Crab Orchard Review Vol 5 No 2 S/S 2000

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In this volume: Sarah Hannah Goldstein Ray Gonzalez James Gurley Jeffrey Hammond James Harms Terrance Hayes Major Jackson Margaret Kahn Steve Kistulentz Leonard Kress Gerry LaFemina Amy Lemmon Jeffrey Levine Rebecca Loudon Rick Madigan Al Maginnes Lee Martin Philip Metres James Nolan Lee Robinson Paulette Roeske

$6.00

Vern Rutsala B. A. St. Andrews Meg Schoerke E. M. Schorb Mark Scott R. T. Smith Adam Sol Adrienne Su Brian Teare Elaine Terranova Richard Terrill Pappi Tomas Amy Uyematsu Eamonn Wall Bryan Walpert Charles Harper Webb Gary J. Whitehead Terence Winch David Wojahn Charles Wyatt Bro. Yao

ISSN 1083-5571

Volume 5, Number 2 Spring/Summer 2000

Liz Ahl Fred Santiago Arroyo Paulette Beete Diann Blakely Bruce Bond Marta Boswell Jennifer Boydston Kurt Brown Edward Byrne Richard Cecil Richard Chess Billy Collins Geraldine Connolly Ricardo Cortez Cruz Jim Daniels Tracy Daugherty Sean Thomas Dougherty Patricia Fargnoli Sascha Feinstein Sergey Gandlevsky Richard Garcia

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Crab Orchard Review

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$6.00us Vol. 5 No. 2

The World of Music, The Music of the World

,77108-DFFHBh:p;m

Anton P. Janulis is a graduate of the Bachelor of Arts program in Cinema and Photography at Southern Illinois University Carbondale.

Crab Orchard Review

Cover Art: Three photographs

by Anton P. Janulis Š 2000

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A B ORCH A R R C D •

•

REVIEW

C RAB •

ORCH A R D •

REVIEW A JOURNAL OF CREATIVE WORKS

VOL. 5 NO. 2

“Hidden everywhere, a myriad leather seed-cases lie in wait . . .”

—“Crab Orchard Sanctuary: Late October” Thomas Kinsella Editor Richard Peterson

Managing Editor Jon Tribble

Poetry Editor Allison Joseph

Prose Editor Carolyn Alessio

Editorial Interns Ruth Ann Daugherty Terri Fletcher Jennifer Gold Anton Janulis Chris Kennedy Samantha J. Lopez Jen Neely Lynanne Page Elise Shalda Lesa Williams Nikita Williams

Assistant Editors Adrian Harris Melanie Jordan Rack Alberta Skaggs Jenni Williams

Book Review Editor Jon Tribble

Spring/Summer 2000 ISSN 1083-5571

Special Projects Assistant Chris Kelsey Board of Advisors Ellen Gilchrist Charles Johnson Rodney Jones Thomas Kinsella Richard Russo

The Department of English Southern Illinois University Carbondale

Address all correspondence to: Crab Orchard Review Southern Illinois University Carbondale Carbondale, Illinois 62901-4503 Crab Orchard Review (ISSN 1083-5571) is published twice a year by the Department of English, Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Subscription rates in the United States for individuals are $10 for one year, $20 for two years, $30 for three years; foreign rates for individuals are, respectively, $14, $28, and $42.

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The publication of Crab Orchard Review is made possible with support from the Chancellor, the College of Liberal Arts, and the Department of English of Southern Illinois University Carbondale; and through generous private and corporate donations.

Lines from Thomas Kinsella’s poem “Crab Orchard Sanctuary: Late October” are reprinted from Thomas Kinsella: Poems 1956-1973 (North Carolina: Wake Forest University Press, 1979) and appear by permission of the author.

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C RAB •

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REVIEW

SPRING/SUMMER 2000

VOLUME 5, NUMBER 2

FICTION AND PROSE Fred Santiago Arroyo

In the Memory of Fields: An Excerpt from For the Love of My Father

1

Ricardo Cortez Cruz

Black Mafia Life

17

Margaret Kahn

Taqseem

21

Steve Kistulentz

Great Basin Sonata

56

Lee Martin

Thumb Under

61

James Nolan

Perpetual Care

76

B. A. St. Andrews

The Healing

111

Charles Wyatt

Emil (A Cautionary Tale)

120

Tracy Daugherty

Ooby Dooby

129

Jeffrey Hammond

I Want to Jump But I’m Afraid I’ll Fall: Confessions of a Rock’n’Roll Snob

159

Lee Robinson

Shall We Gather at the River?

174

Richard Terrill

Improvisations: Wayne Shorter

177

Pappi Tomas

Blow Your Horn

208

Terence Winch

Last Legs

221

Book Reviews

Recent Titles by Sascha Feinstein, 227 Terrance Hayes, Ricardo Pau-Llosa, Sterling Plumpp, and an anthology of Rock ’n’ Roll fiction

POETRY Liz Ahl

Dobro

32

Paulette Beete

Blues for a Pretty Girl

33

Diann Blakely

Me and the Devil Blues If I Had Possession Over Judgment Day

37 38

Bruce Bond

Coltrane’s Teeth

40

Marta Boswell

Mustang Sally Pays Her Debt to Wilson Pickett

43

Jennifer Boydston

Sun Ship (take 2)

44

Kurt Brown

Wow & Flutter

46

Edward Byrne

Listening to Lester Young

47

Richard Cecil

A Night at the Opera

49

Richard Chess

Klezmer

51

Billy Collins

Serenade

54

Geraldine Connolly

One Hundred Elvises

89

Jim Daniels

Red Vinyl

90

Sean Thomas Dougherty

Alphabet Made of Musical Instruments

92

Patricia Fargnoli

Poem for a Composer at Eighty-Three

94

Sascha Feinstein

Plutonium When the Sun Comes Out

96 98

Sergey Gandlevsky translated by Philip Metres

“Sing something about prison and parting . . .”

100

Richard Garcia

Birdlike Sonata

102

Sarah Hannah Goldstein

“Sally Go Round the Roses”

104

Ray Gonzalez

The Allman Brothers’ Live at the Fillmore Concerts

106

James Gurley

Euphonic Sounds

107

James Harms

Bluegrass

109

Terrance Hayes

Friday Rooftop Museum Poem

134

Major Jackson

from Urban Renewal Oregon Boogie

135 136

Leonard Kress

Polka Dancing to Eddie Blazonczyk 138 and His Versatones in Coaldale, Pennsylvania

Gerry LaFemina

Percussion

139

Amy Lemmon

Monday Night Contradance

140

Jeffrey Levine

Ave Verum

142

Rebecca Loudon

Dreaming Patsy Cline

143

Rick Madigan

Red House Blues

144

Al Maginnes

The Endurance of Gospel

146

Paulette Roeske

Mary Wilson-Formerly-of-TheSupremes Sings Ooh-Baby Songs at The Nugget

148

Vern Rutsala

Fifteen

149

Meg Schoerke

Perdido

151

E. M. Schorb

Leadbelly

153

Mark Scott

Velocity

155

R. T. Smith

In Creasy Cove, Domestic Duet Pick it, Squirrel

157 158

Adam Sol

Sacred Music

180

Adrienne Su

Late-Night Commercials

185

Brian Teare

Clock with One Blue Wing

186

Elaine Terranova

White Leather Tango Gloves

188

Richard Terrill

Appalachian Spring

190

Amy Uyematsu

Storm The Soloist

191 192

Eamonn Wall

Blues for Rory

193

Bryan Walpert

Improvisation

195

Charles Harper Webb

Bar Band

197

Gary J. Whitehead

To Build a Fiddle

199

Terence Winch

A Short History of 20th-Century Irish Music in America

202

David Wojahn

For Townes Van Zandt, 1944-97

204

Bro. Yao

Resurrect the Mouth of the Drum

206

Contributors’ Notes

237

INDEX TO VOLUME FIVE — 1999/2000 INDEX OF BOOK REVIEWS — 1997/2000

247 255

A Note on Our Cover

The three photographs on the cover of this issue are the work of Anton P. Janulis, who graduated with his Bachelor of Arts degree from the Department of Cinema and Photography at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. In Fall 2000, he will be pursuing his Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing at the University of Florida.

Announcements

We would like to congratulate past contributors Jim Daniels, Ray Gonzalez, and Patricia Spears Jones.

Jim Daniels’ poem “Between Periods,” Ray Gonzalez’s poem “For the Other World,” and Patricia Spears Jones’ poem “Ghosts,” all of which which appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Volume 4, Number 1, were selected by Rita Dove for inclusion in 2000 Best American Poetry.

Also, we would like to congratulate past contributor Robert Wrigley and current contributor Terrance Hayes. Robert Wrigley is the recipient of the 2000 Kingsley Tufts Award. Terrance Hayes is the recipient of the 2000 Kate Tufts Discovery Award.

Fred Santiago Arroyo

In the Memory of Fields: An Excerpt from For the Love of My Father

Tino is a good six cornstalks in front of me. His wrinkled, sweatstained paper-sack hat knocking against the cream-yellow tassel tops of corn. Deep in the green, up ahead of me, Boogaloo’s voice rises from the wet field like the repetitious song of the coqui frog: Que me duele la cabeza Tráme una cerveza Que me duele el corazón Tráme un palo de ron Then the soft, tired voices—Tino, Arturo, Negro, and my father— sing in harmony the guaracha’s chorus, their voices hanging low near the dirt, floating back towards me through the dew covered leaves. The guaracha is a new lament, a song of sorrow and longing that Boogaloo, my father’s cousin, has brought from Puerto Rico. Only fifteen, I work towards this song, I keep listening and try to stay close to the men.

They keep moving, the tops of the corn rustling, swaying.

Sometimes the song is all we have—the rhythm that soothes our hands scraping the leaves, lifting bags of potatoes, our feet walking up a dusty lane, stepping behind a tractor in the late afternoon sun, jumping on the back of a wagon.

Sometimes the song is all I have—the rhythm of a language that separates me from the men. It reminds me that I have not lived the lives that they have, that even though I haven’t left an island like them, I am too young to be without a home, too young to enter into a life-long struggle of finding work. It reminds me that I should be ten miles down the road, in Niles, going to high school with my friends, Lorime, Juan, Magdalene.

My thighs are sore and chafing in the dew that has soaked my pants. I can’t keep up this morning, my arms tired, my head foggy from too much drinking last night. Outside the Sportsmen’s bar, I sat under a tree drinking a six-pack of beer, while the men went inside. Blue and red lights circled inside, the deep beat of drums escaping from the swinging doors. I was about to fall asleep when Crab Orchard Review ◆ 1

Fred Santiago Arroyo

they came with a bottle of cold Don Q, yelling for me. They passed around the bottle of rum, laughed at each others’ stories and played dice. Under the August moon, we walked along the edge of the highway, back to our shack, the lights of cars and semis spraying across our faces, down to our shoes. Single file, kicking up stones, into the cool darkness we sang our song: If my head hurts Bring me a beer If my heart hurts Bring me a shot of rum Sometimes it isn’t enough to work hard and fast, to try and keep up. Some mornings all I can do is stay quiet and wonder if I have no choice but to become the man my father is: silent, always tied to men who have worked since they were children, men who seem to walk with a stoop straight towards death. I wonder if there will always be Boogaloos in my life: men who don’t feel any pain.

He has just come from Puerto Rico, and he’s full of smiles jokes laughter—full of his voice, the guaracha, and he sings louder and moves faster and faster down the rows.

Rápido, rápido, mis hermanos.

Moving faster, I pull off three more ears, drop them into my burlap sack. Last night, outside the bar, underneath the tree, Boogaloo told everyone how he wasn’t going to work in a field ever again. He came to the mainland to have fun, eat good, live each day smooth and light.

Suave.

Be so rich I wipe my ass with one dollar bills.

My father wasn’t angry and his voice wasn’t drunk. He seemed to speak to the sky, out into the fields. He said that when his father made him quit school to work, he never thought he’d leave the fields of Puerto Rico to end up in another field. He looked at Boogaloo and told him about the mill on the outskirts of the cane field. Chained to the mill, always walking in a circle, was a huge white ox. That ox had walked so much rain filled its path, the water lapping against the bottom of its stomach. My father and the other boys never spoke of the tiredness they saw in its eyes. All they did was keep working, their numb arms unloading the carts stacked with cane. One night, in front of a fire, under a mango tree, inside all the noises of the jungle and the men talking, Changó, my father, just a young boy, made up the guaracha “The Dance of the Tired Ox.” The song kept 2 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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them alive, kept them moving. He told Boogaloo they lost the pain of their skins, the longing for their families, inside that song. Only nine years old, he, like Boogaloo, was filled with dreams. Days went by, years went by, and now there are no more dreams inside, now it is as if he has walked into his fate: my father living in the memory of fields.

I break off another ear.

Those were the most words I ever heard my father speak, and under that tree, in the moonlight, he sang and I heard how beautiful the guaracha is, how deep inside my father has a strong, lovely voice.

I walk out of the corn row to the field lane. Tino jumps up on the wagon—his droopy blue pants frayed, caught on the bottom of his shoes, his shirttails ruffling—and rolls over the mound of corn.

He lands on Arturo; Arturo pushes him off to the side. All the men sit in a circle, their backs against the slats of the wagon, on the outer edge of the corn. Arturo drops his head into his knees, wraps his head with his arms.

Hurry up, pichichi, Boogaloo yells.

They raise their heads, look back, laugh. Mr. Vollman jerks the clutch, speeding the tractor up the lane. I run toward the wagon, lifting the bag over my shoulder. My father kneels at the end and I throw him the bag, jump.

I don’t know what’s worse, hijo, you or the viejo.

It’s only around seven o’clock, my skin soaked, soon the sun rising higher. I will work most of the day with wet, mildewed clothes drying on my body like a wilted second skin: I don’t need Boogaloo’s mouth poking at me, calling me hijo. He may be my father’s cousin, but that doesn’t mean I have to respect him. He smiles, his face broad, black, his teeth white and straight. He waits for me to say something, but I can’t.

My father throws an ear of corn, striking Boogaloo’s chest. He laughs, picks it up and tosses it back to my father, who catches it and drops the ear into his lap. He claps his hands in front of him, then wipes them down the side of his pants. His hair is wet and shiny, his face beginning to turn nut brown. He lifts the ear, pulls back the husk, raises it to his lips, and sucks the juice from the sweet corn, staring at Boogaloo.

My father has told me that Boogaloo’s from the pueblo of Loíza, where most of the Africans live. Boogaloo’s some Yoruban spirit name, and my father can’t even remember his real name—everyone called him Boogaloo for so long that the name has stuck. His mother Crab Orchard Review ◆ 3

Fred Santiago Arroyo

is Iríke, my great aunt who I met a long time ago when we went to Puerto Rico. My father told me I met Boogaloo, too. But there’s this hidden story, some distance between the two. I thought I once saw my father and Boogaloo as close, their arms around each other, smiling.

Here, in Michigan, though, there’s doubt. All the men seem to walk in a dream, seem to forsake who they are and work for people who treat them like dirt. My father is quiet, foolish, drunk most of the time. Him and Boogaloo make fun of each other, cut each other down to the bone, and they don’t question a thing, will not yell out or fight back.

My father turns the corn cob in his lips, sucks one more time.

He tosses the cob at Boogaloo’s feet. He wipes his face with the back of his hand, sucks his teeth, tilting his head back against the wagon slats and closes his eyes, the sun brown and soft on his brow.

I’ve seen my father not drink, laugh, then point out across Lake Michigan, try to explain to me the color of the sun meeting the water, only to turn away, look down to the sand in silence and cry. There must be something else—there must be more, some other time.

We all jump off the wagon. The sun rises higher, prickly warm against the back of my head. A sunny day, my mother’s henna hair, standing in a blue polka-dot dress, a little suitcase by her feet. She slid her fingers into a pair of white gloves. My father took my hand and turned us away. He walked us down the sidewalk without saying good-bye, without questioning why she was leaving, where she was going.

Tino walks forward, slides open the pole barn door. I walk to the rear, open the back door. Arturo moves across the hard packed dirt floor, turns on the electricity, the dusty-yellowed lights flooding down on the green and black machinery. Now we will leave the corn behind. In the afternoons, under the sharp sun, Tino, Boogaloo, my father and I stand on the back of the potato picker watching for sticks, stones, potato plants, clumps of soil. Mr. Vollman driving up and down the rows. Negro and Arturo—the strongest, full of stamina, who work like burros—walk behind the picker and bend over picking up any potatoes the picker has missed, ankle deep in the soil, kicking up dirt, a gold stream rolling behind the picker as they bend low to pick up any potatoes that fall off the wagon. Their arms golden with dust.

Their hair matted, shimmering in the sun. All week long, in the late afternoon heat, wagons being filled with potatoes. Now we will bag those potatoes, now the brand new paper bags wait for our hands.

The ground trembles and buzzes, the energy of the black 4 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Fred Santiago Arroyo

conveyor line building up speed, quickly flowing forward. Negro shovels potatoes from the back of the wagon onto the conveyor, the pitchfork twanging from potatoes bouncing and falling against its steel prongs. Changó stands on the side of the line, in the middle of the potatoes nudging against each other like fish fighting their way upstream, watching for bad potatoes, clumps of soil, weeds, rocks— he pulls, up comes the long roots of a rogue soybean plant. Arturo and Boogaloo wait at the end of the line, the potatoes schooling up against each other. They dip their hands down like nets, scooping up potatoes. They drop them into scales until they have ten pounds, then tip the scales, dropping the potatoes into empty bags. In unison, each sweeps a bag onto a waist-high table and turns back to start again. Tino twists copper bands around the tops of the bags, lifts one off the table, swinging the bag in flight to me, and I catch it and stack the ten-pound bag on a pallet, the first pallet in a long line that I will stack in a five by three design, alternating the pattern every layer, until the pallets are six rows high or four hundred and eighty pounds heavy. Once a bag is set into the pattern I must turn, for Tino will throw another and I must catch it and lay it down and keep going, catch turn catch, the pattern becoming part of my hands, arms, part of my muscles, stacking catching turning, part of my blood, the rhythm pumping through me, creating the intimacy of this paper, these copper bands, my sweat, the roundness of the potatoes against the palms of my hands. The motion turning, circling—I must keep going, my hands sore, must keep turning and stacking and catching faster.

Hurry up, hijo, Boogaloo sings.

You don’t have a row straight Your hands bricks Feet stones Bones like sticks Are ready to break Ready to escape Are ready to run away A bag falls from my hands, hits the ground. I bend over. Tino grunts. A bag strikes my back, the copper band digging into my shoulder blade. I turn. Another bag knocks my hand against the pallet.

You are falling behind, hijo.

Tu vida es muy lenta y la del viejo es rápida Crab Orchard Review ◆ 5

Fred Santiago Arroyo

Boogaloo won’t stop. He’s singing, dropping full scales into bags in a fast rhythm to match his hard words.

I kick the fallen bags away, turn back and try to find my rhythm.

Inside, I try to block out Boogaloo’s words with my own song, with a rhythm that could drown out his laughter. If only I could sing out, Fuck you—you black Boogaloo—Boogaloo you black fuck—I don’t know you and you aren’t anything to me and is that your face smiling or your ass. Es la cara? O es el culo?

I want to sing so Boogaloo will remember that I walked up and asked about the Help Wanted sign, while he and my father and the rest of the men sat in the car and passed around a bottle of Don Q. Yes, you can work here, son. Bring your father and your friends— bring as many as you can. We pay $3.50 an hour, but you can go over to Berrien Center and apply for food stamps. And you can live out back.

I turn, catch a bag, place it down. Inside the market, people buy fruits and vegetables. I stood in front of a table of asparagus and listened to Mr. Vollman. I listened and looked out through the back door, out across the strawberry patches and potato fields, seeing the white cabin we would move into. A shack: no bigger than a child’s bedroom: a leaning square of wood with a table in the corner, a propane burner on top, a single bulb hanging from the ceiling, two dusty mattresses lying on the floor. Boogaloo sleeps every night—a broad smile, his eyelids fluttering—like he’s dreaming of the most beautiful and happiest of worlds, and he never recognizes that I stood there and listened to Mr. Vollman’s words. Piles of freshly picked asparagus glistened on the table, customers lifting bunches into plastic bags. I felt their eyes, heard their words—Look at that boy. Look at how dirty he is.

It wasn’t you, Boogaloo.

I listened, looked down at the concrete floor, my hands balled up inside my pants’ pockets. I stood there for my father.

My song goes unheard, wouldn’t matter to Boogaloo. He doesn’t feel or care about anyone. I catch bags, try to keep up, set them down, try to make the pattern of my life hold together. Catch a bag, lay it down. The scales echo, vibrate against the rafters. Sparrows fly and sing, swerving in and out of the barn, their curved shadows fluttering across the dirt floor. The conveyor belt rumbles on. The pitchfork twanging, the sound reverberating down the line against the back of my skull. I lay a bag down.

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Outside, cars glide down US 31 in a steady stream of color and chrome, pulling in and out of the gravel lot, customers shuffling in out of the market, dust lifting in a swirl, their arms full with brimming bags and baskets of plums, apricots, apples, peaches, sweet corn. A girl walks across the lot. Her long black hair tied with a yellow ribbon. Dressed in a pair of cut-offs, her tanned legs flexing underneath a light sheen of sun-colored down. She has on a white bikini top with pineapples scattered about. She gracefully pulls her legs into the back seat of her station wagon. Her father hands her a basket of apples, closes her door, and he and her mother get in and drive away. To let go. Lay a bag down: to let go: to be free like them.

Tino throws me another bag. The bags are clean, white, the paper smooth and soft against my hands, printed with the silhouette of some red mountains, a green stream running in between them. The dusty smell sweet and light inside the pole barn, the sun beating down hot on the tin roof. I lay the bag down. I turn, wait. Tino pushing on the back of his hips, stretching his spine. Negro’s smiling, bent over, beads of sweat raining from his black face onto the stream of potatoes, his muscles in knots, the pitchfork standing in the midst of the potatoes. He points to Boogaloo.

Almost done, hijo. You’ve worked hard, Ernestito.

Boogaloo’s face twists into a smile, a grimace of sweat. He lets out a deep sigh, his breath whistling through his teeth as if he’s been talking for a while.

Tino throws me another bag, then the last one. I lift up the bags I dropped, lay them on the pallet. Changó takes his box of rocks and clumps of dirt to the rock pile out back. Arturo walks over, turns off the power. The lights flicker. The conveyor belt dies with a final surge of electricity evaporating into the dark corners of the barn.

Here you go, Ernie. Mr. Vollman hands me my check along with my father’s.

Boogaloo comes trotting up, wiping his back and underarms with his shirt. Arturo follows behind laughing. Negro jumps down off the wagon, runs forward. Tino rubs the dust from his pants, slowly approaches.

Mr. Vollman turns to them.

OK, that’s all. Nada mas, he announces, wiping the sweat from his forehead as if he has worked alongside us, as if he feels the rawness of my inner-thighs, the chapped, tender skin of my hands.

As though he feels the tiredness of the summer’s heat and sweat Crab Orchard Review ◆ 7

Fred Santiago Arroyo

from driving up and down the lanes to drop us off and pick us up.

Boogaloo steps in front of Mr. Vollman, tucks his check into his pants, then shows him how to shake the solidarity way: first, a regular handshake; followed by a thumb grip; then a hard shake with a knuckle grip; finally to let go and hit each others’ closed fists.

Mr. Vollman chuckles, his head turned up, his lips raised high over his teeth.

Boogaloo smiles, the red sunburnt arm of Mr. Vollman grazing his black arm.

For a moment, I see Mr. Vollman as decent and caring, a man no different than any of us. He has a wife, two young daughters.

One Sunday afternoon I walked up the hill to Mr. Vollman’s farmhouse to tell him we had run out of propane at the shack. He stood out in the yard, underneath a big oak tree, pushing his daughters on a tire swing. On a picnic table in neat little rows, sparkling in the sun, Mrs. Vollman had canning jars filled with fruits and vegetables, jams and jellies. She came out in her apron and gave me a loaf of bread she had baked and a jar of red raspberry jam. Mr. Vollman never looked at me. He stopped swinging his girls, looked out across his fields, and told me we could build a fire in the yard, and tomorrow he’d have some propane delivered. I walked away, down the hill, the bread warm under my arm, not wanting to hate Mr. Vollman but knowing throughout my life I may have no choice but to work for people like him, and they would take advantage of me, they would pay me what they pleased, they could always send me off to a tired shack out back.

At the bottom of the hill, on the edge of a potato field, I sat down in a clump of raspberry bushes. I heard the girls laughing. I opened the jar of jam. In the distance a dog barked, and out on the highway I could hear trucks and cars. I ate the whole jar of jam with my fingers, the berries sweet and soft in my mouth. The girls laughed again, their voices happy and shrill. I looked up the hill. Mr. Vollman pushed them on their swing, his white shirt rolled to his elbows, a smile on his face, the cool air rushing through the girls’ long blond hair. I tried to get up and leave, but their voices, my sour stomach, some birds thrashing in the bushes—they all made me cry. And then I retched under the bushes and buried the jar deep within them. I walked back to the shack, my throat dry and sore, the loaf of bread tucked under my arm for my father and the men.

Changó walks back into the pole barn carrying his box. He sets 8 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Fred Santiago Arroyo

it underneath the conveyor belt, pulls out his shirttails, wipes his face—brown hand prints and wide sweeps of dirt smudging his white shirt. He’s exhausted, his face drenched with streams of dirty sweat, sick from too much drink, his cheeks saggy, his lips purple and thin. He pulls out a comb, slicks back his hair. My father still wears the same white dress shirts and black pants that he wore when my mother lived at home. In the evening, after our dinner, I walk down to the stream that runs out back by our shack and I wash my father’s shirts the best I can with a bar of soap, by beating them against the rocks.

Changó pats the top of his hair, slides his comb into his back pocket.

Keeping my father’s shirts clean seems to keep him alive, seems to give us both a piece of my mother.

We all head away from the market and the pole barn, out past the old strawberry patches of June, the plants wilted and smashed down to a phlegm-colored yellow by the sun, and across the breadth of the patch, dried husks and stalks of sweet corn lie scattered and torn. Negro and Arturo are a good ways ahead, headed out towards the potato fields, heat-mirages fluttering behind their dust-caked boots. Tino stops to the right: at the trash heap. He lifts a red mesh bag of onions. Taking his short, blunt knife from his waistband, he stabs through the top of the bag; the bag rips open like a fresh wound, onions bleeding out onto the dust in a thud. He kicks a few of the onions over with the tips of his shoes, looking for what’s salvageable, then bends down, stabs an onion, lifts it up, bends down again, stabs another. Cutting away at the soft, black outer edges, he slips the onion hearts into the front left pocket of his pants. My father comes from behind Tino with the jagged end of a watermelon; its insides hanging out—fleshy, red, wet, raw. Boogaloo drinks from a carton of orange juice, spits it back out, a long stream of foamy orange and white, a gush of acid and mold filling the air.

I step to the trash. Raising a broken fruit crate, I lift a head of lettuce that doesn’t look half bad.

Ah, lechuga para el conejo, Boogaloo hisses.

Changó laughs.

His eyes red, rheumy, and watery in the midday sun, Tino wipes his knife against the front of his dust-covered blue pants.

Yes, Boogaloo, and this rabbit has worked quick and light today, Tino says in my defense.

Pero viejo, no matter how quick the rabbit, it’s always caught and skinned, Boogaloo counters.

Crab Orchard Review ◆ 9

Fred Santiago Arroyo

Tino holds the handle of his knife, stares at Boogaloo.

He laughs, his white teeth sparkling in the sun. And then, to spite Tino, Boogaloo jabs: Y viejo, no matter how old the goat, it will still make good stew.

My father cackles, shuffles down the lane in a cloud of dust, the injured watermelon raised over his shoulder dripping seeds and juice into his footprints.

Tino doesn’t say a word. He looks at Boogaloo for a moment, then me, rubbing the handle of his knife. He heads up the lane, following Changó. Boogaloo walks away, following behind Tino and singing: Conejo y cabra La sopa de mi vida El viejo y el hijo Los dos camachos Elegantes como burros Conejo y cabra La sopa de mi vida Cabra y Conejo The song rises, stabs loud into my chest as I walk behind them to the shack, following red footprints.

Arturo is filling a pan with water from the irrigation sprinkler.

Negro washes off some potatoes he has dug from the field. Tino hands Negro the onion hearts to wash off, takes the pan from Arturo to put on the propane burner inside. Under the black walnut tree in front of the shack, I pull out the jar of mayonnaise and the salt and pepper shakers we have shaded with newspaper inside a cardboard box.

Tráme la botella, Changó yells.

The engine in Boogaloo’s passion purple Plymouth fires-up. I turn back, the engine revs, then idles with the sweet sound of salsa escaping out of the car’s windows. The metallic silver-flecked Duster glitters in the late afternoon light. The chrome mag wheels, the scrubbed jet-black tires, silver splashing across the grass. The Duster’s jacked-up, with yellow traction bars hanging behind the tires. On the side windows, decals of the roadrunner and the words Meep-Meep, two lime-green palm trees outlined in neon-orange framing the cursive Local Motion.

This is a car, a silver dream. A father buys it for his son, fills up the gas tank, gives him a twenty so he can go out. Cruising up and down Main Street, his two friends by his side, they take US 31 out 10 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Fred Santiago Arroyo

to Thomas Stadium, the Hayloft Ice Cream Parlor. All the girls sitting on the hoods of their cars in shorts, white blouses, sun dresses, their summer-tanned bodies glowing in the cool night air, licking cold, soft ice cream cones.

A sweet, cherry car is what Boogaloo says he always wanted.

He told me how with the money he saved from working at the Starkist Tuna factory in Mayagüez, he flew to Miami and bought this Duster at the first classic car lot he found. All those dreams, all his work, only to drive up to Niles, only to work in these fields. He never drives the car. He washes and waxes it. He starts it to charge the battery. He turns the stereo loud to hear his songs. But Boogaloo never drives it. We work all day and, no matter how tired we are, no matter how late it is once we get cleaned up, we still walk to the bar.

We work all week and don’t do anything on Sunday but sit under the shade of the walnut tree as Boogaloo puts on a one man show of his favorite jíbaro tales and guarachas. Sometimes I want to tell him I’m tired of his tales, his songs, tired of how easy it is for him to conjure up some memory from when he was little, some evening when he saw a man dancing in the street, some little snatch of song or joke he overheard on some lazy afternoon and has so easily taken within himself and turned into a moment of significance, my father and the other men sitting under the tree mesmerized by his words. I want to tell him to just take us away, that he should drive us to Lake Michigan, just drive us away from these fields.

I remember my father’s cars: a 1966 Impala, a convertible Camaro, a yellow Mustang, the wind on my face, a neck scarf ruffling aside my mother’s hair, my father driving along the sea.

Aye, que suave, Arturo sings, shaking his hips to the beat by the irrigation sprinkler.

Everyone gathers by the edge of the tree, inside the circle of shade. I pass the bottle around. I drink last. The rum’s thick, hot, bristly in the pocket of my stomach; then it evens out, feels like smooth waves rolling against a shore, churning out cool from my skin. I hand the bottle to my father, walk out to the back of the shack to take a piss.

Boogaloo begins to sing: Que me duele la cabeza Tráme una cerveza Que me duele el corazón Tráme un palo de ron Crab Orchard Review ◆ 11

Fred Santiago Arroyo

I look back to his voice. Negro strips off his shirt and pants, jumps into the sprinkler.

Arturo yells out: Dame el jabón.

The engine revs to a high whine, shuts off. I walk away, underneath the clothesline suspended between a small pine tree and the corner of the shack, the line straining with soiled boxer shorts, black socks, white v-neck undershirts, the men’s clean guayaberas for tonight’s drinking. The rum churns through my body in a deep rhythmic wave, splashing against the tips of my fingers and toes, only to crash and begin the revolution of beating water telling me: Ernest, Ernestito, you’re starting to feel okay, it’ll be okay for you’ll drink more and all your tiredness will go away. I pee on a cracked-in-half cinder block, my pee splashing onto the dust, the sound of so much water rushing back across my hair, through my ears. I listen to the strength of this voice, feel those banal words, it’ll be okay, hear the way my mother always whispered what she thought of as a touch of grace.

The sun begins to fall towards the northwest horizon of Lake Michigan. Soon night will come, there will be more laughter, more drink. I can hear my father and Tino talking inside the shack. Negro lets out a howl, Arturo giggling. I zip my pants, turn, walk back toward the voices.

They’re all in hysterics. Boogaloo is standing out in the field scrubbing his afro with a bar of soap. Arturo guides the water from the irrigation sprinkler towards his naked body, hard streams of water hitting Boogaloo’s thighs, his chest. For a moment, it is as if I have stepped into a small, undiscovered moment: Boogaloo’s broad-whitesmile; his wrinkled eyes tightly shut; rivulets of foaming soap suds flowing over his bulging biceps, coursing down his sleek body; his skin shiny under the water like a piece of hardwood; his huge, stiff penis knifing across the water shrouded air, as he moves his body in the rhythm of his hard scrubbing.

Boogaloo is human. He laughs, his teeth gnash, he turns, bends, shaking his ass at Arturo, flapping his arms. I step forward, seeing Boogaloo for real, as if he might have once been a boy living in a small white house with a nice green yard. His father turning on the sprinkler on a humid day. Boogaloo running through the arcing water, a rainbow of colors flowing onto the grass, turning into the most beautiful of greens in the world.

What you looking at, pichichi? ¿Qué, tu quieres mis huevos?

Boogaloo yells, grabbing his balls.

12 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Fred Santiago Arroyo

Arturo and Negro turn, staring at me. They laugh. Prance on the grass and dance in the circle of water. Arturo runs to Boogaloo and grabs his ass. Negro yelps, runs, and then slides face first, his arms skidding water against my legs. He stands, runs again and slides. Arturo and Boogaloo wrestle in the arc of the irrigation sprinkler.

The shack door slams open. Tino walks out waiving his knife in the air, muttering pendejos y cabrones, a pan of cooked potatoes steaming in his other hand, a wooden spoon sticking out of the top.

Changó follows behind, Tino stepping underneath the tree. The men stop playing, look at him, the sound of water sprinkling the ground.

They smell the food and begin to dry off and dress.

Tino calls to Arturo to bring over a piece of tin. On top of a cinder block, Arturo sets the piece of tin. Tino flatly places the pot on top. Changó adds salt and pepper, then mayonnaise. Negro comes over with the onion hearts. Tino chops them up in the curve of his palm. I bring the head of lettuce, ripping shreds that fall into the pot. Tino begins to mix it all up— Párate, viejo, Boogaloo yells, shaking on one pant leg at a time.

He clasps his belt. He walks over and pulls out two little green peppers, and a bigger pepper that’s mostly red with a hint of green.

Back home, my mother boils the skin of a pineapple, mixing the juice with garlic, black pepper and salt, and a few peppers.

Boogaloo holds out his hand in the circle of men. He looks into my eyes.

She put it all inside a rum bottle and set it in the sun.

He closes his hand, shakes his fist up at the evening sun.

She told me: Cómelo con fuerza. Then she sprinkled it on my food.

Boogaloo shakes his hand over the pot, his eyes closed, then looks into my eyes again.

You’ll never be afraid of hell, she told me.

All the men nod in agreement.

My father stirs the pot quickly, sets the spoon down. He says, Yes. Mine the same. Ernest . . . remember when Abuela made some, those bottles hanging from her front porch with white string. . . .

His voice trails off. He lifts the spoon, then drops it. He takes a drink of rum, his face white, his lips quivering. He looks at me but he can’t speak, his eyes blank, my father lost within his memory of fields.

Tino rubs my father’s shoulder, pats him on the back.

Crab Orchard Review ◆ 13

Fred Santiago Arroyo

Boogaloo reaches towards the pot, handing Tino the peppers— but then he stops. He looks into the sky, around the circle, deep into the fields. There’s pure silence save the irrigation sprinkler stiffly splashing the fields. Boogaloo seems to strain his ears as if there’s someone here who shouldn’t be. Everyone concentrates. Listens intently to what may come next out of Boogaloo’s half-smiling face.

Todo somos hombres aquí. Pero el hijo, you my little one, who works like a rabbit—you, Ernestito, must tell us if these peppers pican.

He offers me the peppers. I quickly raise a green pepper to my mouth and bite it in half, chew it up and swallow.

From underneath the shade of the tree, inside the circle of these men, I can no longer make out if there is an evening sun, if night has suddenly arrived. All the men look at me. Their heads look bigger, like they’re wearing masks: Negro’s blank, black as tar stare; Arturo’s leather-colored grimace; Tino’s red, watery, beat-up eyes; Boogaloo’s broad-white-mocking-smile, a queer expression between shame and anger, his face telling me: Oh, I feel sorry for you— you’re a disgrace—you’ll always play the fool.

My father lets out a louder whimper. His eyes blood-shoot, his eyelids fluttering up and down heavily. Small tears roll down his cheeks, a noise coming from his mouth like he’s choking. He holds the rum bottle by the neck, shifts up on his knees, and swings hard at Boogaloo’s head. Boogaloo jerks back, holds up his fists, sticks out his long pink tongue, then laughs, his head swinging back and forth.

No, no, no, Tino yells, pushing my father back off his knees. He holds my father’s arms, takes away the bottle.

It’s okay, Changó, take it easy.

Boogaloo’s head dances from behind his raised fists, his tongue licking the air; Arturo and Negro laughing.

My throat burns, my tongue on fire, my lips swelling, ears ringing with the beating heat rising in my head. The laughter turning louder, echoing from the circle of men, rising into the branches of the tree. Tino turns from my father and hands me a potato peel. I chew on it, pressing the wet skin against my tongue. He hands me the rum and I let it fill my mouth, swish it around, hold it underneath my tongue and along my cheeks, and then swallow. I stand, yelling, cursing inside myself. Even though my father was angry, he now smiles and giggles, waving for me to hand him the bottle. I hand him the rum and he takes a long drink. His hand shakes, his cheeks 14 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Fred Santiago Arroyo

flushed, his eyes closed. My fists clench and I curse him for having me in this field, for letting me work amongst these men who roll on their backs and laugh, and I curse myself for having the hope that I could hold our lives together, that one day everything would be okay.

I walk away from their laughter, away from their voices, out towards the back of the shack. The wind rustles the pines. The scent of manure wet rocks pine. The fields, the orchards shaded purple in the evening heat. In the distance, on the northwest horizon, the sun barely visible, dropping into a line of cottonwoods. I walk towards the sea of fields that lie in front of me, my lips swollen, my throat dry, my inner-thighs chafing with each stride. Faster and faster, my hot senses arcing in front of me, I walk towards the horizon, the purple-gold air hanging like spiderwebs connecting all the trees in the orchard. Following a low path into a patch of red raspberries, I splash through the puddles mirroring their bumpy undersides, the water cool across my face.

August. In this heat, after this day, after this past year, it is easy for me to see that I will never be unreliable; there is just too much truth. I can’t come up with some story, some song, like Boogaloo or my father. I can’t escape my life through dreams.

Last August, on a ninety-degree day, my mother left my father.

He was sitting under a tree, on a wooden apple crate, and I with him, in the shade, stayed behind. We lost the house we rented; during the winter, on Main Street, we lived in the Four Flags Hotel; this summer we came to work in these fields and to live in a shack. A simple gesture: I stayed behind. There is no story, there is no music, there is no song. There is only the day-to-day living inside my skin, inside the truth of my life.

I step onto a stone road, a northwest breeze cool against my bare arms. I can walk west, cross the river, follow a path around the edge of a cranberry bog, and soon I’ll reach the shores of Lake Michigan. I can leave my father and his circle of men behind: I can move into my own world, move out into my own fate: no longer will I have to think of Boogaloo, a mean man who does not care that I only want to be a fifteen-year-old boy with a home; and, away from Boogaloo and the men, I will no longer blame my father, I will only see him for who he is: the man who I always hoped would find some happiness, my father who I never wanted to see cry, who I tried to help escape from the deep music of pain and work he was born into.

Crab Orchard Review ◆ 15

Fred Santiago Arroyo

A loud roar, the dusty road kicking up stones and dirt. A mirage of purple and silver, swimming in waves of dust. Boogaloo glides his duster onto the side of the road. He and Tino emerge showered, cleaned sharply, elegant in their white guayaberas.

I walk towards them.

Boogaloo hands me a cigarette.

Escúchame, hijo. Don’t be mad.

Tino hands me a bottle.

I look at both of them so clean and shiny in the middle of the dusty road. Nobody speaks. The leaves on the cottonwoods rustle together. I take a long drink.

First the conga drums, the starting rhythm, the cuatro guitars strumming the melody, the güiro scratching out a two count, then the maracas rattling from the car to echo upon the stone road. A jíbaro guaracha escaping from the car.

Tino closes his eyes, taps his hands on his thigh, sways loosely, free like a mango tree shaking in the breeze.

Ay—oh—mami—oh. God bless you. Mami, God bless you, come the screams from the back seat. We all turn. Changó lifts a bottle, the rum gurgles into his lips tightly wrapped around the end. His head tipped back, his eyes closed. He looks to be in a dream: his black hair slicked back off his forehead, his head falling against the back seat, his silky brown arms next to his light-blue guayabera.

His face white like bones, except for the tears running down his flushed cheeks.

I turn to give Boogaloo his cigarette.

With his arm around my shoulder, he says in a quivering voice: Ernest, no, hombre. You keep it.

Tino drops his head, walks back to the car, opens the door, lifts up the front seat.

There’s no more hope in the back seat. There’s only my father’s weak, crying body, and, with no hope left, only for the love of my father do I enter into the back seat where the guaracha beats strong, only for love do I sit down and let the song engulf me.

16 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Ricardo Cortez Cruz

Black Mafia Life

“Welcome to the planet, our planet,” says Clinton after dumping shit from a gallon-size bag and snorting up like it is nothing, a circle of Cain all around him. People down on their hands and knees pretending to be worshipping him but really pianoing for stuff accidentally dropped on the floor.

“I am only The Messenger,” Clinton adds. “The shit goes deeper than this. I am only the president of the organization. Two-face is the CEO, top dog. We swing from coast to coast, L.A. to Chicago.

And there’s no need to ask why because I’m a smooth operator.” He signals for his woman, this pretty fly honey named Sade, to leave.

She waltzes out in a strapless evening gown that is tight, and, when she exits, the evening definitely goes with her.

For some crazy reason, Clinton always finds himself searching to say or do the outrageous. His habit has grown so bad until he has become a mere caricature of himself, highly unstable.

Singing “Knee Deep,” Clinton lights a funky bomb and sticks it in Gerardo’s mouth. Gerardo is shaking on a broken stool, his combat boots trying to get themselves b(l)ack on the ground. Several spots of Gerardo’s bare skin turn purple, growing darker from being hazed. Gerardo notices that everybody in the room suffers from a bruised ego.

“This is a black world,” says Clinton, doing all of this torturing over a little bit of money, which his crew inside the shoe shack can tell that he enjoys immensely as hyperbole; his smile is a quarter moon made of green cheese. And he starts circling Gerardo’s body, poking the cat’s tender and sensitive skin.

“I repeat, this is a black world,” says Clinton.

“And then some,” says a synthetic voice in the Chi-Town studio room full of fruits. Clinton is moving the crowd, everybody packed in like slaves in a portal and high-stepping over rotten apples in an effort to show respect and get out of his way.

His hands tied, Gerardo watches the bomb go shake-shake-shake Crab Orchard Review ◆ 17

Ricardo Cortez Cruz

and shimmy-shimmy-koko-pop between his big lips. He cannot bear to look at his fate. It’s too ugly. Clinton dangles it in his hands and cracks up.

“Do fries go wit dat shake?” he asks. The niggas behind Clinton—Mr. Lee, Pierre, Steve “Silk” Hurley, Farley Jackmaster Funk, and Fast Eddie, among them—laugh like one nation under a groove, their laughter so high that Gerardo can’t get over it.

The music in the studio is loud, shouting “get, get, get, get busy.”

“I’m the L, double E!” shouts Mr. Lee, “and this is our house, Grape-man.”

Ralph E. Rosario—a local Hispanic house DJ that has turned traitor and is now making frequent visits to his own community disguising himself as a cop in order to rob people—runs up to Gerardo and tags him with a Taser, a stun-gun. He hums “Livin’ La Vida Loca” before splitting to catch the L-train.

Another one of Clinton’s crimeys, a transvestite or something, lunges for Gerardo and momentarily grabs his crotch. Earlier today, she and some other Butch had beaten Gerardo as if jumping him into a gang. “You’re a big pussy—you ain’t got no balls,” the manly-woman says. Gerardo shakes his hands loose from the blood and the rope and faggot. Loan sharks swim over in the blood to collect their bank while the rest of the niggas sing “aqua boogie,” something about it—it goes straight to their heads, drowning everything that is alive.

Diva Phyllis Hyman is also involved in organized crime, that is, in bed with the mob. (Rumors say that’s why she’s able to express pain in her songs.) With no clothes on, she tries to camouflage her face behind an old school mike.

“Get dressed,” says Clinton, grabbing Hyman’s soft arm and leading her in the direction of the door. “You know your job, don’t you?”

“I cover the waterfront,” Hyman answers, snatching up a large pair of Lee jeans and a black tee-shirt before she goes.

“We above the law, potna,” Clinton says. “There’s no law enforcement. There’s no constitution. There’s no morals. There’s no other way to live but the black way.

“We deal all kinds of illegal substances. East coast-west coast means shit to us. But we pick up our mail in New York City because, there, it’s just easier to get to the shipments. They say that niggas don’t like water, but we do.” Strutting around in a pair of black boots and high-water pants on, Clinton half-hazardly kicks the tooth of a loan shark, knocks it clean out.

18 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Ricardo Cortez Cruz

“A souvenir,” Clinton says. “He sprays Gerardo with live bullets, powder all over his fingers.

“Take what’s left of this chulo to Lake Shore Drive and leave it for the rest of the sharks to pick over.” Singing “Flashlight” and wielding his hot gun under a black light, Clinton does a cock-of-the-walk stride around the room of black men and women standing all up in his face. He feels downright happy to be the president of this exclusive nigga club, this drop squad.

Before they drag Gerardo outside, they kick him and hit him and shoot him again, a couple of bullets attacking his ear lobe, wetting it and whispering sweet nothings like floozies indulging in cheap pleasure as Clinton declares: “I am the greatest! I’m the head-nigga-in-charge!

I’m a bad man!”

“I bet it’s good to be the president!” says one of his more sheltered women. (She is one of his many dependents, tax-deductible.) She grabs some fruit, squeezing a hard banana, then shows the part that says “Dole” to the rest of the gang before laughing and putting it between her lips.

“What would you know about it?” asks Clinton. “You a woman.

You’re not even authorized to be one of God’s ministers.”

“Women make this world go round,” whispers Butch behind the man’s back, not realizing that Clinton is able to hear her mumbling.

“Without us, the world would have nothing,” Butch says.

Clinton abruptly stops the music, then points in the direction of the discarded dead body, where the police sirens and the dueling noises from ambulances and government vehicles begin to overwhelm the city; he thinks about the idea of being bugged like King or Malcolm, as the public had later discovered through Racial Matters.

“No more talk,” says Clinton, thinking about what he has done to Gerardo. Wary and suspicious of the law like gadzillions of other black people, even a character like Clinton knows race matters.

After all this phoney business, after being here—in the white house—as a side participant in this repulsive scene, I want no part of them. But I hear my Creator talking smack. The almighty Creator has plans otherwise. ’Cause you see, the Creator was there when the white man took charge like John Wayne and colonized the Native Americans; She produced this shit. Now She insists that I be a macho man, a gangster, whether I like it or not. “It’s all a part of the master plan/plot,” the Creator says, harping on it. I step back and watch the Creator take Her finger and dig my grave.

Crab Orchard Review ◆ 19

Ricardo Cortez Cruz

“You will be the deliverer,” the Creator promises. At first, Her voice is a clarinet that charms me, captures my attention. She is my momma and my daddy, Mother Nature and Father Neptune.

“What shall it profit a man to gain his soul but lose the whole world?” She asks as The Philosopher. She shows me Her manly skill as an archer, shoots gold arrows into a rotten apple like Robin Hoodlum.

“Go, and I will be with thee,” the Creator says. The awesome sound and force of those instructions, of prophecy, blows me away like Bose/bows. And I do as She says because I am hooked—I’ll do anything for Her.

20 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Margaret Kahn

Taqseem

Sherry practiced deep breathing as she reached into her bag and pulled out her costume. The green glass beads she had sewn onto the bra glimmered under the bathroom lights. She’d been so proud of this costume when she put it together last month she’d almost shown it to Paul. Now she was glad she hadn’t.

He knew enough about her already. He didn’t need to know she worked in her spare time as a belly dancer in Detroit. She hadn’t told anyone else in the Middle East Studies department. It was hard enough to get taken seriously by her professors.

“Is that you Sherry?” Najwa’s voice came from the sink area.

Najwa and her husband had come from Lebanon years ago when the troubles there were first starting.

“I’m in here,” Sherry told her, draping the low slung skirt over her hips.

“Tahir said to tell you he’ll be playing a special taqseem tonight during the second set.”

Sherry came out and asked Najwa to hook her up.

“He’s very excited about it,” Najwa was saying as she pressed her warm fingers into Sherry’s back in order to pull the bra closed.

