62

Two Decades of

James T. Farrell

Anne Sexton

Thorn Gunn

Jorge Luis Borges

Thomas McGuane

Vladimir Nabokov

Cynthia Ozick

Robert Coover

William Gass

Stanley Elkin

Raymond Carver

Robert Stone

c.x Williams

Lorraine Hansberry

William Goyen

Saul Bellow

Maxine Kumin

Julio Cortazar

John Ashbery

and more than sixty others

Iwentv �edr' 01 the bevt conternporarv "rrtong and graph.l' from TrrQuarterl} magazine

Editor Reginald Gibbons

Executive Editor Bob Perlongo

Managing Editor Joseph LaRusso

Fiction Editor Susan Hahn

Special Projects Editor Fred Shafer

Design Director Gini Kondziolka

TriQuarterly Fellow Doug Clayton

Editorial Assistants Brian Bouldrey, James Bryant, T. R. Johnson, Sheelagh McCaughey

Advisory Editors 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, ILLINOIS 60201.

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In 1984 publication of TriQuarterly and the magazine's sponsorship of public events were made possible by grants and gifts-and moral support-from:

The Alumnae of Northwestern University

The Atlantic Richfield Foundation

The Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry, Inc.

The Embassy of Spain, Washington, D.C.

The Lloyd A. Fry Foundation

Hopkins & Sutter

The lllinois Arts Council

The lllinois Humanities Council

The Joyce Foundation

The Mayor's Office of Special Events of the City of Chicago

The National Endowment for the Arts

The Playboy Foundation

The Committee for Cultural Cooperation, Spain-U.S.A.

The Woods Charitable Fund, Inc.

and the following individuals:

Mrs. Donald Atlas

Mrs. Nancy Gabriela Carroll

Michael Claffey

Patty Crowley

Mr. and Mrs. Stephen Deutch

Anstiss Drake

Dorothy Drish

Mary Mills Dunea

Lois Fineberg

Mr. and Mrs. Solway Firestone

Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Freeman

Sondra Gair

Georgina Gronner

Albert Jenner, Jr.

Carl Kroch

Mr. and Mrs. Nat Lehrman

Susan and Lewis Manilow

Norman Ross

Bettylu Saltzman

Mrs. Larry Shindelman

Ruth Stern

In 1984 the success of TriQuarterly and of public events sponsored by the magazine was made possible by the work and participation of the following writers and photographers:

Kobo Abe

Rafael Alberti

Andrew Allegretti

Tony Ardizzone

James Atlas

Jane Aumerle

Stanislaw Baranczak

R. L. Barth

Marvin Bell

Saul Bellow

Gabriel Berns

Norbert Blei

J. M. Caballero Bonald

Philip Booth

Gwendolyn Brooks

Nathaniel C. Burkins

Dino Buzzati

Denis Cameron

Paul Carroll

Maryrose Carroll

Hayden Carruth

Kate Chaltain

Maxine Chernoff

John Ciardi

Cyrus Colter

Terrence Des Pres

Stephen Deutch

W. S. Di Piero

John Dickson

Stephen Dixon

Stacy Doris

Lane Dunlop

Stuart Dvbek

Gloria Emerson

Hans Magnus Enzensberger

Leslie Epstein

Dave Etter

Patricia Evans

Peter Fellowes

Carolyn Porche

Leon Forrest

Stephen D. Foster

Brendan Galvin

Eugene K. Garber

Joseph Gastiger

Jaime Gil de Biedma

Mark Godfrey

Albert Goldbarth

Rockwell Gray

Reinhold Grimm

Jorge Guillen

Rafael Guillen

Lorraine Hansberry

Michael S. Harper

William Harrell

Robert Hemenway

Larry Heinemann

David Hernandez

William Heyen

Angela Jackson

John Jacob

Josephine Jacobsen

Rodney Jones

Ward Just

Edmund Keeley

X. J. Kennedy

Mary Kinzie

William Kittredge

Michael Knoll

Frances Kuffel

Maxine Kumin

Richard Lee

Norman Maclean

Paul Mariani

Gerald McCarthy

Walter D. McDonald

Sandy McKinney

James McManus

Elizabeth Gamble Miller

Marga Minco

Lisel Mueller

Ray Murphy

G. E. Murray

Gerald Nemanic

John Frederick Nims

Howard Norman

Joyce Carol Oates

Carole Oles

Raymond Oliver

Elder Olson

Gregory Orfalea

Michael Orlock

Grace Paley

Linda Pastan

John Peck

Harry Mark Petrakis

Felix Pollak

Reynolds Price

Fernando Quinones

Jeannette K. Ringold

Richard Sanger

Lazaro Santana

Dennis Schmitz

Paul Sequiera

Mary Lee Settle

Fred Shafer

Alan Shapiro

Karl Shapiro

Arthur Shay

Annick Smith

Timothy Steele

Alan Harris Stein

Meredith Steinbach

Richard Stern

Martha Bennett Stiles

Robert Stone

Dan Stryk

Tom Sullens

Antoni Tapies

Mary Trimble

Raymond Trowbridge

Dennis Trudell

Jose Angel Valente

Lawrence Venuti

David Wagoner

Derek Walcott

Bruce Weigl

Harry White

Gayle Whittier

William Wilborn

Eugene Wildman

C. K. Williams

Miller Williams

C. D. Wright

Ray A. Young Bear

Larry Zimmerman

John J. Clayton

Remembering Okinawa

Samuel Hynes

Contributors 233

Illustrations by Jonathan Bumas Cover design by Gini Kondziolka

TriQuarterly is pleased to announce that in addition to support granted earlier for the symposium in November 1984, "The Writer in Our World," an additional contribution was received from the Illinois Humanities Council. Taking part in the symposium were Stanislaw Baranczak, Terrence Des Pres, Gloria Emerson, Leslie Epstein, Carolyn Forche, Michael S. Harper, Ward Just, Grace Paley, Mary Lee Settle, Robert Stone, Derek Walcott and C. K. Williams. Moderators were Angela Jackson and Bruce Weigl.

"In the Cemetery Where AI Jolson is Buried" by Amy Hempel, a short story that originally appeared in TriQuarterly #56, has been included in The Editors' Choice: New American Stories, Volume I, a Bantam trade paperback compiled by George E. Murphy, Jr. The recently-published book is the first in an annual series.

Contributors should note that TriQuarterly will not read manuscripts submitted during the months of June through September in 1985. All submissions received during that period will be returned to their authors. Work may be submitted beginning October 1, 1985.

The North Shore, 1958

Ward lust

1

Swan and I discovered the Art Institute of Chicago in the summer of 1956, the year of our great rebellion, three or four years after I learned to drive. The Art Institute was a secret between us; if anyone asked where we were going, we told them the club to play golf. We would drive into Chicago on weekday afternoons, taking the slow way, Sheridan Road through Highland Park and Wilmette and Evanston, making the turn at the Edgewater Beach Hotel, then flying down the Outer Drive past the high-rise apartments and yacht basins to Grant Park and the fine gray building on Michigan Avenue.

Swan and I drove to Chicago in my Chevrolet convertible, the top down, the radio turned loud to the afternoon opera. In Winnetka, Swan always turned up the radio another notch, hoping to attract the attention and disapproval of the matrons in their station wagons; the matrons reminded her of her mother. The pretty North Shore towns were uniformly quiet and monotonous and it was a tranquil drive, majestic oaks and elms arching overhead, the car tires swishing on the narrow road, dipping, curving and dipping again. From time to time we would see the lake, flat and placid as a prairie, lukewarm under the milky summer sun. Swan and I were never closer than when driving up Sheridan Road to the Art Institute, sharing an excitement our parents must have felt going to their first speakeasy. The Art Institute-its somber rooms, its chaste alienation from Chicago's grab, its Renaissance sensuality - was an underworld as exotic as Capone's.

That summer we wanted to meet Jews. We had never met one, except in books. I had read"A Perfect Day for Bananafish" in the New Yorker and had identified with the desperate hero. I did not know what, if anything, was specifically Jewish about Seymour Glass' predicament in Miami, but I knew he wasn't a Presbyterian. After reading "In Dreams

Begin

Responsibilities," Swan wanted to meet Delmore Schwartz. I said I didn't think Delmore Schwartz was Jewish. Oh, yes, she said; yes, he was, definitely. She had read an article about him in the library at school and there was no question about it, Schwartz was a Jew, though probably not a practicing Jew. He didn't wear a skullcap or anything. But he was a prophet, with a prophet's premonition. Swan had laughed wickedly, inventing a meeting with Delmore Schwartz; it would be in New York, a chic literary bar in Greenwich Village.

"That would show them," she said. What if she met Delmore Schwartz and fell in love with him, and he with her, a coup de foudre? They would be seen all over New York, and their affair would find its way into Winchell's column; it would be a great scandal. He was a passionate man, she knew that much-though what he could possibly see in a drab little debutante from the North Shore, she couldn't possibly guess. He wouldn't look at her twice, and it was too bad because if she became his mistress she could bring him home and introduce him to her parents. They would have cocktails and Delmore could read "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities" to her father, and what a riot it would be! Her father hated Jews almost as much as he hated her mother.

"Come off it," I said.

She said, "It's true."

"You're not drab," I said.

"Yes I am," she replied. She was not fishing, she believed it. Her mother thought she was drab; not a great beauty, not an easy conversationalist, a difficult girl, willful. Swan ruffled her hair and sighed. Her ears were too big and her bosom too small, and she hated polite conversation; she was a charmless dinner partner. But she had a dream, meeting Delmore Schwartz and bringing him home; if only he lived in Chicago, then there would be the possibility of a meeting by chance at the Art Institute.

In any event, we never met anyone at the Art Institute. We never met a soul we knew, nor any Jews. It was always just Swan and me alone on summer afternoons, escaping Lake Forest.

The first time we visited the Art Institute we stayed with the impressionists until closing time. Someone had told Swan that the French collection was the class of the field, and we looked at it with longing and envy; this was a world far from the one we knew. We remained a long time before Degas' "The Morning Bath." It was not until the following week that we came upon the room containing the work of Edward Hopper. He was unfamiliar to us, being an American Artist; of course we favored the Europeans. Hopper's oils were a revelation, and not only for their reductive technique. Dazzled, we saw the desolate soul of the midwest: empty streets, dark light, and turbulence under the still skin of things. Also, it seemed to me that Hopper identified the dead hand of the past: his people were rooted, in place forever, imprisoned by mem-

ory. And memory was an unrequited love. Hopper confirmed all that we thought and felt about Illinois and its bourgeois Republican values, its conformity and repression and suspicion and yahoo chauvinism, America First. In 1955 we had such loathing for the heartland and wanted so to break out, to resign in protest, spitting in LaSalle Street's eye. I have never felt such certitude about anything since.

Swan said, "Oh, look. Look." We entered the room and began to move slowly in front of the pictures (there were not many), avid to observe each detail. Hopper's light was so hard and bright that it hurt your eyes to look at it.

She said, "He takes you so far in that you can almost see the other side."

I said, "I know what you mean." Behind Hopper's motionless housewives, Degas' dancers. The one seemed to suggest the other.

She said, "On the other side of that, just beyond the light and shadows and the silence." She stepped closer to "Nighthawks," peering at it, her eyes squinted, shining. She bent to take off her Capezios, and now they swung free from the fingers of one hand. She moved soundlessly, on tiptoe. I had a vision of her entering the diner barefoot and disappearing through the yellow door behind the coffee urns, the heads of the patrons and the counterman turning, surprised, Lady, where do you think you're going? But she was already gone, the door slowly swinging to. Swan drew back and said softly, "On the other side of that is something great."

"I don't know," I said. I was looking at it again.

"Oh, yes," she said. "I know it."

I said, "What is it, then?"

"My own life," she said proudly.

"Your morning bath," I said. I was making a joke.

"Nothing but," she said. She pointed at the picture. "I'm going to have to go through this to get to that. I'm going to walk right by all those people, all that loneliness-"

"You and Delmore Schwartz." Hand in hand, I thought. Another joke.

"I'm serious:' she said.

"And that's what you want?"

"Yes," she said. "Yes, I do. That's what I want." She paused. "And it frightens me."

The atmosphere of the painting fascinated me. I did not see it, or what it represented, as something to be overcome. It was not threatening. It seemed to me that a world was contained there, a solitary planet, with nothing at all beyond it. It was an isolated world I knew well; I knew its interior. I had never been in a diner at night, but I knew the life there; I knew the town, its cabs and red-brick storefronts and its silent inhabitants, its bleak churches. I said, "I love it, it's real just the way it is."

She turned to look at me. "And that's what you want?"

"Not what I want," 1 said. "What is."

"And what you want, also."

"That's not the point," 1 said stubbornly. "I recognize it. 1 see what Hopper sees. If I could paint, that's the way I would paint. That's not some ideal dream"-I was thinking of "The Morning Bath," but did not say 50- "that's real. That's life, right there. And that's the point."

She nodded sadly, apparently unconvinced; or perhaps she was disappointed.

"That's the world that you have to live in," I said, saying more than I meant, certainly more than I understood. In some way I knew I was defending my own life-what I had made of it to this date, and what I would make of it henceforth. "You have to live in that, before you can live in anything else. Do you see what I mean?"

"Yes," she said after a moment. "And I don't agree with you." There was a strained silence. She dipped her head and I saw she was crying. She made no sound. She stood staring at the floor, lightly tapping the heels of her pumps, heel-to-heel; that was the only sound in the great room. "Yes, it's real. Good, it's real. It's so real it hurts. But that's not all there is. And it's not enough."

She spoke with such emotion that 1 reached out to touch her arm. But she eluded me, smiling grimly, already sliding away to the next Hopper, slipping her feet into her pumps. Subject closed.

It was years before I learned that Edward Hopper was from the East, born in a suburb of New York City. I thought he was a midwesterner through and through, and had gone to paint in Cape Cod and Maine as Hemingway and Fitzgerald had gone to France: to live the life of a midwestern exile, believing that his natural material- a street, a farm, house, an EI, an automat, a woman alone in a room-was seen from afar, perhaps only seen from afar. As everyone knows, midwesterners are great travelers. Swan and I spent many afternoon in the Hopper room at the Art Institute. We would view the Italians, and French, the Germans, Picasso, and Hopper, in that order. Then, driving slowly back up Sheridan Road to Lake Forest, we would argue endlessly over the import of "Nighthawks" and the others. She was troubled, I consoled.

That time is so scattered now, a universe of dead stars, cold and untouchable. I am almost fifty, and its design seems beyond the reach of my eyesight. But its pull is still strong, and thinking of it now is like meeting a childhood enemy years later and finding him charming, not at all the bully of memory. My past is like a picture gallery, with sped, mens from the various schools. Imagine oils displayed on the bone-white walls of a conservative museum. Up close they have a familiar logic, but as you move back from them the logic fades and finally dissolves alto,

gether and you are left wondering what it was that had been so vivid. And of course the reverse is also true.

This much I know for certain: my great rebellion lasted just that one year; one summer, really. I returned to college in September, and in January of 1956 I fell in love with a girl from the East, a Vassar girl, and although the romance ended, my friendship with her and her family did not. Rebellion suddenly seemed-adolescent, a waste of time, and beside the point. My girl was Jewish and came from a family of lawyers-witty, rowdy, disputatious, rich - and I determined that I would be a lawyer, too. It seemed a fine way to mix public and private lives, and somewhere in the back of my mind was the idea of a political career. I wanted to be like them, or as I conceived them to be: cosmopolitan, free from regional prejudice, living in the present and looking to the future without entangling alliances. That is, no longer possessed by the facts of the past. No question, mine was the eye of a midwestern provincial; I tended to see things in primary colors, and my grasp of irony and paradox wasincomplete. At any event, Rachel's family seemed somehow to transcend region, capable of picking up and moving on at a moment's notice; and they studied the past, not with any particular nostalgia or affection, but with the single-mindedness of mathematicians working on an equation whose answer was eternally elusive. "The trouble with loving the past," Rachel said, "is that it doesn't love you back."

I thought those the wisest words I had ever heard from a woman, and they sealed my decision. That I would leave the North Shore was by 1958 a closed question; of course I would. I realized I could walk through an open door.

However, with Swan it was different. And this is Swan's story, not mine. It is a story of the time, Ike's and Adlai's America. In those days it was difficult for girls like Swan to find their feet, and leave their families to make lives of their own. The way out was marriage, and too often that meant only a regional trade-the North Shore of Boston or of Long Island for the North Shore of Chicago. That would never be Swan's way, she was far too intelligent. Her expectations ran so high, and her passions so deep; and she was mature beyond her years. She fastened on things that were just out of reach, in the shadows beyond the light; that was where her fate lay. The Midwest in those days was a landlocked region, the coasts were out of sight over the horizon. For a young woman of impressionist temperament, it was not a journey made solo. So she waited for a kindred spirit, someone as high-reaching and hungry as she was, someone with whom she could share what she called the ethical life. She maintained her crush on Delmore Schwartz, though she found she liked the poems less than the stories, "Dreams" especially. She told me once that she thought he must lead an ideal life, the reward for being a great writer, universally admired, even loved. "He must be' a happy man," she said. But that was a rare lapse of insight.

Swan was patient, always watchful, confident that even on the North Shore there were surprises-unusual men, gallant men, men cut from a different cloth, adventurous men, impressionist men who in a few inspired strokes could create a world.

Art Reisinger had been a Marine in Korea, and badly wounded in the murderous retreat from the thirty-eighth parallel. He had been a volunteer, joining up in his sophomore year at Yale; and he did not go to O.C.S. with his friends, but enlisted as a private. He came home with a false hand which he concealed in a black leather glove. The first time Swan met him, he shook hands with his left hand, palm down. She did not notice the false hand, she said later, because he was wearing a tuxedo and it was dark. She did not know his military history and was not prepared for a false hand inside a black glove. Never had a war been forgotten so quickly and thoroughly as the war in Korea.

She thought he kept his right hand in his jacket pocket as a continental mannerism; he was obviously a worldly man. She was charmed by the left-handed shake before she knew the practical reason behind it. "Right away I knew he was different from the rest of you," she said much later.

I introduced them at a party at the country club. Swan and I were standing at the bar watching people dance. It was a warm evening with a full moon, the steely water of the lake shining in the distance. The clubhouse was perched on a bluff overlooking the lake. There was a hardwood dance floor under a green-and-white tent, the band at one end of the tent and the bar at the other. It was a lively season that summer, parties every weekend. The crop of debutantes was especially vivacious and carefree, and in that respect Swan was remarkable. She was shy and serious-minded. Her mother urged her to be more outgoing, to at least try to be popular, and her friends thought her "deep."

Swan murmured, "Who is that?"

Reisinger was leaning against a tent pole, his feet crossed at the ankles forming a figure 4. His jacket was buttoned. I did not recognize him immediately, he had been gone so long. After he was separated from the service he remained on the West Coast to finish his education; then he dropped out of sight. He slipped out of our suburban orbit, and no one heard anything reliable, only garbled and incomplete reports from his sister. There were reports that he was drifting, reluctant to return home, working as a lumberjack, then as a roughneck in the oil fields, finally that he had settled somewhere in northern California. There was a rumor that he had gotten into a scrape serious enough to require the intervention of the family lawyer, but no one knew any details. He was five years older than me, and taller and thicker than I remembered. His hair was long, and that was not the fashion then. He was drinking a ginand-tonic and after each swallow he would put the glass on a table at his

elbow. The floor was a swirl of color and sound, everyone unbuttoned and in motion. Lester Lanin himself was leading the ensemble. Reisinger was alone and standing quite still, his shoulder against the tent pole.

"That's Art Reisinger," I said.

"Linda's brother?" Swan said. "So that's Linda's brother."

"He's been away," I said.

She said, "I know. Linda said he might be home this summer. They haven't seen him in years-" Just then he turned toward us, an inquisitive look on his face. We were obviously talking about him, and he had caught us off-guard. Flustered, I made a sign of recognition and Swan and I walked over to him. I introduced them and it was then that he put out his left hand, palm down. Swan took it, giving a little delighted laugh and saying how nice it was to meet him, she had heard so much. I remembered immediately about the false hand and that made me even more ill at ease. I thought he might misinterpret Swan's enthusiasm, which to me sounded forced.

I asked him how long he had been in town and he said not long. He was living with his family while he waited for people to vacate an apartment on the Near North Side.

"Well," I said. "You'll find the place hasn't changed much." I gestured at the dancers, Lanin, the lake, the bartenders.

He said, "Yes, it has."

Swan said, "You've been on the West Coast." She said it as she might have said Samarkand or Copenhagen.

He nodded, turning to watch the floor. He had picked up his drink and stood clinking the glass against his teeth. His manner was so abrupt that I looked around for a means of escape. I thought suddenly that I was too old for these parties. I was twenty-three and had been going to them for five-no, six-years. Compared to most of those on the dance floor, I was an older man. Of course I wanted to marry and settle down, but that would have to wait a year; too bad Swan was only eighteen. I turned to Swan, intending to suggest that we dance but Reisinger was talking and she was intent, listening to him. He said, "How do you know that?"

"Your sister. Linda and I are friends."

He leaned down, so his ear was close to Swan's mouth. The music was very loud and it was hard to hear conversation. He used an expression that was unfamiliar to me then, but that I have since recognized as military argot: "Say again?"

"Linda," she said. "Your sister."

He nodded sourly, turning again to look at the dance floor. "And what else did Linda tell you?"

"Linda's very mysterious about you. My brother Arthur, the mystery man from the West Coast. Is there a great deal to tell?" She cocked her head, smiling brightly. I thought she looked tight, though she rarely

drank. Why did you decide to come back here, after all that time out there? Your seven years, so far away. The West Coast, gosh. And what are you going to do, now that you're back?"

He said, "It remains to be seen."

"Brokerage, I suppose," she said. She pronounced it "Brrroke-erage," "Or banking or real estate, solid LaSalle Street stuff. Or selling foreign cars. Or maybe you'll be an ad man, that's a productive thing, very popular. It's what a lot of your crowd is doing now, advertising.]. Walter Fathead. Batton, Barton, Durstine and Halfwit."

I looked on, amused. The advertising industry was everyone's whip, ping boy that year, but I hadn't known that Swan knew or cared. And she was never aggressive, except when defending Delmore Schwartz. Now she was baiting Reisinger; she seemed to be challenging him to something, and his condescending manner was not encouraging. He looked like a man who wanted to back life into a corner, and not with Thoreau's intention of reducing it to its simplest terms. Swan rocked forward on the balls of her feet, her head tilted provocatively. She was waiting for him to reply.

"No," he said.

"Maybe law," she said, with a nod in my direction.

"Not law, either," he said.

"Pulla-rics," she said. "Is that your game?"

He smiled a little.

"Do you like to dance? Do they dance on the West Coast?"

He said nothing to that.

"Why don't you ask me to dance?"

Reisinger looked at her a long moment, then shrugged and very deliberately put his glass on the table. He put his hands out to her, palms up, as if he were handing her a plate. Here, his manner said, what are you going to do with this? Swan looked at his black glove, and then at him. Lanin was playing a waltz. She took both his hands in hers and they stood a moment, looking at each other. Then they moved off to the center of the noisy floor, turning slowly, then faster and faster. Reisinger was a fine dancer. His false hand rested inert on the soft shelf of crinoline at the small of her back. After a moment she deftly switched hands and they twirled in the center of the floor. Now she was leading, her white hand over his black glove. Her head was thrown back and she was looking at him solemnly as they turned to the music. At once she looked years older, not a suburban debutante, but a woman of character. I watched them, fascinated and envious-and with foreboding, too, because they seemed to be out of this world. Swan was leading him in triple time. Young people on the floor made way for them. The floor was abounce with music and color and shouted conversation, the disheveled stag line in constant motion; but Swan and Reisinger retained a kind of detached stillness and authority. Lanin always conducted waltz music as

if it had been invented by Irving Berlin, but they were dancing the real thing, Strauss or Brahms, gallant and serious in the crowd of college-age debs and their escorts.

"What are you doing here all alone? Where's Swan?"

I reluctantly turned to say hello to Swan's mother. We chatted a moment, and when she saw her daughter in Reisinger's arms she shuddered and gave a sharp, nasty laugh. She asked me who he was and when I told her she nodded firmly, oh, yes, him, the crippled Marine who couldn't make a go of it. She knew he was back, Eileen Reisinger had said something the other day. Her prodigal son, returned at last. And it was inevitable, him finding Swan, though it was more likely that Swan found him. "What I've never understood about Swan," she said, talking into my ear, smothering the music, "is these boys she finds who all look exactly, but exactly, like her father at that age. God, it's too strange."

There was a certain physical resemblance. Both men were tall, dark and reserved, and looked at the world with vehemence. Lee Emerson was a bad-tempered and somewhat controversial criminal lawyer; he and his wife had never gotten on, hence her spiteful comment. She had a sharp tongue and was disagreeable in other ways, so of the two I preferred him, a tough attorney of the old school, fiercely proud of his law practice. His interests in life were his golf game, Swan, and his practice. He was not particular about his clients, many of whom turned up in the local papers in the glare of flash bulbs, fedoras held over their faces, manacled to federal agents. My father believed that he had a grudge against the world, and the controversial law practice was his way of getting even.

No question, he and Reisinger shared a muscular, sardonic presence. They had weight, and with the weight the bookmaker's air of knowing the odds. The night that Swan and Reisinger waltzed at the country club remains in my memory, a scene quite out of character for our midwestern suburb, where everyone tried to fit in-the architecture was borrowed from Europe, but the manners were not. And there was something ineluctably European about them that night, a denseness and fatalism, as if theirs were a love affair just past its prime. They looked as if they had shared a dark history together.

Swan and Reisinger dropped out of sight for a while, then reappeared. Three weeks later they eloped, or "eloped" because it was an elopement only by the standards of the North Shore in 1958. Swan's mother always referred to it as "Swan's elopement." Her parents and her brother and Reisinger's parents and his sister were present at the ceremony, and there was a reception later at the Emersons'. There were only a few people at the reception and the new Mr. and Mrs. Reisinger stayed for just an hour. It was obvious that even the hour was a trial, a concession

to the parents, both sides. I had one hurried conversation with Swan before their departure.

She kissed me warmly and I said, truthfully, that she looked lovely. She had a new haircut. 1 said, "All the best."

"We did it, didn't we?"

1 said, "You sure did."

"No, no," she said. "I mean we. We did it." 1 mumbled something affirmative. She looked at me slyly, smiling. "We got me out of here. This ghastly place, the way people have to lead their lives. Remember the arguments we had? We were so over our heads, you and I. But that's all finished now. Arthur-" She looked around the room and when she found Reisinger, she blew him a kiss. "Arthur and I are moving to the Near North Side and I'm going to a real school, the University of Chicago." She said this defiantly and I grinned; the Midway then was thought to be under the influence of Communists and their dupes. I wondered what Reisinger intended to do, brrroke-erage, banking, real estate, advertising, and law being out. Perhaps it would be pulla-tics after all. She said, "He's so different, you can't know how serious he is, what he's seen and done and been through, and what he's made of it. Did you know he was in the Korean War? He volunteered, and then he went to school in California to try to figure it out, the reason for the war. He knows what it is to be intimate, and who your enemies are. And how you have to protect yourself." She was breathless, talking so fast that the words tumbled over themselves. "And you introduced us and that makes you a special friend. I fell in love right away, but I suppose you guessed that. It was love at first sight, him too. Arthur's an individualist. I took him to the Art Institute. But we didn't go our way, we started with the Hoppers and ended with the French. And he agrees with me, and that made me so happy. It used to bother me so, the way you felt, because we were such good friends. You were the only friend 1 had. All this." Her voice deepened and fell as she gestured out the window at the lawn and the swimming pool shaded by oak trees. A few guests, Reisinger's parents among them, stood under trees, drinks in their hands, the men in white ducks and blazers and the women in loose dresses and floppy hats. "All this means nothing to him," Swan continued, "rien du tout. They're not there when you need them." She glanced at her father, standing alone near the front door. "They thought they made everything so safe." She laughed again and I realized how young she was. Two months before she had been a debutante, coming out.

I said, "What happens after the University of Chicago?"

"Ah," she said. "Who knows?"

I said, "I'll bet you have a million children."

She said, "I doubt it. Maybe one or two." She looked sideways at the guests on the lawn. Sunlight fell through the trees, dappling the grass. "We are going to have a great life together," she said. "We are like that."

She pressed two fingers together and whispered, "Arthur's hard to know but I hope you'll try." I smiled, she was so hopeful and spirited; I was convinced she was pregnant.

Later, I stood in the Emerson driveway with Swan's father and watched them depart in Reisinger's old Austin-Healey. He still had his California license plates. I had managed a handshake with him, but that was all. He accepted my congratulations but did not seem eager to talk. He kept looking over his shoulder, searching for Swan. Everyone applauded as they sped out of the driveway, the car tires scattering gravel. But there was no rice and Swan did not throw her garter. Her mother was not present for the farewell.

"Where are they going?" I asked Swan's father.

"Door County," he said morosely.

"It's very pretty this time of year." He looked at me. In fact, as we both knew, Door County was hot, flyblown, and crowded. I raised my glass. "Good luck to them."

"Yes," he said.

I had known Lee Emerson all my life, and liked him despite his bad temper and disreputable law practice, and his grudge. He and my father were golfing friends, and once a few years before, when I was going through a bad patch with my parents, he had allowed me to come and stay for a week, "a change ofvenue." That was the year before the year of my great rebellion, and the beginning of my friendship with Swan. Making conversation, I said, "Where did you and Mrs. Emerson honeymoon?"

"We went to Europe," he said. "It was 1939 and they were getting ready to blow everything up. The world just went to hell. That goddamned Roosevelt."

I did not want to talk politics with him. I said, "Well, it was a nice ceremony."

"Nice?" He looked at me, his eyes watery and vague. He said, "She looked beautiful, as always. She is a beautiful girl, isn't she? She looks the way all girls should look at eighteen. She has always been precocious. She has a subtle mind. She has a mind like mine and was going to Vassar to get it educated. An untrained mind is worse than useless. Now she's going to the goddamned University of Chicago, the great books and all that crap. It's a crime. Of course now, to me, she is a hostile witness. She has married a man who is beneath her in every way. Who doesn't have it here." He pointed at his stomach. "He is a son of a bitch. Her husband." He bit off the word. "Is an oddball."

"Lee," I said. It was the first time I had ever called him by his first name. I was appalled at what he had said, and did not know how to reply. I had affection for Swan, too.

"Weren't you supposed to be engaged?"

"Engaged to be engaged," I said.

"What happened?"

"It broke up but we're still friends. She's a wonderful girl," I said loyally, adding, "you'd like them, a family of lawyers."

"Rachel something," he said. "From the East."

I said, "Yes." Then, "New York."

He said, "Your father told me." He started to say something more, then changed his mind. He looked away, then back at me, nodding sharply. "You're smart. Or lucky. You're too young. So's she. My daughter's even younger than you are. Except she's not smart. Or lucky. She needed some help and no one gave it to her."

I did not understand this remark. I said, "It'll be fine."

"No, it won't." His voice was loud and people near us turned to hear the conversation, Swan's father's courtroom baritone. He stood looking at the place in the driveway where the Austin-Healey had been, but when he spoke it was to me only. "I wish to Christ you'd stood up to be counted, when it counted. I wish to Christ you'd done that, it might've helped. But you didn't. I suppose you had reasons. Did you have a reason?" He didn't wait for and probably he knew there wouldn't be one; no lawyer asks a question without knowing the answer to it. "Now she's ruined her life," he said.

The summer of 1958 was my last on the North Shore. I was entering my final year at law school and after graduation I would go to work, I hoped in the East. On the Labor Day weekend four of us decided to give an end-of-the-summer party, a kind ofvaledictory to the Charleston and the waltz. We had in mind a pleasant, boozy, light-hearted evening. No dance bands, no debs, no sophomores, no crashers, no marrieds.

Terry Harris' parents were away for the weekend, so we assembled at his house, myoid red Webcor stacked with Chicago music, Muggsy Spanier, Georg Brunis, Wild Bill Davison, Art Hodes. Around eight o'clock a sudden rain forced us inside. The party seemed to grow throughout the evening, and in fact a few debs did show up, along with a few marrieds. The marrieds gave the party an air of seriousness and maturity.

Five of us were playing poker in the den when George Field came up behind me and whispered, "There's some trouble." I looked at him and folded my hand. He took me off into a corner and said there was trouble in the kitchen. Reisinger was acting crazy.

"I didn't know he was here," I said. "Where's Swan?"

"In the hall," he said. "She's pretty damn upset. He's threatening people."

"Well, is he drunk?"

George looked at me and shrugged. With Reisinger, it was impossible to tell. But he didn't think so.

I found Swan sitting on a chair in the vestibule, alone. She had her

raincoat on and looked frightened. She stared at me a moment and said, "You."

"Me," I said.

"It's nice to see you," she said.

"You, too."

"It's been a while."

"Well," I said. "Since your wedding. You're an old married women now."

She said, "I guess I am."

"And you've cut your hair."

"No more drab little Swan. Too bad I can't do anything about my ears." She unbuttoned her raincoat, and leaned forward, looking at me. Her hair was parted on the side and swept back, the fashion then. "I hoped you'd be here, and now you are."

"George," I began.

"Never mind George," she said.

I knelt beside her and asked what the trouble was, but she only shook her head. We could both see into the kitchen from the vestibule. George and Bill Darcy were crouched by the door, posed as if they were waiting for a serve at tennis. Reisinger was out of sight. There was no conversation at all.

Swan moved closer and said in a flat voice, "We only came at the last minute. I wanted to, the last party of the summer. We only just got back from Fish Creek. What a nice trip we had."

"You look great," I said.

"Do l?" She turned away, glancing in the direction of the kitchen. "I don't feel so great."

"We'll fix it up," I said.

She nodded, arching her eyebrows, but did not reply for a moment. She said, "Now's the time you can be a special friend to us, if you want to. It isn't a question of fixing anything up." She looked at me again and I nodded. "He ordered me to leave when it began. But if you can get him out of there, get him close to me. Do you understand that?" She put her hand on my arm, squeezing, and I noticed her wedding ring, a plain gold band. She brought her face close to mine, her eyes shining, squinted. "I'm the only person he trusts."

I said, "What happened?"

"Someone said something stupid." Then, "His hand hurts all the time, even though it's not supposed to. It hurts him and he takes stuff for the pain." She paused and said, "Sometimes he doesn't know what he's saying, and when he gets with them-" She gestured at George and Bill, their backs to us.

I said, "Swan."

She smiled and said, "We had such a nice honeymoon. We rented a

house and went sailing. He taught me how to fish, fly cast. We didn't see a soul."

"I've been meaning to call you."

"We've been looking for a place in Chicago."

I nodded. It was still quiet in the kitchen.

"The South Side, near the university." And in answer to my unspoken question, she said, "Arthur doesn't know what he's going to do yet, but he's got lines out everywhere. I've been encouraging him to write a book."

I started at that. Then I rose to my feet, putting my hand on her shoulder. I did not see Art Reisinger as a writer of books, and I wondered what sort of books she was encouraging him to write. "O.K.," I said. "But-"

She said slowly, "They were arguing. Someone tried to bait him, and that's the wrong thing to do. That's a big mistake with Arthur. I'm the only one he trusts around here, and for good reason." Her voice was low and controlled, with a timbre I did not recognize. She said, "We're so close it's as if we're the same person. I love him so, and when we're together, only us-" I listened, flattered that she would confide in me. I felt brotherly toward her, but uneasy listening to her confessions. "I need him and he needs me." She sighed, her shoulders sagging, looking again into the kitchen.

"What were they arguing about?"

"It doesn't matter," she said brusquely. "They're such shits, they don't know anything about anything beyond this town." She smiled, an odd, private smile. "And they don't know anything at all about Arthur, but they're going to find out."

I left her and went to the kitchen door and looked in. There was a breakfast table in the center of the kitchen, and behind the table Reisinger and Terry Harris. Reisinger had a knife at Terry's throat. Terry looked like a child next to Reisinger, who stood behind him, one long arm around his chest and the knife drawn up under his chin. He looked like he was demonstrating some commando tactic. Terry was a full head shorter than Reisinger but that was not what made the contest so unequal. They were a boy and a man, and no matter that only a few years separated them. There was the fact of Reisinger's war, his mysterious past on the West Coast, and the false hand inside the black glove. He did not seem to notice me, and I thought his eyes looked unfocused. The muscles in his forearm bulged. His arm was covered with thick, black hair, and there was a tattoo on the bicep. Semper Fi.

I felt a motion at my elbow and turned to see one of the debs. She was very pretty and quite tight and did not seem to understand the situation because she giggled. She must have thought we were playing The Game. Seeing her, Terry tried to struggle free but Reisinger, grinning, held him fast, tickling his puffy chin with the blade of the knife. The knife was

military issue, its pistol grip and pommel familiar from photographs and movies; none of us had ever seen the real thing.

1 tried to move the deb out of the doorway, this had nothing to do with her, but she wouldn't go. There were now six of us in the kitchen. The others looked naturally to me, I was Swan's friend, I would have some authority. I looked at them. There was no question of us "taking" Reisinger, not one of us was a brawler. When we were hot, we had another drink and cooled off. Fighting was not our style because it was not adult, as we understood "adult." It was true that once or twice a summer someone would throw a punch, but it always seemed they were married men defending their wives' or friends' honor. They were quick fights, broken up almost as soon as they began, invariably late at night in sporting circumstances; the last scrap was in the sand trap off the ninth tee. But this was different, and our experience was not equal to it. We did not know where to begin.

George had said there had been an argument. Terry had said something that Reisinger misinterpreted, though it was obvious that Reisinger wanted to fight, obvious from the moment he walked into the house, Swan on his arm. Misjudging the situation, Terry had asked him about the war. Reisinger took offense. Terry apologized, but it didn't seem to matter.

I said, "Art."

He said something 1 didn't understand but which sounded to me like garbled military language.

1 said again, "Art."

He said, "Roger that," and lowered the knife a little.

I said, "Swan's outside. She wants to go home."

He said, "Get her in here."

1 said, "She's in the car."

"Get her in here!"

I was afraid for her. 1 said, "She won't come."

He cursed once and looked at me sideways with the purest malevolence. I took a step backward, confused. I didn't know what he wanted. Whatever it was, 1 didn't have it. 1 thought that probably Swan did, or anyway knew what it was.

George said, "Put the knife down, Art. For God's sake, we're all friends here. And Terry's apologized. Who the hell cares?"

Reisinger said, "I care." Terry made a sudden movement and Reisinger pressed him again, hard, digging his false hand into Terry's chest. Terry looked at the black glove and closed his eyes. Reisinger moved as if in a trance, his face flushed, skin drawn tight over the bones, eyes wide and accusing. 1 wondered what the memory was, for surely he was now back in his memory. 1 supposed it was Korea and what had happened there, the retreat from the thirty-eighth parallel and the phantom pain in his

false hand. But I knew nothing about the war and could not imagine living with a false hand.

I said, "What's it all about, Art?"

He said, "You'll get what's coming to you."

The deb, who had been watching all this, said in a strained voice, "I'm going to call the police."

Bill Darcy said, "No," and grabbed her arm. I knew his concern: it was unthinkable that the authorities, the town, be brought into this. Every, one's reputation was at stake, and it was all so weird. Poor Swan. Of course the police would be discreet, there was no question of any arrest or investigation or formal report or newspaper story; that was not the way things were done in our town. The point was, they would know and that would mean gossip and comment. And eventually the story would get out and ruin everything; we would be seen to be incapable of rnanaging our own affairs. Bill said something to the deb and she nodded, apparently agreeing that this was not a public matter. It was an incident in the Harris kitchen, too many cocktails and someone spoke out of turn.

Reisinger sighed and muttered something. Then I heard Spanier's cornet, muted, waa-waa, so blue. It was one of the sides with Frank Teschmacher and Dave Tough. George looked at me and winked, wig, gling his shoulders. This was the party we had planned, an end-of-thesummer celebration with Spanier's music, happy blues. It had nothing to do with Korea or Swan or Reisinger's pain or me getting what was coming to me.

"Come on, Art," I said. "It was a long time ago. Listen to Muggsy. Have a drink."

Reisinger said, "You dirty little Jew."

I said, "What?"

In the stunned silence he glanced around him, as if searching for something; or perhaps he had forgotten where he was. He brought his arm up so that the false hand was resting under Terry's ear, black on white, inert.

I said, "What the hell are you talking about?"

"Politics. I'm talking about a conspiracy."

I said, "Wait a minute."

"You and your Jew friends."

I looked at George Field, casually lighting a cigarette; we had known each other all our lives, and had had many escapades together. But George did not look at me. The Harris kitchen suddenly seemed very small, claustrophobic as a cell, and the atmosphere filled with-it wasn't menace, more a kind of morbid curiosity mixed with fear. George said mildly, "Come on, Art." No one moved.

"Your Jew war."

"That's not nice," the deb said.

George laughed, a sharp little snicker.

"Well, it isn't," the deb said.

Reisinger seemed not to hear. He spoke directly to me, though his eyes were every which way; I did not know if it was me he saw, or someone else. He said, "You don't care about anything, you Jews. You entitled people. So long as you get yours, you don't care how many of us you kill. And the question I've always asked is: What's the motive? Why?"

"Stop it," the deb said.

"What are you talking about?" I said again. But I knew what he was talking about, and I didn't think it had anything to do with Jews.

"Jews." Reisinger said. "Jews." The word spoken out loud seemed to give him particular pleasure, for he grinned widely. "Jews and politics. Money and Jews."

Bill Darcy said, "I don't get it."

"No?" Reisinger said. "Well, you'd better."

I said, "Let's have it, then."

He said, "You're asking for it."

Listening hard, I said nothing. Reisinger was deep into the regional subconscious, a forbidden country, unexplored; his vulgar tongue cast it in a shocking light. The Jewish threat was never very far below the surface in our town, yet the word itself was always spoken sorto voce, a side-of-the-mouth word of opprobrium, a whispered word not suitable at the dinner table or in the drawing room. It was not a nice word. By their language shall ye know them, and this was the Anglo-Saxon vernacular of the polite Midwest: accurate, blunt, but with much left unsaid, much concealed, much implied. The word "Jew" was an inch wide and a mile deep, a slender iceberg of a word, brutal as a dagger. Its open acknowledgment was in the locker-room jokes of the period, men talking to likeminded men, the punch line in a dialect I joke, and a blast of laughter. But this was not the locker room and there was no camaraderie, and Reisinger did not seem that kind of man. In the silence, George Field leaned forward, expectant.

George said, "Tell us about the war, Art." He lifted his chin and smiled halfway.

Reisinger said, "You stabbed us in the back, and then you let us fade away. A common Jew trick, chaos."

George laughed. "No argument so far."

Reisinger did not seem to hear him. He said, "Killers."

I started to say something, then didn't. I recognized the tone, a midwestern defensiveness, so familiar. I heard my own voice, the near-whine of an aggrieved subordinate, or a child who believes that a promise has been made and broken. This was the dark side of prairie fatalism, what midwesterners liked to believe was their unique steadiness, simplicity, and resistance to anything modish - their stubborn belief that there was no human conspiracy, only an inscrutable and farseeing God. But this

belief was often strained, and from time to time there were heroes. And if in this world there was a hero, there had to be a villain; and if the hero was also a victim, well then. Things got off the track. I imagined Rachel listening to all this, and wondered at her reaction. I could hear her precise, angry voice, slicing at supercilious George Field, then turning on Reisinger. And when she looked at him, whom would she see? Dr. Goebbels? Ezra Pound? George Babbitt? Or a shell-shocked soldier with his foot in his mouth?

Reisinger said loudly, "Where were you?" He turned then toward the wall, and I saw the framed photograph and knew right away what the argument was about, and how it had begun. Next to the refrigerator was the famous picture of Douglas MacArthur, the taut profile with the corncob pipe under the battered officer's hat with the scrambled eggs on the bill. The photograph was signed and dated. Terry's father had been one of the founders of a committee to draft MacArthur for the 1952 presidential nomination, believing Eisenhower too liberal and Taft unelectable. Taft lacked the common touch. Terry's father thought that the nation's corruption could be traced to the refusal of the Republicans to turn to MacArthur, general, proconsul, and patriot, thereby leaving the destiny of the Republic in the hands of the eastern bankers, the national press, the unions, the Democrats, and the Jews, a junta directed by the quisling Thomas E. Dewey. Terry was very much his father's son, without the certain faith and hatred of the true believer. So they had been talking about the war, he and Reisinger, and Terry had said something about the great general, the tactician, the architect of victory, ruined by a Democrat haberdasher, and Reisinger had taken it badly. Probably it was not what Terry had said, but that he had said anything. Dugout Doug or General Jesus: Terry Harris was not entitled to speak of Reisinger's war, none of us was. It would have been like speculating openly about his intimate life with Swan. Reisinger had been there, a volunteer Marine, a witness, in the line, a casualty of General MacArthur's command. The rest of us were outsiders, and would always be outsiders. And of course Reisinger's view of the war would be perverse: he would enlist our sympathy, but discourage our understanding.

"You bastards," Reisinger sighed, a kind of exasperated sigh of contempt, and placed the blade of the knife flat on Terry's neck.

"Please," the deb said. She was trembling and I thought she was going to cry.

Reisinger looked at her curiously.

George murmured, "Not the time or the place, definitely not the time or the place."

"You ought to try it sometime, you and your Jew friends."

"Try what, Art?" I took a step forward.

Bill Darcy said to me, "Easy now."

George said slyly, "Tell us about the war, Art. Tell us what you did in the war."

Bill said, "Shut up."

"Cowards. You. Him. You're cowards now." He pointed at George, who stili wore his half-smile. "You people really wanted it, didn't you? Just couldn't wait for it. Wanted it so badly you could taste it, except not so badly that you'd go to it. You people, so safe, so out of it, so protected, you stabbed us in the back, and left us there." He said, "1 came in at the end of everything."

His next sentences were incoherent, something about a fifth column and a conspiracy against the volunteers. He mentioned Hiss, Acheson, the Rosenbergs, Truman, and Cohn. He was talking faster and faster, the names running together helrer-skelter. Then he began to lose speed and finally stopped, silent. He rubbed his chin with his false hand, and suddenly 1 understood that he was back in the here and now, out of the shadows. He was in the near distance. I tried to look behind the surface, to penetrate the skin and discover the life there, but I could see nothing. I thought that we were all strangers, to ourselves and to each other. When he began to speak again it was with the gentlest tone, as if he were explaining the position to a curious child. "It was so cold and nothing like our prairie cold, our Windy City; the cold that exists outside a warm house. It was northern cold, colder than hell. It was wind all the way from Siberia. Everyone of us had frostbite, even old Gunny, and when they started up again it didn't get warm and I thought it would. Everyone said it would. It always had. It was just as cold as before except they were coming down on us and just shooting everything to hell. You knew they were going to attack when they blew their bugles. That's the way it was. The lieutenant ran away. We were unprotected, and it was a massacre. I got separated from my unit. That's how I got this, look at it." He moved his arm up and down like a semaphore. "Our weapons misfired. Our food was gone. And the water froze in our canteens." He paused and seemed to concentrate on the music, Spanier's old-fashioned Chicago horns hot and blue. I held my breath. Reisinger listened to Spanier with the offended expression of a man listening to a joke that irritated him and that he didn't get. Then something in him seemed to ignite, and he looked at each of us in turn, a look I had never seen before on anyone's face. He looked as if he were breaking apart; there were tears in his eyes. I felt that somehow lowed him an apology, or anyway a word of consolation. But he turned suddenly, pulling Terry around until their faces were almost touching. I thought for a moment that they would kiss. Then Reisinger pushed him away, hard. Terry crashed into the kitchen table, and then to the floor.

We all stood a moment, uncertain whether it was over or just beginning. Reisinger still had the knife. We stood frozen, watching him and listening to the rain tap-tap on the roof, and Spanier in the distance.

The deb moved behind me and 1 knew without looking that Swan was in the doorway. 1 heard her breathing, and smelled her distinctive scent. I turned to her but she did not seem to notice. She stood with her hands in the pockets of her raincoat, staring into the middle distance; her gaze and Reisinger's seemed to meet at an indefinite point between them, and hold. Her face told me nothing, but 1 deliberately moved to give her room. I had thought, unreasonably, that it was her show. He was her husband, and it was up to her to get him out of Terry Harris' kitchen. But as I looked at her I knew that it wasn't her "show" at all, and that she and Reisinger were using calculus while the rest of us were in simple arithmetic.

"Well," Reisinger said. "You're back. Get bored in the car?"

She shook her head and replied, almost inaudibly, "I wasn't in the car. You know better than that." She looked at me. "Why did you say that I was in the car when 1 wasn't?"

There was no simple answer I could give to that.

To the middle distance, she said, "I was inside, waiting for you. So we could go home."

Reisinger opened the refrigerator and took out a bottle of beer. He searched for an opener, and finally knocked the cap off on the counter's edge with the heel of his false hand. It made an odd sound and we all looked at him as he drank. No one spoke.

Terry shook his head as if to clear it, but of course his purpose was the reverse. He wanted to cloud the episode. We must all forget what had happened. It was an embarrassment, inexplicable, an aberration. We had all wandered away and forgotten ourselves, and there had been a kind of breakdown of civilization. Something dreadful had gotten loose but now it was back where it belonged. Terry said at last, "Let's shake hands, forget it."

I turned away; how like Terry. He observed the conventions and probably somewhere in the back of his mind was the old rule that a gentleman never insulted someone unintentionally. 1 had watched Terry as Reisinger spoke, Terry's eyes wide with disbelief; Reisinger might as well have been reciting the plot of a movie, or been lecturing about Stalingrad, Freud, or the Red Queen. The water froze in our canteens. The lieutenant ran away. And the statement that had begun it all, You dirty little Jew. And what had he meant when he said, I came in at the end of everything? Whatever Reisinger's experience, it had no connection with our pretty suburb with its curving streets and turn-of-the-century rail, road station, and Republican values. It seemed likely in those days that our bellicose fathers had given us a world that would last forever, a structure as secure and tidy as a city-state of the middle ages-a prosper' ous suburban stronghold where everything was built to look like some, thing else, a Cotswold cottage, a chateau of the Loire, a teahouse in Kyoto, a platz in Lubeck, with restrictive convenants more formidable

than any battlement or moat. But where was the bedrock, the natural thing? The human result had seemed to me a weird composite of Bertie Wooster, the Buddenbrooks, and Natty Bumppo-and my attitude toward it could only be ironical, a popgun on that field of fire. What was serious? Atoms for Peace? Adlai Stevenson? All abstract and far from home. And then there was Reisinger and his teeming memory of the retreat from the thirty-eighth parallel, his dead hand, his knife at Terry's throat, and his extraordinary tirade, and the acquiescence with which we listened to it. Now, in the thick Hopper silence, we waited.

Reisinger had not moved. He ignored Terry's hand, and the truth is, I doubt if he noticed; eventually, Terry withdrew it. Swan walked slowly from the doorway to her husband's side, her eyes still focused on the middle distance. I wondered what she saw there-Degas, "Nighthawks," Delmore Schwartz, or the first time she had seen Reisinger, so composed and debonair in black tie. Probably none ofthe above; no doubt she was not in her memory at all, but in the present moment. She moved in an odd hesitant shuffle. They stood there together stiffly, as if posing for a formal portrait. She looked us over one by one. Reisinger's face was blank, drained of all heat or passion. He looked like an animal caught in the glare of headlights.

Suddenly he kissed Swan, a lingering kiss, a lover's kiss. She closed her eyes and did not move; she did not look at him, nor react at all except to put her fingers to her mouth when he finished. Then she put her hand on his arm, leaning close to him, but whether the gesture was meant to steady her or steady her husband, there was no way of telling. She took his hand, then said something inaudible, lifting her face to whisper into his ear. Reisinger nodded. He finished his beer and put the knife in his belt, pirate-fashion. Then he swaggered out of the kitchen. Swan watched him, every step. We heard the front door slam. Swan seemed so alone and defeated, and there was nothing we could say. To comfort her now would be an intrusion, a confirmation that her great adventure, her "great life," was over almost as soon as it began.

The silence was so close as to be unendurable. I said, "Are you all right?" She nodded. "Can I take you home?"

She looked at me. "Arthur's in the car."

I said, "You shouldn't drive with him."

She smiled fractionally, and glanced at Terry.

I said quickly, "He's been drinking."

Terry said, "That's the trouble."

She said, "No, it isn't."

I said, "He's had a lot to drink."

She said, "So have you."

I said, "Yes, but."

"What do you think?" she said. "What are you imagining? Do you

think he'll mistake me for Ethel Rosenberg? Do you think he'll stick me with his knife?"

I shook my head.

"He won't," she said.

"Of course not," I said.

"He would never hurt me."

"No," I said.

"Never," she said fiercely.

I opened the refrigerator and fetched a beer. I did not want to argue with her about Reisinger, or about anything; and I did not want her to think me an enemy. And what was there to be said, beyond what had been said? I wondered what it was that brought them together, and inspired such loyalty. I couldn't believe it was marriage alone, or three weeks together at Fish Creek, hot, flyblown, and crowded. They had only known each other for a summer, and had married in such haste, as if time would run out, as if they both had just this one chance. Swan had committed herself, though; she had bet all her chips. I thought of Reisinger's past, a darkness and disorder greater than anything Swan could imagine or prepare for. What the Jews had to do with it I had no idea; perhaps convenience, an historical mission. Perhaps Reisinger, on reconnaissance in his memory, had recalled a conversation in the locker room, or on the street, or in someone's backyard, or around the dinner table. Anywhere, really. Jews screwing people, Jews in control, Jews always wanting in, Jews sticking together, Jews united in opposition, Communist Jews. And I wondered if everyone felt the heat when Reisinger was at the height of his tirade; there was lust in the air, perhaps of the sort that rises when a man finds a fancy sexual game that excites him, and of which he is ashamed.

Terry said, "Well, the party's over."

Swan said, "What did you say to my husband?"

Terry shrugged and mumbled something about MacArthur, the Marines, and the war. "The police action." It was innocent enough, he said, the sort of casual remark people made all the time. "Hell's bells," he said, "it was just politics."

"I'll tell him that," she said.

"And Art took offense and he shouldn't have."

She said, "I'll tell him that, too."

I thought for a moment that she would offer some explanation, but of course she didn't. Why would she? The explanation, whatever it was, was private between them. They were side-by-side-like that, as she said - and that was why her eyes were fixed on the middle distance and why, when he kissed her, she remained silent, undemonstrative. Swan heaved a great sigh and turned to Terry and smiled. The smile was offkey, but it could be interpreted as an apology, or anyway an expression of regret. Terry was happy enough to accept that, and they embraced

awkwardly. Actually, it was Swan who embraced him, her arm around his waist, a maternal gesture.

"Take care, Terry."

"You, too, Swan."

Suddenly there were loud voices and jostling as others, married men, pushed into the kitchen. I wondered what had taken them so long, the cavalry. One of the married men looked at Terry with an I'm-in-chargehere expression, and demanded an explanation. They heard there was trouble, someone acting crazy. What was it about? He looked belligerently from one face to another, avoiding Swan. Terry said there was no trouble, just a misunderstanding, everything's fine, party's over.

Swan examined the married man up and down, as if measuring him for a suit of clothes. She said, "Who are you?"

Her tone was so cold he moved back a step, and did not reply.

"It was my husband," she said.

He nodded, no harm done then.

"No," she said. "Not to you, anyway."

"Just a second here," he said.

"Yes?" She leaned toward him, balancing on the balls of her feet. For a moment I thought she was going to hit him, and he thought so, too, and moved back a step; but she only grinned, a eat's grin, inscrutable and without mirth.

I said, "Art was telling us how the Jews started the Korean War." "What are you talking about -" he began.

"Jews," I said. "The Rosenbergs, Hiss, Acheson, Truman, Greenglass."

"Watch your language," he said.

"Or what?" said Swan.

"Just so you know what it was about," I said. "What the trouble was here."

He was a tall, slender, married man, a stockbroker, good on the golf course; I had seen him around for years. He had been confused, but now he had his issue: manners. He looked sternly at me, pointing his finger as a schoolmaster might. He said, "Cool off. We don't use that kind of language around here, in this town, mixed company."

Swan looked at me, and I thought I saw a flicker of a smile; it was the distracted smile of a woman looking into a distant mirror. I flickered back. Then we heard the toot of a car horn and Swan left the kitchen. I was waiting for a sign, any sign at all that we were not natural enemies. But she did not look at me. She seemed collected, her hands in her raincoat pockets, pushing past the newcomers. She paused when the deb reached out to her; the deb squeezed Swan's hand and they stood a moment together, silent. Swan looked much older, though in fact they were the same age exactly; they had gone to the same school, but had never been particular friends.

After the front door slammed there was more bluster in the kitchen

but I paid no attention to it. I looked out the window; a spotligh illuminated the lawn, brilliant and glittering in the rain. Shade tree threw thick black shadows. A car's headlights moved on the peripherj Reisinger's Austin-Healey. I thought of them together in that sma space, staring into the rain on the edge of our bright green watery work I imagined her hand over his, white on black. And I imagined he troubled voice, low and hushed in the darkness, soothing, consoling Then they were out of sight around the corner, and I was left with th bluster and Spanier's muted horn. People were laughing now. I hear the clink of ice cubes, and someone mimicking Reisinger's thick speed Things were familiar again, safe and fearless; we were home. Georg Field started to tell the joke about the dog and the Jew sitting at the ba: I continued to look out the window, at the darkness beyond the lighi The Reisingers would be home soon. I tapped on the windowpane, farewell to Swan. There was a little embarrassed silence behind me, an then someone snickered.

2

We corresponded for a while, Swan and me, then drifted apart. Th 1960's were not a good time for staying in touch. I had heard that sh and Reisinger had moved west after Swan got her degree at the Univei sity of Chicago, honors in twentieth-century American poetry. I hal also heard, but somehow did not believe, that Reisinger also enrolled a the university, earning a master's degree and then a Ph.D. in history. did not think of him as a scholar, and I could not imagine him on th Midway. Of course by then I was out of law school, and very rnuci involved with my own life in Boston; I was courting the girl I late married, and divorced.

As my father used to say, "There are only a hundred people in th world and they all know each other." I was brought up to date only th other day by Swan's daughter, whom I met quite by chance at a recep tion in Cambridge. Susan Reisinger was happy to talk about he mother. She related that Swan had a substantial career working for th governor of Colorado and was thinking about elective office, perhap Congress, except that she didn't want to spend half the year in drear Washington. She loved the West, her adopted home, especially Cole rado, highest state in the union. She loved the people, rugged individi alists, always laughing and carrying on. She had taken up skiing and ( course Reisinger was a great fisherman, so they often spent weekends i the high country, fly casting for trout. Swan has become ubiquitous 0 television, talking about the various threats to the Colorado enviror ment. That was her specialty, the environment, though she was also hero to feminists, and great favorite of the men, too. "You wouldn't hav

any trouble recognizing her," Susan said; "she hasn't changed a bit. She looks like a teenager.

"It's the healthy western life," Susan said. "And doing what you were meant to do. And not giving up."

