over time, some writers have questioned the lionization of Finch, mainly noting that he takes on a racist in the courtroom, but does little to take on the racism endemic in their hometown.

6. The Mystery of Boo Radley

The mysterious nature of Boo Radley in the novel and film has made him something of a cult character and a shorthand reference for an unseen figure in a narrative. The role of Radley marked the film debut of celebrated actor Robert Duvall, who has since been nominated for seven Academy Awards (winning one for Best Actor in Tender Mercies). British band The Boo Radleys took their name from the Finch’s neighbor. And Bruce Hornsby’s song “Sneaking Up on Boo Radley” is about the events of the novel related to the character.

Featured image: Shutterstock

The Things Loretta Can’t Have at The Bluffs of Placid Haven

No Lagoon Breeze

The prior owners of her Craftsman-style townhouse had let things go. Not only their marriage, Loretta heard, but also their kids, their money, the house. And because of that, a lot of folks wouldn’t touch it, said divorce and delinquent kids were curse and contagion, that the house was forever haunted by the ghosts of people who half-died while still living there. But Loretta wasn’t scared by any of this. She had nothing left to lose except a pile of cash to plunk down on a place to make new friends with people who liked a little more order and a little more space and a little more neighborhood than what she had living in the city for the past 40 years.

Loretta knew going into it that the house needed some work. Stained carpets. Three fist-sized holes in the master bedroom closet. Half the blinds pulled up crooked or not at all. And nothing had been painted — much less wiped down — in years. Loretta’s bank statements reminded her that she was going to have to pace herself if she still wanted to eat. Hang pictures over holes and place potted plants strategically on floors. Scour YouTube for DIY tips. Acquire the time and energy efficient knick-knackery of modern life in other ways.

For now, Loretta could swing a gallon of paint to freshen up the front door. She browsed color chips at the hardware store and took home a few sample jars in a range of turquoise, her favorite color. She wanted something deeper than the Tiffany’s box that cradled the gaudy engagement ring her sister Tawny just received — who gets engaged with a diamond a fourth time!? But something lighter than the Caribbean pics her former co-worker Daphne posts on Instagram during couples getaways — who wears a string bikini in her 60s!? She wanted no suggestive reminders of what she didn’t want but everyone said she would maybe one day still probably like to have, the things you are not supposed to tell an unattached woman her age but people do anyway because they are impolite or unhappy themselves.

As Loretta painted the last of five different swatches above the brass kick plate, she saw a woman’s reflection moving behind her on the sidewalk. A fluffy beige puppy was sniffing around near the woman’s feet.

“Updating your front door?”

Loretta turned around on her knees. It was Marj Switzer, President of The Bluffs of Placid Haven Homeowners Association. A lame duck president near the end of her second four-year term, and who Loretta heard takes every advantage to enforce the rules while she still has time.

“Yeah, thinking about it.” Loretta pointed to the dog at the end of a blue rhinestone leash. “Cute puppy. Yours?”

“Just picked him up this week! Tucker. He’s a Pyredoodle. Great Pyrenees and Standard Poodle mix.”

“Looks like he’s gonna be a big guy.”

“Nope.” Marj closed her eyes and shook her head with a smug smile. “Breeder said he should stay close to 40 pounds based on her last few litters.” Marj picked up Tucker and snuggled him close to her face. “You’re aware of the list of pre-approved colors in the Rules and Regulations, right?” She nodded toward the door.

Loretta wanted to pinch Marj’s condescending smile into a mute line and twist it. “No, I wasn’t. But I’m just testing out some colors to see how they look at different times of day.”

“Admiral Navy, Desert Steppe, Ship’s Hull … that’s a gray … Brick Red, Douglas Fir, and Obsidian. Those are the six approved colors. And you can’t have the same color as a neighbor on either side, of course.” Marj glanced at the bright blue stripes of wet paint glistening in the early May sun. “But those would’ve been fun ones! Too bad.”

Loretta stood up and took three steps closer to Marj. “Just six colors to pick from?”

“Surely you know this community is part of a homeowners association. We try to keep everything uniform. Consistent. Safe and predictable. I’m not sure how it was in the city where you lived, but that’s why people move here.” Marj leaned down and put Tucker on Loretta’s lawn. After spinning in three urgent circles the dog squatted and released a small mound of loose shit.

“I get there are rules about keeping things a certain way. But paint colors? On a door? How does keeping a short list of approved colors keep anyone safe? It’s just a bit of joy painted on a few square feet of solid wood.”

“He must’ve gotten into something he wasn’t supposed to.” Marj scooped as much of the shit off the grass as she could and tied a knot in the tiny plastic bag. “The list is the list. If you want to appeal there’s a process … ”

“Forget it.” Loretta looked to the left and then to the right at her neighbors’ front doors. “Black seems appropriate here. Excuse me. Obsidian.”

Marj flashed her pert smile before heading back down the sidewalk. “Nice chatting with you. I’m sure you’ll love it here once you get settled and learn the rules.” She glanced toward the brown smear on the lawn. “Sorry about the little mess.”

No Ollalieberry Pie

Loretta tried to get away with it that first summer she owned the townhouse. Right off her back porch grew those royal purple berries no bigger than a thumbprint. The ones that her great-great-granddaddy helped develop on a West Coast farm, just like Mendel with his peas at the monastery. Loretta was open about it too — nothing clandestine like the ganja Beatrice McBarron grew in prim yellow pots on her deck, telling everyone they’re spider flowers that just won’t bloom goshdarnit! wink wink. Loretta tended and picked and sorted and piled those berries into deep-dish pie pans lined with her famous buttery dough. Made a dozen in late August for her neighbors on Breezy Terrace, suggesting a scoop of vanilla as she passed steaming pies across their thresholds. Her phone blew up later that night and she read the texts over and over and over. She was giddy from her new rank in the neighborhood.

OMG this pie!!!!!!!

What’s in this pie!?!? SO. GOOD.

I just ate three slices for dinner don’t tell Gary LOL!!!!

I need this recipe!

U R AMAZEBALLS

thank uuuuuuuu

The next morning there was a knock on Loretta’s front door. Loretta peeked out the sidelights. The lime green cover of the HOA Rules and Regulations was tucked under Marj’s arm. Loretta smoothed her hair and opened the door.

“Can I come in?” Marj didn’t wait for an answer and as the door closed behind her, she handed Loretta a sheet of paper. NOTICE OF VIOLATION was written in bold across the top. For the next thirty minutes, Marj recited sections and subsections and parts and subparts of the Rules and Regulations, admonishing Loretta because only certain fruits and vegetables were acceptable to grow in gardens at Placid Haven, and ollalieberries were not on the list.

Loretta cocked her head to the side. “How’s a blackberry or raspberry that much different from a ollalieberry? It’s a hybrid of those two! They’re all just berries growing on a bush and they make great pies.”

“I’m not here to get into all that. The rules are the rules. If you want to discuss it with the Board you obviously have a right to a hearing first. I direct your attention to section … ” She trailed off as she pointed to the paper in Loretta’s hand.

Loretta scanned the notice and looked back at Marj. “Is this because I didn’t bring you a pie? I only made enough for my neighbors on Breezy. None of them complained about the kind of berry. Terri even asked if I could make three more for her mahjong tournament next weekend.”

Marj’s bottom teeth pulled at her upper lip as she opened the door to leave and then she glanced back over her shoulder. “I’ve got to run. If you pull the bushes out by the close of business tomorrow, there’s no more problem.”

Loretta spotted Tucker’s head in the passenger window of Marj’s car parked at the curb. “Looks like he’s getting big.” Marj laughed but didn’t reply.

At 4 a.m., under the cold glare of the back door floodlight and still in her nightgown, Loretta plucked the remaining ripe berries to freeze them for one more pie, then dug the ollalieberry bushes out of the ground. Fucking ridiculous, she grunted every time her spade cut into the soil, her hair in sweaty ribbons across her forehead. After she tossed the bushes next to the trash barrel, she stared at the three wide holes and contemplated her options: fill the holes or plant blackberries or raspberries instead. She thought of her great-great-grandaddy and all those summers he spent perfecting his hybrid berries. How raspberry and blackberry pies would never have the neighbors texting her late into the night because they could get them on the cheap at Clippity Clop Farm. She looked at her watch: the garden center would open in three hours. She dropped her shovel on the ground and went to clear out the back of her trunk to make room for the bags of loam before going back inside to shower.

No Parrots

The thing Loretta had hated most about living in the city was not having a yard. At the human level, the city had soul and nuance, but structurally, things were pragmatic and anonymously claustrophobic. All she had was a sloping balcony with a couple potted flowers and her bike. At Placid Haven she finally had a real yard and she planned to use every inch of it by filling it with fun and friends. This is what she lived her whole life for, to loosen up and let go a little by dashing off quirky e-vites for mai tais and coconut shrimp on the deck. For eight straight weekends, Loretta curated the perfect mix of kitsch: three hot pink flamingos soldered from scavenged metal, a green wooden parrot with her house number painted on a sign hanging from its beak, half a yellow surfboard anchored upright into the ground near the small stand of white and yellow hollyhock, and twelve solar-powered LED pineapple lights staked along each side of the walkway to her front door.

When she came downstairs on Labor Day to marinate meats and assemble fruit kabobs for her cookout, Loretta saw Marj through the front window measuring the parrot and jotting some notes on a pad of paper before taking a picture with her phone.

Loretta bolted out her front door. “Can I help you?” Her eyes went wide in disbelief.

“These are gonna have to go. I mean, unless you get approval from the board first.” Marj pointed to the surfboard and flamingoes. “Definitely exceed the height requirements.”

“What?”

“Nothing taller than twelve inches unless you get approval first.”

“You’ve gotta be kidding me … ”

“But it’s going to be a hard sell anyway. I mean, that is if they are even considered sculptures or compatible by the board … ” Marj walked closer and pointed to an open page of the HOA Rules:

Oversized decorative objects are defined as any object exceeding 12 inches in height and 12 inches in either width or depth and includes, but is not limited to, such items as sculptures, fountains, driftwood, free standing poles of any type. Oversized decorative objects will be considered based on their size, color, scale, location, compatibility with architectural and environmental design qualities and their visual impact of adjoining lots.

“And the parrot with my house number? The solar lights?” Loretta asked.

“Hmmm. You’re right. Well the lights are out too, I suppose. Section 237(d) says no extraneous light fixtures.”

Loretta stared at the thick layers of eyeshadow and mascara in competing shades of blue that matched the array of plastic bangles clicking on Marj’s wrist. “This is unbelievable. Why is everything so strict around here?” Loretta scanned her neighbors’ yards and realized for the first time that they all looked exactly the same except for the color of flowers. Two warm licks on her calf made her turn around. Tucker was panting with his eyes half-closed near her feet. Loretta looked back at Marj. “Has he stopped growing yet? He looks a lot bigger than forty pounds.”

“It’s the way his fur makes him look.” Marj thumbed through her book of rules twice and frowned before closing it. “Since it’s only ten inches, the parrot might be okay. I’ll need to check with the rest of the board to determine whether it’s considered a small exterior object or a sign, which have a different set of rules obviously. You’ll hear back from me soon on that.” Loretta noticed Marj’s acrylic nails were painted a bright shade of blue when she’d made air quotes while saying sign.

Loretta stomped over to the pineapple lights and pulled them from the ground in rapid succession, then ripped the parrot from its post and tossed it on the pile of lights. “Don’t bother,” she replied.

No Dog-Walking

So far, retirement hadn’t been exactly what Loretta hoped for. Her funds were starting to dwindle because she overspent on lattes and mediocre mall tacos just to have somewhere to go, and the electric bill was higher than she had budgeted for because the night sweats had unexpectedly returned. She also realized the way she relaxed was by keeping busy. She missed the long hours of rushing between city blocks to meet clients for small talk about design and corporate missions that fueled her fire in CorelDRAW when she created pamphlets and websites. She could only take so many watercolor and wreath-making sessions at the clubhouse, and Tiki Bar Tuesdays too often ended with Rosaria cornering her at the horseshoe pit for a bitchfest about her ex-husband.

The residents of Placid Haven didn’t exactly need any graphic designers, but Loretta did see one potential income source: dogs. Most residents seemed to own dogs, and dozens of non-Haven people walked their mutts through the quiet neighborhood. She could easily earn a couple hundred dollars a week and get out of her own way.

Loretta tacked up flyers at the clubhouse, created an Instagram account, and posted on the Placid Haven Facebook page to let people know about Loretta’s Leash Walking Service. In just two days, she was tethered to a fat French bulldog, two wheezy pugs, a recalcitrant Lhasa Apso wearing a pink bow, and a Doxie Scot that spent the first ten minutes of every walk nipping at the bulldog’s heels.

It took Marj three days to leave the voicemail.

“Hey, it’s Marj. Listen, I saw your dog walking ads … cute name! … but I’m not sure if you’re aware of this … home-based businesses are kiiiiinda not allowed at Placid Haven. I’m sure you’ve read the regulations and probably just forgot. Section 140(a) spells it all out. True that Teddy Baxter does everyone’s taxes for half-price but we kinda look the other way on him. ANYHOO. I’m sure you’ll know how to correct this … situation. See you at the clubhouse luau tonight. Bring your party shoes!” Loretta deleted the message then opened her laptop to order two collapsible water bowls and a thousand poop bags.

Two weeks later, Loretta rounded the corner of Breezy Terrace with her pack of dogs when she saw Marj coming from the opposite direction. She looked like she was in a hurry as Tucker slowed down to investigate the other dogs. Rhinestones glinted in the sun as he pulled his leash taut to sniff the Lhasa Apso’s rear end. “Come on, Tucker. Let’s go.” The women avoided eye contact.

Tucker pushed against the middle of Loretta’s thigh as he moved toward the pugs cowering behind her. “Sounds like you don’t have time for a visit today, buddy.” Loretta gave him a quick pat on the head.

Marj yanked the leash and told Tucker to sit. “We don’t,” she sighed. “Started a new part-time job at Bristol Asphalt and Paving. Just some administrative stuff. They’ve been so busy with all the new subdivisions going in. But I can’t ever seem to get there on time.”

“Well, I won’t keep you.” Loretta stepped back away from Tucker.

“Now that I think about it … maybe you could walk Tucker in the mornings for me so I’m not always ten minutes late?” She untangled Tucker from the pugs’ leashes and glanced at the small crowd of canines circling Loretta. “That is, if you can even take on another dog.”

Loretta hesitated. Was Marj casting bait? She wanted to keep her Marj encounters to a minimum, but turning down an extra $25 when she was already out walking another five dogs didn’t make sense. Neither did stepping into a stinking pile of shit.

Before Loretta could answer, Marj continued to consider the idea out loud. “Of course I’d have to give you a key … But maybe we could keep this between us? Seems as though no one else on the board has minded this prohibited endeavor of yours.” Marj reached down to pet one of the dogs. “In fact, this is JJ Morton’s Doxie Scot, isn’t it? Seems like a bold move for the Board Secretary to go along with this.”

“I can do it. Monday through Friday?”

“I have Fridays off.” Marj smiled as she fished a key from her pocket. “Could you start tomorrow? I have a spare key hidden in the yard so you can just take this one.”

When Loretta came to get Tucker the next morning, she couldn’t coax him out of his crate, not even with the “good” treats. “Come on, buddy.” She leaned down to attach his leash and hoist him to a standing position, but he wouldn’t budge. With the other dogs waiting and tethered to the front porch railing she didn’t have time to negotiate, so she picked him up. “How much do you weigh, Tucker? My goodness!” His beefy breath was warm on her cheek, giving her that goofy dog look that made it hard to be annoyed. “There’s no way you’re forty pounds,” she said as she set him down with a grunt and patted his sides.

No Fiberglass Composite

Despite many mornings of tangled leashes and stepping on the paws of her furry charges when she first started, dog walking was proving to be a lucrative venture: Loretta now walked two groups a day (plus a wait list) and had a comfy cushion in her bank account.

She wanted to spiff up her yard and remembered the funny planters at her cousin’s pool party last year. Assorted chubby, troll-like faces atop stumpy legs and oversized feet with no arms or torso in between, with ferns and grasses for hair. A quick online search revealed they were called Mugglies and the local garden store had dozens in stock, plenty for the small crowd she planned to welcome to her front step.

Loretta spent a full Sunday adding potting soil and a variety of fringed and sprouty annuals to give the faces some silly hair. Their expressions were varied — crying, laughing, grimacing — and she couldn’t help but laugh when she stepped back to look at all thirty-three of them ready to greet her after every dog walk and trip to the grocery store.

When she went to get Tucker for his walk on Monday morning, there was a note from Marj near his leash on the counter.

Hey Loretta, Noticed your new plants yesterday. Just FYI those kind of containers aren’t allowed. Concrete or terra cotta pots only. HOA Sec. 49(a)(xvi)(2). Thanks again for walking T!

– S

Loretta’s pulse quickened. She stared at Tucker dozing in his crate before striding to Marj’s master bathroom. She flicked on the light and scanned the room. The edge of a bathroom scale stuck out from under the maple vanity. She pulled it out. Dust-free. Of course Marj would be the type to keep meticulous track of her weight.

She put the scale on the kitchen floor and plucked a dog treat from her pocket. “Here, Tucker!” He walked toward her open hand. As he took the treat, she picked him and stood on the scale. Peering over his fluffy back, she read the number: 231. She put him back on the floor and stepped back on the scale: 164.