Sherry smiled to herself. Tahir was always excited about his solo or taqseem, as it was called in Arabic. From studying Arabic she knew the word was related to the word qisma, which meant “portion,” a word that had come into English in the form of “kismet.”

“He’s talking about making a recording,” Najwa was saying.

“He asked me if we would let him sell it here.”

Tahir was so ambitious. He really thought he could make it, and from here, of all places. Sherry had been excited when she first came here too, but mostly it was the excitement of performing. She’d never been able to do that before. Not even on the piano.

She leaned toward the mirror, applying foundation and then working on her eyes. The redness didn’t show as much after she glued on the false eyelashes.

Crab Orchard Review ◆ 21

Margaret Kahn

Najwa gave her an approving look. “Very nice,” she said.

Sherry laughed. “You mean for someone who doesn’t have the right coloring.”

Najwa shrugged. “You are a dancer. In the Middle East the men love blondes even more than here.”

Sherry laughed again. Yes, that was what it boiled down to.

Looks, not talent. But it didn’t matter, she told herself. This wasn’t her main gig. Then, as she walked down the narrow, linoleum-floored hall leading out to the main part of the club she started to have doubts. What if she didn’t get an academic position somewhere?

Would this be her kismet? Instead of becoming an assistant professor of Middle East Studies the way she had hoped and prayed, she would become a full time belly dancer.

This thought had been haunting her. There weren’t very many openings and the few there were depended who you knew. Now that she’d gone and slept with her advisor she had the feeling it might count against her. Especially since he was pretending he didn’t know her.

She didn’t stop obsessing about it until she came out into the main room and saw all the people sitting around the little tables, studying menus or talking to one another in the animated style peculiar to people who hailed from around the Mediterranean. She loved that style—so different from the repressed people she’d grown up with. She appreciated, too, the smells rising from platters the waiters were bringing around—of grilled meats with onions and garlic, cumin and fresh chopped parsley with lemon.

The musicians were starting up. Tahir had his eye on her. She walked toward the stage area, conscious of the cheap carpet beneath the bare soles of her feet. Then she stopped, remembering how it had been the first time. How she’d been almost paralyzed at the thought of going out there under the spotlight. It had been one thing to do it in class with the other women watching. It was altogether another thing here.

Or so it had seemed at the time.

Now she was used to it. No, it was more than that. She craved it. She was even starting to get excited as she stood waiting for her cue, rising up on the balls of her feet.

Tahir gave a little nod and raised the clarinet to his lips.

She came on slowly, the way she always did. Using her arms to make snakelike movements and lifting her hips, first one and then the other, taking tiny steps as she circled around the tables.

22 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Margaret Kahn

Imperceptibly, the rhythm picked up. She slid her rib cage up and down and lifted her hands, moving her head back and forth, still doing snake movements. Then she started rolling her shoulders and undulating.

Some of the people watching stood up, stretching out their hands towards her and moving their hips in synchrony with hers.

She loved it when they did that. It filled her with energy so that when the band sped up she didn’t even feel it. She was shimmying now, the coins on her belt clinking against each other. The band was in full wail and her zils, the little brass cymbals attached to her thumbs and forefingers, made an insistent bell-like noise.

The music took hold of her body, allowing her to move in ways she would never have dreamed of moving. Waves of energy welled up from the core of her, moving out to her shoulders, her feet, her hands, her legs.

By the second year of graduate school, she’d almost forgotten she had a body. But since she’d taken up belly dancing she’d remembered that Middle Eastern culture was a lot more than squiggly lines on a page. A lot more even than understanding the old stories. Dancing here at the Talisman reminded her of why she had entered this field in the first place.

It was what the stories had promised—the ones she had read as a little girl, piling the tomes up next to her bed. The stories were set in the old cities of Baghdad, Cairo, and Damascus, where jewels winked from every merchant’s hand, where meat was always succulent, and the unsuspecting traveler could stumble at any moment on a garden of delight. She knew it could turn into cliché at any time and here at the Talisman they catered more to the illusion than the reality, but she still loved it.

She wasn’t thinking anymore about Paul by the time she finished.

She wasn’t thinking about anything, except the people applauding her, standing up and throwing money. That was another thing. The people here were generous. They threw five and ten dollar bills, sometimes even twenties. She scooped them up and headed for the bar.

“Ya salaam, you were great tonight.” Omar, the bartender, leaned over the black marble surface and spoke in a confidential whisper.

He had smooth olive skin, perfect black hair, and the features of his namesake—movie star Omar Sharif. Not only that, he didn’t act vain, although he probably was.

“Shall I get you a drink?” he asked in a husky voice.

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She looked into his liquid, lash-fringed eyes. “Thanks,” she told him. “But nothing alcoholic.”

“You are sure?” he replied.

They went through this every time.

“I can’t drink and dance.”

“Why not,” he challenged. “Maybe you will feel more relaxed,” and he gave her a wink that on an older man would have been utterly lascivious, but on him was merely charming.

She couldn’t help laughing at the way Omar kept trying to get her high, as if the two of them were out together on a date. Then Kamran came over. Kamran was a salesman from New Jersey who came to the Talisman whenever he was in Detroit.

“What secrets are you two sharing?” he asked, twitching his moustache slightly.

Kamran was from Iran originally. A Kurd with green eyes, he loved to flirt with her, and she loved to flirt back. She’d always had a thing for Middle Eastern men although she’d never dated any.

She said, “We were talking about whether alcohol is necessary in order to dance.”

He said, a little indignantly, “Of course it is not necessary! To dervishes dancing is a form of intoxication.”

“Then why are you drinking Johnny Walker Red?” she asked.

“Because I am not a dervish.” He smiled and showed his teeth.

Omar had taken a juicer out from under the bar. Then he put three oranges up on the counter and cut them neatly in half. After that he pushed each one down expertly onto the juicer and turned his hand, still pushing, while the juice spurted out. He remembered what she had told him—that she loved orange juice. Not the canned kind or even the frozen, but the real thing, with bits of pulp floating around.

Sherry watched, feeling hunger pangs already. She wouldn’t really eat until after the second set when they would let her order whatever she wanted. It was one of the perks of the job. Once a week she got to savor the kebab or the kibbee, her favorite. She loved the way the crunchiness of the cracked wheat outer shell contrasted with the softness of the spiced ground meat inside. The Talisman wasn’t known only for its belly dancing, but also for the food it served.

Omar glanced up and caught her eye while he poured the juice into a glass. His face wore a little smile, as if to say, I’m doing this just for you.

The orange juice fortified her and, after she drank it down, she 24 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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twisted around on her stool and studied the clientele. The place was busier than usual. She had no idea why. Sometimes it was like that.

Maybe there were more people of Middle Eastern extraction in town, or maybe there was some holiday—the Prophet’s birthday, the end of Ramadan, the return of the pilgrims from Mecca. There was always something. Or maybe it was just the rain. Outside it was pouring. The people who were coming in were shaking off like dogs while Najwa practically grabbed umbrellas out of their hands. Wet floors weren’t good for dancing.

She was watching one couple now. The woman was wearing a long black coat that came down to her ankles. The man, who was tall with blonde hair, was helping her off with it.

Then they turned around.

Without thinking Sherry gasped. Omar heard it immediately.

But before he could ask what was wrong, she was off her stool and heading out of the main room.

She’d never seen anyone from Ann Arbor here. This wasn’t the kind of place that would attract the university crowd. For one thing, it was too far away. For another, it was a dive. The “s” was missing from the “Talisman” sign outside and the plastic flowers and cheap tables didn’t inspire drop-ins.

But there he was. She couldn’t mistake him. And there she was, the famous former virgin.

Sherry hurried back to the shelter of the ladies’ room where she stood, leaning against the door of the stall, trying to figure out what to do. But the more she thought the more she kept hearing the words Paul had said to her last week about his old girlfriend coming from England.

She’d known about Ameera’s existence right from the beginning.

Even before she and Paul had gotten involved three months ago, he’d told her there was this student back at the School of Oriental and African Studies who’d fallen for him rather badly.

“But she’ll get over it,” he’d said airily. “Since I was her first.”

For the last three months Sherry hadn’t even thought of her.

Then, last week he’d mentioned she was coming to see him in Ann Arbor.

“But I thought you weren’t even involved with her anymore,” she’d said like a fool.

He hadn’t said anything, just taken her in his arms. Later when he was just picking up his briefcase from where he’d thrown it on Crab Orchard Review ◆ 25

Margaret Kahn

her couch, he’d turned to her and said hesitantly, “It might be better if Ameera didn’t meet you.”

Sherry looked into the mirror now and thought that if she started to cry again her makeup would be ruined. The door started to open and she fled into the stall.

“Sherry? Are you in there?” Najwa’s voice reached her. “Omar said something happened.”

Sherry came out. “I’m not feeling too well, that’s all.”

Najwa regarded her. “Does it have something to do with that man who just came in? The one with the Egyptian princess?”

“How do you know she’s a princess?” Sherry went back into the stall, ripped off a piece of toilet paper, and blew her nose.

“It’s written all over her. American University in Cairo. I’ll bet you anything. Probably some relative of Mobarak’s.”

Sherry sniffled.

“Why don’t you come out here? Hiding in there isn’t going to make you feel any better.”

Slowly Sherry undid the latch and came out.

She felt idiotic, especially in front of Najwa.

When she first started here, Najwa, who was the wife of the owner, Hossein, was cool toward her. Sherry didn’t get it until one of the other dancers told her.

“In the Middle East, all dancers are assumed to be whores. Most of the wives don’t get involved in the business, but Najwa watches him like a falcon.”

She watched Sherry too until she evidently decided she wasn’t a whore, or at least she wasn’t after her husband.

“That guy out there?” she said now. “He is a friend of yours?”

Sherry said, “Worse.”

Najwa raised her bold black eyebrows.

Sherry had never mentioned she was a graduate student before.

She didn’t know why, but somehow that didn’t seem to have anything to do with dancing here. But now Najwa’s gaze was fixed on her, so she said, “My professor.”

Najwa’s eyes got very big. “Oooh,” she said. “And he wanted you to be with him in order to get a good grade?”

Sherry sighed. If only it had been that simple. “No, not exactly.”

She thought of the conferences they had had. How right from the beginning she had made the mistake of looking into his eyes.

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than the other professors. Maybe it was because he was actually interested in her work. She hadn’t realized he was attracted to her until he started telling her these stories.

Like the one about a remote village near the Iraqi border where old men who were impotent would let their young wives sleep with unmarried peasants in order to have them conceive. She hadn’t believed it. But he assured her he had it on the highest authority.

Or about the men he’d met in another village in the mountains, where the men said they had spent their last rials installing a water heater for the rather primitive public bath. When Paul asked why they were doing this, they said they had no choice. Their women demanded to be licked.

She remembered too the way he had looked at her when he told her this and how she had gotten all hot thinking about it later.

Now she said to Najwa, “Last week he told me his girlfriend was coming, from England.”

“She is his student too?”

“Was,” Sherry said.

Najwa shook her head. “And I thought the people who go to school in Ann Arbor were smart.”

Sherry bit her lip.

Najwa said. “He knows you are dancing here?”

Sherry shook her head. “I didn’t want him to know.”

Najwa’s voice was firm. “You must go on, not just for us, but for yourself. I bring you ice,” she added. “For your eyes. And a special costume. I wear it myself, at home only. For my husband.”

By the time she was dressed and made up Sherry could barely recognize herself. Her old costume wasn’t shabby but in this outfit she resembled the Queen of Sheba.

“Ya salaam,” breathed Najwa.

Sherry said, “I wish there were time to dye my hair.”

Najwa shook her head. “No! You don’t want to do that. He is English. She will wish for hair like yours.”

When she went out again, she stepped carefully. She and Najwa were about the same height so the skirt didn’t drag on the floor but she was wearing a contraption on one foot made out of real gold that went around her ankle, across the top of her foot and fastened on her big toe. Hanging from her ears were eighteen-carat filigree earrings that felt as if they weighed at least an ounce apiece.

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Margaret Kahn

When she appeared, the drummer did a sort of fanfare which Tahir underscored with his clarinet. She rose up on the balls of her feet and peered toward the darkened table area. She couldn’t see them, but she felt their presence. She wondered if Paul had already recognized her, or whether he would have to figure it out.

Only the feel of Najwa’s costume gave her the courage to go on.

But once she was standing there, her mind, which was usually full of her routine, suddenly went blank. She had no idea what to do next.

She glanced over at Tahir. He nodded slightly and then began playing his taqseem. The other band members stopped and there was only the sinuous sound of the clarinet winding itself around the notes of the scale.

Sherry picked up her veil and used it to create a kind of tent around her face and shoulders. It was hokey, but she knew from experience that it worked.

She thought of Ameera sitting there in the dark, trying to divert Paul’s attention from her, and she vamped it up, opening her eyes wide and staring out at them, her lips parting suggestively.

When the music speeded up she literally jumped into her act and she didn’t stop moving until Tahir put the clarinet down.

The applause lasted a long time and then people started making that sound in the backs of their throats that people made at weddings and parties in the Middle East.

At that point someone yelled encore and then everyone took up the chant.

She felt lifted out of herself as she glided onto the floor again.

She didn’t even notice that the band wasn’t playing. The beat was inside her now and she moved her little finger cymbals back and forth until they provided all the rhythm she needed.

Then Tahir stood up and started blowing on his horn. He would play a riff and she would respond to it. Play a riff and then wait.

She’d never done anything like this before, but the crowd loved it. They kept it up until Tahir’s face was red and she thought she might slip on the sweat that was dripping onto the floor.

People whistled and ululated and for a moment she forgot where she was and who she was and what it was all about.

But as she walked back to the dressing room to change into her street clothes, she suddenly remembered. She thought of hiding and waiting until they closed or sidling around to the kitchen and leaving through the back door. But then she changed her mind.

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She walked up to the bar where Omar said, “Whatever you want.

You name it. Drink or whatever.”

She said, “Thanks. Maybe later.”

Then she walked into the center of the room, looking around. A couple of people handed her tips—tens and twenties. But she wasn’t here for that.

She finally spotted them. They were over in a corner. Ameera was facing away from her. But Paul was watching.

She took her time coming over. She wanted to enjoy the expression on his face as she got closer.

Finally she was next to them. “Hello Paul,” she said.

Ameera gazed at her.

“Hello,” he said, his fair English skin blushing a deep red.

Ameera said to him, “I thought you said this was the first time you came here.”

The red in his face deepened and he even started to stammer.

“I–I haven’t ever come here before.”

Ameera looked from one to the other of them.

Paul craned his neck as if he were a giraffe, looking for a way out of the forest.

Ameera’s lips moved wordlessly.

“Ameera, this is Sherry Henderson. Sherry, my fiancée, Ameera El Any.” The word “fiancée” felt like a knife entering her. But still she smiled.

“Sherry is writing a dissertation on the power of Arab women as reflected in the folk tales told by villagers.”

“That’s not exactly it,” Sherry corrected. “More like mirrored power. In the tales, women can do anything. Travel to strange lands, fly around at night, take lovers, while in reality, as we know, their lives are quite circumscribed.”

Ameera’s eyes flicked over her. “So you are a feminist.”

Sherry inclined her head.

“But you are also a belly dancer.”

Score two, thought Sherry.

She went over to the next table and asked for a chair. Then she brought it back even though they hadn’t asked her to join them. She leaned over so her cleavage would be visible, and said, “Paul tells me you’re a student at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.”

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Margaret Kahn

Ameera’s chin came up. “That’s right.”

“You’re lucky,” said Sherry. “Knowing Arabic already.”

“I didn’t know Arabic already,” she said. “I grew up in England.

I had to learn it.”

Sherry said, “Well then you’re in the same position as I am.”

Ameera stiffened and then moved her hand close to Paul’s but Paul was too shocked to notice her plea for solidarity.

He was gazing at Sherry as if he couldn’t take her eyes off her.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” he whispered in a hoarse voice.

Sherry smiled. “I don’t have to tell you everything do I? After all, I’m just your student, not your fiancée.”

Ameera’s eyes opened so wide, Sherry could see the whites all the way around her pupils. She wasn’t bad looking. In fact she was quite pretty, but Sherry didn’t want to focus on that.

“Excuse me,” she said before she headed out of the dining room.

“A thousand thanks,” she told Najwa handing her the earrings and the bracelets. “You saved me.”

“You saved yourself,” Najwa said, dropping the jewelry into the pocket of her skirt.

Sherry went back to the ladies room. The elation was fading along with the endorphins. It would be a long drive back in the rain.

She took Najwa’s costume off carefully. Then she studied herself in the mirror as she wiped the makeup off. Her features were less than stunning and her body had its flaws. But what she’d learned from belly dancing was that if you kept moving people wouldn’t notice.

When she came back into the dining room, Omar called out to her, “See you next week.”

“Yeah, next week,” Sherry called over the noise and Kamran turned and smiled along with several of the regulars.

She almost wished she didn’t have to go back. For five years now Ann Arbor had been her home. But the libraries and classroom buildings didn’t have what this place had.

She stared at the missing “s” in the “Tali-man” sign outside.

When she first came here she’d been almost ashamed. What if someone she knew saw her here? She was a graduate student, not a belly dancer.

Tonight she walked quickly past the puddles in the parking lot to her car. This neighborhood wasn’t the best. As soon as she got inside she re-locked the door and then turned the starter. The car 30 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Margaret Kahn

body was wrecked from all the salt they put on the roads here, but the engine roared to life immediately. She pressed her foot down on the accelerator and swung the car quickly left and right, enjoying the feeling of moving all this metal out into the street. She didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t see the deserted buildings or the empty lots. The road was dark and wet and the drive took longer than she would have liked. But the music kept her going. She didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t need to insert a tape.

Crab Orchard Review â&#x2014;&#x2020; 31

Liz Ahl

Dobro She could pull tears from a glass eye . . .

—C. K. Shine of a silver dollar, smooth curved shape of a promise.

On its back, it glows, anticipating fingers. Fret-slide and strum-pluck: the first song rises slow like the muddy, swollen river inches toward its banks, and past them.

Moan of an old house in a thunderstorm, and the low-throated lullaby of the ghosts who linger there—walking circles in the dim kitchen, pacing slow grooves into the floorboards.

The electric hum of air as it greens before clouds start to twist.

Smoke in the grass. Wind in pines.

A poem aching out through the bones.

A dark day darkening.

The sound moonlight bleeds when it runs its tongue along the sky’s spine. The charcoal song of the clouds that smother the moon.

A stranger’s bootheels on the porch, his hand on the door.

Screen door creaking.

Marsh bird’s cry. Ebbing tide of a good time gone by.

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Paulette Beete

Blues for a Pretty Girl

Preacher Man Preacher Man hotfoots the stage, searches the rhythms in his feet for the right words.

He soothes the congregation Maaaaaaannnnnnnn, widens his mouth round the silver-toothed smile then cuts them/with the parable of The God of Soul Train Avenue.

He was brought low by song he blows he was brought low by harmolodizing gardenias, jukey women, creeping fingers.

He didn’t understand the blues ain’t about bad times.

It’s about a good man feeling bad & over/coming it.

The horns, guitar, drums roar their raucous amen.

Brother Gui-tar Brother Gui-tar moans his six-stringed Nadine, eyelids closed & pleading.

He scats the nubile chords looking for the heaven road. If he can just hold tight to that mouthy D he’ll ride it ’til it brings him back to his lost juke bird.

Brother Boss Bossman is stuttering his bass again.

He leans into her, a man begging his woman for one last giggling kis/s.

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Paulette Beete

Sometimes he seems to forget she’s there, or maybe they just fall so far into each other that only one of them seems really there.

Twinned mouths scatter grace & light, a steeple of fingers pray sound from air.

The Deacon Deacon Eddie chews the chords Preacher spits to the crowd, figures if he can just transcribe their taste, he’ll finally understand.

Preacher always wants to know why Deacon never requests anything Preacher’s actually written.

Deacon says Your songs are like hell & honey—the kind a man needs a pretty girl to understand.

Sister Claude’s Homecoming Baby put your hand in mine, I’m forever yours all my life.

It’s you my love is for, please believe me, Baby put your hand in mine.

Sister Claude leans into Preacher’s siren slick. She knows everyone’s surprised to see her after the last time he set her to wailing & gnashing.

Some sorts of carrying-on are just/ not allowed in the front row.

They all were there afterwards when she tried to talk to Preacher & stumbled/the words You transpose me, make me feel full

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Paulette Beete

so they sounded like less than what she meant.

They gasped when she opened her mouth over his, the silver harmonica between them.

No one knew she could still see the spirit dripping from him & just wanted to save a little for herself.

No one understood that the silence comes so quickly, like the beat between the first drop of rain & the second.

She only wanted a dribble, just enough to water the gardenia wilting in her overlooked belly.

Preacher Man Wanders in the Desert Preacher has lost himself in the upper reaches of the harp.

He doesn’t feel his soles thundering time, sweat mossing his face & hands.

Preacher’s forgotten all about the mass of eyes rolling heavenward in time with his metronomic foot.

He’s trying to tell how sweet it is at the top where the notes are pointy & sharp, where the traveling tongue & keening lips sing the sweetest part of him, the part always out of reach in the quiet.

Brother Gui-tar’s Blues in D Brother Gui-tar’s playing blue.

Brother Gui-tar’s playing blue.

A pair of fine thighs told him goodbye, Now he’s in the key of blue.

Brother Gui-tar’s praying hard.

Brother Gui-tar’s praying hard.

Please Lord find her, please remind her I’m sweet as a Valentine’s card.

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Paulette Beete

His woman left him yesterday.

His woman left him yesterday.

One night he forgot to play sweet & hot.

She up and flew away.

Gui-tar’s asking God for grace.

Gui-tar’s asking God for grace.

Lord I need loving, a fine tuned woman To take my little bird’s place.

Revelation Sister Claude wants a touch from Preacher.

She thinks of the syrup of sound he milks from tin & barren space, how he gives the harmonica a tongue.

She wants Preacher to teach her how to speak the notes she carries in her oversized purse.

She can’t remember how to fit them back into her womb.

Notes: Preacher Man, lines 11-12 from on-line article by Ross Bon. —Sister Claude’s Homecoming, lines 1-5, from “Put Your Hand in Mine”

by Ross Bon.

36 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Diann Blakely

Me and the Devil Blues from Rain at our Door: Duets with Robert Johnson And he said Bastard. He said Mama’s Boy. He said he hated chopping cotton, the sun Above his head like God’s hot blinding eye.

He hated greens and his stepfather too.

He loved his mailordered Jews’ Harp, and wire He’d strung along the shack’s unpainted door, The wire he plucked until his fingers bled.

Me and the Devil was walking side by side, He sang, but that was after his wife died, And his first baby too. He hated blood.

He hated blood unless it slow-pulsed tunes Inside his cotton-headed dreams. Or varnished The guitar that Satan tuned one night, the moon Above their heads like God’s cold blinding eye.

Me and the Devil was walking side by side, He sang when love had mixed with the road’s dirt, The dirt that was his love’s address; I’m gon’ To beat my woman till I get satisfied.

And then he said Alone Alone Alone.

The Devil smiled and asked Who loves you best?

Crab Orchard Review ◆ 37

Diann Blakely

If I Had Possession Over Judgment Day from Rain at our Door: Duets with Robert Johnson Enough of God. Enough of witnesses.

O turn your face to the room’s walls And sing, poor Bob. O sing damnation past drawn shades As cracked with light as mine. Bowls fill With melting ice; fan blades shift, dangerous In the choked air. A man’s brought you to Texas, Twice, to needle songs—I went To the mountain, looked as far as my eyes could see— On vinyl plates. Brought you a pint, And here’s to that first crowd’s drunk, sweaty laughs, Also your last girlfriend’s. O vengeful solo: You didn’t like the way she done And swore she’d have no right to pray. Tears prick my throat As if you’d damned me too, as one Who makes her songs from scaredy-cat bravado And flirts with others’ dues. Enough of love— Aren’t we both vagrants of the South, You born from autumn trysts, black knees splayed in high cotton; I from a history of shut mouths And families gone? Let’s roll beneath the eaves Of sleeping women’s shacks, where you once stayed Till dawn, your fingers muting still The knife-edged chords that beckon toward a possessed heart . . .

Mine’s followed you to Texan hell, Though walls melt down to echoes as you play

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Diann Blakely

And curse God’s vast shining back: don’t throw me out.

Here’s another pint. Another song From this white girl, mouthed to drawn shades; my hymn whispered To your sweet ghost . . . Trouble gon’ come: Roll me, like whiskey and wept judgments, down.

Crab Orchard Review ◆ 39

Bruce Bond

Coltrane’s Teeth

No less than the quarantined cities of god and deep sleep, they too had their secret life, buried in a flung shatter of nerves and carnal wires, in the fray and knotted script of veins he worked his music through; what were they after all if not the tiny Stonehenge of the tongue, the visible bone at the cry’s horizon.

All those binges of liquor and pie, how any tumbler in its moment might soak up the room, sugared with bar-light— small wonder they rotted out like trees down to the red soil until the shyest mordant sent chills of pain into his jaw.

Think of the little teethmarks of heroin and lovers, the gods who opened their wounds and swallowed: near everything he hungered for long enough

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Bruce Bond

and hard took him in its mouth.

Thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s why in those later years especially, beneath the bronze calm of his gaze at strangers, under the ashes of friends and marriages, in the throats of horns the dead had left him, or above those warm stretched rivers of bass, you hear an anxious writhing, a shedding of skins.

Meditations, he called them, prayers, though figured in the clay of questions he never quite straightens out, strong as he blows.

Even as his teeth stumbled crown by crown out of the trench, a bridgework marked their losses like tombstones worn clean, dateless, nameless, the ghosts of all that dissonance flown between.

Who could have guessed it had gone this far, to see him twisting out his phrases with such force, with the anguished face of sex, resisting, eyes closed, sun-blind, his great forehead glazed with salt.

Not the abandoned body of the panicky or numb, but more sanctified in blood, the opacity of grief

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Bruce Bond

gripped by joy; itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s what you see in fits, in the way he bit the thrilled wafer of his reed, dreaming of sweets, his lips sealed about their dark work.

The more compressed the vessel the more he poured his lungs out, as if he were blowing glass, the clear ache of it, blooming.

42 â&#x2014;&#x2020; Crab Orchard Review

Marta Boswell

Mustang Sally Pays Her Debt to Wilson Pickett

Aretha Franklin named me.

She heard Sir Mack Rice stir into a Blue Rock records track he called Mustang Mama until she told him Sally sounded better when he wailed.

Mom says the winter I was born, well, before that, I kicked every time it hit the radio.

Says that’s how she knew my name.

Not that the birth certificate says Mustang, but all the same, that’s me.

Yeah, I know. Little white girl with a name like mine, somebody’s gonna bitch about appropriation, that hitch, one bunch of us snitching something from another, busting it to fit an awkward hole in what we’ve got. That’s, anyway, what Marta thought last time we talked.

What I’m thinking’s mostly that I ought to say thank you and give credit where it’s due.

Sir Mack Rice? Pickett’s mentor.

Recorded it in sixty-four.

See, even Wilson got it secondhand from somebody who knew better.

Crab Orchard Review ◆ 43

Jennifer Boydston

Sun Ship (take 2)

Do you have any idea how much energy is contained in the first drum solo?

How much wood is spent during the horn’s initial run when all the notes slide down in fast-motion beads of sweat off four bodies undone by what their instruments reflect?

Keys create a concussion in swirl— crescendo battling the tailspin of an earthbound mortal fool Pound, pound the brass keys that unlock a dangerous horn that keep the pitch high send it up to the sun Do I hear a wing catch fire in this song? Possibly it has never taken me by such surprise before— Up down staircases waxed with surreal dreams Boats . . . like wings like Icarus caught in a sunshower— sheets of sound suspending Serendipity & science mixed with the randomness of raindrops and the sounds that make them wet Put straight, this is a moment of gravity & grace— an equation of mind & weight, an up that must come down . . .

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Jennifer Boydston

a moment—elusive as success which, having found its way this high you fear you’ll never know again and so drop everything reaching for a harness And this not to suggest that what came before or after is lesser music a failed flight— only to note that the high point of the trajectory the zenith the peak will always take the quill— singed or soaked in the final notes of Ascent

Note: Sun Ship, late summer sessions, 1965, of the Classic John Coltrane Quartet. “Ascent” is track 5.

Crab Orchard Review ◆ 45

Kurt Brown

Wow & Flutter

Flaws in early hi-fi speakers: the “WOW” of volume like a door opened then quickly shut on a raging party; and “flutter” was . . . well . . . flutter: the steady flup flup flup of a punctured tire.

What happened to them?

Demented cousins come to visit in our childhood once, now gone.

They’ve followed their family of junk into the grave: vacuum tubes that glowed like small fires and gave off an odor of burnt dust; lighted dials, masts on a foundering ship pitched across waves of sound.

Wow and flutter. Why do I miss them?

Now the air is a whisper of smooth notes that come from nowhere— each variance, each flaw flattened out and perfect in a place as tedious as heaven.

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Edward Byrne

Listening to Lester Young . . . regrets are always late, too late!

—John Ashbery Late at night, I’m listening to one of Lester Young’s slower solos again, and although I know he’s playing those same notes I’ve heard over and over, as the tone of his tenor saxophone turns toward a lower register, even that patter of cold drizzle now pasting shadowy leaves against my window seems to follow his lead.

I wonder what you would be doing tonight and I want to write a few lines in my notebook about how blue and ivory skies gave way to rain today after you left, or how coming home from the train station, I thought I saw something, a large and ominous animal suddenly outlined by lightning on that sparsely wooded hillside beside the deserted highway we always drive to save a little bit of time. As you travel farther away, hurrying through the muted darkness still surrounding everything, so that you can’t even see the land tilting at the sea or the gulls slanting overhead when you approach the coastline, I imagine you beginning a new book in the dim light of that passenger car, reading another long novel about characters not so unlike ourselves, each of its chapters titled and numbered as if to indicate life is merely a neat progression of unpredictable episodes.

By tomorrow evening you will be at that old hotel where we once stayed for days in a room overlooking Crab Orchard Review ◆ 47

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plaza monuments deformed and whitened like marble by a winter storm, while its foot of snowfall closed the city down as though no one there had ever known such weather in their lives. If you were still here, you’d be able to hear Lester backing Billie Holiday on another ballad recorded more than six decades ago, but years before the two of them finally knew the truth about that high cost of living they would have to pay.

I’m beginning to believe their duets of lost love, the ways they phrase each line of lyric or melody, create images in the mind as vivid as any photo or poem we might have seen, evoke those places Prez and Lady Day played in their earlier days— Harlem cabarets and late-night cafés downtown, or those small neighborhood halls with bare walls and a gray haze of smoke above the stage, the ebony and violet glow of an angled piano lid under indigo lights, and a congregation of friendly faces gradually fading into the black background with a persistent chatter and clatter of glasses that lets everyone know they are not alone. In the half hour before your departure, when we sat silently on that station platform bench, as though any attempt at conversation would be hopeless and in fear someone around us might overhear what we had to say, I tried somehow to take into account how far apart we already were: even then, I felt regrets are all we had left in common.

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Richard Cecil

A Night at the Opera

Despite my years of abstinence from alcohol and popular culture I’d rather guzzle beer with dinner instead of sip this soda water, then shuck these fancy clothes and slip into bed with my wife and cats to watch Charlie Chan at the Opera instead of trudge to the opera live at the Musical Arts Center whose tickets on the bedroom dresser propped against my wife’s jewel box resemble cards that dentists mail reminding patients of appointments.

October First at Eight O’Clock I’ll tilt backwards in my seat as the technician aims the spotlight at the conductor bouncing in brandishing his slim baton.

When he lifts it molar high I’ll hear him, in my inner ear, whisper this might hurt a little as I brace against the chair waiting for his arm to drop.

Yet afterwards, mounting the stairs, I’ll clutch my wife’s thin silk-clad arm and, obsessed by the soprano’s anguished song rejecting marriage to the hollow hearted tenor, her only hope for happiness, I’ll half-shout, like an angry father, “That bastard wasn’t worthy of her!”

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frightening fellow opera goers rushing past us toward their cars poised to whisk them to their suburbs.

“Oh, the winter comes too soon!” sung wistfully by the soprano peering out her snowy window will be the aria they’ll praise for its universal imagery— shivering birds and barren trees, daylight swallowed by grim night.

But, full of passion stirred by art, I’ll circle my wife’s slender waist with one arm while I wave the other conducting choirs of cold night wind that others rush toward cars to flee.

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Richard Chess

Klezmer

Daughter of a butcher, grandson of a wagon twin of the new moon—that’s who this music is related to mud, up goes down into a well and rises again, its face shining and sharp though it was tortured, shot, drowned, gassed, butchered though its gold teeth were extracted, its smile ironed out, though its legs—how we danced from village to village to village with the rebbe in our arms—were broken though its crystal was smashed, its baby tossed into the air to see if it really was a miracle though there was a corner where it liked to meet in the afternoon to smoke and consider the news and women passing by before the women were shrunk to regulation sizes before the news was a colossal darkness before the smoke was all there was to eat, to study it didn’t die, it didn’t refuse to die, it didn’t resist—it wasn’t that brave or dumb—it didn’t offer its body for experimentation it didn’t collaborate, it just didn’t stop wheezing and rattling—breathing! listen to the accordion, how even with that guy squeezing the air out of it it still sings listen to the clarinet, that delight— at night, late, especially on the Sabbath we make shofar noises early the next morning, too, before the mall awakens, a little groggy Crab Orchard Review ◆ 51

Richard Chess

an obscene and proud screw of sound coming from a Volkswagen that the ghost of our mother spits on and blesses it lives on air, the way poor musicians do (though that fiddler owns a posh condominium overlooking the Mediterranean) it rides with birds and hail and light, its traveling companions —it’s stopped at the border, it crosses— maybe you hear it for the first time at the bar mitzvah of a neighbor’s child maybe you hear it for the first time on public radio, Chanukah, and you cry to your husband, chewing nails in front of the tv, the oil burns at the darkest hour of the year! or maybe you hear it on stage, under a tent— your grandparents paid for the tix and no one, not the wife or kids or your own pastel mother reminds you that your grandparents—just atoms now— were raised in South Philly on Mummers or maybe you hear it in an alley in Safed, Israel as it weeps from the window of a lover’s loft, a mystic or artist there in the afternoon, the hours when the study house is quiet, gallery locked, the sky yogurt-blue, same as the color of the headstones of giants of Kabbalah buried on the hillside just below your stroll or maybe you’ve never heard it, not in your neighborhood meditation hall, courtroom or spa not where you roll a cart with trays of food down a hall or dip a wick in melted wax or squat in pain at the top of the stairs or spit cherry pits into grass or sign a will in the presence of three witnesses today klezmer is still being scraped from weeds and blown from windows of 5000 destroyed villages

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it’s history in a spoon, it’s our limp it’s the first language of our home, you could say if your food wasn’t the hoagie if you weren’t born with henna-colored palms in a village where goat roasts and musicians bang, not to violate the orthodox Muslim ban on musical instruments, on gasoline cans and brass tea trays, Yemenite soul still the cry, still the crowd dipping, twirling, beating, smoking— in a barn, study house, social hall, tables slammed aside thousands under a July sky stepping up and down on a lawn —can you keep up with mother’s moods?—outrage, sorrow— but mother, this is a wedding, we’re supposed to be happy pleads the clarinet, this is the Messiah we’re chuckling about here

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Billy Collins

Serenade

Let the other boys from the village gather under your window and strum their bean-shaped guitars.

Let them huddle under your balcony heavy with flowers, and fill the night with their longing— locals in luminous shirts, yodeling over their three simple chords, hoping for a glimpse of your moonlit arm.

Meanwhile, I will bide my time and continue my lessons on the zither and my study of the miniature bassoon.

Every morning I will walk the corridor to the music room lined with the fierce portraits of my ancestors knowing there is nothing like practice to devour the hours of life— sheets of music floating down, a double reed in my mouth or my fingers curled over a row of wakeful strings.

And if this is not enough to rouse you from your light sleep and lure you through the open doors,

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I will apply myself to the pyrophone, the double lap dulcimer, the glassarina, and the tiny thumb piano.

I will be the strange one, the pale eccentric who wears the same clothes every day, the one at the train station carrying the black case shaped like nothing you have seen before.

I will be the irresistible misfit who sends up over a ledge of flowers sounds no woman has ever heardâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; the one who longs to see your face framed by bougainvillea, perplexed but full of charity, looking down at me as I finger a nameless instrument it took so many days and nights to invent.

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Steve Kistulentz

Great Basin Sonata

Allegro I am supposed to start slowly.

I’m supposed to tell you how I feel about last week, a week that came with its own soundtrack, a distinct 1980s undercurrent, songs from records I’d once owned and loved, bands all haircuts and makeup, now gone indistinguishable from each other. I kept thinking how the guitar players from these bands were now likely back in their hometowns, solid American places like Mahonoy City, Pennsylvania, teaching guitar lessons at a mom and pop music store, netting, after taxes, eleven dollars an hour.

This soundtrack, these greatest hits, also included two perfectly sensuous slow dances with you; I was certain you were going to turn out to be the type of woman who would not give me the time of day. Under normal circumstances. Certainly something was not normal, but I could not pin down what it was.

The soundtrack of the week included the band we went to see.

A four piece: two guitars, bass, drums; the tempo of the songs, their handful of originals, was too fast. They played covers, trying to buy some hipster credibility, and they played the little gems too fast. We danced anyway. You put my hand on the inch of bare skin that announced itself between your wrap skirt and the bottom hem of a black shell and we went slowly.

Andante Maybe I should not have gone slowly at all. I wanted to put the whole motion, this back and forth between us, on fast forward; I wanted to turn to the last chapter and find out how it was all going to end; I wanted to find out who the villain was going to be, because, of course, there has to be a villain. I wanted to know not only what 56 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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the results of the evening would be, but also what would happen in the rest of the week and in the rest of this story arc, the rest of this narrative action. Maybe the evening was going to turn out to be a perfect little thing; maybe I was overanalyzing it; certainly I was going to keep on doing that. In the coming weeks, I’d have time to talk it over, during cocktails with old friends, during a once-a-week hourly session with a licensed clinical social worker.

Scherzo I am now certain I did not go slowly at all. I can now tell you every major airline that serves your hometown, though I’ve never seen it, and that at 4:33 a.m., Mountain Daylight Time, the cost of a last-minute round trip ticket to San Francisco was a surprisingly reasonable $398 and I still could not afford it. I could not afford my car payments or my student loan. I could not fit in these jeans, I could not afford to gain another pound. I could not afford to get involved. I was not sure I could weather any complications. But I thought I might want to try.

Allegro More songs should go here, if I were being true to myself, if I were telling the whole truth. More songs should go here, in a list, songs that once made me happy and that come back to me now whenever I feel the way I did then. It was a rare occasion where I felt like going outside to sing at five in the morning, outside because I wanted a cigarette and I was subletting an apartment in Salt Lake City and the only rule to the sublet, beyond paying the rent and the utilities, was not to smoke. I wanted to sing.

Later, in the shower, I hummed the melody to the last song I’d heard the evening before, the last song I heard on the radio, after leaving for the evening. It is important here to note that I did not stay. I remember thinking that the tempo of that song was too fast for the moment, too fast for my mood, and I knew I should have written down what the song was. I should have made note of the weather, the specific hours and minutes of each event (something I started doing later, when I realized what records of these events were already lost). I wished I could go back to the moments of those two slow dances and pull out Crab Orchard Review ◆ 57

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for you the name of the band and the titles of the songs, but each time the singer stepped to the microphone to announce his intentions, he spoke too fast. I should have written down all the concrete details. I should have noted my horoscope for the day and determined whether or not I considered the particular pair of underwear I was wearing (boxer briefs in a heavy, black cotton rib) to be lucky.

What I can tell you is that the week, the relevant parts of it, ended at 5:48 p.m. Mountain Daylight Time, a moment recorded by the green digital clock located in the radio of a rented 1998 Dodge Neon, parked in the passenger drop-off area at Salt Lake City International Airport, on a Friday evening, in front of terminal 2. The sun was bright, the air dry, the temperature 94 degrees. Five forty-eight was the time exactly, by both the clock located in the car stereo and by my watch (inexpensive but generally reliable). And that exact time was some 13 hours and 15 minutes after I had inquired, by dialing an 800 number, about the price of a ticket to San Francisco. I was willing to follow. At that point, there did seem to be other, limited options. The fantastical, ideas like running off to France, weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d already discussed and abandoned. But the concept of San Francisco was discarded because I did not know where you lived.

Diminuendo Your plane departed at some inexact moment after six. I did not walk you to the gate, and so the moment of the closing of the jetway doors, the time when the plane pushed back and began to lumber across the apron to the runway, these times too are unrecorded. In your walk from car to curbside baggage check to the gate for a flight scheduled for a 6:11 p.m. departure, you had time to buy a bottle of water and a package of those peppermints that come in a metal box, the same mints you chewed before our slow dances, and again in my car, one of those courtesies before first kisses, something to counteract the effects of beer and cheap red wine. You bit through the mints, chewed them up instead of letting them dissolve on your tongue.

After you bought the peppermints, you sat and waited to board your plane according to the order that the gate attendant demanded.

The line moved slowly and you had time to construct the events of the next few days in your head, moving only forward. I knew then, at the curb of the passenger drop-off area in front of terminal 2, how I fell in among competing priorities. I fell somewhere among all the plans you 58 â&#x2014;&#x2020; Crab Orchard Review

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had told me: the trip to your mother’s (the first in five months), a business trip, a Hawaiian vacation, taking some time to determine where some other man you’d mentioned was going to fit in. Or whether he was going to fit in at all. Or whether I was. I didn’t know. That is to say I did not know how much you were thinking about me.

This is something I thought would be finished now, not the story, but the idea of it. The idea that from time to time I might still allow myself some luxurious distractions. I figured that by now, on the three story arcs here—my life, yours, this story (the thing itself)— I would have figured out how to go slowly. I thought I would have figured out all of it by now. I thought my thirties might put an end to these distractions, or at least diminish their frequency, until I could tune them out, until they vanished completely, the way FM stations die out as you drive along the plains.

But this is about moving slowly. And how that is a skill I have not yet acquired. It is something I did not know, not in seeing teenagers playing clumsy rock songs about beer and fucking, not when my hands were learning to anticipate whatever you would permit of your body. I did not know your family history or your blood type. I did not know your middle name or your mother’s last.

I did not know what situation I could contrive to see you again, or if letters, even in today’s immediate and electronic form, would be enough. I did not know why I kept thinking about Elton John, and equally I could not predict whether you would be upset to see this story, this part so obviously about us, somewhere in print.

The evening before, we still did not know the answer: were we going to do this awesome thing? We did not know how fast we were going to move. The answer was still in doubt before your flight, you walking through the terminal and me leaning over the open door of a rented car, radio on. Then your plane, or a plane I presumed was yours, was in the sky, making headway up and over the Great Basin. There I was, looking up at a sky full of nothing, nothing but airplanes and radio signals.

But before then, before that perfect moment of your departure, when I was still filled with illusions and did not know how, in the next hour following our scene at curbside, I would end up dazzled and beaten, you gave me a kiss, a solitary benediction placed on my forehead, as if you were choosing to avoid the contradictions of my lips and the intimacies that come with open mouths, choosing instead a kiss I would Crab Orchard Review ◆ 59

Steve Kistulentz

remember, because of its facility and its grace, because it was different, perhaps the only time during eleven minutes in my car that you gave any consideration to the customs of departure and separation, what men and women do at airports (equally perhaps because you knew that departures at airports are a routine occurrence, set out according to schedules displayed on video monitors in each antiseptic building; and certainly because there must be among the memory of this kiss an acknowledgement of that scene in Casablanca, the most famous of airport departures, and the way all previous departures in which we had each participated were accompanied with slamming doors or recriminations, the way the drama of this departure failed to measure up to past experience, and even an acknowledgement that the brightness of the sky and the time of day and the heat of the sun together were not right for the mood, and in the light, you indeed still did look a little like the young Ingrid Bergman) you gave me this kiss, a kiss of departure and solemn grace, a kiss because it was the right thing to do, a kiss that was the only part of you that could remain with me, a goodbye kiss.

Nothing remotely like that has happened to me since.

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Lee Martin

Thumb Under

On Monday, the week of the school’s spring concert, Spangler found one of his second violins, a boy named Jacob Moats, at the conductor’s stand. He was a skinny boy who wore baggy jeans and an oversized flannel shirt as if there were more bulk to him than there actually was.

“Feel the music,” he said, in a lurid, breathy voice. At a break in the rehearsal, Spangler had stepped into his office, not bothering to take his baton, and Jacob had it now. He waved it about and moved his hips in a suggestive grind. “Be the music.”

It was something Spangler often told his young musicians, and though he knew he should laugh good-heartedly to show he could be a sport, he felt something break in him. A white-hot rage crescendoed, and before he could think, he had marched up to Jacob and jerked the baton from his hand. When he did, the tip of the baton lashed Jacob across the face, and Jacob said to him, “Mr. Spangler, you’ve hit me.

And everyone here saw you do it.”

Lately, Jacob had been goading him, first with an exaggerated kindness—false-faced smiles and sarcastic compliments—and then with a more direct assault. “You’ve got it wrong,” he had shouted at Spangler at their last rehearsal when the orchestra had been struggling with the presto section in Saint-Saëns’ Symphony No. 3. “You’ve got us all monkeyed up.”

Spangler had held tightly to his conductor’s stand. “Again,” he had finally said, and the orchestra had taken a half-hearted stab at the troublesome section before Spangler, his hands trembling, had dismissed them.

When the baton hit Jacob in the face, Spangler himself wondered whether he had purposely struck him or whether it had all been an unfortunate accident. He immediately called the rehearsal to an end, and, not bothering to stop at his office to gather his jacket and briefcase, he walked out into the brilliant sunshine, anxious to get as far away as he could from the ugly thing that had just happened.

He had tried his best to support Jacob because he knew what it Crab Orchard Review ◆ 61

Lee Martin

was like to have only a little talent and to wish for more. At Jacob’s age, Spangler had been an exceptional pianist. Then, one day, his brother, Paul, fascinated with fireworks, had tossed an M-80 too close to where Spangler had been sitting on the grass, and the explosion had ripped through the tendons in his right hand. After that, although he could still play the piano, he lacked the strength and flexibility he needed to become a concert pianist. His anger over losing the talent that had always distinguished him kept him from forgiving Paul’s carelessness, and over the years, they became strangers to each other. Spangler went away to college and then came back to Tennessee to teach. Paul moved to Nebraska. Neither of them ever married, as if, Spangler always thought, the ugly incident with the M-80 had made them incapable of loving.

Then Paul had died. He had been a tower foreman for the railroad, and one day he had failed to secure his safety line, and he had fallen.

Spangler, three months later, still woke at night, screaming his way up from dreams in which he himself hurtled toward the ground, heavy with all the words he wished he had spoken to his brother those years when they had lived apart, each of them alone.

He had tried, in the months following Paul’s death, to be patient and forgiving, and now Jacob Moats was testing him. At first, Jacob had been a quiet boy, ridiculed by the others in the orchestra because he came from a family of Holy Rollers. His father had started a Holiness Church near Calhoun, where the members handled snakes— copperheads and rattlers—as a sign of their faith. Cyril Moats, so the story went, had been bitten over a hundred times and had never sought a doctor’s care. And the rumor was that Jacob himself could pick up a live electrical wire and never feel the current. He was some sort of voodoo-freak, the other orchestra members said, never stopping to notice, Spangler thought, the way Jacob kept his head tipped down all through rehearsals, or how, when he thought no one was watching, he looked about him with his soft, brown eyes, eager for someone to say something to him, fearful that, if they did, it would be something he would rather not hear.

As a violinist, he had average technique, but a boundless passion for music. Often, he stayed far past the end of rehearsals, playing again and again the difficult sections of particular pieces. Spangler sat in his office, listening to the ragged bowing, the clumsy fingering, until, finally, he couldn’t keep himself from going out into the rehearsal room to offer instruction.

Why not give him a boost, he thought, shortly after Paul had died.

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Whenever Jacob challenged for a chair ahead of him, Spangler gave it to him even on occasion when he knew Jacob didn’t deserve it.

Then, as preparations began for the spring concert, Spangler heard him say to one of the first violins, “Watch out. Nothing can stop me.

My bow’s almost up your ass.” And Spangler cringed at the arrogance, realizing it was exactly what Paul had always seen in him. (“Look at you,” Paul had said to him once. “You think you hung the moon.”)

Spangler realized how unwise it had been to give Jacob the wrong idea of himself. From then on, whenever someone challenged for his chair, Spangler took it from him. Little by little, Jacob receded down the line of second violins.

One afternoon, a few weeks before the incident with the baton, he came into Spangler’s office.

“I’m going to quit,” he said. “Chuck it all to hell.”

Spangler took off his reading glasses and laid them on his desk.

“Quit the orchestra? Are you sure that’s what you want to do?” He had never meant to discourage Jacob to the point of breaking, only to be reasonable and clear-sighted. He remembered playing the piano after injuring his hand and how long he had tried to convince himself he had the same technique he had before the mishap. “I’d hate to see you give it up,” he said. “You play well enough, and, besides, we can’t all be virtuosos. I used to think I’d be the next Van Cliburn.”

“As long as we’re playing, that stuff about my dad and me, all that stuff people think about us, goes away. Nothing matters except the music.

I know it sounds nuts, but I’m sort of invisible. Then we stop, and I’m me again.” He put his hands on Spangler’s desk and leaned toward him.