Reisinger died two years ago. He taught history at the university, a respected and popular instructor; he was a full professor when he died. He was dedicated to the discipline of history, it being both his profession and his avocation. He loved to teach, though he held the unorthodox view that Santayana was a windbag; history repeated itself whether it was remembered or not. Still, he believed it his mission to elucidate the more obvious calamities. In the evenings, Susan said, he would often retire to the basement alone and remain there long after everyone had gone to bed. The basement was filled with war memorabilia, and a sand table to replicate the notable battles of the Korean War, the defense of the Pusan perimeter, the offensive of 25 September 1950, the Inchon landing, the advance to Manchuria, and the retreat from Manchuria. He recreated the battles according to data furnished in the West Point Atlas of American Wars and a Chinese text someone gave him. "He was trying to find a way to make the chaos visible," she said; "it's harder than it might seem." He even wrote a book about his own experiences, and had it published privately, his contribution to the short shelf of literature of the war in Korea.

Susan said, "He only taught one course in the Korean War because there wasn't much interest in it. They were interested in him, because he had such a good reputation as a teacher; and of course they knew that he had a personal connection with it. As a matter of fact, there was quite a lot about the war that was still unresolved, according to my father. Motives, and so forth and so on."

She said they led a comfortable life, near Boulder. They lived on the grounds of a country club, in a rambling house on a hill adjoining the fifteenth tee, with a gorgeous view of the mountains.

"It sounds like the ideal suburban life," I said.

Susan laughed, raising her eyebrows; at that moment she looked remarkably like her mother, though she had her father's composed bearing. We were at the faculty club at Harvard, an awards ceremony; the recipient of the award was a friend, so she had come down from New York. He was also a friend of mine, and when he introduced us the names registered right away. "You grew up with my mother," she said.

"My mother often speaks of you."

I said, "We were great friends. But we lost touch."

"Well, she remembers."

I said, "So do I. I had heard that she was living in the West."

"And she knew you were in the East." There was a little silence and then she said, "You'd probably be interested to know that my mother owns a Hopper etching. It cost her a bundle."

"I believe it," I said. "Which one is it?"

"It's one of the reclining nudes," Susan said. "Very simply done." She paused two beats. "Degas is way beyond her budget."

I smiled, then laughed. What a pleasure it must be to have a subtle daughter! I envied Swan. It was obvious they were very close, and that would be a pleasure too. I remembered Swan's mother, and wondered how they were able to break the pattern. Then I thought of the woman in "The Morning Bath." A few years ago it came to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and when I saw it I was immediately reminded of Swan, something about the awkward angle of the model's leg; nothing about it had changed. The unexpected sight of "The Morning Bath" inspired such a rush of memory that I went immediately to look at the Hoppers, ofwhich the MFA has a fine collection. Of course "Nighthawks" was still in Chicago. But I stayed an hour, moving slowly in front of the pictures-I thought "Ryder's House" was particularly provocativeremembering the old days, especially the year of our great rebellion. I wanted to ask Susan about her father, the circumstances of his death, and whether or not he and Swan had had a successful marriage. I said instead, "What do you do in New York?"

She said, "Medical school." Then, "Psychiatry. I'm going to be a psychiatrist. My two closest friends also had parents who were ill, it's a fairly common motivation; we three are planning to open an office together when we finish school and our residencies." She looked at me and smiled, waiting. "Would you like me to tell you the rest of it? I'd be happy to."

I said, "Please."

She said that her father had been in and out of hospitals with a variety of ailments, many of them obscure. He had one breakdown and then another and a third. They were frightening breakdowns, always predictable, like a barometer signaling a violent change in the weather. He went to a private hospital in Boulder, never remaining more than a month; her mother usually stayed with him, nights. When he came out he was fine, his old self, until the next episode. He was always on medication of some kind, and the ghost pain in his hand never left him. However, his death had nothing to do with that or with the breakdowns. He died of a heart attack on the golf course; he had been walking alone early in the morning, as he often did, and they didn't find him right away. We always thought, If they had-

The odd part about it was that he was in great shape, very fit from his active life in the West.

Susan said that her parents were the most devoted couple she knew. Everyone said that. She felt sometimes that they didn't need anyone but themselves, they lived in a sweet private world, so close-they had a private language, unintelligible to outsiders-and when she was younger she hated it; she felt excluded. But as she got older she understood how

rare it was, and how beautiful, her parent's love affair. And he was not an easy man, though men are not usually easy; women, either. And when he died so suddenly, her mother was unspeakably low and broken up. She went to Mexico, where she had never been, and then on impulse to Europe. And then she came home for good, and picked up her career where she had left it.

Swan believed he had saved her life, and not only that, he had sacrificed his life for hers, like someone in a war who throws himself on a live hand grenade.

Susan said to me, "I don't believe it, but she believes it. I thought he had more reason to think that than she did, what with his illness and so forth and so on. She was always there for him, always. But he was there for her, too. And perhaps what she needed was not quite so visible. But what do you think? You knew them when."

I said, "They were very special."

"Yes," she said, "they were."

I hesitated a moment, watching her; Swan's memories would be very different from mine, and what she made of them would be different also.

I said, "You know, we had a year of rebellion, your mother and me."

"She told me," Susan said. "She told me all about it. And she always wondered what became of you. She knew you were a lawyer in Boston. She heard you specialized in divorce law. Is that right?"

"Yes," I said.

"She thought that was funny. She said she couldn't believe it. Anyway. You were saying n

I said, "What's so funny about divorce law?"

Susan said, "I don't know. Are you married?"

"Briefly," I said. "Once, a long time ago."

"My mother thought it was funny. She said she didn't know whether you'd be good at it or not. She thought probably you would." Susan smiled brightly. "She said probably you'd never over-promise."

"I never do," I said. She did not reply, waiting for me to answer the other question. Had her father thrown himself on a live hand grenade? In my experience, people did not sacrifice themselves. I was going to say something about Marx in the British Museum and Swan and me in the Hopper room at the Art Institute, alert for Delmore Schwartz, but I didn't. It sounded frivolous and cynical and Susan Reisinger was anything but. I said, "With me, the great rebellion lasted only a year, and after that it didn't seem so important. The world was so large and our part of it so small. The Midwest is just a region like any other. It isn't an earth spirit or Mother Russia, that's what I decided when I went away to law school." Susan looked at me queerly. I went on, "But not to your mother. It was a prison she had to fight her way out of. Not retreat from. Not sneak away from. Not merely leave it or be paroled from it, time off for good behavior. No. She had to struggle with it. She had to defeat it.

She had to defeat its hold on her. Her parents' hold on her. And your father-" I paused. What was there to say about Reisinger? "And your father was the man she wanted to fight beside; she used to say they were together like that. Maybe she thought he had experience. Maybe she knew that with what he'd gone through, he'd never give up. Or allow her to."

Susan nodded thoughtfully.

"And he didn't," I said.

She said, "I guess not."

"And what a great thing that they stuck together."

Susan looked at me sharply. "You wouldn't even have wondered about that if you really knew them, or saw them together."

"I didn't mean it that way," I said. "It was that in the 1960's, everything broke up." But she was also correct. I looked away. The room was dark, dark paneling, men and women in dark winter clothing; a Harvard occasion, the talk low, intense, and obscure. Outside a light snow was falling. Twentv-five years ago I would never have imagined myself at a reception at the Harvard faculty club, an insider knowing most of those present, at ease in the surroundings. In the corner next to the sherry table three men in dark suits stood in a tight triangle, murmuring as if exchanging state secrets. One of them was an old friend, an economist; I had represented him in his divorce. He had wanted me to conceal his government consultancy fees on the novel ground that if revealed they would compromise national security. He had a particular expertise in the Chinese railway system. A memorable exchange with the judge, and with opposing counsel I wondered if it were true, what I had heard about life in the West; I had never been to Colorado. I had been to Los Angeles and San Francisco, and once to Phoenix, but that was not the West as Susan Reisinger was describing it.

"Well," she said. "It's been nice talking. What a surprise, seeing you here."

I said, "It surprises me, too."

"I'll tell my mother I saw you."

"Tell her I send my best. Maybe I'll find myself in Boulder someday." I had one last question that had edged its way into my mind. "Tell me one last thing. Where does she hang the Hopper?"

"The living room," Susan said, smiling broadly.

I asked her why she was smiling.

"She bought it, it cost her a bundle, and the truth is that she doesn't like it much. But she keeps it around anyhow."

"I think I can guess why," I said.

"'To remind,' she says," Susan said.

"Do you know what else she says about you?"

"No, but you'd better tell me."

Suddenly she began to laugh, leaning toward me. People looked at us,

curious; her laughter was gay in the dark formality of the room. I knew that she would say something extraordinary. "My mother said this. She said, 'We are so different. He is the only man I know who could look at the work of Edward Hopper and find consolation.'"

My law practice brings me back to Illinois now and then, and I am always overwhelmed by memory, from the moment the plane floats down over the lake, the towers of Chicago bunched together, a raised hand of metal and glass, and the neighborhoods spreading from it in orderly straight lines. On a clear day you can see north to Wisconsin, and south past the suburban lawns to the prairie itself, flat, fertile, and unwelcoming. I conduct my business on Michigan Avenue, then check into the Drake. I rent a car and drive north on the Outer Drive to Sheridan Road, the old way, the way Swan and I went back then, before the Edens Expressway was constructed. I frequently miss my turn out of the city; so many landmarks are gone, replaced by buildings of no distinction. Once I leave the city, nothing seems changed; I am twenty, driving in a Chevrolet convertible. It is the region as I knew it, frozen in the 1950's, William G. Stratton in the governor's mansion, Adlai Stevenson in Libertyville, Colonel McCormick in Tribune Tower, Art Hodes at the Blue Note. Evanston is still dry; Northwestern still seems the model of an unpretentious rah-rah midwestern campus. I ignore the protestors surrounding the Baha'i Temple in Wilmette, and drive slowly up the North Shore beside the flat gray lake.

My father is retired, and he and my mother live in Florida; the house I grew up in has long since been sold. Most of myoid crowd has moved away, though Terry Harris is still around, managing the family real estate business. His parents are dead and he lives in their house, off Green Bay Road. After dinner, his wife goes out; to her discussion group, she says. He married the girl in the doorway, the deb who thought we were playing The Game, the one who held out her hand to Swan. Terry and I have a nightcap and he tells me that things are very different now, and that the old rules no longer apply.

He is willing to describe the changes. "You know how it used to be around here, everyone knew each other, and things were reliable, day to day. It was like -" he searches for the word, and finds: "Europe. But we didn't keep it, and that's our fault; no one to blame but ourselves. Things moved so fast. Still, compared to most places " The proles are everywhere now, he says, and the police are vicious. You should see the traffic on Saturday mornings. And the taxes! The clubhouse by the lake burned down last year, and there are no plans to replace it; of course there are other clubs, but still. And the debutantes, gad the common accents they have now. You know, we used to have a distinctive accent around here, it meant something. Now they all sound like Mayor Daley, when they're not stoned on white powder or chemicals.

"Or reefers," I say.

"Oh, they've been around forever," he replies.

Naturally the Tribune no longer has a society page, so it is difficult to know who is coming out in Society. As if anyone cared. There are so many new people, people you never heard of from places you never heard of. And out beyond the old mill, they're building condominiums, can you believe it? For the new people to move into, as if this were Fort Lauderdale. They wanted Harris and Partners to go into it with them, provide some of the financing and this and that, and I told them no, absolutely not; this is my home.

"It must be great, living in Boston," he says. "Where do you live? Manchester? Beverly?"

"The Back Bay," I say.

"That's what I mean," he says. "A place where things mean what they used to mean. The Back Bay, that's great."

We have another nightcap.

A little later I remind him of the night in the kitchen with Reisinger. We are sitting in that same kitchen, and he turns to look at the framed photograph of the old warrior, a portrait as familiar as Stuart's historic Washington or Brady's ravaged Lincoln. He frowns and shakes his head, and then he laughs. "Weren't we crazy back then? Gosh, don't you wish we had those days back? What a lot of fun we had -"

Then something stirs in his memory, and a shadow crosses his face. After a moment, Terry says, "Art Reisinger wasn't quite all there, was he? I guess it was the war. Not a bad chap, though, all things considered He brightens, letting the sentence hang. "And that Swan, whatever happened to her? Wasn't she a piece of work? She just loved him to death." And then he changes the subject.

And I brutally change it back. Remember Reisinger's tirade? You dirty little lew! Jew! Jew! Jew! And the knife at the throat, and Reisinger's judgment: You cowards.

Terry shrugs, and seems to nod in agreement; that is, he remembers. But when he speaks, he says this: "Well, as you know, you couldn't say that now. The Jews are all over the place."

He looks away, and the atmosphere chills; the chill is palpable. This is obviously an embarrassment still. I am sorry that I brought it up at all. Terry would not think me a gentleman. I look at my watch, time to go back to the city. I do not tell him that Reisinger is dead, and Swan a Democrat. Instead, I try to make him laugh by saying there was a Woody Allen routine there somewhere, Reisinger's Jew cold and Jew wind, Chinese Jews sweeping down from Manchuria, slant-eyed Hassidim in side curls and yarmulkas, slaughtering leathernecks left and right, all of it supervised by the Rosenbergs and Dean Acheson.

He laughs dutifully, then turns to me with a puzzled expression. He gives another short, helpless laugh. "Who's Woody Allen?" he asks.

Our local chroniclers insisted that the summer of 1958 was the last of the brilliant seasons, really a superb season-though Swan Emerson's elopement was a surprise and a scandal. It set an unfortunate precedent, everyone agrees; and she was such an attractive girl, though not outgoing. The next year the debs seemed plainer and their parents not so conspicuously rich, and there was a general insolence and disregard for the conventions. And the year after that was the summer of 1960, and everyone sensed the change.

The Ex-Class Agent

Carol Bly

Budge Harley had always recognized the good of letter writing. At ten years old he knew a note saying, "Dear Mother: Everything is going fine, but please send fifteen dollars by return for new cleats" brought the fifteen or better-but only relayed through Mrs. Harley's bookkeepercum-manager in Stamford. If he did her a leisurely account of some Calley Academy snafu, on the other hand, his mother would actually write him herself. If nothing better offered, he would tell her about the Head's latest threats to the lower-middler class-they would have to write two history papers about nineteenth-century Europe and Russia instead of one, all because of a trivial ifcarefully planned misbehavior by the whole class. Actual disgrace was better grist for letters: in 1942 Budge's roommate got not only expelled from Calley, but "expunged from the Academy records" for making a snow statue on the Alumni House lawn during Parents' Weekend. It faithfully depicted a happily married pair of parents. At the end of Budge's upper-middler year, a girl's mother showed up at three o'clock in the afternoon, drunk, it was thought, and explained in a loud, midwestern accent that if she was pulling her daughter out of Calley before the girl finished her senior year it was no one's goddamned business but her own. The four or five uppermiddlers and seniors standing around smiled at her dimly and eased on out of the Tiffin Room. The Head wouldn't even see her, but sent the Academy driver to pick her up and drive her all the way in to the North Station. It was days before anyone told Coreen, the daughter, a kind of colorless girl, that her mother had shown up and behaved very non-de rigueur. Budge described the whole thing to his mother. "Jesus," she wrote back appreciatively.

Four days for Budge's letters to get over, four for hers to get back, nearly weightless in their skimpy envelopes, Mit Luftpost and Par Avion. In return for his little life dramas, she told him about Cau. She could

make a Moral Rearmament testimonial sound like first-rate faux pas at a really out-of-control cocktail party.

The thing was, Budge told himself even at twelve, fourteen, sixteen, not to get carried away about some earnest subject. You needed balance and humor. He was the best tackle in Calley's "royal blue line" - but he didn't write his mother about how very much he wanted to smash Middlesex in his last fall at the school. He told her instead about the Massachusetts sky in October. After practice, when the sun lay cold and orange on the bare treetops, Budge hunched home from the field, pretending he didn't have a warm dormitory to go to. He pretended that if he wanted dinner that night he'd have to steal or beg for it, and finally, he pretended he hadn't any bed with both Nineteenth-Century Europe and Dave Darrin's First Year at Annapolis waiting for him. He would sleep in the gutter that night, and Calley boys in suntans or flannels would trot by uncaring. At the dormitory door, he dropped the pretending. There it all was! Warmth for the heroic, exercised body and the bright dinner tables, master and eight boys and girls at each, where sometimes the conversations were funny and surprising. He never gave his mother anything to have conscience pangs or worry about.

Years later, even the dove-gray V-mail photostats his mother got from Somewhere in Africa, and then, Somewhere in Italy, read as philosophical, and incidental as nineteenth-century walking-tour pamphlets. Anzio beachhead, in Budge's telling, was a curious place where an army doctor fortunately took out his appendix, so he was not with his unit when it tried to ascend the slopes the Germans didn't want Americans to ascend. The whole letter sounded like one more amusing myoperation story.

The name "Budge" had started at Calley. The Daily noted gratefully in its November 14, 1942 issue that Harley seemed to be everywhere, blocking every disheveled Exeter player, messing up all the plays, and giving no ground on defense, either. They called him "No-Budge"; it shortened to "Budge," and stuck. Even Millie, through their courtship, called him Budge. When he returned to Calley at age forty-one to be Assistant Director of Development, Budge as name and memory was solid gold. His assistant, Kim, and even Austin, the bonehead on the computer, called him Budge in person and as a matter of policy on letters going out to alumni! ae.

At fifty-eight, Budge still liked letters so much that he and Millie exchanged notes magnetized to the refrigerator. Hers of this morning, formally placed and dated in their regular tongue-in-cheek tone:

CALLEY, 7TH NOVEMBER 1983: PLEASE MAKE NO PASSES AT MIDWEST BEAUTIES STOP HURRY HOME sror FASTEN YOUR SEATBELT WHEN THEY TELL YOU 10 sror I LOVE YOU (SIGNED) MILLP.S. IF I WERE YOU I WOULDN'T EVEN MENTION 10 THE TWIN CITIES GROUP THAT THE RUMOR THAT CALLEY IS GETTING TRI

LATERAL COMMISSION MONEY AND THEREFORE DOESNT NEED ITS ALUMNI IS FALSE. I WOULDNT EVEN BRING IT UP AT ALL LOVE MILL

Budge strode across the Common to the Development building, half noting the dutifully-chalked Kick Harvard Freshmen on Saturday and half trying to think up some wiseacre response for Millie. If he mailed it from St. Paul, he would beat the letter home, and if he had come up with something kind of sweet and funny and dumb, they would have a nice moment over it.

Budge liked his work in Development. He was not an Old Boy trying to hang French oil paintings in the computer rooms so it would all seem more like the Academy one knew as a kid. He was an Old Boy who liked the actual work. He liked rethinking the givens from time to time, to make sure that he and his team - Kim and Austin - weren't missing any marvelous chances for innovation.

He enjoyed the briefing for Minneapolis-St. Paul, a two-day job. No one in his right mind liked Logan Airport-at least, as it was, confused, in 1981-but Budge did. He liked the ratty, old-fashioned Callahan Tunnel because it had classic tunnel ambiance. He liked setting spirited dollar goals for the Minnesota-Iowa-Wisconsin alumni, letting them make their sarcastic remark about his Soviet-taskmaster's-quota style. He noted they were invariably charmed into making the kid-hours and alumnus-dollar quotas, anyway.

Budge did each geographical section of alumni every third year. The interval meant that enough members of any local alumni group were the same to keep continuity, but the intervening two years would provide enough statistical and gossip changes at the Academy so that Budge could bring them fresh news. His briefing team kept him ready with affectionate miscellany.

"All set for gen?" Kim said, smiling. She was waiting for him beside his desk. He saw she had the Calley movie in its carrying case, standing by her ankle. They started their routine.

Kim told him a little about each sheet, passed it over, Budge asked a question or commented, and laid it face-down in his briefcase. Later, on the 727, he would reverse the whole pile so everything came up in the right order. The top sheet had a very few "gross" figures on it. The next page gave what he and Kim called "comparison shopper figures." They proved to Minneapolis-St. Paul alumni/ae that their group always gave better than the national average. Whenever the Minneapolis-St. Paul alumni/ae were less generous than the national average, Kim and Austin between them would come up with some other kind offinding-such as the per,classmate,head,oveHhe,last,ten,years giving record. The third sheet was gossip-selected bio on individual local alumni or alum, nae. All the rest of the packet was rafts of the pale-green-and-white printouts of five-year giving records. Finally, there was a memo sheet,

reminding Budge to check projection equipment, silver-taping, and so forth.

"Almost all the Twin Cities news is good news this time," Kim told him. "Total count of givers up two. Eighty-three alumni-seventy-four men and nine women. Plus fifty-six more in the Iowa-MinnesotaWisconsin grouping. There is one new couple since you were there three years ago: the Minzeskis. Of the whole group, only four are Inactives, and only two are D.C.'s." D.C. was the Calley Academy abbreviation for Don't contact!-people who not only didn't want to be dunned for money but didn't want to be asked for family or job news, either. Kim handed him the top sheet and began picking up on her page-two material. "Budge, do you remember Eddie Goodnough, class of 1912? Last time you visited him in the Episcopal Church Home on Feronia Avenue? He's died in the last four or five months. Here's your map-green marker is the fast route from the airport rental to the Minnikahda Club, where the dinner is. That purple circle marks Lee Framweller's house, president of the area association, and the Framwellers want you to stay with them again." She handed Budge the map. "Your car's Avis this time. Lee's wife's name is Teekie. And Budge, don't ask the Framwellers about their kids unless they bring it up. Since you were there last, the Admissions Office has turned down their second kid for Calley. Lee Framweller dropped his usual one-thousand-a-year gift to ten dollars and I think the ten is just out of good manners."

Kim read rapidly a note to herself, then unclipped a sheet from it to give Budge. "Your Divorced Women project paid off, Budge. You remember, you had nine women in the Twin Cities area, one remarried. Here's the sheet from three years ago, showing their then-employment if any, their giving records for the five years previous to the divorces, and the husbands' income-that Bob what's-his-name at Honeywell who we figured at $48,000 and up, likely up. It all went the way you said: the significant drop in each divorced woman's giving and then after a year, her getting the level right back up to what it was from before, even though she isn't making anywhere near so much money as the exhusband in every case. You mentioned sense of pride or continuitywell, you were right-or whatever you told them last time you were out there was right."

Budge remembered what he had told them. He had gone around during the cash bar, carefully mentioning to each of the women a figure she knew she couldn't afford to give. For example, Bunny Kirk made $13,000 if she made that. That meant $25 from her would be fine-$50 handsome. What Budge had told her, though, was that the Academy depended on the executive-level people like her to come through with the big hundred-dollar annuals. He had said he only wished it were true that every little bit counted, but alas, every little bit didn't, and the managers, the executives, were going to have come through for the

school-unpopular as the idea might sound. He had seen a light in her eye-and now, from what Kim showed him-he had read Bunny, and the other seven, right.

"Now just one more kind of curious thing," Kim said. She passed Budge a last sheet of typing, with a photocopy of a letter on Calley stationery attached. "We've never had anything just like this before. Not since I've been on the job-I thought you'd be especially interested, because it has to do with an alumna in your class. Did you ever know Coreen Sorel? She's been a Don't Contact since 1952 and now suddenly, starting last year, she is a top-notch Class Agent. All through 1980 I had been stuffing the Class Notes with pleas for someone to become Class Agent, because the previous one burned out. Suddenly this woman volunteered-like a windfall. She never said why she was D.C. all these years, or why she suddenly was willing to work. Frankly, I didn't expect much. But then, she got off two very good letters. Here's the recent one."

Dear Classmates [the letter went): As I take on the job ofclass agent, I am struck by the fact that we are all people in our late fifties. We must know our own minds by now. One reason we were ever sent to a private, liberal-arts school in the first place was so that we would tum out to be people who decide their own values. There'd be no sense to good schools if their middle-aged graduates could be made to change their minds just because some class agent did a booster pitch.

It went on to ask, not for change of heart, but for very small checks from alumni!ae who had not been giving. It pointed out that the per-capita giving was what corporations looked at. It mentioned Calley as a kind of armed keep against an invasion of junk values. It suggested that liberalarts education was a flag flying for excellence and mercy both.

Budge liked the letter, but it crossed his mind that his mother would have found it very earnest indeed and would have said "Jesus!" politely and maybe have asked her bookkeeper to send a check or maybe would have forgotten it.

"She got her results," Kim said, seeing Budge had read to the bottom. "Nineteen-forty-two went from three percent to forty-one percent outright giving, and another six percent pledging. And she picked up all three Lybunts in the class." Lybunts were alumni who gave Last Year But Not This. Sorel brought the 1942 figure up from bottom to third from the top in per-capita, and eleventh in dollar figures, not counting Old Guard and bequests. So I don't know what you have for a time-line in the Twin Cities, Budge, but in case you have time, I fixed this up."

She was holding a map of St. Paul and environs between them, showing him a blue-marker-indicated route northbound to White Bear Lake on 1-35E. "Sorel has an RFD address so you will have to ask locally. No one else in the Twin Cities area knows her. Not after all those years as a Don't Contact, I suppose. And she only had one year at the school, too - upper-middler,"

Budge saw in his mind's eye a reddish-haired, pale girl, whom every-

one sneered at a little for raising her hand. all the time in European History II. Now she would be his age. He rose, snapped the briefcase shut, and bent for the Calley movie. "Sorel, the mystery woman!" he said with a grin for Kim. "I will find her out. Come out! come out! wherever you are, angel of White Bear Lake, and I will tell her of our undying gratitude, and I will get her back."

Kim smiled. "And tell us what she's like."

Before the 727 captain told everyone he was starting his descent for the Twin Cities area, Budge had memorized what he had to know absolutely by heart, and was more or less on top of ten or eleven other details about Minnesota-Iowa-Wisconsin alumni/ae. He had to remember, for example, that not only had Lee Framweller's kids not made it into Calley, but a daughter of George and Amy Williams' had o.d.'ed in her Cluster dorm at the school. It meant watching tone, especially if he caught them to talk to during cash bar. As for Lee Framweller's boys, Budge always made a point of never calling up Admissions to find out why such and such an alumnus' kid didn't get in. He needed to be able to tell parents- at cash bars and club dinners all over the United States: "Gosh, I haven't the vaguest. We are pretty committed to letting the Admissions do their thinking without any pressure from us. We have to leave them to it-well, you can see how bent out of shape things would get if the Development Office thought it could lean on the Admissions Office." He didn't mention that on the occasions when the Development Office did feel strongly, it pressured the Admissions people with all the delicacy of a boa constrictor.

As Budge took his Avis out onto 494, he had his usual delight in being lost in the universe. It happened for him when he got into a rental car. He was no longer on the manifest of Northwest Airlines Flight Number 51 and he was not yet being shepherded around by President-of-theLocal Framweller. Happily married, employed, educated men don't get lost in the universe much: he felt heightened, if vague, feelings. He didn't want to identify them: he was content simply to have them. Today-this time-he was especially pleased because there was one genuinely unusual element in tomorrow's work: looking up Coreen Sorel. Not only did Budge never get lost much in the universe, but he got few surprises. Planners and public-relations people tend to think up everything that will happen ahead of time: it was the very nature of his work that it seldom surprised him. Very occasionally something unusual turned up: a member of Calley's old-boy skinflint contingent (people who went to alumni dinners, sang loudly, but never donated) might give Budge a check afterwards-but it was rare. Bequests usually came from the people Budge and Kim and Austin hoped would make bequests. Large gifts came from people Budge and Kim identified and then focused on. As for the small donations, the rule seldom varied: good letters from class agents brought in good per-capita participation, indifferent letters

accomplished less. In all his years of fund-raising, Budge had never come across a long-standing Don't Contact who suddenly volunteered and then turned out to be a natural-and then, stranger still, quit again.

Budge's work at the Minnikahda Club had two parts: first, the cash bar before dinner, with its conversations, and second, his formal talk during dessert, and introduction of the new Calley Academy movie. Work started-being cheerfully lost in the universe ended, that is-the moment he made first contact with anyone from the school: this evening it happened in the classy, scary little ironwork elevator of the Minnikahda Club because Lee Framweller got into it with him. The elevator ride merged into the social hour. Budge tried to get around to most of the Calley people, remembering, when he could, Significant Others, as well. People in the recent classes brought in the most Significant Others-who were fine with Budge and Kim if they stayed the same. It was the turnover, with the unfamiliar faces and names, that kept providing what Austin called low-resolution information. At a Calley evening, Significant Others generally got through with lots to drink. Budge listened to a fairly acceptable story about what happened when Nancy Reagan applied for AFDC help from a Polish welfare worker. He gradually looked up, and found, five of the divorced women identified three years before and thanked them for sustaining their loyalty to the school. At one point he bought a drink for Lee Frarnweller's wife, Teekie, asked her very lightly how the boys were doing, and got such a fast, glittery smile of"O just fine thanks!" that he knew to stay off the subject. It was the glittery smile of a hundred thousand alumni faces whose kids never made it to Calley, or they did and flunked out, and went to the Bay Area for a life of dope and macrobiotic diet and Shintoism or whatever they chose to call it.

All the while Budge kept track of technical minutiae. The projector was now up, under the great royal-blue banner reading "THE CALLEY CONNECTION." Drop-cords O.K. and he took two minutes to give Ferd Hancock a voice-level test-out and helped him with taping. He fell into conversation with two old women. They were talking about girls' basketball rules in 1934, comparing them to what they called the "boys' rules" now used at Calley. They were neat, pretty women: the one with silver hair suddenly reminded Budge of his mother; Budge egged her on in her anecdotes. Like his mother, she warmed to the light touch: she told him how Miss Hall's beat the hell out of Calley's intramural "Griffin" team one year. Budge had another drink someone handed him, remembered that Eddie Goodnough had died now and that we all pass through life as a bird does through a banquet hall, because the Headwho doubled as History master-told them about King Edwin's man advocating the new religion. He asked someone to point out the new couple in town - the Minzeskis.

The dinner itself. Seventy-five people took their Lytton-photocopied

sheets and belted out the Calley football song. By now some of the lit-up Significant Others, who could read music, were louder and surer, at least on the refrain, than the alumni. Budge made a note to tell Millie that-not meaning to feed into the great maw of American cynicism, but the fact was, one good non-alumna or non-alumnus with two martinis who could read music was really worth ten loyal monotones anytime. "0 Calley may your blue line wave," they shouted. "Keep rolling over the red-and-gray," they sang in voices from twenty-vear-olds' to the Old Guard classes', "0, Alma Mater, our school for aye!"

Then everyone attended to the lamb chops and a pinot noir that was better than the genuine vin injerieur which the Detroit alumni had ordered up two weeks ago. Lee Framweller announced the evening's order of events. He made the parents of the "deserving Calley senior" who won the $25 book award rise and be applauded. He introduced Budge. "Budge Harley," Framweller told them cheerfully, "despite whatever else he says he's come to visit us about is basically here to lift all our pockets, so watch yourself, fellows."

"Fellows and women!" shouted a feminine voice from the rear. Framweller bowed and grinned. "Watch yourselves, fellows and women! Budge doesn't care which sex the money comes from, just so it comes!"

By the time everyone had stopped clapping, Budge had his notes laid out the way he wanted them. "Right away," he said, "let me tell you a couple of news items before I forget. First things first. Dusty Sturgis, of Hopkins, Minnesota, threw the darndest Hail Mary I have ever heard of with just possibly the exception of Kramer's pass to Ahmad Rashad in the last second of the game, a week ago here. Sturgis' pass, in the last four seconds against Exeter, put Calley out in front twenty-eight to twenty-one." Budge waited for the particularly aggressive clapping and shouting from a rear table, probably full of people from Hopkins and Golden Valley, to quiet down and then went on. "One other football update for you. Bill Minzeski's ankle is O.K. again, so he is going to be able to play against Harvard Freshmen day after tomorrow. The Minzeskis are fairly new in the Twin Cities area. Just in case you haven't all met them, could I ask Jill and Clay to stand up a second?" The Minzeskis rose together, swiftly, smiling-all set since Budge had warned them about it during the cash bar.

"Now, for those of you who have other things to do in life besides follow Calley football stats, let me just tell you that Bill Minzeski is not just a blessing to the royal blue team. His recent paper on the American Class System, in which he likened some of our attitudes to those of midnineteenth century European attitudes, won the Rogers Award this year, for Excellence in Ethical Thought."

Budge then went to the Comparative Shopper. Minnesota had the finest giving record of any state. He apologized to all Wisconsin

Iowa alumni/ae present but told them they knew, of course, how to fix the situation. He explained that prep schools, unlike colleges, could never become a recognized educational issue to the American people at large. People didn't go off to World War II thinking that when they got home they would use the GI Bill to go to prep school. Small enginerepair shop owners did not dream of sending their daughters to Walnut Hill or Calley. From the point of view of development, then, prep schools were perceived just as snobs howling for funds they had too much of already. Therefore, alumni support was everythingeverything! Thanks to each of you, Budge went on, noting that those present who never gave anything were smiling as widely and receiving his thanks as personally as the regular donors were. He supposed that such people actually believed, at the moment, that somehow they had given, and therefore deserved commendation. They had to pay for their dinners at the Minnikahda, anyway.

"Now we have a terrific movie to show you," Budge said. "Did any of you see The World According to Garp?" Most hands went up and people smiled. Budge smiled back. "Well, let me tell you about this Calley movie. About two years ago, we decided to make it. The Development staff identified a Visiting Committee of alumni and they worked out the general design for the film. Right away I had what I thought was a superwonderful idea about how the film ought to start: we'd have a goodlooking baby being tossed in the air, the way the Garp movie had, against a royal-blue sky-you know, royal-blue for Calley, see-and then after the audience had looked at the baby for a couple of minutes behind the credits, a voice would say, "Yeah gee, he's cute!" or "Yeah gee, she's cute!" and the voice would go on: "But what about fourteen years up the road?" and then you would hear the Calley song and we'd have some character generation for the credits, and the scene would switch to a really nice-looking boy or girl standing in the Calley Gallery looking at paintings ofblue sky, and everyone would see that the nice-looking baby had grown into this really nice Calley kid that liked art. Well-" and here Budge held his arms out, palms up, for them: "since we are mixed company here I won't share with you what the Alumni Visiting Cornmittee on the Film said about my idea. Enough said, they turned it down. But I have to admit they did come up with a lovely movie. I hope you enjoy it as much I do!"

Budge sat down beside Teekie Framweller, who was operating the projector. Someone in the dark slapped Budge's shoulder. Other voices said, "Nice talk, Harley," and Budge twisted his neck each time to turn a smile to whoever it was who had spoken. Since he himself had shown the movie in Baton Rouge, San Mateo, Dallas and Detroit, he watched only absentmindedly. Sensitive-faced boys pulled Stroke and Number Seven oar on the Cam, nice view of the Backs. No voice-mention that the Cambridge boys had humiliated the Calley crew that day. Sensitive-

faced girls rapidly drew the curves of a man's bent back in the Calley Senior Life class. Sensitive-faced teachers conferred about a student. Sensitive-faced Admissions people sat around on oval table, discussing just how badly prepared for Calley this certain inner-city kid was, and could he still make it through, and would Calley Academy work out for that kid the way it wanted to. The camera moved in over the Admissions people's shoulders and showed the boy's application materials. Finally, one of the Admissions officers said in a big, frank voice, "Oh the hell with it, people! Look. He is obviously a terrific guy! I love him! He doesn't play football. He doesn't play hockey! He never even got a yellow in a one-hundred meter! But he is crazy about reading. He doesn't know five cents' worth of English usage but he can express feelings about his own life and society, as he judges it, like nobody's business! We've been round and round about all his non-qualifications. But you know-the fact is-we all want him and we know it. Let's take him!" Then all the other Admissions people around the table (panned around the table) all got that dawning smile which actors do better than real staff (which was why the Visiting Committee on the film opted for actors instead of Calley Admissions staff). The camera then went straight to the kid's photo again, lying on the table-a terrific-looking humorous-faced kid, black, kind of pudgy, sensitive-and then the photo came to life and there was the kid, in what was obviously Creighton Slums (more formally, Calley's Creighton Hall Dormitory), holding forth in a bull session about how just because Shakespeare talked about the poor it didn't mean Shakespeare gave a goddamn what happened to the poor. Three white girls and two white boys were listening to him, impatient to rebut.

Near the end of the film, the Headmaster said straight into the camera, "The thing is-Calley Academy is a project that works. The question is, what makes Calley work so well? What's going to make it work in 1981 and what's going to make it work in 1986?" Budge could feel nearly physically the roomful of Minnesotans sag a little as they anticipated the pitch (alumni/ ae support makes Calley work!) - but this is where the movie had a better idea. The scene suddenly jumped to a football locker room but it was not the Calley football locker room. Sitting on the benches were boys in white pants and red jerseys, their white helmets on their knees. A coach was giving them the final word before they went out for the First Quarter. "Guys-just one final remark to you. Remember this peculiar thing about Calley. If you want to beat Calley today or any day you're going to have to beat the butt off the whole team of them because that's how they play. They may have the good quarterback all right, but we've studied his weakness and you all know how to play him. They may have the one terrific tight end and the one terrific defensive linebacker. But that isn't what their game's based on. They're not using the star system. Calley plays team, team, team, all the way-so listen you

guys-" and the camera, POY EXETER PLAYERS, jogged out of the locker room, camera jiggling as if resting on a boy's pads, across the street, past the Exeter lacrosse field, finally into the football field. The camera swiveled-the way the eyes of a curious, excited young player might: it looked between smeary bars, the way young eyes looked out from behind the face mask, and what it saw was Calley kids, players and cheerers. SOUNDTRACK tremendous cheering, CAMERA still POY EXETER PLAYERS, pan Calley Academy shouting and smiling, freeze frame and "THE END-WHICH IS ALWAYS THE BEGINNING" came up generated across the blue banners. Budge thought, for the dozenth time, O.K. Good flick. Good audience tonight, too. Write Millie about those two old basketball ladies, forwards against Miss Hall's, and tomorrow drive out to White Bear Lake to see that Coreen Sorel and Northwest Flight 42 with time to spare.

Next morning Budge drove north through suburban tickv-tackv and some still rural, some new country places. The aspens were yellow, and maples brilliant. He had not called Coreen Sorel ahead and knew perfectly why he hadn't: he had the P.R. man's inveterate hope of a surprise once in a while. He knew Coreen couldn't be mysteriously beautiful unless she had monumentally changed after the age of seventeen, but she might be mysteriously rich or talented at something. Any mystery would be nice, because he was tired from staying up for the job throughout the late afternoon and evening last night. Budge didn't need major adventures: he was happy in home and job. What he needed was minor adventure, if any offered itself.

A Union 76 dealer told him how to find Sorel's place at the junction of two township roads. It was a three-story farmhouse on high ground, overlooking a grove of oaks. Disused pasture went further up the hill behind it. The house had been built with an unusually steep, classicallooking roof-like the roofs of houses on Christmas cards. It had two chimneys in the old way, and the third-floor peak had a floor-toridgepole window. Downstairs, a trio of windows, with real mullions, was opened to the warm fall day.

Yet what a sad-looking place it was! The house needed paint. A roof gutter hung frankly free of one end's mooring. The lawn, despite its commanding size, was parked over and ruinous with broken machinery. Four lawnmowers and some larger machine lay tipped over, and a pickup door leaned against an upside-down snowmobile with no treads. A badly-lettered sign read "SMALL ENGINE REPAIR. ASK FOR WAYLAND." The nasty-looking pickup by the mailbox had the inevitable sunshield over its rear window: artificial silver deer leapt a silver stream, beneath a flocked-gold sunset or moonset, whatever the case. The deer were kelly-green with baby-blue and silver highlights.

On the lawn, close under the downstairs casement windows, stood two high-impact plastic deer, painted with fawns' spots although both

animals were fully antlered. Whoever had mowed the lawn had saved time by not moving machinery or the deer: higher, messy grass straggled between the skinny legs and the Lawn-Boy green.

There were teenaged kids everywhere, lying on the lawn, two sitting on the pickup cab roof, one leaning comfortably against the truck door that was already leaning against the snowmobile. Budge nodded and smiled at the kids on the pickup roof but they looked through him. As he walked up to the house, he heard himself saying "Hi" in the energetic crow-eating way that city people greet country people's large and probably vicious dogs. All his life Budge had called German shepherds "Old Fellow" and "Old Man" when he was scared stiff of them. As he got near the busted screen door he had the impression Coreen Sorel had been mugged and broken into by a teenaged gang and the robbers never meant to leave the premises. They were taking over.

Someone had put a fist through the screen but the bell worked and a cleaning lady came to answer. She regarded him cautiously, from under wispy reddish hair and a wide forehead with a very bad bruise on it. She held a crescent wrench in one hand; her flowered-apron pockets bulged with screwdriver, wooden ruler, one angle of a square. She chinked with all her kit.

Budge smiled and said, "I can tell I've pulled you right away from the middle of a major job-sorry! I am looking for Coreen Sorel, if she's around?"

As soon as he spoke he realized this was Coreen-of course. This was the mysterious class agent, ex-Don't Contact, and this rundown place and these horrible kids and this horrible screen door she now opened were the gear of her life. He felt aggrieved and in the next second, grateful: she was a mystery, after all. He followed her gingerly into a shadowy hall. He nearly tiptoed after her. They both knew why he had come, but she hadn't immediately sent him away, so he was encouraged.

Sorel took him to a spacious, nearly empty room, filled with sunlight from three casement windows. But the only furniture was a large, chipped dining-room table and a good many tubular-aluminium chairs with vinyl cushions, one of which had been opened up with a knife. From the open window came the two boys' voices, very loud and angry, using foul language. Beyond them, across the road, the oaks were going to bronze and their leaves hung already in the curly clusters, glinting beautifully as pirates' coin. Budge had a split second of pathos: what a mess, he thought, the poor make of things! How differently the ElsonGray Readers presented the poor, in their hollyhock-cornered cottages. Over their wooden bowls and spoons, their clean rounds of pale cheese, and with Canterbury bells popping half into the windows, the poor talked about kind facts: there were no teenagers' obscenities or plastic deer. In literature, the poor have a beautiful relationship with nature; in north White Bear Lake, Minnesota, the lawnful of busted junk, the

house with its linoleum floors-the lawn statues, which now, Budge could see, out the windows, stood mounted one on the other-were all tilted in enmity against the planet somehow.

Budge smiled at Careen. Whatever his inward moral shock, he kept a cordial presence. He explained his business. He praised her smooth, strongly-felt letters on behalf of Calley Academy. He told her he remembered her from the upper-middler year at school. He led her towards telling him about herself-but indirectly-so that at no point need she explain that she was poor.

The kids were not hers, she told him. She ran a foster house. "I'd like to introduce you to my mother," she said.

Budge glanced around in total surprise. In a corner behind the doorway through which he had entered sat a very old woman, carefully dressed in fuchsia.

"I wondered when you was going to introduce me!" she shouted. "One thing about Careen, the manners of these kids must be rubbing off on her. I taught her manners one time." All this she said looking at Careen, not Budge.

"How do you do, Mrs. Sorel."

"Careen doesn't care about their manners is one thing," the old woman said. "If she likes them O.K. she doesn't even care if they bust her in the face. I wonder if you noticed her forehead - but don't try saying anything against that rotten kid-she won't listen to you. 'Wayland will turn out, Wayland will turn out,' is all she says. Well if you ask me, Wayland's just plainly no good."

Now Careen went to the window and leaned so she could see to one side. "Wayland!" she shouted. "You come get those deer back down so they're decent, and then finish up your detail or I'll give you another one!"

A tall boy showed outside: he took the top deer off its mate, gave a grin that wasn't really so much insolent, Budge thought, as aimless, and ambled off.

"The social worker came by and said them kids aren't supposed to hit anyone or back they go to the judge," the old woman commented. "It isn't what I brought this girl up to, I can tell you." She made a tiny fist of one hand and regarded the knuckles of it, in a thoughtful way.

"Tell you what," Careen said pleasantly, returning from the window. "The kids have so much going on outside, we'll never be able to hear ourselves think in here. Would you like a glass of sherry? Good! I'll take you up to my space."

Budge winced at "space" but not at leaving the brutal mother and not at the sherry. If I had the mother, he said to himself, I expect I would be into the sherry by nine each morning and here it is already eleven.

"Teachers' In-service," Careen said over her shoulder to him, "is why the kids are all around today. She led him up a linoleum-covered stair-

case. Even its risers carried their nicked layer of nasturtiums attached to English Ivy and arranged in diamonds. That particular linoleum or wallpaper design was another thing of the 1930's, like crime, Budge would have written his mother if she'd still been alive: just awful, but nothing in the 1930's ever seems to go away. On the second-floor landing, someone had half-buried a gum wrapper in a pot of cyclamen. At the third, Coreen took a huge bunch of keys from her apron pocket, and unlocked three separate locks. She swung the door inward and said, "Peace and quiet!" to Budge.

A high apartment ran the whole length of the house: its ivory eaves went straight to the ridgepole. Reproductions of Millet and Corot hung in brave, gold-sprayed frames. At the south end, Budge saw the long narrow window going from floor to ceiling that he had noticed from the outside. It let in sunlight without tracery. Before it stood a rolltop desk. There was a black-velvet covered cot, and a small cabinet, three comfortable, nearly threadbare chairs. Budge wandered around the bookshelves, glancing. He had a look at the Durer print of the Prodigal Son woodcut and a boring but very echt brass rubbing from Thaxted Church. A beautiful watercolor by someone he didn't know showed a black merchant ship moored in a whity, dreamy harbor at San Cristobal. Coreen had a bottle of Mazanilla out of the little cabinet and was handing Budge a glass. Budge sat in the deep chair near him, with his feet on the Belgian woolen carpet, an imitation Sarouk, and he glanced from the gleaners, lighted by the steep sunlight, to Coreen Sorel.

"What an amazing, wonderful place you have here," he cried.

"I love it."

"I think it is absolutely amazing!" he exclaimed again. "You've made yourself a marvelous island here-well, better than that!-it is nearly symbolic! When you think about it!-the best of nature-" He gestured with his glass toward the handsome window full of sunlight. "And the best of art - and the books! The wonderful peace and privacy of all this! And that great rolltop!"

The rolltop was a little lifesaver to Budge, because he did admire it, whereas he had had to wince his way through the reproductions' being called "the best of art." He was already saving up details to write or tell Millie-this pleasant room, so surprising a switch from the bleak props of this woman's life. "If you were thinking of a 'midwest beauty,'" he would tell Millie, "read pathos and guts for beauty! And the mother! Now I remember her from 1941! Carrying on her horrible way, right across the hall from the mailboxes at Calley!" He would tell Millie that maybe a sense of place is what makes us civilized: here was this woman of no particular personality, so far as he could tell-but she had a sense of place. Maybe it was a sense of place that was making her a class agent: she wanted to keep Calley Academy-as a good place.

He drank his sherry, gathering himself to draw her out a little. Mid-

way through their second sherry, while she was explaining how she had always wanted to run a foster home-it had always seemed like a cozy idea to her: a dream, even! - Budge brought out a pleasant comment. He told her what she had gone and done-did she realize?

"No, what?" she said-a little ironically. He rather loved her a little for trying to look ironic in her horrible apron with the carpenter's square still hanging out the pocket of it.

"Well, corny as it may sound, you have preserved civilization in one place, intact-just the way the monks did it during the Dark Ages-do you recall the Head's course in European history?"

To Budge's surprise she burst out at him: "Do I ever!" Her tone was actually joyful-nearly girlish.

He went on, "It is something like your situation. Bigger scope, but same idea. Outside, what do you have? The great empire all going to pieces, nothing but brigands, mugging or whatever medieval people called muggings, and then inside, the best of art, the best of peaceful surroundings, preserved - and if the monks didn't originate art themselves at least they copied it!"

Her reaction was a little flat. He'd thought he'd phrased that rather neatly! 0 well!

"I am dying of curiosity, of course," he told her conversationally. "All those years you were a Don't Contact! - and then, one of our best Class Agents!" He would hold off coming to the point, in the hope of bringing her back into the fold without having to ask.

"How did that dreadful woman finally see the light?" she said with a laugh.

He thought she was so wonderful to make her jokes in her dingy mien and horrible clothes.

"I had only one year at Calley," she told him. "It was a fluke I got even that. My mother was what we now call 'a single parent.''' Then I expect we called it 'a poor widow.' But she had a nice cousin: a funny, burly sort of woman from Lawrence - the one in Massachusetts. I remember her because she had one of those permanents where the hairdresser starts from scratch-with no reference to what the client's needs or wants may be at all! She was a rough woman, married to a rude, horrible man-I remember-but she had heard of Calley, perhaps because it is so close. Somehow she got it into her head that sooner or later one of our family had a right to go to such a place. Anyway, she gave my mother enough money for me to have two years there. I would have to skimp all the frills; they prepared me for that. I was the only person I know who never once took a taxi from the South Station to the North Station. I expected to be miserable all the time. I knew my clothes would be too few or dead wrong - and they were. The other kids came from day schools. They had listened to Mozart. They knew the very moment the second theme was introduced in the sonata-form movement. I remember feeling the

gummy, webbed seat of that Boston & Maine train the first time-I remember we were passing Ballardvale, where the track is rather high over the terrain - and thinking: This will be a miserable experience, but I will get a wonderful education out of it. So I was very surprised-within a week-to find myself completely happy there!" She stopped, perhaps with a sudden feeling that all this was no longer appropriate, since she had backed out of raising money for Calley.

"0 please go on," Budge said.

"It was the classes. The classes," Coreen Sorel said. "Only ten of us, sometimes eleven, asking questions, not needing to act dumb as I'd had to in high school, not needing to fear scorn if I showed interest - and the masters and instructors being so interested in our remarks. Never in my life until then-and never since in anything like that same way-never has someone routinely, repeatedly, said, 'Coreen, what is the idea this author is trying to show? And-second, what do you think of it?' Then the masters would follow up with, 'Good! You got it! What makes you think that's what Blake was trying to say?' Other people's hands would be waving-we all wanted to get into it. The teacher himself was moved. Never before, never since," Coreen repeated as if a little dazed. "Blake, too! My high school gave me Longfellow! But at Calley, at sixteen-we had Blake on chimney sweeps!"

Budge closed his eyes. "Wait a sed" he said. "Here it is:

And so Tom awoke; and we rose in the dark, And got with our bags & our brushes to work. Tho' the morning was cold, Tom was happy & warm; So if all do their duty they need not fear harm.

"That's it," Coreen said. She didn't seem impressed by his ability to remember these lines. "But the spring vacation of my first year, my mother asked me to come into the kitchen to talk about something serious. I remember how clearly she said she 'wanted my opinion on it, too!' Now that was always bad news, when she wanted my opinion on something! In our household there were no issues for shared decisionmaking-as we say in social work! There were only necessities. But my mother had some idea of manners. As you saw, downstairs. It was manner to ask for someone else's opinion. I expect you could say that Secretary Block has very good manners with midwestern farmers. There we sat then, she and I, with our elbows on the yellow oilcloth, my shoulder near the cord hanging down from the Four Roses promotion electric clock. As long as the clock was plugged in, the lighted roses covered its noisy motor. I remember looking up at the lighted roses, and listening to the thrum of the clock, and thinking: Something good is about to be taken away from me.

"My mother wanted to know if I would mind not having the secondmy senior-year at Calley. If I would finish at public high school, we

would be $1,000 ahead, and frankly she could not see what difference the fancy school out east made anyway.

"I expect I looked horrified, because she said fast and loud, 'Thanks to Thomas Jefferson, we have a perfectly good education for every American citizen without added cost-so why dish out $1,100 to some-' "I remember thinking of Mr. Sweeney-" "Mr. Sweeney!" cried Budge. "English III!"

Coreen smiled and went on: "I remember him leaning over the front row of our little class and saying, 'Do you see how different it is to visualize a little boy's hair being shaved off so he can work all day with soot on his head in people's chimneys-how different that mental image is from talking about "child labor?'" Then I remember he'd return to his desk and go hulking around it and say, 'Blake had various angers - but the biggest anger he had was against adults for cruelty to children!'

"I had a last straw of hope with my mother. I asked her, what about her cousin who gave the money specifically so I could go to Calley? How would she feel if my mother pocketed that for something else?

"Mother gave me the tired, virtuous look which means you are going to be absolutely done in. I don't know just how men do that to one another-but women do it by looking tired and virtuous: watch it when you see that look. It means rattlesnake bite in the next second. She told me that her cousin said it was up to me. Me, Coreen. Whatever I decided.

"And so I asked for the senior year at Calley. 'All right, if that is how you feel despite all I've pointed out to you,' she said. I stuck. Then she forgot the whole discussion. One day she went east, and pulled me out of the school. Maybe you knew that." Coreen gave Budge a fast look.

"I heard about that," he said.

"Sometimes, during that senior year back home, I would hunt up my Calley English anthology and try to explain something of Blake to my mother. We would be sitting eating supper. I never could get her to stop eating while I read to her. I remember once thinking: If I could just get that arm to stop taking food onto the fork, up into the air, over into the mouth, back down for more. Up into the air, over into the mouth, back down for more. No matter what I read! I was doing the one about Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land, and I remember saying, 'Wait, Mama! Don't eat!' but do you know, that arm, she lifted by main force, from underneath my hand, even - by main force despite me, she kept eating! She never broke her rhythm once."

Budge accepted a top-off to his sherry.

Coreen Sorel told him she took Social Work at Minnesota and read the Calley Alumni Magazine Class Notes for 1942 until she couldn't stand it any more. Everyone except her was finding work in New York or Europe! Somebody even went to Russia on a grant! Russia! She had wanted to go ever since the Head's Europe and Russia course. And the

thing was, Calley graduates reported "bumping into so-and-so at St. Peter's Square" or "bumping into so-and-so on the Charles Bridge in Prague!" Coreen Sorel never "bumped into" anyone. Her life had no Strand or Jordan's Basement or watering places of Europe. She asked to be taken off the mailing list.

"Life has its own distractions, though," she said. "I always wanted to run a foster home, so I began to do it. A thousand years went by then, and I expect I never thought of Calley at all. Nor of William Blake."

"Then," Budge said, noticing that his voice sounded very significant and holy, which meant he had had too much sherry, so he roused himself, "then why did you get in touch with us at last!"

"It was the government funding cuts," she said. "It's a technical thing. We used to send very disturbed kids to treatment centers. Eighty-five dollars a day per kid. Foster homes pay only ten or twelve dollars a day - unless there is a 'Difficult Care' clause written in for a kid. Like this kid Wayland you heard my mother complain about-who gave me a sock in the head the other day. Wayland is 'Difficult Care,' so I get twenty-one dollars a day for him. Well, when the present administration brought in all the funding cuts, the social workers started sending disturbed kids to just foster homes instead of to residential treatment centers because they hadn't enough money.

"Somewhere in the middle of those funding cuts I began to remember discussion at Calley. I began to think of how literature- Blake is what I remembered, specifically - makes you have a mental image of the people in bad luck. So I thought, we mustn't let the schools go-where people are taught to make those mental images. We mustn't not support those schools! So I wrote."

She paused again, looking around her private room. "But I stopped, didn't 1," she said.

Budge waited. If she committed herself to a reason, he could then perhaps talk her out of it.

"In two weeks this room will be a bedroom for four more kids," she said. Budge was shocked, and now couldn't have spoken if he had wanted to. But he managed to wonder aloud, "Your beautiful private place!" - and his admiration for it, now that it was to be lost, was onehundred-percent genuine and pained.

"You know how it goes," she said, with a forced cheer.

"How does it go," Budge said.

"Oh, they figured me O.K.," she said. "They said if I could get the extra kids in it'd made a life-or-death difference to them. All they had to do was tell me about the homes they came from and the fathers of two of them so-so out goes the rolltop desk!" She looked at him squarely.

"I gave up on Calley. What a dream it was, though! The idea that a prep-school education could change anything! What a dumbbell I was! I

mean - what interest could anybody at Calley have in what I'm doing? Nothing personal against you, of course."

Budge shrank. He was at something of a loss-but still he was sure he could think of the right way to bring Coreen Sorel around.

After a while, Budge rose. Coreen took him down the staircase. Next week I go to Mobile, he thought-then Charleston, Tryon and Atlanta. Two weeks after that I go to Portland, Kennewick and Spokane. Next year Detroit, Buffalo and Cleveland again. I ought to get this class agent tied back in.

All the way down the staircase he told her how much he admired her hanging onto her civilization as long as she had-despite all difficulties. He would never forget, he told her (deciding not to hug by way of parting), never, sitting with her, looking at the gleaners, looking at that wonderful apartment and listening to her tremendously courageous story.

She didn't seem so charmed as he, but he said to himself firmly: it is my fault. I am the one had three sherries. Maybe she had only two. Or she may simply have more tepid feelings. After all, the print was Millet, not Michelangelo, for eat's sake.

He was not even out the broken screen door before he overheard her voice raised, "Wayland? Come in here, Wayland!"

Budge stood for a moment outside the housefront, looking down over the horrible lawn, taking in again the loveliness of the oak glade past it. He tried to identify just what he was thinking, when suddenly he heard voices, very clearly, straight behind him-no doubt from inside, coming out the open casement.

"Wayland, sit down," Coreen's voice said sternly. "Mother, you are going to have either to leave or be absolutely quiet."

"Well, of all the-" came the old woman's snarl.

"Shut up, Mother," Coreen's voice said. "Listen, Wayland. You listen to me very closely now."

"jeez, Coreen, I been listening," said Wayland's voice.

"Now here's what you do, Wayland. You stop acting crazy. You stop losing your temper and slugging people. You stop not having a job. You go out and get a job - and I don't mean some deal with a pickup some friend puts you onto. I mean a real job. Sane people have to have money. Are you listening, Wayland?"

"[eez, Coreen," again.

"You know the reason you have to do this-stop acting crazy and get a job and get money? It's because there isn't anyone anywhere in the world that cares whether you go on acting crazy and poor all your life or not. You understand that, Wayland?"

"Jesus, Coreen!"

The old woman's voice came from further back: "If you can't get that boy to stop cussing you better throw him out!"

"Mother, you shut up or I will carry you into the yard personally. Now listen, Wayland. People always think some big rich cultivated person somewhere would be looking out for them if only that big kind rich cultivated person knew of their sufferings! I remember this one history class I took at a school I once went to. The Russian peasants-they were like you, Wayland. Poor and forever drinking, having quarrels with their parents and their foster-parents and everyone else, picking up a club and hitting someone, and howling around the house. Well, these peasants always had the idea that if they could just get hold of the Czar-that's the king, see. If they could just get hold of the Czar, and show him what they were going through-how poor their hovels were, how poisoned the wells were, how the muzhiks were cheating them, how the landlords' bailiffs tricked them into longer hours' work than their contract-then the Czar would make it right. The Czar would be touched! That's how much they knew! They never got it through their heads that the Czar was a happy man. The nobles, who were oppressing the peasants, were the Czar's family friends, after all. They were his Old Boy network. They danced with each other's cousins. They met each other by accident when they traveled in Europe. Look-there'd they be, sitting around feeding pigeons outside Nelson's Column and somebody would come up in a fur coat just like yours and slap you on the back and shout, 'By god, look who's here? It's Ivan Dmitrivich! Hey, Vanya, hot enough for you?' if they were all sweating in their fur coats.

"Now listen, Wayland," Coreen said. "You tell me: would people like that, jet-set types, would they care whether a few thousands of peasants were starving or not? Nobody else cares, whether you go on acting crazy and being poor and end up in Attica or Sandstone or Comstock! Listening, Wayland?"

"I been listening, Coreen."

"O.K. Here is what you do, then " and her voice dropped. Budge knew the change in tone meant some practical program was being laid out for Wayland. The moment of rhetoric was over.