The green cover of Marj’s copy of the HOA rules was tossed on a stack of cookbooks near the fridge. Loretta scanned the table of contents. Pets. Section 22.

No more than one approved, registered cat or dog per unit; no exceptions. The weight limit on any pet is 40 pounds (unless the pet is an approved assistance animal).

She did the math in her head. “Well, well, Tucker.” He moved closer to her and pushed his head against her leg looking for a scratch behind the ears. “Looks like you’re twenty-seven pounds too big, mister.” His tail started wagging.

As she walked her second group of dogs, Tucker now back at home and no longer blinking those brown eyes at her, Loretta thought about her next move. She could confront Marj about Tucker’s weight and the violation of the rules. But that was too easy and not worth the trade of simply removing the plants on her front steps. She had the better hand here. She had to play it right.

That night, after trips to the garden center and hardware store, Loretta brought her crew of Mugglies into her kitchen. “OK, kids, temporary change of plans.” She downed a handful of sweet and salty nuts, opened a can of Dr. Pepper, and cued up the YouTube video she found earlier that afternoon. In another tab she went to the Placid Haven Facebook page and scrolled for photos she could crop, enlarge and print for the project; she found the best ones among the photos uploaded from the annual clubhouse pool party and Vic and Dollie’s 50^th wedding anniversary luncheon. She organized an assembly line along her counter: empty square concrete pots, spray glue, printed photos cropped to various sizes that could be seen from a distance of several yards if you squinted, polyacrylic finish, wide paintbrush, and a couple of rags. The kitchen window was open and the fan was on so the fumes wouldn’t get to her while she worked.

The project took long enough that eventually she switched from Dr. Pepper to Grand Marnier on ice so she wouldn’t lose her nerve.

When the concrete pots were dry to the touch, she repotted all of the Muggly plants and brought them outside. It was dark outside and only a few of her neighbors were still awake in their homes. She arranged them along her front patio to face the street like spectators at a parade. Loretta knew the first people to see her new arrangement of plants would be the runners and early morning tennis doubles pairs walking to the clubhouse. Marj would see them last on her drive to work.

The pounding on her front door came precisely at 8:47AM. “Loretta! What the hell are you doing?” Marj shouted through the heavy door as she continued to pound her fist. “Loretta!”

Loretta opened the door and glanced at the concrete pot Marj had plucked on her way to the door. It was the one with the picture of Marj’s half-closed drunken eyes rolling upward. Without saying anything, Loretta crossed her arms in front of her chest and waited for Marj to unleash her tirade.

“What the hell are these?” Her face deepened to red as she pointed to the rows of pots behind her. “Why do all these pots have faces of me? I look ridiculous in all of them! Have you been spying on me and taking pictures? Where did you get these?” she yelled.

“Placid Haven Facebook page.” Loretta smiled at her, arms still crossed.

“You must get rid of them. Immediately!”

Loretta reached over to the small table next to the door, opened her copy of the HOA rules, and began reading aloud. “Residents may have plant pots or planter boxes on front porches, patios, decks, and backyard stone retaining walls. Pots and planter boxes shall not be placed on driveways or sidewalks. Pots or planter boxes may be no larger than 16” wide and 16” high. Pots and planter boxes shall be manufactured of only of one of the following materials: terra cotta, unpainted wood, and concrete. Pots and planter boxes are allowed without permission so long as the plants are pruned and maintained in good health, free of weeds, and do not obstruct a neighbor’s view.”

She paused. Marj’s eyes were darting around the room like she was trying to remember something. “Not sure what the problem is here, Marj. Concrete pots … not too big … no weeds … ”

Marj interrupted. “They have my fucking face!”

“Hmmm.” Loretta glanced back down at the page. “Funny. Nothing in here prohibiting fucking faces.”

“Look, I … ”

Loretta held up her hand and flipped to another page flagged with a bright pink Post-It. “The weight limit on any pet is 40 pounds.” She tossed the book on the side table and stared at Marj.

“What does that have to do with anything?” Marj asked.

“Tucker’s got … shall we say, a weight problem?” Loretta smiled her mean girl karma smile, the same one she used when she ran into the three colleagues who stole her client list and started their own company that failed within the first ten months.

Marj’s face went pale. “What are you talking about?”

“He’s twenty-seven pounds over the limit. I weighed him myself on your bathroom scale.” Loretta took her phone out of her pocket and showed Marj the photo of Tucker’s paws dangling over the digital scale display.

“You had no right to do that!”

“Maybe. But I’m sure the Board would love to know someone’s breaking the rules. I mean you certainly seem invested in keeping order and safety for our community. He could be a danger being that big. Unsafe. Be a shame to see him go … ”

“You wouldn’t.”

“You need to leave now. I have to get ready to walk the dogs.”

“Give me my key back.” Marj held out her palm. “Your services will no longer be needed. I’ll find someone else.”

Loretta silently unwound Marj’s key from the ring she had for her clients’ keys and handed it to her. She opened the front door and stood to the side to let Marj pass.

When Marj was back on the front porch, she turned around and faced the dozens of pots staring back at her, all with her own face. With her mouth open and full of food. Frowning. Raccoon eyes from being in the pool. The worst of them all: a pinky in her nose. She had on fake eyelashes which meant it must have been taken at Vic and Dollie’s 50^th wedding anniversary. The plants in the pots had coarse, wiry leaves, some bushy, making her look like a deranged caricature of herself. Loretta’s front door squeaked as it started to close. “Wait!”

Loretta pulled the door open a little wider. “Yeah?”

“Tell me what you want.” Marj set down the pot she was still holding. “Tell me what I can do so you’ll get rid of these and not rat me out about Tucker.”

As the pie cooled on the wire rack, Loretta scanned the Placid Haven weekly bulletin linked on the Facebook page. Upcoming events, recent real estate transactions, and updates on the new security guard gate. She scrolled to the bottom of the page for the list of HOA regulation amendments voted on at last week’s meeting. Section 140(a) now permitted a limited number of home-based businesses: tax preparation, pet care services, personal trainer, and online sales of homemade jellies and jams. Section 22 now allowed for dogs up to 45 pounds and the Board amended the list of permissible garden plants. The motion to amend the list of approved paint colors was tabled until the new board president was sworn in next month because “President Switzer recused herself from voting due to an inability to be impartial on the issue.”

When the pie was cool enough to carry, Loretta walked over to Marj’s house and knocked on the door. There was some movement inside and she heard Tucker whining, but no one came to the door. Loretta set the pie and a bag of low-cal dog biscuits on the wicker chair next to the door before heading two doors down to walk the pugs.

Loretta walked toward the small dog park on the other side of the development and thought about what she needed to do later that day: repot her plants into the Mugglies and move them to her backyard and order ollalieberry bushes with expedited shipping so she could transplant them before the first frost. As she fiddled with the pugs’ leashes to let them run loose, she felt her phone vibrate in her back pocket. The dogs ran in big circles while she read the text: Thanks for the ollalieberry pie. It’s almost as good as the raspberry pie from Clippity Clop Farm!

Featured image: Shutterstock

Mr. Leith

She was 11, which at that time was a child. She went and stood near her mother and said, “Mr. Leith is cute.” Her mother was at the sewing machine. Every mother sewed, had a flower garden, had a box of recipes and wrote hers out for the others on her own cards. Or maybe not every single one. No, some didn’t have to, or didn’t know they had to.

Lucy was not going to. She was going to do whatever she wanted. She only said Mr. Leith was cute because of her older sisters, who used the word every day on the school bus and at the dinner table and in their room — they were twins and got to share a room. Not so long after that, Lucy would go right past them both, to words they would not have dared to speak. She came late, her mother always said to her father. She’s not the same as the twins, she has her own ways. Lucy knew that made her the favorite.

Mr. Leith was the plumber. He had been the little brother of the plumber — more than a dozen years between his brother’s age and his — and then his apprentice, and now he drove the Leith & Leith truck alone. He would be in the kitchen where the pipes and spigots were giving out or he would disappear down the ladder to the well. When his brother was gone, he began to bring a dog with him, a hound. The dog stayed in the truck; she would put her paws, carefully one at a time, up on the rim of the truck bed so she could think about stretching her neck down to be petted. Her eyes scanning the house for Mr. Leith were a lighter brown than her coat. Amber, Lucy’s mother said. They shone as if with tears as she looked for Mr. Leith. She wouldn’t look directly into Lucy’s eyes when Lucy stood there petting her.

Mr. Leith would be 32 in August, her mother said. His brother had had his heart attack at 46. When he was on his own after his brother died, Mr. Leith had gone to the pound to get the dog, whose name was Brownie, so as to have company on his rounds. They were always on their own, the Leith brothers, poor things, her mother said. Never did have much in the way of a home. How do you know? Lucy said. The mother died before the war, her mother said, and the father drank. Tom Leith never did marry, but this one got married in his teens.

Lucy could see for herself that Mr. Leith was not cheerful. She could remember the older brother laughing at him and bringing her Snickers bars.

Mr. Leith the Second. That’s what Lucy calls you, she heard her mother tell him one summer day. That day two things struck Lucy. First, she stopped in the kitchen doorway and looked at Mr. Leith half under the sink. She saw his long back and his waist. She saw his jeans. When he hunched his way out she saw his shoulders spread to their full extent and his hand go to the back of his neck. She felt herself sucked into another body. She put her hand on her own neck under the hair she was growing long.

Won’t you have a cup of coffee? her mother’s voice said. This irritated Lucy because it was what her mother said to people who had dropped in, and then they stayed. Usually she said tea or coffee, but she didn’t offer Mr. Leith the choice. No thank you, he said. Thought I’d take a look in the well, he said, as if the well with its unsteady pump were his own to look at if he chose.

Later in the day he was in the kitchen again with his tools and Lucy went in and asked him about the dog. Why can’t she get out and run around? Or come in? We could let her in. No, he said calmly. He didn’t say anything more and the sensation she had had earlier when he was under the sink went through her again, followed by a wish to be mean. She said to him, Don’t you get all dirty when you have to do this stuff?

No, he said. He held out his clean hands and looked at them. Some heat came to her face and she shut her eyes and rubbed the eyeballs through the lids. What did your father die of? Your brother I mean. I mean I used to think he was your father. When you both came, whenever that was, when I was young. You always came with him. I thought you were his kid. And why can’t your dog come in? Now she was talking a mile a minute.

He was a father, more or less, said Mr. Leith. Less, he said after a pause. That was when he looked straight at her as he was standing up and she thought she couldn’t breathe. She don’t want to get in anybody’s house, he said. She’s a trained dog. I trained her. I’m the on’y one she wants to be with.

Why do you say on’y instead of only? Lucy said. She couldn’t stop herself.

Why do you say what you say?

She was ready to pretend that made her mad. Without looking at him she was scuffing her foot on the rag rug. Now he had his subject, though, the dog. She was the best dog they had over there, he said. She’s voice trained. I don’t have to raise my voice. I’ll say her name, or what I want her to do. Or I’ll lie two fingers on her back and she’ll stop what she’s doing and wait for me to say.

Lie two fingers? Lucy said. She almost gave him the rule for lie and lay. She could tell he had been told about it, maybe gently by her mother the teacher, and had it wrong. Instead she said, How can she tell how many it is?

She knows.

Why doesn’t he talk? she asked her mother out on the porch where she couldn’t be heard.

He’s tired and he doesn’t have anything to talk about, her mother said, as if those were accomplishments. It’s his wife Jewel, she added. She’d make anybody tired. Always waiting for the check.

Her mother always gave Mr. Leith his check through the truck window, as if she had just remembered and had to run out with it and make him roll the window down.

His wife’s pregnant, her mother said, and her brown eyes took on a shine like the dog’s. Pregnant, she said again.

Later her mother kept talking to him about the sink and the well and the bill. They had sat themselves down at the kitchen table. Lucy couldn’t hear her and he wasn’t answering. Her mother had lowered her voice as she did with the twins so they would have to quiet down about boys and listen. He had his head down while she talked in the low voice; he wasn’t saying anything. A silence fell. Lucy could hear the mutter of the tractor with her father on it at the back of the farm. While it was going on her mother laid a hand on Mr. Leith’s forearm. After a minute he put his own hand on top of it.

For years Lucy could think and think about this without being able to see exactly how it came about so slowly and without surprising her. Mr. Leith, Mr. Leith, she always said to herself when she remembered it. She could see her own hair almost to the shoulders and she could still see the face of the dog in the truck, but not his face, bowed over the kitchen table.

Valerie Trueblood has published short stories in One Story, Iowa Review, the Seattle Times, and The Saturday Evening Post, among others. A contributing editor to the American Poetry Review, she has also authored a novel and short story collections, most recently Terrarium (2018).

This story is featured in the July/August 2020 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. Subscribe to the magazine for more art, inspiring stories, fiction, humor, and features from our archives.

Featured image: Shutterstock

Doghouse

How do I tell Chris he can’t be friends with Kevin?

“I’m not driving you to Kevin’s anymore.”

“Because I jumped off his barn?”

How do I tell him without him thinking it’s his fault?

“No.”

“Because I fell in the gravel pit?”

“No.”

Maybe I could call the school? Have them do something? Kevin’s unclean. He has bug bites. He lives out on the edge of the district.

“He lives way out of town. Chris, I don’t have time. Kevin’s welcome at our house.”

That’ll happen.

I pull past the lilacs into our driveway. I’m chewing a gob of Trident to quit smoking. Black walnuts pop under the tires. Chris runs inside and the storm door bangs shut behind him. The splatted walnuts smell bitter, like fall is bitter. It snowed last night. The sky’s pink behind the city where I have to drive for work tomorrow, and where I have to take Chris for counseling again after.

Our farmhouse has character the way an old dog has character. We don’t farm but Chris’s grandfather farmed. I remember Chris in the field picking strawberries, filling his little basket, covered in red. I remember brown grocery bags filled with corn shucks, and mashed potato craters filled with gravy. But my parents-in-law died, and my husband divorced me, and I don’t think Kevin Herendeen is a good influence for Chris.

* * *

When Kevin told me he had a pond on his land, I believed him.

“Let’s catch frogs,” I said. “Caught one with red spots last summer.”

“Watch out for snappers,” Kevin said.

We crossed the county road into a field and walked for a while.

“I can’t find it,” Kevin said. In the sun his blue eyes shone transparently. He wore a dusty tan shirt all the time, and his arms were darker than the shirt, not muscled but ready for them. He could lift a hay bale. His golden retriever plowed a path through dead corn stalks. “She’s flushing turkeys,” Kevin said. “Zelda’s a hunting dog. Watch out if she gets one.” The stalks tore like paper. Her fur matched the color of Kevin’s buzzed hair. I wore a mullet. Mom said it looked good. Years later I discovered a brown birthmark on the back of my neck.

The back of Kevin’s neck was red.

I pointed at a dimple in the land. “I bet there’s a pond down there.”

“That’s the gravel pit.”

The pit’s dull yellow walls had been scraped out by excavators. Sliding down we trailed ocher streaks in the sand while Zelda strafed the rim. At the floor we chased each other up crane-dropped conical piles of dirt and gravel. Pretending to ski I bounded down collecting pebbles in my shoes and sand in my socks. Rocks clacked under my feet. I tripped headlong, scraping over aggregate. Sitting in a pile at the bottom I examined my palms, the little flakes of curled skin. My left ear burned.

“Am I bleeding?” I asked, pointing to it.

“Yeah,” Kevin said.

“Like bad?”

“Yeah.”

“I gotta go home.”

We came through the neglected corn rows toward Kevin’s house — insulated around the exterior with hay bales, an empty silo towering behind. Mom circled her Astro Van in the driveway — a dirt-worn track in the yard between the house and the barn. I was late. Following Zelda I ran through the field and across the street to her. When I saw her scowling face I cried.

* * *

Chris showered. I’ll have to wait on the water heater before I can do a load. I set our meatloaf and lima beans on the counter. He likes my meatloaf but takes a small portion — he never eats enough — and joins me in the den. Chris used my Pantene. I see his ear is healed. He heals like he’s impervious. I remember gravel in the wound, fingers curled into claws, mouth opening like a dark doorway crying Why Mom? Why did you bring me here to suffer? We’re watching Urkel. I want him to smile with the laugh track, but he doesn’t. How could I have let him play at Kevin’s? His father’s a farmer. He’s always out on the back forty. I can never get him on the phone.

* * *

Sleeping over at Kevin’s wasn’t like other sleepovers. We had the house to ourselves because his dad made a bonfire out back and we weren’t invited. I never saw Kevin’s Mom. I think the school psychologist recommended all the kids of divorce play together, and that’s why Mom let me go there. We sat on the floor close to the TV. The braided rug smelled like dog piss and piss cleaner. Rough wood floors, walls sticky with cigarette resin. Things were left out at Kevin’s: toys, dishes, tools whose use I could never guess. At our house everything had a place. Alone with room-temp pizza and a two-liter, we watched The Leprechaun — rated R. The worst part is when the leprechaun puts holes in a guy’s chest jumping on him with a pogo stick. The leprechaun giggles the whole time. I’d never seen Kevin’s dad up close. He’d be riding a tractor or four-wheeler kicking up a dust wake, dog in chase.

Zelda barked behind the house.

“Let’s spy on the bonfire,” I said. I was sure we’d stay up all night.

Kevin stretched, yawned with his eyes open. “I’m tired.”

“Don’t you wanna sneak out?”