“You know what I’m talking about, don’t you?”

For the first time, Jacob looked directly at Spangler with those soft, brown eyes that were usually casting skittishly about, and Spangler had to look away, shaken. Something in him wanted to say to Jacob, yes, that’s how it is, but he couldn’t bring himself to admit that he, too, had things in his life he would like to escape.

“It’s wise to be realistic about your talents,” he said. “Especially when you’re average like you and me.”

He had meant his remark to be comforting, but he could see right away he had hurt Jacob.

“Is that what you think of me?” Jacob said. “That I’m average?”

“Keep playing,” Spangler said. “Prove me wrong.” ◆◆◆

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Then the episode with the baton had happened. That evening, the principal called to ask Spangler for his story.

“Is it true?” The principal was officious—his tone, even and inquiring. “Did you strike him?”

“I may have. I don’t know.”

“How can you not know, Loren? You struck him or you didn’t.”

“The baton struck him,” Spangler said. “But there were circumstances.”

“You’re saying, then, your baton struck him in the face.” The principal sighed. “The boy’s father is insisting that the school board meet. I really have no choice. In the meantime, perhaps it’s best if I suspend you.”

“But the spring concert.”

“We’ll put it on hold.”

“All because of that boy? That Moats boy? Everyone knows he comes from a family of lunatics.”

“You’re out of line.” The principal’s voice was more severe now.

“The Moats family is not the issue here. In fact, if anything, we have to consider what some might call their persecution. It’s no secret that the other kids give Jacob a hard go because of his father. Loren, I’m sorry all this has happened, but this thing’s in motion now, and we can’t run away from it. All we can do is hold on and ride it out to its end.”

The next morning, Spangler went to the school to retrieve his briefcase. Classes were in session, and he was glad for the empty halls so he could slip into his office, unseen. Before he could get away, the telephone rang. It was a woman named Anna Tremain calling from Meigs County. She had a piano to sell, she told him, and would he please come out and tell her what it was worth.

“There must be someone else closer to you,” he said. “You don’t know me from Adam. How did you get my name?”

“The word’s out on you.”

Spangler imagined the talk swirling now through the town about how he had beaten Jacob Moats, and in clear view of the entire orchestra. “What do you mean by that?” he said to Anna Tremain.

“I hear you know your stuff,” she said. It was true that in his spare time Spangler restored pianos. “Shall we say this evening, Mr. Spangler? Around seven?”

He considered the long days ahead while he waited for the school board to meet. “Fine,” he said. “Yes. Seven it is.”

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And seven it was when he drove his Volvo down her narrow lane. He heard the woodwind squeak of sapling branches scraping the doors and felt the jarring percussion of the tires dropping off into ruts and holes.

He parked the Volvo in Anna Tremain’s farm yard. In the dusk, he could smell sweet lilac, could hear the peepers somewhere in the distance setting up their night song. For a moment, he closed his eyes, content with the lull and calm—the pianissimo—of this solitude.

Then Anna Tremain rapped on the Volvo’s roof with her ringheavy fist. “Are you the professor?”

“The professor?” Spangler turned and saw a pretty woman with a slender face and deep-set eyes above her high cheekbones. “I’m the one you talked to,” he said. “I’m Loren Spangler.”

“You sounded younger on the phone.” She opened the Volvo’s door. “Oh well. Come on. The gorilla’s inside.”

The gorilla, to Spangler’s shock and delight, was a Chickering grand piano, crafted, as best as he could estimate, shortly after the Civil War, and looking now as stunning as ever. Its rosewood case rested majestically on deeply carved scroll legs; its pedal lyre, ornate and delicate, curved down from the center of the cabinet to the floor.

“Good God.” He couldn’t contain his excitement at finding such a treasure, nor his immediate frustration with Anna Tremain for wishing it gone. “It’s a Chickering grand. Why in the world would you want to sell it?”

Anna Tremain stood with her hands on her hips. “It’s such a klutzy old thing. And I can tell you’ve never tried to dust all that scrollwork. Mr. Spangler, let’s not be sentimental. What would you call a fair price?”

Spangler, ashamed now of his outburst, set about inspecting the piano. He examined the cabinet and found no loose veneer or other damage from extremes in dry or humid air. Anna Tremain had propped open the lid, and he could see the straight-strung strings, all of them taut and reasonably free from tarnish. In the breast pocket of his blazer, he carried a small and a large screwdriver, and he knew if he were to inspect the piano properly he would have to remove the music shelf and the fallboard and the keyslip so he could get a look at the hammers and the dampers and the pinblock. But suddenly, under Anna Tremain’s watchful eye, he didn’t have the heart for it.

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heavy rings setting up a steady tap-a-tap, and Spangler feared at any moment the prop would fall free and the lid would come crashing down.

“May I?” he said, sweeping his hand through the air above the keyboard.

“You’re the professor,” she said. She bowed to him, and moved away from the piano.

He sat on the edge of the bench and played an A at different octave intervals up and down the keyboard. Then he played a bit of Liszt’s Consolation No. 3, played until the crescendo in measure forty-one reached its peak on the D-flat chord that opened measure forty-three.

He stopped there, before the composition fell away to its gentle end, and for a moment, the last, urgent chord filled the room.

“Twenty-five hundred dollars,” he said. “Three thousand, but an instrument like this should be played and enjoyed.”

“There’s no one here to play it,” Anna Tremain said. “My mother did, but she died last winter.”

Spangler remembered the name then—Tremain—and the other name that had soon overshadowed it—LaChance, Eddie LaChance— her boyfriend who had killed her father and nine other people across Tennessee and North Carolina.

It had all happened nearly forty years before, when Spangler had been fourteen, the same age as Anna Tremain when she had run away with Eddie LaChance. Spangler could still recall the terrible horror of those two days when no one had known where the teenage killers would next strike. He remembered the deserted streets, and the roadblocks along the highways, and the way his father slept in a chair in the living room, his rifle across his lap. Paul, eight at the time, insisted he be allowed to sleep in “Bubby’s” room, and Spangler still held the dear memory of his brother curled to his body all the cold night, the pleasant heat from his skin, and the clean smell of his flannel pajamas.

Finally, the police had caught Eddie LaChance and Anna Tremain. They had executed him in the electric chair and put her in prison. She had claimed her innocence, insisting that LaChance had kidnapped her and held her hostage. For a moment, Spangler grieved for himself and Anna Tremain, for the people they might have become—she, if she had never fallen in with Eddie LaChance, and Spangler, if Paul had never maimed him.

“Have you ever thought maybe you could learn to play?”

Spangler asked.

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finger. “Really, Mr. Spangler. The idea.” For the first time since she had rapped on the Volvo’s roof, she was shy, and Spangler could tell the idea delighted her. “These stubby old fingers,” she said. “An old dame like me?”

“I could give you lessons.”

“Piano lessons are for young girls.”

“Would you give it a try?” He moved over on the piano bench.

“Here, sit beside me.”

When she was settled next to him, he took her hand and placed three of her fingers on the keyboard: her thumb on middle C, her third finger on E, and her pinky on G. “Go on,” he said. “Press down on the keys.”

She played a C-major chord, and as it sounded in the quiet farm house, she closed her eyes and didn’t speak until the last strains of the chord had faded and died.

“It’s very lovely,” she said, and Spangler knew, for better or worse, they had struck a deal.

At home, he ran his fingers over the doors and fenders of the Volvo and felt the scratches the brush along Anna Tremain’s lane had left.

They were just the slightest scrapes, but he could feel them. He closed his eyes, the way he often did when he was conducting his orchestra, alert in his dark cocoon to glitches in tempo or misplayed notes.

He had bought the Volvo a few years before because he had intended to make a trip to Nebraska to see Paul, to ask him, if he could muster the courage, whether he had meant to wound him with the M-80, or whether it had truly been an accident as Paul had always insisted. It was something Spangler wanted to ask him in person, not over the telephone, because he thought that, if he could see regret in Paul’s face, he might forgive him and have his companionship, as they both moved into the latter halves of their lives. He had bought the Volvo because he had read that it was the safest car a person could own, but he had never made the trip to Nebraska, because Paul had called one night to tell him about being on top of a tower and looking down on a world so small a man could get the idea he owned it. “That’s the danger of being in high places,” he had said.

“You can fall in love with yourself, think you’re infallible. Of course, you know that. You always thought you were God’s gift.”

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man wore bright blue coveralls and white running shoes, and Spangler could smell the lime scent of his aftershave. “Looks like you got too close to something,” he said to Spangler after he had eyeballed the Volvo. He unwrapped a stick of chewing gum and put it in his mouth.

“Aren’t you the music teacher? Cyril Moats says he’s got your ass in a sling. He just dropped off that Ford truck over there.” He pointed across the service bay to a green pickup with a crumpled fender. Moats Demolition, white lettering read on the truck’s door. We Love to Get Dirty. He gave Spangler a knowing grin. “I’ll tell you something. Free of charge. I wouldn’t want to be on that man’s shit list right now. The sheriff put the finger on him last night for handling poisonous reptiles.

It’s a misdemeanor in this state, you know. The word is Cyril’s boy was the one who called the law. At any rate, Cyril don’t have those snakes no more, and he’s fifty bucks lighter in the pocket to boot. I’d say right now he’s running with a short fuse, and I wouldn’t want to be anywhere close by when he goes off.”

Before Spangler could get away from the body shop, Cyril Moats walked in. He was, as Spangler remembered him, an ordinary-looking man, the sort few would notice in a crowd or be able to recall later if the need arose. He wore a pair of dark gray trousers and a matching shirt with an eyeglass case clipped to the pocket.

“Milt,” he said to the body man, “what do you know about my Ford?”

“Nothing yet,” the body man said. “I’ve been checking out this Volvo.”

Cyril Moats took his eyeglasses out of their case and put them on. “That’s a fine automobile,” he said. “I saw one just like it last night out in the country on the Mt. Gilead Road.” Spangler was standing on the other side of the Volvo in the shadows of the service bay, and Cyril Moats had to walk around the car to get a good look at him. He stepped up close. Spangler smelled a sharp odor of ammonia on him, and over it, a sweeter smell, a rich scent like the velour lining of a violin case. “Do you have a practice of treating things rough?” Cyril Moats said to him. His voice was low, the tone of a double bass.

“Rough?” Spangler said.

Cyril Moats bowed his head a bit and stared at Spangler over the tops of his glasses. “You know what I’m talking about.” One eyebrow lifted. “A fine man like you with a crackerjack car like this. I’d be more careful. That’s all I’m saying.”

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Spangler knew, then, how Jacob must have felt when Spangler had told him he was average and challenged him to keep playing— as if he had been cornered and it would take some bold and desperate move to prove himself.

“I was visiting Anna Tremain,” Spangler said. “You remember Anna Tremain and Eddie LaChance?”

“Those kids who killed all those people?” the body man said.

“That’s right,” said Spangler. “She had a piano she wanted to sell.”

Cyril Moats reached up and took off his glasses, and it was then that Spangler noticed his hands: the skin swollen and bruised, the joints arthritic-looking, the fingernails thick and yellow.

“I’m not interested in criminals.” With stiff fingers, Cyril Moats folded down the temples of his eyeglasses. “At least not that one.”

He tried to slip the glasses back into their case, but he bobbled them. They fell, and Spangler had to take a swift step and make a graceful swoop to catch them. He held them on his palms and felt the nosepieces, warm with the heat from Cyril Moats’ skin. For a moment, he marvelled over the quick move he had made and the intimate sensation—exotic, yet familiar—of holding another man’s glasses, especially this man’s when it was obvious that Cyril Moats resented something he thought he knew about Spangler, that he was the maestro with the baton, majestic in black-tie and tails, striding out onto the stage, stepping up to his conductor’s stand, bowing to the audience, basking in its applause.

Spangler lifted his hands and offered the eyeglasses to Cyril Moats.

“You think you’re something,” Cyril Moats said. “But it’s an odd faith a man puts in himself. It’s not to be trusted. Those who know the spirit could tell you that.” He took the glasses from Spangler and held them up to peer through their lenses. “You wait,” he said. “It won’t be long before you see.”

That afternoon, the principal called. “We’ve set a date,” he told Spangler. “This coming Tuesday. That gives you nearly a week to get your story ready.”

“I’ve already told you. There were circumstances.”

“The school board will hear it all. Everyone involved will have a chance to speak. Seven o’clock in the auditorium.”

Spangler tried to imagine himself addressing the board. What would he tell them? That the boy had been mocking him, that he had often been disruptive? All of that was true; the other orchestra Crab Orchard Review ◆ 69

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members would attest to it. They would make it clear that Jacob Moats had been looking for trouble. Spangler was sure of it.

“I shouldn’t have lost my temper,” he said to the principal. “But still the boy was out to make a fool of me.”

“There’s something else you should know,” the principal said.

“The father says you’ve been treating the boy unfairly. He claims you’ve been taking his chair from him even when his playing has been superior to his challengers’.”

“All my musicians think they’re superior. Creation breeds ego.

I wouldn’t have it any other way. But in the end I’m the judge. They know that.”

“Still, it’ll probably come up. I wanted you to be ready for it.”

“I’ve been here thirty years,” Spangler said.

“Please, Loren,” said the principal. “This isn’t a witch hunt. We just want everyone to feel they’re getting a fair shake.”

“Thirty years,” Spangler said again. “I’d like to think my word means something.”

Later, as they had arranged, Spangler drove out to Anna Tremain’s for her piano lesson. Since his first visit, he had thought of her often, and the way she had nearly come to tears the first time he had showed her how to play the C-major chord. He wished he had known her when she had been a girl. He wished he could have saved her from Eddie LaChance and from the lurid history she wore now like a second skin and would never be able to shed.

As Spangler drove along the Mt. Gilead Road, he remembered the Chickering grand piano and the Liszt he had played on it. Over the past few days, he had recalled the sensation of his fingers on the keys, the sheen of the rosewood cabinet, the rich tones of the hammers striking the strings. He knew what he would tell Anna Tremain before he began her first lesson: that music could forgive them, could create a world more noble than the one that had ruined them, that for a while they could live in its grand design, whole and fresh and without blame.

But when he was finally seated beside her on the piano bench, all he could bring himself to say was, “This is middle C.” She pressed the key with a trembling finger, then pulled her hand back as if she had touched something too hot for her comfort.

“It won’t bite,” Spangler told her.

She put her hand to her mouth, and she giggled. “My mother would never let me touch her piano. She said I was reckless.”

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Spangler showed her how to play a C-major scale. The secret, he told her, was to begin with her thumb on middle C, and then, after the third finger hit E, to tuck her thumb under her palm to reach the F and to provide a bridge to walk the forefinger over to the G, then the third finger on A, the fourth on B, and the pinky on high C. “Do you follow?” he asked.

“I’ll try,” she told him.

And try she did. But every time she got to the F, she forged ahead with her fourth finger, forgetting Spangler’s advice about tucking the thumb under, and then she was left with only her pinky and still four notes to play.

“Nuts,” she finally said. She was chewing bubble gum, and when she stopped playing, she sighed and blew a bubble.

“Five fingers for eight notes,” Spangler said, cringing as he waited for the bubble to pop. “Remember, thumb under.”

She was, to his dismay, completely inept. Each time she attempted the scale, she forgot about her thumb and again had to stop.

“Thumb under,” Spangler finally shouted at her. He took her thumb and forced it under her palm to the F. He pounded it against the key again and again. “Thumb under,” he said. “Five fingers for eight notes. You can’t play what you can’t reach.”

She jerked her hand away from him, and in an instant, he felt the way he had when his baton had struck Jacob Moats in the face. He knew he had gone too far and wished for some way to repair the damage.

“I’m very sorry,” he said to Anna Tremain, and before he could stop himself he was telling her the story of Jacob and the baton and the school board meeting that would decide everything next Tuesday.

“I don’t know if it’s true about you hitting that boy.” She glanced down at her thumb, and flexed it a few times. “But I could believe it.”

Spangler played the C-major scale. “It takes practice,” he said.

“And patience. I’ll come back on Saturday, and we’ll try again.”

The rest of the week, he couldn’t erase from his mind the image of her face the moment he had grabbed her thumb and banged it against the keyboard; it was a look like Jacob Moats’ when the baton had struck him—a cold, lifeless stare Spangler imagined prisoners might learn when they realize they have no choice but to do what they’re told. He didn’t want it to be the last look he saw on Anna Tremain’s face, or to think of himself as someone who could bully people or fill them with spite and loathing.

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So he went back. But when he stepped into the room where he had first seen the Chickering grand, he saw that it was gone. Anna Tremain stood in the empty space. Around her, on the floorboards, Spangler could see the impressions where the piano legs had sat.

The small dents were gray with dust.

“You’ve sold it,” he said.

“I had an offer, Mr. Spangler. It was mine to sell.”

“Who bought it?”

“A preacher. A Mr. Moats. He bought it for his son. Isn’t that the one you’re supposed to have hit? He seemed like a nice boy.

Very polite.”

The thought of Cyril Moats’ ugly hands, bruised and misshapen on the Chickering grand, was too much for Spangler.

“I know about you,” he said to Anna Tremain. “You and Eddie LaChance. I’ve known it all along.”

“Of course, you have. It’s what kept you coming here.”

Spangler couldn’t deny the truth. “From the beginning, I thought we knew something about each other.” He took a step toward her. “I thought there was some regret we shared.”

Anna Tremain laughed. “Don’t make me your project, Mr. Spangler.

I’ve already been rehabilitated. Oh, I’ll admit for a while I fell in love with the idea of learning to play the piano, the way I might have done when I was a girl if things had been different in my life. And it was good to have your company. I spend most of my days alone. Of course, I’m used to that. No one really ever tried to know me. They listened to what Eddie LaChance said about me, and that was that.”

Her calm manner, much like Jacob Moats’ when he had said, “You’ve hit me,” unhinged Spangler. “You went along with LaChance, didn’t you? You knew what was going to happen, and you didn’t care.”

“Maybe I wanted it to go on and on. Maybe I didn’t want it to ever stop. A person can get so mad they stop thinking straight. The only thing I know is you have to save yourself. When you’re inside, you can’t see what’s outside. Anyone who’s ever been in prison can tell you that.”

By the time Spangler had walked to the end of Anna Tremain’s lane and started the Volvo, he knew something of what he imagined Eddie LaChance must have felt the night he had started his spree: a fury he couldn’t control, and perhaps would have refused to mute 72 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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even if he had possessed the power. Spangler remembered the stories about LaChance. He had been a pint-sized kid with a stammer, a runt the other kids had ridiculed. From the first day of school, he would say after his arrest, he had started to consider revenge. The only thing he had learned in school was how to think like a killer.

Spangler considered the ugly turns a life could take, and he knew he would go to Cyril Moats and he would tell him the truth about his son. “He was mocking me,” he would say. “Whatever happened, he brought it on himself. I want this business with the school board stopped.”

Cyril Moats lived at the edge of town on an acreage crowded with heavy equipment: bulldozers, dump trucks, cranes. His house was a white clapboard, a two-story with a front porch that sagged on its stone pilings.

When Spangler turned the Volvo into the drive, he saw Jacob and his father in the bed of their green truck. They had backed the truck up to the porch steps and were trying to unload the piano.

Spangler could see, as he left the Volvo and strode across the yard, that they had removed the lid and the pedal lyre and the legs, and had strapped the piano, straight side down, to a wooden skid. They had cleared a path in the truck bed, casting aside a clutter of tools— wrenches, crowbars, log chains, sledge hammers—and they were behind the skid, now, pushing against the piano.

A car slowed on the highway, and a man’s voice shouted out, “Snake-man.”

Neither Jacob nor Cyril Moats gave any sign that they had heard the taunt, and Spangler knew such abuse had become common to their lives.

“Don’t hug it,” Cyril Moats said. “Shove the gorilla. Come on.

Get rough with it. Show it who’s boss.”

“I can’t,” Jacob said in a tired, whining voice. Spangler had never heard that tone from him, and it caught him off guard, raised a sympathy in him he couldn’t have predicted.

“Girlie,” Cyril Moats said, “can’t never did nothing.”

“Don’t call me girlie. I hate it when you call me that.”

“Girlie,” Cyril Moats said again. “I bet you squat when you pee.”

At that moment, a sickening thought came to Spangler. He wondered whether Cyril Moats had insisted the school board meet, not to punish Spangler, but so the truth of Jacob’s coarse behavior and his miserable presence in the orchestra might come out and Crab Orchard Review ◆ 73

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publicly humiliate him. Spangler realized that it was what he himself had been hoping, and the fact that he could share such a malicious desire with Cyril Moats revolted him.

“Mr. Moats.” Spangler stepped up onto the truck bed and put his hands on the front end of the piano. “This piano should have been wrapped in blankets.” He meant his advice to be helpful.

“You’re going to scratch the cabinet.”

Cyril Moats straightened and eyed Spangler across the piano’s length. “Is this your business?” he said. “Is there some law against the way I’m handling this piano?”

Jacob kept his head bowed. “I told you we should be careful.”

“I don’t want to hear anything from you,” his father said. “You’ve had your say.”

Just then, from the snarl of tools, a rattlesnake slithered out and lay coiled on the truck bed halfway between Spangler and Cyril Moats. The snake, Spangler knew, was a timber rattler, straw-colored, with dark vee-shaped bands marking its length.

Spangler took a step back, and Cyril Moats said, “Don’t move.

That’s old Jesse Helms. He got away from the sheriff. I’d been wondering where he’d gone off to.”

Cyril Moats came out from behind the piano, and with a quick move that started Spangler, he stooped and grabbed the snake just behind its head. The snake’s mouth flared open, and its tongue flicked out, and its tail curled, and its rattles started buzzing.

“You think you know something about me?” Cyril Moats bought the snake to his chest and let it go. He raised his arms, tipped back his head, and closed his eyes. The rattlesnake cocked back its head, and for a moment, Spangler feared it would strike, but then its rattles stopped hissing and it flattened out and climbed over Cyril Moats’ shoulder, curled around his neck, and stopped. “You think I’m a crazy man? I’m crazy with the spirit, that’s all. Not everyone can take up serpents. Only those who’s got the faith. Only those precious few.”

Spangler knew he could have told Cyril Moats something then, and Cyril Moats would have understood. Spangler could have told him how it made him feel when he was conducting an orchestra.

The mere sweep of his arm, baton in hand, could cause horns to sound, timpani to roll, flutes to rise pure and clear. And when it all worked—when the brass came in at his call or fell away to make room for the strings—he could lose himself in the music, become part of its swell and ebb. He could disappear, could become 74 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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something the music had made, something greater and more perfect than he could ever hope to be outside its measure and time.

“The tricky part, after you take hold of a serpent,” Cyril Moats said, “is knowing how to let it go.”

And then the snake was in Spangler’s hands. It was just there, he would think later when he would decide to resign before the school board could meet. One minute Cyril Moats was holding it, and the next thing Spangler knew he had passed it on to him. He knew, if he ever told the story to anyone, he would never be able to explain that for a time the snake had been nothing more than motion and sound. He had felt the muscles moving beneath its skin, had heard the rattles buzzing.

It had seemed for an instant—and this is what had finally terrified him—not a serpent, but music he was holding in his hands.

Then Jacob came to him, and he took the snake, and he flung it out into the yard. And Cyril Moats, seeing what the boy had done, yanked up a sledge hammer and swung it against the piano. He swung it again and again, and Spangler heard the cabinet splinter and the strings twang.

He knew, then, that he had meant to strike Jacob in the face with his baton. The shame of that knowledge caused something to give in him, some spite that had caught him the day Paul had injured him with the M-80.

Jacob turned to Spangler, his eyes wide with pleading and fear.

“Stop him,” he said.

But Spangler was too stunned by something he felt now for Jacob and his father, for himself and Paul—a tender pity he might have called love had he been a more courageous man, had he dared imagine himself worthy of such madness.

Crab Orchard Review ◆ 75

James Nolan

Perpetual Care

She hadn’t been to the cemetery since All Saints’ Day. With a grimace, Miss Estelle Arceneaux emptied dried cockroaches from a glass vase and turned on the spigot full force, careful not to splash the white crochet handbag hanging from her elbow. Algae caked around the rim was the hardest to clean, and the paper towel turned to mush between her fingers. This part of the ritual was for the men of the family, yet they were all either in the crypt waiting for their Easter gladiolus, or way out in California playing in some kind of band.

As the last of the Arceneaux women who could both walk and see, she took her family duties seriously. Opalescent plastic earrings marked the formality of the occasion. It’s a shame, she thought as she spun the spigot shut, how fast things go to ruin if you let them.

She squinted in the overexposed New Orleans sunlight reflected off the whitewashed tombs, noticing for the first time the profusion of day-old flowers and wreaths piled around the corner crypt.

Shielding her eyes from the glare, she could barely make out the name: Famille Lemoine. The Lemoines, she knew them, one had married a Landry and lived at the corner of LePage and Esplanade back before the war. The last Lemoine buried there was in 1975, and the family hadn’t engraved the marble slab yet with the recently deceased’s name. Wedging the vase under one arm and securing her pocketbook under the other, she turned to walk on when she heard an echo from somewhere inside the tomb, a tinny, rasping wail.

At first she thought it might be the previous coffin moved from the shelf inside settling to the bottom of that pit—or whatever they have down there—the endless darkness she had tried not to peer down into during a lifetime of burials. Once she had dreamed it was filled with giant crawfish clattering their claws against coffins, trying to open us up for a change. When she was a little girl she had asked her Pepère if it led to China and he told her no, chère, back to France, an answer that satisfied her until she had made her second communion. There was nothing about underground funerary passages to France in her 76 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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catechism, and one of the Laurent boys had told her that down there was where the devil went to the rest room.

Stepping through spongy grass in her oxfords, she mounted the first marble step and stuck her silver perm into the alcove of the plastered brick bread-oven of a tomb styled like a little Greek-revival house. She was immediately blasted by a crescendo of horns and a roll of drums. Jumping back, she almost knocked over an enormous basket of Easter lilies with a ribbon marked “From the Senior Class, McMain High School.”

She could swear there was a Negro man inside singing “I been looovin’ you toooo looong to stop nooow . . .”

“You are tiiired and you wanna be freeee,” he was moaning in falsetto, “My looove’s growin’ strooonger as you become a habit to meee.” She had eaten a banana this morning, and bananas made her dizzy. That was it. She had forgotten to take the potassium Dr. Schumaker prescribed. She would put the white gladiolus in the clean vase, pray for the souls of her family kneeling on the steps of their tomb, sweep around it, get back in the car, drive carefully home and lie down on the daybed in the back room with the blinds closed.

A brass cascade of pleading followed her as she walked quickly away: “Don’t make me stop nooow oh pulease don’t make me stop, don’t make me stop nooow . . .” “Papa,” she murmured to herself, as if answering the voice singing to her from inside the tomb, “I can’t do this all alone any more.”

God knows he had done everything he could for the boy. So Easter Sunday found him speeding in a pearl-blue Cadillac DeVille toward Bay St. Louis, where Dr. Lemoine hoped to console himself over the blackjack tables of the Casino Magic Inn at the $29-a-night sucker’s rate. And the getaway would do a world of good for Sybil, who hadn’t spoken a word all morning. His wife sat sphinx-like with her flipped shoulder-length hair, staring straight ahead into the morning traffic, tapping an enameled fingernail against the cream vinyl seat-bucket to a medley on the Easy Listening station.

Her debutante-ball mask had gotten her through the autopsy, funeral, and burial. And now Dr. Lemoine could picture her floating in a turquoise pool, hair fanned out in a nimbus around her face, that taut mask dissolving into tears like a lump of sugar.

No one could reach them at the Casino, not the hospital, insurance company, police, or well-meaning friends and family.

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None of the psychiatrists blamed either of them, of course. The hospital, well, just hadn’t worked out, but it was the only choice left after all of those . . . shenanigans the boy pulled. Running away from home to go live in the Tremé. Brass bands. Drugs. He could have gotten shot. Yes, he had musical talent but that shouldn’t lead him into the middle of a black neighborhood and—whatever in the world that place was called?—the Little Peoples Club!

“You took the wrong exit,” his wife announced.

“I’m going to take the scenic route, along the coast.” He turned his bearded, marmot-like bulk toward her, stunned at the first words she had uttered all day. She looked back at him as if that was the saddest thing anyone had ever told her. The scenic route—the day after they buried their only son who jumped out of the window of the Rosary Three ward at St. Vincent DePaul Hospital on Good Thursday.

Why couldn’t Jay have become a normal gutter-punk, Dr. Lemoine had often wondered, with green hair and a shirt-stud in his tongue to click against his front teeth for attention. Those kids at least have a reasonable cure-rate. A little therapy. Extra spending money. And an upscale party college. But what could you do with a boy from a good French Catholic family who thought he was black?

As the Cadillac swerved onto the coastal highway, his wife gasped at the first raucous screech, bracing her vermilion fingernail extensions against the padded dashboard as if the seagulls were about to nosedive through the windshield.

The devil was beating his wife over the clapboard office of St. Louis No. 3 Cemetery on Esplanade Avenue. Despite tentative morning sunlight, a persistent drizzle had driven the director inside, where Mr. Broussard felt comfortably alone with his sinuses and hemorrhoid. He was just biting into his second McKenzie doughnut when Miss Arceneaux stomped up the steps in a no-nonsense stride.

He wasn’t in the mood to talk about Perpetual Care.

“Mr. Broussard,” she briskly informed him, “there are colored people singing inside the Lemoine tomb.”

“Where they at?”

“I said I hear the voices of Negroes coming out of the Lemoine family tomb. You must do something.”

“Miss Arceneaux, always a pleasure to see you. Set yourself down right here next to one of these glazed doughnuts I got over by McKenzie. They nice and fresh.”

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“I had breakfast early, thank you. I couldn’t sleep a wink last night. I kept thinking about what I heard here yesterday, inside the Lemoine tomb, when I brought a bunch of glads to my poor papa, who had a hard time of it, let me tell you.”

Mr. Broussard nodded sympathetically and nibbled on his doughnut, pushing the box toward her. “They good.”

“I don’t care for doughnuts, Mr. Broussard. They raise my blood sugar. So I came back this morning and heard plenty more. What I’m trying to say is there’s some . . . dis-TUR-bance,” she said, enunciating the word like the retired public school teacher that she was, “at the Lemoine tomb.”

Remembering her mention of colored people, at “disturbance” Mr. Broussard jumped up as if for a fire drill, closing the box of doughnuts and grabbing his massive ring of keys.

“There’s clapping, singing . . . and a trumpet,” she continued, like a student trying to remember her lesson, “and then a man’s voice saying something over and over about . . .”

Holding the office door open, Mr. Broussard fidgeted while she finished her report. “. . . the fun butbar, or funky butter. You better go see.”

“We’ll get to the bottom of this,” he assured her, as they walked out into the middle of a busload of wet German tourists pointing cameras at each other in front of marble angels, the day after Easter, in the rain.

“Hello, WWOZ, New Orleans’ jazz and heritage station. Travis Refuge on the air. Do you have a request?” Travis cradled the receiver between ear and shoulder as he began to line up CDs for his AfroCaribbean program.

“You hear WWOZ coming out where? Out what tomb?. . . No, we don’t have no transmitters down in there. What you talking about, man?. . . In his teeth? No, I never heard nothing about that, Mr. Broussard . . . Yeah, I’d like to hear that for my own self. Maybe Marie Laveau down there at St. Louis doing her some hoodoo. I’m on the air. Catch you later.”

Travis hung up, swiveling his chair back to the mike to bleed his voice over the final percussion of a souk song. “And those are Les Poivres Rouges from Martinique, with ‘Moucher Ma Bouche,’ here on Afro-Caribbean rhythms this rainy Monday morning, at WWOZ, your jazz and heritage station, in La NOUvel OrleANS.” Travis went on Crab Orchard Review ◆ 79

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to give another plug to the Tremé Brass Band playing this evening at the Funky Butt Bar and Vietnamese Vegetarian Restaurant on North Rampart Street. Then he spun around and shut off the mike.

“Man from the cemetery call up,” he blurted out to Shantrell Cousin, a creole administrator tiptoeing through the sound studio with a file under her arm, “to say WWOZ being broadcast from a TOMB. Say he sit there on the stoop of that tomb and hear me talking and the music I playing. Say he think the silver filling in this boy teeth they bury yesterday picking up the radio signals or something.

I been working here for seven years and THAT,” he said, shaking his beaded dreadlocks until they rattled “is the WEIRDEST MOTHERFUCKER ever called up this station, and they been some. It give me the willie to think my voice coming out some white kid tomb.”

Shantrell lowered her tinted John Lennon frames to peer out at Travis with a “what you been smoking?” inquisitive bugeye. As she rummaged through a drawer, her back to him, she winced at what he intoned into the mike with a dungeon tremolo.

“This is Travis Refuge, the voice from BEYOOOND, on WWOZ, live from the (crrreaak) CRYPT. . . .”

Nine hundred seventy-two pairs of wet Nikes squeaked down the freshly waxed corridors of Eleanor McMain High School on the day after Easter vacation. As the first home-room bell sliced through the banging of lockers, the stampede up the granite staircases left a group in the corner of the girls’ gym, in front of the windows on Nashville Avenue. With looseleaf binders joined at their hips, the students were speaking in whispers and shrieks that echoed up to the exposed pipes on the ceiling.

“It was so gross. I walk up to his mother at Schoen to go like how sorry I was, and she goes who are you, you didn’t love him. And I go like WAIT A MINUTE, Mrs. Lemoine, Jay was my boyfriend since eleventh grade and like what do you know about who he was. You the one made him leave NOCCA and stop playing the trumpet and then put him in that insane asylum. And she like completely loses it right there. Goes ballistic and orders me out of Schoen but there were so many people from McMain with us I just ducked into another mourning room where these Cajuns from Breau Bridge are having a wake with an accordion. And suddenly I’m dancing a two-step with this fat man who’s crying to beat the band about his mama.”

“Cool,” the listeners murmured in unison.

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“When they called me up on Good Friday to tell me about Jay,” chimed in Andrea, blowing wisps of frosted mane from in front of her face with the corner of her mouth, “I was like No Way. I felt so bummed for you, Lynnette. And the next thing I know, I’m in Mass at Holy Redeemer with the statues all covered in purple and staring up at the crucifix obsessing on Lynnette and Jay, Jay and Lynnette.

I was sniffling and my mawmaw goes, finally you got religion, girl.”

“I swear to God I don’t know what come over me,” Lynnette Terramina burst out, her dark Sicilian features taking on tragic ancestral proportions uncommon to a seventeen-year-old with a nose-ring and fuchsia highlights. “After Mrs. Lemoine ran me out into the wake with those coon-asses, I grabbed this tiny clock radio I keep in my purse so I can take naps in my car when I cut, maxed out the volume, set it to WWOZ for midnight on the dot, when Jay and I were usually doing it on Saturday night, ran back into the Lemoine wake like—EX-cuusssse me, I have to say good-bye to my boyfriend, if you don’t mind—and threw myself over the open casket, carrying on like a banshee from hell. It took Mr. Lemoine and two security guards to carry me out that fucking place, but not before I jammed that radio as far as I could down into the closed half of the casket.”

Giggles all around, followed by the hyena laugh of Chaz, a tall thin black kid who squatted down to beat his palms in a staccato rhythm on the gym floor, chanting “yeah (boom), yeah (booom) yeah (boom)!” Thumbs up all around a smiling circle.

“So when was, you know, the burial?”

“The bitch goes don’t you dare show up for the burial at three o’clock but I followed the procession to the cemetery, my car radio blaring Clarence ‘Gatemouth’ Brown all the way.”

“And did your little radio like go off at midnight?”

“I mean I don’t know,” Lynnette began sobbing, as the second home-room bell sounded and the girls’ gym teacher bounded toward them, a volleyball under her arm, pointing at the staircase with the mock severity of someone who had just spent a week in a bikini across the lake, far from the crumbling gray building on Nashville Avenue.

Mr. Broussard rearranged the pillow on his office chair, took a bracing whiff from his inhaler, and hunched forward like a chief of staff manning a battle station. Word had come down that morning from the Archdiocese lawyer on Carrolton Avenue that under no circumstances was St. Louis cemetery authorized to enter a tomb Crab Orchard Review ◆ 81

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without the consent of its owners, even though x-rays confirmed an electrical device inside the coffin, presumably a portable radio. The petition to disinter the burial in the Lemoine tomb “due to unusual circumstances affecting the security of cemetery property” was denied. And he had already left three messages on Dr. Lemoine’s home answering machine that had not been returned.

No one at Mercy knew where he was. The obstetrics nurse he spoke with explained that the doctor had taken a two-week bereavement leave. Where were those assholes, he wondered? If they wanted their boy to have some company in there, why didn’t they toss in a teddy bear or a half-dead hooker from the Airline Highway?

The Archdiocese lawyer had been adamant, breaking off his stiff legalese to thunder into the phone with a Chalmette accent that “we can’t dig up some guy’s dead kid even if they got the whole filly-monia orchestra in there. They can turn around and sue the pants off the church. You get them people to sign on the dotted line, or we wait till the batries go dead, hear? Jeez, we got enough going on here with that priest in Houma diddling them altar boys.”

But by Wednesday, the batteries hadn’t gone dead. It seemed the radio was getting louder, broadcasting from an infernal echo chamber, the marble slab almost vibrating with jazz. Whole carloads of high school students dressed in black had started turning up in the afternoons, sitting in a semi-circle around the tomb hung with yellowing wreaths of white roses, chain-smoking cigarettes and passing skinny joints. They said they were from McMain and the performing arts high school, where the dead boy had gone. Only his mama, they said, made him quit the artsy place on account of some monkey business in Tremé. The girlfriend had pink hair and, if you asked Mr. Broussard, looked like a little Dago slut.

The telephone was ringing off the hook ever since that “Blues from the Tomb” article had come out in the “Living” section of the Times Picayune. The place was a nuthouse. Gator Holiday had called to add three busloads of tourists a day to their contract, CNN was threatening to send someone to New Orleans, and WWOZ was in an executive meeting with the Board of Directors of the Jazz and Heritage Foundation. Mr. Broussard was secretly tuning into the station from a radio he kept in the bottom drawer of a file cabinet, and he knew the DJs were addressing comments to the kids around the tomb, who he could hear clapping and hooting. Jay Lemoine was mentioned frequently, along with people named Jim Morrison 82 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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and James Booker, who he assumed were dead, although he was sure they weren’t buried in St. Louis No. 3.

His only ray of hope was the article had mentioned that this Jay Lemoine character committed suicide. Catholic cemetery by-laws prohibit the burial of a suicide on consecrated ground. The Archdiocese lawyer advised that to exhume a suicide required permission from the Vatican, no less, so Mr. Broussard was writing a letter to His Holiness, Pope John Paul II, over in Rome, Italy. He was stuck on the salutation. He had already scratched out “Your Holiness (and Mine), John Paul II” and “My Dear Pope.”

Pushing the letter aside, Mr. Broussard glanced out of the Venetian blinds and noticed that a Lucky Dog hot dog vendor had set up his cart outside of the cemetery gate, in front of two parked Gator Holiday buses disgorging stout ladies with sun visors and fanny packs. Gangly Gothic teenagers, wiggling to spectral rhythms from Walkmans, were slouched against the fence, handing pieces of paper to tourists. And two black kids had put out a cardboard box top, and were squatting on the sidewalk, adjusting the taps on their running shoes. He dialed the Archdiocese for the fifth time that day, to ask if the Pope has a fax.

It took all afternoon to decide, but the project was a go. The Executive Board of the Jazz and Heritage Foundation, meeting at their offices on North Rampart Street, felt it would be a unique way to kick off the Jazz Fest. The bone of contention was whether it would be “appropriate,” a soothing word from California where people have transcended right and wrong. But they had just taken Marvin, a city councilman’s cousin and the Fest’s marketing consultant from Los Angeles, to a three-hour lunch at Dooky Chase, and he had convinced them to “go for it.”

“What we got here is a tomb with a view,” Marvin enthused over crab claws with greens. “The damn thing sits but five yards from the fence that’s right next to the Fair Grounds, where it all gonna happen. It’s got all the classic New Orleans themes. Death.

Cemeteries. Music. Sex.” “Where the sex come in?” Travis asked, dubiously sucking on a claw without looking up.

“Here’s the pitch. It’s Romeo and Juliet, man. He’s a trumpet player, imprisoned in a tower, then driven to suicide by his high-tone folks who don’t understand him. She’s a seventeen-year-old gutter-punk from Crab Orchard Review ◆ 83

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the wrong side of the tracks, devoted to her man and his music. She waits in front of his tomb all day, listening to all these beautiful sounds coming right from the spot where her love lies rotting. That swing, or what?”

“I don’t know,” said Shantrell, shyly clearing her throat. “It doesn’t seem appropriate to broadcast our program from a cemetery.

This is a really Catholic city. It’ll offend people.”

“Where we at? Some French fishing village?” Marvin sneered.

“Or the City That Care Forgot?”

When the vote was taken later at Jazz Fest headquarters, it was decided to broadcast, on the second Wednesday after Easter, the day before the first Thursday of the Festival, a special “Live from the Crypt” program of WWOZ. The DJ would stand before the tomb, where he would introduce the Rebirth Brass Band. Lynnette Terramina would talk about her boyfriend, and specially orchestrated acoustic effects would transmit the echo from the tomb to a hundred and fifty thousand listeners. The public was invited.

The mayor had his doubts. But when he learned that the local Romanian radio commentator with a Transylvanian accent would step in as the celebrity DJ, and the famous uptown Gothic romance writer would lend her presence as a tie-in with the “Save Our Cemeteries” campaign and her new novel, he was sold. Reluctantly, he placed a call to his old friend the Archbishop. When he got him on the line, and met some resistance, the mayor of New Orleans snapped his plaid suspenders, grabbed his crotch, and reminded the Archbishop of New Orleans of promises a then-simple parish priest had made back in the 1960s to a little Negro altar boy at St. Rose of Lima Church.

In the meantime, Mr. Broussard had already sent his fax addressed TO: His Most Holy See, Leader of the Christian World; FROM: Elwood P. Broussard, Jr., Director, St. Louis Cemetery No. 3, 3421 Esplanade Avenue, New Orleans, Louisiana 70119, U.S.A. Tuesday before the live broadcast, the ten o’clock news on WDSU. A spot with Thadeus Ribbit, celebrated reincarnation of Louis Armstrong. “Jazz Fest kicks off on a solemn note this year” was the crisp lead-in voiced over a snazzy neon Jazz Fest logo, cutting to Ribbit, dressed in fedora and double-breasted suit, caressing his trumpet in front of a peeling shotgun in the Upper 9th Ward.

“I don’t know what to tell you all about him,” he said sweetly, 84 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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looking down at his trumpet. “He come in all the places we play. I see him by Little People, Vaughn, Funky Butt, tall white kid with a trumpet case standing in back the crowd every night, big old white T-shirt, smart-boy glasses, just looking, really digging it but I mean in a quiet way, you know. He always there, sometime with a chick what got pink hair. One night late at Vaughn he let loose with his horn, when we was packing up our axe and barbeque, and he goooood, you know what I mean, just a kid, but he all right. Then he hanging with a crowd from NOCCA and I think one day I gonna hear from this cat. Sorry to hear he passed, and I be there tomorrow at the cemetery to say goodbye, before I play my ten o’clock gig at the House of Blues.”

This was followed by a fade-out to the tomb, covered with bleached wreaths and surrounded by bleary-eyed teenagers, bleeding into a close-up of a petulant girl with pink hair, blowing fierce jets of smoke at the camera, backed by Aaron Neville singing “Mona Lisa” from a staticky transistor radio inside someplace that sounded like St. Louis Cathedral.

Minutes later, the Casino Magic house-doctor was called from an evening consultation with a transvestite with silicone implants to administer a 20 cc. IV of Valium to a woman who had collapsed in hysterics off a high bar stool in front of the TV in the Wild Card Lounge. The cause of her attack was unknown, but her almost inaudible words before going under were something like “fuck the priest” and “even if I have to walk to New Orleans.”

Miss Arceneaux stood at the edge of the crowd in a daisy-patterned sun hat, staring over the bony shoulders of a group of high school students in black tank tops who were circulating what looked like photocopies of a poem through the crowd. When they turned to look back at her, they did a collective double-take and began to chant “Oooh nooo, Miss Arceneaux, oooh nooo, Miss Arceneaux.” Their retired English teacher stepped back to size up her former students, who seemed to have turned out even worse than she had imagined possible. Of course, they let them run wild as alley cats these days.

She was still in a state of shock from trying to maneuver her politely beeping Toyota through the Lucky Dog vendors and hot tamale wagons blocking the gate of St. Louis cemetery. Scrambling between them were children with Styrofoam gumbo bowls Scotch-taped over their heads hawking beers and Cokes from ice-filled garbage pails resting in the shade of illegally parked vans. The wrought-iron fence Crab Orchard Review ◆ 85

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was lined with scraggly Quarter-types selling hand-made earrings stuck to red velveteen display cards. A mime playing an imaginary trumpet was walking through the crowd with a half-sad, half-happy face painted on, and a bald young man with elaborately tattooed biceps was distributing pamphlets about teen suicide from a card table.

Mr. Broussard, still waiting for a fax from the Pope and livid that the Archdiocese had authorized this display of bad taste, had hired an off-duty New Orleans policewoman as a security guard, confident that she could prevent any mayhem. Early that morning, he and his crew had stripped the Lemoine tomb of dead flowers, as stipulated in the Perpetual Care contract the family had purchased, and he had done as little as possible to cooperate with those radio people. Their thick orange cables ran like writhing anacondas from their truck through the alleyways behind adjacent tombs to the front of the Lemoine tomb.

The news commentator with the Transylvanian accent was seated in the grass leafing through a copy of Playboy while technicians in African-print drawstring pants were taping special sound-sensitive mikes to the marble slab of the tomb. The arts high school jazz ensemble had assembled on the lawn, where the efficient blond principal was going over details with Travis Refuge. The Gothic romance novelist from uptown, a slight woman in a black cowl, was curled up on the stoop of a tomb with her arm draped over a plaster urn, gossiping with the grotesque writer from downtown, a tall woman dressed in billowy white, lounging on the steps of the next tomb. The visiting poet at Tulane was already drunk, and Babs Godoy, the beaming society columnist, was mingling like there was no tomorrow.

Then the Rebirth Brass Band blared in at full throttle down a broad grassy avenue of the cemetery playing “The Sheik of Araby.”

Those following along began to second-line, sashaying in and out of the narrow alleys behind and between tombs, waving white handkerchiefs high in the air and boisterously colliding with each other as they joined together into a throng approaching the Lemoine tomb like a Southern Baptist vision of the Day of Resurrection.

Travis Refuge raised his palm to silence the band and to still the rhythmically bobbing white handkerchiefs, then tapped his mike, sending an ear-splitting electronic screech bouncing back from inside the tomb. Wild applause. He gave a final signal for “on the air,” and welcomed WWOZ listeners to the “Live from the Crypt” 86 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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kick-off of the Jazz and Heritage Festival, broadcast from inside of a tomb in the historic St. Louis Cemetery overlooking the Festival site at the lovely Fair Grounds. He was introducing the celebrity DJ from Transylvania when his voice suddenly turned thin and sailed off, light as a paper plate, lost in the meringue clouds of a cerulean April afternoon.

The echo had disappeared. He tapped his mike. Nothing. A sepulchral silence was etched in the glare between row after row of taciturn tombs, festivities poised in mid-air. “Shit,” said Travis in a stage-whisper, staring at the pyramid of blinking equipment. “I guess those batteries in there finally wore out.”

At that moment Thadeus Ribbit lifted his horn, stepped in front of the tomb, and in the lithest tones ever seduced from a trumpet, began to play a taps rendition of “May the Circle Be Unbroken.” Lynnette Terramina collapsed. “Gone,” she kept mumbling, “he’s really gone,” as Andrea and Chaz wrapped their arms around her waist and began to lumber with her behind Thadeus, who was heading toward the gate with his horn held high in the air, playing as slowly as a late afternoon stroll through a New Orleans cemetery might inspire.

Everyone began to follow him out of the cemetery, walking arm in arm. Even plastic plates and go-cups trailed after him as if bewitched, swept along in a melancholic trance, and orange radio cables and studio trucks and disappointed high school musicians who didn’t get to play, holding their instruments over their shoulders like tired children. No one spoke a word until they were out of the gates, milling down Esplanade Avenue in the speckled sunlight under the shady arches of live oaks. And for weeks to come, many still didn’t speak, afraid they would somehow find their own voices abruptly, irrevocably, gone.

Miss Arceneaux was the last to leave. She stooped to pick up the only piece of paper that hadn’t sailed out of the cemetery in the wake of Thadeus Ribbit, one of the photocopied poems the students had been handing out. She fished her reading glasses out of her purse and when she recognized what was scrawled there, her lizardy skin bunched into a broad smile. There it was, an unpunctuated, wildly misspelled rendering of the poem by Miss Emily Dickinson that she had required her tenth-grade English students to recite. “I died for Beauty—but was scarce / Adjusted in the Tomb,” she declaimed, with chin up and chest out, as she had taught her students, “When One who died for Truth, was lain / In an adjoining Room—.” Softly to herself, Crab Orchard Review ◆ 87

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she spoke the final stanza from memory as she folded her glasses and this final homework from her teaching career into her crochet purse: And so, as Kinsmen, met at Night— We talked between the Rooms— Until the Moss had reached our lips— And covered up—our names— ◆◆◆

By the time Dr. Lemoine made it through the bumper-to-bumper traffic on Esplanade, after having his wife admitted to St. Vincent DePaul Hospital on Henry Clay Avenue, it was ten to four and the massive iron cemetery gates were about to swing shut.