He thought of his own mother, whose voice had never got stentorian about anything, whose humor and light touch had never failed her. He thought of how Coreen Sorel had made an island of civilization out of that third-storey apartment and kept it a pinnacle above all this junkladen grass and the awful house. Now, he realized, his conversation with her had been another island. He was glad he had come, however saddened he felt: he had given her another island-an island in time, that is, in which their conversation had got clear of this vulgar, sad, common, inevitable roughness. Coreen had gotten her chance to talk about the Blake poetry, for instance. He was glad he had known a stanza or two to respond with.

So he made his way rather tenderly away from the house. He passed some smashed machinery, picked his way over a little pile of lightly-

rusting C-clamps. He noted that the high-impact plastic deer again had all eight feet on the ground, no longer in the posture of love. In a moment he had passed all the failed tools and props of the Ex-Class Agent's life. He let himself into the little rental car as if he'd been bruised.

In five minutes, though, because the October morning was so beautiful and he had an appreciation of countrysides anywhere, he was completely himself again.

Any Minute Mom Should Come Blasting Through the Door

David Ordan

Mom died in the middle of making me a sandwich. If I had known it was going to kill her, I never would have asked. It never killed her before to make me a sandwich, so why all of a sudden? My dad didn't understand it, either. But we don't talk about it too much. We don't talk about it too much at all. Sometimes we try. Sometimes it's just the two of us at dinner, and things are almost good. But only sometimes. Most of the time it's different. Most of the time I do things like forget to leave her place out at the table. And then we don't know what to do. Then we don't even try to talk. Three plates. Three glasses. The kitchen shines. A bright, shiny kitchen, Mom used to say. And there we are-my dad, her place, and me. And any minute Mom should come blasting through the door, all bundles and boxes, my big winter coat squaring her off at the shoulders and hips, her face smiling and wrinkled like a plant.

I should have known better.

I should have known about these things. Come on, Mom, what do you say? Is it going to kill you to make me one sandwich? Is it really going to kill you? Remember how you used to play with me? Remember? And then I undid her curlers and ran my fingers through her hair until she said all right already, what kind did I want? She looked my way, turned to my dad, and opened her bathrobe so he could get a peak just to see if the old interest was still there. But I don't think it was. What? he said. He hasn't seen this before? Make the sandwich, he said. And he let his body melt like pudding into the easy chair.

That was it. That was the last thing he said to her, I mean. Mom turned up the TV, went into the kitchen, and the next thing we knew, she was calling out for help.

Well, my dad didn't know what was going on any more than I did, so he got up from his chair, trudged across the room-making sure to scrape his feet on the carpet all the way so he could really shock her

good this time-and that was it. Mom was dead on the floor of the kitchen, her bathrobe open at the waist.

And I thought, Well, there's Mom dead, what now? No one thinks about that. No one thinks about what happens after you find your mother dead like that, all over the kitchen floor. But I'm telling you, that's when it really starts. That's when you have to try mouth-to-mouth on her-on your mother, for God's sake-knowing that if she does come around she'll spit up in your face, because that's what happens, but praying for it, anyway, because if she doesn't, then it's all over. That's when you've got to call an ambulance and wait for them to throw a sheet over her so they can take her away from you. That's when you've got to sit there and watch them put their hands all over her body and know they'll never believe you even tried to save her. That's when the neighbors see the flashing light in your driveway and wonder what kind of rotten son you are that you couldn't save your mother. That's when you've got your whole life to live, and all it's going to be is one excuse after another for why you didn't save her. What do you do? We didn't know, so my dad poured her on the couch, and we waited. We waited and watched TV. It was on.

But like I said, we don't talk about it too much. How can we? Mom was the talker. That's what she used to say. She used to say, "Boys, what would you do without me?" And here we are, without her. My dad and I wouldn't know how to talk to each other if you paid us, so we don't even try. Not much, anyway. What am I going to say? How's your love life? What's it like to sleep alone? He doesn't want that. He doesn't want that at all. He wants me out of the house. But he doesn't really want that, either, you know. What would he do then? Six rooms can be too many if you're not careful. I tell him this at dinner sometimes. I tell him how much he needs me. I tell him how much he cares. But he doesn't care. He cares about the kitchen, the robe, the things I did to try to save his wife. My hands. Her body. My lips. Her mouth. "Tell me," he says, "is that really how you want to remember your mother?"

All My Relations

Christopher McIlroy

When Jack Oldenburg first spoke to him, Milton Enos leaned over his paper plate, scooping beans into his mouth as if he didn't hear. Breaking through the murmur of o'otham conversation, the white man's speech was sharp and harsh. But Oldenburg stood over him, waiting.

Oldenburg had just lost his ranch hand, sick. If Milton reported to the Box-] sober in the morning, he could work for a couple of weeks until the cowboy returned or Oldenburg found a permanent hand.

"O.K.," Milton said, knowing he wouldn't go. Earlier in the day his wife and son had left for California, so he had several days' drinking to do. Following his meal at the convenience mart he would hitch to the Sundowner Lounge at the edge of the reservation.

After a sleepless night Milton saddled his horse for the ride to Oldenburg's, unable to bear his empty house. As Milton crossed the wide, dry bed of the Gila River, leaving the outskirts of Hashan, the house ceased to exist for him and he thought he would never go back. Milton's stomach jogged over the pommel with the horse's easy gait. Two hours from Hashan, Oldenburg's Box-] was the only ranch in an area either left desert or irrigated for cotton and sorghum. Its twenty square miles included hills, arroyos, and the eastern tip of a mountain range-graypink granite knobs split by ravines. The sun burned the tops of the mountains red.

Oldenburg stood beside his corral, tall and thin as one of its mesquite logs. First, he said, sections of the barbed-wire fence had broken down, which meant chopping and trimming new posts.

Milton's first swings of the axe made him dizzy and sick. He flailed wildly, waiting with horror for the bite of the axe into his foot. But soon he gained control over his stroke. Though soft, his big arms were strong. Sweat and alcohol poured out of him until he stank.

In the afternoon Milton and Oldenburg rode the fence-line.

"Hasn't been repaired in years," Oldenburg said. "My hand Jenkins is

old." Oldenburg himself was well over sixty, his crew cut white and his face dried up like a dead man's. He had bright eyes, though, and fine white teeth. Where the fence was flattened to the ground, Milton saw a swatch of red and white cowhide snagged on the barbed wire. He'd lost a few head in the mountains, Oldenburg said, and after the fence was secure they'd round them up.

"One thing I'll tell you," Oldenburg said. "You can't drink while you work for me. Alcohol is poison in a business."

Milton nodded. By reputation he knew Oldenburg had a tree stump up his ass. Milton's wife c.c. had said she'd bring their son Allen back when Milton stopped drinking. For good? he'd asked. How would she know when was for good. For all anybody knew tomorrow might be the first day of for good, or 25,500 days later he might get drunk again. For a moment Milton remembered playing Monopoly with C.C. and Allen several weekends before. As usual, Milton and Allen were winning. Pretending not to be furious, C.C. smiled her big, sweet grin. Milton and the boy imitated her, stretching their mouths, until she couldn't help laughing. Milton clicked them off like a TV set and saw only mesquite, and rocky sand, sky, and the line of fence. After his two weeks, Milton thought, he'd throw a drunk like World War Ten.

At the end of the day Milton accepted Oldenburg's offer: $75 a week plus room and board, weekend off. Oldenburg winced apologetically proposing the wage; the ranch didn't make money, he explained. They ate at a metal table in the dining room. Milton, whose pleasure in food went beyond filling his stomach, appreciated Oldenburg's meat loaf-diced with onion, the center concealing three hard-boiled eggs. Milton couldn't identify the seasonings except for chili. "What's in this?" he asked.

"Sage, chili, cumin and Worcestershire sauce."

"Hem·"

Inside his two-room adobe, Milton was so tired he couldn't feel his body, and lying down felt the same as standing up. He slept without dreaming until Oldenburg rattled the door at daybreak.

Milton dug holes and planted posts. By noon his sweat had lost its salt and tasted like pure spring water. Then he didn't sweat at all. Chilled and shaking at the end of the day, his body felt as if he'd been thrown by a horse. The pain gave him a secret exultation which he hoarded from Oldenburg, saying nothing. Yet he felt he was offering the man part of the ache as a secret gift. Slyly, he thumped his cup on the table and screeched his chair back with exaggerated vigor. Milton was afraid of liking Oldenburg too much. He liked people easily, even those who were not o'otham-especially those, perhaps, because he wanted them to prove he needn't hate them.

Milton worked ten-, eleven-hour days. The soreness left his muscles,

though he was as tired the fourth evening as he had been the first. Thursday night Oldenburg baked a chicken.

"You're steady," Oldenburg said. "I've seen you Pimas work hard before. What's your regular job?"

"I've worked for the government." Milton had ridden rodeo, sold wild horses he captured in the mountains, broken horses. Most often there was welfare. Recently he had completed two CETA training programs, one as a hospital orderly and the other baking cakes. But the reservation hospital wasn't hiring, and the town of Hashan had no bakeries. For centuries, Milton had heard, when the Gila flowed, the o'otham had been farmers. Settlements and overgrazing upstream had choked off the river only a few generations past. Sometimes Milton tried to envision green plots of squash, beans, and ripening grains, watered by earthen ditches, spreading from the banks. He imagined his back flexing easily in the heat as he bent to the rows, foliage swishing his legs, finally the villagers diving into the cool river, splashing delightedly.

"I don't think Jenkins is corning out of the hospital," Oldenburg said. "This job is yours if you want it." Milton was stunned. He had never held a permanent position.

In just a week of hard work, good eating, and no drinking, Milton had lost weight. Waking Friday morning, he pounded his belly with his hand; it answered him like a drum. He danced in front of the bathroom mirror, swiveling his hips, urging himself against the sink as if it were a partner. At lunch he told Oldenburg he would spend the weekend with friends in Hashan.

When he tossed the posthole digger into the shed, Milton felt light and strong, as if instead of sinking fence posts he'd spent the afternoon in a deep, satisfying nap. On the way to the guest house, his bowels turned over and a sharp pain set into his head. He saw the battered station wagon rolling out the drive, C.C. at the wheel, Allen's tight face in the window.

Milton threw his work clothes against the wall. After a stinging shower, he changed and mounted his horse for the ride to Vigiliano Lopez'.

Five hours later, the Sundowner was closing. Instead of his customary beer, Milton had been drinking highball glasses of straight vodka. He felt paler and paler, like water, until he was water. His image peeled off him like a wet decal and he was only water in the shape of a man. He flowed onto the bar, hooking his water elbows onto the wooden ridge for support. Then he was lifted from the stool, tilted backward, floating on the pickup bed like vapor.

Milton woke feeling the pong, pong of a basketball bouncing outside. The vibration traveled along the dirt floor of Lopez' living room, up the couch Milton lay on. The sun was dazzling. Looking out the window, Milton saw six-foot-five, three-hundred-pound Bosque dribbling the ball

with both hands, knocking the other players aside. As he jammed the ball into the low hoop, it hit the back of the rim, bouncing high over the makeshift plywood backboard. A boy and two dogs chased it.

Seeing beer cans in the dirt, Milton went outside. He took his shirt off and sat against the house with a warm Bud. The lean young boys fired in jump shots, or when they missed, their fathers and older brothers pushed and wrestled for the rebound. Lopez grabbed a loose ball and ran with it, whirling for a turnaround fadeaway that traveled three feet. He laughed, and said to Milton, "When we took you home you started fighting us. Bosque had to pick you up and squeeze you, and when he did, everything came out like toothpaste."

"Try our new puke-flavored toothpaste," someone said, laughing.

"Looks like pizza."

"So we brought you here."

Milton said nothing. He watched the arms and broad backs collide. The young boys on the sidelines practiced lassoing the players' feet, the dogs, the ball. When he finished a beer, Milton started another. Later in the afternoon he sent boys to his house for the rest of his clothes and important belongings.

When the game broke up, some of the men joined the women in the shade of a mesquite. Saddling a half-broke wild colt, the boys took turns careening across the field. Lopez drove a truckload to the rodeo arena, where a bronc-rider from Bapchule was practicing. Compact and muscular, with silver spurs and collar tabs, he rode out the horse's bucks, smoothing the animal to a canter. Two of Milton's drunk friends tried and were thrown immediately. For a third, the horse didn't buck but instead circled the arena at a dead run, dodging the lassos and open gates. From the announcer's booth Lopez called an imaginary race as horse and rider passed the grandstand again and again - "coming down the backstretch now, whoops, there he goes for another lap, this horse is not a quitter, ladies and gentlemen."

"Go ahead, Milton," Lopez said. "You used to ride."

Milton shook his head. Allen, thirteen, recently had graduated from steers to bulls. In both classes he had finished first or second in every start, earning as much money in the past months as his father and mother combined. Would there be rodeo in California? Milton wondered. In school, too, Allen was a prodigy, learning high school geometry in eighth grade. If he studied hard, the school counselor said, he could finish high school in three years and win a college scholarship. Milton didn't know where the boy's talent came from.

Tears filled Milton's eyes. "Aaaah," Bosque said. His big hand gripped Milton's arm. They walked back to Lopez' house and split a couple of sixes under the mesquite until the men returned. Audrey Lopez and the other wives

prepared chili and chimuth dough while the men played horseshoes and drank in the dusk.

By the end of dinner everyone was drunk. Milton, face sweating, was explaining to Audrey Lopez, "Just a few weeks ago, Allen wins some kind of puzzle contest for the whole state, O.K.? And he's on TV. And C.C. and I have got our faces up to the screen so we can hear every word he's saying. And we can't believe it. He's talking on TV, and his hair's sticking up on the side like hat, just like it always does.

"I see them so real. When c.c. plays volleyball she's like a rubber ball, she's so little and round. She dives for those spikes, and her hair goes flying back."

Lopez slid his leg along Audrey's shoulder. "Good song," he said. "Let's dance." The radio was playing Top Forty.

"Wait. I'm listening to this man."

"Milton talks you into tomorrow afternoon. Come on." Lopez pulled her shoulder.

Audrey shrugged him off and laid her hand on Milton's arm. "His wife and son are gone."

"Dried-up old bitch," Lopez said. "C.C.'s too old for you, man, she's way older than he is. You lost nothing."

Grabbing a barbecue fork, ramming Lopez against the wall, Milton chopped the fork into Lopez' shoulder. A woman screamed, Milton heard his own grunts as the glistening tines rose and stabbed. Lopez ducked and his knife came up. Milton deflected the lunge with his fork, the knife blade springing down its long shank. Milton shouted as the knife thudded into the wall. His little finger had bounded into the air and lay on the floor, looking like a brown pebble.

Bosque drove both men to the hospital. The doctor cauterized, stitched, and bandaged the wound, and gave Milton a tetanus shot. If Milton had brought the severed finger-the top two joints-the doctor said, he might have sewn it on. The men refused to stay overnight. When they returned to the party, couples were dancing the choti and bolero to a Mexican radio station. Gulps of vodka deadened the pain in Milton's finger. He and Lopez kept opposite corners of the living room until dawn, when Lopez pushed Audrey into Milton's arms and said, "Get some dancing, man."

Sunday Milton slept under the mesquite until evening, when he rode to the Box-].

"That's your mistake, Milton," Oldenburg said. "Everyone's entitled to one mistake. Next time you drink you're gone. You believe me?"

Milton did. He felt like weeping. The next day he roamed the fenceline, his chest and neck clotted with the frustration of being unable to work. The horse's jouncing spurted blood through the white bandage on his finger. Finally he rode out a back gate and into the midst of the

granite mountains. Past a sparkling dome broken by a slump of shattered rock, Milton trotted into a narrow cut choked with mesquite. As a boy, he would hunt wild horses for days in these ravines, alone, with only a canvas food bag tied to the saddle. He remembered sleeping on the ground without a blanket, beneath a lone sycamore that had survived years of drought. Waking as dawn lit the mountain crests, he would force through the brush, gnawing a medallion of jerked beef. Most often when he startled a horse, the animal would clatter into a side gully, boxing itself in. Then roping was easy. Once when Milton flushed a stringy gray mustang, the horse charged him instead; Milton had no time to uncoil his rope before the gray was past. Milton wheeled, pursuing at full gallop out the canyon and onto the bajada. Twig-matted tail streaming behind, the mustang was outrunning him, and Milton had one chance with the rope. He dropped the loop around the gray's neck, jarring the animal to its haunches. It was so long ago. Today, Milton reflected, the headlong chase would have pinned him and the horse to Oldenburg's barbed-wire fence.

The sycamore held its place, older and larger. Though encountering no horses, Milton returned three stray cattle to Oldenburg's ranch. For a month, while the slightest jolt could rupture the wound, he hunted down mavericks in the miles of ravine, painted the ranch buildings, and repaired the roofs, one-handed. Even as the finger healed, the missing segment unbalanced his grip. Swinging the pick or axe, shoveling, he would clench his right hand so tightly the entire arm would tremble. By the second month a new hand had evolved, with the musculature of the other fingers, the palm, and the wrist more pronounced. The pinky stub acted as a stabilizer against pickshaft or rope. Milton had rebuilt the fence and combed the granite mountains, rounding up another two dozen head. Oldenburg's herd had increased to 120.

In late August Milton rode beyond the granite range to the Ka kai Mountains, a low, twisted ridge of volcanic rock that he had avoided because he once saw the Devil there. Needing to piss, he had stumbled away from a beer party and followed a trail rising between the boulders. Watching the ground for snakes, Milton had almost collided with a man standing in the path. The stranger was a very big, ugly Indian, but Milton knew it was the Devil because his eyes were black, not human, and he spoke in a booming voice that rolled echoes off the cliffs. Milton shuddered uncontrollably and shriveled to the size of a spider. Afterwards he found he had fallen and cut himself. Cholla segments were embedded in his leg. The Devil had said only: "Beware of Satan within you."

The meeting enhanced Milton's prestige, and Allen was impressed, though not C.C. "You see?" she said. "What did I always tell you?"

In daylight the mountains looked like no more than a pile of cinders. Milton chose an arroyo that cut through the scorched black rubble into

red slabs, canyon walls which rose over Milton's head, then above the mesquite. Chasing a calf until it disappeared in a side draw, Milton left the animal for later. The canyon twisted deeper into the mountains, the red cliffs now three hundred feet high. The polished rock glowed. Milton was twelve years old, and his brothers were fighting.

"You took my car," Steven said.

"So what," Lee said. Milton's favorite brother, he was slim and handsome, with small ears and thick, glossy hair that fell almost into his eyes. Weekends he took Milton into Phoenix to play pool and pinball, sometimes to the shopping mall for Cokes. He always had girls, even Mexicans and whites.

"I told you if you took my car I was going to kill you." Steven always said crazy things. At breakfast, if Milton didn't pass him the milk right away-"How'd you like this knife in your eye?" About their mother"Bitch wouldn't give me a dime. I'm going to shit on her bed." He wore a white rag around his head and hung out with gangs. Now they would call him a cholo.

"So what," Lee said. "Kill me." Cocking his leg, he wiped the dusty bootheel carefully against the couch. Milton was sitting on the couch. Steven ran down the hall and came back with a .22. He pointed it at Lee's head, there was a shocking noise, a red spot appeared in Lee's forehead, and he collapsed on the rug.

"Oh my GOD," Steven said. Fingers clawed against his temples, he rushed out the door. Milton snatched the gun and chased him, firing on the run. Steven, bigger and faster, outdistanced him in the desert. Milton didn't come home for three days. Steven wasn't prosecuted and he moved to Denver. If he returned, Milton would kill him, even twenty years later.

Milton's horse ambled down the white sand, the dry bed curving around a red outcropping. Trapped by the canyon walls, the late summer air was hot and close. The weight of Milton's family fell on his back like a landslide-his father, driving home drunk from Casa Grande, slewing across the divider, head-on into another pickup. The four children had flown like crickets from the back, landing unhurt in the dirt bank. The driver of the other truck died, and Milton's mother lost the shape of her face.

Milton felt himself turning to water. He circled his horse, routed the calf from the slit in the wall, and drove it miles to the ranch. At dinner he told Oldenburg he needed a trip to town.

"You'll lose your job," Oldenburg said.

Milton ate with his water fingers, spilling food and the orange juice that Oldenburg always served. "The lives of o'otham is a soap opera," he cried, trying to dispel his shame by insulting himself. "I love my boy, O.K.? But it's him who has to hold me when I go for C.c. He doesn't

hold me with his strength. He holds me because I see him, and I stop. Sometimes I don't stop."

Oldenburg served Milton cake for dessert and told him to take the next day off, if he wanted.

The following morning Milton lay on his bed, sweating. In his mind were no thoughts or images save the swirls of chill, unpleasant water that washed over him. He could transform the water, making it a cold lake that pumped his heart loudly and shrank his genitals, or a clear stream immersing him in swift currents and veins of sunlight, but he could not change the water into thoughts. The green carpeting and blue-striped drapes in his room sickened him. He could have finished a pint of vodka before he knew he was drinking.

He could not imagine losing his work.

Abruptly Milton rose. In the corral he fitted a rope bridle over the horse's head. As he rode past Oldenburg, the man looked up from a bench of tack he was fussing with, then quickly lowered his head.

"I'm going to the mountains," Milton said.

He let the horse carry him into the charred crust of the canyon. The scarlet walls rose high and sheer, closing off the black peaks beyond. Tethering the horse to a mesquite, Milton sat in the sand. The cliffs seemed almost to meet above him. Heat gathered over his head and forced down on him. A lizard skittered by his ear, up the wall. A tortoise lumbered across the wash. The water rippling through Milton became a shimmering on the far wall, scenes of his life. Milton racing after Steven, aiming at the zigzagging blue shirt, the crack of the gun, a palo verde trunk catching the rifle barrel and spinning Milton to his knees. His father's empty boots beside the couch where he slept. His mother in baggy gray slacks, growing fatter. C.C.'s head snapping back from Milton's open palm. The pictures flickered over the cliff. Milton sat while shadow climbed the rock, and a cool breeze funneled through the canyon, and night fell. Scooping a hole in the sand, Milton lay face to the stone while the canyon rustled and sighed. The wind rushed around a stone spur, scattering sand grains on his face. Several times in the night footsteps passed so near that the ground yielded beneath Milton's head. Huddled, shivering, he thought his heart had stopped and fell asleep from terror. He dreamed of the cliffs, an unbroken glassy red. Early in the morning, Milton woke and stretched, refreshed by the cool air. The only prints beside him were his own. That evening he wrote to C.C. in care of her California aunt, telling her he'd quit drinking.

When C.c. didn't respond, Milton wrote again, asking at least for word of Allen, who would have entered high school. C.C. replied, "When I got here the doctor said I had a broken nose. Allen says he has no father."

Milton knew he must hide to avoid drinking. When he asked Oldenburg's permission to spend a day in the granite mountains, Oldenburg said he would go, too. They camped against a rock turret. The light in the sky faded and the fire leaped up. In the weeks since the former hand Jenkins' death, Oldenburg had become, if possible, more silent. Milton, meanwhile, admitted he had been a "chatterbox," recalling high-school field trips to Phoenix fifteen years before, and rodeos in Tucson, Prescott, Sells and White River. Oldenburg, fingertips joined at his chin, occasionally nodded or smiled. Tonight Milton squatted, arms around his knees, staring into the fire. About to share his most insistent emotions with Oldenburg, Milton felt a giddy excitement, as if he were showing himself naked to a woman for the first time. Intimacy with a white man evoked stepping off the school bus in Phoenix, where buildings like great stone crystals, blanketed in dreamy smog, spilled thousands of white people into the street.

Milton told Oldenburg what C.c. had said.

"Your drinking has scarred them like acid. It will be time before they heal," Oldenburg said.

"There shouldn't be o'otham families," Milton exclaimed. "We should stop having children."

Oldenburg shook his head. After a while he said, "Milton, I hope you're not bitter because I won't let you drink. Drawing the line helps you. It's not easy living right. I've tried all my life and gained nothing-I lost both my sons in war and my wife divorced me to marry a piece of human trash. And still, in my own poor way, I try to live right." Oldenburg relaxed his shoulders and settled on his haunches.

Milton laid another mesquite limb across the fire. As the black of the sky intensified, the stars appeared as a glinting powder. Milton sipped two cups of coffee against the chill. Oldenburg, firelight sparkling off his silver tooth, wool cap pulled low over his stretched face, looked like an old grandmother. Laughing, Milton told him so. Oldenburg laughed too, rocking on his heels.

Soon after Oldenburg went to bed, Milton's mood changed. He hated the embers of the fire, the wind sweeping the rock knoll, the whirring of bats. He hated each stone and twig littering the campsite. His own fingers, spread across his knees, were like dumb, sleeping snakes. Poisonous things. He was glad one of them had been chopped off. Unrolling his blanket, he lay on his back, fists clenched. He dug his hands and heels into the ground as if staked to it. After lying stiffly, eyes open, for an hour, he got up, slung his coiled rope over his shoulder, and walked down the hillside.

Brush and cactus were lit by a rising moon. Reaching a sheer drop, Milton jammed boot toes into rock fissures, seized tufts of saltbush, to let himself down. In the streambed he walked quickly until he joined the

main river course. After a few miles' meandering through arroyos and over ridges, he arrived at the big sycamore and went to sleep.

Waking before dawn, Milton padded along the wash, hugging the granite. The cold morning silence was audible, a high, pure ringing. Milton heard the horse's snort before he saw it tearing clumps of grass from the gully bank, head tossing, lips drawn back over its yellow teeth. Rope at his hip, Milton stalked from boulder to boulder. When he stepped forward, whirling the lariat once, the horse reared, but quieted instantly as the noose tightened around its neck. Milton tugged the rope; the animal neighed and skipped backward, but followed.

During the next two days, Milton and Oldenburg captured three more spindly, wiry horses. Oldenburg would flush the mustangs toward Milton, who missed only once with the lasso. The stallions Milton kept in separate pens and later sold as rodeo broncs. Within a couple of weeks he had broken the mares.

Milton consumed himself in chores. Though the Box-] was a small ranch, labor was unremitting. In the fall, summer calves were rounded up and "worked" - branded with the Box ], castrated, and dehorned. The previous winter's calves, now some 400-500 pounds each, were held in side-pens for weighing and loading onto the packer's shipping trucks. The pens were so dilapidated that Milton tore them down and built new ones. Winter, Milton drove daily pickup loads of sorghum hay, a supplement for the withered winter grasses, to drop spots at the water holes. Oldenburg hired extra help for spring roundup, working the new winter calves. Summer Milton roved on horseback, troubleshooting. The fence-line would need repair. Oldenburg taught Milton to recognize cancer-eye, which could destroy a cow's market value. A low water tank meant Oldenburg must overhaul the windmill. Throughout the year Milton inspected the herd, groomed the horses, maintained the buildings, kept tools and equipment in working order.

Certain moments, standing high in the stirrups, surveying the herd and the land which stretched from horizon to horizon as if mirroring the sky, Milton could believe all belonged to him.

Every two weeks, when Oldenburg drove into Casa Grande for supplies, Milton deposited half his wages-his first savings account-and mailed the rest to c.c. These checks were like money thrown blindly over the shoulder. So thoroughly had Milton driven his family from his mind that he couldn't summon them back, even if he wished to. When, just before sleep, spent from the day's work, he glimpsed C.C. and Allen, the faces seemed unreal. They were like people he had met and loved profoundly one night at a party, then forgotten.

The night of the first November frost, soon after the wild-horse roundup, Oldenburg had asked Milton ifhe played cards. Milton didn't. "Too bad," Oldenburg said. "It gets dull evenings. Jenkins and I played

gin rummy. We'd go to five thousand, take us a couple of weeks, and then start again."

"We could cook," Milton said.

On Sunday he and Oldenburg baked cakes. Milton missed the pressurized frosting cans with which he'd squirted flowers and desert scenes at the CETA bakery, but Oldenburg's cherry-chocolate layer cake was so good he ate a third of it. Oldenburg complimented him on his angel food.

Oldenburg bought a paperback Joy of Cooking in Casa Grande. Though he and Milton had been satisfied with their main dishes, they tried Carbonnade Flamande, Chicken Paprika, Quick Spaghetti Meat Pie. Milton liked New England Boiled Dinner. Mostly they made desserts. After experimenting with mousses and custard, they settled on cakes-banana, golden, seed, sponge, four-egg, Lady Baltimore, the Rombauer Special. Stacks of foil-wrapped cakes accumulated in the freezer. The men contributed cakes to charitable bake sales. Milton found that after his nightly slab of cake sleep came more easily and gently.

The men were serious in the kitchen. Standing side by side in white aprons tacked together from sheets, Milton whisking egg whites, Oldenburg drizzling chocolate over pound cake, they would say little. Milton might ask the whereabouts of a spice; Oldenburg's refusal to label the jars irritated him. Then they sat by the warm stove, feet propped on crates, and steamed themselves in the moist smells.

As they relaxed on a Sunday afternoon, eating fresh, hot cake, Oldenburg startled Milton by wondering aloud if his own wife were still alive. She had left him in 1963, and they'd had no contact since their second son was killed in 1969, more than ten years before.

"She wanted a Nevada divorce," Oldenburg said, "but I served papers on her first, and I got custody of the boys. I prevented a great injustice." He had sold his business in Colorado and bought the ranch. "The boys hated it," he said. "They couldn't wait to join the Army."

In Hashan, Milton said, she and her lover would have been killed. Oldenburg shook his head impatiently. "He's deserted her, certainly. He was a basketball coach, and much younger than she was."

A Pima phrase-he knew little Pima-occurred to Milton. Ne ha: junall my relations. "Here is the opposite," Milton said. "We should call this the No-Relations Ranch."

Oldenburg sputtered with laughter. "Yes! And we'd need a new brand. Little round faces with big X's over them."

"You'd better be careful. People would start calling it the Tic-rae-toe Ranch."

"Or a manual, you know, a sex manual, for fornication. The X's doing it to the O's."

Lightheaded from the rich, heavily-frosted cake, they sprayed crumbs from their mouths, laughing.

At the Pinal County Fair in May, Oldenburg entered a walnut pie and goaded Milton into baking his specialty, a jelly roll. It received honorable mention, while Oldenburg won second prize.

Milton wrote C.C., "I'm better than a restaurant."

c.c. didn't answer. When Valley Bank opened a Hashan branch in June, Milton transferred his account and began meeting his friends for the first time in a year. They needled him, "Milton, you sleeping with that old man?" His second Friday in town, Milton was writing out a deposit slip when he heard Bosque say, "Milton Oldenburg."

"Yes, Daddy just gave him his allowance," said Helene Mashad, the teller.

Bosque punched him in the shoulder and put out his hand. Milton shook it, self-conscious about his missing finger.

Bosque was cashing his unemployment check. The factory where he'd manufactured plastic tote bags for the past six months had closed. "Doesn't matter," Bosque said, "I'm living good." Before leaving, he said to come on by.

"You know what Oldenburg's doing, don't you?" Helene said, smoothing the wrinkles from Milton's check. She still wore her long, lavender Phoenix nails and a frothy perm. After years in Phoenix she'd relocated at the new branch, closer to her home in Black Butte. "Oldenburg wants to marry you. Then he'll get some kind ofgovernment project money for his Indian wife. Or he'll adopt you. Same deal."

"It's not me who's the wife or child. I run that place." Nervous speaking to a woman again, Milton rambled, boasting of his authority over hired crews, what Oldenburg called his "quick mind and fast hands" cutting calves or constructing a corner brace, his skill with new tools. Even his baking. "He has to be the wife," Milton said. "He's a better cook." Milton leaned his hip against the counter. "Older woman. He's so old he turned white. And he lost his shape." Milton's hands made breasts. "Nothing left."

They both laughed. Elated by the success of his joke, Milton asked her to dinner. Helene said yes, pick her up at six.

Milton was uneasy in Hashan. The dusty buildings-adobes, sandwich houses of mud and board, slump-block tract homes-seemed part of the unreal life that included his family. To kill time, he rode to the trading post in Black Butte, a few miles in the direction of Oldenburg's ranch, and read magazines. When he arrived at the bank, Helene slapped her forehead: she hadn't known he was on horseback. Phew, she said, she didn't want to go out with a horse. Milton should follow her home and take a bath first.

They never left her house. She was eager for him, and Milton realized

that as a man he'd been dead for a year. They made love until early morning. Milton lay propped against the headboard, his arm encircling her, her cheek resting on his chest. She briskly stroked his hand.

"Your poor finger," she said. "I hear Lopez has little circles in his shoulder like where worms have gone into a tomato."

"It was bad," Milton said, closing his hand.

"I can't stand the men in this town, the drunken pigs," Helene said. "I don't know why I came back."

Helene wasn't what Milton wanted, but he liked her well enough to visit once or twice a month. Because she lived outside Hashan, few people knew of the affair. They would eat dinner and see a movie in Casa Grande or Phoenix, and go to bed. Sometimes they simply watched TV in bed, or drove Helene's Toyota through the desert, for miles without seeing another light.

When Milton returned from his second weekend with Helene, Oldenburg was peevish. "You drink with that woman?" he said. "You going to send her picture to your wife?" Emergencies arose that kept Milton on the ranch weekends. After selling two wild colts to a stable, Milton took Helene to Phoenix overnight. Oldenburg berated him, "The cows don't calve on Saturday and Sunday? They don't get sick? A shed doesn't blow down on Sunday?" Still the men baked together. At the beginning of the school year they entered a fund-raising bake-off sponsored by the PTO. Oldenburg won first with a Boston cream pie, and Milton's apple ring took second.

Helene transferred to Casa Grande, and Milton brought his account with her, relieved to avoid Hashan. Conversations with his friends were strained and dead. He worked; they didn't. They drank; he didn't. They had families. Milton nodded when he saw them but no longer stopped to talk.

Fridays after Helene punched out, they might browse in the Casa Grande shopping center. Milton was drawn to the camera displays, neat lumps of technology embedded in towers of colorful film boxes. The Lerners Shop manikins fascinated him - bony stick figures like the bleached branches of felled cottonwood, a beautiful still arrangement. "Imagine Pimas in those," Helene said, pointing to the squares and triangles of glittering cloth. She puffed out her cheeks and spread her arms. Milton squeezed her small buttocks. Helene's legs were the slimmest of any o'otham woman he'd known.

During the second week of October, when Milton and a hired crew had set up shipping pens and begun culling the calves, a rare fall downpour, tail end of a Gulf hurricane, struck. For six hours thunder exploded and snarls of lightning webbed the sky. The deluge turned the ground to slop, sprang leaks in the roof, and washed out the floodgates at the edge of the granite mountains. Cattle stampeded through the

openings; one died, entangled in the barbed wire. When the skies cleared, Oldenburg estimated that a quarter of the cash animals, some three hundred dollars apiece, had escaped. The shipping trucks were due in two days.

The next morning, a new hired man brought further news: over the weekend, a fight had broken out at the Sundowner. The fat end of a pool cue had caught Audrey Lopez across the throat, crushing her windpipe. Her funeral was to be at two in the afternoon.

Milton stood helplessly before Oldenburg. In the aftermath of the storm, the sky was piercingly blue, and a bracing wind stung his cheeks. Oldenburg's collar fluttered.

"You have to go," Oldenburg said. "There's no question."

"You'll lose too much money," Milton said stubbornly. "The cattle are in the mountains and 1 know every little canyon where they run."

"There's no question," Oldenburg repeated. "The right way is always plain, though we do our best to obscure it."

The service took place in a small, white, Spanish-style church. At the cemetery the mourners stood bareheaded, the sun glinting off their hair. The cemetery was on a knoll, and in the broad afternoon light the surrounding plains, spotted by occasional cloud shadows, seemed immensely distant, like valleys at the foot of a solitary butte. Milton imagined the people at the tip of a rock spire miles in the clouds. The overcast dimmed them, and shreds of cumulus drifted past their backs and bowed heads.

Afterwards the men adjourned to the Lopez house, where Vigiliano Lopez rushed about the living room, flinging chairs aside to clear a center space. A ring of some twenty men sat on chairs or against the wall. Bosque arrived carrying three cold cases and two quarts of Crown Russe. More bottles appeared. Lopez started one Crown Russe in each direction and stalked back and forth from the kitchen, delivering beer and slapping bags of potato chips at the men's feet.

At his turn, Milton passed the bottle along.

"Drink, you goddamn Milton Oldenburg," Lopez said.

Milton said, "I'll lose my job."

"So?" Lopez shrugged distractedly. "1 haven't had a job in a year. 1 don't need a job." Lopez had been the only Pima miner at the nearby Lorna Linda pit until Anaconda shut it down. He pushed his hair repeatedly off his forehead, as if trying to remember something, then turned up the radio.

Milton sat erect in the chair, hands planted on his knees. He gobbled the potato chips. No one avoided him, nor he anyone else, yet talk was impossible. Grief surged through the party like a wave. Milton felt it in over-loud conversation, silences, the restlessness-no one able to stay in one place for long. Laughter came in fits. Over the radio, the wailing tremeloes of the Mexican ballads were oppressive and nerve-racking.

The power offeeling in the room moved Milton and frightened him, but he was outside it.

Joining the others would be as simple as claiming the vodka bottle on its next round, Milton knew. But he remembered standing tall in the stirrups, as if he could see over the edge of the yellow horizon, the end of Oldenburg's land, and he kept his hands spread on his knees. At the thought of vodka's sickly tastelessness, bile rose in his throat. Pretending to drink, tipping the bottle and plugging it with his tongue, would be foolish and shameful. Out of friendship and respect for Lopez, he could not leave. Their wounding each other, Milton realized, had bound him more closely to Lopez.

As night fell the men became drunker and louder. Bosque went out for more liquor. When he returned, he danced with the oil-drum cookstove, blackening his hands and shirt.

"Hey, not with my wife," Lopez said, grabbing the drum and humping it against the wall. "Need somebody to do you right, baby," he said. The drum clanged to the floor. The men cheered. Lopez, knees bent and hands outstretched as if waiting for something to drop into them, lurched to the middle of the room. A smile was glazed over his face. He saw Milton.

"Drink with me, you son of a bitch," he shouted.

Milton motioned for the Crown Russe, a third full. "Half for you, half for me," he said. Marking a spot on the label with his finger, Milton took two long swallows and held out the bottle for Lopez. Lopez drank and flipped the empty over his shoulder. Side by side, arms around each other, Milton and Lopez danced the cumbia. Lopez' weight sagged until Milton practically carried him. The man's trailing feet hooked an extension cord, sending a lamp and the radio crashing to the floor. Lopez collapsed.

Milton ran outside and retched. Immediately he was refreshed and lucid. The stars burned like drill-points of light. Patting the horse into an easy walk, Milton sat back in the saddle, reins loose in his lap, and gave himself to the brilliant stillness. As his eyes adjusted to the night, he could distinguish the black silhouettes of mountains against the lesser dark of the sky. Faint stars emerged over the ranges, bringing the peaks closer. The mountains were calm and friendly, even the jagged line of the Ka kai.

That night Milton dreamed that a chocolate-colored flood swept through Hashan. The o'orham bobbed on the foam; from the shore others drove backward into the torrent, arms raised symmetrically by their heads. Receding, the flood left bodies swollen in the mudMilton's brother Lee, their mother, belly down, rising in a mound. Milton, long hair fixed in the mud, stared upward. His hands were so full of fingers they had become agaves, clusters of fleshy, spiny leaves.

Peering down at him, C.C. and Allen were black against the sun, arms crooked as if for flight. Milton was glad they had escaped.

Milton woke serene and energetic, the dream forgotten. Over breakfast Oldenburg studied him intently-clear gray eyes, a slight frownbut said nothing. The penned calves were weighed and loaded onto the shipping trucks. Many remained free, and the year would be a loss.

Milton wrote C.C. of Audrey Lopez' death. "I had a big drink to keep Lopez company," he added, "but I threw it up. It was the first booze in more than a year. I don't like it any more."

Lying beside Milton the following weekend, Helene said, "Poor finger. I'll give you another one." She laid her pinky against the stub so a new finger seemed to grow. Her lavender nail looked like the fancy gem of a ring. She lifted, lowered the finger. "And Lopez with the purple spots on his shoulder like the eyes of a potato," she said. She shifted, and her small, hard nipple brushed Milton's side. "It's a wonder you two didn't fight."

"Shut up," Milton said. "His wife is dead."

"I know. It's terrible." She had worried for him, Helene said, knowing he would be at the funeral with Lopez. He should have brought her.

"I didn't want you there," Milton said. "You don't have the right feelings." He left before dawn and hadn't returned to Helene when c.c. replied.

"I was shocked to hear about Audrey," C.C. wrote. "I feel sad about it every day. Hashan is such a bad place. But it isn't any better here. At Allen's school there are gangs and not just Mexicans but black and white too."

She wrote again: "1 miss you. I've been thinking about coming back. Allen says he won't but he'll come with me in the end. The money has helped. Thank you."

Milton threw up his arms and danced on the corral dirt, still moist and reddened from fluke autumn rains. Shouting, he danced on one leg and the other, dipping from side to side as if soaring, his head whirling. Oldenburg's nagging-where will they live?-worried him little. Over dinner Oldenburg suggested, "They'll live in your old place, and you can visit them on weekends. We'll have to move our baking to the middle of the week."

Milton knew he must be with the o'orham. Announcing a ride into the mountains, he saddled up and galloped toward Hashan. Because he couldn't see the faces of his family his joy felt weirdly rootless. The past year he had killed them inside. The sudden aches for Allen, the sensation of carrying C.C.'s weight in his arms from the adobe to the ranch house, were like the twinges of heat, cold and pain from his missing finger. As if straining after their elusive faces, Milton rode faster. His straw hat, blown back and held by its cord, flapped at his ear. The horse's neck was soaked with sweat.

Bosque's fat wife said he wasn't home. Milton made a plan for the Sundowner: after one draft for sociability, he would play the shuffleboard game. Tying up at a light pole, Milton hesitated in the lounge doorway. The familiarity of the raw wood beams crisscrossing the bare sheetrock walls frightened him. But Bosque, sliding his rear off a barstool, called, "Milton Oldenburg."

"C.C.'s hauling her little tail home," Milton announced. "And the boy."

"All riiight." Bosque pumped his hand up and down. Milton's embarrassment at his missing finger disappeared in the vastness of Bosque's grip. Friends he hadn't spoken to in months surrounded him. "When's she coming? They going to live on the ranch? Oldenburg will have a whole Indian family now." Warmed by their celebration of his good luck, Milton ordered pitchers. His glass of draft was deep gold and sweeter than he had remembered, though flat. Others treated him in return. Someone told a story of Bosque building a scrap wood raft to sail the shallow lake left by the rains. Halfway across, the raft had broken apart and sunk. "Bosque was all mud up to his eyes," the storyteller said. "He looked like a bull rolling in cow flop." Everyone laughed.

Fuzzy after a half dozen beers, Milton felt his heart pound, and his blood. He saw them then-C.C., wings of hair, white teeth, dimpled round cheeks. Allen's straight bangs and small, unsmiling mouth. Their eyes were black with ripples of light, reflections on a pool. Milton was drawn into that pool, lost. Terror washed over him like a cold liquid, and he ordered a vodka.

"I'm a drunk," he told the neighbor on his right.

"Could be. Let's check that out, Milton," the man said.

"I never worked."

"No way," the man said, shaking his head.

"I didn't make a living for them."

"Not even a little bitty bit," the man agreed.

"Not even this much," Milton said, holding his thumb and forefinger almost closed, momentarily diverted by the game. "I hurt them."

Holding up his hands, the man yelled, "Not me."

"I tortured them. They don't belong to me. 1 don't have a family," Milton mumbled. Quickly he drank three double vodkas. The jukebox streamed colors, and he floated on its garbled music.

Shoving against the men's room door, Milton splashed into the urinal, wavering against the stall. He groped for the Sundowner's rear exit. The cold bit through his jacket. Milton pitched against a stack of bricks.

Waking in the dark, Milton jumped to his feet. C.C. was coming, and his job was in danger. He was foreman of a white man's ranch. Allen and C.c. would be amazed at his spread. With a bigger bank account than three-quarters of Hashan, Milton could support them for a year on savings alone. The night before was an ugly blur. But his tongue was

bitter, his head thudded, he had the shakes. Cursing, Milton mounted and kicked the horse into a canter. To deceive Oldenburg he must work like a crazy man and sweat out his hangover. The fits of nausea made him moan with frustration. He kicked the horse and struck his own head.

Milton arrived an hour after sunup. Shooing the horse into the corral with a smack to the rump, he stood foggily at the gate, unable to remember his chore from the previous day. A ladder leaning against the barn reminded him: patching. He lugged a roll of asphalt roofing up the ladder. Scrambling over the steep pitch didn't frighten him, even when he slipped and tore his hands. He smeared tar, pressed the material into place, drove the nails. Every stroke was true, two per nail. Milton had laid half a new roof when Oldenburg called him.

"Come down." Oldenburg was pointing to the corral. The gate was still ajar. Milton's horse, head drooping, dozed against the rail, but the other three were gone.

Milton stood before him, wobbly from exertion, blood draining from his head.

"You lied," Oldenburg said. "You abandoned your job. The week is my time. You've been drunk. I'm going to have to let you go, Milton."

Milton couldn't speak.

"You understand, don't you?" Oldenburg said more rapidly. His eyes flicked down, back to Milton. "Do you see what happens?" His arms extended toward the empty corral.

"So I lose a day running them down."

Smiling slightly, Oldenburg shook his head. "You miss the point. It would be wrong for me to break my word. You'd have no cause to believe me again and our agreement would be meaningless."

"Once a year I get drunk," Milton burst out. "We'll put a name on it, November Something Milton's Holiday."

Oldenburg smiled again. "Once a month once a week I'm sorry. I'll give you two weeks' pay but you can leave any time." He turned.

"I've worked hard for you!" Milton's throat felt as if it were closing up.

Oldenburg stopped, brow furrowed. "It's sad," he said. "You've managed the Box-J better than I could. I'm going to miss our baking." He paused. "But we have to go on, Milton, don't you see? My family leaves me, Jenkins leaves me, you leave me. But I go on." He walked away.

Two long steps, a knee in the back, arms around the neck, and he could break the man in half - Milton's arms dropped. He had lost his urge for violence. Long after Oldenburg had disappeared into the open green range where the horses were, Milton stood by the corral. Then, arms over his head as if escaping a cloudburst, he ran into the adobe, packed his belongings in a sheet, and that afternoon rode the exhausted horse back to his old home.

To C.C. Milton wrote, "I don't have my job any more but there's plenty of money in the bank." Weeks later she replied, "Milton, I know what's going on. I can't come home to this." But she would continue to write him, she said. Milton saw no one. Pacing the house, he talked to the portraits over the TV-Allen's eighth-grade class picture, a computer-drawn black-dot composition of c.c. from the O'otham Tash carnival. He disturbed nothing, not even the year-and-a-half-old pile of dishes in the sink.

For several weeks he laid fence for a Highway Maintenance heavy equipment yard. Working with a new type of fence, chain link topped with barbed wire, cheered him. The foreman was lax, married to one of Milton's cousins, so when Milton requested the leftover spools ofbarbed wire, he said, "Sure. It's paid for."

Milton dug holes around his house and cut posts from the warped, gnarled mesquite growing in the vacant land. As he worked, the blue sky poured through chinks in the posts, reminding Milton pleasantly of the timeless first days repairing the line at Oldenburg's range. When he had finished stringing the wire, Milton's house was enclosed in a neat box-two thorned strands, glinting silver. Sunlight jumped off the metal in zigzag bolts. In Hashan, where fences were unknown and the beige ground was broken only by houses, cactus, and drab shrubs, the effect was as startling as if Milton had wrapped his home in Christmas lights.

Milton sat on the back doorstep, drinking beer. Discouraged by the fence, no one visited at first. But dogs still ran through the yard, as did children, who preferred scaling the fence to slithering under it. Their legs waggled precariously on the stiffly swaying wire; then they hopped down, dashed to the opposite side, and climbed out, awkward as spiders. Milton's fence became a community joke, which made him popular. Instead of walking through the gap behind the house, friends would crawl between the strands or try to vault them. Or they would lean on the posts, passing a beer back and forth while they chatted.

Keeping her promise, C.c. wrote that Allen had shot up tall. Even running track he wore his Walkman, she said. But he smoked, and she had to yell at him. Last term he'd made nearly all Ns.

Milton grew extremely fat, seldom leaving the house except to shop or work the odd jobs his new skills brought him. Through spring and summer he drowsed on the doorstep. In November, almost a year after he'd left Oldenburg's, he fell asleep on the concrete slab and spent the night without jacket or blanket. The next day he was very sick, and Bosque and Lopez drove him to the hospital. The doctor said he had pneumonia.

Milton's first day in ICU, Bosque and Lopez shot craps with him during visiting hours. But as Milton's lungs continued to fill with fluids, his heart, invaded by fatty tissues from his years of drinking, weakened. Four days after entering the hospital, he suffered a heart attack.

In the coronary ward, restricted to ten-minute visits, Milton dreamed, feeling as if the fluids had leaked into his skull and his brain was sodden. In one dream the agaves again sprouted from his wrists, their stalks reaching into the sky. Milton gave the name ne ha: jun-all my relations - to his agave hands.

The next morning C.C. and Allen appeared in the doorway. Huge, billowing, formless as smoke, they approached the bed in a peculiar rolling motion. Milton was afraid. From the dreams he realized his deepest love was drawn from a great lake far beneath him, and that lake was death. But understanding, he lost his fear. He held out his arms to them.

Leviathan

Tobias Wolff

On her thirtieth birthday Ted threw a surprise party for Helen. It was a small party-Mitch and Bliss were the only guests. They'd chipped in with Ted and bought Helen two grams of white-out blizzard that lasted the whole night and on into the next morning. When it got light enough everyone went for a swim in the courtyard pool. Then Ted took Mitch up to the sauna on the fifth floor while Helen and Bliss put together a monster omelet.

"So how does it feel," Bliss asked, "being thirty?" The ash fell off her cigarette into the eggs. She stared at the ash for a moment, then stirred it in. "Mitch had his fortieth last month and totally freaked. He did so much Maalox he started to taste like chalk. I thought he was going to start freebasing it or something."

"Mitch is forty?" Helen said.

Bliss looked over at her. "That's classified information, O.K.?"

Helen shook her head. "Incredible. He looks about twenty-five, maybe twenty-seven at the absolute most." She watched Bliss crumble bacon into the bowl. "Oh God," she said, "I don't believe it. He had a face-lift."

Bliss closed her eyes and leaned against the counter. "I shouldn't have told you. Please don't say anything," she murmured hopelessly.

When Mitch and Ted came back from the sauna they all had another toot, and Ted gave Helen the mirror to lick. He said he'd never seen two grams disappear so fast. Afterwards Helen served up the omelet while Ted tried to find something on the TV. He kept flipping the dial until it drove everyone crazy, looking for Roadrunner cartoons, then he gave up and tuned in on the last part of a movie about the Bataan Death March. They didn't watch it for very long though because Bliss started to cry. Ted switched over to an inspirational program but Bliss kept crying and began to hyperventilate. "Come on, everyone," said Mitch. "Love circle." Ted and Mitch went over to Bliss and put their arms around her while Helen watched them from the sofa, sipping espresso from a cup as blue

and dainty as a robin's egg-the last of a set her grandmother had brought from the old country. Helen would have hugged Bliss too but there wasn't really any point; Bliss pulled this stunt almost every time she got herself a noseful, and it just had to run its course.

When Helen finished her espresso she gathered the plates and carried them out to the kitchen. She scattered leftover toast into the courtyard below, and watched the squirrels carry it away as she scoured the dishes and listened to the proceedings in the next room. This time it was Ted who talked Bliss down. "You're beautiful," he kept telling her. It was the same thing he always said to Helen when she felt depressed, and she was beginning to feel depressed right now.

I need more fuel, Helen thought. She ducked into the bedroom and did a couple of lines from Ted's private stash, which she had discovered while searching for matches in the closet. Afterwards she looked at herself in the mirror. Her eyes were bright. They seemed lit from within and that was how Helen felt, as ifthere were a column ofcool white light pouring from her head to her feet like a waterfall. She put on a pair of sunglasses so nobody would notice and went back to the kitchen.

Mitch was standing at the counter, rolling a bone. "How's the birthday girl?" he asked without looking up.

"Ready for the next one," Helen said. "How about you?"

"Hey, bring it on," Mitch answered.

Helen smiled at him. At that moment she came close to letting him know she knew, but she held back. Mitch was good people and so was Bliss when you could get her off the subject of Mary Kay. Helen didn't want to make trouble between them. All the same, Helen knew that someday she wasn't going to be able to stop herself from giving Mitch the business. It just had to happen. And Helen knew that Bliss knew. But she hadn't done it this morning and she felt good about that.

Mitch held up the joint. "Taste?"

Helen shook her head. She glanced over her shoulder toward the living room. "What's the story on Bliss?" she asked. "All bummed out over World War II? Ted should have known that movie would set her off."

Mitch picked a sliver of weed from his lower lip. "Her ex is threatening to move back to Boston. Which means she won't get to see her kids except during summer, and that's only if we can put together the scratch to fly them here and back. It's tough. Really tough."

"I guess," Helen said. She dried her hands and hung the towel on the refrigerator door. "Still, Bliss should have thought about that when she took a walk on them, right?"

Mitch turned and started out of the kitchen.

"Sorry," Helen called after him. "I wasn't thinking."

"Yes you were," Mitch said, and left her there.

Oh, hell, she thought. She decided she needed another line but made

no move to get it. Helen stood where she was, looking down at the pool through the window above the sink. The manager's afghan dog was lapping water from the shallow end, legs braced in the trough that ran around the pool. The two British Air stewards from down the hall were bathing their white bodies in the morning sunshine, both wearing blue swimsuits. The redheaded girl from upstairs was floating on an air mattress. Helen could see the long shadow of the air mattress glide along the bottom of the pool like something stalking her.

Helen heard Ted say, "Jesus, Bliss, I can understand that. Everybody has those feelings. You can't always beat them down." Bliss answered him in a voice so soft that Helen gave up trying to hear; it was hardly more than a sigh. She poured herself a glass of Chablis and joined the others in the living room. They were all sitting cross-legged on the floor. Helen caught Mitch's eye and mouthed the word Sorry. He stared at her, then nodded.

"I've done worse things than that," Ted was saying, "I'll bet Mitch has, too."

"Plenty worse," Mitch said.

"Worse than what?" Helen asked.

"It's awful." Bliss looked down at her hands. "I'd be embarrassed to tell you." She was all cried out now, Helen could see that. Her eyes were heavy-lidded and serene, her cheeks flushed, and a little smile played over her swollen lips.

"It couldn't be that bad," Helen said.

Ted leaned forward. He still had on the bathrobe he'd worn to the sauna and it fell open almost to his waist, as Helen knew he intended it to do. His chest was hard-looking from the Nautilus machine in the basement, and dark from their trip to Mazatlan. Helen had to admit it, he looked great. She didn't understand why he had to be so obvious and crass, but he got what he wanted: she looked at him and so did Bliss.

"Bliss, it isn't that bad," Ted went on. "It's just one of those things." He turned to Helen. "Bliss' little girl carne down with tonsillitis last month and Bliss never got it together to go see her in the hospital."

"I can't deal with hospitals," Bliss said. "The minute I set foot inside of one my stomach starts doing flips. But still. When I think of her all alone in there."

Mitch took Bliss' hands in his and looked right at her until she met his gaze. "It's over," he said. "The operation's over and Lisa's out of the hospital and she's all right. Say it, Bliss. She's all right."

"She's all right," Bliss said. "Again."

"She's all right," Bliss repeated.

"O.K. Now believe it." Mitch put her hands together and rubbed them gently between his palms. "We've built up this big myth about kids being helpless and vulnerable and so on because it makes us feel important.

We think we're playing some heavy role just because we're parents. We don't give kids any credit at all. Kids are tough little monkeys. Kids are survivors."

Bliss smiled.

"But I don't know," Mitch said. He let go of Bliss' hands and leaned back. "What I said just then is probably complete bullshit. Everything I say these days sounds like bullshit,"

"We've all done worse things," Ted told Bliss. He looked over at Helen. When Helen saw that he was waiting for her to agree with him she tried to think of something to say, but finally just nodded. Ted kept looking at her. "What have you got those things on for?" he asked.

"The light hurts my eyes."

"Then close the curtains." He reached across to Helen and lifted the sunglasses away from her face. "There," he said. He cupped her chin in one hand and with the other brushed her hair back from her forehead. "Isn't she something?"

"She'll do:' Mitch said.

Ted stroked Helen's cheek with the back of his hand. "I'd kill for that face."

Bliss was studying Helen. "So lovely," she said in a solemn, wistful voice.

Helen laughed. She got up and drew the curtains shut. Little spangles of light glittered in the fabric. She moved across the dim room to the dining nook and brought back a candle from the table there. Ted lit the candle and for a few moments they silently watched the flame. Then, in a thoughtful tone that seemed part of the silence, Mitch began to speak.

"It's true that we've all done things we're ashamed of. I just wish I'd done more of them. I'm serious," he said when Ted laughed. "I wish I'd raised more hell and made more mistakes, real mistakes, where you actually do something wrong instead of just let yourself drift into things you don't like. Sometimes I look around and I think, Hey-what happened? No reflection on you," he said to Bliss.

She seemed puzzled.

"Forget it," Mitch told her. "All I'm saying is that looking out for the other fellow and being nice all the time is a bunch of crap."

"But you are nice," Bliss said.

Mitch nodded. "I know," he said bitterly. "I'm working on it. It gets you exactly nowhere."

"Amen," said Ted.

"Case in point," Mitch went on. "I used to paralegal with this guy in the city and he decided that he couldn't live without some girl he was seeing. So he told his wife and of course she threw him out. Then the girl changed her mind. She didn't even tell him why. We used to eat lunch together and he would give me the latest installment and I swear

to God it was enough to break your heart. He wanted to get back together with his family but his wife couldn't make up her mind whether to take him. One minute she'd say yes, the next minute she'd say no. Meanwhile he was living in this ratbag on Post Street. All he had in there was lawn furniture. I don't know, I just felt sorry for him. So I told him he could move in with us until things got straightened out."

"I can feel this one coming," Helen said.

Mitch stared at the candle. "His name was Raphael. Like the angel. He was creative and good-looking and there was a nice aura around him. I guess I wanted to be his friend. But he turned out to be completely bad news. In the nine months he stayed with us he never once washed a glass or emptied an ashtray. He ran up hundreds of dollars worth of calls on our phone bill and didn't pay for them. He wrecked my car. He stole things from me. He even put the moves on my wife."

"Classic," Helen said.

"You know what I did about it?" Mitch asked. "I'll tell you. Nothing. I never said a word to him about any of it. By the time he left, my wife couldn't stand the sight of me. Beginning of the end."

"What a depressing story," Helen said.

"I should have killed him," Mitch said. "I might have regretted it later on but at least I could say I did something."

"You're too sweet," Bliss told him.

"I know," Mitch said. "But I wish I had, anyway. Sometimes it's better to do something really horrendous than to let things slide."

Ted clapped his hands. "Hear, hear. You're on the right track, Mitch. All you need is a few pointers, and old Ted is just the man to give them to you. Because where horrendous is concerned I'm the expert. You might say that I'm the king of horrendous."

Helen held up her empty glass. "Anybody want anything?"

"Put on your crash helmets," Ted went on. "You are about to hear my absolute bottom-line confession. The Worst Story Ever Told."

"No thanks," said Helen.

He peered at her. "What do you mean, 'No thanks'? Who's asking permission?"

"I wouldn't mind hearing it," Mitch said.