Kevin pressed a game into his Nintendo. The screen went blue, silhouetting his face. “We’ll get caught,” he said. He blew into the cartridge.

“But I’m the guest.”

Kevin glanced from the TV to the dark window. Cold air leaked through the pane. He went up and turned on his bedroom light, then clicked off the downstairs light. He opened the screen door very slowly. I was sneaky, too. Once, I followed my dad to our barn and caught him smoking after he’d said he quit. He flicked his cigarette into an oil drum full of butts.

Kevin avoided the tractor ruts and disappeared in high grass. I followed. The hazy sky glowed above the far city. Smelling sweet smoke and florid air left me half alert and half dreaming. Kevin crouched, pulled my shoulder down. “No talking,” he whispered. I flinched at popping sap. Kevin’s dad heaved on a pallet, and sparks swarmed the sky. We elbowed forward and Zelda barked. Kevin lay flat as though listening to the earth. I gripped clumps of grass as though the earth shook.

“I can’t see anything,” I whispered.

“Don’t!” Kevin said.

I inched forward. Darkness hid me beyond the fire’s circle. Zelda lay behind the fire, tail sweeping up dust. Hunched on a round, Kevin’s dad sat beside her. Through flame tips I studied him: ponytailed, bearing the same tight-tendon arms as Kevin, unshaven with imperceptibly blonde stubble. His glazed pottery eyes pierced the fire heart. Fueled by a clear bottle, his lips muttered. Zelda absorbed it. Melted glass shards glinted upon the ash bed. I listened over the rushing fire to strings of curses and nonsense. I’d never known anyone could get so drunk, so beyond words. I guessed at the bottle’s fullness, wondered how long until it would be thrown in the fire, shards tinkling like wind chimes. Zelda’s ghostly orbs roved, searching for me.

I backed away. Following his bedroom light I sprinted to Kevin’s and found him in bed sleeping or pretending to. I couldn’t sleep until after dawn, when the bottle broke.

* * *

We share a bathroom and Chris sprayed the toilet seat again. I can’t call him in to wipe it up because I’m worried. I rinse my face wishing sun damage washed out. I’ll run the dryer before work tomorrow. It shakes the house and I don’t want to hear it tonight. I only kept the old farmhouse for the district; I didn’t want to uproot Chris. That was maybe a bad idea. His father was handy. Chris used to have nightmares and come to our bed; when his father said no, Chris would sleep in the laundry basket.

I poke into his room to say goodnight. He has a galaxy of stick-on stars on his ceiling. “You okay?” I ask, settling on the bed. He’s under the blanket facing the wall. “That was reckless today. Do you know what reckless is?” He won’t shift to face me. Reckless is being suicidal without knowing what suicidal is.

“Kevin did it first,” he mutters into his pillow. I rub his back and he cries. Thank god he’s crying. “He dared me.”

“But you’re okay?”

“I didn’t want to. For ski season.”

Chris wants to go to the Olympics. I stroke his back until his tremors settle, then I rise and say, “Sleep tight,” but it feels sarcastic.

Before I shut the door he says, “Mom?”

“Hmm?”

“It’s fine. I don’t want to go to Kevin’s anymore.”

I shut the door and walk past the laundry basket. Later I dream of packing him inside it, like luggage, but his arms and legs keep growing.

* * *

The snow blinded until sun melted the dusting. I guess Kevin’s dad was excited to use the plow because he piled dirty snow against the barn. The barn was my favorite part of Kevin’s property. It had a hay loft.

“Wanna see a deer brain?” Kevin asked. It was hunting season.

I followed him behind the barn where his dad had strung up and flayed a deer. The gutted deer made an impression. It was just hanging there like an unzipped tent. Kevin stepped to a workbench where a brain like a small human brain rested on newspaper, as out of place as anything else at Kevin’s.

“Why’d your dad take its brain out?”

“Dare you to touch it,” he said.

I poked it. It felt solid — not mushy — and cold.

“Dare you to lick it,” I said.

Kevin grabbed it and raised it to his face. He sneered and threw it hitting me in the chest. I reached down and whipped it back, missing by a mile. The smashed brain rolled into sawdust. Kevin carefully wiped it off and placed it on its paper. Our hands were sticky as if from frog catching. We wiped them on our jeans and went inside the barn where nail pegs hung shovels, pitchforks and scythes. The ceiling was high to fit machinery. All the heavy wood beams reminded me of church. I followed Kevin up a ladder of 2x4s nailed to the wall behind a combine with unbelievable tires. We came through a square hole in the ceiling to the hayloft where it smelled less like oil and more sour like straw. Bluish sunlight entered through barn side chinks. Bales stacked to different heights resembled Kuwait City — squarely built here, bombed to jigsaw there. I’d seen it on TV. Kevin mounted the stacks and disappeared. Climbing on top I saw that bales had been removed from against the loft’s back wall, making a stairway down. Kevin rustled somewhere beneath my feet. “Come on!” he yelled. “Down here.”

Straw scraped my back as I crawled. The tunnel wound left and right, up and down, arriving at a chamber. He’d removed bales and set down plywood and replaced the bales. It might have taken years. “It’s booby trapped,” he said. I didn’t believe him. Kevin sat on a bale examining a Hustler. In dim light I saw a pile of them. They showed penetration. “I stole them from my dad,” he said. “He doesn’t know.” His eyes flashed. I think he meant the fort. Loose straw and blankets covered the floor, a couch pillow, a bag of tobacco with an Indian on it. Once, Kevin came to school with straw in his hair. “You want one?” he asked, lifting his chin at the reading pile.

“I’ll get caught,” I said. I sat beside him. I smelled my hands.

“You’re the guest.”

I knew I couldn’t lift even one bale; imagining the weight of twenty above my head, the plywood ceiling seemed to sag.

Kevin pushed past me and crawled out.

“Heads up!”

As I emerged, a stack of hay bales wobbled and fell clogging the entrance like a dynamited mine shaft.

“Told you it was booby trapped.”

I opened my mouth to swear but someone did it for me.

“Somanabitch!” The voice came from outside. We peeked through the slats. Kevin’s dad was at the workbench with the sawdust brain, mumbling, beyond words.

“Escape route,” Kevin whispered.

He tugged me and I followed him to the loft window. We climbed onto the old stable’s roof, which gave access to the upper barn roof. Our footsteps rattled the aluminum sheeting. We stood facing the driveway. My fingertips were numb, my nose wet in the cold sun. I thought Kevin wanted to show me the roof, show me that he could climb out here or anywhere he wanted on his thousand acres. I could see very far up there, to the city, but I couldn’t imagine a thousand acres.

Kevin jumped off. I crouched to keep my balance, as if the barn itself had suddenly thrust upward. Sliding my feet to the edge, I leaned out. Kevin wiggled out of two thigh-deep post holes in the snow pile. “Come on,” he urged. I considered lowering my body below the eave first. Would I tear my shirt? Kevin squinted at me, focusing the glint in his eyes. “Don’t wait too long or you’ll never jump,” he said.

He was right.

“I’m climbing down,” I said.

I slunk back from his view and went to the lower roof and from there to a fence. Walking in the silo’s frigid shadow, I passed the doghouse. I crouched and peaked in. She was balled up tight. I reached in to pet her. She was frozen to the ground.

Kevin stood behind me now, his jeans wet from snow.

“Your dog’s dead,” I told him.

He tilted his head. That was all. Sometimes death has to process. Or maybe Kevin already knew.

“Let me jump,” I said. “It doesn’t look high now, from here.”

Kevin stood below in his dusty tan shirt with his arms crossed. I tried to judge my landing so I wouldn’t hit his post holes. Mom’s Astro Van turned up the driveway.

“Better hurry,” Kevin said.

“Okay,” I said. I stepped off the roof, wind rushing in my ears.

Kevin acted funny whenever I left his house, like there was more to show me — something better than a frog pond or a secret fort. I lifted the van’s door handle prepared to see Mom’s scowl again when Kevin’s dad came from behind the barn holding a farm tool I didn’t understand. He shifted his trucker hat high on his head and smiled at my Mom (who still lives there in my memory, who still throws my ski boots, wrapped a month before Christmas, down the stairs at me, who still shoves me when I’m much too big to shove and I shove her back). I wish I could possess my child-self then, right there in the Astro Van, and tell her it’s fine, I grow up fine. I don’t become my father.

We left Kevin and his dad standing in the driveway.

Featured image: West Virginia Collection within the Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division

Rest, Stop

I am talking to keep Dad from talking because he will want to talk about the smoking. The hand not holding the steering wheel is bobbing with its tiny torch, making my points for me in the near-dark as I string anecdote after anecdote together. His shoulders are pushed forward and his brow is set in a maze of tense lines. In a few minutes he’ll uncross his arms and try to pluck the cigarette from my dancing fingers. I’ll tell him to stop, that I’ll lose control of the car. When I picture the car scraped open off the side of the highway and our bodies in desperate angles, us bags of dead blood still strapped to our seats, I feel something unworthy. The truth is, I realize while taking in the last drag, that I want it. I want a good death. I want to be right.

When I flick my butt out the window into the wet Mendocino night he flinches, chokes back an admonition. The tide of my anger recedes with a twinge of guilt then surges back in stronger than before. I want him to say something that will let me shout. I’ve been preparing retorts in my head from the moment Dad called and asked to ride home to the funeral with me.

I wonder if he’s prepared a eulogy. It would be strange to hear him say her name. I don’t know that I’ll recognize anyone in our hometown. I hope we’re not expected to view my mother’s body. When I stop talking he doesn’t start, and the silence hums between us. I have never learned how to switch him back on when he turns off.

I find a voice that sounds normal and tell him about my roommates, how one moved his pile of dirty clothes and found a dead mouse beneath it. I tell him about a near miss I’d had on my bike. I almost tell him about the guy I’m dating, decide against it. The guy wasn’t going to last long anyway. I talk to the silence for at least a half-hour, long enough for my throat to go dry. With one hand, I try to twist the cap off my stainless steel water bottle in the cup holder between us. With a grunt that’s not quite exasperation, my father pulls the bottle from me, takes off the cap and puts the bottle in my reaching hand.

“Thanks,” I say. My voice is so quiet the word is more like an open vowel.

This act of cooperation makes the silence between us gentler somehow, and a few miles down the road he begins to speak.

“Got a cat.”

“Really? Boy or a girl?

“Boy. Tomcat.”

“Don’t tomcats spray? Your landlord won’t like that.”

“That’s his name, Tomcat.”

“Oh. Okay.”

He doesn’t offer any other information. I try to imagine my father with a cat on his lap, making it purr with cautious fingers. I can’t. He is growing a middle-aged man’s experimental goatee, and it’s carefully trimmed into a point above his chin. I toy with the absurd idea of asking him if he has a girlfriend. We are approaching Willits, my traditional rest stop.

Highway 101 is a lonely stretch north through Mendocino and Humboldt County. In the dark the mountains hulk over you, state-owned land, devoid of a single man-made light. The river’s wink in the moonlight is unfriendly and cold. I have always found reassurance in gas stations, in the smell of diesel and clean fluorescent light. There will be someone inside to ring up my cigarettes, powdered donuts and coffee. Someone who will fortify me before the last stretch of lonely, lightless highway. Someone who may or may not smile at my jokes. Someone who will prove that I exist.

“I’ll get the gas,” my father says.

I open my mouth, close it and walk into the station without looking back at him.

The bathroom is propped open with a yellow caution sign to air out after being mopped, but I nudge it aside and let the door close silently behind me. I pull down my jeans and sit on the toilet seat with my forehead propped against my folded hands. I realize that I don’t really need to pee, but I do need to sit here for a few minutes. If someone were to observe me, it would look as if I were praying.  I’ve been doing this a lot lately. Sitting in a posture of prayer. I’m not talking to anything or anyone though, and I’m sure as hell not asking for anything. I can’t even think. All I can feel is a great white buzz all through my body, like I’m one giant limb that’s gone to sleep.

The woman who called to tell me Mom had died was a stranger. I didn’t recognize her last name. I hadn’t made it home to see her after the diagnosis. I hadn’t been back to see her much before then either. The stranger said she’d known my mother from church. I was still taking in the news that she was dead.

“Church?” I asked the woman. My mother didn’t go to church.

“Yes, we came to know her very well towards the end. She was very brave.”

“Brave?” I repeated, stupidly. This woman obviously didn’t know my mother at all.

“Yes, dear,” the stranger went on, “Oh, she talked so much about you. She loved you very much, you know.” Her voice was sympathetic but uncertain. ‘Shouldn’t someone else be doing this?’ I imagined her asking, ‘Didn’t she have any other family?’

I thought about the time I’d started driving north to see my mother but stopped in Willits and couldn’t go any further. I called and told her that my car had broken down, that I wouldn’t make it up to see her after all. In the static-laced silence I could hear her inhale reflectively on a cigarette. There was a long pause before she said, “Okay.” She said it like a question, and then she said it again like a statement, “Okay.” I drove back down to the City. At the time it felt like the right thing to do.

The church lady asked for my father’s number and I gave it to her. I hadn’t even realized I had it memorized.

Until Dad called and asked for a ride, I let myself believe that the call was a mistake, meant for someone else. Someone who had a brave mother that went to church. Someone who could make decisions about cremation vs. burial, invitation lists, newspaper announcements, final plans for her belongings. I pictured myself and Dad standing in the front room of her little apartment with its nicotine-stained walls, each waiting for the other to make the first move, start putting her things in a trash bag.

Trash bags. The clerk at the counter says they don’t stock them, but he’d be happy to give me one if it’s just one I need. I’ll need a box of them, I tell him. He’s cute in his little grey uniform shirt and second-day stubble. I smile my first smile in hours. Without prompting, he starts drawing me a map to the nearest all-night convenience store.

Outside, my father has spotted me through the glass. He catches my eye and looks down, begins to wiggle one foot in the air. Then he wiggles the other. He moves his torso rhythmically, as though twirling an invisible hula hoop. The Happy Dance. He’s doing The Happy Dance.

This is the dance that he invented for my childhood tantrums. Wiggle the left leg, wiggle the right. Shake the hips. This dance is the closest he can get to an apology. It stopped working the year I turned twelve. Now a laugh I didn’t know I had comes rolling out of me, startling me and the cute clerk.

“That old guy’s really going for it,” the clerk says.

Tears are running down my cheeks. My father has started the second part of the dance, where he rocks from side to side on bowed legs, arms twirling in complex configurations. I see that he is crying too. I close my eyes.

I open them. My father has put the nozzle of the gas pump to his temple. He waits a beat, looks at me.

“Holy — ” says the clerk. My father closes his eyes. Pulls the trigger.

The gas gushes over his face, his shoulder and side. He stands and lets it happen without flinching. It will sting his skin. It will stain the seats of my car. The final hours of our trip will be silent and bitter, cold air pouring in through the car’s open windows. We will use his gas-soaked clothes to start a fire. We will burn the things of hers we cannot give away. We will not talk. I will not smoke.

And I’ll understand the last words I heard him say to her, words that leaked from beneath a closed bedroom door alongside her sobs.

“What would you do?” My mother asked him. “What would you do to keep her?”

“Whatever it takes.”

Featured image: Shutterstock

El Despoblado

The conquistadors had a name for this place: El Despoblado, the unpeopled, but Maria saw hope in those vast sands. She cinched her bag up on her shoulder. She clapped cold hands, breathed mist in the penumbral dark. “Alex,” she whispered, the border miles away. “Hold my hand.”

Alex rushed forward. Prickly chamiza leaves cut along his ankles; sharp tips scratched the skin between his socks and the too-short hem of his pant legs, but what else could he do? His sister hadn’t bought new clothes in ages.

His small brown hand in hers, Maria looked at her light skin and sighed. She pulled her brother forward.

Miles ahead of them lay Juarez; but before that, a forest and the chance for rest and water, and before that, miles of desert stretched like the enormous belly of a spotted jaguar. Its evening breath in slumber made the desert rise and fall as Maria walked, left, right, left, right. Alex still stomped his feet in protest, but soon he tired. He let Maria drag him.

Clear winter nights like this, billions of stars lit up the mammal desert. To the East, a wall of rock, not quite a mesa, looked out over the plain like the head of the yaguara . Miles away, Maria thought she saw its tail of cirrus clouds twirl imperceptibly. The children hiked for hours. The desert seemed to turn its neck to watch them pass, its eye a burst of moonlight through a cleft in the red slabs of rock.

Red rock turned black under white moon. Breathing belly of a desert, rise and fall in time with children’s steps. Alex looked up. The light between the rocks narrowed; the jaguar closed its eye.

*

North, Thomas let his feet hang off the hood of his white F150 and sighed at the sound of his wife walking up behind him. Their small house sat on cinder blocks stacked six high, for the snakes, and the scorpions. Sandra said, “Going out?” And Tom said, “Yeah.”

*

As the children made their way past the head of the animal, the moon hung bare on its black cord in the same place. Was it possible they hadn’t moved at all? Maria chewed her braid. The jaguar’s head seemed lower to the ground, resting on the pooled shadows of its paws, it’s cloudy tail curling in the West. Maria stopped. She pulled their map and compass from his backpack, but Alex knew his sister wouldn’t need them.