He braced himself as he approached his family tomb, but when he dashed out, leaving the car door ajar, he saw nothing and no one.

He stood sweaty and disheveled, ready to be judged by ranks of seraphim and cherubim. By CNN and a waiting nation, by generations of mothers astride rows of tombs, by the only baby he had ever lost, his own. The mute marble slab remained as it had always been. And had not been rolled away.

It bore the name of his father, Emile Eugéne Lemoine, buried in 1975, and stuck to the date was a sliver of silver duct tape. That was all.

Next week, he promised, he would have his son’s name sandblasted into the marble. He saw it there already, followed by his own.

Weaving his way back to the car through the trellis of lengthening shadows, he passed behind an old lady in a sun bonnet kneeling in front of a tomb. She looked like she had been there a long time, and he shook his head at how absorbed she seemed in saying out-loud prayers he remembered from childhood. “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners,” he repeated with her under his breath, “now and at the hour of our death.”

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Geraldine Connolly

One Hundred Elvises

Big Jesse Vaughn blows out The Thrill is Gone but then, suddenly, Elvis sprouts up everywhere, behind goblets, in front of mantels, ferns, in a rhinestone, drop-dead jumpsuit strutting past the bar to sweet talk a woman in leather jeans.

He leaps on the stage to grab a thin microphone.

One swirls in bubbles through strobe lights.

One is young and one silver-haired, rockabilly, raw. Full-blown, at midnight, in gold lamé, he multiplies beneath the crystal chandeliers, arriving late, back from wherever he’d gone. One drops down from the ceiling in a red cape, giving birth to himself before the screaming crowd. Oh I’ve got to do it, he yells, twitching, belting out Sex Machine then softening to a Love Me Tender croon. A hundred diehards, one hundred imitation Kings, hustle and shake, unroll their sobs, rock their gleaming guitars.

Slim, obese, in chartreuse or cherry, they dazzle in sharkskin, shimmy in satin. And the crowd for a moment, undressing its screams, believes.

His head bobs up and down the river of faces like the drowning Orpheus, pieces of his body cut up by the Maenads and strewn, yet his voice sings on—everywhere filling up the room.

Crab Orchard Review ◆ 89

Jim Daniels

Red Vinyl (for Peter Wolf) Ain’t nothing but a party ain’t nothing but a party ain’t nothing but a house party We danced in the aisles, on our seats, shouted ourselves raw. The next day, ears ringing, we sat stunned in class studying the drone of old English poets telling us some shit about love I guess—I was never sure despite what our teachers insisted on.

They talked about the iamb when we were interested in the I am you sang about while Magic Dick moaned on his harp, his afro a breaking wave as he rocked, as he blew.

That ringing in my ears was poetry I know now—pissed off and boasting— poetry with shades on. You danced crazy across the stage—them’s the feet I thought were neat—you spouted you shouted rhythm and blues rhymes.

We were stupid white boys who worked on cars and had no imagination, who did poorly in school without even style to fall back on.

We put huge speakers in our junker cars to rock loud enough to sing along to without shame while in English we whispered and stuttered over Lord Byron and some guy named Percy.

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Your best album, Bloodshot, stamped on red vinyl, circled our turntables in damp basements like a neon cherry— our futures, plain black vinyl, already a little warped, bald tires and bad news, dirty oil and rust. So why not shout a little first, telling wild stories at parties where I could lose the point, get a laugh, a laugh and maybe a red kiss from a mixed-up girl with dirty blonde hair—she’s kissing everyone but I don’t care. I take it home, my ears ringing.

I write that kiss down, pressing hard.

Crab Orchard Review ◆ 91

Sean Thomas Dougherty

Alphabet Made of Musical Instruments

Accordion strapped to the chest makes a lover’s breath, fingering the spine’s keys.

Bass is the booty’s bravado, bongos a laughable beret, bagpipes the Highland’s hum.

Cello is the human tongue, hear it confide in the Conga Drum’s message, djembe in the desert, the didgeridoo speaks 40,000 years before the English horn’s pompous flare announces Elizabeth.

Euphonium Fretting over its lack of limelight, flute, flügelhorn, fiddle the feet. A Guitar weeps for the Andalusian stallions.

Inquisition of the grand piano, Harp’s holy strings, harmonium, Helicon where the Muses made notes.

I can hear the gray hair’d man from Georgia playing a Jews’ harp on the El. How much hope is harbored in a gin joint’s jukebox?

Kalimba with its copper tongued tines, kora’s twelve strings. Kazoo, like a honeybee, makes a humble buzz.

Lyre spoke for Eurydice’s plight, but Orpheus failed. Maybe if he had Maracas to shake, make Death dance, mambo to the marimba? Mandolin Notes of Niobe weeping into her stone hands, her daughters all slain by pride.

Oboe follows Peter home through the woods.

Hear the

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Piano’s keys plead, the bar almost closed. No piccolo pipes through the parking lot. A Quartet of quenas along the path to Macchu Picchu, like a bone Rattle. The Holy One raises his eyes to hear a Sitar strum along the Ganges, a symphony of Sanskrit sighs.

Tambourine of the flat palm, trombone of the Ska, don the dancehall’s sweat, timpani Ululation to rumble The Fifth. The ukulele’s tinny talk on the old Victrola. Vaseline the virginal, ventriloquist the vibe. Viola is the violin’s cousin.

Wind chimes soft as a Xylophone’s pang.

Yodeling high in the Appalachian mountains.

Zither me zither me zither me is the sound of a Southbound train.

Crab Orchard Review ◆ 93

Patricia Fargnoli

Poem for a Composer at Eighty-Three for Juli Nunlist So we go into the old House where Juli lives To hear her compositions Of Rilke’s poems, a cycle: Du gehst mit, Lied vom Meer, You come too, Song from the sea, And the others, sung On tape by the soprano Who gets them exactly right— Each note expressing grief, and Longing, along with beauty— Without which, the best Music, like the world, would be Nothing. So silent we keep— In the small, beamed, wainscotted Room with its watercolor Of Versailles’ gardens, The blue Chinese hand-hooked rug— Following the hand-inked score, Listening hard with our hearts.

The music expands the room— Juli bends toward us, The frail stem of her mortal

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Body. She watches our faces, Her own face, unlined, shining And beatific, as if Already, she has Been in the heavenly world.

Crab Orchard Review â&#x2014;&#x2020; 95

Sascha Feinstein

Plutonium —for Paul Zimmer Shimmering Selmers in the window, Sabretts umbrellas on the corner, purpled Henrietta boogie-jumping with her silver-haired studcake.

I’d gone downtown to buy a box of Rico 4s, a half-step tougher than I could handle, but what kid who’s just bombed a chem test doesn’t need to blow a tenor with a stiff reed? Girlfriends came later, and, oh, how I wanted just to like chemistry, because my teacher hailed from Georgia, wore sweaters that made little Jerry Steinbach drop four beakers in three days. How he passed I’ll never know. Me? An extra-credit term paper: “There’s No Business Like Mole Business.”

She loved me, but I learned nothing, nothing except an olive-drab sense of failure that discolored every incomprehensible question, not one of which I can tell you now—but I remember the subway ride home, by-passing the usual stop, heading straight for my hole-in-the-wall, second-floor walk-up, ordering Rico 4s with as much attitude as I had in me, running my fingers across the waxy logo to convince myself that, if I practiced long enough, hard enough, if the yuppies in the apartment next door didn’t bang on the plaster like they always did

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when I blasted Tenor Madness, shared a chorus or two, maybe I could rub off depression like polishing silver.

I pocketed the reeds, then turned—oof— into the belly of a giant clutching his black sax case. Goatee and formerly-mohawked skull.

Saxophone Colossus: Sonny Rollins.

He set his tenor on the glass case. Check this out, Rod. Solid gold. Yamaha. A present from the Japanese.

Then, Let me see your two best Mark VIs. Repairmen stopped banging out dents. I leaned forward.

And though Rollins didn’t nod or say, Hey there, kid, he must’ve known, as he pushed his own mouthpiece onto the neck, I had daydreamed his saxophone solos until chalkboards became bass and bass drum, that gray slate of a propulsive rhythm section.

He must have known, and dismissed it. This wasn’t about me. It was about action and sound, a test drive that started with fourths, then pentatonic scales.

Bitonal, quadritonal, heptatonic arpeggios.

Overtones became chords, an intervallic series to mirror interval progressions. Palindromic canons.

Ditone progressions that turned into themselves like mercury. Minor sevenths: aluminum, beryllium, then a nickel-plated series of triplets. Magnesium and manganese registers. Uranium C sharps that rattled the store’s neon and countertops.

And though he left without buying a horn— having walked in, I think, just to show off his gold— I knew I’d just heard triple-tongued the whole goddam periodic table of elements.

Crab Orchard Review ◆ 97

Sascha Feinstein

When the Sun Comes Out —for Eddie Green and Sonny Criss You’re bored with Singapore, with this ain’t-close-to-bein’ Philadelphia nightclub: bamboo chairs and mirrors, pristine ventilation. It’s “Satin Doll” and “Satin Doll” again. Your face each ninety-degree afternoon turns a local eyebrow as you stare at skyscrapers, flamed glass above smoldering satay grills, and you’re lost in the summer of ’68, the sweat of a New York studio where you cut wax for Sonny Criss: Rockin’ in Rhythm on the junkie label.

It’s July 2nd, and on the corner of Broadway and 47th Doomsday Duane hollers death dates, Earhart and Hemingway.

You know there’s talk of gun control, and what do you care? The Times: Ray extradited from London where The Beatles top the charts.

You stop at the white studio door.

Sonny smokes in the corner,

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shivers in heat, says, “Hey,” then, “You’ll shoot that piano,” and then, chin to collar, whispers, “Goddam producer’s daughter, man— we’re playin’ ‘Eleanor Rigby.’”

Cranshaw and Dawson, like clocks on a Monday, slog through “The Masquerade Is Over.” Then Sonny calls for “When the Sun Comes Out,” like he’s asking for judgment and don’t care for response.

Your intro descends into time, then you feather chords beneath his pleading saxophone.

Humidity seeps into the keyboard and you could be in Brazil where they’re filming Black Orpheus, overdubbing Jobim while boys just young enough to dance into belief pull the sun to morning with solo guitar and samba.

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“Sing something about prison and parting . . .” translated by Philip Metres To Aleksey Magarik Sing something about prison and parting, With tears and foam at the mouth.

Sing something from Kostroma or Velikie Luki But at dinner, something from the gulag.

This song’s about how a grey-haired son Finally returned home—and with permission!

He drank at Nina’s, cried at Klavka’s— My God, my God, have you forgotten us?

Our train station’s visible from here.

A gutter whispers to itself.

Sing of goodbyes on the platform, Of hooligans taken to the east.

Of people, bread, strategic cargo Traveling the homeland all day.

A song about wasted life— I’m not particular, just play.

In the fall, go out to the open fields, Cool your head in homeland wind.

A swallow of alcohol is like a hot rose, Turning and turning in your chest.

The night of the raven hovers above.

Distances whistle through fingers.

The homeland has no strangers, No, everything’s here, and the air feels Like you woke to an overcast dawn . . .

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Then youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re taken in your underwear. Far away A pond is covered in gooseflesh, A semaphore forces itself to shine, Rain scatters down, and an unshaven man Talks to himself as he passes by.

1984

Note: Aleksey Magarik is a friend of the poet and a musician, whose gulag songs are evoked in the first stanza.

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Richard Garcia

Birdlike Sonata

There was music in the rain as it beat on the tin roof, birdlike.

It was then they finally did dance together, there in the kitchen of Tiki Bob’s, under a tropical plant, and the song they’d sing about it they’d never sing.

They were lost in that rain, under the gossiping plant that hovered over them, birdlike with wings extended across the kitchen observing their odd dance their awkward, monsoon dance.

He never heard her sing, but they did shuffle across that kitchen while he deciphered a word the rain rang metallic across the roof, the birdlike, Malaysian, rimchin, rimchin. He tried to plant his footsteps in hers, to plant a seed in each step of their swing dance.

Into the empty ballroom, birdlike in caution, they slid to imagined music: “Sing, Sing, Sing,” tom-toms pounding like rain, busboys staring at them from the kitchen,

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waitress and bartender smiling in the kitchen.

Was there a moment to plant a thought, suggest the butterfly-step, the rain causing their arms to slither, intertwine, dance all on their own? Not to be the tin roof did sing when he saw how birdlike she slipped away, carefully, how birdlike.

Now the busboy strums his ukelele in the kitchen, the bartenderâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s wet finger makes glasses sing Yes for dancers without music under the plant, dancing their martini in the afternoon danceâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; it was really quite warm and steamy in that rain and she was birdlike, they say, a wavering plant.

Suddenly tropical, the kitchen, they began to dance though it never happened we sing them and the rain.

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Sarah Hannah Goldstein

“Sally Go Round the Roses”

She swears she will not think about it— How the hot street slopes, and her thin dress Pulls and puckers with her flesh—how the air Almost gropes, full of glances.

How the street slopes inevitably downward.

A man whistles, a low horn honks.

Why does she walk so loud?

The eye-hook at the nape of the neck, The shifting fabric, the high sandals.

Her heels on the concrete feel like an event.

And so she hurries.

Sally go round the roses.

A stranger calls out— She will not think of it— She will think instead about the song: Last night, on low in her room, in the tape deck With the two lit windows, two needles wagging, Almost weightless, between the black and red.

The Jaynettes—four girls in the Bronx Crowded around a silver microphone.

She can hear them breathing, And she can hear them holding back, And when they let it go they send the needles soaring Far into the red range in the window of intensity—

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Sally baby cry, let your hair hang down.

She crosses the street. The eye-hooks!

The air is hot and close, a moist tincture, Like the small glow at the center Of the palest flower—trapped light in cool petals, Found pink at the core.

It is only reflection. There is nothing really there . . .

And though it is itself a kind of elision, She still finds herself strangely comforted—

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Ray Gonzalez

The Allman Brothers’ Live at the Fillmore Concerts

The greatest live album of all time—so magnetic and dangerous, I go through periods of being afraid to play it. I saw The Allman Brothers in concert two weeks before Duane died. Las Cruces, 1971. Stoned and trying to stay in the space between the red sunset and the asphalt highway that ran for miles and miles through the desert, trying to get to the arena in the Mesilla Valley. Dickey Betts’ solo on “Whipping Post” the most damaging and monumental guitar solo since the damned instrument was invented. No one knows this but me. It is there on the record. I have written several hundred poems off this recording, twisted my writing life around this album. No one knows this but me. Black cover on the original vinyl, double lp. The remastered CD perhaps the one with the best sound I have heard from the new technology. The biggest shock on the new version is the fact they cut the infamous shout from the audience right before the band starts to play the long song. The dude used to shout, “Whipping Post!” from the crowd and Duane would answer, “You got it!” then Berry Oakley’s bass would start, as the band pulled your heart out on the seventeen minute fury—this moment erased on the CD version! The highway between El Paso and Las Cruces gone on this version. The image of Gregg sitting at his organ and Duane and Dickey eating their burning fingers gone from this version. Duane’s death gone from this version.

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Euphonic Sounds What’s scurrilously called ragtime’s an invention here to stay.

—Scott Joplin —Sedalia, MO, 1899— In the gas chandeliers’ sway, tobacco smoke swirls and syncopated chords from an upright piano, Joplin presides over drunken cakewalking, buck and wing steppers who heed the call of his latest rag, a tune part song, part breath.

In the July heat of this night, this century turning Joplin’s rag celebrates a new signature.

The piano almost a march, the blues played out in some lover’s embrace, a losing hand. The blues into the fourth chorus, says: O this suffering, these weary bones— as the piano grabs hold of the body, tells everything that will happen: I still love you, you hurt me.

This same exhaustion ravers, break-dancers under a kaleidoscope of neon throw off in a haze where what we touch pulsates, as a rapper in baggy pants and jacket spins out tales of bravado, want— where the rhymes’ power, the words’ staccato is its own catharsis.

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was for Joplin at the Maple Leaf, in a late-night jubilee— as hunger’s hard work fills us: O Forgive me, please love, Hold me.

That refrain, until there’s no way for the body not to surrender.

Prairie breezes from an open window singing the rag bearable, a dissonance resolved in sweet measures, riffs, in the dancers falling only to rise astounded, to shake these blues loose. Our abandon downright scandalous.

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Bluegrass Bill Monroe, 1911-1996 In life he had always passed out quarters to all the children he saw. As he lay in the open coffin, mourners—the grown-up children he had been kind to—walked past one by one and laid quarters inside.

—The New York Times How many find a way to make a word their own, to bend it into slow silence.

How many find a name for who they are outside the space of breath surrounding Bruce or Bob or Bill?

In a small community church of pine slats painted white, a line of children has grown into baffled nicknames for how they drive or play a banjo, for the way a lock of hair curls, for a short fuse at the end of Saturday night. A line of children grown taller than mowed Kentucky grass baled and stacked high enough to see Tennessee, a line of men and women who’ve never left Rosine pushes through ghosts from the Grand Ol’ Opry, those toothless shades who flutter like loose laundry in a strong wind, who carry unstrung fiddles and busted mandolins and try to sing from torn throats, whose ragged lungs can’t hold the air . . . the grown children of Rosine step past the wrack of Nashville to drop coins in a coffin. And though it can’t be so they hear their names as they lean down, how he always gave them quarters and sang Crab Orchard Review ◆ 109

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their lives, sang exactly who they were, called them by their given names: John, Lewis, Betty, Sam. Not Speed or Twang or Curlicue or Rage. They lay their change in the felt beside his hands and listen, though thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s not a ghost in sight with wind enough to sing.

But somewhere a broken Philco plays on a sunken porch, a car radio carries on, though the wreck is smoking, the body crumpled behind the wheel.

As if a few notes swallowed hard long ago are now songs sung from silence, like the sky at dusk, how it seems to lose its blue to black.

The color of daylight has fallen from heaven, has landed in the grass. The bruised blue grass.

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The Healing

Without

much dignity, we make it across without skates. I’m thinking a hospital parking lot should be plowed and salted better than this. Tony is disgusted; he slams the metal door against a brick wall hard enough to shatter one or the other. Pulling off layers, he leads us up the windowless corridor of the sub-basement.

I remember this smell. In bad lighting and worse ventilation, the human rats scurry day and night, with no sense of real time.

Medical research at its healthiest. Nothing here sounds particularly promising for real rats either; during one clinical assignment here, I guillotined three hundred of the tiny, long-tailed bastards.

Pathology. Radiology. Radioactive Materials. Anatomy. Nuclear Medicine. Keep Out. I scan doors, ticking off the reasons I’m here.

For one, my Cytology degree gives me some cachet. Not much, but I’ve accepted the impossible certainties of medical research. And of medical researchers. I speak their language. Reason two: I speak the language of shamans. That’s why we’re here.

For better or worse, I’ve talked Avery into Tony Bradley’s invitation. Avery’s doing this for me, and I’m carrying that like a load of stones. I want to repay a debt. Not that I owe Tony anything.

But I owe Doug Copley; he’s the “guinea pig.” Doug’s not asking for anything; he’s not the kind of guy who keeps score. Far from it.

He tutored me through Gross Anatomy when I was just another tobacco-skinned kid with black bangs. He found me staring in at the windows of university science like it was a candy store. I didn’t know how to walk through that door; when I finally crawled in— belly first like a smart little scout—Doug was there for me.

I do an Avery check. As usual, he’s tagging behind, one hand shoved deep in his jacket pocket, the other clutching his gym bag.

It’s his version of a medical satchel. He looks about fifteen, but he’s pushing forty. He’s my cousin, so I’ve known him forever. Even as boys, I knew he was different. The first time I saw him—I mean really saw him—he was six years old and standing stark naked in Crab Orchard Review ◆ 111

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the cold. It’s February, a pearl gray morning. Everything’s stiff as a corpse. Avery’s standing there as if he’s at the lake on a July day.

There’s a snow owl circling over his head. Screeching. I get him home: no frostbite, no hypothermia. Nothing. But he doesn’t know what planet he’s on.

He barely knows now. He’s not exactly a scientific rationalist; as a matter of fact he’s hypersensitive. That’s his gift, I suppose. Or burden. Even as a kid, I had a scientific mind, but even that first time, I knew what I was seeing. Always have. I can see the signs right now; Avery’s struggling.

I keep pace with Tony Bradley; I’m more his speed. I try slowing him down just a little with small talk. “How’d you get non-Western stuff in here?”

“Balls, mostly. Acupuncturists, herbalists, midwives. I’ve lined ’em all up.” He delivers the inventory with a laugh. “I’ve been hauling alternative meds in here for three semesters.”

“Amazing.” I mean it.

“Why not?” Tony shrugs. “Face it, the old medical model’s a mess.

My grad students—the Nurses and PAs—they all know the score.”

He stops at the fire door to drag in a breath. “Boogah boogah stuff is coming at them. Coming right out of the woodwork. Chinese chi, therapeutic touch, herbs. Even NIH is getting into the act.”

“Are you campaigning alone?”

“Campaign?” Tony opens the fire door and clangs up a metal stairway completely surrounded by wire. “I’m nobody’s champion.”

He shouts over our boots. “All I need to find are a couple faculty members willing to go to the stake every semester. Medical heretics.”

“You find ’em?” If I sound skeptical, I’ve got reasons. I worked here. “I don’t see you as somebody who’d go to the stake.”

“Damn right.” Tony barks. “Western med, Eastern mysticism: it’s all the same. I just set it up and watch the thing catch fire.” Tony’s got it all figured out. “The AMA still has the money. Still makes the rules.”

He calls back to Avery, “Don’t quit your day job, Shaman.”

Avery smiles, thin and tight. He is keeping up through a supreme effort of will. I can read his collapsed forehead. His legs are getting all tangled up in the threads and cables of what he hears. He hears voices; it’s like tinnitus in other people. Over the tapping of computer keys, through the rumble of elevators, in the squeal of rusted gurney wheels: voices. He probably wants to run from this brick building. It stinks of phenol and rusted metal. He’s pulling his neck deeper and deeper into 112 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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his shoulder blades like a turtle into its shell. All the way up this stairway, his eyes open and shut like some lidless bird.

Avery stops mid-stairs and finally says something. “What was this place?” His voice is unexpected, deep and resonant; it echoes in the stairwell. Its authority surprises Tony. He stops as if held by invisible hands.

“It was a psychiatric hospital. First one in the city.” Tony extends his arms like a circus showman; these were the three rings of suffering. “Every head case in the county was right here.”

That explains it. Avery’s probably been listening to their wailing, to short exhausted sobs of despair. By now he’s heard a hundred hands rattling the metal cage around this stairwell. “Must have been a hell hole,” I offer, more for Avery.

Tony snorts. “Think about it. Back then it was all lobotomies and electric shock.” He turns abruptly and opens the door to the third floor.

We enter a carpeted lounge painted an industrial green. It looks like fungus. I shoulder my way in and step back to retrieve Avery.

Avery says “What is this?”

“An aquarium without water,” I put my arm over his shoulder and push him in.

Tony greets the graduate students and the four faculty guests. I slip off my leather jacket. My bear claw necklace is heavy on my chest. Avery gave it to me years ago. I wear it when I’m involved in these healings. It helps me, somehow. A slender brunette in a crisp white jacket comes forward, her hand extended to me. She introduces herself as Dr. Carol Mallory. Tony moves around the room like an affable host. Dr. Mallory (“Call me Carol”) leads me to refreshments; she’s cool and regal. She smells the way sunflowers look.

I scope for Avery; he’s made his way over to the only window in the room. Behind his shoulder, I see smoke curl in a question mark over the opposite building. He stands next to a brown sparrow of a woman. He sets his purple Adidas gym bag down as if it held a Waterford collection. Folding his old cotton jacket, he’s totally inconspicuous, wearing a black turtleneck over tan chinos. His only power object is a carved turquoise turtle hanging from a rope of silver far too heavy for his frame.

Carol hands me a cup of coffee and turns on her megawatt charms. If she wants to talk about “red medicine,” I’m there. I improvise; I try to be amusing. Tony claps his hands and makes introductions. I feel a draft separating me and Carol. Everyone looks Crab Orchard Review ◆ 113

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astonished that Avery is the medicine man. Not me. My necklace sets it up every time.

“With all apologies, Mr. DuLac,” Tony laughs, pointing towards Avery who looks like his sneakers are too big for him. “You don’t fit the image we have of a shaman quite as well as Russ here.” Avery smiles and reaches into his Adidas bag.

Tony adds, “Russ is a Cytologist. From here.” Dr. Mallory drifts off like sulphurous smoke; I find this predictable, amusing, even.

“Isn’t it perfect?” Tony continues. “Who can heal? This whole seminar is about appearance and reality. It’s about belief in cure, isn’t it?” The question is rhetorical.

Like a mourning dove, a small man in gray slacks and a gray sweater comes into the lounge. Doug Copley is the color of ashes. I hurry to him. Tony waves, then gestures to Avery as if hidden cameras are turning unblinking electric eyes his way.

Avery walks up to the small woman he spoke with at the window.

She is preparing to sit beside the door. “You are?”

“Gloria Moore. Faculty. Extracorporeal Technology.”

“Will you be staying?” She nods, wide-eyed at the question.

“Would you sit here, please?” He puts the statement as a question, but his authority is absolute. He pulls the correct chair out for her as if he were the maître d’hôtel,0 then nods to me. I secure the seat at the far end of the table.

Avery sees where Tony is sitting; his face creases. He asks the small man I have spoken with to switch seats. “Can’t be done.” Tony erases the suggestion with his hand. “This is Doug Copley. Your patient.”

Avery takes Doug’s hand. It was clammy when I held it, and Doug’s perspiring visibly now. Avery leads him into the center, mentioning my regard. “Thanks for that,” Doug nods back to me. “I’ve taught Anatomy here. Forever.” He leans into Avery and adds something, like he’s delivering a message from an underground group. I can’t hear it, but Doug’s eyes fill. I guess it’s about more than the pain.

Avery touches his shoulder. Doug lies in as comfortable a position as he can find while Avery scans the room and cocks his head toward me. He has set the Four Gates. I’m guarding the South; the sparrow woman sits at the East. At the North, Tony won’t move.

I signal back it can’t be helped.

The Avery I protect recedes like the quarter moon behind clouds.

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pieces of crystal. With infinite tenderness, he strikes them together four times to open the directions. Leaning over, he places one crystal in Doug’s left hand, the other he sets between Doug’s feet.

Then he takes out a blue silk package, irregularly shaped. Chanting softly all the while, he unwraps it. I can hear the sharp intake of collective breath. The shape becomes an eagle’s wing. Not one feather, not a piece of bone. The entire wing rises with a rattle attached by leather thongs. The healer places that on a nearby chair. He holds a small drum with deer skin pulled taut over a hollow gourd. Cradling it between crossed legs, he sits at the patient’s head. The room has ossified.

“Close your eyes,” he says; his voice is Tibetan bells. He means everyone. “The drum will enter you; the singing will seem strange, tonally. Just try to relax.” His left hand falls dead center on the drum. “Relax.” Basso then falsetto voices issue from the small man with the small drum; vibrations fill the room. The breastbones of the listeners vibrate as my own; I feel connected, bone to bone. The drum and the voice go on and on without ceasing. Doug Copley’s breathing becomes audible. It’s as if we’re all sitting beside a whale beached on the sands of Nantucket.

Forty minutes elapse when the drumming stops. I look around.

Some people open their eyes immediately; others stay for a moment on whatever mountain or planet they have found.

Coming to his knees, the medicine man shakes the eagle rattle over the four quadrants of Doug’s body. Chanting low, he twists his own body to the left, to the right. Constantly he stirs the air. The rattle sings with the voices of snakes, the voices of bats, the voices of pine. Lifting the eagle wing straight into the fluorescent lights, the shaman repeats the one word.

“Wakantanka. Wakantanka.”

The eagle swoops and dives. It arcs and glides over and swoops into the old man’s body. Its talons tear at what is causing the pain in him. The disembodied voice elongates each syllable. Wa kan tan ka rumbles from some great cavern. It rumbles down from the wind.

The word rolls through the room like a tidal wave. Dr. Copley’s body shudders violently. Once, twice. It lifts from mid-spine and falls back like a broken feather. Finally, he lies still.

The whole room jolts when Doug cries out. “Ah.” A smile that could only be called beatific spreads over his channeled face.

“Sweetness,” he whispers. We all lean in. “I smell it. The incense,” he drifts off again. I’ve heard this before. The putrefaction is breaking up.

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Avery says it smells like flowers to the patient. To him, it smells like rotting meat or Limburger cheese. This is just another irony he accepts.

Placing the eagle wing across the drum, the medicine man passes his hands over the full length of Doug Copley’s body. He hums, his eyes closed; this goes on for a long while. Finally he sits back on his haunches. Rhythmically, his left hand strikes his knee. The simple music is powerfully calming. Humming, intoning untranslatable sounds, Avery rises and moves through the room. The eagle soars among us. I don’t know if the shaman’s cleansing us or the feathers.

His feet pound out a third rhythm, different from the humming, distinct from the syllables.

When his dance ends, he wraps the wing rattle in its silk. He returns to Doug and passes hands over him once again and takes up the drum. I shift my attention as he hits the signal for the East Gate.

I watch the woman carefully. Her eyes never leave Avery’s face. She registers no external shock, but she places a hand over her heart.

Avery turns to the South Gate; I close my eyes. He plays the old tattoo. I feel the drum in the center of my forehead. Heat suffuses me; I am the center of an enormous furnace. I am sitting inside the sun and suddenly chilled.

When I open my eyes, he has turned to the North Gate and settles his attention. Aware of some shift in the currents around him, Tony sits up from his relaxed slouch. The healer hits the drum as softly as possible, but Tony’s face crumbles. He grabs his lower right side as if his appendix has just burst. In slow motion, he rolls onto the floor in a fetal position. He is shaking. His eyes are wide and white, reaching for me. He shakes even harder when he hears himself. He is crying. Wailing like a newborn thing. Not quite human.

The students and faculty lean forward, more clinically interested than concerned. An amazing manifestation. They have no intention of interfering. This is the science of the unexpected; the discovery of rubber, of fire. Avery moves his hands above the sobbing man.

Unwrapping the eagle once more, he moves the currents over Tony’s back and belly, scattering energy. He moves slowly. His chanting is calling now, low and soft, a loon at dusk.

I can distinguish enough to know the song is different from the one for Doug. Within nine or ten minutes, Tony is sitting up. The searing pain that has thrown him to the ground seems to be gone.

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we all lean back. I haven’t realized we’ve been stretched forward, intent and silent as herons.

Avery lifts the drum for the last time, closing the West Gate.

Silence ripples through the room like seawater, and he lets it fill us.

Announcing the ceremony ended, Avery thanks everyone and dismisses us. Students and faculty rise uncertainly and move toward the door. They nod toward Avery; they touch Doug’s shoulder, murmuring good wishes. He is smiling wanly, his color still pewter.

One or two of them call out to Tony, but they move around him as if he were an underwater rock.

Avery turns to the East Gate woman. She stands with her hand on his arm. I push through to check on Doug. He seems ready to stand, and I’m there. In moments, Avery grabs his other elbow. Doug whispers “Thank you” over and over. He is smiling and crying without making any noise.

When he finally releases Avery’s hand, I take his arm and walk him to the elevator. He seems calm. “Wonderful,” he says, shaking his white, Albert Einstein hair. Holding the door open with one liver-spotted hand, he looks straight at me. “Whatever this is, Russ, the fear is gone from me. The fear is healed. It’s gone. It’s wonderful.” I take him inside bear arms; he feels like a small birch tree. I stand here as the elevator doors close, aware that Doug Copley is leaving us all.

I come back to the lounge. Avery’s helping Tony into his coat. I grab Tony’s shoulder. “Wanna get out of here?” He grimaces. A slight sheen of sweat slicks his forehead, but his breathing is regular. “I’m okay,” he says. “I can make it.” He shakes Avery’s hand off but he lets me help him.

“Elevator or stairs?” Avery asks. Tony mutters to me, not looking at Avery. “Stairs,” I say. “Shortest way. The elevator only gets us to the hospital lobby.”

Avery leads the way back down the caged stairs, back to the parking lot. He turns often to check on our progress. I keep up the small talk. About Carol Mallory. About Dr. Copley. Tony seems to be paying attention to his feet, but he nods from time to time.

Avery opens my car door first, grabs a snow brush, and hurries to brush off Tony’s windshield. The needled air seems to revive Tony.

He shifts weight from me onto the car and growls. “What the hell happened, Shaman?” I don’t say anything; neither does Avery. Tony continues, “I wasn’t supposed to be the main attraction.”

Avery seems to be calculating how much to say and not to say.

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He explains a little bit about the Four Gates. About the power rushing through them. He assures Tony there won’t be any permanent injury.

Tony’s anger mounts. “Irresponsible.” He turns to me. “Your shaman’s god damn irresponsible, Russ.” My arms crossed, I don’t say anything; I’m the wooden Indian outside the old drug store.

“Listen to me, man,” he tries again. “You saw it, Russ. I was thrown down. He hurt me, man. Something hurt plenty.” He’s talking to a tree.

He thrusts his face into Avery’s. “Can you fix it? Can you?”

Avery steps backward, brushing snow from Tony’s front fender.

“The pain’s gone,” he says flatly. “The rest is up to you to fix.”

“Fix? I don’t know what the hell this is. I don’t know what the hell happened.” Tony hears himself half shouting, half whimpering.

Avery tucks the snow brush under his arm and rubs ungloved hands together like a man making fire with stones and flint and sticks. “You’ve been blocking something. Back there, when you were down, I felt something. It’s a stone wall or frozen water or something.

Something needs to be broke up.” Avery squints into an ice-gray sky. I hope Tony gets the diagnosis; he won’t speak again.

“Broke up? Jesus Christ!” Tony turns to me. “What is this, Russ?

A Psych 101 class?” With one hand steadying him, he grabs snow from the car’s roof with the other. He throws it at Avery’s feet. “You’re supposed to be a healer. I set this thing up for you, god damn it. You come in; you hurt people.”

Avery studies the pattern thrown on his boots; he looks like our Grandma reading leaves.

“You hear me?” I step between them, opening Tony’s door. “You call him a healer?” His voice shakes. “You call yourself a scientist?”

Tony rubs at the sweat gathering again over his stiffening lips.

I’ve heard all I’m going to hear. “Get in.”

Tony scans between me and Avery. We don’t walk away, but Tony knows we’re already gone. One last time. “Russell, talk to me.

You’re a Cytologist, for Christ’s sake! You really gonna let this guy loose again?”

I push my chest against his. I’m breathing on him. “You wanted a healing. You set it up.” I step back, ready to slam his car door. I feel oddly controlled; I don’t know what this is, but I do know what it’s about. “Admit it, Tony. The stake, the fire, the pain: it was your call.”

Avery is gone; he stares past both of us. We are invisible.

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tear it completely off its hinges. He extends one foot out of the car; it slides away from him like a detached slug. He rights himself by hugging the steering wheel. He pulls the offending foot back inside.

I have moved Avery and me behind a safely parked car on the other side of the lot. Tony starts the car and idles there for a full minute. He stares straight ahead. He jerks his head violently and shouts inside the closed car. He pounds the wheel a couple times, then rests his head there. Two or three breaths later, he drives off cautious as old Doug Copley.

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Charles Wyatt

Emil (A Cautionary Tale)

Nearly a hundred musicians sat in stunned silence. Anton Joseph Richter, a rather young but remarkably obese man, already renowned as one of the two, or possibly three, greatest living interpreters of Bruckner, had just stormed off the podium. “I will return when this man is removed from the theater,” he had wheezed magisterially.

Emil . . ., the new principal flutist of the . . . orchestra, was eventually escorted from the building. He had argued with the maestro over an entrance, had suggested, emphatically, but unwisely, that the maestro himself was in error. After Emil’s removal, the rehearsal went on, the maestro’s cues were not contradicted; and there were no complaints from the musicians’ guild when the young flutist was subsequently dismissed from his position.

Emil sometimes wondered to what heights his career might have risen if he had not been fired from that orchestra. But that was long ago—and he had found a position, granted, a more humble one, in his home city, a position in the very orchestra where his father had played before him. And now that Emil had performed in this lesser orchestra for more than thirty years, he was reconciled to his lot. Sometimes he still felt the sting of his unjust fate, but life goes on, its vicissitudes merely the shadows of opportunity . . . A new opportunity might . . .

No, Emil thought, as he massaged his arthritic fingers, no new opportunity. New stiffness in my hands, my neck, my fingers, perhaps.

This is the greatest injustice of all. I am growing old.

Yet the stiffness was usually gone by noon. The problem was not severe. Some trills, the ones that used the weaker fingers, were slowing.

But this could be managed with more practice. Emil had always believed in the efficacy of practice. It was not merely necessary for the maintenance of one’s playing skills, its discipline was essential for the man, the musician, for one’s very soul. Long tones, scales, and etudes.

Hours of practice. Emil had learned this from his father. Of course, his father had died of a heart attack in his fifties, in his prime—before, 120 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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Emil imagined, any such tendency toward decline might have arisen.

As far back as Emil could remember, his father had been obsessed with the études of Joachim Anderson. He played them from memory, and what a memory—there were hundreds of them, and he could play them all—at least, no one dared dispute that he could. To the ear of the lay listener they were boring, perhaps hideously so, but to the flautist, they were the Czerny, the Beethoven, the gradus ad Parnassum of the art. Emil’s father had forced his students to memorize many of them; and they had, Emil had, although the process was akin to walking on live coals. Emil’s father was a legend, had toured with famous sopranos playing obbligatos and bird calls. He had always worn a cape and, with his dark eyes and raven hair, had had a wonderful way with the ladies.

Emil was not so dashing. His eyes did not flash, and his teeth were not so white and straight. Nor was Emil the virtuoso his father had been, but he was a solid player. Emil liked the word, “solid.” He did not miss notes, he did not miss entrances, he played in tune, he knew the repertoire. And, like his father, Emil still knew his Anderson. He would play an hour’s worth of them a day, for the sake of his aching fingers; perhaps, however, not from memory. It was his homage.

Of course, Emil had had his fiery days. One unfortunate encounter with that inflated tick, Richter, had not quenched Emil’s passion. A young man replacing his father in a symphony orchestra, no matter how provincial, can feel the burden of comparison, the ghost sitting beside him, sharpened pencil in hand, waiting to mark the mistakes.

The conductor had known Emil’s father only by reputation, but Emil could not be sure of the meaning when the maestro said, “Principal flute, please play this passage without expression.” Or, “with more expression.” Or, “more flute.” Or, “less flute.” Who was this tyrant?

After a few months of such abuse, and undaunted by his experience with the great Richter, Emil rose from his chair, his eyes flashing, in reaction to some such unreasonable request.

“In my hands you may see the flute which belonged to my father, but playing it, if you please, maestro, is Emil . . ., a musician who demands respect. I will not tolerate this badgering.”

Rolling his eyes, the conductor, a man of genuinely placid temperament, called for an intermission, and the two men conferred at length with the orchestra manager. Emil, whose spirit had more amused than aggrieved the maestro, was pacified, and partially convinced that a conductor should be entitled to make requests of his players. Afterward, the oboe player had slapped Emil on the Crab Orchard Review ◆ 121

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back and muttered encouraging obscenities. Emil had won his place among his colleagues, he had found out the enemy, and had stood before him unflinching. Still, it was best not to look the enemy in the eye, not to provoke him. He was legion, lugging his heavy scores, always with a predilection for one more run-through of that already-rehearsed movement. When he was ill, he was replaced by another of his kind— usually less skilled but keener in enthusiasm for lengthy rehearsal.

Conductors came and went with the seasons—they were seasons themselves. Each year their rehearsals seemed more tedious. They strutted and pontificated from the podium, occasionally parceling out lightning bolts to keep the musicians cowed. Emil shrugged and hunched behind his music. He polished his glasses and polished his flute. When he raised it to his lips, his face twitched like a dying fish. Sometimes he seemed to be speaking to an invisible companion. The oboe player could do a wonderful imitation of Emil as he prepared himself to play.

The years passed now so routinely Emil could not be sure how many they were, they swirled by him anonymously . . . Beethoven and Brahms, Brahms and Beethoven. Meatloaf for dinner. Chicken for dinner. Meatloaf again. Emil felt himself growing more philosophical and detached. He noticed there were many young faces in the orchestra.

Young faces, yet they were the same as in all the years before—brass players, homely, slouching, yet stamped from the same good-natured mold—and another mold for the woodwind players, whittling and worrying and soaking their reeds, swearing softly—only among the great masses of violins, the mob, as Emil’s father had called them, there were a few who stuck out, dark, intense, practicing the Bach D Minor Chaconne or a romantic concerto. They would move on, fall off the train, whatever it was that happened. The ones that stayed had a look. Emil could spot it, but he couldn’t describe it . . . it was a look of endurance. They’d come to do a job, not come for art. For art you die.

For a job you sit in a chair and play Tchaikowski. Over and over until the part wears out and they give you a new one. Some of the parts Emil played from still had his father’s markings, a small, light, careful hand . . . he could not bring himself to erase them.

Emil found himself thinking of his father at odd times, in the bars of rest after the off-stage trumpet call in the Leonora No. 3 Overture, the bars before the flute solo. What was the count? Emil was going to whisper to the oboe player when he realized he had begun to play. The old routine had taken over, he did not need to count, he could think of anything, he could wonder if he had set out food for Clarisse, if the 122 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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students he had rescheduled had been notified . . . still, the solo was not quite right. Had the bassoonist been rushing?

In one of life’s small ironies, the once great Richter, now in the nadir of his career, his important Brucknerian stomach shrunken by the disappointments of the decades to a sagging pumpkin, had come to be the conductor of Emil’s orchestra. In his first concert, in the Beethoven Overture, Richter had given a solo bow to the young first trumpeter but not to Emil. Any fool realized that the biggest solo in the overture was the flute solo . . . You would think that bastard wouldn’t have the brains to hold a grudge so long. But hadn’t Richter himself been a trumpet player once? Of course. Of course.

Emil was called for an interview with the new maestro. It was routine, the manager advised him, Richter wanted to talk about his philosophy of music with each of the principal players.

After hearing a muffled “entrez” in response to his knock, Emil took a deep breath and opened Richter’s office door. Emil had been in this place a few times, dealing with conductors as they came and went. There was the grand piano, there were the books, the artfully opened score on the desk. The last one had a score of Parsifal open to the same page on his desk for five years. Up close, Richter seemed even less imposing than on the podium. He was wrinkled, his bald pate was a thinning parchment sprinkled with freckles and moles. The hair above his ears was long and fluffed, giving him the appearance of an ancient poodle. He was old, old! Good lord, we are becoming extinct, Emil thought as he lowered himself cautiously into the chair he was offered, and prepared to endure homilies on the life of Bruckner, upon the nature of the true pianissimo, the proper and improper tuning of the major third.

“So, it is a dynasty we have here.” Richter’s tone had suddenly transformed from instructive to hearty. Emil looked at him blankly, wondering how much time had passed.

“Your father, man, your father! Principal flutist of the . . .

Orchestra for a generation before you. Renowned principal flutist.

Why, do you know I have heard stories about him?”

Oh, do tell us one, thought Emil as he squeezed the chair arms and smiled.

“He was a man who’d take a drink now and again, the legend goes.” Richter winked. “I don’t mean to speak unkindly of the departed, but he was known to create a wake of fallen music racks Crab Orchard Review ◆ 123

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when he made his way to his chair on stage. Then, of course, he played gloriously.”

“It’s true he often enjoyed a vintage wine with his dinner,” Emil said, deciding the man did not remember him in the least.

“Those days, of course, are long departed,” Richter continued. “We are, in these difficult times, of necessity, forced to discipline ourselves.”

“I don’t drink, if that’s what you mean.”

“That’s splendid, just splendid.” Richter smoothed his vest, glanced at his watch. “I’ve enjoyed this visit, Osbert. I’m sure we shall make f ine music together.” Emil rose and took Richter’s extended hand. He decided to ignore Richter’s mistake. Osbert was his father’s name. Richter’s hand was small and freckled like his bald head, his handshake a mere flutter. “We’ll have to do the Mozart soon,” Richter called after Emil as he walked past the clarinetist waiting outside the door. The man was positively white with fear.

The Mozart, the Mozart, thought Emil. The Mozart what! The warmed-over oboe concerto? The flute and harp? Spare me that pedal stamping, those breaking strings.

Emil lengthened his morning practice sessions by an hour, but his long tones were often shortwinded, and even to his own forgiving ears, tended to wheeze. He crashed through several Anderson études like a bear in thick underbrush, packed up his flute, petted the cat, and departed for rehearsals.

Despite his efforts, the concerts did not always go well. When the music was unfamiliar, he found counting out the rests troublesome.

Sometimes he would play too soon, sometimes too late. Once, the piccolo player had asked if she might play the flute part to some odd piece, as if she were doing him a favor, as if he were tired . . .

“No, no my dear, that’s quite all right. I’ve got the hang of it.

These modern works, ugly as they are, must be played in the proper style. That is what I am endeavoring to demonstrate . . .” Emil could be charming and gracious. But he preferred to be left alone.

Still, it was shocking when, after six months, after inviting him again to his office in a most cordial manner, Richter abruptly suggested to Emil that he should retire. Emil straightened himself in his chair, began to say something, but nothing escaped his lips. Who was this man, himself practically doddering, to say such a thing? It was Richter, then, after an unpleasant silence, who spoke: 124 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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“Emil, Emil. How long have we known each other?” (Incredibly, he was assuming an avuncular tone.) “How long? Don’t say. We get old. I’m thinking of retirement myself. Your colleagues are complaining.

The public—remember old Ruzitsky, he used to call them ‘the customers’—the public notice when an old friend is failing. Brahms in heaven puts down his cigar and frowns when there is no flute solo after the C major horn in the First Symphony. You can not sit there with a dreamy expression in lieu of mi–re do, sol–, fortissimo, molto expressivo. And your vibrato—(Richter was becoming somewhat heated) it is, forgive me, like a saw. It cuts the ear. And the tone, airy, fuzzy. And sixteenth notes . . .”

“Basta!” Emil was standing. “Enough! When you raise the stick in your quivering liverspotted hand, then point it toward the ground . . . does it make a sound? Does it give forth that glorious C sharp in l’apresmidi d’un faune? I can see from your face that it does not. And, in Le sacre du printemps, when that stick beats like a tree limb on the window and the left hand flips pages of the score in panic . . . in panic, I say . . . does not the orchestra play on . . . without, in spite of . . . all this insipid flailing?” Emil was red in the face, then white, it seemed, shaken by his own eloquence. But then he grabbed his chest and collapsed.

Emil, had, like his father, died in his prime. At least this was the gist of Richter’s eloquent eulogy. In a special program, in the slow movement, the funeral march, of Beethoven’s Third Symphony, the high woodwind chords were noticeably better in tune—but no one commented. And the piccolo player, a young woman with a furtive manner and an unfortunate complexion, was appointed temporary section leader. She proved to be an excellent player, and only burdened her colleagues slightly by asking many questions in the rehearsals, questions which were intended to demonstrate her thorough knowledge of the score and her grave and conscientious nature.

It was inexplicable, then, that during the dress rehearsal for a performance of the Second Suite from Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloë ballet, in the measures before the lengthy flute solo, that she shrieked and fainted dead away. And equally inexplicable, that after she had been revived, she refused to go back on the stage. It was necessary for Carl, the second flutist, to move up, and for a substitute, an ambitious student, to be engaged. In the concert that evening, during the flute solo, Carl’s immense mustaches worked their way into the corner of his mouth and a definite hissing sound began to be audible.

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Carl seemed to be experiencing serious difficulties. The student, sensing his moment of glory, began to play the solo also . . . but Carl expelled his mustaches with a mighty whoosh and resumed fortissimo. After all, he was the acting principal. The student, feeling he might never have another such opportunity, continued to poach. Never was the great god Pan represented in such a disturbing manner. The two flutes were not precisely in tune, nor did they share the same interpretation of the rhythm. Richter verged on apoplexy. Few in the violin section could resist swiveling in their chairs and ogling the disaster. A strange shadowy figure in the wings went almost unnoticed.

Later that evening, Carl, the second flutist, departed from the warm sanctuary of McGinty’s Tavern and walked carefully from lamppost to lamppost, conversing loudly with himself over the events of the concert, the lack of respect, and the poor intonation of some young people. His mustaches drooped and his eyes watered. His overcoat was not buttoned, but Carl did not feel cold. At a deserted street corner, he halted, stood bolt upright, his attention dedicated to the shadows beside him. His eyes seemed to protrude like a goldfish, and his mouth made little fish-like O’s while he nodded his head dumbly. Then, pulling tight his coat, he walked rapidly, in a straight sober line toward his home.

The review had referred only to “confusion” in the woodwind section. The ambitious student was replaced with yet another flutist.

They are like potatoes, thought Richter, a little misshapen, a few bad spots, yet there is always one to be found, somewhere in the cellar.

The piccolo player had insisted on taking a vacation for her health. It was clear that she was shaken, the pressures of the first chair had overtaken her and loosed those hysterical symptoms.

