56

Editor

Associate Editor

Managing Editor

Manuscripts Editor

Assistant Editor

Design Director

TriQuarterly Fellow

Editorial Assistants

Advisory

Editors

Reginald Gibbons

Bob Perlongo

Molly McQuade

Susan Hahn

Fred Shafer

Gini Kondziolka

Chris Olson

Joe laRusso, Michael Lindsay

David Simpatico, Denise Smith

Robert Alter, Michael Anania, Elliott Anderson, Terrence

Des Pres, Gloria Emerson, Richard Ford, George Garrett, Gerald Graff, Francine du Plessix Gray, Michael S. Harper, David Hayman, Bill Henderson, Maxine Kumin, Elizabeth Pochoda, Michael Ryan

TRIQUARTERLY IS AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ART. WRITING. AND CULTURAL INQUIRY PUBLISHED IN THE FALL. WINTER. AND SPRING AT NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY. EVANSTON. ILUNOIS 60201

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National distributor to retail trade: B. DeBoer, 113 East Central Street-Rear, Nutley, New Jersey 07110. Distributor for West Coast trade: Bookpeople, 2940 Seventh Street, Berkeley, Caltfornta 94710. MIdwest: Bookslinger, 330 East Ninth Street, St. Paul, Minnesota 55101 and Prairie News Agency, 2404 West Hirsch Street, Chicago, lllinors 60622.

Reprints of back issues of Tri�rterlv are available In full format from Kraus Reprmr Company, Route 100, Millwood, New York 10546, and in microfilm from University Microfilms International, 300 North Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106. lSSN: 0041-3097.

With this issue, TriQuarterly welcomes two new Advisory Editors, Elizabeth Pochoda and Michael Ryan.

The settlement of Mars

Frederick Busch

It began for me in a woman's bed, and my father was there though she wasn't. I was nine years old, and starting to age. "Separate vacations," then, meant only adventure to me. My bespectacled mother would travel west to attend a conference about birds; she would stare through heavy binoculars at what was distant and nameable. My father and I would drive through Massachusetts and New Hampshire into Maine, where he and Bill Brown, a friend from the army, would climb Mount Katahdin and I would stay behind at the Brown family's farm.

And it was adventure-in the days away from New York, and in the drive alone with my father in the light-green '49 Chevrolet, and in my mother's absence. For she seemed to be usually angry at someone, and my father struck me as usually pleased with the world, and surely with me. And though I knew enough to understand that his life was something of a secret he didn't tell me, I also knew enough at nine to accept his silence as a gift: peace, which my mother withheld by offering the truth, in codes I couldn't crack, of her discontent.

I remember the dreamy, slow progress of the car on heat-shimmered highways, and my elbow-this never was permitted when we all drove together on Long Island-permanently stuck from the high window. We slept one night in a motel that smelled like iodine, we ate lobster rolls and hot dogs, I discussed the probable settlement of Mars, and my father nodded gravely toward my knowledge of the future.

He gave me close escapes-the long, gray Hudson which almost hit us, because my father looked only ahead when he drove, never to the side or rear, as we pulled out of a service station; the time we had a flat and the jack collapsed twice, the car crashing onto the wheel hub, my father swearing-"Goddamn it!"-for the first time in my hearing; and the time he let the car drift into a ditch at the side ofthe road, pitching us nose-down, rear left-side wheel in the air, shaken and stranded until a farmer on a high tractor towed us out and sent us smiling together on

our way: my father bared his teeth to say, "It's a lucky thing Mother isn't here," while I regretted the decorum I had learned from him-l was not to speak without respect of the woman with binoculars who had journeyed from us.

I thought of those binoculars as we approached the vague shapes of weathered gray buildings, wished that I could stare ahead through them and see what my life, for the next little while, might offer. But the black Zeiss 12 X 50s were thousands of miles from us, and really further than that: they were in my memory of silent bruised field trips, when my father's interest would be in covering ground, and my mother's would be expressed in the spraddle-legged stiffness with which she stared at birds up a slope I knew my father wanted to be climbing.

Bill Brown was short and mild in silver-rimmed glasses. He wore a striped engineer's cap with a long bill, and he smiled at everything my father said. Milly Brown was taller than Bill, and was enormously fat, with wobbling arm flesh and shaking jowls and perpetual streaked flushes on her soft round cheeks. Their daughter, Paula, was fourteen and tall and lean and beautiful. She had breasts. Sweat, such an intimate fact to me, stained the underarms of her sleeveless shirt. She wore dungarees that clung to her buttocks. She rolled the cuffs to just below her knees, and I saw the dusk sun light up golden hairs on her shins. She had been assigned to babysit me for the visit. I could not imagine being babysat by so much of everything I had heard rumored, and was beginning to notice in playgrounds, secrets of the other world.

We ate mashed potatoes and a roast that seemed to heat the kitchen which, like the other rooms in the house, smelled of unwashed bodies and damp earth. I slept that first night on a cot in Paula's room, and I was too tired even to be embarrassed, much less thrilled, by the proximity; I slept in purest fatigue, as if I had journeyed on foot for weeks to another country, in which the air was thin. Next day, we walked the Browns' land-I could not take my eyes from Paula's spiny back and strong thighs as we climbed fences, as she helped me, her child-assignment, up and over and down-and we ate too much hot food, and drank Kool-Aid (forbidden, because too sugary, at home), and we sat around a lot. I rejoiced in such purposelessness, and I suspected that my father enjoyed it too, for our weekend days at home were slanted toward mission; starting each Saturday morning, we tumbled down the long tilted surfaces of the day into weeding and pruning and sweeping and traveling in the silent car to far-offfields to see if something my mother knew to be special was fluttering over marshes in New Jersey or forests in upstate New York.

My father, who made radio advertisements, spoke a little about his

work, and Bill Brown said in his pleased soft voice that he had heard my father's ads. But when Bill said, "Where do you get those crazy ideas, Frank?" my father turned the conversation to potato farming, and the moth collection which Bill and Milly kept together, and the maintenance of trucks. I knew that my father understood nothing about engines. He was being generous again, and he was hiding again while someone else talked of nothing that mattered to the private man who had taught me how to throw a baseball, and how to pack a knapsack, and how-I know this now-to shelter inside other people's words. And there was Paula, too, smoking cigarettes without reprimand, swinging beside me on the high-backed wooden bench which was fastened by chains to the ceiling of their porch. I breathed her smoke as now I'd breathe in perfume on smooth, heated skin.

In reply to a question, my father said, "Angie's in Colorado."

"All the way out there," Milly said.

Bill said, "Well."

"Yes, she had a fine opportunity," my father said. "They gave her a scholarship to this conference about bird migration, I guess it is, and she just couldn't say no."

"I'd like to go there some time," Paula said, sighing smoke out.

"Wouldn't you, though?" Milly growled in her rich voice. "Meet some Colorado boys and such, I suspect?"

"Give them a chance to meet a State of Maine girl, don't forget," Paula said. "Uncle Frank, didn't you want to go to Colorado?"

My father's deep voice rumbled softly. "Not when I can meet a State of Maine girl right here, hon. And don't forget, your father and I already spent some time in Colorado."

"Amen that it's over," Bill said.

"I saw your father learn his manners from a mule out there, didn't I, Bill?

"Son of a bitch stepped so hard on my foot, he broke every damned bone inside it. Just squatted there, Frank, you remember? Son of a bitch didn't have the sense to get off once he'd crushed it. It took Frank jumping up and down and kicking him just to make him wake and look down and notice he already done his worst and he could move along. Leisurely, as I remember. He must of been thinking or something. I still get the bowlegged limps in wet weather. I wouldn't cook a mule and eat one if I was starved to death."

"Well, didn't she-" Paula said.

"Angie," I said. I felt my father look at me across the dark porch.

"Didn't Angie want to come up here and meet us?" Paula asked.

Milly said, "Couldn't you think of any personal questions you would like for Frank to answer for you?"

"Well, I guess I'm sorry, then."

"That's right," Milly said.

"It was one hell of a basic training," Bill said. He said it in a rush. "They had us with this new mountain division they were starting up. Taught us every goddamned thing you could want to know about carrying howitzers up onto mountains by muleback. How to get killed while skiing. All of it. Then, they take about three hundred of us or so and send us by boat over to some hot jungle they once heard of. Ship all our gear with us too, of course. So we land there in the Philippine Islands with snowshoes, skis, camouflage parkas, light machine guns in white canvas covers, for gosh-sakes, and they ask us if we'd win the war for them."

"It took us a while," my father said.

"Didn't it now?"

Bill went inside and returned with a bottle and glasses. He sat down next to my father, and I heard the gurgle, then a smacking of lips and, from my father, a low groan of pleasure, of uncontrol, which I hadn't heard before. New information was promised by that sound, and I folded my arms across my chest for warmth and settled in to learn, from the invisibility darkness offered, and from the rhythm of the rattle of bottle and glass.

I was jealous that Paula wanted boys in Colorado when I was there, and I was resigned-it was like fighting gravity, I knew-to not bulking sizably enough. Their voices seemed to sink into the cold black air and the smell of Paula's cigarettes, and I heard few whole wordsnothing, surely, about my vanished mother, or about my father and me-and what I knew next was the stubbly friction of my father's cheek as he kissed me goodbye and whispered that he'd see me soon. I thought that we were home and that he was putting me to bed. Then, when I heard the coarse noise of Bill's truck, I opened my eyes and saw that I was on the canvas cot in Paula's room in a bright morning in Maine. I was certain that he was leaving me there to grow up as a farmer, and I almost said aloud the first words that occurred to me: "What about school? Do I go to school here?" School meant breakfast, meant wearing clothes taken from the oak highboy in the room in Stony Brook, Long Island, meant coming downstairs to see my father making coffee while my mother rattled at The Times. The enormity of such stranding drove me in several directions as I came from the cot, "What about school?" still held, like scalding soup, behind my teeth and on my wounded tongue.

Paula, at the doorway, shaking a blouse down over her brassiere-I could not move my eyes from the awful power of her underwearcalled through the cloth, "Don't you be frightened. You fell asleep and

you slept deep. Frank and Daddv're climbing, is all. Remember?" Though the cotton finally fell to hide her chest and stomach, I stared there, at strong hidden matters. We ate eggs fried in butter on a woodfired stove while Milly drank coffee and talked about a dull moth which lived on Katahdin and which Bill might bring home. I stared at Paula's lips as they closed around corners of toast and yellow runny yolks.

We shoveled manure into the wheelbarrow Paula let me push, and we fed their dozen cows. One of them she'd named Bobo, and I held straw to Bobo's wet mouth and pretended to enjoy how her nose dripped. I listened to the running-water noises of their stomachs, and I looked at the long stringy muscles in Paula's tanned bare arms. Her face, long like her mother's, but with high cheek bones and wide light eyes, was always in repose, as if she dreamed as she worked while miming for me the nature of her chores and the functions of equipment. I watched the sweat that glistened under her arms and on her broad forehead, and she sounded then like my father, when he took me to his office on a school holiday: I was told about the surfaces of everything I saw, but not of his relation to them, and therefore their relation to me. In Lincoln, Maine, as on East Fifrv-second Street in Manhattan, as in Stony Brook, New York, the world was puzzling and seductive, and I couldn't put my hands on it, and hold.

We went across a blurred meadow that vibrated with black flies and tiny white butterflies which rose and fell like tides. On the crest of a little hill, under gray trees with wide branches and no leaves or fruit, Paula lay flat, groaning as if she were old, and stared up through bugclouds and barren limbs and harsh sun. "Here," she said, patting the sparse fine grass beside her. "Look."

I lay down next to her as tentatively as I might lie now beside a woman whom I'd know I finally couldn't hold. Her arm was almost touching mine, and I thought I could feel its heat. Then the arm rose to point, and I smelled her sweat. "Look," she said again. "He looks like he's resting awhile, but he's hanging onto the air. That's work. He's drifting for food. He'll see a mole from there and strike it too."

Squint as hard as I might, there was nothing for me but bright spots the sun made inside my eyes. I tried to change the focus, as if I looked through my mother's binoculars, but I saw only a branch above us, and it was blurry too. I blinked again; nothing looked right.

"I guess I saw enough birds in my life," I told her.

"That's right, isn't it? Your mother's a bird-watcher. In Colorado, too. I guess there's trouble there."

"They're taking separate vacations this year."

"They sure are. That's what I mean about trouble. Man and wife live

together. That's why they get married. They watch birds together, if that's what they do, and they climb up mountains together, and they sleep together in the same bed. Do Frank and Angie sleep in the same bed?"

I was rigid lest our arms touch, and the question made me stiffer. "I don't see your mother climbing any mountains," I said.

"Well, she's too fat, honey. Otherwise she would. And if this wasn't a trip for your father and mine to take alone, a kind of special treat for them, you can bet me and Momma would be there, living out of a little canvas tent and cooking for when Daddy came back down, bug-bit and chewed up by rocks. And you won't find but one bed for the two of them. I still hear them sometimes at night. You know. Do you?"

"Oh, sure. I hear my mom and dad too." That was true: I heard them talking in the living room, or washing dishes after a party, or playing music on the Victrola. "Sure," I said, suspecting that I was soon to learn things terrible and delicious, and worried not only because I was ashamed of what I didn't hear, but because, if I did hear them, I wouldn't know what they meant. The tree limb was blurred, still, and I moved to rub my eyes.

Then that girl of smells-her cigarette smoke layover the odor of the arm she'd raised-and of fleshy swellings and mysterious belly and the awesome mechanics of brassieres, the girl who knew about me and my frights, about my parents and their now-profound deficiencies, said gently, "Come on back to my room. I'll show you something."

When she stood, she took my hand; hers was rough and dry and strong. She pulled me back over field and fences, and I thrilled to the feel of flesh as much as I hated the maternity with which she towed me. But I thought, too, that something alarming was about to be disclosed. I couldn't wait to be told, though I was scared.

Milly was putting clothes through a mangle near the rain barrel, and she waved as we passed. We went through cool shadows into the room Paula had decorated with Dick Powell's picture, and Gable's, and on the far wall a blurred someone with a mustache wore tights and feathered hat and held a sword.

"My library," she said, opening the closet. "Here." And on shelves, stacked, and in shaggy feathering heaps on the closet floor, were little yellowing books and bright comics and magazines which told the truth about the life of Claudette Colbert and Cary Grant. I doubt that she knew what I needed, for she was mostly a teenage kid on a little farm in Maine. She wasn't magical, except to me in her skin, although she was smarter than me about the life I nearly knew I led. But something made her take me from the swarm of sun and insects, the high-hanging

invisible bird of prey-that place where, she possibly knew, I sensed how much of my life was a secret to me-and she installed me on the dirty floor of a dirty house, in deepening afternoon, half-inside a closet where, squinting, I fell away from the world and into pictures, words.

I read small glossy-jacketed books, little type on crumbling wartime paper, some line drawings, about Flash Gordon and Ming the Merciless and the plight of the always-kidnapped Dale. I read about death rays and rockets that went to Mars from Venus as quickly as they had to for the sake of mild creatures with six arms who were victimized by Ming's high greed. Dale and the other women had very pointed breasts and often said, "Oh, Flash, do you really think so?"

And there was Captain Marvel, whose curling forelock was so much like Superman's, but whom I preferred because I thought we looked alike and because he never had to bother to change his clothes to get mighty: he said Shazam! and a lightning bolt made him muscular and capable of rescuing women with long legs. I read of Superboy, whose parents in Smallville were so proud of him. Littler worlds, manageable by me, and on my behalf by people who could change, whether in phone booths or storerooms or explosions of light, into what they needed to be: Aqua-Man, Spider Man, the Green Lantern, wide, nostriled Wonder Woman in her glass airplane, and always Flash and Dale, "Oh, Flash, do you really think so?"

For a while, Paula sat behind me, cross-legged on her bed, reading fan magazines and murmuring of Gary Cooper's wardrobe and the number of people Victor Mature could lift into the air. When she went out, she spoke and I answered, but I don't remember what we said. I leaned forward in the darkness, squinting and forgetting to worry that I had to screw my face around my eyes in order to see, and I stayed where I was, which was away.

They had a radio, and we listened to it for a while after dinner, and then Milly showed me, in a room off the kitchen, board after board on which dead moths were stiffly pegged. I squinted at them and said "Wow," and while Paula and Milly sat in sweaters on the porch and talked, I squatted in the closet's mouth, under weak yellow light, and started Edgar Rice Burroughs' The Chessmen of Mars. When Paula entered to change into nightclothes, I was lured from the cruel pursuit of Dejah Thoris by Gahan of Gathol, for the whisper of doth over skin was a new music. But I went back with relief to "The dazzling sun, light of Barsoom clothed Manator in an aureole of splendor as the girl and her captors rode into the city through the Gate of Enemies."

When Paula warned me that the lights were going off, I stumbled toward my cot, and when they were out I undressed and went to sleep,

telling myself stories. And next day, after breakfast, and a halfhearted attempt to follow her through chores, I walked over the blurred field to the rank shade of Paula's room, and I sat in the closet doorway, reading of Martian prisons, and heroes who hacked and slew, unaware that I had neither sniffed nor stared at her, and worried only that I might not finish the book and start another before my father and Bill returned. They didn't, and we ate roast beef hash and pulpy carrots, and Milly worked in the shed on the motor of their kitchen blender while Paula listened to "Henry Aldrich" and I attended to rescues performed by the Warlord of Mars.

It was the next afternoon when my father and Bill returned in the truck. They were dirty and tired and beaming, and they smelled like woodsmoke. My father hugged me and kissed me so hard that he hurt me with his unshaved cheeks. He swatted my bottom and rubbed my shoulders with his big hands. Bill presented Milly with a dirty little moth and she clapped her hands and trilled. Paula smoked cigarettes and sat on the porch between Bill and my father, listening, as if she actually cared, to Bill's description of how well my father had done to follow him up Abel's Slide, where the chunks of stone were like steps too high to walk, too short and smooth to climb, and up which you had to spring, my father broke in to say, "Like a goat in a competition. I thought my stomach would burst, following this-this kid. That's you, Bill, part mountain goat and part boy. I don't know how you stayed young for so long. You were the oldest man in the outfit, and what you did was you stayed where you were and I got ancient."

"Nah. Frank, you're in pretty good shape. For someone who makes his living by sitting on his backside. I'll tell you that. You did swell."

"Well, you did better. How's that?"

Bill swallowed beer and nodded. "I'd say that's right."

And they both laughed hard, in a way the rest of us could only smile at and watch.

"Damn," my father said, smiling so wide. "Damn!"

My head felt hot and the skin of my face was too tight for whatever beat beneath it. They were shimmery shapes in the afternoon light, and I rubbed my eyes to make them work in some other way. But what I saw was as through a membrane. Perhaps it was Paula's cool hand on my face that did it, and the surge of smells, the distant mystery of her older skin and knowledge which I suddenly remembered to be mastered by. Perhaps it was the distance my father had traveled over and from which, as I learned from the privacies of his laughter, he still had not returned. Perhaps it was Milly, sitting on the porch steps next to Bill, her hand on his thigh. Or perhaps it was the bird I couldn't see which hung over Lincoln, Maine, drifting to dive. I pushed my face against Paula's hard hand and I rubbed at my eyes and I started to

weep long coughing noises which frightened me as much as they must have startled the others.

My father's hobbed climbing boots banged on the porch as he hurried to hold me, but I didn't see him because I knew that if I opened my eyes I would know how far the blindness had progressed. I didn't want to know anything more. He carried me inside while I wailed like an hysterical child-which is what I was, and what I'm sure I felt relieved to be. I listened to their voices when they'd stilled my weeping and asked me questions about pain. I swallowed aspirin with Kool-Aid and heard my father discover the comics and the books I'd read while on my separate vacation. And the relief in his voice, and the smile I heard riding on his breath, served to clench my jaw and lock my hands above my eyes. Because he knew, and they knew, and I still didn't, though I now suspected, because I always trusted him, that I wouldn't die and probably wouldn't go blind.

"Just think of your mother's glasses, love," he whispered while the others walked from the room. He sat on the bed and stroked my face around my fists, which still stayed on my eyes. "Mother has weak eyes, and these things can be passed along-the kids can get them from their parents."

"You mean I caught it from her?"

The bed I was in, Paula's bed-l smelled her on the pillow and the sheets-shook as he nodded and continued to stroke my face. "Like that. Just about, yes. I bet when we go home, and we go to the eye doctor, he'll put a chart up for you to read. Did you have these tests in school? He'll ask you to read the letters, and he'll say you didn't see them too clearly, and he'll tell us to get you some glasses. And that's all. I promise. It isn't meningitis, it isn't polio-" "Polio?" I said. "Polio?"

"No," he said. "No. No, it isn't a sickness. I'm sorry I said that. I was worried for a minute, but now I'm not, I promise. You hear? I'm promising you. Your eyes are weak. Your head'11 feel better from the aspirin-it's just eyestrain, love. It's nothing more."

"Yeah," I said. "Some dumb vacation. I should have gone with Mommy."

I lay in a woman's bed, and in the warmth of her secrets, and in the rich smell of what was coming to me. And my father sat there as his large hands gentled my face. His hands never left me. I dropped my fists, though I kept my eyes closed tight. I felt his strong fingers, roughened by rocks, as they ran along my eyebrows, touched my cheeks, my hairline, my forehead, then eyebrows again, over and over, until, with great gentleness, they dropped upon the locked lids, and he said, "No, no, this is where you should be." So I hid beneath my father's hands, and I rested awhile.

Veterans

Evan K. Margetson

The scar that J. G. brought home from 'Nam was not made by a bullet. He got it from a VC prisoner Charlie Company ran a train on in Quang Tri. She had passed out from an overdose of fun but that didn't stop the party. When she woke up J. G. was on top and she took a yank out of his cheek like it was a cheeseburger. He knocked her back out, finished his turn, and then snuffed her with his bayonet. The story of the look on his face when the little beaver woke up was famous on the front. Hell, it was folklore, he had been a star.

Before he got back, J. G. didn't think much about what he would tell people concerning the dent in his face. In the war he had never been anything but proud of it and how he got it. So tonight in the bar, he hadn't been really ready when the woman he was talking to, a bold brown sister with her hair in long braids, just asked him straight out, "Say, brother, how'd you get your beauty mark there?"

The truth suddenly did not seem all that heroic, and in fact would probably have blown his rap.

"I was in 'Nam," he said. "I got this in an ambush."

"Yeah? Who was ambushing who?" she asked.

"I guess we did it to them," J. G. said.

"You had to get close, huh?" she asked.

"One damn near bit my nose off is how I got this," J. G. said. He let her get a better look.

"He gave you the serious Vietnamese facial," she said.

"Yeah, but I gave him the Horrible Harlem nose job with my M� 16," J. G. said.

"You a dangerous man then. I don't know if I should even be talking to you."

"Nah, it ain't like that, baby. I'm just patriotic, you know?" J. G. said.

"Hey, it's Mr. Uncle Sambo himself!" she said and leaned back to laugh.

J. G. was snapping along till his look froze on her throat. His scar was burning and itching and he started sweating like he had a fever.

"Hey, brother, are you too high or is there a bug on my neck?" she asked him.

J. G. tried to smile but it carne out mean. He felt like dragging her out by those braids and putting it to her on the hood of a car. He wanted to kiss her.

She stepped back from him. "You scaring me, man," she said.

J. G. refocused his eyes and said, "Don't mean to, baby. I only been back for a few days is all. Ain't no sisters in 'Nam."

"Well, we still here," she said.

"You right," J. G. said, "but I ain't sorry."

"Don't be," she said. "Just don't be looking at me like that cause when I get scared I get mad and you don't know how wild I can be."

"Whoa, lighten up," J. G. said. "It's just that you were looking so fine I had to take a long hard scope to more totally comprehend the magnitude of the star I am having the pleasure of conversing with."

"Now you talking, brother," she said. "C'mon, you still know how to party, right?"

"What?" J. G. said. "Baby, the day I forget how to boogie will be the day I died."

"All right, let's see it then," she said.

J. G. put his hand on her waist and they strolled over to the dance floor.

It was rocking. Thighs were thumping, butts were bumping, sweat was flowing from 'fros and processes alike.

"Work the mad out y'all!" somebody shouted.

"I hear you, brother!"

Jitterbugs and ladybirds were stepping and skating, frowning and grinning, mixing slick mad moves in a soul deep groove.

"Ouch! Too mean, girl!"

"Later for Nixon! He can't stop this jam!"

J. G. was dipping and gyrating to Tandra's slides and motorized spirals. They were getting down so hard that J. G. forgot about his face. All he could see was hers and it was making him feel downright holy.

"I see you stepping, soldier!"

"Got to, baby, to keep up with you!"

"Well, look out-I'm just getting started!"

"Won't shake me, lady, I am on the case!"

]. G. pulled a turnaround squat and caught a view from under of Tandra, her eyes slitted and her head laid back to the side. She had a look on her face like the music was making direct hits on her pleasure centers and the ball of mirrors hanging from the ceiling behind her was the fireworks. ]. G. eased up slow, following the curves of her body with his hands, inspecting the goods so close he bumped his nose on a tit and could smell nature under her arms.

The funk was fading out and mellow horns said a slow tune was coming on. All around ]. G. and Tandra bodies were answering that call-to-grind and starting to rub the creases out of each other's clothes. ]. G. shouted "Thank you, brother!" to the D] for his timing, put his arms around those smooth brown shoulders and made heavenly frontal contact. Her sweet hot spot was burning his crotch. He went for a cheek-to-cheek so he could whisper and croon some, but when she felt that cool slick part of his on hers she flinched and drew back. She put her hands on his chest and smiled like she was sorry.

"I'm going to take a little break, sugar, O.K.?" she said.

She tried to slip away but ]. G. wasn't letting go so easy.

"What's the matter," he said, "you don't like this song?"

"It's all right, I just want to take a break I said "

"Hey, I can put my face on the good side so "

"Your face is cool, man. I think it must be the pace-you know?" She pushed against him a little harder.

"We could just stand here and move real slow,"]. G. said and tried to pull her tighter.

"Maybe you not getting the message!" she said, and stamped on his foot.

"Aaaw shit!" ]. G. let go and Tandra sashayed over to the bar. ]. G. shouted out to her back, "If we was in the war, I'd kill you, bitch!"

She stopped, turned around slow and said, "What?! Well, come on then, motherfucker!" She whipped something out of the disco bag she had over her shoulder. "I got something for your ass!" she shouted. It was a small piece but she was coming at]. G.like she knew how to use it. The dance floor had cleared like magic and he was left standing alone under the mirror-ball.

Tandra came right up to]. G. and jabbed the petite firearm in his stomach. "Well? Now what did you say, Mr. So Bad?" she said.

"Back off, brother!" somebody said.

"Shouldn't mess with Tandra!"

"They need to take that outside!"

J. G. looked her up and down. He hooked his thumbs under his armpits and cleared his throat. He said into her eyeball, "I'm the killer dick of the DMZ, I'm the one-man train of Charlie Company. I got a grenade for my left nut and a land mine on the right. I got a bazooka in the middle that'll make you holler all night!"

Their faces were so close they could've kissed. On the sidelines folks were enjoying the show.

"Talk yo' way out of it, bro'!"

"Five dollars says she fires him up!"

"She will do it too!"

"Quiet y'all-what's she saying now?"

Tandra dug the piece deeper into J. G.'s ribs. "That ain't what you said. Now I want to hear what you said about ME!"

J. G. looked around but all he could see was shadows in the smoke and no help. He thought about breaking her arm, but he wasn't that mad anymore. He felt like there was a spotlight on his scar. He sucked his teeth like he was bored and looked down at her.

"I said .if we was back in the war .for what you just did to my foot? I would have dusted you!" As he said the last thing he grabbed her hand and jerked it up so she fired into the ceiling. She dropped the iron and J. G. kicked it away.

"Lemme out of here!"

"They ain't playing now!"

Tandra connected with a left hook to J. G.'s eye before he could pin her arms. Her voice was going supersonic in his ear. "Who you think you messing with, nigger? I'll kill your ass!" She was trying to bite and scratch and was shaking her head so that her braids whipped]. G. on his neck. "I'll cut up the other side of your ugly face!"

The bouncers showed up now that the gun was out of the way and pulled J. G. and Tandra apart. One dragged her over to the bar while the other two wrestled]. G. across the floor and out the door with him shouting, "That's right, this is ]. G. from the DMZ, baby-and don't you forget it!"

They took him outside and dropped him on the sidewalk. They stomped on his chest a couple of times for effect. "Yo', man," one of them said. "Don't show around here no more, or you gonna wish you was back at the war, dig? We don't go for that gorilla shit here-so check yourself out. You in civilization now, understand?" The two heroes went back inside.

J. G. pulled himself up on the fender of a car and brushed himself off. Two obvious bulls in a bogus taxi rolled by. He gave them the finger and bopped up the street, trying to figure out how much cash he could get together for a ticket to somewhere.

Up on Broadway he bought a beer in a deli and copped a jay from a

no-toothed Puerto Rican outside the porno movie house. After he smoked he felt like the buildings were closing in on him so he crossed to the traffic island separating the up and downtown lanes. There was a bench on it and he sat down to drink his beer. He felt better on the island. He could see people coming from far away and anybody would be able to see him. If they were too scared to pass him by he wouldn't have to see their faces when they made up their minds.

J. G. downed the rest of his brew and threw the bottle so it broke in the street. He wished it were a grenade. "Shirl" He started poking the air like on some unbeliever's chest. "That's right, baby, I'm one dangerous motherfucker, so you better cross the street when you see me coming. My scar is my star and if you stop and stare I say you better be-ware!" The street was quiet like all the buildings were listening close. J. G. stood up to testify better. "I got a M, 16 in my left hand, I got a rocket launcher in my right, I'm a master of camouflage, I'll show up in your bed one night. I'm the runaway train of Charlie Company, I'm the raging blaze of the J. G. stopped.

A little white-haired old white lady was crossing the street right to where J. G. was preaching. She was looking him straight in the eye and came and sat down on the bench. She was wearing a black wool coat even though it was hot out, and she had a red plastic rose pinned to her collar. She was so small her feet were swinging inches off the ground. Her face was so wrinkled that her tiny blue eyes seemed like they were peering out at J. G. from behind some bushes. She was carrying a thermos jug under her arm.

She kept staring at J. G. and it was making him mad. "What you staring at, lady?" he said. "You never see a cold killer before?" He gave her his worst side.

She squinted up at him. "You don't look so bad," she said. "Your eyes are too pinchy, but I think all you need is some good fresh fruit."

"Hey! You got that right," J. G. said. "I'd like to pluck me some right now."

She started to unscrew the thermos.

"What you got there, mama?" J. G. said.

She used the top for a cup and poured something clear into it and took a sip. She passed it to him. "You thirsty, maybe?" she said. J. G. took the cup and smelled what was in it. Straight gin. "You old fox, you," he said. He sat down, wiped some spit offthe cup-edge and tossed back the shot. "That was one on-time taste, grandma." The bench started feeling a little more comfortable.

The old lady poured out another splash. "I don't really need this, you know," she said. "I only drink it for want of something better." She downed her shot.

"Yeah, I hear that," J. G. said. He reached for the thermos. "This

good liquor will keep you away from that cheap wine." He took a swig out of the bottle and poured one for the old lady. ]. G. settled back and lit a cigarette.

They looked up the avenue at the traffic lights changing.

"I like the night life," the old lady said. "I often come by here and if by chance someone is sitting and they are friendly, then we can chat. It helps me to sleep."

]. G. was mellow, blowing smoke rings. "Chat on, baby," he said.

"In the daytime all these people want to talk about their operations, but I never had an operation so I don't have anything to say to them." She sipped her drink.

"Must be that fresh fruit keeping the doctor away," ]. G. said.

"That's right!" the old lady said. "And you want to know some, thing?" She gave ]. G. a sly look and waved him closer.

"What's that, mama?"

She whispered in ]. G.'s ear. "I never ever woke up to an alarm clock-but I always got to work on time!"

"Hey, don't let the CIA find out," ]. G. said.

"Oh, I'm not afraid of them." She banged her cup on the bench. "I was never afraid in my whole life!"

]. G. took another hit from the thermos. "We shoulda had you in 'Narn, baby."

She held her glass out for a refill. "I wasn't afraid of my father," she said. "He wanted me to marry one ugly cousin of mine but I wasn't going to have any of that! I got on that boat and came over here all by myself. That's right. And everybody got seasick-but not me. Happy as a lark I was."

"We coulda put you on river patrol," ]. G. said. He flicked his cigarette into a greasy puddle.

"I heard a story once," she said. "There was this epidemic of some disease, influenza I think it was, and two hundred and fifty thousand people died. Well, one brave fellow decided that he would go con, gratulate Death. So he goes on a long journey and finally finds him. And he says to Death, 'Congratulations on your success, sir-the epidemic killed two hundred and fifty thousand people.' And you know what Death said?"

]. O. took a slug of the gin. "I'm ready," he said.

She stared into]. G.'s eyes. "So Death says, Well, I thank you very much but the epidemic only took away one hundred thousand-it was Fear that brought me the rest!'"

]. G. scratched his scar. "Yeah, I guess he will do that," he said.

"Huh? Isn't that a good one?" She jabbed ]. O. in his arm and started laughing till she was coughing and her head was almost on her knees.

j. O. patted her on her little cricket's back. "That's one hip story, mama-you all right?"

"I'm fine, fine," she said and doubled over again coughing.

"Don't go dying on me now," j. O. said. He patted her on her shoulders some more. He felt kind of silly and was thinking what did that crazy rap have to do with him? She looked up and had tears in the corners of her eyes.

"I just feel a bit tired is all," she said. "Do you mind if I ?" She laid her head on j. O.'s shoulder. He wanted to pull away but he didn't. He thought her head was about as light as a cigarette ash.

j. O. heard a whistle. Across the street, the dude he had copped the reefer from was making circles with his finger to his ear. "Aw shit," j. O. said.

The old lady's head slipped off his shoulder onto his chest and she started snoring. He wanted another smoke but she was leaning on the pocket where his pack was. A bus groaned by and j. O. watched a ball of paper rolling in the slipstream. He remembered he had been wanting to go somewhere.

The very dead

Meredith Steinbach

Teiresias, the boy.

That Europa, Agenor's daughter-skinny and impressionable-had been tantalized by the form the god had taken: the pure white hide of the immense animal, the one black mark of death on his forehead, and the cool pink horns. "Oh, what perfect sport it was, when it started," Teiresias' mother told him. "The small child with the russet hair rushing toward the bull, the one never before among her father's cattle, her father's cattle never before on the beach.

"Up sprang the other girls' warnings as she plucked the bright blue {lowers from the rocky seascape and flung them at the beast. Behind her, the companions' cries-like a lyre.

"Closer she skipped as passively the bull rested, his eyes on Knossos, on the rising tide of the Mediterranean between Tyre and that Island. Her buds pelted the black star, the white nest of fur between his horns; and the bull's mild breath issued from the downy nostrils, moistening the edges of her open bodice and the swellings there. Her little chest was unpainted; she was that young.

"And try, Teiresias. Imagine Europa's surprise: to find the bull so gentle toward her-rubbing its long dewlaps against her shoulder, nuzzling her arms. Then, flaunting her courage before her playmates, Europa mounted the god himself, her skirts hiked up to her thighs, her pink toes spurring his hairy flanks.

"The shore people stand as witnesses-they were the ones who saw

it," Teiresias' mother said in answer to her son. Round and round went the brush as Chariklo started at the periphery of one breast, painting toward the center, stopping now and then to change from purple to silver, outlining every segment with a thin black shape. Meticulously she spiraled in on herself until, the young boy saw, she had completed half her morning preparations, she had made a final ring of blue-black specks and at the center one sharp crimson dot. She had chosen the red, she said, because they were going off to meet a friend who had a particular liking for that color although the friend, a god, was not calm enough herself to wear it.

Lightly she oiled the other breast and dusted it with powder. The little boy watched the camel-hair brush dipping into the pallet. The brush had come from Egypt, from Thebes-the other one, Chariklo said, smiling at him with her enormous gray-green eyes in that engaged way that made him think of owls. Teiresias watched her nipple wrinkling like fine cloth, standing out as slowly the brush approached it. "The other Thebes," she blinked. "The one in Egypt." In the window, his back to the courtyard, he felt his little legs swing out, bounce back off the summer currents of the room that meant to him the things he saw, and then he felt the sudden jolt at the heels of his sandals as they struck against the wall beneath him: what he felt. Back and forth he pumped his stumpy legs, hoping she would not again interrupt herself. He waited for the song in his ancestry to rise up, fall again, and soar in the oblivion of his mother's voice.

The child was on the animal, the boy was in the window, the brush moved back and forth: "'Oh, look out!' the little girls shouted after her as they saw Europa's womanhood approaching vaguely now, for the bull had begun to amble, slowly, toward the water. It was then that the great god Zeus, in bull's attire, walked cheerfully into the sea, swimming with his prize astride his back; and it is said that the sudden moisture of her hot wet tears was no less than that of the ocean his underparts were parting then.

"All life's matters are relative things," his mother said, "even for the young and impressionable, and what would seem from afar a terrible or a beautiful fate might have looked quite the opposite to a young girl setting her foot again on solid but confusing ground, or to us thinking of it now in our homes, or from the viewpoint of an old man mending nets on the beach. One old man was said to have witnessed it, but all he would say was a bull, a girl, and an eagle on the wing. Which was wise," his mother said. "It is no small matter to infuriate a god who may at any moment turn himself or a man to a beast.

''It is said that the bull turned his amber eyes halfway around in his

head to see the slender girl standing beside him, clinging to his ear. In thought, he pawed the ground beside her scrawny legs, her delicate feet. When Europa looked again, her hand was resting on an eagle's head. Even gods show a little pity now and then.

"And who is to say how Europa felt? She would never answer questions, and it is not for gods to speak of their activities to men. Perhaps when he parted her legs with his bitter talons, feathers were lost in the fray; perhaps that day she drew the ichor of a god with her human hand, and rightly so-some say. Maybe the god folded her in the soft down of his new-formed wings as he took her from behind. And then again, perhaps she stroked his golden beak and welcomed him. After all, young women, too, have their own desires. There are many points of view.

"Needless to say, the thing was done. The penis of a bird entered the body of a woman; and three sons were born.

"But that is a matter faraway from you sitting there in your tunic, with the sun in the window behind your head, from me sitting here each morning painting my breasts, and also from the manner in which this little girl's obsessive brother Kadmos, now our king, determined the fate of Thebes."

From the window he could see a sparrow perched across the way, a sprig of cypress clutched in its beak. Teiresias saw the mottled chest, the dark green twig, the small splayed feet.

"Will you think of it!"

Startled, the bird rose in an are, turned on the wind, and disappeared. Teiresias, too, twisted at the sound; he felt his own little neck turn halfway around to face the center of the room. "When once you set out finally to do something, Teiresias," his mother was saying to him now, the orange-tipped brush pointed his way, "put your goods down in the marketplace. Take your chance. Do not sway in the face of distraction. Above all, keep your head!"

But the boy Teiresias had not at all been tempted toward disloyalties, nor had he been by the little bird. She is painting too fast, he thought; she will stop before Father even gets into the story again. And then it was as if he had had two thoughts at once, and nothing was lost for either one in company. They had borne each other up. He set the image of the bird as in a ring around what his mother said. Wing to wing-eagle to sparrow and eagle again-around the picture of what he heard. His mother smiled at him, poured little drops of paint in a vibrant circle around the board she held up in her hand.

"All the sons of Agenor were shipped out of Phoinikia-" she said, "the wife and mother, too-in pursuit of Europa, that sparkle turned cinder in her father's eye. Phoinix, Kilix, Phineus, Thasus-each went his own way in search of the red-black hair, the lost child. Kadmos, that eldest brother, wrapped his young arm around his mother's shoulder and together they set the straight horn of his ship into a polished sea. On that ship it was as if their goals were bound together for the first time in their lives; or so the report came back. Telephassa, the anxious mother, said Europa even in her sleep. In a rocking sea, she woke up crying at the thought of a bull dancing on its two hind feet. "Yes," her son called from the next compartment. "There." Briefly he tossed. "We will." But now we know that Kadmos was saving a word that he would not have uttered aloud. To himself, he said: Escape.

"Now, our king was civilized in his youth-as became all too apparent to his mother, Telephassa, who had brought him up that way. Wherever he went he caused civilization to spring up. It was a storyteller's dream; it was every mother's hope finally realized. No, he could not bear the uncultured life, and everywhere set about rectifying the countryside-while his mother put her face into both her hands and walked about with the little girl's face cupped before her glossy eyes. It has been said that there is a season for each deed, each desire; and this adage Telephassa was forced to emphasize more than once in conversation with her son who was everywhere commanding warriors to engineer instantaneous towns and courts, highways, fountains, and sewage ducts. In her grief, she could not understand that just as some cannot bring themselves to speak to the ill or defamed, the romantic Kadmos could not even think of looking at his sister again.

"It is not often that a mother gives life to two such children, Teiresias, so different from their mother, so like one another. Here was the one completely taken in by the country life, by a bullock with tinted horns-and the other obsessed with engineering mansions, shanties, huts and shacks, central water ducts, walls and ascending ramps. Under stress, the king you've seen being carried through the streets, was in his youth unable to reconcile himself to a hammock slung between two trees. Neither one of the children-the poor mother cried-had a thought for balance in anything! For three years the mother swayed and sighed." His mother stopped.

Again Teiresias looked up to find the source of silence in his mother's voice. Again he felt the two worlds collide: then and now. "Are you tired?" she asked.

"The cow, the snake, the cow," he cried.

"All right," she said. She reached out as if to pat him across the distance of that room. The hand went up and down on air and he felt it in his hair. She nodded, and on it went.

"It was in Thrakia that Telephassa, that mother, the Great Aunt of us all, took her stand. She looked out over the Edonian's highway where that road wound through open spaces like a peculiar line on a wrinkled face. Out from the Edonian city it went through rocky ground and unadorned hillsides salted with sheep. It stretched like a ribbon all the way up the farthest incline, and there it stopped. Beyond it there was nothing at all. She saw the warriors clustered together and her son pointing toward it with a stick, sketching buildings, bridges in the air. It was there in Thrakia that Telephassa-that weary mother of Kadmos, Phineus, Thasus, Phoinix, Kilix, and Europa-raised one finger toward her industrious son and died to her own relief.

"It cannot be said that Kadmos did not mourn his mother. Even a rose misses its thorns if somehow they are lost. For years he had lodged his worries in her. His fears about his sister had consolidated themselves in his mother's quavering voice; and he had discounted them like any normal son who was coming of age. But now-just as when the hired mourners pick up their things and leave-the burden fell on Kadmos, and it came in a doubled weight. He could not think of his mother without thinking of his sister; he could not think of Europa without thinking unthinkable thoughts. Carried away by a bull. He had not seen it himself, but he had been told. Zeus, the people had said with the strange smiles on their lips of those who love bad jokes: Zeus, the active god, had taken her. That night after his mother had risen up in the funeral pyre and settled again over the valley in a fine gray dust, an oracle speaking for Athena came to him, or so he said-though if you were to ask now the proper one you would hear quite something else. You would hear that the Athena you know had nothing at all to do with it. You would hear that Kadmos' guilt took on the most simple shape, and that was what he sought. He would take his men and follow a cow until he found his sister and set his mother's dust to rest. Around the country he followed the confused animal, giving way to his old obsessions at every turn. He laid down the foundations of the world wherever that cow lifted up its tail. Yes! The beginnings of our king, no less. And that is the way of all civilizations," Chariclo said, flinging her dark hair back. "They begin in dung and end in dung, and in between: a great flourishing of growth.

"Now then, all men are filled with youthful folly sometime in their lives, as you already know. To most this comes early on, when it is

easily forgiven as being the nature of the beast; to others it continues like a scurrilous disease distorting and dementing the activities of those who are so innocent as to venture near the man; to others it comes only late in life. Kadmos had a little bit of each. Such is the making of great men. If he had possessed even slightly more or less than what he had, he would have earned a far less significant place.

"A vision of home came to him one day as he stepped absentmindedly along the road, giving up his chariot for the sake of exercise. His mind was not for once on his work. One of his men had counted it out for him: it was his birthday-his nineteenth year-and he was thinking of his personal history as all people do when an anniversary comes around. Oh! he cried aloud, for he just then remembered his soft Phoinikian bed in which he lay as a boy staring at the cracks that even there traversed the ceiling like glorious viaducts. He had seen the ceramic pots lined up like vats on his window sill and his private bath with its imperturbable new plumbing. He had seen his mother's own plump maids grown now into eagerness for his engineering ways.

"On he strolled, dreaming of his own place in the world, to which he could not return, following almost automatically the receding haunches of the cow which had led him through brambles and thickets, over beds of shale. Now suddenly the distant orange flanks loomed large. For this, Kadmos needed no oracle. He had placed his sandaled foot smack in the middle of the modern world: something steaming, something ghastly, large and warm.

"At his shout, throughout the skeletal town, something stirred again in his men that had not budged for years. They threw down their tools and thought the thoughts of warriors; they catapulted to his side. Here they found our king leaping up and down, shouting into the wind at a small orange speck swatting flies on a distant hill. He had stepped, cried out our leader, in the blasted, ultimate, and last site of his building career! Back and forth he paced on that narrow strip of land that is now the street in front of our own house, dragging one foot deliberately through the weeds and calling for the cow and battleax.

"When his warriors had returned with them, Kadmos set forth his first decree. Musical instruments, he declared, would be strung around each bovine neck. Vaguely his men smiled as they sat at his feet. They scratched their heads, imagining it. They looked a long while into their brass armbands. Henceforth, bells-he clarified-would serve as a warning to all who came after cows in years to come, on earth or in the underworld, to keep always the strictest presence of mind. The tinkle would serve as his personal salute to Athena, who knew always where to step and when.

"Bewildered, the men were dismissed to the spring to shovel up water for the sacrifice; and Kadmos was left to curse his authoritarian father, his wayward sister, his domineering mother, his own obsequious life as he tethered a cow: most accursed, brown-eyed, flat-footed thing. He sharpened his ax. It was then that he heard the tune rising up, slowly at first, as if it were merely a part of his self-admonishments, a sort of incantation in the background of his immature distress. He lifted up his head. It was as if all his men were singing together and each one without half his tongue. When Kadmos reached the water, he found them in a bunch, as if they had gathered there with the intention to converse. And there, wrapped entirely round and round their collective waist, was a highly respectable snake-if size alone is reason for respectability, as is so often said.

II How Kadmos killed the snake is of little consequence, as there are many varying reports and you have heard them all: Some say he poked its eyes out with a branch whittled from the poplar tree; others say he tickled it to death with the pinfeather of the native grouse tied to a long stake. Kadmos' own story as he ages is no less variable than the rest.

"When the snake had died, his men fell apart, one from the other, as petals do when even the smallest flower blooms and wilts and casts out parts of itself finally onto the ground. From this ongoing collapse, those few survivors crawled, gasping, away to watch in humility their less fortunate companions fall straight over like felled trees. For Kadmos, very little, as we have seen, has ever been enough. Let us say just this=-wild-eved and unpredictable as a sphinx, the young Kadmos sprang upon the viper's corpse, hacking it into unsavory bits, crying out epithets and yanking from its yellow throat a heap of glittering teeth. Upon this pile of carnage, that youth-who had, even at nineteen, never known the body of man or woman-the man who is now our king, swore an oath and spat.

II From the rock soil and those serpent teeth, by way of Kadmos' finicky watering-and to his bleak astonishment-sprang up spears like young asparagus and with them the forearms of living men, and then the fully clad bodies of an ancestor and several relatives of yours. On each man was the mark that all of us, who have come through that long line from snake to man, now bear. No, it was not a blemish: more of a brand, wine�red and shaped like the head of a spear."

The young seer looked toward his mother. It made him dizzy to think of it, to look at her. The one breast spiraled one way; the other spun left until the viewer warmed the fingers of his spirit on the bright red centers of those orbs. "And that," she said, "was the beginning of your father's family and yours." She pulled her coat on and motioned toward the door. "There you have it." But what did he have? What was it in the speech of an eagle, he asked himself, that could determine the fate of the willowy young girl, the fate of his own family, of Knossos and Thebes?

They say that when even the smallest fish jumps, a circle is formed and then another, that its leap is felt on every shore. I have never seen such a thing, but they say it is true. My father took me to hunt turtles once. I suppose in a way it is a similar thing. The turtle, my father said, was the most ancient and therefore the wisest of living beings. Even then, starting on the long road to the sea, I thought-there are many ways of looking at the world. We started out from town on foot. I remember my mother leaning out, half-painted in the early morning, from the window. Her eyes were very large. Which side she had completed in her toiletries escapes me now. Perhaps it was the left. Then again, right is a good enough approach to things.

"It is most important in the hunt-" my father said, clearing his throat as he often did when the need for authority hampered his voice, "to adopt the turtle's every thought." I was only seven then, and this was not hard to do. When my father laid his hand on my back, it was as if a golden carapace had settled there.

In my father's lifelong search for wisdom, he rarely allowed his thoughts to interfere with his stride. On this day there was no exception. He possessed two long, thickly muscled legs bronzed by the sun; and on these he moved along so rapidly that every once in a while, to my great embarrassment, he would turn and find me gone. "Well?" he asked. His stern blue eyes and long blond hair had made him something of a god in our dark community, and as he stared at me I felt my own lank dark hair growing darker still in his view. As I had no answer to his question, finally the moment passed. I kept up with him for a while until slowly I saw again the one blue vein throbbing at the back

of his knee, the broad back, his long nearly white hair bounding like a ram between his shoulder blades.

My father must have been deep in thought, and this, I thought, was unfortunate for I had time to run furiously toward him again and again before I was hopelessly lost, before I saw him, grown small with his traveling, turn suddenly in the road. "Well?" he would say when I had caught up with him again. I wished that I had been the pebbles in the road he walked upon.

His eyes are in the sea, the others often said with reverence. You are the son of Sea-Eyes, I had never seen the sea, but I imagined it to be an especially terrifying sight. When I was older I came to think that it was the fear of knowing exactly what they saw in him that made me so slow and disappointing to him that day. On we went, starting and stopping. "Well?" he asked, shifting the bag he carried from one shoulder to the other. What kind of bag it was I do not know. It was as if it had not been on his shoulder until we were halfway there. I only remember that it was blue. Or red.

On our journey there was a moment when we stood side by side. This I remember tenderly-perhaps because we were not in motion then. It is hard to follow after a god. The sun was nearly overhead as we stood there gently watering a rock, I remember. And a snake. "Hmmrn," my father said, looking down at me in the sort of com, munion that fathers often feel when standing next to their sons. "I didn't know you had the mark." For there on my penis at the very tip was the wine-red mark he bore on his own arm. I think now that he would have been more accurate in his response to our common nature if he had sat down right there in the dirt and wept for me. But he did not. "Hmrnrn," he said and rumpled my hair enthusiastically.

We went on again, stammering in our progress. "Well?" he asked while I shuffled my feet in a circle in front of him. When I had dragged myself up alongside him for perhaps the twentieth time, he asked it again. This time I did not turn away. My own sullen eyes met his severe ones. My feet grew into the dirt as he shifted the bag from shoulder to shoulder waiting for my reply. Neither of us looked away. Under his breath he was muttering it again-"Well?" "Well?! Well?! Father! well is a hole with water in the bottom of it!" I cried.

My father, the god, rolled his blue eyes upward toward those of his own kind. In this way we went in search of further wisdom. I do not remember which had the greater effect on me, the turtle or the sea. I have seen turtles since and always I remember my father then. I have never seen the sea again and I have never been able to

forget it. "We will be like turtles," my father said, picking me up and plunging me into the waters. "We will wash ourselves before we corne again onto the land." It was true for me then; I could see what the others had said. There standing up to his brown thighs in what they called the sea was my father and in his eyes he carried the waves and at the center of each a turtle was swimming.

When we were on the sand again, my father opened the bag he had carried such a long way and took out a blanket. It was green, I am certain of that. Bright green. Already he had spotted the tracks of the turtle, but he spread out a blanket and took out his cache of food. He had brought along a sack of figs, of which I had a few. I ate some olives, a piece of honey cake, and drank a little wine. We ate these things then because my father said a turtle in its wisdom would not give itself up to a hungry man.

It was late afternoon, and already it was getting a little cooler by the time we set out after the turtle. We had a piece of rope, a stick, and the blanket. I was given the stick to carry. When we carne upon the turtle up the beach a ways, I was disappointed. Oh, it was not the turtle that disappointed me; it was a magnificent turtle: nearly four feet long with a fine shining shell, and in that shell was the red blood, so my father said, of all the living things it had eaten. It was the capturing of the turtle that disappointed me. Yes, it was exciting to hold out the stick and see the monster snap at it, but how quickly and effortlessly my father threw the blanket over its head and wrapped the rope around the cloth-covered neck.

This was the very place where we would lie down to sleep, my father said. We would allow the turtle to collect his thoughts; if we gave him the blanket he would give us our wisdom. During the night I woke shivering with the cold. The sea was pounding against the cliffs down the shore. Here we were without our blanket and my father stretched full-length on the beach, whistling a little in his sleep as I shivered.

As I nestled under the blanket with the turtle. I thought: it's like lying beside a warm rock that slowly cools as the night goes on. Its head was well covered and I felt no danger. Once during the night I woke to find its claws gently scratching along my arm as if to relieve me of some pain. In the morning I woke to find myselfalone, the edges of the blanket neatly tucked around my feet and shoulders. And there on the beach a fire was glowing, and beside it my father crouched next to the bronze ax. The lovely underbelly of the turtle had been split open and my father was roasting its heart on the stick.

How this could have happened, I don't know, since my father was killed, they say, shortly after my conception. I only know that the night before I was to see my friend the potter I fell asleep and when I

woke again I had seen my father there and the tortoise turned on its back, its feet and tail still gently moving.

"I have decided to tell you how to comfort people," Chariklo said to the very young Teiresias. "First of all, you must be attentive. There is no greater discouragement to one who is already discouraged than for him to tell his woes, after much welling up and fighting of tears, to a mere lump of a face or to one that is always veering toward the window, toward some more interesting project. You must look the victim in the eyes, even if he does not look at you. When he glances up, your eyes must be there on him. The more they are avoided the more lost, the more victimized. Now here is a young man sitting before you. Can you imagine it? Yes. You are looking into his eyes. He is telling you of the death of his father, or a serious illness he himself has contracted. Now what do you do?"

Teiresias plumped the pillow he was holding. It was red and gold, a peacock embroidered on it, variegated from eye to tail. "I say I'm sorry, I wish it hadn't happened."

"Look at me when you say it."

Teiresias looked up. He stared into her wide eyes. He could see the young man before him, lost, forlorn, without a father. "I'm so sorry. I wish it hadn't happened to you, to him."

"Now say his name," Chariklo said. She did not take her eyes away.

"But I don't know his name."

"Make one up then."

"I'm so sorry, Terry. I wish it hadn't happened."

"That's much better," Chariklo said. "Do you hear the difference?"

"I do. I think I do, that is. I sort of do."

"If a person feels lost, Teiresias, that person feels nameless. Everything has a name, every kingfisher, cuckoo, pigeon, stone. And in each one a spirit. You say Terry's name, already he feels better. He is really there, he knows it now. And you are there and you are listening. Do you understand?"

" Yes," Teiresias nodded.

"Now go on. What do you say next?"

"I say, Tomorrow the sun will shine and we will play ringstick in the yard. You can use my new stick if you want to." Teiresias smiled

proudly at himself, at his mother who was named Mother, Chariklo.

«Yes, that's very good," his mother said, leaning forward to pat his knee, to rumple his hair, to squeeze his small arm. "But you don't say that for a while yet. You wait until you've both said other things. Do you know why?"

"He doesn't like to play ringstick, Mother?"

Chariklo threw her head back. She laughed. She squeezed his small, palpable arms.

My mother's house was set at the edge of town near a stand of trees. We who saw the mountains all around us but only saw them from a distance looked upon this thicket in the flatlands as a forest. Forest, we said when directing others to our house. It was only natural that we should live here. My mother was Athena's nymph, and it was said that the goddess frequented that spring which rose up in our woods like encouragement and swelled into a flowered pond. Each morning our maids would receive from the men and women of Thebes the sacrifices to Athena at our front door, and the gifts that supported us. And it was out the back door that I went when I first awoke. I did not know whether it was the overwhelming smell of humus emanating from our backyard that led me out, the embarrassment of being so admired by the celebrants if I should go out the other door, or my growing affection for the dark-haired servant girl who made my bed each morning and who, if asked, would bathe me each and every day, long into my old age. There was nothing better in the world, I thought, than to root among the tender undergrowth in search of sticks and brush for the morning baking, to hear in the distance the sound of birds and my mother's gentle humming as mortal and god lay down together entangled in the far reaches of our backyard. I knew our neighbor to the west would be looking out from her window, her delicate skin as blue as that pond beside which my mother lay in rapture.

It was said that the River Kephissos had embraced this neighbor on its way to Lake Kopais, that it had taken her under its tumultuous surface and made love to her until her flesh had turned blue as the iris of one radiant, staring eye. This humiliation had taken place in Phokis from which Leiriope had then fled, or so people said. Here in Thebes

she dwelled on that memory, far away from the place of its occasion, here where people did not falsify the facts in the marketplace and make remarks about love's tumultuous waters practically at the lobe of her tender ear. Often I would see her blue hand rise up in that window overlooking our woods. Each morning her blue hand would wave and then her blue voice would fall gently down upon me in greeting not unlike my own mother's call. Something melancholy would rise up in me then, even as a child, and I could not help the blue tear that sprang each morning out of my eye when Leiriope called my name.