Alex marvelled at the whiteness of the moon and of the sand. When he looked up, for a moment, he couldn’t tell what was light and what was dark. The sky was black, but everything around him glowed and dissipated in the light, every breath they took. There was nowhere to go now except El Norte, and Maria would never forget the direction their father had taken into the forest and out of the mountains. The last time he called, he’d sent a Western Union and told them to just make it. Just make it, mis hijos, he coughed into the phone. After Mama … after —

The white, the white. Alex couldn’t think about this anymore.

*

Sandra went inside as Tom’s truck rode away. Dust rose behind it like a pillar. The TV played blue light, no: an image of an African child with a fly on the white of its eye. Sandra made a tsk sound and reached for the remote.

*

Abuelita, Abuelita, Alex cried. All around, the desert sparkled in the darkness, a glittering pane of glass. ¡Callate el hocico, pendejo! his sister said. Maria bent over the map and pretended to read it in the dark. She didn’t know why she bothered. She barely understood the lines and gradients. And she knew they were going in the right direction. She told herself she was looking at the map to give Alex a break without hurting his little-boy pride.

She gave him the last sip from their before-last bottle of water. He swallowed the pills that were said to give you the strength to resist the freezing cold during your passage through the desert. She dry swallowed the pills that were said to keep you from having a baby. Who knows what worked or not. Maria folded everything back into their pack, she tossed the plastic bottle and it rolled down the grade, making rune lines in the sand. She tucked map into the pocket where the bottle had been.

The old man who gave her the map was the most recent to give them a ride. This was how they left Oaxaca weeks ago. One old man with a car at a time.

*

Tom reached out and touched his right hand to the rifle in the passenger seat, then the knife strapped to his leg, then the pistol cinched up under his left arm, instinctively, one after another, like a sign of the cross. He turned off highway 20, into the desert proper. A garbled voice snarled on the radio. He’d make a sweeping circle across the sand, then come back to the highway roughly where he’d left it. Tom thought about the guys, “Ghost” and them. With their codenames and gear. A few weeks back, they told him, pick a call sign. Tom said he wasn’t that creative. They told him, take your time.

*

The cab of the old man’s truck had filled with the smell of his sweat. She listened for Alex waiting outside, but she heard nothing except an old man’s deep and ragged breathing.

When she climbed down from the truck, she remembered that they were stopped on the side of the road. Sometimes she left herself, wherever she was, and flew up into the white ceiling of a house, a car, or even the sky. Sometimes she imagined herself floating in space above the earth, connected by a line, a hair, to her body on the planet below. She liked facing outward into space, imagining the stars as big as suns, just far away. She liked feeling the Earth at her back.

The sun set behind the truck. Time began to move again. Maria’s shadow stretched into the darkness of the Chihuahuan desert like a bridge, she felt herself like a big cat, coiled and dangerous. The old man had fished a map out of his glovebox, called to her. “Here,” he said. “May the Virgin—”

“And with you,” Maria interrupted.

*

At some point between then and now, morning begins to spill over the landscape. An orange wound in the East of the night. At the same time, a pinprick of light begins to form in the blackness to the North. It moves, imperceptibly, toward the children. The jaguar’s head is far behind them now. The moon enormous overhead.

Alex seems to sleep while he walks. Maria knows they only have to make it to the forest, and they can rest. They can drink water and prepare to cross the river, wait out the hottest part of the day. They might make it. They could.

But in a few miles, moments after we leave them, here, anywhere they are, Maria’s body and her brother’s body will appear as distant forms, animals maybe, unpeople in the empty desert, illuminated in the headlights of a truck.

What can you do?

***

Featured image: Shutterstock

Liz

Well, I was going home from school. In June.

I did see the car. Just in the side of my eye.

Someone screamed something in my ear, it seemed like.

Oh, Jesus.

I was flying.

*

“Where’s my glasses?”

That’s the first thing I wrote down when I woke up, Mom told me. Later, she brought me my glasses case and opened it. It was just full of bits of plastic and glass.

What happened was …

What happened was the woman driving the car hit me hard and I flew into a car coming the other way that was stopped. That car had a hood ornament that looked like an angel. My head hit that angel and the wing went into my head.

“The wing broke into bits. They got all the bits out except one.”

“When will they take that one out?” I wrote.

“You’ll just have to live with it,” Mom said.

I’m living with it.

*

I didn’t have a lot of friends, anyway. I had two good friends. Ben and Yo-Yo. After high school, they stopped visiting. Sometimes they called, but then they stopped calling.

“That’s normal,” Mom told me. “Friendship is important, but not friends, not really. People throw friends away. Even when they’re like family. They toss them out and find new ones. You’ll find new ones. Ben and Yo-Yo don’t matter. Forget about them.”

I tried to forget about them.

I’m still trying.

*

I get headaches, I get migraines. I used to get seizures but the medicine helps. Nothing helps the migraines.

When the aura shows up …

I close my eyes.

I picture a silver wing flapping on a screen, like a movie.

When the pain fades, so does the wing.

The credits roll …

Then I open my eyes.

*

One morning …

I saw Dad standing on the lawn talking to — I wasn’t sure who. A blonde-haired woman wearing a crucifix. When she wasn’t rubbing her eyes, she was rubbing the crucifix.

I wondered what they were talking about.

When I opened the window a crack, Dad looked back. The woman looked over his shoulder. Right at me.

Dad kept talking but the woman … She wasn’t listening.

After a minute, she pulled a bicycle out of a bush and hopped onto it. She rubbed her eyes. She rubbed her crucifix. She looked back at me one more time.

She started pedaling.

*

You’re the only one on this planet. You’re the loneliest person on earth.

I try not to think that.

You’re the loneliest person on earth.

It only feels like that.

Millions of people are lonelier than me.

That’s what I tell myself. Over and over.

As many times as it takes.

*

I heard crying, so I came out of my room. My parents were both on the sofa. They were staring at — someone was sitting across from them, in the armchair.

It was the blonde-haired woman.

When she saw me, the woman sobbed even harder. Her makeup ran down her face, onto her crucifix.

Mom said: “This is Liz.”

Dad said softly: “She’s the woman — ”

I didn’t hear the rest. I didn’t have to.

The woman turned to me. She rubbed her face but that made it worse. She was a mess.

She held out her hand. There was mascara all over it. I couldn’t look at it. I looked at the floor.

Mom said something.

Dad said something.

I lifted my head.

The woman was still staring at me.

I wheeled backwards into my room.

I closed the door.

*

My hand fell into my cereal bowl and I started writing nonsense. Like I was possessed.

Mom rushed me to the hospital.

They squeezed me through a couple machines.

It wasn’t a stroke, the doctor explained, just a migraine. A rare kind. He talked to my parents alone for a bit. Then he sent me home.

“You’re going to be fine,” Mom said, closing the blinds.

I tried not to picture the wing.

I did anyway.

*

Liz came by one day when Mom was out getting my seizure medicine.

She knocked on the middle of the front door a million times.

Then she was knocking a lot lower down. Near the crack in the bottom of the door.

I just listened to her moaning.

Eventually, she went away.

*

I ran into Yo-Yo’s dad at the post office. He looked the same except for the mustache.

“Yo-Yo’s pretty busy. He’s still playing football. Starts school in the fall. Trade school. Wanted to be an engineer but he wasn’t serious. Cars are more his speed, machinery. He can fix anything, that kid. There’s good money in it. Your dad’s a mechanic, isn’t he? Or he used to be? There’s good money in it.”

I watched the fat drop of sweat growing on his forehead. It ran down his nose, into his mustache.

He swallowed.

I blinked.

He disappeared.

*

MOM: I can’t help it. I feel bad for her.

DAD: Should you?

MOM: She’s a lost soul.

DAD: We have one of our own.

MOM: Shh.

DAD: Fast asleep.

MOM: …

DAD: …

MOM: …

DAD: I feel bad for her, too.

*

Millions of people are lonelier than me.

It’s a big planet.

Millions of people are lonelier than me.

They have to be.

*

There’s a park not far from our house. You only have to cross one street to get to it.

When I was halfway across the bridge that goes over the duck pond, a woman on a bicycle almost rode into the water. She dumped her bike in the reeds and started walking fast towards me.

I’d’ve known who it was just from the sobbing.

I squeezed my wheels. I closed my eyes.

The sobbing got louder.

I squeezed the wheels harder, shut my eyes tighter.

Liz didn’t say anything. She just stood in front of me.

I counted to ten.

I counted to ten again.

I was getting a headache. I was breathing hard. I was picturing the wing.

You’re the only one on this planet.

You’re the loneliest person on earth.

Then the wheels started moving. Under my fingers.

I still didn’t open my eyes. I didn’t have to.

I could tell we were going … around the duck pond. Past the bird sanctuary. The playground.

After a while, the sobbing stopped.

I was breathing deep, but not as hard. My head hurt just a little.

Past the flower garden. The fountain. Across the street …

I was breathing alright, now. Surprisingly. I was feeling alright.

Eventually, the wheels stopped turning.

The wing disappeared. The credits rolled.

I opened my eyes again.

Mom was waving in the window.

Then the front door swung open.

Featured image: Rolli.

Fledglings

Sook and I meet at the Bigelow Airlock. There is never much time. We never need it.

My space station orbits Earth’s equator every ninety minutes. I see sixteen sunrises per day. The temperature swings four hundred degrees. Sook’s Jiānkòng has a polar revolution of one hundred minutes. Newtonian math for traveling the radial bulge (Rb) y at velocity (v) x means we come within shuttle-shot twice every fifteen days. So, in ninety minutes Sook will launch back to her satellite on its second proximate, bi-weekly pass.

Until then, we float lazy river-style toward each other, unzipping our suits, only to collide like newborn colts, in hovering fervor. Our bodies have shed their meat and deteriorated from years of weightlessness. Our fluids have dispersed and settled into our faces so we look like bobbleheads. My bones resemble an orchestra of musical instruments.

In the U.S. BioLab, I study brawny microbials from a moon crater. They have vascular biceps on their flagellum. Sook helms her Chinese satellite, keeping tabs on her country’s borders as the war between Eurasian Hostile territories escalates.

The Space Station moves at five miles per second. I orgasm in a whopping 275 miles.

“I admire your efficiency,” Sook always says. Her English is superb. She gets every channel in her satellite. Sometimes she offers that the zero-G has redistributed hers — her G-spot, that is — and I’ll poke her heels and earlobes in hunt, thinking her pity is actually an honest-to-God truth, and that maybe I’m capable of something I’m not.

After sex, of course, I pass gas. Three years in space has made me a whoopee cushion.

“What is a whoopee cushion?” Sook asked once.

“Something made in China,” I said. “It distracts from the obvious.”

“What is the obvious?” she said.

“That I’ve fallen in love with you.”

“You cannot fall,” she said. “There is no gravity. And that is not the obvious thing.”

“What is then?” I said.

“Luke, our time is up.”

Out the porthole, a procession of international space junk crested the globe.

I still don’t know what the obvious thing is. We never circle back in time.

When Sook launches her shuttle toward Jiānkòng, I wave using the station’s large robotic arm built by the Canadians, hence its name: the Canadarm. The Canadarm is left-handed, which for some reason I feel is a very Canadian thing.

 

We jettisoned what lives we had to be in orbit — cargos of virility, fertility, family. Down there, you think these are patient, deferrable things. Up here, you understand the world doesn’t revolve around you. Lately, I’ve been occupied by what feels like a reJesusing. I think it has to do with the fact that I’ve been moving for three years but haven’t gone anywhere. It’s like I’m the only one on Greenwich Time. What else am I supposed to do but fall ass-backwards into love and sneak a little international, galactic nookie?

Sook’s radio silence for those one hundred minutes, she explains to Beijing, is “feminine care” and the men in charge smoking unfiltered cigarettes down there don’t probe. It’s magic how she gets under their skin with the idea that a woman can have a secret. They won’t ever ask after it, believing that their curiosity is a vulnerability.

“The stubborn stupidity of men,” I said. “We’re not so different in that way, in many.”

She said, “But we still are in most.”

I guide her into Bigelow with the Canadarm like one sets a fallen fledgling into its nest.

Which you’re not supposed to do, handle a baby bird, I know.

 

“Progress, Innov8?” Houston asks.

I had a flea circus as a boy. I wanted to be a ringmaster more than an astronaut.

Then the circus died.

“No,” I say. “The flagellum biceps are still at a diameter of twenty nanometers.”

“Keep at it,” Houston says. That is, keep exercising the bacteria, in a nutshell.

You make a vaccine from the dead of the very thing you want to kill. Our current theory? Bulked-up dead bacteria will make stronger vaccines than regular-sized ones. I look down at the United States and salute.

The sun sets. An hour and a half later it rises again.

 

“I was six when my father was sent to prison,” Sook told me once. “He worked in leases. In China, people own their homes but lease the land beneath them. He must have discovered something. He had no due process. He was refused counsel. He was convicted of ‘obstructing traffic.’ This year will be his thirty-seventh in solitary confinement.”

She scratched frost off the porthole, “I should feel lucky. Many have it much worse.”

“Our neighbor vanished for asking about Tibetan books for the schools,” she said.

“Still,” she said. “Many have it much worse.”

“Executions are carried out in vans. People pulled right off the street.”

“The number of annual executions is a state secret.”

For some reason, I thought of those fancy restaurants that don’t put prices on their menus.

Dad left parking tickets under the wipers until they disintegrated, flew a flag on his truck antenna, and was ejected drunk from the bleachers of my little league tournaments. He wanted to be shot into space when he died. He’s buried in a can on a hill with a decent view of the western sky. I wish he could hear me transmit, “This is for yelling at me to crowd the plate, you bastard!”

“But how do you know your father is still alive if you can’t see him?” I asked.

Which is maybe why she stopped telling me things like that.

 

I stick a piece of tape over the BioLab’s camera.

“We can’t see you, Innov8,” Houston says.

“The camera is malfunctioning,” I say. “I’ll fill out a Tech Diagnostic. But there’s been progress. The flagellum biceps are now twenty-two nanometers. I wish I could show you. But you’ll see when I land … ” My indigestion gurgles. The methane has made me sulfuric. I must taste like well water to Sook. I keep thinking about bushwhacking an acre, building a bait shop, getting someone pregnant. I can’t get the idea out of my heart.

“Land?” Houston asks. “No, no. You are to proceed to Phase Two.”

“Phase Two?” I say.

“Place them in the antigen unit to initiate vaccine production. Swab the control bacteria onto your teeth and wait. You will need to be specific with your condition throughout your quarantine, pre- and post-inoculation, until the camera is repaired.”

“How many phases are there?” I say.

“As few as two,” Houston says. “Depending.”

 

I’m somebody who was told that if I kept my nose to the grindstone, rolled up my sleeves, and kept my eye on the ball, then the sky’s the limit. So now I’m up here with a petri dish of unknown muscular microbials on my gums.

I’m somebody who is maybe beginning to feel warm, get the eyelid sweats, see spots.

I log: Feeling flushed. Eyelid perspiration. Spotted vision.

I’m somebody thinking about the time I put a fledgling back in its tree. You don’t do this because if a fledgling smells like a human — an intruder — the mother will abandon it. But I couldn’t stop looking at it in the grass, its open beak like a ceramic pitcher. I couldn’t just leave it. I learned later that when a fledgling leaves the nest it rarely returns.

 

Sook pounds on the Airlock, running out of oxygen. I let her in as fast as I can.

“Where were you?” she gasps.

“Didn’t you get my transmission?” I say. I’ve got bacne shaped like a two-foot microbial.

“Our time is up,” she says. “Look.”

But there is no procession of space junk, no Jiānkòng. My gut sinks, defying zero gravity.

What she’s talking about are these two humongous pink clouds over Eastern Europe. They look like lost-and-found tutus, and move like a flip-book animation of a toddler’s colorings outside the lines. Then there’s a bright flash over the Middle East, and a third pink cloud disperses. Then another flash and a fourth pink cloud over India’s peninsula.

“Oh, my God,” I say. “Sook, what in the hell are those?”

When I turn, Sook’s hands cover her full moon face. She’s crying out her fingernails. Droplets squeeze from beneath each cuticle and float. Her fluids have redistributed again. “They should have heard this from me,” she says. “They must realize I am not in the lavatory. They must know my secret—that I am here. I cannot go back!”

“You can,” I say, hunched with indigestion. “In seventy-two minutes.”

“I cannot,” she says. “I smell like you.”

The whole hemisphere that includes China turns an opaque pink, like a rash.

I admit, I’m so afraid that I fart. It propels me into Sook. She kisses me hard.

“I’m sick!” I say. “I’m supposed to be in quarantine!” I rush-float back to the BioLab with Houston calling and calling, and me not answering, them frantic with emergency, asking what the pink clouds are doing, Maydaying, relaying reports of intercontinental wilting and eroding, bruising and blistering, foamy aspirations and convulsions by the millions, while I take the vaccine to Sook and plunge it into her shoulder. “It doesn’t matter,” she says.

“It matters!” I say. “That was my only vaccine!” And I realize: I’m going home to that pink Earth. I’ve failed the mission. I’ll need treatment. They’ll hook me up to machines and flush me out and dismiss me from service, but I’ll be home.

If they try to keep me up here in quarantine there will be protests.

Sook corkscrews over my clammy head and says into my ear, “I fell in love with you also, Luke.” Though, I know in her voice it isn’t true. “But you should have saved that needle for yourself, you stupid man. You cannot save me.”

“But you could’ve died!” I say.

“I could have it much worse,” she says and floats into a ball on the floor.

We have circled back to the obvious thing.