Perhaps she can be salvaged, Richter mused. Anything to avoid flute auditions, all that twittering and sputtering.

Richter was thinking this during the cadenza of the piano concerto he was conducting. The soloist was a young woman who had won a contest and who believed that her facial expressions could convey the poignance, the depth of emotion, that her faulty fingering disguised. Richter smiled benignly as she cringed and pounded through the cadenza. Then, glancing at the score, he winced at the thought of the flute solo coming at the beginning of the orchestral tutti. I must be certain to bring Carl in carefully, there’s been trouble 126 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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enough. Richter glanced at Carl as the pianist was beginning her cadential trills. Something seemed wrong, instead of raising the flute to his lips, Carl was holding it in his lap in an odd way. Is there a mechanical problem, is no one else going to play? . . . the trill is beginning to resolve, the soloist looks up . . . Carl has removed the footjoint from his flute . . . he is standing up in his place . . . he is going to throw the footjoint at Richter! Richter successfully dodges the footjoint which sails out into the theater and clatters amid suppressed screams. Carl’s second throw, the headjoint, is better aimed, and catches Richter in the Adam’s apple. He drops his baton and flees, choking, around the piano as Carl comes toward him brandishing the body of his flute . . . the lid of the piano falls . . . the soloist screams. Carl falls into a splintering cello and is subdued only when the principal violist, a substantial man, sits on him. The hall resounds with screams and shouts. No one notices whether there is a figure standing in the shadowy darkness of the wings.

After the confusion had subsided, after Carl had been conducted by several strong men to a hospital for observation, after his hand, which had, unfortunately, been resting on the piano when the lid crashed down, had been bandaged, Richter sat in his dressing room and sipped a glass of red wine. His voice, as a result of his encounter with the flying fragment of flute, had been reduced to a whisper, but seemed to be returning. The hall had emptied reluctantly, the excitement subsided, his hands no longer shook, the wine was soothing—what misfortune!

He had had to tip the stage manager, to bribe him, to get rid of the soloist. She was worse than Carl. Her jabbering, her questions, her insinuations that he must know the reason, the origin of all this madness . . . The quiet of the night, another sip or two of wine . . . Perhaps the time was right to retire. No more endless fund-raising meetings, no more applause between movements, no more nervous soloists, no more crazed musicians . . . Richter dropped his glass and spilled the remaining wine on the open score of Fenimore and Gerda—“all marks must be made with no. 2 pencil”—the door to his dressing room had swung slightly ajar. There was a sound coming from the empty hall. The sound of a flute—rather like a flute played under water, or heard by a swimmer whose ears were stopped—Richter pounded his ear with the flat of his hand as if he were that swimmer—the unsteady sixteenth notes, the saw-like vibrato, no, it couldn’t be—and what Crab Orchard Review ◆ 127

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was this awful music, some étude? Richter blotted the spilled wine from his lap as he rose. He felt warm and flushed. Someone, a stranger, a student, had wandered into the hall. Where was the night watchman? Is there no end to inconvenience? Richter picked up his overcoat. He would usher out the miscreant as he himself departed.

The hallway was dark, the concert hall was dark. Darkness eddied about him like the swirls in water which is just beginning to boil, yet there was a chill in the air. How is it that the fires of hell are hot yet are said to bring on shivering? What an odd thought. There seemed to be a figure standing in the center of the stage. Perhaps there were two figures. It was difficult to tell. Richter held his hands in front of him to feel through the darkness.

“Who’s there?” he whispered. If it were not so dark, so utterly impossible to see, it might seem as if he were beckoning to the stage, as if he were conducting, expecting the sound of an orchestra, or something else, to begin.

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Tracy Daugherty

Ooby Dooby

When I was a kid in West Texas, I’d sit in front of my family’s black and white TV watching Roy Orbison and the Teen Kings. They did a local show each Saturday night, crooning rockabilly tunes from an echoey broadcast studio in Odessa, Texas, an oil and cattle town.

I’d plunk on a cowboy hat, pluck at a plastic toy guitar, and wail along with Roy. This was the late fifties, a few years before the song “Pretty Woman” made Orbison an international star, but even early on, he wore black glasses and topped his square face with a sheath of hair as tight and slick as a bathing cap. No one else on the planet looked like him, even remotely—he was funnier than Captain Kangaroo (my morning show), and sang better, too—and I couldn’t wait to shimmy with the T Kings, as I called them, to lose myself in their distinctive Southwestern sound.

One night, their show was pre-empted by something else and I was so upset, I squeezed behind my mama’s Frigidaire, clutching my git-box, bawling in cramped privacy, and wouldn’t come out for several minutes despite my parents’ pleas.

I was hooked by the simple beat of the songs, thumping like an old flat tire; thrilled by the testimonial nature of the lyrics. Though I didn’t understand the tales of squandered love, loneliness, and loss (only my divorce, thirty years later, pressed those matters fully under my skin), I caught the confessional tone. I recognized the similarity to church-talk, to whispered conversations among serious adults, and knew something important was being witnessed to.

Years would pass before I’d hear of Woody Guthrie, before I’d understand that the base of Orbison’s music lay in the gumbo of gospel, folk, and blues that came to be “country,” but I was a fan of Okie music before I even knew what it was.

My dad was an Okie lured to Texas by shiny new oil derricks.

“Ooby Dooby,” he called Orbison after a song the Teen Kings sang.

“Better grab your hat,” he’d tell me after Saturday supper, settling into his leather La-Z-Boy to read the natural gas reports in the paper. “Ooby Crab Orchard Review ◆ 129

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Dooby’s about to come on.”

The television, and the refrigerator, my parents pointed to proudly whenever the neighbors dropped by: they were signs of my father’s growing success as a petroleum geologist, his escape from the stuck economy in his hometown back in Cotton County, Oklahoma.

Still, he could never put the place completely behind him. We visited frequently. And even at night, while we watched TV, Oklahoma seemed ever before us. The rough and rugged behavior of characters in all the shoot ’em-up shows came straight off the plains.

Other programs I remember latching onto as a child also mirrored my surroundings. There was Highway Patrol—Broderick Crawford’s jowls quaking like Jell-O whenever he barked “10-4!” into his dispatch mike—and Death Valley Days, sponsored by Borax and hosted by a handsome young cowboy named Ronald Reagan.

I liked Highway Patrol not for the action or the cop plots, which were old-hat even in television’s infancy, but for the safety Broderick Crawford made me feel—he was a granite block of justice—and the shots of open roads, open skies. I couldn’t even ride a bike yet, but like a ramblin’ man in a country tune, I was restless already with the American passion for heading out—somewhere, anywhere.

I asked my mother what Borax was. She said she thought it was some kind of salt. I don’t remember the stories on Death Valley Days; I was drawn to the vistas of deserts, skies, snaking roads. Death Valley looked an awful lot like West Texas to me, level, bleached by sun.

And in many ways beyond my childhood knowing, it was home— a cradle for the excesses that had shaped our national past and that would shape the decades to come. The Wild West, tamed by the mythic cowboy (personified by Reagan, even then an icon of rough charm and individual resolve). The fecund earth, bursting with mineral riches, begging to be drilled, plowed, dug for the common good.

In the sixties, Charlie Manson camped in Death Valley in an old school bus with a smattering of his followers, brooding, tripping to the Beatles’ “Helter Skelter,” summoning the twisted energy that would, in part, sculpt those turbulent years—the years that first formed my awareness of the world beyond the barbed wire cattle fences of West Texas.

In the eighties, Ronald Reagan would spend much of his presidency trying to snuff forces released in the Summer of Love.

But in 1959, dancing to the T Kings, I hadn’t the faintest idea of America’s past or future. It was the twentieth anniversary of The 130 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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Grapes of Wrath; descendants of the first waves of Okies struggled, still, in California’s fields, alongside Latino families, but I didn’t know that. The United States government had already blundered, significantly, in Southeast Asia, setting in motion a train wreck of events that would soon tear at the nation’s conscience; had already ignored the blight in its inner cities so consistently that racial violence was inevitable, but I didn’t know any of that.

Though I couldn’t see it then, Roy Orbison’s music was a link both to the Dust Bowl (built on the swing that carried many Okies halfway across a continent) and to the coming Beatlemania, the psychedelic rhythms that fed a social revolution, swelling like a flood in the sixties. But I hadn’t yet learned my country’s history, or learned to spot ripples of cultural change.

All I knew was the beat. The confessional pleading. The strange pleasure that came from wrapping private pain—“My baby, she left me this mornin’”— in a powerful public groove that made your body want to move.

I sawed on my plastic guitar. “Ooby dooby,” I sang. “Ooby dooby.”

When I myself was a teen, and the world began to feel larger— shakier—to me, when I could no longer hide behind the fridge and had to face things squarely, my allegiance switched from Orbison to the much darker music of Merle Haggard.

In his early tunes, Merle could sound as cantankerous as Timothy McVeigh would sound, thirty years later. Like McVeigh, he offered an uncompromising vision of our nation. In the mid-sixties, while the wars on poverty and Vietnam surged ahead, Merle sang defiantly his refusal to accept government handouts. At the same time, he insisted on saluting the flag; anyone who questioned America’s values, he said, would end up on his “fightin’ side”—“let this song be a warning.”

Tougher than Roy Orbison’s music, Merle’s testimony scraped and twanged with echoes of beer cans, trucks shifting gears, screen doors banging in sweltering midnight winds: small lives exploding in the TV glows of cramped, rented rooms. His people drove twisted old Mercurys or Pontiacs, just as Timothy McVeigh would, back from Desert Storm, cruising the interstate between Kansas, Arizona, and Oklahoma, crossing the old Route 66.

Born in the thirties in a refinery town called Oildale, just north of Bakersfield, Merle embodied the blue collar life.

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He wrote about his mama’s “hungry eyes,” a “canvas-covered cabin / in a crowded labor camp” that stoked her misery. He wrote about a “class of people” that put his Okie family “somewhere just below: / one more reason” for his mother’s sadness.

If faith and fidelity defined the Dust Bowlers, so, often, did hard drinking, honkytonking, roaring violence, all of which Merle’s music eloquently witnessed. Good and bad, the roots of his raising made him proud, he said. One newspaper dubbed him the “poet laureate of the hard hats,” acknowledging the country’s class divisions, the rigid cultural categories that, for better or worse, helped different economic groups find meaning in their attitudes and habits.

In 1969, President Richard Nixon sent Merle a note of congratulations for his swipes at draft dodgers, campus radicals, and hippies in his most famous song, “Okie from Muskogee.”

Donald Hart, a former mayor of Bakersfield, once said, “I think Merle Haggard summed up our philosophy here. We respect and love America, its flags and symbols. We believe in paternalism, a strong family . . . and the merits of good old hard work. That’s all— nothin’ very sophisticated about it.”

Thirty years later, a year after Timothy McVeigh blew up the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City, Merle released a CD entitled, simply, 1996, like a diary heading. Most of its songs were reflective, highly personal, uncertain. He lamented the death of his father, his losses of love, his helplessness in the face of tragedies on the nightly news. Hard work was no longer exalted as an American philosophy, but as a desperate means to ward off painful thoughts.

He ached nostalgically for the privacies of childhood, “before there was a [public] Merle.”

If Timothy McVeigh, like a hard-hatted hard-liner, was now insisting on a new American symbol—let this blast be a warning— Merle was no longer defiant. As he sang about “bombs aflying and people dying,” his mellow voice cracked like a log on a grate.

By 1996, what had once seemed unsophisticated about America—cultural categories, class behaviors, work, music, meanings—had become a perplexing social upheaval. “At many of Merle’s concerts in Oklahoma now,” the historian Roxanne DunbarOrtiz told me recently, “thousands of folks light joints whenever he sings, ‘We don’t smoke marijuana in Muskogee.’”

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Kings, it’s this doubtful Merle I listen to most often, fretting about Mother Nature—her dwindling forests and factory-brown streams. He sounds less like a working stiff than like an old granola-head. All around us, he says, salmon, eagles, and bears are vanishing like runaway kids.

Weary, sad, he pleads for us all to “stop the wrong we’re doing.”

“Amen,” I say, turning up the volume. “Ooby dooby.”

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Friday Rooftop Museum Poem Japan, 1998 I ascend a few steps behind the women because passion sometimes climbs a ladder over the fence of good sense. Sexual Healing is humping into my earphones. I have a box of lemon tea a woman sold me saying: “Takai,” which in a language without pronouns means: “I am tall,” “You are tall,” “They are tall.” I think she was flirting. There’s no escaping Spring’s drug.

A young man will take an escalator to the scalp of a ten story building lured by the petals of a skirt, the scent of lilac & wonder. He will enter the rooftop museum because the walls are covered with women painted in the name of what consumes him. At the center of each nude, a tiny tabernacle where the spirit kneels in prayer. Joseph Campbell said you can tell what’s important to a culture by the size of its buildings. In America the super-stadiums swell & dazzle even astronomers on Mars.

In Japan the shopping stores are grand towers packed with single women & housewives.

How else can I explain what I did with Friday?

I sat on the roof laureled in music, Marvin singing something sexual to the point of despair.

In my city the buildings are tall as the spine’s supple steeple, the bare deck of a shoulder above men dragging ladders through the streets.

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Major Jackson

from Urban Renewal ix. Block Party [FOR THE ROOTS] Woofers stacked to pillars made a disco of a city-block.

Turn these rhymes down a notch and you can hear the child in me reverb on that sidewalk where a microphone mushroomed with a Caliban’s cipher.

Those couplets could rock a party from here to Jamaica; its code was simple . . . Prospero’s a sucker emcee.

Smoke rising off a grill threatens to cloud this memory; my only light, the urinous cones of streetlamps.

Did not that summer crowd bounce in ceremonial fits?

Ah yes! It was the DJ and his spinning TECHNICS delicately needling a groove, something from James Brown, FUNKY PRESIDENT; then, working the cross-fade like a lightswitch, he composed a stream of scratches, riffs. Song broken down to a dream of song flows from my pen; the measured freedom coming off this page was his pillared spell of drums . . . it kept the peace; a police-car idled indifferently at the other end of the street. What amount of love can express enough gratitude for those reformulations, life ruptured, then looped back, def and gaudy like those phat, gold chains? Keep to sampling language; keep it boomin’ like Caliban yelling, Somebody! Anybody! Scream!

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Major Jackson

Oregon Boogie

Khanum, the things we did, that off-night at THE VET’S when Sister Sledge issued from the jukebox’s lit dome the darker rhythms of our native homes; so, waiving all decorum maps heap upon fugitives our bodies made one nation while in cold pints of pale ale a couple broke conversation— toasted our bacchanal.

Tremblingly, we kissed & our lips splashed like words over a page’s white shores, the foamy crash of the lonely heart at work, my hand coasting up the valley in your back, arriving at the nape thick with ringlets I slowly brought to face & inhaled as you spun out, a laughing pirouette; the desert in my heart was gone.

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But, what of the province beyond that empty dancefloor, the singlemindedness of beating rain, the silent slurs masked by cups of caffeine, the half-hearted grins, that say, Here in Eugene, it’s not the color of your skin . . . but all the while making a fetish of progressiveness.

Along the Willamette, consciousness thins out like smoke rings of cannabis, as the city dances the salsa, as students sip cups of chai, over bell & Cornell, as henna designs flake from wrists.

The idea WE ARE FAMILY finds its artificial ghost in the circle of a spun FRISBEE. At the V ET’S CLUB your smile wide as a gorge; others eventually joined doing the “Eugene Dance,” a spastic, organic whirling.

A break before the next song, over the jukebox’s neon face, we leaned, waiting— then, Bob Marley wailing!

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Leonard Kress

Polka Dancing to Eddie Blazonczyk and His Versatones in Coaldale, Pennsylvania for Brenda W. I’d come, even if I wasn’t invited, to dance polkas, obereks, czardaszes with her.

I’d ping beyond recovery my last-legs-Datsun, bucking it up into the mountains—turnpike, tunnel, Minersville, Slabtown, the Ashland Coal Breaker, flexed like a great bullying arm to fling gravel into the doglegs of these patches.

Where gold church domes bubble up on the surface from sizzling underground veins, and tropical blooms of unmowed Byzantine blue rash across towns abandoned. Her dad would already be downing pitchers of the liquefied amber his Baltic ancestors traded, convinced that enough of it flushing his system might purge the coal dust.

By the time I’d arrive, he’d be at the urinal, among others, groaning black piss.

And her mom, terrified that her son, back, from the city and the sex life there that all here suspect but don’t mention, might drag some young guy from the line at Mack Truck into the Chicken Dance or Fire, Fire.

Such unequivocal joy—a squeezebox resting on gut, fueled by sixpacks and old ladies shaking devils’ fiddles, all so she can hop and twirl, and thread though dancers thickening from heat and age like roux. So she can sweat herself slippery, too slick to hold on to, changing her outfit, her partner with each new set.

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Gerry LaFemina

Percussion

Adamantly you jammed, hands callousing as you hammered the mallets along the xylophone’s tonal teeth.

Father called, Goddamn, cut that noise out but you couldn’t stop practicing, while beneath your attic room he switched channels and drank Dewar’s, islands of ice swirling his glass like the vinyl platters planted almost permanently on your turntable.

And weekend evenings at nightclubs you collected vibraphone riffs and swizzle sticks and selected patrons or waitresses to share your sighs and your sleep.

Mornings you woke always before ten with percussion percolating your pulse. Then: concussive hits on octaves for two hours followed by more albums— Canadian jazz, Jamaican jazz, Russian jazz. When you came downstairs father scowled and returned to his paper. In its brushwork page flipping you recognize the staccato rhythm of your life.

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Amy Lemmon

Monday Night Contradance

We trickle in, set up our chairs on stage, tune up, run through a few quick numbers.

St. Anne’s Reel, The Road to California The dancers form two rows, look up at us.

I raise my fiddle to the mike, we start to play.

Ten Penny Bit, Colraine, Tobin’s Favorite The fifth repeat, I look up from the music to see a pulsing, whirling crowd in jeans or hippie skirts. Riot of arms and legs.

La Bastragne, Joys of Quebec, Old French A child bounces just off-beat against his father’s chest.

Partners change and change again—I struggle to keep up with their feet, the piano, the guitar.

June Apple, Kitchen Girl, Red-Haired Boy Sawing away, I break a sweat, I’m stomping with the dancers as they balance and swing.

Snowflake Breakdown, Levi Jackson Rag Even at the break, some pairs still dance— a Scandinavian spin, like making lace.

Sister Bay Hambo, Polska Frän By

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A sip or two of water, then it’s back into the swing, the swing, a Celtic tune.

Rakes of Kildare, Scollay’s Reel The flushed and laughing dancers gasp and cheer at medley’s end. We give them one more set.

Farewell to Whiskey, Tripping up the Stairs Finally, we ease into a waltz as diehards, smiling, damp, pair off and glide in three.

Si Beag Si Mohr, Bare Necessities My neck and fingers sore, I lower the bow, rest the fiddle on my lap, then turn to see you—just in time for the finale— the solid, dark, slow grace of contrabass.

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Jeffrey Levine

Ave Verum with the Benedictines Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan If you don’t know Mozart’s Ave verum corpus you are more fortunate than I can say because your life is yet unruined by its purity.

A motet for four-part choir, strings and organ— 46 slow bars—not a single note too many, nor one note short of heaven.

The only mark is sotto voce, our master wanted sound beneath the voice. Beneath this sky, neither butte nor mesas rise.

These streets sheltered bootleggers once, were home to brothels in the Gilded Age. Now Matins calls and here am I, trading work for room and board, no cowl or cassock, but pullover and jeans.

Except for chant, there are no words but words remembered, no sound but the sound of work, the split and crack of firewood, percussion of building hammers.

After vespers, evenings in my room belong to me.

I hum sotto voce while I think, hum the Ave verum, hum the voices, organ, strings.

Odd, how long it takes to read the silence.

When we chant at night the wolves join in, we sing the middle of the world to sleep.

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Rebecca Loudon

Dreaming Patsy Cline I stand so close to the microphone, pomegranate lipstick smudges the honeycombed case, slide hands down my waist along a flare of hips.

White satin sings against my palms.

Men watch my ass, little girls in cowboy hats think I’m too big, too bold.

My voice corkscrews from my body like something wild tearing its way out and their faces turn up to me, and they are in love.

I lift two fingers, touch the scars on my forehead, nylon skin of my wig itching and hot.

The boys play too damn fast on this sloped uncertain stage.

I need a drink.

Pancake makeup thick in the lights oils the creases around my mouth, washes into my eyes.

I long for my sweet house, babies pillowed in their beds.

My suitcase is packed: three dresses, a bottle of gin, gold lamé slippers and a cigarette lighter that plays Dixie.

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Rick Madigan

Red House Blues for Stan Lynch Stone Free maybe though more likely it is Fire coming down around the line of cars drained south, men and women travelling home from work to families, or empty rooms, into day’s end darkness moving fast up 441.

Like a photograph he used to tack up to his bedroom wall, spread across those burning fields at Stonehenge, ’67 Stratocaster blurred by smoke, shattered now to druid wood & wire, and on his knees below them in his rainbow-colored coat, the dead man opening a purple sky to fire.

Breaktime, out behind the building getting stoned, he sees those scarlet windows foiled and runneling in light, beneath that big new sign winking topless topless topless. Antaeus in palmetto round the tip of Biven’s Arm, is booming through gray cypress trees and insects.

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and it will do no good to tell them which songs must be loud.

TURN DOWN!â&#x20AC;&#x2122;s lipsticked on napkins as they pelt the band with ice.

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Al Maginnes

The Endurance of Gospel

The two microphones hovering over the musicians like the all-seeing eye of God Sunday school teachers frightened us with missed nothing, not the twang of a wire string stretched into harmony, the fiddleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s back-sliding notes, the whispered curse of the seventeen-year-old guitar player, Pigeon Creek still raw in his voice, already possessed of lightning fingers and a fierce taste for whiskey, nervous about his first record but pleased they would be singing songs his grandmother could listen to.

Because I was baptized in a church built of dark wood and stained glass and not ducked in a river in full view of a congregation of cast-offs, cripples and mutes, the broken reeds of their voices swaying in the current of a song of blood and redemption as I stepped back to land, these hymns, recorded the year I was born, are as close as I can come to the old churches tucked in the crooks of county roads, deserted except on Sundays and sometimes even then. The songs make their own river, where generations bring moth-eaten souls, crippled knees, lungs confettied by cigarettes, and stand, quavering voices bearing rock-smooth words aloft.

Their endurance mocks our modern habit of making each decade a character, as if the same blood,

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the same frustrations did not power all our technologies.

But because this is today, this recording history, I know the guitar player will die in a dozen years, so aged by pills and half-pints of Old Crow his kinfolk will have to look twice to know him.

The banjo player was probably dreaming of long-shanked women in red dresses as he drew the architecture of songs about salvation and eternal light. I know music has always appealed to both what is pure and what is most base in us, cleaving us both to hopes of heaven and the dirty boogie.

Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s been years since I entered a church for more than a polite appearance at a wedding or funeral, and I cannot claim some desire to be washed in belief moved me to lay down money for this disc of bluegrass hymns, remastered for a new generation.

I admit there is comfort in the smooth flow of those voices down the bed of familiar words, but it is comfort I cannot wear for long.

If I could lean on that chorus, kneel on the banks of that river, I might know that ancient balm, but I struck long ago on this dry, rocky path where the less-tamed animals of another music wait, soft growls gathering in their throats.

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Paulette Roeske

Mary Wilson-Formerly-of-The-Supremes Sings Ooh-Baby Songs at The Nugget

Her warm-up is elephants. A & B the rhinestone medallions read draped between their wise and human eyes. Everyone loves an animal act. Corseted, sequined, she dances out of the slide-step decade she spent behind the Queen of R & B whose part she says she will do. Backing her, a boy whose gender means he can’t compete and a hip-heavy braless ingenue who worships her. At halftime when she calls for volunteers, for someone who always wanted to be a Supreme, Michael T., a hairdresser from Minneapolis who’s come alone, smooths his flamingo shirt and squares his shoulders to adjust his offwhite linen sport coat. He takes the stage. Stop! in the name of love, he sings, his right hand palming the audience. Oh he knows all the words by heart. He knows all the right moves.

In short, he steals the show.

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Vern Rutsala

Fifteen

That spring there was always a piano or its echo, two people playing the two part “Heart and Soul.”

I was pledging a secret society with some Greek name I’ve forgotten— me, a kid whose father was a day laborer got a bid! We met in houses like movie sets—carpets, dark panelling, tiled bathrooms with towels so soft and thick they felt like fur. And there I was among the sons of dentists and insurance agents, sons who drove their own cars, who had drawers full of cashmere sweaters, who wore just the right kind of saddle shoes. Over it all the sound of “Heart and Soul,” a sad beauty I floated on, nearly breathless amid the layers of middle class richness—they were sure to catch on, I knew, and blackball me to oblivion. But they didn’t and I stuck it out through the silly fright of hell week until they shook my hand as a brother.

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Vern Rutsala

swearing allegiance to a future of car dealerships or podiatry, all to the tune of “Heart and Soul” like music in a Doris Day movie.

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Meg Schoerke

Perdido

I edge far behind your pianoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s swift, angular runs that lead me blindly, tier by tier, along gap-stepped fire escapes and urge me to leap up to the rooftop, where I can see the city, broad and strong-muscled, stretch before you like a life model shifting poses, who shrugs off my gaze.

You know her streets more intimately than you know my body.

Nightly, you take her measure and sound her pulses with your own.

Restless, with bridges as brief as hers and taut lines jagged, like her contours, you counter her every shift in tone, from metronomic red motel and lounge signs to the cold glass greens of office windows, while I hang back, fearing that she alone can keep pace with your changes.

Bracing myself against soot-blackened bricks, I watch your chords diminish into her alleys, their overtones dissolving like the first snow on her railways, the iron paths that lead to her hard heart, and I know that on those mornings when you come home at dawn, having trafficked with her again along the freeway, Crab Orchard Review â&#x2014;&#x2020; 151

Meg Schoerke

youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll greet me with her scent fresh on your skin and swear that you looked long at her, but never touched.

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E. M. Schorb

Leadbelly for the musical ghost of Blind Lemon Jefferson Leadbelly, grim with your Cajun accordion, with your harmonica blues, with your knife flicking down the twelve strings of your guitar —the Rock Island Line was a mighty good road— bowing, scraping, white-suited trainman . . . made your pride sick, but you sang, fast, strong, quiet, like a driven demon, like you had to get it out before a razor dumped your guts on a blood-mud taphouse floor, or some drunk crazy rednecks nailed you up like Christ, in a dangerous world for anybody but most America for a black poet of low-down places and sky-high loves.

Leadbelly, thirty years hard time murder, six and a half, sang your way out, ten more, intent, then Alan Lomax and his bro, John, folklorists— makes you laugh inside at night—white boys, playing—but they get you out again and in the Library of Congress, that grinding voice part now of something big, like storm darkness, like that lifething, love, always beyond somewhere or crying deep inside, in a dark place, yeah, big like music, big like that gal you call Irene! How many Irenes, you think?

Even the Lomax bros, even them white boys, they know Irene—you driving them through New York traffic, them folkloring in back and you

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E. M. Schorb

being their folkloring black chauffeur.

You drink sharp liquor in Harlem, play with Woody Guthrie, Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, the Headline Singers—radio too, Hollywood and Three Songs by Leadbelly, a French tour . . . You show ’em your razor stretch marks, your shotpitted pot.

Good night Irene I’ll see you in my dreams . . . all that good hot mean hard American life and Lou Gehrig’s amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

It’s The Midnight Special! Fade me, Death!

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Mark Scott

Velocity

The drums hang back, wasting time on “Wasting Time No More,” while the song pushes on in what Albert Murray calls the velocity of celebration, that Kansas City sound, meanly swinging, but never swinging meanly, impelled by the piano, propulsive, direct, moved against the blues and by them, country, melancholy; and feeling all right, not feeling too good myself, getting by, going on; and at every possible bridge, a hanging back, a lag in the drive to move on and celebrate, a counter to whatever’s too fast or too slow or just right; a retraction, a hold, a retard— that indecisive unwillingness to go on; it’s in the center of things, this stop-time: enough, it says, enough; this is good; I’ll stay with this right here, this groove, this tempo, this vamp—pulling no punches, pushing no river— Joe Cocker damping the vapor gapers while he gets by and the bassist changes the rhythm, taking him out, taking him home: he can’t stay; we can’t stay; the upright, seeing all the errors, the crooked timber, never thinks it’s time to stop: braced by the drummer, braced by some percussive blow, it goes on building its ladder of sound, carrying on, pedals firmly off the ground, rumbling, rolling, rocking down the line, fascinated by travel and staying, swaying, the fat hands that bang rag, and Count Basie with his tap foot, tap foot, and Piggy swishing on Vine Street, past the hour, not worried, cuz aint nothin gonna be all right nowhow— Crab Orchard Review ◆ 155

Mark Scott

but keeping time, everybody keeping time; each thing on its track, each track in place, every hit counting; then Cannonball lays out, the great Nat lays down, tearing a hole in the sound the sound works itself around, missing no beat.

It is the beat.

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R.T. Smith

In Creasy Cove, Domestic Duet

And what of the double dulcimer, Friday night, an instrument invented for courting, its two sets of strings marrying in a single song always audible from porch to parlor so the whole clan will know when lovers stop telling Aunt Rhody or rowing the boat ashore, while fireflies in the treeline signal for love or hunger, their intricate bellies near green or yellow, efficient unlike any wicked lamp or candle, their colder fire corrective of the cicadasâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; chivaree frenzy, and again the whispers over yard mint, stingweed, the rock stack where maybe one copperhead crawls and honeysuckle is nearly sweet as the steel strings across an hourglass of poplar, fir, pecan wood, while the summer night waits for his voice to promise while they both press and slide fingertips over the brass frets, the dulcimer living up to its name, all sweetness over the old dependable drone over and over, the insect chorus shaping summer night, and if he ever stammers, someone scrapes catfish bones from a platter and a needle in her motherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s hand pauses, the knot taut, the fatherly newspaper rattling as dulcet echoes still wed the pattern of fireflies weaving about the garden, the quilt big enough for a double bed, the just-born and dying insects morsing their desperate luminescence, their best melody of yes-yes-I-am-ready-yes.

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R. T. Smith

Pick it, Squirrel

Under the red oak’s still shadows six men from far upriver pick the stand-up bass, the git-box, banjo, fiddle. “Uncle Pen,” “Fox on the Run”—a solo, a blend, a riff, sun across a Martin’s polished neck until the afternoon centers on a picker in tight levis and a burgundy shirt, his white hair brushed to a banty rooster’s shock. Is that a grin or grimace?

A short man older than Elvis had he lived, skin ruddy, eyes blue-black, skinny lips pursed— oh, how can your fingers fly so quick?

What deep secret have you seen in the world narrowed through your squint? Now lead us beside the still waters, fret the devil’s bitter wisdom, chord an angel’s sweetest dream.

The air is splitting with your wild discipline as the rest of the old band trips the minor.

Is this a cool cringe and home-cooked sizzle, as if all awe were ordinary, as if being hot on the tail of bliss were easy?

Give us that old-time tickle that rivets us.

Deliver us. Pick it, Squirrel, you blessed man.

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Jeffrey Hammond

I Want to Jump But I’m Afraid I’ll Fall: Confessions of a Rock ’n’ Roll Snob

“Hey hey, we’re the Monkees!” And they certainly were: four living cartoon characters wreaking moptop havoc in their weekly TV ripoff of the Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night. When the Monkees hit the tube, I was fifteen and playing drums in a three-chord rock band— a card-carrying member of their target demographic. Never mind that a growing taste for jazz was starting to deflect me from mainstream teen culture. Given my age and proclivities, the market research that spawned the Monkees indicated that I should have loved them. Instead they made me feel ashamed of being a teenager.

The Monkees’ Davy Jones recently came to my city on one of those rock revival tours, along with Bobby Sherman and Peter Noone, better known as “Herman” of Herman’s Hermits. I read the review in the paper, which said they put on a terrific show, with the same mixture of pleasure and embarrassment that I’d feel at a class reunion. Even as I wondered who would pay to see such a spectacle, I found myself heartened to learn that these guys were alive and well and on tour. I despised all three of them in the old days, and “despised” is not too strong a word to describe a fifteen-year-old’s vehemence. But now that I’m approaching fifty, I’ve gained a little wisdom about falling short, selling out, and making do. Even in the old days, weren’t Davy and Bobby and Herman just trying to get by? How could I have channeled such dark thoughts toward such innocuous figures? What harm had they ever done to me?

Something about Herman’s newspaper photo—the eager-toplease smile, the crisp lines around the eyes, the surprisingly gaunt face framed by shaggy Sixties hair—prompted this unexpected mellowness. It makes perfect sense for a middle-aged man to rejoice that the icons of his youth are still kicking, even if they weren’t his icons. If Herman and his tourmates are helping to make my contemporaries—those thickset teenagers of yesteryear—feel that our demise is a bit farther off, then they are doing honorable work. ◆◆◆

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Jeffrey Hammond

It was my older brother’s fault that I hated the Monkees. When I was five and he was fourteen, he began hosting a Saturday morning kid’s show on the local radio station in our small Ohio town. Dave fell for Fifties rock and roll before it was rock and roll, when it was still called “rhythm and blues” or, in some circles, “race music.”

His station manager wouldn’t let him play it, though, and “The Little Dave Show” featured acts like Patti Page, Mitch Miller, and Perez Prado. Dave would read the coming week’s school lunch menu and then play “Que Sera Sera,” or maybe “The Yellow Rose of Texas” or “Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White.” Even a boy disk jockey can have boredom in his voice if he’s your brother and you know how to detect it.

WFIN’s perky format didn’t stop record companies from shipping hundreds of promotional copies to Findlay, Ohio, plainlabel 45s with the latest cuts from Chuck Berry, Little Jimmy Reed, Slim Harpo, Chuck Willis, and Telly W. Mills (“The Fat Cat”). When Dave’s boss ordered these “devil’s records” out of his sight, my brother obligingly brought them home and played them ceaselessly.

By the time I was nine and Dave left for college, I had logged countless hours listening to these records, along with nightly doses of R&B from WLAC Nashville, crackling through Dave’s tinny transistor radio and served up with the hip patter of Big John R and Hossman Allen. Our house was on the east edge of town, with cornfields stretching off outside the window of the upstairs bedroom that my brother and I shared. It seemed perfectly natural to be hearing this wild music under a night sky pulsating with ancient stars and brand-new radio signals.

At five or six I had no idea that Dave’s music was “colored” music, or that WLAC’s jocks were white men trying to imitate black speech. It was just a new kind of music that made me feel good even when the words were sad. Chuck Willis moaned that the train had gone and that he was hanging up his rock ’n’ roll shoes. Jimmy Reed cried that he’d been unfaithful and that he knew it was a sin.

Ray Charles told me that the night time was the right time. I wasn’t sure exactly what it was the right time for, but that grinding, hypnotic beat made my ignorance seem not to matter.

Rock and roll’s “Golden Era” ended when I was around ten, when a newer, slicker kind of rock came into our house through our sister, who was between Dave and me in age. Given my brother’s radio-nerd weirdness, Sue was the first normal teenager in the 160 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Jeffrey Hammond

family—and her music left me stone cold. By then Dave’s music had made me the world’s youngest rock and roll snob, impervious to the appeal of Ricky Nelson, Frankie Avalon, and the rest of my sister’s idols. When the Monkees made their antic entrance five years later, they never had a chance.

There’s a communal dream surrounding the 1950s, and it goes like this. An organization man in a gray flannel suit eases a mammoth sedan into the carport of a cookie-cutter suburban home, where his wife and two children greet him with a martini, very dry. That evening, after dinner, their living room glows with wholesome family entertainment beaming from a still-novel television set: Red Skelton, The Honeymooners, maybe Texaco Star Theater. Outside, rumbling by in a hot rod, is a shadowy figure who looks like James Dean if you grew up middle class, Elvis if working class. He’s got a pack of Luckies rolled up in his T-shirt sleeve and a contemptuous sneer on his face. His radio blasts with a new kind of music, electric and thumpy and full of shouting. We’ve all had this dream before, and we nod knowingly. This kid is the future: his music will soon shake that family right out of their TV coma.

We Baby Boomers aren’t shy about romanticizing our past—a fact that has never been lost on the media. Forrest Gump was aimed directly at our restless midlife hearts, as was American Graffiti, Happy Days, Laverne & Shirley, and, even earlier, Don McLean’s folksy lament for “the day the music died.” My unanticipated affection for Davy Jones, Bobby Sherman, and Peter Noone, cycling gamely through the old tunes, has forced me to confront the nostalgia with which I’ve smothered my own personal Eden, those foggy years before the Monkees and the Hermits.

The self-image of guys my age and older often hinges critically on something called “rock ’n’ roll.” Not rock and roll, mind you, but rock ’n’ roll, the slurred patter of a hip DJ inseparable from the music itself. There’s even a permanent shrine to our pastel-tinted memories near the Lake Erie shore in Cleveland. A Hall of Fame requires a myth of origins, as the Cooperstown founders knew when they promoted the fiction that Abner Doubleday invented baseball.

Those of us who grew up with the music find the Myth of Rock impossible to resist, as compelling as Genesis or the Gita. Rock ’n’ roll, the story goes, was a spontaneous expression of “the kids,” who rebelled against Fifties conformity to forge a generational Crab Orchard Review ◆ 161

Jeffrey Hammond

tribalism based on honesty about school, jobs, politics, money, and sex. Rejecting their parents’ post-war vision of a good life based on economic success and technological progress, the kids began to invent themselves. Rock ’n’ roll created the Teenager, and the rest, as they say, was history, as unstoppable as Manifest Destiny or the Internet.

It was a good thing, too. According to the Myth, the country was needing a bracing antidote to a military-industrial complex so powerful that even Ike finally laid down his putter to warn us about it. The antidote worked, for a while, and rock ’n’ roll almost saved America from its big, bland self. But where there’s a garden, there’s sure to be a snake. Rock soon went commercial and got corrupted.

Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, and the Big Bopper died in that plane crash in Iowa; Eddie Cochran was killed in a London cab accident; Chuck Berry went to jail; Elvis got drafted; the payola scandals hit—and nothing was ever the same. Rock rolled on, but by 1960 the “real” music had died. Didn’t Don McLean say so?

It’s a good story, chanted like liturgy wherever two or more Boomers are gathered together, and I’ve always believed it. But my unexpected affection for Jones and his tourmates has caught me off guard. I’ve checked some facts since that oldies tour breezed through town, and have reminded myself how many of those middle-aged truisms about early rock ’n’ roll—my truisms—are just plain wrong.

It would be cowardly for a man approaching fifty to turn away from the truth, wouldn’t it? Maybe this is the honorable work that has been given to me. Facing the music seems a small price to pay for a bit of midlife honesty, for getting a handle on this belated peace I seem to have made with those smarmy, god-awful Monkees.

The Rock Myth holds that early rock ’n’ roll broke down the barriers of racism, but as Montaigne once said, “What do I know?”

When I was six or seven and first heard Chuck Berry, I had no idea that he was black. Then again, I was living in Findlay, Ohio, and I’m not sure I even knew what a black person was. I learned that Berry and the others were black only after our next-door neighbor, a Bible salesman from Mississippi, teased Dave by calling his records “nigger music.” Today that neighbor would doubtless agree with the Myth’s view that black R&B performers were “primitive” forebears, precursors of a sound that needed white refinements before it could become the real thing. It always floors me when people say that whites like Elvis and Buddy Holly created rock ’n’ 162 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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roll out of black music. After all, I remember what I heard—and it was black performers who created rock ’n’ roll out of black music: Huey “Piano” Smith, Antoine “Fats” Domino, Little Richard Penniman, Bo Diddley, and, of course, the incomparable Berry. The key, of course, was the big beat that made the moonlit cornfield dance outside our bedroom window. The white elements that went into the rock mix, country and country swing, didn’t last very long.

Consider how quickly the early “rockabilly” of Elvis, Holly, Carl Perkins, Bill Haley, and Jerry Lee Lewis became dated as the music took on an urban, and then suburban, sound. Ironically, the only Fifties rocker whose “country” influence had a lasting impact was Berry, whose singing recalled the Ozarks more than Beale Street.

You’ll often hear it said that teenagers invented rock ’n’ roll, but these black rockers were hardly fresh kids. Instead, they were professional musicians trying to break out of the restrictive “colored” markets and reach the larger white audience. In so doing, they struggled against broadcasting’s insistence on categorizing music by color rather than sound. In a 1955 Billboard poll of DJs, the top “R&B” performer was Fats Domino, the most promising “R&B” performer was Chuck Berry, and the most promising “Country and Western” performer was Elvis Presley. Go figure.

For a time, such loopy distinctions were sacrosanct. Many station managers who refused to play “race music” did not object to the same music played by the white performers who soon emerged to accommodate the separate-but-unequal worlds of radio. When Sam Phillips signed Elvis to a contract at Sun Records because he had “the Negro sound and the Negro feel,” he gave classic statement to what soon became a wholesale repackaging of black music. Fats Domino quickly received blander restatement in Pat Boone and, for an even younger crowd, Ricky Nelson. Little Richard, who quit the business in 1957 after a religious conversion and his ordination as an Adventist minister, acquired his white twin in Jerry Lee Lewis, who shifted Penniman’s racing piano and wildman style from fey to redneck mode. Before long the parade of white stand-ins became a stampede. Doo-wop vocal groups like the Coasters, the Platters, Little Anthony & the Imperials, and Frankie Lymon & the Teenagers found counterparts in street-harmony groups like Dion & the Belmonts, Danny & the Juniors, and—a rarity—the racially integrated Del-Vikings.

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consider the fate of individual songs. Joe Turner’s “Shake, Rattle, and Roll” (1954) was immediately covered by Bill Haley and the Comets. The Drifters’ “Such a Night” (1954) was recorded by Johnny Ray. The Chords’ “Sh-Boom” (1954) was redone the same year by the Crew-Cuts, a Canadian group who also covered the Penguins’ “Earth Angel” (1954) a year after the original. Pat Boone recorded a nearly simultaneous version of Fats Domino’s “Ain’t That a Shame” (1955); Rick Nelson did the same with “I’m Walkin’” (1957). Boone and Elvis both covered Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” (1956). Jerry Lee Lewis’ “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” (1957) was originally recorded by Big Maybelle. And Elvis’s signature rocker, “Hound Dog” (1956), had been an R&B hit three years earlier for Big Mama Thornton. So widespread was the white remaking of black hits that in 1955 R&B star LaVern Baker asked Congress for protection against such blatant copying. That same year, WINS in New York finally ordered its DJs to stop playing copycat recordings. By then, though, the classic white rockers of the Fifties had begun to establish their followings, and it was too late for the black inventors of the sound to cash in.

Early rock was hardly a reaction against American commercialism, as Boomer nostalgia would have it. The strain of R&B that black musicians were developing into the new music was already a highly commercial sound, and when white promoters and performers took it over, the frenzy for getting and spending increased because the market for the music increased. Those bobby-soxers who swooned over Dick Haymes, Bing Crosby, and Frank Sinatra in the Forties could tell you that rock ’n’ roll did not create the Teenager. Instead, rock ’n’ roll created the Teenage Consumer. By offering something else for hidden persuaders to urge young status seekers to buy, the new music shared fully in the spirit of the Fifties as the golden age of advertising. Indeed, sociologist Vance Packard, who popularized these terms, was among those who testified against rock ’n’ roll in Congressional hearings.

Rock’s “rebellion” thus assumed classic Fifties form as the purchasing decision. Guided by the new genre of the teen movie, by promoters and DJs, and by the images and stories embedded in the songs themselves, teenage consumers were channeled into modes of dissent that were in fact wildly conformist. With rock you could rebel and belong, an outsider cocooned in the safety of numbers.

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latest clothes and hairstyles for school or the sock-hop, she joined most teens in embarking on a quest to be “cool” that was really just an age-specific version of the same desire to stand out and fit in that determined the buying decisions of their G.I. Generation parents, who also wanted to get ahead without getting weird. The conformity of the era, highlighted in such popular sociological studies as David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd (1950), was countered by the existential ideal of defining yourself through individual choices—in this case, choices about how to spend your allowance. This was the decade of the Beatnik as well as the Organization Man, and early rock managed to work both sides of the street.

If anything, rock ’n’ roll made adolescent turbulence easier to deal with. Much has been made of the “dangerous” quality of the earliest rock, but when you really listen to it, you have to wonder what my brother’s boss at WFIN was afraid of. Huey “Piano” Smith typified this playfulness. His persona was sexually charged but oddly incapacitated, a performer-as-shaman who embodied desire and frustration in fairly equal parts—not a bad mix for music aimed at teenagers. “I want to jump but I’m afraid I’ll fall / I want to kiss her but she’s just too tall / Old Man Rhythm’s got a hold of me too / I got the rockin’ pneumonia and the boogie-woogie flu.” To rock was to be misunderstood, but as Smith’s comic riff on music as illness suggests, it was also to laugh all the way to the bank.

It’s not for nothing that Smith’s band was named the Clowns.

Fats Domino was even less threatening—his subdued list and amiable persona careful concessions to early rock’s concern with marketing.

While the sexual nature of the “thrill” found on “Blueberry Hill” (1956) was perfectly clear to my brother and sister (though not yet to me), the lyric itself was a string of romantic clichés: “The wind in the willows played / Love’s sweet melody / But all of the vows we made / Were never to be.” If any suspicious parents actually listened to the words, they heard tamer stuff than “Canadian Love Song” or “Destiny.” Even Little Richard, for all his outrageousness, worked hard to defuse whatever threat he seemed to pose. Although his screaming renditions of “Tutti Frutti” (1956), “Long Tall Sally” (1956), and “Good Golly Miss Molly” (1958) set the standard for hard-driving rock ’n’ roll, his hammed-up performances were very funny—and intentionally so.

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style popularized by the 1957 opening of West Side Story, fed parental obsessions with that new cultural icon: the Juvenile Delinquent.

Blinded by the JD nightmare, most adults overlooked Berry’s selfmocking humor. Elvis soon followed Berry in adopting a low-slung guitar as rock’s essential stage prop, but the Tupelo boy missed the performative humor of it all. While Berry’s famous “duckwalk” was more goofy than sensual, the gyrations of the sullen-faced Pelvis seemed involuntary, even mechanical.

The notorious sensuality of Fifties rock—vilified at the time but now celebrated by Boomers as cultural liberation—asserted itself as safely channeled rebellion, a fantasy tease rather than a true reversal of America’s traditional distrust of sexuality. Although an actual sexual revolution would arrive in the late Sixties, early rock’s blend of doomed romanticism and comic goofiness helped keep the lid on the real thing.

Since the music made teens like being teens, there was no hurry to grow up. In fact, the music let them dwell a bit longer than otherwise in a realm of pre-coital fantasy, usually centered around a favorite teen idol. Frankie Avalon’s first hits—“Dede Dinah” (1958) and “Venus” (1959)—started a parade of heartthrobs poised to replace Elvis when he entered the army in 1958. These were my sister’s favorites: Fabian, Tommy Sands, Bobby Rydell, and the now grown-up Rick Nelson.

Objects of crushes rather than lust, these guys were hardly icons of risky business. On the contrary, they kept real sex safely buried beneath layers of romantic idealism and rose-tinted schmaltz, thus paving the way for the early Beatles and their lesser imitators, including those Monkees and those Hermits.

To be sure, early rock had a beat you could dance to, as the kids on American Bandstand never tired of saying, and the dancing indeed touched places in the id. But the dances of the late Fifties, far less sensual than the Forties jitterbug, functioned more as mass sublimation than communal foreplay. The long double line formed to the Diamonds’ 1957 remake of Chuck Willis’s “The Stroll” was a blatant substitute for the passage from innocence to experience—but substitute it assuredly was. With Chubby Checker’s 1960 cover of Hank Ballard’s “The Twist” (1960), the dance craze peaked as a movement that was both sexual and sexless, typically Fifties in its ambivalence. However provocative the moves looked, they were performed in a crowded, smelly gym and virtually no touching was involved.

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of authority, boredom with routine, the freedom provided by the automobile, the ups and downs of love, and fierce loyalty to the music and to the teen nation for which it stood. Charting archetypal moments in the life of Everyteen, songs like “Maybellene” (1955), “School Days” (1957), and “Sweet Little Sixteen” (1958) did more to shape the self-image of Fifties teens than any other single source.

The vaguely autobiographical cast of “Johnny B. Goode” (1958) and “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” (1956), reinforced by Berry’s wide-eyed mugging, also articulated the standard rock attitude of self-celebration. “Roll Over Beethoven” (1956) and “Rock ’n’ Roll Music” (1957) remain the most durable anthems to the rock ’n’ roll culture that Boomer males idealize, the songs that the casts of revival shows usually perform as a finale. Most middle-aged guys hear these songs as hymns to our former selves. We’ve forgotten—if indeed we ever knew—that they were satirical comments on the teen culture they were helping to shape, self-conscious jokes about the crazed demand for the new music: “I got no kick against modern jazz / Unless they try to play it too darn fast, / And take the beauty of the melody/ Until it sounds just like a symphony.” Frustrated by bad grades or acne or a car with a hairline crack in the radiator? Here’s a balm for all of it: “Just give me some of that rock ’n’ roll music!”

Once you start dismantling a story dear to you, it’s hard to stop.

