EXPULSION

Michael Ansara

Was not once the known world— with its cooling streams, wandering forests, frost-rimmed seas, all its seductions, overlaid, wound loose and tight, tight and loose as a pair of snakes in sun —infinite until revealed as a spinning speck in the dust-filled womb of the universe?

Splitting the dark, a lamp throws its halo of safety over my daughter, her infant son, the two touching closer than lovers, within that soft heat, a certain instant of grace.

Are we not all seeking a way back to that?

MY FATHER’S GARDEN

Kimberly Nunes

I have the ornamental orange trees. After he died, I took them. The fruit are not sweet. The rind hard to peel. He never picked them, nor ate them, but loved to walk there, and talk with ease, sometimes, lost in thought. In large terra cotta pots, impatiens surrounded each tree. In winter, the gardeners planted chicories.

He left three letters for me and my brother, wanted to explain our aborted “siblings,” the women unknown to us. He wrote, I’ll be with them soon, in his desire to apologize.

Cymbidium orchids clumped in pots in the southwest corner of the courtyard. Nearby, the floral spikes obscured the statue of St. Francis he loved so much, a hundred purple irises. Salvias, pink roses, thick heather thrusting up from loamy beds. This, his garden.

And in the distance, beyond the stucco wall, tall coastal pines in blue California sky, unwavering. He called them his sentinels. One could see how they watched over him.

Regret, contrition, disgrace. Hell’s eternity. Something’s wrong? How did I miss this soul-withering pain in his final years of life?

My brother’s wife took the orchids. I preferred the trees—two Inoki cypress in tall black urns. They look out of place on my small Carmel plot—one on each side of the path along the west side, toward the ocean. My sentinels now.

And I saved the old Christmas cactuses, in their rustic pots. My daughter has loved them, and now, they’ll go to her.

His grief relieved at Roman Catholic retreats in the mountains, he wrote. Before he died, he told me the flasks of vodka helped him cope with the priests— where and when they must have asked him to name the children.

The huge chestnut-colored pots spill over in my garden now, with speckled geraniums, begonias, dwarf maples, and vines. I have tucked them into odd places—near the chimney, and large camellias, the glazes and heft impress me with his taste.

He esteemed the bodhisattva statue kneeling with hands held out—where we placed her—she stared in gratified blankness as my children brought offerings of flowers when they were small. She’s now sheltered among the ferns near my giant redwood tree.

It’s true, high stakes to transplant citrus trees. One still struggles, from pot to new soil. This winter, the oranges were the size of kumquats. Undesirable to me.

One he called Mary, the other Michael; the last fetus aborted, he named Rebecca—he must have wanted to tell me while we walked in his garden, but never did, too trapped in thought.

Come Saturday Morning

Lauro Palomba

Pawn takes pawn

Rusty removed mine from the board.

We were fairly well-matched, as he had been with my father before his death, but occasionally he’d make an incisive move, totally unforeseen, that hinted his mind had once been exceptionally sharp. He had, after all, co-founded a chain of highly successful discount stores, ultimately selling his share so he could now comfortably till and thresh his remaining years in the Ridgeview Retirement Residence where he’d befriended my father and, through him on my visits, me.

I liked him from the outset. His bearing showed he hadn’t come through the maze of living in tatters but neither had he put on airs. Somehow, in those thousands of hours of promoting the sizzle as well as the steak of his products, he’d refined thoughtfulness. As if at the close of day, his mouth and his brain, having worked together towards their livelihood, went their separate ways. After my father succumbed to his heart attack eleven months earlier, another unforeseen development, I had without fanfare taken his place across the chessboard from Rusty Solberg. Whenever neither of us was occupied on a Saturday morning, I’d drop into Ridgeview to chat and play.

Knight takes pawn

I removed his.

Rusty had wriggled into seventy fit, clear-eyed, and sporting all his marbles. He did have a scar on his leg from the knee to inside his white sock, like a dried irrigation canal, and I wondered if there wasn’t a similar one down his chest under his polo shirt. To his full head of graying hair, he’d recently added a circle beard, whiter on the sides of his chin. Trimmed and accessorized with his current ball cap and a pair of sunglasses, he passed for a well-aging action movie star—which he deflated by replying, “Ain’t nobody pretty no more.” Without them, and if he’d let the chin sides thicken, he reminded me of a medium schnauzer I’d had as a child. I felt sufficiently at ease with him to mention this too and, of course, he was able to laugh at himself.