"Well, I would." Belen stood and looked down at Ted. "It's my birthday party, remember? I just don't feel like sitting around and listening to you talk about what a crud you are. It's a downer."

"That's right," Bliss said. "Helen's the birthday girl. She gets to choose. Right, Ted?"

"I know what," Helen said. "Why don't you tell us something good you did? The thing you're most proud of."

Mitch burst out laughing. Ted grinned and punched him in the arm.

"I mean it:' Helen said.

"Helen gets to choose," Bliss repeated. She patted the floor beside her and Helen sat down again. "All right," Bliss said. "We're listening."

Ted looked from Bliss to Helen. "I'll do it if you will," he said. "But you have to go first."

"That's not fair," Helen said.

"Sounds fair to me," said Mitch. "It was your idea."

Bliss smiled at Helen. "This is fun."

Before Helen began, she sent Ted out to the kitchen for more wine. Mitch did some sit-ups to get his blood moving again. Bliss sat behind Helen and let down Helen's hair. "I could show you something for this dryness," she said. She combed Helen's hair with her fingers, then started to brush it, counting off the strokes in a breathy whisper until Ted came back with the jug.

They all had a drink.

"Ready and waiting," Ted told Helen. He lay back on the sofa and clasped his hands behind his head.

"One of my mother's friends had a boy with Down's syndrome," Helen began. "Actually, three or four ofher friends had kids with problems like that. One of my aunts, too. They were all good Catholics and they didn't think anything about having babies right into their forties. This was before Vatican II and the pill and all that - before everything got watered down.

"Anyway, Tom wasn't really a boy. He was older than me by a couple of years, and a lot bigger. But he seemed like a boy-very sweet, very gentle, very happy."

Bliss stopped the brush in mid-stroke and said, "You're going to make me cry again."

"I used to take care of Tom sometimes when I was in high school. I was into a serious good-works routine back then. I wanted to be a saint: honestly, I really did. At night, before I went to sleep, I used to put my fingers under my chin like I was praying and smile in this really holy way that I practiced all the time in front of the mirror. Then if they found me dead in the morning they would think that I'd gone straight to heaventhat I was smiling at the angels coming to get me. At one point I even thought of becoming a nun."

Bliss laughed. "I can just see you in a habit-Sister Morphine. You'd have lasted about two hours."

Helen turned and looked at Bliss in a speculative way. "It's not something I expect you to understand," she said, "but if I had gone in I would have stayed in. To me, a vow is a vow." She turned away again. "Like I said, I started out taking care of Tom as a kind of beatitude number, but after a while I got to look forward to it. Tom was fun to be with. And he really loved me. He even named one of his hamsters after me. We were both crazy about animals so we would usually go to the zoo, or I would

take him to this stable out in Marin that had free riding lessons for special kids. That was what they called them, instead of handicapped or retarded - 'special.'"

"Beautiful," Mitch said.

"Don't get too choked up," Helen told him. "The story isn't over yet." She took a sip of her wine. "So. After I started college I didn't get home all that much, but whenever I did I'd stop by and get Tom and we'd go somewhere. Over to the Cliff House to look at the sea lions, something like that. Then this one day I got a real brainstorm. I thought, Hey, why not go whale-watching? Tom had whale posters all over his bedroom but he'd never seen a real one, and neither had I. So I called up this outfit in Half Moon Bay and they said that it was getting toward the end of the season, but still worth a try. They were pretty sure we'd see something.

"Tom's mother wasn't too hot about the idea. She kept going on about the fact that he couldn't swim. But I brought her around, and the next morning Tom and I drove down and got on board the boat. It wasn't all that big. In fact it was a lot smaller than I thought it would be, and that made me a little nervous at first, but after we got under way I figured hell with it - they must know what they're doing. The boat rocked a little, but not dangerously. Tom loved it.

"We cruised around all morning and didn't see a thing. They would take us to different places and cut the engine and we would sit there, waiting for a whale to come along. It was nice out on the water. We were with a good bunch of people and one of them fixed up a sort of fishing line for Tom to hang over the side while we waited. I just leaned back and got some sun. Smelled the good smells. Watched the seagulls. After an hour or so they would start the engine up again and go somewhere else and do the same thing. This happened three or four times. Everybody was kidding the guide about it, threatening to make him walk the plank and so on. Then, right out of nowhere, this whale came up beside us.

"He was just suddenly there. All this water running off his back. This unbelievably rancid smell all around him. Covered with barnacles and shells and long strings of seaweed trailing off him. Big. Maybe half again as long as the boat we were in." Helen shook her head. "You just can't imagine how big he was. He started making passes at the boat, and every time he did it we'd pitch and roll and take on about five hundred gallons of water. We were falling all over each other. At first everyone laughed and whooped it up but after a while it started to get heavy."

"He was probably playing with you," Mitch said.

"That's what the guide told us the first couple of times it happened. Then he got scared too. I mean he went white as a sheet. You could tell he didn't know what was happening any better than the rest of us did. We have this idea that whales are supposed to be more civilized than

people, smarter and friendlier and more together. Cute, even. But it wasn't like that. It was hostile."

"You probably got a bad one," Mitch said. lilt sounds like he was bent out of shape about something. Maybe the Russians harpooned his mate."

"He was a monster," Helen said. "I mean that. He was hostile and huge and he stank. He was hideous, too. There were so many shells and barnacles on him that you could hardly see his skin. It looked as if he had armor on. He scraped the boat a couple of times and it made the most terrible sound, like people moaning under water. He'd swim ahead a ways and go under and you'd think, 'Please God don't let him come back: and then the water would start to churn alongside the boat and there he'd be again. It was just terrifying. I've never been so afraid in my life. And then Tom started to lose it."

Bliss put the brush on the floor. Helen could feel her stillness and hear the sound of her breathing.

"He started to make these little noises," Helen said. "I'd never heard him do that before. Little mewing noises. The strange thing was, I hadn't even thought ofTom up to then. I'd completely forgotten about him. So it gave me a shock when I realized that he was sitting right next to me, scared half to death. At first I thought, 'Oh no, what if he goes berserk!' He was so much bigger than me I wouldn't have been able to control him. Neither would anyone else. He was incredibly strong. If anyone had tried to hold him down he'd have thrown them offlike a dog shakes off water. And then what?

"But the thing that worried me most was that Tom would get so confused and panicky that he'd jump overboard. In my mind I had a completely clear picture of him doing it."

"Me too," Mitch said. "I have the same picture. He did it, didn't he? He jumped in and you went after him and pulled him out."

Bliss said, "Ssshhh. Just listen, O.K.?"

"He didn't jump," Helen said. "He didn't go berserk, either. Here we come to the point of the story-Helen's Finest Hour. How did I get started on this, anyway? It's disgusting."

The candle hissed and flared. The flame was burning in a pool of wax. Helen watched it flare up twice more, and then it died. The room went gray.

Bliss began to rub Helen's back. "Go on," she said.

"I just talked him down," Helen said. "You know, I put my arm around his shoulder and said, 'Hey, Tom, isn't this something! Look at that big old whale! Wow! Here he comes again, Tom, hold on!' And then I'd laugh like crazy. I made like I was having the time of my life, and Tom fell for it. He calmed right down. Pretty soon after that the whale took off and we went back to shore. I don't know why I brought it up. It was

just that even though I felt really afraid, I went ahead and acted as if I was flying high. I guess that's the thing I'm most proud of."

Helen rose up on her knees and stretched. "This happened nine years ago," she added.

"Thank you, Helen," Mitch said. "Thank you for sharing that with us. I know I sound phony but I mean it."

"You don't talk about yourself enough," Bliss said. Then she called, "O.K., Tea-it's your turn."

Ted did not answer.

Bliss called his name again.

"I think he's asleep," Mitch said. He moved closer to the sofa and looked at Ted. He nodded. "Dead to the world."

"Asleep," Helen said. "Oh, God."

Bliss hugged Helen from behind. "Mitch, come here," she said. "Love circle."

Helen pulled away. "No," she said.

"Why don't we wake him up?" Mitch suggested.

"Forget it," Helen told him. "Once Ted goes under he stays under. Nothing can bring him up. Watch." She went to the sofa, raised her hand, and slapped Ted across the face.

He groaned softly and turned over.

"See?" Helen said.

"What a slug," Bliss said.

"Don't you dare call him names," Helen told her. "Not in front of me anyway. Ted is my husband. Forever and ever. I only did that to make a point."

Mitch said, "Helen, do you want to talk about this?"

"There's nothing to talk about," Helen answered. "I made my own bed." She hefted the jug of wine. "Who needs a refill?"

Mitch and Bliss looked at each other. "My energy level isn't too high," Bliss said.

Mitch nodded. "Mine's pretty low, too."

"Then we'll just have to bring it up," Helen said. She left the room and came back with three candles and a mirror. She screwed one of the candles into the holder and held a match to the wick. It sputtered, then caught. Helen felt the heat of the flame on her cheek. "There," she said, "that's more like it." Mitch and Bliss drew closer as Helen took a glass vial from her pocket and spilled the contents onto the mirror. She looked up at them and grinned.

"I don't believe this," Bliss said. "Where did you get it?"

Helen shrugged.

"That's a lot of toot," Mitch said.

"We'll just have to do our best," Helen said. "We've got all day."

Bliss looked at the mirror. "I really should go to work."

"Me too," Mitch said. He laughed, and Bliss laughed with him. They

watched over Helen's shoulders as Helen bent down to sift the gleaming crystal. First she chopped it with a razor. Then she began to spread it out. Mitch and Bliss smiled up at her from the mirror, and Helen smiled back between them. Their faces were rosy with candlelight. They were the faces of three well-wishers, carolers, looking in at Helen through a window filling up with snow.

Two Stories

]ames Kelman

A Nightboilerman's Notes

The bunker faces outwards, away to the far corner of the ground surface area. When it requires replenishing (twice nightly) I push the bogey out into the corridor and through the rearmost swing doors, down the steep incline onto the pathway by the canal, along to where the coal mountains pile some thirty yards from the embankment. It is good to walk here, the buckled rattle of the bogey wheels only emphasizing the absence of noise. The Nightoutsideman has charge of this area. I used to envy him. His job has always seemed so straightforward in comparison to this one of mine. He sits on his chair to the side of his hut door, gazing at the sky or at the canal. I walk past him but he doesn't look across, not until he hears that first strike of my shovel into the coal, when he turns and waves.

It takes four bogey loads to replenish the bunker. I could manage it with three but the incline up into the factors is too steep to push the bogey comfortably if fully laden. And there is no need to rush. This is a part of the shift I like. Once the fourth load is in the bogey I leave it standing and go over to have a smoke with the Nightoutsideman. We exchange nods. I lean my back against the wall on the other side of the hut door from him; sometimes I lower myself down to sit on my heels. Due to the configuration of warehouse and factory buildings there is never any wind here (a very, very slight breeze, but only occasionally) and the canal is still, its water black, gray foam spreading out from its banks.

"A Nighrboilerman's Notes" © 1985 by James Kelman and "In a Betting Shop to the Rear of Shaftesbury Avenue" © 1983 by James Kelman. These two stories come from Lean Tales, a collection of stories by James Kelman, Agnes Owens and Alasdair Gray published by Jonathan Cape (1985).

He will have been waiting for me to arrive before making his next cigarette. He used to make one for me but I prefer my own. I strike the match; while I am exhaling on the first draw I flick the match out onto the canal, watching for its smoke but there never is any; if there is 1 haven't been able to see it. He raises his eyebrows, a brief smile. He smiles a lot, speaks very rarely; he just likes to sit there, watching the things that happen. Most of the buildings are unoccupied during the night and their differing shapes and shadows, the shades of black and gray, red-tinged. Now and then he will gesture at the sky, at the bend in the canal, sideways at one of the buildings, to the one where jets of steam suddenly issue from escape pipes, and to high up in the same building, at the large windows where head,like shapes appear frequently. I never quite grasp what he is on about but it probably has to do with plain truths, and I nod, as though acknowledging a contrast. Then when I finish the smoke I flick the dowp out onto the canal, listening for the plop which never comes (which never could come, not in any canal).

I wait on a few moments, before going to get the bogey. I like this last push up the incline, that rutted point near the top where the wheels seem to be jamming and the bogey halts and I cannot hold it any longer! All my strength's gone! The load's going to roll back down and crash into the canal!

and then I grin; I breathe in and shove, continuing on up and through the swing doors into the corridor, still grinning. I have charge of the boilers. Their bodies are situated in the basement and their mouths range the ground surface area, shut off by solid square hatches with set-in rings. The floor is made of specially treated metal plating so that although it is still very hot it is never so hot that it is impossible to walk upon when wearing the special boots (metal studded, and perhaps the uppers are of a special substance?). When I arrive with the fourth load of coal I wheel the bogey past the bunker and go straight across to begin stoking. I have a crowbar to insert in the rings to wedge up the hatches which settle at an angle of 100°. With the hatch raised the heat and light from the boiler is tremendous and I have to avert my face while stoking. Asbestos gloves are there to be used but I work without them, simply taking care not to touch the metal parts of the shovel. It is habit now and I cannot remember the last time I burnt my hands. There is an interesting thing that a child would like to see; this is the coal dust dropping from my shovel during the stoking, it ignites simultaneously to touching the floor so that countless tiny fires are always blazing, and it looks startling (diamonds that sparkle). Then I have finished and kick down the hatch, and there is that thud of impact separating the loud roaring of the open boiler from the dull roaring of the closed boiler that I can never quite anticipate. And I move onto the next. Finally, when I have finished them all, I wheel off the bogey to its

position by the bunker then return with the wire brush to sweep clean the floor of the ground surface. Coal bits will be laying smouldering or burning nearby the hatches; I sweep them straight across and into the water trench next to the basement entrance. Towards the end of the shift I rake out the trench and use what is there on the last stoke. Whenever I forget to do this the trench is full when I come in next evening. The Dayboilerman is responsible. This is his way of reminding me not to do it again.

From a distance the entrance to the basement resembles another boilermouth but it is set away to the side of the ground surface, and its hatch is permanently raised. There is a stepladder going down, the top of which is welded onto the inside panel of the hatch. I enjoy descending. I grip either side with both hands, sometimes scurrying down to break the existing speed record, other times I go stepping very, very slowly, very deliberately, as though engaged upon ultra-serious business to do with submarines or spaceships. I can be standing watching myself from way over beyond the bunker, seeing my head sink from view, vanishing, wondering if it cracked against the edge of the metal-plated floor but no, always I just avoid that by the briefest margin possible, gglullp, gone. Then I poke out my head again. Or maybe remain exactly there, just beneath the surface, counting twenty-five, and only then will I reappear, and back down immediately.

Nowadays I appreciate no tasks more than those that have me down in the basement. It did use to have its frightening aspects but my imagination was to blame. The black holes is the best example. I would step past them and pretend they were not there, or if they were, that I was not particularly bothered by them. This was daft and I knew it was daft but I was just working out a method ofconquering myself. At that time I was having to actually force myself to enter the basement. I would say inwardly: these black holes, they are ordinary black holes, ordinary in the sense that they are man-made, they only exist because of the way the walls have been designed. (They also exist as they do because of the effect the lighting system has on the boilerbodies: permanent shadows.)

The basement is a sealed unit, built to accommodate the boilers; the only entrance/exit is by way of the stepladder. Firstly the boilers were sited then they built the basement, and the rest of the building. It took me a while to understand that fully. And when I had I think I was either way over my fear or well on the road to it. It was pretty bad at the time. I had to force myself to sit down beside them, the holes, facing away from them, not able to see them without turning my head. I would sit like that for ages, thinking of horrible things, but not being aware of it till later, sometimes much later, when walking home. One morning the Dayboilerman found me. It was a terrible shock for him. The sound of his boots on the steps of the ladder had reached me but could scarcely correspond to anything I knew so that I wasn't really aware of it beyond

my thoughts. Then he was there and his eyes staring as though seeing a ghost, seeming about to collapse with a heart attack. Yet he had been looking for me. I hadn't clocked out at the gate and the timekeeper had asked him to check up. So he was looking for me and when he found me reacted as though I was the last thing he expected to see sitting there. He told people I looked like a zombie. A zombie! But eventually it made me realize he had never managed to conquer himself. He must have been really nervous, terrified about what he might find.

The switches for the basement lighting are on the wall behind the ladder so they can be turned on before reaching the bottom, but they are supposed to be kept on permanently. I think the reason for this has to do with the idea of one man being down and then another man coming down without realizing the first is there, and returning back up and switching the lighting off, leaving the first man in total blackness. That would be a horrible thing to happen, particularly to someone new in the job. But I have to admit here and now that I do play about with the switches, sometimes leaving the lighting off during the times I'm away from the basement. I think about how it all looks down there, different things. Also, there is that incredible sensation when switching them back on again later. I go stepping off the ladder with my back to the inner wall, facing away from the shaft of light above, right out into the blackness. Occasionally I will walk three or four (five at the most) paces until that feeling of narrowness has me stock-still and trying to reflect on a variety of matters, maybe wondering how it would be having to work in such conditions forever (a miner whose lamp keeps going out?). And I continue standing there, thinking of different things, then slowly but surely I notice I am moving back the way, sensing the approach of that strange feeling of being buried in cotton wool and I am turning to reach for the switches calmly, not panicking at all, getting my bearings from the shaft of light high above at the entrance. And the lighting is immediate throughout the basement, and the noise of everything now audible apparently for the first time, that deep, deep humming sound.

The boilerbodies dominate the basement. I can stand watching them. They are large, their shadows rigid but falling on each other (it can seem as though your eyes are blurring). There is a complex of narrow passageways between them, just wide enough for a man to walk, carrying a crate of cinders and a rake and shovel perhaps. I used to think a bogey might be adapted to fit the passageways but this is not at all necessary; it is possible the idea only occurred to me because of movable objects-l thought it would be good to have one, a bogey. There are four tools: two crates plus a rake and a shovel. There are also two pairs of boilersuits, one for the Dayboilerman and one for me; they have to be kept in the basement; if we want to wear boilersuits on the ground surface we have to order different ones for the purpose. I also keep a towel down here,

which I find necessary. Although the atmosphere is not stifling it must be akin to tropical. I think of equatorial forests full of those peculiar plants, gigantic ones, with brightly colored buds the size of oranges hanging down the middle, and that constant dripping. But there isn't any dripping in the basement, nothing like that. There is water in the trenches, of course, which surrounds the bottom of the boilerbodies. Cinders fall through to here somehow and I rake them out and carry them in a crate to the foot of the ladder, dumping them into the other crate, which I will carry up later on, for eventual use in the last stoke. I enjoy carrying the crate between the boilerbodies. I take different routes and go quickly or slowly, sometimes very, very slowly, studying my boots as they land at that point on the passageway nearest to the trench. Even though I work naked I continue to wear the boots. I once tried it barefoot but the edges of the trenches get quite slippy when I'm raking the cinders out; also a daft thing, I was being continually tempted into the water, just to dip my feet (but if I had succumbed to that I would maybe have gone in for a swim!).

The trenches are narrow and they slope in below the bottoms of the boilerbodies so that cinders can become stuck, and stuck fast. There seem to be a great many crannies. I know most of them through having used the rake so often. This part of the job is good, the raking noise and my own silence, that clung of the rake-head below the surface of the water on the sides of the trench, the scraping noise of its teeth in the crannies. I could have expected both that and the sense of touch to grate on me but they don't, perhaps because they come from outside of me altogether. I work silently, and in silence. It is an important point. The idea of the work noise is funny, how it would appear to somebody (not the Dayboilerman) poking his head down the ladder, seeing how all the objects and everything are so stationary, just taking it for granted for a spell while not being conscious of anything else, not until that moment he has become aware of something, of an unexpected noise, rhythmic, and I couldn't be seen from there because of the shapes and shadows, only the clung and scraping sound; after a moment the person would react by snorting, maybe giving himself a telling off for being so daft, and then he could climb back up and out as quickly as he could, trying to kid on he wasn't bothered by it.

But nobody from outside ever comes down into the basement. Firstly the ground surface area needs to be crossed and it cannot be crossed without special footwear. If anybody wishes to attract my attention they either shout or batter the floor with a crowbar. It happens only rarely and I seldom respond since it is always to advise me that the pressure isn't being maintained. This I discover myself sooner or later because of the safety precautions. I might be wrong not to respond. I sometimes wonder whether to ask the Dayboilerman what he does. But his perception of the job will differ radically from my own. It cannot be avoided,

he is on constant day and I am on constant night, we each have our own distractions. Yes, I can still be distracted; in some ways it is essential to the work; but I cannot be distracted against my wishes. If 1 think of things they must be things I wish to think of.

I used to make myself sit by the black hole farthest from the entrance; it lies on the same side but to reach it I have to walk to the wall opposite the ladder then follow the passageway there, right around and into the corner. I would bring the boilersuit to sit on and the towel to lean my back on against the wall; then llighted a cigarette. Smoking is frowned upon down here but I've always done it; 1 really enjoy it, finishing a particular part of the work and sitting down quietly and lighting one. Sometimes when 1 sit down I leave the cigarettes and matches beside me for a while before smoking; other times I'm smoking even before sitting down. One thing I used to do in the early days, I used to push the matches and cigarettes inside the hole. I was there for a long period afterwards, till finally I knelt and withdrew them without looking in, just using my hand to feel around.

There is nothing extraordinary about these black holes, they are cavities and short tunnels. I found them of interest because they had never been seen into since the factory's original construction. I still find the idea quite interesting. When I first found them I thought they were just inshots, little gaps, and I sat by them not bothering. Then one night after sitting a while I suddenly was kneeling down and peering in and I couldn't see anything, nothing at all. I struck a match and the light scarcely penetrated. It was really funny. Then I had to push in my hand; I discovered the wall, and then a tunnel veering off at a tangent. I could have brought in a torch or a candle, and a mirror maybe, but I never did. If I remember correctly I was wanting to check the dimensions of the wall in relation to it, the cavity and tunnel. I knew it had to be some sort of double wall, but probably a triple one, as part of the safety precautions. I went round by the canal pathway to look at the outside of the building but that told me nothing. On this particular side of the factory the pathway only goes along a few yards before narrowing and tapering out altogether, with the wall going straight down into the water.

There were quite a lot of things about it that bothered me at the time but nowadays it all seems hazy. But I think the main factor must connect to the idea of isolation, maybe bringing on a form of deprivation or something. It wasn't good when I had to sit by the black holes at first, some of my imaginings were horrible. I just had to stick it out and conquer myself. I had to succeed and I did succeed. It taught me a lot about myself and has given me confidence. Sometimes I feel a bit smug, as if I've reached a higher level than the others in the factory; but I don't speak to many of them, I just get on and do the job, enjoying its various aspects.

In a Betting Shop to the Rear of Shaftesbury Avenue

Heh John! John I grinned: How you doing?

He made to walk past me. John, I said quickly, how's it going-I thought you were in Manchester?

What He looked at me. My name's no John. He sniffed and glanced sideways, then muttered: McKechnie. McKechnie! Christ. Aye I thought you were in Manchester? How you doing man?

He looked away from me. I've no been in Manchester for years. And again he made to walk past, but I stepped slightly to the front.

Christ, so you left!

Aye, years ago. He sniffed, gazed round the interior of the betting shop. It was a poky wee dump of a place and with nearly quarter of an hour till the first race only a couple of people were about. McKechnie looked at them. He was holding a rolled newspaper in his left hand. So how long you been here then? You been here long?

What naw. He glanced up at the board to where a clerk had gone to scribble the names of the day's nonrunners. He glanced across to the counter; the two women were eating sandwiches, sipping at cups of tea. Then he glanced back to me, and he frowned momentarily. He said: Mind that wife of mine? I'm in for a divorce of her. She wants the wean, but I'm getting the wean. Lawyer says I'm a certainty. And these lawyers know the score

Aye. He nodded.

After a moment I said, Aye-these lawyers! He nodded again. The door opened and in came a punter, then another. McKechnie had noticed them and he moved slightly. And

then the knocking sound from the extel speaker and through it came the first betting show of the day.

The other people were now standing gazing at the form-pages tacked onto the walls. Up at the board the clerk was marking in the prices against the listed runners; he held a fresh cigarette cupped in one hand. McKechnie unrolled his newspaper.

So you left then?

What

Manchester, you left?

He nodded without taking his gaze from the newspaper, not even raising his head. But he muttered, Aye-I went to Sheffield.

Sheffield!

Mmhh.

Christ sake!

At this point a further betting show came through. When it was over 1 said: Sheffield!

Mmm. He sniffed, still gazing at the racing page.

Did you never think of going back then? To Manchester I mean-did you never think of going back?

What He shook his head, and he grunted: Hard race this.

I shrugged. Favorite can't get beat, it's a good thing.

Aye He indicated the selection of one of the racing journalists. That's what he says and all. 1 don't know but, 1 hate backing these fucking odds-on shots. It's one to beat it I want And he glanced at me, and added: Warrior Chief's supposed to be the only danger

Aye, it's got a wee chance right enough. Heh d'you ever see Tommy on your travels?

Tommy? His forehead wrinkled as he glanced at me again.

Tommy, Christ, you must mind him-used to work in the building game. Carried the hod or something.

Aw aye, aye, I mind him. Subbied.

You're right! Hh! I laughed. That's right man-Tommy, Christ: lucky bastard eh! Must've made a real few quid, no having to pay any tax or fuck all.

McKechnie nodded; then he sniffed and indicated the comments on the race by the journalist. According to this cunt, Warrior Chief's the only danger.

Aye, it's got a chance. Heh, I wouldn't mind a start subbying somehere myself, eh - that's the right way if Hard race but, McKechnie muttered, a lottery, fucking lottery.

Another betting show was in progress and I altered my stance a bit, to be able to see the race-card in his newspaper. Then when it was over I said: What about yourself man, you working?

Who me He sniffed, he glanced up at the board, rolling up his newspaper at the same time. Hang on a minute, he said, I need apish.

And he walked off immediately.

I went to the nearby wall; the front page of the Chronicle was tacked here and I read the postmortems on yesterday's results. A couple of minutes before the off I looked up. I noticed McKechnie, he was standing right beside two old codgers who didn't look to have the price of a packet of Rizlas between them.

And it dawned on me: there wasn't any toilets in this fucking betting shop.

I crossed the floor. He had taken a brand-new packet of cigarettes from his pocket and was unwrapping the cellophane. He looked at me and extended the packet. Ta, I said. When we were smoking I smiled: To tell you the truth man, I never even knew you were married, never mind in for a divorce!

What! Christ, where've you been? Married-I've been married for years.

Hh. Who to? that wee thing back in Manchester?

He glanced at me: I was well married before I hit that fucking place. He sniffed. She thinks she'll get the wean but she's got no chance.

Good I nodded. But still and all, sometimes

Hang on a minute, I'm just He turned and squinted at the formpage on the wall. Then he was edging along to where another punter stood and I could hear him mutter, This Warrior Chief's supposed to have a chance of upsetting the favorite I stepped over and peered at the form. Could do, I said, but the favorite's got a good bit ofclass about her. Won hell of a comfortably last time out and the way I heard it she won hell of a cleverly, a hands and heels game.

The punter was maneuvering himself to write out his line in such a way that nobody would see what he wrote. Suddenly McKechnie thumped the page on the wall. That's the thing I'm feart of, he said.

Dark Lights?

Dark Lights. He nodded, and he grinned briefly. Dark Lights Hh.

Aye, he went on, they've just stuck it in here. What?

Aye, fucking obvious.

I nodded. It's got a chance right enough. But you can't always rely on winning form out of maiden races; I mean this is the first time it'll have run in a handicap, and you know as well as

Hang on a minute, he said. And he walked to a different wall, to where a youth was standing gazing at another form-page; I could see him begin muttering.

Then the runners were being loaded into the starting stalls and the youth strode to the counter to place his bet; and shortly afterwards McKechnie had scribbled down his own bet and was striding to the

counter just as they were set to come under orders. And when the woman had returned him his change and receipt he went to the other side of the room.

It was no a bad nightlife in Manchester, I said when I got there.

What

The nightlife-Manchester. Mind you, it's no bad here if you know where to go. Murder when you're skint but.

He nodded.

Aye, I said.

He sniffed: I've no been here that long. What! Christ, ach don't worry, don't worry, man, I mean you'll soon find your way about - once you get the hang of their fucking tube system. And then, when you've got a few quid you can always.

I'm going up the road the morrow.

Eh?

Edinburgh. I'm going to Edinburgh. Edinburgh! Christ sake. Edinburgh I nodded. Aw aye, I'll tell you

OFF BRIGHTON: THEY'RE OFF BRIGHTON: RUNNING 2.17: AND ON THE OFF THEY BET FOUR TO NINE NUMBER THREE, FIVE TO TWO BAR

The race was over the minimum trip and soon they were entering the final stretch; taking the lead at the distance the favorite won going away-exactly the style in which an odds-on shot should win.

A horse by the name of Lucy's Slipper ran on to snatch second place close home. Neither Warrior chief nor Dark Lights had received a mention throughout the entire commentary.

But McKechnie was grinning all over his face. Told you, he shouted, I fucking told you-that favorite: couldn't get beat-a fucking certainty! I knew it.

I nodded. Trained at Epsom as well, if you noticed. These Epsom runners usually do good here, the track, nice and sharp, fast. And The forecast! McKechnie was laughing and he elbowed me in the ribs: I've dug out the forecast! What?

The forecast-I've dug it out, that Lucy's Slipper! A certainty for second place, I knew it, I fucking knew it.

Hh.

He winked. I'll tell you something: the shrewd money, all the shrewd money's down to it. Know what I mean? They've just stuck it in herefor the forecast. Fucking obvious. Think they're going to take odds-on on a single when they can lift five or six to one on a fucking forecast? You kidding!

Aye, eh.

Kept saying it all morning to myself: look for a forecast, I says, look for a forecast, this favorite can't get beat, look for a forecast. McKechnie grinned and shook his head. And after a moment he glanced to the payout window. The youth stood there, holding a receipt in one hand. McKechnie walked across; he was still grinning; then I could hear him say: So you got it?

The youth nodded, and they began comparing notes on the following race in between congratulating each other on the last, as they waited for the weigh-in.

McKechnie copped the next three winners but the youth didn't return to the pay-out window. It had become difficult to tell where he was getting his selections; various people were going to the pay-out and McKechnie seemed to be in contact with most of them. He kept edging his way in and out of places, eavesdropping here and there. He had this peculiar kind of shuffle, dragging his heels as if his shoes were hell of a heavy - he probably kept a reserve fund stuffed inside his socks, the bastard.

I went out for a breath of fresh air. I walked up and down the street a couple of times. Back inside he continued to dodge me but then I stepped right in front of him and said: A nicker, just a nicker, that's all, I'll give you it back man honest.

Aw I can't, he said, no the now-I'm going to stick the lot on this next favorite. I'll weigh you in after but, don't worry, you'll be all right thena nicker? Aye, no bother, you'll be allright for a nicker. He about turned and walked to study a form-page, close in beside the two old codgers. Then just as the first show of betting came through on the next race I noticed him glance at me. Moments later he did a vanishing trick out the door. He probably thinks I didn't see him but I did.

The Governor's Ball

Ron Carlson

I didn't think until I had the ten-ton wet carpet on top of the hideous load of junk, and I was soaked with the sour, rust water that I might be late for the Governor's Ball. The afternoon was already dark, and I had wrestled the sopping carpet out of our basement to use as a cover so none of the other wet wreckage that our burst pipes had ruined would blowout of the truck as I drove to the dump. The wind had come up and my shirt front was stiffening with ice as Cody pulled up the driveway in her Saab.

"You're a mess," she said. "You going to make it?" It almost sounded like she wanted me to, and I nearly replied: "A deal's a deal. I've won you back."

I said it this way: "Have our stuff packed. After the ball tonight, we're coming home."

"We'll see," she said. Well, that will always be a terrible thing to say, and she added, "You've got two hours to live."

It made me want to fight again, but I stood and said, "You just be ready. The plumber's gone, the house is clean, I'll be there."

"You're not going to do this now."

"I can do this, Cody. I've got to go now or a tire will go flat." I wanted to say, "Look at this job of loading the truck. Isn't this a great load? Do you think Dirk could load a truck this well? Do you know, in fact, anyone who would fight this dragon for you?" But it was an era of not quite getting to what we wanted to say, so I just turned back to my work and said, "I'll see you."

Her window was already up, and I watched her haul the sharp black car around and wheel into traffic. Since our pipes had burst, we had been staying with Dirk and Evan, sleeping on the modules. Dirk's place was full of modules. Cody kind of liked staying on the modules; it was like a holiday in a hotel we couldn't afford, and it gave us no space to argue.

It had been our winter. Perhaps you saw us. We were the couple sitting in the Albertson's parking lot, arguing. We were the couple in the parking lot at Sears, arguing. In all, on our evening drives, we had hit K mart, Skaggs, three different locations, a Taco Time, and the parking terrace at Crossroads Mall. It had been our winter, and we'd drive around, park somewhere, and argue.

It's hard to recount an argument, a good one, an argument in which two people sit in a car for two hours hurting, hoping for the line, the certain slip of affection that would turn the world back into a habitable place. And an argument full of the word relationship is impossible to diagnose, describe, remember. We wanted to be loved; we wanted to hear a phrase that would allow us to breathe and turn across the seat and say, I'm sorry, I Lotle you. But what we heard was relationship or nine years of this or nine years of that, and the occasional lapse of we'll see, and those phrases lead you only deeper into other parking lots, other arguments. We were finally acting, I remember Cody said once in the Skaggs Drugs parking lot, Like adults.

That's why I was counting on the Governor's Ball. I was counting on my ability to clean up our house, take Cody to the Governor's Ball, eat a little salmon, introduce her to the Governor, and dance with her, my hand on the small of her back. We'd made a deal in the last parking lot: no more arguing. I would take her to the Ball on time, and she'd have our gear packed from Dirk's and come home with me.

The old Ford was listing hard to the right rear, so I skipped back into the house for a last tour. Except for the sour water everywhere, it looked like I had everything. But I checked the basement and saw the king-size mattress. It was so large I had overlooked it. Our original wedding mattress. It took the rest of my strength to hoist it up the stairs and dance it out the back, where I levered it onto the hood of the truck. Then I dragged it up over the load, feeling awkward as I stepped backwards across the freezing carpet.

The rear tire was even lower now, so I hustled, my wet feet sloshing, and tied the whole mess down with the rope, lacing it through the little wire hoops I'd fashioned at each corner of the truck bed.

There was always lots of play in the steering of the Ford, but now, each time it rocked backward, I had no control at all. My fingers were numb and the truck was so back-heavy that I careened down Fifth South like a runaway wheelbarrow. The wind had really come up now, and I could feel it lifting at me as I crossed the intersections. It was cold in the cab, the frigid air crashing through the hole where the radio had been, but I wasn't stopping. I'd worried my way to the dump in this great truck a dozen times.

The Governor's Ball is two hundred dollars per couple, but we went every year as Dirk's guest. He'd buy a whole table and stick us in two of the seats. The event itself is held at the Hotel Utah, and the asparagus

and salmon were never bad, but holding a dress ball in January is a sort of mistake, all that gray cleavage, everyone sick of the weather.

I was thinking about how Dirk always seated himself by Cody, how he made sure she was taken care of, how they danced the first dance, when the light at Third West turned green and I mounted the freeway. The old truck was rocking in the wind like a dinghy; I was horsing the steering wheel hard, trying to stay in my lane, when I felt something go. There was a sharp snap and in the rearview mirror I saw the rope whip across the back. The mattress rose like a playing card and jumped up, into the wind. It sailed away, off the truck, and was gone. The mattress had flown out and over and off the ramp, five stories to the ground.

Looking back as I slowed, I couldn't see a thing except the rope, snapping, and the frozen carpet, which wasn't going anywhere.

The traffic around me all slowed, cautioned by this vision. I tried to wave at them as if I knew what was going on and that everything was going to be all right. At the Twenty-first South exit, I headed west, letting the rope snap freely, as if whipping the truck for more speed.

The dump, lying in the lea of the Kennecott tailings mound, felt strangely warm. Throwing the debris onto the mountain of trash, I could smell certain sweet things rotting, and my feet warmed up a bit. By the time I swept out the truck, it was full dark. I still had half an hour to make the Governor's Ball.

I hit it hard driving away from the dump, just like everybody does, hoping to blow the last germs from their vehicles, but when I got back to Ninth West, I exited. I didn't want to go retrieve the mattress; it was nine years old and had been in the basement three. But I had lost it. I had to call Cody.

The first neon I ran across was a place called The Office, a bar among all the small industries in that district. Inside, it was smotheringly warm and beery. I hadn't realized how cold my hands were untill tried for the dime in the pay phone. The jukebox was at full volume on Michael Jackson singing "Beat It!," so that when Cody answered, the first thing she said was: "Where are you?"

"I lost the mattress; I'm going to be late."

There was a pause, and she said, "Now, tell me what's new."

"Go along with Dirk. Take your stuff. We're still O.K. I'll join you. Don't let anybody eat my salmon."

"Where are you?"

"The mattress blew out of the truck. I've got to go get it."

She made a noise, a hard little "Ha," into the phone and said, "A man's got to do what a man's got to do."

"Cody," I said. "Cody." "What."

"We're still O.K."

"We'll see, Doug."

It was not until I had hung up that I saw the dancer. They had built a little stage in the corner of the bar and a young girl wearing pasties and a pair of Dale Evans fringed panties was dancing to the jukebox. Her breasts were round and high and didn't bounce very much, though they threw nice shadows when the girl turned under the light. I sat in my own sour steam at the end of the bar and ordered a beer. My fingernails ached as my hands warmed. All the men along the row sat with their backs to the bar to see the girl. I sat forward, feeling the grime melt in my clothes, and watched her in the mirror.

When the song ended, there was some applause, but only from two tables, and the lights on the stage went off. The barmaid was in front of me and I said, "No, thanks," and then she turned a little and said, "What would you like, Terry?"

I realized that the dancer was standing at my elbow. Now she was wearing a lacy fringed pajama top too, and I could see that she was young, there was a serious pimple above one of her eyebrows. I didn't know I was staring at her until she said: "Don't even try to buy me a drink." I started to put up my hands, meaning I was no harm, when she added: "I've seen your kind before. Why don't you go out and do some good?"

The barmaid looked at me as if I had started the whole thing, and before I could speak, she moved down to serve the other end.

It was a long walk back to the truck, but I made it. January. The whole city had cabin fever. She'd seen my kind before. Not me: my kind. The old truck was handling better now, and I conducted it back along Ninth West to Ninth South and started hunting. I'd never been under that onramp before, except for one night when Cody took me to the Barb Wire, a western bar where we watched all her young lawyer friends dance with the cowboys. In the dark, the warehouses made their own blank city. It was eight o'clock. Cody and Dirk were having cocktails in the Lafayette Suite. She'd be drinking vodka tonics with two limes. Dirk would be drinking scotch without any ice. He would have the Governor's elbow in his left palm right now, steering him around to Cody, "You remember Cody Westerman. Her husband is at the dump."

I crossed under the ramp at Fourth West and weaved under it to the corner of Fifth, where I did a broad, slow U-turn across the railroad tracks to scan the area. Nothing. Two derelicts were leaning against the back of a blue post-office van, drinking out of a paper sack. I cruised slowly up beside them.

"Hi, you guys," I said. It was the first time all day I felt fine about being so dirty. They looked at me frankly, easily, as if this meeting had been arranged. One, his shirt buttoned up under his skinny chin, seemed to be chewing on something. The other had the full face of an Indian, and I was surprised to see she was a woman. They both wore short blue cloth air-force jackets with the insignias missing.

"Have you seen a mattress?"

The woman said something and turned to the man.

"What did she say? Have you seen one?"

The man took a short pull on the bottle and continued chewing. "She said, 'What kind of mattress is iti'" He passed the bottle to the woman and she smiled at me.

I thought: O.K. What kind of mattress is it? O.K., I can do this. "It was a king-size Sealy Posturepedic."

"King-size?"

"Yes: king-size, Have you seen it?"

He took the bottle back from the woman and nodded at me.

"You have? Where?"

"Would this king-size postropeeda fly out of the sky?" the man said. His eyes were bright; this was the best time he'd had all day.

"It would."

"What's it worth to you?" he said.

"Nothing, folks. I was throwing it away."

"You threw it all right!" the woman said, and they both laughed. I waited, one arm on the steering wheel, but then I saw the truth: these two were champion waiters; that's what they did for a living.

"Where's the mattress? Come on. Please."

"It's not worth anything."

"O.K., what's it worth?"

"A bottle of this," the man said, pulling a fifth of Old Grand-Dad from the bag.

"That's an expensive mattress."

The man stopped chewing and said, "It's king-size," They both laughed again.

"O.K. It's a deal. One bottle of bourbon. Where is it?"

For a minute, neither moved, and I thought we were in for another long inning of waiting, but then the woman, still looking at me, slowly raised her hand and pointed over her head. I looked up. There it was, at least a corner of it, hanging over the edge of the one-story brick building: Wolcott Engineering.

Well, that's it, I thought. I tried. Monday morning the engineers would find a large mattress on their roof. It was out of my hands.

The woman stepped up and tapped my elbow. "Back this around in the alley," she said. "Get as close to the building as you can."

"What?"

"No problem," the man said. "We'll get your mattress for you; we got a deal going here, don't we?"

I backed into the alley beside Wolcott Engineering, so close I couldn't open my door and had to slide across to climb out. The woman was helping the man into the bed of the truck, and when I saw it was his

intention to climb on the cab of the truck to reach the roof, I stopped him.

"I'll do it," I said.

"Then I'll catch it," he laughed.

The roof was littered with hundreds of green Thunderbird bottles glinting in the icy frost. They clattered under the mattress as I dragged it across to the alley. For a moment, it stood on the edge of the roof and then folded and fell, fainting like a starlet into the cold air.

By the time I climbed down, they had the mattress crammed into the pickup. It was too wide and the depression in the middle formed a nest; the man and the woman were lying in there on their backs. "The bottle," the man said.

"Don't you want to ride in front?"

"You kidding?"

The Ford's windshield was iced, inside and out, and that complicated my search for a way out of the warehouse district. I crossed sixteen sets of railroad tracks, many twice, finally cutting north through an alley to end up under the Fourth South viaduct. I heard a tap on the rear window. I rolled down my window.

"Could you please drive back across those tracks one more time?"

"What?"

"Please!"

So I made a slow circuit of our route again, rumbling over series of railroad tracks. I adjusted the mirror and watched my passengers. As the truck would roll over the tracks, the two would bounce softly in the mattress, their arms folded tightly over their chests like corpses. The woman's face absolutely closed up in laughter. They were laughing their heads off. Returning to the viaduct, I stopped. The man tilted his head back so he was looking at me upside down and he mouthed, "Thanks."

I cruised around Pioneer Park, a halo frozen around each streetlamp, and eased into the liquor store parking lot.

"We'll wait here," the man told me.

Inside, I was again reminded of how cold I was, and the clerk shook his head looking at my dirty clothing as I bought the bottle of Old GrandDad and a mini-bottle for myself. He clucked as I dropped the change. My jacket pocket had gotten ripped pushing the mattress across that roof; the coins went right through. My hands were cold and I had some difficulty retrieving the money. When I stood, I said simply to the clerk: "These bottles are all for me. I'm going to drink them tonight sleeping under the stars and wake up frozen to Third West. You've seen my kind before, haven't you?"

Outside, I laid the bottle on the man's stomach.

"Many thanks," the man said to me. "It was worth it."

"Where can I let you om"

"Down at the park, if it's no trouble."

The woman lay smiling, a long-term smile. She turned her shiny eyes on me for a second and nodded. The two of them looked like kids lying there.

I drove them back to the park, driving slowly around the perimeter, waiting for the man to tap when he wanted to get out. After I'd circled the park once, I stopped across from the Fuller Paint warehouse. The man looked up at me upside-down again and made a circular motion with his first finger, and then he held it up to signal: just once more.

I opened the mini-bottle and took a hot sip of bourbon. The park, like all the rest of the city, was three feet in sooty snow, and some funny configurations stood on the stacks of the old locomotive which was set on the corner. The branches of the huge trees were silver in the black sky, iced by the insistent mist. There were no cars at all, and so I sipped the whiskey and drove around the park four times, slowly. It was quarter to ten; Cody would have given my salmon to Dirk by now, saying something like, "He's been killed on an icy overpass, let's eat his fish and then dance."

I stopped this time opposite the huge locomotive. I stood out beside the bed of the truck. "Is this all right?"

The man sat up. "Sure, son, this is fine." He hadn't opened their new I bottle. Then I saw the woman was turned on her side. Something was going on.

"What's the matter? Is she all right?"

"It's all right," he said, and he helped her sit up. Her face glowed under all the tears; her chin vibrated with the sobbing, and the way her eyes closed now wanted to break my heart.

"What is it? What can I do?"

They climbed over the tailgate of the truck. The woman said something. The man said to me: "We're all right." He smiled.

"What did she say?" I asked him.

"She said 'thanks'; she said, 'It's so beautiful. It's so chilly and so beautiful.' "

The Voyage of Their Life

Glenda Adams

The rooster was crowing, at two in the afternoon, and the cicadas had started up again after their lunchtime quiet.

"It's a case of too much noise," said Henry Watter, the father of Lark. "Far too much noise." He seized the hammer and rushed into the backyard. He thrust the rooster into a wooden crate and hammered it shut, the sun glinting on the hammerhead and on the lenses of his metalrimmed glasses. The Bakers' dog next door started barking. The rooster continued crowing. From farther off came the buzz of a lawnmower.

Lark looked through the old seventy-eights and the sheet music stacked near the pianola-Caruso singing "Vesti La Giubba," a silly song called "I Lift Up My Finger and I Say Tweet, Tweet." She had already saved a hundred pounds, almost enough for a one-way passage to somewhere, Singapore or Ceylon perhaps, or even Kansas, and she had arranged for an interview with Qantas to be an air hostess, after her exams. That was one way to get away.

Lark's father rushed into the house, then returned to the backyard with several army blankets and an old Belgian flag, which he draped over the crate, layer on layer, creating night for the confused bird.

"Sits there like a stunned mullet," said Henry Watter.

"Do you think that's wise, Henry?" asked Lark's mother from under her pink cloth sun hat. Her hands, in white gloves, were pegging clothes on the line with such alacrity that she could have been playing a scherzo on the pianola. The gloves protected her hands from the sun. The sun hat, in addition to performing its intended function, protected her head from the kookaburras and magpies, which liked to swoop down to take strands of hair for their nests.

"Like bombers," said Henry Watter. "It's a case of World War Two in our own backyard. This country's a joke. One big joke."

The crowing continued, muted, while he lobbed stones at the yelping dog next door. Every now and then he threw a stone into the trees to

The woman lay smiling, a long-term smile. She turned her shiny eyes on me for a second and nodded. The two of them looked like kids lying there.

I drove them back to the park, driving slowly around the perimeter, waiting for the man to tap when he wanted to get out. After I'd circled the park once, I stopped across from the Fuller Paint warehouse. The man looked up at me upside-down again and made a circular motion with his first finger, and then he held it up to signal: just once more.

I opened the mini-bottle and took a hot sip of bourbon. The park, like all the rest of the city, was three feet in sooty snow, and some funny configurations stood on the stacks of the old locomotive which was set on the corner. The branches of the huge trees were silver in the black sky, iced by the insistent mist. There were no cars at all, and so I sipped the whiskey and drove around the park four times, slowly. It was quarter to ten; Cody would have given my salmon to Dirk by now, saying something like, "He's been killed on an icy overpass, let's eat his fish and then dance."

I stopped this time opposite the huge locomotive. I stood out beside the bed of the truck. "Is this all right?"

The man sat up. "Sure, son, this is fine." He hadn't opened their new I bottle. Then I saw the woman was turned on her side. Something was going on.

"What's the matter? Is she all right?"

"It's all right," he said, and he helped her sit up. Her face glowed under all the tears; her chin vibrated with the sobbing, and the way her eyes closed now wanted to break my heart.

"What is it? What can I do?"

They climbed over the tailgate of the truck. The woman said something. The man said to me: "We're all right." He smiled.

"What did she say?" I asked him.

"She said 'thanks'; she said, 'It's so beautiful. It's so chilly and so beautiful.'

The Voyage of Their Life

Glenda Adams

The rooster was crowing, at two in the afternoon, and the cicadas had started up again after their lunchtime quiet.

"It's a case of too much noise," said Henry Watter, the father of Lark. "Far too much noise." He seized the hammer and rushed into the backyard. He thrust the rooster into a wooden crate and hammered it shut, the sun glinting on the hammerhead and on the lenses of his metalrimmed glasses. The Bakers' dog next door started barking. The rooster continued crowing. From farther off came the buzz of a lawnmower.

Lark looked through the old seventy-eights and the sheet music stacked near the pianola-Caruso singing "Vesti La Giubba," a silly song called "I Lift Up My Finger and I Say Tweet, Tweet." She had already saved a hundred pounds, almost enough for a one-way passage to somewhere, Singapore or Ceylon perhaps, or even Kansas, and she had arranged for an interview with Qantas to be an air hostess, after her exams. That was one way to get away.

Lark's father rushed into the house, then returned to the backyard with several army blankets and an old Belgian flag, which he draped over the crate, layer on layer, creating night for the confused bird.

"Sits there like a stunned mullet," said Henry Watter.

"Do you think that's wise, Henry?" asked Lark's mother from under her pink cloth sun hat. Her hands, in white gloves, were pegging clothes on the line with such alacrity that she could have been playing a scherzo on the pianola. The gloves protected her hands from the sun. The sun hat, in addition to performing its intended function, protected her head from the kookaburras and magpies, which liked to swoop down to take strands of hair for their nests.

"Like bombers," said Henry Watter. "It's a case of World War Two in our own backyard. This country's a joke. One big joke."

The crowing continued, muted, while he lobbed stones at the yelping dog next door. Every now and then he threw a stone into the trees to

silence the cicadas. And he stood, waiting for the next noise, in his singlet and khaki shorts, which were held up by a piece of rope tied around his waist in a reef knot. His feet, in black nylon ankle socks and lace-up shoes, looked as if they had been planted and had sprouted those white legs now trembling with rage.

The lorikeets, fifty or sixty of them, started lining up on the veranda rail, jostling and squawking, peering in the window, arranged in a multicolored tableau vivant, waiting for the daily bread that Lark's mother put out for them. Taking care of Australia's natural heritage, she called it.

Lark's father took a mop and waved it at the birds on the veranda rail. "Heritage be damned," he said. "In this flaming country it's a case of too much nature. Far too much nature."

"Henry, please, no language," whispered Lark's mother.

"Where's that cat when it's needed?" Henry Watter muttered. He swung at the birds. "William the First," he said and swung again. "William the Second," and he swung again. "Henry the First, Stephen."

"Watch my windows," called Lark's mother from under her hat. "They'll cost the earth to replace."

"Henry the Second, Richard Lionheart, John." Lark's father threw the mop down beside the back steps and stamped inside.

"Mind my parsley and my mint," said Lark's mother.

"William and Mary," said Lark's father. "Far, far too much nature."

Lark had always planned to run away. When she was four, she had packed her little cardboard sewing case with her supplies for the journey - a swimsuit, an umbrella, her money box, and a little bottle of water- and kept it under the bed, next to the large black umbrella that could also be used as a walking stick. She wanted to wander around and around the world, until she found some kind of island to settle on.

"I'm going now," she often said, taking the suitcase and the umbrella, standing at the front door.

"She's going now," they said, if they said anything at all.

And sometimes she went along the cliff road, above the Pacific Ocean, past the school, as far as the corner.

In that house in Park Avenue on the cliff in Sydney, Henry Watter sat memorizing Bartlett's Familiar Quotations.

Lark was dumping her books in a canvas bag.

"Test me," Lark's father said.

The lorikeets were at the window, nudging the glass, tapping it with their beaks, chattering.

"I was just going down to the beach to study," said Lark.

"Test me first," said her father. He, too, had been preparing to run away for years.

Lark sighed. "Kings of England? Shakespeare? Definitions?"

Henry Watter pointed at the street map of London pinned across the bookshelves.

"Streets of London, then," said Lark.

The muffled cries of the rooster still reached them.

"God love a duck," said Henry Watter. And then, "God stiffen the crows."

The Bakers' dog was still yelping.

"How do you get from Regent's Park Zoo to," Lark searched for somewhere for him to go, "to the Tower of London."

When Lark was young, Henry Watter had taken her to the zoo, the Sydney zoo, and at the end of the day had said, "Let us catch the ferry now and go home." Lark thought he had said he was going to catch a fairy, and she was in some state of excitement as they walked down the path to the harbor. At the wharf, when he asked "Is this the ferry to the Quay?," the boat hand nodded and they boarded. "Where's the fairy?" Lark asked, and her father said, "You're on it." It felt like a cruel joke. Lark ran onto the wharf and refused to get back on the ferry. Her father had to get off, too, and the ferry left without them. That particular ferry caught fire in the middle of the harbor and the passengers had to take to the lifeboats. Several of them drowned. They all said it was Lark's sense of impending doom that had saved them.

Henry Watter settled in his chair, turning his back on the map. He pushed his glasses on top of his head. His voice became soft and slow. "Turn left on Marylebone Road, then south on Tottenham Court Road, which turns into Charing Cross Road, to Trafalgar Square. Then turn left on The Strand. Keep going." And he kept going, until he ended up at the Tower. "Of course," he added, "you could go out the northern end of the park, near Primrose Hill, and walk along the footpath beside the canal to Camden Town, then take the tube." He took care to explode the It' in tube. "You see, Larkie, I'll get along there, when I go. I can say tube like an aristocrat, instead of chube like a pleb."

"I'm going to the beach now," said Lark. "I have to study my French."

"Just one more, Larkie, please," pleaded Henry Watter.

"But l'll really need my French, when I go," said Lark.

"And I'll need to know my England."

Lark sighed. "Name three of Shakespeare's clowns," she said, "not including poor Yorick."

The lorikeets were calling out. The tableau had broken formation and the birds were falling over one another in anticipation. Henry Watter placed Bartlett's Familiar Quotations in Lark's hands. "Test me, Larkie."

She let the book fall open. "'There is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.'"

Henry Watter sat up straight. "'Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries.' W. Shakespeare, J. Caesar. Act four, scene three."

Mrs. Watter was putting out the bread soaked in milk and honey. The beaks of the lorikeets hit the tin pans like gravel falling on a tin roof.

"Get the cat," cried Henry Watter. "Set it on those birds." He fell back into his chair. He shook his head for a while, then picked up the dictionary and continued to memorize it. "Martello tower," he said. "A circular, masonry fort."

"But you'll note," said Lark's mother, "that sometimes he holds the book upside down. I do believe he thinks he is a writer or something. He keeps scribbling things in an exercise book. I find it under the mattress when I turn the bed."

With her books under her arm and the beach umbrella over her shoulder, Lark walked along Park Avenue to the path that led to the beach. She hoped to find Solomon White there. They had started doing things together, going out. The night before, they had seen Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Solomon had asked Lark if she could put on her nylons the way Elizabeth Taylor had in the movie, a kind of peeling-on motion. Lark had said she thought she could. And they were to go to the Recovery Ball together, after Lark's exams. Solomon had graduated and no longer had final exams, only his research, and he was waiting to hear from the dozens of universities abroad, where he had applied to do his doctoral research.

Solomon's younger brother, Marshall, was in the schoolyard, mowing the lawn, earning his pocket money. That was a good sign. It seemed to mean that the Whites were around, not off at their country house or at a luncheon in the eastern suburbs.

The three White boys were named after islands in the South PacificGilbert, Solomon and Marshall.

"Better than Guam," Solomon said. "Or Nauru."

"I wish I were named after an island," cried Lark, "or that an island were named after me."

"You'd have to own one," said Solomon, who had already traveled a lot. "Then you could name it what you wanted."

The Whites were the most exotic family in Park Avenue. Mr. and Mrs. White had even taken their three sons to England for a year, for the culture, when they were all very young. Solomon's great grandfather, Charles White, and his great grandmother were said to have Christianized the entire South Pacific. It had been ascertained that Charles White had drunk with Robert Louis Stevenson. And he would have conducted the service in 1914 when the ashes of the storyteller's wife were brought to Samoa, if a storm had not prevented his boat from leaving the island where he was proselytizing at the time.

Lark pushed hard on the rusty metal catch of the old canvas umbrella. Another year and she should have enough money to go away. She lay on the sand and started with L'Etranger, trusting that sentences like, "1 was almost blinded by the blaze of light," "the sand was hot as fire," and "now and then a longer wave wet our canvas shoes" would be useful during her future adventures, away. Two flies buzzed around her, alighting on her lips and nostrils, and, as she read, she had to keep brushing her hand against her face.

Solomon White threw his car keys on the pages of Lark's book. She had not sensed his walking toward her across the sand. "La campagne bourdonnait du chant des insectes," she said to Solomon. "The countryside was throbbing with the hum of insects. I'll be needing that, when 1 go away."

Solomon was shaking his head to get rid of the two flies, which had transferred their attention to him. He sat on the sand beside her and rubbed suntan oil on her back.

"Can you justify the following being regarded as a short story?" Lark asked, looking out to sea. "What does the author achieve within the severe limits he has set himself? That's the kind of question I'm going to have to answer." She continued, quoting, ""'To die like Joan of Arc," said Terbaud, from the top of a pyre built with his furniture. The SaintOwen fire-brigade hindered him.'"

Solomon laughed. "That's not a story."

"Why not? You have plot, character, a protagonist who wants something urgently, in this case, a death like Joan of Arc's, an antagonist, in this case the fire-brigade, you have a sense of time and place," said Lark. "That's all a story needs. Three lines. Less."

And then Mrs. Baker came huffing past, since it was Saturday and not a sign of turpitude to be on the beach, and stopped to shout that it was a hot day, like a furnace. Solomon continued to rub the oil on Lark's back, Lark agreed that it was a hot day, and Mrs. Baker passed on to pitch her umbrella a little further along the sand next to a friend, and her chattering began again. "Like a parakeet in a cage," Lark said.

Lark's mother remarked that Mrs. Baker had seen Lark on the beach with a young man.

"1 was with Solomon White," said Lark. Lark's mother asked what he had been doing. Lark frowned and thought. "Possibly he was helping me put up the umbrella."

"Mrs. Baker said that Solomon White was rubbing oil on your body." "That's right," said Lark. "That's what he was doing."

"Then why didn't you say so?"

From his chair Henry Watter called, "Get thee to a nunnery."

And Lark thought it would not be long now before she left.

"I'm leaving," Solomon White had told Lark as he smoothed the oil over her back and arms. "I have the fellowship. Champaign-Urbana. I am going forever."

Lark had hunched over her book. She wished that Solomon would fail at something. "Rester ici ou partir, cela revenait au meme," she'd said, surly. "To stay here or to leave, it comes to the same thing."

"Sour grapes," said Solomon. "You'll be going soon, too. Everyone does."

They went down to the water's edge and walked along the bright sand to the sandstone rock platform at the base of the weathered cliff. The sun glinted on the mica and quartzite fragments in the stone. The sea gulls picked at the bits and pieces of oysters and periwinkles. The sea was calm. The waves welled up, rose, like a loaf of bread, and spilled gently across the rock shelf, wetting their feet. They lay down together on the rocks. The water, tepid from its journey across the warm rock shelf, slid under their backs. Lark's head rested on Solomon's shoulder.