The Myth has always claimed that early rock ’n’ roll rebelled against the Fifties mania for technology as the key to the good life. The decade saw a massive push to create demand that would match the shift in industrial production to consumer goods after the war ended.

There were dishwashers, power mowers, drink blenders, and the increasingly ubiquitous TV set—and rock seemed to mock all of it.

If the Rebel had a Cause, it was surely despair at all the “stuff ” that science, technology, and Madison Avenue made his parents want to buy. This part of the Myth makes it easy to forget the sobering truth: without the technology of electronic amplification—and some handy electrical outlets—the Rebel’s favorite tunes would have sounded like hopped-up renditions of “Kumbaya.”

Rock also capitalized on innovations in the business and technology of broadcasting. As the Fifties began, radio was threatened by the advent of affordable television sets. Introduced as a general medium for the entire family, television took over radio’s longstanding staple, the broadcast drama. With TV providing Crab Orchard Review ◆ 167

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something for everyone, radio was forced into niche markets. Of course, if you were like my brother’s boss and ran the only station in town, you could hold the line and play “Al Di La” until the cows came home. Such was not the case, however, in larger and more competitive markets—another factor behind early rock’s urban thrust. Just as the new music was gearing up, most of the big-city stations that went with it did so in a desperate attempt to stay afloat.

It was a smart choice. Not only was the spending power of teens on the rise, but rock stations found themselves buoyed by AM’s technical limitations, always a headache for classical and other “good music” formats. Radio in the Fifties was exclusively AM (FM didn’t start commercially until the mid-Sixties), and far lower in sound quality than the AM we hear today. This low-fidelity sound was tailor-made for early rock ’n’ roll. The AM signal, with a band so wide that you could tune slightly off-signal for tinnier or fuzzier customized effects, enhanced the live, roadhouse feel that recording engineers sought with improvised wall coverings, broken speaker cones, and experimental miking. If you want to hear this sound in all its lo-f i glory, listen closely to Huey Smith’s “Rockin’ Pneumonia” (1957) or “Don’t You Just Know It” (1958). These are great songs, but from an acoustical standpoint early rock was garbage in, more garbage out.

When miniaturized transistors made portable radios practical and affordable, teens could take their music into the privacy of their bedrooms or out of the house altogether. If early rock had depended for its success on the wood-paneled, multi-band Hallicrafters showcased in the living room, it’s doubtful whether the music would have survived. That receiver, after all, was controlled by Dad, who would never have subjected its delicate speakers to high-volume rock ’n’ roll. Vic Damone and Harry Belafonte were OK, and even Stan Getz if Dad was a hepcat—but not Bo Diddley or Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. Once decent-quality radios became standard equipment in cars, teen culture really came into its own. The automobile became, in effect, a rolling sound-box that enveloped the kids as they listened to rock in rock’s ultimate setting.

Teen separateness was furthered by rock’s primary medium and product: the record. By 1954 most labels were distributing promotional copies to stations in the new 45s, which were more durable and cheaper to produce and ship than the bulky, fragile 78s.

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WFIN—were originally designed to minimize promotion and distribution costs, but when companies began selling them retail, teens could build up their own collections, checking out the new releases in the “listening booth” without the store owner pulling his hair over scratched inventory. Along with the 45s came the portable phonograph, that tiny, brightly-colored suitcase whose scratchy speaker did its part to degrade the music’s already rough sound.

Another inevitable accessory was the record carrying case, perfect for teen-exclusive events like sock-hops and slumber parties. You could even wear 45s, with record-shaped iron-ons to grace poodle skirts and dark hipster shirts.

The lowly 45 also made possible the instant fame central to rock ’n’ roll fantasies. Elvis became the “King of Rock” not just because he was white, but because his rags-to-riches story brought the new music under the familiar umbrella of the American Dream.

A performer no longer needed an album’s worth of cuts or a large record company investment to make it big. Because new songs could be pressed and distributed so quickly and cheaply, the result was a staggering flow of “product.” Those classics that we Boomers cherish at revival shows were planned for obsolescence, cranked out by a system fed by top-forty radio formats that imitated TV’s old Your Hit Parade and by the weekly release of national and local “charts,” as popular as they were unscientific.

Although the Myth usually aligns television with a Fifties complacency that rock ’n’ roll supposedly smashed beyond repair, TV helped legitimize the new music for what it really was: mainstream American show business. Rock ’n’ roll must be for real: wasn’t Ed Sullivan booking Elvis, Buddy Holly, and Fats Domino on his family-oriented variety show? Sullivan’s bemused endorsement of such acts (“All right, you youngsters, settle down!”) helped ease parents’ fears. Those crazy kids—what will they come up with next? Locally produced dance shows soon sprang up in the major markets, and Dick Clark’s American Bandstand went national on ABC in 1957. Here, too, TV endorsed the acceptability of the new music. The late-night DJ could dish up suggestive hipster patter because radio was essentially a private medium, one jock sharing cool-talk (“The pick to click!” “The wax to watch!”) with a single teen or a carload of like-minded pals. Television, however, was public, viewed in spaces where parents slumped in La-Z-Boys and younger siblings like me frolicked on the rug. For this reason the Crab Orchard Review ◆ 169

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clean-cut Clark wisely positioned himself as the antithesis of early radio wildmen like Chicago’s Dick Biondi, Cleveland’s Alan Freed, New York’s Cousin Brucie, and Tijuana’s Wolfman Jack. Clark was like a hip high school teacher, with the kids but too smart to pass himself off as one of them, and parents adored him. Television solidif ied the business end of rock, not only in the constant promotion of new acts, but in commercials for products—Clearasil was a longtime “Bandstand” sponsor—that helped make “rock ’n’ roll” more than just a kind of music. TV joined radio in promoting rock as a way of life—the way of life, really—for anyone who was, as Pat Boone’s popular advice book put it, “twixt twelve and twenty.”

As for this typically American mix—the frenzied marketing, the racial economics, the collusion of hepcat technology with oldfashioned show biz—I remember hardly any of it. I was not “twixt twelve and twenty” at the time, but only half that age and as discriminating as a sponge. The fact that I was too young for all the teenage hoopla, and thus got my rock ’n’ roll straight, surely explains why I became a pint-sized rock ’n’ roll snob, and why I later found it easy to buy into so much of the Rock Myth. It’s also why I remember the music more vividly than the faces of my elementary school classmates. I can still conjure up at will—I mean actually hear— the sloppy, draggy-hand tinkle of Huey Smith’s piano in my head. The same goes for that throaty saxophone solo at the beginning of Ray Charles’s “The Night Time (Is the Right Time)” and the blaring guitar break that kicks off nearly every Chuck Berry song. This music forms a constant soundtrack to fleeting images of the younger self who still lives in my mind, who still goes about his boyhood business in a plaid shirt, high-cuff bluejeans, and no-name sneakers.

Although the music is well worth remembering, I wish that some of my contemporaries would stop sullying it with a bogus myth of origins. Like old men decrying the demise of Cuban cigars even though they never smoked one, we Boomers are constantly rewriting our history. Chuck Berry’s “Maybellene” and Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” may be the seminal tunes of 1955 in our heads, but Berry’s song never made the pop charts, only R&B—and the Haley tune didn’t hit until it was featured months later in the movie Blackboard Jungle. The real hits of 1955, in terms of record sales, were the songs my brother was forced to play at WFIN: Pat Boone’s “Love Letters in the Sand,” Perez Prado’s “Cherry Pink,” the Four 170 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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Lads’ “Moments to Remember,” Sinatra’s “Love and Marriage,” Mitch Miller’s “Yellow Rose of Texas,” and Tennessee Ernie Ford’s “Sixteen Tons.” In 1958, the zenith of rock’s Golden Era, Berry’s “Sweet Little Sixteen,” Holly’s “Peggy Sue,” and Eddie Cochran’s “Summertime Blues” shared billing with the Kingston Trio’s “Ballad of Tom Dooley,” the McGuire Sisters’ “Sugartime,” Domenico Modugno’s “Volaré,” and—God save us all—David Seville’s “The Chipmunk Song.” Even the 1958 hits by acts that have been canonized in Boomer memory were surprisingly tame: the Everly Brothers’ “All I Have to Do Is Dream,” Rick Nelson’s “Poor Little Fool” and “Lonesome Town,” Bobby Darin’s “Splish Splash,” and Elvis’s “One Night.” An unsentimental look at the “King of Rock” says it all. Despite his popular reconstruction as the original rocker, Elvis’s list contains one “Hound Dog” (1956) for every fifteen sedatives like “Love Me Tender” (1956) or “Teddy Bear” (1957).

So much for Fifties rebellion. Trust me: you could listen to the gentle boogie shuffle of “Teddy Bear” a hundred times and never— not even once—contemplate sucker-punching your English teacher or lobbing a brick through the police station window. If rock ’n’ roll music made teens “want to jump,” as Huey “Piano” Smith once keened, it demanded only a modest leap. What’s more, an allAmerican safety net of consumption ensured that nobody would “fall” while sowing inconsequential oats.

These weird contradictions in early rock shouldn’t surprise us.

America has always given off mixed messages, no matter how hard the people in charge keep trying to harmonize them into a single, smoothed-out story. We Boomers, who cut our teeth on Vietnam and Watergate, have grown up hearing revisionist retellings of the American story, from JFK’s affairs through J. Edgar Hoover’s crossdressing to Jefferson’s DNA and all the rest of it. But we’re the people in charge now, and naturally, it’s our personal story that we cannot bring ourselves to revise. When we mythologize early rock ’n’ roll, we mythologize ourselves, and there’s something unseemly about that. In the usual narratives of how rock began, we’re the foundational figures, latter-day pioneers of hip living and hot loving who held out for a beat we could dance to. This constitutes the primal Boomer myth. Anyone over sixty or under forty will tell you, quite rightly, that it’s all a bit much.

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Potomac or Davy Crockett killing a “bar” when he was only three.

Still, a middle-aged guy realizes that it can be a mistake to set things too straight. To quote Montaigne again, “What do I know?” Why be a wet blanket, a Dr. Bringdown so curmudgeonly as to deny an entire generation its foundational story? It seems uncharitable, at my age, to begrudge Davy Jones and his pals the right to profit from legend.

Didn’t Homer and Virgil and Shakespeare do the same? This much I promise: if I ever find myself squeezed into a seat in a suburban arena singing along to Monkees tunes, I hope I have the good sense to enjoy myself. At least Davy Jones isn’t whining about the humbling effects of time or lamenting the inevitability of change.

He’s up there making people happy, cranking out harmless pop narratives whose charm does not depend—it never did—on some profound, self-defining truth at their core.

Besides, isn’t that just what Chuck Berry and Huey Smith and Little Richard used to do? Didn’t the real rock ’n’ roll—my rock ’n’ roll—start from just this sort of communal goofiness, something that fools felt together? If you ever hear a pop-culture academic braying about “Almost Grown” as a hymn to problematized subjectivity or explicating “Back in the USA” as an ironic commentary on the Cold War, run the other way. Such critics are merely repeating a mistake once made by a fifteen-year-old rock ’n’ roll snob who had already idealized an earlier sound that he thought had been cheapened by America’s inexhaustible capacity for silliness. By the time I heard Jones and his Monkees cohorts telling me that they were believers—or was it daydream believers?—and that someone had better take that last train to Clarksville or wherever, I had already absorbed my rock ’n’ roll story and had no room for another. My brother, who was finally finishing his on-again, off-again college career, was about to leave for Vietnam, and the cornfield outside our bedroom window had been invaded by three new ranch houses. The Monkees’ antics were no help at all with the vague sense of loss that I was already associating with those houses and my eerily quiet bedroom.

Middle age is indeed a time for reconciliation, and even though I’ve had to abandon some rock ’n’ roll dogmas, at least I’ve made my peace with Davy, Herman, and Bobby. I wish them well. But while much is taken, one thing remains—and it’s a memory I cling to with all the certitude of a former seven-year-old whose older brother once said, “Hey, listen to this.” You really should have heard “Rock ’n’ Roll Music” rattling from a transistor radio as you gazed out at a starry sky looming 172 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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over a table-flat cornfield that seemed to sway with a back-beat you can’t lose it, any old way you use it. The scene I can still picture in my mind’s eye was worthy of Van Gogh, and even with one good ear he would have been slapping down those juicy, nighttime-is-the-right-time blues and purples, with streaks of chrome yellow for the airwaves, in perfect rhythm. I probably never felt more like a real American than I did at that moment. I didn’t know, of course, that whatever came afterwards could only be a falling away, that a price would have to be paid for such mindless animal joy.

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Shall We Gather at the River?

The

kids of Weed, New Mexico, have left their school for the summer, but the gym—a no-frills, low-budget place—is full of voices. This Sunday afternoon the big room rings with gospel music.

Friday and Saturday there was traditional bluegrass from a succession of bands; this morning, a worship service.

As I took the turn off the state highway onto the dirt road that led into the little town I thought, “This is the last place anybody would ever come for a vacation.” Weed is a five or six-block square of unremarkable buildings which together give the impression they’ve been erected yesterday, in a hurry, and that the whole place will probably be blown away in the next heavy wind.

But here I am, on my vacation. I discovered Weed and its musical weekend while perusing the “Calendar of Events” in the Mountain Monthly, published in nearby Cloudcroft. I’d missed the flea market and bingo game in Timberon on July 4 as well as the Mescalero Parade and Rodeo. I’d also arrived too late for the Chili Cookoff.

But something drew me to the gospel afternoon. I’m not alone.

The dusty parking lot outside is crammed with travel trailers and RV’s. Most of us are in blue jeans, many wear cowboy hats, but the woman beside me seems to have dressed for a nightclub, with her satiny blouse, her fire-engine fingernails, the gaudy rings that circle each finger. Her immovable helmet of hair, dyed purplish black, doesn’t disguise the fact that she’s at least twenty years older than I am, as is most of the audience. I don’t know who they are or where they come from, but I know what we have in common.

We love this music.

I grew up in the Carolinas, in the Episcopal Church. “I’ll Fly Away” was never posted on the hymn board. In my smocked dress, my wide-brimmed hat with the ribbon down the back, my white gloves and Mary Jane shoes, I never sang, “Some bright morning, when this life is over, I’ll fly away . . . to a home on God’s celestial shore, I’ll fly away.” Kneeling to repeat the morning prayers and 174 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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confessions in those churches of my childhood, I never felt “like a bird that prison bars has flown,” and the solid, purposeful hymns from the red hymnbook didn’t deliver me, either.

But at church picnics, family reunions, and at summer camp I discovered another world of song. There the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant girl could clap, tap her feet—even stomp if the spirit moved her. I could feel that “joy, joy, joy, joy, down in my heart.”

Joy not once, but over and over.

And later, at funeral services, I was not comforted by the prayer book’s promises nor moved by the hymns that seemed to command my soul to march in lockstep to heaven with a horde of other dutiful parishioners. Afterwards, though, at the home of the deceased, after the casseroles had been consumed and the whiskey poured, if we were lucky, someone with the requisite musical talent would sit down at the piano and begin to play the songs we all wanted to sing: “I was standing by my window on a cold and cloudy day, when I saw that hearse come rollin’ for to carry my mother away.” “Precious Lord, take my hand, lead me on, let me stand . . . I am tired, I am weak, I am worn.”

We would hold hands, something which would have been unthinkable in the Anglican church of the late fifties and early sixties. We would touch each other.

Up on the stage now, the Haskell Family Band is muddling through “In the Garden.” They are comfortable with each other and seem untroubled by the fiddler’s flat solo. Perhaps she’s new to the group—an in-law who wants to try her hand at this music. They accept her and nod encouragingly in her direction. The audience, too, claps its approval as she steps back from the microphone that has amplified every imperfection of her rendition. An older fellow— the father of the clan?—picks up where she left off, confidently picking out the notes on his guitar, his voice steady and confident as he sings “And he walks with me, and he talks with me, and he tells me I am his own . . .”

There are tears in the eyes of the man next to the woman with rings on every finger. Who knows where this song has intersected his life, where it had touched him, how it has changed him? This is not background music, not something for casual listening. This music wants you to give yourself over to it—with no reservations—and most of us do. Even I, a non-believer, feel the power of these melodies, these verses.

I can sing, “I’ll fly away to a land where joys will never end” without holding out any hope of a life after this one.

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My mother fears for my soul. She doesn’t particularly like gospel music, doesn’t get any closer to it than listening to her long-time housekeeper, Pearl, sing while she fries a batch of chicken in heavy grease. It’s important to my mother to be dignified, and gospel music isn’t dignified. She discourages any “show of emotion,” which includes crying, screaming, clapping and stomping. Sometimes she seems close to tears, though, when she tells me that she worries about my soul. “You’ll wish you had some faith,” she warns, “when you’re on your deathbed.”

When I dropped out of the mainstream Protestant church and became a Unitarian, she gulped hard. At least, she said, you’re going to some church. But she remains deeply troubled by my failure to embrace the notion of life after death. “I’d like to,” I’ve told her. “I just can’t.” And now that I’ve moved out West to live with a Jew she’s almost given up hope that I’ll see the light on the heaven issue.

And what about Jerry, my husband, who sits besides me?

Growing up in Baltimore he sang in choirs and glee clubs. He knows the words to most of the Christmas carols. But this gospel stuff may be a stretch. Does it conjure up images of crosses burning? Remind him that “The Old Gospel Ship” might not have let him on board?

Does he wonder what goes on at all those Baptist camps nearby, what they are teaching their children about his children?

If I were to argue in defense of “Precious Memories” and “When the Roll is Called Up Yonder” I’d point to all the humble, good people who really believe in the songs’ promises, people who don’t preach hatred or join lynch mobs. I’d talk about the many for whom simple religious conviction was a saving grace—the Africans my ancestors enslaved, for example. And I would talk about how this music connects me to my heritage as a southerner, the good and the bad, to my birthplace, to the innumerable souls who’ve shared it with me.

I would say that to hold hands and sing these old songs is a kind of heaven.

Jerry holds my hand, taps his foot, and smiles patiently as I mouth the words to the Haskell Family’s last number: “Yes, we’ll gather at the river The beautiful, the beautiful river Gather with the saints at the river That flows by the throne of God”

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Improvisations: Wayne Shorter The beautiful idea has no relation to size, and may be as perfectly developed in a space too minute for any but microscopic investigation.

—Nathaniel Hawthorne

Impossible to imitate, the solos are spare as Chinese aphorisms, as the poetic inventions of the Frenchman Guillevic, who writes, “It’s a question of seeing / so much clearer, / of doing to things / what light does to them.”

The solos are the work of Hawthorne’s “Artist of the Beautiful,” who gave life to a mechanical butterfly, but then saw it to be a mere symbol in a world of spirit. I listen to Wayne Shorter on the headphones, play on my saxophone the same few sounds that were his, then wonder why mine sound so different. Sound so differently. It’s as if we’re at the United Nations and need an interpreter. As if Wayne Shorter has walked into our world, an alien who has no interest in being taken to our leaders, but has come to our door, has asked us to explain.

I put my saxophone down, my Discman on pause, and furiously take notes on what I’ve just failed to do. I’m afraid the ideas won’t last until I get to the computer across the room. Written by hand, they are barely legible. Even committed to paper they disappear.

“I was thinking,” Shorter explains on the liner notes, “of misty landscapes with wildflowers and strange, dimly seen shapes.” These are the pre-Weather Report days of Speak No Evil, Wayne still on tenor sax, before his soprano became our lullaby and alarm clock in college.

He was “Wayne” to us—this ownership coming out of our fandom.

Coltrane and his early sixties rhythm section—McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison, Elvin Jones—we called simply “the boys.” This was no racist slur; we just meant they couldn’t be topped. So with Wayne.

Our bass player, my college roommate, used to play drop the needle on Weather Report’s “Unknown Soldier,” off their second album I Sing the Body Electric. I didn’t know until the following summer’s lit survey that the title had anything to do with Whitman.

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air raid sirens, when Miroslav Vitous, the Weather Report bass player, went into a hurried and jagged-edged free swing, a descending line that was followed by Wayne’s climbing line on tenor, which went to the top of the hill where it had a view of the battle, then climbed chromatically down, out of rhythm. Sometimes Craig would play the moment again and again and again. Maybe four or five times right before he was off to Music Theory class at 8 a.m. He would take a quick pull of a bottle of scotch on his way out our rented door.

We both knew that I Sing the Body Electric was our cat Fumpy’s favorite album as well. Used to progressive jazz from living in a house with five young musicians, Fumpy nevertheless would stop whatever he was doing in another part of the house—chasing a dust ball, burrowing into weeks of garbage bagged up on the three season porch—whenever he heard the rain and drone of Wayne Shorter’s weather report. He would come into our bedroom and jump on up Craig’s bed to listen. Or at least we told everyone that’s why he came. We once caught his tail moving in time to Chick Corea’s Return to Forever. I witnessed this.

In Weather Report, Wayne Shorter was crystalline. A few years later I bought the album he cut right before that band’s first release, and I could already hear the minimalist contribution he would make to his future group. In this earlier album, Odyssey of Iska, Shorter played mostly soprano, long potato notes over Latin rhythms on one side, and on the flip side a twenty minute piece of program music to the wind.

The liner notes tell of Shorter’s new experimental group he has just founded with Joe Zawinul: “Weather Forecast.” They’re also filled with the rant of the day, post-sixties abstractions: “adversity!” “mind-polluted people” “war, greed, ignorance.” The music is much more.

As is Speak No Evil: his tone is vibrato-less, the playing stops in mid air. It’s like a fast walk on a humid day. A picture of flight. The playing is modal, which is to say the musicians don’t play around the notes of chords that pass quickly by. They play in modes, collections of notes, for eight or more bars at a time before the harmony of the song changes and the soloist must use a different mode. The notes of a mode are not lined up as in a parade, but corralled in a fence and tagged one after another at what seems at first to be a random order. So not do re mi, but here here there here again. Sheep in sheep’s clothing. We can’t tell the perfectly adequate from surprise.

Perhaps one should write about Wayne Shorter’s playing the way it sounds, so form follows function. This would mean. Writing in short.

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Richard Terrill

Sentences and. Phrases, groups of words that are. PUNCTUATED.!. in strange ways, broken in str ange places, so that the reader reader reader is can’t f o l l o w what re-rethinking his shape or shaping.

The difference is that no one wants to read this kind of stuff. The listening gives more pleasure. It’s no mere gimmick, or metaphor.

Imagine I’m listening again to “Witch Hunt” or “Speak No Evil.”

Imagine you are listening too, and imagine Wayne Shorter is playing as if it were always 1969. Imagine the words “identity” and “communion,” only imagine some objective correlative for those abstractions, something as solid and dependable as the sound of a tenor saxophone. Wayne Shorter plays a dorian minor scale, the first five notes—simple—then the minor triad that goes with it. The notes could be Ravel or even Lizst. But the notes played with his gravel-edged sound become like no other music. The sound is like a dog chewing on a soft stick. Except it has pitch.

Then Freddie Hubbard comes in on trumpet with what sounds like night. I can feel and hear its dampness. I can hear the absence of Wayne Shorter now, which I imagine is how he wanted it.

Wednesday 6/24 I see the weather’s clouding up again. This sky just never stops, dropping so low the mountains are just ideas.

The air thick as a minor chord. When will the rain break, what will come next, what will come? Almost nothing or no one can say, but someone will bring it, like lunch in a plain basket, food you never have to eat. For two or three minutes I could see through his infant eyes. The moments were not consecutive.

“Is it alive?” we ask the artist of the beautiful.

“Judge for yourself.”

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Adam Sol

Sacred Music

I. Tutti De la musique avant toute chose, Et pour cela préfère l’Impair.

—Verlaine Rumour has it this will be the last Cantor’s Concert— some dispute about allowing a woman to join the committee.

Still tonight, despite the rain and the wires spidering around the dais under the ark, we are all together. In the balcony, a Haredi camera crew videotapes the Reform cantor opening the show with his operatic English, host’s privilege.

And even the Moroccans seem to enjoy singing the yiddische zimmeren a bearded redhead leads from the stage. Believe me, it’s no small thing to see a woman wearing a sheitel in a building with stained glass windows and a pipe organ. But it’s all Jewish music, yes?

Even if the pronunciations are different— this one sings sov, this one tav— or even if some of the melodies sound distinctly Arabic. Look at the cantors during the chorale, every man’s voice climbing on the shoulders of the others, in sibling rivalry. The Sephardi adds his trills 180 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Adam Sol

above the melody, even from his place in back.

And the hazzan from Aish ha Toireh adeptly dodges the swinging arms of the Conservative conductor whose kipah is embroidered with a Nike swoosh.

II. Messiah And Music shall untune the sky!

—Dryden The program notes chirp: Join the Maestro’s Club for $1300.

Not as many Jews on the list as I’ve seen elsewhere.

Tonight’s performance sponsored by Blockbuster.

Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion; Shout, O daughter of Jerusalem.

The soprano can’t stop smiling: found Jesus, probably.

Can’t say the same for me, though the bass is outstanding and the tenor is doing his best with what he’s got.

A long-haired counter-tenor sings the alto: Then shall the eyes of the blind be open’d and the ears of the deaf unstopped.

I’m checking to see which parts are Isaiah, which parts Luke. Handel’s librettist swiped from the Bible all out of order, and the program notes report that before they heard the piece, leading London puritans scoffed at such a sacred theme being performed in a common house of entertainment: “David said, How can we sing the Lord’s Song in a strange Land; but sure he would have thought it much stranger to have heard it sung in a Playhouse.”

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Adam Sol

He was despisèd, and rejected of men, a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief.

My Bible at home translates that verse from Isaiah as, acquainted with disease.

When they start with Halleluyah chorus, my wife says, We’re all Christian soldiers now.

There’s a part of me thinking, Hallel Yah, my God, mine, but I don’t hesitate to stand, and it’s not out of some sense of the good faith of humanity, or the belief in all religion’s essential search for truth, but because of the basses— And He shall reign forever and ever— because of counterpoint, and the resolution to dominant.

Halleluyahs resolve from perfect fourth, not fifths, because in the Middle Ages the Church believed that a five-seven chord contained the Devil’s Interval.

Halleluyah, halleluyah.

III. Solo Music heard so deeply That it is not heard at all, but you are the music While the music lasts.

—T. S. Eliot Now hush—here’s the oldest cantor to sing his solo.

We can hardly see him behind the clutter of music stands and wires,

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and the liver spots on his scalp are glistening.

He’s chosen a setting of the Unetaneh Tokef— a prayer from the Yom Kippur service said to be written by Rabbi Amnon from Mainz while he was being dismembered during the Crusades.

Let us proclaim the sacred power of this day.

It is awesome and full of dread.

He later came to a young rabbi in a dream to dictate what no one had thought to write down at the time.

The chord progressions, though, are right out of Beethoven.

The great Shofar is sounded, and the still, small voice is heard.

How he gathers himself beneath the notes.

How the small body clenches, then releases.

His grandson is up front, his hair spiked green.

The angels, gripped by fear, declare in awe: This is the Day of Judgment!

For even the hosts of heaven are judged, as all who dwell on earth stand before You. I knew an Irish singer who would wave her hands before her mouth when she sang, as if she had something burning in her lungs, the power of her voice was so strong.

As the shepherd makes his flock pass under his staff, so do You muster and number every soul.

One night, on television, she shredded a picture of the Pope.

But repentance, prayer, and good deeds can temper the bitterness of the decree.

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The other cantors, like boys, poke their heads out from behind the stage. They know he wonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t be singing like this for much longer.

We could shut off the microphones, and the stained-glass windows would still shiver in their earthly frames.

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Adrienne Su

Late-Night Commercials

You’re exhausted when they deliver the hits of your teenage decade, taking you back to the movies as well as the songs, shirts, and haircuts you cringe to remember.

You see teachers giving out answers and shaping your faraway sense of the future, which you now inhabit. It’s not nearly as bad as you imagined, nor as good.

Now that teachers’ ghosts are briefly invoked by the worst commercials—which bring to mind a tenth-grade lecture on tragedy, which someone called the flip side of comedy—you see that there was something to keep.

You can watch those sorry songs scroll by, laugh at the way you lived and lost, and sleep.

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Brian Teare

Clock with One Blue Wing (after Chagall) When my husband was alive, the villagers thought a violin couldn’t be a symbol of anything, music a catgut keening, nothing more. He knew better: as a boy the violin had drawn from his neck a dark weight, and as a man his beard unfurled black in clefs rich as licorice. Polkas and polonaises he made, and mazurkas like an old-fashioned hurdy-gurdy.

While he played, the stars stopped fidgeting in their sockets and the moon laid down her light like a law so just I could love the world. Though I smelled still of onion and my kitchen hands lay callused in his, we waltzed the hours down around the butcher block. Leading, fingertips to spine, my body hummed a tune he knew.

No one believed their feet could leave ground for love of air, of the barcarolle. Jealous, they threw stones, stole his bow for kindling until he packed up. Ten years ago.

I heard from him only once, a year after. A package with no return address. In it, a clock with one blue wing and a tag attached: The River of Time has no Banks.

Next to my bed, it sat, squat cruel homunculus whose hands stretched the hours between three and six, whose fingers pinched the mean skin of minutes until each squealed like a baby.

Nights I didn’t spend alone were never what I hoped: desire a belt buckle pressed into my hip; miserable lips whose wet pressures left me sexless; hands, graceless as mechanisms, fingers dull as the snub-nosed boots laced too quickly at six. I forgot him mostly; in bed, listened to my heart’s stupid ostinato keep time. Said to myself This is what I have: a body and a space where a body should be, and sometimes they are the same.

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But this morning I went out to my garden where everything is what it’s supposed to be, no tricks. Claustrophobic above the roofs of the neighbors’ houses, the sky swelled low, wet with clouds threatening as the high whitecaps of rough water.

When we were young and I listened to him play, he’d ask, “Magda, what does this sound like?” and I would tell him— drunk man, pigeon, race horse. For ten years I woke wanting the world to be anything but what it was, and in the garden I realized I let him alone live in blessing. He knew better, but did I? Belief frightened me— and the villagers. We were wrong to be jealous of what anyone could do: this morning in the sky over the garden, I made a fish whose wings shook white as laundry on the line, and it swam in that strange water, time.

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Elaine Terranova

White Leather Tango Gloves

I put on the white leather gloves I thought were a gift. They came up over my elbow, hooking with small covered buttons at the wrist. Shimmering, elegant, they wrinkled like skin.

And I saw how a glove could be a token of something else. How it bracketed a touch.

Uncle and nephew, they called themselves.

I came to believe, like us, they were lovers.

Still, they needed me. Men didn’t dance with men.

I was the fuse of the music.

As Pierre sat silent in a corner, I danced each dance. Tango after tango, arch and false.

It was a continuing melodrama, yet something of the truth was moving in it.

The way he held me, the way he looked into my eyes, for the young man this dance seemed a way out.

So many steps could have taken us very far in any one direction, but then we’d turn and start again. It was not a dance so much as a series of wrong decisions.

Through the window, I saw how the moon clung to the branches. And when the record stopped, when the guitar or the accordion—whatever keyboard it was someone had strapped across his heart— stopped playing, I felt the breathlessness you feel as you are shocked out of sleep.

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Later, I’d think of those two men, busboy, janitor, at what, in a grander city, might have been the grand hotel. The gloves were souvenirs, found in the nearly empty drawer of a hotel room. A guest who had checked out wouldn’t go back, even to ask. The gloves had covered the small red marks on my chapped hands, contacts with the world that show I’m not careful. They took them back. Pierre, as well, was sure they didn’t fit. And when would I have worn them again? Where music wants you so much it is a direct address, or love turns toward you and away at the same time.

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Richard Terrill

Appalachian Spring

We don’t know where we are really, or when, only that the instruments occur like something not yet said. A year newly broken from the swift red flesh of winter, a barn newly built on rocky confidence, allow a brief planned carelessness an octave deeper into the earth.

Prayer is almost comical in this abundance, fate a minor key that’s left unplayed.

This reminder courses through the woodwinds, turns in open fields. Faith says landscape is there. Faith and works return à tempo in the greening hills, the unmemorized lines of animals.

Pieces of sunlight cut from a cloth is sky.

It’s a simple gift to know what can be taken from us.

The last time through, the piano beats time, the cellos pray again, the preacher simply ignored, the new Americans quiet in their house of myth.

Shakers have no descendants and therefore must have faith in cycles of work, day and death.

No night closes over their eyes cello and obbligato haven’t foreshadowed.

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Amy Uyematsu

Storm —after the Kodo drummers’ “Monochrome” At first we hear nothing only the barest flicker of wrists and sticks appear Then a flutter of sound coming closer together until everyone hears This delicate drizzle pretending to lull us its liquid drone Slowly swells to a clatter the hands moving now in frenzied precision So unforgiving the staccato air its godly clamor Drilling the ear then arms falling still the silence That comes after rain and we never suspect how much heaven needs us

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Amy Uyematsu

The Soloist â&#x20AC;&#x201D;for the Kodo drummers of Sado Island what melodies for a man whoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s married to his drum what words to humm to himself almost naked he stands the hip bones jutting from his spindly frame his body tempered to nothing but muscle and tone he raises his arms each hand gripping a heavy drumstick quickly targets the center with practiced abandon then strikes again his bulging heart nearly leaps from the chest pounding so hard because he never wants to end

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Eamonn Wall

Blues for Rory

From the Slaney Co. Wexford Mississippi Delta rode the rails in flannel shirts, warm CIE beer in hands in the smoking carriage by big muddy cities Gorey/Chicago, Arklow/St. Louis, moving on mile by mile marker by great rivers getting closer still to hearing the legendary bluesman from Cork City play on his battered strat the blues, and sing I could’ve had religion but my little girl wouldn’t let me pray, that kind of girl hard to come by in the Slaney Co. Wexford Mississippi Delta though neither did we pray too much being all prayed out since Confirmation. Rory Gallagher at the National Stadium after Christmas, the first live gig ever for me except for wedding bands in the Slaney Co. Wexford Nashville Tennessee as I served across the counter large macks to speeded up Country Roads, couples gliding across the maple floor. All confused in Connolly/Union Station the route to Harold’s Cross to breathe the raw elixir of the blues, Rory Gallagher’s sweat falling on his guitar: I could touch his feet if the bouncers turned their heads. Who can describe the thrill of knowing it all for the first time, first bottleneck solo couple of numbers in? Lord, take that sinner boy home & I’m here on the prairie now with new CDs from Amazon.com, window breeze from the deep south wafting for tree-lined street to tawny alley, potholes open wide, the rusted trucks, loose gravel, night light yellow flickering, where for hours the repo man stood with his forms and magazines, the world not so bright now for your absence, Rory Gallagher, Can’t believe it’s true, I can’t Crab Orchard Review ◆ 193

Eamonn Wall

believe itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s true. How we walked by the Grand Canal in wet midnight winter air, lost looking for Ranelagh, electrified & silenced by the wonder of it all, not caring if we ever made it home to Model County Wexford, hotbed of hurling, home of strawberries, fields of barley & country music.

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Bryan Walpert

Improvisation

To shoot the album cover for Jazz On The Beach required four men to not exactly play jazz but to appear as if they played jazz on a beach, December waves frozen like their breath against a gray sky the mind sees as blue, though the photo is black and white, its frame cropped against the moment before the moment captured to capture sound or the eye of the ear that will hear it, an instant that slips back among the others as the tideâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s tongue slips unremembered into the mouth of the Atlantic in New Jersey behind men whose sand-scratched trumpet, bass, and drums would carry scarcely a whisper over the static of the sea, would not make it more than a few steps down the sand that stretches even further into the past than music, if they played to anything but the camera, played anything at all: a moment of pure sadness, of being alone, adrift on such Crab Orchard Review â&#x2014;&#x2020; 195

Bryan Walpert

moments, notes floating over the drive home, the stoplights, a quartet on the radio, dinner, stretching for sleep, which waits with the patience of sand, one grain so like another, so like music or a moment to lift then settle in wind.

There, weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve done it again.

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Charles Harper Webb

Bar Band . . . you don’t know what work is.

—Philip Levine You get to wear a velvet suit, silk scarf, and shiny high-heeled boots. You get your picture in the lobby, long hair shagged, “Boogie!” grin inviting violation by a pencilled prick.

You get women who wait in line to beg for “Brick House” or “Achy Breaky Heart,” and slip you phone numbers on coasters soaked with beer, and touch your callouses where steel strings try to saw through into blood.

Nine till two, six days a week, fifty weeks a year, you play the hits until their chords are tinnitus in your ears, their words are alum on your tongue.

To businessmen gulping their brews, spewing smoke that rots your lungs, you’re the omega baboon.

Banks laugh when you ask for a loan.

Your union grabs your dues, and shoos you away.

You stand always outside the party: a dad from Detroit driving his Dodge Visigoth through Bel Air, explaining to the kids why mansions have pools, and tenements have none.

Music—temptress who used to bellydance you out of bed each day—withers until she looks worn as your mom in the “rest home.”

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steps to the stage, all you know about the doctor in this pisspot town is that you can’t afford him.

You suck your gut in, hoist your “ax,” and play.

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Gary J. Whitehead

To Build a Fiddle

Think first, for a long time, on the patience of a tree, the way it waits, almost imperceptibly, to dress and undress and converse with the world when the wind lets it.

Dream of a small dark hollow like an owlâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s nest where a vowel announces either its opulence under the duress of feathers or its insubstantial glee.

Wake to the vision of a long-necked woman, rotund but thin-armed, big-bottomed but slim in the hips, with wooden demeanor and a voice like a memory of slow torture over long time. Now the tree is ready for rough hewing, now it is ready for form and press, for mature curve of body, for neck, head, belly and ribs. Boil the wood for the sin of its hardness, and bend it to your will. Boil it in a seasoned broth for a night and a day until cellulose and lignin grin when you flex it. Whittle down bouts of pine with a honed blade. Swathe each waist rib in a corset so the hot wood cools to form an ess.

Meanwhile, make the glue: Vivisect the hoof of a fertile pig, smash it, stew it while the bloody stump it leaves clots like a moss-filled spigot.

Let the glue cook, let the addled pig guess why it walks in a circle. Stand the plumb-lined neck to cure in autumn sun. Find the hardest knot

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in the shoulder of an anxious tree, preferably cherry, and chop out a block for the scroll. Imagine its clef and then force it to the shape of a still-furled fern.

Auger into the scroll four fine holes. If the pig happens to perish, saw four buttons from its thickest shank for pegs; otherwise fashion them from a blessed pew in an abandoned church. When the body is glued, when the head is firm, when tailpiece, bridge, and fingerboard are true, let the glue dry and then make the secret varnish. Because “The first dance was to Cornets, the second to Vyolines,” take second-generation resin and thin it through a woman’s dress with chestnut pulp and wine and women’s sweat.

Let the ingredients dance as they render in the pan, and when the varnish is done, speak a charm so that it doesn’t crack. Beware of the dark within the f-holes when brushing on the stain, and take care not to work this phase in the shadow of a tree.

While the varnish dries, make a bow. Bend a virgin limb across a knee and skin it. Do not forgive it.

Do not love it. Insist it forget that it was ever meant to be anything but what it will be. In the interim trim the longest hairs from the tail of a black horse and speak a word of love into the prison of cord as you twist it. Rosin it with dregs of distilled turpentine. Then let it dry. Resist the urge to pluck it.

Resist nocking an arrow to the finished twine.

Lastly, thread the strings to the neck and tune them into fifths. Stretch each note with the turning of a peg.

Then coffin it all in a velvet case, where the ghost

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will wait for its conjuring, where the fugitive music, yet to be ruled, will dream till itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s born again.

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Terence Winch

A Short History of 20th-Century Irish Music in America

The Flanagan Brothers prospered, picking out tune after tune in the bright light of New York, back when everyone could dance the Stack of Barley and sing “the Old Bog Road” at the same time.

They strode into the Yorkville Casino, where their money was no good. They took out their instruments, chose a key (probably D), and tore into a paradise of jigs and reels.

The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem played no reels.

They dwelt within the universe of song, where no mere tune held sway. Decked out in tuxedos, they lived on stage, the key to the city in their pockets, sin in their hearts, the dance of love in their beds. Ed Sullivan controlled all the money till they made him give some up: “C’mon, Ed, it’s time.”

Where were the McNultys by then, but shrouded in the mists of time, Pete and Ma dead, Eileen in exile, Rockaway just an old newsreel in her memory, the glory days long over, applause gone, the money spent, Ma’s old accordions in a closet somewhere, no more tunes from them. Pete living on in the hearts of the people—o, to see him dance once more, his mother on the box, Eileen warbling slightly out of key!

Others took the stage. Mickey and Ruthie, each of them a key contributor, reconstituted the cosmos in three-four time, so that every Bingo hall in New York every weekend held a dance, and it was the waltzes versus the foxtrots versus the reels, and anybody in the parish who could remotely carry a tune sang “Danny Boy,” and the Monsignor left last with all the money.

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You could sense the pace quicken by then, antennae out for the big money the music could make. The Dubliners, the Chieftains, stuck the key in and unlocked the loot, and suddenly at every turn the great tunes took root—fiddles, flutes, accordions blazing, bodhrans marking time in smoke-filled pubs, drunken pipers copulating with sets of reels in the after-hours street, while feet entreated feet: let’s dance!

Who can say what happened next? We are in Circuit City and “Riverdance” is playing on seventy-five monitors, and the cold smell of money is in the air. The ghost of the great sean-nos master Joe Heaney reels around in confusion. Fat record-label moguls sport scary key board size smiles. We hear spooky New Age confections every time we turn around, hoping always to catch someone belting out a real tune.

So we rant and rave about money and decline, berating everything, fumbling for the car key when the dance is done, the century nearly at an end, our fragile sense of time bolloxed up and reeling, when suddenly we hear—listen!—some distant, lovely tune.

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David Wojahn

For Townes Van Zandt, 1944-97

Death was his subject & music & drink his form, & upon him was bestowed the dubious gift of prophecy—that he would die at fifty-two, in homage to his father, & on New Year’s Day, in homage to Hank Williams. Death his subject, which is to say he understood tradition, that life for example, is brutish & short, but absolved by moments of defining clarity: rain on a conga drum, the days like rain on a conga drum. Melodies plaintive & the voice hurled out from a shaman’s cave you visit when all other means have failed. & you stand with his ensemble in the winter rain, the outlaws & chain-smoking whores, the track marks & betrayals, the dead beloveds asleep forever on culvert blankets beneath the four-lanes, the brown bag passed & shared on the curb with your pals before the heat of the day, to celebrate your windfall from the sale of plasma.

Our longings are content & content is error. & our longings are form, which is error as well.

Drink was his form & death was his music, music his drink & death his form, & a silence prowls between the notes of his every song, which is not error, a terrible soothing silence which tells me, for I love his songs, that the likes

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of Townes Van Zandt will never come again, which is another way to understand tradition, & another absolving clarity. It was Tucson but it was snow, Tucson twenty years ago: half the water pipes in town had burst & tufts of white had fringed the prickly-pears, the saguaros bejewelled with Christmas lights. & this explains why only six of us had made it to the club that night. Twelve-string & a back-up band consisting of a flask upon a stool, some jokes involving leprechauns, & a chorus which avows that maybe “she just has to sing for the sake of the song.” Between sets he sat among us & he talked, mostly to my girlfriend.

Already his face was Audenesque, lines as deep as his West Texas drawl, head bent down when he spoke.

A double was procured him & by the middle of the second set his voice was shot, the lyrics slurred & sometimes forgotten & in the back of the room the desert wind blew open a door to the parking lot, arcing falsetto as snow danced the pool tables’ felt, the longneck empties teetering & the chairs already upturned by the men’s room door, corkscrewing white below the beer signs trembling their neon & the Flashdance & Farrah posters a-ripple in strict waves. O I & everyone did not stop breathing, but I tell you no one moved. No one moved & Townes was elsewhere, gone into where he now has gone for good: the song lurched on until it was complete.

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Resurrect the Mouth of the Drum

where John Coltrane found what he was trying to say among the stars that cloud an African’s brain taste of sugar, taste of pain a silent night in Hamlet between the trains tracks still like the path to the future no witness no sound no one to write this thing down this one note will bring back fire in my mother’s belly on the night I was born the page where history was torn from the drummer’s body like hands the flesh of a man crucified on a tree hoisted in the night over me

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to finally speak these things and the Jericho they bring finally breathe the breath I had not breathed since drum was spirit was wood was tree was one with me

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Blow Your Horn The Horn

When I was quite young, three or four, my father let me amuse myself with his old trumpet, which he had played in grade school and all through senior high. It was a silver trumpet, a worn fork-and-spoon silver, and, as far as I remember, I battered it beyond repair. I see half of it there in the toy chest, bent and dented among plush stuffed rabbits, colorful plastic trucks; and a piece there, twisted like a circus strongman bar. I don’t recall ever blowing into the thing, from either end, but I must at least have held the instrument to my mouth, because I imagine my father must have demonstrated it for me, and of course I must have tried to imitate him, in my primitive three- or four-year-old way. Maybe by the time it found itself in my oblivious possession, my destructive fingers, it was already worse for wear, my father’s school-days trumpet, old as it was. He must have known I was too young to respect it, to see it as anything but a bright plaything, a gift. He must have already come to a decision about that trumpet, about his ever playing it again, decided that he and it were through.

Years later, in fourth grade, when I chose an instrument on my own, the violin (an instrument I would have to handle carefully), I might have been more receptive to the idea of playing my father’s trumpet, instead of tossing it like a football, swinging it like a bat. Yet by that time, there was no father’s trumpet to play.

Then a few years after that, as a Christmas gift to himself, my father bought a brand new B-flat trumpet, this time a shiny brass one, the trumpet I have with me today.

That Christmas, and several thereafter, for grandparents or any relatives paying a visit, he and I and my brother—trumpet, violin, cello—gathered around a single music stand in the family room to play Jingle Bells, Deck the Halls, Silent Night, Good King So-and-So. Grandpa shouted bravo. “Real nice,” said Grandma, clapping softly.

My brother and I were no longer mortified, bathed now in all this praise.

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“One more,” they coaxed. Well, okay, if they insist. Dad was having a great time, too. Standing behind the two of us, who were seated in metal folding chairs, he blew hard and loud, so I could hardly hear my bow against the strings. It was amazing, I thought, that our father could play a trumpet after so many years, and play it this well, strong and clear. Yet we took it in stride, my brother and I, as if we had already agreed he was capable of many things, this impressive father of ours, some which we had yet no inkling of.

Then the playing ended, horn returned to its navy plush case, bedded down for one more year.

To tell the truth, I forgot about my father’s instrument (too busy remembering the man, I suppose) for years. Then one evening, I happened to be reading student essays down at the Union, in a study area that doubles as pool hall and bar. A local jazz collective was on the docket to perform, and as I had nowhere to be, and little work pressing me, I put away the essays and sat back to listen. What a treat these musicians turned out to be; stacked on each other, it seemed, like the tiers of a cake; pulsating; brass and bass atop woodwinds and percussion; a mass of glinting big-band fun. I was enthralled.

It was a particular trumpet player who really turned me on. Short and small-bodied much like my father used to be, he stood up and spilled out a winding trail of improvisation, climbing suddenly, then tumbling back down, each note happily swung into the next, always in control, rolling along with no slack in the excitement. I was so carried away by this man’s playing, so willing to follow his capricious chain of notes anywhere, I could hardly sit still. Give me a horn, I wanted to say.

Let me blow like that.

Of course the impulse passed. I didn’t follow, didn’t find myself a horn right away. But I didn’t forget. And when finally it occurred to me, a year later, that someone in my family must still have my father’s trumpet, I drove back to Michigan for a visit and acquired it from my brother, the someone in my family into whose hands the horn had fallen.

I opened the black case, and picked up the golden instrument from its soft bed, turning it in the sun like a piece of alien technology. I pressed a couple of pearl-topped valves, heard them thump and suck, as if still moist and oiled after all this time. Then I peered into the dark bell, trying to hear the smooth, jazzy voice I hoped it would someday produce—hoped I could make it produce. ◆◆◆

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Three Signs

I didn’t find a teacher right away either. Instead I waited for the right moment. Watched for promising omens. Listened.

One day, descending the stairs of the English-Philosophy Building, I overheard a man, about my age, telling another that he had been studying the trumpet for over a year now. “Such a great instrument,” he said. “I love it.” The man listening agreed, mentioned something about a local amateur jazz collective. Aha! I thought.

Surely this was the voice of my destiny speaking through these two men, beckoning me to follow.

A few weeks later, my wife Rebbecca and I rented From Here to Eternity, in which Montgomery Clift plays an ex-boxer who is also a wizard on the bugle. Not a trumpet, of course, but close enough, I thought, to serve as an omen. In his shirt pocket, Clift carries around his favorite mouthpiece, though he can’t use it on a bugle because he once killed a man in the boxing ring. Because he once killed a man in the ring, he now refuses to fight, and because he refuses to fight, his sergeant, who wants him to duke it out for the company team, won’t let him anywhere near a bugle. The resulting dramatic tension finds release in two enjoyable scenes. In the f irst, drunk and despondent, Clift buzzes a lament on his mouthpiece to accompany a fellow soldier on the guitar—Enlisted man’s blues . . . something like that. The next time, in a crowded bar, sitting beside the guy the sergeant did allow to blow the company bugle, but who can’t blow it so well, Clift yanks the horn from his mouth. “Would you learn how to play that thing?” he says, holding it to his own lips, then standing up and playing along with the jukebox, a hot squealing solo that brings down the house. Finally, boy and bugle are reunited when Clift is allowed to play Taps for Frank Sinatra, who has died from a stint in the stockade at the hands of Ernest Borgnine. Poor Frank.