Featured image: Towhee Bunting (John James Audubon, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Transfer from the U. S. National Museum, Smithsonian Open Access Collection, CC0)

Awake, O Sleeper

Wake up, O sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.

–Ephesians 5:14

Mother was a ballerina when she was young, and when I was a child, I would sneak up the hallway on my hands and knees to watch my parents dance. She moved like the ocean, arms rising and lowering with the music, legs reaching for the coast. Her hair was long then and she tied it behind her before they began, lifting it up in one growing strand, twisting it on top of her head then through itself in a loop. I often wondered how a man like my father caught her. Mother was educated; she spoke six languages. My father, on the other hand, barely spoke at all.

As a family, we rarely left the house because everyone else came to us. Each day brought a visitor of some type: church ladies, encyclopedia salesmen, my father’s friends from work. One summer, Mother taught dance in the kitchen and the house was full of girls, more than I’d ever been around at once. They paid ten dollars an hour and Mother showed them how to form the five positions.

First position was always the easiest. Feet side by side, arms forming a cradle. There I found stability and calm. But second position was hard. The girls boldly spread their legs and arms, eager to take flight. I, on the other hand, always lost my balance and had to bring my body back into itself, then slowly slide out from there.

After a few weeks, I decided it was much more pleasant to watch Mother dance than to try it myself. There seemed to be fluidity in the way she transformed the kitchen counter-edge into a barre; everything she touched seemed to be in the midst of metamorphosis. Even my father seemed in constant change under her touch. He had been a coal miner before they married, hands black and calloused. But the father I knew had soft hands, light as they took Mother’s waist.

After they’d finished dancing, my father’s hands would reach down to lift my sleeping body. I would wake up somewhere along the journey, head bobbing with the rhythm of his steps. I remember thinking this was the best feeling in the world — my father carrying me to bed. He’d lay me down and pull the blanket up to my chin. Then I’d fall asleep again and dream about them dancing.

As I grew, I learned this made me different; no other child lived his life inside music like that. But I suppose all great artists were brought up inside one art form or another. The parents of poets read to their children; the parents of painters keep oils around the house — tubes of cerulean blue lying in the kitchen drawers, vats of crimson tucked under the bed with shoes and old T-shirts. I’m a musician now, so of course my parents played music when I was young.

Mother, you see, was also a singer. When the radio was off, her voice filled the house. Mostly spiritual songs — not the “contemporary” music megachurches play now, but hymns — real hymns — songs that only a piano or an organ could play. “All Creatures of Our God and King,” “The King of Love My Shepherd Is,” songs you only hear now at weddings. When the churches stopped playing them, Mother quit going. Worship was more about music for her than God anyway, and she decided her best praise was singing good songs at home as opposed to humming bunk with the masses.

I think that’s one reason why the church people visited so much, encouraging us to come back. They weren’t concerned about the tithe we gave or the future of our eternal souls: They wanted mother in choir. The loss of her voice hit the sound with a sharp-edged sword. “The soprano section is weak now,” Miss Ellen told Mother.

“Why do you need a soprano section,” she said, “when the songs you sing are all written for second altos?”

“What do you mean?” Miss Ellen said, shifting her tea cup from left hand to right.

“They’re so low, those praise hymns.” Mother’s voice was even melodic speaking. “It hurts my throat to sing them.” Gone were high Gs from the Second Baptist Church, but years after she died, I could still hear them. “Awake O sleeper,” she would sing every morning, “awake and the Lord will shine upon you.”

And until a point, He did.

After I turned seven, my friend Jared Johnson joined the Little League. He played pitcher for the Panthers and got to wear a red uniform. Sports had never been in my life before since, to Mother, they were in full-on war with the arts. I didn’t understand how. The dancers at the Kentucky Arts Center wore red when they danced; the red of Jared’s baseball jersey was just a duller shade.

But Mother claimed a uniform was radically different from a costume. “A uniform makes you part of the crowd, while a costume shows the crowd who you are. But,” she looked at me, long hair unlooped across her shoulders, “if you prefer to fly with the others for a while, I suppose you can. We’ll sign you up tomorrow.”

So my father took me down to the Recreation Department and registered me for baseball. It cost 35 dollars. I watched him take his billfold out of his back pocket and slowly count the bills on the counter.

“So Jeremiah’s gonna play this year, huh?” The lady behind the counter took the money and counted it again.

“Says he wants to.”

“So what’s your wife think about that?”

My father ignored her. “Where do we get his uniform?”

“I’ll get one from the back,” she said. Then the lady looked me up and down. “You better practice up, kid. Those other boys’ll eat you alive.”

During the ride home, I asked why she’d said that.

“Not everyone has your mother’s appreciation for ballet, son. They think the arts are for girls.”

“And baseball’s for boys?”

He looked at me. “Something like that.”

“Then why do you dance with Mother?” I thought of them in the front room, twirling to Chopin.

“Because I love her. And because I don’t care what they say.”

Mother didn’t come to my games very long. At the beginning of the season, she sat on the top bleacher, eyes gazing across the field as though she were looking at what was past it instead. Then she stopped looking out and started looking down. She looked down at her hands and down at her feet, sometimes shutting her eyes and just sitting there. Then she stopped coming at all, simply dropping me off before driving to the studio two counties over. “I’m losing my grace,” she told me. “I need to be back in a studio. Some place real so I can dance the way I want to again.”

This was the summer she and my father stopped dancing together, the summer he had to work so much that he wasn’t there when the music played. Mother would stand with her arms stretched out and lean with the notes, feet in fourth position, body stretched out into space. Then she could pretend that my father was with her, pretend he would catch her embrace.

But I couldn’t pretend to have him carry me to bed. By then, I was too old for that, had grown too big, and no matter how long I lay on the floor waiting, eventually I had to wake up and walk myself. Sometimes he would wake me in the middle of the night, coming home from work, hand brushing across the top of my head. He never meant to wake me, I knew, so I always pretended to still be asleep.

This was what nights in my house had become, the metamorphosis. Me, pretending not to be awake while Mother danced alone.

Things kept changing. My father started coming to my games; Mother started coming home late. Toward the end of the summer, when school was about to begin, my father’s work dropped off — or “slacked back,” as he called it. He was around more, but by the time this happened, Mother had already stopped dancing at home. Now my father was alone in the living room at night. He would switch on the turntable and set down the record needle. Slowly, Chopin would begin to play and he would sit in a chair and listen to it with his eyes closed. “I never liked classical music before I met your mother,” he said. “Never could stand it at all.”

I crawled in his arms and we waited together. She walked in after he was asleep, ballet slippers dangling from her left hand, their ribbons looped like her hair. She turned and saw us sitting there together, smiled, then walked down the hall to go to bed, shoes still swinging in her hand.

Another night she laid her slippers on the counter instead, resting her bag and wrap beside them. “I need real space,” she told my father. “Room to grow and stretch. I’m opening my own studio in town.” She picked her things back up and walked down the hall, ribbons always trailing behind her.

My father and I didn’t make it to the opening as there really wasn’t one. One day Mother didn’t have a studio and the next she did, offering lessons to whoever walked in the door. She taught ballet on weekday evenings, jazz and tap on Saturday afternoons, and ballroom dance on Sunday nights. That left me and my father without her except the mornings, when she still woke the house with her singing, beckoning that we awake and arise.

The next year, I turned nine and my Little League team made it to the district championship. This was a game Mother did attend, but the only one all season. She never sat down, just stood beside the stands, arms folded, hair released, eyes mindlessly gazing toward the field. Even then, I realized there was something there Mother couldn’t — or wouldn’t — see. Something about sliding into home reminded me of fourth position, fielding a ball meant extending your arms like jazz hands forming. I never shared this with anyone, the thoughts I thought to merge my new world with hers, the way I connected sports and art. These thoughts were large for a nine-year-old and I’m not even sure I could have spoken them if I tried. I did wonder if this was what life was like for my father, caught between her world and this other one, constantly moving himself back and forth. He’d started to spend more and more time at work again, so much time he didn’t even make it to my games. Jared Johnson’s momma called it negligence, negligence that she had to give me a ride home every week, negligence that Mother didn’t care about sports and that my father was too busy working. Jared Johnson’s momma shared her opinion quite freely — only once did she stop herself from sharing it around me. “She thinks the whole town doesn’t know what she’s up to down there,” she told Miss Ellen from the church.

“Watch your words, Emily Johnson,” Miss Ellen said back, tilting her head toward me.

We got in the car without my understanding and by the time she dropped me home, I had almost forgotten that anything had been said at all. I came in the house to join my father by his phonograph, where he had changed out Chopin for Rachmaninoff and Vivaldi, music with much more aggressive sounds, pressured pounding of the piano keys, strengthened downstroke of the violin’s bow.

A year later, before school began, Mother expanded, turning her administrative area into a studio and the studio into a ballroom. She had mirrors shipped in from Chicago, as well as an instructor she knew at the conservatory where she danced when she was young. She took the daytime classes and he taught at night, with her staying to supervise. When the space was completed, Mother actually did hold an opening, an exposition of sorts, twirling couples everywhere, girls in pink leotards and tutus, young ladies tap-tapping as they walked about. Around thirty people came and Mother glided through them, hair twisted behind her, forehead high, chin out. She held her arms slightly out to her sides like she was ready to perform at any moment and kept her hands cupped in mini c’s. Though I’d always known Mother was beautiful, I never knew how much until I was old enough to understand what my father said about women changing you, to know how he must have felt, calloused hands touching hers. Mother had been his teacher as much as she’d been mine and he loved her for it too.

My father and I went to the studio together that night, his face covered with pride. For a moment, I thought things would go to back to normal right then, that they would dance together that night with me watching on my hands and knees in the hall. But when Mother did come home, hours after the lights were off and the recital was over, my father stared at his records, not her, and she barely even looked at us before going down the hall, slippers in a bag instead of her hand, ribbons not dancing but the next morning her voice still pleading for my father and me to awake and arise.

Another year passed. Mother taught classes, my father bought records, I played baseball and went to school. No one came to persuade Mother to rejoin the choir anymore, having realized she was never coming back to church. All the women in town developed a crush on the instructor from Chicago and my team got new uniforms because our sponsor changed. I was no longer “flying with the crowd,” as Mother called it, in red but now in royal. I walked to the studio one day after school. Stealing in the backway, I heard music — the same Chopin she and my father used to dance to years ago. I stood there alone and remembering. Mother in my father’s arms, my bobbing head as he carried me to my room. Running my hand along the wall, I crept through the building hall and, finally reaching the door, bent down onto my hands and knees to watch my parents dance. There she was, an ever-moving ocean, arms rising and falling like a wave, legs reaching for the horizon. A growing, reaching strand of hair tied into itself and balanced on her head and he held her as they moved and floated as one. The bodies in my mind melted with ones before my eyes, there, real and present in the studio before me. Her arms reaching out, his hands longing to catch her. Together, they twisted and twirled and as he turned her, bringing his own body to face me, I realized the man who was holding her was not my father.

Featured image: Julie de Graag, 1921, The Rijksmuseum

The Way the Sun Falls on a Threshold

Uncle Emerson was not really our uncle but the neighbor who knew my mother back since they were kids in school. His farm was just down the road from ours, and he always plowed us out after new snow, and once he saved a calf of ours that got itself birthed into the Bear River. We knew him since we couldn’t remember when, but none of us knew how he lost his eye until Maxie Adeline asked him flat out the summer we picked berries for him.

May was a month of rain that melted off the rest of the snow in the Bear Lake valley. Maxie and I were both taking Driver’s Ed after school so we could get our day permits, and on the Friday before Memorial Day, my mother was late picking us up after class. We waited under the stoop of the closed-up school and shared a bottle of Coca Cola until the brown Cutlass station wagon pulled up. We squished into the front since the back seat was filled with fresh-cut lilacs to take to Montpelier and the family graves: Papa Hollister, my brothers Hyrum and Josiah, the Aunts May and Francella, great-grandpa Ross and both of his Mormon wives, Elma and Grace — one on each side of him. Ma said every grave had a story, sometimes two.

Maxie didn’t have a jacket, so we held mine over our heads with the box of flowers between us, slogging to the graves through last year’s dead grass. Rain clung to the lilacs, bending the green stems. Ma lashed them together with baling twine to make little shocks of purple blossoms to lean against the headstones.

Then there was Uncle Emerson in his best boots with a pot of store-bought mums wrapped in green foil. A black leather patch covered his missing eye.

He nodded to my mother. “Hazel.” He touched his fingers to the wide brim of his hat. “Miss Rachel. Miss Maxie.”

He asked if we wanted to pick for him this year. I said yes, and he said didn’t I have a younger brother, and I said I’d bring him. Uncle Emerson nodded and went on alone to the other side of the cemetery.

Ma clucked her tongue against her teeth. “Such a shame. So much tragedy.”

What tragedy it was, I could only imagine. My mother had been a farm girl her whole life and had seen her share. My oldest brother Hyrum got himself killed his first week out in Vietnam. I was too young to remember, but I was twelve when my next brother, Josiah, drowned after his tractor trailer rolled into the Snake River along the Palisades. That left me and my little brother Gabe. Such a burden on a mother didn’t leave much room for tenderness. Yet Uncle Emerson moved her. I tried to imagine something both shameful and tragic, which made the possibilities all the more thrilling. For weeks afterward, Maxie and I speculated dramatically about Uncle Emerson: lost lovers, runaway bride, a fated love triangle — as tragic as our fourteen-year-old imaginations could fathom.

Maxie already had her own real-life tragedy. Her mother had run off with the Craftsman Tool rep who used to drive a company van farm to farm. Now when Maxie’s dad gets drunk, he says he sure does miss that Craftsman guy. Ever since, my Ma made sure Maxie had enough clothes and socks for school each year, even tampons after we both got our periods the same week in the 7^th grade. But as long as we’d been best friends, Maxie never talked about her mother. Not once.

Early berries came on fast in June, and Uncle Emerson called us for the first picking. Later we’d work alongside full crews of ten or twelve high-school kids, but in the beginning, it was just the three of us—Maxie, Gabe, and me. My brother was a grade back, and we lorded it over him. When we got to drive the truck between fields, we made Gabe ride in the back. Made him carry our berry buckets and bring us water. If it was me, Gabe argued, but for Maxie, he did every single thing she asked. When she wasn’t around, I called him Beck-and-Call until he blushed or punched me. Or both.

Picking was cold and hard. The pre-dawn dew soaked our boots and jeans. We worked in long sleeves against the cold and to protect our skin as we reached through the thorns. On the first day, Maxie showed up without a long-sleeved shirt, and Uncle Emerson made her wear one of his. He showed us how to cover our hair with bandanas and cut the tips off our gloves — index finger and thumb — so we could feel the berries for ripeness.

There was a rhythm to picking. Our buckets swayed with the reach and give, catch of thorns, and the swish and pop of cane. The morning sun dappled the dark corrugated leaves, and we lifted them like private skirts to uncover the deep cluster of red berries.

Uncle Emerson weighed our pickings on scales set on a sawhorse table at the end of the field. He tracked our numbers in a ledger and paid us out each day for the day before. The berries were measured into green plastic cups and loaded onto flats for delivery to the fruit stands. On a heavy day, if our rhythm was good, we’d pick enough to make quota before the rising sun hit the crest of Meade Peak.

It was one of those mornings Maxie asked him about his eye. The sun was spreading, warm enough to burn off the chill and start the grass to dry. Gabe had taken off his long sleeves and was stretched out like a sunbather next to the irrigation canal. Maxie sat on her sweatshirt. She picked grass and threw it at Gabe. He put a piece in his mouth and twirled it in his teeth.

Maxie let down her hair, rolled her sleeves, and stretched her bare arms.

“Uncle Emerson, tell us what happened to your eye.”

I gave Maxie a look like I-can’t-believe-you-asked-him, but she just raised one shoulder.

Uncle Emerson was smoking a cigarette out by his truck. A magpie screeched from the water wheel over the canal. Uncle Emerson leaned back on the dropped-down tailgate.

“It’s kind of a long story,” he said.

Maxie turned quick, and even Gabe rolled up on his elbow. I slid down the curve of the knoll to the edge of the berry field and sucked in my breath.

Uncle Emerson lit a new cigarette off the butt of the old one. “I was just turned eighteen, and there was this bar fight over in Soda, where a man gets killed. I don’t have any recollection of it, but people say I killed him. I was drinking so I couldn’t remember coming or going. But there were witnesses and such.” He pulled his hat down to the top of the black eye patch.

“The judge sentenced me to life,” he said. “So off I went. I wasn’t even graduated from high school.”

He pointed his cigarette at Maxie. “But that’s not where I lost the eye. That’s just the beginning of the story.”

“They sent me up to IMSI, maximum security over to Boise. My mama visited every weekend. You should have known her. She was born on this farm and raised right. My daddy, he left us when I was a baby, so we didn’t have anyone but each other.

“She said my daddy was a drinker, same as me, and nothing good ever came of it. It had to be hard on her, me going to prison and all. She said she would pray for me every day. And I guess she did.

“Prison was nothing like I knew before. It’s a different set of rules. I did what it took to survive. Learned where to go and who to know. Sometimes I had to fight, but I didn’t mind.

“If you knew people, you could get them to bring things in for us. Drink. Other things. Those people who brought things in, they did it for love. Or responsibility. Love is best. If you can get someone to love you, you can get anything. I only had my mama. She loved me, but the most she ever brought in was the Holy Bible.

