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Publication of TriQuarterly is made possible in part by the donors of gifts and grants to the magazine. For their recent and continuing support, we are pleased to thank the Illinois Arts Council, the Lannan Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Chicago Community Trust, and individual donors.

TriQuarterly also thanks the following recent donors and life subscribers:

Walter Adams

Simon J. Blattner, Jr.

Louise Blosten

Mr. and Mrs. H. Bernard Firestone

C. Dwight Foster

Mr. and Mrs. David C. Hilliard

Charles T. Martin

Mr. and Mrs. Andrew McNally

Michal Miller

Fran Podulka

Gilaine Shindelman

Allen R. Smart

Gary Soto

Marc Straus

Lawrence Stewart Geraldine Szymanski

Scott Turow

NOTE: TriQuarterly welcomes financial support in the form of donations, bequests and planned gifts. Please write to Reginald Gibbons, editor. Please see the last page and the inside back cover for names of individual donors.

Spring/Summer 1997

Editor

Reginald Gibbons

Managing Editor Kirstie Felland

Executive Editor Bob Perlongo

Special Projects Editor Fred Shafer

Co-Editor Susan Hahn

Assistant Editor Gwenan Wilbur

Design Director Gini Kondziolka

TriQuarterly Fellow

James Lang

Reader Ian Morris

Advisory Editors

Editorial Assistants

Kemba Johnson, Jacob Harrell, Dylan Rice, Elizabeth Taggart

Hugo Achugar, Michael Anania, Stanislaw Baranczak, Cyrus Colter, Rita Dove, Richard Ford, George Garrett, Michael S. Harper, Bill Henderson, Maxine Kumin, Grace Paley, John Peck, Michael Ryan, Alan Shapiro, Ellen Bryant Voigt

TRIQUARTERLY IS AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF WRITING, ART AND CULTURAL INQUIRY PUBLISHED AT NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY.

Subscription rates (three issues a year) - Individuals: one year $24; two years $44; life $600. Institutions: one year $36; two years $68. Foreign subscriptions $5 per year additional. Price of back issues varies. Sample copies $5. Correspondence and subscriptions should be addressed to TriQuarterly, NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY, 2020 Ridge Avenue, Evanston, IL 60208. Phone: (847) 491-7614. The editors invite submissions of fiction, poetry and literary essays, which must be postmarked between October 1 and March 31; manuscripts postmarked between April 1 and September 30 will not be read. No manuscripts will be returned unless accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope. All manuscripts accepted for publication become the property of TriQuarterly, unless otherwise indicated. Copyright © 1997 by TriQuarterly. No part of this volume may be reproduced in any manner without written permission. The views expressed in this magazine are to be attributed to the writers, not the editors or sponsors. Printed in the United States of America by Thomson-Shore; typeset by TriQuarterly. ISSN: 0041-3097.

National distributors to retail trade: Ingram Periodicals (La Vergne, TN); B. DeBoer (Nutley, NJ); Ubiquity (Brooklyn, NY); Armadillo (Los Angeles, CA).

Reprints of issues #1-15 of TriQuarterly are available in full format from Kraus Reprint Company, Route 100, Millwood, NY 10546, and all issues in microfilm from University Microfilms International, 300 North Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, MI 48106. TriQuarterly is indexed in the Humanities Index (H.W.Wilson Co.), the American Humanities Index (Whitson Publishing Co.), Historical Abstracts, MLA, EBSCO Publishing (Peabody, MA) and Information Access Co. (Foster City, CA).

A story that originally appeared in TriQuarterly #97-"Transactions" by Michelle Cliff-is to be included in The Best American Short Stories 1997 (Houghton Mifflin), edited by E. Annie Proulx and annual editor Katrina Kenison. The book will be published in December.

The poem "No Sorry" by Catherine Bowman, which originally appeared in TriQuarterly #95, has been selected for inclusion in The Best American Poetry 1997 (Scribners), edited by James Tate and series editor David Lehman. Publication will be in September.

"On with the Story" by John Barth (TQ #95) has been chosen for publication in Prize Stories 1997: The O. Henry Awards (Doubleday/ Anchor), edited by Larry Dark. Publication will be in October.

Gibbons FICTION

ETCHINGS BY TONY FITZPATRICK

Izzy's Trumpet; Birth of a Kingsnake; Carnival Cat; The Atomic Ant; The Shroud; The Songbird; Crow in the Service of Ghosts; Orbit Dog; Zombie Seal; Apparition of the Racehorses; The Mange Dog; The Cat Driven Mad by Swallows; Rat Tormented by Ghosts; The Slugger; Lightning Born; The Matador's Bad Dream, on pages 6, 29, 81,91, 104, 109, 112, 116, 127, 131, 134, 140, 154,168,184,202

Cover etching (The Eternal Snake) by Tony Fitzpatrick

Cover design by Gini Kondziolka

Photograph of Steve Fisher on page 142 by Cherry Vasconcellos

Izzy's Trumpet [black-and-white]

Three Stories

Kanai Mieko

Translatedfrom theJapanese by

Sarah Teasley

When Treading on Soft Earth,

When treading on soft earth, or even if not, the naturally soft pads of feet seldom make any noise: those extremely soft fleshy objects make only a faint sound when they touch something, hard concrete or brick, or black-and-gray marble spread like a chessboard on the front wall and floor of the first floor of a building-was it the young man wearing blue overalls (there was a red line around the collar, and the company name was written in red letters on the chest, although I haven't read what it says) who came from a cleaning company every other week on Sunday afternoons to clean the floors and windows of the building, speaking broken Japanese (always listening to tapes of songs by Taiwanese or Chinese popular singers with the volume turned up as he chattered, and sometimes there was a melody I knew; I have gone for a walk in the evening and realized that I was humming that song, the one that says Even though I always knew the only person I wanted to meet was you, my heartstrings would not tie), was it he who showed me the cross-section of a small trilobite fossil emerging from the face of a stone against which it had been pressed, or maybe it was the newspaper-delivery boy-in which the shape of a trilobite appeared, and even though it was summertime it was chilly; when running on hard concrete or on marble, that sensation of stretching so far as if wanting to grasp onto things with the claws of the forelegs, so that the faint dry clicking sound was the noise made by the pointed tips of the small half-transparent hooked claws, hollowed and tinged with light purple in the middle, claws like however many folds of epidermal tissue piled on top of each other, as they touched the hard floor, now not stealthy steps on the ground like 7

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soft moist red earth littered with fallen pine needles, but walking slowly with an easy step-it flares moist rough orange nostrils slightly and makes small drops of water at the ends of shining white whiskers sparkle-the eat's coming is watched, and it pauses at the edge of the pond, its circumference lined with bricks reached by the morning sun, bricks lying width-wise around the circumference of the rectangular pond three-and-a-half tatami mats large in which float lotus leaves; on summer evenings, a rod-shaped bug-light like vaguely pale lukewarm water is switched on, and the edges of the light peach-colored petals layered over and over each other take on a blue cast tinged with green, while reddish-purple lines diverge finely like capillaries in the white part near the calyx; it was possible to replace the water in the pond, its mud settled at the bottom, through a pipe buried underneath the bricks, but mosquitoes appeared and it became clear that the bug light had no effect, so by way of a countermeasure to the clouds of mosquitoes the manager thought to put toad eggs from the pond of a nearby park's Japanese garden into a plastic bag and to bring them for release into the pond; one morning in May when the continual rain had just stopped, he brought the eggs lined up neatly like brown beans in a transparent graytinged string; back in his elementary-school days at the school in the center of the town they had been made to write a tadpole group observation journal for science class and he had been the group leader, so he had labored valiantly at finding tadpoles, he told the watching residents; the fat woman up in room 302 on the third floor said afterwards, He said he'd written a tadpole observation journal in a group and he'd been the group leader, so that manager, he must be a lot younger than I'd thought, and speaking of group leaders, the army, what's it called, it's called a regiment? things like that make me think of group leaders, and she had laughed while saying it; she sat down on the bricks around the pond in which float the round dark green leaves of small lotuses-the pale rod-shaped flame of the bug light made the twilit green leaves and black surface of the water shine-and put the soles of her feet on the damp bricks, and wind came blowing between the pines, the locust trees, the dark peach-colored oleander and the white cotton roses; the smell of paint on the steel frame of the just-painted gray fence around the yard facing the hill road mixed together with the stench of decaying mud from the bottom of the river that had remained on the roads, in gardens and below the floors of the houses along the river when the river flowing along the private railway line connecting the suburbs and the city center down the hill road and across the four-lane street was

flooded by heavy rain, it was a smell like the fish- and blood-smelling secretions of goldfish scales from the water in the pond; she was wearing a summer dress with a print of small yellow flowers-buttercups, forsythia, yellow roses, saxifrage, mimosa, which was it?-and green leaves on a background of extremely pale white flax that left shoulders, arms and neck bare and gathered fully at the waist-there were three thin straps (the same color as the yellow flowers on either side of the green of the leaves) on each shoulder connecting the deeply plunging back to the front with its built-in rubber bra with nylon-lined cups-every time she moved her body slightly the light flax fabric made the hushed sound of a dress rustling-that summer dress wasn't one with fasteners in the back, but once undone fastened from the left armpit to the narrowest part of the waist with two-piece hooks made from small silver pins, and there was also a zipper to zip from the hips up towards the waist, so that every time she went to take it off-even though she had on only small damp panties under that summer dress with its background pattern of small yellow flowers-slight confusion arose, the thread in the part where the thin straps attached to the body would loosen, and when she took off the large quantity of rustling cloth that was the skirt by pulling the lining over her head, the small gold hair pins in the shape of musical notes fastened above her ears by which she held her hair back and up fell out and her brushed, waved hair became disheveled and tangled in the fasteners, what annoying clothes; her pale face was thrown onto the surface of the water that reflected pale light; two frogs lying concealed in a grassy part of the garden jumped lightly to appear at the edge of the pond paved all around with bricks, while watching them stay as they are, motionless, I say I've heard it said that if one of the frog couple dies the other one will stop eating and die too, but where did I hear that, and raise my voice softly and laugh; the black tiger-striped cat jumps up lightly onto the edge of bricks around the pond, extends its neck far and begins to lick the surface of the water with its peach-colored gracefully supple tongue as if whipping something.

The calm, slender voice might have faded away above the waves. On the hill road on the far side of the fence, its greenish-gray paint peeling away and brown varnish to prevent rust flaked off here and there so that the roughened earth colors emerge, red rust and black iron, a young girl riding a bicycle with light reddish-yellow birch-colored legs bared from gray shorts bends forward and pedals to come up the hill so that her hips seem to float, pulls up right in front of the window, puts one foot on the 9

ground and wipes sweat from her forehead with the sleeve of her white cotton sweatshirt; she notices the cat, sitting half-asleep on the brick border, its forelegs folded up beneath its body, and pouts her lips, flicks the tip of her tongue against her upper jaw and cries like a mouse to attract the eat's attention, but the cat, its eyes narrowed, only moves its ears back slightly, after a moment cuts across the yard paved with bricks and comes walking towards the window without giving the young girl any attention and takes one bite of the tips of the long, thin, stunted, light-green leaves, their roots growing in the earth of the cracks between bricks; the young girl following the eat's figure with her eyes meets the gaze through the window, and looks away slowly, neither smiling nor hurrying in confusion, leans her body forwards and at the same time lifts her right foot from the ground onto the pedal, pedaling once, moves her delightful suntanned legs, all birch- and rose-colored speckles, up and down slowly in a large arc and rounds a curve up the hill road; the yellow-fuzzed skin of fruit, the moon like a peach beginning to tum pink, sizzles as it begins to rise in the space between the storehouse, its earth walls creeping with withered ivy, and the charcoal-gray slate roof surrounded by a long stone wall; An encounter in Venice, an unexpected second meeting, says the young man, and pauses a moment: bog moss constantly dampened by water sank down into the stairs of the palace's stone boat dock, and the small sound of footsteps on the stairs resounded and echoed in the corridors of the palace, the sound of water slapping against the gunwale and the long wooden pole pulled by the boatman passed through the water, the creaking sound of the iron crutch crossed the surface, and the canal spreading out around the stem shattered the moon's reflection, he continues in a hushed voice; the woman who brought melting frozen cod fillets in a white plastic bag enters, Why didn't you bring in the wash while the sun was still out, didn't I ask you to, I had to do it all, this is so tiresome, and Because of this, I answer, because of this I say we ought to buy a clothes dryer; she begins to cry from this stupidity, buries her chin in the big roll collar of her sky-blue coat, it certainly seemed to take a long time, but in all honesty I don't really know.

The bricks were always wet from the humidity and their rough dark red surface was cool; during the rainy season light green moss grew and the whole surface looked as if mold had grown on it, but the ground near the fence was dry narrow red earth, so her opinion that the earth in this area was naturally moist had been incorrect; but even so, the old

house to the west had a well which became the well designated as drink, ing water in times of emergency, so they were just dredging it the other day, and from what the manager who had been to see it said, the fact that it was a much shallower well than had been thought was proof that the earth there had a high moisture content so that's why the bricks are always wet; when the rainy season cleared and the summer sky spread out, the foreigners who were temporary employees of the cleaning com' pany played Chinese or Taiwanese pop songs on the tape recorder with the volume turned up all the way as they ran water from the waterpipes out of a light blue vinyl hose, and after they had scrubbed off the moss with a long-handled brush used for cleaning the deck, she opened up a folding deck chair upholstered with red, yellow and blue-striped canvas onto the brick patio, saying Because it's cool here and feels better than being in an air-conditioned room, she's sensitive to heat and perspires heavily, so to cool down her body that never stops perspiring from a bath, she turns off the lights facing the window in the room, lights spiral anti,mosquito incense on a white cake-plate, puts on a soccer-field-style dressing gown meant to be worn after the bath and sinks into a deck chair; she puts a towel wrung out in ice water on her red, glowing face and sweats continuously, always saying Because it flows like a waterfall until I simply can't take any more; she wipes perspiration from the back of her head and the nape of her neck, and from her chest, with its seem, ingly grayish cast in the shadow of the two full breasts, in which ribs float up between the breasts, full but whose shape had begun to collapse with the sensation of hanging down a little, in the center nipples like black cherries and elliptical areolae with grainy pinkish beige skin, soft and heavy flesh that when lifted up with the palm of the hand quivers wetly like a white custard, then quivers slowly while returning to its original shape when let go of with the upraised hand, with a towel soaked in ice water then wrung out; even though there was no intention of stealing a glance (or anything to steal a glance at) from the dim room-because of the bluish radiation from the television screen, vague light seeped from the room with its lights turned off-the line of the body, held in cloth stretched curiously taut and unaccustomed to skin, light-blue, violet and bright brown stripes on a beige background, had begun to collapse but still had elasticity, white skin wetted by perspiradon and emanating rose-colored light-a member of the cavalry brigade wearing a white hat with his uniform, blue trousers with a yellow stripe, and riding a Morgan horse with a rounded body and a short arched neck that inclined forwards, its whole body gleaming lustrous vellow-gold->-

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the Morgan horse and the man had become one like a centaur from myth-galloped through the desert dried reddish-yellow with snow, white clouds dense like whipped cream floating in the parched ultramarine sky above soaring crags; the camera moves sideways along the long rail as if sliding, she brings her wet upper body up from the deck chair as if leaning and bends her neck forwards, slowly raises her fattened white arm bared from the curiously cut sleeveless soccer'field clothing, holds up the clean wet hair at the nape of her neck so that it hangs down in front of her face and keeps the towel soaked in ice water at the nape of her neck without moving; Indians fiercely riding gray, chestnut, brown, and-white-spotted and black-and-white-dappled Appaloosas follow behind the man galloping on a Morgan horse, The towel's lukewarm from my body, so won't you go soak it in ice water in the sink then wring it out for me, she calls out with a gesture-she ought to do it her' self-Or it would be good to put some water with ice floating in it in a plastic washbasin and put it out near the deck chair-but even so, I get up from the sofa, open the window, approach her deck chair, and take up the moist towel, lukewarm from absorbing the heat of her body and smelling of the sweetness of perfumed soap-the plump warmth of her damp body temperature held up with unexpected heaviness in the palm of my hand-the hoofs of however many horses resound across the earth like grains of an easily crumbling sweet rice cake or red,brown tobacco leaves, and yellow dust rising wildly like clouds in the sky blown away in a gust of wind winds in front of, behind and around the Appaloosas and the Indians as it moves.

The kitten with soft, bright orange fur on its stomach, white fur around its mouth and under its chin and chestnut and umber stripes everywhere else peeped out its dark red rose'colored tongue with the sharp tip and cried in the entrance to the parking lot; If you'd seen that it would have become unbearable, and there's nothing I need to tell you, but since the child laid down was still an infant, I remembered the time when, eyes closed and stuck fast to a nipple, it drank from my breast, she said; the small living creature that seemed buried in soft fur climbed up on my lap with helpless lightness, got its light violet claws curved like hooks caught in the weave of my wool pants, the tips of the pointed claws opening out from the soles of the feet pricked as they pierced the skin: we raised it from the evening of that day on; I heard it from the fat lady upstairs, she said while pulling wet spinach out of a white plastic bag from the supermarket, the office on the fourth floor that up until

two years ago was called a "model club" was really the office for a call, girl organization, and one morning three patrol cars pulled up without sounding their sirens and raided the office, and the girls that were in the office were handcuffed, tied together with a rope and taken to the police station, did you know that had happened? she asked; but Of course I'd neither known that story nor heard such a rumor from anyone, I answer; That's because you're not in the habit of standing around exchanging greetings and small talk with the building's other residents and the man' ager, she said; It's the same thing in the long run, she says, bringing up something completely unrelated, in the long run what had changed: in the beginning I myself had invisible desires hidden in depths that choked my breath as it was blown by the strong hot wind, desires that flowed through my whole body as if softly dissolving and overflowing, and thought it meant that I myself had changed; but meanwhile because of that alone it cooled down suddenly, and in the end nothing had changed even a little bit, and daily life only dragged on as slowly as before; I haven't a set address or anything, she begins to cry, says that the soles of her feet are hot and puts her bare stockingless legs down on the damp bricks, I'm so unsure I can't stand it; she wipes her sweat-moistened forehead and cheeks damp with tears with a gauze handkerchief pulled from the pocket of her skirt, and a skin-colored makeup stain sticks to the gauze handkerchief; she doesn't notice that a small box tied with a brown velvet ribbon and wrapped in paper falls out of her hand, bag, put down as if thrown down on the floor, but when she turns around suddenly it catches her eye; and because the smells of the wax polish on the hall floor and the sugary-sweet chemical cleaner had waft, ed into the room from the open windows down the hall it was Sunday, so it must have been ten days later-she had left, and the cat that hated the smell of wax polish twitches its nose, sneezes delicately, runs outside the window with small steps, nibbles the long thin leaves of grass grow, ing in the cracks between bricks, walks over slowly to leap up onto the edge of the rectangular pond and begin to doze with its front paws folded under its chest; the red earth, dried by the lukewarm breeze, flies up soft, ly and small round lotus leaves quiver and sway from the small waves on the surface of the pond; I yawn, and the skin under my eyes that feels stiff as if sleep dust has stuck to it itches faintly from a small tear leaked from the comer of my eye, so I wipe it away with my finger.