Then, out on one of our late-evening walks, Rebbecca and I heard, close by, what else but a lovely, sweet-toned trumpet, its player leading it through a quick, difficult scale study behind an orangelit window in a house we were passing. Beside a tall, burly evergreen, we stood and listened, watched the orange square of light, as if it arose, warm and profound, from the very notes themselves. Then Rebbecca spoke. “You know someone’s good,” she said, “if you don’t 210 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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want to stop listening.” I agreed, and thought of that small man from the jazz collective, whose playing, as far as I was concerned, could have gone on and on, so that when he did stop, let the horn fall from his lips, which glistened and (as I know now) must have tingled from the vibration, the phrase he had ended continued in my ears, altering and composing itself so curiously, so lucidly, I was sure if you gave me a trumpet that instant, I could have reproduced the sounds playing in my mind. I would have known how to play it.

The Teacher

His name is Barry, and the first thing he had me do was play a G. (For good? For god-awful? Still not sure.) “I’ll play one,” he said, “then you try.”

I listened. So that’s a G, I thought. I believe I can make one of those. Tucking in the corners of my mouth the way Barry had demonstrated, dragging out his perfect G in my head so as not to lose the pitch, I brought the horn to my lips (with more purpose now than I had as a child), and applying enough pressure to make any sound at all, I blew. I blew intending to play a G, and as if by magic, a G emerged from the bell of my trumpet. “That’s great,” Barry congratulated me. And then played another G for me to mimic, and another, until to my pleasure I could play one on command.

Not as pretty as his, but a G nonetheless.

My half-hour was just about up, but Barry, it seemed, was just getting started. The G—fifth note of the C major scale, the B-flat major scale on a piano, hence the horn’s name, B-flat trumpet—requires no pressing of valves, nor do the low and middle C, top and bottom notes of the scale; as on a bugle, you play these notes, and others in the natural harmonic series, with only air and lips and oral cavity, no shortening or lengthening of pipe, which is what the valves are for. So Barry told me about the three valves on my instrument. He showed me how they work (how they more than merely thump and suck) and what I could do with them. And before I knew it, another half-hour had passed and he was writing down the fingerings of a C major scale, and the notes to such songs as Mary Had a Little Lamb, Twinkle Little Star, Row Your Boat. Suddenly I was back again in fourth grade, scraping out these same ditties on my quarter-size violin, no doubt torturing the Crab Orchard Review ◆ 211

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ears of my old teacher, Mr. Dunning, who despite the racket was the embodiment of patience. “Okay,” he would say in a high, gentle voice, tapping his baton on a stand raised just to the V of his Oxford sweater-vest, “let’s try that again.”

Barry too is patience personified. I suppose one must be to make a good music teacher, or any kind of teacher. As a teacher of writing, I read one scratchy, out-of-tune sentence after another, until my ears ring with them. It must be the same for Barry. Yet week after week he tells me I sound “really good,” that I’m “headed for greatness,” that more awaits me “over the horizon.” Much of what I play for him elicits similar hopeful, praising responses, sometimes even exuberant surprise. “Wow,” he says. “That’s great,” he claims. I do the same for my students, sprinkling their margins with bright exclamations. I do so because I was once in their shoes (often still am), thankful and hungry for the kind of encouragement I give them. Now, as a trumpet student, I am back feeling the same hunger, the same gratitude.

Not that Barry doesn’t mean what he says (though he must exaggerate sometimes). Among the scratches, the miscues, there is usually something impressive, something unexpectedly pleasing.

And there is improvement. Even I can hear it. From one lonely, shaky G to a whole C major scale, from scale to exercise, exercise to étude.

(No one has yet mentioned the word solo, but I’m sure it awaits over the horizon.) I can hear my tone improve, feel my breathing become more controlled, more relaxed.

And I can see my progress as Barry and I turn one page and then another in my short stack of exercise books. He has a method for impressing upon his student this visual progress. “You’re going to think I’m picky,” he said to me the day I brought in the books he had urged me to get, “but I have this thing about marking things off.” With a pencil he circled the numbers of each exercise I was to practice that week. The following Friday, if my playing indicated I was ready to move on, he would mark an X in each circle, then circle each of the next batch of exercises. And to show me that he was doing more than placing teacherly hoops before me, from a shelf he pulled down what he calls affectionately his “Trumpet Player’s Bible,” a thick spiral-bound collection of studies meant to educate the advancing trumpeter in the heritage of the instrument. He opened to one of the early pages and pointed out the long columns of titles, each marked discretely with pencil, providing, at a glance, a picture of diligence and care that, while possibly fastidious, was also quite impressive.

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“Someday,” he told me, lifting this heavy book brimming with crowded notes, “you too will drink from this font.” All right, I thought to myself, contemplating this new teacher of mine, I’ll follow you.

A Bit of Mania

At first there were trumpets everywhere. Trumpets on my car stereo, and playing from speakers at the grocery. Pictures of trumpets on billboards, on book and magazine covers. Trumpets in short stories and in the titles of essays. I had just begun around this time to read the Bible, which, with all the holy carnage of the Old Testament, contains a profusion of trumpets. At a party, the opening of a beer bottle against my lips feels very much like my trumpet’s mouthpiece. I borrow more jazz CDs from the library than I have time to listen to.

I play Miles Davis’s Blue over and over, hoping to absorb some of his groove. I practice an hour a day, chiding myself for missing a session. I develop irrational fears. I wonder if too much playing will make my lips become thinner, or rupture, as I’ve heard can happen.

They tingle after a long practice—should they? Will the purple impression on my left index finger after I play for a while stay there like the mark on my neck from playing the violin? Will I be good enough by my thirty-fifth birthday to play in a jazz band? Can one oil the valves too often? As the muscles in my mouth develop, will I begin to look like a trumpet player? Will I ever really be a trumpet player?

Predictably, most but not all of this anxiety subsides, and I start enjoying myself.

Embouchure

Pronounced, according to my American Heritage dictionary, äm' boo-shoor', accent on the last syllable, the way a Francophone would say it. But as far as I can tell, brass players this side of the Atlantic pronounce it äm' bä-shûr', accent on the first, the way you might hear it in Chicago, or Minneapolis. Nor does the dictionary seem to represent the word’s common meaning among musicians who use it. Meaning number one is “the mouth of a river.” Number two is Crab Orchard Review ◆ 213

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“the mouthpiece of a wind instrument.” Three is the “manner in which the lips and tongue are applied to such a mouthpiece.”

Times like these I lose faith in dictionaries. If one didn’t know better, one would leave with the impression that an embouchure has nothing at all to do with a trumpet, the playing of which requires that never the tongue and mouthpiece shall meet. And a trumpet is not a “wind” but a “brass” instrument. The only meaning here I do approve of is the first, for playing the trumpet, as far as my lips and lungs have told me, is indeed like meeting the mouth of a river. You enter timidly, not sure of the current, not sure there even is a current . . . but there is, and it begins inside you, and only you keep it flowing, filling the banks, swelling the horn . . .

But this matter of the lips, of the embouchure, it’s a crucial one, and no amount of flowing will result in music if the mouth of the river is not set just right.

As I’ve mentioned, the corners of the mouth are tucked in, pulled to the sides. This tucking creates tension across the lips, thereby causing them to vibrate properly against the mouthpiece, and around the column of steadily exhaled air. In appearance, a well formed embouchure recalls the face of someone plunging down the first steep dip of a roller coaster, as if teeth and jaw are moving just ahead of skin. As you can imagine, it is hard to produce such a face without the help of the roller coaster.

The tucking is hard to manage at first; the mouth is not used to it.

So Barry, seeing me struggle, offered a few strategies for training the muscles. Some, he said, insert toothpicks and clamp them between the teeth; but I couldn’t imagine playing anything with my teeth clenched, as if wired shut. Others, he said, insert thumb and forefinger, like someone preparing to whistle. I tried this, and though it didn’t help, it did made me think of my father, who used to whistle like this at professional sporting events, and at concerts where I played violin in the high-school symphony orchestra. It was either whistling, or yelling bravo, and for the sake of my grave teenage dignity, I preferred to hear the latter, though simple applause would have sufficed. Then I thought of a strange imitation my father used to do of a man without teeth.

Tucking in the corners of his mouth, rolling his lips under, he would say, “Look at me, I ain’t got no peep.” My brother and I laughed and laughed, the way kids do at the nonsense grownups sometimes invent. And recalling that silly expression of my father’s, I realized it was not so far from a half decent embouchure. So I said to myself, “Ain’t got no peep,” and it seemed to help.

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The Pupil

When I first spoke with Barry over the phone, he told me he enjoys teaching people like me, educated adults with some prior knowledge of music. Not only do we know how to read a musical staff, and can we grasp quickly how to play notes in tune, we also have an interest in discussing the technicalities of learning an instrument, and are able to articulate them.

Indeed, the morning I arrived at Barry’s house for my first lesson, I felt in command of my intellectual faculties. Just two guys getting together, I thought, to discuss music and the trumpet. Barry greeted me at the door, his three-year-old son Neal—who, like me at his age, has all but destroyed one of his dad’s trumpets; there it sits in the studio, bell downward, pummeled and scuffed, held together with Band-Aids and tape—peeking up at me from behind his father’s leg. He smiled, my new teacher, somewhere around my age, it seemed to me, but more athletic-looking, with short brown hair and warm hazel eyes. He led me through the living room, the carpet decorated with plastic toys, bright colors of childhood, then past the kitchen where his wife Camille, an accomplished pianist (what surely awaits their children!),was at the sink rinsing dishes, and through a door and down into the basement. There he has a small room fixed up as a studio. It was then, when I saw the music stand, metal folding chairs, little chalkboard up on the wall, thin hard carpeting and dog-eared exercise books, that I began to doubt myself, that in my stomach, like the grade-school musician I used to be, I felt the first flutter.

Sure, in such a situation one can keep the intellectual faculties intact, but the emotions, they seem to follow a song of their own. It dawned on me, as it hadn’t until now, that I was about to attempt something new, something alien. I would falter and stumble. I would look ridiculous. And I would fail. Yes, I was sure to fail.

And yet I was excited. I felt giddy, happy all of a sudden that I had called this young teacher and arranged to be his student. I knew, sitting down and placing my trumpet case on the floor beside me, that despite everything I did not know about this instrument, I was not as incapacitated as I felt. I would, when asked, raise the trumpet to my mouth and blow, buzz, pucker, tongue, whatever he asked me to do. Like a child who is afraid, but whose desire is more profound Crab Orchard Review ◆ 215

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than his fear, I would hear every word, follow every instruction, practice every chance I could get.

After my first lesson, which was supposed to have stopped at thirty minutes but lasted over an hour, my confidence carried me back up the stairs and through the living room, the soft light carpeting now clean of toys and color, but followed me no further than the threshold. “You’re destined for greatness,” Barry told me as I walked away. “Okay,” I said, but thinking to myself, “Whatever you say.” And as I drove away with an entire scale and three songs jotted into my practice log, the trumpet case like a partner in the passenger seat beside me, I felt the pleasant anxiety of wanting to meet my teacher’s expectations, not to mention my own, and heard in the back of my mind that precarious G, the only note I had really learned to play that day, and wondered if this were just a whim after all, this silly idea to learn the trumpet.

The Mystery Therein

Much can be taught, it’s true, but there is always a significant portion of any skill that can be absorbed only in the doing. “You’ll be surprised,” Barry tells me over and again, “how many adjustments your body makes on its own.” He’s right about this. Since I began learning the trumpet, so many new skills have slipped into my repertoire without my having checked them in at the door. I tried at first to keep a journal, to record this minute process of acquisition and growth, but it proved too vast, too time-consuming, impossible.

There is so much happening, as you can imagine, when one makes a sound with a trumpet. There is the breathing, first of all, which must start down near the diaphragm, filling the lungs from bottom up, like a bellows, completely and quickly, then exhaled strongly, in a steady stream of directed air. “You want to go to the trumpet,” Barry told me the first time we talked about breathing, “instead of bringing the trumpet to you.” There is a practical reason for this, of course—too much pressure against the lips means a pinched sound, a small range—but in Barry’s instructions I recognized a kind of philosophy of being (my ears always perked for philosophies of being). Commit to the action, follow through the movement, don’t hold back, seize the day—in other words, take control of the horn; BLOW; give it all the breath and life you’ve 216 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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got. Then your sound will have substance, then there might be music.

There is also the mouth and lips, the embouchure, which need to be tight enough to hold the stream of air (like two hands held out a speeding car’s window, pressing air between them), to vibrate around it, but still remain supple enough to pucker and form the higher notes of the register. The lips of a good trumpet player are always in motion, blood always running through them, as they relax for lower notes and contract for higher ones, like the aperture of a camera, as Barry described it to me. And there is the pressure of the trumpet itself against the mouth, which is necessary, but detrimental if applied too strenuously, for it can hamper circulation in the lips, weaken them, and throw the whole machine off kilter.

All these points of attention must work in concert for a trumpet to sound as pure and beautiful as it can. And yet each part— breathing, mouth, pressure—breaks down further into the most infinitesimal adjustments which no teacher can teach, and perhaps no student can describe. It is here, of course, the ineffable region of response to a complex web of sensual impulses, where successful trumpet-playing takes place. And try as one might to pay it attention, to record it, there is only so much one can monitor; the rest, as Barry promises me, understandably reluctant to put the unknown into words (to teach such hubris!), can be left up to the body, for the body, if you have faith in it, will see to everything.

Never is this idea more true than when one tries a hand at improvisation. Perhaps it sounds odd that, beginner though I am, I should have already ventured into the unmapped land of improvisation. I have only Barry to thank for this. Along the pedagogical spectrum, he is of the jump-in-now-learn-to-swim-later persuasion. I had just become comfortable with the C major scale when he asked me if I wanted to “try a little improvising.” Okay, I said, hiding my excitement, though I knew before playing even the first note that I was in over my head, no longer as cocky as I had been that evening at the Student Union.

Starting together, to the drum, bass, and piano accompaniment of a compact disc he had chosen from his collection, we played the head—the melody of a tune, usually run through twice before and then once after the improvised middle—then plunged right into chaos. Well, when Barry improvised, which I let him do first, it wasn’t so chaotic. I could hear what he was up to; the chain of notes made sense to me. But when it came my turn to translate music Crab Orchard Review ◆ 217

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heard into music played, I couldn’t do it; a note here, a note there, allusions to something coherent, but the rest gibberish, the rest garbled.

“That’s okay,” he assured me, “that’s okay.” Or should I say he “comforted” me? For I could tell by the way my face felt, hot and wrinkled, a little brooding, that I was taking my failure too seriously.

Back when I had decided to take up the trumpet, I vowed that I would not approach it as gravely as I have other new endeavors.

This is going to be fun, I told myself. I’m not out to be the next Dizzy Gillespie. I’m just going to play this instrument as best I can, and be happy and thankful I thought of doing such a thing at all. It’s funny, though, what happens as you proceed further and further into a discipline. Yes, you want to have fun, and most of the time you do; but there are moments when, damnit, you’re not going to stop until you play this note right, this passage without mistake; dinner can wait; start the video without me. And Barry doesn’t help any by sending me home with one compact disc after another—Wynton Marsalis, Miles Davis, a twenty-something trumpet prodigy from Russia. For inspiration, of course, a constructive pedagogical impulse, but I can’t resist my own impulse, a destructive one, to brood over the distance between my mediocre skill and the amazing ability of these brilliant musicians. What am I doing? I berate myself.

I have yet to succeed in my chosen vocation, and here I am toottooting on this stupid horn, wasting my time. A teacher of Barry’s once told him that it’s only out of frustration that success is born, and like the natural teacher that he is, Barry passed this truth on to me. Most of us have heard similar admonishments: no pain, no gain; if you don’t learn to fall, you’ll never learn to ride. As common as they are, they are easy to forget. In the moment of frustration, of failure, one just wants to say screw it.

Voice of the Angels

It used to be said, long ago when it was used either for military purposes or for religious ones, that the sound of the trumpet was the voice of the angels. I have heard angelic trumpets, so soft and sinuous that some heavenly involvement would not surprise me. But the earliest trumpets, the very earliest being little more than long megaphones, evoked a different kind of angel, the one predicted by 218 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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the Bible to show up at Armageddon, announcing the end with a blast, not a pretty song. Those first few weeks, my style was likewise not pretty; sometimes it was apocalyptic.

The weather was still quite warm, and since I practice upstairs, where it’s the hottest, I should have left the windows open. But I couldn’t. I was too self-conscious, too afraid of annoying the neighbors, of offending the ear of anyone, really, who might be able to hear. I shut the door at the bottom of the stairs, for the sake of Rebbecca, piled clothes atop the heating vent, slid down all the windows, and if all this weren’t enough, opened the closet door and set my chair facing into it, the trumpet bell pointed safely into the darkness. Of course, within minutes my face and body were dripping sweat, my lips sliding off the mouthpiece, and on top of such discomfort, my playing sounded like hell.

At the music store, shopping for a mute (I had my doubts about the closet), I spoke about this matter of noise with a mother there to buy supplies for the trumpet her daughter was going to play at school.

“Who cares what people think?” she said. She used to play the saxophone in high school. “You’ll never learn to play if you worry about other people.” I liked her attitude, and I suspected she was right.

Sometimes you just have to blow your horn, the rest be damned. Even so, I bought the mute (I still had a relationship to keep intact), and for at least a little while longer, I continued blowing into the closet.

The trumpet is not a timid instrument, and therefore probably not meant for timid people. There is a good deal of athleticism involved.

Early on Barry showed me how to practice breathing. We sat erect in our chairs, puffed out our chests (his more puffed than mine), raised our arms, put our heads between our knees, the way plane passengers do before a crash—breathing deeply all the while, sucking air and holding it, reminding me of my early pot-smoking days. Yes, the trumpet demands a fit body.

In light of this, I can almost see why as a child I chose the violin over the trumpet, or some other blustery brass instrument. I was then a shy, cautious boy, not fond of athletics. There was a subtlety and effeteness about the violin that perhaps felt right for me, whereas the trumpet evoked military calls, marching bands, the world of sports and war and deep, physical power, lungs torn by exertion.

Instead I opted for a sore wrist and a quarter-sized bruise on my neck, which teasingly my friends blamed on a girl’s mouth, teasingly because there was no girl to blame.

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Over the Horizon

I still have my violin from high school. The handle of its case is missing, the bow is frazzled and needs new horse hair, and I’m sure after all these years the sound post and bridge could stand some adjusting; but these are minor repairs, routine refurbishments. My first idea, before the trumpet occupied my thoughts, was to have this work done on my violin, find a teacher, and learn again to play an instrument I already knew much about. I still adore the sound of a violin, and just as I now have fantasies of playing in a jazz band someday, I had visions then, too, of joining or forming a small chamber ensemble, rehearsing on weekends, giving free concerts in churches and on the street at art festivals, where I have seen and heard such groups perform. But the idea of learning the trumpet overpowered the violin, as the voice of the first could easily do the second.

I suppose that is what I have wanted, to speak in a voice more powerful than the one I adopted as a child, and different from it; and yet in a way much like it, a kind of shout, that wild unabashedness of early childhood (here I think of myself, of Barry’s son Neal, pulverizing our father’s trumpets), a pouring out of spirit and joy. All this, and to play my father’s brass trumpet, which in his case allowed him to revive a voice of his own that, in ten and more years of fathering and career-making, he had lost. Indeed it was quite a surprise, as a child, to hear that secret voice of his for the first time, to hear all that joy and spirit escaping his lungs.

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Terence Winch

Last Legs

I always bowed my head whenever I passed a Catholic church, even if I were just whizzing by on a bus. I was an altarboy, though better at Latin than at remembering all the secret signs that governed the serving of Mass. The priest would cough or scratch his head and, in my anxiety to do the right thing, I would misinterpret the gesture and go fetch the wine and water. Innocently standing there, holding the two cruets perched on a glass tray, I waited as the priest would shuffle angrily over to me, vestments rustling, and hiss between his teeth: “not now!”

Or I would mistake some other slight gesture and begin to ring the bells, creating chaos in the church as the befuddled congregation would be standing, kneeling, sitting, kneeling, standing at moments in the service that had never called for bells or movement before.

God was remote. But Jesus and Mary, not to mention many of the saints, were just a blink, a dimension, away, waiting to scare the bejesus out of me on any given night. I slept with the light on and, when I could get him, with my grandfather sitting in a chair studying the Reader’s Digest while I struggled to shake off the supernatural and fall asleep. In truth, I don’t think I distinguished much between Catholicism’s holy host and other characters like Dracula and the Creature from the Black Lagoon. They all had a keen interest in me, which, though flattering, was completely terrifying.

Frightening though it may have been, Catholicism was the all-embracing framework of our lives. Protestants and Jews might have more money, and live in buildings with elevators, and they might be able to sin to their hearts’ content in this life, but when the chips were down, as they would some day surely be, the miserable creatures were doomed in the next life to an eternity of envy of us Catholics, who would be sitting pretty at the right hand of God. Though always having to seek consolation in the hereafter for life’s unfairness could be a pain in the ass, it was the best we had, and we worked with it.

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Just about everything was a matter of them against us. KnowNothingism was part of the fabric of America, and good Catholics needed to be ever vigilant. Groups like the freemasons and Shriners were frightening conspiracies of rabid anti-Catholics, the likes of which we could only contemplate with horror in our imaginations. That weird stuff on the back of the dollar—the pyramid with the eye—what was that all about? Just more evidence of the extent of anti-Catholicism, whose symbols could be right in your pants’ pocket.

That’s why I was taken aback to learn that the Grand Potentate, who presided over a concert we played in Denver in 1997 for the Shriners, was a first-generation Irish-American Catholic dentist, originally from New Rochelle. This was my first true realization that Catholics were now on the inside. At this rate, soon Jack Kennedy and Pope John would be sowing seeds together on the ten-spot.

We all immediately loved the Potentate, whose father was from Tipperary. He was eccentric and affable, qualities that seemed to be a requirement for all members of his organization. I knew the whole experience would be on the strange side when we arrived at the El Jebel Temple, entered the huge, empty hall and were at once overwhelmed by the sounds of Frank Sinatra singing “It Was a Very Good Year” blaring into the cavernous space. Oz-like, an old guy behind the curtain on stage blasted out one Sinatra standard after another as we set up for the show. I did it my way. Strangers in the night. Rubber tree plant. Only when we told him that we needed to do a sound check did he finally shut Frank down.

All the Shriners smoked. During our show that night I noticed that the old guy working the stage for once wasn’t smoking. In fact, he wasn’t moving, his head was tilted back, his mouth open, and I thought, my God, he’s died, and right during our set. I slipped off stage during an a capella song and said something to the Potentate, who was lingering backstage, to the effect that the curtain man might be having difficulty. I really wanted to shout “Dead Man! Stop the Music! Clear the hall!” The Potentate squinted in the direction of his cadaverous comrade and chuckled. “Don’t worry,” the Potentate reassured me, “he’s just sleeping. I’ll wake him before the end.”

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refused to promote it. No one knew we were there, our one and only time in Denver. They didn’t even do a flyer. They spent a small fortune bringing us out there, putting us up, and paying us, but it was their little secret. It really wasn’t so surprising. Most of the members of this chapter of the Shriners were WWII vets, part of that amazing generation of fearless Americans who have earned the relaxed selfconfidence that comes from defeating Hitler and Hirohito. They are locked into their way of doing things and they take no advice or suggestions, period. Friends in Denver had urged them to advertise the gig, but no amount of pleading could convince them. Nothing influences them. When you ask for something—water, for example—they just walk away. They don’t even say anything. You think maybe they’re going to get you some water, but they never return.

That night, after we finished, there was a “medieval feast”—all the Shriners were dressed up as lords, ladies, knights, and jesters. The program read: ATTENTION LORDS AND LADIES OF THE REALM! A fine feast is to be held in the castle halls of El Jebel. Many a Monk, Friar, Wizard, Lord, Knight, Princess, and Noble are attending.

Many a ridiculous Shriner, too. They had stocks that they put people in as mock punishment for various infractions. It was a bizarre situation of great silliness, the kind we revel in. You just sit there and try to absorb it all. The Potentate, decked out in his medieval robes, presided over the feast, telling jokes, circulating around the room, spreading good cheer. I stopped him at one point, as he came within my table’s orbit. “Potentate,” I said, “aren’t the Shriners some kind of anti-Catholic secret society?” “Oh, goodness, no,” he replied.

“That kind of thing went out years ago.” I’ll believe it when the pyramid-eye disappears from the dollar.

You fly off to Denver, meet some very strange people who are goofily entertaining, then you head back home. One more gig to scratch off the list of gigs that are your allotment. How many more will there be? It’s weird sometimes, dropping into other peoples’ lives for a day or two, then careening away, the whole experience confirming once again the stinging realization of the millions, billions, of people Crab Orchard Review ◆ 223

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out there in their own private universes, and you in yours. Is the Internet the World Soul? Will we all be finally connected, all part of some larger, higher power?

I just wanted to get home. That’s where I like to be. I go to parties and hear ambitious friends chatting about their upcoming Hawaiian vacations, their visits to Singapore, their honeymoon trips around the world, and I am not at all jealous. Go, have fun, enjoy yourselves, just don’t make me come along.

But Regan and Linda wanted me to go on one little side trip before leaving Denver, where they both grew up. Linda plays flute, Regan plays piano and stepdances. Although Linda is fifteen years older than Regan, they both had been friends and students of a box player named Pat Flanagan. They asked if Jesse and I would go with them to visit Pat and play a few tunes for him. He was the Source of the music, the connection to the real thing, for them in their younger days. Now he was on his last legs. Meeting this old man is what I remember most from that expedition.

After his first stroke many years ago, which left him partly paralyzed, Pat retaught himself to play the accordion with his left hand by holding the box upside down. This is staggering information to me.

As much as I love to play, I find it a challenge to play right side up.

Then another, more recent, stroke finished off his playing days for good. Now he is a commentator, a scholar. There are other visitors besides us and he orders people to go to his bedroom and fetch this or that piece of music or tape so that he may discourse on it. They bring out his old accordions and he looks at them as though they were sweethearts who had rejected his marriage proposals long ago.

He was born in Chicago, raised in Mayo, then emigrated back to Chicago. He moved to Denver decades ago because his wife Mary had asthma. “Did that take care of the asthma?” I ask. I remember how my brother Kevin wanted my parents to move to Arizona when I was a child, because of my asthma. I prayed they would pay him no mind. The idea of leaving the Bronx for the alien West terrified me. “It helped for the first year,” Mary says. “Then the asthma came back full force. We figured, what’s the use? We’re here now, we might as well stay.”

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Somebody lugs out Pat’s old white Baldoni. It has four or five thumb straps affixed to it, for reasons I assume have to do with the stroke and playing upside down, but I don’t ask. He also has piles of xeroxed pages from O’Neill’s, and is clearly ready to discuss, should the opportunity arise, the intricacies and provenance of several hundred Irish melodies. Jesse, Regan, Linda, and I sit down in the living room, around a coffee table, take out our instruments, and begin doodling around. But Pat is running the show, and begins requesting certain tunes—imperatively calling for “The Trip to the Cottage,” “The Bucks of Oranmore,” and other pieces traditionally associated with the accordion. He’s watching me like it’s target practice, and I am so glad that I actually practiced some of these very same tunes the week before. He’s not impressed with me, but not appalled either.

He is a real scholar of the music, immediately recognizing that the tune we call “The New York Jig” is “Paddy’s Resource” in O’Neill.

From among his stacks of papers, he pulls out a cryptic chart of accordion keys, full of arcane symbols and directions, and gives it to me, but I have no idea what any of it means. Now I start to wonder if he’s in the same class as those creative eccentrics who make cars out of bottle caps and models of the Titanic from a million popsicle sticks. But then he is back, insightfully assessing some of the leading box players of the day—Bobby Gardiner, Johnny Connolly, James Keane, Joe Burke—analyzing styles, repertoires, recording quality.

He is so full of defiance and passion, so caught up in his own considerable authority, that I forget he is old and sick and can’t play any more.

It is time for us to leave. I ask to use the bathroom, because I always have to pee, and Mary points the way. There was a seat in the bathtub, I guess so that Pat could sit there and have someone bathe him. The sight of it threw me full-speed ahead into fear of death mode, where I spend too much time. This is how we all wind up, I started to think. Old, twisted, needing to be bathed, unable to play. Get me out of here. I don’t want to confront it right now.

Mary is in tears when we leave. She knows it is a tribute for us to have come for the visit. All I’m thinking, as we back out smiling and hugging, is how long it will be before there’s a seat in the tub for me.

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The next day on the plane home I wind up sitting behind a couple of old runners who have been in Denver for a marathon. They are talking about a friend of theirs, a fellow runner. “I still can’t believe it,” one of them says. “He was in such great shape. He was only around fifty.” The guy dropped dead of a heart attack while running on a great trail in New Zealand is what I overhear. “What a wonderful way to go. I hope I’m that lucky,” one of them says. These people are completely nuts, I think. There is nothing wonderful about the way we all must go.

I remember back to the Dubliner, the bar near Union Station where we were the house band for nearly ten years. The day after St. Patrick’s Day. Around 1981. We had just taken a break and I sat at a table in front of the stage with some friends. All of a sudden my heart started beating wildly, thumping in my chest to such a violent degree that I thought my friends could probably see it beating. Oh, God, I thought. Too many cigarettes, too much booze, too much coke, not enough sleep. This is the payoff, the end, the punishment for my sins. Dead in the Dubliner in his mid-thirties, his promise still unfulfilled. After the longest two minutes or so of my life, the thumping abruptly stopped, my heart went back to normal. Nobody had noticed anything. I’m still grateful for the reprieve.

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Book Reviews

Feinstein, Sascha. Misterioso. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2000. 71 pages. $14.00.

Sascha Feinstein’s first full-length book of poetry, Misterioso, is a testament to jazz. Not just to the music, but to the inherent fluidity of improvisation. Like the musicians appearing in his poems, Feinstein is able to riff off the truisms of life and make them gratifying. His poetry, birthed by the same rumblings that spawn jazz, is able to reconcile the need for conscious attention to detail with the unexpected. In fact, his poetry is constructed much like jazz music. His poems blend the meticulousness of successful poetry with the impetuousness of a Thelonious Monk chord progression.

The first section of the book is comprised primarily of blues dedications to musicians. But Feinstein does not canonize the musicians.

He relates to their suffering and offers an avenue for others to do the same. The first poem, “Coltrane, Coltrane” is an example: Monk’s voice cuts through the drug’s pull: his mouthpiece locks against rotting teeth, sound responding in a flurry on the beat. It’s a strong solo but not his best, not quite up to what would come. Ten years before his death, he’s thirty-one, just four years older than I am now. The tape clicks into auto-reverse, and as I drive past Indiana’s busted red barns the album cover comes to mind: . . .

Moments like these, Feinstein navigates between the self and that Crab Orchard Review ◆ 227

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part of the self intrinsic in music. He uses the music as an avenue for reflection. The second section of the book shifts the focus away from the music and more toward the internal. “Christmas Eve,” a poem inspired by the album Miles Davis & the Modern Jazz Giants, shows the subtlety of the shift: Twenty-five years later, I fall for A woman who has both out-of-print LPs, Together a collage of tunes From that gig, two cuts of “The Man I Love” With a mumbled argument that stops The first take. We tried so many times To make out the words, unable to hear Enough through her speakers, pressing together.

Young love. . . .

Feinstein is able to avoid the commonality of ‘jazz musician as god’ in these poems. When musicians are present, he depicts them as human, only separated from the rest of the Homo sapiens because of their ability to produce music.

This strategy is resolved in section three by poems like “Corcovado,” a crown of sonnets about Stan Getz and his wife Monica.

The poem dwells little on the saxophonist’s musical acumen, focusing instead on Getz’s relationship with Monica and his incessant drinking.

The beginning of the poem sets the tone: . . . from the beach house she clicks precisely at midleap, thinks, He’s a dolphin, then removes chilled orange juice thick with pulp, crumbles Antabuse that floats and dissolves. Underwater, Stan replays his June gig on the South Lawn with Johnson, who’s booked him for Thailand Variations on the last line of each sonnet begin the next sonnet in the sequence and demonstrate the tension throughout the collection existing between improvisation and control, between artistry and inspiration.

When the final line of the sequence echoes the first utterance— “Even 228 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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behind glass it curls to sepia,” transmuted to “flash his glass, ice curling to sepia.”—the reader is left with the unexpected: the same wonder displayed in the music itself; the same imagination the musician brings to sound.

—Reviewed by Adrian Harris

Hayes, Terrance. Muscular Music. Chicago, IL: Tia Chucha Press, 1999. 80 pages. $10.95.

Terrance Hayes’ first book, Muscular Music, delves into the connection between the sounds we humans create and our cultural identities. Music has long been a cultural mark and Hayes utilizes mellifluous language to expand on that understanding. In his poems, the melody of a culture becomes that culture’s hallmark. In Muscular Music, African-American culture is emphasized and the muscularity of the sounds created become the backdrop for—and access point to— a more extensive understanding of African-American identity. The opening lines of “What I Am” are indicative of this: Fred Sandford’s on at 12 & I’m standing in the express lane (cash only) about to buy Head & Shoulders the white people shampoo, no one knows what I am. My name could be Lamont.

George Clinton wears colors like Toucan Sam, the Froot Loop pelican. Follow your nose, he says. But I have no nose, no mouth, . . .

Hayes juxtaposes deliberate euphony of language with images of African-American culture to demonstrate how they relate to the dominant American culture. As a result, his poems are saturated with references to pop culture. The allusions aren’t gratuitous; they simply expand on some aspect of African-American culture. In “Buy One, Get One,” Hayes manipulates familiar name brands into social critique: “This morning / it’s Aint Jemima’s Authentic Maple Syrup With Artificial Flavoring, / BUY 1, GET 1 FREE. Meaning, one’s half as much as usual / & I’m getting something for nothing. . . .”

The inherent incongruity of “Aint Jemima” as cultural figure is played out later in the poem: “‘Buy one, get one free,’ said the slave Crab Orchard Review ◆ 229

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trader to cotton heads / when pregnant African girls mounted the auction block. America! / Everything has its price; . . .”

At times, Hayes addresses societal issues by directly addressing the artists who create the music themselves. Marvin Gaye, Donny Hathaway, and Roberta Flack all become vehicles for social critique.

For example, the poem “When the Neighbors Fight,” explores the theme of domestic violence through the music of Miles Davis: The trumpet’s mouth is apology.

We sit listening To Kind of Blue. Miles Davis Beat his wife. It hurts To know the music is better Than him. . . .

Regardless of the subject matter of the individual poems, Hayes’ book is constant in its adherence to musicality. Whether the poem is about the grocery store or a love affair, the sounds remain and allow Hayes to use music to depict aspects of African-American culture through aspects of the culture itself, rather than as it is defined by American society. And that—even more than the language itself—may be this book’s most muscular quality.

—Reviewed by Adrian Harris

Pau-Llosa, Ricardo. Vereda Tropical. Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1999. 96 pages. $12.95.

“What do you get from those songs, Ricardo?” Ricardo PauLlosa’s fourth book of poems, Vereda Tropical (“Tropical Path”), is dedicated to “Cuba’s exiled musicians, who keep the imagination alive.” Pau-Llosa, through his lyric and painterly gift, leads readers down an exquisitely rendered and richly hued “tropical path” of remembrance. Throughout the three sections of the book, “Café Nostalgia,” “Thing City,” and “Tú la dejaste ir,” Pau-Llosa explores memory, questioning not only how memories are summoned but how they might work for us.

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Cuba’s golden age of music. In his first section of the same name Pau-Llosa raises the question: When do “we find songs ageless or simply old?” In the last poem of the section, “At the Bar,” the poet Germán, escaping Cuba’s regime by securing his poems in plastic and swimming to the American military base at Guantánamo, asks the speaker why he sits watching old Cuban music videos: “Dímelo.

What do you get from those songs?” While the songs remind Germán of actos de repudio (acts of repudiation—disownment—violent attacks against Cuban emigrants), in his poem “Juan Carlos Formell,” the songs allow Pau-Llosa to see that: The moon comes out dressed in blemish and neon when Juan Carlos Formell takes the strings, takes voice in hand, and rebuilds the festive labyrinth of risk, wakes up the whole neighborhood of squatting notions about feeling and makes them flee from the history they have cheapened, the way a flock of pigeons explodes when a motorcycle scars through the plaza like a burin.

And only music remains the way the sand does after the corrida.

Pau-Llosa’s regard for the past takes shape through elegiac poems dedicated to musicians whose sensibility he not only admires, but finds most instructive. In “Pachu, Trumpetist,” Pau-Llosa shows how music works like poetry to unname our language, our world: Trumpet says, Music and sea are not about dialogue but about tearing up the arrangements of safety.

Nothing dances prettier than little bits floating.

Makes air and sea rivals. Accomplices.

Trumpet says, I own the air much as a mirror owns the past. Shuffle pages and call it fire.

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I am the exaltation you cannot tame by resemblance.

Man was punished to voice. I am the sly recompense.

Pau-Llosa’s notes in Vereda Tropical explain that “history has transformed” a 1936 Cuban song of the same title, where a “memorytormented man” blames the “tropical path” for letting his “beloved” leave, into “an evocation of exile.” For the cover, Pau-Llosa chose a Paul Sierra painting called “Lost Steps” depicting a man with no visible feet, sunk to the knees on his path. In his richly layered poems, Pau-Llosa charts our passage through landscapes both physical and spiritual, insightfully contrasting themes of owning and disowning, identity and diaspora, history and nostalgia, imaginary homelands and “Thing” cities, colonized islands and unreachable horizons.

—Reviewed by Terri Fletcher

Plumpp, Sterling. Blues Narratives. Chicago, IL: Tia Chucha Press, 1999. 72 pages. $10.95.

Sterling Plumpp’s collection Blues Narratives is a glimpse of a longer, ongoing work in progress, Mfua’s Song. This project attempts to reclaim the stories and the music of a family’s lives and generations by reaching back to the earliest ancestor the author can know—Mfua, a woman who was kidnapped in Africa, enslaved, and brought to America. The history, heritage, and spirit of this ancestor are manifested in the qualities and challenges we see in the twentieth-century lives of Mary and Victor—the portraits drawn here of the poet’s mother and grandfather. The ambition and accomplishments possible in Plumpp’s project are hinted at in the significant work that is here on the page in Blues Narratives.

But, in the end, Blues Narratives may leave us with more questions than answers. Each of the two sections finds the poet speaking to and with a dying family member whom is both eulogized and confronted in the sequence of poems. In “Mary (1920-1980): Dialogue With My Mother,” the unfinished business in this relationship is particularly heartrending: . . . I can not say a rosary for you since 232 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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the only beads you know are knots side your head and columned on your spirit There is a clear desire for some peace, some healing to be reached between a son and a mother who left him for her father to raise; but, like too many lives’ stories, this is a ballad of what doesn’t happen, of the understandings never reached and shared.

“Victor (1880-1955)” is a more complete portrait of the grandfather the poet calls in his dedication, “the only daddy I ever knew, / man of blues and prayers,” and it is the spirit of Victor that both these sections invokes: I tell words from your orations in a song and some wise critic say I get them from Robert Johnson The credit of influence the poet identifies with his grandfather is substantial. In the face of hard lessons that abandonment taught, “Poppa” (as Victor is affectionately referred to at times) gave the boy growing up some roots in the tradition he had sprung from. The poet acknowledges the legacy of Victor in the words that sing these narratives of blues from his own tree of life: My history is a school day after goodtimes been let out My history is a school day after goodtimes been let out I am all alone in a vacant building where I do with little and Lawd I do without

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Victor’s strength may not have been enough to change the world around the boy, but his “orations” helped the young man grow into his mature voice.

Some readers will be put off by the way these poems present themselves on the page in terms of stylistic choices (italics, centered lines, lack of punctuation). There are places where such choices can stand in the way of the remarkable music Plumpp discovers in the best of these poems. Sterling Plumpp’s Blues Narratives is a collection to read with your ears, not your eyes. John Edgar Wideman writes in “Sterling Plumpp’s Poetry,” the afterword to the collection: “Poems are a means of saying thanks, of returning bounty for bounty, replenishing the source, the tradition.” These poems do that and more than that—they sing. Open your eyes and listen closely.

—Reviewed by Jon Tribble

Eidus, Janice and John Kastan (eds.). It’s Only Rock and Roll: An Anthology of Rock and Roll Short Stories. Boston, MA: David R. Godine, 1998. 291pages. $16.95.

It’s Only Rock and Roll: An Anthology of Rock and Roll Short Stories, edited by Janice Eidus and John Kastan, is a collection of narratives that have been carefully selected and arranged into five sections: “Glory Days,” “Keepin’ the Faith,” “You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me,” “Welcome to the Jungle,” and “Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay.”

These section titles taken from popular songs serve as a mini-thesis to each section, suggesting and reflecting the characteristics of the era of rock and roll, while the short stories themselves serve as examples of one or more of these themes. Eidus and Kastan invite us to delve into that which unites us—a celebration of music and narrative.

The first section, “Glory Days,” includes lighter stories of star and fan moments. “Elvis in Wonderland,” by Kathleen Warnock, invites the reader to share the experience of meeting and knowing Elvis: “He sang right to me, kneeling down over the invisible mike, jumping up, stalking the stage, working his audience of one.” And in Janice Eidus’s own “Vito Loves Geraldine,” a young couple explores the depth of faith in a spoken promise: “. . . promise me, you’ll [Geraldine] wait for me as long as it takes. . . .”; and the answer, “I promise, Vito. I promise.”

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idol worship and the effects that ripple within a family, in particular, between sisters: “You’re bringing your sins on all of us,” the narrator, Joanie, writes in her journal. And in “Never Mind,” by Madison Smartt Bell, we are asked to think about a definition of love which links a character’s past to his present situation, and, “because of love,” a poignant realization surfaces about the evolution of that definition: “I could have put it all back in his hide, everything he’d taken out of mine.”

By the third section, “You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me,” the stories have become truly gripping, with language to match. Linda Gray Sexton, in her story “Over the Line,” transforms a young and innocent experience into a frightening sexual encounter, and her protagonist is left to survive the experience alone: The hardest thing right now was that she didn’t really understand what had happened to her . . . and, for the first time in her life, she wasn’t going to be able to ask her mother to explain it.

“Welcome to the Jungle” even more aggressively weds the language and form of the stories to the snarl and attitude we expect from rock ’n’ roll. In Lee K. Abbott’s “The Unfinished Business of Childhood,” Bobby explores the troubled and confused side of his character: “I have a dark place in me, . . . The light of love does not reach.” His diction imitates his delusions: “I have information about betterments, . . . The details will make you frolic and gambol.” And Harold Jaffe’s “Madonna,” is written in one long paragraph, suggesting the never-ending legendary quality of the star herself: . . . on the publication of her nudies in both Penthouse and Playboy, the year was ’79 (before AIDS), Hamilton Jordan was deftly counseling Jimmy Carter on “Human Rights,” Madonna was an eighteen-year-old tyro called Louise Ciccone, slim but breasty, brown hair and lush bush and sexy hair on her belly and lots under her arms, her “look” Lower-East-Side-sulky, even then she was religious as heck, in her way, . . .

In the final section, “Rock and Roll is Here to Stay,” the selection Crab Orchard Review ◆ 235

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“Bigger Than Jesus,” by Lucinda Ebersole, playfully explores the ability of rock’n’roll to enact its ‘metamorphosis’ upon our civilization and the lives within it. Waking up one day as a Beatle, Sammy realizes the power of this personal transformation and thinks: “He is going to change music . . . He is going to be bigger than Jesus.” Like John Lennon joked, the enormity of rock ’n’ roll can reach ridiculous proportions.

This anthology invites readers to join along with the richly told stories of this unforgettable era. It is like being dipped into paint, and then with meticulous brush strokes the reader is placed within the canvas, imagination all the room and space played out in grand irreverent style. And in the process of creating these living portraits, language encompasses aspects of drama, giving us the feeling of being a part of an American dream unfolding before us, and at the same time, placing us in history alongside characters who have become our modern legends. These narratives are like songs—full of diversity and individuality, but communal enough to form a kind of human solidarity, so that each time we read one, we repeat the experience, connecting character to reader, resurrecting memory, forever linking us with words like love, faith, glory, and committment.

—Reviewed by Alberta Skaggs

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Contributors’ Notes

Liz Ahl’s poetry has appeared in the American Voice, Southern Poetry Review, Slipstream, and other journals. She lives in Lincoln, Nebraska, where she is an editorial assistant for Prairie Schooner.

Fred Santiago Arroyo is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where he teaches Native American literature, rhetoric, and writing. He’s currently finishing For the Love of My Father: Vestiges of Jíbaro Grace, for which he received an Individual Artist Grant in literature from the Indiana Arts Commission. “The Memory of Fields” is his first fiction publication.

Paulette Beete currently lives in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where she is a Writing Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center. Her work has previously appeared in Callaloo, Third Coast and Rhino, as well as in Crab Orchard Review’s special issue on “Writing Of & From the Americas.”

Diann Blakely’s second book, Farewell, My Lovelies, was recently published by Story Line Press. She lives and works in Nashville.

Bruce Bond’s collections of poetry include Independence Days (R. Gross Award), The Anteroom of Paradise (Colladay Award), and Radiography (BOA Editions, Ornish Award). He is Director of Creative Writing at the University of North Texas.

Marta Boswell’s work has appeared most recently in Oxford Magazine and Poet Lore. Poems are forthcoming in the Connecticut Review and Puerto Del Sol. Jennifer Boydston is a California native and MFA student in poetry at San Diego State University. She writes: “I find the impulse to write often occurs when something from the outside crashes the all-night party going on in my head and falls into the emotional pool in the backyard. These days that something is jazz music; Sing forYour Supper (my act so to speak) is a collection of poems that are “jazzy” either by historical context or through a relationship to composition.”

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Contributors’ Notes

Kurt Brown is the founding director of the Aspen Writers’ Conference and Writers’ Conferences and Festivals. His first book of poems, Return of the Prodigals, was published by Four Way Books in 1999.

Edward Byrne is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently East of Omaha (Pecan Grove Press, 1998) and Words Spoken, Words Unspoken (Chimney Hill Press, 1995). His work has appeared in numerous journals, including American Poetry Review, American Scholar, Carolina Quarterly, Missouri Review, and Quarterly West. He is a professor of American literature and creative writing at Valparaiso University, where he also edits Valparaiso Poetry Review.

Richard Cecil’s most recent collection of poems, In Search of the Great Dead, was published by Southern Illinois University Press in 1999.

Richard Chess has published one book of poetry, Tekiah (University of Georgia, 1994). His poems have been anthologized in Telling & Remembering: A Century of American Jewish Poetry (Beacon 1997).

He directs the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of North Carolina at Asheville.

Billy Collins’s latest collection of poetry is Picnic, Lightning (University of Pittsburgh, 1997).

Geraldine Connolly lives in Bethesda, Maryland, where she teaches at the Writer’s Center and edits Poet Lore. Her collections include The Red Room, Food for the Winter, and Province of Fire. Her work was included in the recent anthology Boomer Girls: Poems by Women from the Baby Boom Generation, published by the University of Iowa Press.

Ricardo Cortez Cruz teaches English at Illinois State University and is the author of Straight Outta Compton and Five Days of Bleeding, novels short and funky. He has stitched together a third body of slanguage/slang-gauge, Premature Autopsies: Tales of Darkest America.

Jim Daniels’s most recent books include No Pets, a collection of short stories published by Bottom Dog Press, and Blue Jesus, a book of poems published by Carnegie Mellon University Press.

238 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Contributors’ Notes

Tracy Daugherty is the author of four books of fiction. He teaches at Oregon State University.

Sean Thomas Dougherty’s most recent book is the critically praised, mixed-genre The Body’s Precarious Balance (Red Dancefloor, 1997). He lives with his two-year-old son in Syracuse, New York, where he balances community activist work, teaching, and completing a Ph.D. in Cultural Rhetoric.

Patricia Fargnoli’s first book, Necessary Light, won the 1999 May Swenson Poetry Award and was published by Utah State University Press in 1999. She is a retired psychotherapist from Keene, New Hampshire. Widely published in such journals as Poetry, Ploughshares, and Cimarron Review, she has new work forthcoming in Calyx and Southern Poetry Review.

Sascha Feinstein won the 1999 Hayden Carruth Award for his poetry collection Misterioso. He is the author of two critical books, including Jazz Poetry: From the 1920s to the Present, and co-editor (with Yusef Komunyakaa) of The Jazz Poetry Anthology and its companion volume, The Second Set. He teaches poetry at Lycoming College and edits Brilliant Corners: A Journal of Jazz & Literature.

Sergey Gandlevsky was born in Moscow in 1952. Winner of both the Little Booker Prize and the Anti-Booker Prize in 1996 for his poetry and his prose, Gandlevsky is considered to be one of the best contemporary Russian poets. He is the author of two books of poems; a memoir, Trepanation of the Skull (1996); and a collection of essays, Poetic Cuisine (1998). Translations of his work have appeared in several anthologies, including In the Grip of Strange Thoughts: Russian Poetry in the New Era (Zephyr, 1999), 20th Century Russian Poetry: Silver and Steel (1993), and The Third Wave (1992).