“One time we were waiting for someone’s wife or girlfriend to bring in some smoke, and this batch of heroin came instead. That was something. I did it up and felt like I could breathe again. I guess I’d been wound pretty tight. But heroin, that was something.”

Heroin. The word sent a shimmy down my back. It was as exotic as Persian or subway. I tried to catch Maxie’s eye, but she was leaned forward — mesmerized. Even Gabe was staring, mouth open. I hugged my knees.

“After fifteen years, they start evaluating me for release. Every year there’s a hearing. My mama came and listened to them say how many fights I been in, heard my psychological testing read out, along with all my violations. When they asked her if she had anything to say, she’d say she knew I had a good life in me. Every year, the same thing.

“After eighteen years, they moved me from maximum to minimum. I didn’t know anyone, so I was sick as the dope came out of me. The withdrawals make your insides turn right out. And a cold, hard aching down in the center of your bones.

“After a time, I started to feel better. ICC had something new called Vocational-Rehab, so I took some tests and trained to be a bricklayer. What with all the fighting, I was strong. I could sure sling some brick.

“Then one year, there’s a hearing, and my mama doesn’t show up. It’s the first one she’s ever missed, and they grant my release. Two weeks later, I’m out. They give me $440 left from my government check and a phone number for a job. I’m out after twenty years, all said and done. I get to my mama’s house, and she’s sick with the cancer. Two weeks later, she passed.”

I heard Maxie gasp. Uncle Emerson’s lighter clicked behind his cupped hand. At the end of the lane, a row of cottonwoods grew alongside the farmhouse. The breeze shifted, and a wave of cotton lifted off the trees in a flurry of white that broke over the house like snow.

“So that was something,” he said, his voice strained.

None of us moved. We’d never heard such a story before.

Uncle Emerson re-crossed his legs and cleared his throat, and I realized with a pang that he was crying. I opened my eyes wide so my own tears wouldn’t fall out, and when they did, I tried to wipe my face on my shoulder so Gabe wouldn’t see. Except he was doing the same thing. Only Maxie was dry-eyed and watching Uncle Emerson like nothing else.

The raspberry cane rustled like rising quail. Or rain. Uncle Emerson leaned his arm on the truck. He could have sent us home, and we wouldn’t have faulted him. It was more than we’d ever expected, him turned out and crying. But he cleared his throat, spit, and went on.

“I had a little money, so I post-dated a check for my mama’s funeral. Best service. Flowers. Casket. Headstone. She had a plot up to Montpelier with her folks, both of them long gone. I was all she had. She left me the farm, but I was drinking so I couldn’t tell my head from a hole in the ground. When it came time that check was due, I didn’t have the money.”

He dug the toe of his boot into the dirt and flipped a rock into the canal where it landed with a floop.

“My mama used to say, ‘Hope leads a hero’s journey; despair a fool’s errand.’ And I weren’t no hero. I figured sure as the sun coming up, nothing could ever get better. That’s what I thought.

“I made a plan to rob the bank over in Preston. Back then, there was an Idaho First down on Main. I’d learned all about robbing banks in prison. My buddies told me how to talk to the teller. How to find the ink bomb and where to find the big money down under the counter.

“I took a gun. Not to use — just to scare folks. It was strapped up under my arm.” He pointed. “My plan worked up until I got shot.”

The truck creaked as he stood up off the tailgate, and his words came faster.

“See, there’s this marble counter where the teller is.” He smoothed the air in front of him as if it was a big, flat surface. “The teller’s all hunkered down, crying.” He waved out over the field. “Everyone else is on the floor. I tell the girl, ‘It’s alright, darlin’. I ain’t going to hurt no one.’ I remember I sure wished she would stop crying, and over to one side, this man leans over the counter.”

He makes a gun with his hand.

“Shoots me. Bam!”

I yelped before I could help it, and slapped both hands over my mouth. Uncle Emerson pushed his hat back and squinted his good eye at me, then up at the sky. I held my breath.

“I’m looking straight up at the ceiling,” he said. “White plaster flowers all around, and a gold light in the middle on a gold chain. I can tell there’s blood coming out of my mouth. It’s on my face. And I can’t breathe.” He touched the center of his chest. “Feels like something big is holding me down. And I can’t feel my legs.”

He took a long drag on his cigarette and breathed out blue smoke.

“They say your life flashes before your eyes. But it was more like I was standing over the top of that old house, looking in.”

“I see everything. My mama. Me as a boy. And in that moment, all of it felt important. Every little thing. My red wagon in the yard. The way my grandfather built that house with his own hands. My grandmother’s teacups from Scotland. The Bible with our genealogy inside the front cover. My muck-boots on the porch. All of it meant something. From my mama’s prayers to the way the sun falls on the threshold.

“The feeling became a kindness, and it made me grateful for my life, maybe for the first time.”

A grasshopper burst up from the cane with a buzzing clack of wings. Uncle Emerson watched it fly all crazy across the canal and land in a curved swale of grass.

“Ease is what flows through me then. A big rush of ease. But soft. Like how the wind can turn, and you smell lilacs you didn’t know were there. They were always there. Waiting for you to notice.

“The weight on my chest is gone, and I’m still looking down. Only now I see myself on the floor of the bank, blood all over. There’s folks all around me. My gun is on the floor by my boot, and a bag of money is spilled out on the other side. Everything is quiet.

“When I wake up in the hospital, they tell me I died three times on the table. Three.” He laughed. “That’s my lucky number.

“The police officer who shot me was off-duty. He saw me through the window, came in, and shot me. Once through the chest. Once in the head. Collapsed my right lung. Shattered my cheekbone. They took my eye to save my life.

“After a month in the hospital, I was back at IMSI. I did eight more years. Two for bank robbery.” He held his fingers in a vee. “Attempted. By the time I got out, I was too old to lay brick, so I came here. Only everything was different.”

Uncle Emerson stamped out his cigarette on the bed of the truck. “Ain’t it something? Who’d have thought it would be like this? You. Me. This day. The sun.” 

He flicked the butt to the edge of the berry field where it fell in with chunks of dirt and field stones. “Anyway, you kids best be off. Day’s a wastin’.”

He slid the raspberry flats into the truck and slammed the tailgate. We were kicking rocks in the road when he drove past us toward Garden City. His hand raised out the truck window. We waved back.

Maxie held her sweatshirt tight to her chest. Gabe skittered a rock in front of her, and she stepped over it. I held my hand over the tall grass heads, feeling the seeds flutter against my palm. I didn’t have the words, but I knew what made my mother’s eyes soft for Uncle Emerson. He’d gone further away than any of us, to places as dark and tragic as anything in real life and came back with goodness still in him.

“No one will believe us,” I said. If we hadn’t heard it ourselves, we wouldn’t believe it.

“Who cares?” Gabe said.

“It’s like he was two people.” I wanted to figure it out. “Two different people. Like he got two different lives.”

Maxie shook her hair across her shoulders. “I hope I get that.”

Gabe shoved her so she staggered a little sideways. “What?” he said. “Hope you get to kill someone?”

Maxie kicked a small, flat stone up the road. She watched it skip off into the dark earth of a fresh-tilled field. “No, stupid. Something different.”

Featured image: Shutterstock

A Trace of Dampness

I watch them in every season, but they inspire me most in winter. On this steel-cold February morning, they descend on the garbage cans with a madcap shrieking, wing beats snapping time to their plucking and gobbling.

Standing outside McMillan’s Deli, waiting for my bones to chill, I enjoy their fervor. Their table manners are atrocious, but they are survivors. There is beauty in that.

A man steps up beside me.

“I hate seagulls,” he says.

“Herring gulls,” I say.

I recognize him. He is new in town. A retired commodities broker. We used to be a community of plumbers and fishermen. People who worked until they fell over dead. This man is not yet fifty. Brown fur wraps the wrists of his gloves.

He gestures at the shredded donut wraps and greasy paper plates as if commanding them to round themselves up.

“Look at this mess,” he says. “It’s disgusting. Stupid, useless birds. We need to find a way to get rid of them.”

Left alone without a credit card you wouldn’t last two days.

“They’re survivors,” I say.

He turns up the collar of his jacket.

“If that’s what it takes to survive, I’ll pass,” he says.

The birds jostle and peck at each other in the brittle gravel. I wonder if the floor of the Stock Market looks any different.

He takes his leave wordlessly. The door chimes as he steps inside the deli.

My bones are well chilled, but I wait outside just a touch longer. Along the roof line, the rusted rain gutters sag under a five-day garnish of ice. This winter has been unseasonably cold. The ice catches the light of the rising sun and sparkles like tinsel. I take a deep breath of sharp, salt-laden air.

The Caterpillar hats nod as I step through the door. Behind the counter, Jennifer graces me with her prize-winning smile. Lord, a young girl can light up more than a room.

“Top of the morning, Mr. Udall, so nice to see you,” she says, as if she hadn’t seen me yesterday morning and the morning before.

I stand for a moment, enjoying the warmth. It’s why I wait outside. No real pleasure without pain. The heat creeps about me, like a lover’s perfectly planted kisses.

When I step to the display case, Jennifer leans close. She only wears one earring. A tiny silver dreamcatcher. I find this fetching. Piratical. For months now I have been working up the nerve to tell her this. But I worry what she’ll think. What happens to us when we get old? I’ll tell you. We become poster children for hesitation and doubt. You’d think with the end looming, we’d run naked in the street.

Instead I shuffle my feet.

On the other side of the counter, Jennifer leans close. Her eyes flick piratically to her left, where Mr. Scrooge sits alone in a booth.

“My last customer told me you were crazy.” She winks. “I told him we’re all here because we’re not all here.”

No one has winked at me in eight years. Even a wink can fill a heart.

“You are wise beyond your years,” I say.

It will have to do.

“Tell that to my chemistry professor. The usual?”

Jennifer waits a beat, as she always does, as if I might actually order something different.

I think about it. I really do.

Eggs benedict and two mimosas, please. One for me, one for you.

She is already turning. She truly is wise.

“One black coffee and one raspberry donut coming right up,” she says. “And a trash bag for you back in the kitchen.”

“I thank you. My feathered friends thank you.”

“You’re birds of a feather,” Jennifer says.

She stands at the coffee machine, her back to me, but I only half see her.

I think, Are we?

 

When Marlene was alive we visited an island off the coast of Los Angeles. The island was small, less than one square mile. In those times we walked effortlessly, hiking the island’s perimeter took less than an hour. The island was nothing but beating waves and shrieking sea birds. We went for the birds. Well, I went for the birds. Marlene went for me. She was a slave to all animals, but Marlene’s feelings for sea birds were mixed.

The island was sun-blistered and wind-blasted, and, on the rare occasion when the wind eased, it smelled like a giant guano belch. But as we walked the paths through tawny grasses, my wife smiled and laughed and squeezed my hand. Birds were everywhere. The guide book I carried informed me that the island was home to house finches, horned larks, peregrine falcons, orange-crowned sparrows and even barn owls (“The owls fly silently out from the mainland to dine upon the island’s succulent deer mice,” the author wrote). But all we could see was a vast army of sea birds. Brown pelicans, black oystercatchers, ashy storm petrels and cormorants; in the sun-bleached grass, on the bald escarpments of rock, on the ledges of dark, plunging cliffs, they smothered the island. But mostly there were Hunnish hordes of gulls. Western gulls, to be exact. Many of their nests rested alongside the trails. As we approached, they rose in screaming clouds. Before we got back on the boat, we rinsed our ball caps in the ocean.

On the return boat trip I started a conversation with a ranger. He was heading home after a week-long stint on the island. He was fortyish, and spoke so softly I could barely hear him over the thrum of the engines, but he was kind. He politely answered my questions. When I asked him about the myriad litterings of delicate bones I had seen, assembled in small circles like the aftermath of some horrific Lilliputian battle, he smiled. Chicken bones, he said. Extricating gnawed chicken bits from garbage cans on the mainland, the adult Western gulls gulped them down, flew across the water, and regurgitated them for their young. The gulls also spat up onions, spaghetti, casserole, carrots, chips, dog food and mince. The ranger told me this with an endearing trace of pride. When I said I knew few human beings willing to traverse thirty miles of ocean for a half-eaten chicken wing, he laughed. I told him that, of all the sea birds on the island, the Western gulls were my favorite.

He regarded me through several engine thrums.

“I’m not joking,” I said.

“They’re my favorite, too,” he said.

That night in our Los Angeles hotel room, Marlene stood silent in front of the floor-to-ceiling window. From where I sat on the edge of the bed, I could see her sober reflection in the glass.

The air conditioner purred. In the room above us, a television broadcast the sound of gunshots and screaming. On television, people who are shot have an inordinate amount of time to scream.

Marlene turned to face me. Sequin city lights framed her slender body.

“You don’t know everything,” she said.

“I don’t.”

“I hated every second on that island,” she said.

I almost said, I know.

“All those birds,” she said. “I felt like they could turn on us and there would be nothing we could do.”

She turned back to the window.

“Did you hear it?” she said to the glass.

“Hear what?”

“The sound the gulls made when they first lifted into the air. Right before all the godawful noise.”

“No.”

In the room above us, more people were shot.

“Their wings made the loveliest rustle,” said Marlene. “Like a bag of sand lightly shaken.”

She stood so I could not see her face.

“You can love something, and still be afraid of it,” my wife said. “Sometimes you’re afraid of it because you do love it.”

I understand her fear fully now.

 

Sometimes late at night in my lonely ranch house on the far edge of Long Island, I see Marlene standing in front of the sliding glass doors to the patio. She is not silhouetted by city lights. The woods behind her are dark. But there is light from somewhere. Possibly, my heart.

“Marlene,” I say softly, “thank you for always holding my hand.”

My wife looks out to the woods.

“That’s what love is,” she says to the glass.

 

Marlene was ambivalent about birds, but she loved cats with every fiber of her soul. The last of her housecats still resides in our home. Luther is named after Martin Luther King. He is midnight black. Perhaps this is politically incorrect, but it seemed straightforward when Marlene named him.

I have one last cat at home, but I have seven out on the windswept point at the northernmost tip of this island. Marlene and I have cared for a waxing and waning group of feral cats for thirteen years. Well, I have cared for them for thirteen years. Marlene cared for them for eight. It began as a temporary job, filling in for Mrs. Simmons when she went to visit her son in Orlando for Christmas. But people die. So we took up the torch, Marlene and I, caring for the cats dumped in the woods or left behind at summer cottages. On a resort island living is easy for feral cats in summer, with brimming dumpsters and soft-hearted tourists. In February, the tourists are gone and the dumpsters are often frozen shut. The wind howls off the Atlantic like a sodden freight train. The thickest fur isn’t always enough. A frozen cat is the queerest thing. For some reason they are often stretching out at the last. These renders them a little like a boomerang. I confess, I have side-armed a cat or two in the direction of the burlap bag I carry in winter for such exigencies.

The glen where the feral cats live is ten miles from my home. Every afternoon I drive my Ford pickup up the long, empty rises with their vistas of gray, green and blue sea. I look out the windshield, but often I don’t see the road at all.

The glen is pretty and peaceful. After a snowfall, the bare trees preside over the white silence like respectful monks. Sometimes bright sun sparkles the snow, and trilling blue jays hop between the branches. Other days, bruised clouds rule the sky, their shadows passing like dark sleighs over the snow. The cats pad over the ice-crusted snow like furry butterballs. But not always. In my zealousness, I fear I have overfed them. Now and again they plunge through the crust. When this happens there is a wild clawing flurry, and snow flies everywhere. Eventually the cat emerges with a small toupee of snow. I imagine they give me an affronted look. Perhaps they want me to build elevated walkways.

After thirteen years, I still don’t pet the cats. They are wild. They have absolutely no affection for me, though I believe they felt some small affection for Marlene, as almost every living thing did. The cats see me solely as legs ferrying buckets of food. They hear the chunk of the truck door, and they meet me at the opening to the woods. As I carry the two green painters’ buckets, each containing stacked paper plates of dry cat food, the cats follow their wheezing Pied Piper as he makes his way along the narrow path. But when I come to a stop and put the buckets down, behind me the cats ooze away into the woods like the outermost edges of a smoke ring. They don’t trust people. I do not blame them.

Their homes in the glen are simple structures. This is partly because I built them, but mostly because simple is all they require. Plywood roofs rest atop bale walls of hay. The bales, in turn, rest upon a plywood floor. The floors are lined with straw. Straw doesn’t freeze like rug fragments do. More important, straw dries quickly. Cats can stand a lot of cold, but they can’t stand wet and cold. Even on the nicest winter day, a trace of dampness attends the sea. Before Marlene and I learned the difference between straw and rug, we lost several cats. I never tossed one when Marlene was around.

Winter is hard on the birds too. Sometimes a bird will light down on a plate to help itself to dry cat food. Sometimes a cat will take the opportunity to indulge in a two-course meal. It took us only a short time to settle on a solution.

Every day of winter, except for two, I feed the cats the same thing. On Christmas and New Year’s Eve they get chicken liver and hamburger. The extravagance was Marlene’s idea. She also hung tinsel in the trees. One Christmas she decided to put out catnip mice. She stood very still as the cats awkwardly nudged the tiny sacks.

“They don’t know how to play,” she said, and I saw that her eyes were wet.

She kept putting out the catnip mice, along with the tinsel. On Christmas and New Year’s Eve we’d bring hot chocolate and fold out chairs and sit in the glen as evening turned to night, the tinsel catching the moonlight as cat shadows padded about. Women make the world beautiful.