Horizons West

The white neck wrapped in a soft lustrous long-haired black fur had the shape of a smooth column, and to delicately lick with the tip of the tongue the downy hair at the nape of the neck, arranged into two wedge-shaped pieces by the thin sharp blade of a razor as if just trimmed at the hairdresser's, might have produced the faint taste of metal. Cool and chilled, the taste of cool, chilled metal spread to each taste bud on the rough, disordered tip of the tongue: the skin on the smooth neck shivers slightly as if being tickled and pricks like small waves in excitement; she looks down as if burying her jaw into the soft black fur with its lustrous gleam, and her neck becomes level, the surface of its skin raised in small prickles, as her pointed vertebrae emerge; the soft fur around her buried jaw ruffles faintly in her breath, and she suddenly thinks of the cool deep dark silence that enwraps the round head-eyes gleaming like deep-colored amethysts or small black beads, the wet nose trembling minutely as it senses its surroundings, whiskers transparent and silver, sharp tensed claws that eat into the earth and the full round tail, quietly laid down on the frozen earth-of the whole of the small living creature wrapped in fur gleaming smoothly in waves as if wet; her jaw buried in the fur collar, she moves the soft kid square handbag carried on her left arm to her right arm, and grips the sleeve of the thick coarse tweed coat with her gloveless hands. The tweed is rough to the touch, the oversweet smell of lanolin remains in the stiffly twisted yam, and the nap of the stiff thread must leave a pricking sensation in her fingertips; the strength in her cold fingers comes through layers of cloth wrapped around the arm; the thread of the grainy tweed is chafed by nails stained with pearl-colored nail enamel, and an extremely faint rasping sound passes to the ear.

The daughter I had left at home was already a high-school student, and although when younger she had called me "Mama," she had for some time been calling me "Mother," even though I had liked the sound of small soft lips springing open twice that is "Mama," the close sweet childish sound springing open, whenever it was it had changed to the cool-feeling name "Mother" I had definitely had a lover; like a shipwrecked sailor, that sound opened wide my despairing eyes in the mornings and nights of my solitary life-The clothes Mother buys me are nasty, she says defiantly, opening to the whites her eyes like her father's, no one wears things like this, such a frilly dress-spotting the shadow of

a white sail in the deep thick milk-white fog that wiped out the distant horizon, I didn't know if whatever was loaded to overflowing on that boat meant new distress or good fortune; every morning I open my eyes, and without thinking Surely that will happen today, prick up my ears at every sound, spring to my feet, am surprised it isn't happening and in mad and sudden melancholy have nightmares and cry in bed. Lukewarm tears cling to my cheek and drip from my chin onto my neck: turning my head sideways on the pillow, tears spill from the comer of my eye to flow along and into the outside of my ear, before long entering inside; the small volume of liquid that spills lukewarm from my eye has chilled completely to become cool by the time it flows into my ear, like words whispered to my ear alone-No matter how long you wait, that's something that will never happen, you've been betrayed again-something to freeze the soul; that man appeared like a white sail materializing out of deep milk-white fog. But of course that's the beginning of new despair, and before long another man will appear enveloped in deep milk-white fog; the mother who never uttered one word in the form of half-tacit approval about her only daughter's infidelity says That's a loose thing to do as she pours tea from an old, old light brown teapot cracked in the shape of the character shi and bordered with a pattern of small light-blue flowers and yellow citrons into cups with the same pattern, could it have been your upbringing that's at fault, she added while sighing; it wasn't the owner of the boat Tsubame with its four hanging bunks that she meant when speaking ill of younger men proposing marriage and living with the child. The small girl manikin wearing a thin pink dress like a ballerina's costume with layers of rows of white lace ruffles on the skirt had a light-blue grosgrain rosette hanging down low in the back; it could have been because I didn't buy you that thin starched straw hat decorated with cloth-dyed red, orange and yellow artificial anemones, says the mother, and the daughter gives a <smile as if snapping>; in the end she married the younger man, and the daughter demanded to live with her grandmother and her grandfather, opening wide to the whites her eyes, resistant like her father's; you understand how I felt at the time, don't you.

Of course I didn't understand, but what would have changed had I said It was because I understood?

Treading on soft earth, clods of damp black earth were stuck in a dappled pattern to soles of feet that had tread on moist earth thickly layered

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with soil from decayed leaves fallen to the ground; the smells of rotted plants and sweat mixed together, and I say You have to wash that off, but Putting the burning soles of her feet on the damp earth feels as if the heat remaining in her veins is chilled, and that feels so good, she says; I hug the black silk-lace shawl covering her bared shoulders, and in the slightly sour smell mixed with the simultaneous fragrance of orange blossoms, the drenched hair, drenched shawl and drenched skirt that had lost its shape and sagged somewhat, and as a contrast to the two cool and firm arms, the warmly glowing chest, lower back, abdomen and thighs make soft muscles flex while inside my arms: That's completely unbelievable, I mutter, but it's the truth, she continues, murmuring in a damp voice that conveyed the entirety of her soaked body in my arms; It's destiny that things tum out this way, she whispers, her throat trernbling as if swallowing saliva, and in the mixing together of the raw smell of rotted water plants and the smell of dust trapped in a room, I press my lips to her face, become an irregular pattern of heat and cold. Teeth wetted with lukewarm saliva, swollen lips slightly chapped as if feverish, the smooth taste buds inside them with their faint salt taste, her ears become hot and red, a neck that sounded the gushing noise of the blood flowing in its veins, the mass of long sodden hair coiling around the neck, nipples pressed softly whose stiffness could be seen through the bra, and below them to the left the heartbeat that continued to sound, all of these were inside my arms, and even though that was clear, the area around my stomach was oppressively sore and my throat severely parched.

As if in afternoon sunlight gradually becoming delicately fainter, I'm not sure if I'm looking at the ocean or the earth's horizon, and my dim impression of space in the distance becomes increasingly unclear throughout; I realize I am being won over unawares by sleep and try faintly to resist, but from the tips of my hands and feet begin to dissolve into gray space, and before long heavy sweet gray starts to spread around my lower back and in the area around my forehead; it looks as if this causes the faint smile that floats up around my mouth, but my consciousness no longer makes judgments, and the gray space dissolving from the tips of my fingers is vague like thick dust; in that way however many days and nights passed by, and the grayness that dyed me from the tips of my fingers enwrapped me softly, softly; It changed into something like a kind of anger, she says, and adds at that time I bought this expensive fur-trimmed coat on impulse; the long-haired black fur with its Ius-

trous gleam has become the circumference of a stand-up collar and hidden buttons that make the black cashmere coat look flat, decorated from the chest around the waist to the hem, the fur draping from the chest left and right and at the hem quivers and moves gently; dropping her head as if burying her chin in the fur worn in a circle around her neck, the fur ruffles faintly in her breath, become white steam beneath the bluish-white glow of streetlamps in the park; she switches the square kid-leather handbag carried on her left arm to her right arm, and the distance between the two of us walking side-by-side lessens, she wraps her left arm, empty now that she has moved her handbag, around my arm, the feel of her cold hands passes through the coarse stiffly woven fabric of my heavy tweed coat.

He realizes suddenly that his throat is severely parched, and-the mucous membranes in his oral cavity smart and his esophagus is drying out and becoming choked-slips out of bed without making a noise to go barefoot to the kitchen, opens the door and flips the light switch; the soles of the feet that had been warmed in the blanket feel the roughness of the cool, chilled linoleum floor covered with dust as he takes a glass from the cupboard, turns on the faucet and fills the glass with water. The small window above the sink is open and cool, damp air flows in; in the obscured dark gray gloom, a hydrangea shakes in the wind, halfspherical heavy-looking flowers and large leaves swaying slowly from right to left, and the tip of the Himalayan cedar in the garden near the fence facing the road quivers; the rain that until then had appeared to continue to fall gently slantwise suddenly becomes stronger; closing the kitchen window, small drops of rain spread across the dirty and clouded window pane, and the figure of the man looking like an old man standing in pajamas before the window is reflected, drinking dry a cup filled to moderation with lukewarm water; because it probably had not been washed well, a rotting odor remained in the cup; on the dusty stainless steel countertops next to the sink, a small white plate with one round cookie covered in granulated sugar, a round nibble taken out of it, remaining on it sits lined up next to milk glasses used either before going to sleep at night or before leaving in the morning, it's unclear which-a faint white film of milk fat had stuck to the inside and dried that way, half-transparently cloudy; even though he'd thought he was so thirsty the water he had drunk sits heavily in his stomach, not mixing with gastric juices but forming a layer of water on top of those gastric juices, heavy and viscous-like water in a moat with aquatic plants

growing densely and rotten mud at the bottom-as if rippling in waves while flowing back up through his throat to overflow into his oral cavity. Lotus leaves float on the surface of the water, freshwater plants grow luxuriously as if whipped to a froth, at the bottom dead fish, crayfish, tadpoles that had failed to become frogs, leftover food and the corpses of cats dumped by neighborhood residents and fallen leaves from the cherry trees planted on the embankment decompose in the thickly resting mud; it doesn't have a strong smell year-round from the water with its mud become greasy black sludge, but the water in the moat always has a faintly rotten odor, and on summer evenings before nightfall, rain striking the surface of the water with fierce vigor churns in places all the water in the moat that encircles the castle ruins with however many bends, and the rotting odor rises up amidst the dark green clouded surface of the water, water that looks olive green from the color of the water plants dissolved in it becomes the yellow ochre of mixed mud. Even though he thought he had shut the window, the heavy sweet smell of double-flowering gardenias drifts in from somewhere, and turning around on the coarse dust-covered linoleum kitchen floor to look back, white lace curtains become full and swell from the wind in the recesses of the dark living room, rain shining like silk thread floats up in the blue-white glow of the garden bug-light, the surface of the rectangular pond bordered by bricks makes waves and the round leaves of lotuses quiver; going over to the window, a spray of rain hits his swollen eyelids and dry lips with unexpected force, drops of water under the long thin cylinder of the bug-light that adhere to the surface without falling link pale light-blue glitterings in a line; coarse reddish soil mixed with dust, torn-off scraps of faded paper, a contorted handkerchief, white polkadots on a red background bleached however many times by the rain and stuck twisted to the floor, a potted jasmine, long since withered, a deck chair covered in dust, its paint beginning to peel and the red, yellow and blue of its canvas matching exactly sit on the veranda: now all of those things are soaked by the rain.

She turns off the lights in the room facing the window, puts on a soccer-field-style dressing gown meant to be worn after the bath and sinks her body into a deck chair, puts a towel wrung out in ice water on her red and glowing face, perspiration running continuously; Because it flows like a waterfall to the point that I simply can't take it anymore, she says while wiping with a wet towel-Since she perspires heavily in the summertime, no matter how skillful the hairdresser razor marks are left on her smooth white column-like neck and stinging, smarting

grainy rose'colored spots float up in relief, so motionless thin and downy hairs that look light silver-gray and brown lie as if gauze has been draped over her neck's whiteness, and the sharp outline like a column is softly obscured-the perspiration that has outsprung on the back of her head and the nape of her neck; her ribs float like a shallow relief between her breasts, full but whose shape has begun to collapse with the sensation of hanging down slightly, in the center nipples like black cherries and elliptical areolae with grainy pinkish beige skin, soft and heavy flesh that when lifted up with the palm of the hand quivers like a white custard or a blancmange, then shakes slowly while returning to itsr original shape when let go of with the hand that had seemed to scoop them up; small points of perspiration spring up on her chest with its seemingly gray cast in the shadow of the two full breasts; on the television screen, seen from the garden so that it looks like it emits strong bluish-white light, a gunfight between two men in early old age in a desolate rocky area that reflected pure-white light in the intense strong afternoon sunlight may have been beginning. The aging sheriff had to pull metalframed reading glasses from the inner pocket of his jacket to read the murderer's arrest warrant, and the young blond-haired girl in the desert in a checked dress with her chest bound by a whalebone corset that also emphasized the swell of her breasts glances with seeming compassion at the light eyes-gray eyes tinged with blue, maybe faded and bleached by the sun-in the sunburned face like leather of a not very good quality, its wrinkles sliced deeply and weathered for a long time by sun and dust in the desert and the rocks and at the brown hair mixed with white that could be seen under the hat with blackish beads of sweat surrounding its circumference between the crown and the brim, then raises her eyes towards the clear horizon, Something's on the horizon she begins to mouth the words, but the man at the edge of old age grumbles, It's clear that realistically, from my eyes on, the limiting horizon of my age and physical strength has shrunk; the checked skirt with its two bands of black taffeta around the hem is stirred up by a sudden gust of wind that steals through the desert and wraps itself around legs covered in blue jeans above spurred boots; the man in early old age moves one leg backwards as if avoiding entanglement in the heavy hem swelling out from the skirt's full gathers, the checked taffeta,trimmed entwining skirt and the leg with its spurred boot appear for a moment as if in the middle of a revolving whirlpool in a light waltz step, and the figures of the two are erased by a sandstorm flying up from the horizon.

Long Gray Line

Enduring the repetition of long, dull time-like an accumulation of fine dust, dry and withered, or something sticky at the tip of the finger like blood or like bodily fluids circulating persistently, not to ask here and now which it was-and the endurance of its repetition; to record it anew, the endurance of the repetition of long, dull time, a ballpoint pen with black, water-and light-resistant ink used for recording documents-no, not that, the hand and fingers with sticky fluids coiled around on them seem to remember that an H.B. or B. Yacht pencil with green {dark olive green} and yellow {deep bright yellow} stripes, or more likely a green Castell pencil tinted khaki with a slightly less bright tinge of olive green, slid the sounds of those words {those writings} onto the smooth, white, high-quality paper-or not, rather an H.B. or B. pencil scattered exceedingly fine dust made of a mixture of graphite and clay like a somewhat lustrous powder slippery as talcum powder or face powder on the white paper, and the pinky finger curved to hold the pencil and the swelling of the palm of the hand under the pinky finger became completely black as the words "the endurance of the repetition of long dull time" were written down. Those words had no great meaning in themselves, but the hands dirtied with exceedingly fine powder made of a mix of graphite and clay like somewhat lustrous black dust, slippery as talcum powder or face powder, must be washed over and over again on that occasion with brown soap that is worn away and reeks of tallow {or perhaps it was soap the color of milk tea with the fragrance of violets or yellow soap with chamomile}. She wipes her hands wet with water on the towel with a lattice pattern wrapped around her waist while shifting the direction of her body, glances in the small mirror that hangs like a picture frame on the wall and, with the tips of her fingers, arranges the short soft thin hair coiled in disarray in waves on her forehead and temples that perspire from the steam filling the kitchen from hot water from the gas hot-water heater flowing out of the tap and from the pot sending up whitish steam over the blue hissing flame of the gas stove; almost unconsciously she hums a song, removes orange-red rouge from her lips, the color of their lipstick faded-with the part of the lipstick in its gold tube designed like a Grecian column, its small edge pointed like the tip of a claw, she draws the heart-shaped outline of her upper lip, then stains the whole of her upper lip with lipstick and presses her upper and lower lips together, quickly applying one coat inside; as she does this,

the rouge staining her upper lip follows the outline of her lower lip and is transferred like a print, moving one coat of lipstick in the small gold cylindrical container-and using the pad of not her ring finger but her pinky finger acquaints the soft, vertically-lined skin of her lips with lipstick; she moves her head one way and the other in order to inspect the sides, and in the smooth, rounded, amber-colored picture frame, her slightly perspiring, flushed cheeks, shiny forehead extending into the hairline, painted curving like a stiff bow, and eyes opened wide in deep concentration to inspect the details of the face are for a moment stilled; then her face is immediately turned this way and she makes a smiling face that could be called intentionally mischievous. She apologizes for having made a little mistake, or for a serious failure as if the meat in the oven has roasted for too long and been charred black or the stew has boiled down and stuck to the bottom of the pot so that from those mishaps, the meal on the dinner table has become meager, and to hide the absentmindedness that caused the failure of the meal and whatever seemed to have been the cause of the absentmindedness, says I have a bit of a headache; If she'd take <not just any kind of> medicine for the headache that has visited her (especially in the bedroom with the lights extinguished) intermittently for days (no, for months) it would soon get better, he says, It's nothing to worry about; but as he tries to feel her forehead saying Don't you have a fever she throws her head back as if her whole body unconsciously moved that way; of course that's a refusal to be touched, or more than a refusal, it might could be called a hatred of being touched, he confirms with a bitter thought what he seems to have realized long ago. Of course a knife with a thin sharp flexible blade is emphasized. The woman's thin graceful white neck is shaped like a smooth column, and to delicately lick with the tip of the tongue her hairline at the nape of her neck, its downy hairs arranged into two wedge-shaped pieces by the thin sharp blade of a razor as if just trimmed at the hairdresser's, produces a faint taste of metal similar to that of cool, chilled blood; in the heat of the tongue wet with saliva the chill of metal tasting of blood runs through each taste bud on the rough disordered tip of the tongue and the graceful neck in the shape of a column is caressed by <these withered fingertips, neither puffed nor damp> as if extremely unwilling to part with its thin grace; of course that continues to imitate the sensual relation between the eat's smooth throat with its soft, slippery fur that grows luxuriantly and the hands that caress it; the long thick fingers at the neck and the hands thick but not at all puffed, seen as ever so uncouth-s-even though it wasn't "a profession in which

TRIQUARTERLY

you must wash your hands before arriving at the table," the hands and fingers were soiled black with fine particles of graphite and clay, and minute amounts of blood and whitish skin scraped off remain in the space underneath the nails from the time the nails had stood in the face and throat stiff from the strained muscles and swollen blood vessels of the man with the long flat jaw that looks like a knife in the deep shadow cast by the line of the soft gray hat-just like a hint of the faint, thin blade's keen, supple, gleaming sharpness, the dexterous hands that enjoy this habitual motion are spread with gentle, delicate caresses (those hands take up her neck as if it is a small chicken with its wings not yet sprouted and wrapped in down like cotton chaff, fallen from a nest up in a tree and that stimulates its parent birds' nurturing instincts with a yellow bill awfully large for its body; they touch her luxurious white skin softly, softly, with gentle care and even deeper affection than the parent birds as if it is something above which there is nothing more valuable, something so precious so that handling it with gentle but half-witted care and even slight violence would break it) around the sharp, slightly thin lips and the area near them in an entangling of tension and joy when she sizzles bacon in the frying pan with unexpected skill or slices thin lumps from liver, or when he applies layers of thinly dissolved paint soaked into the tip of the paintbrush on the canvas with deep concentration; before long they convulse violently and tighten around the top of the round neck shaped like a smooth column. But in order to achieve a luster like that of a pearl and a still, soft rose-colored gleam on the graceful neck like a column, the smooth roundness of the shoulders, the cheeks gleaming with youthful elasticity and tight plumpness and the rounded forehead, those hands apply layers of thinly dissolved paint soaked into the tip of the paintbrush on the canvas while mumbling as if reciting from memory. <Select extremely good quality Venetian oils, fresh if at all possible, and just-refined turpentine oil.> He selects the quality of the materials with care, moreover with deep concentration. The Sunday painter continues to wait with much patience for the girl who not only finds posing boring but reads a novel with her legs flung out untidily as she holds her pose. As he continues to be absorbed in gazing at her in the lightbeams that flow falling in like transparent water from the large opened atrium window on the north side, he can't help but be fascinated even by her manner of not trying seriously to hold a pose but immediately and languidly moving her slovenly body; of course painting the picture is also something important. You can't use too much Venetian oil paint. It's slow to dry, and because of that it's easy for

dust and minute sable hairs shed from the paintbrush to adhere to the canvas sticky with oil. <But on the other hand, if you use Venetian oils, no matter how many times you add paint to the original sketch the surface of the painting doesn't get heavy. If you work like this, blending certain forms into shades and these shades into the surface of the color, bringing the original colors into appearance again with stronger lines, then with this control still concealed by a soft veil that holds stiffness at bay you can do it before the surface of the paint begins to stiffen.>