I did not know for some time that Leiriope had a son, for he did not often go out of the house. He was only a bit older than I, but to me age had never made a difference. It was said that the River had fathered him, and his olive skin was smooth as a pebble at the bottom of a stream. His eyes were not blue; they were black as Leiriope's and were said to start the hearts of children and adults (men and women alike) aflame as if those eyes had been pieces of flint for people to strike their bodies against.

It was a custom that no man should take a boy to be his favorite before that boy had sprung his first down from his chin; and yet all the elders and the king, too, it was rumored, had courted him. Little presents they brought him, setting him on their knees and stroking his sleek hair, letting their fingers wander into the hollows of his cheeks, along his child lips. But he would give no response. He sat-not angry, not the slightest irritated, and certainly not in love with them. He was the pebble itself before the persons sitting there. He did not cry out, nor murmur; he sat silent as a chair while his gifts piled up. Often the women would fondle him too, crying out: Tiny Beauty, Perfect Skin. He was nine and I seven when I, too, fell in love with him.

It is true that children in their own ways often fall in love with one another, but my feeling for Narkissos was not the same as that. How does one love another who gives no response? Passionately, I say. More and more-projecting one's own feeling as the sentiments ofthe other, saying that that person must feel as I feel for he will not deny it. It is nothing more than self-love in the end; and what can be more

enticing, more destructive than that? There are situations but they are few and terrifying to think about.

One day, inexplicably, Narkissos started coming from his house each day to sit in the woods near where Helen, our maid, and I went to gather kindling. He had, I think, been driven from his own house (even the kitchen, the courtyard, his own room) by the persistence of his suitors. A little arbor had grown up in the woods like a cave and that was how I first saw him-crouched in view of our back door, casting pebbles against a fallen nut-tree. My arms were already full up to my chin with branches which I intended to break down behind our house into more manageable pieces for the hearth, and Helen had gone back to prepare my mother's morning cakes while I continued the search for just one more.

I stopped suddenly before him, staring unkindly. "Whatever has made your hair so silver?" I blurted out. His hair shone out the color of an aging man's, but with luster. His one eye was set in his head just slightly higher than the other. I knew immediately who he was, though later out of politeness I would ask him. No, he was not beautiful as they had said, I thought then. Certainly I was as compelling. I had the same black hair-though mine was not streaked as his was. My skin was soft, too, like a fawn's ears, but my eyes, I knew, did not seem to drift ever so slightly one from the other.

"Well then," I said, watching him looking at me-not with suspicion. No, he was not suspicious. It was as if he did not care what it was that I would say. "If you won't answer my question, will you tell me your name?" I could have said anything and his eyes would have been just as disengaged.

His voice was not unusual; it was neither high nor low; it did not break yet between childhood and manliness. He was about my own age I determined when he said his name, when he said Narkissos. Shyly he said it. Or perhaps I only thought it shyness for I felt it myself as I watched him pitching stones halfheartedly at the nut-tree. Although he did not invite me to sit down with him, I let my bundle of sticks fall with a crash to one side of us. "I live over there," I said, squatting down beside him under the tangled branches. I, too, pitched a stone toward the nut-tree as he looked toward our house and nodded.

"I have silver hair because my father took my mother on a gray day; the sun had just come out from behind a cloud," he said, digging in the dirt for a particular stone. The choice of stones was all-important in pitching. We both knew that; that was unspoken.

"My father is a shade," I said matter-of-facrlv, for he had been so for as long as I could remember-at least when I was awake.

"My father is a river," he said. "A god," he said proudly. "When' ever I want I can see my father, whenever someone will take me there. I remember when I was born, too."

"You do?" I said, looking askance at him.

"I do," he said. "I floated up from the river into a hollow cave where I got my silver hair, and then I fell into the world smiling. I was smiling when I was born."

"How do you know you were smiling?" I asked him. We were pitching another round of stones. "Only someone else could have seen that. Maybe you heard someone tell about your smile. Maybe you only thought you remembered it yourself."

"I felt it," he said. "I felt myself smile."

I smiled then off into the open space beyond the thicket where we crouched. I tried to feel it. "Yes," I said. "I see what you mean."

"I haven't smiled since," he said.

"Maybe you should gather wood with Helen and me," I said. "That always makes me smile. I smile, too, when I see your mother in the window. Then I cry."

"I haven't any reason to smile," he said.

"I could make you smile, I make Helen smile when we gather wood, and my mother, too, when I holler in my bath. I could holler. Would that make you smile?"

"No," he said. "Did you know King Kadmos comes to see me?"

"Does he try to make you smile?"

"No. He tries to make himself smile. Everyone wants me for his favorite. Everyone thinks I'm beautiful. My father is a god."

"Lots of people's fathers are gods," I said. "That doesn't make anyone think you're beautiful. Why, lots of people have gods for fathers. There are bunches of them right on our street. Besides," I said looking at him. "I think you're kind of plain. Your right eye looks like it might drift right out of your face."

"It does?" he asked, looking at me for the first time. He closed his right eye. "Does that help? Maybe I have my one eye closed when they look at me and call me beautiful. Does it help?"

"No," I said. "Try the other one."

He closed his left eye.

"Now open them both," I said. "I think you're better with your eyes open-even if one does look like it might drift right out of your face.

There was a little twig in his hair and I went to brush it out, but he raised his hand to block my arm. "Nobody touches me," he said. "Nobody?" I asked. "Nobody."

"Not your mother?" "No."

"Not your maid?" "Nobody."

"What about King Kadmos then? He must at least put his hand in your hair. You couldn't refuse to be touched by the King."

"I don't feel it. I was born in Phokis," he said. "I fell into Phokis smiling. My eyes aren't crooked."

"They are. Your right eye is higher than the other. But, you know, it really isn't plain. A minute ago I thought that, but now I think it isn't plain. It isn't beautiful, but it isn't plain. Plain would be if they were straight like anybody else's. Are you bored?"

"What?"

"Are you bored? Your eyes don't look bored; it's the rest of your face. "

"I have a cat," he said. "Do you want to see my cat?"

"What kind of cat is it?" I asked.

"A boring cat, but I can show it to you. Its name is River Willow."

"I have to take the kindling in now," I said. "But I can see your cat after that." I stood up and began to reassemble my stack ofsticks. "Do you want to come along? Then we could see your cat."

"No." He chucked another stone.

"All right," I said. "I'll come back. Will you still be here?"

"Most likely," he said. "Most probably I will."

Finally my mother had convinced the blue Leiriope to make the journey with us. We would travel-my mother and I, little Narkissos, Leiriope, and several of our maids-to Delphi. We would go slightly out of our way so that Leiriope could visit the banks of Kephisos, which she had not seen since she had given birth to Narkissos. Here, too, Narkissos might know heritage. At Delphi each of us would, that next day, ask the Pythia one question. I had had considerable trouble selecting only one, but I would turn eight soon and I was certain that, with my new age, I would be better able to think about whatever it was I wanted to know. Narkissos would not say what his question was, and I had not the opportunity to ask Leiriope for hers. Helen, when asked,

merely threw the cooking towel she wore around her waist up over her head.

My mother alone would confide in me. She would ask the Pythia. she said. what her future would be. When I asked her why she did not ask the oracle what the gods planned for me instead, as the other mothers did for their sons, she stared at me as if I had just become a stone. "Would you crawl back into my womb, Teiresias?" she asked quite harshly. When I said that I would not, she replied, "Well, then." This perplexed me for some time. (It was not until I myself had become a woman and a mother that I understood, and then I under, stood it only by degrees until I heard myself actually saying it.)

Each morning I found Narkissos in his cave. All I could speak of was the approaching journey to the great crevice where the gods were said to speak, where all of the world had begun to turn for counsel. As for Narkissos, he seemed to have no interest in that part of our excursion.

There had been some conversation between Leiriope and my mother about the need for protection. We had not ascended into the wealthy ranks of the charioteers and so we would be walking for twelve days all together. There was said to be some danger ofmarauders though they did not frequently venture inland, and the thought of this quite terrified Leiriope. If we should meet up with any sort of adversity, my mother told her, we would call upon Athena. At this remark, Leiriope was instantly reassured. What better protection could she have had than that of the god of battle? My mother's relationship with that god was not unknown in any part of the world as far as anyone we knew could determine.

On the night before our departure, my mother took great pains to alleviate Leiriope's self-consciousness about wandering into Phokis where her blue skin had become legendary. The people in her home, land could not restrain themselves from looking at the way her sullen eyelids came down over the white of her eyes, the way her blue lips set off the flash of her teeth. They could not keep themselves from looking; they could not keep from looking away. And so, on this final evening the lamps were lighted. The maids from our house and Leiriope's had been called into my mother's sitting room. Paints of every color and of the least and greatest expense had been accumulated; all around the room pallets and pots and brushes were strung like beads in orderly rows, and at the center stood Leiriope stripped bare of all her clothes. Narkissos and I sat quietly together in one large chair-for how could we be anything but quiet with one another? Narkissos would not say a word. The maids were chatting wildly about what should be done while upstairs my mother rushed about

dragging chests and boxes across the floor. When she came into the room, her softest paintbrush in her hand, a silence fell. Leiriope crossed her arms over her breasts, turned toward the window, toward the door.

"Ah," sighed my mother, seeing her friend. Leiriope's back swept down in a luminous curve, her spine a thread of cobalt pearls. Her buttocks were smooth, slightly hollowed from her loss of weight, like delicate shells. Out from under her narrow collarbone, under the thin crossed arms, a crescent of breast appeared and under that the cascade of little ribs, her sloping belly and thin hipbones like wings above the blue'black tuft of hair. "So," my mother said, admiring her perhaps even more than the rest of us were doing now. "So the new hairless cult has not taken you in," she said.

Leiriope hid her slight smile with her hand. It was rumored around that the women in the palace had started removing all their body hair. They had begun, it was said, with the plucking of the soft hairs on their hands and toes. Next had come the thighs and shins until finally the people said there was not a hair left on the women at the palace save on their heads-not on their knees, beneath their arms, or between their legs. The queen, her daughters, and all the women ofthe court had plucked themselves bald in a self-destructive rage. Soon, the common people said, there would be a profession made of it. Slaves would be trained to tweeze the little hairs one by one from each female torso and limbs. Even now it was reported that the women surround, ing the king were pouring hot wax on one another in order to more easily "rip the devoted moss from the stone which would be freed."

Narkissos and I could see that our mothers thought it a great joke. Half the maids were burrowing under one of the curtains as if it were a skirt, mock tweezers in hand. "No! Whee!" the others squealed, tossing the draperies up and down.

What were the colors they placed on the body of the meek Leiriope? The deep green of the turtle, the turquoise of the peacock's feathered eye, the soft gray of the swallow's down. Vermilion, amethyst, the royal cadmium. And under all of it, under the circles, squares, and swirls, lay a coat of the finest gilt. From head to toe she wore a golden crown. Even her blue hairs were coated with Egyptian reds and greens. We watched her strutting boldly back and forth as if she were none other than herself reborn to an even more exaggerated skin. The maids stared on to see her there-the sad and small Leiriope had thrown her shoulders back. Her small breasts bobbed like two jeweled purses on her chest as she strode from windowpane to windowpane, looking into the wild reflection of herself. Only when she opened her eyes up

wide could we see that slightest blue at the insides of her eyelids. From window to window she spun, flinging out her arms in gestures we had never seen, laughing wildly to herself.

"Funereal seal!" my mother cried.

The gold face turned and fell. "What is it?" Leiriope's hands fluttered up to her spectacular, beaded cheeks.

"It's all wrong!" my mother shouted. "Every bit of it!"

Leiriope drew her gilded fingers up toward her wrists as if to hide them in her nonexistent sleeves. "Remove all this!" my mother cried. I felt Narkissos grip my arm. I do not know even now whether he was touched by his mother's flight into ecstasy and tormented by her fall, or whether he had found in his mother some beauty or release from shame in himself that he had never experienced before. He sat staring on, saying nothing as we watched the blue tear drop from her eye and nestle briefly on her golden collar bone. Down it ran, tingeing the path to the ebony-tipped breast, resting there and dropping onto her belly. My mother walked quietly over to her friend; she put one finger under the golden chin and turned the painted face toward hers. "Little Lily," she said, looking into the dark and overflowing eyes. I saw my mother's other hand then cup itself around the brittle painted hairs between Leiriope's golden thighs as if to cradle Leiriope where the god had wounded her. My mother's eyes did not leave Leiriope's and Leiriope did not look away.

In that instant Leiriope's shoulders ceased their heaving, her eyes cleared and she flung her arms around my mother as a child might have done, as I myself wanted to do. In a single breath, the maids sighed. "We will start over-" my mother said, "if that's all right with you, Lily?" Leiriope turned her eyes up once again toward my mother and nodded. I heard her say, "Thank you, Chariklo." It seemed odd to me to hear my mother's given name spoken, as it always did when I was a child.

The following morning we started out. On Leiriope there was no paint anywhere save on her chest where she wore like a pendant above her breasts the symbol dilL painted delicately in the gold which had overpowered her so. It was a word that I would not understand until one night many years later when Emporous and his reluctant scribe sat scratching it in stone.

As we went along, the maids divided into two groups. Helen and two of Leiriope's attendants walked on ahead of us, while three of our maids followed in our wake. Always I liked to hear them discussing the small worlds of the kitchen and bedroom, worlds that then seemed large to me. At the center of our procession walked my mother and

Leiriope. Leiriope carried a bundle ofdried water flowers she had kept beside her bed for years, or so Narkissos said when I prodded him. It was Leiriope's intention, Narkissos said, to toss these flowers into the river-god's hair.

Narkissos and I stepped along directly behind our mothers, our sandals swinging over our shoulders, accompanied by the great huge cat that Narkissos had said was boring. Its head was larger than the shoulders it sat upon, and out of its striped face stared two immense green eyes. It had a short yellow tail, no longer than my own hand, that stuck straight up above its white rear. It marched directly at Narkissos' side as though it had been born a puppy. Every once in a while we would hear it speak in that same small aspiring voice that the town rooster had. I had never had a puppy or the white-breasted weasels people kept to hold on their laps and stroke. As it padded along beside us, I grew exultant that this one cat had escaped the furriers, that it had not gone the way of other cats. I was not just a little irritated though that the stocky River Willow should give so much obedience to Narkissos who attended to no one at all.

During the second day, I heard my mother saying to Leiriope that she thought Leiriope should turn of her own accord from her thoughts of Kephisos. That she should not carry these devotions further once she had been at the river again. Leiriope cried at that as she walked slowly along, weighted down by the thought of it, at the borders of the lake. In a few months the lake would be nearly dry again, returned to marshland as it did each year in the latter part of spring. That small island toward which Leiriope now turned her eyes would no longer be a spot of green in that sweep of blue; it would be until winter came again merely a part of the vast morass. As she turned it was almost as if she had been swallowed up by that lake and its source, so similar was the color of the water and her flesh. I could see only the light dress she wore, her sandals, and the inscription on her chest. My mother took her hand and they went on ahead of us up the beach. I could see her shoulders shaking in front of me, and I stepped up and took hold of her skirt, following along that way for some time, her other hand lying over the top of my head and forehead like a cap of sky. That night we put down our bedding at the edge of the lake just as we had on the first night. We prayed that Athena would keep an eye on our procession and tried to fall directly to sleep. I lay cuddled up with the large cat on my belly until Narkissos called to it and it shot to his side on the other side of the fire. Leiriope lay some distance from me but still I could see her tossing and turning there on the night before we would reach the Kephisos. On the other side of me rested my mother and all around us lay the maids, chatting quietly until they,

too, nodded off. By night and by day we made a long journey. each in our separate ways.

Leiriope stands on the cliff above the Kephisos. My mother holds us back. Narkissos is crying: he wants to see his father, he wails. He is biting and kicking the maids. Over the edge Leiriope is throwing the deadened branches she has carried with her since the day when she opened her eyes under these waters and knew pain. We are below her, below the cliff, downstream. That is your father, Helen says. Hush up! The branches float, whirl in an eddy, are sucked under. She throws her veils, her scarves, the rings she has worn to sanctify an act she had no part in choosing. We see the yellow scarves float down, catch at a willow, smother briefly the stream. The rings make for a moment two small holes in our grief as we hear her above. No one understands her words. She has taken the ivorv-handled knife from her basket. We see it white as teeth in her hand. She is cutting her hair. I want to see my father. Helen slaps his wailing face. My father will kill you, he screams. My father will rape you and turn you blue like mold. Leiriope leans precariously over the edge. She is shouting, she is wailing. No one knows what she has said. My mother holds me back. My mother calls the name she has given her. Lily. Hair floats down like petals onto the rapidly flowing stream. Leiriope is tugging at her hand. Her back turns toward us. We hear her yelling now. It is a cry of relief. We all look up. Something sparkles in the sunlight and falls. We see it plummet. The maids turn their heads away. They cover their faces with their hands, for there-caught in a shallow between two rocks-is Leiriope's blue little finger and on it a ring.

Up we went along the path where the mountain ruptured itself into that place they called Delphi. Leirope walked on ahead of us, humming without variation, her bandaged hand held out in front of

her as if it were her own pale shadow. Narkissos had had to be dragged away from the banks of the Kephisos, and now he languished on the litter the maids had been forced to draw behind them. One arm he had thrown up over his head in sulky consternation, the other he wrapped severely around the absurdly loyal River Willow. I looked at them there-clamped tightly together. I would gladly have taken either's place to have been part of such a union. The great furry mass was stretched out on its back, its striped tail thrust up between its hefty thighs, the immense head secured like a turnip on Narkissos' shoulder. Narkissos' eyes had shut me out, as had the River Willow, content in its violent purring. I hated them both.

I had been trying not to think about that question which I had not yet formulated for the oracle. My own indecisiveness now hounded me. Should I not, at my advanced age-I was eight now, was I not?should I not be able to think of one question? Infants had been to the oracle, stammered the right syllables and rhythms, and gone home with their entire lives charted before them. The problem lay in the restriction. Two questions would have been far more reasonable than one, three than two, I thought, counting out each of my ridiculous ideas on my fingers. My pointer finger with the little nick on it where once I cut myself, where I had first discovered blood, would be the first. Would I have, like the charioteers, a tunic spun all in silver threads, gold armbands up and down both tremendous arms, a bronze dagger inlaid with a muscled lion? I followed the finger up my arm to my own sallow, skinny bicep. The second question would come from the middle finger which I often raised in salute as the other boys did. Would I have a cat-No! not a dog! But a cat which I myself would save from its usual fate: the imperiled existence of a scavenger until inevitably it was caught and skinned by peddlers in the marketplace before the cheering crowds. At this thought, my head refused to turn toward them, toward Narkissos, who had already accomplished this, and the cat who had superseded the destiny of his kind. Against my will, my eyes sneaked in their direction. There they lay, together, content. I held up the finger. It was a noble request to present to the pythia, but it was not enough. Three. This was the finger, they said, that had roots which grew up a person's arm and through the shoulder, down and around into the pounding of the emotions. Walking far ahead of us all now in her purple gown was the beautiful Helen, and there on the litter lay the slender body of Narkissos. When I was old enough, would they love me as much as I now loved them? Or would I be chosen as the favorite of the king?

I had what I considered to be three questions now. But I could not think of a fourth any more than I could single out one good one to

present. My fingers wagged before me. I didn't need to voice these three possibilities. I could imagine how my mother and Leiriope would smile at one another, and at me, raising their eyebrows momentarily. Their long dresses swayed before me, lifting slightly to show their tightening ankles. Beneath the one skirt the white heels glittered from out of my mother's sandals; beneath the other the blue slivers startled me. I looked at my hands. Perhaps it was just as well that only one question could be asked, for at what number would the limit be set if not at that one? I would have been taken with a serious sadness (perhaps I, too, would have been incapacitated and carried on the litter-to lie with them both; I thought about that possibility for some time) if I had had to see Leiriope hold up what was left of her blue hands in confusion before the Pythia and say: "Ten? Ten? But I have only nine questions for you."

It was said all over the world that the oracle could predict the future of anything: the number of grapes that would cling in one summer to a vine as it trembled upward, the exact revolution at which a particular pink moth would soar too near a flame, the day and hour when one stone on the road from Thebes to Athens would be crushed by a passing chariot. My hands trembled and my ankles and knees revolted at the thought of my impending moment before her. I would stand before the greatest of them all, inhaling the scent of sweet myrtle as it emanated from just the one of her awesome nostrils, overcome by the unquestionable authority of rotten garlic as she jettisoned that from the other. I would stand there stricken by my own incompetence and say, as I had heard my nighttime father say, the one word: Well-

But there would be no question to it. I had no questions.

A shaft of light preceded us now, cutting straight up to where the Kastalian Spring circled transparently beside the cave of the Pythia. I do not know what happened between the time when I still looked forward to days of traveling and the moment when we stood in front of her, marveling at the oiled surface of her head, the two strands of black hair that ran down her crown and were tucked definitively behind an ear. I watched her flesh rolling as if in waves as she crouched there at the mouth of the cave sighing repeatedly, eyes closed, apparently waiting for one of us to speak.

One by one the others went ahead of me. The watery eyes opened. Yes, little Helen would marry-a man of her own age-and cast forth seven children-the first two, stones. Leiriope's red-haired maid would die in the flames of passion, the old woman said, but not before she had enjoyed the warmth. I could see the maid tossing her bright hair out of its stays, thinking not of the end but of the pleasure, as the other servants went forward. All but one would have children and

bake the finest cakes on the plains, the one with bright hair would lie like a rug before kings. I saw them looking at one another, obviously pleased; even the one who was to be childless before the throne. It was just as my mother had said: the Pythia did look like a yellow onion with only the two hairs to interrupt her wisdom. She was truly a great one. And l? I was the smallest of fleas.

It was now my mother's turn. I stood kicking at a stone in anxiety. My mother would speak and listen. Then Leiriope, Narkissos, and II would have to say something. The cat was stretched out on the litter in the sun. That would not be a suitable question, I knew as much as that. It had to be something important, but how was I to know importance in my life? I kicked again, and then I heard my mother hiss. I heard my name. She was staring at me, as were Leiriope and everyone of the maids. Narkissos had turned in disgust. What makes a cat, too, look at one with all the rest? I drew myself in like a branchless stick. The old woman was staring straight ahead.

"I have this to ask-" my mother said now, clearing her throat as if to rid them all of the thought of my impropriety. I could see her hands clenched tightly behind her back, one finger pointing at me in admonition. "I have borne a son; I am mistress to Athena-"

"Sssisss-" the Pythia adjudicated. "I know all that."

"I would like to have a daughter, though I will not couple again with a man."

The Pythia'S face grew rounder, though she did not actually smile at that moment. Her eyes opened wide. "Ha!" she laughed then. "An entire questionnaire! Who would have expected it?" The corners of my mother's lips went up and then they fell as she glanced around at us.

"You will have a daughter, though you will not bear a daughter. You will not see her face."

"But what does that mean?" my mother stammered, looking again at the rest of us.

"Enough," the old woman said. "It pleases me to give an answer to your question equal to the question itself. Stand aside. You have heard the truth."

Leiriope fell on her knees before the oracle even before my mother in her daze had moved at all, before my mother had given up the attempt to collect herself and had slumped down in the dirt. The blue hand was out in front of them, cradling the bandaged one.

"You have healed your hand," the woman said to her. "Sometimes to heal ourselves we must cut ourselves off."

Leiriope's face turned up, her eyes gazing into the closed eyes of the Pythia. She began to sob. "Will my sadness never leave me?" she wailed. "Will I never be free from all this?"

"One question only! Which one?"

Confused, Leiriope looked down at the dirt on which she and the old woman were crouched; her hands shook in front of her.

"Ah," said the old woman, opening her eyes. "Can't make up your mind. Next."

"No, no," cried Leiriope. "I'll make up my mind. I will."

"Shush," said the old woman. "I will answer your question. Life overtakes us like a series of unexpected assaults. Can we be free, as you say, when this is irrevocably the case?"

Helen, watching this, had clasped hold of the red-haired maid's hand, and the red-haired maid had grabbed onto the hand of yet another of them. Here we were in our fear and yet the trees rustled quietly, pleasantly, overhead.

"Blue bird!" the Pythia said. "I have asked you a question. You must learn to answer back. That is the only freedom that begets freedom. Will you take it or leave it, Blue Bird?" Leiriope cringed quite visibly as the oracle went on. "What is it in the color blue that scarifies you so? Is blue not the color of the unimpeded sky? Is blue not the color of this coveted eye?" The massive woman drew down her own lower lid and laughed as the blue eye stared out at Leiriope. "Hal Sky. Eye. I have made a sound that very much pleases me. Is blue your eLILL? Is blue your destiny? I have nearly done it again." She laughed quietly to herself. "You! Blue Bird! do not know the difference between derision and a catalyst to gather strength. Be bold, be bold, be bold, be not too bold. How can a human being be in the world when he thinks only of the size ofhis nose, or of the place where once a splinter pierced his foot? Listen to Chariklo; she knows something of this."

At this mention of her name, my mother looked up, startled. She and Leiriope gathered themselves together and limped to one side. At this, Narkissos leapt, as though he had never once been disheartened enough to ride the litter all this way, to take their place. "Don't ask me about your father," the old woman said. "And don't ask anyone else."

Narkissos looked at her in astonishment, his one eye riding his forehead like a fly. He thought for a moment and then slowly he closed it. "Don't try to be beautiful," she said. "That will get you nowhere with me."

"But what will I do?" Narkissos said suddenly. "There is nothing for you to do. The jig is up. As for your cat-he will live a long and happy life." Then the Pythia laughed. My mother shoved me forward then as if to fill up the awkward silence as Narkissos skulked to one side. I was in front of her. I was peering into the mound of flesh with the two closed eyes.

"This is my son Teiresias," my mother said, as I had not said a word.

"No questions from him," the old woman said.

"But I have a question!" I cried, misunderstanding her, for just then I had come upon it. "I have a question for you. I thought I wouldn't but I do."

Her thin lip curled up in the excess of her face, her eyes narrowed in disgust. "I will hear no questions from you!" She spat at the side of my foot.

"But why?" my mother, Helen, and Leiriope cried in one voice. "Is that another question?"

"No," they said, looking in subjugation toward the ground. "Then I will answer it," the Pythia said. "I will answer this nonquestion for you. I will answer it with a question or two, and then I will go in and have a rest. Here is the question: Why should the young Teiresias ask the onion lady what he already knows? Does the eagle ask the bat how he should see? He knows everything; do you not, young Teiresias?" She spat once again near my heel in disdain. With that she raised herself up and we watched her suntanned haunches moving slowly into the darkness of the cave.

"Whatever does she mean about my daughter, about me?" my mother cried, thrusting her hands up to her cheeks. "And you! Youlout!" She whirled furiously toward me. "You think you know everything! She means you are insubordinate!" She boxed me on the ears. Helen and the rest of them would not look at me. I had been scorned by the oracle at Delphi! We left our offerings at the entrance to the cave and turned in our own footprints to make the long journey home. I wandered along behind them all, holding my one question dose in my heart. Why death? I asked myself again and again. Why death?

WILLIAM GOYEN

The Texas Principessa

Who would've dreamed that I would get the Palazzo? WeHlet me try and stay on what you asked me about before we were so rudely interrupted-by me. That ever happen to you? Start out to tell one thing and get off onto another? WeHlet me try and stay on what you asked me about. Welcome to the Palazzo.

The Texas Principessa had married a Naples prince of an old line. Hortense Solomon (we called her Horty) was herself of an old lineof dry-goods families. Texas Jews that had intermarried and built up large stores in Texas cities over the generations. Solomon's Everybody's Store was an everyday word in the mouths ofTexas people and an emporium-which was their word-where Texas people were provided with everything from hosiery to clocks. The Solomons, along with the Linkowitzes, the Dinzlers and the Myrons, were old pioneers of Texas. They were kept to their faith by traveling rabbis in early days, and later they built synagogues and contributed rabbis and cantors from their generations-except those who married Texas Mexicans or Texas Frenchmen. These, after awhile, melted into the general mixture of the Texas population and ate cornbread instead of bagels and preferred barbeque pork and tamales to lox and herring. That ever happen to you? Let's see, where was I?

Oh. The Naples prince, Renzi da Filippo, did not bring much money to the marriage because the old line of da Filippos had used up most of it or lost it; or had it taken from them in one way or another-which was O.K. because they had taken it from somebody else earlier on: sometimes there is a little justice. That ever happen to you? Renzi was the end of the line. Someone who was the end of a line would look it, wouldn't you think so? You could not tell it in Renzi da Filippo, he looked spunky enough to start something; he was real fresh and handsome in that burnt blond coloring that they have, sort of toasted-e-toast-colored hair and bluewater eyes and skin of a wheaty color. He was a beauty everyone said and was sought after in Rome and London and New York. Those Italianos! About all he had in

worldly goods was the beautiful Palazzo da Filippo in Venice, a seventeenth-century hunk of marble and gold that finally came into his hands. Had Hortense Solomon not given her vows to Renzi in wedlock, Palazzo da Filippo might have gone down the drain. It needed repair in the worst kind of way-all those centuries on it-and those repairs needed a small fortune-which Horty had a lot of. As soon as the marriage was decided upon, there was a big party. The Prince was brought to Texas and an announcement party was thrown, and I mean thrown, on the cold ranch river that flowed through the acres and acres ofhot cattleland owned by the Solomons. The gala stirred up socialites as far as Porto Ercole and Cannes, from which many of the rich, famous and titled flew in on family planes. Horty Solomon-which was very hard for Italians to say so they called her La Principessa di Texas-started right in with her plans for fixing up the Palazzo. The plans were presented in the form of a little replica of the Palazzo used as a centerpiece for the sumptuous table. Two interior decorators called The Boys, favorites ofHorty's from Dallas, exhibited their color schemes-a lot of Fuchsia for Horty loved this favorite color of hers. "You're certainly not going to redecorate that Palazzo" (they said Palazzo the way she did, so that it sounded like "Plotso"}, "you're certainly not going to furnish it out of Solomon's Everybody's Store!" The Boys declared to Horty as soon as they heard ofher plans to redo the Plotso da Filippo. "Nor," said they, "are you going to make it look like a West Texas ranch house. We're using Florentine silk and Venetian gold, with rosy Fuchsia appointments!"

When Palazzo da Filippo was in shape, the Texas relatives poured in. The Palazzo was crawling with them, young and old. The Palazzo could have been a big Texas house. Black cooks and maids from East Texas mingled with Italian servants. The Venetians loved it. "Viva la Principessa di Texas!" they cried. Those Italianos!

Here I must inform you something of which you were asking about, that on his very wedding night in a villa in Monaco (the beautiful Prince gambled on his wedding night) the beautiful Prince Renzi burst a blood vessel in his inner ear and succumbed (the newspapers' word for it). He just plain died in his wedding bed is what it was. You were asking about how he died. Vicious talk had it that the only stain on the nuptial (newspapers' word)-only stain on the nuptial sheets came from the Prince's ear. Crude. The poor bride, who had been married before-a big textile man from Birmingham, Alabama-was stunned. Poor Horty. Tragedy dogged her, as you well can see. I myself have never experienced the death of a husband but I have experienced two divorces and let me tell you they are simular, they are like a death. They are no fun. My last divorce was particularly nasty. Thank God

there was no issue, as the Wills said. Both my husbands were without issue. Issue indeed. That's a joke for the last one, who issued it to Old Granddad instead of me-mind as well say it; and excuse the profanity-that one had little issue except through his mouth when he threw up his Bourbon. Crude, I know. But that's mainly the kind of issue he had. That ever happen to you? Let's see where was l. Oh. Anyway, this left me in London, quite penniless; tell you why I was in London some other time. Don't have time for that garden path nowit's a memory lane I choose at the moment to take a detour from. But the thing of it is, this is how Horty Solomon got the Palazzo da Filippo, which is what you were asking me about: under the auspices of a sad circumstance-a broken blood vessel leading to death; but a tragedy leading to a new life for her. And for me, as you will soon hear the story (that you were asking about). Anyway, Horty went on with her plans for the Palazzo, now all hers.

As I said somewhere-I can't tell a story straight to save my life, my mind races off onto a hundred things that I remember and want to tell right then, don't want to wait. That ever happen to you? Anyway, as I said somewhere, Texans flooded into the canals of Venice because of the Principessa: Venezia was half Texas some days-and loved it. And if you've ever heard a Texan speaking Italian, you won't believe the sound of it. Big oilmen came to the Palazzo and Texas college football players-Horty had given them a stadium in Lampasas (they called her Cousin Horty)-Junior League ladies, student concert pianists (Horrv was a patron of the Arts, as you will see more about), and once a Rock group-they had that Grand Canal jumping, and some seventeenthcentury tiles fell, I can tell you. And maybe something from even earlier, a Fresco or two from the Middle Ages. And talented young people who wanted to paint or write came over to the Palazzo. See what Horty did? Some of them were offered rooms in the Palazzo, to write in or paint in, or practice a musical instrument in; and they accepted. See what she did? Palazzo da Filippojived, that was the word then; it was in the nineteen-fifties. That joint jumped, as they said. I said back there that I was going to tell you why I was in London. Or did l? Can't remember. Just try to remember something with all this noise around here. Italians are noisy, sweet as they are-singing and calling on the Canals. Now where was l? Oh. London. Well, forget London for the time being-if I haven't already told it to you. Just keep London in the back of your mind. Now where was I? Oh. Well, you have asked me to tell you what you are hearing-the story of the Texas Principessa, myoid schoolmate and lifelong pal, that you asked about. After the Prince's death, Horty pulled herself together and got the Palazzo together-a reproduction of Palazzo da Filippo was en-

graved on Renzi's tombstone with Hortv's changes incorporated (which, of course, I thought was rather nifty, wouldn't you?)-and Horty pleaded with me in April by phone and cable to come stay. "Come and stay as long as you want to, stay forever if you're happy in the Palazzo; just come on," Horty said, long distance, to me in London. Horty loved to have people in the house. This doesn't mean that she always loved being with them. Sometimes I've seen it happen that a motorboat would arrive and disburse a dozen guests and a week later depart with the same guests and not one of them had ever seen the Principessa. Horty would've confined herself off in her own apartment in the far right top wing and there remain in privacy. Simply did not want to have anything to do with them, with her guests. "That's Horty," everyone said. They'd had a grand time, gone in the Principessa's private motorboats to Torcello, to lunch at the Cipriano, to cocktails at other palazzos, been served divine dinners with famous Italians at the da Filippo. But no Horty. She usually-she was so generous-gave expensive presents to her guests to get them to forgive her. Once she gave everybody an egg-a sixth-centurv-c-BrCd-c-egg of Chinese jade. Amounted to about a dozen eggs. Somebody said the retail value on those eggs was about one hundred and fifty dollars apiece. Where was I? Oh.

Well this was in April and in May I came. Horty at once announced to me that there was no room for me at the Palazzo! She was getting crazy over painters. She'd become more and more interested in painting, Horty did, but that's no surprise because she always seemed to possess a natural eye and feeling for painting, not so curious for an heiress to generations of garment salesmen, even though you might so comment. For Hortense Solomon inherited good taste and a tendency for her eye to catch fine things when she saw them. Though there were Brahma bulls leering through the windows of the Solomon ranch in West Texas, what those bulls saw inside was fine china and Chippendale, silver and crystal and satin and silk. Those bulls saw the handiwork of a chic decorator and an elegant collector; not every bull sees that. So a seventeenth-century palazzo in Venice was not so far a cry for Horty to fix up.

Well, here was I living over at the Cipriano where Horty, who couldn't do without me till I got there and then banished me-to a terrific suite, I must say, and footed by her-and here was I coming across the Canal every day to observe the goings on at the Palazzo. Frankly I was glad to have me a little distance from the commotion. Well�known artists came to live in the Palazzo da Filippo and to set up studios there and in the environs. Horty patronized them. Gave them scholarships as she called them. A few were very attractive, I must say,

and some very young-Horty's eye again. The Venetians adored La Principessa di Texas. They appreciated her for unscrewing the horse's outfit from the horse sculpture in her garden on the Grand Canal when the Archbishop passed in his barge on days of Holy Procession. The Principessa had commissioned the sculpture of a beautiful horse possessed of some wild spirit, with a head uplifted and long mouth open in an outcry. On it sat a naked man, again possessed of some wild spirit, seemed like, and his mad-looking head was also raised up in some crying out. You did not see the rider's outfit but the horse's was very apparent, and the Principessa commissioned the sculptor-a then-unknown but handsome sculptor-to sculpt one that was re� movable. Which seems to apply to a lot of men that I have knownwhere was it? A lot of them seem to have removed it. Put it in a drawer someplace. Or mind as well have. Where was l? Oh yes. The horse's outfit. On high holy procession days the Texas Principessa could be seen on her knees under the belly of the horse with grasping hands, making wrenching movements. The Italians coined a phrase for it. When they saw her going at the horse as if she were twisting a light globe, they said to each other that La Principessa di Texas was "honoring the Archbishop." The community generally appreciated her decency for doing this; some felt that the Archbishop should give her a citation. And a few called her a castrator-in Italian of coursecastratazionera, oh I can't say it right but you know what I mean; and of course a few from home in Texas said she was a dicktwister-had to put their nasty mouths into it. Crude. Where was l? Oh. An American painter came to visit Horty one afternoon. He was showing in the Biennale, which is what they call the show of paintings that they have every year. Horty and the painter drank and talked about his painting. When the Principessa turned around from making another double martini for the American painter-she hardly gave it to him when she had to whirl around and make another one-pirouette is what you had to do when you made drinks for that man. Unless you just made a whole jug and gave it to him. Anyway, she whirled to find him urinating in the fireplace. The Principessa was so impressed with the American painter-imagine the audacity!-that famous summer afternoon that she asked him to stay. He stayed-over a year, it turned out-and you can see some of his paintings in the Palazzo gallery; they have become very sought-after and the painter very famous-though dead from alcholism not so many years after that. More proof of the ability of discovery that the Principessa had, which is what an article about her recently said. And of the tragic cloud that kept lurking over her life. Even with all her money and the good that she did people, that cloud lurked. And of course it got her, as you well know.

Because Horty's dead. As you well know. Which is what I started out to tell you the details about when you asked me. Well, it was when we were lunching on the terrazzo ofthe Palazzo. One ofthose goldJune days that Venice has. I'll go right into it and not dwell on it: Horty was bitten by something, some kind of terrible spider, and blood poison, ing killed her before we knew it. Guess where the spider was? In a peach. Living at the core of a great big beautiful Italian peach from the sea orchards of the Mediterranean. Horty cried out and fainted. We'd all had a lot of champagne. By the time we got her to the hospital she was dead. Doctor said it was rank poison and that Horty was wildly allergic to it. When she broke the peach open out sprung the horrible black spider. I saw it in a flash. And before she knew it, it had stung her into the bloodstream of her thigh, right through pure silk Italian brocade. I'll never eat a peach again, I'll tell you. All Venice was upset. The Archbishop conducted the funeral himself. Horrv'd left quite a few lire to the Church. We forgot to unscrew the horse's outfit, but when the funeral procession passed by, all the gondoliers took off their hats. Those Italianos!

And I am the new Principessa-except of course I am not a Principessa. But the Italians insist on calling me the new Principessa. The Palazzo is mine. Who ever dreamed that I would get the Palazzo? When the will was opened back in Texas they read where Horty had given the place to me! I almost had a heart attack. The will said "to my best friend." But what in the world willI do with a Palazzo? I said. I have not the vast fortune that Horty had. But you have all the paint, ings of the famous dead American, they said. Sure, the family have all fought me for the paintings of the dead American painter. Just let somebody find something good and everybody else tries to get it. Like a bunch of ants. That ever happen to you? They couldn't care less about the Palazzo. But the paintings are something else. The Museum has offered half a million dollars for one. I will not sell yet. And that man that peed in the fire died drunk and broke. Ever hear of such a thing? But they say the pollution is just eating up the paintings. And the Palazzo. So far I'm safe, but I wonder for how long? And the very town is sinking. Venice is a little lopsided. I don't know where to go. I hardly know how I got here. Sometimes I think, who am I, where am l? That ever happen to you? But the Texas Principessa is a saint in Venezia. Better not say anything in this town against Horty, I'm telling you. Those ltalianos speak her name with reverence and the Arch, bishop says her name a lot in church. I have offered the horse to the Church, without outfit, but the Archbishop suggested-he's so cute, with a twinkle in his eyes, those ltalianos!-the Archbishop suggested that il cavallo stay where it is. Because it is an affectionate monument

for the townspeople, particularly the gondoliers. They point it out to tourists. I hear they're selling little replicas near the Vatican. The sculptor is very upset. He's made many more sculptures (not of horses) but nobody ever paid much attention to any of his other work. Isn't everything crazy? Aren't our lives all crazy? Some days I can't believe any of it. Sometimes I want to go home but I hear Texas is just as crazy. Anyway, that's the story of Horty Solomon da Filippo, the Texas Principessa. Which is what you asked me about, isn't it?

But one more thing. Next morning after the funeral I saw below the terrazzo something sparkling in the dew, something pure silver with diamonds and rubies and emeralds-like something Horty would've worn-and I saw that it was a gorgeous web. And there in the center, all alone, was the horrible black insect that I am sure was the one that had lived at the heart of the peach that killed the Texas Principessa and brought the Palazzo to me. How could something so ugly and ofdeath make something like that so beautiful? I had the oddest feeling, can't describe it. That ever happen to you?

Well, that's the story, what you asked me. What happened.

Arcadia (excerpt)

My name is Arcadio and I will not do you no harm, come under the shade of this old rayroad trestle if you wan to. Train's gone. Por favor: sientase, set down please, here by the blooming vines of Morningglory and Honeysuckle that smells so sweet in the morning sun, here in the bed of the river, white bed ofshell, river's gone too. You look like you been walkin for some time in the hot river'bottom through the palmettos and the dewberries and the crawling vines, sientase. Set down. If you wan to.

How did you find me did you hear my tune did you come to where the frenchharp played, tis an old tune you heard acornin from the dead river's bed, "The Waltz of the Spotted Dog," mv old tune that I played out in the Show, a sad waltz, some folks have said that tis the same tune as "Missouri Waltz" if you have ever heard a tune called that, "Missouri Waltz"; tis not, tis not the same tune, compadre. When I was in the Show. And never said a word, only sound my breath made was through this little harp, played it once for each Show Old Shanks made me do it well did keep me awake and showed I had some talent. Sometimes tears of my eyes run down into the little harp, I blew the music through my tears, a watery sound for a vals, this little arpa harp is rusted from the salt of my tears, little salted frenchharp. When tears dry up their salt bites deep as rust. Ever see that on something? Makes a little speckle of rust. Tears can rust, compadre. Hope you never had to cry too many. You wan hear. Cantando, compadre. Canto. But there was a long time when I didn't sing no song. I am at large. Which is how they called me on the radio when I was found missing. At large. There is no Mescan word for it. Canror soy. I think of myself as a singer. A singer at large. I had not been free in all mi vida, that's the Mescan word for life, untill excaped. Locked up by my father Hombre, locked up by the Chinaman Shuang Boy, locked up by Old Shanks in the Show. All of which I will tell you, singing my song. Come under the trestle and listen if you wan to, in the shade of the Morningglory vine in the morning, God knows

how it blooms so fresh without no water; or go on, if you wan to. I am bidding a sweet Adios to civilization, old world is wearing down, Corczon. What have they done to this place? I got a sweet goodbye to sing to it. Pasa el mundo viejo, se pasa. Old world is passing away. Meantime, I keep out an eye for my mother. Sounds funny but that is the words for it, keep out an eye, that is the Anglo espression. We have no such Mescan espression.

I am used to sitting silent under the public gaze as a serene listener. I was not allowed to speak back to my gazers nor answer their questions. Away from my gilded chair of serenely listening, I now sit in an open place and sing free. An at-large singer. You listen if you wan hear it. If not, the air is my listener, leaves and birds my hearers. I listened to the world, now world hear me is what I'm thinking! Que dice Arcadio? Que dice el Mundo? God knows the years my ears heard whispers and soft calls. Muiieco! Chingame! Corazon Dulce! Show it to me! Fuck me! Filthy people of cheap towns. Sometimes a person alone in the tent with me would stand before me and tell me his trouble. My wife she run off with another man; my little baby turned out deafand dumb, are you a healer can you lay on hands? As if I was a Buddha or San Jose Saint Joseph-or Santa Teresa. Sometimes one of my gazers would implore. Comprendes? You wan hear? Sometimes I would be supplicated in whispers. But I do not now supplicate nor implore. My song serenely sing, cantando, is the way I look at it. And I keep an eye out for mi madre, which is an espression, keeping out an eye, comprendes.

On most days I have me some paz. Peace. It was not so before. I wan be on the road, peaceful, I said, to be wandering in the woods and prairies, in the liveoaks and bluebonnets of myoid home, I wan beg for my supper and lay in the fields, I said, be with the stars and the streams, sit all day if I wan to, in the shade, see Texas, see Texas down around the Boca Chica down around there, if I wan to, at Brownsville and down around there, I said. And ask about my mother over at San Antone, although I have a feeling that she met an early death. I am dressed in this old Army officer's uniform of some old war, man said to me that give it to me outside of some town, said that he don know where tis from, an old war, said don know which, man said; give me the cap too; nor do I know the name of the town. I am contento in this old war uniform and I am clean, I dote on cleanliness, I bathe in rivers and keep my body fresh and 1 wash my clothes in waters of streams when I can find them without any brown foam afloating, what is that shit? Who did all that? What in God's name have they put into the rivers and the streams?-where they happen to run water, most of them are dry-who let them do that to the waters? Put all that shit in

the waters? I beg for bread at doors, to know a part of human charity though I'm pretty rich in my own right porque I saved my money in the Show. Which I carry privately, rob me if you wan to, I feel too gentle to resist, I am a peaceful person walking towards God. You'd never find it anyway, compadre.

I try to stay out of the stinking cities-who did that, who put all the cars? Ought to catch em and throw em into the rivers of shit, that put all the cars. You wan hear? I am near the little town where I was born, in Texas, where I lived before my mother left me. I know that I am now outside that town because I remember this trestle rising up high out of the river waters, today when first I come upon it trestle was higher to me than ever I remembered it and its long thin legs comin up out of the old bottomland seemed like twas made of paper when first I seen it, lonesome bridge of orange rails and gray ties, tis a lonesome pier areachin over a white riverbed of shell, a vision seemed to me when first I seen it, seen the trestle. And under the trestle as I got closer come bloomin up out of the white shell of the dry riverbed Morningglories and Honeysuckles and Trumpetvines all abloomin in the early morning light. And into this visiOn I took my seat, sat down to rest and play my frenchharp. And you come.

And I remember the train passin over and the blue thicket of trees where are they all now who did this seems like somebody burnt up a lots of the trees, dry trees, lots of dry trees among the green ones I hate a dry tree, Devil got it. And greedy rich men helped him. And I know I am now outside that little town where I was borned because I hear the rumble of it, must have grown severely for I don remember a rumble when I lived there with mi madre Chupa before she run away. Who did that? I never been back since, after my mother run away from us, for my father Hombre took me on to a town that I will later sing you if you wan hear it, if not I'll tell it to the air, as I have said earlier, it is the singing that is important to me. I wonder if I'm tryin to come back home, to where I started, wonder if that's in my head, travelin at large. As a traveler with the Show, in my cheap wagon-have I ever told you about my Show Wagon? I'll have to tell you sometime. I said why the iron bars on my wagon windows Senor Shanks, why the big lock on my door, is this wagon for Heracles the old lion jeroz for God's sakes? You wan get raped or beat up some night? said Shanks. Some nights it's a thought, I murmured. Shanks riled. Bars on Heracles' wagon, he riled, is to keep him in, on yours to keep them out. Well one way not to keep em out is to make it look like a whore wagon, I said to Shanks. All the glass jewels of rubies and sapphires, tin moons and golden-leaf paint. Yet a hovel inside. Course you don wan em in my wagon, see a pig sty, gold leaf and glass jewels on the outside, broken bed inside and

roaches that travel as if twere part of the Show. We'll fix the bed, Shanks riled, we'll fix it I keep tellin you. You keep tellin me, I answered. People see glass and tin shinin for a mile away in the bright sunshine, see what you'd think was gypsy whores movin in the night, sparklin under the moon. No wonder they stoned it that time outside of Hannibal Missoura. Is why we have on the lock and iron bars, like I've told you, says Shanks, gettin hysterical. You could not win with Shanks (nor could those bars keep him out when he'd had a few rums and Cokes, I can tell you, you wan hear?) As a traveler with the Show I was in almost every town and city of this old nation. This was in the nineteen-hundred-and-thirties and the nineteen-hundred-and-forties and the nineteen-hundred-and-fifties. I believe the time of my excape, of becoming at large, was in the nineteen-hundred-and-sixties, no estoy seguro. I am not for sure. I know that right now as I sing to you it is in the nineteen�hundred�and�seventies, near the end, it may be nineteenhundred-and-eightv I don know, nobody comes up to me and says what year it is. I only know that this old world is wearing out. I sing a sweet Adios to it. Cantando, compadre. Canto. You wan hear?

Come back to the show

It could be said that I have run away from the Show. The word excaped was used by some, I'm sure. Oh they looked for me. That Tarrance Shanks surely shined his light in the bushes. One night right after I departed-which is a smart word for somebody crawling like a snake one minute then changin into a bat outa Hell the next-I saw fires in the darkness. They was ahuntin me in the bottomlands. Twas that Tarrance Shanks, my boss and head of the Show, leading a ridiculous posse. Composed of the Mescan Dwarft Eddy Gonzales, my friend, powerful as a bulldog, [uene, but with qualities of beautiful friendship; Josie Ella, the Xylophone player, sweet but who had such a temper, bent the keys of the Xylophone with her little hammer, would beat with such fury sometimes, and my friend; but God help you if she came after you with her little felt-tipped hammer, would sting your brains out, compadre, felt tip had the sting of a wasp, Josie Ella said twas only Shammy-Skin, I said twas made of thorns, give you an idea of what [esucristo felt. And the dog Junipero Perro, a sweet white Mescan jumping dog that loved me always slept beside my side. We spoke Mescan together-course he didn't speak but when he barked to me so pertly he was speaking Mescan, for sure, compadre. They hunted me with affection-even that Shanks, for whom I was a valuable asset. Yet I bet they'd have killed me if they'd have had to, to

keep me from excaping the Show, from leaving them. We used to speak about the world outside with vows to stick together forever. They hunted me with love and murder in their hearts. They come so close. Once Junipero Perro, silver in the dark, put his sweet nose to my brow where I crouched under a palmetto and I muttered Te Amo jun{pero, pero tlate perro, go! vate perriro, dame la Vida! A Dios! A narrow excape! For a moment he gave me his warm tongue. But Junipero Perro did not rat on me, though I know his heart was confused and broken. A broken dog's heart! I suppose there's little worse than the broken heart of a dog, don you? I credit a sweet little white Mescan jumping dog for my successful excape to freedomGod's helper. That was a long time ago, that little dog is dust. Yet I miss the Show. I may go back, I don know. I don even know which town it's in. For the time being I am at large.

A recurring impulse to seek noticias de mi madre, some notice of her, recently recurred again and I am on the road ahuntin. I run out with that hunger and begun to look for her again. I had been living in a burnt-out kiln of an old sawmill, vines had grown all over it and had made of it a cool dark place. A couple of goats lived with me, billy and nanny, and twas peaceful. In the early mornings I heard the Meadow, larks asinging. I guess folks knew I lived out there, outside of town where once twas a thriving sawmill, but nobody bothered me. When I went into the town and asked for anything to eat they give me some. Nobody was afraid and give me some. Once again I had that craving for noticias de mi madre. I will soon to tell you why, compadre. I had had a feeling that my mother Chupa met an early death. People like my mother Chupa run down fast like a flashing firework you see abursting on the ground at Fourth of July Fiesta: something crazy shoots it here, there, then it's out. But I don know, compadre, I thought as I went hunting for my mother Chupa that if I found her don know what I'd do, some days felt like I might choke her throat, what she done to me.

Chupa

A woman of worn beauty had kept comin to the Show. Her beauty was wearing out on her-and so was the dress she wore, a green dress of thinning fringe, diamond-tipped, a tiny shining drip hung from the strings of fringe. I first noticed her on a Saturday night, a crowded night and a rainy night. My God the rain comin down on the Show. Mud on the shoes of my gazers and the smell of wet sawdust, the smell of the wet tent. There she was. Winkin green fringe, bruised green

shoes with spangled buckles, tinsel combs in black long hair. Twas in Memphis, Tennessee. Come away, she whispered. Come with your mother, su madre. Hijo Hijito! my little son! she whispered. I flared as though she had struck me like a match. Who are you, woman? I gnashed through my teeth. Did you get enough of wherever you've been? Are you through with whoever you've been away with? And now coming back to me? Madre? Manui?

I saw her fall to her knees. Through a split in the crimson curtain of velvet that half circled me I saw her pray before me sitting in my gilded chair. I saw the pore glitter in her hair. I held still in my stillness of the Show, sitting in my gilded chair, looking straight ahead. But when one of my eyes fell again upon her I saw her mouth red as a plum murmuring, Midnight. Train depot. I had had other such offers. I held my stillness of the Show.

At midnight, as a Cowboy, un Charro under a wide sombrero and with a red sweat handkerchief around my throat like the Mescans working on the railroad wear, my ancestors, I was at the train depot, in the darkness of under the water tower. Paying no attention to my Charro, I could have been a Priest just as well, or God knows a redheaded woman, Chupa opened her ruby mouth to start talking and I said, I don wan hear it. She pouted and flounced her sparkled fringe and burred out a hot Mescan word. Let's get outa town, I said.

We left town together, a Charro and a Puta, my God, and went out a ways on the road towards the moon that seemed like was a white flake something was eating out a piece of, something was eating the moon. I wanted to choke my mother and wanted to lie on her breast. In the green light of the eaten moon I saw the figure of this woman smartin along on high heels poppin up silver shiners, dartin white eyes, sparklings in her black hair, silver flurries all over, quiverin and poppin in flurries and little burstings; and I thought, what will douse her, what will flash out all this light from her, all this restless blink of her why won't she go out, what'll quench her? Mean but waiting for me to make one move of welcome, one reach of tenderness, pitiful, too, recently beautiful, young face, as if only this morning it had creased there around the mouth and only last night that skin there under her chin had slipped a little. She's beautiful, I thought, in her dancin starry fringe and the plump breasts under the dancin fringe and that black hair over her shoulders; and more alone than anybody in this world, gay and sparkling prancin though she was, cut away from everybody by her own hands, cut adrift solitaria by her own hands, just won't be tied to anybody or anything, think they have you then you leave ern holding strings in their hand, a sparkle, you're gone, woman; cut away even from her own flesh and blood. So now you're back, intrudin onto me, what for? How long will you be here, madam

Madrecita? Looking good, anything I can do for you? Would you like a drink? Some coffee; gin? Are you hungry, Tempesui? When did you eat; need a little money? So the law is after you again? How long can you stay, Sweetheart, whore? Corszon.

When can we talk? she asked me. I wouldn't answer. When we could talk, arriving at an empty place in the woods by the river, we did not talk. We slept, tired to death, in each other's arms. Once I come a little awake, aswaying as if in a soft boat and twas my Madre rockin me in her arms very softly in her sleep; I was in the nest of her, hair and feather strands; and smelt the smell of my mother; and once I come straight awake and in the white moonlight saw that face, saw it as familiar a feature as my own hand, saw a look before me that was ancient, old as my own eyes, the first image I ever in my life seen when my new eyes could gather vision and see-an ancient image of tenderness and craving, fear and awe and murder: my mother, the woman who bore me; and wanted right then to kill her, at the throat, with my hands; or lie upon her breast to go for her with my mouth, to suck her, my being was in my mouth, like in a fish; she drew me by my mouth, as in the very beginning. Lyin on her breast I felt entero. I was total, one. She had not known my division. Should I "reveal" myself to her? Reveal! The old word for the Show. "Arcadio will not consent to reveal his final mystery to anyone. He has chosen to keep it a secret." Would she, like so many others, then flee me? Not my mother. She would see that I carried on my body herself and her man's self, my father's. That I was the walking replica of the two of them. A combination. I not only understood the nature of them both, I was them both. They had no secrets from me. This time my mother would not leave and she would not ever leave me again. When I chose to "reveal." Ladies and gentlemen Arcadio will now consent to reveal his final mystery. To his own mother! It was my trump card, my secret weapon, my instrument of vengeance.

But I heard a dog and I heard footbeats crushing through the vines. I crawled off fast and got into a big tight bush wound like a ball ofbailing wire and curled up in the very center. This is where I have told you the sweet junipero Perro come to touch me farewell with his warm tongue. I don know where Chupa went or how she hid herself; but don worry they didn't find her. She could vanish under a flat rock, slide like a snake. A supreme disappearing act was my mother, the gypsy, the tramp, the runaway bitch left me behind long ago, just couldn't stay with anybody or anything, not even her own, always had to leave something, even a piece of her own body, an artist of magical vanishment, now you saw her now you didn't, not for half your lifetime you didn't, not for half your lifetime. What were you afraid of, bitch mother, Chupa, mi Madre, Madrequericia? I cried out to

myself God deliver me of this rage on my mother! Oh I miss the Show and I may go back. I don know.