"You're giving me a golden shoulder," he said, and kissed her. "Perhaps you'll end up with me in Champaign-Urbana. Who knows?"

"End up?" said Lark. "We would just be beginning." She sat up and watched the sea gulls. "I want to go to Paris. You'd like living in Paris, too," she quoted. "And of course we could travel about France for some months in the year."

"Paris?" said Solomon, puzzled, sitting up. "I have to go to America. Sometimes I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about."

"Camus," said Lark.

Very far out a ship was gliding past, a freighter heading north, for Newcastle or Gladstone, and then possibly further, across the Pacific to America.

"Could I come with you now?" Lark had asked into Solomon's shoulder.

"I'll write," Solomon had said. "l'll tell you what it's like, away. We'll see what happens. I'll miss you, you know."

"Can you justify the following being regarded as a short story? 'Silot, a valet, established an attractive woman in the home of his absent master at Neuilly, then disappeared carrying away everything but her.'"

"You didn't go around the rocks, did you?" asked Lark's mother.

"I don't remember," said Lark.

"Mrs. Baker said you went around the rocks with him," said Lark's mother. "You know what happens around the rocks. It's not nice, for one thing, and for another the waves can be dangerous. They can kill."

"He's leaving," Lark said. "You don't have to worry about him and me anymore. He's off, lucky devil."

"Please, Lark, no language," said Mrs. Watter.

Lark walked slowly along the cliff-top road from the house to the little school with the iron fence. Solomon White had flown off to America.

"We'll have to fly," Mrs. Watter had said once, when Lark was very young and they were running late for the bus into town. Mrs. Watter had seized Lark's hand and run down the front path, hauling Lark along, who expected that at any moment they were to rise into the air and fly to the bus.

Lark stopped at the school gates, leaning her forehead against the bars, her eyes closed. The cicadas were shouting, like a male chorus, causing the air to throb, the sound waves almost palpable. She heard again those mouth organs, the recorders, triangles, tambourines, little drums and the sound of spoons beating against saucepans and saw those children, some fifty of them, parading in a circle around the school lawn, looking neither happy nor sad. The older ones, Solomon White among them, were playing the musical instruments, the younger were banging the spoons and saucepans. Lark was crying because she had only two spoons to beat together. The headmistress stood on the school veranda and announced several times, wringing her hands, "We have won the war in Europe, children. God was on our side. The Germans have been brought to their knees. We have cut them down."

A girl who was a celebrity in the school because she had been in England when the war broke out was allowed to plant a tree in a special ceremony.

"VE Day will be our May Day forever more," said the headmistress. "And now there remains only the Pacific to be won."

In the cloakroom Lark stole the woolen beret of the girl who had planted the tree. She crammed her own panama hat on her head, trying to tuck the beret under it, out of sight. When the girl cried that she could not find her beret, the teacher seized Lark's panama and reclaimed the beret. Her face leant down into Lark's.

"Two hats?" the teacher said, sarcastic, dangling both in Lark's face, humiliating her in front of all the children. "Get your own beret, if you want one."

But with wartime rationing, only the rich had woolen berets.

"What is May Day?" Lark had asked her father.

"Mayda?" He sat up, his book face down on his knees, delighted with the question. "Mayda is a legendary island southwest of Ireland, and west of Brittany."

"May Day?"

"Oh, you mean Mayday! That's an international distress call. Do you want me to teach it to you?"

"No," said Lark.

Then she remembered leaning against the mulberry tree and watching her mother chop the head off a chicken. The body ran around the yard. The Pacific war was over and they were celebrating with a chicken

dinner. The Bakers took down the flags of the allies, which they had flown every day of the war. They offered the Belgian flag to Lark, the little girl next door. Lark was surprised that the black, yellow and red cloth was woolen and extremely rough to the touch. She wrapped the flag around her, like a cloak. She put on her father's gas mask and crept to the fence and peered over at the Bakers' boy. He ran to his mother, screaming that there was a monster on the back fence, and Mrs. Baker told him that the Watters were a strange lot.

"Ask me the stops on the air route from Sydney to London," Henry Watter said to little Lark. "It won't be long now, before I go." Then he continued, without waiting for her to form the question, "Sydney, Brisbane, Gladstone, Townsville, Karumba, Groot Island, Darwin, Kupang, Bima, Surabaja, Batavia, Klabat Bay, Singapore, Penang, Bangkok, Rangoon, Akvab, Calcutta, Allahabad, Gwalior, Karachi, Gwador, Dubai, Bahrein, Basra, Tiberias, Athens, Brindisi, Rome, Marseilles, Macon, Southampton, London."

Lark lifted her head from the fence rail. The cicadas, accompanied by lawnmowers, were still at it.

To her Qantas interview Lark wore a floral blouse buttoned to the neck and a dark-green linen skirt with four buttons at the back, forming the four points of a square, like the buttons on a man's double-breasted jacket. She thought she looked rather like an air hostess already. "With those buttons, I hope you don't have to sit down," Lark's father said. In her coat pocket she carried Solomon White's first letter.

The secretary told her to take off her coat before she went in to the personnel officer. "He has to check your deportment," she said. So Lark abandoned her coat and entered the huge office, where a man in a brown suit sat behind a desk at the far end and watched her deportment as she walked to him.

"Why," he asked, "do you want to be a Qantas air hostess?" He tapped a pencil against his finger, as if he had asked a riddle about the meaning of life.

Lark hesitated. She thought of saying she had always admired Qantas and had wanted to serve that particular company ever since she was little.

"I want to leave Australia," she said. "I want to go away."

She had to walk out again, across that vast floor, with that personnel officer watching those four buttons and judging.

"The bermuda season has arrived here and both men and women are gaily decked in the new season's colors and subtle variations of cut and style," Solomon White wrote. "And here is a piece of one-upmanship you might like to have at your fingertips. The word is 'raincheck.' I called a girl to ask her for a date-you have to go out on dates in America, it's the done thing, it doesn't mean anything-and she said she was very

sorry, she couldn't make it but would I give her a raincheck please. I said, yes of course, but being a cautious soul I enquired what it was I had just given her." Solomon White seemed to be in the most exciting place in the Northern Hemisphere. And while he had not mentioned again that Lark might join him, he had said that he remembered her head resting against his shoulder and that he missed her.

"I feel now that it is time for me to attend to other matters," Solomon had ended his letter. "So if you will excuse me I will just pour myself another bourbon and squirt from the cocktail bar and make a graceful exit through the kitchen, where the pretzels and beernuts are kept."

Lark was informed that she was not the right material for an air hostess.

She searched through the Saturday Herald for jobs abroad, govern, esses wanted, anywhere, fares paid.

"We had an air raid today according to the radio," Solomon had written. "But since I didn't see any aeroplanes or bombs I can only assume that it was a hoax, a failure on sombody's part, or perhaps a civil, defense effort. I was in Washington D.C. with a friend during our semester break and viewed the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Declaration of Independence in their bombproof, shockproof, fireproof, helium-filled vault. The traditions of America are very obvious to one and all and, quite seriously, I came away very impressed. I can now think of America as something more than a plastic hotdog, a huge imperialist financial machine and the home of the midwest."

And then he had added, "Summer in Champaign-Urbana is a time for socializing in a capitalistic sort of way, and I am drastically short of money. Yesterday a young lady and I went out stealing peaches and tomatoes from the university orchard. It doesn't mean what you think. In America it's just a social necessity to date."

In the library among the many books written by various Charles Whites, Lark found one by a Charles White who was the first man to ride a single horse across the North American continent, from Catalina Island in California to Coney Island in New York. She copied this information out and sent it to Solomon White, in the middle of the North American continent. "Why don't we do something inventive like your ancestor?" she wrote. "We could write a book about it. Together."

Solomon White wrote and told Lark that he was facing a long, hot, lonely summer and could no longer do without the steady companion, ship of a female. He had succeeded in meeting a tall, fairly attractive, fairly blonde American. They had been to New York together. "It's the most exciting place I've been to," he wrote. "You should see the real Park Avenue." And some weeks later Solomon White's mother conveyed to Lark the good news that Solomon was getting married to a fairly tall,

really beautiful American blonde. And Solomon's letters to Lark stopped altogether.

Lark dreamt she was waiting for a New York subway to whisk her off to an unknown destination. When the train hurtled into the station, it bore the sign, "Beware the deadly gases of Atmium and Thomium." It was definitely her train. She had to board it, although she had no gas mask.

At dinner Lark said, "I'm going now."

"This bird is tough," said Henry Watter. He looked up. "She's finally going?"

"To Paris," said Lark. "Or New York."

"What do you want to go there for?" Henry Watter asked. "England's the only place." He chewed at his food, looking at each piece on his fork before he put it in his mouth. "Tough old bird. Just like your mother."

"It's that Solomon, isn't it?" said Mrs. Watter.

Lark shook her head. "I always meant to go."

"Well, at least we finally got rid of that rooster," said Henry Watter, chewing.

"And you'll get married of course."

Lark shrugged.

"Just like a war bride," said Lark's mother. "I remember them after the war, so excited to be going away. I wanted to go, too."

"No more crowing in the middle of the flaming day," said Henry Watter. He looked at Lark. "I chopped its damned head off, you know. We're eating it."

"Please, Henry, language," said Lark's mother.

"Throw me the gravy," said Henry Watter.

"Please, Henry, pass," said Mrs. Watter, handing him the gravy boat. She stared out the window. "I used to go down to Pyrmont to see the boats off and throw streamers to all those soldiers and their war brides, sailing off across the Pacific at the end of the war. We'd hold onto the streamers as if we might be taken along, too."

Henry Watter held the gravy in the air, making it sail along, up and down, like a toy boat on the sea. "Take the current when it serves," he said.

"Henry, please, manners."

"J. Caesar. A self-made man. Like N. Bonaparte. Self-made men," said Henry Watter. He stood up. "And so to bed."

Lark's mother stayed a moment longer at the table before clearing away the dishes. "We even thought the men going off to war were lucky to be traveling," she said softly. "When I was a little girl, I was taken down to the Quay to wave them off to Gallipoli, as if they were going on a holiday. It was very jolly. And only much later did we learn what

Gallipoli really was, that Churchill and our own government had betrayed us."

Lark's earliest memory was a picture in the Sydney newspaper. An Australian soldier, a prisoner in the Changi camp in Singapore, was about to be beheaded by a Japanese holding a sword. He was kneeling, his arms tied behind his back, his head bowed. To spare his family at home, the soldier's face had been blacked out.

"A good thing we got the bomb first," shouted Henry Watter from the bathroom.

"So much noise." Lark's mother shook her head. "Sometimes," she whispered, "I have absolutely no idea what he's talking about."

Lark helped with the dishes, then went to her room to pack her things for the voyage.

The New Moon Party

T. Coraghessan Boyle

There was a blizzard in the Dakotas, an earthquake in Chile and a solar eclipse over most of the Northern Hemisphere the day I stepped up to the governor's podium in Des Moines and announced my candidacy for the highest post in the land. As the lunar shadow crept over the Midwest like a stain in water, as noon became night and the creatures of the earth fell into an unnatural frenzy and the birds of the air fled to premature roosts, I stood in a puddle ofTV lights, Lorna at my side, and calmly raked the incumbent over the coals. It was a nice campaign ploy-I think I used the term "penumbra" half a dozen times in my speech - but beyond that I really didn't attach too much significance to the whole thing. I wasn't superstitious. I wore no chains or amulets, I'd never had a rabbit's foot, I attended church only because my constituents expected me to. Of portents, I knew nothing.

My awakening-I've always liked to refer to it as my "lunar epiphany" -came at the dog end of a disappointing campaign in the coach section of a DC-lO somewhere between Battle Creek and Montpelier. It was two months before the convention, and we were on our way to Vermont to spill some rhetoric. I was picking at something the airline optimistically called Salade Madrid, my feet hurt, my digestion was shot, and the latest poll had me running dead last in a field of eight. My aides-a bunch of young Turks and electoral strong-arm men who wielded briefcases like swords and had political ambitions akin to Genghis Khan's-were daintily masticating their rubbery coq au vin and trying to use terms like vector, interface and demographic volatility in a single sentence. They were dull as doorknobs, dryas the dust on the textbooks that had given them life. Inspiration? They couldn't have inspired a frog to croak. No, it was Lorna, former Rose Queen and USC song girl and the sweetest, lovingest wife a man could want, who was to lift me that night to the brink of inspiration even as I saw myself swallowed up in defeat.

The plane dipped, the lights flickered, and Lorna laid one of her pretty white hands on my arm. "Honey," she whispered, with that soft, throbbing City-of-Indusrrv inflection that always made me think of surf caressing the pylons of the Santa Monica pier, "will you look at that moon?"

I stabbed at my salad in irritation, a speech about Yankee gumption, coydog control and support prices for maple sugar pinwheels tenting my lap, and took a hasty glance at the darkened porthole. "Yeah?" I said, and I'm sure there was more than a little edge to my voice-couldn't she see that I was busy, worn-out, heartbroken and defeated? Couldn't she see I was like the old lion with a thorn in his paw, surrounded by wolves and jackals and facing his snaggle-toothed death in the political jungle? "What of it?" I snarled.

"Oh, I don't know," she murmured, her voice dreamy, seductive almost (had she been reading those women's magazines again?). "It just looks so old and shabby."

I squinted through that dark little porthole at the great black fathom, less universe and saw the moon, palely glowing, looked at the moon probably for the first time in twenty years. Lorna was right. It did look pretty cheesy.

She hummed a few bars of "Shine On, Harvest Moon," and then turned to me with those big pale eyes - still beautiful, still enough to move me after all these years - and said, "You know, if that moon was a love seat I'd take it out to the garage and send to Bloomingdale's for a new one."

One of my aides-Colin or Carter or Rutherford, I couldn't keep their names straight - was telling a joke in dialect about three Mexican gar' deners and an outhouse, another was spouting demographic theory and the stewardess swished by with a smell of perfume that hit me like a twenty-one gun salute. It was then-out of a whirl of thoughts and impressions like cream whipped in a blender-that I had my moment of grace, of inspiration, the moment that moves mountains, solves for x and makes a musical monument of the "Hymn to Joy," the moment the mass of humankind lives an entire lifetime for and never experiences. "Of course," I blurted out, upending the salad in my excitement, "yes," and I sawall the campaign trails of all the dreary, pavement-pounding, glad-handling years fall away beneath me like streamers from heaven, like ticker tape, as I turned to kiss Lorna as if I were standing before the cheering hordes on Inauguration Day.

Colin or Carter or Rutherford turned to me and said, "What is it, George-are you all right?"

"The New Moon," I said.

Lorna was regarding me quizzically. A few of the other aides turned their heads.

I was holding my plastic cup of 7,Up aloft as if it were crystal, as if it

were filled with Taittinger or Dom Perignon. "To the New Moon!" I said with a fire and enthusiasm I hadn't felt in years. "To the New Moon Party!"

The American people were asleep. They were dead. The great, the giving, the earnest, energetic and righteous American people had thrown in the towel. Rape, murder, cannibalism, political upheaval in the Third World, rock and roll, unemployment, puppies, mothers, Jackie, Michael, Liza: nothing moved them. Their worst fears, most implausible dreams and foulest conceptions were all right there in the metro section, splashed across the ever-swelling megalopic eye of the TV screen in living color and clucked over by commentators who looked as alike as bowling pins. Scandal and horror were as mundane as a yawn before bed; honor, decency, heroism and enterprise were looked on as quaint, largely inapplicable notions that expressed an inexcusable naivete about the way of the world. In short, no one gave a good goddamn about anything. Myself included. So how blame them when they couldn't tell the candidates apart, didn't bother to turn out at the polls, neither knew nor cared if the honorable Mr. P. stood for Nazi rebirth or federally-funded electronic walkers for the aged and infirm?

I'd seen it all, and nothing stirred me either. Ultraism, Conservatism, Progressivism, Communism, Liberalism, Nee-Fascism, parties of the right, left, center, left-of-center and oblate poles: who cared? I didn't even know why I was running. I'd served my two terms as a fresh-faced ambitious young representative during the Eisenhower years, fought through three consecutive terms in the senatorial wars, wielded the sword of power and influence in the most armor-plated committees on the Hill, and been twice elected governor of Iowa on a platform that promised industrial growth, environmental protection and the eradication of corn blight through laser technology. And yet for all that I wasn't satisfied. I guess, even at sixty-one, I was still afflicted with those hungry pangs of ambition that every boy who can't play centerfield for the Yankees will never wholly shake: I wanted to be top dog, kick off my shoes in the Oval Office and stir up a fuss wherever I went, I wanted to climb high atop the mountain and look down on the creeping, minuscule figures of queens, rock stars, matinee idols and popes. It was a cold life in a comfortless universe, I didn't believe in God, afterlife or leprechauns. I wanted to make my mark on history-what else was there?

And so I-we-came up with the issue that would take the countryno, the world itself-by storm. From the moment of my epiphany on that rattling, howling DC-lO I never said another word about taxes, inflation, social security, price supports or the incumbent's lamentable record on every key issue from the decentralization of the Boy Scouts to relations with the Soviet Union. No, I talked only of the New Moon. The moon we were going to build, to create, to hurl into the sky to take

its place among the twinkling orbs of the night and recover the dignity and economic stability of America in the process. Jupiter had twelve moons, Saturn ten, Uranus five. What were we? Where was our global pride when we could boast but one craggy, acne-ridden bulb blighting the nighttime sky? A New Moon. A New Moon Soon: it was on my lips like a battle cry.

In Montpelier they thought I'd gone mad. An audience of thirty-seven had turned out at the local ag school to hear me talk about coydogs and maple sugar pinwheels, but I gave them a dose of the New Moon instead. I strode out onto the stage like a man reborn (which I was), shredded my prepared speech and flung it like confetti over their aston' ished heads, my arms spread wide, the spontaneous, thrilling message of the lunar gospel pouring from me in evangelical fervor. LUNACY, mocked the morning headlines. THORKELSSON MOONSTRUCK. But the people listened. They murmured in Montpelier, applauded lightly-hands chapped and dryas corn husks-in Rutland. In Pitts, burgh, where I really began to hit my stride (I talked of nothing but the steel it would take to piece together the superstructure of the new satellite), they climbed atop tables and cheered. The American people were tired of party bickering, vague accusations and even vaguer solutions, they were sick to death of whiz kid economists, do-nothing legislatures and the nightmare spectre of nuclear war. They wanted joy, simplicity, a goal as grand as Manifest Destiny and yet as straightforward and unequivocal as a bank statement. The New Moon gave it to them.

By the time the convention rolled around, the New Moon was waxing full. I remember the way the phones rang off the hook: could we take a backseat to Fritz, throw our support to John, accept the V.P. nomina' tion on a split,issue platform? Seven weeks earlier no one had even deigned to notice us-half the time we didn't even get press coverage. But New Moon fever was sweeping the country-we'd picked up a bun, dle of delegates, won in Texas, Ohio and California, and suddenly we were a force to reckon with.

"George," Colin was saying (I'm sure it was Colin, because I'd canned Carter and Rutherford to avoid the confusion), "I still say we've got to broaden our base. The one issue has taken us leagues, I admit it, but -"

I cut him off. I was George L. Thorkelsson, former representative, former senator and current governor of the Mesopotamia of the Mid, west, the glorious, farinaceous, black-loamed hogbutt of the nation, and I wasn't about to listen to any defeatist twaddle from some Ivy League pup. "Hi diddle, diddle," I said, "the cat and the fiddle." I was feeling pretty good.

It was then that Gina - Madame Scutari, that is - spoke up. Lorna and I had discovered her in the kitchen of Mama Gina's, a Nashville pasta house, during the Tennessee primary. She'd made an abbacchio alla cacciatora that knocked my socks off, and when we'd gone back to 129

congratulate her she'd given me a look of such star-struck devotion I felt like the new Messiah. It seemed that the Madame (who wasn't Italian at all but Hungarian) was a part-time astrologist and clairvoyant, and had had a minor seizure at the very moment of my epiphany in the DC-Wher left arm had gone numb and she'd pitched forward into a platter of antipasto with the word "lunar" on her lips. She told us all this in a rush of malapropisms and tortured syntax, while cauldrons of marinara sauce bubbled around her and her faintly-mustachioed upper lip rose and fell like a shuttlecock. Then she'd leaned forward to whisper in my ear like a priestess of the oracle. Leo, she'd said, hitting my sign on the nose, Scorpio in the ascendant. Then she drew up her rouged face and gave me a broad Magyar wink and again I could feel her lips moving against my ear: A New Moon Soon, she rasped. From that moment on she'd become one of my closest advisors.

Now she cleared her throat with a massive dignity, her heavy arms folded over her bust, and said, in that delicate halting accent that made you feel she could read the future like a Neapolitan menu, "Not to worry, Georgie: I see you rising like the lion coming into the tenth house."

"But George-" Colin was nearly whining. "Gimmicks are O.K., but they can only take you so far. Think of the political realities."

Lorna and the Madame exchanged a look. I watched as a smile animated my wife's features. It was a serene smile, visionary, the smile of a woman who already saw herself decked out in a gown like a shower of gold and presiding over tea in the Blue Room.

I turned to Colin and tersely reminded him of the political realities his late colleagues were currently facing. "We need no nay-sayers here," I added. "You're either on the bus or you're off it." He looked at me as if he were about to say something he would regret, but the Madame cut him off, her voice elevated yet soft, the syllables falling together with a kiss that cut through the confusion and the jangling of telephones like a benediction: "Promise them the moon," she said.

The convention itself was child's play. We'd captured the imagination of the country, restored the average workingman's faith in progress, given America a cause to stand up and shout about. We split the thing down the middle and I took my delegates outside the party to form the first significant rump party since the days of Henry Wallace. We were the New Moon Party and they came to us in droves. Had anyone ever stopped to consider how many amateur astrologists there were out there? How many millions who guided their every move, from love affairs to travel plans to stock purchases and the most auspicious time for doing their nails, according to the conjunction of the planets and the phases of the moon? Or how many religious fanatics and sci-fi freaks there were, Trekkies, lunatics, werewolves, extraterrestrialists, saucer nuts and the like? Not to mention women, who've had to carry that

white goddess baggage around with them since the dawn of time. Well here was an issue that could unite them all. Nixon had put men on the moon, I was going to bring the moon to men. And women.

Oh, there were the usual cries of outrage and anathema, the usual blockheads, whiners and pleaders, but we paid them no heed. NASA was behind us, one hundred percent. So was U.S. Steel, the AFL,CIO, the Teamsters, Silicon Valley, Wall Street and Big Oil, and just about anyone else in the country who worked for a living. A New Moon. Just think of the jobs it would create!

The incumbent-a man twelve years my senior who looked as if he'd been stuffed with sand-didn't stand a chance. Oh, they painted him up and pointed him toward the TV monitors and told him when to laugh or cry or make his voice tremble with righteousness, and they had him recite the usual litany about the rights of the rich and the crying need for new condos on Maui, and they prodded him to call the New Moon a hoax, a technological impossibility, a white elephant and a liberal, humanist threat to the integrity of the interplanetary heavens, but all to no avail. It almost hurt me to see his bowed head, smeared blusher and plasticized hair as he conceded defeat to a national TV audience after I'd swept every precinct in the country with the sole exception of Santa Barbara, where he'd beaten me by seventeen votes, but what the hell. This was no garden party, this was politics.

Sadly, however, unity and harmony are not the way of the world, and no leader, no matter how visionary-not Napoleon, not Caesar, not Mohammed, Louis XVI, Jim Jones or Jesus of Nazareth-can hope to stave off the tide of discord, malcontent, envy, hatred and sheer seething anarchy that inevitably rises up to crush him with the force of a tsunami. And so it was, seven years later, my second term drawing to a close and with neither hope nor precedent for a third, that I found the waves crashing at my very doorstep. I who had been the most heralded chief executive in the country's history, I who had cut across social strata, party differences, ethnic divisions and international mistrust with my vision of a better world and a better future, was well on my way to becoming the most vilified world leader since Attila the Hun.

Looking back on it, I can see that perhaps my biggest mistake was in appointing Madame Scutari to my cabinet. The problem wasn't so much her lack of experience-l understand that now-but her lack of taste. She took something truly grand - a human monument before which all the pyramids, Taj Mahals and World Trade Centers paled by comparison-and made it tacky. For that I will never forgive her.

At any rate, when I took office back in January of '85, I created a new cabinet post that would reflect the chief priority of my administration-I refer to the now infamous post of Secretary for Lunar Affairs - and named Gina to occupy it. Though she'd had little formal training, she

knew her stars and planets cold, and she was a woman of keen insight and studied judgment. I trusted her implicitly. Besides which, I was beleaguered by renegade scientists, gypsies, sci-fi hacks (one of whom was later to write most of my full-moon addresses to the nation), amateur inventors and corporation execs, all clamoring for a piece of the action - and I desperately needed someone to sort them out. Gina handled them like diners without reservations.

The gypsies, Trekkies, diviners, haruspices and the like were apparently pursuing a collective cosmic experience, something that would ignite the heavens; the execs-from U.S. Steel to IBM to Boeing to American Can-wanted contracts. After all, the old moon was some 2,160 miles in diameter and 81 quintillion tons of dead weight, and they figured whatever we were going to do would take one hell of a lot of construction. Kaiser proposed an aluminum alloy steel filled with Styrofoam, to be shuttled piecemeal into space and constructed by robots on location. The Japanese wanted to mold it out of plastic, while Firestone saw a big synthetic golf-ball sort of thing and Con Ed pushed for a hollow cement globe that could be used as a repository for nuclear waste. And it wasn't just the big corporations, either-it seemed every crank in the country was suddenly a technological wizard. A retired gym teacher from Sacramento suggested an inflatable ball made of simulated pigskin, and a pizza magnate from Brooklyn actually proposed a chicken-wire sphere coated with raw dough. Bake it with lasers or something, he wrote, it'll harden like rock. Believe me. During those first few heady months in office the proposals must have come in at the rate of ten thousand a day.

If I wasn't equipped to deal with them (I've always been an idea man myself), Gina was. She conferred before breakfast, lunched three or four times a day, dined and brunched and kept a telephone glued to her head as if it were a natural excrescence. "No problem," she told me. "I'll have a proposal for you by June."

She was true to her word.

I remember the meeting at which she presented her findings as keenly as I remember my mother's funeral or the day I had my gall bladder removed. We were sitting around the big mahogany table in the conference room, sipping coffee. Gina flowed through the door in a white caftan, her arms laden with clipboards and blueprints, looking pleased with herself. She took a seat beside Lorna, exchanged a bit ofgossip with her in a husky whisper, then leaned across the table and cleared her throat. "Glitter," she said, "that's what we want, Georgie. Something bright, something to fill up the sky and screw over the astrological charts forever." Lorna, who'd spent the afternoon redesigning the uniforms of the scouts of America (they were known as Space Cadets now, and the new unisex uniforms were to feature the spherical New Moon

patch over the heart), sat nodding at her side. They were grinning conspiratorially, like a pair of matrons outfitting a parlor.

"Glitter?" I echoed, smiling into the face of their enthusiasm. "What did you have in mind?"

The Madame closed her heavy-lidded gypsy eyes for a moment, then flashed them at me like a pair of blazing guns. "The Bonaventure Hotel, Georgie-in L.A.? You know it?"

I shook my head slowly, wondering what she was getting at.

"Mirrors," she said.

I just looked at her.

"Fields of them, Georgie, acres upon acres. Just think of the reflective power! Our moon, your moon-it'll outshine that old heap of rock and dust ten times over."

Mirrors. The simplicity of it, the beauty. I felt the thrill of her inspiration, pictured the glittering, triumphant moon hanging there like a jewel in the sky, bright as a supernova, bright as the star of Bethlehem. No, brighter, brighter by far. The flash of it would illuminate the darkest corners, the foulest alleys, drive back the creatures of darkness and cut the crime rate exponentially. George L. Thorkelsson, I thought, light giver. "Yes," I said, my voice husky with emotion, "yes."

But Filencio Salm6n, author of The Ravishers ofPentagord and my chief speech writer, rose to object. "Wees all due respet, Meeser Presiden, these glass globe goin to chatter like a gumball machine the firs time a meteor or anytin like that run into it. What you wan eez sometin strong, Teflon maybe."

"Not shiny enough," Gina countered, exchanging a hurt look with Lorna. Obviously she hadn't thought very deeply about the thing if she hadn't taken meteors into account. Christ, she was Secretary for Lunar Affairs, with two hundred ]PL eggheads, selenologists, and former astronauts on her staff, and that was the best she could come up with?

I leaned back in my chair and looked over the crestfallen faces gathered round the table-Gina, Lorna, Salm6n, my National Security Advisor, the old boy in the Philip Morris outfit we sent out for sandwiches. "Listen," I said, feeling wise as Solomon, "the concept is therewe'll work out a compromise solution."

No one said a word.

"We've got to. The world's depending on us."

We settled finally on stainless steel. Well-buffed, and with nothing out there to corrode it, it would have nearly the same reflective coefficient as glass, and it was one hell of a lot more resistant. More expensive too, but when you've got a project like this, what's a hundred billion more or less? Anyway, we farmed out the contracts and went into production almost immediately. We had decided, after the usual breast-beating, shouting matches, resignations and reinstatements, on a shell of jet-age plastic strengthened by steel girders, and a facade-cone side only-of

stainless,steel plates the size of Biloxi, Mississippi. Since we were only going up about eighty thousand miles, we figured we could get away with a sphere about one-third the size of the old moon: its proximity to earth would make it appear so much larger.

I don't mean to minimize the difficulty of all this. There were obstacles both surmountable and insurmountable, technologies to be invented, resources to be tapped, a great and wealthy nation to be galvanized into action. My critics-and they were no small minority, even in those first few euphoric years-insisted that the whole thing was impossible, a pipe dream at best. They were defeatists, of course, like Colin (for whom, by the way, I found a nice little niche in El Salvador as assistant to the Ambassador's body-count man), and they didn't faze me in the least. No, I figured that if in the space of the eight years of World War II man could go from biplanes and TNT to jets and nuclear bombs, anything was possible if the will was there. And I was right. By the time my first term wound down we were three-quarters of the way home, the economy was booming, the unemployment rate approaching zero for the first time since the forties and the Cold War defrosted. (The Russians had given over stockpiling activities to work on their own satellite project. They were rumored to be constructing a new planet in Siberia, and our reconnaissance photos showed that they were indeed up to something big-something, in fact, that looked like a three-hundred-mile-long eggplant inscribed at intervals with the legend NOVAYA SMOLENSK.) Anyway, as most of the world knows, the Republicans didn't even bother to field a candidate in '88, and New Moon fever had the national temperature hovering up around the point of delirium. Then, as they say, the shit hit the fan.

To have been torn to pieces like Orpheus or Mussolini, to have been stretched and broken on the rack or made to sing "Hello, Dolly!" at the top of my lungs while strapped naked to a carny horse driven through the House of Representatives, would have been pleasure compared to what I went through the night we unveiled the New Moon. What was to have been my crowning triumph-my moment of glory transcendentbecame instead my most ignominious defeat. In an hour's time I went from savior to fiend.

For seven years, along with the rest of the world, I'd held my breath. Through all that time, through all the blitz of TV and newspaper reports, the incessant interviews with project scientists and engineers, the straw polls, moon crazes and marketing ploys, the New Moon had remained a mystery. People knew how big it was, they could plot its orbit and talk of its ascending and descending nodes and how many million tons of materials had gone into its construction - but they'd yet to see it. Oh, if you looked hard enough you could see that something was going on up there, but it was as shadowy and opaque as the blue-

print of a dream. Even with a telescope-and believe me, many's the night I spent at Palomar with a bunch of professional stargazers or out on the White House lawn with the Questar QM 1 Lorna gave me for Christmas-you couldn't make out much more than a dark circle punched out of the great starry firmament as if with a cookie cutter.

Of course, we'd planned it that way. Right from the start we'd agreed that the best policy was to keep the world guessing-who wanted to see a piecemeal moon, after all, a moon that grew square by square in the night like some crazy checkerboard or something? This was no department store going up on West Twenty-third Street-this was something extraordinary, unique, this was the quintessence of man's achievement on the planet, and it should be served up whole or not at all. It was Salm6n, in a moment of inspiration, who came up with the idea of putting the reflecting plates on the far side, facing out on the deeps of the universe, and then swinging the whole business around by means of initial-thrust- and retro-rockets for a triumphant-and politically opportune-unveiling. I applauded him. Why not? I thought. Why not milk this thing for everything it was worth?

The night of the unveiling was clear and moonless. Lorna sat beside me on the dais, regal and resplendent in a Halston moonglow gown that cost more than the combined gross product of any six towns along the Iowa-Minnesota border. Gina was there too, of course, looking as if she'd just won a fettucine cook-off in Naples, and the audience of celebrities, foreign ambassadors and politicos gathered on the south lawn numbered in the thousands. Outside the gates, in darkness, threequarters of a million citizens milled about with spherical white moon candles, which were to be lit at the moment the command was given to swing the New Orb into view. Up and down the Eastern Seaboard, in Quebec and Ontario, along the ridge of the Smokies and out to the verge of the Mississippi, a hush fell over the land as municipalities big and small cut their lights.

Ferenc Syzgies, the project's chief engineer, delivered an interminable speech peppered with terms like photometric function and fractional pore space, Anita Bryant sang a couple of spirituals and finally Luciano Pavarotti rose to do a medley of "Moon River," "Blue Moon" and "Amore." Lorna leaned over and took my hand as the horns stepped in on the last number. "Nervous?" she whispered. "No," I murmured, but my throat had thickened till I felt I was going to choke. They'd assured me there would be no foul-ups- but nothing like this had ever been attempted before, and who could say for sure?

"When-a the moon-a hits your eye like a big pizza pie," sang Pavarotti, "it's amore." The dignitaries shifted in their seats, Lorna was whispering something I couldn't hear and then Coburn, the v.P., was introducing me.

I stood and stepped to the podium to spontaneous, thrilling and

sustained applause, Salmon's speech clutched in my hand, the shirt collar chafing at my neck like a garrote. Flashbulbs popped, the TV cameras seized on me like the hungry eyes of great mechanical insects, faces leapt out of the crowd: here a senator I loathed sitting cheek-byjowl with a lobbyist from the Sierra Club, there a sour-faced clergyman I'd prayed beside during a dreary rally seven years earlier. The glowing, corn-fed visage of Miss Iowa materialized just beneath the podium, and behind her sat Coretta King, Tip O'Neill, Barbra Streisand, Carl Sagan and Mickey Mantle, all in a row. The applause went on for a full five minutes. And then suddenly the audience was on their feet and singing "God Bless America" as if their lives depended on it. When they were finished, I held up my hands for silence and began to read.

Salmon had outdone himself. The speech was measured, hysterical, opaque and lucid. My voice rang triumphantly through the P.A. system, rising in eulogy, trembling with visionary fervor, dropping to an emotion-choked whisper as I found myself taking on everything from the birth of the universe to Conestoga wagons and pioneer initiative. I spoke of interstellar exploration, of the movie industry and Dixieland jazz, of the great, selfless, uncontainable spirit of the American people who, like latter-day Prometheuses, were giving over the sacred flame to the happy, happy generations to come. Or something like that. I was about halfway through when the New Orb began to appear in the sky over my shoulder.

The first thing I remember was the brightness of it. Initially there was just a sliver of light, but the sliver quickly crew to a crescent that lit the south lawn as if on a July morning. I kept reading. "The gift of light " I intoned, but no one was listening. As the thing began to swing round to full the glare of it became insupportable. I paused to gaze down at the faces before me: they were awestruck, panicky, disgusted, violent, enraptured. People had begun to shield their eyes now; some of the celebrities and musicians slipped on sunglasses. It was then that the dogs began to howl. Faintly at first, a primal yelp here or there, but within thirty seconds every damn hound, mongrel and cur in the city of Washington was baying at the moon as if they hadn't eaten in a week. It was unnerving, terrifying. People began to shout, and then to shove one another.

I didn't know what to do. "Well, er," I said, staring into the cameras and waving my arm with a theatrical flourish, "ladies and gentlemen, the New Moon!"

Something crazy was going on. The shoving had stopped as abruptly as it had begun, but now, suddenly and inexplicably, the audience started to undress. Right before me, on the platform, in the seats reserved for foreign diplomats, out over the seething lawn, they were kicking off shoes, hoisting shirtfronts and brassieres, dropping cumrnerbunds and Jockey shorts. And then, incredibly, horribly, they began to

clutch at one another in passion, began to stroke, fondle and lick, humping in the grass, plunging into the bushes, running around like nymphs and satyrs at some mad bacchanal. A senator I'd known for forty years went by me in a dead run, pursuing the naked wife of the Bolivian ambassador, Miss Iowa disappeared beneath the rhythmically heaving buttocks of the sour-faced clergyman, Lorna was down to a pair of six-hundred-dollar bikini briefs and I suddenly found to my horror that I'd begun to loosen my tie.

Madness, lunacy, mass hypnosis, call it what you will: it was a mess. Flocks of birds came shrieking out of the trees, cats appeared from nowhere to caterwaul along with the dogs, congressmen rolled about on the ground, grabbing for flesh and yipping like animals - and all this on national television! I felt light-headed, as if I were about to pass out, but then I found I had an erection, and there before me was this creamcolored thing in a pair of high-heeled boots and nothing else, Lorna had disappeared, it was bright as noon in Miami, dogs, cats, rats and squirrels were howling like werewolves and I found that somehow I'd stripped down to my boxer shorts. It was then that I lost consciousness. Mercifully.

These days, I am not quite so much in the public eye. In fact, I live in seclusion. On a lake somewhere in the Northwest, Northeast or Deep South, my only company a small cadre of Secret Service men. They are laconic sorts, these Secret Service men, heavy ofshoulder and head, and they live in trailers set up on a ridge behind the house. To a man, they are named Greg or Craig.

As those who read this will know, all our efforts to modify the New Moon (Coburn's efforts, that is: I was in hiding) were doomed to failure. Syzgies' replacement, Klaus Erkhardt, the rocket expert, had proposed tarnishing the stainless-steel plates with payloads of acid, but the plan had proven unworkable for obvious reasons. Meanwhile, a coalition of unlikely bedfellows-Syria, Israel, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Great Britain, Argentina, the U.S.S.R. and China among them-had demanded the "immediate removal of this plague upon our heavens," and in this country we came as close to revolution as we had since the 1770's.

Coburn did the best he could, but the following November, Colin, Carter and Rutherford jumped parties and began a push to reelect the man I'd defeated in '84 on the One Moon ticket. He was oldantediluvian, in fact - but not appreciably changed either in appearance or outlook, and he was swept into office in a landslide. The New Moon, which had been blamed for everything from rain in the Atacama to fomenting a new baby boom, corrupting morals, bestializing mankind and causing crops to grow upside down in the Far East, was obliterated by a nuclear thunderbolt a month after he took office.

On reflection, I can see that I was wrong-I admit it. I was an optimist,

I was aggressive, I believed in man and in science, I challenged the heavens and dared to tamper with the face of the universe and its inscrutable design-and I paid for it as swiftly and surely as anybody in all the tragedies of Shakespeare, Sophocles and Dashiell Hammett. Gina dropped me like a plate of hot lasagna and went back to her restaurant, Colin stabbed me in the back and Coburn, once he'd taken over, refused to refer to me by name-l was known only as his "predecessor." I even lost Lorna. She left me after the debacle of the unveiling and the impeachment that followed precipitously on its heels, left me to "explore new feelings," as she put it. "I've got to get it out of my system," she told me, a strange glow in her eyes. "I'm sorry, George."

Hell yes, I was wrong. But just the other night I was out on the lake with one of the Secret Service men - Greg, I think it was - fishing for yellow perch, when the moon - the age-old, scar-faced, native moonrose up out of the trees like an apparition. It was yellow as the under, belly of the fish on the stringer, huge with atmospheric distortion. I whistled. "Will you look at that moon," I said.

Greg just stared at me, noncommittal.

"That's really something, huh?" I said.

No response.

He was smart, this character- he wouldn't touch it with a ten-foot pole. I was just talking to hear myself anyway. Actually, I was thinking the darn thing did look pretty cheesy, thinking maybe where I'd gone wrong was in coming up with a new moon instead ofjust maybe bulldozing the old one or something. I began to picture it: lie low for a couple years, then come back with a new ticket-Clean Up the Albedo, A New Face for an Old Friend, Save the Moon!

But then there was a tug on the line, and I forgot all about it.

Mutts

Wesley Walden

Sgt. Williams found out his mutt loved chocolate bars. That's what gave him the advantage. They were easy to get hold of, too, because they were semisweet and none of the soldiers wanted them. He got a box full every week from the field rations and put them up on a high shelf in his hootch. The mutt could sniff all he wanted, but soon as he lifted his front paws off the floor Sgt. Williams'd knock the crap out of him. And not just once, to teach him. He'd curl back his upper lip till it was hidden under his big red mustache, like a funny smile, and he'd whack the dog four, five, six times, like he was mad. There was only one way the mutt could get a chocolate bar. That was just before formation, which we'd started having every morning.

We hadn't got hit for two weeks. We were artillery, protecting the border where the North Viets were bringing supplies down through Cambodia. We had the big guns=eight-inchers and 175's, and we must've been hurting them, because they'd been trying to get us for a long time. We figured we'd get hit again soon; but you never knew where from. It'd likely come from the east, the Cambodia side, where the guns were aimed, and where there was about a thousand meters of what used to be jungle but was now flattened into no-man's land and speckled with claymore mines and sensor devices.

But you could never tell. A hundred meters to the west you could see the thatched roofs of the village showing between the green curved banana leaves. It was pretty good-sized, and wasn't to be trusted. The north and south were rice paddies, where the mosquitoes hatched and then flew over the perimeter to drive us nuts; and where, all day long, normal-looking Viets were farming, but you knew they were watching everything we did on the fire base.

So we were scared of getting beat, and we were getting hit, and we were wanting to get smart about surviving. But at 0700 hours every morning, the heat already baking our heads inside the steel helmets, we were standing by the south perimeter fence, so the Viets could count

very one of us. Some of us had pant legs cut off at the thigh, some had oots unlaced, some had no shirts on; but everyone had a steel helmet, ecause the new CO had put out the word.

Sgt. Williams said, "He can go fuck himself if he thinks I'm gonna tand out there every morning, especially with that steel pot on!"

"Right!" someone chimed in. "What good's that steel pot when one ocket would wipe us all out!"

Everyone agreed.

But they all showed up. And they all wore the steel helmet. And when hey started betting on the dogs, they forgot all about griping.

The new CO had brought us luck, it seemed, which was as important s anything. We'd got hit fifteen straight nights with mortars and rockets nd small groups of quick silent men popping up out of nowhere. A iandful finally slipped inside the compound in the dark night and tayed hidden for hours, throwing explosives into hootches and equipnent. And we sat, huddled and shaking, watching the explosions, cared that if we moved we might get shot by our own men. When the un came up they were gone. Somehow they hadn't got to our guns, but hey had got to our CO. That's when this new one, fresh from the �orld, took over. We hadn't been hit since. We were wishing it would ast.

The two weeks had given us a good break. We were tired, and even hough that didn't go away things were beginning to loosen up. Some of he wounded came back; the dead friends weren't thought of so much. ,omeone said we ought to misdirect our fire so we don't piss them off mymore. There was always the hope tickling at the back of your head hat you might never have to fight again.

The new CO even let us go into the village, with a sundown curfew. Some said this wasn't good, because half the village was Viet Cong ,ympathizers. Others said that being with a woman was worth it. Sgt. Williams thought so.

"Her name's Mai," he said at formation, looking around and stroking lis mustache. "An' I see anyone sniffin' aroun' her, I'm gonna break :heir neck!"

It was quiet for a minute.

Pvt. Moser, who'd seen her first and claimed to love her, just stood ooking straight ahead.

I guess going into the village made Sgt. Williams stop thinking so nuch about home, and everything else. He was smiling more. They were ill smiling more, and lying in the sun, and betting on the dogs. That's lOW his mutt learned he could get a chocolate bar.

You see, at 0645 hours, everybody waiting formation, they'd come out vith the dogs. The money'd be held by a third party, then two of thern'd �et their mutts by the scruff and shove them nose to nose. They'd make �rowling sounds, to give them the idea, then bash their noses together, oull them apart about an inch, and shove them together again; then

growl some more, till the mutts were snarling and curling their lips back. Then they'd let go, and step back. The dust would stick to the sweaty faces and fill up the air. Everybody was smiling and laughing. Except a few that didn't smile. Pretty soon you'd see some red on the dogs. The loser was the dog bleeding the most by the time the CO came out. If there wasn't blood, it was a draw. But that was rare.

The first couple times, Sgt. Williams' mutt piled up for just a few seconds. Then, like he realized it was senseless, he walked away. When the other one saw that, he walked away too. But Sgt. Williams yelled "Airborne!," took him by the scruff and hind legs, and dropped him on the other one.

He was small, but he got to where he could hold his own with any of them. He was smart: he stopped facing them straight on. Instead, after Sgt. Williams got him all primed, he'd stop snarling right away. But he wouldn't walk away like he did before. He'd just walk in a big circle around the other dog, like he was taking a stroll; like he was completely occupied with something else. And when the other one let down his guard, Sgt. Williams' mutt'd catch him from behind, and wouldn't let go till he had another chocolate bar. He got to be real good. Every other dog in the battery fell for the same trick, and there were lots of them.

With about fifty soldiers- in the compound, there must've been fifteen or twenty mutts. I don't know where they came from; except I heard Sgt. Williams say that we were being good-hearted. If we didn't take them, the gooks'd eat them. He proved that to me one day when we were riding past the village and he pointed to some red and black meat hanging from a porch roof. They were skinned, and their paws were cut off, and there must've been a million flies on them. But you could still tell they were dogs.

"We're savin' their lives."

Anyway, as soon as Sgt. Williams' mutt made the connection between winning the fight and eating a chocolate bar, there was sometimes no way of stopping him. He never quit in the middle of a fight anymore; sometimes he wouldn't quit at the end of a fight.

One time he got hold of Sgt. Garcia's mangy brown-haired by the throat and they couldn't get him loose till they threw water on them. The CO was yelling "Fall-in!" and Sgt. Williams was just beaming. The brown-haired mutt, all wet from the soaking, couldn't move, and lay right where the CO was supposed to stand. But he acted like he couldn't see him; just stood a step in front.

"Gentlemen, we have had reports of North Vietnamese activity." He was young, and his hair and face were almost white in the sun. He looked like he was glowing. "We may be in for a strenuous period; but if we face our problem intelligently, the outcome will be success."

There was a little pool of blood coming from under the brown-haired mutt; he was panting hard, and his eyes were growing dazed.

"You men are fighters! You have proved that in actual combat. I

wouldn't be prouder to be the commander of any other unit in Vietnam

The pool ofblood broke and started coming around both sides on one heel of the CO's boot, and made a slow little dark red river between his feet. Then he told us to check the ammo on the .50 calibers and the grenade launchers. But we weren't listening, because we always checked the ammo on our weapons, and we were more interested in watching the brown-haired mutt trying to stay alive. The CO said if the North Viet activity got worse, he was going to cut out passes to the village. That brought everyone's attention back. Sgt. Williams groaned. I looked at him and saw his yellow-haired mutt sitting there panting, looking uphis tongue flopped out on the one side of his mouth - waiting for the chocolate bar. His teeth were pink, and there were splotches of red on his snout. And jutting out from his lower teeth you could see a hunk of brown hair, which he tried to get rid of every once in a while with his tongue, but it wouldn't go.

The CO dismissed us and turned to leave, slipping a bit on the blood, stepping over the mutt. But he kept his eyes straight ahead, and went back to his hootch.

There were three or four of them, including Sgt. Williams, laying odds whether the mutt was dead. They couldn't see him panting, so they agreed, and paid. But when they picked him up, his eyes popped open and he whined. An argument broke out and the mutt slipped out of their grip, landing with a smack, and a cry. Then they exchanged money again. They threw him in the shitting trench and put a couple rounds in him. To put him out of his misery.

Sgt. Garcia came up with another dog, to take on Sgt. Williams'. Well, it turned out that Sgt. Garcia had just taken the dog from a Pfc., who came running up to get him back, saying his mutt was never going to fight. Sgt. Garcia tried pulling rank, and the Pfc. finally took a swing; and almost hit him. Sgt. Garcia said he was going to press charges, and everyone laughed. They quit, though, when he said he was going to get the nigger's ass some dark night. You could see fear in the Pfc.'s eyes, but he blinked it back inside. Big Sgt. Rutkowsky walked away, shaking his head. Then the Pfc. left-with his mutt. Another dog challenged Sgt. Williams', but it didn't take him long to get his chocolate bar.

The thing that everybody looked forward to, now that the mutt was on a winning streak, was that he crapped when the fighting was over. Some said it was from the chocolate; others said he was just claiming his territory. Then someone else said dogs don't claim territory that way, they do it with urine. This wasn't natural.

"It's happened to me after a fight!"

"It's because he never was a fighter before I made him one," Sgt. Williams said. "He knows he's supposed to do something, he's just mixed up."

But it brought a laugh. Especially if the other dog was too worn out to

move. There'd be Sgt. Williams' skinny mutt, backed up and laying a dump sometimes right in front of the other dog's nose.

In the meantime, a lot of the others were trying to give their mutts a taste for chocolate, or anything else. But they just couldn't seem to find the right reward.

And the CO never took away the passes, because, like Sgt. Williams said: "He knows we're gettin' tense with these gooks aroun'. He wants us to relax." Then he'd grin, and twirl his red mustache like some Don Juan, and head off toward the village.

The morning before the night we got hit I saw Sgt. Williams' mutt at formation, but I didn't see Sgt. Williams. It was pitiful, that dog going around to everybody and being shooed away. When the talk spread that he never made curfew, suddenly they got real friendly with the mutt, and tried to get him to fight anyway. But he didn't want any part of it. He just kept searching, and finally settled himself at Pvt. Moser's feet. But the kid just kept staring straight ahead.

Then someone said they'd brought Sgt. Williams in from the village, and everyone got quiet. I never got the whole story because that night, when we got hit, I caught a round in the knee, and was sent home soon after. But from what I did hear, his girlfriend and he were in bed and she stuck him, took his money and weapon, and ran. And it seems she didn't just stick him to kill him, but she got him again and again, and even cut up his face some.

We were hit from the east. A battalion of North Viets came through the no-man's-land at us. We had a hard time of it. They were quick, and they were intense, and the few reinforcements we got that day didn't make much difference. My guess is they put Sgt. Williams down as one of the killed in action.

We'd known he was dead that morning, though, before the fighting started, because Sgt. Garcia and I were given the detail of getting his personal items in boxes, so they could be mailed home.

I was the first one to go into Sgt. Williams' hootch. But I was stopped right at the door. The mutt had gotten the chocolate bars down from the shelf, and it had taken him a lot to get them, because there were claw marks all the way up the wall. And there was the mutt, in the middle of the hootch, Sgt. Williams' stuff scattered around him, and he was devouring the box of chocolates: tearing at the paper, ripping at the box, crunching and drooling. When he saw me, he curled his lips back and growled. We tried to coax him out, but we finally decided we should leave him alone.

But when the mutt had gone, and we went back in, there wasn't anything left worth putting into boxes. What he'd not torn up trying to get the chocolates, he'd crapped on.

The Old Man Tells His Story and Gets It Wrong

Richard Spilman

They sat in the shadow of the house. Bright sunlight hurt the old man's eyes-even from the shade he could not look into the yard without squinting. They sat in redwood chairs on a lawn speckled with daisies and dandelions, and as Carl talked, he rocked his chair back and forth on two legs. Three empty beer bottles stood on a small bench between them. His daughter had gone, saying she would be back soon. He tried to remember where but gave it up, afraid that he would lose track of what the boy was saying. His grandson had just returned from a summer RarC camp and was full of wonders-rifles that found their targets in the dark and tiny round grenades with a range so wide they'd kill the man who threw them carelessly - which fascinated him and brought back memories of the War. He rubbed his hands, which were cold despite the nearly smothering late spring heat, and his eyes wandered from the bed of withered daffodils to the line of button bush along the fence, wrapped in flowering honeysuckle, into the oak above them, whose branches spread over the entire house. He heard explosions and rifle fire, and from the tree, the cries of hundreds of birds.

With a sound like the creaking of canvas, the chair rocked up and down, pushed by a bare foot in a torn sneaker, while the boy's pale voice described blast holes and shivered targets. Still no meat on him, his grandfather thought.

The old man hated to be alone with strangers, and over the last whatever number of months it was almost everyone but the daughter he lived with had become a stranger, even Carl. Sooner or later he would lose track of the conversation. There would be silence, the two of them smiling the way people do when they can't understand each other's languages, and even though the boy knew, he would have to say, "Grandpa ain't what he used to be." As if he knew what he used to be.

"The last night was a real trip," the boy enthused. "E and E - Escape and Evasion. They take you out at night and drop you in the middle of

nowhere and leave you to find your way back. The seniors play the enemy. If they catch you, you're dead."

All your life, his grandfather thought. Escape and Evasion. His father, his wife, the banks, the lawyers, the Germans-he'd fought them when he could, and when he couldn't, he'd run away. Most of the time it was useless and some of the time it was wrong, but even when he had hated himself, it had felt good to fight. Imprisoned now in a body that would not obey, he envied the boy's ability to do things he might regret.

A breeze rippled across the grass, through the swaying shadow of the oak. He barely felt it.

He had expected that senility, if it appeared, would come gradually, an enemy he could recognize and confront. But it hadn't. After a weekend of storms, he had gone out on the river in his boat. A flood had washed out one end of the little dam across Sumner Creek, and bass had swum up the river to feed on the shad that came through the breech. Where the rough water smoothed into a current, there were underwater stumps. Casting among them, he began to feel strangely, as if the water were glass, a thick murky glass that his lure just skidded across, and the men fishing from the bank and the clouds moving above them were slowly hardening into glass. Dark shapes moved beneath the surface, and he was afraid any second they might break through. The fear took such a hold that he had to stop. But when he turned the boat, the brush along the creek seemed to merge into a solid mass. In a panic he tried to force his way through and grounded the boat on a bar. Someone had to wade out from shore to help.

High blood pressure, the doctors agreed, and something to do with valves. They gave him pills, but the confusion did not go away. It lay in the shadows of his mind like a whisper at the bottom of a gravel pit. Ifhe listened even for a second, he forgot where he was.

"No compass, no map, no nothing. And it was cold at night. I was the only one in my unit who had the sense to bring his jacket. The guys called me a pussy, but they call anybody a pussy who doesn't pretend he's got iron balls. I told them, if there's war it'll be the guys who don't pretend that make it through."

The old man harrumphed, remembering the bodies lying like busted grain sacks in a field of new wheat and later, in occupied Germany, pictures of the dust and gravel that had once been Hiroshima. Go ahead, he thought, wear your jacket.

From this he fell to mourning how quickly a man disappeared in his children. In his prime people had told him he looked like Humphrey Bogart, and though his back had stiffened he could still carry an eightypound sack of cement from the truck to the garage. Yet across from him sat a thin, blond, gangling creature, who had to use both hands to lift his chair, and this was his grandson. Two generations and what was left? Blue eyes, a crooked smile and long-fingered hands-the rest swallowed

up in others. He studied his own hands, which were swollen at the knuckles, the age-spotted skin so papery he could flake it off with a fingernail like the scales of a fish, and glowered at the boy as if he'd stolen something.

Once they'd almost got killed, the boy was saying, because a couple of smart-asses had taken a shortcut across a moonlit slash of open ground. For an hour they'd had to lie in stinking mud at the edge of a slough and listen to the underbrush crackling around them.

The smell of ripe silage rose in his grandfather's memory from the marsh he had slogged through, the day his regiment had parachuted into France. He was tempted to tell the boy, but it would turn into a story and that was too much trouble. His daughter would raise hell. You don't talk to people, she complained, you just tell them stories. Next thing I know, you'll be peeing your pants.

What could he say? There was no way to explain how it felt, to live with nerves that would spin him into nightmare at the backfire of a truck, in a world where a flash of light could make him anxious for hours and where often he could not walk around the block without losing his way. So how could he describe the joy of telling a story through from beginning to end, feeling it draw him on and the pieces fall into place as they had seemed to do when his mind was whole. All his daughter heard was an old man repeating himself.

Anyway, it was a story to tell among men, that one. A woman wouldn't listen to killing, but if you said to a man, "I was scared, I was mad, I wanted to kill them, and when I did, it felt good," he'd hear you out. He knew what you were talking about.

Carl's chair thumped down, startling him, and he found himself face to face with his own crooked smile.

"I'm going to get another beer. You want one?"

The old man shook his head, thinking that if he followed the boy into the house, he could turn on the TV and they'd have an excuse not to talk. But it was afternoon - the soap operas were on. He couldn't watch soap operas, they jumped around too much. Through the glass of the patio door, he watched the boy's vague form moving around in the kitchen. The heat felt as solid as a gag in his mouth.

He tried to imagine guns that saw in the dark, but couldn't. It seemed to be in the nature of things nowadays that he could not understand them. In the old world, his world, things acted the way everybody but a damned fool supposed they would. You could depend on them. Which was not to say accidents didn't happen, but even the accidents were solid-the bank went under, the girl got pregnant, the crop failed-and you grew around them the way a tree roots around a rock. Now the girls had pills and the farmers had insurance, and there were atoms and the insides of atoms and the insides of the insides (niceties the boy had once tried to explain to him). He felt a kind of pity for the boy, and for

himself. Because he was an old man, gone frail in infuriating ways, and because the world that was worth a damn had gone feeble too. And because the boy probably liked it that way.

His grandson stepped through the sliding door and pranced across the patio singing,

You've got yoga, honey

I've got beer

You got overpriced

And I got weird

But it's all right

He plucked his empty off the bench. "You sure you don't want another? I won't tell." And flipped it high, end-over-end, toward the trash barrels behind the garage. It landed with a "whang" that rolled through the old man like a sudden scream. "Goddamn you!" The glare leapt from the garden and burned all around him.

"Missed." Carl plopped into the chair. "What's wrong?"

He waited, trembling. The light slowly retreated. A cloud of images settled around him like sparks from a disturbed fire, dying before he could tell what they were. His stomach hurt.

"Did I scare you?"

"I've been scared since I was born," he said, wearily. Then realizing this was a confession of sorts, added, "Army gave me a medal for it."

"For being scared?"

"For running." Stuck in a hedge, a muddy parachute strained one way and another in the wind.

Carl ran a hand though his mare's nest of yellow hair. "You O.K.?"

The question was so transparent, he laughed out loud. "Hell, no, I'm not O.K. But there's nothing you can do about it!"

"Mom says you're better."

"Your rna don't know her ass from a hole in the ground."

Carl sipped his beer and gazed down the line of hedges and fences where the backyards joined. "I wonder what I'd do if the bullets were real."

"The last thing you'd expect to do, probably." The jigsaw of fields lay below him, beautiful and strange, and he could feel himself falling. "They say you get used to the fear, but you don't. You stumble along, shooting at people you can't see and wondering where the hell the war is. And about the time you think you're not scared anymore, some poor bastard steps on a lump of loose dirt, and there it is. Like a wall."

"What did they give you the medal for?"

"Machine-gun nest. 1 must have told you that story - the woods and the machine guns and all?"

"Unh-unh. I think you tried to once, but Mom wouldn't let you."

"That don't surprise me. It's the killing. She says I ought to be ashamed

up in others. He studied his own hands, which were swollen at the knuckles, the age-spotted skin so papery he could flake it off with a fingernail like the scales of a fish, and glowered at the boy as if he'd stolen something.