Doing animal-like things like that with you is nasty, the young girl on whose skin the scent of orange blossom-scented bath oil remains from her bath opens her eyes affectedly like a little girl or a maiden in a silent film full of fear and hatred, yet he gazes at the revealed shoulders, breasts, and buttocks with their soft skin elastic in curved lines like rolling waves wrapped in the white satin dressing down with fur decorations around the neck, down the front and along the hems and at the calves like those of a farmer woman with her muscles revealed half-hidden in the soft imitation ermine fur and-the camera becomes a look of desire and with a short, rigid shot of blank amazement for his erection, shoots the young girl's calves (given their nature, the well-defined rnuscles of her buttocks that continue from there seem to press forcefully with instinctive rhythm against the protruding part of the other body placed perfectly on hers) and her two good, richly fleshed white arms touched by the soft fur; the young girl laughs scornfully through her nose as if he's the fool this time, and in a tone that says this astonishing and shameless matter won't be a problem roars forcefully with scornful laughter, Old men like you who do things like that look like fools (even though you don't have the resources or the right to do such a stylish thing); of course there's no need for the young girl to ridicule the older man's sexual desire to such an extent, but the old influential man's prosaic Figaro-like existence or a feeling of revenge against that was probably included in that. For some time the young girl laughs with coarse, hysterical exaggeration, then sprawled on the sofa bends her whole body like a stretching cat, stretches her arms, putting on airs coldly picks up a book with a woodblock print on the cover from the artificial marble one-legged coffee table and begins to read the sequel. Orange-blossom perfume with the same scent as the bath oil-the exceedingly pure essence of young all-white orange blossoms with a strong fragrance, raised in the clear California sunlight, a picture of a young girl wearing Hollywood-style white clothes in the spirit of the orange blossoms against a background of branches laden with the fragrance of blooming

orange blossoms against the blue sky is printed on the perfume box. You know, a sweet kiss wafting the scent of orange blossoms, that's what makes snow-white petals into a crown for a bewitching, burning bridehas been sprinkled liberally on the silk dressing gown, and the sweet, cheapish smells of the orange blossoms, emitting the sweet fragrance of the inner part of the flower as if inviting honeybees to fly about the orange trees with their blossoms in full bloom bathed in the warm California sunlight mix with the ever so strong animal smells of the young girl's body and the volatile smell of Venetian oils in the room filled by hushed, peaceful sunlight, flat and transparent like water from the large opened window on the north side; because the heater has been set too high those smells are crowded stuffily in the room; when in the book with its woodblock-printed cover framed in acanthus leaves in an arabesque pattern, a man's strong arm wrapped around her waist as both arms stretch obliquely, twisting her body and showing her defiance even as the neck curved backwards and the face adjusted to look upwards with an expression of rapture double-cross the refusal in her gestures; the beautiful orphaned heroine was forced to confess to her husband the fact that at fifteen she had her maidenhood taken from her by the lecherous older landlord who is her legal guardian and the young girl sympathizes entirely with the unhappy fate of the pitiful orphan girl heroine at the point she is being made to confess, and her breast shakes like a small dove as if that fate were her own. What a hateful brute he is! Isn't he just like a dog that wags its tail as it's thrown a scrap of meat, it's because his own wife had been with another man before their marriage, she was laughing at me as she flirted wholeheartedly with him, wasn't she; why, a man who talks like that is worse than a dog; and in addition, he rubs his wife's head against the leg of the bed, pulls her hair and drags her around the room, then when she tries to get up strikes her and pushes her back to the floor, using despicable violence, she explains the plot of the story to a girlfriend, and her girlfriend takes a showy ladies' cigarette case from her small patent-leather handbag, slowly opens it and puts a cigarette between her lips; she blows out cigarette smoke from her pointed lips painted red in the shape of a heart, then says with an ill temper Look how he beat you because you said you didn't sleep with the man? I don't know which one's the beast, him or the husband in that book? she says ill-temperedlv, The young girl with blond bobbed hair that reveals the nape of her neck opens wide her eyes emphasized by black mascara, distinct eyeliner and bluish-gray eye shadow speckled with sparkling gold powder and discontentedly sticks out her lower lip

drawn in cherry-red with lipstick, But that's a story in a book, you skip over the boring, irritating parts when you read (but because it has no relation to the plot of the story), But don't you start to wonder what's going to happen to "her"? A cast-iron art-nouveau railing on a terrace that faces the street-a design of tulips and lilies-a white parakeet's wings wave like the shape of a crown (pointing backwards heroically like the headdress of an Indian warrior or the wings on Hermes' ankles) in a dome-shaped chrome birdcage that shines brightly, suspended in the open window facing the inner courtyard, white tulle curtains that wave in the wind swell; the maid whose face has been seen in the window of the third-floor kitchen across the courtyard paved with stones, an old well and a stone washtub at its center, turns towards the woman washing sheets by the well, calls out My match just went out, do you have any on you? and the woman washing the sheets wipes her waterwet hands on her apron before pulling a small box of matches from the pocket of her blouse, places the matchbox on the palm facing upwards, swings her arm backwards in a great motion, and fixes her aim; she flings it high forwards, upwards and with a speed like that that the captured bird with wings in the shape of a crown like those that decorated Indian warrior headdresses must have had when it flew through the sky, the small yellow matchbox soars as if painting a line in the air; the arm with the blue sleeve of its uniform turned up stretches from the kitchen window, and the five opened fingers gently catch the small yellow bird; around the washerwoman children scream and cry making a noise with the soles of their wooden shoes as if killing centipedes that move about, changing color from gray to grayish blue, from blue to violet, and from violet to green like peacock wings; from a neighboring window the pure white languidly large cat that had been looking down over the courtyard follows the small yellow bird's painted, somewhat curved line with its eyes; a round glass goldfish bowl is placed on the upright piano with its lace cover, and one green waterplant and a vermilion fish float in the small spherical water in which sink smooth pebbles like small round sugar candies filled with almonds; a small girl in her best dress of thin white cloth with light pink ribbons decorating the waist and the large round collar falters while repeating interruptedly the same melody over and over again with clumsy fingers, earnestly playing an old folk song; matching the piano's liability to falter, before long the maid wiping the dust from the furniture with a feather duster ignores the piano's accompaniment and hums a song, Oh, oh belo-ved Genevieve, oh, dear Genevieve, oh, I'll cross the ocean to bring you home, bring you back to 25

your green homeland, your rosy cheeks may have paled, your hair may be white and the sparkle in your eyes may be faded, but Oh Genevieve, I'll cross the ocean to bring you back to your green homeland; to test the comfort of the springs of the bed, its cover soft cloth on which appears a luxurious mass of Turkish embroidery, the young girls stretch out both hands backwards, lean to the rear and repeatedly make their ample, round, unsagging and well-fleshed buttocks jump lightly with a snap so that the feet in high heels with a button on the strap over the arch of the foot and the legs encased in charming silk stockings knitted in a faint diamond pattern, legs bared from the hem of the short pleated skirt, rise into midair like a spring'loaded toy; the four legs encased in lustrous silk stockings flash and look like dolphins soaring artlessly out of the ultramarine sea; in the stimulating book, the heroine drunk with desire as if glowing from the inner core of her small-framed body breathes out a long sweet sigh as if she would faint away as for the first time she entrusts her body to passionate embraces and caresses in the arms of her lover; the blond,haired girl raises her voice while reading these "amazing" pages aloud. The heroine with the small frame and the slim, well,stretched posture is rearranging the inside of a drawer-non, chalant signs of impressive and romantic episodes are engraved in the midst of those unimportant, mundane little jobs-and pricks her finger with something: it's the metal pin attached to the corsage of her wed, ding dress; the ironed, revived swellings of flower petals in the artificial orange blossoms on the thin silk are yellowed with dust, and the thin satin ribbon lined with silver picot stitching is frayed along the edges; she throws that bouquet into the fire in the hearth. The bouquet burned up faster than dry straw, and before long it became a bright red grassy field and rotted away slowly above the ashes while the small paper fruits exploded; the metal pin twisted sinuously in the heat and the artificial orange blossoms shrank and floated along an iron plate at the back of the hearth before rising softly like black butterflies and, after a while, flying out the chimney. Whatever kind of woman she was, all women would find it impossible not to identify with her beauty and unhappiness as they read; the woman who is far and away clever and wise when compared to the weakness of her appearance but while foolish and sullied was at the point of not being able to refrain from destroying her lover and is fated to be purified in happiness like a little girl because of love is enraptured and drunk with love in the man's strong, gentle arms, and whispers in a sweet, hushed voice mixed with a sigh, I have lived far, far more in the few minutes I spend with you is far, far greater than

the sum of all the time of the life I have lived to this point; the luxurious black lace shawl that had covered her head entirely to hide it from notice crumples at the foot of the bed, and reflected in the hearth flame thrown about as if playing with flickering shadows and light the two pairs of soft lips fit perfectly, burning with heat in that exact covetousness of love; together they drank dry the water of life thicker, thicker than high-grade sake, didn't they; but this is the kind of thing that happens in a novel, it's not necessarily not going to happen in reality. She was wearing a black silk lace shawl to hide her bare shoulders, chest and upper arms-or was it to protect her bare shoulders, chest and upper arms from the cool evening wind-and every time she moved her body slightly the light transparent flax fabric-a decorative skirt with a shorter hem divided into four panels at the waist is layered above the underskirt of the full gathered skirt made in two layers-made the hushed sound of a dress rustling, and through the transparent part of the decorative skirt that was not in two layers the roundness of her calves wrapped in shadow was made apparent. You came, you came, you really came, but why did you come, she calls; embracing her closely, shawl and all, the slightly sour, animal-like smell mixed with the fragrance of orange blossoms, the simultaneously wetted hair (the deep black lustrous hair parted down the middle and folded back had curled at the forehead and temples from humidity and perspiration-it isn't as long as one strand of the blond hair brought across the sea in the beak of the stormy petrel that had told the old man of her existence, but reacts by expanding and contracting to the humidity as if showing the changes of the barometer-and small, small waterdrops from the mist are bound over the whole surface of her hair as if she is wearing decorative netting or a silver veil; touching it with a finger it becomes slight, cool water and runs as if perspiring from the pad of the finger to the joint), wet shawl and wet skirt that has lost its pleats in its dampness and hangs down ever so much and the cool, stiff arms, chest, waist, abdomen and thighs make the soft muscle undulate in his arms; in a moment all of that is pushed violently and perfectly against my chest, abdomen and thighs, My thigh is wet, and my hair too, soft, warm, trembling lips bite at my lips from which words were about to escape; for a long time after coveting the saliva that is wetting the lips and the tongue she shifts her neck as if to throw her head back and her face changes expressions like the moon; the red "kiss-proof" lipstick in a gold tube shaped like a Grecian column hadn't run around her lips, but the sticky oval traces wet with saliva catch the light from the dim lampshade as if they are dim shadows or

bruises and the faint, faint sticky water reflects in ovals. She sighs, bends forwards her neck that had been thrown back and presses her forehead against his left shoulder blade; the lustrous hair put up but slipped out from its pins falls with loose waves from her neck to her shoulders, and the parts of the loosely curved waves shine glossily at their crest as if painted with dark brown varnish; faint shivers run up his shoulders and back, and her rising heartbeat and the beating movement that make her temples pulsate repeat entrusted with heat across the hot skin; the Sunday painter carries a glass container filled with freshly mixed Venetian oil paint, bought to supplement that which he had entirely used up and of which only a small amount remained, goes in the entrance to the apartment and completely undampened, hums as if executing a nimble dance step quite at ease in his loose, fat body and comical, bestial face that looks like that of an old man three bars of the tune of the sweet song sung by a young boy to accompany the melody of a hand-organ on the street, with melancholy just like a circus acrobat, a dancing bear or a big dog that shakes hands, hums three bars, sings three bars with consecutive "la"s and "hum"s, here and there faking the lyrics he remembers faintly-Please be sweet my dreamed-of dear one, la la la la, sweet one I have yet to see, wherever we might meet, hum hum hum hum, I'll know at a glance that you're the one, kiss me sweetly, he says, I am yours-while climbing to the fourth floor as if bouncing as he sings the three bars; he knocks rhythmically on the young girl's door like the rapturous "lover" in commedia dell'arte or in a puppet show, raises the pitch and extends his voice as if making an appeal, smiles gently and sings the last line of the sweet ballad off-key, Kiss me please; as he opens the door, the young girl and her lover lying together on the bed with its cover on whose soft fabric appears a luxurious mass of Turkish embroidery appear in the soft, silent, flat beam of light flowing in like water from the large open window on the north side; rather than become angry at that situation he is simply surprised and confused, and closes the door quietly as if he is ashamed and it was entirely his own conduct which was inappropriate. When he returns to the room to forgive her, the foppish man like a small cunning fox has disappeared, and distorting her lips stained with heavy rouge the color of cherries (the color of darkly stagnant blood), the young girl screams As for you, a doddering old man like you, I've never loved you, and stamps on the ground with her small foot in its high-heeled satin mule decorated with a peach-colored pompom made from swan down like a spoiled child that has lost its temper as she flourishes her arm, Don't be so full of yourself, don't be so

full of yourself, have you looked in a mirror? Do you think that's a face a woman could love? You're just jealous, she cries. The young girl wearing a silk dressing gown decorated with white fur from the collar down the front, around the hem and at the mouths of the arms was lying down on the bed reading a love story that made her heart beat; she looks at the man who has come for the second time, takes a paper knife by its handle from the artificial marble table to put it into a book, and after she has boldly reviled him tells him in a cool hard voice Won't you get out so I can read. The Sunday painter trembles as he asks, Get out? How should I do this, he mutters, tightly grasps with a shaking hand the handle of the paper knife stuck inside the book with the woodblock-printed cover, and the young girl crosses both arms and covers her face in fear; because her arms are raised the heavy fur on the cuffs slides down to her upper arms, and the bared white richly fleshed arms cover her face; the inside of the upper arms now exposed tremble out of the cuffs of the gown, and in the soft, flat water of the light streaming in from the large open window on the north side, the knife grasped tightly by the man is buried deeply over and over and over again like a silver shower or the sharp beak and flashing wings of a bird gliding in the sky in the soft flesh of the young girl, deeply and slowly swallowed up and enwrapped in the soft, ever so soft skin of the young girl.

The Orderly

Douglas Gilmore Power

It was twelve-fifteen by the time she locked her car in the nursing-home parking lot and went in the back door near the dumpster hoping no one would see. But Charlene was standing outside her small office down the hall just as if she'd expected a black orderly to be trying to sneak in.

"My son got hurt in the elevator," she said, taking her coat off fast to stop it being a coat still on and a person coming in late. "I mean in the elevator shaft. A man threw him. We had to go to the police station so my son could identify him in a lineup."

Charlene looked at her. "I'll have to dock you," she said.

"It wasn't my doing! They took him out of school and I couldn't let him go by himself. He's only six!"

"A man threw him in the elevator shaft?" Charlene said like it pained her mouth to repeat it. "Where was the elevator when all this was going on?"

"It's broken."

"Then why would your son and some man be trying to use it?" she said as though this sprang the trap closed.

"I'm not making this up if that's what you're thinking. Right after I got home last night the police brought my son to the door, and then today I had to get him out of school and I just now got here. Couldn't I use sick time?" She opened her locker and hung up her coat, keeping her back turned so she wouldn't have to see whatever disapproving face Charlene might choose to display.

"Sick time is for when you're sick," Charlene said.

She made a quick round of her rooms to see who wanted help going to

the potty or had a bedpan needed cleaning, then returned to the locker room to steal a few minutes to study for her night class. Charlene burst in and she threw the book under a sheet in the laundry cart to hide it.

"Are you sleeping in here?"

"No ma'am," she answered like a caught orderly, caught sleeping, caught lying, looking up at Charlene's face as though too stupid to be much at lying but not so stupid as to be untrainable. Then she couldn't help smiling at the concept of pegging the right level of stupid and Charlene's eyes widened in fury that she was being insolent. She sat straighter on the short bench. Charlene walked close in front of her, wanting to emphasize the supervisor badge with her name on it that sat on the slope of her breast like a prize.

"You were sleeping with your head in that laundry cart," said Charlene, the look on her face painting Linda as someone who had no objection to touching her face to other people's dirty sheets. "This is a locker room, not your bedroom." She glanced from side to side as though she might find a lover hidden inside a gray metal locker with his brown peeker sticking out.

"I was feeling sick," Linda said.

"Are you pregnant?" This seemed to amuse Charlene until she remernbered it might have happened on her time. She crossed her arms and drummed her fingers, that were thin considering how plump she was, on the leather,bound pad she always carried. Linda shook her head.

"Have you missed your period? Do you keep track?"

"Of course I keep track."

"Well, Mrs. Aspen's been buzzing for ten minutes. Maybe you could try keeping track of that." Before Charlene turned away she looked once more with disgust at the dirty sheets and a corner of the book was stick, ing out. Linda stood up to block her view but Charlene had already stepped past, moving as though still twenty and used to dancing. She seemed confused to find it was a textbook in her hand and became angry when she saw that it was calculus. "What's this, another way to get free money?"

"I'm taking night classes in nursing. You'd hate that, wouldn't you? If I was a nurse like you." She saw Charlene shrink back from the terrorist revealed in her voice and eyes, hiding in the rooms of the nursing home like a sniper, having opinions that couldn't be monitored.

"In your dreams. You'll never get past calculus. If I had to work my butt off, what do you think's gonna happen to you?" Charlene smiled to convince her it was hopeless. "And what do you think would happen if

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you got fired from this nursing home? You don't even clean bedpans right. I'm keeping the book. You'll get it back at the end of your shift. You aren't studying on my time." She turned, having reclaimed her advantage, and swirled out of the locker room.

Linda stood for a time without moving. Finally she went to make another round of the bedpans. Charlene was standing in the central hallway that connected all the rooms. She'd handed the calculus book to the other white nurses standing next to her who were passing it back and forth. All three of them looked at her and grinned. She had to con, centrate not to trip.