In a little while it was all quiet again, my hunters had gone, my darling Perrito had not ratted on me, and I emerged from the ball of weed, my hiding place. No trace of mi Madre. Gone again, I said. But in a moment more my eyes saw a dark figure and twas the woman herself. It was pitch midnight; no moonlight sparkled her. I swear to God she'd know how to turn off the moon if she had to, if moon shone on her and led somebody to find and catch her. She come to me. Lay down again, she said. My son. On your mother's breast and sleep. Tell me what you've done, I sternly said. I wan no more sleep till I hear what you've done. They was looking for you, not your mother, she answered. Because I excaped. For you, I snarled. Tell me your story of what you did, where you've been, I demanded quietly. Or I'll never lay on your breast again. What happened? Madre mfa, mi Madre.

The white Bible

But before I tell you my mother Chupa's story as she told it to me, I want to interrupt, or interfere, is that the word, something wonderful that come to me. I come upon a wondrous book with wondrous stories I keep tellin ever since I read them. Twas a little Mescan Bible fresh white when twas handed long ago to me as I sat in the gazing Show. A hand reached out to me and handed it to me. I could not see the face whose was that face that give the wondrous book to me-who was it oh who was it? In my glass-jewel wagon I read the wondrous stories, of course tis yellowed now with the years and with handlin and from bein in the inside of my pocket where it rests to this day against my flesh when I'm not readin it, the little white Mescan Bible, I do not know the person who handed me the white Bible written in Mescan and never saw the face, who was it oh who was it; but the hand that reached out the white book to me handed me out my feelings of life, and my salvation, and many words, just the most wonderful stories in the whole world, though I had not read any other book ever in my life, I know that this is so. But to tell the truth I never read a word until the hand handed me La. Biblia Blanca, oh I could tell some palabras words that the women taught me in the China Boy but I never had much time to read even if I could, unless twas written on the flesh of a body. And I wrote ARCADIa my name. But to tell the truth I never read a word that twas not with the help of Eddy Gonzales, the atheist Mescan Dwarft that did not believe in God. The nights in the chow tent and

the nights in the glass wagon with the Dwarft areading me the stories was the starting of my life. I have not time to tell all the stories to you. I can tell you them almost as they was written down. Eddy was amazed that I could read em out almost exactly like they was written down and look up to the next page right on time, Dwarft said he was astounded. Guess I become a storyteller more than a reader.

I learned tambien from the tales outrageous that whores told, back in the China Boy. While other kids sat in school. A special one was a grand queen whore from Newark-said she was part Greek-and that her madre had been the principal of a school. Edna Pappas loved words more than anything. When she wasn't on her back she was reading a book-and even while she was, sometimes; she would crook around her head and study her ceiling, even though it jumped sometimes when her customer john was abouncing. When she said to him easy mister it was because he was interfering with her reading. The johns didn't know that she wrote on the ceiling over her bed the words that she was learning for that week, printed in grande letters. Every week she printed out a new list, her big ass up on a ladder while I held it. Oh we had fun! If a john shifted positions and looked up, what he might see if he held his eyes open would be a big word, like AD � MIR � ABLE or PRO� CRAS � TIN � ATE. These are only a few of Edna Pappases words and some which I learned, among many others. Edna Pappas was improving herself for when she would one day get out of the China Boy. I wanted to do the same: the telling of tales fantcisticos was what I wanted and the using of grande words, palabras. But for a long time I got off on the wrong track into a Show where I could not use my words but have to set like a dumb ox, as you know, Oyente, but still-what I learned from Edna Pappas-I put my secret study words on a big boxtop down in front of me and nobody ever knew that I was learning them, I didn't even move my lips when I practiced them; sometimes if I did mouth a word the gazers thought I was apraying or talking to myself like a crazy person, when all I was doing was saying a divided-up word like Edna Pappas showed me to, silabas, syllables. In this way I was getting myself ready for the world, to tell tales, grandeza is what I wanted, extraiieza, belleza, you wan hear. My teachers I will always thank, one taught me from the ceiling of a whorehouse, one from a Bible, and one to tell tales [anuisticos with tongue of tin or silver. Once I excaped, as you will know, Oyente, I used what was taught to me, the telling of tales and the using of words. I have talked off my head-which is a peculiar espression, if you wan think about it, to talk off a head. Edna Pappases brother Silvestro Pappas came almost every day to have a beautiful poet's conversation with his sister when she wasn't on her back, Silvestro Pappas was a poet, full of some

bullshit but his tongue was a silver angel's tongue and a liar's tin one, too, and a bitter one, and suave and mean-demonio-but he told tales fantdsticos. I listened and I learned un poco how to speak like Silvestro Pappas and to get the rough Mejicano sound of my ancestors out of my mouth, I wanted to speak big habla, to be suave in my speaking like Silvestro Pappas and to have the words like his sister Edna. I will tell, he said, you cocksuckers, about the five trees in a hidden canyon of Montana which remain undisturbed summer and winter and whose leaves do not fall. Whoever sees them will not experience death. I, Arcadio, have memorized this, do you hear how good is my habla, Oyente, do you hear how good is my grande speaking, just as I have learned by my heart the stories to read in La Biblia Blanca. Edna Pappas said him You will take me there to those trees when I have one .housand dollars in my sock. Unless, said Silvestro to his sister, you will have grown so old. That's why, answered Edna Pappas, I have to work very hard and with only rich johns. But Edna Pappas never got outa of the China Boy to go to Montana to the hidden five trees, you wan hear, she waited too long. I used to tell her you better go now Edna Pappas and not PRO � CRAS � TIN � ATE, but she kept waiting. I need one thousand dollars in my sock before I go, she said. But in a fight with her own brother she was stabbed by him under her tongue in her throat. Shut up! Silvestro yelled. Stop your goddamned words! Edna Pappases words was not stopped, though, but stayed on the ceiling because no one ever knew they was there but me. She was in the M's at the time of her stabbing. This was the immortality of Edna Pappas-palabras grandiosas on the ceiling of the China Boy, in a house of whores on a whore wharf.

When the white book was handed to me I went with it to Eddy and said what is this book? The Bible said he. The word written down of God. Show me how to read it I said. Eddy was not courteous to do it and besides since he was un atea atheist; but I said you are my friend how did you read who learned you how to read? And Eddy said what good did it do me? Por favor Eddy I says, for your mother's sake. Her? said Eddy. Eddy was so bitter at everything. But he loved me and I give him the promise of tenderness, to touch me sometimes because I knew how lonesome the pore Dwarft was and how he loved me, and because he could read. As a swap for reading out to me I let him handle me. Eddy was a hot little lonely Dwarft and I loved God and wanted to read his words. That was the bargain.

Our first lesson went sweet and I listened to the Dwarft read right out about the making of the world, of the moon and of the stars and waters. His little goose voice. He was surprising gentle when we studied reading together, surprising sweet and did have pacieticia. But

he would not believe the stories of the Book, he said. Why you hate God so rnuch? I asked hirn. God is posiblemente a Dwarft, had you ever thought? Eddy Gonzalez laughed so rnuch and rolled like a clown and rocked his big head in his little hands and then stopped quiet and said, And rnaybe He is a half-man half-woman, and rolled and laughed and rocked his big head sorne rnore; and when he stopped I says, Maybe. What's so fuckin funny?

At night when the Show was through and I was alone in rny wagon with Junipero Perro the sweet white Mescan jurnping dog, I told out frorn rny Biblia Blanca as if I was areading it. I got mas y mas astounded, rnore and rnore. junipero Perro was a very quiet oyente listener. God rnay be a white Mescan jurnping dog, I says to him. And as the Show rode all day on the road toward another town, I told out frorn the white book like Eddy had read it to rne. Sornetirnes I read out frorn it to rny friends Eddy and Josie Ella in the chow tent, but of course not the old Shanks. Sometimes they intently listened, sornetirnes they was restless. I told thern they could never set still like I had to in the Show. You jurnp and roll all over, I told Eddy the Dwarft, you don know about staying still; and you, I said, Josie Ella, you thrash and fling at your Xylophone. I have to stay still, in the gazing stillness. Now let rne read out and let rne rnake sorne sound frorn rny throat, for God's sake, I arn not a mudo I have a tongue and can speak. But Eddy the Dwarft answered to rne tell it in Church I arn an atheist why would I want to believe in a God that rnade a Dwarft with one of his hands like the fin of a fuckin fish? Well I says this is God's world and he hath rnade it, this white book has told rne so and in Mescan so He rnade the Mescans too and He rnade the combinations and mixtures, Mestizos of a dark and secret kind. Why not the Dwarfts? You got a better thing, said Eddy. Of course you can praise God and read out of the Bible. I drag rny butt on the ground when I walk and have a fish's fin for a goddarn hand. And rny friend Josie Ella was igualmente not interested. She was a plain wornan-when she took off the silvery wig-that sewed at night in the kitchen tent after the Show, drinking black coffee. She did not want to go to sleep for fear that her hands would harden. Besides she said Flora the lady cook that shared her wagon srnelt of Irish potatoes. But once when she put too rnuch brandy in the black coffee she told rne that the reason she would not sleep was because she was afraid to die. She slept in cat-sleeps in the kitchen sittin up. As long as I knew Josie Ella she had not finished sornethin she was sewing on, she rnade so rnany rnistakes and had to unravel. But she told us that she had to keep her hands rnovin all the tirne could not let thern harden, for the Xylophone of the Show; yet she rnade rnany a rnistake and Shanks cursed at her and said twas because of all the black coffee and

no sleep on her back poor Josie Ella had her problems, too, like the rest of all of us

Mi Madre told me that I had a half-brother in this world somewhere, given her by Joe Schwartzman's wild loving on the only day she knew him and born of her, under evil airs of murder and guilt and suffering, nine months later in a jail in Missoura where she had been locked up seven months pregnant not for the crime of killing but for stealing the green-fringed, diamond-tipped dress that hid her sevenmonths child; under a swaddle cover of soft fringe and silver shiners this child swelled up his mother and mine until he burst out of her in her cell of the Missoura jail-she never told what town-to the surprise of the jailer and the judge, an old drunken fool with a harelip but he let her go free, she said; mi madre brought this bursting child out of her with her own hands, in secret in the night. The name of my brother that my mother gave him when he was born was Tomasso. She left Tomasso in the Missoura jailhouse for adoption and he was brought up in a Missoura jailhouse in an unnamed town adopted by the jailer and his wife. My God, I called, I have somewhere a brother. And you have a dead Jewish stepfather, stop grieving over completely lost things she told me, stop taking everything I tell you so hard, I want to forget it all. But my half-brother Tomasso is not lost, I said, and for God's sake who are you to tell me to stop taking everything so hard? And besides I am not taking it so hard I am only listening attentively as I have been accustomed to for years in the Show. But now I will have to begin to wonder how to find Tomasso. Why don't you look in Missoura? Chupa asked me. Because I am sure he has excaped by now, I says to her. And anyways, where is Missoura? Don't ask me, Chupa said. I was only in jail in it. How do you know that Tomasso is not dead like his Jewish father and besides how many can you look for, father, half-brother, mother? Well, I found you, I told my crazy mother. Who answered I found you. In a Sideshow. It was my home, I spat back; something you never gave me. It was a Show, she spat at me. For deformities. Fake deformities. What is this world, I cried out, what in damnation is this world? It was not an act, I said, pulling back from what was going to be a fight between us. It was a cheap act and one to humiliate your mother, my mother shouted, until I came to get you out, and I shouted, it was not an act! And she cried humiliation! Cheap humiliation she screamed from a face that was wild with her feelings of fear and self-hate and run off a ways and turned her face from me and cried into her hands, bitterly and for herself, for all her life that she had just told me-and for more than I could know, but not for me. And while she sobbed her lonesome anguish, cut away,

again, from the world, and by her own hands had done it, again, cut herself away, with one hand, you wan hear it, I opened my pants and with both hands pulled down my pants to my ankles and lay back. Look, I said softly, Mama look, I said softly with softness and love, without blame or anger, I don know why it wasn't anger but I guess because it was the work of God, I said Mama look. I am revealed. My mother turned, whimpering, and gazed upon me lying revealed in the firelight; and then she came closer and looked down upon me and then my mother Chupa stepped back from me, and back, stepped back whispering 0 Dios 0 Dios 0 Dios and vanished into the trees, some' place way back, and the night was silent, where was my mother was she praying was she going to steal back and kill me? And then I heard her crying. Mama, I called, why you cryin; don cry for me. I already cried enough, God knows, tears enough to fill a hundred buckets. Nobody ever cried for me but me and tears enough I've cried to fill a bowl to wash your long black hair; don cry for me. There was no answer. And I laid on there, as alone as ever; quiet, though, now; and finally revealed the final mystery; the final mystery that old Shanks could never get from me in the Show; and now felt older and more of myself, don know why exactly; and laid on, laid on awake and under the eternal stars, naked as God made me and revealed to Him; and the night passed. You wan hear it.

At daybreak I built a fire, and my mother Chupa come back, smelling the fire. We was quiet and then I said to her quietly, and loving her, what'd you expect, the Dallas Morning News? And then to my surprise I felt myself breaking into crying, so full, for the whole story of my mother, and for my whole story, all what happened to me, for the whole troubled thing, our lives, that just suddenly drownded me down like heavy water over me. Then my mother swept like a wave of water into her sobbing and we cried deep and full together, lagrimas de dolor lagrimas dolorosas, negro es el color de nuestras mstezes, like the Mescan song says. I'm sorry for your black life of shit, I told my mother, rubbing off tears with the back of my hand for some reason laughing now.

I've had some good of it, I heard her say while she begun to comb down her black bitter hair.

Don you think I haven't out of mine? I said. Corazon ? Sweetheart?

You seem to be getting ready to go someplace? I asked, sensing the old abandonment, the way she used to brush her hair before she went out.

To relieve myself, she said.

I never saw my mother Chupa again. You wan hear it? Twas later

said to me by somebody that twas the sin of uncovering, of revealing, that put a curse on my mother Chupa-or another one, seems to me, she was born already with a curse-as in the white Bible when Noah was looked upon uncovered and a curse fell upon the viewer of his nakedness-his very son. Sent my mother wandering away, the uncovering of my nakedness. God knows, I don't. But although I will be telling you of hunts for her and espectations of her you might as well know now that never again did I find my mother Chupa. That morning by the fire I waited and waited long after the fire had sunken into ashes and cold. But mi madre Chupa never did come back to me. To relieve herself indeed, well she relieved herself that morning, relieved herself of me forever. That was her swan song with me, though I did not know it then.

Since it was my mother cause me to excape from the Show to meet her then run away from me again, I decided to remain excaped and search for Tomasso who had swollen up my mother and burst out of her in a jail in Missoura, I do not even know which town. In searching for my half-brother, I might just come upon my mother Chupa now excaped from me; and, quien sabe?, might even come upon my father Hombre somewhere, running his long member up somebody; or sitting blue and old somewhere with a bottle of beer. Maybe I could bring us all together.

Margo (from Six women)

Well you said you wanted to learn to paint. And so we brought you the oil paints and the easel and the canvas and showed you a few things and you went to it. I know it was a celebration, everything was-or used to be, in the earlier days when you felt better. Now it was bad for you most of the time. You felt bad, things went bad. But you never said so, you never said you felt bad. "Honey it's O.K., everything's wonderful. To be naked and drink Vodka out of the bottle and smoke and paint bright wild "pictures" all night long with Daphnis and Chloe playing and The Firebird, was a way to just go to hell; and who cared?

Sweet choir-singer in Livingston Methodist Church, Livingston, Texas, you had that Texas girl sweetness and a full-faced smile, that Texas ready belief, that quality of listening, that gentle willingness of Texas youth as I remember it, that courtesy. You were also, you told me, one of the first girls in Livingston to smoke with the men out behind the churchhouse between anthems at choir practice; and even in the place of worship you had some of the Devil in you-and some of the Devil's plans: to get out of town, out of Polk County. And you already liked a little booze. You were also a hardheaded hellion that simply could not be shut up once you started talking about something you had to have. You stood up before the City Council of Houston and said to them, "Honey, I don't care what it costs, you got the money. Houston's got the money. Give me the Grand Ballroom in the Lamar Hotel. What the hell's a ballroom when you haven't got a damn ball? When you can have theatah, when you can have plays. Wonderful, magical plays. Honey we got to have some magic, some wonder. Give me that ballroom." And you got it.

They couldn't get all the colored paint off your face. You'd used a lot of purple and green. Your hair-you had a big head of wiry hair, shocked over a bulging forehead-your tangled hair was streaked red, green, yellow, purple. Scratched your head, didn't you Margo, when

you couldn't figure out what to paint next; grabbed your face when you were crazy and despairing and wiped the tears of your sobs away with painted fingers; and you stroked your body a lot, you must have hugged yourself and clawed yourself a lot. They said they never could get all the colored oilpaint off your body. The agony you died in, in your forty-second year-bewildered pain-was still over you for those who came to see you in the casket before they closed it. You were, they said, my dear, a bit gaudy in your casket, but who the hell cared, you'd have asked. You just would not hold back that wild night, naked and crazy in the Stoneleigh Hotel in Dallas, raging with hurt and failure and disappointment and booze and pills, with the Debussy playing and the Stravinsky. You were gaudy and wild-looking and puffed up, painted and strutted with late chaos. They closed your casket as if to hold you in, rising like a loaf, and face like a face in a painting, DeKooning, Dubuffet-you had become a painter; indeed, you were your own first and last work, you had created a head of a panicked woman, your times, and they buried you like that, in East Texas, under a liveoak tree in Polk County, in Livingston.

And oh honey it's goan be so beautiful, goan be beautiful, honey it's goan be magical in the theatah, I just cain't tell ya, and we goan cahst it real right; honey we goan get beautiful actors, nobody's goan tell me I cain't cahst this play way I dream of it, honey it's my dream. This is the theatah, honey, this is the magic and the wonder.

And oh honey please don't leave me, where you goin honey, oh please don't go; wait a minute till I can get up and get me a cup of coffee, go get me a cup of coffee, oh honey I didn't go to. What'd I do? Baby we uz all drinkin; did I say anything? Oh was it about Joe's design for the set, that it looked like a goddam tourish court, a goddam motel; oh baby wait lemme get a cup of coffee, please don't leave me alone and mad at me like this, oh baby.

Well Margo, I had to go. And as I turned back to look at you in your bed, insane with hangover and still half-blind with blackout, shaking and crazy and dying (you knew it), I did not know that I would never see you again. We talked once more, on the phone, longdistance, and I yelled at you while you called back Oh Baby, Baby, please please listen to me, don't hang up, don't go away, don't leave. And I hung up, Margo. I cut you off. I never heard your voice again. And they buried you back in East Texas, casket closed, in Polk County, before your wild body would rise up bursting, and they couldn't ever get all the paint off you, gaudy and unquiet, wildlooking, just arrived from violence and strife, as if you had just been thrown, struggling, into the casket, snatched out of violence as if your

house had been on fire or had exploded, snatched out of strife and bound down into a coffin, strutted with wild thwarted hopes, stopped from your dream, kept back, held down, drunk and doped out of your living mind; you, Margo Jones, fantastic figure lying under the leaves of the liveoak tree since 1955 in Livingston Cemetery beckon to me, betimes; but I won't follow.

When you came to the loft where I was living with the painter, on West Twenty-third Street over the used-piano store and a block away from the Woolworths where the old Macaw languished in the Pet Department for want of a purchaser-he was too expensive and Woolworths would not come down on the price of him-when you came trembling with your excitement and sparkling-faced and shiningeyed from what you called the "wonder"; when you came that morning and I, daubed then with paint that I could not even see, I was so blind, and you said, Why Baby you're covered with paint, it's even in your hair; then, when you came that day I showed you the story ofthe great fallen dead horse by Central Park, by the Plaza Hotel and you wept and said Oh honey, honey, and I wanted to tell you, then, how bad it was and how I wondered if you could take me away, if I could go away with you, into the service of your wonder, be in some show, made-up in greasepaint and lit by colored lights, away from that drab city of fear and noise and poverty. And when we sat downstairs in the Paradise Bar and Grill on West Twenty-rhird Street and you drank and I listened-it was the first time I'd been out of the dark loft for many days-you said, Baby there's paint on your eyebrow and paint on your elbow and even under your fingernails, here lemme see can I get it off. I was surprised, I had not known, in the winter darkness of the loft. But would you help me get away? Get away was what I always wanted. Get away. Would you help me get away, to where you were, to the show?

I told you about the dancing shoes hidden in my closet on Merrill Street in Houston when I was fifteen, about the magical makeup box of greasepaint that smelled in the Texas humid nights, hidden there, too. And of the afternoons I rode around City of Houston with the top down, in the convertible, between shows, in our makeup, with the Vaudevillians from the Metropolitan Theatre, Johnny Tap, the fastest tapdancer in the world and beautiful Carmelita the Spanish dancer, Queen of Castanets, the dancers and the singers, people of enchantment, four-a-day people. We rode past Central High School that I was absent from most days that year to hide backstage in the shadows of the wings, in my painted makeup that the Vaudevillians had transformed me with, into something extravagant, sitting in the darkness of

the wings in my colored makeup, that I had on even now, in the daylight, in the convertible, and looked out at the drab building of Central High School that I had fled, past my father's office building, drab sober building where he sat earning his poor pay that couldn't move us from our little house on Merrill Street, where my tap shoes were hidden and my greasepaint and my secret cardboard piano that no one could hear when I played it-hello Dad, look at me, I'm something glorious, all golden and rosy and purple-eyed and brilliantine slicking back my hair; hello Dad this is how I am, something marvelous, to hell with your Texas yellow pine and cheap clothes and your poor low-down family from the Mississippi sawmills, they won't break my heart anymore, why have I cried for them in the night, a boy crying for a whole family, for the doomed generations, wondering how on earth he can ever save them from sickness and poverty (he ought to be thrashing with a young hard-on and jacking off to the promise of life); yet "oh my people!" I heard that voice in me utter, "oh my people, I will make it all right, you'll see! Lean on me. I will make it all right and give you beauty for ashes, joy for the oil of mourning." In my makeup, riding along Main Street of Houston in the open convertible in the company of wonder people, I ached with guilt for my secret and whispered I'm forsaking you, my father, I'm abandoning you, my family, I'm departing you, my little drab house that smells of collard greens and oil cloth, I've got my suitcase packed, I'm leatlin. Oh my people! Already I felt a warm hand on my thigh and the new breathlessness of desire. Shivering with desire and transported from old dead places, painted and beautiful and full of my early thrilling confusion, now drawn apart and ready (and sixteen), I flung back my head in the hot afternoon sun of North Main Street in Houston, and saw us passing Woodland Heights Methodist Church-there where the old piano was, in the basement-the Young People's Departmentthe very key was in my pocket that the preacher gave me secretly so that I could practice the piano and hear it-this one wasn't a paper piano-hear it tinkle and boom in the empty churchhouse on Sunday afternoons ("Practice?" I hadn't even learned anything; it was all by ear and blurted-out rhapsody); there where I sang in the choir and took the body ofChrist on my tongue and came up the aisle one morning to stand up before the congregation, vowing to serve the Lord as a missionary to China. Oh Lord, I thought, in the convertible, passing that church, look at me, I'm going away; are you coming with me? The Vaudevillians were drinking out of a bottle now, not much, a swig here and there, but I smelled the terrifying fumes of whiskey that had crazed my grandfather and killed my Uncle Ben and one time my own father kicked out a window on a half-pint, we saw him praying on his

knees by his bed, kneeling in the broken glass, and I was afraid. But we rode on, on a spring afternoon in the open convertible, down the sunny streets of Houston and saw the white azaleas blooming and the camelias and all the yellow roses, and we were free and splendid and faraway from everything out there beyond the open car, we were beautiful and rosy and glittering and there was a show coming soon, in the afternoon-a show in the afternoon! with colored lights and costumes and music and we belong to that, you on the sidewalks carrying your briefcases and your purchases from Foleys Department Store, that's where we're going: to the Show, back to the Show.

It was on one of those afternoons, Margo, that I kept the bottle and did not let it pass me by, and turned it to my mouth, there in the Metropolitan Theatre, in the enchanted shadows of the wings under a silvery light filtering from a blue and silvery stage, and music of a saxophone waltz, huddling, painted and trembling, with Eddie and Johnny Tap, and Carmelita. Out of me flared up a wild and thrilling being, a grand and wild and ready being of flesh and heat; and I didn't care, I let go, I was ready to go. And flaring with whiskey and trembling with new tenderness, I gave up myself and found, for the first time, painted and caught in the silver and melancholy music, a bursting away of unhappiness and an ease of longing; and a kind of dying. When they saw that I had brought my suitcase and was ready to run away with them, with the Show, they brought me home, passed out; and when I came to in my glaring makeup, with all the neighbors and my parents gathered around me, I called "Johnny Tap! Carmelita!" and saw on the floor my forlorn suitcase.

You'd been gone for many years, Margo Jones, when I got to Newport Beach in California in 1976. You'd turned a thousand bottles to your mouth and finally fallen to your painted death. You'd been twenty years in the ground in Livingston Texas under the liveoak tree when I got to that Newport Beach hotel in California. In that hopeless night, there in Newport Beach, I saw before me many departed; and I saw your fantastic figure, crazy rainbow hair, face colorslashed and strutted, beckoning to me.

And I, too, fell to my own floor in that beach hotel in California, saw in the haze of my sinking away, shining on my hands, my feet, my naked body, red, green, purple, yellow. And the miracle that drew like a siphon that deadly color out of me, those countless pills soaked in gin, and saved me there, has kept me here to speak to you now, has given me mind to remember, vision to see some meanings, tongue to speak amends of love.

Tongues of m.en and of angels (from. work in progress)

I started out to tell about what became of two cousins and their uncle who loved them, according to what the older cousin told me. But some of their kinfolks' lives would have to be told if you're going to talk at all about the cousins and their uncle. So what I have to tell about first is all one family, what I heard told to me and what I watched happen. I have been here in this family's town longer than any of the family, and have in my long time noted-and wonder if you have, ever-the turning around of some peoples' lives, as if some force moved in them against their will: runaways suddenly arrived back, to the place they fled; berserk possessed people come serene; apparently Godblessed people overnight fall under malediction.

Joe Parrish

Blanch, Louetta's mother, ran away from everybody-mama, papa, husband, child-with a good young Mexican that had worked on the East Texas place, named Juan Melendrez from the Rio Grande Valley. Blanch's husband, Louetta's father, named Joe Parrish, went loco at this. He was found lying in the mud of the pigpen, sockeyed and slobbering from what was thought to be a stroke, staring up at the mudcaked pigs grunting over him. And again, some fishermen came upon him prostrate in the steaming weeds of the river. Cottonmouth water moccasins glided all around him yet no snake bothered him. He's gone crazy, said the town, and tried to persuade Blanch's folks to put him in the insane asylum, but they would not. A black woman was brought by Kansas Tate to pull out the devils that had taken hold of Joe Parrish, but she said that they were deeper into him than any she had ever witnessed. She told how devils put roots into a person that

thread around his liver and his lights and rope his heart and grow thorns into his lungs. This is why he foams and screams and pants for breath. But then Joe Parrish quieted for a while and sat on the porch, calm. Until one night he was missing. He was gone, leaving Louetta a tragic orphan in her grandparents' house at fourteen.

Now a lot of years later, Joe Parrish came back one night, and he wanted to see his daughter and to get her to help him, but found no one left on the place but the uncle. Joe Parrish told that he was escaped from the Penitentiary, a murderer-convict that had killed six Mexicans in the Rio Grande Valley. A winged man with black wings had come near him and unfurled and curled back again a thin black tongue like a horned toad's and said, "Get even. Pay back the Mexicans." Now he had broken out and had come back barefooted and in rags, wanting to hide on the place.

When told that Louetta had drowned in the well, his old bedevil, ment took him again, and again the black-winged figure came and licked out his black tongue and suggested that at the bottom of the well Joe Parrish would possibly find better times for himself. Before the uncle's eyes Joe Parrish lept into the very well, which had long been without water and was only a cistern of deep thick mud. Flash, lights revealed only the yellow soles of Joe Parrishes naked feet lying on a floor of black mud, like a pair of turned-over houseshoes. When the rescuers, about fifty of them gathered from all over the county, threaded through the well-wheel a rope with an iron claw at the end of it and hooked it to Joe Parrishes feet (some said the claw looked like the Devil's pitchfork but it was used to grab along the riverbottoms for bodies of the drowned) they strained together as if they were lifting an enormous bucket of wellwater. Suddenly there was a socking sound deep in the well and its echoing was a sound of horror, and then the tuggers, who had fallen back upon one another upon the ground, saw swaying at the crest of the wellwheel, dripping of mud and blood and clawed by the iron claw, two naked feet. Joe Parrishes feet had been pulled from their ankle sockets. The whole town was sickened for a time by the feet of Joe Parrish. They poured bag after bag of lye into the accurst well on the back porch of the old house and then strong men laid a cement hood over the cement top of what was now Joe Parrishes tomb. Except for his feet, which of course many thought ought to have been thrown into the well. Instead, they were stolen from the Funeral Home where they had been taken-where else could you take them?-and it was not known whether they were embalmed or whether they were just rank feet in the hands of the thief. And then began the rumors of the feet of Joe Parrish, one foot or both, cropping up here and there. Some reported seeing a footless man

crawling through the woods, howling for his lost feet. But the two feet of Joe Parrish began to haunt people. One person said she saw one of the feet walking on the railroad track one moonlight night and that it chased her; another screamed that a foot was in her bed when she got in, but nobody in her household could find it; and sure enough a woman at a dinner table, wanting the butter, asked somebody to please pass the foot-the town was so foot-haunted: and another, way down in the Rio Grande Valley in a Mexican town, reported being followed home from the midnight shift by two steadily tromping feet. Finally this all stopped. Joe Parrishes feet were never found, or haven't been yet. God knows where they came to rest. You will say that every town old enough to have its stories has some hand or a head or has something walking without peace to haunt people. This town was not any different. But since I am interested in the old places that are lost and the stories in them and how they were almost lost until they were saved by some who had ears and tongues and mouths, I thought I'd mention the story of Joe Parrish.

But one question: what had Joe Parrish done to deserve all this? Is there no meaning to some lives? Doesn't it sometimes seem that a life has reeled through its time without making any sense to the rest of us? Or is it that Joe Parrish was just a toy of a bad angel, a poor soul crazed by jealousy-madness and vengeance, that lept headfirst into a well of mud at the bidding of a bad angel. Are there such angels?

But I have some more to tell.

Inez Melendrez McNamara

Two women arrived in town one day. One was an older but beautiful woman, and the other a beautiful brown young girl of some fifteen years with flowing coarse black hair. It was Blanch and her Mexican daughter, Inez Melendrez. Juan Melendrez had been killed beside Blanch and Inez in the truck as they drove along a road back of Refugio, Texas. They said that three gunshots shot out of the fruit groves. Blanch saw Juan burst into blood as though he were a punctured wine sac, and had enough composure to grab the wheel and put on the brake. Inez was thrown through the door and into the air and came down like somebody under a parachute of black hair into a watermelon field and landed astraddle a large watermelon. Blanch couldn't stop screaming. A car stopped and helped. Juan Melendrez was dead, faceless, in Blanch's lap of blood. Inez was badly hurt-her womb was crushed-and she was told that she could never bear a child.

Blanch thought to come back home. Did she think they would all be waiting with open arms? There was no one there to tell her the story of all that happened, of Joe Parrishes fate and of Louetta's, her daughter's. Her sister and brother in Houston had long ago disowned her and had left their home place to rot and fall in upon their drunken brother, the uncle I will tell you more about (and his two nephewsmaybe you will remember) in a while.

When mother and daughter came to the family house, they found doors and windows all boarded up. Blanch came face to face with the forbidding riding figure on the glass pane. She fell back for a moment and felt a cold shudder over her, but then, being a strong woman of Texas prairie and valley, she tore open the front door. The odor of the house was of death and rot, and when she found the well cemented over and read the words drawn with a nail in the cement, THIS WELL ACCURST, and the figure of a skeleton head in the embrace of crossbones, she felt a chill of horror. When she was later told of the content of the well, she pulled her daughter Inez Melendrez to her and told her the tale of Joe Parrish and of Louetta, her daughter, and of Juan Melendrez and of the uncle, her brother and of the red nigger. She was told that the uncle had gone off to Houston to seek his sister and brother and just as she was making plans to go there and find him and to bring him back home, the uncle arrived, but as a wasted corpse in the hands of his nephew. You have already heard of the funeral. Blanch and Inez Melendrez went on living in the house with the accurst well. She had an altar built over the well and kept a candle burning on it night and day, but you can sure enough believe and will want to know that evil spirits were not in the least held away by the burning light of any candle.

Blanch began to be worried by the sound of somebody walking on the roof. She placed a ladder to the roof so that she was often climbing the ladder day and night, staring at the roof. She had climbed the ladder so many times that she had blisters bleeding in the palms ofher hands and the soles of her feet. No sooner had she come down the ladder than up she had to go again. Up and down the ladder she went, night and day. Inez Melendrez feared for her mother's sanity because she herself had not heard anything. One night Inez heard a crash and when she ran outside she found that it had come from her mother Blanch who had fallen off the ladder in the dark and was dead in the Canna Lilies from a broken neck. At last Blanch had peace. But who knows who has peace? It is told that when Inez found her mother dead in the lilies, a black-winged person stood near and with a long black tongue going in and out of its mouth said, "Joe Parrish won." Inez cried out and the figure vanished. She lifted up her mother and carried

her into the house where she laid her in her bed and lit candles around her. That night when Inez dozed, the house burned to the ground, burning Blanch to ashes in it as Inez fled for her life. Nothing but the well was left.

I later came to the place to see what was left of the door. I found in rubble on a jagged piece of glass the perfect head of the horse rearing passionate and proud in his curling delicate mane, and took it. I looked for the rider but never found him. He must have lain on the burnt ground in a thousand pieces of blackened glass. I would give anything to have found the rider of that precious horse, horseman lost forever.

Inez the Chicana was now seventeen. She saw suffering, persecution and unfair treatment of the Mexican people in her county. She de' plored the exploitation of her people by rich Anglo-Texans. "I am a Tejana," she said. "I am a Texan as well as a Mejicana. She was widely sought after since she was so haughty and beautiful with her fountainous coarse black hair. A rich independent oil man named Ralston McNamara pursued Inez Melendrez and he happened to be one of those who confiscated land wherever he wanted it to drill for oil from it. He took away land from Mexican people then hired them as cheap labor to work on it with his drilling company, promising a share of profits which they never got, since they did not know numbers or how to speak English. How could they figure anything out? They seemed to be naturally in disgrace everywhere. Why was this? Many towns would not allow Mexican people to eat in their cafes or to come into their stores. "I'll tell you, give me a nigra anytime over a greasy Mescan," is what you heard.

Ralston McNamara continued to pursue Inez Melendrez and in some time Inez Melendrez married Ralston McNamara. His big wells which he gave to his young bride (she was nineteen) as a wedding present, Inez No. I and Inez No.2, had come in like earthquakes and explosions bursting open the earth and splattering with thick oil mud a countryside of grazing cows and blooming cotton fields and tomato and pea farms, and bringing overnight power and riches to Inez Melendrez McNamara. She at once moved to invest and to buy and to accumulate. She bought a hotel in the Panhandle, acreage in the small town of Houston adjacent to what would one day be a great international airport, and some several miles of the early Houston Ship Channel, along which she built docks and warehouses for cotton and grain. She bought automobile agencies in some small towns like Tomball and Conroe, Texas and a radio station in the state capital of Austin. Ralston McNamara was amazed at her avarice and her clutch, ing sense of money and was already experiencing spells of impotence

with his young wife. Within two years of their marriage he was dead from a split skull brought about by the blade of a machete that fell from a rigging. His head had been sliced in two to the end of his nose. For a time there had been suspicion of foul play among the Mexicans since it was known that the Mexicans were not fond of Ralston McNamara even though he had a Mexican wife. Now all the McNamara fortune fell into Inez' hands and at twenty-and miraculously pregnant-she was perhaps the most powerful person in all Texas and no doubt in the whole Southwest, probably in half the country. Soon after McNamara's death Inez Melendrez McNamara gave birth to an Irish-Mexican boy who was named Juan McNamara. This boy was the idol of Inez McNamara's eyes. He was not out of her sight. She held him against her breast wherever she went, whatever she did. He slept beneath the cool cover of her coarse black hair. But the shining glory of an immense fortune was darkened by the sickness of a child. Juan McNamara was attacked by a mysterious illness when he was two years old and he lay in a pale languor night and day. The beautiful ivory-colored child could not be healed. Famous doctors came and were of no help. Inez' investments fell; she did not care. She closed shops and offices and warehouses, cancelled contracts. People embezzled her and stole her property. She was in a trance of dread, clutching her dying child to her. She pawned and sold for a nuisance her silver and furs to pay for exorbitant miracle medicines and to bring healers and holy men to her child. But Juan McNamara died. He was three years old and had withered to look sixty.

Inez Melendrez McNamara turned her back on her former life. She brought a bag of cash money and jewels to a Carmelite nunnery in the fields near San Antonio, Texas and entered it, taking a vow of renundation and total silence.

No one from the outside world has ever seen her or spoken to her again. Not once has she opened the little door to her cell. The nuns who feed her and take care of her have been pursued by people from all over the world for information about the hidden beautiful woman of sorrows. And some have come with business papers, leases, titles and contracts. The Sisters would not speak to them, although some needed immediate life-saving answers that only Inez could give. Some begged to slip a piece of paper under the door for Inez' signature. There was even one incensed man on the roof of Inez' cell crying down to her to help him salvage some few dollars of his lost fortune, but there was no answer. The Sisters would not speak to anyone of Inez Melendrez McNamara, as though she did not exist. Only one little Novitiate who was missing and was found in the Shamrock Hotel in Houston wearing a huge emerald and ordering elaborate room service

for a bunch of conference salesmen in a penthouse orgy, told some news of Inez before she passed out, champagne-sodden. She told how Inez Melendrez McNamara weighed 350 pounds and that her huge body was cloaked by her coarse black hair, which dragged on the floor, like a shaggy black cape. When the Novitiate sobered up she found herself back in the nunnery, raped so many times that it took some weeks to heal her.

But time has almost carried off forever the story of Inez Melendrez McNamara. I've saved a little of it here.

Ormsby

What is this wild thing that will cut like a shark-toothed blade through a person until it has hacked him to pieces? Or more, what I am interested in is the change that will come over a wild person, as though a devil had suddenly departed him. Where did the devil go? The Bible says into some swine that, filled of two men's devils, ran crazy over a cliff and fell into the sea, leaving the two men peaceful after long torment. But I am not interested-right now-in the receivers of the demons that flee insane people, in the swine: it is the wild person that takes my thought right now: a man named Ormsby.

Now Ormsby was a wild red young nigger come down from a poverty-killed back swamp town near Mobile, Alabama to get work at a sawmill in Moscow Texas. He was in trouble from the first because he drank whiskey with the Coushata Indians and fucked them and cut them across their throats and faces with a nasty knife. He was wild with his red dick and mean with his knife and was locked up a lot and bound to posts and trees to keep him from tearing up half a town-or his own self.

Look how he changed to a pink-headed loving old nigger: After the violence in the woods with the raped white girl Louetta, Blanch's daughter you will recall, he ran back toward the Alabama swamp that he grew up in. He hid in weeds and crawled by rivers and walked highways in rags until he stole some clean clothes off a clothes, line and put them on. He finally got on a truck that took him as far as Mobile and from there he got to the hidden swampland that he knew and sank into it, hidden from the world. His wretchedness and his self, loathing made him grovel in the alligator excrement and filth of the shallows of the swamp water. He lay naked among the alligators, hoping they would bite him to pieces and eat him up. They did not touch him. Sometimes, blinking, they lumbered over him as he lay in the steaming swamp mud; their claws left deep bleeding gashes on his

body whose white scars he carried to his death. The heat was infernal and fierce swamp insects sang in his ears and stung his naked body until he threw himself into the hot swamp water, howling. He could not die.

And then one afternoon in his dementia he heard an urging to go back to Moscow, Texas to the sawmill and stand up and work honestly and earn his pay. When he determined to go, to turn away out of the hell swampland, he stood up and felt the madness in him leave. And he saw the alligators go crazy, as if they were mad as he had been. They thrashed and lept and beat their horned heads against the cedar stumps in the water and all of them that he had lived with battered themselves to death. The water was blood. When the silence that followed filled the swampland, Ormsby the changed man stood up in a peace that he could not understand; but he got himself ready to go back to the sawmill. He found his filthy clothes and washed them in a spring and they dried in an hour while he scoured his filthy body in the clean springwater until he was fresh again. Ormsby then walked out of the dark hidden place of his madness.

At the sawmill they saw that he was a different man and in trust they gave him a job. Ormsby worked hard and was quiet among the men who could hardly believe that he was the same man who had been chained, hollering and gnashing his teeth, to trees so that others could be safe from him. Because of his long suffering, Ormsby's hair, which had been red, had turned pink.

He came one day into the nearby town where Kansas Tate had lived, asking for her in niggertown. He was told that she was dead and that he could find out more from the man, the uncle, who still lived on the place where Kansas Tate had worked for so many years.

At the place Ormsby found the uncle, who took right to him, and the uncle told the long story to Ormsby and how Kansas Tate was dead from shock and grief. Ormsby wept and seemed gentle and saintly, yet he was the cause of all the woe and doom that had fallen upon the place. The uncle then told Ormsby his own story of his love for Louetta, of his fathering and nursing and healing Leander, child of rape, when he was dying in a cave from the violence of the KKK, of Leander's lust for Louetta and of Louetta's terrible suicide in the well. Ormsby then told of his long suffering and hiding and how he had been urged back to ask forgiveness. He told the uncle of his terrible deed and begged on his knees for mercy and forgiveness. His pink head shook with the sobs that poured silver tears down his black glistening face and the white signs of the claws of the alligators shone on his black body. The uncle might have straightaway killed Ormsby there in the house. But an extraordinary thing occurred. I forgive you,

said the uncle. Who can cast the first stone? They had loved the same woman, and the white man had brought up the black man's son and loved him like his own. The uncle told all this to Ormsby, the pinkheaded nigger. Let's try to live together in this place, the uncle said, or the Klu Klux Klan will kill you if they catch you, and me, too. You can live in this house with me. And together, the uncle said, being the only ones left of the whole story, we can wait for the possible return of our son Leander. The town rumbled at a white man and a black man living in the same house, for of course they found out about them. But who among them knew all that had happened? Yet they judged and denounced the two men as derelicts and the KKK rode for many nights around and around the house with burning torches until the dust from their horses' hooves set a cloud over the old family house. But the two men laid low inside. Sometimes they saw the glow of fire at their windows and they looked out to see burning crosses staked in the road and in the fields. It is a miracle that the KKK arm of justice and morality did not set the house on fire, and their threats of this and of tar-and-feathering the two men as a means of punishment and of setting things aright came often in shouts and chants, but the old house stood untouched and the men inside unharmed. This is because, it is said, that some said they saw in a white glowing above the roofof the house the bright figure of a winged man flashing a sword and calling 'with a powerful voice, "This house is blest by forgiveness. Go away." And all the fires of the burning crosses died out. This is what they say, this is what some saw.

Leander never returned. Some dark nights and on some dark stormy days, one or other of the two men was sure that he saw a figure of Leander, the lost son, coming across the pasture, rising and falling in the high grass; or leaping and darting toward the house like a jackrabbit, at dusk in the twilight; or sometimes on the road in the summer heat, a glowing veil-like shape seemed to be arriving. But Leander never arrived.

Finally Ormsby was found dead in his bed by the uncle one sleety morning in November. The uncle buried him in a grave on the place and put at its head a slab of wood with the words on it, "Leander's father forgiven."

From then on, alone in the house of sorrow and forgiveness, the uncle drank, full of his silent story-except what he would tell of it to me when he would let me through the horseman-cursed door-graced, too, by the horseman and the horse-until he closed that door to the old house and walked out on the highway to wait for somebody to pick him up that was going to Houston. There he was going to look for his brother and sister; but we know that he never found them.

Two cousins

Now the old family land, accursed, had been disinherited by the uncle's brother and sister in Houston-I will tell more about this later-and inherited by two cousins whose whereabouts was not readily known. When one, the older, was found and came to the town he heard all this story. Of course by the time he found out the story nobody knew how much had been added to it but he saved what he heard and what he knew.

His one mission was to find his cousin. The city of Houston was reaching out seventy, eighty miles into towns that were no longer considered towns but additions to the city of Houston. What had been a quiet, ramshackled little town was now called a "suburb" and Houston people were building fine homes in it. The chemical age was flourishing, its toxic waste dumps lay festering in hidden ravines or vacant lots, and choking smogs and acid rains seeped into the gigantic shopping malls. The fouled water of rivers choked its own fish. The family land was suddenly worth a good price. It lay, in its modest acreage, in bitterweed and mallow and thistle under half a dozen liveoak trees as old as the county. Only some burnt timbers of the house and the cemented well gave signs of the former dark life on the land.

The cousin sought his cousin. There was very little hearsay of him since he had been such a silent figure in the town. None ofthe Klu Klux would tell anything about him. It seemed to be a case of a person quite thoroughly disappeared from the face of the earth. The older cousin could not sell the land without his cousin's signature. Yet if the cousin were never to come forth to claim his property would it become the possession of the next in line? It was said that fifty years would have to pass before this forfeiture could occur. This would make the older cousin over a hundred years old. The older cousin made a surprising decision and it was to stay home in the old town where he began his life. Why couldn't he build a dwelling for himself on the land which was half his? He planted a grove of white and rose Oleander around the old well, and under two ancient liveoaks he built a simple house. As soon as the house was finished-it hadn't been a month-there appeared three blond women with news which the cousin had not been able to find out anywhere, and they brought it with odd good humor. These announced themselves as ex-wives, sisters, of the younger cousin. Each one had married him and divorced him in turn. They explained their ex-husband's one annoying flaw-a defect of speech which turned him unpleasantly silent most of the time, except when he was excited. This impediment was caused by a freak accident.

The man had a habit of clenching his doubled tongue between his teeth when he strained at anything, and while sliding on his back under a saw-off locked door he had slit his tongue down the middle on a protruding nail. It was ridiculous what some said, the women announced darkly. That the KKK had cut off their ex's tongue for talking too much-could you imagine that! they exclaimed. Yet the KKK said that the man had divulged some of their secrets. But it had always been the man's silence that soured marriage, the sisters declared, even before he'd slit his tongue under the door; although they well knew about it when they entered into wedlock. You never knew what he was feeling, the sisters complained. Was the dinner good? No answer. Do you love me? Silence. How could a person live with somebody who couldn't comment on things, have an opinion? the women questioned. Each marriage had lasted only a few weeks. In turn each sister simply couldn't make a go of it, yet each had been so challenged to accomplish what the other could not that she took on the silent one. "He ran through the whole crop of us," the sisters told the older cousin, "and then he left the area." One sister said it was to Port Arthur that he went, to enlist in the Merchant Marines but of course they wouldn't take him, with a split tongue. Another said that when he married her he had begun to make ungodly sounds, particularly when excited. And the other, the third, said that when her time carne the cousin disclosed on their wedding night a brand on his thigh, a letter and a number, which was the mark of a well-known penitentiary. "I had married an escaped convict!" she cried. The three women were so good-natured, overall, that it was hard not to believe their stories. They all vowed that the speechless groom was the hottest lover and that he had the body of a statue. He knew how! they giggled. So they stayed on with him for awhile. And for a little while each sister had had the same thought, saying to herself, listen, does he have to talk? But life's not all sex, they concluded, in their well-earned wisdom. And they departed, leaving their disturbing news behind them.

The older cousin pondered what to do about his lost kin. He put ads in the newspapers of Texas towns urging his cousin to corne back and claim his due. Somebody sent a letter to the older cousin informing him that his cousin was working among the Mexicans in the pea fields of the Rio Grande Valley where he was known as "EI Mudo." He had long ago learned not to speak at all, since he had begun to make such sinister sounds when he tried. But when he drank whiskey he seemed to fall into the possession of demons, for he broke into rages and flailed and kicked in the dust, whirring his tongue in a sound like a rattlesnake. He would finally have to be held down in the dust until he weakened and his horrible sound died out. The poor man, wrote the

informant, had no friends. After his ferocity had passed, he was gentle again, a harmless Mudo hoeing the peavines in the fields. I have shown him the newspaper ads but he seems not to understand it or to care, ended the letter.

One night in the early dark hours after midnight the older cousin was wakened by a distant sound, and it came closer. With a chill he recognized the horrible sound of his cousin as it had been described to him, the whirring that afflicted him when he was excited. He lay in his bed and heard the sound come closer and then it was at his window, like a snake in the bushes. His cousin had at last arrived. He called his cousin's name. Come in, he said, I've been waiting for you. This is your home.

He heard the window open and saw in the deepest dark the form of a man and heard the terrible sound. His cousin was desperate to speak, to tell something. The older cousin turned on the light and he saw a horrifying gasping figure. He embraced his cousin and said, welcome; please come and let me help you. He knew that his cousin could not speak and so he sat him at a table with paper and pencil and asked him to write to him all that he could not say. But the young cousin fainted and his cousin lifted him into the bed, where the two slept for some hours side by side. In the early dawn the older cousin awoke and saw his cousin writing at the table. He wrote of the horror of his life. How KK men had accused him of telling their secrets. They had cut off his tongue and put a fishhook in it and hung it on the branch of the tree they tied him to, and all night he saw the organ licking and lapping its drooling saliva. He had been tormented by the image of the lapping tongue and of the genitals of black men he had helped castrate; they seemed to be the same human members. He raved in the nights, sleepless, and then he poured whiskey down his flaming throat to bring deliverance. But the whirring sound began and he became a monster that men would sometimes club with sticks, like a snake, to stop the horrible sound. When men discovered his erotic throat and its tantalizing arrangement of parts, they used him. For the KKK had cut off his tongue where it is fattest and lies beneath the moist and quivering membrane called the uvula. When breath played through these soft meats they quivered and clasped the lingual stub, a chunk of thick meat throbbing at the vestibule of the throat, causing the dry whirring sound men feared. It was a deformity caused by the evil of men. Yet a warm and hospitable sucking and clasping organ had been re-made by nature in its healing. This creation was so sexually maddening that once the men discovered it they fought each other over it out of self-loathing and unending whipping prurience, and, still in rabid sexual arousal, an infernal priapism, they slashed open each

other's throats and stabbed one another in the bowels and tried to castrate each other. In his trance, the cousin saw that the men seemed to be caught hold of by devils, and it occurred to him that they might have created in him a trap of their own destruction in his lascivious throat. When he lay almost dead from strangling and suffocation and had thrown up some of his insides, in the vision of exhaustion he thought that a winged person who looked like an angel appeared in front of him. "Through man's savagery and nature's remodeling of it," said the winged person, "you have been made the very device of your enemy's undoing: the withering of malevolent energy coming from insatiable lust." Then the person unbound the cousin from the tree where the men had tied him and showed him to the cool river and refreshed him and urged him to go to his cousin, which he did.

The older cousin longed to put his cousin to rest and to pacify the tormenting images before him; heal him. He held his young cousin to his breast, and for the first time since their own uncle long ago had held them each under an arm against his breast, the young cousin felt love and tenderness and forgiveness, without a word being spoken; and he felt that his cousin was saying to him, in this way, that you do not have to speak to tell somebody something that is gentle and loving. By showing him the fullness of silence, the older cousin was able to bring his young cousin to some peace and the tormenting images, and even the horrible whirring sound, began to pass away.

It was then that the young cousin was visited again by what he thought was an angel. A big winged male came before him and the cousin asked him, "Are you an angel?" "Yes," said the angel and said that he had come to offer the cousin his tongue and straightway installed it in his mouth and told him to speak with it. The cousin was so afraid for a little while, to have an angel's tongue in his mouth, but it was not for long before he spoke to the angel and told him ofhis joy and thanks. The angel then told him that he could keep his tongue if he would use it to show the poor Mexican people in the peafields of the Rio Grande Valley among whom he had worked how to spell words and how to add numbers. The cousin said he would try. Some mysterious money came to his hands from a Carmelite Nun who arrived one day. She drove up in a cleanly washed Ford in which another Nun sat. The money was to be used for the teaching of words and numbers to the Mexicans so that they would not be speechless even as he had been and know when they were cheated and how to protect themselves and get better pay.

The cousin returned to the peafields and established a kind of school at night, speaking with the angel's tongue. People of the Valley who had known him before as El Mudo did not recognize him to

be the same person until a man cried out "EI Mudo!" and then he was recognized by all and beloved. He was now speaking so freely that he did not know whose tongue he was using, his or the angel's. A lot of the time he found that he had not even thought about it-he simply opened his mouth and said the words he had to say.

In some time the angel returned and announced to the cousin that he would take back his tongue and that he might very well see how well he could speak with what he had of his own. "Do what you can with what you've got," advised the angel. "You may now be able to speak better than you think." The cousin was afraid for a while, but when he saw that he could do pretty well with what he had of his own, he lost fear. And he lived on for quite a while, there in the Rio Grande Valley among the Mexicans he loved and helped and who loved him. When he and his brothers and sisters of the fields began to organize the first Union, the KKK blew right in like a fresh washing of white sheets in the red wind of the Valley. El Mudo called out to the angel, "Give me your tongue to denounce these men!" And he felt the angel's tongue in his mouth; and with full tongue he drove back with eloquence the men who had once humiliated him, to their astonishment and fear.

It was then that the angel appeared for the last time and told the cousin that it was his own tongue that had spoken the truth before the enemy, for somewhere during his speaking the angel had taken back his own tongue and the cousin without knowing it had gone on fully with his own. In joy, the cousin saw that he had been restored through the help of love and trust.

This is the end of the story of the two cousins whose uncle loved them. Unless some more comes to mind later about the older cousin. The younger one lived on among the Mexican people of the Rio Grande Valley. He never saw his father again, never went over to Shreveport, Louisiana to find him as he had in his boyhood planned. His mother had died of the TB that cropped up in the family from time to time over two generations, but this was in the torment of another world. He later found that she had been buried in Houston with a burial insurance policy for which she had paid a few dollars a month for years.

The older cousin had finally corne horne-it looked like. He sank peacefully into the land of his ancestors and lived there in his house built over the foundations of the old, dark house and the ruins of the door that haunted him. I am not sure what he does. I go out to the place and talk with him from time to time. His father who turned his back on his own brother because of his drunkenness and would not corne horne to his funeral died not long ago in an Old Folks' Horne

paid for by his pension from the oil company he had worked for for over thirty years, brought to his death by a liver cancer caused by "the excessive use of alcohol." Those were the words used. His mother had turned into a recluse and kept planning to come to live with him, but she never came. Interesting how this Houston brother and sister disavowed the old place of their grandparents and their childhood. The truth is that they were just plainly scared to death and in their fear and unhappiness were counseled by the leader of their religious group to wash their hands of the cursed place of so much bloodshed. There's some more in this to be told, about this afflicted man and woman who labored and went down under their own accursedness.

But I'll wait until later to tell it. I've wanted to stick to the two cousins and the outcome of their loving reunion that brought to their family's troubled lives redemption. Or so it has seemed to me.

Where's Esther?

How could we know that was what it was? That we were losing a whole person? We were having a ball. While before our eyes Esther Haverton was having a downward plunge to-I don't know what to call it. It began in the fall, lasted most of the season, Easter saw it over and Esther at Greenfarm.

Well, she always bent the old elbow a lot-who doesn't? But I mean lots when the onset of this started-whatever it is-coming last fall (now, looking back, we know). Starting at 11 A.M., onze heures, that bejeweled hand went right for the Vodka Martini with a deadly grip, oh my dear!

Why didn't somebody stop her? But how could they know? That she was on her way to-this? Anyway, what would things have been like if we'd stopped Esther? Dreary. Morbid. Too glum to think about. But once Esther Haverton started, you just couldn't stop her. A whole party stopped for her. She was a real entertainer, you know: a natural performer. Oh, she danced and she switched her bottom and just made everyone roar with laughter. She was here, there and every' where, like a bird in a room. If she fell, she was up on her feet before you could help her up; and not one scratch! She was at all the parties, no one could wait until she got there and when she got there they wished she hadn't come, within ten minutes. There were some who cursed her and accused her of insulting them, including the very host and hostess, who were finally upon each other like dog and cat. Because of Esther! She caused it, turned the closest friends and most devoted lovers upon each other. And how had she done it? No one could guess, could even notice signs of rupture-until suddenly there were these two intimates at each other's throat.

Nevertheless, when Esther left, all followed. The night was young! Into a restaurant which Esther at once commanded. She was at the

waiters as if they had done something personal to her, and they had only asked for her order; called them names of rankest insult, which somehow prompted all her friends to beat on the table, stomp the floor with delight, screaming "Esther!"; and even the waiters like it.

What made Esther? Well, she had the laugh of all times, to begin with. It was so tJerbal. The things that laugh said! Then she just plain had the face for it: a huggable face, sweet-featured, like somebody feeding a baby-so sentimental but with the chicest hairdo over it, my dear, to let you know she meant business. What wrong could a face like that do? Until those lips started curling. They were preparing to emit foul cries, oh my dear! She had a body that rivaled the best, curving tight in various simple but exclusive creations-by somebody she had on West Fifty-fifth Street, a personal designer-and topped off by a real pair of breasts. That I envied, considering my personal limitations. Still, as I told her, I come from a line of humble-breasted women of the Midwest. Never tell Esther Haverton anything. She'll use it back on you literally as if she'd memorized it, at the most unscrupulous time. Why did she have to be so unscrupulous? But she was gay-hearted and didn't mean it, I guess. Besides, as we know now, she was losing her poor-marbles. More coffee, please. I love this coffee shop. Never heard of Irish coffee in here, thank God. Black's best, anyway.