Once they'd almost got killed, the boy was saying, because a couple of smart-asses had taken a shortcut across a moonlit slash of open ground. For an hour they'd had to lie in stinking mud at the edge of a slough and listen to the underbrush crackling around them.

The smell of ripe silage rose in his grandfather's memory from the marsh he had slogged through, the day his regiment had parachuted into France. He was tempted to tell the boy, but it would turn into a story and that was too much trouble. His daughter would raise hell. You don't talk to people, she complained, you just tell them stories. Next thing I know, you'll be peeing your pants.

What could he say? There was no way to explain how it felt, to live with nerves that would spin him into nightmare at the backfire of a truck, in a world where a flash of light could make him anxious for hours and where often he could not walk around the block without losing his way. So how could he describe the joy of telling a story through from beginning to end, feeling it draw him on and the pieces fall into place as they had seemed to do when his mind was whole. All his daughter heard was an old man repeating himself.

Anyway, it was a story to tell among men, that one. A woman wouldn't listen to killing, but if you said to a man, "I was scared, I was mad, I wanted to kill them, and when I did, it felt good," he'd hear you out. He knew what you were talking about.

Carl's chair thumped down, startling him, and he found himself face to face with his own crooked smile.

"I'm going to get another beer. You want one?"

The old man shook his head, thinking that if he followed the boy into the house, he could turn on the TV and they'd have an excuse not to talk. But it was afternoon - the soap operas were on. He couldn't watch soap operas, they jumped around too much. Through the glass of the patio door, he watched the boy's vague form moving around in the kitchen. The heat felt as solid as a gag in his mouth.

He tried to imagine guns that saw in the dark, but couldn't. It seemed to be in the nature of things nowadays that he could not understand them. In the old world, his world, things acted the way everybody but a damned fool supposed they would. You could depend on them. Which was not to say accidents didn't happen, but even the accidents were solid-the bank went under, the girl got pregnant, the crop failed-and you grew around them the way a tree roots around a rock. Now the girls had pills and the farmers had insurance, and there were atoms and the insides of atoms and the insides of the insides (niceties the boy had once tried to explain to him). He felt a kind of pity for the boy, and for

himself. Because he was an old man, gone frail in infuriating ways, and because the world that was worth a damn had gone feeble too. And because the boy probably liked it that way.

His grandson stepped through the sliding door and pranced across the patio singing,

You've got yoga, honey

I've got beer

You got overpriced

And I got weird

But it's all right

He plucked his empty off the bench. "You sure you don't want another? I won't tell." And flipped it high, end-over-end, toward the trash barrels behind the garage. It landed with a "whang" that rolled through the old man like a sudden scream. "Goddamn you!" The glare leapt from the garden and burned all around him.

"Missed." Carl plopped into the chair. "What's wrong?"

He waited, trembling. The light slowly retreated. A cloud of images settled around him like sparks from a disturbed fire, dying before he could tell what they were. His stomach hurt.

"Did I scare you?"

"I've been scared since I was born," he said, wearily. Then realizing this was a confession of sorts, added, "Army gave me a medal for it."

"For being scared?"

"For running." Stuck in a hedge, a muddy parachute strained one way and another in the wind.

Carl ran a hand though his mare's nest of yellow hair. "You O.K.?"

The question was so transparent, he laughed out loud. "Hell, no, I'm not O.K. But there's nothing you can do about itl"

"Mom says you're better."

"Your rna don't know her ass from a hole in the ground."

Carl sipped his beer and gazed down the line of hedges and fences where the backyards joined. "I wonder what I'd do if the bullets were real."

"The last thing you'd expect to do, probably." The jigsaw of fields lay below him, beautiful and strange, and he could feel himself falling. "They say you get used to the fear, but you don't. You stumble along, shooting at people you can't see and wondering where the hell the war is. And about the time you think you're not scared anymore, some poor bastard steps on a lump of loose dirt, and there it is. Like a wall."

"What did they give you the medal for?"

"Machine-gun nest. I must have told you that story - the woods and the machine guns and all?"

"Unh-unh. I think you tried to once, but Mom wouldn't let you."

"That don't surprise me. It's the killing. She says I ought to be ashamed

of myself." His apprehension disappeared as the familiar flow ofthe story began to carry him along. "They don't mind you saying you were glad to win the war, but God help you if you say you were glad to kill a German."

The boy grinned, and once again, briefly, he saw himself mirrored. "Well, you know, I was old to be a paratrooper, but if you were in good shape and wanted it bad enough, they wouldn't stand in your way. And I wanted it. I was tired of farming for my father, and your grandma and I weren't getting along too well, and anyway, the times got into my blood. If it had been hippie time, I'd probably have been a hippie; but it was wartime, so I went to war.

"We shipped to England in the wintertime and trained near Scotland. Dropped into the moors around dawn, with the frost on the heather bushes to light the way. Getting the timing down, you know, because a minute late and you're a mile from nowhere. Then we'd attack a mockup town and the sheep pasture behind it.

"Then we came south and sat. Nothing to do, not much news-just air raids and drills. We played poker and drank infirmary alcohol mixed with a chocolate drink we'd stole from the Navy, but after a while it got so that even when we were sober we didn't know what day it was. Then one night the drill turned out to be real, and we were airborne before dawn. They had us packed in rows facing the back of the plane, my platoon right up next to the fuselage." He saw it ribbed and riveted like the inside of a boxcar, the skin of the plane swelling in and out in the dusky light, and heard the drone of the engines. "The Lieutenant repeated what we'd heard in the hangar: form fast, take the highway, take the town, if we could, or go around it, take the hill behind the town and hold on. It was cold as a witch's tit and the air stank like a gas station and nobody said much. The kid next to me kept mumbling 'Combien baiser, Mademoiselle?' in hillbilly French. You understand French?"

The boy nodded.

"Your grandpa, he just fiddled with his harness."

"Were you scared?"

"I don't know. All I remember was wishing I could blast a hole in the side of that plane, so we could get some air. Finally we passed over some anti-aircraft fire. You wouldn't believe what a relief it was to hear those guns. Hallelujah! Somebody's out there, and they're trying to kill us!"

Carl burst out laughing. It surprised him that from such a thin voice the laughter should be so deep.

"Not long after, they lined us up and shot the doors open, and the hillbilly got sick on my boots. It was like everybody had been sleeping. We just stood there looking at that door as if we expected somebody to climb in. Some they had to push, and by God, one of them fought back.

I just kept my eyes on the helmet in front of me untill saw the wingtip in that little square of gray sky. The sergeant shouted 'Go!' and I went.

"The air gave me a jolt, and the parachute, when it opened, gave me another one. But I tell you, after the inside of that plane, the biggest shock was all that green down below. The reconnaissance photos had been black and white, you know? They made it look like a place you'd shoot somebody. Looking down, I kept thinking, there can't be a war here. It's too pretty."

The hills clothed in forest, the hedged black fields, the town with its four-spired Gothic church still untouched, the sun on the horizon shining through the morning haze like a lamp through a gauze curtain. And everywhere the sky was crisscrossed by double strands of falling soldiers. They were west of their target, at the edge of the woods, and he'd had to pull back hard on the straps to keep the tow from carrying him in. Even while he fought to stay clear of the trees, even while the man next to him dropped his arms and swung like a bob, he felt the beauty of the land below-still felt it after forty years. An uneven line of collapsed parachutes spattered the fields. The line came closer, the ground seemed to leap, and he rolled down in a spray of mud.

"The Army don't teach you to think."

"Don't think-react!" the boy agreed.

"They know the man who thinks is going to end up dead, so they put that little switch in your brain-see the enemy/hit the dirt. You'll find that's a sound bit of advice. Any time you see trouble-bill collectors, preachers, salesmen - hit the dirt!" the old man whooped. "They'll get you in the end, but by God you can take a few of them with you.

"Anyway, there 1 am trying to wad up the chute, the field spinning around me like a circus horse, when all of a sudden a machine-gun burst rips through the canvas and makes a hole right through my cloud of breath. So what do I do?"

The boy grinned. "Hit the dirt!"

"Shit no. I ran like a bat out of hell towards the woods. Didn't run for cover, didn't look back, just ran. Even when I got to the trees 1 kept going, till I got so far in that I began to be scareder of what might be ahead than what I was running from. So much for training. I sat on a log to catch my breath and clean the mud from my rifle. It must have rained the day before; the woods stank of wet leaves, and there were puddles. It wasn't till 1 was sitting there that I saw, for the first time, one of those stone huts with the sod roof and a cockeyed window near the door, and the gun flashes out of the window. That's the strange thing about running scared-you don't notice much at the time, but later on, when you stop, it comes to you.

"I went back almost to the edge of the woods. There was a strip of rough pasture with the stone house at one end, a dirt road near it, and on the other side of the road were fields ankle-high in wheat. The

Germans were searching bodies. My friends, some of them. They looked like pieces of something big that had fallen out of the sky and gone bust. But I didn't think 'my friends'-you don't at the time. I worried about being cut off. And while I watched, three truckloads of German troops come tearing down the road, heading east, and a soldier ran out from the house to wave them down. I went back, figuring maybe I could get around them through the woods-the fighting sounded light. I thought, in maybe fifteen or twenty minutes I could work my way out. But that was no Illinois woods."

The pines were tall and bunched together as if on purpose to block out the light; where the light shone through, there were alders, and the ground was tangled with brush. He picked his way slowly, using his rifle like a hand to push back branches in his way. Every few yards he would slip on a buried limb or lurch into a hole, making his stealth ridiculous. With the Germans out of sight, he began to populate his surroundings with imaginary enemies. In every thicket, rifles glinted. Shadows waited for him to come within range. And more than once he spun around quickly, only to discover that the footsteps he'd heard were the forest's pale echo of his own.

"Took me about five minutes to get lost - and that only because I was walking slow. It's amazing how you can know exactly where you're going, and get there and not know where the hell you are. So I wandered for a while, till I stumbled across a path, which I followed because it was a path and I was lost. But then I started to go light-headed and had to hide myself behind a rock so as not to faint in the open. God's truth, the minute my butt touched the ground I curled up and shook like a dog in a thunderstorm. I thought I was going to die. I saw myself out in that wheat field with the rest, watching those bastards coming towards me and nothing I could do. After the shaking quieted I sat up and listened-not for anything in particular. My mind was as blank as if I'd just woke from a nap. Then I went on."

The forest ofglints and shadows had disappeared. In its place the smell of pine needles, the rustling of the trees beneath the distanceless crackle of rifle fire, the roughness of the bark as he leaned on a hemlock, smokywhite shafts of sunlight angling through the trees to spotlight a circle of brush, a small tree.

"The path was a lot ofpaths. Every half mile or so it forked, and hell, I didn't know one direction from another, I just followed the angle of the light. Later on, it dawned on me that the angles should be pointing east and the town was east, but at the time I was on automatic. I walked maybe two miles, looking for a way out. A ridge rose up on the left and seemed to get steeper the farther I went. And on the right there was a pretty easy slope the path kept climbing toward but never quite reached. The mortars were pounding away now, but it was hard to tell whose was whose-the sound came from everywhere at once."

Though he tried to keep his eyes peeled for some flicker of gray ahead, what he saw were GIs running in a crouch from stone doorway to stone doorway through a town he'd never seen but seemed more real to him than the woods because it was where he ought to be.

He paused for a moment. So much talking had brought a flush to his face. He touched his cheek and discovered that his fingers were icy.

"Where was H"

"Where the projection of the town was more compelling than the reality of the forest."

He snorted, partly because of his grandson's language and partly to hide his embarrassment-so he'd spoken those private thoughts. Next thing, he would be pissing his pants.

"Interesting idea," Carl added.

"I don't need no psychoanalysis."

The boy set his bottle on the bench and curled his legs under him like an Indian.

"After a mile, maybe, the path began to switch back up the ridge. About halfway up, it came to a kind of plateau with huge gray rocks scattered over it. For the first time in a long while I could see the skylight-blue and not a cloud anywhere. You would have sworn it was glass. In the middle of the plateau was a tall pine absolutely loaded with starlings the battle had chased from the fields. I got rid of my pack and helmet and climbed a tree to have a look. But the hill on the right wouldn't give me a view of the fighting. AlII could see was where I'd been, which didn't look like much - a nice, gentle slide downhill. Like nobody but an idiot could have got lost there.

"Then I saw little flashes of light, like a fish makes when he swims near the surface, and they were coming towards me. They stopped and started again, and I just hung there and watched. I'd seen so much trouble that wasn't there, I'd got like Doubting Thomas-I didn't believe my eyes. But when they started up the third time, near the bottom of that hill, I slid down the tree like a fireman-scraped half the skin off my hands.

"The suddenness must have scared the birds because that big pine exploded-oh, you should have seen it!" They rose with a single shriek, keeping some of the shape of the tree in their flight, and the sunlight flickered on their wings. Even in their terror, they did not break away, but slued back and forth together, giving the flock the appearance of a man trying to fight his way out of a sack. Then slowly they returned, and the tree became what it had been.

Again, he ran, but this time he ran easily, the rifle swinging from one hand, the other flung out for balance. The enemy! The old man felt exhilarated. On the far side of the plateau, the path split, one branch climbing father up the ridge while the other dipped down to follow a stream. "I figured sooner or later that stream ought to let out on the

farmland below the town, so I took the low road. It was prettier that way too. The slope was rocky, but there were yellow flowers everywhere. The stream and the path went, nice and easy like a double set of stairsteps, down into the pine forest."

The sun fell behind the ridge as he descended. Once into the shade of the pines, he could see his breath again-and the trail of the bullet. The creek bank had grown steeper. Small trees, half-uprooted, leaned over it, and in places it had cut into the path. This side of the plateau, the rain from the night before had not seeped into the ground. In some low spots the path had disintegrated, and dozens of boot tracks cut their own trails across the mud.

He stopped talking and felt for his helmet and pack. Where were they? He couldn't have left them behind. In forty years of telling this story, he'd never left them behind. But his memory was playing tricks on him. There he was, clear as day, a squat, black-haired young man without a pack, pounding the butt of his rifle on a tree that had fallen near the path and cussing himself for forgetting them. He looked toward his grandson but saw only himself without a helmet. It was as if the part where he'd picked up his gear again had been washed away, and the story had continued without it. Bewildered, he went on, but listening now to his own words the way the soldier listened to the forest.

Because there were no shafts of sunlight, he could not tell direction, but soon the stream curved around an incline and he knew he had reached the hill that had blocked his view. A humped wooden bridge crossed the stream, but the path it led to, after skirting a couple of soggy glades, returned to parallel his on the opposite side. Then a crease appeared in the hill. The creek veered toward it, drew in its banks, gathered speed and plunged straight down into a narrow ravine. Leaning cautiously over a steel railing bolted to the rock shelf at his feet, he peered over the edge. The water spread like a fan as it fell and broke into spray on a heap of boulders maybe forty feet below. But instead of gathering itself back together, it remained spread shallowly in a kind of rocky marsh. A mist hung around its trees like smoke, and there was a sharp, ripe smell that reminded him of silage.

Running his fingers over the pitted bar, he tried to picture what this spot would be like for the people of the town. He could hear them puffing as they clambered up the trail, the last ten feet or so holding onto a rope threaded through metal loops nailed into the rock. He saw them leaning over the edge to watch the falls and then carrying their baskets across the humpbacked bridge to one of the glades, where German soldiers searched the bodies of the dead. He saw them spreading picnic cloths to the sound of mortars and rifle fire. He thought, strange His mind stuck on the word and would not go on. Strange. Overhead, the flight of starlings rushed by like a black river, with a sound not very different from that of the falls.

The path at the bottom lay more or less underwater, but there were blazes on tree trunks and strips of cloth tied to bushes. No way he could tell footing. Rocks went swimming under his weight; boggy spots turned out to be hard underneath. Several times he lurched into water above his knees. His feet went numb, and the rest of him ached. Yet he sloshed forward from blaze to blaze, happy as a hog because he was getting through. Somewhere on the other side of this foolishness, he would come out into the open. There would be a town or a highway or fields; there would be real soldiers fighting a real battle and dying real deaths. And once he could see where he was, he would find them. Feeling the young man's eagerness, and knowing how it would end, he trembled as if he were already running along the edge of the meadow through a dapple of sunlight and shade.

Mist hung everywhere over the water, thin as a whore's nightie and drifting with winds too light for him to feel. Hiding nothing, but playing tricks on the eyes. He would halt, casting about for the next blaze, and find it on a tree he'd looked at twice before; a strip of white cloth tied to a bush not far away would be gone when he got there or transformed into a bit of soggy gray newspaper in German. Even then, this obscuring and revealing had seemed magical, as though there were someone just ahead laying down the path-and if he hurried, he might catch up.

Soon the ravine began to widen, islands of solid ground appeared, and the pine woods crept down into the basin. The young man worried about what would happen when he returned to his own lines, to men who were not his friends and would wonder where he'd been. What could he say? That a machine gun had chased him into the forest and a couple of hours later he'd wandered out? Lost, they would repeat. There were plenty of ways to desert. If he could tell them, "1 heard a runner coming toward me. 1 waited in ambush, and here is the message he carried." But he had nothing to show.

The walls of rock grew green, relaxed and sprawled back into the trees, the marsh shrank to a creek with banks and once more he walked a path torn by bootprints. The mist still drifted above the water-thicker, it seemed, for being penned in - and the path weaved in and out of it. The ravine slipped behind a nub of the hill. It was the old man who noticed. The soldier glanced over his shoulder, saw nothing and was satisfied. But something had changed. His eyes probed the bushes along the path. He listened but heard only the intermittent rifle fire and the thump of his own footsteps. Gradually it dawned on him that he was listening to an absence. The mortars had stopped.

But knowing the cause only added to his unease. The forest had paused to wait. He could feel himself drawn forward.

Then, in the mist ahead a wavering shadow (he would say, "a runner broke from the mist"), as if someone were answering his fear ("and 1 waited for him to come within range"). The shadow resolved vaguely

into the figure of a man. But the figure was not running-it appeared to be turning small circles, like a man tamping down the earth around a mine. Close to the water. He approached slowly, ready to jump for cover but the figure kept to its task. Something was wrong. Pinning his gun against the trunk of a tree, he shouted. No response. He shouted again, and again no answer. So he pulled the trigger.

"First time in my life I ever shot at a man."

The sound echoed back from the ravine, and somewhere up ahead a machine gun caught the echo and sent it back. The mist leapt aside like a startled deer. The old man lowered his rifle and spat into the stream. "Shit."

One of his own-one of the bunch who played basketball on the courts next to the commissary. The boy circled like a pendulum in his straps, his feet inches above the water, his parachute tangled in the trees he'd fallen through. Arms and legs bent and rigid, head lolling against the top of the pack, he seemed to have been frozen in midstep as he'd thrown his head back to laugh. And the old man saw himself falling, saw the town with its four-spired cathedral, saw the swath of green below and realized this time he would not be able to pull back - he blinked away the vision. Watching the dead man revolve to the creaking of his canvas straps, he thought, I must be close to the edge of the forest. His head throbbed. All around him he saw dead men matting the wheat; it would be easy to lie down like them. The hand he leaned on the trunk of an alder began to shake. He snatched it away. He'd missed, apparently, because there were no wounds-he looked the body over again to be sure. Not a one. A little purple welt on the neck, and a man had become a coathanger.

Eyeing the bindings of the dead soldier's pack, the old man felt a queasy "No!" in the pit of his stomach. But he needed a blanket and rations-it would be cold tonight, and God only knew whether they'd have a field kitchen. The corpse swung by not far from the edge of the bank. With luck he could slip the pack off. Grabbing hold of a nearby bush, he leaned out over the water. But the first time, at the touch of that rigid arm, he flinched away, and the corpse turned in its harness as if it were trying to shrug him off. The second time, he caught the harness and drew the body towards him. The young man's head, which had been nodding in time with the revolutions, paused, then suddenly slid to the edge of the pack and stared, white-eyed, straight at him.

He let out a yelp, lost his balance and fell backwards into the stream, which dragged him a couple of yards and nearly took his feet from under him. The water was freezing cold. As he scrambled out onto the muddy bank, a stiff foot brushed his backside.

Still on his hands and knees, trembling, he let out a pure gut-scream of frustration and pain that was answered somewhere in the trees above him by the shriek of a bird. Then he laughed. The laughter caught in

the old man's lungs and turned into a coughing fit that shook him from head to heel. When he'd swallowed his phlegm and had begun to breathe evenly again, the young man on the bank took his hands from his knees, and picked up his rifle and went on. His whole body felt numb. Out of plain stubbornness he did not once look around. But he could feel the dead man's eyes burning into his back like tiny disks of ice.

The path angled away from the stream, as it always had. He would follow it till the stream was out of sight. Then at the top of a knoll the forest would open upon a sunlit meadow. Over a crescent of trees on his right he would see the tops ofthe spires. Yes, and as he walked out from the cover of the trees, the Germans would begin to shell the town from the hill above. He would be running towards the explosions, looking ahead, and he would not see the soldiers with their machine gun until he was almost on top of them. One who had been lighting a cigarette would drop it, grab his rifle by the stock and lunge wildly. The bayonet would pass under the old man's arm. He'd club that man to the ground and shoot the other two before they could turn the gun; then he'd swing back to the first, kneeling beside him, open-mouthed and blinking, and would empty the rest of the clip into him.

The old man grunted, relieved that he could see ahead to the end. Yes, he had been scared, he had been lost, he had taken to shooting at shadows, but finally, almost by accident, he had killed his Germansand from there he was able to find his way back.

The man in the forest had continued some distance along the path. Gun drooping, he limped slowly ahead, favoring his left leg despite the fact that there was no feeling in it, and wearing his shame and anger as resignedly as he wore his wet and muddy clothes. The more pain he felt, the more vivid the woods around him became. The thinning stand of pines, the ground beneath strewn with leaves, brush, fallen brancheshe saw them now as distinctly as he had seen the flashes of gunfire from the window of the hut. Under a patch of sunlight a dark thicket spread, covered with new growth like a coat of light-green fur, overrun everywhere by a tall, spiny weed with purple-rimmed leaves. In the middle of it, three small pines grew out of and around the remains of a fallen log. He thought, strange. And remembered the sun nosing up between the hills as he descended, checkering the town with light and shadow. He understood now that it was the strangeness that made them beautiful. The strangeness that-what was the boy's word. Compelled. Because it was wrong. Like a whore's whisper that you couldn't help going back to.

As the path began to climb a shelf of white rock, he smelled nitrate. The path was sprinkled with wood chips and dirt. At the top he had to use his rifle as a cane to step around a shell crater and a small shivered birch. Trees nearby were freckled with flame-shaped wounds, each with a fragment ofblackened metal burrowed into its meat. The path continued up a low knoll. Beyond its rim the outlines of the trees were blurred

with sunlight. And he knew where he was. He walked more easily, feeling the breeze on his face, and watched the sky rise above the rim of the knoll. There was the meadow glazed with white and yellow wildflowers, and on the other side of it a macadam road and a gray frame farmhouse, and there were the spires of the cathedral. As they should be. He approached haltingly through a dapple of sunlight and shade, and on cue the shelling began.

Awkwardly, but without pain, he ran along the edge of the woods towards the road, across uneven ground whose every dip and roll he knew. The Germans behind their hillock of grass cried out. Startled, as he had always been, the old man tried to stop, but his feet had turned to air. One of the Germans reached for his rifle slowly, and when he lifted his face the old man saw with horror that the eyes were blank. As the German lunged, it was as it had been at the door of the plane, where he could not tell if he had been drawn forward by the air or pushed from behind. Either way he could not stop himself.

"No!"

But the bayonet was already a cramp in his guts, and he had fallen backwards to the ground. He tried to get up and felt it higher, thrusting him down again. He screamed at the pain, as though his anger could hurl it back, but his head dropped back onto the grass. The line of trees above him solidified into a black ring, as sharp as a barrel's rim, and there were waves in the sky. Then there was no sky at all.

Where it had been he heard the boy crying, "God! Oh, God!" And wished he could tell him it didn't matter. The pain had disappeared, and the warmth flowing out of him gave him a fugitive pleasure. The voice that had shouted "No!" told him he was dying, but he didn't believe it. Because the voice came from too far away and because all the while his body was telling him it felt good.

Suddenly, fiercely, the wounds began to hurt and their pain brought back his sight. He lay among the white and yellow flowers looking up to the treetops which seemed to be on fire. The soldiers were arguing in accents he remembered from his childhood, pointing to him and to the town. One was wiping his bayonet with a fistful of grass. An officer stepped out from the trees and snapped an order. And the soldiers, muttering to themselves, quickly broke down the gun and hurried away in the direction the officer had come.

"Esel!"

The officer descended to where he lay. The German was thin and young, and his yellow hair stuck out at odd angles where his helmet had been. One of his hands swung uselessly at his side - a big hand with long fingers. He knelt to look at the wound but immediately stood up again. "Nutzlos, mein Bekannter." Unsnapping his holster.

He tried not to struggle, but he could not even lift his head. Sharp-

nosed pistol in his good hand, the German knelt beside him. He could only whisper, "No!"

The young officer's grimed face cracked into a weary half-smile, and he answered in English. "Haven't you killed enough of us?"

The old man looked away and contemplated the fire in the trees. The rippled sky glittered like glass and he could not breathe for the thickness in his mouth. It was wrong, but that did not matter. Once again he was falling through the freezing dawn air-the hedged fields below, to the east the rolling forest and the cathedral town - and the earth was rising up to meet him.

From Scretchings, a Study of the Making of a Poet

Karl Shapiro

The B&O Railroad station sat slightly below-ground on a large and purple brick pavement and was ornamented with a high clock tower. It was never crowded, it was spotlessly clean and quiet as a library. This was the elegant station in Baltimore. Though classless like all American vehicles, the B&O trains were first-class. Everybody knew that. They floated noiselessly through the beautiful rolling countryside of Maryland and Pennsylvania, slowly it seemed, without the roar and flash and melodrama of the Pennsylvania Railroad trains, which went an entirely different route, at high speed straight through the city.

The two stations were just a few blocks apart. The steel-and-glass Pennsylvania depot sat above the street and its tile mosaic floors, like bathroom floors, were always crowded and in a hurry and excited with coming and going. Wire-laced glass doors led down to the tracks when they opened, and the pungent and delicious reek of locomotives rose up the stairs and the travelers poured below. Porters and hawkers and gatekeepers were everywhere among the throngs, and there were always throngs in Pennsylvania Station. At the B&O station there were never throngs. One might set up a meeting for a quiet talk at the B&O, hardly at the Pennsylvania.

The young poet sat on the immense scrolled wood bench alone. There could not have been a half dozen other people in the station. His concern was to spot Professor Hazel, whom he had never seen and to whom he had sent his privately printed book of poems. He was shy, tremulous and bold at the same time. So, it turned out, was Professor Hazel, with his great bulk and bald head and English tweeds. The poet was dressed approximately like a college student of the Middle Atlantic states of the thirties, or so he supposed.

When the professor strolled to his chair-car with his shabby briefcase and they shook hands in a kind of glow, the young poet knew he would have the scholarship. He would be a university student again, among

gentlemen, and even ladies. He walked home mantled in his new superiority and supercilious glee, up Eutaw Place, past the mansions built antebellum, before the Civil War, past the nineteenth-century solidstone rockfaced apartments which he described as Assyrian, to his own modest car-lined street where the almost-rich Jews lived.

When the good Professor Hazel had gotten him a scholarship to Johns Hopkins the poet had felt rightly that his little book of poems had forced the lock to higher education for him, and he entered with a high heart and would achieve at least a cosmetic education, reserve himself for Latin and Greek and history and philosophy and read the English geniuses and lesser lights. Pure snobbishness, he frequently thought, to separate him from the business life and the blind pettiness of the world outside his books. He plunged into study with a powerful will and did perfectly. He had to. One slip or even a fraction of a slip and he was out. In a small, tight, competitive academy he had to be within one point of perfect in grades, to be on the safe side, he who had had to be coached in algebra and then barely scraped by, though he loved algebra for its runic magic, had to be perfect in French, Latin, Greek, history, philosophy, and no sciences, luckily. The first year, a week of final exams and all, he did it, knowing he would in spite of his nighttime job at Sears, Roebuck and all day Saturday, in the work-clothes department. The second year the same, receiving his H's-H stood for "Honor," or 95-100 on the Richter scale - in all subjects, with gleaming remarks on papers. His philosophy professor, a brilliant esthetician, wrote compliments under his H. He had written his paper on Jefferson and Lord Herbert of Cherbury. The young poet's adoration for Jefferson would never leave him. Virginia would never be faraway.

But there was an unseen hidden flaw in the second year's hard work which was to change his direction, his career, even his life, a single comment on the final history exam on one question, which x'd the poet out of student life forever.

The question was about the Fashoda Incident and colonial expansionism. And the answer the professor wrote in the margin of the poet's essay was "TOO BITTER AGAINST BIG BUSINESS."

In the poet's mind it was a headline that would haunt him for the rest of his life, for the exam as a whole was marked "B," and B would cost him his scholarship and mean the end of school unless he could raise tuition, which was impossible. Student loans had not been invented; such an idea was laughable.

He went to see the history professor, a famous history professor at that, one who was to be put in charge of the official history of the Second World War when it came, as it was about to do, engulfing poet and professor in different ways. The professor was kindly at the interview, and even paid the poet the compliment of seeming warmed-up or

heated for a decent number of minutes, about the poet's interpretation of Fashoda, but the verdict would stand: Guilty! The poet said nothing about the consequences to him - he would rather die than plead. In this he was consistent, for not long after he could have said, "I would rather die than go before a draft board," had there been such a thing, as there probably was.

He was both sad and relieved at his fall. No shame or humiliation entered into the matter. There was nobody who cared, really. His father had disappeared, the brother had dropped out of graduate school in mathematics and was working in advertising and was about to marry his secretary. The sister too was about to marry. Mother was home alone with him, suffering the hells of desertion and fears of penury or at least dependency. So he was alone with his poems, where he wanted to be. He had done his best, better than he was capable of really, for he was not a born student, and besides, he had no academic ambitions beyond putting himself out of the reach of the business world. That in a few years the poet, with his smattering of education, a sophomore undergraduate, would be brought back to the same university as an Associate Professor with tenure, the magical synonym for sinecure, a great, almost unprecedented honor with a capital H, which he would blithely abandon after three years for a chancy and ill-paying job as editor of the poetry magazine which had accepted his first good poems, was beyond his ken.

There was a glorious dark pleasure in being fired, let out, sent down, rusticated, booted out, and it meant having time, time to write poems. He began again that very day, having seen his future in the verdict "TOO BITTER AGAINST BIG BUSINESS." He felt like a bird on its first flight, flip-flopping, scared and ecstatic, with its mother hovering and swooping close at hand and somehow returning the fledgling to its nest, where undoubtedly it would brag all night and keep everybody else awake.

Through the summer he wrote his first characteristic poems that would see print in the renowned poetry magazine and continued his parttime job selling work clothes and leather jackets at Sears. One day in August as he was about to board the streetcar for the long ride to the job he opened a letter he had carried from the mailbox to look at on the trolley. He could see the yellow trolley floating toward him several blocks away as he tore open the small envelope printed simply Poetry and which he assumed was an ad. Inside was a blue slip with a letterhead, a rather pre-Raphaelite Pegasus, and the name and address of the Chicago magazine. His eye lighted on the words, "We are pleased to accept for publication" and listed four of his poems. The streetcar stopped for him and opened its door with a welcoming sigh but the poet waved to the conductor and turned and ran back home. He called the store and said he could not come in that day. Then he sat back and read

holes in the blue notice and went and got the poems they had accepted and studied them with new eyes.

But now he received a number in the mail, a postcard from the government telling him to report to the Fifth Regiment Armory at 7 a.m. on the 25th of March for induction into the army.

The poet was not politically ignorant. Most people he knew had never heard of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, a pretty piece of jargon and skulduggery cooked up by the Japanese fascists and egged on by Hitler and company. Everyone knew about Hitler and Lend-Lease and the sinking of American ships. And everyone pretended not to know about the Jews in Germany, though he knew, all Jews knew, and the radicals he consorted with knew very well. Everyone followed the Phony War in Europe eagerly, the stalemate in which Hitler was making up his mind about invading England. Everyone knew about the Panzers and the Luftwaffe and not very secretly admired them. Everyone knew about American Nazism spreading over the Midwest and even in the very center of Manhattan. A Nazi battleship had even visited Baltimore, its officers and crew feted by the city officials and the bluebloods of the city. And everyone knew that we were really English at heart, England's ally and brother, and that sooner or later we would have to help her fight Germany again. So the Congress had passed a one-year draft and an official picked a number out of a goldfish bowl and the famous first number was only three digits away from the poet's. And now the poet was the goldfish and the hand that signs the papers had dipped into his life and plucked him out.

He was fearful of what lay ahead for him but not terrified. It never crossed his mind to demur or dissent. His Communist friends pretended to be pacifists for the moment, since Hitler and Stalin were now bedfellows, but the poet could not understand pacifism. He was a Jew, and an American; how could the Communists temporize with Hitler?

He went to the horror of Armory day for the daylong physical, amongst the nakedness and the yelling, a scene from pandemonium, a kind of orgy or a bedlam from the pen ofHogarth. He had read accounts of scenes of induction; they all came true. But the poet weighed only 104 pounds, hardly an impressive specimen of a soldier in arms, and the doctors passed him around with his chest X-rays, thinking he might be tubercular. He would be satisfied to be rejected but by afternoon they had pronounced him fit to bear arms and he was sat in a large waiting room where the inductees were making phone calls to their families, and he phoned his mother cheerfully that he was going to Petersburg, Virginia, a place she knew well and where he had visited distant cousins as a child. That was all. He was put in a bus in a line ofbuses and driven to a railroad station for freight trains and escorted into an old train where every seat was quickly and noisily occupied.

In Washington, an hour away, he sent a postcard to his girl. Then back in the train for a very long ride to the camp in the wee hours of a very late March day. There they were given doughnuts and very foul coffee in what looked like shaving mugs and finally escorted to a barracks with bare blinding lights and two rows of cots and told that reveille would be at six in the morning, about three hours away. He crowded into the latrine with its rows of open toilets and sinks and no stalls and urinated with difficulty. He rinsed his mouth and splashed water on his face and went back to his cot and fell asleep instantly.

They were walked - they didn't know how to march - to the quartermaster area to draw clothes and to discard every outward vestige of selfness and individuality. From now on one could distinguish oneself only by rank, by stripes or bars, but this would take time. There is more to personality than the suits and ties of the outside world, and it would take time to let the personality withdraw into some deeper recess of self before the soldier and the man could become friends and meld into one.

In the quartermaster sheds they passed counter after counter where a sergeant would glance at them and fling down a shirt, trousers, underclothes, tunic, fatigue clothes, or ask the foot size and clump down a pair of boot-like shoes. They were in the last stages of the clothing operation when the poet found himself face to face with a young officer, a shavetail, whom he knew and who walked over to him and glared into his face.

"And we don't have any fucking Communism here," he said audibly enough for two other recruits to turn around and look. The poet paled and stared and said nothing, while the Rare second lieutenant disappeared into a room with a desk in it. A shock of horror seized him and his mind blanked out as he wandered back to the barracks among his joking comrades-in-arms, all trying to assimilate the absurdities of the new wardrobe and by now secretly proud to shed their personal togs and be in recognizable official dress.

He had known this second lieutenant in Baltimore, the elder son of an attractive widow; he had put himselfthrough law school and had begun to practice when he was called up by the peacetime draft to exercise his skills in the Judge Advocate Corps of the new army. The poet had met him many times at get-rogerhers, more or less political, and rallies for peace and had had hot and sneering words over political theory, for the young lieutenant hated radicalism in every shape and form, especially if it was espoused by Jews. He was a Jew trying to be the kind of Jew who would one day live in Roland Park and be driven to his offices by a chauffeur. What was he doing in the quartermaster sheds-looking for the poet, to gloat over him? The poet had to think so.

The most highbrow literary-political magazine in the country, one that was "left of Communism" and that was now printing his poems, asked him to write a monthly letter about army life and he said he would. He wrote one, about the treatment the army gave its new conscripts, acting like a parent to its children, cajoling and punishing, putting a bright orange in front of each soldier at breakfast-a huge naked room full of oranges! This would never do for the highbrow ultraradical review, which obviously wanted something deeper and darker. The poet knew he could not do himself or the magazine any good with this kind of orangerie and tush-tush. Should he write about the greasy cutlery, never wiped but tossed in a sheet at four o'clock in the morning, fried eggs that had petrified for six hours, bread that was gray, made from the coarsest potato flour, as if they were Russians, coffee that was not coffee? The drilling? The poison ivy they had to jump into in mock strafing drills, sending half the company to the hospital? The endless scrubbing of floors, the open toilets, the homosexuals? He decided against it and stuck to his poems where he let the unwritten emotions tincture his imagery. It was all a bad kindergarten that everyone had to go to. But it would be over soon and the next bunch would have its turn.

A captain called the poet to his office and said, "Corporal" - he had two stripes by then, toward the end of his year-"Corporal, I want you to go to Officer Candidate School." "No, Sir," said the poet.

In nine weeks one could become an officer, with all rights and privileges appertaining thereto. One could walk into and through the best hotels in the world and be bowed to, as it were, with the fine twill uniform and good leather and a certain American sloppy hauteur which is irresistible to practically everybody. One could be highly paid and be driven by enlisted men wherever one wanted to go. One could jump from bus driver to aristocrat in one fell swoop. In nine weeks.

"No, Sir," said the poet.

"Why?" said the captain.

The captain was a Regular Army doctor, a bad recommendation for anything in the days of the peacetime army. A doctor in the army? Unthinkable. He was a big, sallow, pockmarked, soft-looking man who shambled and had big swimming bluish eyes.

"Because, Captain," the poet answered politely, "I am getting out in a couple months." It was late autumn and the poet's year of soldiering was three-quarters over. He had toyed with the idea of becoming an officer himself; poetry was far from being incompatible with war.

"What makes you think you are getting out?" said the captain, and the poet had no reply. All his life he would remember this mysterious question and ponder it. It was three months before Pearl Harbor.

The poet was sitting on his porch on that mild Sunday afternoon, battling a poem in his notebook. He could hear the radio in the living room playing "Till Eulenspiegel," his favorite funny-sad music, which he would frequently whistle in the barracks and at his typewriter. He would see his girl for a couple of hours before his soldier friend picked him up to drive back to the camp in Virginia. They would usually leave late on a Sunday night after the three-day pass and get into the camp stomachtired. When he was short of sleep, his fatigue would manifest itself in the poet's stomach, or somewhere down there, and he would feel stomachfatigue all the next day. A funny place to get tired.

The achingly wistful composition finished and Till Eulenspiegel's soul danced off into the sunset. Then there was a long silence and the poet went to adjust the dial of the radio. And then he heard news of a bombing of American ships somewhere, the announcer was not sure where; it was not a newsy station, and he switched to another number and heard excited voices breaking in on one another and such declarations as "the American Navy in flames," "total confusion," "sneak attack" and such alarms. He settled down to listen as it dawned on him for the first time that he was in uniform and that the uniform meant war. The soldier with the car phoned and said he was rounding up the others and that he had heard the order for all men in uniform to return to their bases immediately. It was already dark when the Ford rolled up. The poet had said goodbye to his girl on the phone; his mother was not yet home and he left her a note on the kitchen table.

The ride back thrilled them, and the soldiers-suddenly they were soldiers-babbled incoherently while the poet filled them in on Japanese fascism, Manchuria, Nanking, the drive to the south, oil, capitalism"TOO BITTER AGAINST BIG BUSINESS" - and the Axis. What was ordinarily a peaceful Sunday night drive on virtually empty roads became a movie full of searchlights in the sky, army vehicles, soldiers standing by bridges with helmets on and fixed bayonets! These maneuvers were real and the soldiers drifted from a dream of peace into a reality they were not ready for. It was some kind of game maybe. Nobody in their right minds would attack the United States Navy. Even the Japanese high command thought that, but it would be decades before that was known to the world.

They had to drive through Washington to get to Virginia. They had to cross the bridges that separated the capital from the old Confederacy and the bridges were long and narrow and the traffic of army trucks was heavy and soldiers were everywhere in battle dress and they were stopped and they squinted into flashlights and showed their weekend passes and were told to get back to camp in a hurry. They began to feel important, more important than they ever had, as bridge after bridge stopped them and passed them through the lines, the poet thought, remembering the battle lines that wavered back and forth for four years

in all these very places south of the Potomac, down to Fredericksburg toward Richmond. The poet knew his Civil War-he hadn't gone through Virginia public schools for nothing-and every town, every signpost, was like a pin in a battle map and lights flickered everywhere along the way like campfires, he thought, working up similes, until, exhausted and talkative, they came to their camp, home, and were gone over by half a dozen guard groups before the car was admitted to the camp and they were free to get back to the barracks. There they were told to get coffee and doughnuts in the mess hall and turn in. There was no tattoo, no taps that night, or if there were, they didn't hear them.

Then, on the fifth day after Pearl Harbor, or rather the fifth night, they were raided. By their own army, raided.

He could never remember what time it was in the night when the lights suddenly were glaring in their faces and somebody yelled "attention!" and they leapt up naked or half-naked and tried to stand at attention while helmet-clad strange soldiers meticulously searched every footlocker, flicked through letters, rummaged through underwear and fatigue clothes, looked on the top shelf over each bunk, peered under the cots and, after a command of "At ease!," stormed upstairs to the second floor. It was frightening, saddening, a shock to their blossoming allegiance to the Army, a nightmare. Three men were led down from the second floor, one never to be seen again, a Nazi spy they were to believe later, who had his own plane which he flew to the Texas-Mexico border every weekend. He looked the part and had the charm and the accent, like a movie spy. Could it be true? Another man with a German accent looked the opposite of the "Nazi" and was a small, badly coordinated man, very gentle and with a soft laugh, who could not do anything right and was constantly on K.P. or latrine duty for his ineptness. In drill he was hopeless. He had been a lawyer in Washington before he was drafted. Everybody liked and tried to help this very unTeutonic German, who was so obviously unadaptable to the military life. He too was led away with a quiet face, though in a few days he was back, back in the outfit, and nobody questioned him.

The Raid blew over and didn't blow over. A kind of scar tissue grew over the newly formed outfit, now a full-fledged hospital ready for service overseas. The wound of the Raid seemed to unify the men, almost as if they had been in combat. It was known that theirs was the only barracks subjected to this treatment, and one could turn the insult into a compliment by conjecturing that some dangerous characters had been sequestered among the good guys to keep an eye on them-in case. In case of Pearl Harbor, for instance.

But the poet felt a connection between the incident and his meeting with the second lieutenant in the quartermaster shed, simply that he was among suspects, politicals, and he was one of them. Yes, he was one

of them, and it would do no good to try to explain to some fictitious tribunal that he consorted with Communists to make fun of them, that yes he believed in socialism of a sort and that he was too bitter against big business, and so on. It wouldn't wash. The tribunal would yawn and take a pinch of snuff and condemn him to the galleys. All through the war he would sound off about socialism and what's wrong with Soviet Russia and how it was a nightmare out of Franz Kafka and why Hitler and Stalin were really the same person, though we were being allies with the Red Menace and were not supposed to be hostile to the benighted Russians who would someday adopt the American constitution and become just like us.

The poet was probably correct in his belief that he was the only member of his outfit who had read The Sexual Life of Savages, the book that described the rules and regulations of love among those pretty Melanesian islanders.

The first night the men were kept awake till dawn by unbelievable screaming and yells and the beating of drums and the piping of flutes, and now and then a native would fly by their tents streaked with white paint. He had been told to pass the word to the others that it was a funeral and nobody was to interfere or even watch while the islanders were frightening the evil spirits away from the corpse. At dawn the noise ceased as if on a single beat of a conductor's baton and the natives, streaked in their paint, came to the tents with melons and bananas and flowers and shook hands and laughed like actors in a play who still had their costumes on.

A diagonal path ran through the Lever Brothers palm grove where they had pitched camp, leading to the village water pond, a large deep spring-fed pool where the natives drew their water daily and bathed and washed their gaping sores. The soldiers were warned not to touch the water and the doctors began to treat the open sores, yaws and other lesions by pouring sulfa powder freely on the affected parts. The natives seemed very pleased to have these magical doctors so close at hand.

Each morning work stopped while the parade of bare-breasted women and girls and grannies filed through the camp on the way to the water hole and returned with the pots of water on their heads. It was immediately dubbed The Tit Parade and the Gl's became experts in designating the size, shape and condition of breasts. Two young girls named KagwaLosa and Baka-Koobla, about twelve years old, became daily visitors to the poet's tent, where the soldiers befriended them and exchanged trifles and all learned a few words and phrases from one another. The girls were treated with an almost deferential respect and the poet was astonished. At home they would have been seduced or raped.

On this Trobriand island the poet wrote what was to be his most anthologized poem in after-years, an elegy for a soldier who was killed, who died while he was watching, whose funeral he took part in. He was not a battle casualty, but the poet left that up in the air. He was an accidental death, maybe even a suicide. The soldier was cleaning his MI and it fired and struck him in the chest. Accident, suicide, battle casualty, it was neither here nor there. The poet saw his first dying, first death, first funeral- at the age of twenty-nine. The infantryman had been carried to the Palmolive soap grove on a stretcher but it was too late to operate and he was given blood and plasma and oxygen in the open tent. He expired. An officer took his dog-tags and left in a recon car. For some reason the funeral was held in the palm grove next day and the poet got it all down in the poem like a reporter.

He used a kind of sonnet stanza which he invented. It set up the time and place and led into a kind of funeral oration about the unknown man and his sense of history, or lack of it, and led out again into the scene itself. And it ended on an epitaph with religious benediction tones, ironic, he hoped, but was never sure. There was no message but inevitability, even a kind of fatalistic acceptance of the death, a consequence of one's Americanness which the poet accepted in himself and all the others. It was not a flag-waving poem and it was not an anti-flagwaving poem, a hard balance which the poet always tried for, slipping from one side to the other while his balancing-pole wavered wildly.

The death, the strangely ceremonious funeral (for there was no combat in the island), and the poem were prologue to a new and sudden directive to return to the sinister New Guinea coast and to camp opposite New Britain, Jap territory. They were going to go in with the Marines, and everybody knew what that meant. New Britain was a keystone to the stolen empire and they weren't going to give that one up. What the poet and everyone else suspected was that they had already been judged and sentenced. Somewhere they were already registered in some military obituary as expendable, a diversionary gambit, bait, to make the enemy believe that the real landing would be on the northern coast where the big Japanese naval armada was nursedRabaul, with its enviable whorehouses and hotels and gambling establishments and other luxuries the soldier daydreams about. The whole thing was a trick to draw the Japs away from the real offensive, which was going to be a thousand miles to the north. While they were going to be expendable, which is to say, dead. The poet in fact found out after their escape that they had been reported missing, officially. "Missing" may mean anything from drowned, shot or captured to temporarily misplaced.

The outfit sailed back to New Guinea in small flatboats without escort, reinforcing the feeling of peacetime. This was one peculiar war, the poet thought; it was so full of peace. But then he added, all wars are

alike, mostly peace broken by sudden outbreaks of horror, and he compounded this by concluding that man is always at war, either with himself or with nature, and peace is only a staging area. They were puffing past the islands called D'Entrecasteaux and the poet thought how beautifully the French named their islands.

The flatboats pushed up on the sand between two rusted and burntout Japanese landing craft blasted with shell holes and small machinegun stitching. Every man in that boat got it, the poet ruminated, and began to admire the ruin, forming it in his mind as a terrific sculpture, if properly cut up with an acetylene torch and mounted on a concrete block in front of a neo-Romanesque government building on Constitution Avenue or a soaring glass skyscraper on Madison Avenue.

They sat in tents on the beach and knocked tree crabs out of their shoes and wrote letters. Every night they were routed out by air-raid alerts and could hear the [ap planes and the American pursuit planes called Black Widows, for the Yanks were now flying by night like their enemies. Both were flying low. Everything was close. Tomorrow, if they were lucky, they would set foot on the back porch ofJapan. He hesitated to follow the line of thought.

They reembarked on the little flatboats in helmets and life jackets and squatted between Bofors, anti-aircraft guns manned by their gunners in strange oversized helmets.

"These here little coffins," said a gunner to nobody in particular, "can't do more than four knots:' and spat on the deck. The poet remembered that the eighty-thousand-ton Queen Mary* could do thirty knots zigzagging; four knots was standing still. He could see New Britain in the afternoon light across the straits and everybody knew that the japs were looking right down their throats. But it was no time to think.

They started moving at dusk in a crowd of all kinds of strange craftwooden patrol boats, the poet noted with horror, crowded with sailorsand even two PBY flying boats to evacuate the wounded and dead. Near shore there lay a whole flotilla of landing craft and out at sea a destroyer blinking; they joined the forming pattern. In the dark the motors were all but shut down and they seemed to drift on the black water of a windless sea. It was so still the mosquitoes bit.

At dawn they followed a line of ships into the bay where some of them had already perched on the beach and soldiers were moving toward the jungle with vehicles beside them. There was no firing, no noise to speak of, when a Marine landing barge drew alongside and a solitary soldier stood up and waved a Japanese flag at them in a gesture of triumph. Simultaneously, as if they had been signaled, Japanese planes came down from the mountains with their guns wide open. Most of the men

"The

didn't even have their helmets on and they all fell to the iron deck seeking whatever protection they could get, while the Bofors started their thumping firing straight up. One of the gray wooden patrol boats churned in a curve to turn back out of the Bay when it exploded into a million sticks. The poet's boat continued toward the beach with bombs exploding on both sides of the ship and men and bullets screaming and the Bofors grunting and pumping. The poet heard the CO yell at him, "The galley!" and he turned and followed him into the cramped cooking area where the men were already setting up makeshift operating tables and laying out the gleaming instruments in their cloths. The ship struck the sand and the ramp came down and the men raced to the trees, all but the poet's outfit who were told to stay aboard and get ready for wounded. The poet could see the stretchers moving to the little boat which was now flying the red cross as a signal and in the vain hope that the laps wouldn't strafe them.

They were bombed through the night but not hit. Everything around them was. The casualties were carried into the little galley and sometimes carried out again after a word from one of the doctors, all four of whom were operating elbow to elbow. After an operation, even an amputation, the patient was carried out on deck to make room. A few times the just-operated-on man would be struck again by flying shrapnel or bullets and would be brought back in. The poet was kept busy opening cases of blood plasma with a prying tool. He knelt on the floor in the din and felt hypnotized. Now and then he was called to help with the stretchers and then would return to his cases of plasma. He tried to think of words and thought of triage, which was what the doctors were doing now, winnowing the living from the dead, deciding in a split second whether a man might have a better chance than the next man and never pausing after the decision was made. He shuddered at their responsibility and was glad to be just opening crates.

The CO was a very small fine-looking Georgian, a surgeon whose perfect gendemanliness symbolized authority. The poet had noted that during the months of inactivity, sitting on beaches or doing paperwork in palm orchards, he had developed facial tics which occasioned jokes among his cruder fellows who began to mimic him. The poet wondered if he was cracking up and would be sent home. The tics had increased severely before this assignment and the surgeon's hands trembled when the poet handed him papers to sign. Now during the bombing and the surgery the poet looked at him, smooth-faced and calm, hands moving swiftly and evenly, all the while giving orders in his clear authoritative southern voice, perfectly at home, it seemed, in the world of his vocation, cured of anxiety, though any minute might be his last.

The poet could never write a poem about the night of death, a night which people were experiencing all over the world. Instead he wrote a

prose poem about the next morning on the beach, a bitter and hopeless poem about a dying GI with a Spanish name.

The bombing and the strafing stopped and the flying boats came in and loaded what wounded they could carry back to the base hospitals. Coffins were being loaded onto the flat-decked ships and the poet wondered if the outfit would stay or go. It appeared that our air force had beaten back the enemy because they did not appear again. Rabaul was a ruin though the harbor was dense with their warships of every description, mostly unhit. Our bombing was not all that accurate. In three days the poet's outfit, still on the same boat, puffed back to New Guinea. To the men it was like going home. Hideous New Guinea looked as sweet as San Francisco.

Again they lounged in their tents and slept through the air-raid alerts at night without getting up. They were veterans, they felt. It was safer in the cot. The mosquitoes couldn't hit you there.

The mosquitoes hit the poet. He had started to run a temperature and felt fine but dizzy. One of the officers stuck a thermometer in his mouth and said, "Get your shaving kit. I'm taking you up the hill."

Up the hill was an actual hospital with actual buildings and actual nurses and actual food. The captain was good enough to escort the poet to this hideaway and made the poet sit in the middle between him and the driver for fear he'd fall out. The poet joked about delirium but the doctor only stared ahead. He was probably going to see a nurse.

They watched their ship come in with hearts sinking. A Dutch colonial tramp, no more than twelve thousand tons, if that. If it could do eight knots it would be speeding, a sailor said. He calculated it would take fifteen to twenty days to make it to the West Coast, if it didn't fall apart. Nobody mentioned submarines; they might hear you. More listless than happy, they boarded and watched the patients follow them up the gangplank, some on stretchers, a few in straitjackets, one singing at the top of his voice. Nobody was a passenger, every man was assigned, the poet to ward duty in the ''battle fatigue" section that was kept locked and under constant guard. No matter how well searched, some of the psycho patients, as they were called, had matches and tried to start fires, tried to set the ship on fire or get it torpedoed in the night. Searching for matches was number one, the sergeant in charge told him.

He wrote a poem about the ghoul-ship and the homecoming and the great cheer from the troops as they passed under the Golden Gate Bridge. On the starboard side lay San Francisco, white as an egg, vibratingly within reach, the treasure. But they would never get there. The ship, led by a pilot boat, veered to the north a little and headed for a green island in the Bay and slowly docked.

The rumor spread through the troops like a flash of lightning: they were to be quarantined! There was no way off the island, called with a bitter irony, Angel Island. What had they done; were they contaminated? Were they cursed for serving overseas while soldiers and sailors in neat, pressed uniforms were strutting around San Francisco with their bright-eyed women and floating from bar to bar and bed to bed? An insurrectionary rage swept over the boat as they prepared to land. They had been at sea for twenty-five days, they had been overseas for three years, they had had the worst of it, and now the purgatory was not going to let up. "Look," said one of the soldiers, pointing to the next island up the Bay, "that's Alcatraz," and they all turned and looked, for they were on their own Alcatraz now and a chant started up among the men: "Alcatraz, Alcatraz, Alcatraz," intermixed with "AI Capone, Al Capone," who was the most famous guest on the Rock, as the movies called it.

They were home and they were not home; they were prisoners with wounds and medals-the poet had four bronze stars, which people in the know about military heraldry would stare at as if he were some kind of Hercules, though he had earned them only by being present and accounted for in those four landings which merited such decorations. They were prisoners with wounds and medals and crackups and sicknesses that would never be cured and organs blighted with tropical this and tropical that, and they were incarcerated on Angel Island to stare at San Francisco across the Bay, and Alcatraz their neighbor. And to cap it all, someone said they would be allowed one phone call. The poet began to think in his fashion: the Japs have won the war; the Yanks in charge of us are traitors; we are going to be paraded in Tokyo. He looked up, half-expecting to see a Japanese Rising Sun flag over the island, but no, there was the American flag. And here they were in quarantine. They were processed, they were examined, they made their phone call, they stared at the city, which stared back, they looked at Alcatraz and the flotillas of ships of every kind, even white pleasure boats, yachts and sailboats and fishing boats, which were still allowed outside the submarine nets to bring in the albacore and sea bass and dungeness crab and abalone for the better restaurants. They sat in their drab withered uniforms with drawn yellowish faces and skinny bodies and cursed God. They looked at the peninsula of Tiburon where the millionaires lived in their sparkly mansions overlooking it all, and they were as cut off as if they were still in New Guinea or the Marianas. As much as they tried and pleaded and bribed they were denied permission to visit the magic city. Some talked about swimming over but knew from the folklore that no man had ever swum from Alcatraz to San Francisco and lived to tell the tale. The Rock was safe; they were safe; the tidal currents would sweep every swimmer to his drowning. The bodies would not even be found in San Francisco Bay. They gave up hope.

They were put on wide ferryboats that veered close to the magic city and veered away again, toward the east bay to Oakland where trains were waiting in the Naval Yard to carry them back to the East Coast, sealed trains the poet thought, a new kind of train the poet had never seen before, trains built for the likes of them, the quarantined, trains that a civilian would never set foot on, cars with canvas strung at three levels like a troopship to accommodate as many bodies as possible. They piled in with their barracks bags and sweltered and smoked and played cards for hours before the train started to move.

Were cities to be kept from him, even married, even demobilized? The poet and his wife decided to move to the country, far up in Connecticut, and live among the Lost Generation "Exiles," as they called themselves, because there were no places to rent in wartime New York and the oneroom apartment was too tiny, and, besides, the wife thought the country would be less distracting for the poet. They rented a house which a divorce had emptied. The poet began to study peacetime living nervously.

They visited back and forth with the Exiles and listened to their histories of the twenties that had gone into their writings, for they were all living in the past and had only contempt for the present, and the poet wondered if he too were stuck in a recent past and wouldn't get over it, though his was no cultural past of Steins and Hemingways and Picassos, but only of seas and jungles and cities from which he was always expelled. Well-known and even famous writers showed up at the Exiles' parties, some whose names he knew only from anthologies and encyclopedias, and he was awed. The poet was always polite and never argued with these bigwigs and in a sense only spoke when spoken to. He didn't feel he belonged to their world or even to the world of writers because he had never been in such a world and didn't know how to act.

One visitor, a southerner and poet-critic, a small elegant man radiating influence, was extremely friendly. He had written a thrilling review of the poet's books in which he compared him favorably with T. S. Eliot, and this southerner was the American exponent of Eliot himselfwho, in spite of his reactionary politics, as they were called, was printed in all the best radical magazines and listened to closely. At one gathering he asked the poet what he would do after his year of living in the country was up, for everyone knew that the poet and his wife were living on his severance pay from the army and that they were expecting a baby, and the poet said he had no idea, he hadn't thought about it, and the influential exponent of T. S. Eliot asked if he would be interested in becoming a Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress. It paid very well, the southern gentleman said, and there were no duties unless the Consultant invented some. The poet had heard of sinecures but thought they

existed only in Europe and he said yes, he would like to be the Consultant in Poetry. Thus he was knighted as a Member of the Establishment and it was as if he had had an oak-leaf cluster added to the Congressional Medal of Honor.

Robert Hayden in the 1940's

In 1942, while studying at the University of Michigan, Robert Hayden won a Hopwood Major Award in Poetry for a book-length manuscript entitled The Black Spear. The award was a sizable one, $500, and the judges were eminent: George Dillon, Marianne Moore and John Neihardt. Most of the poems in this manuscript have remained unpublished, for Hayden apparently felt that they were not strong enough to stand up to his own later standards of excellence. His scrupulosity as a writer is well known, but in this case he may have erred on the side of discretion, for there are several poems in The Black Spear that compel attention as finished work, and also point to an early impulse that Hayden later refined greatly, toward framing the injustice of racial discrimination explicitly in his poems.

The manuscript, which is excerpted here with the kind permission of the poet's widow, Mrs. Erma Hayden, carried the following note at its head:

The poems under the tide of "The Black Spear" are part of a larger work in progress which has as its theme the Negro people's struggle for liberation and their participation in the anti-slavery movement and Civil War.