"I've been pushing this buzzer for half an hour," the old woman said, elevating herself to a sitting position on the bed with trembly arms, squinting at Linda like she must be new to the home or so slow she'd forgotten what the buzzer meant. "Can't you orderlies ever be prompt?" She looked like a baby bird straining to see if momma had brought her something and Linda felt sorry for her, then was mad at her because she didn't want to feel sorry.

"I'm here now, Miz Aspen," she said, walking to the bed. "I was work, ing on a problem. If a bullet," and suddenly her brown hand flew out over the top of Mrs. Aspen's thin lump underneath the sheets, "is shot horizontally at nine hundred miles an hour from the top of a building that's a thousand feet high, how far will it travel before it lands? And how fast will it be going when it hits?"

"Well I-it's Mrs. Aspen, as you very well know. He was a judge. And he'd turn over in his grave if he could see the way I'm treated. He and I both know who stole his lucky rabbit's foot, and I want it back!" Linda watched Mrs. Aspen's hand on top of the sheet, her thumb stroking the fur of a rabbit's foot that wasn't there. "Please help me to the bath, room," she said.

Linda rolled the wheelchair to the bed and eased Mrs. Aspen into it, pulling her nightdress down when it rode up dry white-stick legs sliding off the mattress. Her hair was a whiter white but her eyebrows were stern and black over gray metal eyes. Linda got her settled and, imagining for a moment she was herself looking out those gray eyes to see what it would be like to get old, she didn't swivel the chair enough going through the narrow door to the bathroom and Mrs. Aspen's big toe got squeezed between the footrest and the door frame.

"Ow! You did that on purpose! I'll tell Charlene, and my son when he comes to visit. He's coming tonight, don't you know," she added like she

was talking about her husband.

Linda bent over to look and was frightened to see the toe turning pink. "Sorry, Miz Aspen." She blew on it. She hated the wheelchairs because they were heavy and hard to get going. It was like the grocery cart when her son was mad because she couldn't afford chocolate cereal or ice cream and he'd stopped walking and sat in the aisle. She felt she had to show she loved him by letting him ride then in the cart, and sometimes she hated him just for that moment, when the cart wouldn't want to budge from his weight.

"Are you O.K.?" She glanced up and could see it didn't hurt anymore but Mrs. Aspen wouldn't admit it, frowning like everything was her fault. Linda stood up. "I did ask you before not to stick your feet out."

"You did not."

"It was just this morning," she said, carefully maneuvering the wheelchair next to the toilet. "Or I guess it could have been yesterday. I'm not saying that it wasn't my fault."

"Help me to the seat." Mrs. Aspen pointed at it.

Linda bent over Mrs. Aspen from behind to lift on her elbows as she was slowly straightening her legs. "Can't you be a little bit gentle?" Linda saw one of her feet suspended above the floor as though the knee had frozen. She came around to the side, still holding her upright, and stooped over to reach with one hand to push down on the ankle.

"Were you the one who took my rabbit's foot?" Mrs. Aspen whispered. "No. I didn't." She pushed harder and noticed at the same time that Mrs. Aspen's flannel nightdress smelled like diapers. She wanted to pinch a tiny bit of skin between two purple-blue veins on her foot to make her yell and pretended that she was going to do it to see how it might feel and then while pretending she did it.

She was standing straight again before Mrs. Aspen said Ouch. "What's the matter?" Linda asked. "Can I help you with something?"

Mrs. Aspen was confused. Linda smiled and let Mrs. Aspen see, so she'd understand that Linda could tell everyone how forgetful she was, how useless and old. "Don't forget to raise your nightdress," Linda said. Yesterday she hadn't remembered and got the smell on her Linda smelled now.

"Not in front of you I won't. You're no nurse; you're just an orderly. Get me on the seat and then get out."

"What if I told you I was studying to be a nurse? A lot of nurses are black, you know."

"Not at this nursing home."

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Linda was patiently keeping her in balance but upon hearing that she let her go. "Help me," Mrs. Aspen pleaded, suddenly feeble again.

"I'm just an orderly," Linda said, placing, however, her hands on the outside of each of Mrs. Aspen's upper arms and assisting her to shuffle in a slow quarter turn. "Down now," Mrs. Aspen said.

Linda knew she was hurting. The skinny-as-a-stick bones poked sharply from inside her skin and Mrs. Aspen knew she was dying. When she was safely on the seat Linda removed herself from view and closed the door. She wouldn't have done what the old lady wanted except Mrs. Aspen's pain made her move so slow it reminded Linda of her grandma and her momma. Each was grouchy the same way and she'd had fights with them before they died of their white blood cells going on a rampage. Linda checked in the mirror above the sink near the built-in dresser to make sure the plastic sanitary cap was covering all her hair, more concerned with keeping germs out than in, hoping she wouldn't ever get something growing in her she didn't ask for, a lump or a bump or another baby.

Her cheeks looked pink in the mirror under the three big dark freckles and lighter brown skin. The two on the left cheek looked like the handle of the big dipper she saw once in a backyard with a boy she'd thought was nice because he explained the sky, but then he'd made her look at it too long on her back and she'd had to change her clothes so no one else would know. The one on the right looked like dust at the bottom of her eyesight except when she was mad or embarrassed and then it puffed higher the size of a bread crumb. She was embarrassed remembering the big dipper and mad at herself that she resented her son sometimes and embarrassed that she wasn't a nurse yet. She knew it was the calculus. She'd known it would be from the first time she saw the course list.

"O.K.," came the command. She went in and found Mrs. Aspen already standing. "I hope you didn't steal anything else."

"Little bit of your hem got in there," Linda said. "Do you want me to help change you into a nice clean one?"

"Just get me into the wheelchair."

Linda looked at Mrs. Aspen's bare feet below the nightdress, slight as an orphan child's. "It's right here," she said, holding her upper arm and pointing down with her other hand at the wet place. "See?"

"How dare you!" Mrs. Aspen swiveled her head as though she intended to peck at Linda's eyes. "Get away from me!"

"Yes ma'am," Linda said, letting go of her arm and backing away,

afraid she'd lodge a complaint about her to the nurses.

"Oh no," said Mrs. Aspen, dizzy from turning her face and yelling. She leaned toward the seat of the wheelchair but missed, flailing onto the armrest. She tried to catch hold but slid off to the tall narrow wheel on the side and was slipping from that when Linda grasped her thin bony shoulders to slow her fall to the hard tile floor. Linda heard hollow bones tapping against each another in a sea of white blood cells.

"Are you O.K.?" she asked, afraid Mrs. Aspen had broken her wrist on the wheelchair or her hip on the tiles. She didn't answer. Linda heard her crying. "Let me help you," she said, touching the feathery white skin of Mrs. Aspen's arms and raising her to sit.

"Thank you," she said like a little girl who'd been bad and was ashamed. But Linda was afraid someone would walk in and see Mrs. Aspen on the floor.

"Ready?" she said and helped Mrs. Aspen up into the wheelchair, wedging one foot against the spokes to keep it from rolling. "Should I bring you to the nurses?" she asked when Mrs. Aspen was safe; but as soon as she'd said it she wished she hadn't. They'd blame it all on her.

"I'm fine. Don't you worry." Mrs. Aspen waved her hand weakly and at the same time stiffly, humiliated in front of a black person, and Linda saw that she wanted her to leave and go somewhere else.

When she checked two hours later Mrs. Aspen was still inside the bathroom in the wheelchair, chin on her chest. Not moving at all. "Mrs. Aspen?" She went closer. Sometimes they died. But what if she'd caused it, not catching her in time when she'd fallen?

Would they be able to tell? If they found her in the bathroom Charlene would know that was the reason Mrs. Aspen had been buzzing and from that she might guess what had happened. She looked behind her at the open door to the hallway and moved the wheelchair out and next to the bed. She looked shrunken. Linda started for the door, to get help.

Then she stopped. Better to get her into bed. She went back and put her hands down to grasp underneath the old lady's armpits. But if she was dead, and a nurse saw her moving the body, it'd look even worse.

She had to decide and put her hands lower and picked up the weight that turned out to be heavier than expected. Mrs. Aspen's head lolled toward the bed and gas escaped from her mouth as if she was coming back to life. She straightened the body and half-carried and halfdropped the bony breast and neck and head onto the mattress. She moved down to gather in the hips, the legs dangling, and as she reached

one hand further to get under the knees, a voice said: "Ow-stop that."

She swung around and saw that the eyes were open.

"My hip hurts. You made me fall."

"No I didn't," she said, furious at Mrs. Aspen for scaring her. "You fell on your own. Don't you remember?"

But that wouldn't help. What were you doing when she fell, they'd say; watching her? "When did you fall?" she asked to confuse her. "I just came into tell you that you had a phone call." She smiled openly because her teeth were too long and people who had big teeth and smiled anyway were thought not capable of hiding secrets.

"Why didn't you tell me!" Mrs. Aspen cried, struggling to reach for the phone on the night stand.

"They hung up. They called to ask about visiting hours."

"Who?"

"How should I know?"

"My son?"

"That's it."

"Is he coming tonight?" Like she was asking about Santa.

"Yes. So you were telling me you fell down, before I came into the room. That's why you couldn't get up off the toilet a while ago, remember? And then you buzzed for help." Mrs. Aspen looked at her and rested her head on the pillow to think.

"It hurts," she said.

"I'll take you to the nursing station. I want them to check you. It's a good thing you told me."

"Oh thank you," Mrs. Aspen said, remembering to move her hands to fluff out her white hair in preparation for meeting company. "Maybe I should put on lipstick," she asked. "Do you think so?"

Linda, for whom Mrs. Aspen had never thought to put on lipstick, looked at her.

"Why am I asking you?" said Mrs. Aspen.

At the nursing station in the middle of the long hallway listening to Jeopardy coming from the rooms, Linda moved up her sanitary cap in back and was rearranging her short thick ponytail while she waited for Charlene and another nurse to finish a conference when Mrs. Aspen started shouting.

"This isn't where I wanted to come! I wanted to go to the bathroom!"

"You went just a little while ago," Linda reminded her, whispering to get her to be quiet.

"I want to go potty and she won't take me. She wants me to soil my chair!"

The nurses looked at them, frowning. "Straighten your cap," Charlene said to Linda.

"She won't take me potty."

"What's the matter with you?" demanded the other nurse of Linda.

"Stop fooling with your hair," ordered Charlene, "and take care of that patient. What do you think we pay you for?"

"She fell down," Linda said. "I wanted you to look at her."

"Sure I fell, when she wouldn't help me. I had to go potty and I fell on the floor."

"For God's sake, orderly, take her to the bathroom! Can't you do anything right?" Charlene turned to look at the other nurse, who raised her eyebrows as she slowly shook her head.

"But you don't understand," Linda said. "Look here, her gown's still damp from where it fell in the toilet."

"Take care of that patient or you're fired," Charlene said in a deadly voice. Linda's face burned and she was dizzy. She began to tum the wheelchair with them staring at her. The other nurse snorted.

"But if I try to discipline them," Charlene confided, "they'll say I'm being unreasonable. And I've warned you before, Linda," she called out, "about wearing that uniform so tight!"

Her backside always showed more when she walked fast in the polyester dress. "How many men," Charlene wondered just loudly enough to be sure Linda could hear, "do you suppose that one's had?"

"They ought to fire you," Mrs. Aspen said as they entered her room.

Linda closed the door to the hallway. "You told them a lie."

"How dare you call me a liar! You're a nothing colored girl. Help me to my bed."

Linda, about to park the wheelchair, pushed it suddenly toward the bathroom. "Didn't you tell them you want to go potty? You're going to stay in there a good long time, so you won't forget where you been!"

Mrs. Aspen shrieked. The footrest hit the door frame, jarring the old lady's head forward. "God help me," she cried.

Linda saw something fly from the wheelchair from the abrupt halt, and for a horrible moment thought part of Mrs. Aspen had tom loose from her body. Then she saw it was the rabbit's foot. It landed on the floor.

She was relieved to see it. She'd been almost afraid, wondering if it

would show up in her locker and she wouldn't remember how. There were other things she'd made herself forget and she'd lost confidence that she knew for sure, when someone accused her of something, whether or not she'd done it. But it was stuck in the side of Mrs. Aspen's wheelchair all the time. "Look," she said. She pointed at it on the tiles.

Mrs. Aspen saw the brown skin of an arm and shrieked again, thinking it meant to hit her. "Save me!" she shouted, staring as though Linda's was the ugliest face she'd ever seen. The noise bubbled out of her in whoops.

"Be quiet," she pleaded. "I'll lose my job."

"She's threatening me," the old lady sobbed. Linda stared at the contorted face, spidery lines stretched into diagonals, the reds of her eyes expanded, eyeballs floating as Mrs. Aspen tried to tum the wheelchair with wrinkled white fingers aimed toward the door.

She clamped her hands over Mrs. Aspen's and pulled up on her fingers. They started to bend the wrong way, upwards and backwards. She forced herself to stop, knowing still that she had to prevent Mrs. Aspen from reaching the door and opening it and screaming into the hallway for the nurses. She lay down on the floor in front of the wheelchair. Lay on her back in her uniform, hands at her sides.

Mrs. Aspen wheeled the chair back a few feet and rammed it forward into her arms and stomach, the footrest hitting the side of her chest, hurting her breasts. Mrs. Aspen turned the wheelchair to go around past her head and Linda slid next to the door, leaving no room to get by. Mrs. Aspen ran the footrest into the top of the sanitary cap, into her forehead. "Help me!" she shouted. "Move, damn you!"

Eventually, she tired. Linda stood slowly and went behind the wheelchair and rolled her toward the bed. After helping her into it, she walked to the small bathroom and bent down to pick the rabbit's foot up off the tiles. On her way out, she paused next to the bed. "Here," she said, handing it to Mrs. Aspen, who grabbed at it eagerly. "You go to sleep now."

The car she'd bought a year ago for three hundred dollars was always, in her mind at least, threatening to strand her by the side of the road. It made a noise near the muffler and the left-turn signal didn't work so she had to pump it up and down while waiting at corners for the traffic to clear, then as soon as she started turning some guy would speed through

on the last of the yellow and when she braked the engine would die and other cars would start honking. Sometimes she'd get flustered and try to start it in drive because of all the people staring.

This evening, when she needed it to bring her back to her son to find out what had happened, it wouldn't start for her at all. Linda was bent over the engine in her stretched white uniform looking at things she didn't understand when a white man's voice asked if it could help.

She understood that: some guy was staring at her bottom. Probably thought she was a nurse. She turned her head and saw a medium-sized man with blue eyes and thinning brown hair who smiled respectfully, looking not at her skirt but at her face. She waited for his reaction but it wasn't what she expected. He seemed pleased how she looked. She had snow on the fringes of her thick hair framing her forehead and temples where it escaped the plastic rain bonnet and she realized there was something pretty about that in his eyes.

"It won't start," she said and blushed at how obvious this was. Straightening up, she made it worse by hitting her head on the hood latch. He looked alarmed.

"Are you hurt?" he asked, coming closer to touch her forehead where the wheelchair had hit her but pulling his hand away at the last second as though afraid of touching brown skin.

"It doesn't come off," she said, partially to cover her frustration at being clumsy in front of him, then was mad at herself for feeling selfconscious. She bent over the engine again, not caring where he looked.

"No, it's-" He turned red. "I didn't know if you'd want me to be touching you." He watched her face and saw she wasn't going to respond. She sensed he was relieved for a moment until he could cornpose himself. Then she peeked and saw him glance at her skirt curved tight. "I got to call the Amoco," she said, backing away before standing erect and walking to the driver's door and reaching past the steering wheel to get her keys.

"An old blue Chevy," he said, having followed her, not giving up. "I think everyone at one point in their lives owns an old blue Chevy." He smiled as though remembering his, but she didn't know if he was making fun of her for still owning one or was just trying to find something they'd have in common. She picked up her black raincoat that she'd taken off for safekeeping while looking at the engine, but instead of putting it on, she draped it over her shoulders, like a cape, so her breasts wouldn't stick out when fitting her arms into the sleeves. She became conscious how the white shoes and nylons showed underneath the coat,

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with the white dress looking like a tall up-and-down vest. "Look like a penguin," she muttered. Then realized she was apologizing because her car wouldn't start.

"What?- Oh-" and he laughed, looking at the white beneath the black. "That's marvelous. Listen, why don't you use the phone in my car?"

She wondered what "marvelous" meant when he used it. She wondered if he was rich. He had kind of a big nose she saw as he pointed at his car. "Is that a Mercedes?" she asked and wished it hadn't sounded so nakedly like the first she'd ever been invited to sit inside.

"I have a newer one, actually," he said. She was surprised to find him trying to impress her.

"I'll use the phone in the office," she said, beginning to walk, "since it's an old one." And was surprised to find herself teasing him.

He caught up with her. "That sounded obnoxious. I'm sorry."

"Oh. Well, thank you," she said, uncomfortable with his walking right next to her, snow on the shoulders of his navy cashmere overcoat, almost the same height since she was tall, which made it even more like they were together because they chose to be. Then she saw her supervisor coming out the door toward them. Linda nodded quickly.

"Car trouble again this evening?" Charlene said loudly, standing still so Linda had to stop. Charlene was a similar height, but probably weighed more than the man did.

The man stopped, too, surprising Charlene, who was so pleased she got flustered. Linda saw her inching her red coat closed to cover thick thighs in white slacks. "Hi there!" she said. "Coming to visit your mother? Aren't you a good son."

"I got to call the Amoco," Linda said, starting to edge up the salted sidewalk ramp. She saw Charlene grinning at the man, shaking her head, wanting him to agree with her that she was hopeless.

"Nice to see you again," he muttered quickly and followed Linda, who slowed up as though to wait for him but really to see Charlene's reaction, who stared at his back as if he'd come right out and said walking with Linda was his preference. Linda turned her head away before Charlene noticed her watching.

"Why don't you wait for the tow truck with me?" He'd followed her outside after the phone call and looked at her in a way that she knew he thought she was pretty.

"I couldn't do that," she said but letting it sound just barely like she

was tempted. "Besides, aren't you supposed to be visiting your mother?" she added, taking a chance again to tease him. He looked pleased and she felt exuberant.

She opened her car door and saw the inside light was faint and flickering. It was starting to snow again and she wanted to sit in the Mercedes, to see what leather seats felt like and how they smelled; to see the dashboard and hear the radio and if it was real quiet and whether the seats were heated. "I'll take a jump if you'd give me one," she said quickly to prevent herself going to his car.

"What!" He looked surprised.

"I've got jumper cables. I'll show you." She walked to the trunk and unlocked it. "See!" She pointed at the black and yellow cables her previous boyfriend had most probably stolen and wound up leaving in her apartment when he was surprised to find no interested buyers in summer. He'd presented them with macho flourish like they'd help pay his share of the rent, but she'd thrown him out before it got cold and then found herself glad to have them.

"Oh," the man said, disappointed about her not sitting in his car, but at the same time possibly relieved, about what, she didn't know.