I always feed the birds right after I feed the cats. Keeping them at the truck keeps them off the plates. When Marlene was alive we would make our way briskly back to the empty parking lot. Marlene would get back in the truck. There she’d sit, with the window rolled up, smiling at her husband enveloped in a clamoring cloud of birds. Five years later, I still look over at the truck.

 

I think about this, and the hundreds of other feckless things that make up a life, as I drive along the empty undulating road to the end of our island. On this afternoon, dark clouds, ragged at the edges, scud across the dishwater sky. At the top of the rises I can see the spread of marsh and the gray Atlantic. From inside the truck I can still smell the sea. I shift in the seat. My back hurts a little. I carry the hefty bag of leftover bagels and bread out the kitchen door and across the parking lot. But always, I must lift the bag into the bed of the pickup. I will accept a sore back over asking Jennifer for help.

At the height of their civilization, Marlene and I cared for nineteen cats. Damp, time, and the occasional road misadventure have seen to the whittling. I do not wish to saddle someone else with the burden. Sometimes I imagine myself peering up into bleak faces from my deathbed. Promise me you’ll feed the cats. But we had no children, and I have no more family. I have no idea who might peer down at me. Perhaps their faces will be bleak only because they fear being asked to care for uncaring cats. But I don’t worry too much about the cats. Like the birds, the cats are tough cusses. The toughest will find ways to survive. I suppose, at any time, I could have just stopped, but I am part of a generation cursed with the inability to quit. And we become creatures of habit. It’s why I brought the hefty bag. I look up into the rearview mirror and smile at my folly.

 

When I park the truck, I walk around to the back. Leaning over the hatch, I open the bag, carefully rolling back the edges. It is my mimosa.

I do not turn to look back at the truck.

When I reach the glen, I lay the plates out quickly and efficiently. You would expect nothing less from someone who has done this roughly two thousand times.

But this time, when I finish distributing the plates, I don’t leave. I find a spot far enough from the plates, and I sit in the snow. The cats eat warily. Their eyes never leave me.

I look at my watch, as if I have some appointment later this evening. A small part of me wishes I was standing in the parking lot in front of McMillan’s, where, after a time, I might step inside to warmth and the brilliant smile of a young woman who doesn’t really know me, but is kind to me nonetheless. I know this will sting a little, but I also know it will pass. Youth is resilient and has its own concerns. Maybe it won’t pass entirely, but that is okay too. Even on the brightest days, a trace of dampness attends life. But maybe that makes things sweeter. Like stepping into a warm, welcoming deli.

I realize now that, once night falls, a neighbor might notice that none of the lights are on, a small oversight on this preoccupied day. But my dark rancher likely won’t matter. Most of the homes in our neighborhood are no longer ranchers, just as the neighbors are no longer plumbers, fishermen and friends.

It could be a chuckle. It could be my teeth clack slightly.

I lay back in the snow. From this position I cannot see the cats, but I know they watch me as they move among the skeletal trees. They will not come close for a long time. They are survivors.

But sometimes there is no joy in survival.

I don’t have to wait long for my bones to chill.

Featured image: Shutterstock

11 Fiction Stories to Read During Quarantine

If you’re stuck at home and have already resorted to organizing your sock drawer, take the opportunity to dive into some of the best new and classic fiction from the Post’s archives. We’ve handpicked contemporary fiction from new writers and classics by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sinclair Lewis, and we promise they will spark more joy than those old tube socks.

 

“Wolf” by Lucy Jane Bledsoe

Published on December 17, 2012

As Jim tries to identify with the Yellowstone wolf trackers, both he and his wife have an awakening that changes their lives forever.

 

“I Want to Smoke Pot” by John Skow

Published on January 27, 1968

A personnel director spins a web of lies to satisfy his wife’s mod curiosities.

 

“They Grind Exceeding Small” by Ben Ames Williams

Published on September 13, 1919

A miserly lender goes about his cynical existence until he meets a shocking, ironic fate.

 

“Melodramas for Depressed Persons” by Rolli

Published on July 17, 2015

A depressed writer braves gloom and doom on a sarcastic quest for catharsis.

 

“The Refugees” by Edith Wharton

Published on January 18, 1919

Two well-meaning caregivers mistake one another for Belgian refugees in 1914 London.

 

“The Ice Palace” by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Published on May 22, 1920

A small-town southern girl wants to be “where things happen on a big scale,” but the dreariness of the North will test her resilience.

 

“Crack” by Myles McDonough

Published on December 22, 2016

A chance encounter between an Iraq War vet and an Iraqi immigrant awakens painful memories.

 

“Hobohemia” by Sinclair Lewis

Published on April 7, 1917

A Midwestern lumber businessman pens a pessimistic Russian novel to win back his poet lover.

 

“What’s the Worst a Date Can Do?” by Michael McGlade

Published on February 19, 2016

After Aileen leaves him, Eóin copes by living according to a strict routine. Now Ciara threatens that routine just by showing an interest.

 

“Every Hero an Hombre, Every Wolf a Clown” by Doug Lane

Published on February 26, 2016

In a Texas town where luchadores and clowns just don’t mix, one father risks exposing his double life to grant his son’s birthday wish.

 

“The Life of the Party” by Irvin S. Cobb

Published on January 25, 1919

Mishaps and mayhem befall a wealthy lawyer that finds himself on the wrong side of town in an outlandish costume after a theme party.

The Lady with a Hundred Pockets

Doris and Mickey drove to the recreational complex in separate cars. They arranged to meet at the playground and cut through to the picnic area where the day-of-fun benefit for Cameron Ferderbar was taking place. Cameron, Doris’s neighbor, had fallen off a ladder when cleaning out his roof gutters, and now he was laid up in a rehab facility, which, let’s face it, was actually a nursing home that smelled like diapers. Bankruptcy was pawing at the family’s door, and the GoFundMe had come up short, so Cameron’s men’s club was putting on the benefit hoping to cover some of the healthcare bills.

Doris arrived at the playground wearing a CAPS Sugar sun visor, a red-and-white striped shirt, and white slacks. CAPS processed sugar, and Doris worked in inventory control. As she waited for Mickey, Doris noticed children crowding around a woman dressed in an enormous multicolored patchwork skirt covered in rows of pockets. Next to her was a sign on a chair that read, “The Lady with a Hundred Pockets. Fifty cents per chance.”

The woman smelled like a tropical fruit salad. She reminded Doris of a fertility goddess. She wore her hair in a massive braid, thick as a bicycle tire, that she fixed in a circle on top of her head like an Italian Easter bread, except there was no pink or blue dyed egg in it.

Children were begging their adults for change and darting over to the pocket lady. After she zipped their coins into her belt bag, she let them plunge their hands into her pockets. They came up with mini pinwheels, plastic knights, frogs, lions, junk jewelry, and tiny squirt guns. A few kids liked their loot, at least for a moment, but some did not. They wanted to put the junk back and try again. But the pocket lady tilted her head, shook her finger, and said, “For another chance, you must pay again.”  Most of the adults shelled out for two chances, but when the kids wanted more money, their adults escorted them to the play equipment, and, if they kept making a fuss, back to the car.

Mickey showed up twenty minutes late, but at least he showed up. It was a hot August afternoon, and he was mopping his brow. Doris offered him an air hug. Like Doris, Mickey was in his early sixties. They had met two months ago on a dating site for mature people. Age was just a number, that’s what everyone said. Like it was only about age.

Doris had been through one divorce, Mickey three. A solidly built man, he wore his thinning iron-gray hair in comb-over. Not a ridiculous comb-over, one of those trimmer comb-overs. He was a delivery driver for UPS.

“Who’s the gypsy?” he asked.

“That’s the Lady with a Hundred Pockets. For fifty cents, you get to pick one of her pockets. I’m going to try my luck.”

She meant this to sound playful, but Mickey mumbled something about her acting ridiculous and like a little kid and there being better ways to spend money. He stood with his hands in the side pockets of his plaid knee-length shorts while Doris gave the woman two quarters. The lady told her to go for it. Doris stuck her hand into a paisley pocket and pulled out a gold plastic ring with a big faceted plastic ruby in it.

She showed it to Mickey. “My lucky ring. Maybe it will grant me three wishes.”

Mickey gave her a whatever look. “Now I know something new about you. You believe in wishes and luck.” He mopped his brow again.

“I do happen to believe in wishes and luck,” she said, and Mickey gave her another whatever look. It would have been nice if he played along in the spirit of fun, but he evidently did not budge on his principles. She began to think of her wishes, but she kept them to herself. She wished for a caring guy with a sense of humor, speedy healing for Cameron, and a winning state lottery ticket for the Ferderbars. Maybe a winning lottery ticket for herself. What did she spend, maybe ten or twenty dollars a week on the state lottery?

“Why don’t you put that silly thing back and let a kid get it?”

This made Doris feel ashamed. She put the ring back in its paisley pocket. Maybe some little girl would pull it out and be delighted.

“You don’t have to put it back,” said the lady. Doris shrugged like it wasn’t a big deal. Then she saw the lady aim an evil eye at Mickey. It was like a laser locking onto a target. Maybe she had real gypsy powers. Doris hoped that things would improve during the day of fun.

She had paid for the beef and beer tickets, which was only right since this was her cause and the decision to go had been her idea. She wondered what it would be like, Mickey meeting so many of her friends all at once. Maybe he was skittish about that. So far, their dates had been one on one, your basic dinner-and-a-movie thing, and they always went halfsies. It would be nice if he treated her now and then.

The men’s club had produced a shindig. A sound system played country music. There was a dunk tank, horseshoes, drawings for gift baskets, bingo for prizes, and a bean bag game called cornhole. It cost extra for the games. There was a prayer station, too. No charge for that, of course. Connie Ferderbar sat in a lawn chair with a giant get-well card that everyone signed. The aroma of barbeque wafted through the air.

Doris and Mickey headed to the food table, Doris waving to acquaintances along the way. There must have been two hundred people there—neighbors, friends, people from the community.

“Didn’t Cameron have health insurance?” asked Mickey.

“Connie said he dropped their coverage as soon as the government lifted the no-insurance tax penalty. Not too swift, I know.”

“Talk about false economy. And they didn’t find him for three hours? He lay there for three hours? Working alone on a ladder, no spotter?”

“He took risks. But you can fall off a ladder even if you have a spotter,” remarked Doris.

“The guy’s an idiot,” said Mickey. “You take precautions. You carry coverage.” A yellow jacket flew up to Mickey, and he swatted it away.

“There’s good luck and bad luck.” Doris thought of all the times Cameron and Connie had been there for her both during her divorce and after. Cameron had helped her with a leaky faucet, a busted screen door. He’d helped her change lightbulbs she couldn’t reach. “Well, he’s my friend, and that’s the reason we’re here. Do you really have to call him an idiot?”

Mickey loaded his plate with a heap of barbequed beef, big mounds of macaroni salad and cole slaw, and stuck tortilla chips into the salads. He took a can of Pabst and headed to the picnic tables, which were under a pavilion. Worried that Mickey had taken more than his share, Doris took less than she wanted, then sat down next to Mickey.

The Chens, the Rothmans, and the DiPietros joined them. After the introductions, Frances Chen updated everyone on Cameron’s situation. He’d broken a leg and three ribs, screwed up a shoulder, suffered a concussion, and, worst of all, had a spinal cord injury. The spinal cord injury made it hard to predict if he would walk again. Plus, an infection had cropped up in the diaper-smelling rehab. Don’t even ask about the bills. Before the accident, Cameron had managed a restaurant.

“How do you guys know each other?” asked Rose Rothman inclining with interest toward Doris and Mickey.

Marrieds always asked. Singles also asked each other how they met. But that was different, everyone on the same playing field.

“Online dating,” replied Doris, not in a terse voice but in the kind of voice that said she wanted to move on from that topic.

Bea DiPietro said she’d heard quite a few stories about online dating, women meeting creeps and such. Sometimes nice guys too, countered Doris. Bea wanted to know what site she used, and Doris replied in a general way that it was one of the over-fifty sites. In truth, she couldn’t recall if it she’d met Mickey on SilverSingles, or OurTime, or one of the others. No law against having two or three accounts at once. It increased your possibility of finding Mr. Right or, at least, Mr. Available. Sometimes Doris saw the same guys overlapping on the sites. Maybe they noticed her overlapping, too.

“That’s how it’s done now,” said Mickey, rescuing Doris. He took a swig of beer. “You meet people online.”

“Mickey’s a pitcher in a softball league,” Doris piped up, and the husbands, clearly impressed, picked up on the sports theme.

After lunch, Doris and Mickey ambled over to the activities area. Doris bought some chances on gift certificates for local hair salons and restaurants. Mickey said she was wasting her money, why not just patronize the places directly? Doris stared at him.

“You do it to help them raise money,” she explained like he was some kind of dolt who didn’t get it. “The guy had an accident, and now everybody’s helping out.”

“Well, the guy didn’t play his cards right. So now everyone has to bail him out?”

“You think you always deal your own cards, Mickey?” Doris was surprised at her sharp tone.  “What about a flood or a hurricane? What about cancer?”

“You buy insurance for those things. You don’t buy a house in a flood plain. You manage your risks.”

Now he was acting ridiculous. And hard-hearted.

“You can’t always control what happens to you. What if you go to a festival and a shooter opens fire?”

“Do you know something I don’t?” he said, trying to be funny.

They walked past the horseshoes and the dunk tank to the bean bag toss with the weird name. Mickey wanted to show his pitching chops. The game was popular, and they took their place in line. Doris wondered if he would pay, since cornhole was his idea, or if, at least, they’d go halfsies. The fellow in charge explained the rules of the game, which were fairly involved with all sorts of scoring levels. You aimed to toss the bean bag into the hole, and the holes were on two slanted boards. One board had a sun, the other a moon.

“Hey, Sugar,” said a voice behind Doris. There stood Louella from work, also sporting a CAPS sun visor. She was with a fellow named John, whom Doris had dated in the past. They had met on OurTime. Or was it SilverSingles? Louella and John were holding hands.

The women made the introductions.

“How do you do?” said Doris, trying to act as if she were meeting John for the first time.

“Pleased to meet you, Doris,” returned John. They discovered that they were each there to support Cameron, who was a mutual friend. “A good time for a good cause, but a good cause for a sad reason.”

They decided to play teams. First girls against boys, then couples. John took out his wallet. Mickey left his wallet in his pants.

Doris’s bean bags kept landing on the grass. Louella had slightly better aim, but the boys won, Mickey landing all this throws right in the hole. Doris noticed that Louella wore a slender gold ring with a tiny red gemstone, a garnet or ruby, on her right ring finger. “A promise ring,” said Louella with a glint in her eye.

Doris took the singles prerogative and asked how they met.

“Online dating,” said Louella.

“What a coincidence. That’s how we met.” What had she missed in John? She had thought him boring and stodgy and let things trail off after two dates. What a gentleman he was and clearly in love with Louella.

They changed to couples teams. Louella and John tried impromptu rituals each time they prepared to throw their bean bags, touching an ankle for good luck, doing a few Charleston steps, each breathing on the promise ring. They racked up points, but again Mickey landed all four of his bags in the hole. He tried to help Doris improve her aim, advising her to shoot to the left since her tendency was to pitch to the right, but that did not help. She finally turned around and threw backwards. Shockingly, her last bean bag made the hole.

Mickey shook his head in amazement. “Gotta say, dumb luck won that time.”

Doris did a little happy dance.

After the game, Louella and John moseyed off in the direction of the food table, and Doris and Mickey headed to the dunk tank. There was a big crowd there too, and one of the neighbors sat on the platform of the dunk tank cage egging people on, “We want a pitcher, not a glass of water! We want a pitcher, not a belly itcher!” Everyone was missing the target. “You pays your money and you takes your chances,” yelled the guy collecting the money. It cost ten bucks for three tries.

“Sugar, I’d like a shot at that dunk tank. Bet I could sink the guy,” said Mickey.

“I bet you could,” said Doris. “Show ’em what you got.”

Mickey stood there with an expectant look. Then he rubbed his fingers together in a where’s-the-money gesture.

Doris blinked. “Pretty much, Mickey,” said Doris, “it’s your turn to pay for some of the entertainment. To be fair, I mean, looking at the whole afternoon.”

“The laid-up guy is your friend. It’s a conflict of interest for me. I don’t believe in paying the bills for people who got themselves into their messes. Ethically, you should pay.”

“Ethically? Ethically, there’s something called sharing and generosity.” She looked at him for a response. He looked at her. It was a standoff. “Come on, Mickey. Come on,” said Doris. “Don’t be cheap and childish. You’re acting like a little kid asking his mom for money. Like those kids with the pocket lady.”

Mickey blazed a look at Doris. She had called him on his behavior, maybe overdid it, and he more than didn’t like it. He looked ferocious, and it scared her.

He tore a ten-dollar bill from his wallet and thrust it at the carnival barker guy. People noticed his rapid movements. He was making a scene.

Maybe she should have paid the ten bucks and afterward called it quits between them. A one-time appeasement. But something in her made her say what she said and in the tone that she said it.

Everyone stepped back as Mickey wound up for the pitch. Doris knew his skill, but the others did not. They only saw his aggression, the hard set of his mouth, and Doris standing by with a crooked smile. She knew that in the privacy of a home, which they would never ever share, he would always be right, even if he were not right. She knew that type. The type that called disagreement starting a fight.