Thirdly, Esther had the carelessness for it! Why she didn't give a hoot. Why should she? She had all the money in the world. She just sawed her wood, and let it fall where it would, to use an old Midwestern expression. Still, nobody could care that little. I think the pills did it-made her tell the world to go peddle its apples. Sawed a lot of timber, those pills-whatever they were-some were of colors not even in the rainbow. I got flashes of them when she opened her bag, glowing like a Tiffany lamp, my dear. Yet I never saw her take one as long as I went around with her. End with a dimpled shoulder, and a behind that went with her and not against her-you know, not fighting her-and there you have Esther!

How could anybody know that Esther was-well, I still can't believe it. She was so gay-such a character, and just the best person in the world, would give you her right arm if you asked for it and with her diamond bracelet on it-that's Esther! Yet, here she was, going rockers. We thought it was her natural wit. Anyway, her demeanor in public grew to such infamous proportions and resounded to such acclaim that she was the most vaunted guest. Her profanity increased to dazzling proportions. Esther would slap out a nasty word that would splatter all over a place like she'd thrown a messy pie. It was generally against somebody in our bunch-somebody she had apparently been

good friends with, and then this-"You ",,�����!" That person would storm out. A phone call the next day got the whole thing aright. People were so forgiving of Esther. Thank goodness, now that I think about it, sober, and see that she was going bonkers. But I don't know how she got by with it, I swear. Anybody else would have had their heads knocked off, but not Esther. Of course they were all drunk, but even then! But thank goodness, we were all forgiving of her, knowing what we do now.

The next day on the phone: "Sugar, I don't remember a word of it. If I said it, forget it. Come for a hair at six." You'd be there at six. By eight you'd had your head knocked off again. Why was that? Why did we sanction that?

Oh, Esther! Racing at night through the streets of gold and laughter, drink here, run on there, drink yonder; and suddenly they were telling you it was 4 A.M. Who cared? Heaven could wait! On to somebody's place. Dawn! and Esther absolutely incandescent. At those times she was like a blazing serpent, flashing and striking. She caused people to surpass themselves beyond their wildest dreams. It was the responses to Esther that held people to her. What you heard yourself say to her was magnificent. What would we have been without her? She made usmart!elous! Why, she could have led us to the terrace and told us to jump and fly, and we'd have flown-somehow. Esther put wings on you! Once I did a whole soft-shoe routine-complete with ride�outit was at somebody's penthouse-on an open terrace nineteen flights up-and I'd never soft-shoed in my life, couldn't again. Because of Esther! She made wonders out of us. Isn't that weird? Like she had some kind of-you know-power over us. Esther, lying there drab in that room at Greenfarm and not herself at all. If I didn't know her so well, I'd say she was a changeling-that somebody kidnapped Esther and replaced her with a blah stranger. Who wants that nothing person lying there? Another person, that's all, could be anybody; why that's an ordinary person lying there, not Esther. Where's Esther? This calm person lying there is not Esther. As though she existed out of booze. Vodka made Esther! Pour several drinks into this person and out develops who we call Esther! Don't pour the booze, you get this. I'm beginning to see. A sober view of Esther, you might say. The most boring conversations-Unity pamphlets strewn around. Why Esther doesn't know Unity from Simplicity-the patterns, I mean. Sweetie, she's an agnostic. Only two things she cares about are Dior and Majorska, and she'd cut that in half if she could wear a Vodka bottle designed by Dior; just dress in it, my dear. Well, they can have whoever that is. That's not Esther! "Where's Esther?" I kept wanting to say. "Who are you?" I kept

wanting to say. "I don't believe we've met. You zombie!" Oh, I need a laugh. Some drinks and a laugh. But with Esther.

Well, the whole thing has rather sobered me up. A week on the wagon, without Esther, during which time I've done me some thinking over coffee, as I am right now, and a change is coming over my mind. I'm going to say it. I don't even feel like going back to Greenfarm to visit Esther. She's beginning to shape up in my mind's eye as something I can do without. Why, I've been thinking of some of the things she said about me in public. They're beginning to come back to me, over coffee. I'm beginning to take them seriously (I mean I can be serious, too). Goddamn it. I mean, I'm not a fat-ass, like she called me several times, and once at a seated dinner. And perhaps I am a little flat-you know, like I said-but why did Esther bring that to the public eye by shouting it out at lunch at Maude Chez Elle? I feel like disliking Esther now. I feel like she wanted to hurt me. In vino veriras, my dear. All the terrible things she did to us and said to us are dawning back over me after a week of black coffee, and now I'm going to say it: Who needs Esther Haverton? Screw her! Isn't that right? I mean, to hell with Esther! I mean, good riddance. Well, I guess I'm taking too sober a view. Thinking too much. A stiff drink does-may I add-keep you from taking too sober a view towards things, keeps you from thinking too much. Maybe I should just go on with the bunch. Heaven can wait. You only come around this way once. I mean, life is hard enough. This isn't church! Why should I go on worrying about Esther Haverton! Maybe I should just go on with the bunch. But why go on with that bunch without Esther? Those creeps. I'm mixed up! Let's face it: we need her. In the absence of Esther we are nothing-just about like what she is now, without booze. Jesus, it's like we drank Esther. Oh, I'm going crazy. When I go into a place where we used to go, with everybody calling, "Where's Esther? Where's Esther?" I feel like a damned ghost. As if nobody saw me. And I hear myself asking the same question. "Where's Esther?" I must admit that the other night, before I went on an alcohol-free diet, on one of our sans-Esther sprees, I found myself, in the absence of Esther, imitating her. Well, I was knocked on my backside within one minute! Do you know what? Only Esther can do it. I feel so drab, so dull, so dead, so plain. And I'm feeling crazy. Nerves jumping out of my skin; rattling the coffee cup. And who sleeps? Just can't find that spot in the bed-and when I think I have, guess who's in it? Old Sleeping Beauty, dozing sweet as a choirboy-which he definitely is not. I flee from that. Esther knows. Last night I dreamt I went into the most beautiful bar, dark and cool, deep cushions, soft music: and who do you think was there,

elbow on bar, Martini hoisted? Yep, Miss You-know-who: divine Esther! Tongue like a serpent's, poised to strike. Life began! All afternoon we laughed and drank. We drank and we drank. And I was myoid self again. Because of Esther. The bar was ours. We never fought, not once. We drank the world away, laughing and laughing. "I want Esther!" I cried when I woke up in the dark. "Esther, Esther! Come back!"

Who wants this life, without the old days? But I tell you they are surely gone. I can see that a mile a minute, now. All those good times, all that laughing-gone. Oh, I think I need some help. I don't know what to do. If I drink I'm like a bad Esther-and anyway, what's a drink without her? If I don't drink, I'm like Esther is now, drab, dull, dead, plain. Will somebody please tell me what to do? Now that you've heard a little of it? To get over what's happened to Esther?

An interview with Willialll Goyen

People in my life told me stories, and 1 sang. They had the speech, and 1 got the voice.

Wiliam Goyen was born in Trinity, Texas, in 1915. His father was of a Mississippi family, and worked in the forests and sawmills of the East Texas lumber industry. His mother's family counts four generations of Texans. When Goyen was still a boy, his parents left their small-town rural household and moved to Houston. This was an odd, eager, segregated, spread-out, somewhat lawless town in the 1920s and 1930s, with its slums and incongruous grandeurs (the Rice Hotel), its backwater cultural efflorescences (opera and vaudeville and theosophical society), and its small-minded commercial optimism, wealthy but crude and unscrupulous. Goyen came of age in a realm of extreme hopes and disappointments, each feeding the other in a typically American atmosphere of marvels and possibilities, of failures and crushing practical realities and injustices.

Goyen took a BA and an MA at Rice Institute, then taught for one year at the University of Houston. World War II wrenched him out of Texas and into the U.S. Navy for five years, much of that time spent on an aircraft carrier. When he returned to Texas it was only long enough to gather his things. He moved to New Mexico, where he lived in relative isolation for several years on and off, working at his first novel and his first stories in a tiny adobe house he built himself. The House of Breath was published in 1950, and the stories, Ghost and Flesh, in 1952. Between 1948 and 1957, Goyen moved through several cities-London, New York, Rome, and others-and twice won a Guggenheim fellowship, but returned periodically to New Mexico.

In 1955 he published In a Farther Country: A Romance; then came The Faces of Blood Kindred (stories, 1960), The Fair Sister (novel, 1963), Come, the Restorer (novel, 1974), Selected Writings of William Goyen (1974), and The Collected Stories of William Goyen (1975). He also wrote a number of plays, which have been produced in New York, Providence, Boston, and for CBS Television. Martha Graham staged "Holy Jungle" in 1974, a dance based on The House of Breath.

From 1966 to 1971, Goyen worked as an editor at McGraw·Hill, and after many years in New York he moved in 1975 to Los Angeles, where his wife, Doris Roberts, works as an actress. Since moving to the west, he has continued to teach from time to time. Although Goyen still returns to New York, the city in which he wrote most of his work, his writing has changed with his moving to California, and in the interview he speaks of the importance to him of place, and of the artist's peculiar sensitivity to place, and need to establish a place for himself inside his work.

This interview was taped in Los Angeles, the first three days of November 1982. The transcript cannot show the range of tones of voice that animated, punctuated, and emphasized Goyen's statements. Notably absent from the printed version is his laughter. Unexpectedly, at moments of seriousness or in pondering somber subjects, Goyen would heartily, delightedly, laugh, as if with wonder, with an unselfconscious and entirely becoming sense of amazement at the complexity and mysteriousness of the things he was talking about. Perhaps this is partlv what Flannery O'Connor characterized as a kind of daze that compels the writer to look longer and more fixedly at things others merely glance at. "The longer you look at an object, the more of the world you see in it," she said. But beyond that, Goyen's wonder seemed to me of the deep sort that Plato calls the source of philosophy and of poetry-of theogony and of myth. Given Goyen's recent work, no other attitude could be more appropriate, for both his language and his material seem now to be aimed at shaping stories in which the mysterious course of human action, and of human speech, reveals the presence of compelling outer powers-whether it is the command of the "black-winged figure" over others in "Tongues of Men and of Angels" (in this issue of TQ), or the simple awareness that, as a storyteller speaks, another figure speaks through him. Stevens' aphorism (from the "Adagia") comes to mind in connection with Goyen's work:

When the mind is like a hall in which thought is like a voice speaking, the voice is always that of someone else.

In the interview, Goyen observes that despite his reputation as a Texas writer, it is not a given historical or regional speech that he seeks to reproduce in his work, however accurately he has wished to hear it when immersed in it. Instead, he says he has sought to create a language that will itself serve as the place of his fiction-a rather different and more complex impulse. Thus his preoccupation with style, and his insistence, in his own terms, on voice over speech.

Perhaps this preoccupation, which the reader of the work in this

issue of TQ will readily perceive, partly explains the attention Goyen's work has received from translators and readers in France, Germany, and elsewhere. The accomplishment of a writer who can meld Arnerican materials with a "European" concern with language as a medium has drawn notable acknowledgment indeed. Goyen's translators have included Ernst Robert Curtius and Maurice Coindreau, his critics Bachelard and Anais Nin. This interest continues: in September 1981 and May 1982 the Nouvelle Revue Fran(aise published translations by Patrice Repusseau of "Precious Door" and "Arthur Bond," two of Goyen's most remarkable stories, as yet uncollected in English. In 1981 Gallimard reissued two of his books in uniform format, so that all or nearly all of his work is in print in Europe, while in the U.S. we have none.

Perhaps the very idea of a fictional style has been more congenial to European readers, even though they must guess at the contours of that style through the veils of translation. What seems likely, at least, is that readers whose sense of prose fiction matches Goyen's own, with its gestures of acknowledgment to such diverse figures as Flaubert, Beckett, James, Thomas Wolfe, Whitman, and Proust, can see more readily the correspondence between style, narrative (i.e. "literary") technique, and a sense of story or tale, even of fable. After Hawthorne (with whom Goyen professes an affinity), American fiction strikes rather seldom with seriousness into the realm of the fabulous, and also steers cautiously away from Goyen's notion of voice, preferring a concept of style as either an unobtrusive means of communicating narrative events, or as a descent into speech (sometimes into dialectbut Goyen is not writing dialect). Goyen has rejected both of these alternatives. His method, as self-conscious as any other, is both more impassioned and more ventriloquistic than that of authors who prefer either a coy authorial presence or a coy authorial invisibility. An ironic stance, so much favored by our age, cannot withstand the pressure of feeling that Goyen's stories tap and transmit to the reader. His intent as a writer seems to me to acknowledge something many readers are not accustomed to looking for, much less finding, in much recent fiction: the conviction that the hidden life (perhaps what Frank O'Connor tagged as the lonely voice) lies everywhere, waiting to be recognized, and that, once seen, it will dominate the imagination, far overpowering the outward and mundane appearances of human action. It is partly the sheer exuberance of Goyen's narrators (early signaled and wonderfully accomplished in "Ghost and Flesh") that impresses the reader with this unmistakable sense of hiddenness in the stories. Such talk, however studied an artifice, is also passionate and believable, revealing-even praying-where it seems to conceal or merely ramble, and transforming the listener.

In all of Goyen's work, there is a notable faith that the story as a form can carry meanings and emotional power larger than what more genteel writers and readers are used to expecting. Sometimes the force of Goyen's fiction seems at the point of breaking the conventions by which we distance ourselves from the lives we are reading about, drawing us uncomfortably close to the fires burning there. Among our best writers, we have masters of the bitten-back understated minor tragedies of upper and lower classes; we have collectors of random observations drawn from lives that never cohere; and we have those who can drive a good narrative to a powerful conclusion. But Goyen insistently urges the story to bear the weight of the largest unfathomable mystery, not the smallest, and in this he has few colleagues. When somebody's aunt ups and runs off with another man, leaving behind husband and a child, it is not, for Goyen, an occasion for musing on how feckless and impulsive someone seems to be; nor is it the moment for weary disillusioned reflections on gin and mistakes, with the pretense that everyone is like that; nor is it a moment for self-reflexive ironies. Instead, it is an instance of mostly incomprehensible and overpowering feelings that seem almost to throw someone into another identity. Our understanding of such actions involves, for Goyen, a receptivity to their fabulous side as well as to the everyday difficulties that follow in their wake, for the woman, for her husband and child, for the man she runs off with, and for the one (the nephew, say) who later simply must tell us what happened. This is not to say that Goyen's work isn't aimed at understanding; it is indeed, but not with the expectation that either literary device or psychological insight will be sufficient to the task. For in addition to these, something else is required, a kind of participation of both writer and reader that much contemporary writing is either too cautious or too cynical to try for. That something else could be defined as an extraordinary attention to the human voice, a keen listening, as rapt as when on a summer porch unexpectedly someone spoke, surprising everyone, and told of something till then hidden.

Note: References in the interview to works in Goyen's Collected Stories are followed by "[CS)"; other stories are identified by place and date of periodical publication. Readers wishing to acquire a copy of Goyen's Collected Stones or Seiccted Writings will probably be able to obtain them only from Daedalus Books, 2260 25th Place, N.E., Washington, D.C. 20018 (202-526-0558), whose owner, Robin Moody, has taken on the responsibilities of an ad hoc publisher with regard to many writers whose works have been allowed to go out of print, but which Daedelus has purchased in lots before they reached the shredder, the pulper, or the warehouse incinerator.

-Reginald Gibbons

What starts you writing? It starts with trouble. You don't think it starts with peace, do you?

TQ: A passage from "Nests in a Stone Image" [CS] could serve as epigraph for all your work:

He had come here out of some loss and bereavement and to sit and have back again, as it wanted to come back to him. with whatever face or feature. shape or name. what he had lost; to turn back into what had happened and let it speak to him and. out ofhis listening. make it all over again. this time. at least. to control it and keep it from chaos again. to give it its meaning that it waited for This was what claimed him.

WG: I found a kind of statement for myself there, didn't l?through real deep suffering. It's really meditation. It's kind of a salvation-a lot of those pieces are really my little salvation pieces: they represent my being rescued again from deep suffering.

TQ: Rescued by what?

WG: I felt that I was rescuing myself. I got a sense of myself, in a flash. It was a spiritual experience, of course. And with that clarification, I was able to move on out of what might have destroyed me. I don't know that I have ever felt that I have been lifted by a higher power-a god or anything. By divinity. It must have been art, then-a sense of one's self suddenly frees him, at least for that time, and one is able then to go on.

TQ: The story is quite free of what readers normally expect from a story-

WG: God bless them!

TQ: -it doesn't give them a plot or character development.

WG: But I see that it was a form I found for myself, and used over and over again, in a whole body of work, without knowing that I was using it. I didn't put it up on the wall and say, "This is the form I will now follow." But it was deep pain, a feeling of utter isolation and removal from the community of human beings-that kind of lostness. And then, through an acuteness of feeling and an awareness of things around me, coming back to life, through life around me-in this case-in the story you quoted from, "Nests in a Stone Image"people in the rooms around the speaker in the story. In his misery and isolation he was surrounded by human beings, all singing and making

love and talking, and life was in those rooms around him, and then rising. It was always the rising action, that I felt, over and over again.

TQ: That's what you mean by the sense of form?

WG: Corning up, yes, from the bottom, rising to the top and then being freed of that pain and being identified, is surely what it was, wasn't it?

The form was new each time. But two things-it's about love, and total giving in love till there was nothing left, total faith in life and love; and then feeling destroyed and abandoned, and then finding again through life going on. Despite my misery, life was just going on! Those were such great revelations, do you know that? Suddenly you heard people next door saying, "Well, do we need eggs? Well, let's see, we need eggs, bread " They're making a list of groceries! And writing checks. That life was restored to me, so often not through great bursts of something, like St. Paul's revelation, but through just the trivial, which I still hold to, the everyday trivial detail. That has always pulled me through.

"Nests in a Stone Image" Katherine Anne [Porter] cared a great deal for, and I read it to her, I read her a lot of these stories, I was writing these stories when I was close to her, in the early fifties. She was not able to write at all, then; she was tremendously shut down. She wanted to hear, yet she was really-really she could have murdered me. She listened murderously. Once, when I finished reading a new story to her (it was "Children of Old Somebody" [CS], which I've dedicated to her, for that reason), she stood and walked up and down the floor and cursed at me. She had all the feelings of a writer who couldn't realize her own work. I read a lot of newly finished work to her in those days in New York in the early fifties. I had never done this before with anyone. But Katherine Anne was so close to my work then and so impoverished and cut off, I hoped I could help her to work again. She, indeed, invited me to share my work with her.

TQ: Do you remember having conversations with her about questions like this-the form that you felt was peculiar to your stories?

WG: We discussed that a great deal. I told her I felt submerged in life, given love and work and vision-and that suddenly I felt drowned. It was always almost a water image, and then it was only when I was able to rise from the depths that I could go on. So that each time these memory pieces were being written-"People of Grass," that whole group of stories set in Rome-it's someone who has lost his way. The House of Breath is just the great mother-shape, isn't it? It begins with someone who has lost his way. His own name, even. Through the detail of people in life around me, through their simply saying, you know, "We've got hemorrhoids, and the peas in the

garden are all burnt up"-it was the simple detail of everyday struggle-this character was always brought back in these stories to some realization. And then there was an apostrophe to something at the end, often in italics. It embarrassed me later but now I think it's O.K. A great utterance-he has lived to utterance, he can speak! As in The House of Breath, speech is found for what is not spoken.

TQ: Why did you feel embarrassed by that?

WG: I suppose I felt-you know, we go through periods of restraint. And now I'm very pleased that I got the pure feeling down on paper, but there was a time when I felt (probably in the sixties-those stories were written in the fifties) that I wanted to be more restrained. Burst at deeper depths. Not detonate right on the ground!

TQ: You often mention "listening" in "Nests in a Stone Image," and I gather you listen when you work. But you told me you didn't entirely trust what Arcadio was saying, in your new novel.

WG: I am responsible as the listener-the responsibility lies with the listener, the re-teller, not the teller, and my responsibility is to know when I'm hearing madness or to know how to give on what I've heard, because what I'm talking about is the continuity of listening, telling, listening. The listener needs a listener, then, when he now begins to tell the tale on. This is what everything I've ever written seems to be about. I see that now, yet if I sat down and thought that, when I wrote, I'd fall, like the centipede trying to count his own legs to see which moves when, over into the ditch.

So I'm telling again. "Twice-told tales," Hawthorne called them.

TQ: The telling of the story, not its substance, is the meaning, then.

WG: It has a spiritual significance. Someone wrote that about my work-that the liberating, therefore spiritual, significance of storytelling was in the very telling itself, a kind of a prayer or meditation or apotheosis of feeling, a dynamic spiritual action. So: the need to tell, on the part of a lot of characters I have written about, like Raymon Emmons ["Ghost and Aesh," CS].

But in some writers what one gets is diction more than voice. That is, it's thick speech, rather than voice. There's a great difference between speech and voice. "Correcting" the speech of my characters, as some copy editors wish to do, affects the voice. That's the pitfall of some writers, some of the Southern writers, who get hung up on diction and speech. Synge was in danger of that, too. There is a quality of voice that is, I guess, undefinable. I feel I know what that is, and I have to wait for it, and that determines my work: voice. I can't fake it, and I can't find it if it's not there. I have to hear it. This I know for myself. Sometimes the voice, the same voice, tells me a bunch of stories.

People in my life told me stories, and I sang. They had the speech, and I got the voice. And I place the burden for that difference on angels, good and bad. Some people seem to have a good angel, or a bad one (can there be bad angels?), and yet some have none at all.

TQ: Still, you have to work at the art-the angel's not going to do the work for you, is it?

WG: But it can put a tongue in my mouth for a little while ["Tongues of Men and of Angels," TQ 56]. That's what happened to me.

When I first rode a bicycle, I couldn't ride it without my father pushing me, holding me there, and I said, "But what am I going to do? Don't let loose! Don't let loose!" (We had just a little hill.) He said, "Son, I wouldn't let you aloose, don't you worry." And one day, he had, and I was going right along! And I looked back, and he wasn't there, and I was doing it! From then on I rode the bicycle.

Now, when I'm really working, really writing, I have the feeling it's coming from outside of me, through me. An absolute submission, absolute surrender. It's being had, being possessed. I'm being used.

TQ: Are you very curious to define that "it" that is using you?

WG: No. I recognize it, and know when it's not there. It's like being in love, or being mad-all those radical emotions.

TQ: Are you reluctant to talk about it?

WG: There's something in me that shuts it off.

TQ: Is it like that moment when Dante describes Virgil and Statius walking ahead, speaking of poetry, and Dante won't repeat what they said?

WG: I'm not able to talk about it. St. Paul speaks of the inexpressible, what you don't repeat. There are some revelations I have, he said, that there are no words for, and why should I try? There is a reticence.

TQ: In an interview with William Peden, you said "the storyteller is a blessed force in telling his story to a listener; a redemptive process occurs, and it's therefore a spiritual situation, and one cannot avoid that." What do you mean, "a spiritual situation"?

WG: It has to do first of all with distinguishing simply between spiritual and material. It's not, "How much am I going to get for it?" And if it doesn't have to do with tangible rewards, then it has to do with intangible ones, with my spirit, with my own yearning toward something higher than I, something by definition divine, some outer higher power working through me, that I have no power over or at least did not create.

I remember Marian Anderson was my first experience with what

truly was a spiritual moment. Suddenly when she sang she was purely an instrument for the spirit, pure spirit. Through her mouth, here was this blessed moment, the light and the fire were on her, way beyond her training or the song itself. I was sixteen; I identified thoroughly, purely, with her. "That's where I belong, I come from that," I said. "That's why I feel so alone, because I belong to whatever that was."

TQ: You wrote some poems once. What is the difference between the fictional and poetic impulses, to your mind?

WG: The poems aren't very good-they're not poems. I have no interest in the form of poetry, in the lines. I really care about fiction and style and speech and form, and that seems to be wholly the way I wish to work. I'm refining that more and more, and I feel great control, most of the time, when I'm really down on it. I feel the weight of all those lines I've written. I know a lot more about that instrument. But the impulse is to tell on, to reveal, and to be absolutely un-selfcensoring. Not to hold back because I feel it might be unseemly or offensive or whatever. I never did feel censored. But I spent some time wrestling to make a decision again, not to be censored. I don't any more. I trust the impulse now, or the vision of it. I may think I'm mad for a moment-so I wait. I do all the things an artist does; I wait. When revising I do whatever I can for the form of it, the art of it, the clarity of it. I have the sweep of the story from the beginning, and the imagery of it develops, astonishingly, almost like a bone structure. Arcadio is another kind of aria, though.

TQ: Two sorts of stories in your work seem distinguished from each other by your presence in them, as narrator. Stories like "Old Wildwood" [CS] seem almost memoir, and very unlike "The White Rooster" [CS].

WG: But I think the stories like "Nests in a Stone Image" are delivered beyond that. I was freed, myself, as the experiencer of things (as in "Old Wildwood") to see the revelation of stone and wood and the eternal city and a little town fading away.

TQ: You don't seem to feel that a story needs to be cut loose from the writer, needs to be consciously taken away from autobiographical sources?

WG: Katherine Anne [Porter] kept feeling that, she kept feeling that it had to be cut away finally, all strings cut away from the bearer of it, as it if were a bunch of balloons.

TQ: Did she think it was terribly unsophisticated otherwise?

WG: She did, yet she saw that her salvation was in not cutting herself free. And this is why she sat down and committed a fairly unseemly act in writing a novel called Ship of Fools. She cut some

strings loose, and others not. Her prejudices and her bigotries were quite cut away; she was caught-holding a lot of things aloft, maybe balloons. The hand that is holding those strings is absolutely essential to the aloft-ness of the story. She says in the end, cut them all free, and the hand is gone that held them.

TQ: Didn't Eliot and Pound, whom you count as useful influences on you, cut those things away and conceal the hand?

WO: They held some strings more than we know. Who did cut away all of them? I was constantly told that that was naughty, to hold on that way, if my hand was visible. That was not desirable, for some reason. And I kept saying-Well, to hell with you, was about all I said, but not without worrying, "How will I get my hand free? How willI erase my own clutching hand?" Even in stories like "The White Rooster" I didn't strive to remove myself, and the body of my work is made up of both kinds of stories. Now you see the hand, and now you don't.

TQ: In "Had I a Hundred Mouths" [TQ 55] you reveal the hand at the beginning, in the presence of the two nephews, one of whom will tell this story again, later. But then Ben delivers the tale, and that listening presence, that nephew, who is the hand holding the strings, disappears, until the end, when with a startling effect the nephew's voice speaks, and there's the hand again.

WO: That happens often in my stories-as in "The Faces of Blood Kindred" rcsj

TQ: SO if the invisible hand is the modern, or the sophisticated, then to hell with that?

WO: Well, yes! All I ask is that living voice.

TQ: What's the connection between this sense of the visible hand and what you call listening?

WO: Finally, and foremost, we're speaking of the person, the personal. What clears the way for me is listening, finding the listener. In terms of craft, too. Often I begin by telling what I know, what I'm feeling, in terms of myself, but soon I know that that can't go very far, to my own satisfaction, that I'm caught in a web that is self-begetting, And that doesn't interest me. I have to be freed to let somebody tell me what I'm telling, and I know the voices, very often. It's often a woman's voice talking to me. It's someone who is trying to make it clear to me-you see, I'm not clear about what I'm telling: somebody else has to make it clear for me. I get all mixed up. And somebody keeps editing me, and saying, "That's not right, listen to me, what I'm trying to tell you is This helps me tell the story. I have to have help! It also removes me another step. I keep trying to step out of it, as the speaker-I don't want it to be my memoir, my reminiscence, it's

much more than that, it's Rome, not Charity, Texas, finally. It's ancient ancient fossils in stone instead of a clapboard house ["Old Wildwood"].

TQ; What's your sense of the occasion of a story? What starts you writing?

WG: It starts with trouble. You don't think it starts with peace, do you? It's an occasion that brings a whole cluster of occasions together.

TQ; You don't worry about the connections between them?

WG: No. The bridges start forming. That's the fun sometimes, and the slavery too, in making the bridges. They are always implied, because they come of their own volition, I feel.

Trusting the connection is the process of work. Everything I've written has been generated that way. I once spoke of medallions [Interview, Paris Review 68, Winter 1976]: when my mother made a quilt, she made what she called medallions first, a whole bunch of separate pieces. They don't do the whole quilt at once! When these were all together-till then, you don't see the connections, but it makes a whole.

TQ; I think of your work as domestic in a similar sense.

WG: I understand. One of those stories I saw as a kite-and we used to make our own kites. The idea of buying a kite! Who bought a kite? We made it out of stuff at home. String, newspaper-and it flew, it flew. But it was made domestically. That's what you call domestic invention. The cruder the better, sometimes. I think of writing as that very often. I'm most comfortable with things that happen at home.

Without art would 1 just have been a kind ofevangelist?

WG: Style is, or has been, for me, the spiritual experience of my material.

TQ; How do you mean, "spiritual"?

WG: Well, people say craft, and I'm talking on the other side of craft. Of course, I know my craft, I know what I will let go and what I won't, and I know when it's not the best. More and more I know about the control of words. But I'm talking about the spiritual experience of Arthur Bond ["Arthur Bond," Missouri Review, Fall 1980]-to have experienced those characters and the world they have created around them through their own infirmities or life in the

world, has become a spiritual revelation of the human being that I would not have got by studying the work of other writers.

TQ: What's the bridge between that experience and the words that make up a story?

WG: The bridge is the transformation. An artist transforms. He can't just stay where life is as he finds it, not at just the level oflife. Or so it is for me: the art of it becomes the transformation that must occur of that spiritual experience into the controlled craft so that the vision is tied down, is anchored everywhere, by craft. "Arthur Bond" had to be anchored in all kinds of detail, and mostly painterly detailthere was some yellow (the color came to me), the worm with the head of a doll: it all became very pictorial for me. But the man was caught in a spiritual wrestling. This was what I experienced first, his wrestling. "It is not his fall you see, but this man's wrestling," Shakespeare said about one of the kings.

TQ: The word "spiritual" then doesn't mean "religious"?

WG: Not at all. It has to do with a certain program of action. By that I mean I don't come into this experience to get my eyebrows longer, or my muscles stronger, or my belly flatter. So it is therefore not physical. O.K.? That's as clear as I can make it. Something else is involved beyond the corporeal. Shall we all start there? I can't define it any more than that. That's what I mean by my spirit. It is not my body. So let's go away from whatever we think of as physical and try to get into an area that is non-corporeal. Something happens to me which changes my attitude toward you. What is that? It's not that you've given me a lot of money, or bought me a house, or given me a reward. What changed my attitude toward you? Something, I say, came from outside me. And I see as I say this that I tend to look up, because we've been told that heaven is above us, though it may not be at all, it may be quite lateral, I don't know. But it has come from beyond me somewhere, it is not anything I have learned, been taught, or even done. So that the spirit is involved in this change of feeling between me and you.

Style, then, is directly related to that experience. So that style is a spiritual manifestation of the experience of the story, for me. My stories are spiritual.

And yet there are an awful lot of genitalia in them.

TQ: Why is that?

WG: That's spiritual, too, I guess. "Ghost and Flesh," I wroteone's expressed right through the other, for me.

TQ: Is there some writing that, you feel, doesn't have this spiritual element?

WG: I don't feel it's in most contemporary writers that I try to read.

I feel that they really are too busy with repeating themselves, and repeating their own success, not necessarily material.

TQ: But despite your artistic intransigence on this point, I know that as a person you have been extremely generous and helpful to many writers who haven't displayed much of the spiritual in this sense, at all, haven't reached that level of art.

WG: I've tried to lead them toward it, I guess. That's all I can give them. An opening out. That's obviously why they have corne to me. I'm not proselytizing and I'm not looking for disciples. I think that's my freedom as a teacher-I don't think people should write like me. I couldn't, by my nature, stay very long in a classroom, teaching. I've started out thinking, this is a class about craft, and that's what we'll be about. But halfway through it I soared into this other thing, we're off into another realm. I can't talk about writing very long without talking about seeing that possible transformation. And this is what I talk about a lot. There has to be a change, some change has to pass over what happens to me, what I experience. It seems to corne from a deeper reality than a knowledge of what literary device I can use to bring the change.

So I like to talk about style that way, and maybe finally I will write about it a little. In the past few years I've had fresh experience with these things-style, image, and life-writing-e-in my work. Image brings a spiritual revelation of the very life-material itself.

TQ: Do you mean both the small-scale image, the occasional thing-

WG: No I mean the larger I don't say Symbol because I mean a concrete image, and it is concrete. It comes abstractly to me, but then my problem is to transform it into the concrete. The drowned (in sand) diving figure in "Bridge of Music, River of Sand" [CS] is an example. I was haunted by that image, to begin with.

TQ: "Had I a Hundred Mouths" seems to demonstrate something of what you mean by style as a spiritual transformation of the ex, perience or the material. But the second part [ 'Tongues of Men and of Angels"] is very different, a flamboyant explosion and fragmentation of stories, so many different ones. How do you corne to shape a piece like that?

WG: It's odd that I chose to keep each little tombstone-is that what they are? That's what appears to be the peculiar form of the story, that it's in lives, in the shape of about five lives.

TQ: As if you had set a little cemetery around Leander's empty grave, since we don't know where he is. Is he a kind of touchstone for the others, his tale-of being begotten by lust and condemning himself with it and being made to suffer for it-the origin of their stories?

WG: You could see that the teller was preoccupied, at the beginning, with how some people just put down everything they have and go away from it. And how some do come back and how, if they do, some force has totally changed them. He's perplexed by that. That's what he has to tell.

TQ: But it's not Ben who's telling the tale.

WG: No, that's the point, the voice has changed, the voice is really the nephew. He's in a search. When I first wrote The House of Breath, and it was published in that very form, in Accent, it was called "Four American Portraits As Elegy." I wrote four lives: "Auntv," "Christy," "Swirnrna," and "Folner." In a Farther Country is written the same way. And so is Come, the Restorer. This too is style.

TQ: It seems less style than shape.

WG: It is shape. The design is the last thing that comes, for me, yet it is the first thing, as well as the last. But without it I'm lost. I get it early. But then I have to lose it, and the feeling is that I'll never get it back. But finally it's the design that I'm able to see, specifically, the architecture of it. The two parts of this new story were pretty much of a whole, and actually the second part is contained in the first few pages of the first. It is there. All these people seem to me to be out of some book of the accurst. They're evil figures. They're demonic figures. They frightened me to death, those three sisters! Or they're just spiteful figures, or just nuisance figures. But the horror of the Klan, the blackness of that, the evil of them, just pervaded that whole land. And there always seemed to be henchmen of it, and it seemed to be a nightmare of mutiny and banditry. This is the world I was in.

TQ: At the end of "Had I a Hundred Mouths," the narrating nephew sees his cousin in white sheet and hood, with others. Then that Klan nephew is tormented and tortured by the Klan in the second part of the work, for having spoken of their doings.

WG: Because he told their secrets. And what were they? That they had had children by black women, and that they had hanged black men for fucking white women. They had scapegoats. Those are horrors, horrors! A medieval world of terror. You know it was like that, to me; as a child I really felt that. I lived around all of that. There was a man preaching the salvation of my soul in a tent across the road from my house, but up on the hill beyond there the Ku Klux were burning their crosses and I saw them run tarred and feathered Negroes through the street. I saw them running like that, twice. Aflame. We stood and watched that.

TQ: What sort of reactions were apparent in those around you?

WG: They were terrified. Just as if you were a Jew and those were Nazis. Most of them simply lived in terror and hid. It was that kind of world, as I saw it. And it could only have to do later with the brutality

that I wrote about and also with salvation. It was also full of the erotic and the sensual and all that, for me, too. It was a maelstrom, it was a cauldron.

TQ: Does that world seem another universe now, as if you were writing about something you could present only emblematically, that sort of horror?

WG: How is it another universe? It seems very contemporary. If they murdered how many hundreds in those camps in Beirut the terrorism around us Hollywood is a town of absolute terroristic violence. It's a cursed place. It's full of a violence that comes out of a whole lot of things, but out of abuse, and persecution.

But the town, the environment, which for me was the river and the fields, and the wonderful things that bloomed, that are so much in my stories, was still stalked by some horror all around it. And the tales I heard-a whole lot of that is stated in "The Icebound Hothouse" [Missouri Review, Summer 1982]. That story comes to be about that. And at the end there is an apotheosis, again, to say, "Why did I ever think that that house, that door, where I'd like to go home, that promised hospitality to the one who was arriving-why did I think that there were all sunny stories of joy and laughter?" The door is a dark door. Who chose that door? Who is the dark presence in that house? This is a culmination for me of the House of Breath metaphor, all these years later-this is what I came upon in finishing this story. So it is precious door again. ["Precious Door," Southwest Review, Autumn 1978, and the title of Goyen's new book of stories, not yet published.]

And now as I grow older and I go through these experiences-of almost dying, and changes of place, as from the East to the West, here-I keep getting closer to those images of terror and horror, as well as of the sublime pastoral garden.

TQ: SO there's a way to redeem that experience?

WG: Yes, and it's art and the holy spirit, which are one for me, more and more. Without art, without the process of memory, which is the process of art, and the spiritual experience of it, which for me is style, what else would I do about it? Would I be an addict? Would I be dead from alcoholism and addictions of one kind or another? Would I just have been a kind of evangelist?

TQ: Are you saying holy spirit with small h and small s?

WG: Well, you know, I tend to capitalize where other people always strike things down to l.c. That means that I'm elevating it, somewhere, that's what it means in my head, and I insist on keeping that, because it is somehow elevating it beyond the pedestrian lower case.

I think there's no such thing as meaningless suffering, and this is

spoken by someone who sees the terror of life. You know, there's a recent book called The Horror of Life? Of course, I bought that faster than I'd buy something called Days in My Garden. And it's the lives of five people who all view life as horrible. Their life-view was one of horror and fear. Baudelaire, De Maupassant, Flaubert, Jules de Goncourt, Daudet, It turned out that they were all syphilitic and had a horrible disease. I'm not talking about that. I'm not talking about the horror of life. But the horrible and the terrible element in life. Why would I endure life if I thought life was horrible? What good would I gain by enduring? Enduring is a hopeful action.

TQ: Flannery O'Connor said in answer to those who criticized the apparently despairing content or material of modern novels, that people without hope don't write novels.

WG: Of course it's an act of hope, and faith. Art is redeeming, and art is an affirmation. There's no other way. The creation, the result, may not be very wonderful in some cases, or even very good, but I'm given joy and faith again through watching people's impulse to make something, and their energy in making it, their willingness to make something.

TQ: You also seem to agree with Lowell, however, that poetry is not a craft. Do you think that the craft-mentality of the writing schools is all right? Does craft drive out art?

WG: I don't think that's possible. Art won't have it. There's no way possible to substitute anything for art. I believe in the absolute hegemony of art, and craft can't hurt it.

TQ: You have said that "elegance in fiction frightens me, and exquisiteness." Even if you were speaking there of style, I suspect that "elegance" applies also to the impulse to wrap things up a little too neatly. Yau certainly leave a lot of things just flapping their wings in the air. That can seem to mean something in itself. Do you worry about being too symbolic?

WG: No. I don't have any worry about being symbolic, I don't think I'm symbolic. Arcadio has got two genitals-

TQ: But you take a figure like Leander, and you castrate him. He is de-sexed; he is half white, half black. He was a man and is no longer a man; Arcadio is half man and half woman: these things are em' blernatic. Not that I can put a ready meaning to them, but you seem to be interested in more than the shape of a man, you're interested in the significance of the shape of a man.

WG: And yet, you know, how emblematic is a woman with one breast? I saw a great photograph yesterday in a bookstore, a huge life' size photograph of a very beautiful woman with a wonderful breast, and on the other side was a tattoo of roses across no breast at all. She had had one removed, and yet the photograher was saying, "This

is all right. This is beautiful. Don't be horrified. She has one breast!" But it was a creature: it seemed almost like Leander. I said, "What a defamation of a beautiful thing!" I heard myself say that. "How defaming to take a breast off her! How they slaughter women in the name of cancer." But I was with a woman, and she said, "But look how beautiful, it's all right." So I caught myself. It was kind of a wreath of roses tattoed. So that is very emblematic-that's what I'm talking about: there's a breast, I could suck that breast! That's very exciting. On the other hand, there's a kind of monster.

TQ; And a kind of a symbol? Not a real rose, but the picture of a rose?

WG: No, a woman, who is saying, "I am a woman, and I am beautiful still."

TQ; Is it the physically grotesque that interests you?

WG: I really mean more of a spiritual deformity. Of course, dwarves, and humpbacks, and harelips, and so forth. That's only the beginning for me. I can't linger on that very long but it delivers me from the boring reality of realistic reporting. Since I am not writing Zola-istic realism, then everyday reality, the detail of it, is obviously not going to sustain itself for me, forever. I'm not Dreiser, I'm not interested in that at all. I'm aware that there is no everyday trivia in itself; that beneath it, or going on within it, there's always some slight deformity of thought or action. It's the hidden life I'm talking about.

I'm not writing within the vogue for the bizarre. My insights are deeper and deeper into what we're talking about, and the revelations that are coming to me make me more and more aware of an over, whelming imagery of the crude and the violent, but I mean more than that. I suppose it's always been with me, and I can see it back in The House of Breath, my earliest work. It really has more to do with tenderness, rather than less. It's not hardness of heart that is happen' ing. I see more and more brutality, and the metaphor that exists in brutality. It may be that in my earlier work I gentled that, but I see it more now. It begins in the latter half of Arcadio, for me, and continues on through Leander's story ["Had I a Hundred Mouths"] and the last I've written ["Tongues of Men and of Angels"].

TQ; Far from the sorrow and the wonder and gratefulness that surround the erotic in "Ghost and Flesh," you've moved to consider it a dark power.

WG: True.

TQ; A dark power over men, not a mystery in their lives that is constructive or renewing.

WG: Yes. It was a great power, that's true. I'm really astonished by all that, myself, it's still new for me, I have no hypothesis about it yet. Where I am in this work-and it's leading me more and more-there's

a tenderness, always, at the core. "Had I a Hundred Mouths" is a tender story-the love of that man, and the love of the black man: those people have a tenderness that is almost old-fashioned. But what I really see is that within that tenderness is a brutality and a striking violence of feeling and action. It has nothing to do with disillusionment-I was never more spiritual in my life. It has nothing to do with losing faith, or any of those cliches. It's that the light is on that now, I see that: I see lust as demonic. I have never known it to be anything else! Have you? Good Lord! The lust is the very devil working, a demon in me-my lust. I don't know about anybody else's. I've had a demon in me.

TQ: How can la Santa Biblia and that lust inhabit the same creature, as they do in Arcadio?

WG: It's the human arrangement, it's just our very nature, I think. It created people like St. Paul, but oddly enough it didn't create a man like Jesus, did it? We don't think ofJesus as a lustful man, but it's very possible that Paul was-he's so angry against women, against marriage, against sex.

TQ: Is that fruitful anger?

WG: Fruitful in his case-he did a lot of good work, and he did walk among real violent, lustful characters-all those Romans! I think lust is a very rare feeling, and one of the grand emotions. Arcadio is a grand figure of lust and tenderness, I think.

TQ: With a Bible in his hand?

WG: Sure. Redemption is what he was looking for. And the Bible is the handbook of redemption. It's the song at the end of a life, he's an old man, in his seventies. And he seems a bit deranged, too-I don't know what he is! He's gone a bit mad. I'm not sure how much is true and how much is false of what he's telling me at the end. He's now such a fabricator that he's one of the great fabricators.

TQ: Near the end of an interview, in French, you mentioned St. Francis, and the sense that certain saints had of sexuality, of the erotic and the sensual. I think the popular image of St. Francis is of someone feeding the birds from his open hand, and not of him as a sensual creature.

WG: Have you ever fed a bird? It's very exciting. These holy people were walking around with the same impulses that I have, or else they wouldn't be able to reach me. They had the same equipment that I have, if they were men, the same desire, man or woman. Those desires were not submerged; they exist; the Pope perhaps wakes with a hard, on.

I think there is an inevitable confrontation with the spiritual in every human life at some time or other.

TQ: Right in the most sensual experience? Eating?

WG: Coming. Absolutely. Certainly all the nailing, and the Penitente things, are sensuous. No: sensual.

TQ: You want the word that seems more animal?

WG: Yes. The French sensuelle is the word that applies to all those almost genital actions. St. Francis to my mind was a genital human being. St. Theresa was-she no doubt menstruated. This is what I mean-this helps me to find purity and holiness. It's even there in the act of hiding away: like that woman in my story, Inez Melendrez McNamara, who went into that convent ['Tongues of Men and of Angels"]. Her hair became more and more sexual. Her body itself became more voluptuous.

TQ: At the same time, Arcadio, like Leander's story, leads to genital horrors.

WG: I see people who have emasculated each other. I see people who have been made Leanders of, by wives and husbands, by lovers. My God, the brutality of love-relationships! A mastectomy would be more benevolent than what men do to women's bodies sometimes, making them loathe their bodies or abusing them or hating them or whatever. That's why that picture of that woman with one breast, and one scar, was such an affirmation: She said "I am beautiful." So that in a way Leander means that to me-as much as all the other abuses of whites upon blacks, and so on. People render each other sexless, finally; they can castrate each other, and the denial can close up the genitals of a woman and she can grow together. She's been denied that, or it's been abused.

A lot of that is in Leander.

TQ: And in Arcadio, especially in characters like Arcadio's father and johna, the whore who is with him when he dies.

WG: Those people live for their genitals only. She had a mdquina between her legs, that was an absolute machine, and they were purely genital, and that's death.

I feel everything of mine is on the ground, now, but not gathered. There are still some things on the tree, that have to get ripe, but the great body of my work is on the ground, but not gathered.

TQ: You have prepared a new selection of your stories, and you seem to want a larger audience for this book in particular-not that any writer doesn't want the largest audience possible.

WG: I've been thinking about the curious kind of recognition that I

have experienced, a curious misreading or misjudging of my work, I think. Or misplacing! I suppose I don't need an explanation for it, and the reason I may seem to be asking for one is that I don't understand it when people say my work has been ignored in Texas or the country as a whole, and it has such an audience in Europe. I used to get sick over that, to suffer over it, and something seemed wrong. I was turning out work, and it seemed worthy of being recognized, I mean of being acknowledged, at least. Acknowledgment of my existence as an American writer: neither praise, nor dispraise, but, "Here!"-with my hand up. "Present!"

TQ: I think this has partly to do with a climate of expectation among readers who are more used to what I'll call "writing" than to what I'll call "art." A literary climate formed by trivial or superficial or inconsequential or over-intellectualized or journalistic work may leave readers disabled in the presence of powerful feeling.

WG: But who disables them? Where is that perpetuated? This is probably the bafflement of my life. But I could either let it obsess me and take the place of my work, which is what many people do or I can keep working.

TQ: What's the particular forcefulness of your work? It is quite different from much contemporary fiction, which seems emotionally barren by comparison, though the other is also, by that token, not as emotionally exhausting as your work, either, especially your recent work.

WG: Well, "Had I a Hundred Mouths" is an exhausting story. I just know about my own work, not that of others. Somebody asked Tallulah Bankhead, "What makes you so sexy? Can you give us an idea?" She went around in a mink coat without anything under it, things like that. "You're a naturally sexy woman, what makes you so sexy?" they'd ask. "I don't know," she said. "I don't do a thing." I don't know why I'm exhausting. I don't know what other writers do, I only know what I do.

TQ: I think the simple answer to the question, "What do you ask of your reader?" is: a lot. More than many other writers ask.

WG: But you see, those «'Titers ask too much of me. They ask me to bog down in boring tale-telling that is not new anywhere. They're asking me to listen to warmed-over tales of lives that have already been handled. They're not startling me into experiencing freshly what they're giving me. I want life made clean again. I want it brushed up clean so I can see it again. Some writers give the reader what they think he can best handle, because he has handled it before. Like your mother putting down the same goddamned meat loaf a lot of nights, and you said, "But I'm tired of it." "But you like it," she said, "this is what you

like! You told me how you love it." So she just settles down for what I like. Stops all enterprising; no longer surprises.

I'll do something else if I have just to repeat the old images. Everybody is slightly knocked in the head and benumbed by the beginning of a boring story. And so they read through kind of stupified.

I don't know why I know this but it's sure not a stand I'm taking, and I'm not a revolutionary, I don't have a thesis, "The trouble with writing is !" I don't have answers. Writing can be benumbed by attitudes like that.

TQ: Were there some writers whose influence you felt you had to reject or throw off?

WG: Oh sure. I had to work through them. Because a lot of them are standing in the way. We have to go through their legs or get around them or really just kind of have them, in order to be free of them, or let them have us. Thomas Wolfe. Singing people. Whitman. Early Saroyan. I had to find out whether I could do it or not, and since I didn't have anything to replace it with yet-l tell students this: since you don't have anything to offer yet, then take what they have to offer, and spend it. If somebody wants you to make love to them that badly, then go ahead and do it. Just go ahead and do it, get out, get through it! Never James-though he astonished me. The same as Proust: those were abundances, flowerings. They confirmed me.

TQ: Why is a minor writer like Saroyan more of a problem than a writer like James or Proust?

WG: Saroyan speaks very much to young people. That great freedom-"I'm leaving, I'm going to do what I have to do, get out of my way, let me fly!" But his spiritual transformation was not mine; his style, finally, was not one that I could graft onto me as my own. It was his spirit.

TQ: Did you read Sherwood Anderson?

WG: He didn't attract me. I didn't know what Ohio was. I hardly knew what Texas was, but I was determined to find out. I did find stories that knocked the hell out of me, and made me want to writebut write my own stories. Flaubert's "Saint Julien, l'Hospitalier"; Thomas Mann's "Tonio Kroger." I suddenly found literature through classes at college. I had been cutting classes trying to learn how to compose music, and hiding out in vaudeville theaters, and trying to say something through performing. I hadn't found the word yet. I settled for that, really, when my father told me that I couldn't perform, that I was not allowed to, and almost at the same time in my life I came upon writing, and the whole thing burst open for me. I was reading French and Spanish, and German, too, early-languages were

easy for me and I was studying them. Lazarillo de Tormes! Poetry: Goethe's lyrics. Heine's. Rimbaud. Blake.

The American writing around me seemed to all just hang at that level of life that I spoke about, just at whatever tide there was-there was Hemingway, whom I couldn't abide. Fitzgerald, totally foreign to me. I didn't know about that world, the swell life. Or even Fitzgerald's own transformations. Hemingway seemed to me to be like the brutes that I knew that I wanted to escape from, in Texas. That physical bravado, that leanness ofstyle, that was anathema to me. Why would I not use three adjectives? Why not? I was a rhapsodist, why would I cut down on my adjectives? What was Hemingway trying to tell me, what was he hiding?

So those people were around me, and I chose Whitman, and Saroyan, and Wolfe.

TQ: But you chose them as enemies, did you not?

WG: No, I had to go through them. Then I went into people who had a profound influence on me-like Milton, Chaucer, Dante.

TQ: It was a long time between 1937, graduating from Rice, and 1950, when you published The House of Breath. Were those figures riding with you all that time?

WG: All that time. They rode with me on a godforsaken aircraft carrier, for five years. I got into the ship in 1939 and I got out of it in nineteen fucking forty-five, at the end of the war. That's where I was. I had to study ballistics, command a battery of anti-aircraft guns. But I was carrying these people with me. I was shooting off in my bunk when I should have been in love affairs ofall kinds, I should have been in life, breaking my heart. That's a forced monastic living-since I'm a late bloomer, that's something to think about. I can see the deprivation of that; but I can see too that it probably added years to my life because I was physically in good shape. I realize as I talk now the extent of a residing anger in me, resentment, bitterness, about that. I've never really assessed that time. It did free me from all the crippling influences in my life, the crippling circumstances-family dependence, Texas, and probably from excessive study and scholarly isolation. I have never really realized the madness of those years. I went quite mad at the end of the fourth year of it, quite crazy, I had to be under morphine on the ship. I became so enraged at the war that my rage couldn't be contained by my body or quietened by one thousand men. We were near the coast of Japan. When would it end? It was all right for a while, but will this go on!? I was a captive. I felt punished. For what? What had I done? I recall these maniac feelings. I was a wild man on the ship, a rebel, an outlaw. My poetic and voluptuous youth, I felt, was dying and passing away a mile a minute in the China Sea in 1944.

He thought how he had always wanted to belong to a landscape, yet it seemed his destiny to be only a figure riding through many landscapes, drawn to places and faces, bodies and minds, drawing these to him, disappearing and vanishing. Sitting in public places in his own country, returned, listening, he had thought how strange and outlandish he was, as though he were a ghost that was revisiting his native place and was never seen, never spoken to.

-"Nests in a Stone Image"

TQ; One could divide your stories into those in which uprooted, ness is central, and those others in which for a moment that homeless, ness is conquered and there is a sense of getting back.

WG: I had a sense of myself-which has lessened a bit, but is still an underlying sense of myself-as a passager, as someone passing through. So many of my stories were almost ballads-saying that I'm on my way, I'm just passing through, I've sung my song, now I'm going on, I just stopped by here. That came out of my feeling that I couldn't live in Texas, that I couldn't live among my own, that something alienated me, that I was drawn apart. And that was a heartbreak for me. I accepted it as a kind ofdestiny and often as a curse. I couldn't be there, whatever those reasons were, and that led me to an immense homesickness, a longing for where I couldn't be. It's an exile. I don't know what the exiling factors or forces were, may never know.

TQ; Were they personal more than artistic?

WG: An artist moves, goes out, comes back and then leaves again.

TQ; You're not speaking about a cultural question, about the writer who goes to New York because there is no one to read him in Texas?

WG: No, of course not. When I went back, it was almost-just a death, one of my deaths. I couldn't get over waking and hearing Texans. I couldn't believe their speech! At once I thought, "This is where I belong! I'm here, I'm home here!" And then my second feeling, on the heels of that, was that they would never let me become a part of them. I talk like that, that's my speech, and those are all my people, but why is it I can't be a part of them? Why am I here in this room alone, isolated and exiled from them, just outside my door?

I still feel that when I go home.

TQ; Is that relationship something you expect to find, or aren't surprised to find, in other people's work, or do you feel it's peculiar to you?

WG: It seemed to be so deep in me that I thought, if I read it somewhere else, I felt confirmed, or affirmed. I didn't associate it with

Joyce and with the classic exile of Joyce, because I felt that Joyce's was much more planned, reasonable, he was much less bewildered by the forces upon him, at him, and he was dealing with a whole huge culture, a literary and an ethnic culture, the whole Celtic renaissance. My case seemed a very personal thing, almost demonic-a curse: dark. Therefore the meditational quality, a prayer-like quality, almost "Help me, Save me, Deliver me."

TQ: Given the italicized passages we spoke of, rising at the ends of some stories, it seems to me that prayer was addressed to the language itself.

WG: True.

TQ: And you have called them songs, those stories, as well.

WG: They always came like anthems, or serenades. And they were sung, finally; it was an anthern-, a joyous hymnal-feeling I had, even in "Arthur Bond," that late. The language is always a principal character in the story for me; I suppose that's why I can't read so many other writers. They feel they're giving me whole characters and they probably are but the characters don't interest me if I can't hear them speak or identify them with words, by which they are delivered to me.

TQ: Your literary mode, your literary consciousness, your artistic devices, and your gypsy experience, have all been extremely cosmopolitan, but even when you start on West Twenty-third Street with Marietta Chavez McGee [In a Farther Country], you always go back to that rural reality, in your work, more a different place in the mind than a geographical place, a world of fewer emblems and more powerful ones, which we seem to say is rural, mostly. A good example is "Old Wildwood," which begins in Rome, but goes back to the funny little morel cabin on the shore of the Gulf of Mexico.

WG: That saves me each time, though, because it's the detail of the small scope that keeps me from being lost in the Rome of it, or in the New York City of it, because I am not really writing about Rome, or I would have to find the detail of Rome.

TQ: That sort of fictional texture doesn't interest you, does it?

WG: No. The house, therefore. I look for containment. I see this now, and I guess I do at a certain point know when I'm engulfed by roo much, and then I really try to get into some little manageable harbor, get anchored somewhere, and it's in simple and homely detail, and often in bizarre detail. An absolutely recognizable detail, that seems trivial. I have to be contained by a house, or a place. I'm then free to do what I want.

TQ: And yet, if sometimes you suggest containment, at other times you suggest freedom of a roaming, wandering sort.

WG: Sometimes people just go, and you never hear from them

again. Or they come back very different from what they were when they left. What makes them come back? Or changes them-if some force took that demon out of them and put it into swine? Later I'd like to talk about the swine! Somebody was exorcised through me, I took over people's demons and I went on off with those demons, a lot of the time. They went off pure and fine. They flew on off, like angels, and I was cursed! I was the pig. The cliff by the sea beckoned me.

The bizarre, and the supernatural, that we were talking about-l thought sometimes I was the receiver of a cursedness. I felt often that I was a carrier: that image. I've written about the carrier, in The House of Breath. That image of myself, carrying, benignly walking through and infecting others, or receiving what others put onto me

TQ: You describe Lois Fuchs [In a Farther Country] falling in love at thirty-five with a seventeen-year-old boy, who then dies, as if she has cursed or infected him.

WG: That's what I'm talking about. But I can't account for these people-not Leander either. I'm not responsible for accounting for Uncle Ben ["Had I a Hundred Mouths"], although it seems I'm his creator. I'm therefore held, it seems, accountable. But I don't believe the artist is held accountable. Is he, maybe? Morally, we feel that he is. Do we just abandon characters to the destiny that life has for them? Do we let them go into life out of the art we have made? Or do we hold them within our art and try to account for them totally through art? I don't think so. Leander was restored to life, I guess-he had to take his chances out there maybe. I was done with him, in a way. I came upon my own redemption in the streets somewhere, as creator-narrator, and looked upon my own flesh and felt my own reality in Leander now at large from my own creation.