"They work fine. I've used them plenty of times." Abruptly her face grew hot, it crashing inside that not only did he figure she was some kind of fool, having to jump her car so often, but he was dirty-minded and thought she'd meant something different when she said she'd take a jump if he'd give her one. It felt like sun beating on her face where she stood in the cold of evening.

"You're well prepared," he said and it seemed clear now that he was mocking her.

"I haven't had time to buy a battery," she lied. "So how about giving me a jump from your Mercedes!" She looked him square in the face, knowing he wouldn't want to. She wouldn't let herself look away.

"I don't have any-" He stopped. He'd just seen jumper cables in her trunk. "Mercedes have tricky electrical systems," he said.

She smiled and closed the trunk.

"I'm sorry," he said. She walked past him as if he hadn't spoken and got in her car. He stood there lamely for some seconds and finally knocked on the window. "It's cold. Why don't you wait in my car!" He looked forlorn.

She reluctantly examined his face, which was sort of handsome for a white man with a big nose. His eyes were kind if a little wavery, like he was a drinker without any drinks inside. She looked the other way, to 41

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see if any of the nurses were in the parking lot, or the orderlies. She'd never had a man with so much money wanting to spend time with her. She smiled at the silliness of it, as though it meant anything. She wondered what he was really after and hoped it wasn't just something new for his dick. Then nodded at herself and her fancies because what else after all could it be.

He thought she was being friendly again and opened the door, but just an inch. "I promise to be polite."

But the other thing she had to consider before looking at him for maybe the last time was that her membership in the Amoco had expired. When the tow truck came and they asked to see her card, after seeing it they'd ask for money.

"My goodness, this is fancy," she said, touching the thin strip of wood on the dashboard. "How does the seat move?" she laughed, feeling like she was on a date the way they show it in the movies as her hand found the control and she played with the position of the backrest. She crossed her legs, letting the raincoat open and her nylons show for him as the heater warmed her. He was looking at her stockings, how they looked on long legs that tinted white nylon tan. He had a wedding ring and thick fingernails the color of wax paper when it's folded over into layers. He had wiry black hair on the backs of his fingers; she looked at hers that were neater and a uniform color. She twisted the brown shoulder strap of her purse and then let go of it to pull her dress down to cover her knee because he was still looking and she'd started to feel funny about it. He turned his head to the front as though knowing he'd done wrong, but whether it was his staring that was regretted or that the legs underneath white nylon were brown, she couldn't tell.

"Are you a nurse?" he asked.

"No, but I'm taking classes at night." She heard how that sounded and made a face. Next she'd be asking for pats on the head.

"What's your name?"

"Linda."

"But isn't that a nurse's uniform, Linda?"

"It just looks the same. I'm an orderly." She uncrossed her legs, preparing to get out, hearing he was disappointed. "I clean bedpans." She saw that she was winding the strap in her fingers again and stopped it.

"You have beautiful hands," he said. She moved each of them up the opposite arm's raincoat sleeve to hide. He was looking now at her face. She knew he found her different or pretty and she didn't know what to

make of it. Or why he also, now, seemed to be discouraged about something. "Perhaps you know my mother," he said, like he was pressing on nonetheless. "Mrs. Aspen."

But of course.

"I shouldn't have sat in your car." She looked around to make sure Charlene and the other nurses were gone from the brightly lit parking lot.

"What is it? Was she especially bad today?"

"She's fine. I wish the tow truck would come." Then she hoped it wouldn't, at least for a while; to give her a chance to get friendly with him before his mother told him to get her fired, for smashing her wheelchair into the door frame of the bathroom.

"I can't stand visiting her."

She looked at him because of something in his voice that was like a real person. She knew what he meant and felt bad for him, having to see his mother changing into something different.

"Could I pay you?" he asked. "To give her special attention? Then I'd be able to not worry all the time."

"I think you mean you'd be able to not visit all the time. Shame on you! My mother died in a room with no one there to hold her hand. You should visit her every single night."

"I'm here to visit tonight, aren't I?" he said defensively. She looked at him and recovered her senses, and knew one thing for sure; she couldn't let him visit her right now. Two hours ago she'd almost snapped his mother's fingers. She felt her cheeks betraying her fear and covered the bulging freckle with her hand. "What would you be paying me to do, exactly?" she asked, attempting to smile as though finding the notion of taking money from him filled with mystery and promise. He was staring at her and she wanted to run away. He was a big businessman or something; trained to see through people. But then he blushed slightly and she felt, she knew, that she was on the right track. But would have to be oh so very careful. If he got to feeling uncomfortable that she was coming on to him, he'd tum against her the second his mother showed him her fingers, or complained about the rabbit's foot. He'd rush to agree that she was untrustworthy and sneaky because he'd be feeling the same way about himself and would want to blame it all on her.

"Just watch my mother," he said, "you know." He looked into her eyes and away again. Shy. She almost laughed with relief.

"Just spend time with her? I could do that." She smiled as though it

was him she wanted to spend time with. "But it would help if you told me stuff. Like when did she start, you know, sort of imagining things?" Such as an orderly bending her fingers.

"Imagining things?" He looked confused.

"Oh, it's nothing serious. We see it all the time. You must not be visiting her enough," she added and pretended to be scolding, wagging her finger closer to his chest than he would have expected. But he seemed to like it.

"What kind of things?" he asked, almost eager. She smiled and leaned toward him as though they were going to share a secret.

"Well," she said, fingering the lapel of his overcoat, "she just loves you to death. She talks about you like you were her husband and father as well as her favorite son."

"I'm her only son." Not just correcting. It was important to him.

"You're more than that," she covered her mistake, "you're her reason for living." She pressed lightly on his chest with her palm, as though he might become her reason, too. "But anyway, she makes up stories and then thinks they really happened. She thought one of the other patients was sneaking in her room stealing things. She accused him of taking her rabbit's foot and the poor old man was terrified."

"That's terrible," Mr. Aspen said. "Did you tell her to stop?"

"Oh, gee, I don't know if I could do that. I mean I'm just an orderly. I don't think your momma would like it too much if, you know, a black person told her she was causing a problem."

"She's not prejudiced."

"Well, it doesn't matter anyway," she said, shrugging as though she didn't want to be impolite, disagreeing.

"Yes it does. I don't want you thinking that about her, or me either. I mean, I wouldn't be talking to you if I thought it was a waste of time. And I can tell you it isn't very often that I find anyone worth talking to." He smiled at her, upon whom he'd bestowed his valuable praise.

"Gee," she said. "I guess you must really be smart."

"No," he said, trying to be modest. "I mean, it's just that I hardly ever find someone. It's always a surprise."

"That means a lot," she said, "coming from you."

His face and expression grew warmer and she saw it was the mother's milk of recognition and flattery. "You've got such blue in your eyes," she said, leaning closer to him. "I bet it goes back to some long-time-ago sailing ship carrying my great-great-grandma down in the hold, doesn't it?" She raised her eyebrows as though pretending to be innocent.

"Not at all," he protested. "My ancestors came to New England; they didn't bring slaves with them."

"I'm just teasing." She looked down as if apologetically, then glanced at his face. "But I bet they killed a lot of Indians."

"Yes, they did," he agreed, setting himself apart.

"You would have done the same thing," she said. "You wouldn't have been able to help it. You're a white man, through and through."

"What?"

"So self-confident, I mean. You know. Sure of your place in the world."

He looked startled and uncertain; but underneath he was preening. "I don't know about that; though I'd be interested to know why you said it."

"It'd take too long." She made her face look as though she was willing, as if she wanted to share things with him, but was afraid he didn't really care.

"Tell me."

"It would take hours, to even make a dent." His face looked so surprised that she was briefly embarrassed at hurting his feelings; and let him see that she was. It was working perfect. "I'm not saying you don't mean well. We live in such different places."

"But we ought to be able to get past that. We need to find one another."

She saw he possibly even believed it, and wondered why. What could she offer him he didn't already have? If I was him I wouldn't even be talking to me.

"I think you're right," she said. "I just wish there were more people like you." She smiled so he could see how impressed she was. Also how brave, in the face of lesser people's intolerance. He seemed pleased by this acknowledgment of his virtues and gazed into her face, approving of her perceptiveness. He seemed to see wisdom and innocence, in spite of all she must have suffered, in her brown eyes that could appreciate his depth; saw the strength of labor in the fields in her smooth fertile skin. Slowly she reached her hands behind her neck to remove the neat maroon bow from thick pulled-back unstraightened hair, breathing large to open her raincoat and astonish him that, added to everything else in her she was also, look at those curves, a woman.

It was all there, in his face. She looked humble for a moment, to nail it.

"So whatI was wondering," he said, returning with renewed resolve to the subject, "was whether you'd consider letting me pay you to take special care of my mother. I'd still visit her all the time," and saying this he

began to blush, "but that way I could be sure she was getting the best of attention. We could discuss how she's doing."

"Well

"I could pay you a hundred a week," he offered quickly. "It'd be worth it to me."

She was stunned. It was almost what she got now, after deductions. She'd been about to brush out her swirly-curly hair because it seemed an intimate thing to do in front of a white man, revealing to him what before had been secret, but now she couldn't because it would seem a shameless response to the money.

"Just to make sure she's comfortable," he continued. "We can start this minute." He reached for his wallet and picked out from it a fifty and three twenties. "Do you have change?" he asked, and there was suddenly something too impersonal in the way he said it. She stared, nonetheless, at the cash in his hand.

"I make a lot of money. This is nothing to me."

There was a lurching grinding sound of a heavy engine slowing, and they both looked to see the tow truck coming close, clanking and banging, pointing at the open hood of her old blue Chevy. Mr. Aspen glanced from the tow truck to the money in his hand; like he knew.

The driver got out of the truck and zipped his vest over a red plaid shirt as though zipping up his pants. He had a long dirty beard and looked like a member of a motorcycle gang. She opened the door slowly to get out and face him. Then turned back to see if the money was still in Mr. Aspen's hand. "That's all you'd want?" she asked. Feeling inside very unexpectedly, unpleasantly, so much like when she was small.

He nodded as though taking pride in his timing, as if he'd created this whole scene to suit his purpose. She looked at the money and, pressing her teeth together behind closed lips so he couldn't see, she moved her hand toward his, quite afraid suddenly, to take it.

"I'll get change from the man," she said and swiftly walked away.

The motorcycle-gang member looked at her and with increasing interest at the man in the Mercedes. "Guess you weren't in any hurry," he drawled. Even his teeth were misshapen.

"It beats freezin' my butt off waitin' for you," she said and got behind the wheel and saw he was smiling as he walked the cables to her engine and clipped them to the battery. She turned the ignition and pressed the gas pedal halfway down to be sure it kept going. The motorcycle-gang mernber disconnected his cables and returned them to the back of the truck.

She lowered her window as he approached for payment. "That'll be a hundred," he said. She stared at him, thinking he must have thought he did more just now than what he did. "He's good for it," he added with a sneer at her lips, and a nod at the Mercedes that made it clear what he thought she'd just finished doing inside the car.

"It ain't no hundred." She wanted to hit him. "It's just a jump." She wondered if her lipstick was smeared, the way he kept looking at her mouth. She stopped her hand from going there to wipe it. "I've got an Amoco card," she said. She'd decided not to risk trying to use it because of having Mr. Aspen's money, but a hundred was far too much. She handed it to him.

"It's expired." He ripped it in two and let fall the pieces. "You better have a hundred dollars or I call the cops on your ass." He walked a few steps to where he could see her license plates; pulled out a pen from his red plaid pocket with thick dirty fingers and wrote the numbers on a small receipt pad. Then he banged down the hood of the car and walked back to her window. Snow was collecting on his beard and ponytail. She saw Mr. Aspen through his windshield. She hoped he'd get out and speak up for her, and asked for him to do that by moving her eyes away from him and back again. How more obvious could she make it? But he just sat in his Mercedes and watched.

The motorcycle guy scratched his crotch. "If you're thinkin' of payin' the way you done him, forget it. I like white meat."

"What?" She stuck the gearshift into drive to make herself feel better that she could leave the leer of his filthy fingers standing behind, but never dared remove her foot from the brake. He knew where she worked and Mr. Aspen would see. He'd believe then whatever his mother told him. He'd tell Charlene that the orderly had tried to break his mother's fingers. Charlene would tell the director and he'd call in the police.

Mr. Aspen, still watching, finally opened his door and rose out from his car, buttoned his overcoat and slowly, as though it was nothing to do with her, walked toward the old blue Chevy. The motorcycle-gang member looked pleased, as if hoping for an excuse to punch him. "Hi there," Mr. Aspen said. Then, to her: "Do you need change?"

She was at first speechless. Was he in the same world? But maybe he hadn't heard. "He wants a hundred dollars! For a jump it's supposed to be twenty-five."

Mr. Aspen looked at her, not grasping the problem. "A hundred?" He looked at the driver. "Is that how much it is? It seems a little high, but I guess I've never needed a jump." He looked so innocent as he smiled,

but beneath that in a quiet way satisfied.

"Two hundred for you," the motorcycle guy said, eyeing his Mercedes. Mr. Aspen laughed and turned to her.

"I guess it's a hundred," he said cheerfully. And then waited for her to pay him.

"No it isn't," she insisted. But he looked at her as though she was naive and he'd suddenly become an expert on the procedures and prices of tow trucks. He began to show impatience, and appeared to be reconsidering the merits of having an arrangement with someone so difficult to deal with. So she gave all the money to the dirty fingers waiting. "I need ten dollars back," she said and fought off a twitching in her eyes. He pulled out a packet of bills and handed her a crumpled sweaty ten that smelled of his blue jeans as she took it into her car.

"Pleasure doing business with you," he said and laughed at the way her face looked; hitched up his pants and walked to his truck and climbed inside. He accelerated backwards with a squealing of tires and clanking of chains, skidding into a circle, and peeled out of the parking lot with the money he'd stolen from her with Mr. Aspen's help.

Mr. Aspen was watching as though this wasn't at all surprising or in any way a victory for the driver or an insult to her. Then, when he glanced at her face, he looked slightly confused. "What is it?" he asked.

She smelled dirty jeans and greasy fingers in the ten-dollar bill and thrust her hand out the window with this last of the gift of unexpected money, and newfound worth. "Here's your change," she said.

"Oh, thanks," he said. Not getting any of it. Then, slowly, he looked a tiny bit doubtful. "Would you like to keep it? That was kind of expensive, I guess."

"No."

"Then I'll see you next week?" he asked, like everything was still the same. "I did pay you the money. You took it. I mean, even though the tow truck got it, I need to get my money's worth."

She thought in that moment she didn't care anymore what might happen when he went in to see his mother and if she told him. It was like the calculus. She'd never find the distance the bullet would travel, or the speed it would be going when it hit. "Sure," she said and stepped on the gas. But took her foot off, for just a second, thinking there must be something in all this that ought to be discussed or he ought to under, stand. Then she pushed on the gas again and saw him in the rearview mirror, tilting his head as he watched her drive away.

The Dinner Party

Robert Girardi

Kurt pulled the Lagonda onto the drive of the ugly pink mansion that had once belonged to Claudio Pouffon, the industrialist. He stopped the big car precisely beneath the porte-cochere and waited for me to finish dressing. Two brass carriage lamps burned on either side of the archway; phosphorescent lizards scurried up the stucco into the wavering shadows. A footman stood on the veranda at the top of the front steps. Behind him, the great doors were thrown open, and from the ballroom came a sad, jittery music and the muted swell of conversation.

A crowd of neighbors watched silently from the black and white mosaic sidewalk of the Esplanade, across the Avendida Perquitos. It must have seemed terrible to them, an outrage. Still, no one raised a voice or threw a rock or came over to demand an explanation. The neighbors understood somehow that the dinner party was beyond shame and suffering, beyond morality itself.

I saw Kurt's dark, piggy eyes in the rearview. He picked up the speaking tube.

"Your tie, sir," he said.

"Shut up, Kurt," I said, but I straightened it in the privacy glass. Then I twisted the cuff links and fixed the red sash with the few modest orders they had provided for me and slipped my feet into the polished slippers. If you've got to be at a dinner party, I told myself, you might as well be dressed. Or perhaps there were other reasons I did not care to examine.

Kurt came around the car to open the door. I stepped from the Lagonda's leathery interior into calm night air that did not hold the slightest breath of the green inferno that consumed the city below. The wall of flame stood just the other side of the rose garden, neatly pruned

bushes running up to it, not a single petal singed to the line.

"A moment, sir," Kurt said as I turned towards the steps. He touched me on the shoulder and pulled a glittering cigarette case from the pocket of his double-breasted jacket. "It would never do to enter a dinner party late without a cigarette. A question of style."

"Then I'm late as usual?" I said.

"Perfectly late, sir."

"You always had an eye for the smallest particulars, Kurt," I said, taking the cigarette.

He lit it and touched his cap.

"Till next time," I said.

"Enjoy your meal, sir," Kurt said.

"Never," I said.

He was one of their creatures. He smiled his lackey's smile, utterly without humor, then he got into the Lagonda and pulled away.

The footman at the door was hollow-eyed and shivering. His uniform did not fit him well. At the last minute they had gotten some extra help from the agency, he said. How was he to know what would happen? He had a wife, an apartment in the Rua Coutora. She was helpless without him. Had I heard anything? Was there anything I could do? He must have recognized that though I was not exactly one of them, I was no longer quite human. They have a gleaming quality that is startling, like platinum static, and unmistakable.

"The Cini District, the docks," I said, shaking my head.

He rolled his eyes. There was a painful twitch.

"You mean?"

"Gone this afternoon," I said. "Cinders. Also the Palace of the President, the Botanical Gardens, the Alcaron Library I'm sorry."

He was weeping now. The flames had come up so quickly. It was almost impossible that his wife had gotten any further than the Praca Olvidos, a raging gully of green fire by ten 0' clock. The tears shone on his cheeks in the light from the tall windows.

"Don't let them see that," I whispered. "If there's one thing they can't stand, it's weakness. Courage, my friend."

"What does it matter now," the footman said. He slumped down on the pediment of one of the columns that supported the entrance way, and covered his face with his hands.

I could see into his life suddenly, the narrow comfortable limits: a small, neat apartment, blue curtains in the window, a young wife from

the country. They made love twice a week, Sunday and Wednesday. And on his rare night off, she put on her best dress and they went to the Olympia and laughed at the pantomime with the rest. Or to the Yoruba Ballroom to watch the young toughs and their hard women at the latest dances, maybe stepping in timidly for a tango or two. There was a bottle of Aracon on the table-an extravagance, but one must be extravagant now and then-and the moon in the street on the way home. I envied him his lost routine, his vanished certainties.

"Stand up," I said. "Let me help you." I lifted him by the elbows. There was a clean handkerchief in the pocket of my tux. I gave it to him and he blew his nose.

The music squealed and tittered from inside, a stiff orchestral arrangement of a popular dance number. I turned towards the door to this sour accompaniment, and at that moment Maire appeared in the threshold. The same aquiline profile and startling blue eyes. I was not surprised to see her. This time, she wore a black evening gown that exposed her breasts. Her shoulders were smooth and muscular, her breasts splendid, nipples teased into a state of perpetual excitement. The straps of the gown and her tiara were encrusted with diamonds as big as my thumbnail. Her black hair, streaked attractively with blue to match her eyes, curled cleverly around her ears. She was a little drunk. She held her martini at the same precise angle, always about to spill a drop, though she never did.