“What’s that new contraption?” I asked. We were both able and willing—until we reached crunch time, anyway—to temporarily break off focus and take up whatever else had arisen in our pondering.

At the farthest end of Ridgeview’s garden, a yellow mechanism hung from a pole near the rose bushes. Apart from ourselves at the rear patio table, only a couple had ventured out to enjoy the freshening hour.

He looked over his shoulder. “Japanese beetle trap. It lets off a sex and floral chemical that attracts them. They empty it every night.”

The Japanese beetle had been invading our neck of the woods for several years and I’d considered getting one for my backyard. “I read they may actually attract more beetles than they kill. Seems self-defeating.”

“Efficient or not, a bunch regularly go missing. No more letters home. We should tell them there’s more to life than feeding and mating.”

We went back to studying the board.

My father had related he’d been married once, and briefly, to a woman for whom, according to Rusty, love, friendship, fidelity, more or less everything, was a calculation. But for a calculating person, she calculated poorly; and she confused willful with determined. Following the divorce, she’d speedily evaporated. Childless, himself an only child, Rusty was apparently down to a handful of cousins, one of whom still came to spend time, along with his former business partner and a lady or two who’d likely been, or might yet be classified as, lovers.

Bishop to B5

“Any of your friends started disappearing,” Rusty asked “or aren’t you at that stage of life?”

I’d already prepared a countermove and looked up. “You mean dying?”

“It’s not that you see them about and the next time they’re shrunken in a casket. That’s how it usually goes. You lose contact with them first. Like those beetles. Not over some argument, just drift off while on good terms. Then you hear they died but their resting place has gone too.”

“Can’t think of anyone right off. You’re excluding parents?”

“Friends specifically. The ones you’d had no trouble locating when you weren’t quite flourishing.”

Trying to distract before a move with a weightier matter wasn’t Rusty’s style. He observed the protocols. I benignly scoffed, “You’re feeling bad for the beetles.”

“Something crossed my mind not long ago. When friends disappear, when there’s nobody left to share your history, is it the end of you?”

“Might make a good line for a song.”

Knight to c5

Like something sticky adhering to his hand that couldn’t immediately be got rid of, he lingered on the subject: “Friends go missing lots of ways. Soldiers in wars. Civilians in dementia. In faraway geography. Or could just be nearby neglect. Turns out quite a few of mine went missing. Some left the world, some the friendship. That’s not counting those who have plenty of friends but not enough friendship. When most of your friends have gone, sometimes you have to fight the idea that what’s left isn’t much of a party.”

Rook to c1

His response was so swift, he must’ve anticipated mine. But overconfidence always exposes an opportunity.

My father didn’t carry grudges. If he failed fairly. Or it could have been the egalitarian in him that prompted one of his quotes: “At the end of the game, both the king and the pawns go into the same box.”

“Your dad was right. But before that, sometimes the queen rides off with the knight.”

I chuckled at his suddenly lighthearted comeback. “Hadn’t ever heard that.”

His tone as quickly switched off. “There are four or five on the tip of my tongue. First job I had, my boss became a sort of mentor. Older man, younger wife. A nasty child custody fight did him in. He went AWOL and was found months later in a demolished car out west. The second, alongside a country road not far from here. We hadn’t crossed paths for years but no animosity. Roommates once. Off hunting at dawn. Heart attack like your dad. Later, a professor I’d kept contact with. Saw him on a Sunday, made an appointment a few weeks forward and the next call came from his executor. And throw in a cousin too. Married a Brit, moved to England. We’d email back and forth. She got a cancer, bowels I recall, and then it was her husband on the phone. Four undisclosed gravesites. Four persons I knew who knew me. The best-laid plans go up in smoke.” And the heaviness vanished again. “That’s how I’m going. Better cremation than holding on to a plot of land.”

“It won’t be for a while. Hope you have that down on paper because things get lost in translation.”

“World’s designed to make us surly. If not designed, it still turns out that way.”