TQ: In the French interview [Masques, Summer 1982] you were asked if all your characters weren't either waiting for something or wounded. Is that waiting a kind of disablement like the physical disablement that afflicts some of them?

WG: I think they're waiting for miracles, for wonderful visitations=-thev're waiting for the marvelous.

TQ: Is the marvelous that important?

WG: I'm not didactic-it's just surprise, waiting for the wonderful surprise. It's probably waiting for the Second Coming, underneath. I'm sure that's all I've ever been writing about. Salvation, redemption, freedom from bondage, complete release. All those people from those little towns, that's what they were brought up to wait for: the end of the world, when the trumpets would sound, and they'd be free of all this daily labor. That's the whole black southern thing. Rebirth, a new life, heaven-freedom from pain, bondage, travail.

Those characters in my stories all are waiting. They're really kind of hopeful people, expecting more. They're open to something. They are forerunners. They've lost place-a lot of them are displaced, that's their sorrow.

"But there's a better place I know," don't you know that's what they say? "I accept that I've lost my place, my home, my town, my river- a whole river is gone!" When Jessy comes back to her mother, in The House of Breath, she says to her, "Life is loss, Mama." Her mother is just waiting, sitting in a chair. She had closed the blinds, and the wind played memory through them. Jessy says, "Life is loss, don't you know that? I know that, and I'm only ten years old."

TQ: How do you feel now that you have adjusted to living in southern California, after several years?

WO: I feel exhilarated, it's encouraging and hospitable to me, for my work, because I am in a foreign country. This is the way I've been able to accept it. The people are foreigners to me and I am in a strange land. I'm at home in a strange land-always my image of home was of someplace where I would put down the deepest roots and build a permanent place and I would never stray from that. But of course that was pure fallacy, pure idiocy, a fake way of thinking about my life, that was never possible, I would never allow that, anyway. It's not anything I really would care about!

Beckett said this for me at a time when I was looking for the statement, that the artist lives nowhere. "L'artiste qui joue son etre est de nulle part. Et il n'a pas des [reres,"

TQ; Who would have guessed this of a writer as concerned with such specific speech and with the exile's return?

WO: But that place has become a language, now, for me. That's a language of it's own; I've created a language, as I did for Arcadio, that was never spoken there. That's become my style, for me.

TQ; You're not reproducing a speech?

WO: Not at all, not the way those Southerners do. I'm not a "Texas writer" or a "regional" one. I'm not interested in that, I never really was. I was making a language out of speech. If you harm that language, you're harming the life of that work, and you're harming the character himself. You're re-dressing him. You're saying, "No, he wouldn't have this kind of a hat on, he wouldn't have that color eyes." It's a violation. The language has become paint, as for a painter-the quality of the paint, the texture. A cezanne local mountain is paint.

TQ: What's special to you about Arcadio speaking Spanish? Why does he speak it? Why isn't he just a redneck hermaphrodite?

WO: He is a Mexican. That is his speech. That's his mother-she has a real hard time with English. His father is an East Texan, but his

mother is a strange, foreign thing, jumping around, and she don't belong nowhere, she can't stay still!

That's his language too and what you get out of him finally is his struggle to speak, any way he can. He can't use his father's language, or the speech he hears around him, and he knows his own. Again, he's trying to tell.

TQ; Bilingual, and split sensual/spiritual, male/female-schizoid?

WG: He becomes quite crazy at times And what son can tell you about his father?! I think the son-father relationship is as enigmatic as can be That's a wild nightmare there, though, that was given to me. And I feel I just have to let it alone. There's no such thing as clarification of it. I'm interested in what other people say about it, but it's almost like "Tongues of Men and of Angels"-that's the way that tree grows. And either further work will clarify it, will straighten that tree up, or

TQ; You revise and revise, though, so it's not your spontaneous early drafts that you seem to be protecting in this way.

WG: But something is never changed. And that's what I know not to change. I can't say that it's words: it's the vision, and it is never changed. There are no "revisions" for me, in that sense. I'm really in trouble if I try to change that. But it's not as if my first draft were holier than any other.

TQ; Your attitude is nothing like that of the Beats, then, for whom the spontaneous composition was sacred?

WG: Those states were induced, those visionary states. Now, in the last five years, I've read the Beats, and I've found there's something there. But at that time, the fifties, they were crazy, and I was trying to be sane. My God, I started by being crazy, why would I want to induce insanity? And writing kept making me sane, at least tying me down somewhere. So I couldn't hear any of that, then. They scared me, too. Wild people I find that when I get a little depressed or morbid I want to stop talking. It's probably that I've just used it up. That's a good sign, to me.

TQ; A clear signal, you mean?

WG: Yes, I think it is, to let it alone So that I don't get into other feelings-fear. And the kind of memory that is not creative. There is a destructive memory, too, that has nothing to do with recreating life, and I know when it is, more and more. I used to brood on it, and use it, and think it was a part of my creativity-it really was demonic. It came when it came. I was a prey to it. I drank to stop that, obsessed and on the verge of insanity. I'm through that. I was afraid of those things of mind, and I just joined the ranks of many others. The destructive memory was all that would come to me then, and you have

to learn through the destruction-if you survive-when it is creative, when it is a building thing. I think some poets never knew that. I thought at that time that the idea of insanity in poets was somewhat hallowed. And there was such a false feeling about that. There still is. I have not much patience with it now, I just consider them ill, people who need help. And once they are restored, then their process goes on again. But the madness of the poet, and the poetry that came out of madness and suicide and all that-it impresses me less and less. Too much destructive memory. And I feel that a lot of poets begin to use that as a way of life, a pattern of behavior, even as a creative pattern.

TQ: How do you distinguish between the creative and destructive memory?

WG: Through surviving it. And through knowing when to let it alone. This is why I am physical, thank God. I am physical. I would use sex. I would go digging-I dug whole arroyos, irrigation ditches where there was no water, in New Mexico. I made adobes, and lifted, and built.

This was healing, I thought-to go into the detail of everyday life again. That was my survival, that's why I'm here, I knew that. Because basically I wanted health, I wanted an art that was healthy and healing, that had life-force in it, life-strength, When it got into this darkness, I knew more and more to let it alone. If I was in a relationship, a loverelationship, that was dark, and was caught in it, with no way to escape from that, then it was very very dangerous for me. Or if I went homeoften I would go home thinking that would restore me, but I found that black angel there, though home was a great source of restoration and healing for me, I thought. This was when I was not writing. But if there were traps that I couldn't escape-l won't stay where that black angel is-then that's a dangerous time for me. And it looked to me that California might be the final trap for me. And it seemed thatthat dark angel, that bad angel, that I wrote about, was here.

I came here thinking: sunshine, the flowers, and a new way of life, from New York apartment living-and I never have been able to live in New York, really. Ever! I've done it, but only happily in my own place, my own rooms, a nest-a life-giving place.

TQ: Not in the city, only in your nest there?

WG: That's right. As my present self, I'm not able to handle the place now.

TQ; But when you go home, aren't you wiser and stronger than before?

WG: But what I'm shown is that I'm not, and that's the last straw! I come there vulnerable. I have come there out of seeking, and to seek is to be vulnerable, I guess. I have come there seeking, saying, "Well, that

will save me," and already now I'm open to any kind offorce that can get me down, destroy me. Also I suppose that wisdom reveals that often there was a dark angel where we thought there was a bright one. I said, "Those people sitting on the porch, and singing together at night, and those stories they told, in the twilight who was the dark figure in that house? Who among them chose that front door pane with that forbidding figure that says 'Don't come in this house-Who are you?-don't enter here-you're not welcome here.''' When I'd come with my suitcase, saying, "I'm here!" I'd see that figure on that horse saying "Come in!" and yet "Don't! It's just pain and darkness." That house is still there, and so far as I know, that door is still there. A very precious, suspicious, dangerous door.

-Reginald Gibbons

with the assistance of Molly McQuade

The gilded cage: posttnodernism. and beyond

Leigh Hafrey

Nabokov's model institution: Introduction

During my freshman year in college, I took part in a volunteer remedial skills program at a nearby reform school for girls, teaching English. The school was a "model" institution, which meant the windows were unbarred, the fence around the school was not particularly threatening, and the living conditions generally were decent. The girls, in their early to mid-teens, came to the school for various reasons, theft, prostitution, and chronic truancy among them. Some supposedly were there to get through an unwanted pregnancy, some supposedly because their parents wanted them out of the way.

The model aspect of the school also meant that the inmates regularly "ran" or escaped, and I got the sense that the girls' worst experiences came in these escape attempts. They often used a safe-house where they paid in sexual favors for their freedom, and most often returned to school the worse for wear, turned over by those supposed to help them or betrayed by their own first instinct to go home. Back at the school, they faced periods of solitary confinement, the punishment doubling after the first escape. Yet they continued to run-the school, in the final analysis, leading to the very antithesis of reform.

I might-given this knowledge-have been particularly careful about the material I chose to read with my three tutees. During the preceding summer, though, I had discovered Nabokov's Lolita and, for subterranean motives of dubious intelligence, thought the book might appeal to them. More consciously, I admired Nabokov's descriptions of Humbert Humbert and Lolita wandering across the United States, his deft evocation of a national life-style.

My tutees didn't quite see it that way. I assigned them eighty pages of reading and returned a week later to find they hadn't liked it; to be more precise, they said: "We know all about that stuff." I don't remember anymore whether we finished the book or went on to other things. The Moratorium and student strike of spring 1970 came along, and by the following autumn I had other students, with whom I read other things.

The rejection of Nabokov affected me deeply, and took the form of a politico-aesthetic epiphany (to use a term then current in literary studies) not uncommon among freshmen in the late sixties. I had read a lot of recent American fiction-Updike, Cheever, Bellow, Mailer, Barthelme, Brautigan, Pynchon, Vonnegut-and knew that John Barth, who belonged to the same group, had recently published an essay entitled "The Literature of Exhaustion," in which, it seemed, he had nothing but praise for writing in the style of Nabokov, Borges, and Barth. No one seemed terribly exhausted in student circles at that point in time, and so it was easy for me to agree with my three tutees and to jettison the whole Barthian crew.

No doubt it was rash to turn thumbs down on Nabokov because three might-have-been-nyrnphets had said they didn't like him or his book. They certainly hadn't had the training necessary to appreciate his craftsmanship; nor had they sat in on enough seminars to appreciate the role of the anti-hero in twentieth-century Western fiction. And while they certainly had a valid interest in escape, literature was not necessarily the place to look for it.

The three of them had seized, though, on a fundamental truth of Lolita: there is a radical split between Humbert Humbert's style, refined and cosmopolitan, and his actions, perhaps still cosmopolitan, but definitely incapable of ennoblement through his poetic effusions. The girls had no trouble understanding the plot, and rare as the prose might be, it was all too familiar. Humbert Humbert's Lolita was a prisoner, as they were, and the gilding on the cage didn't deceive them.

I have read my Aristotle a sufficient number of times since then to know that, in the tragic scheme of things, we still read anti-heroes as heroes and that Humbert Humbert is not one of them. The binary opposition preserves the claim to attention an audience normally accords the hero, but the tragic flaw is much harder to recognize as such in an ignoble character than in a noble one; and beyond critical rationale, one's sympathies, therefore, are bound to undergo a change. In a literary critical perspective, Nabokov's craft masks a vacancy, an absence of motive; and the rhetoric embellishes upon but does not compensate for that fact.

Is there life after Barth?

1 never found Barth's essay,' though 1 read several of his novels, as well as later work by his contemporaries and models. Over the years, 1 did use his phrase, "the literature of exhaustion," to cover much of that fiction; and then, early in 1980, I discovered that he had published another essay in the pages of the Atlantic Monthly, this one entitled "The Literature of Replenishment."! In twelve years, it seemed, we had set literature straight, and through Barth I discovered that it was a matter of "modernism" and "postmodernism," though I soon realized that the labels would not of necessity indicate what the problem had been.

Perhaps the best approach to the definition lies in Barth's use, in the later essay, of direct evidence, the opening lines of, respectively, a "premodernist," a "modernist," and a "postmodernist" novel:

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

-Anna Karenina

riverrun, past Eve's and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.

-Finnegans Wake

Many years later. as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

-One Hundred Years of Solitude

Garda Marquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude certainly warrants Barth's enthusiasm, and it does differ from both Finnegans Wake and Anna Karenina, just as those two works differ from each other. Despite the play of temporal perspectives in the opening line of One Hundred Years of Solitude, however, and for larger reasons to which I will return, I find Garcia Marquez' work pragmatically, syntactically, and semantically less different from Tolstoy's than from Joyce's; and that relative in-difference for me calls into question Barth's genealogy, the main line of which remains, as his terms clearly indicate, modernism.

The historical underpinnings of Barth's work did not escape Borges, who, by the American's own admission at the close of "The Literature of Replenishment," reacted badly to Barth's admiring interpretation of his work in the first essay. With that admission, Barth returns to assertions made earlier, to the effect that forms and modes of art naturally succumb to time and the advent of new artistic conventionsa harmless and accurate statement. Yet Barth also says in the early essay-and I think we may assume that he agrees with what he appreciates-that in Borges' view

for one to attempt to add overtly to the sum of 'original' literature by even so much as a conventional short story, not to mention a novel, would be too presumptuous, too naive; literature has been done long since. A librarian's point of view! [Borges'] ficciones are not only footnotes to imaginary texts, but postscripts to the real corpus of literature."

This is not the place to discuss whether Barth does the Argentine writer justice in his two essays. But his analysis of the latter's work does suggest that Barth is trapped between two notions of literary history (and by extension history at large) which explain his later attention to postmodernism and replenishment, in full cognizance of the epigonic relations and lack of resources the terms imply. Barth deals either in historic tautology-Borges' facing mirrors motif-or in the one-damn-thing-after-another school of historical thought, a view he assigns to late modernism and which leads him willv-nillv to reject the possibility of comprehensible historic novelty. Barth's formulation of literary history as one in which all "original" conventional literature is a thing of the past fatally suggests that convention itself is a thing of the past. Yet Barth knows conventions of some kind are essential to story writing; and so, by his own prescription, he finds himself using dated conventions with the ironic authorial selfconsciousness that signifies no futurity.

Text-consciousness is not a new thing in American fiction. One has only to think of The Scarlet Letter and Moby Dick to realize how continuous is the American concern with the power of language and of the text. Yet Barth's work, from The Floating Opera to Letters, seems to me to build on the antithesis of the concerns of those earlier novels. Barth focuses in "The Literature of Exhaustion" on the matter of craft, on the author fully conscious of his intent and his effects, a virtuoso of the first order. The word "inspiration" does creep into his discussion, but as an additive or alternative to "bright aesthetic ideas. The visionary quality of the American romance, perhaps the tradition in American literature, has no place in Barth's scheme of things, except as a topic of ironic commentary.

His is a fundamentally mechanistic view of creation, not an in' frequent occurrence with followers of mystics, of which latter, according to Barth, Borges may well be one. Barth approvingly cites one of Borges' editors, to the effect that:

'For [Borges] no one has claim to originaliry in literature; all writers are more or less faithful amanuenses of the spirit, translators and annotators of pre-existing archetypes. '4

It may be that, in theoretical terms, Barth has advanced from this statement of his position in 1967. Yet with Borges' archetypes firmly

grounded in this-worldly, textual reality (specific motifs, specific plots, specific tropes), Barth's own plots have continued to proliferate like an incantation gone astray. The sensual equivalent of the mystical union (for some the sensual route to that union), the sexual act recurs in Barth's novels in a vivid evocation of what his French postmodernist colleague, Philippe Sollers, calls "la stupeur sexuelle de l'humanire" (Paradis). The fire in Barth's writing, like the fire in my ill-fated tutorial choice, Nabokov's Lolita, lies with the style, with the play of words and tone of voice, the mockery, the mimicry of past and present ways of speaking, and effectively precludes release and renewal. Nourished on the modernist credo and the works it accompanied, Barth sees the literary world of today in terms of that limited past. The definition of his key words, then, lies in that temporal would-beatemporal relation: postmodernism, the literature of replenishment, is the literature ofexhaustion, a postscript to man's real literary creation.

Anti-doornails; or, the word in eclipse

To do away with Barth, of course, is no easy matter. He and others named earlier have occupied or continue to occupy a central position on the American literary scene, and the postmodernist school has thus acquired the symbolic value of a literary establishment for the society as a whole. To suggest that the movement is retrograde at best, terminal at worst, invites defeatism in the literary world, because it creates a vacuum which apparently defies filling: who is not postmodern, if he or she claims to be or is critically acclaimed as a "serious" writer?

Barth's covert return to the late sixties took me back as well, in search of those aspects of life-literary and otherwise-which had so clearly contradicted his use of the word "exhaustion." The search assumed a physical dimension and, not surprisingly, I found a resurgence of that fading American scene in Mitterrand's France, the belated fruit of the Paris riots of May 1968: a little more than a year after Barth's Atlantic reprise, the Socialists swept into power; and, not long thereafter, the Living Theater, symbol of the American Left and of the avant-garde in the fifties and sixties, active participants in the French events of 1968, arrived to set up a permanent home on the outskirts of Paris. Come the summer of 1982, their posters appeared across the city, advertising Bertolt Brecht's Antigone and Ernst Toller's Masse Mensch, battle hymns of much earlier days, against a backdrop of iron bars and the red flag. The Paris Free Voice (july-August 1982) heralded their return, though the Voice reporter wondered in conclusion who the group's new audience might be.

The surfacing ofJulian Beck and Judith Malina focused a number of similar manifestations during those months in Paris. The Talking &nd, a New York-based Living Theater spin-off, performed on Boulevard Raspail at the American Center, a major purveyor to the city of American artistic trends. Then, in a more narrowly literary vein, the Center hosted the opening sessions of Polyphonix 4, billed an "inter, national festival of immediate poetry." The festival was organized by [ean-jacques Lebel, French companion of Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Giorno, McClure, and others, and participant-along with Man Ray, et al.-in the Paris "happenings" of fifteen-odd years ago. The festival promised to be a showcase of antiestablishment-or as one Center staff member put it, "anti(dead�s)doornails"-literary performance. Announcements placed it in a line of descent from the Futurists and Dadaists, creative iconoclasts all; and Lebel, citing the current crisis in the publishing industry at a press conference prior to the opening, expressed the hope and the conviction that the festival would put the word back in the mainstream of life todav.'

I revised my own hopes very quickly, and Lebel must have done the same as the festival followed its week-long course, producing ill-timed laughter in the audience and ill-chosen contributions on stage. Nothing if not partisan, Lebel took by the second day of his MC,ship to periodic introductions of "the star of the show," invariably some American friend; and it must be said that they were all perfectly articulate, in their own way. Bob Holman, of the St. Mark's Poetry Project and the Giorno Poetry Systems' Dial-Avl'oem poets, rapped it up in the best City style; and if his rhyme schemes kept the lyrics firmly to the border of nonsense for the ten minutes he was on stage, the steady trickle of people out of the theater did dry up. Brion Gvsin, a painter who made his debut in the thirties with the French Sur, realists, who in the late fifties invented The Dream Machine and later-together with William Burroughs-the "cut-up," came onstage backed by a punk guitarist and a drummer for two Gysin cornpositions, "Blue Baboon" and "Champagne." Finally, Dick Higgins of Fluxus, the group of poets and musicians who, inspired byJohn Cage, made their carefully timed Paris debut in 1962, had his drummer render a Higgins score, "Dreams," followed by "Sparks for Piano," also wordless.

Higgins did an encore the last night of the festival, this time in the big auditorium at Centre Pompidou, and managed single-handedlv to drain the hall by fifty percent during his reading of "Bodies Electric ," a twenty-minute alphabetic unhinging of the Walt Whitman poem. Local post-structuralists must have loved it, but the less sophisticated took active and vociferous revenge with cries of "France for the French" (the dark side of the Socialists' fiftv-percent

hike in arts subsidies), "Phoque you," and "Yeye McDonald's!" Michael McClure, who followed Higgins to close the show, earned the ultimate insult as he was deadpanning it through the Billy the Kid-jean Harlow exchanges of The Beard: "Oh, it's much too lyric," someone wailed; to which McClure smiled and said: "Thank you."

Whatever the ups and downs of the American contribution to the festival, it is certain that the word was in eclipse. From the nonsense of Gysin's pieces, to the five minutes of sibilance in three voices that made up Higgins' "Glass Ass," to the honorable but not terribly contemporary readings by McClure of Blake and Chaucer, spoken and written language was not the medium by which the poets acceded to meaning. It was Gysin's guitarist who contributed to their performance an image and a sense of something building, something much more vital than the unceasing rhyme of "pain" and "Champagne" in the poem of that name. The distinction was perhaps in part due to a difference of age, but also to the performers' attitudes toward their respective arts. The guitarist played as though that were a credible thing to do, his confidence born in part of audience sympathy, of a reciprocal agreement that his playing did signify. Gysin performed to prove that his words, words period, could not convey meaning, and only an empty theater would have done him justice.

Commenting on Polyphonix 3, the French daily Le Marin argued that "Polvphonix seeks to break through the absurd barriers raised between music, dance, and writing, which are in fact nothing more than the many faces of a single mental activity. "6 Experiments in the mingling of the arts have produced landmark works over the past halfcentury, tributes to a tremendous cross-fertilization, notably in theater and dance: the Living Theater's choice of Brecht points to one major source of that vitality; and beyond the conflict of intentions in the performances of Gysin and Higgins with their musicians or Holman with his cassette deck, the same possibilities for mutual enrichment dawn.

At the same time, the various arts do have unique qualities and individual rhythms of development. If they present so many faces of the same mental activity, different means of expression also establish different perspectives on that activity; and if, for a long time, the message conveyed by the medium of language narrowly defined has seemed in need of deconstruction, the communication by that means has continued, however dully or deceitfully. To turn recent literary language inside out, to reduce it, to show its mechanics in all their apparent inaccuracy, is a worthwhile endeavor, although those who do so may not have any historic or psychic choice in the matter. Having witnessed the act, having seen it associated with a specific political

statement or attitude toward society as a whole, we need to find out what new vistas have opened up before us.

Polyphonix finally suggested that, surface differences between Barth's mannerist eighteenth, and nineteenth-century realism and McClure's "beast" language aside, both types of artistic exercise take for granted the impossibility of significant verbal communication. Unwilling or unconscious epigones, the festival iconoclasts seem merely reactionary today, narcissistic in their concern with a dying convention, because they have generalized their revolt against it to words at large. Within the artistic context, Polyphonix' mingling of modes of expression suggests a valid means of rejuvenation, since it crosses a weakened poetics with other, more vital, art forms. But that is not enough: the disruption of a way oflooking at the world reminds us that we do look at the world, just as an eclipse of the sun reminds us that the sun normally mediates our vision, ifonly-intermittently-by the crescent moon. What, then, do we see by the light of the word, now that the living theater has met the literature of exhaustion?

Pacing the new journalism

The answer to the question of the word lies in the intertwined dilemmas of my three reform-school tutees and their literary counter, part, Lolita: they are imprisoned by different conventions, certainlysocial convention, the order of daily life in the case of my tutees; literary convention in the case of Lo' and her creator. Yet each order regularly appeals to the other for its justification, trading rhetoric for reality and vice versa as a means of release and the rediscovery of vital functions. The juxtaposition, the mutual determination of these realms, will always provoke controversy, for the simple reason that language always keeps them close. Realism in literature, fantasy in daily life-the accurate and believable versus storytelling, fiction and lies-are so many terms for strife over values, as language mediates our weaving of the fabric of society.

Nowhere has this problem been more apparent for the word than in a domain nominally beyond the pale of "serious" writing, the pages of the newspaper. While Barth was busy working out the postmodernist program, American journalism lived through the crisis phase of a movement long in developing, the "new journalism." That trend in writing has raised and continues to raise in theoretical and practical terms, many of the questions which have always appeared central to the craft of writing: objectivity, the power of style, the relation of language to reality, the social commitment of the writer, censorship,

plausibility and the truth of fiction. Whatever the journalists' beliefs (and I think here, for example, of Thomas Kendrick's introduction to the Washington Post Writers Group collection Writing in Scyle7), their exploration of new ways ofreporting the news has profoundly affected the nature of that news and the relationship of the print media to it and to us, the readers.

Two upheavals in the press in the spring of 1981 symbolize this change. "Jimmy's World," the chronicle of an eight-year-old heroin addict, set the Washington Post and D.C. mayor Marion Barry at daggers' points and initiated a city-wide search for the boy in question. It also won the paper a Pulitzer Prize and the author, Janet Cooke, a promotion, until she admitted she'd made the story up, thus provoking a scandal at the Post and around the Pulitzer Prize Committee. Less than a month later, New York Daily News columnist Michael Daly received Columbia University's Meyer Berger Award for distinguished reporting on New York City-the same week, Daly resigned over "On the Streets of Belfast, the Children's War," a column the London Daily Mail had called "a pack of lies." Daly couldn't provide independent corroboration for his piece, but he claimed it conveyed the reality of the situation in Northern Ireland; and the Pulitzer Prize Committee clearly felt that "Jimmy's World" did the same for the District of Columbia and, beyond it, for urban America.

I am not by any means suggesting that a journalist who can't come up with a story manufacture one. Yet the notion of the newspaper as an impartial journal of record, a peculiarly American notion and one which is little over a century old, meets very limited and, more and more often, mythical needs among its readers. The newspaper purveys news, not facts, since it publishes only what it deems fit to print, and that by a certain hierarchy of news values expressed directly on the editorial page and indirectly through the makeup of each day's issue. The new journalism has been an attempt to confront this reality ofthe linguistic presentation of the everyday: over the past twenty years, from the Bay of Pigs to the Civil Rights movement to Vietnam, Watergate, Chile, and Iran, we have met and rediscovered ourselves as a nation in the pages of the paper. If the press establishment has struggled to control the movement, the public experience of a writer confronting the real has challenged us and will continue to do so, because it has made explicit the role of the fact as an instrument rather than an end in itself.

Truth is not just a matter of presentation, but it can never be a matter of all the facts, either. It is a process, an encounter with and expression of the object, the other, and the gradual incorporation of it and the observer into a coherent world view. The reporter is supposedly immune, impartial, and yet the reporter who knows his or her

subject and presumably has some affinity for it does the work best. In this line, at the far limit of the journalistic and on the borders of the literary, come books like Dispatches, Michael Herr's Esquire essays on Vietnam, in my opinion the best, most contemporary writing on that war in print today. It works for me because Herr clearly found himself engulfed by the war, because his perspective so visibly changed as a result of the experience. More than that, and beyond the inarticulate sincerity which cripples much of the Vietnam veterans' literary testimony, Herr's book works so well because it generalizes the phenomenon of the war, shows it to be an event which involved not just the Vietnamese and a few million American fighting men, but the entire American people. "Vietnam Vietnam Vietnam, we've all been there": The closing line of Dispatches states Herr's thesis, but he has proven it long since, in the electricity of his reporting and his ability to comrnunicate the color, the conflict, the excitement and the guilt he experienced in Southeast Asia as a correspondent. The measure of his excellence as a writer lies in his ability to strike the national chord, to see the extension of his own limited experience.

Herr has his predecessors: Norman Mailer Tom Wolfe, Hunter Thompson, Truman Capote, all of whom have worked the frontiers between journalism and fiction, and who continue, as in Mailer's Executioner's Song, to walk the line. It is, I suppose, possible that Mailer may someday cross into the realm of the higher fiction with his "great American novel." But others have already done it with much less. I think of Grace Paley's two collections of short prose, The Little Disturbances of Man and Enormous Changes at the Last Minute. What Paley achieves is a sense of the real, the quotidian detail, even as she moves beyond it to a vision which encompasses her characters and which presents a seamless web of form and content. Gone is the stylistic excess of Lolita, gone the excess of portraits from real life that swells Barth's Letters to its seven-hundred-odd pages, or the confusion-c-charming and irritating, entertaining and demanding, always believable-that keeps Mailer's Armies of the Night too firmly on the ground of the event.

Whether consciously or not, Paley and Herr share the conviction of having something to say, an urgency that can take the form of humor or despair, but always assumes that language does mediate between object and subject, between the world and the perceiver (if onlyinitially-the author). Urgency does not necessarily mean an exclusive focus on the givens of daily experience or today's major issues, either: Barth's inclusion in his latest book, Sabbatical, of twenty pages direct from the Baltimore Sun on the death of an ex�CIA official makes it no more current than The Sor-Weed Factor; nor does the fact of writing a novel on computer technology or information science, as Joseph

McElroy does in Lookout Cartridge, alone bring the authorial act closer to a viable place in contemporary American society." Hawthorne reached back several centuries to find his subject in The Scarlet Letter even as, in the "Custom House" opening to the book, he made clear his preoccupation with a decidedly current American problem.

I am not suggesting a return to nineteenth-century romance, the fiction which Henry James, in his preface to The American, described as "the balloon of experience" insidiously freed from the earth by its author. We will have the imaginative freedom of a vision for our time, however, the freedom to shape and give unity to the real, only if we accept the relative autonomy of our material. Borges' preexistent archetypes apply here, insofar as they indicate the necessary vulnerability of the writer, a humility born of our inevitable exposure to that which we can neither control nor fully know. When Borges precludes authorial originality, he does so to guarantee that the author not take his or her creation for The Creation. Yet the limitation does not terminate man's contract to mediate between the unknown and his fellow men, and it is here that postmodernism goes astray, because it misses the nature of the writer's freedom. It may be that, in the books of Herr and Paley, even in the books of Garda Marquez, the pressure of daily events forestalls any authorial presumption upon the material. But to the extent that the three succeed in their work, they do so because they have at once been open and done their best to make sense of what they have received. They are, to paraphrase Emerson, not "writers," but men and women writing. It is a distinction hard to maintain in today's society, escaping the writer's version of the gilded cage. But the value of our contemporary literature depends upon it, and with that literature, some small part of our contemporary society.

1. John Barth, "The Literature of Exhaustion," Atlantic Monthly, 220 (August 1967), pp. 29-34; referred to hereafter as "Exhaustion."

2. John Barth, "The Literature of Replenishment," Atlantic Monthly, 245 [january 1980), pp. 65-71.

3. Barth, "Exhaustion," p. 33.

4. Ibid.

5. Press Conference, Polyphonix 4, American Center, June IS, 1982.

6. Le Matin, June IS, 1981.

7. Thomas Kendrick, "Introduction," in Writing in Style, Laura Longley Babb, ed. (Boston: Washington Post Writers Group/Houghton Mifflin, 1975), pp. i-xi.

8. See Thomas LeClair's "Avanr-garde mastery," TriQuarterly 53 (Winter 1982), p.264.

Three poems

Dennis Schmitz

The knot

Better for us to rise out of the sweaty sacking two bodies; better after love to falter, to be subtracted to oneself& hours later, still inventing the vernacular kiss, wade the loft hay looking for the plain gold ring that bound us, pressed down by our struggling to the mouths of the animals

nourished from above as we are: chaff, ratshit, apotheosisholding back because which taste is the one we most desire?

On all fours going down I comb hay, gunnysacks

& unwrinkle the shirt in which you knotted watch & ring to keep them. Hay-must coats my back; the fine hairs in my nose thicken as I breathe it. Below, in the horse-boxes, you whinny.

The Chronicle "Green Sheet" dries out BIC pen mustaches & goggles, underwear women the boys decorated with paisley lesions,

interpreting the news. Extinction seems a protracted, ironic task: though Hitler's manager Albert Speer dies

only a few pages ago, I remember Hitler's death on the radio was the work of an age, a whole industry; Eva Braun was anyone's sister gone wrong. Finally I go on my belly with the children to highlight what is real. Newsprint bruises ripple all over me; faces come off on my sleeves

as I sweat & fill page after page, call for new stacks. Captions pull off like scabs, but reversed: this news understood only in mirrors, accepted by the body, will teach me shame. My wife kneels too on what we once thought important:

boldface sex crimes, ferocious nations &. burned-down discos. Unaware of all they carry, both boys stagger in with old Trib issues, the Guardian, The Berkeley Barbs so yellow from garage weather that they flake &. snow down on us lost, unrecoverable lives.

Gill boy

for John, my son

The toys I bought for you splash down in your brothers' tub, are rubbed paintless, protean, in the 15 years coming down: the space vehicle Apollo, the rubbery aliens, the tooth-scarred astronaut who trails air-hose, prepared to go breathless into the child's world. You lived only five days, unable to surface, cyanotic in the isolette, then coldthe way I've learned to accept you when I wash your two brothers real, when I shape each of their small parts over & over again with soap. I tried to forget, to sublimate, but under seven inches of bathwater, out of reach, you learned to breathe. The suds your brothers leave, the soapy waste webs galls & scaly eyelets all over your skin so cruel no one could love you & want to survive.

Ambush

John Morgan

A light with the richness of cream pours over the bar. Slack night. I sip a glass of beer remembering who I think I am and then forgetting. "Killing's more direct than talk,"

he says, says he could do it still but what's the use? His breath's a heavy metal stink about like dirt or the wide circles of waiting he pledged allegiance to before his birth.

Camped in the Asian dark, sick on his first patrol, he tells me how they wouldn't talk to him, his alien platoon that first night out. Then something like a finger beckoning.

He turns, hears in his middle ear a bird's frail tune, thick eons shouldering over oceans of recall. With hardly time to think he's off his stool, rolling in a fit of peanut shells and drool.

The mind at war has got its reasons. Plunging in a sink of need, he's there as well as here, hands tensed around his snub-nosed sharp-toothed pet, and suddenly I could do with one less beer. Tomorrow if he lives he'll burn a village, be a vet. All wars are fought by country boys used to this long road.

Three poem.s

Mairi MacInnes

At five the train left Hendaye

At five the train left Hendaye and trundled inland, across the foothills of the Pyrenees, bound for Marseilles.

At dusk it drew up somewhere, earth dark, horizon high, a greenness in the air, and stars over the hills.

Half the passengers dismounted, and doors slammed on crowds.

That's how we knew it was Lourdes, that and the little fires carried up under the stars.

We sat in the dark carriage, broke bread and drank wine, until we couldn't see what was flame and what star, and the train took us off to Marseilles in secret, as before.

Your eyes

Pheasant-colored eyes; eyes like glass chips, Basalt, needle light; lamps of the cat, Chinks on bright rooms of talk; Full-summer eyes; wink

On a sprinkled green day of lawns, The paradise gardens where you walk Musing all along the empty vistas.

I sense you before I see you, The senses each fiercely ajar

Sniffing your acrid want; The sough of wind spiraling down

To a gasp in the watcher; You blind always, fingering blind

The texture and pattern of thought, Not the Braille of the provinces, But-rubbed between pointer and thumbThe full hand of Paris and Rome.

Now your eyes are dark in shock. Someone has torched the empty house

We lived in once. Swamp, landfill, And thicket smother the grounds. The plastic and paper of crowds

Litter terraces where we'd stroll

The length of our eyesights. The mind flaps about its skull. Printouts blot over the windows

Saying, "You can't possibly win! You are not completed, never! You dirty the world you see!"

My picture of your world must fail When your mere looking makes it new. Yet in your looks all things beginTable and chairs leaf out and fruit, And windows spring upon the dark. Deer and donkey and honest pig Cautiously advance to feed. Your eyes espy necessity, Your arms go out, you approach them in tears, Your hands full of bread, in the harshest winter.

A linen skirt

The flax grew in the field So the skirt is tough. From the first it had the weave And hand of field-grown stuff.

Then I bit into a peach And juice ran from my chin. I promptly washed the skirt But the mark stayed in.

The skirt bleached pale as cream And dyed a shade of toast Save where the juice had fallen And pinkness had set fast.

I cut my finger next And drops of blood fell down. The skirt bleached white as lint But the blood turned brown.

Red as a crayfish, then, And russet as a bird, Whatever dyes I chose The peach and blood stains showed.

Yet I wear it with delight And smile when the colors fade, Because the weight and weave Show something flax has made;

Marked as the palm of my hand Where experience is revealed, Because, I like to think, The flax grew in the field.

Figure by a chim.ney

Frannie Lindsay

The shade holds the dark in place for you, while you fell your sky for winter. This morning you went out, your unsteady swagger swinging the ground beneath you. Ax at your hip, you are plotting the fertile light and how it will fall. All December, the rings of the thinnest trees rise warmer out of your chimney until the sky above you is old. You can hear the years of wind coming into the flue, like ice-blue bark curling dry in your stove. You have a warm door to keep filling with winter, the sky at your side like a tool reflecting the angles of carefully falling light. You keep your ax polished cold. Next June, when it hangs like an angry heel inside your garage by the tires and rags, your paths will have melted behind you, their damp ground hung with kindling. Go out alone for your gathering. Bring back the rest of the sky: thin branches too useless with all their suggestible wind gone dry inside them, the green inside them gone. March, when the weather grows graceless with parts of change, I can't help you hold your broken land. The clouds tear their soft puzzles. Pieces of house come back to me: the old snow on the wood by the screen door left unlatched. Someone should bring it in soon.

Two poem.s

John Peck

The well of St. Regisse

Soundless waterfall, cave-in, And from emptiness the infused nova As sense burns more flatly, and window Gives onto window in receding seriesEven in the center, extinguishings Whose turbulence, carried, is a working also.

But Andersen's father, permeable to each wind And fleeing that sorrow in his father before him Carried his boy at the first sign afflicted Out to the dispossessing spring to leave him Through the night on St. John's Eve, a cold year.

Cinched into leggings and mittens with hemp drawstrings And canvas from a wrecked fishing smack, He was set down in the strict, abused place.

There was, in their case, extenuation, Huddled toward a cure before drenched April, Consigned neither honeysuckle nor lily, With belief even before hope, before cloud Had towered and dissolved through June of the ruins.

Tempest came with a breastplate clangwheeling Through his chilled dream of armor, and the mad girl

Scrumpled unseen near his feet broke away in a cascade Of labials, leaving him sprocketed to after-flashes, Unable to lay hands on a shield, leaving him Through years growing tenuously glad For other lightnings, those that retained passage. As if yanked upright he tore from that ground Oddly surefooted, agile through pitch downpour, on his back The fame and fate of shattered armor for his countless sons.

(Untitled)

It seemed an eagle, simple Turning and tall descent, the burnt dome ample, Undeniable. But what shot Down was a shield

And stuck in the marsh and turned it Smoky and depthless. Close by, still filthy, Rearing as a hot brass flower Out of all size, It made midday sullenly Rebound, and I thought of crouched Scythians When bowl, plow, and ax plummeted Among them, and one,

Coming to his wits, Grabbed them up and made himself their first king. For me, only this reeking slab And my two hands.

And I needed to claim it, Though not for always, and not totally. No weapon with it, no hotly Squiring mania.

Ignoble needful shield. Florilegium for the plucking, where dusky Stasis answered to pierced air By the bean field,

By the mucked mallow pond, Under noon reasserting its bullhorn. I was born near hills but shall fight In the marsh forest.

Birth. Homelessness. Rome's wars.

January, plinth of two-headed winds, Gateway of two-faced auguries, Opened on me.

Two poems

Marvin Bell

Instructions to be left behind

I've included this letter in the group to be put into the cigar box-the one with the rubber band around it you will find sometime later. I thought you might like to have an example of the way in which some writing works. I may not say anything very important or phrase things just-so, but I think you will pay attention anyway because it matters to you-I'm sure it does, no one was ever more loved than I was.

What I'm saying is, your deep attention made things matter-made art, made science and business raised to the power of goodness, and sport likewise raised a level beyond.

I am not attaching to this a photograph though no doubt you have in your mind's eye a clear image of me in several expressions and at several ages all at once-which is the great work of imagery beyond the merely illustrative. Should I stop here for a moment?

These markings, transliterations though they are from prints of fingers, and they from heart

and throat and corridors the mind guards, are making up again in you the one me that otherwise would not survive that manyness daisies proclaim and the rain sings much of. Because I love you, I can almost imagine the eye for detail with which you remember my face in places indoors and out and far-flung, and you have only to look upwards to see in the plainest cloud the clearest lines and in the flattest field your green instructions.

Shall I rest a moment in green instructions? Writing is all and everything, when you care. The kind of writing that grabs your lapels and shakes you-that's for when you don't care or even pay attention. This isn't that kind. While you are paying your close kind of attention, I might be writing the sort of thing you think will last-as it is happening, now, for you. While I was here to want this, I wanted it, and now that I am your wanting me to be myself again, I think myself right up into being all that you (and I too) wanted me to be: You.

Hawaii too

If you travel north up the Manoa Valley, the triangular backlash of sun you see up the mountain, abovethat was our house awhile.

From its A window, our view escaped into the city and beyond to the rough Pacific. A driver who was frightened turned over her car, backing on our hill. A neighbor who was frightened by noises hacked a field of fire beneath us and sat with a gun by the window.

The place is just as beautiful to see as they say-let me say. It's out of the way.

How shall we see its beginning and its ending?

The Sandwich Islands, barely discovered, are today a Ring of Fireone day a month the Navy displays a radar" sonar" missile,laden example of protection. If proof were needed, the things themselves before they are used have always convinced us.

If talk story and hula could have prevented this, if poi and pig and ahi had been enough to fill our stomachs, if farmland could satisfy our appetites

We looked at it and we saw it. We wanted to tell the story, but could tell only the one that included us.

Two poems

David Galler

To

a

daughter

I know that growing up Is of itself depressingAll the sudden rup-Tured ties, helpless confessing, Fierce recriminating, The self-deceiving omnip-Otence, the devastating Isolation, whip-

Ping you along; and know The world is brutally Unsafe, and is made so By a duplicity

In those not more dishonest Than your mother and I, People with the finest Morals, though (I'd agree)

Repressive, over-critleal of anything, And with a kind of wit That courts demolishing;

But they are morals, inTellect and wit, poor dear, And not true doing-in, And you have not to fear

Except one thing: that we Will not be here forever. Till then, try amnestyTry not so hard to sever.

We do take on the spot And hue of what we hate. What can one say? Do not Discover this too late.

To the jazz musicians

Here's to the sweet gliss and the hollow honk, The stabs and flutters, polyrhvthms, funk,

The wailing horn that rides through to the heart, Swinging for all it's worth, to shake apart

Our deadlocked feelings and dissolve our guilt! Here's to the joy that is on sadness built!

Trash

John R. Reed

Scavengers start out early to beat the garbage trucks, their scabby pickups and cankered vans hacking at the curb while they rummage through our castoffs lining the street

like mourning friends or nightwomen few men stop for.

We want them taken away like the shadows that never trouble the bright quattrocento saints and people who are all color and light in a world where love is not human, while these sprung men hold to their faith they'll find a use

for what we throw away-a black shoe like a boat with its side stove in, half sunk in tomatoes bleeding like martyrs, their wasted seed white as a cup's cracked skull, and a chair like a disassembled cross.

Maybe one of them will have good luck with the lamp I've given up for dead, and his room will shine, radiant and warm, while I read in mine the lessons of the past or some current cry of pain or listen to news

tossed on the midden of the world or think offriends whose lives are collapsing or of those others long ago chucked out from the cluttered households of the human heart that I for a time so eagerly caught up.

Super inferno: midway mall

Barbara Howes

The sun's medicine hat plunges all outerworks to flatness; weeds cringe to neutral ground. Within, dust grovels at the exits; a sentinel policewoman is made of wax.

So much here is overtired, over gone-over, overlooked even for merchandise; sleazy as the common cold, just down to basic "stuff."

Aisle III leads to flaking summer gear-plastic fish,'n',chips, gray curlicues like paper roller, skates, trembling-down which

Mrs. Bilge lurches: with that much weight aboard, you plant a foot ahead six inches-test, with the other, for balance

3 stick-thin young pull busted glassine shreds from stacks: "Ma, kin I I"

Mr. Bilge is bear: his gruff body-shirt widea hairy composr-heap=he lugs himself along the garden alleys toward his bar-stanchion

As we ebb out, old girls wan as dusters, tot up on their chic machines the vast killing fundament of a day's take Then that whole kindly tumult rises to warn: "Never be back!"

Two prose poem.s

Joyce Carol Oates

(In parenthesis)

(Why? Because it isn't crucial-it has no consequence in our legitimate lives.)

(My father helping my mother step into the gently rocking boat. Silver fish slicing the water, in the harbor. Hazy sunshine, a daguerreotype formality. "Where are you going? Why are you leaving me? Will I ever see you again?" etc.)

(The value of such moments, he says, twisting my wrist until the skin turns elastic, is that no one is recording them: no one knows. They have no bearing upon our "real" lives.)

(Buttons in the filthy gutters ofchildhood, mistaken for irnprobable silver coins. Report cards that mark the soul forever. Long lazy autumn afternoons in Wisconsin, all honeymoon love, honeymoon naps on a quilted bedspread we'd later throwaway, too prodigal to be sentimental.)

(Clattering snow-pellets against a windshield. Rain in the moment of turning to sleet. Kisses tasting of meat and blood, a thumb hard on that artery beneath the jaw, Will you love me forever or betray me like all the rest ? I sensed that I must not arouse his anger. To "arouse" is to participate in sin, be an accomplice to crime.)

(l stood on the wharf staring as the little boat moved out of sight. The oars' wash, the hypnotic motions of the waves, my father's dimming profile, one final gesture of my mother's whitegloved hand "Does this mean you don't love me any longer?" "When will I see you again?" etc.)

(No one has dwelt, even parenthetically, upon the fact that Wittgenstein when a country schoolmaster ate porridge day after day and never cleaned the pot with the consequence that the pot, in a sense, grew smaller and smaller as the encrusted porridge stuck to the inside. Eventually he could barely turn his wooden spoon in it. Eventually the "pot" ceased to exist.)

(Vistas glimpsed from speeding cars that swell the heart to bursting. The splendor of the futile, the lost. That dime-store reflection of a thirteen-year-old's face, radiant with hope-WillI be pretty, willI be loved? A great tree falling in sections, the leaves dryly crackling like ants devouring ants Why? These moments without consequence in our lives?)

(They have vanished. Even the waves' lapping has faded. Soon the wharf will disappear, the sky shift to blank featureless white, no memory, nothing to disturb.)

Playlet

May I serve you? This is delicious. Please sit anywhere. Please take off your coats. You are very generous. Is it cold outside? We're so grateful. Have you all been introduced? Shall I take your coats? Thank you very much. Please pass it on. Please come back soon. Can you find your way out? Let's close the door quickly!

Will you have another serving? Thank you so much. It doesn't matter, please sit anywhere. We are in the habit of sitting anywhere. It is a custom to sit anywhere. Thank you very much, this is delicious, may I have the recipe? It must be very cold outside.

Siblings and parents devour every second child for unclear reasons having to do with "mystical strength." Among the Pitjentara tribe of Australia. Yes, thank you. We're grateful for this visit. Yes the snowflakes have a crystalline quality. Thank you. You are exceptionally generous. We're grateful for every' thing. Will you have another serving? Perhaps they devour the children for reasons of nourishment as well, though the feast would be at best minimal: an infant of a few days is decidedly small. Except if it is named. If it has been given a name. No I don't think baptism, they wouldn't be that advanced. But if it has a name then it can't be eaten. If it has a name then it's safe and can't be eaten. Some people will believe anything they're told-!

Actually they are primroses. Would you like to sit here? Has everyone been introduced? Has everyone had a second serving? It must be freezing outside. It's warmer by the fire. Lees adjourn to the other room. Coffee, brandy. We are ravenously hungry. Where are our coats? One of the physicians commented upon morbid obesity. She died suddenly. It was a lingering death but at the end, sudden: that is often the case. We can't be responsible for aboriginal behavior in Australia!

May I serve you? May I take your coat? Why must you leave so early? Yes, but we must leave. But you have just arrived. Thank you very much, we are all grateful.

Your typical surgeon however good-tempered develops a decided prejudice against obese people. This too cannot be avoided. It was a merciful death as deaths go. Please take another serving, there is more than enough for everyone! Three days' preparation have gone into this meal. She was secretly disappointed. This is certainly a privilege. This is particularly delicious. Why are you shivering? Come sit by the fire. Have you all been introduced? It is ten o'clock. It is always ten o'clock. Death was by way ofheart failure. It is always ten o'clock in this room. Why must you leave so early? Thank you again. Please come back soon.

This is delicious, thank you. Has everyone been introduced? You are very sweet to have invited us. She has been dead now-oh I'd say more than a year: fifteen months. Yes, the roses are exquisite. Actually they are primroses. Please have another serving and pass it on. Must you leave so early? Has everyone been introduced? But you have just arrived. But we are very grateful.

Make her wait

Stella Fujimoto

I've heard that he finally walked out on his wifeThere was a quick glance, a spin in a rented car -A doorman would attest to that at Marriott-and They abruptly left together.

A friend of my friend says and I agree That the reason why he took up with Daisy, The male nurse, is because his wife drove him to it; That wicked woman ought to be punished.

Understandably, lawmakers sensibly declared the following. Pluck her fantasies-she might call in the dead Who serenades in his flower-bed. By all means Padlock Heaven's door.

How justice always prevails!

C. G. lung told me that his uncle told him that in hell The devil punishes poor souls by making them wait. So why not make her wait?

Three poems

w. s. Di Piero

June harvest

They've all come down. And for reasons I should know by now but don't, another vision of you caught me up. I saw you at the kitchen table, one year before you died, head fallen on your arms, crossed as if to shield you from the heart's loosening terror. The air shone all around, facsimile of the formica top. What was that terror after all? To reckon that no nerve sustains us in the need to be effectual and good, that we can't be both at once. Husband, father, worker, perfecting what? And so the casing broke in grief so general, pure, and brittle, no elemented mind could sort or shape its meaning, no words could spell or justify the guilt of lost sense. You wept in that knowledge.

And now they've all come down. The poplars' lazy fuzzballs loosed in absent wind, the shaggy maple fruit and box-elder wings, all collapsed upon the dandelions shrunk to seed, spongy camomile, and clover. So my daughter and I went gathering while two swallows looped overhead,

quickened points of midday shade. Fists full of elm castings, we sat and slowly peeled each one, ripping down the paper sheath from the clean notched mouth. As the seeds squirmed loose we set them in neat files. That's when the vision carne. The little pause, seen, stuns me now as my laughing child tugs my arms and begs me not to hide my head, to speak to her. Having this, I feel a wild gladness for you, that you were soon done with life.

Summer in winter

The stars, richly mussed and fitful, oversee the unfinished season.

Two weeks of warm days. It seemed the branches might flower overnight in fooled good will, ready to yield, until brittle snow drove down and stopped that false move. The trees looked pleated. The snow ran to sleet that raised beads of slush on branches. The fitful buds shone, wet and doubled.

An old man with a cane tempted squirrels to claim bitter berries and nuts from his high loose fist. Today I saw him again. The snow is nearly gone.

Fewer squirrels too, rooting snow mounds, residues, sustenance until dew

returns on summer grass, more overripe fastness failing of its own intensity.

Like these disorderly stars, twisted fiery rags, gasses, divine strays.

Lines to a friend in trouble

I send your own words back bent by temperamental need, mine, too cautious of that radiance, all yours, of sorrow and uncertainty. "Great walls of bamboo, killed back severely in untimely frost, looked like the soul of desolation, bare and gray in the dimlight before the sun." Don't you see how that fullness drives out sympathy? How can I wish to be closer? It's easier to touch that language than come near your grief, which turns more dreadful, but more clear, in its saying. Forgive me. I'm glad you're far, remote in the purity of speech, coherent, singular. That much I can take. It's all I want.

Two poem.s

Quinton Duval

Ola and Casey

Down at the bar they danced Fridays and Saturdays dressed in purple and orange like old sunsets in an album of smoke and booze and music. Together they were an arrival dance of clear water, four hooves put delicately one after the other on the colored light and planed floor. Drinks would come, one apiece, for each new dance and the band had to practice more each week to fool them and never could at that. You think I'm going to tell you something sad, something like they died dancing, a sunset slowly fizzing into the sea of sawdust and cigarette ends. You think I don't know anything but sad endings, that Ola and Casey have been told to you for some big purpose. Even sunsets blur in the eye: there doesn't have to be any end. It's just a little story on how we act, what we are stuck with. An excuse-I mean it-for living in some odd place already over.

On the river road

Why, with the perfect sun going down, supper behind us on the shaded terrace, with a glass or two of wine missing inside us and a warm wind blowing through the car, do we discuss hard unseemly things?

We've made this trip so many times; a few miles out of town we always feel set free. Even now you are wide open, vulnerable, legs on the dash in a delicious basket of triangular air. The darkness down there is attractive, but we're back again to old wars, arguments that come and go like waves. Ahead, as the sky crushes out light on the water, a fisherman, lantern lit, hauls out a trap full of crayfish like a box of gray hands grabbing each other. The river turns silver and wanders away from the road. We drive back silent, the radio telling stories of other couples, everybody, and their tough luck. It isn't fun to hear it sung like that, for just anybody, but we still sing along.

The great exception

Lucien Stryk

After the inspection at the Gate she joined the others waiting in blue shapeless gowns for their assignment. From the start she felt it a mistake, but what she'd heard here of the other place discouraged her complaining. Silent gazes disapproved. Maybe it was an air acquired on the streets, a painted scarlet letter. Alone, as always, she trailed behind the others: reaching at last

The Spirit of the Universe, learned to her astonishment she was the Great Exception, chosen as an image of her kind. She wondered what was expected of such favor, found it was in Heaven's interest to token fairness-all were equal here. Yet where was compensation in this Paradise of inner gardens, secured from men? Pining away a dozen years of everlasting life, she must revolt. Her tongue, long gentled,

found its former salt. Loosening her gown, unpinning her hair, she was discovered wandering naked in archangels' quarters. For that and other sins she was advanced, with proclamation, to a higher order, greatest of Great Exceptions.

In the cemetery where Al jolson is buried

Amy Hempel

for Jessica

"Tell me things I won't mind forgetting," she said. "Make it useless stuff or skip it."

I began. I told her insects fly through rain, missing every drop, never getting wet. I told her no one in America owned a tape recorder before Bing Crosby did. I told her the shape of the moon is like a bananayou see it looking full, you're seeing it end-on.

The camera made me self-conscious and I stopped. It was trained on us from a ceiling mount-the kind of camera banks use to photograph robbers. It played our image to the nurses down the hall in Intensive Care.

"Go on, girl," she said, "you get used to it."

I had my audience. I went on. Did she know that Tammy Wynette had changed her tune? Really. That now she sings "Stand By Your Friends"? Paul Anka did it too, I said. Does "You're Having OUT Baby." He got sick of all that feminist bitching.

"What else?" she said. "Have you got something else?"

Oh yes. For her I would always have something else.

"Did you know when they taught the first chimp to talk, it lied? When they asked her who did it on the desk, she signed back Max, the janitor. And when they pressed her, she said she was sorry, that it was really the project director. But she was a mother, so I guess she had her reasons."

"Oh, that's good," she said. "A parable."

"There's more about the chimp," I said. "But it will break your heart.

"No thanks," she says, and scratches at her mask.

We look like good-guy outlaws. Good or bad, I am not used to the mask yet. I keep touching the warm spot where my breath, thank God, comes out. She is used to hers. She only ties the strings on top. The other ones-a pro by now-she lets hang loose.

We call this place the Marcus Welby Hospital. It's the white one with the palm trees under the opening credits of all those shows. A Hollywood hospital, though in fact it is several miles west. Off camera, there is a beach across the street.

She introduces me to a nurse as "the Best Friend." The impersonal article is more intimate. It tells me that they are intimate, my friend and her nurse.

"I was telling her we used to drink Canada Dry Ginger Ale and pretend we were in Canada."

"That's how dumb we were," I say.

"You could be sisters," the nurse says.

So how come, I'll bet they are wondering, it took me so long to get to such a glamorous place? But do they ask?

They do not ask.

Two months, and how long is the drive?

The best I can explain it is this-I have a friend who worked one summer in a mortuary. He used to tell me stories. The one that really got to me was not the grisliest, but it's the one that did. A man wrecked his car on 101 going south. He did not lose consciousness. But his arm was taken down to the wet bone-and when he looked at it-it scared him to death. I mean, he died.

So I didn't dare look any closer. But now I'm doing it-and hoping I won't be scared to death.

She shakes out a summer-weight blanket, showing a leg you did not want to see. Except for that, you look at her and understand the law that requires two people to be with the body at all times.

"I thought of something," she says. "I thought of it last night. I think there is a real and present need here. You know," she says, "like for someone to do it for you when you can't do it yourself. You call them up whenever you want-like when push comes to shove."

She grabs the bedside phone and loops the cord around her neck. "Hey," she says, "the End 0' the Line."

She keeps on, giddy with something. But 1 don't know with what. "The giveaway was the solarium," she says. "That's where Marcus Welby broke the news to his patients. Then here's the real doctor suggesting we talk in the solarium. So 1 knew 1 was going to die.

"I can't remember," she says, "what does Kubler-Ross say comes after Denial?"

It seems to me Anger must be next. Then Bargaining, Depression, and so on and so forth. But I keep my guesses to myself.

"The only thing is," she says, "is where's Resurrection? God knows I want to do it by the book. But she left out Resurrection."

She laughs, and I cling to the sound the way someone dangling above a ravine holds fast to the thrown rope.

We could have cried then, but when we didn't, we couldn't.

"Tell me," she says, "about that chimp with the talking hands. What do they do when the thing ends and the chimp says, 'I don't want to go back to the zoo'?"

When I don't say anything, she says, "O.K.-then tell me another animal story. I like animal stories. But not a sick one-I don't want to know about all the seeing-eye dogs going blind."