"Finally," she said in a throaty, beautiful purr. "We didn't think you were going to make it, darling. There's always that possibility." She offered her white cheek for a kiss which I ignored.

"Listen," I said, taking a step to the side. "This poor fellow here. His wife

She pulled back angrily. "Don't be ridiculous," she said. "Do you avoid stepping on ants? Do you feel sorry for bacteria?"

The footman stared at her, at first confused, then his face stiffened with rage. "Medusa! Bitch!" he spat at her through his teeth.

These were words she didn't like. The footman was not a coward. His tears had been for others, not for himself.

Maire leaned down till her face was an inch away from his. He didn't flinch at first, then he began to wail softly.

"You will be cursed," she said quietly. "Not only now, but through the generations."

"Who are you?" the man whispered.

"Don't you know?" She straightened, triumphant. "We are the gods!"

I almost laughed. "That's ridiculous," I said. "Sheer melodrama. Don't believe her for a second."

But the footman was already halfway down the drive, his ill-fitting shoes flopping against the gravel. Then he veered off into the roses, towards the wall of flame, hand out before him as if pushing open a door. There was a small flash when he fell into the poisonous green and was consumed.

In the ballroom an orchestra played on a riser draped with maroon velvet set in between two forlorn rubber plants. The hom players could barely keep the instruments to their lips, which were white with fear. The sound of distant explosions interrupted their harmless melody. It was the oil tanks along the estuary at Isola Iguenol blowing one by one, or a last regiment of the Civil Guard dynamiting the suburbs in a desperate attempt to stop the spread of the flames. A bright green flash lit the room with each shudder, the faces of the guests saved in green for a moment from the soft illumination of chandeliers clattering nervously above.

They had invited a crowd of about fifty for cocktails. The dinner later was always a private affair. Just me and them. I recognized some of the unfortunate guests, but I couldn't say from where. Famous people, no doubt; generals, cabinet ministers, actresses, millionaires. Maybe even the President of the Republic himself, though-I realized with a shock-I no longer remembered what the man looked like.

A few of the guests put up a good show, sipping gin-fizzes with false smiles, telling jokes, trying to take the measure of their new masters. Making conversation as their world burned around them. These were the ones who could knife their own mothers should the need arise, then go smiling to breakfast. But most of the others looked shaken and scared. Many sobbed openly, huddled together at the windows. It wouldn't go well for them.

I remembered my family with a painful jolt. Yes, I had a wife, children. They were out in the country, at Las Cruzas, visiting mother. How long would it take the flames to reach them there? I remembered a bright noon ten years gone, buying a yellow parrot, a gift for my wife's birthday. The parrot's eyes had been yellow like its feathers, it's voice sweet and musical. For a moment, I could see the yellow parrot with the yellow eyes quite clearly. I had taken this happy bird in his cage from a dim shop in the Alfama District into the sun and shadows of the arcade. But all that was fading. Soon, I would no longer be capable of memory or tears.

Maite had me by the arm. Her touch, the sight of her breasts filled me with a heat I could not name. Were they sexual beings, or too grand for such crude passions? I knew they were still flesh, just a special kind of flesh. I had once known more, everything, been among them. The rest would come.

Joris stood talking to a frightened blonde in a blue dress. The blonde's skin was tanned, she had been to CriscoI or La Maya from the look of her. Sunning herself on the beach, playing baccarat in the casino. [oris was impeccably dressed. Pinned to the sheeny lapel of his tuxedo, a silver rose to match his lustrous silver hair. He was without age, there were no lines on his face. It was perfectly smooth. He ran his hand down the blonde's arm and over her breast. She shuddered but didn't stop him. How could she?

"[oris is up to his usual filthy tricks, as you can see," Maire said. "He'll take the little vermin to bed in a bit, I'm sure. I can't imagine what he gets out of the experience. It's too disgusting. Anyway, have a drink, darling. You look utterly parched." She held out an exotic cocktail afloat with cherries and paper umbrellas that hadn't been in her hand a second before.

Suddenly, I was struck with a terrible thirst that I recognized as one of their tricks. "No thanks," I managed, trying not to look at the moisture sweating down the sides of the glass.

She raised an eyebrow. "You're sure?" The cocktail trembled a moment between her fingers.

I said nothing and she let it drop to the glossy tiles. This was a signal. As the glass shattered, the others turned towards us out of the crowd. I saw Petra, Ani, Jane, Colum. Their white, too-perfect faces were the faces of giants. Their perfect marble lips touched with cold smiles of incalculable disdain.

"We throw a dinner party because we haven't seen you for ages, darling, and you refuse to drink a little drink with us, with your good friends?" Maire sounded hurt.

"Not a drop," I said. "Not now, not ever."

She brought her face close. The smell of her breath was an intoxicant, a drug. "Listen, after we have a few drinks, and after dinner, we can go upstairs, just the two of us, and make love. Like old times. It's been so long for me. Too long. After dinner you'll resume your true shape, we'll give it back to you. It must be terrible to be trapped in such a body. It must be terrible making love to earthly women. The smells and the whimpering and the wetness."

"Making love is an exchange of vulnerability," I said. "What's the use of two invincible beings making love? It would be like trying to breath in a vacuum."

"You're cruel," Maire sniffed. "Awful. We had so much together, once. I know you remember."

She was talking just to talk, just for the drama. I had only the vaguest intimations of that ancient life. Nothing more than a dark flash upon waking that I recognized now as my dreams: black mountains lit by a black moon, reflections in a pane of silvered glass, the glitter of jewelry, a scent that filled me with longing. It wasn't much, a damning nostalgia. But I knew now that it was more than they had.

A few seconds later, there was a brilliant explosion. Probably the refineries at Port Doux. The after-shock shook the old house to the frame. The orchestra stopped playing; a gasp went up from the guests. In the silence that followed, Maire said in a loud voice:

"So, you no longer care for me?"

"I guess not," I said.

A single theatrical tear slid down her cheek and fell into her martini. The liquid froze instantly, and the glass cracked in her hand. She threw it to the floor in another shatter of glass and ice across the polished tiles and stormed off.

I wandered the mansion to get away from the pathetic scene in the ballroom. I went into the empty salons and drawing rooms, up the winding stairs into the onion-domed turret. The furnishings on the second floor were elegant if a bit dusty. Faded photographs showed people dressed in the formal style of the last generation. Through the door to the master bedroom I heard the sound of the blonde and [oris going at it. I tried to get water from the faucet in an old bathroom in the servant's quarters on the third floor to cool my burning mouth. That wouldn't count, I thought. As long as I didn't accept anything from them. This was civic water, from the public works; I had actually paid taxes for the privilege of drinking the foul stuff. But when I turned the handle, there was just a bare rusty trickle and then nothing.

In the big kitchen, Ward and Colum were shooting dice with the cook. Jane sat up on the butcher-block table, a bottle of excellent champagne in one hand, laughing that high pointless laugh of hers. The cook seemed the only one in the house not afraid of them.

"You're lucky, old man, damn lucky," Ward was saying to him. "You

don't know it, but you're the luckiest man in the world right now."

They always pick one each time for their special favors, their whimsical magnanimity. This cook would be a prince in his next life, a ruler of men. He didn't look like he would care much for that sort of thing. Pots boiled over on the stove behind him. He checked over his shoulder every now and then, from habit, and shrugged.

"Right. It don't matter no more," he said in a thick accent. "I seen that quick enough." He was a Montagnard, dark and rugged, with a head as big as a mule's. These people had never cared about much to begin with, toughened by wars, persecutions, blood feuds and the rigors of life in the mountains. Now, he was calmly winning at dice against Ward. He would be a prince and he didn't care one way or the other. I had to admire his complacency.

When I stepped from the hallway into the yellow light, Jane looked up.

"Here he is," she said. "Mr. Gloom. A drink?" she held up the bottle. I shook my head.

"No, of course not," Colum said. The jerk's going to make us go through the whole routine one more time."

The three of them made up the younger set, the fun crowd, lighter in attitude than Joris and the rest. They fancied themselves characters in a dizzy farce, all champagne and imported cigarettes and practical jokes. Though of course it was only a question of style. There was no difference in substance, none at all. I knew there was no chance with them, but I always tried.

"There are a billion stars," I said. "You could leave me alone on any speck of dust to the windward of just one of them. A normal lifetime. Then the end."

Jane laughed and tipped up the bottle. She was the girl dancing on the table at the party, the tease with the gleam in her eye. Her heart was black.

"Oh, boy," she said. "You're a scream."

Colum straightened and brushed the wrinkles out of his tuxedo. The cook had just shot a seven against his eight. Ward was swearing under his breath.

"You're getting a little too lucky, cookie," Ward said.

"I loose if you want, sir," the cook said.

Jane laughed again at this. A sharp, inane sound that set the copper pots above the stove to ringing.

"Listen, we'd like to help you out," Colum said to me as he patted his

pockets for a cigarette. "But what can we do? Joris is an absolute tyrant, you know that."

"Just a swallow, old sport," Ward said, looking up. "That's all it would take on your part. A morsel, a smidgen."

"A crumb," Jane said.

"Naturally, you'd have to sit down at the table with us for a minute or two," Colum said. "For the sake of ceremony."

"No." I said. "I won't eat with you. That's out of the question."

"Then ." Ward pursed his lips.

"What do you think, cookie?" Colum said, nudging the man with the toe of his pump.

The big Montagnard shrugged. "I don't know," he said. "He does not want to eat. He is not hungry."

In truth, I was very hungry. I hadn't eaten in three days, just as they had intended. There were sausages and hams hanging on hooks from a beam in the ceiling. There were dried peppers and jars of spices on the window sill. The cook went back to his game, a pile of colorful 10,000 Escudo notes stacked up before him, probably more money than he had seen in his entire life. But he seemed to know now that money no longer had any value. He was playing for something far more important.

"You're an idiot and a drip," Jane hissed at me from her perch on the butcher block. "You know at last we'll make you do it. You'll stop begging, you'll stop refusing and you'll just eat. You'll stuff your face with it. We'll find a way to make you."

"You won't," I said. "You never will."

In the darkened library, a row of silenced clocks stood along the mantle. On the walls, in cases, hung regimental flags from the last war. The young blonde who had gone with Joris earlier was here now and had pulled a chair over to the open window. She sat unmoving in green shadow, watching the city bum.

I came up behind and put a hand on her shoulder.

"Are you all right?" I said.

She didn't tum around. "That's a ridiculous question."

Her blue dress was tom. She couldn't go back to the party looking like that. I pulled up another chair and sat beside her in the green semidarkness.

We stayed like that for about fifteen minutes without speaking-really the first bit of quiet I'd had in days. And it was only now that I could feel myself becoming hollower, each second riven of the things that had

made me human. Suddenly, I wanted badly to remember, to call back every moment of the life that was leaving.

"I have to tell someone before it's too late, before it's all gone," I began in a trembling voice.

The blonde said nothing.

"And you, I've seen you before. I know you," I said.

"No. You don't know me. I was famous, I was in films. From the cover of magazines, probably. My face," she said in a tired voice.

"It's just that I'm forgetting," I said.

"Forgetting what?"

"Everything. This life."

"What's wrong with that?"

"You don't understand. It's like the floor falling out from under your feet. It's horrible."

"Once the fires reach the pampas," she said, "the whole countryside will go up. Who knows where it will stop."

"It'll not stop," I said.

Lying open on the big library table, the atlas showed a map more real than the landscape it portrayed, already gone, gutted, unrecognizable.

The green light was almost pleasant for a moment. The sound of music and ballroom conversation seemed natural from this distance. It could be any Saturday, any slightly dull society party, except for the unquenchable flames consuming the city below.

"I'm responsible," I said. "I'm responsible for all of it." I bowed my head and told her in a tired voice everything I knew. I wouldn't eat with them, I wouldn't take a drink. I had refused time and time again. They pursued me across the eons, through so many lives and still I wouldn't eat with them. A mouthful of food was worth ten million souls, a drop of wine another million. For a whole meal, they would spare this world, or what was left of it now. But I would never eat with them. Never.

"Who are you?" she said. She did not seem surprised at anything I told her.

"I don't know," I said.

"You're a man?"

"Yes," I said. "In this life."

"No. You're a monster."

"So you believe me?"

"Yes." She leaned back against the brocade fabric of the chair, her face lit green by the blaze. Her irises were green. There was a swollen circle

of bite marks on her shoulder, darkening into bruises.

"You know what," she said. "I don't care. It can all go to hell."

"It is."

"You look so normal," she said. "Dumpy, really. No one could tell from looking at you."

There was a mirror strung at an angle over the fireplace. I stood and walked over to it. I had already forgotten this face, this body. A small man, about fifty. Balding, a slight paunch, uncomfortable in dinner clothes. Used instead to open collars and dusty linen suits, to cheap cigars on a patio in a less fashionable suburb and commonplace meditations over a glass of beer. The eyes were a little short-sighted from squinting at copy, the skin tinged with an unhealthy gray from too many hours out of the sun, too many late nights in the city room, too much coffee. Still, I saw something likable about him. Something that had made people listen.

A few other pictures glimmered in the mirror as well, deep in the silvering heart of the glass. I could see a long road of red dirt, banana trees. The tumble-down walls of kitchen gardens on either side. Country houses built in the days when country houses weren't so far from the city. We had a house there, my wife and l. It was small, and the backyard of scrabble grass faded into the scrub of hills, but it was ours. Had she been happy?

I remembered the patio lined with plants in terra-cotta pots. Cactus, Wandering Jew. She had collected them in the hills, her hands protected by a pair of my old gloves, a floppy hat shading her brown face. Her father had been a sea captain. We had a chest in the attic full of his moldering uniforms, gold braid gone brittle with age. One night after the cinema we made love, very quietly so as not to wake the children who were asleep upstairs. Her eyes glistened with tears as she put on the gramophone and unhooked her dress, and as we lay down together on the old divan. Those tears were nothing, she explained afterwards in my arms, just the melancholy of life.

I stared up at my face in the mirror now, a stranger's face visited with uncertainty and weakness, green in the dreadful light. Not daring a hope, I waited for a single forgotten evening to recall other evenings, links in a chain receding into the murk of vanished lives. Perhaps the whole picture would emerge at last, perhaps

In the distance, black mountains touched with snow beneath the black moon; and everywhere through the gloom along the agate path, red ants struggle with small bits of bloody flesh. There is the sound of someone breathing

hidden in the underbrush, and the breathing of the horses. On the steps of the palace, crushed and broken�faced, my cousin then in a prison cell

No. It was impossible.

From the chair, the girl called to me. I sat down again beside her and took her hand.

"My lower half has gone numb," she said. "I can't feel a thing."

"That will happen," I said. "To you it would be like poison."

"But it doesn't feel bad," she said. "It feels quite pleasant."

"Yes," I said.

"And the places where he touched me. They're going numb too."

"I remember you now," I said. "I saw you riding up the Avendida Alberto Liku in a big car once. You came through my district with your windows closed, and you didn't even wave, but still people lined the street to get a look as you passed."

"That little jaunt was my publicist's idea," she said. "The district just south of the Alfama is full of radicals. Bomb throwers. Of course I kept the window up."

"My newspaper offices were there," I said. "In the Via dos Prazeres."

"La Presna?"

"I can't remember."

"Try, please." The green light in her eyes was fading. "Keep talking, please."

"I wrote editorials," I said, speaking quickly. "We were closed by the Secretariat and closed again. But we always managed to re-open. There was a fan in my office that made a strange clattering noise. We wanted people to have cleaner water to drink. We wanted people to be able to walk the streets without being stopped by the police for their papers, and arrested on a whim. I had a secretary, an earnest girl from the provinces, Rio Platos. She had nice legs. Once, just before the general strike, working late, we

"Will you kiss me?" the blonde said. Her voice was weak. She let go of my hand. When I reached her lips with mine, they were cold. She was already dead.

I waited the last hour in the garden. This was the part of the dinner party I hated most. Joris liked to go around popping heads. He'd just look at them, the poor beggars, and narrow his eyes a bit, and that would be it. An ugly spectacle. "The process is painless for the animals," he said once, then I hit him and we never made it to dinner that time. How could they be so cruel and so stupid after all this time? Stars

had come and gone and still they behaved like spoiled children out on a spree. Consciousness is about knowledge or nothing; they think it's about sensation. How idiotic.

Most of the city was gone now. Soon dawn would reveal the final vista: A broken plain of smoldering rubble as far as the eye could see.

They always left a few servants alive until the end, and one came into the garden to fetch me. A boy, fifteen or sixteen with a tear-stained face.

"They told me to tell you dinner was ready, sir," he said. "They said they'll kill me if you don't come."

"I know," I said.

"Hurry, please."

I followed him through the garden and up the grand staircase. The dining room was on the second floor, a long room with a row of arched windows overlooking the holocaust. They were all waiting at the table, and as I came through the double doors, they greeted me with a light smattering of applause.

"There you are, old boy," Joris said. "Was busy earlier, didn't have a chance to really say hello."

"I saw that Joris," I said. "She died in the library."

"Who?" he said, genuinely perplexed.

"We were about to start without you," Maire said, holding out her hand. My place had been set next to hers at the far end of the table facing Joris. Jane sat between Colum and Ward on one side, across from Ani and Petra, grim faced on the other. To them it was a solemn occasion.

The table looked wonderful, as usual. All ice swans and fresh cut flowers and sterling flatware; a bewildering array of food arranged on heaping platters down the center. Everything smelled delicious. I saw game and mutton, pork, fish, fowl and roast beef, lobsters, oysters, noodle dishes, vegetables, salads, salmon molds, desserts, fruit, cheese, wine. Enough food for a hundred guests. The sight of all that food made me dizzy. Pierced with hunger, I felt my will begin to bend.

"Sit down darling, sit down," Maire insisted.

I hesitated, but sat beside her and there was another smattering of applause. The empty black plate set before me reflected candlelight and the shame on my face. I didn't usually sit down, they knew that.

"Well done," Ward said.

"Yes, maybe we can finally conclude this business in a civilized manner," Jane said. "Maybe we can get on with it!"

"Shut up, you little cunt!" Maire said, her hand over mine. "Can't you see it's hard for him!"

I felt feverish, my mouth watering. The smell of all that food was more than I could bear. "Don't give in!" I whispered to myself, and looked around the room for a sign. Waiters in white jackets stood, teeth chattering, at their bussing stations. A cold fire burned in the fire place. [oris' eyes were the color of lead. There was nothing to help me.

"Just one little swallow, baby, that's all it will take," Maire said in my ear. "One little swallow and you will be with us again. A small thing, a swallow." She was very close. Her white limbs gleamed at the edge of my vision.

Ward leaned across the table. "Remember all the fun we used to have, old sport," he said. "We'll have all that fun and more again. Just a nibble, just a sip. In fact, I'm going to propose a toast." He stood and lifted his glass, then everyone stood. "To good times again," he said. "And to you, old sport." He nodded at me, his smile gruesome and redlipped. He could almost get away with the makeup, he almost looked natural. But the smile was horrible. They shared it, looking down at me, glasses raised.