The poems presented here may be regarded as a kind of "lyrical synopsis" of the larger work.

In comments now published in Hayden's Collected Prose, edited by Frederick Glaysner and introduced by William Meredith, Hayden seems to have not so much a cautious view of this early work, as an affectionate one. He certainly seems to have conserved some regard for the poems, as well as for the time in which they were written, and the troubles and triumphs he experienced, as a writer, in finishing them.

Hayden was born in Detroit and as a young man attended Detroit City College (later Wayne State University). Then he did graduate work at the University of Michigan, where his most celebrated teacher was 177

Auden. Hayden later said of the poems begun in that time, "Since I knew that our history had been misrepresented, I wanted to contribute toward an understanding of what our past had really been like. I set out to correct the misconceptions and to destroy some of the stereotypes and cliches which surrounded Negro history." The title for the manuscript came from a passage in Stephen Vincent Benet's John Brown's Body: "0, black-skinned epic, epic with the long black spear, I cannot sing you now, having too white a heart" (Robert Hayden, Collected Prose, University of Michigan Press, 1984, p. 162).

The desire to write this epic was not realized till "The Middle Passage," but this was a poem that Hayden began to write in 1941:

It began in 1941. That fall I returned to the University of Michigan to do advanced work in English, and I planned to submit a manuscript in the Hopwood creative writing competition. I hoped to have enough of The Black Spear, as I first entitled the series, ready to enter in the contest. I continued research on the slave trade at the University of Michigan library I read histories, journals, notebooks, ships' logs. Meanwhile, I was writing poems on the Civil War and poems based on folklore such as "0 Daedalus, Fly Away Home," but I could not do much with the poem that was later to become "Middle Passage." I had a great deal of material, I'd taken many notes, I had gathered all the facts I needed, but I couldn't work out a form, a pattern. Actually, I had tried writing the poem in blank verse but, then, it was too much like Benet, not only in form, but in diction and narrative organization also. When the deadline for submission of manuscripts to the Hopwood competition came, I had finished enough of the other poems in The Black Spear to enter the contest. But "The Middle Passage," which was to be the opening poem, was nowhere near completion. In the spring of 1942 I was awarded the first prize for The Black Spear.

The interviewer who elicited these comments also asked Hayden about the fate of that winning manuscript, and Hayden said (in 1972):

I abandoned the work eventually. But not before I had completed it, more or less, and sent it around to various publishers. A few editors thought it had possibilities, but most of them thought parts of it were better than the whole. And they were right. You see, by the time I'd come to the end of it, The Black Spear was a mixture of styles, idioms. One reason for this was that during the years I worked on the series-and I must have been at it, off and on, for at least seven-my outlook, my style, my technique, were changing. Another reason was that during all that time I'd been teaching, first at the University of Michigan and afterwards at Fisk University, and I almost never had time for really sustained work. I had to write whenever I could find a few hours after everything else was done. And of course there were other difficulties too. I had energy and enough stamina, though, not to let circumstances defeat me entirely. I did finish The Black Spear and write poems such as "Ballad of Remembrance" as well. But The Black Spear in its final form was fragmented, a mixture. I was able to salvage the best of the poems I'd written for it, but I lost interest in the project as I'd planned it originally. Obviously, I didn't lose interest in writing history poems, for "Runagate" and "Nat Turner," for example, were written afterwards. And "The Dream" in my latest book, Word.s in the Mourning Time, combines two of the poems I had written for the series a long time ago. Perhaps some day I will gather all my history pieces and publish them in one volume, and what started out as The Black Spear will have a different sort of

organization and a new tide but will be essentially the book I first tried to write many, many years ago (Collected Prose, pp. 187-188).

Hayden called Auden his "third poet," after the first two whom he met, Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen. If Hughes and Cullenalong with Stephen Vincent Benet! - inspired in Hayden the ambition to attack poetically some themes and topics that were still conspicuously absent from too much American poetry, then Auden seems also to have had decisive influence in encouraging Hayden's technical gift as a poet. The poems published here show the confluence of these two elements. There are the long lines of the first three poems, at times both relaxed and incantatory, and there is their explicit comment on social relations; and there is also the neon modernist poem "Schizophrenia," in which another modern topic is approached in a way rather more predictably technical. Understanding these two poles of poetic expression, and finding a way to unite them so as to be able to write about deep personal experience of problems as much social as individual, became one of the motives of Hayden's later poetry, and it's in "The Middle Passage" that the "impersonal" material finds a plangent and very personal expression, as narrative and fact are set poetically against song, refrain, personal misery. It's instructive, as well as moving, to read these early poems and see how the problem seems to split the poet in two. In 1941, there was no escape for the poet (nor perhaps was any desired) from the problem of uniting the extremes of experience and feeling that were likely to be felt by the man who was American and black, with the ambitions of the poet who was serious and accomplished.

- Reginald Gibbons

(Untitled)

I am the secret, midnight voice you do not hear, the scheming mouth held down so close to earth its whispers rise like a familiar spirit from the ground.

I am the prayer upon whose slow and noiseless stone the axe is sharpened, and from the grinding fly sparks that shall set slow fire to burning in your walls.

I am the mouth and the voice and the prayer, and I am the unguessed silence that wears the mask of song and crouches watchful-eyed beneath a fiddle-tune,

I am the match thrown carelessly into dry grass, the hidden weapon - the long black spear cached under rags and filth and sharpened on a dream.

(Untitled)

They are sitting by the Cumberland, the Suwanee, the Mississippi, the Tennessee; by the long deep rivers that have no name but sorrow:

A people in chains, a people exiled, earthflung, whip, scarred, hunted, reviled; gargoyles of oppression, watchers of stars, knowers of earth.

They are standing in slave-pens, wrists and ankles raw from the cankering chain; on auctionblocks, in coffles in the courthouse square, bought, sold, bargained for like beasts of the field.

They are moving in subtle and treacherous dignity in the Big House dining rooms, there watching, learning; the plotting mind concealed behind the white erasure of a smile; the plotting hands staining the silver like a tarnish;

They are planting in the ricefields of Georgia and singing, "Trouble don't last always"; they are worming the tobacco leaves of Virginia and Kentucky; they are offering their beautiful, sorrow-mothered bodies to the planters' sons in the brothels of New Orleans.

They are rolling that cotton down, rolling that cotton down all over the Southland, with a song about Liza, Mandy, Jane; they are building up the levees, making roads, building cool sweet houses for old Pharoah, making flower-gardens and winding stairs for old Pharoah and his daughters.

They are bleeding at the whipping-posts, rebellious flesh torn by the rawhide, rebellious mouth closed on its secret, on its pain;

They are lying in caneleaves, potato-hole, thicket, mire, waiting for the North Star, the hushed signal, waiting for the one chance;

They are hiding in swamp-shadow, hearing the blood, hounds nearer and nearer, knowing death the one clear road;

They are running, running, running into night that is a way and a promise to them; into blackness toward the far shining.

(Untitled)

He had no time for pulling at his pipe And letting his worn mind drift with the smoke, This way and that, among vain images

Of things that would not ever come again; They needed him inside the house to use

Such doctor's skill as he could summon without Benefit of doctor's instruments

To pry apart the jaws of suffering locked In savage hold upon the wounded men.

He would go back inside after a little

To the broken bodies, the moaning, the stench of death; Meanwhile, let him sit here alone and smoke, Savoring the warm tobacco smell

That merged with tentative sweet fragrances Of jessamine into something sorrow-bright And palpable that reached out from the dusk And gently touched the sleeve of memory

This ruined house had once been Jessamine Hall; He'd driven out to parties here from Charleston Once or twice Was it so long ago

Since there'd been dancing, music, laughing girls And high rooms glittering with lights and mirrors?

Yes, it was long ago, and he could not See clearly now the faces of the girls, Nor think of any of the tunes Despair And nausea whirled in the mirrorless rooms

His pipe went out, he lighted it again And walked into the garden, trampled now And crushed by hooves and wheels of war, though here And there he glimpsed the feathery Acacia.

(Oh, ruined garden of the South)

He looked beyond it toward the empty quarters, And saw again the child-brained niggers fleeing At brazen cockcrow of the Yankee bugles

In black betrayal blacker than themselves; They ran the roads like apes let out of cages, Their blighting shadows monstrous upon The ravaged honey-garden of the South.

Let the damned theorists warming their behinds In library chairs, with paunchy rhetoric Declare the South fought for its sovereignty Alone; but he and thousands more were fighting To keep the slave a slave as well- to keep The black blood dammed

He took a long deep drink Of scented air and turned toward the house.

Just as he reached the steps he heard the roar Of Yankee guns and saw the sentries running And a full moon rising over Jessamine Hall.

Schizophrenia

(Ed Dalton, his poem)

We were trying to re-arrange the split shards of the major illusion, but it was blitzkrieg's year, and the bombs were falling.

I saw a man in a cracked gold mirror and a man in surrealist streets where murderers awaited him, and I ran shouting:

One of these is I and the other is I, but which I am they won't tell me.

We were trying to harvest the fragments of our scattered spirits, but it was blitzkrieg's year, and the bombs were falling.

I saw a pale girl, savage of eye, fondling a headless doll, and a boy smashing a clock's face, and I wept, screaming:

One of these tasks is mine, and the other is mine, but which is mine they won't tell me.

They locked us up in padded cells with spiraling walls, shouting: "Be quiet now, you crazy bastards, for it is blitzkrieg's year, and the bombs are falling."

I heard the voices of dead heroes on rusty gramophones

and the wailing of hysterical shortwave sopranos, and I wept, laughing: and nobody would tell me why I was laughing and nobody needed to tell me why I was laughing.

The Family Baumann: A Spy Story

Robert Watson

The presence of all the paperbacks (with swastikas on their covers) in newsstands over the past few years, stories about Hitler and World War II, makes me think of a Nazi spy who lived in my neighborhood in Rawpack, New Jersey, when I was a boy. Not many years ago I saw his wife. She was sitting, destitute and senile, on the porch of the Cedars Nursing Home. It was said that Walter Vogel, the rich industrialist, had installed her there at his expense, after rescuing her from a forlorn oneroom apartment on the East Side. "The nurses say she doesn't remember anything," my mother told me.

The Cedars Nursing Home was the Woodrows' old house. It was still painted brown, still looking like a gingerbread castle with its three little towers and the stained-glass window over the front door. She sat sternly, her hair drawn back tight in the same bun, wearing amber as she had always worn amber. An aluminum walker stood in front of her green, straight-back chair-in the old days when my sister Jane and I peeked through the Baumanns' window in the warm fall evenings we would see her sitting sternly in amber before her cello, an aluminum music stand in front of her while she waited for little August to distribute the music to her and Dr. Baumann. She looked much the same now. From where she sat she could see the top of the Magnifico Apartment Hotel, a sixstory affair with ugly concrete balconies on Park Drive, where once all the houses had been built, not with wood as on Columbus Avenue, but with brick, or stone, or stucco, mostly in imitation Elizabethan or Georgian style. The Baumanns had lived in a brick house on the site of the Magnifico, when as little children, around 1930, shortly after Hilda came from Berlin to be our maid, Jane and I first became aware of their existence. At first, from the stories Hilda told us, we thought of the Baumanns as dwelling in the magic woods of Hansel and Gretel not far from Little Red Riding Hood's house. Hilda told the stories first in German and then in English. We gathered that the Baumanns were

King and Queen of the forest of our books and dreams, and their son, five-year-old August, the Prince.

Always invited Christmas and New Year's Eve to the Baumanns' on Park Drive, Hilda was wild about the family Baumann; who could match the brilliance of Herr Doctor Otto Baumann, the great chemist and industrialist, Executive Vice-President of Vogel Fabricant, manufacturers of dyestuffs? Although Vogel at the outbreak of World War I had cut its connections with the German parent and changed its name to Bird Chemicals, Inc., to Hilda it was always Vogel-and who could match the Kultur of Frau Baumann or the promise of August, their only child, who had been given a little violin on his fourth birthday?Jane and I didn't mind. We knew that we couldn't compete with the son of the gods in Valhalla, a heaven which certainly contained a room like the combination library and music room in the Baumanns' house, where we were never to be invited, a room I imagine now lined with plaster busts of Goethe, Wagner, Schiller; complete sets of Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, in dark mahogany bookcases with glass doors; a grand piano; a porcelain bowl filled with bitter chocolates; a dachshund sleeping on a red satin chair; butterfly specimens on the wall next to a stuffed boar's head; a collection of long-stemmed clay pipes and ornate beer mugs on the mantel; and guarding the sliding doors, their Doberman pinscher.

On Friday afternoons in winter when Hilda gave us hot chocolate at the kitchen table, we had a Baumann story with our cookies. All the servants in our town had Thursday and Sunday afternoons off. After the lunch dishes on Thursdays, Hilda went to the Baumanns' and joined their butler and two maids (Klein, his wife and sister). They would all take the bus to Union City where they would attend a GermanAmerican club. In the evening they were joined by Gunther, Hilda's fiance of four years' standing. Gunther had come to America in 1928 from Berlin, where he had been an engineer, and Hilda, a legal stenographer, had followed him to New Jersey in 1929. Gunther supported himself as a house painter. On Sunday afternoons Gunther always called for Hilda at the back door carrying a rolled umbrella, wearing spats and a Homburg. While he drank his coffee, or in warm weather a bottle of dark beer, Jane and I were required to perform before we were given apple strudel. Jane sang "0 Tannenbaum" or "Die Lorelei"; I counted to zwanzig or recited "So wie eine Rose." Gunther corrected our pronunciation, and they would depart at three-thirty. Father said Gunther returned with her Sunday nights at exactly nine, never a minute after.

One Friday during cocoa but before cookies, Hilda cut some pictures out of one of the German magazines that Dr. Baumann gave to his servants, who then passed them on to Hilda. They were photographs of a man wearing a little black mustache and on his arm was a band, with a

design Jane noticed was the same as one repeated all over the front of our mantelpiece. Father said it was an Indian design meaning "lightning." Hilda called it a swastika. "That is Adolph Hitler, the greatest man in Germany," Hilda said. But we weren't interested until Hilda came to the part she had told us so many times after our recitations when our mouths were filled with cookies. "When I was a little girl we had a war. After the war everything was very dear. My father lived in a big house like the Baumanns'. Then we were poor. One day I was sent to the dairy for an egg. I carried a whole bushel basket full of money and the lady at the dairy said that I didn't have enough for the egg. We had no coal, and to keep warm we had to burn some of the furniture. For a month one winter we all stayed in bed and had nothing to eat but soup made from potato peels.

"This man," she said, pointing to the picture of Hitler that she placed on the dresser of her attic room, "will give the people in Germany lots to eat." Jane and I munched on, listening with the same vague curiosity we had when a bum knocked at the outside kitchen door, then sat on the back hall steps eating a meat-loaf sandwich, washed down with a big pint jar of coffee; or with the same curiosity we had when watching the garbage pickers on Tuesday and Friday evenings as they pawed through the coffee grounds and sucked the breakfast orange peels.

Hilda was seldom satisfied with us on Fridays, the day after her visits to the Baumanns' and the German-American Club. The only day I remember when she talked to Gunther about us with the same tones of awe and affection she used when speaking of little August Baumann was the day Jane and I received a package from our grandparents who were touring Europe that winter. The box contained Tyrolean costumes. Tears came to Hilda's eyes when she saw the familiar garments; on Sunday Gunther arrived with a borrowed Leica. Hilda braided Jane's hair. I posed, feeling very foolish, in a green velvet hat, lederhosen, and high socks. Gunther gave Jane and me each a copy of that photograph for Christmas. Hilda framed a print and placed it on her dresser along with photographs of the Baumanns (taken in their music room with their servants, the dachshund on Mrs. Baumann's thin lap and the Doberman pinscher at Dr. Baumann's feet), of Hilda's deceased mother and father standing stiffly in a park, and of Adolph Hitler, the magazine photograph, pasted on a cardboard backing and placed in a Woolworth frame.

"Deutschland aber alles; Father said in his college German when Hilda mentioned Hitler. We had our first radio, and Hilda was allowed to hear the seven o'clock news before she returned to the kitchen to finish the dishes. "Ah, but Mr. Hamilton," Hilda would reply in the beginning, "both Gunther and Dr. Baumann say In 1932, when Hilda had been with us for almost three years, she began to irritate Father. The moment she pronounced the words

"Baumann" or "Hitler," Father suddenly became deaf. And Hilda, though conscious of her position as servant, never learned to keep Hitler and Baumann out of her conversation with my father.

One evening, though, when my parents thought I was listening to "Little Orphan Annie," I overheard Father say to Mother, "Either she keeps her opinions to herself or out she goes That man is guilty. He kidnapped and killed that child."

Mother didn't reply because she knew Father would not approve of her permitting Hilda to listen to the reports of the Lindbergh trial from Flemington. The day Bruno Hauptmann, a German immigrant, was arrested for the kidnapping and death of Charles Lindbergh's baby son, the German-American community became furious. Hilda called both Klein and Gunther on the telephone. Dr. Baumann himself wrote a letter to the New York Times explaining how the ransom money in the tin cans buried in Hauptmann's garage must have been concealed there by a party unknown to Hauptmann. Nothing would change Hilda's mind. Father told her that she could either keep still about Hauptmann or go work for the Baumanns or someone else. Hilda said that she would stay right here and convince Father of his innocence; nothing would budge her; then she would be glad to seek employment elsewhere. The morning after Hauptmann's electrocution Hilda cried in her attic room and refused to come down all day. Mother told Father that Hilda had a bad cold so he took us all to the Foxgrove Cafeteria for dinner. Jane and I had never been to a cafeteria before and we hoped for more electrocutions before the year was out. Hilda was sullen until Sunday when Gunther came. That Sunday afternoon Jane and I did not have to recite in German. For the first time, to our surprise, Gunther scolded Hilda, and we caught the names "Hauptmann," "Hitler," and "Baumann" several times. Hilda lowered her head, not saying a word, except to offer Gunther more coffee and cookies. On Monday morning when Father kissed Mother goodbye, Hilda held his overcoat for him and brushed it with a whisk broom, a service she had never before performed. In the months that followed Hilda's references to the Baumanns and Hitler grew fewer and fewer. Father thought Gunther had applied to Bird Chemicals for a job and had been turned down.

In the years following Hauptmann's electrocution Hilda's visits to the Baumanns were fewer. On her Thursday afternoons off Hilda would occasionally take Jane and me to the movies, but only to films she felt were suitable. Walking home from the movies one Thursday, I saw August for the first time, and never saw him again until I was twelve, when we both joined Boy Scout Troop Number 6, which met in the basement of the Methodist church. A large gray Packard driven by Klein turned through the two pillars marking the entrance to the Baumanns' circular drive. Klein, in his black chauffeur's uniform, got

out, walked around and opened the back right-hand door. A fat blond boy carrying a violin case floated up the steps, preceded by Klein, who opened the front door for him. Hilda waved at Klein when he descended to put the Packard in the garage, but Klein did not see her. Later, thinking about the fatness of August - his father and mother were very thin - I pictured Klein, his wife and sister remembering their long winters of potato-peel soup and popping nourishing bits of chocolate, cookies, cake into little August, their Siegfried, whenever Mrs. Baumann was not watching. These childless servants stuffed August like a turkey, each morsel a kiss, a reserve of fat for the years ahead which might perhaps hold only potato-peel soup until the return of a Germanic heroic age. Nothing pleased Jane and me more than to know that August was a fat boy. We thought he was funny looking, but he went to a private day school and we went to Public School Number 7.

Hilda married Gunther in 1936 when I was eleven; they had been engaged for eight years. Gunther, who had gradually given up his spats, his Homburg, his rolled umbrella, who in 1935 insisted that he and Hilda speak only English when alone, had at last been hired as a draftsman by Curtiss-Wright. No wife of his would work.

Hilda was replaced by Anne, a seventeen-year-old second-generation Polish girl, who read True Confessions and every movie magazine on the stands. She taught us the polka. S1 ,e taught my sister how to use a curling iron. She colored a picture in a newspaper contest; the prize, three free tickets to RKO's to see Joe Penner, a famous comedian, who would keep saying "Wanna buy a duck?" and everyone would laugh. She won and took Jane and me. Anne was fun.

In 1937 I saw August again every Friday evening at Boy Scouts. He was fatter than ever, a junior Hermann Goering in appearance, and like Goering, August apparently loved uniforms. He was the only scout in our troop with a complete uniform, right down to regulation socks and shoes. The rest of us owned only the shirt and neckerchief. At Scouts August never said anything. He just did as he was told and perspired until his shirt was wet. He arrived alone and walked home alone. The Friday his father was invited-or perhaps invited himself-to show slides of camping in Germany-was the only Friday at Scouts when August looked even vaguely comfortable. Dr. Baumann, a thin man of medium height with a large black mustache and gold-rimmed glasses, showed us slides of scouts in the Black Forest, scouts climbing white-peaked mountains, scouts singing Lieder around open fires. He walked in time to his words, delivered in slightly stilted English, while August worked the slide machine. In the semidarkness Dr. Baumann's long pointer sliced the air like a fencing foil. Then he would pound twice on the floor, a signal for August to change slides. No one snickered at Dr. Baumann. After the slides Mr. McRay, the scoutmaster, pushed a pair of parallel bars to the center of the floor. Dr. Baumann reappeared from the cloak-

room wearing a white polo shirt, black tapered pants with a white stripe down each side, and basketball shoes. His glasses were taped down at each side and at the bridge of his nose. He talked a moment about physical fitness. Then for about half an hour he performed brilliantly on the parallel bars, while we alternately watched him and August, waiting for Dr. Baumann to show off his son and student. What a sight it would be to see August struggling to balance that great sack of a stomach upside down on the parallel bars. We were denied this pleasure. But in the years to come August and his father would provide us with several unexpected, undreamed-of pleasures.

On the Saturday morning after his father had instructed the scouts, I was passing the library on my way home from the shoemaker's. August stepped out just as I passed the library door. He had a black leather binocular case over his shoulders and was carrying a small book. He didn't speak and I didn't speak; we both walked slowly hoping the other would pull ahead. I didn't mean to, but I found myself asking, "What book you got there, August?"

"Waterfowl of Northeastern United States," he said.

We were silent for about two blocks. One block more and August would disappear behind the pillars into the circular drive. Klein had died of a stroke, Hilda told us on one of her infrequent visits. Dr. Baumann now did all the driving himself; no more did August ride to music lessons, the library, and Country Day. Thinking of Klein, of Hilda, the question popped out: "You still for Hitler?" In our heavily Republican neighborhood, the question was little more insulting than asking, "You still for Roosevelt?"

August tightened his ample buttocks, pulled in the famous stomach, his blue eyes getting that vague inward look of door-to-door salesmen who have carefully memorized their pitch and who if interrupted must start again from the beginning. Now I would have the chance to beat him up, just the way Ed Walsh beat me up when I explained, giving all my father's arguments, why Landon would make a better president than Roosevelt, the only president we ever had whose wife could, I said, eat an apple through a picket fence. Then Ed had hit me. August tightened, but said only, to my disappointment, "Yes, I'm for Hitler." And fell silent. Before I could think of my next words we were in front of the two stone pillars at the entrance to the circular drive before the Baumanns' house; August, without a word of farewell, turned in and walked on.

"Hitler stinks. He kills Jews," I said in desperation, forgetting that I had called Roosevelt "Rosenfeld" for Ed Walsh's benefit. August gave no sign he had heard.

"What's the matter, fat boy?" I said, not really loud enough for him to hear. It was Saturday and maybe Dr. Baumann was home, hidden by the brick wall, and within earshot. I crossed the street and dropped the

shoe box on purpose and turned to pick it up. I could see August leaning against a tree in his front yard looking at me through his binoculars.

Two years later I saw August, to my bewilderment, waddling down a corridor of our high school. He had always gone to Country Day. Now instead of the floppy stomach August had when I had last seen him, he had an enormous chest, as if during the last two years his stomach had risen half a foot. He didn't speak. I saw no reason to speak. I hadn't seen him at Scouts because I found it more fun to take girls to the movies and afterwards go to the Soda King. Anne was teaching me to dance and I could practice at the Soda King with the juke box. Soon I would take clarinet lessons and be another Benny Goodman when I got old enough. I nailed some taps to my shoes, but Mother made me take them off.

At dinner that evening I mentioned having seen August at high school. I wondered why he had dropped out of Country Day.

"Because Bird has canned Dr. Baumann," said Father, trying hard not to seem pleased. "I got it straight from Walter Vogel's brother-in-law Bill Wiley at the bank. I'm not a bit surprised. The government almost confiscated Vogel's in World War I. Well, two weeks ago Walter Vogel returned unexpectedly to the plant in the evening. He had forgotten a bracelet he was going to give to Mrs. Vogel at breakfast the next day for her birthday. He saw a light on in Baumann's office and went in without knocking. There was Dr. Baumann in his underwear about to put on a Nazi Bund uniform he had kept in his office safe. Walter fired Baumann on the spot and gave him a month to get out of the Park Drive house. It's a company house, you know."

"Poor Mrs. Baumann, poor August," said Mother, "I wonder what Hilda will say?"

"I'll have another helping of ice cream, if you please," said Father. Mother rang, and Anne, thinking we had finished, entered with her hair up in curlers.

Our first meeting in the corridor had set the tone of our relationship; August and I ignored each other, and continued to ignore each other even after the Baumanns had moved into a frame house, much decayed, three houses down from us on our street, Columbus Avenue. Dr. Baumann, we assumed, had found a job as a traveling salesman, for each Sunday morning he would load up the old Packard with two heavy suitcases and would not reappear until Friday night. August always walked to and from school alone; he never played "one-a-cat" in the street, never, I heard, went to Boy Scouts anymore. He didn't even join the high school orchestra. Sometimes I saw him go off on his bicycle alone wearing a small knapsack. Walking past their house on warm Sunday evenings, we often heard Mrs. Baumann on the cello accompanied by Dr. Baumann and August on violin. It was classical music.

Shortly after the Baumann's move to Columbus Avenue Hilda

dropped by with her little girl. Jane said to Hilda, "The Baumanns have moved into Green's house."

"Yes, I've heard," said Hilda. And dropped the subject. If she ever visited the Baumanns in their new home we never heard about it.

One afternoon I was up in the attic trying to find an old steamer rug to take on a hayride our Hi-Y Club was having. Out of the side of the gabled window I could look over the backyards, all neatly hedged for privacy. From that height I could look down into the backyard of the Baumanns where August at that moment was fitting together barbells from a neat stack of weights on the ground. Up and down he lifted the weights, up and down. Up and down until I got tired of watching and went downstairs to tell Mother I couldn't find the steamer rug.

In July I went to Camp Moccasin up in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. About two miles away in the woods, much to my delight, was Deutschland, a Nazi-Bund camp. The name of the camp was written on the roof of the long, one-story lodge in large, white Gothic letters. It was a weekday when we hiked over to see it. The place was deserted. I had half expected to catch a glimpse of Dr. Baumann and August in full Bund uniforms, goose-stepping in the large field in front of the lodge, yelling "Heil Hitler," and giving straight-armed salutes. One camper threw a cherry bomb left over from the Fourth ofJuly onto the porch. There was no reply from Deutschland; the only response was from Gene, our counselor, who made us put down the rocks we had picked up for window smashing.

That summer the Bund did use the camp at least once because it was raided by the sheriff, and Fritz Kuhn, the leader of the Nazi Party in America, was arrested and put in jail. The New York Herald-Tribune had a photograph of the sheriff posed at the door of Camp Deutschland. We tacked it up on the little bulletin board in our tent. A few years later the sheriff made the New York papers again: he was accused of operating a network of stills, one on the site of the abandoned Camp Deutschland.

In the fall, Jerry Carpenter, our postman, a great gossip and diligent reader of all postcards, told us that Dr. Baumann had disappeared. Jerry mysteriously hinted that the Post Office Department had more than a casual interest in the affairs of Dr. Baumann. We imagined that Jerry, who was always a couple of hours behind in his deliveries, drinking tea and coffee with elderly widows, was steaming open the Baumann mail. Mrs. Cartwright, whose front porch entertained Jerry's mail bag for a half-hour each morning, hinted that she knew more than she could let on about Dr. Baumann and that she was in contact with some government agency which had sworn her to secrecy.

The most exciting day of our careers in high school came two years later-it was either the day of the Southside football game on Thanksgiving or the day after Pearl Harbor. The day after Pearl Harbor we all went wild, including Mr. Trumper, our principal. He held a fire drill and

unknown to him the mayor asked the factories to blow their whistles at the same time just to see if everyone in town could hear in case we ever had an air raid. Everyone, even the teachers, thought we were about to be bombed. We all swarmed on the sidewalk and did one of our cheers, "Hit 'em again, hit 'em again, harder, harder." The teachers fidgeted, wondering whether we would be better off bombed on the sidewalk or in the building. Mr. Trumper, confused by the factory whistles, was trying to get the mayor and the Board of Education on the phone for instructions but the lines were jammed. A bunch of us from our home room slipped away and went downtown for a pizza pie. All the boys were delighted with the news. We were bored with school. After finish, ing off his pizza, one boy, a senior who was flunking, went to the Post Office, joined up, and never came back.

On our block all the neighbors immediately started to put their shoulders to the wheel. Our first duty to the country, we believed, was to watch the Baumann house. Every afternoon for the first month I took up my post at the attic window. Every evening I walked past their house to see whether the ominous shadow of Dr. Baumann would show behind the drawn blinds. When Mrs. Sweet returned from Canada she had news. She had been sent there by her husband, because prices were lower, to buy scotch, butter, and other items against a shortage.

"1 tell you, May," she said to Mother, "sure as 1 am sitting here, 1 saw him. 1 saw him ride past in a bus in Montreal. I was crossing the street and the bus was just pulling out from the curb. And there he was in the window seat behind the driver. Only he had shaved off his mustache."

Most of us had assumed that Dr. Baumann was in Berlin sitting at the right hand of Hitler. But wouldn't he though, perhaps, be more useful as a spy? We all watched the house a little closer to see some signs that August and his mother were ready to bolt. But Dr. Baumann never returned to the house on our street, and August and his mother never bolted, never went anywhere much but the A&P and the Lutheran church.

"Poor Mrs. Baumann," it became in 1942, when the notice went up on the bulletin board of the Lutheran church: Lady offers private instruction in cello, and the French and German languages. And children began to appear in the late afternoons with violins or cellos or books, where only the vegetable man and Jerry Carpenter, the mailman, had stopped for the past few years. We said, and even our Jewish neighbors said, "Poor Mrs. Baumann." Her husband had not only betrayed his country, Mother said then, but had abandoned his wife, leaving her behind with a child to support.

Though sympathy rained on Mrs. Baumann, none rained on August. He was dry and aloof. He didn't even take on a paper route or sell magazines or work at a soda fountain after school. He was six-feet-two. The lonely afternoons at the barbells and pulleys made August's stom-

ach and buttocks shrink; the weight moved to his chest, his arms, his shoulders. We might back then have pitied a fat boy who was a birdwatcher, but not a blond, thickly muscular young man who glowered at anyone who approached. Was he loyal to his father, his father's homeland? We didn't know. We saw in the papers that Germans had been captured in Yorkville and on Long Island for sending coded messages to Germany over high-frequency transmitters. We did know that our country was mushrooming with aircraft-engine plants, all carefully camouflaged. We could hear the hum of the great motors being tested all day and all night. We could see the searchlights fanning the sky for enemy aircraft that never appeared. Gunther, whom we never suspected of anything more serious than a narrow dedication to work, was busy at the drawing board designing the engines that would carry the bombs soon to level whole blocks in the city of his and Hilda's and the elder Baumanns' birth. Perhaps one of these bombs would send Dr. Baumann himself to a grave of rubble. Then I joined the Navy.

I was in a naval hospital in 1944, suffering from a light case ofbronchitis, when I got Mother's letter telling me that August Baumann had been killed in the Battle of the Bulge and that my brother-in-law Bill, Jane's husband, had not been killed, only wounded in the shoulder. They had enlisted in the army on the same day. No one, not even Walter Vogel, knew where Dr. Baumann had gone. He had disappeared in 1939. One morning in 1950, six years after August's death, I found an item in the morning's paper:

Dr. Otto Baumann, 61, died at his home today after a long illness. He is survived by his wife, Urania Wagner Baumann of Rawpack and a brother, Hermann Baumann of Bonn, West Germany. For many years Dr. Baumann was a vice-president of Bird Chemical Company, now a division of Argo Drug. Services will be private. No flowers.

Time Exposure

John J. Clayton

I've been thinking what it must have cost her, her transformation from little Jewish girl in Kishinev at the turn of the century to a modern American woman-a career woman in New York-and then to fade, like a shooting star burning out, into marriage with "your poor fool of a father." I've been thinking about their marriage.

The staircase to my study is lined on both walls with family photographs. One side of the family on each side of the stairs-my father's side, my mother's. Facing each other now: my father in shirt-sleeves, an idealistic-looking boy-my father and his younger brother with that tough, cynical grin-against a brick wall in Chicago-and with them their father in short hair and mustache, dapper little man, his hands on the shoulders of his sons. And across the stairway, my mother, black hair in ringlets, older brothers and sisters surrounding her, she the youngest, the pet. Her father, in skullcap, with heavy beard and intense, wise eyes. Her mother looks thick like a peasant; hard work shows on her face even in this studio portrait. My father's family looks American; my mother's, like immigrant Jews. Black coats, heavy silk dresses. For my mother to turn herself into a bright, gay woman of the twenties, a successful fashion buyer, must have been like skipping a century. To love and marry and relapse into her mother's role must have been a relief.

I never understood it when she'd hear swing music on the old Victrola radio, mahogany case like a miniature Gothic church, and dance in circles on the kitchen linoleum, flirting with an elegant invisible partner, singing in her throaty cigarette voice and smiling a public smile. "You think your mother is old-fashioned, don't you? You don't think I'm a modern woman?"

Her only audience, I waited.

"God grant me long life as true as I'm standing here I was in Flo Ziegfeld's gorgeous apartment-some apartment, let me tell you-over

the theater, and he said to me, 'Myra, you're something special. You know what's going on. Where did your family come from?'

"'From Russia, Mr. Ziegfeld,' I told him. 'I was born in Kishinev.' Well- the whole world knew Kishinev because of the terrible pogrom. "'No!' he said. I said, 'Yes, Mr. Ziegfeld. From Russia. I came to America when I was five.' 'My God,' he said, 'and you are every bit an American girl.'''

This was like getting a Ph.D. in American Girliana. Did Ziegfeld really say that? It doesn't matter: it's her imagination of herself that matters to me.

'Myra,' Flo Ziegfeld said to me, 'if you ever want to come to work for me' - he meant in the Follies - 'you just come to see me.' Of course, he was joking - would your mother ever do such a thing? But I charmed him. Well? You don't think so?"

She waited for me to dare laugh at her.

"What? You don't think your mother used to be beautiful? You think I was always a Musfrau and a frump?" She'd find a couple of quarters in the pocket of her housedress and place one between her knees, one between her calves. "You see? This is how Ziegfeld made his girls stand. To test their legs, ferstaste?"

Once - she sighed - once she sailed first-class on the France and ate at the Captain's table. A Rothschild fell in love with her. And look-look how she'd come down in the world. "Your poor father. A slave to his brother. But a better man God never made. He can't help being what he is. I can't help being what I am. I fell in love. Do me something-your mother fell in love."

And so now, because of love, we lived in Jackson Heights, Long Island - in a dismal, red-brick apartment building on a street ofred-brick apartment buildings. The wrong side of the East River, Manhattan a short but shameful subway ride away.

"He means well, the poor fool. Can he help being what he is?"

"And now!" she'd sing out. "Voila! Isn't your mother a stunning woman?" Hands lifted: a statue. Her one good black linen outfit, a blue silk scarf at the throat.

"It's true, Ben," my father would roar. "She's a goddamn stunning woman, and look what a bum she married."

He called in reservations at the Sea Fare in the name of"Judge Kagan." We drove the 1937 Pontiac, obsessively polished, into Manhattan over the Queensboro Bridge. The downtown lights flashed like the jewels my mother wasn't wearing.

He was an actor, not a patron, at the Sea Fare: Leo Kagan as "Judge" Kagan. I was fearful lest the headwaiter unmask him - "You, a judge? Don't you know it's against the law to impersonate a judge?" But no-it was always, "Follow me, please, Judge." The judge winked my way.

Five times at least during the meal my father computed, recomputed, the waiter's tip. "We're getting pretty decent service, right, Ben?" Or else, he'd flash the fancy racetrack watch my uncle, my rich uncle Cy, gave him for his birthday: "You see how slow he is with the bread and butter? I can predict what kind of tip that schmuck is going to wind up with."

And, cupping his hand so my mother could pretend not to hear, he'd whisper, "I wouldn't give that schmuck the sweat off my balls."

Partly, I suppose, it was spending the money; partiy, it was having to be on his best behavior in front of my mother. But always on the way home, things fell apart. Another driver would pass him or block his way or squeeze him over. Dad would pull alongside and yell out the window, "Who gave you a goddamned license? You ought to have your head examined."

No answer.

"You want to make something out of it? Get out of the goddamned car!" Then, at the light, my father-maybe 220 pounds, face red, shoulders hunched-jammed on the hand brake, slammed out of the car, and pounded his palm on the other guy's rolled-up window. "Come out of there, you fag."

Never once did this lead to a fist fight - no matter how I wished. But always it led to misery when he stormed back to our car. My mother would refuse to acknowledge his existence, and it would drive him wild-he'd thump the dash, explain and explain, "That son of a bitchdid you see that turn, Myra?"

And she'd sigh, in her cultured, fake-British voice, "Well, and isn't it nice weather, Ben? D'you think it's likely to rain tomorrow?"

Louder and louder he'd explain. Finally: "Goddamned woman! Goddamn you!" And silence choked off the air in the car.

In this roundabout way he got to aim his anger at its real object, as he played out the drama of his own worthlessness. Did I understand this in some way? Did I understand that he needed to goad her into despising him-so that then he could hate her for despising him and not have to hate himself so much? As she used him-used him to excuse her retreat from complicated modern America? So both of them could be justified in how they imagined their lives?

Next morning, she'd be her most charming, regal self, telling stories. Her story of Old Man Bonwit of Bonwit Teller's.

"You think I'm your ordinary housewife?" she'd say over breakfast. "Listen: When you were born, Old Man Bonwit, God rest his soul, called me up to see him. I'd been away from the business for three years. Well. I dressed up in my smartest suit - you'll laugh: there was a moth hole in the collar: I wore a brooch to hide it - and I took a cab down to Bonwit's. When I came in, his secretary announced me, and I could hear his voice over the intercom, 'Myra Bresloff? Send her in, send her in.' 199

Well. So I went in, he stood up from his desk and took both my hands. 'Myra Bresloff. Myra Bresloff.' I can see him to this day. A little man growing bald-but smart. 'I'm Myra Kagan now, Mr. Bonwit,' I told him. 'Myra, you can name your price.' 'How sweet you are,' I told Old Man Bonwit, 'but I have a little boy, my dear, and I believe a woman belongs with her family.' 'Is there nothing I can do to change your mind?' 'If anyone could, you could,' I told him. 'But my family.' 'I admire that, Myra. Every woman should take lessons from you.' So-that was that, you understand. You came first. But when I got home that afternoon, there was a bouquet of flowers. That was a big man. Well-so, you came first. You see? Now, what kind of mother do you have?"

"A bitter mother."

"Bitter? Who's bitter? Are you crazy? I'm a happy wife and mother."

When she was just twenty-five, twenty-six, Old Man Bonwit sent her to Paris for the first time; then he sent her every spring to preview the fall lines. She stayed at the Georges Cinq. Rich men danced with her; coming back to the hotel, she would find a dozen roses and no card and not know which of a half-dozen men to thank. But she married "your poor father" and expected he'd be a rich man someday. Only it turned out, "funny how things turn out," he was just a slave to his younger brother the Boss. "An unsung hero," she'd praise him when she wasn't feeling bitter. "That grubyom, that peasant!" she'd snap when she was feeling bitter. "My poor father wouldn't sleep in his grave. Did you know he brought me up like a son? To read Hebrew, to say the prayers. He had a great long beard - well, in those days, you understand. He held me on his lap, I can see him as clearly as I see you, and he loved me; oh, how he loved me, he bounced me on his lap, well, I was his youngest, he was an old man by the time I was born, May his soul rest in peace, he was some man. You understand? In Russia, he owned land, he kept lambs. In Russia. A Jew couldn't own land, but my father had special rights. Did I ever tell you the time his brother, poor simpleton, was supposed to watch the sheep?"

Yes, she had told me, but I loved the story and wished for more details.

"This was in Russia, you understand, and he was watching a thousand sheep, one of the flocks. After the pogroms he emigrated to Brazilanyway, he fell asleep, and I don't have to tell you, sheep are stupid. One went into the river to drink, and so the next followed, and the next, until godforbid all the sheep were carried away and drowned. He woke up and you can imagine what he felt, the poor fool. Well. My father never even raised his voice. This my mother told me herself. He never raised his voice. You can imagine, how serious a thing. My father was a holy man. Did I tell you, the Jews in the town, even the gentiles, they worshipped him. Anytime there was a problem, a husband and wife, two men squabble over a cow, whatever-they came to my father. He 200

was like a judge. So. You see where your roots are? He didn't come to this country in steerage. We were Somebodies. Not that there's something to be ashamed of in poverty. Poverty is Never Something to be Ashamed of-" her finger upraised.

"When my poor father, may his soul rest in peace, came over-I was just a little girl at the time-he didn't speak a word of English. He spoke Russian, he spoke Hebrew, and of course he' spoke Yiddish. But somehow-that man got along."

I could see her searching for the story that her heart required. She nodded. She'd found it.

"Well. When he came to Rochester, there was a landsmann-ferstaste ein landsmann, Ben? What's the matter you can't speak a word of Yiddish? In any event-a person from the same community, from Kishinev, was retiring; he had an abbatoir - a slaughterhouse - and he was willing to let it go for a song." She lit another cigarette off the butt of the one she was smoking and crushed out the old one on the edge of her saucer.

"But my poor father, he had to get some kind of license, whatever, so they were to go to City Hall, the old butcher and my father and my oldest brother. Well. So, all night before, my father worried, How could he be American enough? He didn't speak English. They'd never give him permission. And my brother Willie, he spoke just a little bit of English. From a book

A Yiddish lilt began to creep into her voice, and her eyes grew soft as they saw the past - as if the past were in soft focus as a romantic film from the thirties.

"So the family went to sleep, but my father stayed up with a lamp. And in the morning, at breakfast, my mother asked him, 'Vos has tu getun die ganze nacht?' - What were you doing all night? - 'Hat shtudirt,' he said - I studied. And then he recited for us, 'I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America .' The whole thing. 'What's that?' we asked. 'To make me an American,' he said. 'Es so mir machen ein American.' So. So he went to City Hall and I don't know if he said it or not, but he knew it, and it gave him confidence. And he brought home the license. Oh, he was so proud! He didn't say a word. He put the license on the table. Not a word. Well, that was my father." She crushed out her cigarette and she sighed. "And now, look at me. My father would turn over in his grave."

They wooed her together, my father and his brother Cv. It was my father she fell in love with, but it was Cy who'd made the money, made the success, convinced my mother she was marrying into a "family of Somebodies." When my mother met them both, should she have known that the success was my uncle? My father, his frightened servant? She swore she never knew. She gave up her blooming career to find fulfillment through marriage-the way she was expected to.

When I write, "frightened servant," I know how much it leaves out. My father was a powerful man, an athlete, a man well loved by the taxi drivers, the fleet owners, the cops, the tire changers he worked with every day. But maybe he wasn't much of a businessman-or maybe Uncle Cy needed him to feel like a nobody. When my grandfather became sick, my uncle sent my expendable father to California to nurse the old man. My father didn't know how to refuse.

And perhaps didn't want to. I suppose he fled from my mother, using his father, his brother's orders, as excuse. Stayed in California four months, then again a year later, nine months, then six months. Without Dad around to curse for her lot in life, she grew more inward and strange, saw no one but me. At six, at seven, I was her company, her audience, her "reason for living." She sat at the typewriter as I walked up and down her bedroom, dictating stories. At night, she prowled the house, smoking cigarettes. I woke to find her standing in my doorway, watching me sleep.

Recently, I discovered this letter to my father among her papers. Not a carbon. Dad must have brought it back with him from California.

June 10, 1944. Dearest Leo,

Your Thursday letter came today. With the snapshots. Your face looks good, and you don't look too heavy. But your pants need pressing, and don't they wear ties in California?

Please, Leo, don't say to me, "Please be sweet." I have been sweet too long. It is now into the sixth month since you went away. That's nice, isn't it? 1 don't say that you are there out ofchoice, but after all, you are not a dummy, and if you are a human being, you could have said the second month you were there, "I am going home to my wife and child." Well, you are as you are, and 1 will never change you, Leo. Enclosed you will find a short letter from Ben. Why he loves you is more than 1 can say. He is deserving of a devoted father, not a dummy who is shoved around by his brother.

1 will have to pay Hoover $4.61 for repair Thursday. Remember, Leo, 1 have been a good wife, and a girl a man doesn't have to be ashamed of. And 1 have given you all my love, Leo, dear. But your staying away has disgusted me beyond repair.

Love, Myra

So my father came home. He went back to work for his brother. We didn't see much of Uncle Cy. He stayed as far away from her as he could manage. To me she cursed him for having destroyed my father's life, for having ruined her life. To my father, she said. "What kind of a pushover gets bossed around by his younger brother?" "Goddamn woman. He knows what you are. That's why he doesn't come near us."

UOh, why wasn't I born a man? You think we'd be living in Jackson Lice, Long Island?"

When it grew too terrible for her-and by the time I was ten it grew too terrible nearly every day-she would stagger to her late afternoon bitter nap, seasick grope to bed, holding herself straight by fingering the walls. Maybe she drank - but I watched, as if I were her keeper, and I never saw her take a drink, never smelled it on her breath. She slept, then, and woke transformed - back centuries, an ancient Jewish crone. She stood in the doorway to my bedroom and mumbled curses in Yiddish.

"What, Mom? What is it? Come on."

She nodded her head rhythmically as if to offer assent, an audience of one, to her own propositions of suffering. She'd thump her breast and rock and I'd want him to come home and do something with her. "As God is my judge," she'd say. "You see what my life is?" she'd say-but then she was past rational saying. "Mein lieb ist schwartz, black is my life, black is my blood, schwartz, schwartz, my life is black, my blood is black:' Yiddish, English, as she rocked. Until she could raise the pitch of pain enough to thump her breast through her nightgown, score bloody claw tracks deep in the skin of her arm, always nails of her left hand into skin of her right arm, and blood would lift in the old places to the surface of the skin.

I identified with those nails as if I drew forth the blood with my own will; identified, too, with the bleeding welts.

But it was my father she needed.

He'd come, finally. He'd scrub the walls she'd stained with her fingers, or he'd sit at his desk, back turned. I imagine him paying a pile of bills, the whole weight of his enormous back and shoulders protesting what she was costing him. She'd wake, she'd stand behind him, holding onto the doorjamb, rocking. "Son of a bitch, you son of a bitch, oh you son of a bitch, a man, some man, some man I married," and my father's neck thickened and he went down into himself deeper, all that flesh and muscle thickened, hunched up against her words.

Until-"Goddamn you!"-he'd jerk to his feet, maybe knocking over the red velvet bench and making the floor lamp wobble, and that chaos would let him release his violence and he'd bellow, his face hot, "I've had plenty from you!"

Now she'd have her claws out, pawing the air before her eyes, and the crazy old shted crone look on her face, lower lip folded down, teeth bared. "Come on, you!" she'd hiss, old Russian Jew Medusa; and clumsy bear, he'd come at her, she'd scratch out, he'd grab and slap, push her towards the bedroom and sometimes she'd let him, or sometimes she'd moan and go down, crumple to the carpet, tragedy-queen poisoned, eyes rolled back - too slow and too graceful to be completely real.

"Your mother's a crazy woman-l hardly touched her. Get water, Ben."

Or say he yelled at her and didn't touch her, just yelled in his amazing Army Sergeant voice I had to block out with fingers in my ears-then she would forget her original curses, would rush from window to window, closing them "so the neighbors wouldn't hear," and so he'd bellow louder, he'd open the goddamn windows after her and really yell.

"And you," he'd scream at me, "you goddamned mama's boy, you, you spoiled little mama's boy, you're the cause of half the goddamned fights in this house. Money! I suppose you think I'm made of money?"Because most of the fights began over money, day after day of one continuous battle over buying something, not buying something. Battle over his inadequacy to justify her life, justify her renunciation of the amazing career she actually had built for herself, justify becoming a Good Jewish Wife.

And when he'd turn on me, she'd stop cursing, smile suddenly-"l'll tell you what! -" as if she'd just had such a clever idea, smile politely, and rush to the oven, turn on the gas without lighting it and, crawling on her knees, shove her head inside. Then my father would yank her away and shut off the stove, open the window and wave a dishrag. "You want to blow us all up, you crazy woman?" Or she'd run to the bathroom and pull open the door to the medicine cabinet, stand deciding which bottle would do the job on her. He'd grab her away. She'd weep, he'd lead her, gently, lovingly, to the bedroom, rubbing and patting her bent back, and put her to bed.

As much as I could, I lived in my room, away from the fights. Not that I could escape his voice: always I could tell by the level of his shouting how deep she'd thrust her knife, could tell whether this night she was likely to shut herself in the bathroom or to fight him past cursing to tears and collapse.

Cursing nearly every night, only once did she rebel-the time I was sixteen and she left him.

First the usual shouting, but then theatrical laughter. "I'll tell you what!" Another gesture of suicide? But no-she rushed, hands in front of her as if through a fog, into their bedroom. He went back to his newspaper, unfolding it with a commanding shake. An hour later, snazzy in her one good black dress and old Persian lamb coat, suitcase in hand, she came into my room. "Ben, dearest-I'll call you when I'm settled."

"What are you talking about?"

"You see how it is, my dear."

"Mom! Really?"

"Tell that man goodbye."

That man stood in the doorway, arms folded over his chest. "What the hell do you think you're doing?"

"Nice weather, isn't it? I'll call when I'm settled."

"You can go to hell for all I care."

"Sweet," she said. Taking up her suitcase, she walked out the front door.

"She'll be back," he said. "Where's she gonna find a cab at this hour?"

"I'll follow her."

"You will not follow her. She'll be back in five minutes if you don't make a big fuss. Crazy person. Where's she gonna go?"

I couldn't imagine. My father went back to his paper; I listened for the elevator.

"What's she doing, goddamn woman," he said after a few minutes. "Walking the streets!" He folded his glasses neatly into their case, put on his coat and trudged out - "Stay put in case she calls. She's probably standing right downstairs."

But he didn't come back - half an hour he didn't come back. Then the telephone rang.

"Hello, my darling son."

"Where are you?"

"Is he there?"

"He's out looking for you."

"The poor fool. I'm registered at the Plaza."

"The Plaza? The Plaza on Fifty-ninth?"

"There's only one Plaza, my dear."

"Well what are you doing at the Plaza?"

"I'm not sure," she said after a moment. "Perhaps I'm teaching him a lesson."

"Maybe," I said, "you ought to stay away for awhile. Get back into business."

"You think I couldn't?"

"I didn't say you couldn't. Maybe you'd be better off."

"What would your poor father do without me?"

"You want him to call you?"

"Let him worry," she said. "But tomorrow, if you wish to visit your mother

She must have known I couldn't keep it a secret from him. When we hung up, I left a note for my father and went downstairs after him. But he was nowhere-the drugstore at the corner, the subway station. I guessed he was hunting her in our car.

A taxi swung around the corner. If it hadn't happened along, I would have gone back home to wait, but without thinking, I flagged it down. "To the Plaza Hotel," I said, and felt in the name the magic I knew she felt.

As we crossed the East River, I ignored the lights of the city, kept my eye on the meter and fingered the loose bills in my pocket-pay from delivering for the drugstore. It was just fifteen minutes to the hotel,

grand chateau with its green mansard roof lit up, its fountain lit up, and inside, mirrors and candelabra brilliant after the dark ride.

"Mrs. Kagan?" I asked at the desk. "She's my mother-she just registered." There was no Mrs. Kagan.

Furious, I was about to call home. But then I thought-"What about Bresloff? Myra Bresloff?"

The desk clerk nodded, finger over some list. "Miss Bresloff? Room 414."

"In case anybody calls," I said. "It's the same person. Miss Bresloff, Mrs. Kagan."

Her room faced the park - nothing but the best. She was still in her black dress. "Well, isn't this a surprise." I looked around. The windows looked out on the lamps of Central Park. Dirty windows and paint peeling from the corner mouldings and the carpets were sad, but this was, after all, the Plaza. "It's come down in the world," she said. "But it's a little bit of all right." She looked me over. "Couldn't you dress up a little?" she asked. "That old shirt of yours

"Who cares? Mom, what are you doing?"

"Don't I deserve a vacation?"

"You deserve. Oh, sure you deserve "1 noticed her beautiful suitcase with its brass fittings and fine linen sides covered by pale fleur-de-lis. It sat on a luggage rack for the maid to admire.

"That's some suitcase, isn't it?" she said. "You see the workmanship? You should have heard me hondel with the salesman. This was years ago, of course. When do I go anywhere these days?" She sighed. "This is for your wife someday, after I'm gone."

I didn't answer. She watched me looking up at the high filagreed ceiling.

"Long before you were born-this is as true as I'm standing here-I was at a party for Al jolson at the Plaza. Naturally, it was the finest suite in the hotel. Everybody in New York was there-"

"That must," I said, "have been some suite."

"[olson and I talked about family. At heart what was he, after all, but a good, simple, Jewish boy?"

The telephone. My father. She listened.

"No, my dear," she said finally. "I'm not coming home." Hanging up on him, she turned to me. "He won't let me alone. Well, naturally."

I couldn't speak. She asked would I like anything from Room Service. "Where did you get the money?" I asked.

"Well, shouldn't a woman keep a little money in her own name?"

"I'm not blaming you, Mom." I stared out at the lights of cars cruising the perimeter road in Central Park.

"If you were a little older, I could tell you a few things."

A light tap at the door. Suddenly I understood that his call had come

not from home but from downstairs. She must have known already, but she went to the door as if curious.

"Myra."

"Mmmm," she said, hand on her hip. "You've had enough?"

'Listen, you've been crazy enough for one night. Would you get your bag?"

"My dear-"

"Oh, don't give me that phony voice, Myra. Forgodsakes "

"Isn't he elegant, Ben?" And then, all of a sudden, her face dissolved, the gracious lady dissolved, she grimaced as ifpain had caught her heart. She shook her head. "Yah. Yah. Yah. Nice. Elegant. You think this is a joke? It's no joke. My life isn't a joke. Understand?"

She sat in a big armchair and he, not asking nor being prevented, collected her things and snapped the fancy suitcase shut. Then, not speaking to her, he lifted her, unresisting, half limp, from the chair. "Come on. We're going home. Ben, take her coat."

We hardly talked on the way. Home, still she didn't talk except to moan, "This is some life. Look at this life." And he said, "Leave us alone for awhile, will you, Ben?" So I didn't hear what they were saying for such a long time in the closed bedroom. There was no shouting-just thick guttural whispers.

I went into my own room and tried finishing my homework, but as my eyes read, my ears listened. Whispers answering whispers. Waiting for it to be over, I brewed a cup of tea and sat in the kitchen, remains of a pot roast still in the platter, cold grease caked around the brown meat. I heard weeping. I drank my tea. When the door opened and footsteps came and went, I stood at the end of the hall and looked into the bedroom. She was sitting beside him, rubbing his back, and he was the one crying, my big father crying, and she was saying, "You are what you are, my dear." Then, to me-"You know I love your father."

This love, that seemed to take away her life. I couldn't understand this love, as, years later, when I was married myself, had children of my own, I couldn't understand her telephone call.

"My son?"

It was the vibrato in her voice that told me he was dead. "It's Dad?"

"One hour ago. A heart attack-you know what his heart was like. I had to collect myself to call you. 'Myra,' he said to me as if he had a joke to tell. Then he took a step towards me and fell like a tree. Poor soul. Poor simple soul,"

"I'm very sorry, Mom."

"God grants some special people very gentle deaths. He was dead, your father, before he touched the floor, so he wouldn't feel the hurt from the fall. I turned him on his back myself-he was light as a feather. So. So.

So. It's done. It's finished. Fertig. A life. You understand? No. How can you? That man-he was as good as gold to me."

"Good to you?"

"A better man God never made."

"Mom? I'll be down in the morning. You'll be all right tonight?"

"Listen, my dear-you have a decent suit?"

The photographs on my staircase walls were culled out of the boxes my mother left when she died last year. Photographs going back, back through the thirties, the twenties, the War, to Russia. My father, born in Odessa in 1892; my mother in Kishinev, Bessarabia, in 1900. My mother, my father, coming so far from Russia to marry in New York, coming all that way as if God had laid out a plan, a mystical conjunction, so that they could live with one another in love and misery.

Highest up the stairs is the photo of my mother in the late twenties, another world, her own late twenties, just before she met my father, fur wrap over wool suit, standing on the deck of a ship-porthole, brass fittings, polished wood - with a friend, "With the actress Joyce Bancroft" written floridly at the bottom of the photograph. Both of them hamming it up for the camera. Playing elegant - I remember the posture from my childhood. So young, they seem. Indeed, I could be her father. I could offer her advice. Knowing that in just a few years she will meet the man on the other side of the stairs, that good-looking, overweight man posing with baseball bat as if waiting for a pitch, grinning with all his powerful good nature for the camera. A man with drinking buddies. Scared of women. Loyal to his parents. Scared oftaking chances. He will do well enough early through his charm, then pale, fade, work in fear and loyalty for his brother, love a woman who was too much for him, too complicated, too smart, too full of the need to be grand, love a woman he had nothing in common with except love, then retire to grumpiness and heart attack.

But there he is, pretending confidence, waiting for the pitch, and across the stairs she has her eye on him.

Remembering Okinawa

Samuel Hynes

Every generation is a secret society. The secret that my generation-the one that came of age during the Second World War-shared was simply the war itself. We grew up on active duty: I entered Navy Flight School when I was eighteen, and I was not twenty-one until two weeks after the war ended, and most of the young men I flew with were roughly my age. The years that in peacetime we would have spent in college, we spent instead in learning to fly, and to fight a flying war, and then in fighting it. Our secret made us different from those who were older and younger than ourselves, or who were not in the war. I can't formulate the differences in terms that seem adequate to the experience; but perhaps I can recover something of the experience itself.

In the spring of 1945 I was a twenty-year-old Marine pilot in a torpedo bomber squadron stationed at Ulithi, a fleet anchorage in the Western Carolines. When the attack on Okinawa began in March, the squadron was ordered to fly its planes north, via Saipan and Iwo jirna, and to become the first land-based bombing squadron on the island. Weather slowed the invasion, and held us at Saipan; we reached Okinawa in late April.

Our flight approached the island through gray, broken clouds beneath a high overcast. The sea was gray, too, and empty at first; then I saw one picket ship, then more and more, and then the dark bulk of the island. It was the first place I had seen where a war was actually going on, and I looked down when I could as our flight swung round the southern end of the island, staying well out to sea, because that was the end that the Japanese held. I could see nothing very clearly, only wooded hills across which artillery smoke drifted like low clouds, but I knew that it was enemy earth down there. There could be nothing familiar about it - it was a totally alien place.