No, 1 would not tell her a sick one.

"How about the hearing-ear dogs?" I say. "They're not going deaf, but they are getting very judgmental. For instance, there's this golden retriever in Jersey, he wakes up the deaf mother and drags her into the daughter'S room because the kid has got a flashlight and is reading under the covers."

"Oh, you're killing me," she says. "Yes, you're definitely killing me."

"They say the smart dog obeys, but the smarter dog knows when to disobey."

"Yes," she says, "the smarter anything knows when to disobey. Now, for example."

She is flirting with the Good Doctor, who has just appeared. Unlike the Bad Doctor, who checks the l.V. drip before saying good morning, the Good Doctor says things like "God didn't give epileptics a fair shake." He awards himself points for the cripples he could have hit in the parking lot. Because the Good Doctor is a little in love with her he says maybe a year. He pulls a chair up to her bed and suggests I might like to spend an hour on the beach.

"Bring me something back," she says. "Anything from the beach. Or the gift shop. Taste is no object."

The doctor slowly draws the curtain around her bed.

"Wait!" she cries.

I look in at her.

"Anything," she says, "except a magazine subscription."

The doctor turns away.

I watch her mouth laugh.

What seems dangerous often is not-black snakes, for example, or clear-air turbulence. While things that just lie there, like this beach, are loaded with jeopardy. A yellow dust rising from the ground, the heat that ripens melons overnight-this is earthquake weather. You can sit here braiding the fringe on your towel and the sand will all of a sudden suck down like an hourglass. The air roars. In the cheap apartments onshore, bathtubs fill themselves and gardens roll up and over like green waves. If nothing happens, the dust will drift and the heat deepen till fear turns to desire. Nerves like that are only bought off by catastrophe.

"It never happens when you're thinking about it," she observed once.

"Earthquake, earthquake, earthquake," she said.

"Earthquake, earthquake, earthquake," I said.

Like the aviaphobe who keeps the plane aloft with prayer, we kept it up till an aftershock cracked the ceiling.

That was after the big one in '72. We were in college; our dormitory was five miles from the epicenter. When the ride was over and my jabbering pulse began to slow, she served five parts champagne to one part orange juice and joked about living in Ocean View, Kansas. I offered to drive her to Hawaii on the new world psychics predicted would surface the next time, or the next.

I could not say that now-next. Whose next? she could ask.

Was I the only one who noticed that the experts had stopped saying if and now spoke of when? Of course not; the fearful ran to thousands. We watched the traffic of Japanese beetles for deviation. Deviation might mean more natural violence.

I wanted her to be afraid with me, but she said, "I don't know. I'm just not."

She was afraid of nothing, not even of flying.

I have this dream before a flight where we buckle in and the plane moves down the runway. It takes off at thirty-five miles an hour, and then we're airborne, skimming the tree tops. Still, we arrive in New York on time. It is so pleasant. One night I flew to Moscow this way.

She flew with me once. That time she flew with me she ate macadamia nuts while the wings bounced. She knows the wing tips can bend thirty feet up and thirty feet down without coming off. She believes it. She trusts the laws of aerodynamics. My mind stampedes. I can almost accept that a battleship floats, and everybody knows steel sinks.

I see fear in her now and am not going to try to talk her out of it. She is right to be afraid.

After a quake, the six o'clock news airs a film clip of first-graders yelling at the broken playground per their teacher's instructions. "Bad earth!" they shout, because anger is stronger than fear.

But the beach is standing still today. Everyone on it is tranquilized, numb or asleep. Teenaged girls rub coconut oil on each other's hard, to-reach places. They smell like macaroons. They pry open compacts like clamshells; mirrors catch the sun and throw a spray of white rays across glazed shoulders. The girls arrange their wet hair with silk flowers the way they learned in Seventeen. They pose.

A formation of low-riders pulls over to watch with a six-pack. They get vocal when the girls check their tan lines. When the beer is gone, so are they-flexing their cars on up the boulevard.

Above this aggressive health are the twin wrought,iron terraces, painted flamingo pink, of the Palm Royale. Someone dies there every time the sheets are changed. There's an ambulance in the driveway, so the remaining residents line the balconies, rocking and not talking, one-upped,

The ocean they stare at is dangerous, and not just the undertow. You can almost see the slapping tails of sand sharks keeping cruising bodies alive.

If she looked, she could see this, some of it, from her window. She would be the first to say how little it takes to make a thing all wrong.

There was a second bed in the room when I returned. For two beats I didn't get it. Then it hit me like an open coffin. She wants every minute, I thought. She wants my life. "You missed Gussie," she said.

Gussie is her parents' 300-pound narcoleptic maid. Her attacks often come at the ironing board. The pillowcases in that family are all bordered with scorch.

"It's a hard trip for her," I said. "How is she?"

"Well, she didn't fall asleep, if that's what you mean. Gussie's great-you know what she said? She said, 'Darlin' just keep prayin', down on your knees.'"

She shrugged. "See anybody good?"

"No," I said, "just the new Charlie's Angel. And I saw Cher's car down near the Arcade."

"Cher's car is worth three Charlie's Angels," she said. "What else am I missing?"

"It's earthquake weather," I told her.

"The best thing to do about earthquakes," she said, "is not to live in California. "

"That's useful," I said. "You sound like Reverend Ike: 'The best thing to do for the poor is not be one of them.

We're crazy about Reverend Ike.

I noticed her face was bloated.

"You know," she said, "I feel like hell. I'm about to stop having fun."

"The ancients have a saying," I said. "'There are times when the wolves are silent; there are times when the moon howls.'"

"What's that, Navajo?"

"Palm Royale lobby graffiti," I said. "I bought a paper there. I'll read to you."

"Even though I care about nothing?" she said.

I turned to page three, to a UPI filler datelined Mexico City. I read her "Man Robs Bank With Chicken," about a man who bought a barbecued chicken at a stand down the block from a bank. Passing the bank, he got the idea. He walked in and approached a teller. He pointed the brown paper bag at her and she handed over the day's receipts. It was the smell of barbecue sauce that eventually led to his capture.

The story made her hungry, she said, so I took the elevator down six floors to the cafeteria and brought back all the ice cream she wanted. We lay side by side, adjustable beds cranked up for optimal TV viewing, littering the sheets with Good Humor wrappers, picking toasted almonds out of the gauze. We were Lucy and Ethel, Mary and Rhoda in extremis. The blinds were closed to keep light offthe screen.

We watched a movie starring men we used to think we wanted to sleep with. Hers was a tough cop out to stop mine, a vicious rapist who went after cocktail waitresses.

"This is a good movie," she said, when snipers felled them both. I missed her already; my straight man, my diary.

A Filipino nurse tiptoed in and gave her an injection. She removed the pile of popsicle sticks from the nightstand-enough to splint a small animal.

The injection made us sleepy-me in the way I picked up her inflection till her mother couldn't tell us apart on the phone. We slept.

I dreamed she was a decorator, come to furnish my house. She worked in secret, singing to herself. When she finished, she guided me proudly to the door. "How do you like it?" she asked, easing me inside.

Every beam and sill and shelf and knob was draped in black bunting, with streamers of black crepe looped around darkened mirrors.

"I have to go home," I said when she woke up. She thought I meant home to her house in the Canyon, and I had to say No, home home. I twisted my hands in the hackneyed fashion of people in pain. I was supposed to offer something. The Best Friend. I could not even offer to come back.

I felt weak and small and failed. Also exhilarated. I had a convertible in the parking lot. Once out of that room, I would drive it too fast down the coast highway through the crab-smelling air. A stop in Malibu for sangria. The music in the place would be sexy and loud. They would serve papaya and shrimp and watermelon ice. After dinner I would pick up beach boys. I would shimmer with life, buzz with heat, vibrate with health, stay up all night with one and then the other.

Without a word, she yanked off her mask and threw it on the floor. She kicked at the blankets and moved to the door. She must have hated having to pause for breath and balance before slamming out of Isolation, and out of the second room, the one where you scrub and tie on the white masks.

A voice shouted her name in alarm, and people ran down the corridor. The Good Doctor was paged over the intercom. I opened the door and the nurses at the station stared hard, as if this flight had been my idea.

"Where is she?" I asked, and they nodded to the supply closet. I looked in. Two nurses were kneeling beside her on the floor, talking to her in low voices. One held a mask over her nose and mouth, the other rubbed her back in slow circles. The nurses glanced

up to see if I was the doctor, and when they saw I wasn't, they went back to what they were doing.

"There, there, honey," they cooed.

On the morning she was moved to the cemetery, the one where Al jolson is buried, I enrolled in a Fear of Flying class. "What is your worst fear?" the instructor asked, and I answered, "That I will finish this course and still be afraid."

I sleep with a glass of water on the nightstand so I can see by its level if the coastal earth is trembling or if the shaking is still me.

What do I remember? I remember only the useless things I hearthat Bob Dylan's mother invented Wite�out, that twenty-three people must be in a room before there is a fifty�fifty chance two will have the same birthdate. Who cares whether or not it's true? In my head there are bath towels swaddling this stuff. Nothing else seeps through.

I review those things that will figure in the re-telling: a kiss through surgical gauze, the pale hand correcting the position of the wig. I noted these gestures as they happened, not in any retrospect. Though I don't know why looking back should show us more than looking at. It is just possible I will say I stayed the night. And who is there that can say I did not?

Nothing else gets through until I think of the chimp, the one with the talking hands.

In the course of the experiment, that chimp had a baby. Imagine how her trainers must have thrilled when the mother, without prompting, began to sign to the newborn. Baby, drink milk. Baby, play ball. And when the baby died, the mother stood over the body, her wrinkled hands moving with animal grace, forming again and again the words, Baby, come hug, Baby, come hug, fluent now in the language of grief.

Weights

Charles Baxter

When Tobias slipped open his usual locker, he saw someone else's white sock inside, soaking wet. It smelled of sweat, of living matter washed up by the ocean. Instead of picking it up and putting it on the floor, he moved down to the next locker, number fifty-eight. The Y didn't assign lockers, but Tobias thought of number fifty-six as his, territorially. It had been the year of his birth and was no trouble to remember, even when he was blasted after a workout. A month after he had started his program he had blanked on his locker number and had had to sit for ten minutes straight before he could think of it, his sweat cooling in layers on his skin and in his clothes. After that he went to numbers planted in his unconscious: his birth year, his parents' street address.

He stripped off his street clothes in the usual order: shoes, socks, pants, shirt, watch, underwear. He stood naked, breathing steadily, feeling his heart accelerate, then reached down into his gym bag for the jock, sweat suit, socks, weight belt, shoes, and gloves. At the bottom of the bag was a copy of The Maltese Falcon for the bus ride home. He scowled at the book and crammed the gym bag into the locker, his hands getting damp as he heard the clank of plates falling on each other.

Brian, a young laid-off cop, was doing bench presses on the Universal machine, grunting and arching his back. Tobias went over to spot for him. Brian's thick arms were trembling, and his forehead underneath his curly hair was plum-colored.

"Easv," Tobias said softly. "Easy up you got it there Brian come on be proud do it one more finish it all right come on all right." Brian yowled, brought the bar down with a chrome-on-chrome crash, and Tobias clasped his hand and pulled him up. They didn't say anything at first; then Brian said, "Shit," and walked over to the water fountain.

Tobias went to the opposite side of the room for warm-ups. After a minute, he stepped over to the bench where Brian had been, and increased the weights.

Tobias had started to take an interest in his health after he had been laid off for the third time. He had taught history in high school before enrollments declined and he was released. He found a job as a bartender at a chrome-and-molded-plastic restaurant in Ann Arbor where young singles met for quiche and salad. When the recession cut into disposable income, Tobias was pink-slipped. Using willpower against panic, he applied to be a night clerk at a Howard Johnson's. But then people seemed to stop traveling. So he collected unemployment insurance and lounged around in his girl friend's apartment, eating Fritos and playing his guitar to Carlos Montoya records. The apartment had southern exposure and a good view, and all through September Tobias basked in the sun, refusing to think. At five Miriam would come home from the hospital where she worked. By October, she had lost her characteristic smile, and Tobias knew that he would lose his position as her lover within two weeks.

"Tobias," she said, coming in. She took off her nurse's shoes and lit up a cigarette. "Any luck?"

"I haven't been out all day," he said, then shrugged and smiled.

"Are you depressed?" she asked. "You seem depressed."

"I'm unemployed. That makes a difference."

She blew out a puff of smoke. "Your depression is making me depressed. I wish you were busy. You know: with some kind of life."

"I've had a life," he said, putting down the guitar in a solemn way. "I've had quite a few jobs, after all. They keep firing me. It's not exactly my fault that I'm not working."

"You aren't persistent," she said, leaning back. "You don't act like a success. You've got to peddle yourself. Be aggressive. You've got-" She made a vague gesture. "You've got to show them."

"Show them what?"

"Show them how smart you are. Show them your degrees. I know how smart you are. You've got a lot of degrees."

"I sure do," he said, happy to agree with her about himself. "Lots of useless degrees." He held up two fingers, and they both said, "Two master's degrees," simultaneously, without smiling.

"So try computer programming," she suggested.

"Those people aren't getting jobs in Michigan," he said. "Not any more." He opened a new bag of Fritos. "No one's getting jobs here." He munched thoughtfully. "Nobody."

"I've got a job!" she shouted. "Someone has to have a job."

"You're a nurse. People are sicker than ever. You were always a nurse. People pay you to do what you do." He smiled. "It's different."

"No, it isn't. You just sit around. It's funny, but I'm getting so I can't stand that."

"What's for dinner?" he interrupted, pulling his hand through his hair. "There's nothing for dinner." Bending down, she snatched a twenty' dollar bill out of her purse. She carefully folded it into a paper airplane and flew it toward him. It nose-dived in front of his guitar, and Tobias had to pick it up. "Get us some dinner, love," she said, walking toward the bathroom.

In Spanish, Tobias said, "I don't like it when you show contempt for me."

"Speak English. What did you say? God, I hate it when you do that." She closed the bathroom door.

He unfolded the bill and put it in his pocket. "I'll walk," he told her. Then, in French, he said, "Take your time in there."

Two hours later, he came back carrying a large brown paper bag. Miriam was asleep on the sofa and woke up when he came in. "My God," she said, "I thought you'd been robbed. Where were you? What took you so long? I'm starving."

"I can explain." He put the bag on the kitchen table and then turned to her, smiling with an odd smile. "It was a pleasant evening. I decided to walk over to Nature's Harvest. I thought I was going to buy some eggs, but there was this salesgirl who said that what I needed was some vitamin C." He pulled out a brown plastic bottle with speckled orange pills in it. "She said that people in my condition also need magnesium and trace minerals, and I thought: why not?" He pulled out a smaller bottle whose pills were brown and oval-shaped. "And Bvcomplex." Another bottle. "And a protein supplement, loaded with vitamins and trace minerals." He showed her a can with a yellow label, on which was printed a photograph of a man and a woman, both wearing swimsuits. "She said that bad nutrition was the cause of what I'm feeling. So: no more Fritos, Maybe she was cuckoo, but I thought, what the hell."

Miriam, now in her jeans, stared through the doorway into the kitchen, though she hadn't moved from the sofa. "Is that what you picked up for dinner?"

"I sort of forgot about the dinner."

"Tobias, it's been two houTs."

"Well, I enjoyed the walk."

She closed her eyes. "How soon can you be out of here? Is a week much too fast for you?"

ttyou want me to move out?"

"We don't like each other now, do we?"

"No," he said, examining the label on one of the bottles. HI guess not."

"Well then. Can you move out by the weekend?"

"That's pretty soon. I don't have any money. I'll have to plan."

"That's your problem," she said. HDo what you have to do. Take yourself somewhere. I've had it." Her voice was rising. "The sooner the better. No more of this. No more vitamins. No more Carlos Montoya. No more friends worrying about you."

Tobias shrugged and bent down experimentally to touch his toes.

The salesgirl at Nature's Harvest was named Gerri, and unlike Miriam, she didn't keep many books around the apartment. Instead, her walls were decorated with posters of forests and seal puppies. Tobias had gone back to Nature's Harvest each day for the next week, and he and Gerri discovered that they had attended the same elernentary school in Oak Park, a suburb of Detroit, and had had the same third-grade teacher, Miss Heseltine, four years apart. Gerri had been attending the University of Michigan but had dropped out to explore her other possibilities. Her considerable overbite gave her face an unlucky aura. She invited him over for dinner, and after dessert he explained his life-situarion to her. She was intrigued. Secretly his heart was pumping hard. From the shoulders up, Gerri was not beautiful and seemed rather stupid, unlike Miriam. She would never fire him as her lover. He would get her to re-enroll in the university and then become essential to her by doing her homework. In time he would find some sort of serious job. It would work out. Gerri was chewing sugarless gum, and as they talked, she would stop chewing long enough to give him a smile.

He put an ad in The Ann Arbor News, offering to do house painting, lawn work, and home fix-it jobs at competitive rates. His ad went into a long column of other such ads. In three weeks he received two calls. One was from a woman who wanted him to walk her Pomeranian. The other was more serious and involved his cleaning out a basement and hauling away the trash in his Volkswagen Beetle to the city dump. He earned thirty dollars for that. Instead of renewing the ad, he let it lapse. On days when Gerri didn't have to work, she would bring him along with her as she jogged. She was in excellent condition; she had displaced all her pride and vanity into her legs.

One day she ran him over to the Y and told him he should become familiar with the facilities. He went into the weight room. With all the

noise and hard breathing, it reminded him of his high-school locker room after a good baseball game. It was a mindless collective. He joined the Y the next day, using money he borrowed from Gerri. Andrew, the scholarly black attendant in the weight room who wore bifocals and had the physique of a linebacker, put him on a program for beginners but quickly modified it as Tobias made progress through the first three months. Tobias started coming in every day, and Andrew said he had never seen anyone make so much progress so fast. Never.

Tobias now had a third eye. This eye was in the middle of his forehead, and when he was doing his sets the eye would shine a beam of sharply focused particle energy toward a point. The point could be both inside and outside of his body. He could make the energy surge toward his hands when he was doing sets such as preacher curls that required force contracted or extended in an arc. Most of the time the beam of energy turned inward. It charged his spine with positive electrical ions. When the eye was open, he felt like a bomb that had been cleverly converted into a multi-purpose generator. The eye was especially tolerant of anger. It fed on anger and knew how to channel its tensions through the body out into the gloved hands. Tobias had never known how much like the sun his anger was-how brilliantly it radiated.

In the morning, Tobias would stand in lines and fill out applications that were always printed on yellow or orange paper. On bad days, the secretaries would tell him right away the particulars of his overqualifications. By lunchtime Tobias' third eye was beginning to open. If it had been sleeping, it was now alert and awake, red with unwobbling pinwheel anger, its thermonuclear heat stoking up on his forehead. At that moment he would pack his gym bag and jog to the Y. By winter, the contempt visited upon him all morning enlarged his spirit and drove him, inspired, through the long afternoons. Andrew, approvingly, told him, "Some people get mad and eat. They eat and they eat. You do this."

When Gerri came home from Nature's Harvest, she liked to make love. Because of her face, she had never had a steady lover, and now that she did, she took advantage of her opportunity. But in November Tobias arrived home early and found her sitting in the living room with a man he'd never seen before. They were both eating ice cream directly from the carton. Tobias smelled pot. "Hi," he said. "What a surprise."

"Tobias." Her voice stayed flat. "I took the afternoon off. I was sort of tired. This is Patrick."

Patrick smiled slightly, dropped his spoon into the container of ice cream, and raised his hand upward and out from his face. "Pleased to meet you, Tobias," he said, his lips smeared with chocolate. Tobias shook his hand before taking his gym bag into the bedroom. Since they never made the bed, he couldn't tell if it had been used. He wasn't jealous; he was afraid Gerri would leave him. He returned to the living room.

"Where have you been today?" she asked.

"At the Y. Other places."

"Tobias," she said, turning to Patrick, "is very big on physical fitness. He could break you in two."

Patrick smiled and continued to eat ice cream. "No kidding!" She nodded. Tobias looked at her. "You're stoned," he said. She nodded again. "We used up all the dope," she admitted.

"All of it?"

"I guess we must be pigs," Patrick confessed. "Are you angry?" "I don't know," Tobias said. "Are you old friends or something?"

Patrick nodded, but Gerri shook her head. "Well," Tobias asked, "which is it?"

"Yes and no," Patrick said. "We might be old friends. We met two years ago but haven't seen each other since."

Tobias was still standing. "Before today."

"Right."

Tobias stood over to the side and waited. At last he said, "Some, thing I should know here?"

Patrick closed the lid over the ice cream and shook his head. "Nope. Nothing here at all, man." He lifted himself up from the chair and put the spoon and the ice cream carefully on the floor. "Tobias," he said, holding his hand out for a shake. Tobias shook it. "Gotta run. I'll be seeing you. Tobias nodded. "Good luck with the weights." Neither Patrick nor Gerri looked at each other as Patrick slowly and deliberately made his way toward the door.

"I hope he makes it home," Gerri said. "He's real wrecked. And," she added, "he's a bad driver." She stopped eating. "I suppose I should ask how this makes you feel."

"I feel like stepping on your face," he said, picking at his fingernails. "Don't do that," she said. "I'm too stoned. Are you going to come at me with a knife?"

"No."

"I know how men go crazy," she said. "Are you going to do that?"

"I doubt it."

"You aren't the sort of man who beats women up."

"That's right," he said. "I'm not."

"Tobias, it wasn't anything serious. We just met at Hudson's and came home. Actually," and here she stood up and raised her hand to stroke him on the side of the head, "once we got home, he didn't attract me at all. I mean, you saw him. So what are you worried about? You're beautiful." She smiled. "Really, you are. You haven't been insulted."

He went into the bathroom, shut the door, and sat in the bathtub for an hour, until Gerri called for him. He was thinking of wars: of rockets, submarines, and exploding gasoline cannisters.

Here is what he ate: at breakfast, four eggs, two cups of milk, an orange, a protein supplement, and six vitamin pills. For lunch he downed yogurt with wheat germ, three ounces of tuna, and broiled liver, along with another two cups of milk. For dinner he consumed two servings of broiled fish, garbanzo beans, and a salad of spinach, tomatoes, sardines, anchovies, peppers, onions, capers, provolone cheese, and Genoa salami. He was gaining weight from 125 grams of protein each day. Gerri, who approved of this diet, was stealing the food from Nature's Harvest, where the procedures for checking in' ventory had not been clarified.

Plant closings were announced almost every week. The weight room at the Y filled up with the unemployed. Laid-off men watched Tobias, concealing their amazement. Then they came up to him, introduced themselves, and asked for advice. These questions shattered his con, centration and dragged him away from the silent battlefield where, every hour, he imagined several bloody victories.

He had sold the Volkswagen and now walked everywhere or took the bus. In December, as he was leaving a grocery store, a golden retriever trotted up to him and wagged his tail. The dog had an intelligent, quizzical face, with a long sleek forehead: a university dog. Tobias bent down and patted him. The dog's mouth opened, and he panted with affection, his breath visible in the cold air. When Tobias started walking, the dog followed him. "Go home, dog," he said. It was no use: the dog traced his steps. When he arrived home, he went out into the backyard. Standing under a dwarf apple tree, he commanded the dog to sit. The dog sat. Tobias walked over to the other side of the yard. "Come here, Andy," he said. The dog remained seated. "Come here, Archy. Come here, Ace. Come here, Alfie." He went through all the Aenames he knew

and was in the middle of the B's and had said, "Come here, Boris," when the dog stood up, boot,camp style, and ran over to him.

"So your name is Boris, huh?" The dog wagged his tail in agree, ment. Tobias felt around the dog's neck for a collar or name tag but found nothing. "Are you hungry?" He brought him inside and broiled some hamburger from Gerri's side of the refrigerator.

When Gerri came home, Tobias and Boris were sleeping on the bed next to each other, the dog's paws over Tobias' chest. The dog barked as she entered the room, but Tobias told him to shut up, and he did. "This is Boris," Tobias said. Gerri smiled. She lay down next to Tobias and kissed him. They pushed the dog off the bed before they made love, which for the first time reminded Tobias of some obscure form of exercise.

When they were finished, Gerri gazed down at Tobias. "You should see yourself. My God." But he knew exactly what he looked like and his eyes were closed.

On her days off, Gerri said she wanted to laze around the apartment with Tobias. The first two times she made this request, he agreed, but when she asked again, on a Thursday, he said no.

"Why not?"

"I have to go to the Y."

"You were there yesterday."

"I was there yesterday, and I'll be there tomorrow. I have to go today.

"For how long?"

"I don't know. Two hours minimum."

"Take a day off."

"There are no days off. Not ever. If I stop, I'll spoil it, and I can't stop."

"Why not?"

"It's pulling me. It's impossible to explain."

"So why are you doing it?"

"I'm in training."

"For what?"

"I don't know."

"Let's lie around in bed all day."

"No," he said.

"Let's lie in bed," she repeated slowly, "and do anything we want to do to each other. Then let's fall asleep and when we wake up we'll do it again." They were in the kitchen, standing, and she was sipping orange juice and giving him a steady look. "I love you and that's all I want. I want to make love, and I want to do it with you." She came over to 190

him, put her arms around his waist, and hugged him. "Aaaahhhrrr," she groaned, "why do I always have to be the one? Give me some help.

He stood motionless. Slowly his hands came up to her shoulders, where they rested. She leaned her head into his chest. He wondered how much she weighed.

"I don't want to," he said.

Her hands dropped away from his waist, though she continued leaning against him. "Some women," she said.

He looked down. "Some women what?"

"Huh?"

"You didn't finish your sentence."

"Yes, I did. Anybody else would know. Well." She backed away from him. "Guess I'll go shopping. Or maybe I'll have a beer. There are some friends I want to see. I may not be back for dinner. I don't know. Don't plan on me."

"O.K."

She turned around and walked out, shaking her head.

During his workout, doing leg extensions, he ran through some songs in his head until he settled on Roy Orbison's "Pretty Woman," which had just the right nagging insistent bass line. His endurance had improved so that he needed to rest only a minute or so between sets. After leg extensions, he did leg curls, then squats; then he started bench presses, dumbbell incline presses, and lat pull-downs on the Universal machine. There were curls, tricep extensions, and sit-ups still to be done, and by the time he got to them he had gone through "Pretty Woman," "Laugh Laugh," "96 Tears," "Brown Sugar," and "I Got a Line on You." The eye in the center of his forehead had not yet opened, so during the last half-hour he looked in the mirror to center himself. Brian, the unemployed cop, came over to help him. He was huffing. With his short curly hair, blue cop's eyes gone slightly wild, and thick arms, he scared newcomers, who also noticed his creosote-like smell.

"Come on," Brian said, "do it. No pain, no gain."

Tobias struggled to finish, imagining how much he hated cops. "Man," he said when he was through, "I always figure you're going to arrest me if I don't do the set. Take me away in the patrol car."

"Don't I wish," Brian said. "Don't I just wish. These days, a person can get away with any damn thing he wants to, like that sloppy set you just did. It's a shame. I tell you, buddy, there's nobody out there to arrest anybody anymore. They've all been sacked. The reptiles are taking over the jungle." He put his left hand on his right arm, tensed

the muscle, and nodded to himself. "I could tell you stories. I know what people are getting away with. I think about it a lot." He looked at Tobias carefully. think about it. I mean, I know how to break-andenter. I know about those alarm systems. Why don't I do it? I don't because I'm not there yet. But I lie awake nights." Tobias nodded. They were both panting softly. "When myoid lady wakes up, she looks at me, and then she goes back to sleep. She knows what I'm thinking, but she doesn't say anything, because she knows what it'll get her if she says it. She knows her place. And she knows I'm out there on the streets, in my mind, on the prowl. But you," and here he put a hand for a moment on Tobias' elbow, "you work out here like you already did the crime. Like those guys in Jackson prison. So tell me, man, what are you running from?"

"Nothing."

"Save the bullshit for the dinner table. You can tell your friend Brian. I mean, shit, you have put on thirty-five pounds solid of body weight since you started coming here. The amateurs are watching you, my friend, and wondering where you get it from. You come here and you get down humming rock-and-roll instead of groaning like these other assholes. And I have discovered your secret. I am telling you that I have. All I want to know is the particulars. It's guilt, right? It's remorse. What'd you do?"

"I haven't done it yet."

"Did you lay a hand on your woman?"

"Gerri? No, I'm not into that."

"What about the other one? The one you told me about. Big Nurse."

"No. "

"So what'd you do? You don't steal. You don't set fires. You are an educated type. I've seen those books in your gym bag. So tell me, man, what do you do?"

"Layoff, Brian. This isn't the station house."

"It's the station house, if I'm in it. Come on, Tobias my man, everybody has his crime. There was never a time without crime. What's yours?"

Tobias exhaled, smiled, turned to Brian and said, "I kill dogs."

"You do what?"

Tobias said, slowly enough for Brian to catch all of it, "I've got a rifle. I go out in my car on weekends. Sunday mornings are best. Everyone's in church. I take the back roads to where the farms are, you know, where the dogs are chained to the front yard. Sometimes there's a doghouse. I take the rifle out of the car and I shoot the dog. Sometimes in the head, sometimes in the heart. If I'm in a real bad mood I plug them in the gut. They take a little longer to die that way.

It's the agonizing death, y'know? That's where the interest is. I've done it at night but you can't always see the details, so I've been disappointed at times."

"You don't own a car. I know that. You come here on the bus."

"O.K. I don't own a car."

"I don't think you own a rifle, either. I have this feeling about you that you couldn't load a weapon if you had to."

"Brian, you are right again. I don't own a rifle."

"Yeah?" Brian scratched his hair, and drops of sweat fell from his scalp to the floor. "So do you kill dogs?"

"Not yet."

"It's pretty sick. What is it between you and dogs?"

Tobias shrugged. "It's welfare. I can't stand welfare. For anything."

"Jesus," Brian said. He turned around. "You got it worse than I do."

"So?" Tobias said to his back. "So?"

After he turned the key in the lock, he heard Boris' barking. The retriever jumped up so that his paws were on Tobias' chest; he licked him on the face. Tobias gave him some dried dog food, then poured him some fresh water. It was dark outside, and the streets were slippery. It might be easy to get a car to run over the dog. "You want to go for a walk?" Boris wagged his tail.

He had his hand on the doorknob when the phone rang. It was Gerri, who sounded drunk. She was in a bar and told Tobias to come down right away. In the background was the blare of loud music. Her voice sounded strange, so Tobias agreed.

The bar, a rock club called Pruneface's, had a large dance floor with a particle-mirror ball overhead. When Tobias arrived, Gerri was bent over her table as if examining it for flaws. Tobias surveyed the place for friends but saw no one he knew. He touched Gerri's hand. She gazed up slowly, her mouth open. "I wanted to dance," she said. "I wanted you to come here because I wanted to dance and for you to see me."

"All right," Tobias said. "Let's do that."

She took his hand and led him out. The song's rhythms were early sixties, fast, pre-war. Gerri moved as if she had been living inside the song for twenty years, witty and sexual moves. Tobias tried to find a beat that would accept him, but each time he thought he had found it, the song pushed him back out. His body jerked against the startled and unsteady air, but all his movements were slow, timed for dead lifts. He felt stranded inside the arc of his body, his musculature. Then he saw Gerri looking at him. She was laughing.

"Tobias, oh, Tobias," she said. "You dance like a psychotic."

The eye in his forehead looked down at her, and he reached forward around her waist and pulled her to him. He stopped her virtuoso dancing by holding her, by making her feel the accomplishment of his back.

"Take me home," she said.

Two hours later Tobias rose from the bed and went to the bath, room. He turned on the light and looked at himself a long time in the mirror. He clicked off the light and went into the bedroom, where he dressed in the dark.

He walked to the hall and put on his overcoat and called the dog. Boris padded over to him and they went out together.

Late Michigan March: a light snow. Tobias jogged down the side, �'alk, the dog near him, patiently calm. For two blocks he watched the cars, waiting for an old one with bad brakes. At the right moment, he jumped out into the street. Boris followed. Tobias stopped, lost his balance on the ice, then leaped backward. The dog slipped, skidded, and moved back. But the car, a '68 rust-speckled Camaro, swerved, went into a spin, and smashed into a blue Chevette parked in the street. Something like a cloud puffed up from the Camaro's engine, and Tobias saw a spider web bloom inside the glass on the driver's side. Green liquid, radiator fluid, dribbled down into the snow. Boris sat down on the sidewalk. Meanwhile, Tobias ran to the car, where a teenager with a drunk look on his face stared in shock from behind the wheel, blood oozing down in parallel lines from his forehead, already scarred from some other accident. Beside him on the drive-shaft hump was an emptied six-pack, its bottles scattered over the floor. The car smelled of beer and antifreeze. On the passenger side a woman wearing a yellow cap with a visor was groaning, sounding like a soprano about to go onstage. Bent forward, as if kissing the dashboard, she looked peculiar, with her left arm raised in an improbable position, wrenched from its socket. A splash of blood discolored the ashtray and the radio dial.

"You'll be all right," Tobias shouted. "You'll be O.K. O.K. O.K."

The driver reached down a bloody hand for the latch, all the time staring at Tobias. The door would only open part of the way, and Tobias would not pull at it. Wavering, pushing his legs through, the teenager picked his way out of the car, fell to his knees in the snow, then stood up.

"You jumped in front of me," he said tonelessly. "I was tryin' to evade you." Inside, his girl friend was still groaning with each intake of air.

"I was about to kill my dog," Tobias said softly.

Tobias felt something on the side of his head. He felt it again. Then he realized that the teenager was attempting to hit him. Specks of blood from his forehead were falling into the snow. The boy's fists were like seeds in a windstorm: tiny, stinging without impact. ttyou wrecked my car," the boy shouted. "I worked hard for this car."

The boy layout in the snow after Tobias hit him. Some bystander grabbed Tobias' elbow, and Tobias hit him, too. Six months of continual weight training gave Tobias enough strength to deck another man who was interfering; it required only one blow. The faces moved back. Boris was barking. Tobias held his fists up into the air and noticed that at night snow looks more gray than white. The moon was a smile without a face, pasted into the winter sky. He felt like hitting someone else, but no one was against him.

Who's to say this isn't love?

William Pitt Root

It was exactly twenty-seven miles to the doctor, and there wasn't a mile without a pair of switchbacks or a hairpin combination tight enough to make a well man gasp and pale. Red Dog was not what you'd call a well man. I had no intention of sparing him the least of those curves. I had the perfect excuse, at last. I was saving his life. Red Dog, which is how he liked to be called, from his navy days, was both just then-red as a beet with strangulation, sick as a dog from his latest drunk. He was having an asthma attack, and he'd run out of whatever it was he usually took to bring him around. My mother, his wife, had called ahead to the doctor. I was to deliver Red Dog to the clinic, as quickly as possible. Which was just fine by me. I was twenty, home from school for the summer. For wheels, I had a '53 Ford convertible, electric blue, with white tuck-and-roll Naugahyde upholstery that would pass for leather, until you ran your hand over it. I loved it, loved sitting in it and daydreaming, loved taking off into the California coastal hills on a sunny day with the top down and radio blaring, tearing into these curves like I was crazy to die. And I was, in those days.

So when my mother called me by sending my twelve-year-old sister down to the beach, you can be sure I was ready. "He can't breathe," she gasped, breathless herself after the three-block run from the house. By the time I got there mother had him sitting on the steps outside the radio shack where he spent most of his time. The shack was exactly that, set apart from the house itself, a kind of island in the backyard. It was loaded with radio gear that got Red Dog in touch with other hams all over the world while his wife sat in the kitchen chainsmoking and probably dreaming how one day he'd come out that door and talk to her like he talked to "The Limey" in Sussex or the guy in Teaneck, New Jersey, the one with the prostate problem, or any of the other air voices with whom he could cheerfully exchange all the

thoughts and feelings he would boil down to "Hey, get me another beer, will you, hon?" when he spoke to his wife, my mother. He looked awful. His face was splotchy red and white and his lips were blue. A patriot. The veins across his temples were distended and his eyes were bright and frantic. He gave me his drowning look, the look he reserved for when he was smashed and telling his war stories or when he'd got himself in a jam I was supposed to get him out of.

We got him to the car and I slammed the door and locked it to be sure he wouldn't go tumbling out on the first hard curve. The top was already down. My mother was hovering over him, clearly regretful at missing this chance to be needed by him, to help him in a way she knew. But one of the babies was sick and even for this she couldn't leave. And I was the fast driver. Actually, of course, it wasn't as serious as it seemed. I mean who ever dies of asthma? To my way of thinking at the time, it was just a grownup's version of the child, holding-irs-breath, a tantrum the subconscious threw when a couple of neural lines, probably overloaded originally decades ago, accidentally crossed and short-circuited. Like I said, I was twenty, I'd been off to school, I'd read some things.

"Not too fast," she tried to call out after the car as I took off, deaf and determined. I was on a mission. Old Red Dog had talked missions plenty of times to me, making sure I understood I'd never had any' thing more important than a dentist's quarter hour depending on me in my life. Now it was different. By the time I hit the town-limit sign at the edge of the bay, half a mile from the front gate of the house, he knew. At first he tried feebly to wave a hand to signal me to slow down, but I could sense in him the moment he grasped it, the situation I mean, and he let his hand flutter back into his lap like a semaphore flag whose handle had snapped. As soon as he recognized his helpless, ness, he decided to cut his losses. I had to respect that.

In fact, there was one mile that was almost straight where the two' lane blacktop followed the bay shore to the intersection with Highway 1. We hit that intersection going just under ninety. The legallimitwas thirty-five. There was an old yellow pickup half a mile south, nothing else, and we went through that intersection like a hound with a half, pint of red-eve up his ass. Which was one of Red Dog's sayings. He had a million.

A lot of those expressions, which I would later recognize for the service cliches they were, struck me at the time, for all their vulgarity, as clearly richer and more effective than the catchphrases of my peers. Most of those trumped-up inanities already have vanished from my memory, leaving only an aftertaste so vapid I have to admit Red Dog

was right about us. We were snot-nosed kids. We were the ones lucky enough to avoid the draft before most of us really grasped that Vietnam could become anything more than an inconvenient delay in our oblique quest for a secure spot just left of center in the middle class we thumbed our noses at. King was already on the march to the mountaintop. Rockwell, the Nazi, openly inveighed against "niggers and jews"; Rockwell, the artist, could safely make it all look cute and healthy; Rockwell, the industrial manufacturer, still could safely keep the minority employees "in their place." The Beatles were just catch, ing on, the Stones were still unthinkable, Alice Cooper was not old enough to catch the second generation "You Bet Your Life" reruns.

But sometimes Red Dog got things curiously backwards. Or so it seemed to me at the time. The summer before, when I'd come back from school (in response to my mother's plea that I come stay with her to protect her from Red Dog while she got a divorce), he'd known what was in the air. He looked at me like looks should kill so he wouldn't have to waste a bullet. We got right into it.

"How you like college?" he said, but now without looking my way.

"It's O.K. with me." Never one to be caught without a snappy reply, from the shoulders of Nietzsche, Fichte, Spinoza, Wilde.

"Well, I'll tell you what, you snot-nosed piece of shit," he began, a metaphor that would have left Kilmer, for all his ingenuity at mangling, slack-jawed. "I'll just tell you what. When the gooks take over this place, and believe me, they will, and when they do they're going to take all you snot-nosed college kids and chain your asses to machine guns-then you'll see just how it is." He glared. "You'll think of me then, and you'll say, 'The Chief was right. He knew what he was talking about. He told me how it was.'"

Now I'd only laid eyes on Red Dog a few times before. He'd done his courting by having my mother meet him down at the CPO Club, surreptitiously, you might say. I'd met him, of course, briefly, I on my best behavior, he on his, each equally deceptive, friendly. Two years later my mother married him to get him out of the alcoholic ward of the VA Hospital in southern California, where he was facing court, martial. Before that, when she got pregnant, he'd skipped the country and only answered her letters when he ended up stateside in the lockup, urging her to give him the chance to give his daughter a name. Which she did, against her own better judgment as well as mine. A name's a name. What I'm saying is he had taken me aback.

"So just how is it?" I countered, foolishly.

And that is how we got into the duel with bayonets that first night I was home. I'd had a bayonet ever since my real father gave me one when I was a little kid. And I could throw it, let me tell you. So when he challenged, choice of weapons was mine. I chose bayonets and for 199

the first time he smiled a real smile. I knew I was in trouble. He knew I knew. There was no backing down. Not my first night home.

"Jim," my mother, his wife, cried. He did have a Christian name. "Don't be-" and for a second I had the notion she was going to accuse him of being rude, "like that," she finished, tears welling. I didn't know it at the time, but she was pregnant again.

At sunset, as agreed, I waited for him in the backyard, and he saved my life. I had it all planned. When he approached he'd have to pass a certain tree. I'd already tested the range, sinking the bayonet two inches into the meat of the trunk after a double flip. When he came I'd nail him right there. But he didn't come. Either way he saved my lifeby not killing me, by not letting me kill him. He saved me by getting sloshed and passing out in bed. That I found out later. It didn't matter. I admit it. I was glad.

But it did seem to me he'd gotten things mixed up, using the "gooks" as his henchmen in the threat. He wasn't going to show me, he was going to let them show me. Like they were his guys. And it wasn't until the duel that we got back on the right track, if you can call it that.

"So how you doing? Can you breathe?"

He was laying his head back against the seat, staring up at the sky twisting and turning overhead as I negotiated the preliminary curves heading into the hill range. I didn't want him going to sleep. I didn't want him to miss a thing.

He began working his mouth but no sound came out. No sound loud enough to be heard over the roar of wind sucking down behind the windshield anyhow. Fish out of water is what he looked like. One of those big goldfish with yellow mouths sipping at the top of the pond. Red Dog had red hair, pink skin, red lips, blue eyes. When he drank the blue would wash out. He'd look at me with those milky eyes and tell me some story. The stories were interesting, I had to give him that. Interesting the first three or four times.

One he liked to tell was about being torpedoed in the South Pacific in World War II and spending three days and two nights in the water, him and fifteen hundred other men. Fifteen hundred other men to start. By the end something like two hundred eighty. I guess there weren't enough boats for everyone, or the ship just sank too fast. So they were hanging on to anything, the flotsam and jetsam, although he never would've called it that, and at night he said you could hear the guys keeping track of each other, calling out and all, and then he said you'd hear a scream. And you'd know it was the sharks. All night. And it was beautiful, he said. Stars, the moon, and there wasn't anything you could do.

First they'd call out questions, encouragements, then it was just names. "Johnson, here." "Horowitz, yo." "Shannihan, here." Then a scream. "Johnson, here." "Horowitz, here and you'd know. You'd know, but there wasn't anything you could do. By the second afternoon some of the men were too exhausted to fight off the gulls, and the gulls would just land on a guy and peck out his eyes and often as not the guy would just be staring straight ahead by then, like he was looking at something, and the gulls would just do it. Then the night again. He said by the end there wasn't anybody who wasn't crying. Looking up at the stars. By the end two hundred eighty, I think that was the number, were rescued and he was one. He told me this one a lot, at the CPO Club.

The first time he told it, when he finished he looked pretty bad, and I put my hand on his hand on the bar. He looked at me, and he really put it to me.

"Do you like me?" he asked.

"Sure. Sure, I like you." What else could I say? Besides, just at that moment I did like him. Something like that. I knew him, which is as good. Or so I thought.

"Do me a favor?" he says.

And I say, "Name it."

"Call me 'Dad.'"

I felt sick. I think he could have asked me almost anything else just then, and maybe I would've done it, just then, like it was. But that. That was the one thing. And I looked at him and he knew it, and I hated his guts for asking me that when he knew what it was. He knew exactly-right through his drunk, right through his story, he knew.

"I can't. You know I can't." And the son of a bitch watched me with the tears in my eyes I couldn't brush away without him seeing.

Right at the start, the first good curve, he had thrown his right hand up along the top of the door to steady himself; when finally, miles later, his left hand rose in an involuntary gesture to get me to slow down, I didn't see a thing. The trees crowding the road along this stretch blurred into a mess of running greens and the poppies by the roadside streaked by like golden dashes if you looked at them. I loved those poppies, the way they could retain the light at twilight, glowing equally, perfectly, from each petal. At this speed trying to see them was like trying to decipher the graffiti on a subway roaring by.

Which is how a lot of things seem to me now. At twenty, everything seemed eternal in its passage, every object a symbol eager to yield up meaning, every face a face you would know always-whether to hate it or to love it hardly mattered next to that unexamined assumption of its permanence in your life. But the faces, the amused or hateful or

loving faces, that once held light like wine in crystal, have a way of running into each other, calling out to one another in the dark or in dreams, screaming or suddenly vanishing without a sound; and they turn into stories, in order not to disappear altogether, and the stories are entirely at the mercy of memory in which the tides of need may shift, unpredictably, at any hour. A certain plea, heard at twenty, is obscene; a few years later, it seems, almost, to have been a prayer.

And so we tore through a gathering twilight which has continued to darken through all these years since, slowly, slowly, him hanging onto that locked door and full of the ghosts who could creep out of him only when drunkenness permitted rage or tears to blast open the gates or when the vast electrical spaces conducting anonymous air voices let him blunt the edge of his isolation against that of others-all this in threats, trivia, whining, the calculated plea-until his throat would seize around it rather than release it into such a world, such a people.

But at that time, careening through those woods, over the crests of those hills which left our bellies hung like kites in the air as we plunged downward and on, and his grip on the door tightened, his hand white as his face-at that time, I thought it was all up to me. I thought I could give him his own back again. I thought I had the wheel.

I was a good driver. Stupid, but still good at staying on the road. Too good, as it turned out. Halfway there, he turned to me, his face by that time green as the trees behind him.

"You're one hell of a driver."

I looked over at him.

"What'd you say?"

"Hell of a driver," he wheezed, his smile ghastly as a death's head.

"Keep it up."

Keep it up. I stepped on the gas, grim. But the fact is, it pleased me to hear him say that. It wasn't what I wanted, to be pleased. I wanted him to beg me to slow down, I wanted him to lean over that door he clung to and throw up his whole damned life. Ridiculous. After all those years aboard ships, a little motion sickness wasn't going to be in the cards. Years later, on my first trip at sea, I threw up and I thought of him, that way he had of walking like he still was on deck, bowlegged, ready to go to this side or that for balance, if the earth shifted. And the first time I had to work for a real SOB, I remembered Red Dog's story of him and another Chief throwing a snot-nosed Lt. JO overboard in a storm. After months of his riding them and all the other old hands too hard, they drew straws. Matches, I mean. "Man overboard," Red Dog called, an hour after the splash.

I pushed the Ford too hard finally and spun out and we both ended up just about in each other's arms by the time we came out of it and I

got the car tracking again. At first I assumed he was wheezing, and he was, but the wheeze was his laughter, the closest he could get to it then. I almost started to laugh, too. But even when he laughed his eyes were wrong. I mean he had that way of watching you even when he was dead drunk, even when he was laughing.

When I came home from swing shift that time and found him alone, glaring from his chair, and I asked what was going on, he wouldn't say a thing. He just glared, watching through the glare as through a one' way mirror. "Where's mother?" Nothing.

Then she burst in, breathless, looking back and forth between us. "Did he tell you? What he did?" He had chased her out of the house with his Luger because she defended my sister-eleven at the time, my adopted sister-against his demand that she get out of the house within twenty-four hours, because, he said, her mother had been a whore for a French troopship and he didn't want her in the same house with him. The story came out fast but by the time my mother, his wife, had it told, I was on my feet, explosive, and I lifted the coffee table in front of me and threw it across the room at him where he sat, drunk, watching me. It was a flimsy thing and it glanced off the wall beside his chair and clattered to the floor, broken-legged. He just sat there watching, hating.

I stood over him, fists balled, grinding my teeth one instant, scream, ing at him the next.

"Do you know what you did, you son of a bitch, answer me, do you know what you've done to that kid?" I grabbed him and shook him, and he shook like a sack of laundry. No trace of resistance, nothing. I grabbed him by his red hair and pulled back his head and raised my fist, and he glared, watching. I couldn't do it. I couldn't punch him if he wasn't there for it, if he seemed almost to want it. I wouldn't work for him like that. So I stood there panting and heaving, and I told him to get out, sent him to the bedroom like a bad child, and he went.

By the time he came back I was numb, my rage was spent. He had the razor-knife from the warehouse he was working in those first days as a civilian, having beaten his court-martial for drunkenness by two weeks-a twentv-vear-rnan, with nowhere left to go but out. He caught me in a corner of the room, with that knife weaving in front of me and a crazed brightness in his colorless eyes, and he said, "So, punk, you want to fight? You want to fight, let's fight. Let's see what you can do."

The first thing I did was order her out of there. "Get the cops," I added. She stared like she was mesmerized for a minute, then went out the front door.

"All right, punk," he began. "Now it's just you and me, just you

and me, son." And he continued, working his way through his litany of hate-names for me and my kind, all the Lt. JG's in the world, the snot-nosed kids who'd pulled rank on him all his life. And with each new name he slashed nearer with the razor. Then it caught on my shirt, opened it like a paper wrapper.

I was ready. That's always surprised me, how quickly I was ready for that moment, as if I'd been waiting all my life for it. He had three inches on me in height and reach, and he had the knife, the literal edge. But I watched the knife, and I saw that the razor in it was extended only enough to slit open the cardboard cartons it was meant for, or my guts, if I let him reach them. He hadn't thought to extend the blade before he began waving it at me. Half an inch, maybe less. That meant he could slice me to ribbons, but no way could he kill me fast. And I knew before I would die I would kill him, could kill him, and would. I knew it, I saw it in my mind as in slow motion: he would reach forward to slash and as he slashed I would break his larynx with my fist. A sucker's swap. My blood, his life. When I spoke my voice was so transformed I knew he would hear the death in it.

"Touch me you're a dead man." And it was as if I had already done it, broken him. He looked at my eyes, not watching now, but looking. He looked at me, looked at the knife in his hand. He turned around and went back into the bedroom, without a word. After that, things changed. He was broken somewhere. He drank, drove the car off a bridge one night in the fog, ended up in jail. They let him off. It was all going fast now. Again, he got drunk, while I was at work in the factory, chased my mother and sister from the house with the Luger he couldn't even hold in his shaking hand. Jail again. This time she had him committed. The second child was born. Eighteen hours of labor, at her age, alone with only me there, alone without him. I went back to school, she left him, moved to the coast, tried to cover her tracks.

He found her once he was out, and she let him in like you'd let in a dog from a storm. But he was the storm as well as the dog. The older baby called him Daddy. By the time I saw him again, a year later, they both could say that: Daddy, Daddy. And he would hold them over his head and say, "What's happening?" Spin them. "What's happening?" Then he would disappear for days, drunk.

What did I know? It made no sense to me then, none of it. I married, too, and by the time we broke up nothing of that made sense to me either. I could tell something in me was destroying her, and she wanted me to stay and finish it. One bad night we were parked by the ocean, looking out over the waves coming in through the dark. She was crying. I held her. She knew it was over. She knew before I told

her, but she wanted me to tell her and I did. She was crying and she liked to have me hold her. What could you do? Then she looked at me and even in the moonlight I could see her eyes dilate, cat-like, and a kind of cheer came into her face. I couldn't look away from those eyes whose tears I tasted in my mouth.

"I know what we can do," she said.

I looked at her, waiting.

"We can kill ourselves." I looked away from her after a minute, looked down into the waves with their silver linings answering only to the moon. "We can," she repeated. And that was what had been in her eyes. I felt my heart shrink. That's no figure of speech. When astronauts come back in from the void, their hearts are shrunken. No one knows why. It happens.

But by that time in my life, it had all begun to rush for me, everything, rushing by so fast that if you reach out to grab, something comes off in your hands-an arm, the collapsed mask of a face, memories forming almost before the events they recount have even occurred. And what can you do? It all goes by like wreckage in a river or faces in a plunging train, and if you grab there's carnage and if you don't there's nothing. So you end up in an eddy somewhere, maybe with someone. Maybe not. And it's your life. It's your life. He and my mother and the girls: his bottles, her cigarettes; his violence and asthma, her enlarged heart and bronchitis; his radio intricately glowing in the darkness of his shack, her eyes full of the night she looks down into from her window above the backyard where he carries on conversations with Lima and Toronto, her cigarette a dull red star in the window he turns his back on. Who's to say this isn't love?

So I had the wheel that time, when I still believed in the wheel and revenge, and rage was as pure as a songbird bringing up the sun. But as I raced he smiled, and the deathly silence of his smile was an avalanche that outsped my skill at anything I imagined I could do to him. I was not ready to die. He was. And death was close for him, but it was not in one of the tree trunks blurring by nor in any of the dusky drop-offs at the edge of the road. And it was not at the hand of a friend. He told me that one only once. Korea, his best buddy on his knees in front of him as the dust cleared, leaving him stone-deaf for days afterwards. Red Dog knelt before the man, whose hands glistened in his own guts, more than even both of his hands could hold; and as he begged Red Dog-soundlessly, like a clip from a film in which something had gone wrong, some mechanical failure-he kept trying automatically to stuff them back into his drenched shirt as they lolled out over his hands like the heavy coils of a snake that would not be still.

Red Dog shot him, between the eyes, as he looked at him, or through him, with the same gun his hand could not hold again against my mother, later. He didn't say it then, when he was telling the story; but later, drunk, when he would interrupt a silence with that question over and over, I would know.

"What is a friend for?" He made it sound like a riddle. "What. Is. A friend. For." And he would look into his hands open on the bar before him, squeeze them slowly closed, clenching his jaw as he did it, closing his eyes.

On the way back, after the doctor gave him the injection and he was himself again, there stood in the headlights a row of eucalyptus trees, their bark hanging from them in red loops. We were both getting drunk. I was driving slowly. The ranks of eucalyptus seemed to go on and on in the headlights as we drove beside them. I remarked that they looked like beggars in rags.

He looked at them a long while, and when he turned to me I imagined his eyes were brimming tears. "That's right, that's exactly what they look like," he said, and then he said, "Thank you, thank you for telling me that." I don't think I said anything. I was surprised. It was nothing.

In two years you were dead. In a rented room in an L.A. dive. Congestive heart failure, strangulation. My mother, your wife, had had you committed again, had escaped you again, this time to the City of Angels, as she called it when she first wrote to tell me her plan. You'd found her again, but this time she turned you away. This time she was ready to live. She turned you away without letting the girls see you and beg her for their daddy again. They never knew you had been there, a wool cap hiding the flap of scalp sutured over the plastic plate where your skull had been caved in during some brawl or in some alley where you had wakened to find a stranger's hand in your pocket. You couldn't remember. You'd been in a coma for weeks. You'd learned to speak again, to feed yourself, to walk short distances, your indomitable sea legs still there to hold you up when the earth shifted, as it did so often then.

"No more drinking, hon." How familiar for her the heartbreak of that promise must have been. "The docs said one drink, that's all she wrote." Standing in the porch-light at the foot of the stairs which she had come halfway down, so you wouldn't have to speak so loudly as to wake the girls, you shyly took off the cap to show her the gleaming, the way a kid might show off a frog, knowing others might find it repulsive, but knowing, nonetheless, what a prize it truly was. When they found you among the empty bottles in your room,

they couldn't even determine how long you'd been dead. You were thirty-seven.

Now I am thirty-seven. King is dead, long live the King. The Nazi is dead, and the painter. JFK and Bobby. John Lennon is dead. And Penny Lane. The Stones are middle-aged millionaires. Alice Cooper was one of the last, perhaps the last, to comfort Groucho as he died. The list goes on. The list is hungrier than we are. One of your daughters is a nurse, always looking for the man she can heal. The other is the image of you, asks about you sometimes. We lie, and she loves you. We lie, and she knows, and she loves you. The young girl you ordered out of your house is a woman with her own home now, her own children, a strong woman who refuses marriage. Mother did not remarry, keeps her cats and dogs, keeps your name, keeps having difficulty breathing. One night in San Francisco, years ago, police took away my bayonet. Maybe it was time for that, because I was relieved to let it go. Later I read that along with all the other weapons confiscated that year it was melted down to be cast as a statue by Benny Bufano, the waterfront sculptor. And that's not all, you'll like this part-it's a statue of Christ welcoming sailors home from the sea.