I stood slowly. A wine glass was put into my hand. The room seemed to be swimming in food. The wine glass got closer to my lips. But before I drank, I looked into the bottom of the yellow liquid and saw something there that made me remember. I set the glass down beside the black plate.

"No." I said. "Not a bite. Not a single swallow. It will always be the same."

I was remembering everything now, all of it, every moment of a thousand vanished lives in a mad rush of passion and regret, foolishness, squalor, courage, cowardice, grace. Then the first life in which I had walked with them on the streets of a black city, moon black above the mountain peaks upon which there was always snow. I was remembering faces in the crowd, the first crowd, and the first ghastly meal. Never again. Worlds could perish, galaxies implode, but I would not eat with them again.

When I looked back at the table, the food was gone as I knew it would be, the cutlery and place settings gone. Only one plate remained, my plate. And at the center of that plate a single black pill.

"There it is," Maire said. "Swallow it. Go ahead."

"Swallow swallow," they all murmured.

I turned my face from them and left the room.

Before I reached the staircase, the wall of heat that was their undying rage hit the mansion. Everything around me seemed to float for a sus-

pended moment, then the south facade crashed away to a great hollow booming and there was green flame all around. The fire would spread, the planet would be reduced to cinders. Another dark hunk of rock circling a nameless sun. Another billion burned souls on my conscience.

The great roof beam of the house cracked with a roar. Flames consumed the foundation. The floors buckled and opened at my feet. This was always happening. As I fell, I caught a last glimpse of the burning city. Green flames followed the columns of refugees all the way to the sea.

My family had a house there once, a big ramshackle place in the middle of a pine grove, by the sea at Isola Verde. In the spring, armies of blind caterpillars came down off the trees, touching head to tail, following the leader, marching straight for the garden in long lines of undulating fur. They got into everything, even into water freshly drawn for the bath. Once they stripped the petals off every one of mother's precious bearded irises in a single day. So, every spring, father waged war against them:

He would wait until the caterpillars had almost reached the garden, pour kerosene along each line, strike a match, and they would go up in flames in a straight shot right back into the trees. It was a tricky business. You had to stay out of the way of the smoke, run when the wind shifted. The caterpillars could give you a terrible rash if you touched them, even the smoke from their burning bodies could give you a rash, make your eyes swollen and red. When the flames burned out, father would sweep their tarry remains into neat piles, bag them up and bury them in the woods. But the smell of kerosene and burnt caterpillars would linger in the yard for days.

Seven Stories

Clarence Brown

The Groom

Florian was a groom. Not the sort of groom that tends to horses. He was the sort of groom who accompanies a bride down the aisle. He was a groom for hire. He had been happily married to Mickey Jean, a plump little person with a sunny disposition and a large gap between her front teeth, for nearly six years. Mickeygee, he called her. Mickeygee could see nothing wrong with his being a groom, so long as it was strictly a commercial proposition. He made far more money than he had formerly made as a cook, and the work was much less tiring. Besides, she enjoyed listening to every detail of his numerous weddings, especially the description of the bride's gown, what the maids of honor were wearing, and so on. It added a little color to their life. He would come home, change out of whatever formal wear the clients had hired for his appearance that afternoon, carefully fold it for return to the shop, start telling Mickeygee all about the wedding, continue the description over spaghetti and wine at Louie's, and sometimes still be talking about it when they went to bed hours later. Mickeygee couldn't get enough of it, and Florian was happy to have such an interested audience.

He would often go beyond the actual event of which he had been a part and begin to tell of the bride and groom's escape from the happy throng of well-wishers, of their being alone at last in some luxurious hotel room, or suite of rooms, and of their at first timid and then more and more eager enfolding of each other in the hot ecstasies of the wedding night. This of course was pure imagination. Perhaps for that reason alone Florian's embroidery of it could so excite them both that they would occasionally wake up in the early hours of the morning to find themselves making love all over again, more madly than before. On the

brilliant screen of their fantasy, they became the bride and groom of Florian's story, but this only increased their sense of being real people, a real husband and wife, who made real love.

Business was very good. It did tend to slacken a bit in the harsh days of winter and in the dank, cold onset of spring, when grooms were naturally in slight demand, but let the first warm rays of the sun bring the crocus up, let the first soft breezes from the south move through the region, laden with a kind of humid perfume, and the telephone receiver had to be removed from its cradle if one was to think at all. And from that time, right through the hottest days of summer and until the last mild exhalations of autumn, Florian was in constant demand. At times he would come home from a wedding in the morning, change his clothes, eat a lunch of cold chicken from the night before, drink a glass of white wine, sleep for half an hour, rouse himself with difficulty, put on the fresh attire that had only just come from the haberdasher's, and hasten away to be married for the second time that day.

His success was hardly surprising. He was after all a stalwart young fellow, not yet twenty-five years of age, gifted with passionate dark eyes and raven hair. Dressed in elegant evening clothes or morning dress, depending on the hour of his wedding, he was a striking figure, one that any father-in-law would not only welcome into his family as the sire of his prospective grandchildren but even consider as a partner in his firm. He was also well-spoken, had practically no trace of the accent with which he was born, and could maintain a light and fluent conversation on any topic that weighed no more than a feather. There were other grooms for hire, but none was so much in demand as Florian.

He would sometimes wonder whatever had become of his numerous brides. Saying goodbye to them immediately after the ceremony was the part of his work that demanded the utmost from his native tact and good humor. Most of the young women came from the best families and were models of delicate, graceful, and above all correct deportment. They took their leave with a stoic demeanor, and some even with a sardonic or sadly humorous remark. But there were naturally some who found it beyond their powers to bid farewell to Florian almost before they had had the chance to take a good look at him. Some, forgetting themselves completely, would throw their arms round his neck, cover his face with tearful kisses, and even offer him fortunes if only he would persist in the process so beautifully and elaborately begun.

To such entreaties he was obliged by contract to turn a deaf eargrooms who failed to understand the strictly limited nature of their

employment seldom lasted long in the profession-but there was no stipulation that he be cruel about it, this rupture of a relationship so recently begun, and with vows of lifelong fidelity, at that. It would sometimes require an hour or more of whispered consolation, tender reasoning, even prolonged embraces that were, some of them, little bet' ter than erotic, before he could disentangle himself and, to cut short the suffering, blow one last kiss and abruptly depart.

Word of his brides, or of some of them, occasionally reached him if only by way of the newspaper, whose columns were always open to the doings of the most prominent families. Florian did not read newspapers or anything else, but Mickeygee would often glance at the paper, some, times weeks old, that was passed about at Louie's tavern, and she was quick to recognize anyone to whom her Florian had been married. True, it was often Florian's surname, Proudfoot, that first caught her attention.

In accordance with a custom at that time still inviolable, all of his brides took the name Proudfoot. It was Florian's principal contribution after his essential presence at the altar on the given day. And all the children of the union, should it be blessed with issue, were equally Proudfoot. A name at one time obscure, and a bafflement to the science of genealogy, it set forth, thanks to Florian, upon a giddy career. Between "Prosser" and "Provost" the telephone directories, first of his town, then of his region, and then of several foreign capitals, blossomed in pages of "Proudfoot."

Florian listened indulgently to Mickeygee's reading of the stiff news, paper report, though it bored him intolerably to hear her lively voice pick its way through the cliches, but if a photograph should happen to accompany the story, he could not look at it enough.

One photograph, not from the newspaper but from a glossy magazine that had been left behind by some patron, showed the Countess Lydia de Proudfoot in the costume of an admiral (at least) against the back, drop of her yacht in the harbor of Antibes. Ranged beside her were her children, all in naval costume, all boys, and all versions of Florian him, self at the ages of fourteen, eleven, eight, seven and four. The same eyes, the same raven hair, the same appealing diffidence when, as now, obliged to be the center of all gazes. With the journalist's usual insufferable presumption of familiarity, the writer had identified them only by their family nicknames: Flor (Florenz, he supposed), Bud, [az, Vetch, Weed and Blossom.

Mickeygee did not much relish the news of the children, and, against all the evidence, even denied their slightest resemblance to Florian. The

truth is that she yearned for nothing so much as children of her own. But in six years of marriage Florian's hundreds of official offspring, the eldest of whom already knew their catechism, to say nothing of foreign languages, had never been matched by so much as a single baby of their own. The bassinet in the small room off the upstairs hall had eventually been draped with a sheet to protect it from dust. The layette so kindly provided by their friends had been folded away in drawers, and the day when Mickeygee had found a pair of woolen booties eaten by moths, and thrown them away, she had cried for hours, and considered herself thenceforth barren.

Did Florian want children? The answer was yes and no. He knew of course that he would not be a young man forever, and that children are widely reported to be a comfort in the waning years of life, but he could no more conceive of old age, his own old age, than he could of his own death. And the picture in his mind of children running about his house, chasing his cat, hanging round Mickeygee's neck when he himself felt like hanging there, scattering his collection of lead soldiers it did not appeal to him.

Still, he could not help noticing the look that came into Mickeygee's eyes whenever they passed a young mother playing with her child in the park. He loved her so much that the slightest thought of her sadness weighed heavily upon his heart. Why they had not produced a child was a mystery. The doctor whom they had consulted after two years of wedded life had pronounced them both fit and had counseled patience, good cheer, and failing all else, meek submission to the inscrutable designs of Providence.

One night in September, when the moon was full, they were lying wide awake in their bed and listening to the owl, the occasional complaint of a cat, and the brush of the linden bough against the eave. Mickeygee could not sleep on the night of a full moon, and Florian could not sleep when Mickeygee was awake. They fell to talking.

-The women you marry, Florian. They never have children before, do they?

-Of course not, silly. What an idea.

-But afterwards

-Afterwards is different. They're married ladies then, aren't they? They have all the children they want. It's nature's way. What was that?

-The linden tree against the roof. I've asked you to see to it. It's already knocked one tile off. Do you think I might get married to one of your friends, one of the other grooms, the same as them others?

-!?

-Florian, it wouldn't be for real, no more than yours are But, as it didn't seem to work for us, why couldn't we try it again, with a differ, ent groom ?

Imagine for yourself the rest of this conversation, but do so with all of the loving kindness that bound Florian and Mickeygee inextricably one to the other. The thing was more than irregular, of course-it was pre, posterous! A married woman-and married, what is more, to one of the best'known grooms of the county-going through another ceremony with a different groom! It could never be done in public, the church would never hear of it, nor for that matter would the civil authorities, in fact it would have to be done in strictest secrecy, and very probably in some remote place where none of the participants would be recognized. It was madness. But then whoever supposed that love was entirely sane?

Florian's relationship to the other grooms was friendly, though distant and correct. There was no guild of grooms. They never met except at Louie's, or in one of the many pathways leading from the several chapels of the Cathedral, after a wedding. There being work for all, their feel, ings for each other were guardedly fraternal. Drinking with other grooms seemed, however, a bad idea, since the conversation drifted inevitably to the one topic that bound them together and quickly became uncensored and even dangerous.

With one of his fellow grooms, however, Florian enjoyed a relation, ship that went beyond mere acquaintance. He and Jethro Frame-called "Red" because of his fiery hair, the color of the sun-had been boys together, had been classmates together, had often hunted and fished together in the summertime, and had even done their service in the same regiment. To cap it all, they were distantly related: Red Frame had married one of Florian's cousins. The only slight strain in their friend, ship had come when Red followed Florian into the profession of groom without the slightest prior mention of this step to his friend. But that had long ago been forgotten, and Red Frame was closer to Florian than anyone outside his own family. It was naturally to him that he turned, and Red, who loved all adventures without exception and those tinged with daring and illegality most of all, agreed on the spot.

The conclusion of this story is briefly told. A friend of their soldiering days had attained the rank of magistrate in a village that lay a half day's journey to the north of them, on the coast. He readily entered the con, spiracy. Plausible excuses were made for their absence, and the company even set out in a southerly direction before turning round to the north on a small road that skirted the village. The ceremony took place in a

spacious hunting lodge that the magistrate had rented under the pretext of readying it for some large reunion of his family. That it happened at night lent an even more mysterious and romantic air to the occasion, for the light of the candles lay softly on the many flowers that the magistrate's wife had kindly provided. Red's best man was the husband of their children's nurse, who, along with Red's wife Miranda and the magistrate's wife, supplied the maids of honor. Florian himself, astonished at the myriad of emotions that were nearly choking him, gave away the bride, who was radiant in a white satin gown and carried a bouquet of white roses. Thus were the nuptials of Mr. Jethro Frame, "Red" to his numerous friends, and Mrs. Mickey Jean Proudfoot, solemnly celebrated in the presence of a select company. Following a wedding journey of undisclosed destination, the happy pair will take up residence, each with their former spouse.

On the day that Mickeygee was finally certain that she was with child she nearly exploded with impatience for Florian to come home. His joy was as great as hers, and from that day to this, their house has known the happy commotion of seven children, four boys and three girls, the first of Florian's progeny with an inalienable claim to the name Proudfoot, and the first to unite his flashing dark eyes with hair as fiery as the sun.

Ink Soup

MEDIAS RES, Texas-This little town on the Rio Grande, just over the border from Mexico, is normally quiet and dusty. It is a place where, until recently, you were more likely to see mesquite and dead cow skulls than famous writers.

Medias Res is beholden not to dead cows, however, but to a dead Ianguage for its present prosperity. Were Latin still a subject taught in schools, this dump would still be the dry gulch that it was manifestly meant to be.

Aspiring writers would know that the injunction always to begin in medias res means to start your story in the middle of the action. The Chamber of Commerce here, Luke Haverstraw, can claim credit for circulating the idea that what it really meant was: if you want to be a writer, start out in Medias Res. And bring money.

Luke ought to know what he is talking about. He is himself a fictional character. He has been out of work for decades, but he started out as the hero of a script that William Faulkner was working on during his stint as a screen writer in Hollywood back in the forties.

Faulkner modeled Luke on himself, which is to say that he was short, drunk and randy as a monastery goat. He had fought in the War Between the States, of course, during which he stole horses from both sides and sold to the highest bidder (Faulkner used parts of him in later, more successful characters), but his blood was well over the legal limit ofWild Turkey.

He was fired the day Faulkner, the studio head and about eight suits sat around a conference table waiting for him to show up, which he never did, as he was just then trying to drive Faulkner's Packard to Catalina Island. They never did find the car. Luke headed back to Mississippi but was ejected from a cattle train as an undesirable element not far from Medias Res.

He wired his creator: Dear Boss. Woke up in Medias Res. Sorry about car. Send money. Love Luke.

Faulkner wired back: Not even in the bloodstreaked dawn of some as yet to be imagined and probably in the long run unimaginable hell of avarice and unreliability and ingratitude will the shiftless likes of you ever lay eyes on the least farthing or shekel or infinitesimal red cent of my hard-earned and earmarked for my own drink money. Mail the keys. Luke, long familiar with his master's style, immediately understood

what this meant. It meant: Start a writing school.

The response was instantaneous. Luke himself was principal of the school, needless to say, and he hired the first five applicants as the staff. Their first task was to draw up a list of the books they intended to write, and the prizes that they hoped to win, and then change all the verbs to the past tense.

At the end of three weeks, when this had been accomplished and their tuition money was beginning to run low, they put these lists into a brochure for the Symposium in Medias Res. The acronym SIMR was inevitably pronounced "simmer" to suggest not only the incubation of authorial talent but also the climate.

You will hardly be surprised to learn that SIMR specialized in openings. Luke's Latin, like that of all purely imaginary persons, was excellent, so he called the one and only course offered by his academy Incipit 101. In the immemorial way of all schools, this was shortened to Ink 1. I am mortified to say that the dreadful glop produced by those enrolled in Ink 1 came to be known as Ink Soup.

I have, however, turned this matter over to my attorneys, and as it is currently sub judice I shall have nothing further to say about it. In fact, owing to the length at which I have run on, I shall have nothing further to say, period. Finis.

The Adventures of Dr. Soup by Himself

Chapter One

"Have you packed the bags?" I asked Melchior. He nodded. I adjusted one of the butterfly nuts that protruded from the side of his neck and repeated the question.

Now he nodded and spoke: "Yes, sir."

"Excellent," I said. My research shows that even mechanical devices appreciate the odd word of praise. "And the olive pitter. You remembered that?" Again the silent nod. Again the adjustment.

"Yes, sir."

Conversations with Melly are of course limited in scope, though persons as unattractive as myself must be grateful for whatever verbal intercourse they can manage to scrape together. When all his adjustments are correct and I have not forgotten to oil his CPU, Melchior is capable of quite diverting sallies, all of them unintended, to be sure, since intention is quite beyond him and, at times, me.

"Where to?" asked Melchior, turning the key as though it were in the ignition.

"Good man," I said. "I will tell you where to after you have loaded the luggage into the automobile and we are seated in it. Not before."

"Automobile?"

"The car!" I forget occasionally that his vocabulary is rather simple. "Defenestrate the piano!" leaves him puzzled, but when I say "Throw the piano out the window!" he complies at once.

"No! No!" I say, wresting the baby grand out of his powerful arms, "I was merely illustrating the point for those who have just joined us. Go and put the bags in the automo the car. And come straight back, do you hear?"

"Stereophonically," he said, showing off a newly acquired word.

"Good man!"

We were headed to New Orleans. My dear friend Mrs. Oracle had telephoned me the night before, sobbing hysterically and pleading with me to come at once. Her pet iguana was missing and she feared the worst, namely that he had fallen into the hands of a Cajun cook.

Relations with Laetitia Oracle had been rather strained. The iguana,

Gustav, had bitten, or tried to bite, Melly, and this had unaccountably terrified him. Melchior was afraid of nothing on earth except this iguana. At the Philadelphia Zoo he had once got into a shoving match with a rhinoceros and it had cost me a small fortune to pay for reattaching the hom. But now, for the nonce, there was no iguana. There was the eternal Scriabin on the phonograph, but there was no iguana.

Laetitia was my oldest and dearest friend. Our love had survived her three husbands. I had never married. I had built Melchior instead, though my relations with the robot were platonic, or only mildly Socratic.

I went to the window. Melchior was putting a traffic warden into the trunk of the automo the car.

"Melchior!" I yelled. "What are you doing?"

"I am packing the olive pitter, please," he returned.

"Good man!" I yelled. It was a plausible mistake. The hole punch that she had been using to indicate violations on the traffic ticket did indeed resemble the olive pitter. Good old Melly! Even when he errs, there is a lesson for the careful observer.

Chapter Two

"There you are, Lucinda," said I, helping her back to her feet. "Nothing broken."

"I'm warning you, Soup," said she. "One more outrage and I'm taking you both downtown."

This from a child whom I've watched grow up on our block, with whose father I served on the board of deacons! But bless her heart-she was only upholding the dignity of the uniform.

Without further mishap, and with Melly at the wheel, we roared out of Trenton in high spirits and low gear, headed for New Orleans to help Mrs. Oracle search for Gustav, her truant iguana. Evening found us in Montana. The next morning found us poring over the map, wondering whether it might not have been a good idea to tum left at Cleveland, after all.