I more-or-less nodded in more-or-less agreement, then concentrated on avoiding a blunder.

Castle 0-0

Elapsed time between our moves lengthened, nothing seemingly happening, but any activity where the minutes quit nagging almost assures pleasure. Fewer pieces, more spaces, greater choices, enhanced pitfalls.

Until an obligation whispered as I defended an attack. I checked my watch. The chessboard was still hoarding an infinity of moves that might take an hour to resolve, barring a howler from one of us or a startling breakthrough. We’d poured a second coffee that morning and kibitzed before getting started and now I was running late.

“I’m sorry, Rusty. Your game. Duty calls; promised the wife only one and I’d be home to help her pack.”

“A draw then. It’s not how we score a win.”

“Draw it is.” I stood up. “Oh, another sorry. I’ll be away the next two Saturdays. This trip is overdue. We’re making the rounds of our far-flung kids. Email you when I’m back.”

“You gave me a heads-up last week.”

“Did I? Early version of a senior moment.”

“I’m luckier. All my moments are senior. But if you can hold on one more sec or I’ll forget. I’d like you to listen to this.”

He pulled the smartphone from his shorts pocket, logged on, and tapped the screen deftly as in a fast-forward recapitulation of our game moves; or the upcoming ones we’d abandoned.

“It’s called ‘Come Saturday Morning’. The song in a movie about first love between this uptight freshman and a kooky girl. Don’t recall the title. Pretty good movie but it doesn’t end with wedding bells.”

The song he’d selected began, gentle and harmonious, and in a sotto voce he spoke the lyrics, as if verifying them, checking for rust, without disturbing the music:

Come Saturday morning

I’m going away with my friend we’ll Saturday spend till the end of the day just I and my friend we’ll travel for miles on our Saturday smiles and then we’ll move on

He let the rest lilt and soothe unaccompanied.

“Know it? From the Seventies.”

“Can’t say I do. I’d have been a baby.”

“Every time it came on AFVN radio in ’71, all firing on the rifle range ceased and we’d listen to it, then go back about our business after it finished. It came on a fair bit too, maybe by request, because the station didn’t have commercials. Instead they were always telling us to clean our weapons, take malaria pills, change socks, avoid marijuana.”

“Wacky deejays if you ask me.”

“Not on the Armed Forces Vietnam Network.”

“In Vietnam?”

“That would be a safe guess. At the sniper school.”

“Sniper school in Vietnam?”

“The enemy’s there. Then he’s down. And his buddies know nothing about it,” he said, as if repeating an ingrained training mantra.

I’ve always believed choices aren’t made, can’t be made, separate from character and this seemed a disconnection. I don’t know if I actually gaped but I stood there feeling as if he’d just introduced me to a stranger, a stranger worth frequenting.

“You mind if I ask you about that when I get back?”

He shrugged casually. “The story hasn’t changed.”

Draw

It was the following dozy Saturday, after breakfast, while my wife was driving us from daughter two to son one that the conversation revived in me. I searched for the song with my smartphone, dodged the advertisement, and unmuted the sound.

“That’s a nice song,” my wife said in recognition. “Haven’t heard it forever. When mum baked she was happy, or the other way around. She’d half-mumble, half-hum along. Going away with a friend, traveling for miles. Don’t think she’s been on an airplane more than twice.”

“More a take-to-the-road song. Rusty played it for me. A history comes with it.”

“Usually the case. Like mine. Start it again.”

I was intrigued by Rusty at that school and maybe what came after, but also by all these young men honing their sniping but stopping to listen to such a dreamy, contemplative song rather than something more raucous, the Rolling Stones or similar adrenaline-pumping rock-and-rollers. That was the soundtrack of any Vietnam movie I’d ever seen. Unless they had meant it as a spoof. On the other hand, being patient snipers, not the drudgery of infantry, maybe they preferred to slow the blood instead of rousing it. It’s what worked best for their absorption and their triggers.

I was surprised how eagerly I wanted to get back to Ridgeview. But running counter to it, as the music tailed off, an absurd and grotesque endgame flashed at me: Rusty had died and been cremated. His cousin had taken him away in an urn and, as a disappearing friend, neither a headstone, plaque, or disposal site would exist to indicate his presence.