Mickey launched his meanest fastball and hit the bullseye hard. It was assault by proxy. She could feel it. He smiled a triumphant smile. Normally people would clap and laugh as the guy in the dunk tank dropped into the drink. Instead, silence settled over the crowd. “You really know how to spoil an afternoon,” he snapped loud enough for others to hear. “Don’t bother to call.” With that, Mickey stalked off in the direction of the playground.

Her face reddened with embarrassment, but it would have been worse if Louella and John had witnessed the drama. How lucky that she and Mickey had come in separate cars.

Abandoned, or was it liberated? Doris wandered around the grounds. “Old Town Road” played on the sound system. She looked at her cell phone and watched other people play bingo and lawn games. She joined Connie Ferderbar and chatted with her about the great turnout, the tasty barbeque, and the loving and supportive friends.

Frances Chen, Rose Rothman, and Bea DiPietro joined them. Had they observed the scene at the dunk tank?

“Where’s your friend?” asked Bea.

“He had to go somewhere,” replied Doris, trying to look stoic. The women nodded.

“I don’t know how anyone finds anyone in this world,” said Frances.

“It takes a miracle, but you have to believe in miracles,” said Rose.

Doris did not stick around for the prize drawings. She said her farewells and made her way toward the playground and the parking lot. She’d taken a chance on Mickey, and it wasn’t a winning chance. Or maybe she had chosen Mickey, and it turned out to be a bad choice. Her thoughts turned to poor Cameron, and she felt that her dating issues were just plain silly compared to other people’s problems.

The lady with a hundred pockets was packing up. She recognized Doris and waved to her. She didn’t smell like a tropical fruit salad anymore and her elaborate Easter bread hairdo was falling apart. She no longer wore the theatrical face of the seer.

“Where’s your man friend?”

“He couldn’t stay,” replied Doris. “He had to leave.”

“That dude was a jerk. You can do better. Here, have another try at a pocket. It’s on me.”

Doris found the same paisley pocket in which she’d found the ring. Lo and behold, the golden piece of junk, the trinket that Mickey had shamed her into giving back, was still there. She smiled and slid the clunky thing onto her finger. As Doris drove back home, she felt safe. She had never felt safer. And she thought of her wishes, which were pretty things and well worth wishing for, even though they might never come true.

 

Featured image by Furuya Korin, Shutterstock

A Knock at the Door

An angry fist beat against the door of Harold’s log cabin. The noise awakened him from a recurring dream. In the dream, his deceased wife, Marge, was still alive but for some unknown reason she had disappeared. Harold went from room to room in a big empty house desperately calling her name. But there was no answer. Now, the fist banged harder. The window glass rattled.

Since Marge’s death, the 93-year-old retired doctor lived alone deep in a hardwood forest on a narrow gravel lane four miles from his nearest neighbor. He slept naked. His once wavy dark hair had thinned and whitened. He had let it grow long, and he tied it back in a ponytail. His body was lank, tough, and lean as a strip of jerky. But his pale and ancient skin hung on his frame in pleats like an oversized garment. Harold had been a busy and beloved family physician, someone who saved lives and brought comfort to his patients no matter their station in life. Now he believed his greatest accomplishment was survival. Groggy, Harold thought it must be Marge at the door. She’s come back, ­Harold thought. His heart leapt. “Wait a minute, dear,” he said. “I’ll let you in.”

But as the haze of sleep lifted, he remembered she had been gone for five years. Harold rolled onto his side. The old doctor squinted at the luminous numbers of the clock beside the urine bottle on the bedside stand. It was 1:30. He lay still and listened. The pounding grew louder.

“Stop it, for Christ’s sake,” Harold muttered. “Be quiet and leave me alone.”

Normally Harold wasn’t afraid of threats from the external world. What he feared were the inner ravages of old age, like losing his memory, or becoming blind with macular degeneration so he could no longer see the dogwood and redbud blossoms in the spring, or otosclerosis that would steal his ability to hear the barred owl whose call to him at night asked, “Who cooks for you?” But now a suffocating dread coiled around Harold’s chest. Cold sweat beaded his brow. He sat up and listened. Although he didn’t believe in a God who meddled in the lives of individuals, he said a prayer for whomever was at the door to just leave. The knocking crescendoed.

Harold thought of calling 911, but his telephone hadn’t worked since a thunderstorm a month ago. For a moment, he wished he still had his double-barrel Winchester 21, but with old age, he had changed his thinking about guns and killing living creatures. Once an avid hunter, he no longer could shoot a bird, let alone a human being, even if his own life was threatened. Marge’s death had solidified his belief in not only the impermanence of everything but also the interconnections between all that existed. Harold was convinced that the entire universe was bound together with what caused it and what was around it.

The pounding stopped. Harold closed his eyes. He waited. For a moment, he thought his hypocritical prayer had been answered. But the angry fist against the door shattered the silence.

Harold remembered that a few miles away on Plum Creek Road last week the body of a young college girl had been discovered. She had been bludgeoned to death with a big sandstone rock. A mailman had found her in a ditch in the fetal position with dark blood pooled under her head. A manhunt for her killer was on. Police and national guard troops were searching the vast forests of the county. Earlier in the day, Harold had heard the bark of their dogs echoing through the valley of his land. Was it her murderer at the door? His heart beat furiously. He reached over and touched the pillow where Marge’s head had once rested. In his fingertips, he could feel the texture of her skin. He believed that in whatever form she existed she could still hear him when he spoke.

“Don’t worry, dear,” he whispered. “It’s nothing to worry about. Just some poor soul who doesn’t know where he is. I’ll go talk to him. Get him headed in the right direction.”

Harold swung his feet over the edge of the bed. He put on his thick wire-rimmed glasses and looked out the window. The sky was moonless and black. The darkness seemed to have swallowed the world and everything in it. A feeling of inevitability, of finality, descended on Harold. Darkness is where we begin, he thought. And where we end.

The pounding grew louder. Harold thought the panes would break. He considered climbing out the window and hiding on the roof over the laundry shed or locking himself in the bathroom. Sadly, he knew it would merely prolong the inevitable. He pictured a tall black-clad figure carrying a large scythe at the door. Harold wondered if he was going crazy. He rose from the bed. His joints were stiff and painful. From a rocking chair, he picked up a pair of gray work pants. He pulled them on awkwardly and struggled to keep his balance. He looped the suspenders over his shoulders. Harold put on a faded denim work shirt that Marge had given him because it matched the pale blue color of his eyes. He groped through the dark to a fan-shaped window that overlooked the entry to the cabin. In spite of his indifference to death, his pulse raced. A tingling prickled the back of his arms.

Harold looked out the bedroom’s window. He blinked in the glare of a big pickup truck’s headlights that were aimed at the cabin. Harold remembered reading that the man suspected of murdering the college girl may have driven a Ramcharger.

“What in God’s name does he want with me?” Harold asked as if Marge were there. “I’m just an old man with nothing of value.”

“Open up,” a husky voice yelled.

Harold pried open the window. A gust of night air assaulted his face. The dark form of a big man stood at the door. The figure was tall and thick but a little stoop-­shouldered.

“Who are you,” Harold yelled. His high-pitched voice cracked in midsentence. “What do you want?”

“I’m a deputy sheriff,” the man called.

Harold didn’t believe him. “Step into the light so I can see you,” he commanded.

The man moved back so that he was illuminated by the truck’s headlights. He wore a campaign hat with a wide, flat brim like officers of the law wear. Harold squinted, trying to see him better. He couldn’t make out the man’s face or if he had a gun. The man held up his hand and waved something.

“Here’s my badge,” he said.

Harold couldn’t see it either, but he said, “Okay, I’ll come down and let you in.” Clutching the rail, he descended the steps to the cabin’s one-room first floor. He went to the door and turned on the porch light. He took a deep breath and opened it. In a pool of yellow light, the tall man stood with feet set apart and his hands on his hips. He wore a khaki shirt with epaulets and a zippered front. His wide belt holstered a big revolver. He pushed a silver star badge toward Harold.

“I’m Deputy Armstrong from the sheriff’s department,” he said.

Harold studied his face. Up close and in the light, he was clean shaven with wide-set inquiring eyes and a big jaw. Harold thought he looked respectable, but he still wasn’t convinced he was who he said he was.

“I’m Harold,” he said, shaking the deputy’s broad hand. He no longer introduced himself as doctor because it had been so many years since he was in practice, he believed he didn’t deserve the privilege anymore.

“I’m sorry to bother you, sir. But we got a 911 call from your number.”

“How could that be?” Harold said. “My phone hasn’t worked since that storm a month ago.”

“Sometimes a broken line will short out and trigger a call. We’ve seen it before.”

“I wish the damn phone company would come fix it,” Harold said.

The man lowered his head. He looked around Harold and his eyes roamed the cabin. “You sure you’re all right?” he said.

“I’d be fine,” Harold said, “if I could just get a good night’s sleep.” He stepped back from the door. “Since you’re here, you might as well come in and have a drink.”

“I’m on duty,” Armstrong said. “I’ll just have some water.”

Harold led him to the pedestal oak table in the corner of the room. He turned on the Waterford crystal chandelier he had bought for Marge in Dublin on their 25th anniversary. Dusty light from its flame-shaped bulbs played on cobwebbed crystal prisms and shone on the deputy’s face.

“Sit,” Harold said. “Be my guest.”

The officer found a ladder-back chair. He took off his hat and laid it on the table. Harold went to a sink crammed with dirty dishes. He filled a Ball jar from the tap. With a trembling hand, he set it in front of the officer. Then he poured himself a glass of red jug wine and sat across from the deputy.

“I thought you were the man who killed the girl over on Plum Creek,” Harold said.

“We caught that guy today,” Armstrong said. “You don’t have to worry about him anymore.”

The deputy looked around the room that Marge had furnished with tasteful family heirlooms and folk art. On a worn Navajo rug that covered the cherry wood floor were fragments of acorn shells that chipmunks had left.

Harold wondered if he already knew the story. A silence followed. Harold was afraid the man was going to excuse himself and leave.

“I’ll bet you’re hungry,” Harold said. “I have some cookies. Let me get you a cookie.”

Harold rose from his chair and went to a Hoosier cabinet where he found the bag of sugar cookies he had purchased at the bakery in town a week ago. He put them on a saucer. His hand trembled when he set the cookies on the table.

“My life has sure had its ups and downs,” he said. “And plenty of regrets. But for the most part it’s been a good life.”

“Exactly how old are you?” Armstrong asked.

“As old as the hills,” Harold said. “Ninety-three to be exact.”

“Wow. That’s quite an accomplishment.” Harold shook his head.

“Old age isn’t an accomplishment,” he said. “It’s an ordeal. It’s like flying an airplane through a thunderstorm. Once you’re in the tempest and being tossed around, you can’t bail out. You just keep flying and try to be smart about it.” He traced the rim of his glass with a finger. “You’re lucky, son. You’re young and strong with a lot of good years ahead if you mind your p’s and q’s.”

“Don’t worry, dear,” he whispered. “It’s nothing to worry about. Just some poor soul who doesn’t know where he is.”

“Hope you’re right,” the deputy said. “Mind telling me what happened to your wife?”

“Cancer,” Harold said. “It was what they call a small-cell carcinoma. It started in her lungs and spread from there. Chemo and radiation didn’t work. I took care of her here at the cabin until the end. It’s where she wanted to be.”

Harold remembered Marge the night she died and a sadness welled up in him. Delirious with pain, she had fallen when she tried to get out of bed. She had lain on the floor disheveled and exposed with her nightgown up around her waist. Her skin was deeply jaundiced. He muscled her bulky body back onto the bed. He slipped a down pillow behind her head and told her he was sorry he had hurt her. Then he gave her morphine with a medicine dropper until she let out a little sigh and quit breathing.

“She was cremated,” Harold said. “I hired a crop duster to spread her ashes over the land. She loved it here as much I do. She knew where all rare wildflowers grew and where the morels were.”

Harold pointed to a series of botanical watercolors that hung on the log wall behind the deputy. There was a Siberian iris. A fiddlehead fern. A red maple leaf with a curled edge.

“That’s Marge’s work,” he said reverently.

Armstrong rose from the table. While he studied the paintings, Harold pictured Marge in her studio over the barn. She was at her easel, her long white hair in a blue bandana. An opera was playing on the radio. Her smock was a paint-smudged white lab coat Harold had worn when he saw his patients. Harold’s rheumy eyes glistened. He wiped them with the back of his hand.

“Look at the veins in those leaves,” the deputy said. “I love the detail. They look so real.”

“She was a fine artist,” Harold said. “And she was a fine woman. I loved almost everything about her.”

“I’m sure you miss her.” The deputy sat back down. “Did you have children?”

“No,” Harold said. “We weren’t lucky that way. It was a medical situation.”

“So you’re alone way out here in the middle of nowhere.”

“I’ve got the flora and fauna to keep me company,” Harold said. “I have lunch every day with two finches. They always let me pick up the tab.” Harold took a drink of wine. He closed his eyes, savoring the memories of Marge. “You probably think I’m demented. But I’m different than most folks. This is the kind of life I like. It’s what keeps me sane.”

“How long do you intend to stay out here?”

“As long as I can. I don’t make plans. I guess you’d say my forward-looking days are behind me.”

“Don’t you get lonely?”

“Sure. At times. But then sometimes it’s loneliest when there are people around.” Harold paused for a moment. He looked out the window at a dark sky. He could hear the barred owl, its plaintive call mocking the night. “It’s not that I don’t like people. I do, but not swarms of them and all their buzz. What I like more than anything out here is the silence of the land.”

The deputy nodded as if he understood. Then he looked at his wristwatch.

“I need to report in,” he said. He raised the Ball jar. “Here’s to you, Harold. A man of independence, longevity, and grit.”

“Longevity for sure. What’s the old joke? If I had known I was going to live this long, I would have taken better care of myself.”

The deputy chuckled. He drained his glass and set it on the table. Harold was feeling warm from his wine. He wanted Armstrong to stay and talk some more.

“Sure you don’t want something else to drink? A little glass of wine would go well with another cookie.”

“Thanks, but I’m still on duty.”

The deputy rose and put on his hat. He creased its brim with his fingers.

“I’ll see to it your phone gets fixed, pronto,” he said.

“I’d appreciate that.”

“I’ll come by and check on you once in a while. If you don’t mind.”

“That would be fine, too,” Harold said. “Just don’t show up in the middle of the night.”

The officer smiled. He turned and headed to the door. Harold followed him.

“You a fisherman?” Harold said.

“Yeah,” the deputy said. “I guess you could call me a fisherman.”

“Fly or spin casting?”

“I prefer fly fishing.”

“Good man,” Harold said. “Maybe you’d like to come out and try your luck. The ponds are well stocked with bass and bluegill.”

“I’d like that,” Armstrong said. “I’ve got a boy who likes to fish. Maybe I’ll bring him along. You can teach him to fly cast.”

Harold thought back to 80 years ago when his father first brought him to these rugged hills in a Model A Ford. He had taught Harold how to bow hunt for deer and bass fish up the road in Yellow Wood Lake. How wonderful that had been, how it had changed his life and the way he considered the Earth.

“Bring him out,” Harold said. “I’ve got rods you can use. I make the rods myself. They’re bamboo. I split the cane with a special knife.” He said that although he hadn’t made a fly rod since Marge had died and his tremor had worsened. “I’ll get one and show you. They’re in the barn.”

“I’ll bet they’re dandies,” the deputy said. “I’d like to see them, but I’ve got to hit the road.” He touched his hat. “Good night, Harold. You take care.”

“Good night. Thanks for stopping by.”

The man shook Harold’s hand and went to his truck. Harold slid the dead bolt into its receptacle with a reluctant, metallic click. He turned off the chandelier. Slowly he climbed the stairs. He paused a second to rest halfway up. He couldn’t believe how weak his legs were. Harold’s 93 years had taught him it was better not to count too much on things, but something told him he would soon see the man again. Harold entered the bedroom. He felt very tired. Without bothering to take off his clothes, he climbed into his side of the bed. He lay in the dark. His breathing was slow and even. He heard the truck pull away. The drone of its engine. The crunch of tires on gravel. The sounds stopped briefly, then resumed and soon faded away. The silence that remained was deep and complete. No breeze in the leaves. No insects pinging the window. No owl calling out. The logs of the cabin seemed to let out a sigh.

Harold rolled toward Marge’s side of the bed.

“See, dear,” he said. “I told you. Nothing to worry about. He seemed like a nice guy. He’s going to come fish someday.”

Harold looked beyond the bed out the arched window. Two stars had appeared in the black sky. A nimbus of creamy light surrounded them. Like a magician’s scarf, a cloud drifted by and made them disappear. When they reappeared they seemed brighter and more clearly defined. Harold believed that Marge was one of the stars and he was the other. There was a chill in the air. It occurred to him that winter was coming soon and he wasn’t prepared. He closed his eyes and hoped for the strength to cut and split a rick of firewood in the morning.

 

Daly Walker is a retired surgeon whose fiction and essays have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly as well as numerous literary journals, including The Sewanee Review, The Louisville Review, and The Catamaran Literary Reader. His collection of short stories, Surgeon Stories, was published by the Louisville Review’s Fleur-de-lis Press. For more, visit dalywalker.com.

This story is featured in the March/April 2020 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. Subscribe to the magazine for more art, inspiring stories, fiction, humor, and features from our archives.

Featured image: Shutterstock