Richard Garcia is the author of The Flying Garcias (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1993). His poems have recently appeared in Colorado Review, Georgetown Review, and Luna. His next book, Rancho Notorious, is forthcoming from BOA Editions. He is poet-in-residence at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles.

Crab Orchard Review ◆ 239

Contributors’ Notes

Sarah Hannah Goldstein’s poetry has appeared in Parnassus:Poetry in Review, Southern Review, Gulf Coast, Poetry Northwest, Southern Humanities Review, and other journals. She is cur rently a Presidential Fellow in the Ph.D. program in English Literature at Columbia University.

Ray Gonzalez is the author of a recent book of prose poems and long poetic sequences, Turtle Pictures (University of Arizona Press, 2000). He has previously published f ive books of poetry, two memoirs, and is the editor of twelve anthologies. He holds an endowed chair, the McKnight Land Grant Professorship, at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.

James Gurley lives in Seattle, Washington, and edits the online literary magazine Salmon Bay Review (www.serv.net/njmg/sbn), devoted to Pacific Northwest readers and writers. His poems have most recently appeared in Poetry, Luna, and Many Mountains Moving. A chapbook of poetry, Radiant Measures, was published in 1999 by Floating Bridge Press.

Jeffrey Hammond, Professor of English at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, has published three books of criticism, including The American Puritan Elegy: A Literary and Cultural Study (Cambridge University Press, 2000). His literary nonfiction has appeared in Missouri Review, Classical Outlook, Massachusetts Review, Antioch Review, Southern Humanities Review, Southern Review and Sport Literate. Other pieces are forthcoming in Virginia Quarterly Review, Salmagundi, Shenandoah, and American Scholar. He is currently on the editorial board of Early American Literature.

James Harms’ third book of poems, Quarters, will be published early next year by Carnegie Mellon University Press. His second, The Joy Addict, was awarded the PEN/Revson Fellowship. He directs the creative writing program at West Virginia University.

Terrance Hayes is the author of Muscular Music (Tia Chucha Press, 1999). His poems have appeared in various anthologies and journals.

He lives in New Orleans, Louisiana, with his wife, poet Yona Harvey, and their daughter, Ua Pilar.

240 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Contributors’ Notes

Major Jackson is an Assistant Professor of English at Xavier University of Louisiana. He has been published in American Poetry Review, Boulevard, Callaloo, and Obsidian II, among others. He is the recipient of a PEN Fellowship in the Arts and he is a graduate of the University of Oregon’s Creative Writing Program.

Margaret Kahn is the author of Children of the Jinn: In Search of the Kurds and Their Country, as well as short stories which have appeared in Ararat, Kalliope, and other magazines.

Steve Kistulentz lives and works in Washington, DC. His poetry and f iction have appeared in Quarterly West, Antioch Review, Metropolitan Review, Press, and elsewhere. He has completed a novel, Things in Motion, Things at Rest. He has been awarded fellowships from Writers at Work and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

Leonard Kress teaches writing and art history at Owens College in northwest Ohio. Publications include The Centralia Mine Fire (Flume Press), as well as work in American Poetry Review, Massachusetts Review, Missouri Review, and New Letters. He is currently an associate editor for Artful Dodge.

Gerry LaFemina is the author of Shattered Hours: Poems 1988-94 and 23 Below, as well as several chapbooks. He has work appearing in recent issues of Chelsea, Quarterly West, and Nimrod, among others. He lives in northern Michigan and edits Controlled Burn.

Amy Lemmon’s poems have appeared in Rolling Stone, Verse, Literal Latté, Bellingham Review, and elsewhere. She teaches writing and literature at the Fashion Institute of Technology and lives in New York with her husband, jazz bassist Bob Bouten, and their son Robert.

Jeffrey Levine won last year’s Missouri Review Larry Levis Award for a group of poems, as well as the Skyland Writers and Artists Association award. He is a graduate of the Warren Wilson MFA Program. His manuscript, Waters, Metal, was a finalist for the Poets Out Loud competition. One of his poems has just been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Recent work is published or forthcoming in the Beloit Poetry Crab Orchard Review ◆ 241

Contributors’ Notes

Journal, Many Mountains Moving, Yankee Magazine, Missouri Review, Quarterly West, 5 AM, Nimrod, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Barrow Street, ForPoetry.com, and Luna, among others. He is Editorin-Chief of the Tupelo Press, a new, independent press devoted to poetry, literary fiction, and creative nonfiction.

Rebecca Loudon lives and writes in Seattle, Washington. She is a violinist with Philharmonica Northwest. She has recently published poems in Switched-on Gutenberg, American Jones Building and Maintenance, Between the Lines, and the Metro Poetry Bus. Rick Madigan lives in East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania.

Al Maginnes’s most recent collection, The Light In Our Houses, won the Winthrop University/Pleaides Press contest and will be published in 2000. Recent poems appear in New England Review, Quarterly West, Defined Providence, and Southern Poetry Review.

He teaches at Wake Technical Community College in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Lee Martin is the author of a story collection, The Least You Need To Know, and a memoir, From Our House, to be published by Dutton in June. He teaches in the creative writing program at the University of North Texas.

Philip Metres’s poems and translations have appeared in Artful Dodge, Crab Orchard Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, Ploughshares, Spoon River Poetry Review, and In the Grip of Strange Thoughts. He has translated A Kindred Orphanhood: Selected Poems of Sergey Gandlevsky and is working on Selected Poems of Lev Rubinshtein.

James Nolan’s collections of poems, both from Wesleyan, are Why I Live in the Forest and What Moves is not the Wind. He is a translator of Pablo Neruda (Stones of the Sky, Copper Canyon) and of the Spanish poet Jaime Gil de Biedma (Longing, City Lights). Recent short stories have appeared in the Southern Review and Hawaii Review. He lives in his native New Orleans, where he teaches at Loyola University.

242 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Contributors’ Notes

Lee Robinson practiced law in Charleston, South Carolina, for over twenty years and now lives in San Antonio, Texas. Her poetry has appeared in Harper’s, Hollins Critic, Poets On:, Southern Poetry Review, Appalachia and other magazines. Her novel, Gateway, was published in 1996.

Paulette Roeske’s collections include Divine Attention (Louisiana State University Press), which won the 1996 Carl Sandburg Book Award for Poetry. Her poems and stories have appeared in Poetry, Virginia Quarterly Review, Georgia Review, Glimmer Train, Other Voices, and her essays in The Great Ideas Today, an Encyclopedia Britannica annual. She is a professor of English and creative writing at the College of Lake County.

Vern Rutsala’s most recent books include Selected Poems (Oregon Book Award) and Little-Known Sports (Juniper Prize). He has recently published poems in Poetry, Sewanee Review, and the Prose Poem.

B. A. St. Andrews, whose writings appear in Paris Review, Carolina Quarterly, and Journal of the American Medical Association, teaches Medical Humanities at Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, New York.

Meg Schoerke has published poems in TriQuarterly, American Scholar, and River Styx. An essay of hers recently appeared in How Shall We Tell Each Other of the Poet : The Life and Writing of Muriel Rukeyser, from St. Martin’s Press.

E. M. Schorb is the author of three collections of poetry: The Poor Boy and Other Poems (Dragon’s Teeth Press); 50 Poems (Hill House, New York); and Murderer’s Day (Purdue University Press), winner of the Verna Emery Poetry Prize judged by Heather McHugh. He also has two novels forthcoming from Denlinger’s Publishers Ltd., Paradise Square and Scenario for Scorsese. He has literary fellowships from the North Carolina Arts Council, the Fine Arts Work Center in Povincetown, and the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation.

His work has appeared in Yale Review, Southern Review, Sewanee Review, and many others.

Crab Orchard Review ◆ 243

Contributors’ Notes

Mark Scott has poems forthcoming in Raritan, Paris Review, Kenyon Review, and Seneca Review. His first collection of poems, Tactile Values, will be published in September by New Issues Press.

He does a soul and R&B show on public radio every Sunday afternoon in Carbondale, Colorado.

R. T. Smith’s most recent books include Trespasser (Louisiana State University Press), Split the Lark: Selected Poems (Salmon Publishing), and Messenger (Louisiana State University Press). He is the editor of Shenandoah and lives in Rockbridge County, Virginia.

Adam Sol’s first book, Jonah’s Promise, won the First Series Book Award given by Mid-List Press, and will be published this summer.

He has published poems recently in Crazyhorse, Prairie Schooner, and Malahat Review. He lives in Toronto, Canada.

Adrienne Su, author of Middle Kingdom (Alice James Books, 1997), received a 2000 Pushcart Prize in poetry. She has poems in Best American Poetry 2000, American Poetry: The Next Generation, and The New American Poets: A Bread Loaf Anthology, and essays in Prairie Schooner, Saveur, and The NuyorAsian Anthology.

Brian Teare is completing his final year as an MFA candidate at Indiana University, where he held the 1997-98 Lilly Fellowship in Poetry. Currently, he works as poetry editor for Indiana Review and as Assistant Director of the IU Writer’s Conference. His interviews, reviews and criticism have appeared or are forthcoming in Indiana Review, Black Warrior Review, and Quarterly West. His poetry has appeared in Poet Lore and Spoon River Poetry Review’s 1999 Editor’s Prize issue, and is forthcoming in Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, Pleiades, Connecticut Review, and Quarterly West.

Elaine Terranova’s most recent book is Damages. She has new work in the Cortland Review, Boulevard, and Ellipsis.

Richard Terrill’s poems and essays have appeared in the North American Review, Iowa Review, and the Writer’s Chronicle. His first book, Saturday Night in Baoding: A China Memoir, won the Associated Writing Programs Award for Nonfiction. His new book, Fakebook, a jazz memoir, will appear this fall from Limelight 244 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Contributors’ Notes

Editions. He teaches in the MFA program at Minnesota State University.

Pappi Tomas lives in Iowa City. He has reviews in Iowa Review and American Literary Review, and an essay forthcoming in Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction.

Amy Uyematsu’s second book, Nights of Fire, Nights of Rain, came out in 1998. Other recent work appears in Rattle, 51%, Solo, Luna, Art/Life, Bamboo Ridge Journal, The Geography of Home, and Prayers for a Thousand Years.

Eamonn Wall’s poetry was included in the Irish & Irish-American issue of Crab Orchard Review. His books include Dyckman-200th Street and Iron Mountain Road. A collection of essays, From the Sin-é Café to the Black Hills, is forthcoming from the University of Wisconsin Press.

Bryan Walpert received his MFA from the University of Maryland and is now pursuing a Ph.D. in English at the University of Denver.

His poems have appeared most recently in the Metropolitan Review and Poet Lore.

Charles Harper Webb uses three names because there are so many Charles Webbs in the world. He is the recipient of the Morse Poetry Prize, the Kate Tufts Discovery Prize, and a Whiting Writer’s Award.

His new book, Liver, won the Felix Pollak Prize, and was published by the University of Wisconsin Press.

Gary J. Whitehead has authored two chapbooks of poetry, Walking Back to Providence (Sow’s Ear Press, 1997) and A Cool, Dry Place (White Eagle Coffee Store Press, 2000). Other awards include the Pearl Hogrefe Fellowship from Iowa State University and the Robert Traver Award from Fly Rod & Reel. His poems, stories, and essays have appeared in the Christian Science Monitor, Connecticut Review, Double Take, Poetry Ireland Review, Western Humanities Review, Verse, and Yankee. He teaches English at Tenafly High School, Tenafly, New Jersey, and lives in Warwick, New York, where he is editor and publisher of Defined Providence Press.

Crab Orchard Review ◆ 245

Contributors’ Notes

Terence Winch is the author of two award-winning poetry books: The Great Indoors won the Columbia Book Award, and Irish Musicians/American Friends won an American Book Award. He’s also written a short-story collection, Contenders. His work has been included in The Best American Poetry 1997 and in journals such as the New Republic and American Poetry Review. In 1992 he received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry. He recorded three albums with Celtic Thunder, one of which, The Light of the Other Days, won the INDIE Award for best Celtic album and includes the best-known of his songs, “When New York Was Irish.”

David Wojahn directs the program in Creative Writing at Indiana University, and also teaches in the MFA in Writing Program at Vermont College. His most recent collections, The Falling Hour (1997) and Late Empire (1994), appeared from the University of Pittsburgh Press.

Charles Wyatt teaches English at Denison University and contributes poems and stories to journals like this one. He was principal flutist of the Nashville Symphony for more than twenty years. He has never thrown a flute at a conductor–until now.

Bro. Yao (Hoke S. Glover) is a poet living in the Washington DC metropolitan area. He has recently been published in African American Review and Mosaic.

246 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

INDEX TO VOLUME FIVE — 1999/2000 Title Index After Dinner at the Pig & Steak (ptry). Miles Garett Watson Allman Brothers’ Live at the Fillmore Concerts, The (ptry).

Ray Gonzalez Alphabet Made of Musical Instruments (ptry).

Sean Thomas Dougherty Anders and the Norns (ptry). Sascha Feinstein Antique Dress (ptry). Jane Satterfield Aphrodite in Tennessee (ptry). Leigh Anne Couch Apostrophe (ptry). Billy Collins Appalachian Spring (ptry). Richard Terrill Arkansas Afternoons (ptry). Linda Gregg Ave Verum (ptry). Jeffrey Levine Bar Band (ptry). Charles Harper Webb Barrio-Man (fctn). Judith Ortiz Cofer Birdlike Sonata (ptry). Richard Garcia Black Mafia Life (fctn). Ricardo Cortez Cruz Blow Your Horn (prse). Pappi Tomas Bluegrass (ptry). James Harms Blues for a Pretty Girl (ptry). Paulette Beete Blues for Rory (ptry). Eamonn Wall Borges Ascending: An Excerpt from the Novel Quién (fctn/trans).

Carlos Cañeque/Joan Lindgren Cadzzilla (ptry). Katharine Whitcomb Car Thief, The (ptry). Marcus Cafagña Careful Distance, A (fctn). Jason G. Daley Cholera (fctn). Mark Jacobs Clock with One Blue Wing (ptry). Brian Teare Cochino (ptry). Virgil Suárez Colorful Fish (ptry). Billy Collins Coltrane’s Teeth (ptry). Bruce Bond Connivance (ptry). Virgil Suárez Dear Maureen Seaton, Dear Maurya Simon (ptry).

Maura Stanton Desolated (ptry). Steven Schreiner Dobro (ptry). Liz Ahl Dreaming Patsy Cline (ptry). Rebecca Loudon Easter (ptry). Christopher Davis Elegy to West Point Fishermen (ptry). Patricia Jabbeh Wesley

5(1): 209 5(2): 106 5(2): 92 5(1): 5(1): 5(1): 5(1): 5(2): 5(1): 5(2): 5(2): 5(1): 5(2): 5(2): 5(2): 5(2): 5(2): 5(2): 5(1):

50 155 46 42 190 100 142 197 19 102 17 208 109 33 193 264

5(1): 5(1): 5(1): 5(1): 5(2): 5(1): 5(1): 5(2): 5(1): 5(1):

217 39 52 81 186 202 44 40 204 200

5(1): 5(2): 5(2): 5(1): 5(1):

159 32 143 48 215

Crab Orchard Review ◆ 247

INDEX TO VOLUME FIVE — 1999/2000 Emil (A Cautionary Tale) (fctn). Charles Wyatt Endurance of Gospel, The (ptry). Al Maginnes Eulogy for Red (fctn). Gina Ochsner Euphonic Sounds (ptry). James Gurley Eurydice in Hades (ptry). Joy Arbor-Karnes Exterminator (fctn). Tim Parrish Faith (ptry). Maria Terrone Father’s Instructions, A (ptry). Debra Bruce Feathers (ptry). Lisa Glatt & David Hernandez Fifteen (ptry). Vern Rutsala First Snow (ptry/trans). Saadi Youssef/Khaled Mattawa flesh of the orange still belongs to someone else, The (ptry/trans).

Ivón Gordon Vailakis/J. C. Todd For Townes Van Zandt, 1944-97 (ptry). David Wojahn Fragile (ptry). Lawrence Raab Friday Rooftop Museum Poem (ptry). Terrance Hayes From Birmingham to Bristol in a Boxcar (ptry).

Carole Boston Weatherford from Urban Renewal (ptry). Major Jackson Garden of the Impossible (ptry). Maria Terrone Geese at Mayville, The (fctn). Ellen Slezak Great Basin Sonata (fctn). Steve Kistulentz Green Children, The (ptry). Janet McAdams Harmonica (ptry). Linda Gregg Healing, The (fctn). B. A. St. Andrews Heart Flowing Out, The (ptry). Linda Gregg Honored Guest (ptry). Cathy Song Horizon (ptry). Cathy Song House of Correction (ptry). Marcus Cafagña I Now Wander (ptry). Patricia Jabbeh Wesley I Want to Jump But I’m Afraid I’ll Fall: Confessions of a Rock ’n’ Roll Snob (prse). Jeffrey Hammond If I Had Possession Over Judgment Day (ptry).

Diann Blakely Improvisation (ptry). Bryan Walpert Improvisations: Wayne Shorter (prse). Richard Terrill In Creasy Cove, Domestic Duet (ptry). R. T. Smith In the Memory of Fields: An Excerpt from For the Love of My Father (fctn). Fred Santiago Arroyo Invisible, The (ptry). Lawrence Raab Issue (ptry). Alice Jones Jump (ptry). Lisa Glatt & David Hernandez Jungle Room at Graceland, The (ptry). Fleda Brown Jackson Killing James Bond (ptry). Carrie Lea Robb

248 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

5(2): 5(2): 5(1): 5(2): 5(1): 5(1): 5(1): 5(1): 5(1): 5(2): 5(1): 5(1):

120 146 115 107 36 126 208 38 93 149 222 261

5(2): 5(1): 5(2): 5(1):

204 151 134 211

5(2): 135 5(1): 206 5(1): 165 5(2): 56 5(1): 112 5(1): 102 5(2): 111 5(1): 104 5(1): 162 5(1): 164 5(1): 41 5(1): 214 5(2): 159 5(2): 38 5(2): 195 5(2): 177 5(2): 157 5(2): 1 5(1): 149 5(1): 111 5(1): 95 5(1): 110 5(1): 153

INDEX TO VOLUME FIVE — 1999/2000 Klezmer (ptry). Richard Chess la naranja todavía es ajena (ptry/trans).

Ivón Gordon Vailakis/J. C. Todd Last Legs (prse). Terence Winch Late-Night Commercials (ptry). Adrienne Su Leadbelly (ptry). E. M. Schorb Learning to Say No at The Immaculate Conception High School (ptry). Julianna Baggott Letters from Noa to Nowhere (fctn). Nelinia Cabiles Line Dancing (prse). Marie Nasta Listening to Lester Young (ptry). Edward Byrne Long Breath, A (ptry). Debra Nystrom Lough Gill: View of the Lake Isle of Innisfree (ptry).

Maura Stanton Mae West Chats It Up with Bessie Smith (ptry).

Colleen J. McElroy Mango (ptry). Sascha Feinstein Mary Wilson-Formerly-of-The-Supremes Sings Ooh-Baby Songs at The Nugget (ptry). Paulette Roeske Me and the Devil Blues (ptry). Diann Blakely Memory on the Shoulders of the Gaze (ptry).

Beckian Fritz Goldberg Missouri Bar (ptry). Mark Halliday Monday Night Contradance (ptry). Amy Lemmon Muchness, The (ptry). Linda Gregg Mustang Sally Pays Her Debt to Wilson Pickett (ptry).

Marta Boswell Night at the Opera, A (ptry). Richard Cecil Nocturnal (ptry/trans). Saadi Youssef/Khaled Mattawa Not a Pretty Bird (ptry). Linda Gregg Old Pictutes from Kout Al-Zain (ptry/trans).

Saadi Youssef/Khaled Mattawa One Hundred Elvises (ptry). Geraldine Connolly Ooby Dooby (prse). Tracy Daugherty Oregon Boogie (ptry). Major Jackson Other Mother, The (prse). Rebecca McClanahan Our Secret Other Worlds (prse). Rigoberto González Pastel (ptry/trans). Liviu Antonesei/Mihaela Moscaliuc & Michael Waters Percussion (ptry). Gerry LaFemina Perdido (ptry). Meg Schoerke Perfect Poem, The (ptry). Margot Schilpp Perpetual Care (fctn). James Nolan Pick it, Squirrel (ptry). R. T. Smith

5(2): 51 5(1): 260 5(2): 5(2): 5(2): 5(1):

221 185 153 37

5(1): 5(1): 5(2): 5(1): 5(1):

1 243 47 146 199

5(1): 141 5(1): 49 5(2): 148 5(2): 37 5(1): 96 5(1): 105 5(2): 140 5(1): 98 5(2): 43 5(2): 5(1): 5(1): 5(1):

49 219 103 220

5(2): 5(2): 5(2): 5(1): 5(1): 5(1):

89 129 136 231 223 35

5(2): 5(2): 5(1): 5(2): 5(2):

139 151 158 76 158

Crab Orchard Review ◆ 249

INDEX TO VOLUME FIVE — 1999/2000 Plutonium (ptry). Sascha Feinstein Poem for a Composer at Eighty-Three (ptry).

Patricia Fargnoli Polka Dancing to Eddie Blazonczyk and His Versatones in Coaldale, Pennsylvania (ptry). Leonard Kress Possibilities for Salsa Music in the Mainstream: An Interview iith Judith Ortiz Cofer. Lorraine M. López Red House Blues (ptry). Rick Madigan Red Vinyl (ptry). Jim Daniels Resurrect the Mouth of the Drum (ptry). Bro. Yao Ruined Trails (ptry). Patricia Jabbeh Wesley Sacred Music (ptry). Adam Sol “Sally Go Round the Roses” (ptry). Sarah Hannah Goldstein Scar (ptry). Lisa Glatt & David Hernandez Serenade (ptry). Billy Collins Shaker Door, Circa 1820 (ptry). Matthew Graham Shall We Gather at the River? (prse). Lee Robinson She Rented Manhattan (fctn). Joshua Furst Short History of 20th-Century Irish Music in America, A (ptry).

Terence Winch “Sing something about prison and parting . . .” (ptry/trans).

Sergey Gandlevsky/Philip Metres So Different from Heaven (ptry). Linda Gregg Soloist, The (ptry). Amy Uyematsu Storm (ptry). Amy Uyematsu Structuring Free Space (fctn). Gordon Weaver Suffering (ptry). Kyoko Mori Sun Ship (take 2) (ptry). Jennifer Boydston Taqseem (fctn). Margaret Kahn Television News: Arkansas, 1957 (ptry). Fleda Brown Jackson Thumb Under (fctn). Lee Martin To Build a Fiddle (ptry). Gary J. Whitehead Turkey Necks and Crowder Peas (ptry).

Carole Boston Weatherford Vanishing Point (ptry). Margot Schilpp Velocity (ptry). Mark Scott Visiting Team: Early Season Game, The (ptry). Ron McFarland What Is Given (ptry). Cathy Song When the Sun Comes Out (ptry). Sascha Feinstein White Leather Tango Gloves (ptry). Elaine Terranova Why Women Need to Dance (ptry). Colleen J. McElroy Winning (ptry). Linda Gregg Wow & Flutter (ptry). Kurt Brown

250 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

5(2): 96 5(2): 94 5(2): 138 5(1): 23 5(2): 144 5(2): 90 5(2): 206 5(1): 216 5(2): 180 5(2): 104 5(1): 94 5(2): 54 5(1): 97 5(2): 174 5(1): 68 5(2): 202 5(2): 100 5(1): 5(2): 5(2): 5(1): 5(1): 5(2): 5(2): 5(1): 5(2): 5(2): 5(1):

99 192 191 183 144 44 21 108 61 199 212

5(1): 5(2): 5(1): 5(1): 5(2): 5(2): 5(1): 5(1): 5(2):

156 155 142 161 98 188 140 101 46

INDEX TO VOLUME FIVE — 1999/2000

Author Index

Ahl, Liz. Dobro (ptry) Antonesei, Liviu (translated by Mihaela Moscaliuc & Michael Waters). Pastel (ptry/trans) Arbor-Karnes, Joy. Eurydice in Hades (ptry) Arroyo, Fred Santiago. In the Memory of Fields: An Excerpt from For the Love of My Father (fctn) Baggott, Julianna. Learning to Say No at The Immaculate Conception High School (ptry) Beete, Paulette. Blues for a Pretty Girl (ptry) Blakely, Diann. If I Had Possession Over Judgment Day (ptry) Me and the Devil Blues (ptry) Bond, Bruce. Coltrane’s Teeth (ptry) Boswell, Marta. Mustang Sally Pays Her Debt to Wilson Pickett (ptry) Boydston, Jennifer. Sun Ship (take 2) (ptry) Brown, Kurt. Wow & Flutter (ptry) Bruce, Debra. A Father’s Instructions (ptry) Byrne, Edward. Listening to Lester Young (ptry) Cabiles, Nelinia. Letters from Noa to Nowhere (fctn) Cafagña, Marcus. The Car Thief (ptry) House of Correction (ptry) Cañeque, Carlos (translated by Joan Lindgren). Borges Ascending: An Excerpt from the Novel Quién (fctn/trans) Cecil, Richard. A Night at the Opera (ptry) Chess, Richard. Klezmer (ptry) Cofer, Judith Ortiz. Barrio-Man (fctn) Collins, Billy. Apostrophe (ptry) Colorful Fish (ptry) Serenade (ptry) Connolly, Geraldine. One Hundred Elvises (ptry) Couch, Leigh Anne. Aphrodite in Tennessee (ptry) Cruz, Ricardo Cortez. Black Mafia Life (fctn) Daley, Jason G. A Careful Distance (fctn) Daniels, Jim. Red Vinyl (ptry) Daugherty, Tracy. Ooby Dooby (prse) Davis, Christopher. Easter (ptry) Dougherty, Sean Thomas. Alphabet Made of Muscial Instruments (ptry) Fargnoli, Patricia. Poem for a Composer at Eighty-Three (ptry)

5(2): 32 5(1): 35 5(1): 36 5(2): 1 5(1): 37 5(2): 5(2): 5(2): 5(2): 5(2):

33 38 37 40 43

5(2): 5(2): 5(1): 5(2): 5(1): 5(1): 5(1): 5(1):

44 46 38 47 1 39 41 264

5(2): 5(2): 5(1): 5(1): 5(1): 5(2): 5(2): 5(1): 5(2): 5(1): 5(2): 5(2): 5(1): 5(2):

49 51 19 42 44 54 89 46 17 52 90 129 48 92

5(2): 94

Crab Orchard Review ◆ 251

INDEX TO VOLUME FIVE — 1999/2000 Feinstein, Sascha. Anders and the Norns (ptry) Mango (ptry) Plutonium (ptry) When the Sun Comes Out (ptry) Furst, Joshua. She Rented Manhattan (fctn) Gandlevsky, Sergey (translated by Philip Metres).

“Sing something about prison and parting . . .” (ptry/trans) Garcia, Richard. Birdlike Sonata (ptry) Glatt, Lisa & David Hernandez. Feathers (ptry) Jump (ptry) Scar (ptry) Goldberg, Beckian Fritz. Memory on the Shoulders of the Gaze (ptry) Goldstein, Sarah Hannah. “Sally Go Round the Roses” (ptry) Gonzalez, Ray. The Allman Brothers’ Live at the Fillmore Concerts (ptry) González, Rigoberto. Our Secret Other Worlds (prse) Graham, Matthew. Shaker Door, Circa 1820 (ptry) Gregg, Linda. Arkansas Afternoons (ptry) Harmonica (ptry) Heart Flowing Out (ptry) The Muchness (ptry) Not a Pretty Bird (ptry) So Different from Heaven (ptry) Winning (ptry) Gurley, James. Euphonic Sounds (ptry) Halliday, Mark. Missouri Bar (ptry) Hammond, Jeffrey. I Want to Jump But I’m Afraid I’ll Fall: Confessions of a Rock ’n’ Roll Snob (prse) Harms, James. Bluegrass (ptry) Hayes, Terrance. Friday Rooftop Museum Poem (ptry) Jackson, Fleda Brown. The Jungle Room at Graceland (ptry) Television News: Arkansas, 1957 (ptry) Jackson, Major. from Urban Renewal (ptry) Oregon Boogie (ptry) Jacobs, Mark. Cholera (fctn) Jones, Alice. Issue (ptry) Kahn, Margaret. Taqseem (fctn) Kistulentz, Steve. Great Basin Sonata (fctn) Kress, Leonard. Polka Dancing to Eddie Blazonczyk and His Versatones in Coaldale, Pennsylvania (ptry) LaFemina, Gerry. Percussion (ptry) Lemmon, Amy. Monday Night Contradance (ptry) Levine, Jeffrey. Ave Verum (ptry)

252 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

5(1): 5(1): 5(2): 5(2): 5(1): 5(2):

50 49 96 98 68 100

5(2): 5(1): 5(1): 5(1): 5(1):

102 93 95 94 96

5(2): 104 5(2): 106 5(1): 5(1): 5(1): 5(1): 5(1): 5(1): 5(1): 5(1): 5(1): 5(2): 5(1): 5(2):

223 97 100 102 104 98 103 99 101 107 105 159

5(2): 5(2): 5(1): 5(1): 5(2): 5(2): 5(1): 5(1): 5(2): 5(2): 5(2):

109 134 110 108 135 136 81 111 21 56 138

5(2): 139 5(2): 140 5(2): 142

INDEX TO VOLUME FIVE — 1999/2000 López, Lorraine M. Possibilites for Salsa Music in the Mainstream: An Interview with Judith Ortiz Cofer Loudon, Rebecca. Dreaming Patsy Cline (ptry) McAdams, Janet. The Green Children (ptry) McClanahan, Rebecca. The Other Mother (prse) McElroy, Colleen J. Mae West Chats It Up with Bessie Smith (ptry) Why Women Need to Dance (ptry) McFarland, Ron. The Visiting Team: Early Season Game (ptry) Madigan, Rick. Red House Blues (ptry) Maginnes, Al. The Endurance of Gospel (ptry) Martin, Lee. Thumb Under (fctn) Mori, Kyoko. Suffering (ptry) Nasta, Marie. Line Dancing (prse) Nolan, James. Perpetual Care (fctn) Nystrom, Debra. A Long Breath (ptry) Ochsner, Gina. Eulogy for Red (fctn) Parrish, Tim. Exterminator (fctn) Raab, Lawrence. Fragile (ptry) The Invisible (ptry) Robinson, Lee. Shall We Gather at the River? (prse) Roeske, Paulette. Mary Wilson-Formerly-of-The-Supremes Sings Ooh-Baby Songs at The Nugget (ptry) Robb, Carrie Lea. Killing James Bond (ptry) Rutsala, Vern. Fifteen (ptry) St. Andrews, B. A. The Healing (fctn) Satterfield, Jane. Antique Dress (ptry) Schilpp, Margot. The Perfect Poem (ptry) Vanishing Point (ptry) Schoerke, Meg. Perdido (ptry) Schorb, E. M. Leadbelly (ptry) Schreiner, Steven. Desolated (ptry) Scott, Mark. Velocity (ptry) Slezak, Ellen. The Geese at Mayville (fctn) Smith, R. T. In Creasy Cove, Domestic Duet (ptry) Pick it, Squirrel (ptry) Sol, Adam. Sacred Music (ptry) Song, Cathy. Honored Guest (ptry) Horizon (ptry) What Is Given (ptry) Stanton, Maura. Dear Maureen Seaton, Dear Maurya Simon (ptry) Lough Gill: View of the Lake Isle of Innisfree (ptry) Su, Adrienne. Late-Night Commercials (ptry)

5(1): 23 5(2): 5(1): 5(1): 5(1):

143 112 231 141

5(1): 5(1): 5(2): 5(2): 5(2): 5(1): 5(1): 5(2): 5(1): 5(1): 5(1): 5(1): 5(1): 5(2): 5(2):

140 142 144 146 61 144 243 76 146 115 126 151 149 174 148

5(1): 5(2): 5(2): 5(1): 5(1): 5(1): 5(2): 5(2): 5(1): 5(2): 5(1): 5(2): 5(2): 5(2): 5(1): 5(1): 5(1): 5(1):

153 149 111 155 158 156 151 153 159 155 165 157 158 180 162 164 161 200

5(1): 199 5(2): 185

Crab Orchard Review ◆ 253

INDEX TO VOLUME FIVE — 1999/2000 Suárez, Virgil Cochino (ptry) Connivance (ptry) Teare, Brian. Clock with One Blue Wing (ptry) Terranova, Elaine. White Leather Tango Gloves (ptry) Terrill, Richard. Appalachian Spring (ptry) Improvisations: Wayne Shorter (prse) Terrone, Maria. Faith (ptry) Garden of the Impossible (ptry) Tomas, Pappi. Blow Your Horn (prse) Uyematsu, Amy. The Soloist (ptry) Storm (ptry) Vailakis, Ivón Gordon (translated by J. C. Todd). la naranja todavía es ajena (ptry) The flesh of the orange still belongs to someone else (ptry/trans) Wall, Eamonn. Blues for Rory (ptry) Walpert, Bryan. Improvisation (ptry) Watson, Miles Garett. After Dinner at the Pig & Steak (ptry) Weatherford, Carole Boston.

From Birmingham to Bristol in a Boxcar (ptry) Turkey Necks and Crowder Peas (ptry) Weaver, Gordon. Structuring Free Space (fctn) Webb, Charles Harper. Bar Band (ptry) Wesley, Patricia Jabbeh. Elegy to West Point Fishermen (ptry) I Now Wander (ptry) Ruined Trails (ptry) Whitcomb, Katharine. Cadzzilla (ptry) Whitehead, Gary J. To Build a Fiddle (ptry) Winch, Terence. Last Legs (prse) A Short History of 20th-Century Irish Music in America (ptry) Wojahn, David. For Townes Van Zandt, 1944-97(ptry) Wyatt, Charles. Emil (A Cautionary Tale) (fctn) Yao, Bro. Resurrect the Mouth of the Drum (ptry) Youssef, Saadi (translated by Khaled Mattawa).

First Snow (ptry) Nocturnal (ptry) Old Pictures from Kout Al-Zain (ptry)

254 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

5(1): 5(1): 5(2): 5(2): 5(2): 5(2): 5(1): 5(1): 5(2): 5(2): 5(2):

202 204 186 188 190 177 208 206 208 192 191

5(1): 260 5(1): 261 5(2): 193 5(2): 195 5(1): 209 5(1): 5(1): 5(1): 5(2): 5(1): 5(1): 5(1): 5(1): 5(2): 5(2): 5(2): 5(2): 5(2): 5(2):

211 212 183 197 215 214 216 217 199 221 202 204 120 206

5(1): 222 5(1): 219 5(1): 220

INDEX OF BOOK REVIEWS — 1997/2000

All Saints: New and Selected Poems by Brenda Marie Osbey. reviewed by Jon Tribble And Her Soul Out of Nothing by Olena Kalytiak Davis. reviewed by Maria McLeod Blues Narratives by Sterling D. Plumpp. reviewed by Jon Tribble Born Southern and Restless by Kat Meads. reviewed by Kathryn Kerr The Broken Bridge: Fiction from Expatriates in Literary Japan edited by Suzanne Kamata. reviewed by Betsy Taylor Cabato Sentora by Ray Gonzalez. reviewed by Jon Tribble Chick-Lit 2: (No Chic Vics) edited by Cris Mazza, Jeffrey DeShell, and Elizabeth Sheffield. reviewed by Beth Lordan Crossing the Snow Bridge by Fatima Lim-Wilson. reviewed by Paul Guest The Dance House by Joseph Marshall III. reviewed by James Gill Dialogue for the Left and Right Hand by Steven Cramer. reviewed by Josh Bell Donkey Gospel by Tony Hoagland reviewed by Cynthia Roth Dry Rain by Pete Fromm. reviewed by Greg Schwipps Fire from the Andes: Short Fiction by Women from Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru edited and translated by Susan E. Benner and Kathy S. Leonard. reviewed by Jenni Williams Funk Lore: New Poems (1984-1995) by Amiri Baraka. reviewed by Robert Elliot Fox Galileo’s Banquet by Ned Balbo. reviewed by Melanie Jordan Rack Hammerlock by Tim Seibles. reviewed by Adrian Harris The Hour Between Dog and Wolf by Laure-Anne Bosselaar. reviewed by Kathryn Kerr It’s Only Rock and Roll: An Anthology of Rock and Roll Short Stories edited by Janice Eidus and John Kastan. reviewed by Alberta Skaggs

4(1): 240 5(1): 250 5(2): 232 3(1): 247 3(2): 264

4(2): 261 3(1): 245

3(2): 267 4(2): 258 3(1): 242 4(1): 239 3(1): 244 4(2): 264

3(1): 239 5(1): 249 5(1): 256 3(1): 241 5(2): 234

Crab Orchard Review ◆ 255

INDEX OF BOOK REVIEWS — 1997/2000 Living on the Edge: Fiction by Peace Corps Writers edited by John Coyne. reviewed by Chris Kelsey Lost Wax by Heather Ramsdell. reviewed by Paul Guest Misterioso by Sascha Feinstein. reviewed by Adrian Harris Muscular Music by Terrance Hayes. reviewed by Adrian Harris Naked by Shuntaro Tanikawa. reviewed by Kathryn Kerr Near Breathing, a Memoir of a Difficult Birth

by Kathryn Rhett. reviewed by Kathryn Kerr Night, Again: Contemporary fiction from Vietnam edited by Linh Dinh. reviewed by Joey Hale Ocean Avenue by Malena Mörling reviewed by Ruth Ann Daugherty Of Flesh & Spirit by Wang Ping. reviewed by Paul Guest Prospero’s Mirror: A Translator’s Portfolio of Latin American Short Fiction edited by Ilan Stavans. reviewed by Michael McGregor The Secret History of Water by Silvia Curbelo. reviewed by Kathryn Kerr The Stars, The Earth, The River by Le Minh Khue (translated by Bac Hoai Tran and Dana Sachs; edited by Wayne Karlin). reviewed by Vicky Kepple Turn Thanks by Lorna Goodison. reviewed by Kathryn Kerr Under the Red Flag by Ha Jin. reviewed by Katherine Riegel Vereda Tropical by Ricardo Pau-Llosa. reviewed by Terri Fletcher Walking Back from Woodstock by Earl S. Braggs. reviewed by Terry Olsen The Women Carry River Water by Nguyen Quang Thieu (translated by Martha Collins). reviewed by Terry Olsen You Come Singing by Virgil Suárez. reviewed by Adrian Harris

256 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

5(1): 258

4(1): 242 5(2): 227 5(2): 229 3(2): 266 3(1): 248

3(2): 263

5(1): 254 3(2): 270 4(2): 266

4(2): 259 3(2): 261

5(1): 252 3(2): 260 5(2): 230 4(1): 237 3(2): 268

4(2): 263

INDEX OF BOOK REVIEWS — 1997/2000

Book Review Policy Crab Orchard Review’s staff considers for review collections and anthologies of poetry, short fiction, and literary nonfiction published by small independent and university presses. Please send titles for review consideration to: Jon Tribble, Book Review Editor, Crab Orchard Review, Department of English, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, IL 62901-4503.

All reviews are written by Crab Orchard Review staff. In the past three years, the following presses have had titles reviewed in Crab Orchard Review’s pages: Anhinga Press, Tallahassee, FL BOA Editions, Rochester, NY Carnegie Mellon University Press, Pittsburgh, PA Cleveland State University Poetry Center, Cleveland, OH Coffee House Press, Minneapolis, MN Copper Canyon Press, Port Townsend, WA Curbstone Press, Willimantic, CT David R. Godine, Boston, MA Duquesne University Press, Pittsburgh, PA FC2, Normal, IL Graywolf Press, St. Paul, MN Littoral Books, Los Angeles, CA Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, LA Lumen Editions/Brookline Books, Cambridge, MA Lyons & Burford, New York, NY New Issues Press, Kalamazoo, MI Ohio State University Press, Columbus, OH Red Crane Books, Santa Fe, NM Seven Stories Press, New York, NY Stone Bridge Press, Berkeley, CA Tia Chucha Press, Chicago, IL University of Georgia Press, Athens, GA University of Illinois Press, Urbana, IL University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, MA University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, NM University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI Washington Writers’ Publishing House, Washington, DC

Crab Orchard Review ◆ 257

Announcements Crab Orchard Review and Southern Illinois University Press are pleased to announce the 2000 Crab Orchard Award Series in Poetry Open Competition selections.

Our final judge, Rodney Jones, selected J. Allyn Rosser’s Misery Prefigured as the first prize winner.

Mr. Jones selected Julianna Baggott’s This Country of Mothers and Oliver Francisco de la Paz’s Names Above Houses as co-second prize winners. All three collections will be published by Southern Illinois University Press in April 2001.

We want to thank all of the poets who entered manuscripts in our Crab Orchard Award Series Open Competition.

Crab Orchard Review’s website has updated information on subscriptions, calls for submissions, contest information and results, and past, current and future issues. Visit us at:

<http://www.siu.edu/~crborchd/>.

the Crab Orchard Award Series in Poetry WINTER AMNESTIES Poems by Elton Glaser “Elton Glaser’s poems are classic in the best sense of the word: he achieves stateliness without stuffiness and form without confinement. . . . This is an American poetry, a civic poetry infused with enough sly wit to make us root for the oak trees and the stars. These poems also will convince even the most jaded of postmodern readers that Beauty with a capital B is nothing to be ashamed of.”

—Lucia Perillo Elton Glaser has previously published three fulllength collections of poems: Relics, Tropical Depressions, and Color Photographs of the Ruins. Among his awards are two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, three fellowships from the Ohio Arts Council, the Iowa Poetry Prize, and the Randall Jarrell Poetry Prize.

Copublished with Crab Orchard Review 77 pages, ISBN 0-8093-2305-2 $11.95 paper

photo by Betty Greenway

Available at bookstores, or from

southern illinois university press P.O. Box 3697 • Carbondale, IL 62902-3697 • 800-346-2680 • FAX 800-346-2681

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the Crab Orchard Award Series in Poetry CROSSROADS AND UNHOLY WATER Poems by Marilene Phipps “Marilene Phipps is an exquisite poet.

In her work, dragonflies flirt with water, children fly blouse kites, the Virgin appears in a blue and yellow mist to comfort the river women, the worshippers, the nonbelievers, the bereaved, and all of us. Through Phipps’ lyrical visions and breathtaking images, we are all transformed.”—Edwidge

Danticat, author of Breath, Eyes, Memory and The Farming of Bones

“Crossroads and Unholy Water is a first book by Marilene Phipps, but this wonderful collection embodies a fully initiated voice that dares some old truths through youthful language. . . . this collection embraces awe and woe through curses and praise that unearth a meeting place for the unspeakable as well as culminant beauty—a book of acknowledgment and ritual.”

—Yusef Komunyakaa Copublished with Crab Orchard Review 71 pages, ISBN 0-8093-2306-0 $11.95 paper

photo by Frank Monk iewicz

Available at bookstores, or from

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www.siu.edu/~siupress

the Crab Orchard Award Series in Poetry In Search of the Great Dead Poems by Richard Cecil

“Richard Cecil’s magnificent title poem suggests metaphorically his pursuit of all things deemed precious and abandoned or lost. It is a serious theme, and a difficult one to carry off, but Cecil does it again and again, looking squarely into the depths of experience with a great dry wit, and without resorting to nostalgia. No small part of Cecil’s triumph results from his uncanny sense of balance and proportion, a gift that is manifest in both his prosody and his emotive vision. In Search of the Great Dead is an inventory of obsessions and hard-won consolations.

In poems that range from his satirical take on realtor-speak to his moving elegy for the poet Lynda Hull, Cecil lives by a combination of intelligence, craft, and eloquence that can only be described as character. Perhaps no poet since Larkin has treated the romance of hope to such a helping of irony and come off in the barely possible human affirmative.”—Rodney Jones 96 pages ISBN 0-8093-2259-5 $11.95 paper Copublished with Crab Orchard Review

“[T]he technical skill and humor on display in this collection make it likely that Cecil’s poems will be read long after he joins that ever-longer roll call of poets who have passed on. . . . [A] remarkable book.”

—Quarterly West Available at bookstores, or from

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the Crab Orchard Award Series in Poetry The Star-Spangled Banner

Poems by Denise Duhamel

“[S]o overwhelming is her relish for life that embarrassment, or titillation when the subject is sexual, just doesn’t stand a chance.

Life-affirming without being treacly, Duhamel is a character who assures us the world is full of character.”

—Booklist “Denise Duhamel is heir to both the urbane, campy fortune of Frank O’Hara, and to Walt Whitman’s more commodious open estate. It is the mystique and absurdity of opening the private experience to the public weal that triggers and fuels her heroic emotional candor, and in this open air cafe, she thrives as stand-up, diva, ballerina, and sage. Should someone arrest her? Yes. Duhamel is the one buying feminine protection in a foreign country, the one accounting for the cost of her poems, not in angst, but in paper clips, pens, and ink cartridges. In all of her poems, there is such a feel of release, of unmitigated joy, that one is surprised to come back later and find her beautiful and exacting craft. She is one of the most engaging American poets to have emerged in the last twenty years.”—Rodney Jones 64 pages, ISBN 0-8093-2259-5 $11.95 paper Copublished with Crab Orchard Review

For more information on the Crab Orchard Award Series in Poetry: www.siu.edu/~crborchd

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Man on Spikes

Eliot Asinof New Foreword by Marvin Miller “[T]he writing of Eliot Asinof looks so easy that you don’t realize he has conveyed an entire milieu in the life story of a very ordinary man with one special talent and an allconsuming love for his sport. Then you discover that you’re having trouble reading the page because of the mist in your eyes and the tension in your chest.”—Harlan Ellison, San Francisco Chronicle Book Review $14.95 paper

My Baseball Diary James T. Farrell New Foreword by Joseph Durso

My Baseball Diary (1957) chronicles Farrell’s enduring passion for the game. “[T]his collection of essays and novelistic excerpts still reminds us just how talented a writer Farrell was. . . . A fine collection.”

—Publishers Weekly $14.95 paper

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OFF-SEASON Eliot Asinof

“A shocking murder involving the wife of a big leaguer’s old high school teammate plunges the major league superstar into a viper’s nest of small-town secrets, racism and lies.”— USA Today Baseball Weekly “Here is the book’s great originality: it lets readers see how despite financial and cosmetic changes, baseball still retains its uncommon pertinence to the deepest truths about American life.”—Jerry Klinkowitz, author of Basepaths and Short Season 176 pages ISBN 0-8093-2297-8 $22.50 cloth

“[A] successful mixture of hard-boiled mystery, coming-of-age story, and baseball yarn.”—Booklist

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FULL COUNT Inside Cuban Baseball Milton Jamail Foreword by Larry Dierker “Nobody understands Cuba’s passion for béisbol better than Milton Jamail.

Part travelogue, part investigative report, Full Count covers all the bases.”—Tim Wendel, author of Castro’s Curveball and contributing writer for USA Today Baseball Weekly

176 pages, 25 illus.

ISBN 0-8093-2310-9 $24.95 cloth

“. . . easily the most exhaustive and detailed look at contemporary Cuban baseball.”—Baseball America At bookstores, or from

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Edited by Richard F. Peterson

ALSO NEW THIS SEASON

THE NATIONAL GAME Alfred Spink Foreword by Steven P. Gietschier Originally published in 1910 (with a second, revised edition in 1911), The National Game by Alfred H. Spink is the first important history of baseball, predating Albert J. Spalding’s better-known America’s National Game by a year. Dedicating his first edition, Spink spells out his lofty goal: “I want this book to live forever, so that the names of those who helped to build up and make base ball the greatest of outdoor sports may never be forgotten.” That goal was postponed, however, as Spink’s The National Game has been out of print since 1911.

488 pages ISBN 0-8093-2304-4

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Owning a Piece of the Minors

Jerry Klinkowitz Foreword by Mike Veeck 160 pages, ISBN 0-8093-2194-7, $24.95 cl

The Best Seat in Baseball, But You Have to Stand!

The Game as Umpires See It

Lee Gutkind Foreword by Eric Rolfe Greenberg 224 pages, 11 illus., ISBN 0-8093-2195-5, $12.95 pb

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The New Young American Poets

An Anthology Edited by Kevin Prufer Foreword by Richard Howard “I invite the reader to join me . . . to discover just how real, how rich, how rewarding our new poetry might be,”—Richard Howard

Contributors Demonstrating the range and vitality of the new generation of American writers, The New Young American Poets features the work of forty poets born since 1960.

Now Available 256 pages ISBN 0-8093-2308-7 $49.95 cl ISBN 0-8093-2309-5 $16.95 pb

Sherman Alexie Talvikki Ansel Rick Barot Paul Beatty Erin Belieu Rafael Campo Nick Carbó Joshua Clover Nicole Cooley Denise Duhamel Thomas Sayers Ellis Suzanne Gardinier James Harms Allison Joseph Julia Kasdorf Joy Katz Timothy Liu Khaled Mattawa Jeffrey McDaniel Campbell McGrath

Heidilynn Nilsson Rick Noguchi Barbara J. Orton Alan Michael Parker D. A. Powell Claudia Rankine Matthew Rohrer Ruth L. Schwartz Angela Shaw Reginald Shepherd Larissa Szporluk Ann Townsend Natasha Trethewey Karen Volkman Rachel Wetzsteon Greg Williamson Max Winter Sam Witt Mark Wunderlich Kevin Young

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