Ethnic warp and woof

Samuel Reifler

The mistaken belief that Americans are the happiest people in the world sterns from the fact that, when unhappy, the American reverts to his roots: the Italian-American pouts, the Chinese-American apologizes, the Scotch-Irish-American twists up one corner of his mouth and gazes vacantly into space, the Native American looks as if he were made of wood, the Afro-American, eyes blazing, smiles to himself. Thanks to the ingenuity of the American chemical industry, the Americans are certainly an extremely happy people, but the hap-piest people by nature are the Indonesians, combining the passivism of the Japanese with the studied optimism of the modern Indians. The Indians, like the Greeks, inhabit the ruins of a more advanced civilization, but while the Greeks are guileless and affable and possess a highly developed, if subtle, sense of honor, the Indians are hysterical and conniving and have no sense of honor at all. In the Occident the English have the strongest sense of honor, while Scottish honor is diluted by too many allegiances and the Welsh repress theirs out of spite towards the English. The Irish sense of humor is stronger than the Irish sense of honor, and a good joke in a jolly pub has betrayed many an Irish secret. The Italian seeks honor through his children, the Swede through his vocational skills, the Swiss through horne economics, the Belgian through the acquisition of property, the French and Russians through devotion to political principles-with the Russian blindly following whatever philosophy is officially sanctioned and the Frenchman laying his life on the line for a passing sectarian fad. The Japanese have the strongest sense of honor, the Chinese, the feeblest. When the Chinese say, "Honor your parents," they mean not to forget to burn incense in their tombs. The Chinese commit suicide only in despair, never from shame; with the Japanese it is just the opposite. Ever since it went Socialist, Sweden has had the highest

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suicide rate in the world; before that, the Swedes were a hearty, extroverted people who, when violent, were homicidal rather than suicidal. When Russia turned Communist the national character underwent a similar about-face: from a nation of intense, brilliant, dissipated, psychologically tormented geniuses wracked by the great paradoxes of religion and philosophy, Russia became, overnight as it were, a nation of sodden, unemotional, unimaginative hypocrites. The character of some nations can withstand social upheaval-the French were just as coldly patronizing and babbled just as incessantly before 1789 as after. The French-at least those with the classic Gallic physique (squat torso, short legs, oversized shoulders)-feel most comfortable in groups. There is a gigantic strain of Frenchmen-to other Frenchmen what Morgans are to other horses-who prefer to remain aloof from the crowd. They are often somewhat doltish, although there have been geniuses among the French giants as wellfull-blooded, virile masters like Balzac and Rodin. The gigantic Charles de Gaulle must be classed as one of the dolts, however, judging from the vanity he displayed in response to public adulation. French vanity is superficial, though, compared with that of the Spanish, the vainest nation in Europe. The greatest heights of vanity, however, are reached by the Coraillo Indians of Colombia, whose main industry is mining tin and processing it into large oval mirrors which they hang around their necks. One Coraillo will communicate with another only if he can see himself at the same time. SpanishCoraillo intermarriage has produced the epitome of vanity, the LatinAmerican dictator. In contrast, the most modest people are the Irish, even though they tend to swagger among friends. The three finest hours of the great Irish hero, King Cuchulain, are spent wandering, hungry and forsaken, across a mist-enshrouded bog, crouching against an Atlantic storm in a lonely coomb below a spray-swept crag, and weeping beside the bed of his wife, when she has turned her back to him. In Mediterranean countries vanity takes the form of pomposity and is usually accompanied by a short, rolv-polv, Napoleonesque physique. There are pompous persons everywhere, but Japan has the fewest. The demeanor of Emperor Hirohito during World War II is a lesson in modesty. He was considered a divine being, the population ofJapan was prepared to die for him, yet he wore conservative Brooks Brothers suits, eschewed all but the simplest ceremony, and walked in little, mincing steps, with downcast eyes, giving the impression that it was he who was the sacrificial victim. The most obnoxious people when pompous are the Germans; pomposity takes its most agreeable shape in the United States, where it is appreciated as a form of entertainment: note the pompous New England college professor, the

pompous Hollywood film director, the pompous Southern senator. Modern Russia is so pervaded by a frugal, rigid pomposity that it is no longer even recognized as such; before the revolution, pomposity was rare in Russia and when it did appear it rang especially hollow, having to contend, as it did, with the backdrop of the vast and mighty Russian landscape. Until recently, pomposity was reviled in China, the porn' pous suffering ridicule and ostracism under the Imperial Dynasties and forced labor and public self-abasement under the Communists. China is more tolerant of pomposity today, under American influence, but the American influence has done nothing to modify the extreme uncommunicativeness of the Chinese, who go so far as to refrain from keeping pets because they fear their behavior toward them might reveal their true feelings. The Americans, who keep the most pets per capita, are the most communicative people in the world; the Spanish are the most communicative Europeans and also boast Europe's largest pet population, if songbirds are included. The Spanish love to sing. The Belgians hate to sing and do so only at gunpoint. The Swiss like to sing, but cannot carry a tune-the art of bell-making developed in Switzerland to ensure that everyone sang on key. (Yodeling, in which the Swiss excel, does not require perfect pitch.) The best singers are the Pakistanis. The greatest singers of opera are Jewish and Italian. In the arts, the Italians are always second-best=-rhe best musicians are the Austrians, the best writers are English, the best painters are Chinese, the best architects are Egyptian; the second-best musicians, writers, painters and architects are Italian. The French are best at pastels, the Mexicans at fresco, the Peruvians at tapestry, the Sudanese at basketry, the Nigerians at beading, the Russians at monuments, the Greeks at narrative verse, the Tibetans at chanting, the Bulgarians at whooping, the New Guinea aborigines at polyphonic vocal music, the Trinidadians at steel drum, the Iranians at oud, the Liberians at penny whistle, the Yugoslavians at foot stamping, and the Germans at tuba. The most aesthetically deprived nation is Scotland, with Walter Scott its best writer, Alexander Nasmvth its best painter and all its most lovely ballads stolen from the Irish. The most artistically inclined nation is France-Cezanne! Flaubert! Berlioz! Paris! La rive gauche! But French cinema is weak. The best filmmakers are the Japanese (the Italians are second-best), The best film audiences are in Malaysia, the best music audiences are in India, the best lecture audiences are in China, the best execution audiences are in Goa, the best drama audiences are in Manchuria, where Hamlet cannot be performed because of the likelihood of someone in the audience running on stage and plunging a kris into Claudius. The best dance audiences are in the Philippines. The best dancers are the Indonesians. The worst dancers

are the Native Americans, which is ironic, considering how much dancing they do. The second-best dancers are not the Italians, but the natives of Central West Africa, carrying over into America, where the best dancers are the blacks. Afro-American dance, however, like all Afro-Arnerican art, differs from African dance in that it relates exelusively to sex. Despite his reputation, however, the black American is not the best lover; the best lovers are the Swedes-despite their neuroses (or because of them). The worst lovers are the English, who are always disappointed with sex. The most imaginative lovers are the Moroccans-the least imaginative, the Welsh. The most licentious people are the French-the least licentious, the Albanians. Statistically. the Swiss are more continent than the Albanians, but the Swiss harbor strong sensualist tendencies. kept in check only by a highly developed sense of shame. Shame plays only a minor role in the Eastern psyche. The Chinese do not even have a word for it. Instead of shame. the Hindu or Buddhist feels contrition-when he transgresses, the way to absolution is elearly defined. whether it is skipping lunch or committing hara-kiri. Hand in hand with the West's acute tendency to shame goes an acute sensitivity to justice. Both the English and the Jews share a profound sense of justice. The English Constitution and the Book of Leviticus stand as pillars of modern justice. French justice is undermined by political principles, Spanish justice by banality, Italian justice by family ties, German justice by rhetoric, American justice by confusion. Greek justice by certain events which occurred between 1945 and 1948, Irish justice by garrulousness. Belgian justice by arbitrariness. Dutch justice by aesthetic considerations (the attractive go free, the ugly are convicted). South American justice by greed. Chinese justice by indecisiveness, Yugoslavian justice by a Serbian or Croatian bias, Israeli justice by anxiety, Arab justice by mercilessness. Polish justice by sympathy, Swiss justice by bourgeois attitudes and Russian justice by peer pressure. The concept of justice is less pronounced in primitive societies. where a common spiritual bond replaces the social contract. The more primitive a culture, the greater its spiritual strengths: the Australian aborigine continues to exist in his arid desert thanks entirely to his telekinetic powers. If he is thirsty. a well springs up at his feet-if he is hungry, a nutritious cactus. with a plump kiwi entangled in its roots. He sleeps naked under the stars, protected by an aura so intense that it can ward off a pack of famished dingoes. The West, compared with the rest of the world. is a spiritual kindergarten, where the religious experience still requires an ernotional stimulation. Among the Europeans the Germans are most capable of transcendence, since they get the most wrought up over abstractions. The least capable are the French; all the great French 212

mystics-Saint Joan. Pascal, Michaud-were plagued by self, consciousness. This self-consciousness, when not in saintly guise, becomes French wit. The Germans believe they are as witty as the French. but no one else shares that view. National character is ex, pressed most purely at the moment of death, and at the moment of death the Frenchman is witty-compare Duchamp's "Up till now, it was always everyone else who died" with Goethe's sulky "At least now I will be left in peace." The Roumanian, an insufferable romantic, faces death clutching a memento of love-a ring, a photograph, a letter-his sentiments often reverting to the days of his youth. Imagine the distress of the spouse of an expiring Roumanian when suddenly, as if out of nowhere, a faded dance program materializes in the loved one's hands and from the loved one's lips falls the name of a stranger, or worse. The dying Italian was described by Edith Gault Wilson, in an account of a tour through a Bolzano hospital in World War I: "How can anyone doubt the warm and loving nature of the Italian character after having walked up and down these wards and on every side heard the wounded and dying calling out the names of women. or simply, 'Mama! Mama!' or 'Sorellal Sorella!'" The Swiss addresses his final words to his lawyer or, if he is a lawyer, to his banker. The Belgians. if not already insane, become so at the approach ofdeath and Belgian deathbed scenes are the most original-take. for example, the death of the surrealist poet, Jacques Osman, who died with a gloved foot and stockinged hand hoisted in the air and a calling card, with the word "Adieu" scrawled on it, clenched between his teeth. American deathbed scenes are mawkish, with Tad Lincoln's "Tell Prissy I like her dress," the touchstone of American last words. Often the dying American is engulfed with recollections of a childhood pet, and with his last breath utters "Chippy," "Muffin," "Rexall," or "Sam." The dying Chinese remains careful to reveal nothing about himself. The Jew, always the intellectual, asks a question, like "Why?" or "What next?" or "Who's going to call my sister?" The dying Russian cries out the name of the part of the body that pains him-see Bakunin's "Eyes! Eyes!" Most Englishmen are surprised by death, which usually interrupts them in mid-sentence (either while calling for tea or making a comment about tea that has just been served), accompanied, if time permits, by "Damn! What a nuisance!" The Pole dies believing he is only going to sleep. The Spaniard dies in silence, gallantly, his chin thrust forward beneath a broad grin-picadors, imaginary or real, fat, dressed in beige, hats in their hands, stand around the deathbed, weeping.

Time to go

Stephen Dixon

My father follows me on the street. He says "Don't go into that store and don't go into the next one you might want to go into either. Go into none, that's what I'm saying." But I stand in front of the door of the jewelry store I heard was the best in the city and am buzzed in. My father's right behind me, and I nod to the guard and say to the saleswoman after she says "Can I help you?" "Yes, I'm looking for a necklace-amber-I mean jade. I always get the two mixed up. But jade's what I want: long-lasting, forever, is the symbol, right? This might sound funny, but I want to present the necklace to my wife-tobe as a prenuptial gift."

"Doesn't sound funny to me and you've come to the right store." She takes out a tray of jade necklaces. All have gold around or in them, and, when I ask the price of two of them, are too expensive.

"I don't want any gold in them, except maybe for the clasp, and these are way too expensive for me."

"Much too expensive," my father says.

"I'll show you some a little lower in price."

"Much lower in price," my father says.

"Maybe a little lower than even that," I say.

She puts away the tray she was about to show me and takes out a third tray.

"These seem darker than I want-to go with her blue eyes and kind of pale skin I mean-but how much is this one?"

"You can pick it up," she says. "Jade doesn't bite."

"Just the price," my father says. "But go on, pick it up. You'll see how jade's as cold to feel as it is to look at."

I pick it up. "It feels nice, just the right weight, and seems"holding it out-"the right size for her neck."

"Is she around my height?"

"Five-five. "

"Then exactly my height and this is the size I'd wear."

"I'm sure it's still too expensive for me."

She looks at the tag on it, which seems to be in code: 412XT+. "It goes for three-fifty but I'll make it two-seventy-five for you."

"Way out of my range."

"What is your range?"

ttyou're going to wind up with crap," my father says, "pure crap. If you have to buy a necklace, go somewhere else. I bet you can get this one for a hundred any other place."

"Around a hundred, hundred-twenty-five," I tell her.

"Let me show you these then."

"Here we go again," my father says.

"I have to get her something, don't I?" I tell him. "And I want to, because she wants something she can always wear, treasure-that'll remind her of me. That's what she said."

"Fine, but what's she getting you?"

"How do I know? I hope nothing. I don't want anything. That's what I told her."

"Oh, you don't want anything to remind you of her?"

"She'll remind me of her. I have her, that's enough, and besides, I don't like jewelry."

"You thinkers: all so romantic and impractical. I wouldn't get her anything if she isn't getting you anything. Listen, I like her, don't misunderstand me: she's a fine, attractive girl and you couldn't get better if you tried for ten more years. But tit for tat, I say. He who gives, receives, and one should be a receiver and giver both."

"You're not getting my point. She wants something and I don't. I accept that and I wish you would."

"Sucker," he says. "All my boys are suckers. None of them took after me."

"Some people might say that was an improvement."

"Stupid people might, just as stupid people might make jokes like you just did. If you took after me you would've been married sooner, had almost grown-up children, a much better job, three times as much income and been much, much happier because your happiness would've been going on longer."

"Look at this batch," the saleswoman says, putting another tray of jade necklaces on the counter. I see one I like. A light green, smaller beads, nicely strung with string, no gold on it except the clasp. I hold it up. "I like this one."

"Hedge. hedge," my father says. "Then ask the price and offer her half."

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"How much is it?" I ask her.

"A hundred-ten."

"Fifty-five or sixty-quick," my father says.

"Sounds fair, and this is the first one I really feel good about."

"That's the only way to buy. Janine," she says to a younger saleswoman, "would you try this on for this gentleman?"

Janine comes over, smiles and says hello to me, undoes the top two buttons of her blouse and starts on the third.

"It's not necessary," I say.

"Don't worry," the older woman says. "That's as far as I'll let her go for that price."

Janine holds the necklace to her neck and the older woman clasps it behind her. "Feels wonderful," Janine says, rolling the beads between her fingers. "This is the one I'd choose of this box-maybe even out of all the boxes despite the more expensive ones."

"Who are you working for, him or me?"

"No, it really feels great."

"Don't fall for their patter," my father says. "Sixty-five-go no higher. She says seventy-five, say 'Look, I'm a little short, what with all my wedding expenses and all, can't you take the sixty-five-the most, seventy?' But you got to give them an excuse for accepting your offer, and no crying."

"How much is this one again?" I ask her.

"One-ten," the older woman says, "but I'll make it a hundred."

"That's just fine. I didn't mean to bargain down, but if you say it's a hundred, fine, I'll take it."

"Idiot," my father says. "You could've had it for seventy easy."

"Terrific. Janine, wrap it up special as a pre-wedding gift. Cash or charge, sir?"

"You'll take a check?"

"[anine, I don't know this guy, so check his references. If they're O.K., let him pay by check. Thank you, sir. What about calling Michaels now?" she says to a man at the end of the counter and they go in back. I take out my wallet.

My father sits in a chair next to the guard. "My son," he says to him. "Nothing like me. Never learned anything I ever taught him and I tried hard as I could. He could've been much more successful if he'd listened. But he was stubborn. All my children were stubborn. Neither of my girls had the beauty of their mother and none of my sons the brains of their dad. Health you'd think they'd have had at least, but they didn't even have that. Oh, this one, he's healthy enough-strong as an ox. But two I lost to diseases, boy and a girl, and both in their twenties, which was hard for my wife and I to take, before I went

myself. So, there you have it. And I hope his bride likes his present. He's paying enough. Though why he doesn't insist on getting something in return-hint on it at least if he doesn't want to insist-or at least insist her family pay for the wedding, is a mystery as much to you as to me. To everyone including his bride, who I admire-don't think I was just buttering him up there-he says he's too old to have anyone but him pay for the wedding, and she makes it worse by praising him for what she calls his integrity. Make sense to you? Doesn't to me. Since to me integrity is great in its place but is best when it pays. All of which is why I hound him the way I do-for his benefit and his only. So, think it'll stay as nice out as it is? Ah, what's the difference?"

I get off the train from Baltimore, get on the subway for upper Broadway; suddenly my father's in the car standing beside me. "Welcome home," he says. "You still going through with giving her that present and making the wedding all by yourselves? Anything you say. I won't interfere. I can only tell you once, maybe three times, then you have to finish digging your own grave."

"If that's really the last time, fine by me," and I go back to reading my book.

"Just like when you were a boy. You didn't like what I said, you pretended I wasn't there. But I'm here all right. And the truth is, in spite of all the mistakes you made with your life and are still making, I'm wishing you all the luck in the world. You were O.K. to me at the end-I won't deny it. I can't-who could I to?-the way you took care of me when I was sick-so I suppose I should be a little better to you now. Am I right? So do you want to be not only family now but good friends? If so, let's shake like friends. We kissed a lot when you were young. In fact, kissed right up to when I went and then you to me just a few seconds after that, which I don't think if our tables were turned you would've got from me-but for a first time let's just shake."

The car's crowded. Late afternoon Christmas shoppers returning home but not the rush-hour riders yet. I'm squeezed right up to him. "Look," I say, "we can talk but don't remind me of how sick you were. I don't want to think of it now. I will say I respected you for a lot of things in your life, especially the way you took the discomfort and pain then, something I told you a number of times but I think you were too out of it to understand me. But you also have to realize, and which I maybe didn't tell you, how much you screwed me up, and I allowed you to screw me up-whatever the causes or combination of them. I've worked out a lot of it, I'll try to work out the rest, but no real complaints from me for anything now for I'm going through absolutely the best time in my life."

218

"Good, we're friends," and he shakes my hand. I get off at Magna's stop. Today began my school's winter break. I head for the revolving exit gate at the end of the platform. A boy of about sixteen's between me and the woman exiting in front of him. But he's hesitating, looking around and behind him, at me, the down, town platform across the tracks, the woman who's now through the gate and walking upstairs, back at me sullenly. I don't know whether to walk around him or go to the other end of the platform and the main exit. Maybe I'm wrong. He might just be an angry kid who's hesitating now only because he doesn't know which exit to take, this or the main one. I walk past him but keep my eyes on him. As I'm stepping backwards into the gate he turns to me, sticks his left hand in his side jacket pocket and thrusts it at me, clamps his other hand on my shoulder and says "Give me all your money." I say "What? What?" and push backwards and revolve around the gate to the other side and he has to pull his hand away or get it caught between the bars.

"Hey, wait," and he revolves around the gate after me, rips the satchel off my shoulder and runs upstairs. It has the necklace, my writings, student papers, a framed drawing I bought for Magna, some clothing. The boy's already gone. I yell upstairs "Police, police, catch that kid with my satchel-a canvas one," as I chase after him. On the sidewalk I say to that woman "Did you see a boy running past?" and she says "Who?" but he's nowhere around. A police car's across the street and I run to it. The policemen are in a luncheonette waiting for their takeout order. I go in, say "I'm not going to sound sensible to you, believe me, but I was just robbed, he might've had a gun or knife in his pocket, a kid, boy, around sixteen with a gray ski cap on his head with the word 'ski' on it, down in the subway exit there, he took my satchel with some valuable things in it and then ran upstairs. I'm sure if we-" "Come with us," one of them says and we rush outside and are getting in their car when the counterman raps on the luncheonette window and holds up their bag of food. "Later," the policeman shouts out his window as we drive off.

We drive around and don't find the boy. The policeman says "There are so many young thieves wearing the outfit you described. Parka jacket, fancy running sneakers, hat sort of extra tall and squeezed on top, sometimes with a porn-porn, sometimes not. Tough luck about your necklace and painting though."

"I could've told you," my father says, seated beside me. "Fact is, I told you-a thousand times about how to be wise in New York, but you always got your own ideas. You think l'd ever exit through a revolving gate when there's no token booth there, even in what they call the better days? That's where they leap on you, trap you against

the gate on either side or on the stairs leaving it, but you never want to play it safe. Now you've lost everything. Well, you still got your life and it's not that I have no sympathy for you over what happened, but it seems you were almost asking for It it could've been so easily avoided."

"Layoff me, Dad, will you? I already feel bad enough." I get out of the car in front of Magna's building. "Thanks, officers."

"As I say," my father says, going in with me, "I can understand how you feel. But this one time, since your life depends on it, I wish you'd learn from your mistake."

I go upstairs and tell Magna about the robbery. My father sits on the daybed she uses as a couch. "Every week closer to the wedding she gets more radiant," he says. "You got yourself one hell of a catch. She's smart, she's good, she has wonderful parents and she's also beautiful. I don't know how you rate it but I'm glad you did."

"It had your special present in it," I tell her, "plus some drawing for you I know he's going to just throwaway. I won't tell you what the special gift is. I'll try to get something like it or close to it. God, I could have killed that kid."

"That wouldn't have helped," she says.

"It certainly wouldn't've," my father says. "Because in the process you could've got killed in his place, and those kids always got ones working with them or friends for revenge. This is what I tell you and hope you'll remember for all time: stay out of other people's business, and if something like a robbery happens to you, shut your mouth and give everything you have. Twice I got held up by gunmen in my dental office and both times my advice worked. They not only didn't harm me but gave me back my empty wallet."

Magna and I go to the Marriage License Bureau. The line for applications extends into the hallway. "I hate lines," my father says. "I've always avoided them by calling before to see what time the place opens and then trying to be the first one there."

"It looks like the line for food stamps," the woman in front of us says to her mate.

"To me like the one for Welfare," another woman says.

"Unemployment insurance," Magna says to me. "I've been on them. Didn't want to but had no choice. Have you?"

"Him?" my father says. "Oh, he was too pure to take unemplovment. He deserved it, too, but you know what he did? Refused to even go down to sign up for it. He was living home then and I told him he was crazy. I said 'I always want you to have a job, but if you're fired from one or laid off, well, you paid for that insurance, so take it.' But

him? Always too damn pure. That can work against you as much as it can for. Must've got that trait from his mother, because he certainly didn't get that way from me."

"I could have got unemployment a few times," I say to her, "but I always had some money saved and so thought I'd live off it and write at the same time. To sort of use the time break to produce some writing that might earn me some money, but not intentionally to make me money-"

"There he goes again with his purity bent. Look, I never encouraged my children to take anything that wasn't theirs. Oh, maybe by my actions 1 occasionally did, but 1 never encouraged them personally to take like that. But he wouldn't listen about that insurance. We had terrible fights over it. Of course he never would've had to reject or accept any unemployment insurance if he'd've become the dentist like I wanted him to. 1 pleaded with all my sons to and each one in turn broke my heart. But he out of all of them had the brains and personality for it and he could've worked alongside me for a few years and then bought me out of my practice. 1 would've even given him the practice for nothing if that's what it took to get him to become a dentist, though with maybe him contributing to my support a little each month, mine and his mother's."

"1 wasn't good in the sciences," I say to him. "I told you that and offered my grades as proof over and over again. 1 used to almost regurgitate every time 1 went into the chemistry building and biology labs. I tried. 1 was pre-dent for more than two years."

"Regurgitate. See the words he uses? No, you didn't want to become a dentist because 1 was one. You wanted to go into the arts. To be an artiste. The intelligentsia you wanted to belong to. Well, now you're able to make a decent living off it teaching, but for how many years you practically starved? You almost broke my heart there, too, seeing you struggle like that for so long. You still have time to become one. Dentists average even more money than doctors today."

"Next," the clerk says.

Magna gives her our blood test results. She gives us the application to fill out.

"Can we come right up to the front of the line after we fill it out?" I ask.

"You have to go to the back," she says.

"Why aren't there two lines as there are supposed to be? Why's the other window closed?"

"We're a little shorthanded today You think 1 like it? It's double my usual load."

"There are three people typing over there and two putting away

things in files. Why not get one of them to man the other window till this line's a little relieved?"

"Shh, don't make trouble," my father says. "You can't avoid the situation, accept it. It's the city."

"I'm not the supervisor," she says, "and the supervisor can't just tell someone to do something when it's not that person's job. Next," she says to the couple behind us.

Magna pulls me away. "Wherever we are," she says, "I can always count on you to try to improve things."

"Am I wrong?"

"You'd think at the Marriage Bureau you'd tone it down somewhat, but no real harm. It'd be too laughable for us to break up down here."

"He was always like that," my father says. "Always a protester, a rebel. Nothing was ever good enough in life for him. He'd see a Broadway play that maybe the whole world thought was great and which'd win all the prizes, he'd say it could've been much better. Books, politics, his schools, the banks-whatever, always the same. I told him plenty of times to run for mayor of this city, then governor, then president. He never took me seriously. I suppose all that does mean he's thinking or his heart's mostly in the right place, but sometimes he can get rude with people with all those changes of his he wants. He doesn't have the knack to let things roll off him as I do. Maybe that's good. I couldn't live with it if that was me. You'll have troubles with him, young lady."

We go to the Diamond Center for wedding bands. "How'd you find us?" the man behind the counter says.

"We sawall the stores and didn't know which one to choose," I say. "So I asked this man who looked as if he worked in the area 'Anyone place carry only gold wedding bands?' He said 'Nat Sisler'S,' who I suppose, from the photo there, is you, '4 West, down the middle aisle on the right. There are forty other booths there but you won't miss his. He's got the biggest sign.

"Just like me on both my office windows," my father says. "Biggest the city allowed for a dentist. If they'd allowed me to have signs to cover my entire window, I would've."

"Too bad you don't know this man's name," Nat says. "We always like to thank the people who refer customers to us. But he was right. We've nineteen hundred different rings, so I promise you won't walk away from here without finding one you like. Anything particular you looking for?"

"Something very simple," I say.

He holds up his ring finger. "Nothing more simple and comfortable

than this one. I've been wearing it without taking it off once for fortyfive years."

"That's amazing," Magna says. "Not once?"

"I can't. I've gained sixty pounds since 1 got married and my finger's grown around it. Maybe he'll have better luck with his weight. He's so slim now, he probably will."

"More patter," my father says. "Then when you're off-guard they knock you over the head with the price. But remember: this is the Diamond Center. The bargaining's built into the price. Here they think it's almost a crime not to, so this time whatever price he quotes, cut him in half."

"Single or double-ring ceremony?" Nat says.

"Double," Magna says, "and identical rings."

"Better yet," my father says. "For two rings you have even greater bargaining power. Cut him more than half."

Nat brings out a tray of rings. "What do you do?" he asks me. "You look like a doctor."

"I teach at a university."

"So you are a doctor, but of philosophy."

"I barely got my B.A. 1 write, so 1 teach writing. She's the doctor of philosophy.

"Oh yeah?" he says while Magna's scrutinizing the rings.

"Turn your ears off," my father says. "Next he's going to tell you you're a handsome couple, how great marriage can be, wish you all the luck and success there is, which you'll need, he'll say-all that stuff. Though they love bargaining down here, they love making money more, so act businesslike. Ask him right off what the price of this is and then that. Tell him it seems high even if you don't think it is. Tell him you're a teacher at the lowest level. Tell him you make almost zero from your writing and that she won't be teaching next year, so you'll have to support you both. Tell him any other time but this you might have the money to pay what he's asking, but now, even if it is something as sacred as marriage, you're going to have to ask him to cut the price more than half. And being there are two rings you're buying-"

"What do you think of this one?" Magna asks me. It looks nice. It fits her finger.

"You have one like this in my size?" 1 say.

"That's an awfully big finger you have there," Nat says, holding my ring finger up. He puts several ring sizers on my finger before one fits. "Ten and a half. We'd have to make it on order. When's the wedding date?"

"Ask him how much first," my father says, "ask him how much."

"The fourteenth," Magna says. "But I'm sure these will be much higher than we planned to pay."

"That a girl," my father says.

"Hey," I say. "You'll be wearing it every day of your life, you say, so get what you want. I happen to like it."

"How much are they?" she asks Nat.

He puts the ring she wants on a scale. "Seventy-two dollars. Let's say seventy. The professor's, being a much larger size-and they're both seamless, I want you to know; that means they won't break apart unexpectedly and is the best kind of craftsmanship you can get-is eighty-five.

"Sounds O.K. to me," I say.

"Oh my God," my father says. "I won't even say what I think."

We go to the apartment of a rabbi someone told us about. His wife says "What would you like to drink? We've scotch, vodka, white wine and all the mixers."

"Scotch on the rocks for me," I say.

"Same for me, thanks," Magna says.

"So," the rabbi says when we all get our drinks, "to your health, a long life, and especially to your marriage," and we click glasses and drink. He shows us the certificate we'll get at the end of the ceremony. "On the cover-I don't know if you can read it-but it says 'marriage' in Hebrew."

"It's a little bit gaudy for me," I say. "You don't have one with fewer frills? Oh, I guess it's not important."

"It is so important," my father says. "That certificate will end up meaning to you more than your license. And it's beautifully designed-good enough to frame and hang-but of course not good enough for you."

"You'll have to provide two glasses for the ceremony," the rabbi says. "One with red wine in it which you'll both be drinking from."

"Dry or sweet?" Magna says.

"What a question," my father says. "Sweet, sweet."

"Whichever you choose," the rabbi says. "You'U be the ones drinking it."

"A modern rabbi," my father says. "Well, better than a modern judge. Ask him what synagogue he represents."

"By the way," I say, "do you have a congregation? George said he thought you'd given that up."

"Right now," he says, "I'm marketing a wonderful little device that could save the country about five hundred thousand barrels of oil a

month, if the public would just accept it. I got tired of preaching, but I'll get back to it one day."

"What he's not saying," his wife says, "is that this gadget will only cost three and a half dollars retail, plus a slight installation fee, and will save every apartment and home owner about fifty dollars a month during the winter. The oil companies hate him for it."

"I wouldn't go that far," he says, "but I will say I haven't made any friends in the oil industry. But the effectiveness of the device has been proven, it'll last without repairs for up to fifteen years, and someone has to market it, so it's almost been like a crusade with me to get it into every oil user's home. Wait, I'll show it to you."

"Wait'll he comes around to telling you the cost of his ceremony," my father says.

"The other glass," I say, after we've passed the device around. "Is that the one I'm supposed to break with my foot?"

"Scott has the most brilliant interpretation of it during the ceremony you'll ever want to hear," his wife says. "I've heard it a dozen times and each time I'm completely absorbed. Actually, except for the exchange of vows, I'd call it the highlight of the ceremony."

"Would you mind if we don't have the breaking of the glass? We've already decided on this. To us it represents the breaking of the hymen-"

"That's just one interpretation," he says, "and not the one I give. Mine's about the destruction of the temples and other things. I use biblical quotes."

"Wait wait wait," my father says. "Did I hear you don't want to break the glass?"

"It's also just a bit too theatrical for me," I say to the rabbi. "Just isn't my style."

"Isn't your style?" my father says. "It goes back two thousand years-maybe even three. You have to break the glass. I did with your mother and her father and mine with our mothers and their fathers and so on. A marriage isn't a marriage without it. It's the one thing you have to do for me of anything I ask."

"I can wrap a light bulb in newspaper if it's only that you're slightly concerned a regular glass might cut your foot," the rabbi says. "But if you don't want it."

"If they don't, they don't," his wife says.

"We don't," Magna says, "but thank you."

"Then no second glass," he says. "It's your day."

"That's it," my father says. "Now you've really made me mad. That she's on your side in this-well, you must've forced it on her. Or maybe not. Anyway, I'm tired of complaining. From the man's point

you'll be missing the best part of the ceremony, not the second best. I won't even begin to advise you about anything about the rabbi's fee."

"1 know what your advice will be," I say, "and I don't want to bargain with him, is that so bad? Because what's he going to charge-a hundred-fifty, two hundred? So how much can I cut off it-fifty, seventy-five! What's fifty anyway? What's a hundred? And he's a professional. A professional should not only do his work well but know what to charge. You always let your patients cut your dental fees in half?"

"If I thought they'd go somewhere else, sure. Because if I wasn't working on them I'd be sitting around earning nothing in that time. But if your rabbi asks four hundred?"

"He won't. You can see he's a fair guy. And I'm not a complete jerk. If I think his fee's way out of line, I'll tell him."

"That's not the way to do it, but do what you want. I've said it a hundred times to you and now I'll say it a last time. Do what you want because you will anyway. But I'll tell you something else. Your mother didn't give you three thousand dollars of my insurance policy benefit to just piss away."

"That money was gone years ago. I didn't ask for a cent of it but she thought I deserved it because of the four years I helped her with you. And I used it to good purpose. I lived off it and worked hard on what I wanted to work on for one entire year."

"Oh, just pay anything he asks no matter how high. In fact, when he says his fee, say 'No, it's too little,' and double him. That's the kind of schmo I sometimes think you can be."

We're being married in Magna's apartment. The rabbi's talking about what the sharing of the wine means. My mother's there. My brother and sister and their spouses. My nieces and an uncle and aunt. Magna's parents and cousins and her uncle and aunts. A few of our friends and their children. My father. He looks tired and ill. He's dressed for the wedding, has on his best suit, though it needs to be pressed. He sits down on the piano bench he's so tired. The rabbi pronounces us married. I'm crying. Magna smiles and starts to cry. My mother says "What is this? You're not supposed to be crying, but go ahead. Tears of happiness."

"Kiss the bride," my sister says. I kiss Magna. Then I kiss my mother and Magna's mother and shake Magna's father's hand while I kiss his cheek. I kiss Magna again and then my sister and brother and brother's wife and my nieces and aunt and uncle and Magna's aunts and uncle. Then our friends and Magna's female cousin and I shake the hand of her male cousin and say "Oh what the hell," and kiss his

cheek and the cheek of my sister's husband and the rabbi's cheek too. I look over to the bench. My father's crying. His head's bent way over and he dabs his eyes with old tissues. He starts making loud sobbing noises. "Excuse me," I say and I go over to him, get on my knees, put my arms around his lower legs and my head on his thighs. He's sitting up straight now and pats my head. "My boy," he says. "You're a good sweet kid. I'm actually having a great time. And there was no real harm meant between us and never was, am I right? Sure, we got angry as hell at one another lots of times, but I've always had a special feeling for you deep down. It's true, you don't have to believe me, but it's true. And I'm so happy for you. I'm crying because I'm that happy. I'm also crying because I think it's wonderful you're all together today and so happy, and I'm glad I'm here. Your other sister and brother, it'd be grand if they were here too." I look around for them. "Maybe they couldn't find the right clothes," I say. I get on one knee and hug him with my cheek pressed against his and then he disappears.

At war

Michael Wilkerson

"I'm right behind you," Aiken shouted. Kuzmic tripped the wire. Aiken heard the language of shrapnel and shielded himself, then saw Kuzrnic, red on the green jungle floor like Christmas. It was a dream, a fake, it wasn't true. Aiken, stunned, stared at the pattern Kuzmic made, and dropped to his knees, slumping his shoulders.

"Come on, soldier. There's a lot of false emotion going on here," a medic said. They slapped him on the stretcher and ran back toward the helicopter, boots crunching dirt like muted gunfire.

Kuzmic and Aiken, last two living recruits at the end of the war, played catch with a hand grenade, its fuse specially altered for a long contest. Each throw, they backed a step away from each other.

"Just like summer camp," Kuzmic would say. "Of course you remember that I always won this game at summer camp."

"I survive when the stakes are high enough," Aiken would say, feigning an overhand throw. He'd watch Kuzmic duck and, laughing, would take aim while the grenade ticked.

There was a time when Aiken was twelve and Kuzrnic fourteen; Aiken remembers the winter morning when Kuzmic solidified their friendship by slamming a textbook into the left side of Aiken's head, while his right smeared a violent pattern in the pane's frost.

At the front, Aiken received books from his mother and letters from others. He opened a short one from a young woman in California. "Do you think I'm normal?" it said. "I'm so incredibly bored."

Aiken considered his combat technique unorthodox. He memorized a story, in which he believed he was meant to be the main character:

"They lined him up single-file against the wall. He could see triangular spots of concrete flaked away, missing in action. There were two or three holes in the blocks, places where something had bored straight into the wall as if searching for a vital organ.

"'Is it time yet?' someone asked.

"He heard something that sounded like a deadbolt door lock. He looked at the soldiers and relaxed. There was another voice.

'''What is the meaning of time when the captain cocks the rifle?' it asked."

Letters came in long pauses, followed by rapid bursts, as if someone had pulled the trigger of a pen and held it down, beyond endurance.

At age thirteen, Aiken had a favorite spot, several hundred feet behind the crumbling house in which his family-mainstream troops, on the whole-bivouacked. An apple tree older than mustard gas hung on near a fence-row, protecting a platoon of velvet grass. His mother used a cowbell to signal for dinner. He'd sit at ease, pretending his mother's calls were carried away instead of toward him on the spring wind. He would study the buds of asparagus, shooting out of their silos, until his shift had ended.

He remembers a paramilitary experience held by others at his expense. A man who claimed to be a front-line director was talking with Kuzmic, Aiken and some of the older recruits.

"You are, of course, in on the Joke," he said. Kuzmic said he wasn't. Aiken played it cool, but his expression gave him away.

"If you aren't in on the Joke, you're going to have a rough time ofit, men," the front-line director said. "Code Seven," he continued, and, while Aiken and Kuzmic stood mute at attention, the laughter surrounded them and burned like napalm.

They spent their formative years in a decaying town in the Midwest. You can always tell a town is decaying when it calls itself something like "Pride City." A twentv-vear-old down the road was blacklisted from the law schools after beingphotographedduring a demonstration.

"Poor Phil, he just wanted to watch," Aiken's mother said. "That should be a lesson to you. No one can just watch. Don't watch," she said, walking to the front door to investigate a smell.

He went with her. Kuzmic, a half mile down the road, stood at his door, with his mother. Together, they inhaled the by-products of Pfizer Chemical, which rubbed out the lilac.

It became clear that television would be crucial to the resolution of the war. Aiken studied it carefully. An undercover amputee on the late movie had his remaining arm cut off to avoid enemy detection. The pursuer found him in a grocery store. He kept his eyes on the shelf. Beans, blue lake. Beans, ranch-style. Beans, sliced and laid open. The pursuer spoke to him, keeping in mind this was to be on television. "Prices sure are going up fast." Silently, he slid on leather gloves, reached in his pocket, set in motion his distasteful task.

Aiken loved the commercials for their precision and gross beauty. He lurked behind enemy lines at grocery stores, reconnoitering entry blanks; co-conspirators at the post office provided him with a cache of stamps and a ration of envelopes. He entered contests rapid-fire, winning case after case of discontinued product, a self-developing camera for espionage purposes, and a chronometer calibrated to Greenwich Mean Time.

On warm days in 1968, he rode his camouflaged bicycle smoothly over the principal arteries to the motel swimming pool. Brotherless, he invented ways to perform successful football, basketball, and wiffle ball operations without a visible opposition. The games were pure motion, offense and defense merging, the act of quarterbacking and receiving one and the same with each long, high pass. He gave himself two points for each medium-length pass caught, subtracted likewise for missed or broken plays, and upgraded the power of the bomb to five points.

The wiffle ball game played itself out against the peeling-paint earth, tones look of the family HQ; pinpoint accuracy of the projectile was all-important. Above the white wrought-iron porchwork was a double; exactly on its facade was a triple. Aiken aimed and swung. In the evenings he picked up pears from the fruit tree grove in back and hurled them like hand grenades at the neighbor's horses, who stood close enough to his lines to intercept messages.

Careful study was an a priori requirement. He read Sergeant Fury while scrutinizing the shadowy movements on television. His militarily hapless mother, failing to understand the value of mental preparation, interrogated him relentlessly. "Inactivity will make wallflowers of us all," she said, serving him a piece of hot apple pie. "Eat this before it gets cold." Taking nothing for granted, Aiken examined the artifact, cataloged it, listened for telltale sounds, consumed it as proposed.

Kuzmic's parents hired a transport, shipped their gear to a base of operations in Terre Haute; Kuzmic and Aiken became blood friends.

Kuzmic brought a dark knife to Aiken and watched as the smaller boy's hands shook on the blade. Kuzmic cut Aiken's arm, then his own. He merged the red spots of their forearms together. "In this way, we'll always know who the enemy isn't," Kuzmic said.

"Notice the kamikaze nature of bats," Kuzmic said. He threw a rock into the sky at dusk; a winged animal homed in on it, dive-bombed after it toward the ground. Aiken suggested a modification and brought out a wooden implement from his Little League baseball team. Kuzmic threw another stone, and Aiken swung at the diving creature. "Strike one," Kuzmic said. "This is even harder than baseball," Aiken said. Over the summer Kuzmic batted .285, Aiken .212.

Aiken tried hard to avoid looking at Kuzmic, who'd tripped the wire. The jungle was red and green like Christmas. There were stores they'd seen in Nashville, Indiana, that sold nothing but Christmas ornaments. December there is the slow season; the ice storms strafe the hills and the roads glaze over. Bridges freeze first. The interstate highway system was built with Defense money. Aiken owned several maps of proposed interstate routes, noting why this one was shifted and that one canceled. Four lanes were upgraded to eight on an expressway in Seattle. A classified contract was subsequently awarded to Boeing. Aiken mused: Who in the world has ever seen what's in one of those big trucks that move with impunity along the coasts, encircling the camps of the sympathizers?

A cousin left the United States to visit Montreal, rented a room in a corrugated tin building left over from the bankrupt Expo, bought five berets, and stayed. Aiken wrote him often before writing him off. The cousin invaded the Russian Pavilion, found roof leaks, was stopped by guards, held in a remaindered barbed-wire pen. He commandeered a monorail and drove it to the illusive safety of the U.S. pavilion, a leftist dome. Aiken heard this from him: At any moment we could be destroyed.

What the fat old man dared tell the tender recruits was almost beyond Aiken's system of belief. "You begin the war all at the same level. It's how you end it that matters. We expect most of you to come out alive. Some of you may have to come back and retrain. And others-" The fat old man paused, said, "Let's just say that there are things that must not be said." That cannot be said. One picture, Aiken wrote, is worth a thousand of these words right here, but who can draw these days? He doodled on a sketchpad, saw the conspiracy

theories apparent in his sketchings, faced the realization: The enemy knows how to draw.

Recruits moved toward the podium, one by one, surrounding the fat man with threateningly large bodies. Most of them were perfectly honed, ready to explode into battle. Their eyes were hollow from lack of sleep; all had dark, angry circles that looked like the ends of gun barrels. The fat man fell silent; the recruits let the territory fall, demilitarized. They hauled the fat man outside. Aiken slid low in his seat. A janitor walked by, gawked at him. "Support troops," Aiken said. "Carryon." The janitor slowed, pulled a life mask out of his mop bucket, handed it to Aiken. "Kuzmic," Aiken said, and he was safe.

"Wear these blinders," the frail man who'd replaced the fat one said. Aiken could tell by looking that this one needed to talk tough. "Put the blinders on, concentrate only on yourselves and your orders, march when you're told, think no thoughts on major themes unless specifically so instructed, and we will take care of you. You will feel uncomfortable in the blinders at first, but soon you won't even know you have them on. I don't think I need tell you the dangers of not wearing them. Good day, gentlemen."

Aiken put the blinders in his pocket. "Remind me never to wear these," he told Kuzmic, who'd likewise pocketed his. "We're in this together, you and me, remember," he said.

Quite simply, most soldiers, himself included, were generally unprepared for individual confrontations with the enemy, Aiken believed. He held his weapon in his right hand. His opponent leaned back, pointed, angled his weapon about forty-two degrees to the left and down toward the green turf. "Fourteen ball in the side pocket," he said. Pained lines formed on Aiken's face. The enemy stared ahead, fired, dropped the ball over the brink.

Kuzmic acquired a female consort. Aiken knew she was not seriously attached to his partner, but he felt that approval of the association had not traveled through the appropriate channels. No forms had surfaced. No requisitions were on file. He read from the manual to Kuzmic, who laughed, seemingly unfazed by the danger of the subtle weapon that had been deployed against him. Kuzmic suggested that Aiken follow procedures similar to the ones he had, but Aiken refused. "I have too much work to do," he said, knowing that

Kuzmic brought a dark knife to Aiken and watched as the smaller boy's hands shook on the blade. Kuzmic cut Aiken's arm, then his own. He merged the red spots of their forearms together. "In this way, we'll always know who the enemy isn't," Kuzmic said.

"Notice the kamikaze nature of bats," Kuzmic said. He threw a rock into the sky at dusk; a winged animal homed in on it, dive-bombed after it toward the ground. Aiken suggested a modification and brought out a wooden implement from his Little League baseball team. Kuzmic threw another stone, and Aiken swung at the diving creature. "Strike one," Kuzmic said. "This is even harder than baseball," Aiken said. Over the summer Kuzrnic batted .285, Aiken .212.

Aiken tried hard to avoid looking at Kuzmic, who'd tripped the wire. The jungle was red and green like Christmas. There were stores they'd seen in Nashville, Indiana, that sold nothing but Christmas ornaments. December there is the slow season; the ice storms strafe the hills and the roads glaze over. Bridges freeze first. The interstate highway system was built with Defense money. Aiken owned several maps of proposed interstate routes, noting why this one was shifted and that one canceled. Four lanes were upgraded to eight on an expressway in Seattle. A classified contract was subsequently awarded to Boeing. Aiken mused: Who in the world has ever seen what's in one of those big trucks that move with impunity along the coasts, encircling the camps of the sympathizers?

A cousin left the United States to visit Montreal, rented a room in a corrugated tin building left over from the bankrupt Expo, bought five berets, and stayed. Aiken wrote him often before writing him off. The cousin invaded the Russian Pavilion, found roof leaks, was stopped by guards, held in a remaindered barbed-wire pen. He commandeered a monorail and drove it to the illusive safety of the U.S. pavilion, a leftist dome. Aiken heard this from him: At any moment we could be destroyed.

What the fat old man dared tell the tender recruits was almost beyond Aiken's system of belief. "You begin the war all at the same level. It's how you end it that matters. We expect most of you to come out alive. Some of you may have to come back and retrain. And others-" The fat old man paused, said, "Let's just say that there are things that must not be said." That cannot be said. One picture, Aiken wrote, is worth a thousand of these words right here, but who can draw these days? He doodled on a sketchpad, saw the conspiracy

theories apparent in his sketchings, faced the realization: The enemy knows how to draw.

Recruits moved toward the podium, one by one, surrounding the fat man with threateningly large bodies. Most of them were perfectly honed, ready to explode into battle. Their eyes were hollow from lack of sleep; all had dark, angry circles that looked like the ends of gun barrels. The fat man fell silent; the recruits let the territory fall, demilitarized. They hauled the fat man outside. Aiken slid low in his seat. A janitor walked by, gawked at him. "Support troops," Aiken said. "Carryon." The janitor slowed, pulled a life mask out of his mop bucket, handed it to Aiken. "Kuzmic," Aiken said, and he was safe.

"Wear these blinders," the frail man who'd replaced the fat one said. Aiken could tell by looking that this one needed to talk tough. "Put the blinders on, concentrate only on yourselves and your orders, march when you're told, think no thoughts on major themes unless specifically so instructed, and we will take care of you. You will feel uncomfortable in the blinders at first, but soon you won't even know you have them on. I don't think I need tell you the dangers of not wearing them. Good day, gentlemen."

Aiken put the blinders in his pocket. "Remind me never to wear these," he told Kuzmic, who'd likewise pocketed his. "We're in this together, you and me, remember," he said.

Quite simply, most soldiers, himself included, were generally unprepared for individual confrontations with the enemy, Aiken believed. He held his weapon in his right hand. His opponent leaned back, pointed, angled his weapon about forty-two degrees to the left and down toward the green turf. "Fourteen ball in the side pocket," he said. Pained lines formed on Aiken's face. The enemy stared ahead, fired, dropped the ball over the brink.

Kuzmic acquired a female consort. Aiken knew she was not seriously attached to his partner, but he felt that approval of the association had not traveled through the appropriate channels. No forms had surfaced. No requisitions were on file. He read from the manual to Kuzmic, who laughed, seemingly unfazed by the danger of the subtle weapon that had been deployed against him. Kuzmic suggested that Aiken follow procedures similar to the ones he had, but Aiken refused. "I have too much work to do," he said, knowing that

Kuzrnic would soon correct his error and devote full attention to the cause.

The terrifying, frail man extracted the blinders from his desk drawer. "We found these in your footlocker," he said to Aiken. "The only option is to send you back to training camp." Aiken studied the grain in the floorboard, noted that it ran east to west, and wondered if it might be wired a certain way. "I'm going to quote from the report here," the frail man said. "'Subject is becoming less and less com, municative. Recommend forced communication in order to improve verbal/oral skills." Aiken found a pencil and began to play with it. He bit off the eraser and made a throwing motion. "We want you to live with some new recruits to regain your spunk," the frail man said. "We plan to concentrate on defoliation techniques." Aiken ducked, expecting the explosion.

There was a grapevine at the training camp, old and thick with peeling strings of flesh-brown fiber. It blasted through the low branches and hung like a fuse in front of the platoon. "Climb," the sergeant said, and Aiken did, hand-over-hand as he'd been taught from the first week of gym class in seventh grade. Aiken felt the pull on his shoulders and armpits. His helmet lipped sweat onto his face. The others circled around the bottom of the tree. The vine began to swing as though being tugged. Aiken looked down, risked a wave to the group. A bullet whizzed past his ear, traveling straight up. The vine's fibers began to unravel. "Fire and keep firing," the sergeant said, and Aiken panicked, failing to rebut the officer. He realized that this incident should have been preventable. The blinders kept him from seeing the periphery. The grapevine crackled and tore. He screamed, pointed his steel-toed boots at the spot where he believed the sergeant would be standing, missed, and felt the right toe-plate clang against a buried stone. A twig in his lower leg snapped like a bone. The sergeant was nowhere to be seen.

They kept him in a small room. Orderlies brought briefing reports code-named like newspapers. He read: "Once the great bomb comes in, if you are lucky enough to see its path, you will notice that it enters your atmosphere directly, then begins a series of swirls that become increasingly intense, until its trajectory seems nothing more than a hopelessly convoluted knot. You will give up on it and ignore it, but in good time it will unwind itself, and you will feel the impact."

Kuzmic requisitioned a crystal and talked to Aiken during clear' channel hours. "I'm holding the fort, old friend," he said. "It's a

wainng game, but we're going to win." "I'm out of commission," Aiken said. "Only temporarily," Kuzmic said. "You're going to snap out of it." Specific instructions from Kuzmic never seemed to arrive as promised. While these negotiations continued, Aiken thought of implosion. For hours he stood at ease by the window, holding a cold cup of coffee, thinking of the spiral knotting of the bomb's path. "This kind of futility is invented, fabricated," Aiken said. The lights came on early against the gray slate of the sky. "C'est la guerre." His strong wrist suspended the cup of coffee in the black atmosphere of the room.

The correspondence he received seemed tightly controlled. Paragraphs were excised, names blacked out, the addresses of uncles and aunts marked "CLASSIFIED." Kuzmic began to bombard him with detailed information about the technological advances that were being made without him. The correspondence contained records of the programs that were presented in color, and a full rundown of the agents of the video regime, their importance rated on a scale of one to five star-like indicators. Aiken, disgusted by the blinders he still resisted wearing, noted the irrelevance of these missives.

They accepted his request for leave. He selected Paris, revealed his whereabouts to no one. The streets were deserted except for the Occupation's officers. Panzer tanks rolled through the Right Bank. "lch bin ein Berliner." Aiken believed in the virtues of concealment. He investigated the coffee, noted the French beans, darkly roasted and shaped like smart bombs. Talks lasted twenty-four hours a day at the nearby embassy. The subject at hand was the shape of the table. Square? Round? Diamond? Beanlike? Aiken refused to take part. He conspired to learn the harmonica in his hotel room, spoke to no one, watched small boys in Luxembourg Gardens who looked as if they were composed of an endless series of shimmering, colored dots. He noted the maneuvers of the shimmering, colored dots. He noted the maneuvers of the shimmering, colored-dot boats on the glassy ponds. Troops of Boy Scouts drilled on the grass, ripping it from the ground, rutting the mud, sinking from sight. Outside his window, disembodied long johns hung in the wind. He read the tag: Baumwoolle, cotton. Bomb wool.

Strangers began to come to him. A moon-faced, pimply kid with an M�16, looking for a hiding place. Aiken threw him out. A crazy, aged monk visited, turned toward the Persian Gulf, transformed everything. Trained killers dressed like diplomats sought advice. Aiken

revealed nothing, remained inactive. "I'm on leave," he said. A guide dog belonging to a woman of international mystery and intrigue sniffed his knapsack in a cafe. "C rations," Aiken said. "March," she ordered. He clipped off ten blocks on the primary rue, turned around, saw her missing in action. Kuzmic was there instead. "Your leave's over," he told Aiken. "1 have to hide. They're onto me."

They commandeered a jeep, drove past the embassies, now flaming and converted to maximum-security prisons, saw entire cities covered with white dust, nearly broke down in a plantation of giant rubber trees that blocked the sun and made an aggressive attempt to reclaim the jeep's tires. Kuzmic narrated his own escape from the blinders. "It was close," he said. "They had me monitoring visual signals on electronic reception devices untill almost lost consciousness. The frail sergeant had the blinders behind me, but 1 busted loose." The jeep ran out of gas. Kuzmic leapt from it, and ran into the jungle. Aiken heard the explosion, realized Kuzmic had never really eluded the sergeant, wondered whether he too had been set up. The enemy's expertise lies in wait, he thought.

The chopper brought in the paramedics, who scraped the red off the green, told Aiken to stop crying: "There's a lot of false emotion going on here, soldier." They urged him to report back to Paris. A man with lampblack came to his door, bearing a bottle of dark red wine. Aiken expected a lit match to materialize at any second, didn't see it, let the man in, learned the truth. "Kuzrnic could never have been a perrnanent ally for you," the man said. "You cannot succeed alone in this war."

The woman of international mystery and intrigue was seated at the same cafe table. "I've dismissed the dog," she said. "They're just like humans in that they disappoint you as they get old. Treaties are signed, broken, denied." She offered him a chair. He considered making his leave permanent. "I'll have nothing to do with a man on leave," she said. Aiken had his base of operations transferred. He missed Kuzmic, had heard from him only occasionally since the jungle incident, only thought of him when the exigencies demanded. "Where are you?" she said. Her dress was red in the green garden, with Christmas approaching conspiratorially.

There is emergency news. Kuzmic has renounced relecomrnunications as a solution. "It is but a vehicle," he says. The new Kuzmic no longer demands the exchange of blood with Aiken; he is relatively

certain that he has eluded the frail man and his blinders for good. "You reach a stage," he says, "where choices are irrevocable. You trip the wire. In my case, I was destroyed and have been forced to rebuild from scratch." He urges Aiken to avoid undue flirtations with television and film. "Vehicles of the occupation," he writes. "They have virtual control of the mainstream. Trust your judgment."

The trick is to lower expectations without scrapping the game plan, Aiken learns from the woman of international mystery and intrigue. He saddle-soaps his cracking boots and marches headlong into the arms of his home city, now considered an Occupied Territory. The woman of international mystery and intrigue is with him, suggesting alternatives, contributing instructional suggestions, following her own set of maneuvers. They are stunned by the terrifying ransacking that has taken place in this city. Aiken realizes that swiftness of destruction is, in this case, only a question of appearances. He knows this has been planned for many years. The frail man is probably located here, managing the occupied zone, confusing the populace, finding ways to run amok and be admired for it.

Awake before sunrise, Aiken resumes hand-to-hand combat with a frenzy, firing fusillades at the rosy-fingered dawn. Wake up! he shouts to the occupied city, receiving a response that ranges between expectation and hope. There is a letter bomb from the frail man in the mailbox. Aiken places it on the oak table that serves as joint staging area for himself and the woman of international mystery and intrigue. Deftly, he unrolls the pressure-sensitive tape, avoiding the wires. He takes a liquid-tip drone, blacks out his own name, writes "Merry Christmas. Return to Sender," daring the occupation troops to detect it. He carries it out to the drop,off point. She stirs on the bed. He accepts the necessity of her tendency to bring smart'bomb coffee beans into the house, understands the nature of alliance. He is now aware that even a soldier can make certain compromises. Kuzmic calls, accepts his invitation to be best man. The cadres are ready for the campaign's beginning. Conflict resolution skills improve. The woman of international mystery and intrigue diagrams her plans on the oak. He comes up behind her, on full alert. "I love you," he says, and trips the wire.

The third count

Andrew FetZer

I am wainng for my sister Nina to drive up from Boston for our Saturday lunch in my house on Bay Road, an old country road near Dudleyville. For a bachelor of fifty-nine, I make good lunches, she says. I have covered the salad with Saran Wrap and put it in the fridge. She wants her lettuce crisp, with a tomato from my garden and a sliced boiled egg. Besides the salad, we will have chicken rice soup (we had chicken noodle last week), cold cuts, and toast with Diet Mazola. For dessert, fresh peaches and cottage cheese. She is dieting again.

For thirty years my sister Nina has been seeing psychiatrists and feeling better about herself. "It's a process!" She has discovered health foods, but won't refuse an offer of Bavarian cream pie. She has tried est, folk dances of many cultures (Roumanian dances are fantastic), protein powders for clearing her blood, sweetened calcium tablets for her puffy eyelids, and human potential encounters for raising her consciousness. But not until Jesus saved her, a year ago, could she forgive our father for having been a Christian.

Our father, Hamilton Crail, was a successful businessman and a founding father of the Full Gospel Church in Boston. As an elder of that church he practiced a mixture of Scottish Calvinism and American fundamentalism. He struggled continually against sins of the flesh. When my sister Nina was fourteen, for example, he marched her off to his study one night for bringing the devil into our home. I don't know how she could have provoked our father. Did he catch her fondling herself, or wearing a pretty dress, or smiling while wearing a pretty dress? Shamed and bewildered in his study, she sobbed and on command croaked the Repentance Song: "Just as I am, without one plea." Apparently not satisfied, he took her to his study again the following night, for closer questioning behind his locked door. 238

And then, two months after these curious interrogations in Nina's fourteenth year, she fell sick and had to be taken to the hospital. She was brought home looking pale and wilted, cured of an "infection." Our father praised the Lord, and in church, as if inspired by Nina's recovery, he stirred up the congregation against our pastor for false preaching, and had him sacked. God, our father cried from the pulpit, holding up the Bible for his authority, could not use a modernist who doubted Creation Science and tolerated immoral books in public schools. Our false pastor, moreover, had done nothing to rescue from a mental hospital a young widow, a firecracker for the Lord, who had branded the foreheads of her two children with the emblem of the cross, to protect them from demons. The widow ought not to have used a heated knife, our father allowed, but her love and faith were great.