We flew past the island, and over the fleet, where there was more drifting smoke from the guns of battleships and cruisers, and then turned back toward the island and began our landing approach. As we descended and crossed the beach, I saw the part of the island that American troops controlled, and familiarity returned. It looked more like a construction site or a highway project back home than like a battlefield - slashes of red earth everywhere, bulldozers, steamrollers, cities of tents and temporary buildings, heaps of supplies. Seabees were building roads, and there was an atmosphere of American energy. It was only when we had landed, and I was standing uncertainly on the flight line waiting for orders, that I became aware of the presence of war-a distant rumbling, like a trolley car passing late at night, that was the sound of guns.

The squadron's living area was on a low hill near the airstrip, and I found an empty tent there and moved in with the four friends with whom, it seemed, I had always lived. We had been together for most of our service lives: Joe, whom I had known in high school back in Minneapolis-an athlete, and the best pilot I ever saw; Bergie, from a small town in South Dakota-we had come to active duty in the same group, had ridden the same lonesome train to our first flying school in Texas, and had been together ever since; Rock, a laconic Texan who had joined us in primary training; T, my closest friend, from Alabama. We had drunk together, chased women (and failed to catch them) together, flown together. We went to the same tent without talking about it, without even thinking about it-we were friends, we were buddies.

Officers' Country had been a wheat field, and the tent stood in the spring crop of young wheat; under my cot the grain was still growing. I threw the parachute bag that held all my possessions onto my cot and went but, like a kid in a new town, to look around. At the end of the officers' street-a dirt path between the rows of tents-and on either side behind the tents, the ground fell away sharply into narrow little valleys, gullies almost. The officers' toilet had been built in the valley behind our tent, and I walked down that way, past the toilet and on up the valley. In a hundred yards or so it came to an abrupt end, and there, set into the steep hillside, were fan-shaped walls of masonry that I knew must be tombs, each with a narrow terrace in front, and a low, narrow entrance to the vault. I was a little afraid, alone there among the tombs-there might be a leftover Jap in one of them, or a booby trap-but I went nearer. The tombs had been broken open, and shattered funeral urns and bits of bone were scattered about. No doubt some infantryman had hoped there would be something worth taking there; but these were poor people, and they had buried nothing but their dead. I crept inside one of the tombs, and found in the stooping darkness only dust and fragments and dry, dead air. It didn't even feel like a special place, the way cemeteries back home did; the war had robbed it of its reverence.

The author/pilot.

From our hill we could see the whole of Kadena airfield-fifteen hundred feet of runway, with a yellow bulldozer parked across one end to encourage short landing runs, and a makeshift tower. Taxiways led from the runway to revetments where the planes were parked, and a dirt road ran up the hill to the squadron camp. On the far side of the field was a gravel pit, from which trucks carried gravel all day to build more taxiways and an extension of the runway, down beyond the parked bulldozer. To the north was Yontan, once the principal Japanese airfield and now a Marine base, spread out across the top of a low plateau a couple of miles away; to the south-three or four miles off-we could see the hills where the Marines and the Army were attacking the main Japanese defensive line. We could stand at our tent doorway and watch the battleships that lay just offshore shelling Shuri Castle, the Japanese strongpoint in the middle oftheir front line; we could even see the shells arcing through the air, changing color from white to red as they cooled. But when air raids came, we didn't watch, we scuttled into the foxhole that we had dug behind our tent-a hole like a root cellar back home, roofed over with lengths of Japanese railroad track covered with sandbags, and smelling of cold dampness. To make my exit even faster I put a pair of rubber boots beside my cot, with my pants stuck over them fireman-style. I was going to be the first man in the hole every time.

One raid came suddenly in the twilight, though, and caught me sitting contemplatively in the officers' toilet, down in the little valley behind the tents. There was nothing to do, no point in running up to the foxhole; I simply sat there with my pants around my ankles, and went about my business. It was very quiet, after the siren, and then, with a sudden ripping sound, a Japanese fighter swept over the trees by the mess hall, very low. I could see the blinking of his machine guns as he swung toward the parked planes on the field. And he was gone. Not a single gun had fired at him; I had the feeling that no one had even seen him but me. I pulled up my pants and walked up the valley to the tents. Only then did I think how embarrassing it would have been to die down there, on the toilet, with my pants down.

At that time, early in the battle, the Japanese were sending desperate waves ofplanes down from the main islands, and we spent a good deal of our time hiding. The sirens would start their rising wail, and we would throw ourselves into the foxhole; then if the guns around us didn't begin to fire, we'd peer out, cautiously at first, and then more boldly, and finally climb onto the roof for a better view. The air raids became a spectacular show, and the roof of the foxhole was our box seat. From there, one night, I saw a Japanese bomber (the twin-engined type called a "Betty") fly the length of the island along the west side, held in the searchlights all the way, and in a network of tracers and exploding shells, and when it was over the fleet anchorage, at the point of fiercest fire, do a perfect, insolent slow-roll and fly out of range. It was a beautiful gesture, the pilot up there with his lost war, showing his skill, being a pilot still.

As time passed, and the Japanese expended their experienced fliers and their best planes, they began to send beginners, in anything that would fly. One night we saw, caught in an intersection of searchlights, a little biplane, a trainer much like the trainers we had learned to fly in. The lights, like long fingers, held it almost motionless in the center of brightness. No guns seemed to be firing at it, there were no explosions of shells, no tracers, only the fragile plane alone in the light. Then it began to spin, slowly, never picking up much speed, down out of the lights into the darkness beyond Naha. Some kid, not used to night flying, had been dazzled by the lights, and had spun in. It wasn't a kill, it wasn't a credit to anybody. Just a flying accident, the kind we used to read about in Navy publications back in flight school. It seemed sad, a shame, not fair.

Our own losses began too, almost at once, though they were less spectacular than the deaths of the Japanese pilots. I had been on the island only three days when a first lieutenant named Fox was killed. He was one of the old hands of the squadron who had left Ulithi before I got there, to go up to Okinawa by ship with the forward echelon, so I

hardly knew him. He didn't even have a first name for us yet, and when Joe came into the tent to tell me about it he simply said, "Fox is down."

Fox had been flying an artillery spotter around over the front lines. It was a job that we all did, but that nobody liked-passing back and forth across the island, flying low and slow, while the spotter looked for gun flashes and radioed their locations to his own gunners below. It was at once boring and dangerous: the air was full of shells, the Japanese gunners were accurate at low altitudes, and yet there was nothing to see, and nothing to do except drive, like a chauffeur. Shuri Castle was down there, at the center of the front, and two armies were struggling for it, but you didn't notice it; you only saw guns winking, tanks breathing flames like dragons, maybe a patrol running across a field, but nothing more, nothing that looked like a big war.

The planes we flew were useful for this job, but they were also vulnerable-or at least they felt vulnerable when you were flying. They were TBM's, single-engined torpedo bombers that were built to carry a ton of bombs or torpedoes and a crew of three. The Navy called them Grumman Avengers, but we had another name: somebody, looking at the fat belly-line that the bomb bay gave the planes, had said that they looked like pregnant turkeys, and so Avengers became simply Turkeys. They were big, they were heavy, and they were hard to maneuver; they

"Turkeys" (rBM's) over Okinawa.

made good targets, but they had room for an observer, so they also made good platforms for artillery spotting.

That's what Fox was doing when his plane was hit. An Army artillery captain saw it happen, and wrote a report. The plane was flying at about 250 feet, he said, when it was hit-by a "high-trajectory shell," so it must have been one of our own mortars, lobbing shells over the line, maybe a mortar that the captain commanded. The plane crashed on our side of the front, and the captain got to the wreck within ten minutes of the crash. There was, he said, no sign of life in the area.

Three days later Bergie took off on the same kind of flight and simply disappeared. This time there was no eyewitness, and, though weeks later a rumor reached us that a plane had been hit by mortar shells that day, it was never verified, and no wreck was found. T and Joe and I put together Bergie's possessions-there was almost nothing worth savingand gave them to the Adjutant to send home; then we took his cot apart and moved it out of the tent. For a while there was a patch of dead wheat where the cot had been; but gradually it was worn away, until it was like the rest of the tent floor.

When you have flown from an airfield for a while, the landscape around it becomes as familiar as a neighborhood. You know where you are by the pond there, the hill over there, the highway, the smoke of the town. But at first it is strange, and no feature is yet a landmark. At Kadena the land was even more alien: it was a foreign place, with tiny fields and tombs, but with no railroads or water towers or highways to navigate by, and it was a battlefield, devastated and smoking. In the island's principal town, Naha, there was only one wall standing-not a single entire building, just that one white wall (it looked as though it might have been a public building, perhaps a school), rising uselessly from the ruins. All the villages had been destroyed, and the people who lived in them killed or driven into camps; the only signs of human life that you saw from the air were military signs - the supply dumps along the beaches, the airfields, and the columns of trucks creeping along dirt roads towards the front.

I still had this sense of an unknown landscape below me when I flew my first strike at Okinawa. Our target, we were told, was a set of torpedo launchers, thought to be hidden along the eastern shore of the island. We flew there and circled in formation, in over the beach, out above the anchored fleet, and back again to the shore. Pine trees grew at the edge of the water there, and it looked quiet and pleasant, the sort of place where you might stop for a swim, or have a picnic. It would also have been a good place from which to launch torpedoes against the ships anchored in the bay, but we couldn't find any launchers.

From my position as wingman in the rear section, I couldn't even look for them; I had to watch the planes ahead of me, and I had only a vague sense of where we were-now over water, now over land. As we turned

in over the beach for maybe the tenth time, I looked along my port wing toward my section leader, watching him, working to hold my position, and there on the wing surface, a few feet out from where I sat, a row of holes appeared. We flew on, I kept my position in the flight, we swung once more out over the bay; the holes seemed to have nothing to do with anything. I had been hit, that was all. Not as dramatic as losing your virginity, not even like a first drink; just four or five holes the size of quarters in the smooth dark metal.

We gave up looking for the rocket launchers and turned across the island toward Naha, where the Japanese still held the bombed and shattered airfield. We had to do something with our bombs, so we would attack the gun emplacements there. The air over Naha was full of Navy planes and confusion; it seemed as though all the failed strikes that morning had come to the same place to unload. We circled, waiting for an opening in the traffic, and then began our attack. The flight leader peeled off and dived, and when my turn came I followed, trying to remember all the things I should do: bombsight on, bomb bays open, bombs armed, machine guns armed (don't forget to fire them!). I could see the other planes of our flight spread out across the bright spring air in a loose diagonal below me and to the left. Some AA fire was rising

Okinawan tomb.

from somewhere on the field, spotting the sunshine with little clouds of smoke, but in the flurry of my preparations I couldn't see the guns.

On the field below, bombs from the lead planes began to explode. I was nearly at the point at which I had to drop, and I hadn't found anything to drop on, hadn't even had time to look for a target. Then, in the right angle where two runways crossed, I saw a gun emplacement, with tracers rising out of it like roman candles. But it was too late, I couldn't turn to it, the altimeter read 2000 feet, then 1500, I had to pull out. I dropped my bombs-just threw them away like rubbish, something I had to get rid of-and pulled out and to the right, across the beach and out over the fleet, and joined up with the rest of the flight. Two years' training, I thought gloomily, for this-this aimless attack on nothing. I had come at last to the Big Test, the moment of real fighting in a real war, but somehow I had missed it, or it had missed me.

This sense of the aimlessness of the war never quite left me, though later strikes were sometimes more comprehensible, as the squadron found its own special mission. We began to fly attacks in support of the infantry-low-level precision bombing of enemy positions just in advance of our troops. We'd circle over the lines, and a controller on the ground would give us our target: "Do you see a hill with a road running up it? We're marking it with blue smoke. There's a gun in a cave at the top, to the left of the road." The strike leader would find the target and drop a bomb on it, and we'd drop on his explosion. The system worked pretty well, though one hill with a road up it looked very much like another, and the Japanese sometimes confused things by firing blue smoke back onto our own lines, so that occasionally we dropped on the wrong troops, and an angry complaint would come to us from an infantry commander. But our own soldiers were not much more real to us than the enemy. If they were in the Army they were Doggies, which was short for Dogfaces, and Marines despised them, along with their commanders. (Marines taught Okinawan children to stand by the road when Army units passed, shouting "General MacArthur eats shit!" They thought it meant "Give me a cigarette.") And even our own Marine infantrymen were a species different from us, called Gravel-crunchers or Crunchies-remote allies, at best. And anyway, they were all down there on the ground, invisible except when they did something spectacular, like attacking with flamethrowers or tanks; and we were up here, separated from them by the supporting air.

Life at Kadena slowly began to take shape, and our squadron camp became a sort of village. The road down the hill to the airstrip was our main street, and along it a village life moved. At the top on one side of the road was Officers' Country, and on the other side the squadron mess hall. Downhill from the mess hall were the enlisted men's quarters, rows of tents like the officers', but closer together, and with more men in each tent. A quonset hut across the road was the Operations Office, and also

the village post office, a place you could just drop into when you were passing by, to talk and to listen to the latest rumors. A little farther down, two tents together were the offices of the Commanding Officer and the Adjutant, the village's town hall. And at the bottom of the road, beside the strip, were the squadron shops: tents for armament, for radio and radar, and for the quartermaster's supplies. On an ordinary day men moved up and down the street, or stopped in little groups to talk and laugh, jeeps threaded among them, and from below the sounds of men working drifted up-the clanking and hammering, and the rise and fall of engines being tested.

It was an odd community-a village with no women or children, in which only one business was conducted - but it had a wholeness, and it felt familiar and comfortable and not, like the rest of the island, incomprehensibly different. Everything you wanted (except women, children, and peace) you could get in our village: clothes at the quartermaster's store, food at the mess hall, mail at Operations. The Red Cross tent down by the strip provided tobacco and writing paper, and sometimes a brown, rock-like substance called Tropical Chocolate, which would not melt, and had to be pulverized between the teeth. Back of the tents in Officers' Country there was a tub for washing clothes, and a shower, bath made from an oil drum and a piece of pipe; you could build a fire under it and have a hot shower, if you wanted one.

There was even a village movie theater, on the hillside behind Opera' tions. It was primitive and uncomfortable-you sat on cartridge cases in the open air-but it completed village life, and made it more like life back home. A movie began every night as soon as it was dark enough,

Foxhole. The fouT occupants are (as mentioned in text), clockwise from front-Left: T, author, Rock and Joe.

just about when the first nightfighters took off. It usually began with a newsreel, edited to give an encouraging view of the war, and a short, which always seemed to be Lawrence Tibbett singing "The Road to Mandalay," and then the feature film. Most nights we didn't get through the whole program, though; the feature would start, and then the airraid sirens would begin to wind up to a howl, and the screen would go dark, and the ninety-millimeter gun on the hill behind Officers' Country would begin to fire. I saw the beginning of a Spencer TracyKatharine Hepburn movie five times, and never saw the end; they were together in a buggy, and he was courting her-and then the sirens would blow.

Some nights the air raids came later, in the hours after midnight, and we would wake in the dark, sometimes to the mournful howling of the sirens, sometimes to the cough of the ninety-millimeter behind the hill, and would crowd half-asleep into the entrance to the foxhole, and stand there, shoulder-deep in the earth, to see what was happening. We were standing that way one night in May when the darkness over Yontan lit up like a Fourth ofJuly show. Searchlights began to probe and cross the sky, and guns sprayed tracers into the dark. Guns in the fleet began to fire too, and then our own guns at Kadena, and others, until it seemed that every battery on the island and in the anchorage was hurling a converging fire at Yontan. As we watched, the guns' trajectories gradually lowered, until they were firing nearly horizontally, a dense crisscross of fire that was almost solid.

Up from the net of gunfire a sudden ball of flame rose, and a moment later we heard the explosion, and then another and another. Something was burning, a plane probably, and other fires started and rose up, filling the sky with flames that were brighter than the tracers' tracks. What possible attack could be taking place there, a mile or two away? We could see nothing except the tracers and the flames, and we knew nothing except what we saw. The defensive fire seemed desperate and irrational-they must be firing into their own positions-as though the attacker were something monstrous and inhuman, that could not be fought in a customary way. Then the gunfire began to subside, and for a time there were only the tall flames, and scattered explosions, tardysounding after all that noise. And then the flames died, very slowly at first, and then they were gone, and the night was dark and silent.

The next day we heard the story. The Japanese had sent seven bombers, loaded with troops, in a suicide raid against Yontan. The planes were to crash-land on the runways, and the troops, armed with explosives, would leap out and destroy the aircraft parked on the field. Three of the bombers were shot down by nightfighters before they reached the island, but four got through, and approached the field, coming in low over the trees in the darkness. The horizontal gunfire we saw had been directed at them, and three were shot down in the last 218

'd attack on ¥ontan (Corsairs in the foreground).

e seconds before they landed; the first flames we saw were those exploding planes.

d and to et his load of troops out onto

Only one pilot managed to lahn, k d glanes throwing grenades and h ng t e par e p, d H h the runway. T ey ran a�o h were killed by rifle fire. When ay ig t firing machine guns, until t ey d with smoking wreckage and f ld Y tan was scattere Ii h d came, the ie at on a 000 barrels of aviation gaso me a bodies. Twenty-nine planes an? 7 'h d b killed. The control tower d d Marmes a een h h been destroye ,an two bl k d with wreckage. In t e tree d h way was oc e was wrecked, an t e run d s and twos along the strip, were crashed bombers, and scattere m could say how many of the burned d J No one cou b th sixty-nine dea apanese. hit b the Japanese and how ma�y y e American planes had been Ii h d killed the two Marmes (they wild defensive fire, or whose bu ets a were in the tower).

f the war' how could it? We The raid had no effect on th� progress old pile a field with wreckage, d Mannes; we cou Th had more planes an more f hting without an interruption. e burn a gasoline dump, and go onhig known that and the men who d k b b rs must ave

men in those ar om e id By happening at ontan, up 1 did Yet the rat came. 1 sent them certam y I ld watch the whole spectacu ar there on the next rise where we cou

The Japanese SUlCI

madness of it, it forced upon us the strangeness of the people we were fighting.

For in an air war you are not very conscious of your enemies as human beings. We attacked targets-a gun emplacement, a supply dump, a radar station - not men, and succeeded or failed in terms of the things we destroyed. I flew more than a hundred missions during the Okinawa campaign, and never saw a single enemy soldier on the ground. If I thought of the men down there at all, I thought of them as ordinary, like us-men who ran supply dumps and radar stations, and who manned their guns and shot at us when we attacked them; the rules, I thought, were the same. But the raid on Yontan was different; it wasn't something we could have done. It was not concerned, as our raids were, with destroying, but with dying. It seemed to me then that the true end of the war for the men I was fighting was not victory, but death. And spectacular death, fire and explosions, the body bursting in a terrible, selfdestroying orgasm. One of the Japanese at Yontan had held a grenade to his belly and blown himself up.

Later that month I woke in the night to the sound of a shout, and then a burst of automatic rifle fire. There were running footsteps in the company street, and voices, and when I looked out people were hurrying past with flashlights. I hurried, too, in my rubber boots. At the end of the row ofofficers' tents, where the hill dropped offsharply, a sentry was posted, and it was his voice that I had heard, and his rifle. Someone had crept up the gully below, and had begun to climb the hill toward him. He shouted once, as regulations told him to, and then fired a whole magazine, point-blank.

The body lay at the bottom of the hill. It was the first dead man I had ever seen. After all the dying that had happened along the way - in flight school, in training squadrons, at Ulithi - the friends lost, the wrecked planes crumpled on the bombing target, this was the first time that actual, particular death had reached me. I went down the hill and pointed my flashlight at the body. It didn't look like a man who had just been alive. It didn't look like a man at all. The clothes seemed to have neither color nor shape, seemed not to be clothes at all; it was a bundle of rags that lay at my feet, just rags without even the shape of a human being. Perhaps he wasn't even a Jap, only an Okinawan, hiding and hungry, not murderous but only desperate with hunger and fear. I felt revulsion at his deadness, so ugly, sprawled and defaced by the bullets that had killed him, but no fellow feeling at all. He might have been a dead dog, hit by a car and thrown to the side of the road. We all turned away and left him there, and went back to bed.

The next morning T and I went to see our section leader, Billy Childers, in his tent. We didn't like Billy much-he was an ex-enlisted man from Arkansas, and we thought him ignorant and crude, and what was worse, a clumsy, incompetent pilot; but he was a captain and we

were second lieutenants, and we had to fly with him, so we talked with him about flying when we had to. When we came in, Billy rose from his cot, put his hand slowly into his pocket, and brought out a dirty hand, kerchief. Slowly, carefully, he unwrapped it, holding it in one hand while he turned back the handkerchief with the other. Then he looked up proudly. On his extended palm, on the handkerchief, lay the dead man's ear. "Got me a souvenir," Billy said.

That was the only dead man, but there were many deaths, and the images of those deaths came back like film clips. We are watching a movie on the makeshift screen near the strip. A nightfighter pilot, approaching to land, mistakes the lights of a road for a row of landing lights, and settles to a perfect three-point landing between the road and the strip, in the gravel pit. The plane explodes, and a sudden ball of fire rises into the night. The movie is stopped until darkness settles again, and then continues. I sit in my plane on the taxiway at Yontan, waiting for clearance to take off. A Corsair damaged in a fight approaches for an emergency landing; it levels off, stalls, a wing drops and it flips over to crash beside the runway. From my foxhole I see Japanese planes hit; they blossom in flames, are shot to pieces, crash.

I remember a day in June-a hot, sunny, still day. I was lying naked in the sun, stretched out on a canvas cot, reading not very attentively at one of those odd-shaped, lengthwise paperbacks that the Army distributed to the troops. The day seemed peaceful, though the war was there, if you listened for it. A mile or so offshore the Missouri was still shelling Shuri Castle, and the sound of the firing and the detonations of the shells reached me as a dull, monotonous rumble, like the sound of a factory making something heavy but uninteresting. But where I lay the

The dead man.

earth was silently, soporificallv hot, and I might have been on a beach back home, sunburned and sweating and thinking about nothing.

On a cot next to mine, Rock was lying propped on his elbow; we were probably talking about girls, or the wild parties he'd known back at A&M. But at the sound of planes we stopped, and watched a flight of Turkeys come rumbling over the field. They looked as they always did in the air, cumbersome and tired, as though they didn't like flying very much, and weren't very good at it; but they were in good formation, a tight V of V's, trying to look as much like fighters as their ungainly shapes would allow. They flew the length of the strip and began to peel off for landing, and as they did, I counted them. There were only eleven: one was missing.

I tried to remember who had gone on the strike, and where they had gone, but I couldn't. None of my close friends, anyway. We watched the formation break into a stretched-out string of separate planes, watched wheels and flaps come down as one by one they turned to touch down.

Then I saw the other one approaching from the south, flying low and slow. It passed over us, so close and so slow-moving that I could see the oil streaks on the cowling, and a hole in the belly just aft of the wing. And I could see that the gunner's door, at the rear of the plane, had been jettisoned, and that there was someone in the open doorway, motionless, looking out.

The plane made a slow circle of the airfield, and once more headed down the strip. The radio must be out, I thought; he's looking for a green light from the tower. We could see the controller in the tower raise his signal light. The pilot began to rock his wings, slowly back and forth, to acknowledge the controller's signal.

Then, from the open door, something fell. Slowly, as though the sunlit air were bright water, it sank toward earth, turning and turning, very slowly. It struck the airstrip near the tower and bounced, suddenly and surprisingly high. And as it bounced, it opened, and became a spreadeagled man, and fell again to the earth, and lay, once more a lump, a something. The plane, as though relieved of an intolerable burden, circled more swiftly and prepared to land. On the strip near the tower there was a sudden flurry ofjeeps, and an ambulance, and men running, but there was no sound - I particularly remember that there was no sound-except for the quick bass roar as the pilot changed to low pitch for his landing.

The ambulance began to move slowly up the strip toward the sick bay, and the jeeps and men scattered as quickly as they had come. The strip was empty except for the plane rolling slowly and a cloud in sight.

The plane had been hit by groundfire, and a shell had exploded inside the fuselage, somewhere behind the wing; it had knocked out the radio, killed the turret gunner, and wounded the radio operator. The wounded man couldn't talk to the pilot with the radio out, and he could see the

great hole in the fuselage, so he had tried to bail out, but had fainted in the doorway. When the plane tilted over the strip, he fell, and died. Of all the deaths in the squadron, his was the only one I actually saw.

The rains began in late May. Clouds slid in from the China Sea and lay low and motionless over the island, and the rain fell heavily and ceaselessly, day after day. I would wake at night and hear the rain droning on the tent roof, and wonder if it would ever stop, and fall back asleep to the dull sound of the rain, and wake to find that it was morning - dark and gray, and the rain still falling.

We lived in a world of water and mud. The company street ran first in rivulets, then streams, until it became a bog of gluey mud that sucked at your feet as you walked. Tent roofs sagged with the wet, and dripped where you touched them, and tent floors were slick with mud. Foxholes filled slowly, like bathtubs. We were always wet. Bedding and clothing never dried, so that night and day our bodies were continually in con, tact with something damp and unpleasant to the touch. When we went out we wore suits of Navy rain gear-rubberized parkas and baggy pants that were clammy and cold - and high rubber boots; but the rain found entrances, streamed down our faces and necks, and in at our sleeves. Rain became the medium we lived in, a part of our air.

In the rain the airstrip looked like a dirt road to nowhere. Water stood in ponds on the runway, and the taxiways were rivers. Nothing was flying, no planes moved on the flight line, and there were no human beings in sight. Our Turkeys sat in rows with their wings folded, like wet, melancholy birds. The air-raid sirens were silent-the laps were grounded too, and were not even sending suicide attacks against the fleet. It was as though man's gift offlight had been withdrawn from him, and he had returned to earth and water, and to primeval mud.

The roads on the island quickly became impassable, slippery in the high places and flooded in the hollows. Every road to the front was jammed with stalled trucks and tanks and jeeps, miles,long lines of them, motionless and abandoned. Only the shelling went on, very muted and distant in the rain, but audible, if you listened: the rumble of shells from the fleet, and the more staccato sound of the field artillery. Sometimes at night, even through the rain, you could see the flicker of shellfire along the southern horizon, like summer lightning.

As the rain continued, and the road remained clogged with mired vehicles, the troops in the line began to run short of supplies. Our squadron was given the task of delivering new supplies by parachute drops, and for nearly a month we delivered everything that reached the front: food, water, ammunition, medical supplies, even a telephone switchboard.

We would take off in the rain, splashing through puddles that threw sheets of water back over the cockpit, and climb to the base of the hanging clouds-five or six hundred feet, most days-and slide into a

loose formation and head south, toward the lines. There a controller on the ground took over by radio, and directed the flight toward the drop area, where a colored panel spread in a field or a smudge of colored smoke identified the exact place for the drop. As we rumbled along over the low hills, I looked down into what seemed the ruins of an ancient, peaceful world - tiny fields and old stone walls, deep, narrow lanes lined with gnarled old trees, a heap of stones where a house had been. I wondered where it ceased to be American-held and became enemy territory, and what the [aps would do to me if I were shot down there.

To drop supplies this way successfully, you must fly over the target low and slow, and in a level, straight line. If you fly too fast, the chute will split when it opens; if you aren't straight and level it may entangle itself in the bomb bay. You must calculate the wind, and correct for it, or you may deliver your supplies to the wrong army. You settle into your run, the marker ahead and just to one side. It slides under your nose, and you open the bomb bays and begin to count. You feel exposed there, the plane maybe five hundred feet from a Japanese gun, belly open, the airspeed dropping. It seems that a Jap with a good throwing arm could hit you with a rock. You wait, counting. Now! The weight drops free and the plane lifts, you throw the throttle forward, the plane surges, and you swing north, away from trouble, and head for home. It has all taken less than an hour.

The squadron flew nearly five hundred of those drops during that rainy stretch; my logbook says I flew nine in the first five days ofJune. It was surely the most useful thing we did during the whole campaign. While the rain fell, air raids ceased, but in their place we began to have shelling. One gun, hidden from the spotting planes during the good weather, could now be run out of its cave, fired for a few minutes, and hidden again before it could be located. The shelling would come at any time-in the night, or while we were at lunch, or just as we taxied out to fly a parachute drop. There was no warning-just the first whuff of the distant gun, the descending shriek of the shell, and the explosion. Other shells would follow as the gunner worked his way around Kedena, aiming blind and changing direction slightly for each firing. We called him Pistol Pete, and his presence, down there in the hills in the rain, became a part of our existence.

Pistol Pete caused two kinds of fear. One was the steady, subliminal fear that you felt when he wasn't shelling, the fear that soon-nowright now - as you crossed the road, exposed and helpless, the shriek would sound and the shell fall, carrying your death. It was a terrible game that we all played. Now! (walking down the hill to the head). No, now! (sitting at dinner). No, now! Always the thought that at this very moment you might have finished all your living. The other kind was the fear that came while the shells were falling. It was deep and clutching, like a seizure. I sat in the foxhole with Rock during a shelling, and

though he was a brave man he shook uncontrollably. None of us was surprised or shocked, we all felt the same, though it had not seized our bodies that way. And we were right to be frightened; before Pete was silenced he had wounded seven of our men.

The rain ended; it was mid-june, summer weather, flying weather. The squadron grew restless. For two months we had been flying hardtwo or three hops, some days-but they had been local, unspectacular flights: a strike against a cave or a hidden gun, supply drops, antisubmarine patrols. In one month we had flown a thousand combat missions, and had dropped a hundred tons of supplies. We had delivered mail, sprayed the island with DDT, dropped propaganda leaflets behind the enemy lines. These had been useful services, and we might have argued that VMTB-232 was the most useful squadron on the island, but usefulness is only a military virtue among the upper echelons: generals cherish it, but second lieutenants don't. We had been raised on Dawn Patrol and Wings and G-8 and His Battle Aces, and for a year or more in flight school we had been handed the Navy's literature-all those glossy leaflets with titles like "Winning Your Wings of Gold." Military flying, these sources agreed, was bombing and shooting, sinking carriers and sending planes down in flames; it was daring, not utility, that counted. After all those services, we wanted a bit more daring in our lives.

Down at the southern end of the island our strikes were less and less necessary as the Army and Marines tightened their ring around the last defenders. The Japanese fought on, but the battle was really over; they had no more guns, and their caves and tunnels were blasted and burned out one by one. Shuri Castle had fallen at last. There was nothing left but the killing, and the infantry could do that. We flew our last strike on the island against some trivial target on June 19; Joe came back to assure the intelligence officer that he had got a direct hit on a three,hole privy. Two days later Admiral Nimitz, commander of the combined attack forces, announced that organized resistance had ended, and the island was secure. We heard stories, afterwards, of what those last days had been like for the defenders, and of how at the end the senior officers had ceremoniously committed suicide. But we didn't know enough about the defense to know that it had been brilliant and courageous. All I felt when I heard those stories was incomprehension: how could men behave like that, when they had lost?

We began to fly strikes against neighboring islands: to Mayako and Ishigaki, south of us towards Formosa, and north to Kikai jima and Amami 0 Shima. This was more like what we had expected - the massed flotilla of attacking planes, rumbling in formation toward the invisible target, the high, nervous movements ofthe fighter cover, nothing else in sight but water and clouds. And then the island appears ahead, the planes slide into attack formation, the high-speed descent begins, the first plane peels off, and you really see the island for the first time, in

your bombsight: a grove of trees on the right, an airstrip, a few buildings, and the tracers begin to rise lazily toward you, and little clouds of AA bursts hang in the air as you dive past, and you have dropped and are pulling away, over the trees toward the beach and safety.

They were classic, beautiful strikes, with the feeling of planes and men relating in the intricate choreography of a strike formation, the gutknotting climax, and the long, calm return. What memory returns to me is images: on a flight to lshigaki, I look out over the formation, the planes invisibly linked together, a squadron, and the weaving fighters above us, and I feel the sun warm on my cockpit canopy, and I am content to be there; and a later moment, not of contentment but of heightened life-diving, the plane bucking in the troubled air, and the tracers rising.

We flew another strike against a radar station on Amami, and there I got the only certain direct hit on anything that I can remember-two bombs dropped precisely through the roof of a long building, and quite effectively destroying it. But what was in the building? Radar equipment, we were told, and certainly there was an antenna nearby; but it might have been a big barn, or an abandoned warehouse, or almost anything. It might have been a barracks; perhaps there were men in it, but I don't think so, and of course I want not to think so. Being a bombing pilot, I had never had to set out to kill anyone, or to think of human beings as my target. I discouraged my two crewmen from firing their machine guns at random when we flew against little islands like Amami, which lay so peacefully in the summer sea, and looked as though they might be occupied by peaceable people-a few farmers, maybe, and a couple of radar men who kept a garden, and wrote haikus about loneliness.

Kikai, across a narrow strait from Amami, was more military-looking. It had a bombed-out airstrip, and the guns around the strip were manned by skillful gunners, who conserved their ammunition, only fired at sure targets, and never used tracers; so you never knew when you were being shot at until you felt the shells hitting your plane. We flew strikes against Kikai occasionally, dropping on the strip just to keep it out of operation, but we were cautious there-get in, drop, and get out, away from the hidden guns.

On one of these offshore strikes Joe took a bullet through his engine cowling that hit an oil line, and on the way home he gradually lost oil pressure until, as the flight crossed the eastern coast of Okinawa, his engine stopped dead. Below him was a new airstrip, just being finished, and he glided down and made a fine dead-stick landing on it. He came back to Kadena later that day in a jeep, in very high spirits: he had spoiled the Colonel's Grand Opening, he said, and the Colonel was very pissed off. It had been arranged that the Colonel would land the first plane on the new field the next day, thus officially opening it; but Joe

had got there before him. Still, as joe said, the Colonel would be the first to land a plane with its engine running.

The next day the squadron was told to prepare to leave Kadena. Henceforth we would operate out of Awase, the new field that joe had just initiated. Moving from Kadena to Awase was like moving from the frontier to the suburbs. Kadena had been built in a hurry, while the war was being fought a mile or two away, and it had a hasty feeling, even after months of village life. The tents still had dirt floors, and every tent had its foxhole; the shower was still an oil drum, and officers and enlisted men ate together in one mess tent. It was an agreeable kind of place, and I was happy there. But it was primitive, there was no denying that, and we moved with a sense of upward mobility.

Awase had been built like a real-estate development. Along the beach, at the edge of the eastern anchorage called Buckner Bay, was the stripnew, hard-surfaced, and longer than we were used to. The Air Force had installed a P,S 1 squadron there, on the east side, by the water; we were to have the west side. Inland from the strip the land rose steeply in irregular, treeless hills. Roads had been built up into these hills, and the squadron quarters were scattered along these roads, like development houses. The roads even had development-sounding names-Roosevelt Road, Admiral Something Drive, General Somebody Boulevard. They had been named, we were told, by the former Minnesota congressman who commanded the base.

Our squadron's area was high up, on a hilltop with a view of the field and the harbor. We had quonset huts, tents with floors and screens, a mess hall with a separate officers' mess and an ice machine, electric lights, a hot-and-cold shower-even a laundry, staffed by flat-faced, gold-toothed, grinning Okinawan women. There were no foxholes, and we didn't dig any; it would have been like digging a foxhole in Edina, or Great Neck. It was summer, and the island was secure; it was a time and a place to be soft. We lay in the sun, drank in the evenings, and flew uneventful anti-sub patrols and mail runs, and occasionally an unnecessary strike to neutralize an already bombed-out island. It was like sum, mer vacation, when we were kids-the sun always shining and hot on the skin, nothing much to do, the rhythm of life slowed.

The war had passed us, and we lived a suspended life, waiting for a new beginning. The next assault, we knew, would be against the home islands of japan, and we had heard from someone in Group headquarters, who had it from someone in the Wing, that ours would be the first bombing squadron to be based on Kyushu, as it had been the first on Okinawa. When I thought about it I felt doomed, with a japanese fatalism. I imagined the desperate defense of the homeland, the suicide attacks, the fierce concentrations of AA fire. The whole population would fight against us: in my imagination farmers attacked with pitch, forks, crying "Banzai!" and geisha girls held grenades between their

inscrutable thighs, every object was a booby trap and all the roads were mined. We would all be killed, I thought, by fanatics who had already lost their war. We would die a month or a week before it was all over, come all this way and die at the end of it, stupidly and unnecessarily.

But now it was summer, and we lived a summer life. We wandered the hills above the camp and found in the highest hill a tunnel, cut through the rock of the hill's core, that led to a chamber with gun ports overlooking the valley below. Japanese defenders had crouched here with their weapons, scanning the valley, waiting for an attack that came another way. Looking through those slits in the rock was like looking through their eyes-you could imagine the expected battle, the machine-gun fire pouring down on troops as they toiled up the slope below. And you could imagine the long despair of waiting, guarding those empty hillsides against an enemy who never came. Now the tunnel and the room at the end were empty too; only a sad dampness, the smell of cellars and funeral vaults, filled it. This one defensive post was the only sign around us that Japanese soldiers had lived here, that the war had been fought on this ground. All the other evidences had been erased, swallowed by the American suburb in which we lived and waited.

We went on flying. Sometimes it seemed that we flew simply because we always had flown, that we were a machine that couldn't run down. We flew strikes against islands that now are only names-Gaga Shima, Kume Shima. We hunted Japanese radar installations on the little islands that ran north in a chain toward Kyushu, and attacked buildings and antenna towers with bombs and rockets, and bombed yet again the unusable airfields that we had bombed the week before, and the week before that.

Among the pilots, and no doubt even more among the senior officers of the Group, there was a growing feeling that we should do something more spectacular than that - make some memorable military gesture before it was too late, and the war was over. Ships were reported in the China Sea, over near the mainland, and there was talk of a torpedo attack (no one in the squadron had ever fired a torpedo against a real target); but it never happened-maybe the Navy sank the ships, or maybe they were ours all along. If not ships, then the Japanese main islands. Kyushu was barely within range of our planes, and we'd have to hit the extreme southern tip if we were to get back to Okinawa, but we could do it, and we'd have bombed Japan. A target was chosen-an airfield on the southern coast - and a strike was launched. There was no particular reason to bomb that target: surely the Navy and the Air Force's B-29's had been hitting it for months; and anyway, the Japanese were virtually out of aircraft, and their fields were no serious threat to us. The strike wasn't really an attack, it was a sightseeing expedition, something to tell the grandchildren; it was as though we were getting

ready, now that the war was near its end, to become boring old soldiers, full of interminable war stories and lies.

Everybody was excited by the plan, everybody wanted to go, and I was disappointed and angry when I wasn't chosen, and even felt a touch of satisfaction that the weather was going to be awful; with a little luck, I thought, they won't even find Kyushu. They did, but under a storm front that covered the island with low, solid cloud. They couldn't find their target, headed for another field, couldn't find that one either, and were about to head for home when someone saw an airfield through a hole in the clouds. Any target was better than lugging the bombs home again, and they straggled down through the hole and dropped. They had bombed Japan, but nobody could be much more precise than that.

In mid-July the squadron tried another strike against Kyushu. This time all my friends-Rocks, T and Joe-went, but once more I was left out. This time there was to be an elaborate fighter cover, forty-eight Corsairs over the twelve TBM's; it was going to be a show, something to remember. The fighters took off first, and circled in divisions of four, stacked up into the blue summer air. But our planes were delayed, and by the time they were airborne the fighters didn't have enough fuel left to make it to Kyushu and back; and so the strike was diverted to the airstrip at Kikai jima. We had flown an eighteen-plane strike there the week before, and there couldn't be anything left that was worth bombing, only the patient gunners waiting for a sure shot. But once you had started such an elaborate operation you had to send it somewhere, if only to get rid of the bombs, and Kikai was handy.

I hung around on the hill that morning, watching the squadron take off. It was hot and sunny, and after they had joined up and left I took off my shirt, and brought a chair out into the sun and tried to read. But I couldn't. It was too quiet-everyone else seemed to be on the strike-and I felt restless, up there alone, waiting for my friends to come back. The ordinary air traffic moved around the field: a P-S 1 took off, sounding like an intent insect, a nightfighter landed. Down on the line a mechanic ran up an engine, up and up to a high scream like pain, and then suddenly back to a hoarse whisper. Then there was silence, only the hum of summer, and I waited in the sun.

I heard the flight before I saw it, a steady rumble out of the north, and then I could see them, first only a line, at eye-level from where I stood on the hill, then separate planes, in tight formation, a column of threeplane V's, close together and steady and formal-looking, like a parade. But in the last V there were only two planes. The space where the third plane should have been seemed an enormous emptiness that denied the strict symmetry of the formation, and the vanity of its parading. One plane was down somewhere-in the sea, or wheels-up on a beach, or crumpled in the rubble at Kikai field.

I waited. I could have gone down to Operations and heard the story,

but I stayed on the hill, and put off knowing. The pilots would land, they'd be debriefed by intelligence, and then they'd come up the hill, and I'd hear then.

It was Joe who was missing, and he was dead. He had dived in his turn over the target, and had flown straight into the ground, not even the beginning of a recovery, just straight in. He must have been killed in the air; otherwise he'd have got the plane somehow into level flight, and out to sea, as good a pilot as he was. There was no explosion when he hit, T said, and no fire - just the smash, like a car against a wall, or a tree falling.

In a month the war was over. The atom bombs were dropped, though we got only sketchy and confusing reports of what the Bomb was exactly, and what it did to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We were relieved; sitting around the bar, drinking, we told each other that we were relieved. But we were saddened too, though we didn't talk about that. Our common enterprise had come to an end: the invasion of Kyushu would not take place.

Our war ended officially on August 12, and that afternoon we launched every plane that would fly in what my logbook calls "Victory Flight," a sweep out over the fleet anchorage in a huge V formation. The bay was crowded with ships, motionless at anchor; they looked very peaceful and tranquil in the August sun, as though they would never put out to sea again, or fire a shell, or spray up tracers against attacking planes. It was a painting of a fleet that we flew over on that hot, latesummer day; the fleet itself belonged to the past.

We finished the sweep and turned, and the flight leader signaled us into a column. We dove back toward the ships below us, as though in an attack, and then, to my astonishment and alarm, the lead plane pulled suddenly up and heaved itself over into a portly barrel-roll-a sort of parody of a fighter pilot's victory roll. It was like seeing a fat lady somersault-it seemed impossible, it was certainly unwise, but she was doing it. The second plane followed, and the next, and it was my turn.

The Turkey was not built for acrobatics: the wings would not bear negative stress, and if I faltered in the roll while the plane was upsidedown I would surely pull both wings off, and plunge into the bay. I told my crew to hang on, pulled the nose up sharply, and rolled. The plane seemed to resist at first, and then resignedly rolled over. A year's accumulation of rubbish fell from under the floorboards, and I could hear loose gear rattling around in the tunnel behind me; I wondered how my poor crewmen were surviving back there. Then we were rolling out, swooping up toward level flight, the horizon returned to its proper place, and I joined up on the plane ahead of me. So much for Victory. It was a stupid thing to do, but I understand why we did it, why it was, in a way, necessary. We were giving Death the chance that he'd missed at Kvushu, We had survived a war, and all the ways that airplanes can kill

you, and we were going one step further, stretching our luck. Some of the sadness was in it, too; from now on our lives would never be daring and foolhardy again.

Summer turned into fall. The trees on the hillsides above the strip turned brown and gold, and the nights were cooler, but the days were fine and clear, only with that metallic look that blue skies have in autumn. Our lives were aimless now, without the momentum of war, and we spent our time mostly just waiting for the orders that would send us home. Flying then was only another form of idleness-circling around and around the field testing an engine, or flying to another field on the island to deliver mail, or pick up an engine part, or for no reason at all, just to be doing something. Some pilots I knew flew to japanese-held islands, and landed, and were received with formal courtesy, and there were several round trips to Kyushu, to the airfields that the squadron had never been able to find. But I didn't go on any of those tourist trips; I had had enough of islands.

In that fine autumn weather I might have taken a good look at the island on which I had lived for nearly six months. I could have walked over the ruins of Shuri Castle, or looked for souvenirs. But I didn't; I stayed there in our tent at Awase, doing nothing, feeling emptied of all motives. For me, the machine had run down.

September passed. The days were sunny, and warm at noon, with a haze at the horizon-like good fall days at home. On one of those days I flew to Kikai to look for the wreckage of Joe's plane, and, really, to say goodbye to him. It was an odd, uncomfortable feeling, to approach that hostile island, and to fly low and slow over the gun emplacements from which my enemies had looked up at my squadron's planes, and had killed my friend. The airstrip had not been repaired, it was still what it had been-a heap of useless, broken concrete-but the camouflaged guns had been uncovered, and I was struck by how many there were, a ring of them around the field. As I flew slowly across the field, a man came out of a shed and waved. I rocked my wings. Hell, the war was over.

I found the wreck just south of the field, not far from the beach. The engine was buried in the earth-the plane must have hit at a steep angle, at high speed-and the tail stood up in the air, like a monument. The wings had crumpled with the impact, but I could read the number painted on the tail; it was Joe's plane, all right. I couldn't think of anything to do. I flew around the wreck once or twice, very carefully (you could stall and spin in, doing that), and then turned south and headed back.

Along the northern coast of Okinawa I flew in close to the shore; I would probably never see that part of the island again. It was a bit of peaceful northern landscape-rather like Norway as I imagined it-that had not been touched by the war; its steep wooded hills and narrow

valleys were too rugged and too small-scale to interest generals or contain armies. I turned up a little valley, and saw a small house by a stream, and two or three people working in a garden. They looked up as I passed over, shading their eyes with their hands, curious but not frightened; I had nothing to do with them.

Then I flew on to Awase and landed, making the squadron's customary approach - the dive to the strip, the steep, impossible-looking bank, wheels and flaps down in the turn, the sharp, last-minute roll-out as the plane touched down. It was still pleasing to land in that extravagant way - if you could make a Turkey behave like a fighter, you could really fly. But there was something wrong about it, too. The war was over, and there wasn't any point in danger anymore. I wasn't a combat pilot now; I was only mortal.

Contributors

Ward Just's most recent novel, The American Blues (Viking, 1984), was excerpted in TriQuarterly #59, a special issue which took its title from that book. * * * A chapbook of five stories by Carol Blv, entitled Backbone, was released in November 1984 by Milkweed Editions, and three of her stories are being made into a video play, to be produced in 1985 by the Minnesota Short Story Project. She is the author of Letters from the Country (Harper & Row, 1981).

* * * David Ordan is a senior at Columbia College, in New York, where he studies fiction writing under Gordon Lish. The story in this issue marks his first publication.

* * * Christopher McIlroy has been a free-lance journalist and photographer, and an instructor of composition at the University of Arizona. A previous story of his was published by the Sonora Review, and another is scheduled to appear in Fiction.

Tobias Wolff's story, "Leviathan," will be included in a new collection of stories, Desert Breakdown, to be released by Houghton Mifflin in September 1985. His last book was The Barracks Thief (Ecco Press, 1984). He teaches at Syracuse University.

* * * James Kelman is the author of three volumes of stories and a novel, The Busconductor Hines (Edinborough, Scotland: Polygon Press, 1984). The stories in this issue will appear in Lean Tales, a collection of work by Agnes Owens, Alasdair Gray and Mr. Kelman, to be published in the United Kingdom in 1985 by Jonathan Cape. A new novel, A Chancer, will also be issued in 1985 by Polygon Press. * * * Ron Carlson recently finished his third novel, The Speed of Light. His story, "Car Baseball," appeared in TQ #58.

Glenda Adams, an Australian, is the author of The Hottest Night of the Century (1979) and Games of the Strong (1982), both published by Angus & Robertson in Australia and the United Kingdom. She teaches fiction writing at Columbia University's School of General Studies.

* * * "The New Moon Party" will appear in T. Coraghessan Boyle's new book, Greasy Leg and Other Stories, to be published in May 1985 by

Viking. At the same time, his second novel, Budding Prospects: A Pastoral, will be released in paperback by Penguin Books. * * * Wesley Walden was drafted into the army in 1970 and served a year in Vietnam, including time at the fire base described in "Mutts." He re-enlisted five years ago, and is serving in Berlin as a translator in Military Intelligence. He plans to leave the army in March 1985. * * * Richard Spilman, a member of the faculty at Marshall University, has published stories in MSS and Quarterly West.

The distinguished American poet, Karl Shapiro, is the author of several books, including his new and selected poems, Love & War/Art & God (Palaemon Press, 1984). Mr. Shapiro recently retired as professor of English at the University of California at Davis. Another section of his autobiography appeared in TriQuarterly #60. * * * Robert Watson is the author of five volumes of poetry and two novels. * * * John J. Clayton has published a novel, What are Friends For? (Little, Brown, 1979), and a collection of short stories, Bodies of the Rich (University of Illinois, 1984). His stories have appeared in Esquire and Playboy, as well as several literary journals. He is a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, in Amherst.

Former combat aviator Samuel Hynes is a professor of English at Princeton. "Remembering Okinawa" is part of an unpublished memoir of World War II. * * * Free-lance artist/writer Jonathan Sumas has had illustrations published in various books and magazines. He is currently working on a book with pictures entitled Toward The Garden.

In TriQuarterly #61, Fall 1984, the final portion of Alan Shapiro's essay, "The Dead Alive and Busy," was incorrectly printed. We offer our apologies to the author, and would like to supply the reader with the correct wording of the essay's conclusion:

I don't know what conclusions to draw from Patty's example. I certainly don't think one needs to be dying of cancer in order to read well. Such experience could easily have the opposite effect and compel one to read his own obsessions and preoccupations into the text. I'm not offering a kind of lecteur maudit theory of reading whereby the reader requires himself to suffer cancer or divorce or alcoholism before he can appreciate the poet's work. And yet I think the lecteur maudit is an exaggeration of a truth which Patty illustrates and which we sometimes lose sight of in the classroom. Perhaps there's a distinction to be made between usable and exploitable experience. Just as the poete maudit exploits his life, inviting catastrophe for inspiration, so also the lecteur maudit exploits his by making his problems an excuse for reading selfindulgently, for reducing the text into a mirror that gives back only what he wants to see and not necessarily what's there. Our particular experience and temperament, for instance, may predispose us to interpret a man hurrying into a waiting car as a bank robber, or businessman late for an appointment with his shrink, or any number of possibilities which closer examination and thought would corroborate or refute. The good reader would use his own life when reading, would draw on it as a basis of sympathy, but also go beyond it if he had to. Good reading issues in self-knowledge but not only by identification or appropriation, but also by enabling the reader to find expression for what he or she already felt but could not articulate. Because the feeling or idea was unarticulated, it remained unknown to its possessor, till the poem released it.

If all great art is symbolic of a kind of moral plenitude, of conflicting attitudes and impulses explored and worked through toward some ideal clarity, the act of reading is itself a model of ideal human relations, aspiring toward a perfect attentiveness in which emotional possession and intellectual comprehension - what experience conditions us to see and what the text insists we see-inform and alter one another. Reading well, in other words, is symbolic loving. If most students, still too naive to integrate their own experience into their conception of themselves and others, haven't yet discovered this, perhaps we can prepare them for this discovery by cultivating an intelligent enthusiasm for the poems that attempt to wake them, and when we can, for the poems that assume they are already awake.

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Robert Louis Stevenson and The Beach ofFalesa

A STUDY IN VICTORIAN PUBLISHING WITH THE ORIGINAL TEXT

BarryMenikoff. One of Stevenson's finest achievements, Falesa ranks among the masterpieces of English novellas. Yet, because it ran counter to various Victorian political, sexual, and religious convictions, it was never published as Stevenson wrote it. Language was revised or deleted, entire passages were garbled or bowdlerized, and punctuation was changed to "refine" or "correct" Stevenson's style. This work transcribes Falesti from the original manuscript, and includes an analysis of what happens when a work of art is converted into a commodity to satisfy the tastes and prejudices of the period. Illustrated. $28.50

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TWENTY POEMS OF AIME CESAIRE

Translated, with an Introduction and Commentary, byGregson Davis. Cesaire has long been regarded in France as one of the great poets of the zoth century. Moreover, the philosophy of negritude evolved by Cesaire and his friend Leopold Senghor is an important bridge between modernism and contemporary Third World nationalistic movements. The poems in this book, presented in French with facingEnglish translations, have been chosen to illustrate fundamental aspects of Cesaire's thought, imagery, and style. The commentary makes possible a deepercomprehension of the poems and their formidable linguistic difficulties. Illustrated with etchings done by Picasso for Cesaire's Corps perdu. $18.50

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Major New Publications of The New York Public Library

Alto Rhapsody by Johannes Brahms

Opus 51 for Contralto. Men's Chorus and Orchestra lnec by Walrcr Frosch

A facsimile (In three colon) of the onl)' exlant complete manuscnpe uf the oftenperformed work. wuh .1 percepuve mrroducnon and reproducncn of earher mU'i.I".11 sketches m the Ge'sdls..:h.lfr der MUSlktreunde m VlCnna. Puhhshe-d from the- ongmal manuscript In the llbrar)"� Mu"c Dlvlston In celebranon 01 the' scrh .1l1nl\'(r· s,1ryof Br,1hm's brrth a handsome facsimile edition of Ithe library'sl treasured manuscriptStem) Review lIIus 198, 76p §-J.8\·S doth S�o_oo

The Complete Works of Scott Joplin

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The- major Ame'Cl,,;an composer's works In a comprehensive new edmon Wl(h an expanded discography and the three- rags (FI, UQf R"g. ROH L'ilf f("R, ':1�Il"hI'gh! Rllg) that hold to be omueed from the 1'1 ':' �dltlOn of Jophn's Collrctrd Wor., (which Chotu called "a landmuk In Amenun mu:uul history"). \blllinciudet the com· plete plano·vocal SCOf'(" of Scott Joplln's open Trumonube. The works wIth therr decoretrve cover deslgn!l are reproduced from orlgmal or early sheer musIc wnh any mUM",1 �rrata correcrrd. Superb, a splendid facsimile edltlon-Nrwswee,,"

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Charles Dickens' Book of Memoranda

A Pbotographu: and TypographIC Facsimile ofthe Notebook

B'gun In January 18 f5

Transcribed with mtro and notes by Fred Kaplan

Here ,U� the seeds of some nl Dickens' most memorable- �turIH-rlnl!lo.l.:har cter ,ketchn.lragment!lo of conversancn.fong lists of Impos!IIhly possible names, allrotted down In the' notebook he UK'd for mu!ot of the- la!ol fitreen years of hl� hfe Now puhhsbed for the first time- tn ItS entirety from the original volume In the Library's Ikrg Collecnon.

beaulilully prinred cuno IIh.II will delight lovers of hterature-e-Washington Post an important C\'CIIt in Dickens studies-kathleen Tillotson 119811 118 P \-179'7 doth ho.oo

Bulletin of Research in the Humanities Volume 86 (1983)

In vigorous IlIusrrate'd arncles scholars throughout the- world explore art, htrrary history, and the performln, arts. Vulumc 86 Includes newly dIKovcrNleue'r!) nf He-rman MelVille and "uys on Coleridge's and Yut\'!. father!o. on Madame- de Stat'l"s hrerary career, on Fanny BurnC')' a!o paue-nt. on D. H Lawrence and an, and on raez and the pamter RDmare Ik.arde-n.

Now edited and pubhshed cocperauvely by the library and the State Umversuy of New York. Slon\ Brook CELJ 1982 Award for "the bes, lournal dnign"

,"di�pc::nsable to any research hbrary�nals Rt"\'u�w

Quarterly I"ole: 1St ISSUe- Will be pubh'hed In early �pnng 19841. Volume- 86: h�. Ins(I{utlonal rate, S18. indIVidual rate

Mclymbrosia

by Virginia Woolf

An Early VersIon of The Voyage Out

Edired by lOUISe A. DeSalvo

A reading 'er!olon 01 Ihe c.uhc\t recoverable full versron ct Vlrgmla Woulf\ fir�t novel, whrch ,he revued m.1ny t,me!) betcre publu anon In 191�, The exploratory mrrcducnons and appendices with textual variants document the .1uthor', evclvmg \'Iew!) 01 women, hfe.fove, marna"" potmcs, and art. highly recommended-Choice 1'i81 24\ P Sol. ·""0 doth ho.oo Inot J\.1,lablc to booksellers outside' the' U.S.

W. H. Auden [907-[972 by Edward Mendelson

An Exhibmon from the Berg Collection Foreword by lola l. Szladus

A.n d�ant memonel �at.llogUC' of the m.1IUf archive of Auden'!! works. written by hl!o Inen.rv eaecetor. lncludes a bnef biography; reproducnons III manu!o"npts and pe-Bonal pbotegraphs, deKnptlon!) of Import.lnt notebooks, manuscnpts .Ind prmred works; and record, of Auden's collabora(Ions with Chester Kallman. Cbnstophcr Ishtr ood.lknld.mln Bnnen, and others. lIIu�119801 64P S-264'9 paper wr.lppcrs $11.00

Q" Among our other m-pnnt pubhcancns arc' Sean O'Casey's earhest extant play T� H",I-rst ftstllNJI (cloth. SI1.00). the histone '301m.!" edmon uf W�/' Wh"",,,,, 'i 8/,,� Boo' (1 vols. boxed. SbQ 00 I, L IlIl.1n Moore\ 3wud-wlnnmg r.elcct,on of our Dan"e- ColI«tlon\ early ''''.�S oflhr D""u tdoth, SI � .00), and rwo ohmreprmle-d uandard rtfe'KncC' works. Gtorge F Black\ Thr Sur""mts of5(otl."d (cloth, h5.00) and Charles E. DombuKh's M,t,tary BlbllOgrapby of,b� Cwd Wllr t} wols, cloth, S65 00).

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Four books from Northwestern that will change the wayyou read

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Hershel Parker,l1awed Texts and \'erballcons: LiterarJ'LlurhorilJ' in Anu'rican Fiction

In this clearlv mitten. witty polemic. Hershel Parker demonstrates that interpreters, theorists, and teachers ofliterature cannot afford to ignore the ronrvrns oftextual scholars with the conditions of production. revision, and publication ofliterarv works, Concentrating on American classics sud} as The Red Badge qrColll'agt', Tender is the ,\'(I(ht, Pudd'nhcad WilSOll, and All Ame,icall Dream, Parker shows that the neglect ofthe textual histulies" ofliterarv works has led both to editorial blunders and'critical misinterpretations, Even deconstructionists, who "put into question" the coherence ofliterary texts. take for granted the authoritv ofthe texts thev proceed to deconstruct. Cloth S19 95

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• Charles Newman, The Post-Modern Aura: The Act qfFiction in an Age of'lnflution

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The Best of Intro

This volume, published in 1985, reviews fifteen years of INT ROd u ction of such writers as Barry Hannah, Ai. lames Welch, Gregory Orr? Larry Levis, Carolyn Forche. Leslie Ullman, Maura Stantonl Olga Br oumas, Lee Zacharias, AJan Weir; and many other writerJ who now have successful writill,g careers.

ASSOClATED WRITING PROGRAMS Old Dominion University Norfo1k� VA 23508·8510

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#S7 A special two-volume set-Vol. 1, A Window on Poland: featuring essays, fiction and poems written during Solidarity and martial law. Konwicki, Brandys and others, with twenty-two photos and graphic works. 128 pp. Vol. 2, Prose from Spain, 'featuring recent fiction and essays, plus an interview with Juan Goytisolo and eight color pages of street murals. 112 pp. $3.95/each vol., $7.90/set

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IN FORTHCOMING ISSUES

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