We were happy, Nina and I and our three brothers, when we could tiptoe through the day without attracting our father's attention. We scattered when we heard him coming, or froze in guilty attitudes when his figure loomed in the doorway. We could not live up to his standards. But we were not to despair. Our sins were God's opportunities. Hamilton Crail never hugged his children, flesh revolted him, but he worried about our souls. He believed in spiritual diagrams and drew pictures of our souls-a rectangle, say, containing circles and arrows going in and out.

Silent and withdrawn since her visit to the hospital, Nina found music harder to ignore than diagrams. Sometimes, when the church choir sang "Perfect submission, perfect delight," she was touched by the love of Jesus and wept. "Filled with His goodness, lost in His love."

But when the call to repent thundered from the pulpit, she did not go forward to prostrate herself before the elders, among whom Hamilton Crail stood waiting darkly.

My sister Nina is fifty-five years old now and very fat, and she has spent her life worrying about her weight. A year ago, at a meeting in Boston of charismatic youngsters who call themselves The Disciples, she found happiness, she tells me, that cannot be expressed in words. She gave herself to Jesus completely, without reservations-Nina insists upon her surrender by tapping her chest with her chubby fistand in return Jesus has taken her burdens upon Himself. "The only word for it is bliss!" she says, chattering without stop-she who used to hesitate before speaking-and smiles at my wonder. She feels ornnipotent, she could do anything, she declares, and looks around my living room for a mountain to move. 240

Nina has backslidden twice since her conversion a year ago. During these dark spells that test her faith, lasting two or three weeks, she looks miserable and mutters about our father. "He must have hated me," she says. Would 1 say she had been hateful as a little girl? She says he never forgave her for the "unspeakable secret" between them, which Nina has never revealed to me beyond its being her unspeakable secret. "I hope you never guess," she stammers, her intelligence lapsing strangely, and tears fill her eyes.

Poor fat Nina takes her backslidings to her overworked psychiatrist, who gives her two Valiums and sends her to The Disciples for another fix. The Disciples rally round her. Lovely youngsters with effulgent eyes. They chant and clap to the accompaniment of electric guitars and drums, and raise their hands, palms up, when the Spirit begins to move, drums beating, until Nina shudders and jiggles with hiccups, and the storefront resounds with jubilation. "I'm a Jesus junkie, there's no way without Him," she says happily, between backslidings, and has taken to quoting chapter and verse and using evangelical language not heard in our family since our father died in the Lord thirty-five years ago.

She is an honest soul, my sister, and frankly expresses doubts about The Disciples and their Apostle, who has spoken face to face with Gautama Buddha, Moses, and Jesus, and who will be translated bodily into heaven. Their Apostle sends pamphlets, tape cassettes, and instructions to his flocks from headquarters in Los Angeles. Her doubts are received with love and understanding by the joyful youngsters. They don't say much about Father, as they call their Apostle, to new converts. Her doubting is beautiful, they tell her. Her every opinion is beautiful. And after the meeting they have coffee and cake, and the elders (ages eighteen to twenty-six) organize the week's Outreach activities. Think of all the people who will be left behind, any day now. Next week, the Boston flock will divide for missionary forays into Worcester and Amherst, scheduled for the same Monday, a college holiday, and Nina has offered to transport a load of them in her Plymouth Volare.

The minister is a twenty-six-year-old sweetie from Salt Lake City, Utah, for whom the Apostle picked a darling girl from Dallas, Texas. Nina has never seen such a happy couple, so in love with each other. The girl's parents tried to have the marriage annulled, spending more money on lawyers than they ever spent on their daughter. The Apostle limits the happy couple to spiritual intercourse for two years and may separate them in different missions far from home, to deepen their God-centered commitments to each other. His missions are nursing and foster homes in thirty-eight states-God's plan is to cover all

fifty-into which are funneled federal and state moneys, only the Apostle knows how much and the Lord's work cannot have enough. The godless parents of that darling girl, Nina tells me with a mildly crazy look in her eyes, have not seen these kids at work, in prayer and praise.

At the meeting in their temple, a Boston storefront, Nina sits with the young minister, paper plate on her lap, styrofoam cup in her hand, and tells him how she relapsed from her slimming diet. Does her relapse signal another backsliding? "That's beautiful," says the attentive young man, and places his hand lovingly on her fat arm. "You're a beautiful person, Nina."

All this Nina relates with a full heart, her eyes shining. Her eyes are too old for clone-like effulgence and cloud over when she gives a scared smile of hope for me as well. We should be in this thing together, she says. Our three brothers rejected Jesus, she reminds me, and look at what happened to them. All dead. "You're all I have left, Jim," she says. Jesus takes pity on her backsliding and turns His face to her again, and pulls her to His forgiving bosom, and even lets her eat if she wants to. Eat or don't eat, but don't make such a big deal of it. "Look at the flowers of the field!" she cries. What am I going to do about Jesus? she wants to know. After all His suffering for us, will I accept Him or reject Him? If I accept Him He will accept me, and if I reject Him He will reject me.

The child's garden in her soul has had a long time to grow into a jungle. Lost in those senseless mazes, Nina is at last finding a way out, or believes that a way out is being found. I am glad for her and am almost grateful to The Disciples. Better than Valium, maybe. We were five once, four boys and one girl. Now Nina and I alone are left and our Saturday lunches are the last gasps of our family.

She forgoes some of our Saturdays for The Disciples. She lends them her car and gets it returned with a bashed fender. One Saturday she joined them in a street demonstration against Moonies, followers of a false prophet who claims that Jesus was hot to get married when He was killed, a doctrine the true Apostle in Los Angeles has pronounced unbiblical, inspired by Satan, leading to such Communist godlessness as the mass suicide-murder in Jonestown, Guyana. Full proof available on request, without cost or obligation.

Nina called last Monday to say that she would be free-freel-to visit me this Saturday, and suggested chicken rice soup for lunch. "Father says we should eat more rice, less potatoes." So the Apostle of The Disciples is her new father. She would arrive at noon, she said,

and added that she had committed ten percent of her stock portfolio to The Disciples. The principal, not the income. That would come to $30,000, roughly. She sounded pleased with herself.

"The principal?"

"I knew you'd gasp. It's the tithe I owe them. I'm ashamed I didn't promise more. I owe them everything!"

Imagine owing anybody everything. Since her religious conversion, she has begun to talk like a fourteen-year-old. "Nina, you can't do that."

"I knew you wouldn't understand," she said with harrowing patience. "Just trust me, O.K.? I know what you think of The Disciples, but you're dead wrong. You're still blinded, like I was. Please don't bring it up again when I see you."

If it made me feel better, she said, the young minister talked her out of giving more than ten percent. She had to grow stronger in the Lord before her new father in Los Angeles would consider accepting her total commitment: Caesar could contest large donations in court if they were not done right. I felt a weakness in my knees and sat down by the telephone, at my kitchen table. "I'm sorry I mentioned it," she babbled. "Just fix the salad and I'll be there by noon. You know what it's like, Jim? Coming to Jesus is like coming home again!"

Right.

Ten percent to that fellow in Los Angeles-for a start. itA tithe," I said, "is a tenth of your income, not your principal, for Christ's sake!"

"I won't have you taking the Lord's name in vain!" But she allowed herself a pause, perhaps for the shadow of a doubt to cross her mind. "I don't care what a tithe is. I'd rather be dead than live without Jesus. It's called faith, if that still means anything to you. For all his faults, Father had faith. Now I'm sorry for every bad thought I ever had about him. I beg his forgiveness!" she began to yell. "I repent in dust and ashes! I was hateful! Yes, I love him! Do you hear me, Jim? I just can't hate him any more, don't you understand? I'm tired! I've made peace, and you're still ranting after all these years. Except now you are ranting at me instead of at Father."

Before The Disciples got to Nina we talked about lawn fertilizers and stock options, and walked in the woods, and came in for coffee and an oldie showing Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Now Nina talks about Jesus. I had rather we talked about fertilizers and stock options again, and about a little elephant in our county.

I want to talk about a local inbred, Sloan Mudge, a spawn of incest who keeps a female dwarf elephant in his zoo. Sloan Mudge is physically and mentally deformed, and his elephant, recently acquired,

resembles Nina in her obesity. I hold them in view when she talks about Jesus.

Last summer I took her out to Teewaddle Road for a look at Sloan Mudge and his dwarf elephant. Nina did not want to go, she loathes Mudge and his slithery ways. But she had not seen his elephant and came along.

Mudge sat askew on his crate, clutching a roll of zoo tickets, and greeted us with his professional "'Joy yourself, now!"

She ignored him, and she hated his dirty elephant standing in its own muck, regarding her with little eyes. Raising its trunk, it worked its prehensile lips an inch from her face. Nina would not stay another minute in that damned zoo. "Is that what you brought me out here for?"

On the telephone, Nina's voice quavered, suddenly plaintive. "Are you there, Jim?"

"Look," I said. "I don't mind your Disciples. They give me an idea to buy Sloan Mudge's elephant."

"What are you talking about?"

"If you can spend ten percent on Jesus, I can spend a few dollars on an elephant."

Her intake of breath was followed by a threatening silence.

"We could trade," I said. "You give me Jesus, I'll give you the elephant. "

"Is that all you can feel about me now? Ridicule?"

She was crying. Kids in a Boston storefront, gone from pot to pushing an Apostle in Los Angeles, taking their guitars with them, attract a sad fat woman who has never married and loves children. They give her a jesus-fix and she feels bright, a beautiful person with beautiful opinions. But there is a side to Nina that is not primitive: her backslidings will grow longer, darker.

"I'm sorry," she said, sniffling, when she'd had her cry. "I didn't mean that about you. God knows you're a sweetie. But listen. Are you listening?

"I'm listening."

What she said next chilled me, as if she were offering lemonade and cyanide in Jonestown, Guyana. "Jim, you mustn't be afraid. I'm not afraid any more. I'll be with you, we'll go together. I know God will reclaim you, even if He has to break you first-remember? Father was right, after all."

He was right. All our brothers suffered diseases or accidents or bad marriages. The eldest was broken by all three, the second by suicide, the third by madness. Two to go, Nina and me. Hamilton

Crail's ghost has been stalking his children and now has Nina cornered, a lonely woman too weary to keep running, a broken and a contrite heart. In a year she will be ready to give her last stitch to The Disciples, mop floors in a barracks in Beulah, and write, when permitted contact with the doomed world, of her fears for me, and send unbelievers to hell, and pray for my salvation. It would be too awful for Nina to go alone, as the Bible threatens: sister taken, brother left behind.

In parting, Nina said on the telephone, "I'll pray for you, Jim, and I won't stop praying for you. That's all Father could ever do for us."

"Thank you very much."

"Don't trifle with God! I can't ever, ever, allow you to use that tone again-praise the Lord!"

That did not sound like Nina but like the old Full Gospel Church.

Salad, cold cuts, peaches and cottage cheese-all is ready for Nina's arrival at noon. The table in my dining room is set with our father's silverware, his monogram engraved indelibly. In the kitchen I find a squat vase with narrow neck, for my glass flowers. I bought them yesterday at the Crafts Fair from two scrubbed members of a commune, a man and a woman-bare feet, Levis, plaid shirt, mop of hair, torpor common to both. These two were working out their salvation by selling handmade clay pipes, ceramic medallions on thongs, glass flowers with long metal stems, and home-sewn cotton tunics piled rumpled in a dirty cardboard box. Their eyes drifted and they gave me slack-jawed smiles.

At my kitchen window I can keep an eye out for Nina's car to appear on Bay Road, while I arrange the glass flowers in the vase. Blue, green, red, and yellow-two of each. I got them for my crystal collection, glass flowers for my crystal dancer. They are supposed to sway and tinkle.

In the living room the grandfather clock Nina picked up at an auction chimes the eleventh hour, a ghostly sonority recalling the ordered days and years of a family long gone. It occurs to me, with a spasm, that I need some disorder in my house, something alive and warmer than my crystal dancer. Nina's religious estrangement is cooling the weekly warmth she used to bring. Her voice has a hard edge when she talks about Jesus. Her face looks tight. She'll end up a missionary, if I know the signs. How keep myself warm? My incontinent old Airedale had to be put away last year. How about Sloan Mudge's dwarf elephant? A little madness would be nothing new in our family.

The owner of the elephant is of a race of New England inbreds still to be seen in our parts, a stunted little man with matted hair, low forehead, yellow eyes. At today's prices he could make a good living cutting firewood, but he can't stick to anyone task. He sets up a stand of blackberries for the sparse traffic on his road, hires himself out to pick cucumbers at child-labor rates, patches car tires at the Mobil station in Dudleyville. Sometimes, he disappears for a month, nobody knows where. Life has taught Sloan Mudge to be secretive. Once, an alarming rumor compelled a Congregational minister to bear a gift of groceries to his shack, and ask the recluse if he kept a grown daughter chained to his bed. "Nope," said Mudge, and took the groceries. The minister did notice a fall of chain in the rubbish on the rickety porch, but no daughter in the shack or near it. "He had a daughter by his sister," Nina said when we gossiped, her belief unshaken. Nobody had ever seen a woman in his vicinity, and all other Mudges, young and old, were safely tucked away in Mildwood Cemetery.

Sloan Mudge put up signs for a quarter of a mile along his road, boards nailed to trees, reading "CAMPING $2" in whitewash and an arrow pointing to the sky. He had run a water pipe from his well to the camp, and clapped together an outhouse with boards from his collapsed barn. A few out-of-state explorers pulled in with their cam' pers and were driven out by mosquitoes from Mudge's swamp. His camp fared no better the second summer, though an agent from a state agency in Boston, studying water resources, offered to drain the swamp and kill the mosquitoes. Government interference did not sit well with Mudge, but the threat may have fired his ingenuity to come up with a better idea for pulling in campers. His dream of the good life would not die, and, in the third summer of his camp's existence, below his amended "CAMPING $4" appeared a second sign: "ZOO." I did not drive out to Teewaddle Road for a look at his zoo until two college students stopped by my house soliciting signatures for a petition to free the animals. The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals had been alerted, and legal machinery had been set in motion to close Sloan Mudge's private enterprise.

Driving out on a hot summer Saturday, when Nina was serving The Disciples, I was touched to see that in his "ZOO" signs along Tee' waddle Road Sloan Mudge had not availed himself of the adman's exclamation mark. His "ZOO" stated a fact, take it or leave it. I felt instinctive sympathy for Mudge, and rejoiced at the sight of cars pulled up by the zoo entrance, a classic example of Mudge architecture: gravel dumped over a culvert.

Here, Sloan Mudge himself sat on a crate, sweating and scratching himself, wearing a new Tvshirt over stained pants, and guarded the

entrance with a board reading "25" propped up beside him. He looked a happy man, his aches forgotten. Without raising his yellow eyes to mine, he snatched the coin from my hand before I could give it, and, turning to spy who else might be coming up the road, said, "'Joy yourself, now!"

Seven campers and two tents showed in the trees on the swamp' side, striped awnings unfurled. In the foreground, a dozen locals converged around a snack wagon featuring popcorn, Fritos, hot dogs, Table Talk pies, and sodas in the drifting dust.

Setting forth on my tour, I came upon a fox in a chicken wire enclosure, lying dusty beside a dusty tin plate. The fox was being urged to move=-t'Move it!"-by a man who had taken his denim shirt off in the heat, his paunch hanging over his belt. "Bet this critter's dead," he guffawed, jabbing me with his elbow, and tossed his crushed beer can at the fox, just missing the tail.

The next attraction was a coughing mongrel tied by a rope to a post. Atop the post was fastened a five-inch cage made of window screening, containing a spider watching flies trying to get in. Then the path forked, offering choices. The left path took me to the birds: a pintail duck sitting in the dust, a turkey in a swarm of flies, a ring-necked pheasant with a broken tail, and two chickens and transient sparrows, all in one enclosure. Chicken wire, strung between two pines and a young elm, housed a screech owl asleep on a truncated branch. Be, neath this triangular cage, small bones and droppings littered the ground, and from the hexagonal mesh of the cage floor hung bits of rodent skins.

Returning to the spider's post, I took the more traveled path to the most impressive structure in Sloan Mudge's Zoo, a massive cage of four-by-fours, spacious enough for tiger or lion, but as yet vacant. Fortified with hot dogs and sodas, the locals had preceded me to a dwarf elephant beyond.

This captive, a spiritless female and the only animal in the zoo foreign to our parts, was no larger than a donkey. She was chained by a hind leg to an iron stake driven into the ground. Behind her lay the predictable dry bucket in the dust, overturned. Children reached out to slap her lethargic trunk-"Don't get too close!"-and the man with the beer paunch stood pelting her dusty hide with popcorn, expressing the general disapproval, for in her prolonged exposure to the hot sun the little elephant ignored her visitors. In the minutes I watched, she did not rest from her comatose swaying, back and forth, each forward motion forcing her chained hind leg off the ground as she pulled the chain taut. Her trunk hung unresponsive amid flying popcorn and candy wrappers.

When I left the zoo, Mudge called from his crate, "Come again, now!"

Three months later-l had taken Nina to the zoo in the intervalthe SPCA succeeded in having Sloan Mudge's zoo closed and his animals impounded, including a knock-kneed pony I had missed seeing, an emaciated pony that had been kept in a narrow stall for such a long time (four years, the Dudleyville Gazette said) that its hooves had curled up like Turkish slippers. Mudge's domestic animals, except his coughing mongrel and spider, were taken to the university's Agricultural Station for documentation.

But for some legal reason the authorities could not impound his dwarf elephant, for which he was able to produce a dubious bill of sale. The elephant had to await separate legal action.

Yes, I am dwelling on Sloan Mudge. Arranging the glass flowers in the vase and keeping an eye out for Nina's car to appear on Bay Road, I sit at my kitchen table and dwell on Mudge. Consider. In town Mudge has been showing acquaintances his picture in the Gazette. How, I wonder, given his material and mental resources, did he achieve so much in so little time? A zoo, no less, with an elephant and a screech owl and other birds and beasts, and maybe a lion or tiger on the way. A good idea builds. He had actually pulled it off, his greatest idea. He had looked happy that day, snatching the coin from my hand and wishing me joy in his paradise. He and his generations of inbred artists have always run afoul of the law; it is not his fault that the law wrecked his great zoo. Tenacious, ingenious Mudge has tried. He can rest now and feel in his weary bones the tug of millennia and the deliverance that lies in extinction.

In my mind I have christened Mudge's elephant Baby. What if I offered him $2,500 for her? Would he hold out for $3,000? I foresee problems with Baby, not the least of them local publicity. But the publicity will pass and Mudge inspires. Of course Baby would be better off in the Boston Children's Zoo-or would she? I could give her my love and a good home. Her bucket would never run dry. Hell, I'd give her a whole pool to play in, in a fine expansive paddock of upright railroad ties, even if I had to dip into my stock portfolio to do it.

Apparently Mudge does have title to Baby, though how he acquired her, with what money, where, remains nobody's business but Mudge's. His bill of sale for her, an incomprehensible German "Rechnung" on which Mudge's name is superscribed, was pictured on page 20 of The Boston Globe: "Sie erhalten auf Grund lhrer Bestellung als Postpaker: I Elephas africanus pumilia." Signed by one "G. Hagenbeck, Hamburg,"

the bill shows numbers for "Postschekkonto," "&nkkonw," "Girokasse," "Girokonto," and is originally addressed to "Herm, Frau, Frl., Firma Nelly Billiard, Philadelphia, Pa., U.S.A." Did G. Hagenbeck ship the elephant to Nelly Billiard by parcel post? Beyond the "Elephas africanus," this bill of sale, in its every aspect and unimaginable connection with Mudge, or indeed with Nelly Billiard, is as unintelligible to me as my own life-those aspects and connections of my life that occupy my thoughts.

My main difficulty would be providing for Baby's comfort so late in the season. Fall is upon us, the leaves are turning, you can smell arctic regions in breezes from Canada. Winter is coming. Whoever has no house will not build one now. If I kept Baby in the garage I would need a shed for my tractor mower and workbench. I'd have to lay a drain' pipe for hosing the garage floor, and run the pipe out to the septic tank. The garage would need enough insulation and heating to be warm as the Congo during snowstorms. All this needs planning, contracting, time. For this winter, I see, I would have to take Baby into my house. Needless to say

Is it really impossible?

Who would consent to having a child if he foresaw in a flash all the expense and terrors which the rearing of his child would visit upon him? My sister Nina and I are vulnerable in this regard, our father's religion having tinted our souls with catastrophic expectations. I worry, for example, that Baby's progress through my house would punch holes in the floor, like tracks in snow. But stop and think. Look at her. This specimen of a pigmy Congo race is no larger than a donkey, which some Sicilians keep in their houses. She is no heavier than my Yamaha upright piano, which I have rolled about the house for a good acoustical spot, without cracking the floor. Baby could safely mount the two steps from garage to kitchen and find her own way to the running water, down the hall to the right.

I can see my little elephant sitting in the tub, filling her trunk with water and spraying it around the walls. I'll have the walls and doorway hung with plastic curtains, and the floor tiled toward a drainpipe, a simple job in the bathroom with its wealth of plumbing. Baby could easily climb in and out of the tub, for it is a modern tub, only twelve and one-quarter inches deep, designed for space calculated by efficiency engineers. She would not want to get out of the water, I would have to scold her through the plastic curtain, mop in hand, my view blurred by drops and rivulets on the curtain: "You've had all morning. Nina is coming. You don't want Nina catching you here, do you?" Waiting for Nina to arrive for our Saturday lunch, I sit at the kitchen table turning the vase of prismatic glass flowers. The ceiling

glitters with refracted sunlight. Outside, the wind has risen. The forecaster promised a calm day. I know a meteorologist who does not forecast; he marks the sweeping picture of the years. The prodigious elm tree on my lawn flutters in a frenzy of yellows and browns, seemingly on fire in a blizzard of elm seeds. In the light of this conflagration, Nina's car, sporting the fender bashed by The Disciples, turns into my drive at last.

"If I thought you were serious," Nina says when we have eaten the peaches and cottage cheese, "I'd commit you to a mental hospital."

She is taking my elephant fantasy more seriously than I expected. "Baby would be in the house only this winter," I say, testing Nina's credulity. "By spring I'd have the garage ready for her. The paddock would take no time at all. The big job would be the pool, but she could wait for that."

"Baby will certainly want to express her gratitude. She'll corner you one day, right there by the TV, and crush you to death."

Nina has gained weight again. She has exchanged her tweed suit for a loose batiste in penitent gray, resembling a maternity dress, too light for the season. Over her shoulders she has thrown a girlishly pink sweater, pink on gray like fall leaves awaiting winter.

A horrible thing happened when we sat down to lunch. She could not fit herself between the arms of her chair Too fat. I hastened to substitute an armless guest chair. Seating herself precariously, she composed her face and said: "Disgusting, ain't I. Well, it's true. Why pretend?" It was a bad moment for me to go on spinning my elephant fantasy for my elephantine sister. But I would have done worse to drop the subject abruptly, after introducing it with such a toot for something a bit messy in my life.

We take our coffee to the couch in the bay window. I see the elm burning in the sun, positively on fire. Every fall Nina remarks on the turning colors, but for once I don't call her attention to my elm. A trick of light does something unpleasant to it, something other than pretty. I stand transfixed.

"Why don't you get a dog?" she says, impressing the couch enormously with her buttocks. Her body seems to be inflating before my eyes.

I sit beside her. "No dog," I say. "After Emmy"-my Airedale gone to glory-"there is no other."

"Get a cat," says Nina.

"Emrnv was afraid of cats."

"You're beginning to irritate me. You're doing it on purpose, aren't you. To get back at me?"

250

"For what?"

"For Jesus," she says.

"I don't know Jesus. I know some people who know Jesus."

"Your joke is wearing thin. Why do you keep hammering away at it?

"What makes you think I'm joking?"

"Because an elephant is unthinkable, even to you."

"The unthinkable can become thinkable. Jesus, for example."

"Jesus unthinkable?"

"Of course Jesus is unthinkable. Born of a virgin? Passing understanding. Why else would you need faith? If you can think aboutJesus, why can't I think about an elephant?"

"Where in hell," Nina explodes, "do you propose to keep your damned elephant! In the guest room?"

"The guest room is too small. So is the sewing room."

"You considered the sewing room?" she wails. "With all my things in the sewing room?"

"I wouldn't touch your things. You can come live here any time you want."

"Bay Road," she says with a moan. "I can't live on Bay Road. I need people. How can you live on Bay Road? You must have ice in your veins, like that crystal dancer of yours. Why don't you move to Boston?"

"I'd go crazy in Boston."

"You're going crazy on Bay Road, talking about elephants."

In the bay window the wind is subsiding, the elm stands burning like an iceberg.

"I couldn't keep Baby in this room, either," I say, pushing my fantasy. "I'd have to move the couch to your bedroom and the TV to the kitchen. But where would I put the piano? The kitchen isn't big enough for the piano."

Nina rolls her eyes, an expression she reserves for my inanities.

"The dining room," I say, "is long enough, but too narrow. The den is my library. I'm not giving that up, not even for Baby. The only room left is your bedroom, Nina. It's large enough for Baby, private bath and all. Just for this winter, remember. You could have my bedroom when you stay over. I'll sleep in my den."

She is stunned.

She says, "Why do you hate me?"

"I don't hate you."

"I have nobody."

I ought to hug her now, divert her with something light, affecting, a confection on Channel 3 or a home-fried gospel song to make her clap

her hands with all the people, and let her have her cry, and sniffle, and smile again. But I shall not divert her from my fantasy. She will divert herself in a moment. I am thinking of the children of Hamilton Crail, no less than of a little elephant whose keeper shows doubters a mysterious bill of sale for his authority to chain her to an iron stake. Seeing God-appropriators pelting Nina with religious popcorn, I am brightening the corner where I am. "Stand thou on that side, for on this am I!" the Full Gospel Choir used to sing in transports of selfconfidence. Here is my own song, about a little elephant.

Nina recovers, going from tearful to tough in twenty seconds. "You're not hurting me, James. What I can't understand is why you should want to hurt Jesus. Because that's what you are doing. After all He has done for us! Never mind me, but Jesus does matter." And she quotes John 3: 16 to prove that Jesus matters. "Come with me to the temple," she says, referring to the Boston storefront of The Disciples. "Just once. Your eyes will be opened."

The elm on my lawn burns icily. Shall I ask her to look? She would not see the terrible tree. She would see God's glory in the fall colors. Nina is moved by nature. "That's the glory of God," she will say. She is learning or recovering pretty ideas about God. She knows as much about God as TV evangelists and Job's comforters. She knows how loving God is, for God is Love, and, though just, He is merciful, her loving Father.

Silent, we sit on the couch, and then she is crying.

"I want to pray," she says. "Will you pray with me?"

"You go ahead."

"It's something we can do together, Jimmy."

"I'm not stopping you. Go ahead and pray."

"I want to help you!"

I feel a double-take. She wants to help me. I live in perpetual astonishment, in a kind of low dread that does not respond to singalongs sung ardently off key. Nina must have happiness, warmed and passed through many hands.

Hurt by my resistance, she sits rocking back and forth like my little comatose elephant chained to the stake. With great effort she pulls herself up from the couch, her effort so great that her eyeballs show their whites as if she's gone blind. She lumbers out between couch and coffee table and turns uncertainly, casting about for a way to kneel on the rug.

Somehow, she lands softly and stands on hands and knees, on all fours like Baby, her huge bulk breathing, her loose dress flowing in gray folds from her buttocks, revealing a blotched, liver-spotted, awesome circumference of thigh one might glimpse in the jungle.

Her pink sweater has fallen from her shoulders and lies hooked on the coffee table. She rights herself from all fours to her knees and raises her hands for praying, her body cantilevered like that of a circus elephant.

And then, horribly, our old Repentance Song breaks from her throat in her sweet little-girl voice; and I see her bewildered at four, teen, locked up with our father in his study, humiliated at his feet: "J ust as I am, without one plea.

But I have always loved Jesus, even as a little girl, Nina has told me since Jesus saved her, as if she were eager to please Jesus even in her memories.

"Jesus, my Lord and Savior," she says, swallowing a catch in her throat, and prays in whispers inaudible to me.

I sit on the couch studying her desolation. Thus have I known her since her fourteenth year. I can still see a vestige of that little girl in poor Nina, an outlined innocence in elbows and hands clasped in prayer. She is backsliding again and hanging on for dear life. Now and then my name rises from her slurred whispers, so she is praying for me too. Maybe I could help her by drawing the curtains: the light in which the tree stands is too harsh-too harsh altogether. I could play my stereo record of Mendelssohn's Elijah: "If with all your hearts ye truly seek me, ye shall ever surely find me." I'd like that myself, make no mistake. I'd need a hanky, hearing Elijah, and Nina would weep torrents and feel better, much better.

As Nina prays in her loneliness, I turn to look at the tree. The wind has fallen, the leaves are stilled, the great tree stands motionless like a crystal arrangement, not impressively colorful just now. It is a muted incandescence suffused with cold blue. I once sailed in a luxury liner dwarfed by a radiant iceberg that inclined my voyage, I know today, to this tree on my own lawn.

Yesterday, I happened to see the ruins of Sloan Mudge's Zoo. Stopping by his culvert, I got out of the car and scanned the blighted field for relics. A rank odor, sweetly putrescent, infected the air. A stark post stood where his zoo once stood. Rotting boards lay strewn about. A bit of window screening had curled and, with grass grown through, disguised itself as tumbleweed. The massive cage of four-byfours, once intended for a miraculous lion or tiger, had vanished without a trace.

May not such a miracle live in the pilgrim's reverence, on evidence not seen?

Pilgrims not lacking. Three distinct truck tracks, made by vehicles heavy enough to churn up mud, snaked across the field to Mudge's

swamp. There, where campers once camped in clouds of mosquitoes,I now discerned a scattering of industrial drums, indifferently concealed from the road. The drums led the eye beside the still waters of the swamp proper, a glimmering darkness streaked with silver and foam, such as rna y be painted by chemical wastes.

When Mudge gets caught he will be fined $50 for polluting his own drinking water, and admonished. "Yes, sir," he will say.

I drove on but slowed down and stopped again as Mudge's shack came in view on high ground, etched against the sky. He had prospered. In his weedy yard stood a new pickup and a horse trailer. A junked car lay on its back. Within the dark proscenium of his porch, a naked light bulb shone in an uncurtained window. Beside the shack stood the wreck of a barn, somehow keeping its feet, whole sections ofwalls missing, the roof caved in as if smashed by a fist. In a gaping hole in the barn I saw what I had not consciously come to see, the dwarf elephant. Or was it a pony? I got out of the car for a better look. From the road I could not make out the animal's shape in the gloom. The head seemed too large for a pony, the body too thick. I could not see her trunk or judge which way she faced. She stood under the caved-in roof, a shadow.

A shadow, polluted waters, a stark post in a blighted field, relicsSloan Mudge never disappointed. True to his generations of inbred artists, he continued to provide. The westering sun played its light on his old sign, a board nailed to a tree by the side of the road. The sign was weathered now, hung askew, the whitewash faded but still legible: "CAMPING $4" and an arrow pointing to the sky. And below, in witness of a bygone marvel: "ZOO."

He will never knock down these joyful tidings. If a traveler should ask, Sloan Mudge will steal a look at the out-of-state license plate, shift his yellow eyes to the swamp, and in time, with hindsight and fore, sight, spin a myth.

I felt tired approaching my sixtieth year and was struck by the similarity between Mudge's road and mine. Too far from shopping malls, schools, and churches, both roads were shunned by home builders. Abandoned farms on Bay Road had been reclaimed by woods, while Teewaddle Road favored swamps and thickets. At twilight in October, roads more solitary than Mudge's and mine may not be seen in our parts, nor vistas more withdrawn from the human concourse. Such roads are sometimes pictured in tabloids. I could not loiter. A parked car on these desolate stretches suggested something less definable than lovers or bird watchers.

Nina's prayer smolders and goes out. It is hard to pray with an 254

unbeliever in the room. I steady her as she reaches for the coffee table and maneuvers herself up from her knees. Having regained her feet, she pulls away from my supporting hand, recovers her pink sweater, and looks about for her overcoat.

"You're leaving?" I ask. She is. She is going back to her friends in Boston. "I really must. We have an early meeting today."

My silly elephant fantasy has ruined our lunch. We'll not be walking in the fall colors and tart air promising winter. How pleasant it would have been, then, to come in for coffee and an oldie on TV, Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce this afternoon. Great Heavens, Holmes!

"What about our day?" I remonstrate. "There's a Sherlock Holmes movie today. Basil Rathbone."

"Really." She smiles in token that she has passed beyond such pabulum.

Besides losing our family hour with Sherlock Holmes, I have forfeited the moment for moderating Nina's caprice to squander $30,000 on The Disciples-her promised "tithe." Had I been sensible I might have nudged her to reconsider the sum for The Disciples. What possessed me to offer her bedroom to an elephant? I cannot reach her now, as she stands poking in her shoulder bag for the car keys.

"The chicken soup was great," she says. "Thanks for reminding me of my nothingness."

"That's not what I meant."

"That's exactly what you meant." She clasps her hands in mock gratitude. "Isn't that what you always meant-all of you? Didn't I get to wash the dishes while you played the piano? Nina the Moron?" And she stings herself three times with our childhood singsong: "'Nina the moron!'

Is that what her prayer tossed up? As I move to mollify her, she wards me off and whimpers the old incantation through gritted dentures. I can't get near her. She is spitting hellfire.

I follow Nina out to her Plymouth Volare.

Bay Road passes through woods here and my clearing is surrounded by woods. Summer and winter, my garden (now bedded in straw) stands in shadows well after sunrise and well before sunset. From the road my house, fieldstone and wood painted white, looks neatly tucked away in the woods. When the leaves turn, an occasional tourist car slows and sometimes the driver points at my house for his passengers to see. The sky is bright now but darkness abides in the underbrush.

As I hold the car door for Nina, she falls in expertly backwards.

Then she pulls her thick legs in after her, one at a time. I wonder how she avoids collisions: she drives reclining at an angle of forry-five degrees. The seat belt is not long enough for her girth. 1 close the car door. She fumbles with the keys and rolls down the window. Her cheek does not respond to my kiss.

"Are you really going to a meeting?" I ask.

She sits touching up her hair before the rearview.

"You treat me like a stranger," she says, adjusting a curl. Satisfied, she turns to give me a parting shot. "I wanted to talk about something important to me, and you talk about keeping an elephant in my bedroom. You think that's funny? You think it's funny telling me to trade Jesus for your damned elephant?"

"I'm sorry. It was a stupid joke. You came to talk, let's talk. Come on, get out. It's time for our walk. Then we'll have coffee and Sherlock Holmes. Won't that be fun?"

"I've had quite enough, frankly," she says. The car engine sparks to life.

Reclining now in her fearfuldriving position, she shifts her automatic into Rear but keeps her foot on the brake pedal, hesitantly. "Giving money to The Disciples doesn't really do it, does it?" she says.

"I couldn't agree more."

"Money is not enough," she says, resolutely, and shifts back into Park. "I want to go to a Bible College. I've been thinking about Okeko in San Diego. But my friends say Okeko discriminates against fatsos. They say fatsos are cursed by God. Do you know anything about it? Is it true?"

Is this what Nina came to talk about, and I talked about an elephant? Is it true that Okeko Bible College discriminates against fatsos, or that God has cursed fatsos, or cursed the lot of them?

"If Okeko says so," I say, "it must be in the Book."

"But that's only a human interpretation! Why can't they read the Bible like it's written!"

1 stand looking at her. She is close to tears again. Unaccountably, Nina wears her hair short, effectively lowering her forehead to simian proportions, capped by stiff ringlets of thinning hair blasted by beauty parlors. Her hair is graying. The ringlets do not altogether conceal the curvature of her skull, when viewed against light.

"It's great your wanting to go to college," I say. "I wish you'd told me sooner. I'll find a perfect little college for you. Just don't do anything in the meantime-all right?"

"I know all about your perfect little colleges. No thanks. But find out about Okeko. If I can't go to Okeko, I'll try Father. It's just that I'm not worthy of him yet."

"Worthy of Father?"

"Our Apostle," she says curtly, and seems to regret having blurted that much to an outsider. A guarded expression veils her eyes.

"Does that mean you will leave The Disciples, if you go to Okeko?"

"Why do you pretend interest? You're not interested. You haven't the faintest idea what it takes to be worthy of Father. What can you know on this deserted island of yours?"

"Are you coming next Saturday?"

"Are you inviting me?"

"Of course. Always."

"Not next Saturday," she says. "We're doing Outreach. I'll call you when I can."

So she leaves. Her car passes my roadside mailbox and glides out of my clearing into the woods.

Will she pay $30,000 to be found worthy of Father, and boil her brains into the bargain, in some Bible College that teaches Creation Science in the name of truth, avoiding profane and vain babblings, and oppositions of science falsely so called: which some professing have erred concerning the faith? Nina would have made a good horticulturist, or a good pastry chef. She has a green thumb, can talk to plants, and her pleasure in sweets would impress an effendi in Istanbul.

Silence flows back. Bay Road is a quiet old country road, traffic having abandoned it for a better one. From the lawn bench under my elm I contemplate the empty road and hear a soft wind in the trees and the raucous slang of a blue jay, a bird whose insolence is bred by violent dislike of predators. A hawk is about, or a roosting owl. Inhaling the cool air, I return to myself on this deserted island of mine.

I have never known a man whose agonies about the sins of his children matched my father's intensity. His after-dinner Bible Hour brought the Full Gospel Church into our home every day between Sundays, and when he judged we needed more he summoned us to the living room at bedtime, or later. On such occasions, while waiting for him to appear, we sat without speaking, as ordered, and scowled accusations at each other. Who among us had transgressed?

Hamilton Crail did not account himself the most blameless man in Boston, only the most God-loving, Shortly after Nina's "infection" in her fourteenth year, his rage for glory tortured him to confess himself the Chief of Sinners.

I do not recall what else he said that night. Our family meetings were all alike, indistinguishable from church services and the Radio Gospel Hour, without the latter's pitch for a Free Grace-Faith ("golden metal") Prosperity Cross prayed over according to God's

promises in Deuteronomy and Matthew. My father had indeed prospered, he could not love God enough, and he used to conclude our family meetings with a swing of the evangelical cudgel: "Pray with me!"

What I remember lucidly is my falling into a troubled sleep after one of those meetings, a sleep that conjured up the meeting in the form of a dream. It is my dream of the event, rather than the event itself, that has stuck in my memory through the years. From time to time I dream that dream again.

In my dream, the five of us have been summoned and sit waiting in the living room for our father to appear. My two younger brothers grow restive and pull at me to climb up on a ladder-back chair. They want to sled me around the room. I mount the chair, our eldest brother watches to see if we dare, and just then the door opens and a gigantic stranger enters, instead of our father.

Our summons is explained by the stranger's cropped hair and uniform of a prison guard from a 1930s melodrama. Massive neck and shoulders, blunt nose, stump of chin. He surveys the room with an air of authority. Much has happened behind the scenes last night while we slept, his manner tells us. We have all broken the law, and our father has had to go to the authorities and do his duty. The guard advances heavily into the room, an immoderate hulk suggesting restrained force, and speaks without raising his voice: "You all get ready to move, now."

He will brook no disobedience, it is clear. All except Nina rise to their feet. She slumps on the floor by the bookshelf, a dropped puppet in a pretty dress, her face that of an old woman, oddly darkened.

The guard seats himself in a Windsor chair and looks us over. His eyes rest on Nina and move on, unconcerned. Oblivious of my elevated position on the ladder-back chair, I remain standing on it, guessing that we will be marched out to a wagon and taken to our destination. I face the guard with confidence in my alacrity to obey. Hypocritical obedience is my strong suit. I will hop on one leg when ordered, fling myself to the ground when ordered. What can't I do, when ordered? I shall be a model prisoner, I shall win over the guard and get a commendation for good behavior, and maybe privileges.

"Now," says the guard, after he has scrutinized us. "When I count to three, you all start running out that door."

He will see what a good boy I am. Standing on my chair, I brace myself as for the start of a race. I want to be the first in the wagon. "One two "

As the guard holds off the third count, I become aware of his watching me narrowly to see if I jump the gun. I will not jump the gun,

never never. I will make for the door on the third count precisely, not a split second before or after.

I keep this promise to myself, inspired by fear of the unknown and by my need to survive. I don't jump the gun. And the third count never comes.

The guard sits scanning the room. All stand frozen like dummies. We wait for the third count, and the guard's silence persists. My forward knee begins to tremble with the effort of holding still. I can't abandon my feeling that he is only doing his job, an elementary humanity behind the functionary must respond to my good will. I read in his eyes, as he returns my look, that he understands my sentiment. But he appraises me with an animal's vacant regard, and then I see that his skull is empty but for an implacable, unqualified, impersonal hatred, hatred without sense, directed not at transgression or trans, gressor but simply there like a reptile.

The third count never comes. But for a moment the pain of its not coming is transcended. My two younger brothers, ages nine and eleven, below the age of reason, one could plead, suddenly give the chair I stand on a shove, and, as I catch my balance, sled me around the room. In an eruption of play they push me in a delightful circle over the carpet, to the far end of the room and back. I feel securely fixed on the careering chair, and with the momentum gained I steer myself as on skis to the guard and come to a stop with a happy little flourish.

He leans sideways and holds me in his reptilian gaze. He can't punish me, I'm sure. Technically, I did not disobey him, I did not leave the chair, I remained standing on it, waiting for his third count, I was shoved and the chair slid about by itself.

"Having fun?" he says, and turns to the room at large. "You all accept Jesus, now. There's no other way. By the time I count three it will be too late."

Who could have invented such an instrument?

Reviews

Evan S. Connell, Saint Augustine's Pigeon. Edited by Gus Blaisdell. North Point Press, 1982.291 pp. Hb, 12.50; pb, $8.50.

In the sixteen stories of Saint Augustine's Pigeon, Evan S. Connell's characters belong to a society in which the pressure to conform is strong. The stories are set, for the most part, in the United States during the fifties and sixties, when it seemed that scarcely anyone could escape social constraints. Many of Connell's characters are happy to embrace conformity, as part of what one of them calls "the responsibility of being human"; others, who think that they've freed themselves, have been influenced by the expectations of the community in ways they cannot imagine. As a storywriter committed to traditional forms but not to conventional values, Connell wants to know what happens to all of these people, particularly when they begin to see their lives more clearly.

The characters who accept conformity in Connell's stories tend to believe that they are following a system that has been established in their best interests. They buy houses, raise children, and endure unexciting jobs, since "to us that seemed the proper pattern because it was traditional, and we were holding to it as best we could." Although aware that they are getting older and that life's pleasures are decreasing, they stay convinced of the need to accept "what might be called average happiness-3 % down the years so to speak. It wasn't exhilarating, not even adventurous, but it was sufficient." When they hear of someone who thinks differently, they are quick to charge that person with having wasted his or her life. It helps their case that so many of the people who attempt to break the pattern end in failure, brought down apparently

by influences on their personalities that they cannot overcome. No matter how hard they try, these characters continue to be the products of their upbringing, often remaining too innocent or naive to deal with new threats in an unfamiliar world. In one story, a girl travels to New York, full of hope, only to become a prostitute, eventually servicing a man from her hometown. Another girl has such a good time with two Arabs in Paris that, assuming it is part of a game, she lets them buy a basket the size of her body and then accompanies them to a park, where they behead her. In another story, a screenwriter enjoys his one fling with a woman in a motel, and is murdered by a jealous husband; his widow holds it against him that the woman was overweight and unattractive.

The victories, when they come, tend to be small, and strange. One man finds a lover, but fails to see that she is even more domineering than the wife he wishes to divorce. The highlight of another man's life occurs when he persuades his wife to remove her corset and perform acrobatic tricks in their bedroom. Some people can only be witnesses of the success of others, as when a family from Iowa visits a restaurant in Santa Cruz and listens with awe to the wild, inspired cries of a fisherman. Seemingly, the most such characters can expect is to remain on the inside looking out; they aren't suited for escape.

The only real success in eluding conformity is the character]. D., who appears in two stories, a man regarded by his friends as "one of those uncommon men who follow dim trails around the world hunting a fulfillment they couldn't find at home." The statement suggests a special genius for breaking ties and disregarding influences; indeed, ]. D. travels the world for years, seeking out

the places where the tourists don't go, ancient villages in the mountains of Spain, windmills in Majorca, palaces remote in the provinces of India. The men who have stayed at home need to think that J. D. has wasted his life, becoming a "middle-aged man without a trade, without money or security of any sort," and with "no bona fide skills." When he returns home to live, however, they feel betrayed, admitting that "perhaps without realizing it we trusted him to keep our youth."

It would be easy to attribute such conformity solely to ignorance or a lack of imagination. Rather, the willingness to accept beliefs and forms prescribed by society, Connell suggests, may arise from a deep need for security in a troubled world. In a set of three stories, Muhlbach, a protagonist who recurs in Connell's novels, becomes obsessed with the fear of unknown forces when his wife dies. To protect himself and his two children from "evil. misery, destruction, violence, life without hope," he builds a bomb shelter. It doesn't matter that he has laughed at the government publicity on the value of shelters against nuclear attack. "I acquiesce in the name of prudence, which is a sort of wisdom," he contends, until his son attempts to shock him into recognizing his timidity. But Muhlbach accepts social restrictions in other ways as well, convinced that he must not exceed "the limits set for my nature." After attempting to meet a young woman in Manhattan, he decides to live "within my province," quietly and routinely. Like many of the other characters in these stories, he welcomes the comforts of a structured society.

To some critics, Connell might seem to contradict himself by examining social constraints while relying on established literary forms. He might even be accused of imposing conformity on the reader, who is required to stay within the boundaries of a carefully controlled text. Certainly this collection demonstrates that Connell is in charge of every element

of his narratives and that he has been in firm control since his early publications more than thirty years ago. The stories are marked, however, by a dialectical play between the desire for freedom and the conformism of Connell's characters, which suggests the subtlety of his approach as a writer of short fiction.

Some of the most powerful effects of this struggle arise from what Connell leaves unstated. In the story "Arcturus," a former lover of Muhlbach's wife comes to visit, bringing his current girl friend. Although Muhlbach's wife is dying, almost nothing is said about her illness; yet her appearance and the obvious concern of her family and servants load significance into every action and statement in the story, from the implicit competition between the two men down to Muhlbach's closing reassurances to his son, who fears that the sky is falling. When a character begins to discover the limitations of his or her life, Connell invariably draws back and lets the reader carry the implications forward. This happens near the end 00. D.'s visit home when one of his friends, envious 00. D.'s travels, attempts to talk about his own plans. He announces that he and his wife intend to visit the Bahamas:

"You'll like the Bahamas," J. D. said.

"We consider other places," Russell said unexpectedly, and there were tears in his eyes.

J. D. was watching him with a blank, pitiless gaze.

"I think I'll go to Byzantium," Russell said.

"That doesn't exist anymore."

Russell took a deep breath to hush the panic that was on him

The freedom that Connell gives to some characters, he gives to the reader as well. By disguising the subtly subversive elements in his apparently traditional storyforms, he draws the reader into the panic of characters whose responsibility for

their lives prompts the reader's responsibility to judge them. Connell is too crafty to judge them for us, but also too humane to allow us to condemn them without understanding their fears, which are ours.-Fred Shafer

Raymond Federman, The Twofold Vibration. Indiana University Press, 1982. 175 pp. Hb, $10.95.

Addressing critics, readers, fellowwriters, and others opposed to the iconoclastic forms and rebellious spirit of experimental fiction, Raymond Federman once wrote: "Yah! That much must be stated, you guys know how to express yourselves. Yah beautifully. Impeccable style. Long and difficult sentences. Nothing there to bitch about. Complex phrases. Well constructed (within the rules and the logic of grammar) and with respect for syntax and punctuation. And all kinds of scientific words and wellmade images. And all sorts of levels of meaning and double meaning. That much is clear," he wrote. "There you are unbeatable. And when it comes to expression and writing, you guys surpass one another, without the least effort. You guys are really tremendous in the catechism of lirrerature and Belles-Lerrres with all its ABCDEFGHljKLMNOPQR5TUVWXYZ in Capital letters and in miniscule letters abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz and the whole upper gamut of punctuation all that very indicative exclamative interrogative derogative punctual scripture!"

Continued Federman: you guys aaaare the oooones wHo judge whooo dedeDeciDe what ooothEr GuUUUys should or shooouid nononot read. First published in Chicago Review, such passages reappeared, with others, in Federman's novel Double or Nothing. There they lurch, flaunt and squeal in the face of an enemy who is reassuringly vivid. Yet the enemy, obviously, helps to define Federman and his typically puck-

ish verbosity; the enemy, as much as Federman, chastises us and entertains. Is Federman now meandering toward the enemy's camp? A former habitue of Fiction Collective circles and other determined cabals of literary subversion, with his latest novel the writer seems to have cast his lot with the establishmentIndiana University Press. Along with Charles johnson's Oxherding Tale, The Twofold Vibration marks the debut of Indiana's fiction series. Thus it's rather odd to recall Federman's earlier attacks on bourgeois intellectuals and bourgeois literary hacks, who failed largely, it seems, not by being bourgeois or being hacks or being powerful, but simply by not publishing enough Federman. One might expect to find signs, in The Twofold Vibration, of questionable collaboration between old foes become friends: modifications of Federman's once zealous obscurities, linguistic revolts, and refreshing discursiveness, to suit a new officialdom. But not so. Though undoubtedly more accessible than usual, the author of Vibration is much the same Federman as before.

Vibration is called an "extemporaneous novel" by its author. And of course the term invites playful speculation on our part, knowing Federman's delight in setting up a game-or several-for woebegone highbrows who want a scent to catch. 50 "extemporaneous" it is, in robust, casually punctuated, spontaneously strung paragraphs that relate in picaresque fashion the story of a roguish central character caught in the bureaucracy of a future world. And it is extemporaneous, too, in the sense that time is considered a flexible, not a linear, quantity-a continuum where past, present and future intermingle in the hands and minds of one or more narrators. Time exists as something "out of time," as time is normally construed.

The strengths of the novel, though, lie not in any such theories as may animate it; they lie in the fictive animation itself, Federman's. His feel for suspense, always

with a humorous tinge in it, keeps the plot-unorthodoxically-rolling. His uninhibited affection for his main character, a writer who quite fetchingly resembles himself, is also endearing. Federman's companionate juggling of narrators, who act as middlemen between himself and "the old guy," amuses most of the time. And his thumbnail surveys of Western cultural history, including forays into future decades, are mildly critical and mainly sidesplitting. This is to say nothing of the plot itself. It is satisfyingly unpredictable, but not cute. Held together loosely by the medium of those paragraphs-taut, digressive, descriptive and philosophical by turns-the plot begins and ends with the same ostensible enormity: the deportation of the old man, Federman's hero, from earth to "the space colonies." The year is 1999; January 1,2000, marks the day of departure for a multitude of citizens deemed undesirable by the powers that be. Federman sends his middlemen, Namredef and Moinous, in search of clues to explain why "the old guy" has been singled out for this disgrace, and also in search of a way to forestall it. So they journey backward and forward through time and through their knowledge of him, to this end.

Such a summing-up, however, makes Vibration sound conventional. It isn't. Though skirting several genres, it doesn't plummet into anyone. It's not science fiction; it's not social criticism; it's not avant-gardism bellying up. It's a little of each, and then more of Federman.

Who else could successfully combine, for example, a macabre visit to the camp museum at Dachau with an impetuous sexual fling? Who else would shamelessly put Jane Fonda into fiction-Jane Fonda circa sixties radicalism-and seduce her? "June Fanon" is far more appealing than her flesh-and-blood twin; "the old guy" gallivants with her in the South of France for some five weeks, following a student riot they inspire at a university campus in Buffalo, New York-where Federman teaches. There's obviously a personal stake of one or another kind implanted in nearly every cranny ofthe novel, whether scapegrace fantasies or ideological diatribes result.

Federman's pleasure in the story he tells is not his only rudder while he tells it. But as one of several, it is valuable enough. Most novelists now writing either conventional or innovative prose take themselves too seriously, whether they are serious or not. It is rarer to find exuberance the predominant mood, tempered by experience. Federman brings an unexpected vitality to the university presses.-Molly McQuade

Publishers of books reviewed:

North Point Press 850 Talbot Ave. Berkeley, CA 94706

Indiana University Press Tenth and Morton Sts. Bloomington, IN 47405

Contributors

Peter de Seve is a free-lance illustrator in New York City. His work has appeared in Atlantic Monthly, Connoisseur, American Photographer, and The New York Times. Frederick Busch has written nine books of fiction. The tenth, a novel entitled The Outlaw Jew, will be published this year by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. A native New Yorker raised in Harlem, Evan K. Margetson is a participant in the Writer's Work� shop at Columbia University. "Veterans" is his first published story. Meredith Steinbach is the author of the novel Zara (Ecco Press, 1982) and has recently completed a second novel, You/Like the Dust in the Road. She is a Fellow at the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College. William Goyen's new novel, Arcadio, an excerpt from which appears in this issue, will be published by Clarkson Potter this year. He lives in Los Angeles, where he conducts a writing workshop at the University of Southern California. Leigh Hafrey is Reviews Editor for the literary journal Argo and teaches writing at M.l.T. Dennis Schmitz' latest book is String (Ecco Press, 1980). He lives in Sacramento. The Bone-Duster, John Morgan's first poetry collection, was published in the Quarterly Ret-'ieU' of Literature's poetry series; his chapbook, The Killing of Anton Webern, was published by Owl Creek Press. He lives in Fairbanks and teaches at the University of Alaska. Mairi MacInnes's collection Herring, Oatmeal, Milk and Salt was published in the Quarterly RevieU' of Literature series. She is working on a third book of poetry. Besides appearing in many magazines, Frannie Lindsay has had three chapbooks published: The Horse We Lie Down In (Pikestaff Press, 1980), The Harp of the First Day (Nocturnal Canary Press, 1980), and The Aerial Tide Coming In (Swamp Press, 1981). John Peck has two books of poems, Shagbark (Bobbs-Merrill, 1972) and Broken Blockhouse Wall (Godine Press, 1978). Marvin Bell's newest book of poems, These Green-Going-toYellow, was published by Atheneum in 1981. Two other books, Old Snow Just Melting: Essays and Interviews (University of Michigan Press)

and Seques: A Correspondence in Poetry with William Stafford (Godine Press) will appear this year.

David Galler has three collections of verse: Walls and Distances (1959) and Leopards in the Temple (1968), both by Macmillan, and Third Poems: 1965-1978 (1979) by the Quarterly Review of Literature. In 1978 he received an Ingram-Merrill Foundation Fellowship in Poetry. John R. Reed's poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Poetry, and The Sewanee Review, and he has a collection of poems, A Gallery ofSpiders (Ontario Review Press, 1980). He teaches at Wayne State University in Detroit. A Private Signal: Poems New & Selected (Wesleyan University Press, 1977) is Barbara Howe's most recent book. Soon to appear will be Moving, a chapbook of poetry, and The Road Commissioner and Other Stories, a collection with block prints by her son Gregory Jay Smith. Currently teaching at Princeton, Joyce Carol Oates' latest novel is A Bloodsmoor Romance (Dutton, 1982). "Make Her Wait" is Stella Fujimoto's first published poem. W. S. Di Piero's book of poems, The First Hour, was published in 1982 by Abattoir Press. A new collection, The Only Dangerous Thing (Elpenor Press), was published in January 1982. Quinton Duval teaches creative writing at Solano College in California. His poetry has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Quarterly West, Chariton Review and Whetstone. Lucien Strvk's Encounter with Zen was published by Swallow/Ohio University Press (1981), and his World of the Buddha by Grove Press (1982). In preparation are Collected Poems 1953-1983 (Swallow/Ohio University Press) and Triumph of the Sparrow: Zen Poems of Shinkichi Takahashi (University of Illinois Press). "In the Cemetery Where Al [olson Was Buried" is Amy Hempel's first published story. She has worked as a newspaper reporter and an editor, and lives in New York and San Francisco. A member of the English Department at Wayne State University, Charles Baxter has had fiction in The Pushcart Prize VII and Best American Short Stories, 1982. He also has two books of poetry by New River Press. "Who's To Say This Isn't Love?" is from Ask Your Mama and Other Stories, one of William Pitt Root's two recently completed short story collections. His latest books of poetry, all published in 1981, are Reasons For Going It on Foot (Atheneum), In the World's Common Grasses (Moving Parts), and Fireclock (4 Zoas). Samuel Reifler, the author of I Ching-A New Interpretation for Modern Times (Bantam, 1972), lives on the shores of Interesting Lake in Clinton Corners, New York. He has published fiction and poetry in, among others, Esquire, Harper's Bazaar, and Transatlantic Review. Stephen Dixon has had three short story collections published, the latest, 14 Stories, put out by Johns Hopkins Press in 1980. A new

collection will be published by North Point Press this year. Michael Wilkerson was a founding editor of Indiana Review in 1981, and has published fiction in Iowa Review and other journals. Andrew Feder is the author of a novel, To Byzantium (Houghron-Mifflin, 1965) and a collection of short stories, The Travelers (University of Illinois, 1976). This year he will have his fiction anthologized in Ted Solotaroff's Many Windows (Harper & Row).

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