"J. Edgar Hoover, late director of the FBI, forbade his driver ever to make a left tum under any circumstances whatsoever," said Melchior, who was merely repeating what I had just said, something that I urge him to do for the sake of his vocabulary. Personally, I find Hoover's practice extreme. I allow, even encourage, Melchior to take left turns when

they seem absolutely to be called for. This one had simply eluded us.

But backing Up there I draw the line. New Orleans was not behind us, for heaven's sake! After a hearty breakfast-flapjacks for me, a bowl of alternating current for Melly-we set out in a southerly direction, overtaking and occasionally passing the tumbling tumbleweed.

"What would you like to talk about?" I asked Melchior. His word-processing unit seizes up if not given regular exercise.

"The impermanence of events," he replied, unhelpfully.

"That is an illusion ascribable to the bias of the observer," I answered. (I recommend this, reader, as an excellent way of dismissing almost any remark and abruptly terminating any unwanted conversation.) "What else?"

"Mrs. Augury," said Melchior.

"Oracle," I corrected, not for the first time. "Mrs. Oracle is distressed over the disappearance of a dear friend and we are going to help her find him." I did not mention Gustav, whose ineffectual attempt to bite Melly had given him a sovereign dread of iguanas. He would learn soon enough for whom we were going to search.

"Gustav is lost," said Melly, and drove the Packard over an embankment. It turned over twice and, with great presence of mind, landed upright in a convenient riverbed, fortunately dry.

"We have had an accident," said Melchior. Did I detect a faint amusement in his tone? Impossible. Robotic risibility is not even on the drawing board.

"You have had an accident," I said. "Hand me the map."

As I suspected, the map-a Mercator projection of the world, supplied free to patrons of the Esso station that used to be at the comerdid not show this riverbed. It barely showed Montana, to be quite frank. We were lost.

Chapter Three

A sound of weeping crept across the desert from behind a cactus. I sent Melly to investigate and he returned with a pretty, if tearful, blond person in a black sheath. This is how we met Dorine, of Hollywood. Her business card read: "Dorine, the Misleading Lady."

She had been, like all starlets, an Aspiring Actress. During a strenuous career in a series of steamy films, she had been a Perspiring Actress. Now, all too evidently, she was Dorine the Expiring Actress.

"My career had been stymied for years," said Dorine, despondently. "But I knew it was curtains when they didn't cast me in the role I was born for, Princess Di in the Sam Crass epic of the British Royal Family."

Sam had walked in and said: "Tough luck, kid. The Di is cast."

Melchior, whose tolerance for puns is minimal, hemorrhaged a pint of oil. I could not resist the opening. "I suppose the part went to that cow Alea Jacta?" I asked. Dorine did not react, but Melly emitted another pint. I decided that erudite punning was not worth the expense merely to baffle her and sicken him.

"No," said Dorine, placidly. "It went to Meryl Streep, as usual. And the role of Prince Charles went to Pee Wee Herman."

When I had topped Melchior off with a can of the SAE 40 that I always pack, he and Dorine managed to set the Packard back on its wheels, and we set off across an oddly familiar landscape of mesquite and empty road.

I ventured to remark that it looked like Hitchcock's North by North, west. "One can almost see Cary Grant being strafed by the aeroplane," I said.

"See who being what by a what?" asked Dorine. I abandoned the effort to make her feel at home by references to classical cinema, of which she appeared to know only the coming attractions.

Fresh adventure awaited us, twiddling its thumbs impatiently.

"Deseret News!" shouted the boy who all but blocked our ingress into the arterial road. I bought a paper merely to remove the obstruction. My name leapt out at me from the front page:

DOCTOR SOUP FEARED LOST IN DESERT MISHAP!

FAMED TRENTON SPECIALIST LAST SEEN WITH LONGTIME COMPANION ALEA JACTA IN POWERFUL TOURING CAR.

The inaccuracy of {some} newspapers is quite depressing. The Pack, ard was a closed saloon, not a touring car.

"I don't see Pee Wee Herman as Prince Charles," said Dorine. "I know for a fact that he cannot play polo. He frightens the horses."

I ignored this. We were back on an interstate and the weather was in that blissful state of earliness and generous rebate to which my years in central New Jersey had accustomed me. Fleecy clouds edged here and there with great galloons of golden sunlight had been tastefully arranged against a bottomless azure and the air lacked only the familiar attar of

petroleum to be perfect. A perceptible diminution in the velocity of our powerful machine brought me out of my reverie.

"Why are you parking here?" I asked Melly.

"I am not parking. I have reduced the speed to 95 mph to eliminate vibration in the rearview mirror."

"What is reflected there?" I asked, not without misgivings. "The congested face of a Royal Canadian Mounted Policeman," said Melly.

Chapter Four

Like all Canadians, he was the soul of courtesy. He asked me to step out of the car as though it caused him genuine personal anguish to inconvenience me. The body search was-how shall I say?-almost enjoyable. And I speak as a physician who knows ways to make a body search highly disagreeable.

He found nothing of course, if you disregard a quantity of lint. His search of my lady companion took somewhat longer, not that she seemed to mind any more than I did.

When, however, he motioned to Melchior to disembark and commenced a body search of what was, essentially, not a body in the usual meaning of that word, I tried to warn him that intimate digital inquiry into the mechanical person demands a delicacy bordering on rigor.

I was too late. There was a sharp snap, a blinding burst of arc light, and he drew back a hand on which all the fingers were now of one uniform length.

"Sacre bleu!" said he. And we were not even in Quebec!

"I'm so sorry, officer," I said. "But I tried to warn you. My servant is terribly ticklish-especially there."

"There is where they hide it," he replied, with that irrefutable logic for which the Royal Canadian Mounted Police are so famous.

"What exactly were you looking for?" I asked.

"Nothing, sir. You were speeding. For ten kilometers over the limit, we issue a warning. For fifteen, we give a ticket. For twenty, we throw a tantrum. Above that, one is on one's own. I've always been keen to do a body search

He was a charming young fellow and evidently much taken with Dorine, the leading lady. He invited us to come home with him.

His father, having misunderstood the evening news that they picked up on a Detroit station, thought that the Free Trade Agreement was the

Fur Trade Agreement. He had invested heavily in mink, only to lose everything when the mink, who had hired a Spotted Owl as their attorney, got themselves declared exempt from everything, especially being killed and skinned.

This blow, falling immediately after the ninety-eighth consecutive failure of the Canadian banana harvest, had reduced the Mounty's family to little better than penury. Hugo's salary as a policeman was all that stood between them and destitution. Call me a sentimental old fool if you will, but I cannot look impassively on such suffering. I hired him, for a song, as my bodyguard. Half the pittance that I paid him was enough to keep his relatives in porridge until the next replanting of the banana groves.

"I will not sit beside Hugo," Melly announced. He was still fuming. "That is perfectly all right," said Dorine. "I do not in the least object to having a young, virile, and handsome policeman sitting back here with me."

My satisfaction at this harmonious resolution was troubled by a thought to which, just then, I could put no name. One of those hair-inthe-mouth things. Seldom my problem.

Chapter Thirty Seven

Synopsis of the action thus far: You had to be there.

Mentally, I surveyed my situation in bewilderment. The pieces of Melchior lay distributed around the dark cellar. Pieces of him were missing. The head, to name only one, and, a fortiori, the tongue these were gone. Never again would he have a thought, or lie; it was too sad. I missed in him more than the robotic creature that I had assembled in my Trenton laboratory, more than the complacent servant, almost the friend.

The public knew him as the front-page celebrity, the first Mechanical Man elected to the New Jersey State Assembly, author of the madly imaginative plan for state-sponsored Russian roulette as the only really fair means of population reduction. I knew the private, the intensely private, person behind the stainless-steel smile, the debonair dreamer beneath the platinum toupee, the boyish lover who could cry himself to sleep over his rejection by the refrigerator.

Hopeless to think of reassembling him. The Iguana, his old nemesis, had done his evil work all too well, and now that filthy lizard had fol-

lowed poor Melly into oblivion. My friend Laetitia Oracle was no less fond of her pet than I of my dear bionic chum, but in the enlightened state of Louisiana roboticide is on the books as a capital offense, so the monster had been put down.

We were left now, two old friends, determined that our love would survive the painful clash of others dear to us. Together we tallied our resources, material and spiritual. I still had my medical skills, my sublime literary talent, my insouciant contempt for those who thought otherwise. She still had her gallery, her extensive real-estate interests, her vineyards in the Vaucluse, the fortunes inherited from seven overactive husbands, and, at the age of 103, was not a bad-looking dish.

"Well, Mrs. Oracle," I said, "there is nothing further to be done here. Let us have a drink."

"Help me up, Soup," said she. On her feet, she spoke to her butler over the wristwatch intercom. "Bunthorpe, clear away the scrap metal from the cellar of the north wing, and we wish to hear nothing further about it. Interment is to be private. And bring a pitcher of martinis to the library."

We watched Jeopardy as we downed the consoling cocktails. "I can stop watching Jeopardy whenever I feel like it," she said. "It's just that Alex Le Bee's costumes are so hilarious

I corrected her. "It's Alex Le Pet," I said.

"Whatever," said she.

"What am I to do with my life, Laetitia?" I said. Her answer astonished me. Though it should not have done. The mind of Laetitia Oracle was, after all, formed in the artistic and commercial ferment of the 1890s. It was forever doing two things at once. All the while she had been whispering the silly Jeopardy questionsWhat is benthic ecology? Who was Hounslow Fink?-she had been hatching new schemes to tempt my awesome faculties.

"Transgenic pigs," she said.

Chapter Thirty Eight

(Alarmed by the recent turns in Dr. Soup's story, especially the murder of Melchior, his mechanical man, and his increasingly unhealthy involvement with Laetitia Oracle, a woman many years his senior, we have recalled him from New Orleans back to Trenton for consultation.)

INK: Welcome back to Trenton, Soup. Don't worry-no one knows you are here. And take your feet off the desk.

SOUP: May I smoke?

I: Are you crazy? You've never smoked.

S: I know, but the interview format gives me this craving. They always smoke.

I: Try to understand that this is not fiction. This is real life, not your story. It's because your story was haywire that you've been ordered back. Besides, Trenton is smoke-free. It's part of the effort to build a baseball park and attract a Little League franchise.

S: What ever became of my application to build a seismic station here? Earthquakes are all the rage.

I: I wrote you about that. The town fathers liked it until they came to your new city motto.

S: "Trenton Shakes, the World Takes"? What's wrong with that?

I: Skip it. We've got to talk about transgenic pigs.

S: That's what I like about this column. The little surprises. The lack of all logical sequence. The complete innocence of transition

I: It was Mrs. Oracle who suggested transgenic pigs as the vehicle for your comeback, was it not? What exactly are transgenic pigs?

S: They are pigs improved by genetic upgrading. You take the genes of some higher form, the giraffe for instance, and insert them into the pig. That way the pig can reach the higher leaves on the tree.

I: Genetic research is fraught with moral and ethical problems of all kinds

S: Food and drink for a columnist, right?

I: We'll ask the questions, Soup. Let us suppose for one mad instant that you somehow insert human genes into the pig?

Sr But of course! That was Laetitia's whole idea. We're going to call the thing "Pigs R Us."

I: You amaze me.

s: O.K. But you've got to promise to amaze me back. Maybe we'd better tum the tape off?

I: Will you be serious, Soup? I tell you you're in deep trouble with the front office. If you don't settle down to some comprehensible sort of plot they're threatening to cancel.

S: Mind if I tell you something, Ink? Serious is your whole problem. You're too serious. Nobody wants serious from you. Why do you think they have Harry Sayen, George Will, the Reverend Willie Smith, and that crowd?

I: We don't talk about what's going on in other shops. You've got to drop Laetitia Oracle. She's too old for you, for one thing. For another, she's too rich. You're typical New Jersey. You think the rich have all the answers.

S: Nonsense. I think they have all the money. With money you buy the answers. Ask ETS.

I: Stop changing the subject. If you become the latest husband of Mrs. Oracle, she'll discard you as she did them. She'll suck the life out of you Why are you turning purple?

S: Sorry, chief. A random memory. But she did not discard them. She buried them. They were dead. New Orleans has these funny laws

I: All right, she'll bury you. And there will go you AND your precious pigs up the chimney!

S: You are a lord of language, I never denied it. Will she bury the pigs, too, before we all go up the chimney?

I: I'm warning you, Soup! Where would you be without me?

S: In the soup?

The Dream

In a desolate spot on the road that leads from the mainland out to Chincoteague Island there is a low building sitting alone among some scrub trees. Of all unlikely things, it is a skating rink, with a bar, and is painted all over in a single color, a darkly passionate pastel pink, made more garish by the monochrome vacancy of its environs. A smallish though rather flamboyant sign, the only visible lettering anywhere, declares its haunting name: THE DREAM.

This vision riveted me the first time I encountered it years ago. Everything about it had the feeling of uneasy magic, though it was undoubtedly the name alone that fetched my language-haunted brain. The mere isolation of the words heightened their eeriness. Where was all the tawdry advertising that normally plasters such buildings?

But it was the definite article that galvanized me. For this was not just any dream, but THE dream, the one maintained in Plato's celestial Bureau of Standards, alongside the Inch and the Scruple.

You think you had a dream last night? Well, maybe so and maybe not. Have you matched it against THE Dream, on the Eastern Shore?

I have a trunk of old dreams, some of them quite threadbare, and I would hate to have to explain why I keep them-not that it's anybody's business. But I would never think of taking them down to The Dream to check them out. I like them just the way they are.

New dreams, however, if they seem important and likely to be something I'll want to keep, I do set aside and check them out against The Dream when I'm down that way. Here are two dreams that I can vouch for as being guaranteed authentic dreams. As it happens, they came to me on the same night, in London, and on this point I have independent witnesses, since I discussed them the very next morning at breakfast with the poet Dannie Abse and his wife Joan, with whom I was staying.

The first dream came from something I'd read long ago. A young man had suffered for some time with headaches that became increasingly severe. A tumor was of course feared. A scan of his head revealed the presence of some foreign lump, so a surgeon opened up his skull and removed it. It was not a tumor. It was the undeveloped fetus of what, had it not somehow become imprisoned in his own cranial cavity, would have been his twin brother. For some twenty-five years, he had carried a potential duplicate of himself about inside his own skull.

In the dream, I was of course the young man, and when my brother was taken out of my head, I went crazy with remorse and loneliness.

The other dream concerned a young Swiss couple, just married, who were climbing near their village when he fell, disappeared into a crevice of the glacier, and was given up as lost, his body never recovered. The young woman gradually overcame her grief, married again, and had a large family. Over half a century later, she now being a widow in her eighties, a climbing party came to the village with sensational news. The frozen body of a young man had been recovered from the glacier. Walking to the spot with a cane, and supported by her grandchildren, she looked at the youthful unchanged body of her childhood sweetheart.

When I took these dreams to The Dream for authentication, I found, as I expected, that they were genuine, though perhaps a little contaminated by literature. What I did not expect is the further comment made by the Inspector:

"Not only are they real," she said, "but they are the same dream. We'll charge you for only one."

Carnival Cat [black-and-white and sepia]

Chloe

My friend in Electrical Engineering, Dewitt Suggs, has come up with a wizard device that allows you to tell what cats are thinking. Or dreaming, which is even more useful. Not that it is always easy to tell the difference between a thinking cat and a dreaming cat.

The device looks like a small box of aspirin. The name Bayer and the picture of two aspirin tablets complete the impression. Open the lid and you are none the wiser: it contains, or appears to contain, only a few aspirins.

Dewitt is the secretive type of electrical engineer who feels that everyone, even friends like me, is out to steal his inventions. He is the only man on the faculty (known to me) who spends his sabbaticals in the Federal Witness Protection Program, though no one knows, and least of all the FBI, what exactly he is being protected from.

He goes to absurd lengths to protect the children of his brilliantly inventive mind. He once described to me, in strictest secrecy, a thing he had made to convert ordinary shoe leather into victory at the polling place.

He told me that he had tried to market it to politicians, or to those who hung out at the same bars that he frequented, but few of them were familiar with ordinary shoe leather. Some admitted frankly that they carried in their wallet all that was needed to guarantee ordinary electoral outcomes.

They wanted to know whether there were any other, slightly higherclass, electoral engineers, and how much they cost. He later claimed that he had been speaking of electrical outlets, not electoral outcomes.

Well, I happen to know what he wishes to be protected from, and it is not politicians, shod or barefoot, indicted or unindicted. It is cats.

The reaction of my cat Chloe is typical. She loathes Dewitt with a homicidal passion and has vowed to dismember him slowly if she ever gets a claw into him.

It was on Chloe that I tested the Cat Dream Detector. She was lying in her favorite spot, just beneath the lamp that is suspended over the dining-room table, warming herself and trying to digest a vole that had come to a sticky end under one of the rhododendrons in the backyard.

She used to knock voles back the way some kids eat potato chips, but in her old age they no longer agree with her. She had passed through the REM (Rapid Eye Movement) stage of sleep and was now into the

SIT (Spasmodic Tail Twitch) stage. Her vibrissae fluttered. I felt it was time for the fake aspirin box.

As Dewitt had directed, I set it near her principal oneirogenous (dream-producing) zone, turned it on, and went into the sunroom to watch what happened on the display screen.

While the image was resolving itself, I had a glimpse of the Sphinx. In the distance a pyramid was under construction. Sweating Egyptian laborers were hauling immense stones up an incline. The mind of Chloe was sprawled under a palm tree, eating a vole stuffed with dates, and looking at the laborers with a mixture of loathing and pity and a terrible amusement.

Suddenly I saw myself on the horizon. I came nearer. I was looking up at myself from a novel angle, at about twelve inches off the floor. I was carrying a small aspirin box. I was smiling sweetly, in a way that I no doubt meant to be reassuring. I bent over and placed the aspirin box near a platter of date-stuffed voles. I was mumbling idiotically. Something was wrong with the audio. All at once, iron jaws clamped my hand. Gouts of blood spattered the screen. I saw my arm and then my whole body disappearing into the jaws I had seen enough. I went quickly back into the dining room to retrieve Dewitt's device. It was open, and the three aspirins were stacked neatly one on top of the other. Chloe's eyes were also open. She was, as usual, looking at something above and slightly to the right of my head.

The Bow Wow

-God knows where it will stop, said Angela Main. She was talking as usual about a bit of gossip from the college where her husband Henry was chair of the Linguistics Department. It was her way, her small way, of participating in the life of the school and expressed perfectly her contempt for it.

-I didn't even know they liked dogs. Except stir-fried. Remember the old Carl Rose cartoon?

The subject was the ancient greyhound improbably owned by Mr. Hu, the tiny and wildly eccentric chemist from Taiwan. The two, Mr. Hu and Sheila, would have been an item on the campus even without the recent outrage that nearly cost the college a whole wing of the Science Building, so new that it still awaited its benefactor and his name.

Mr. Hu took the animal with him everywhere, including the laboratory, where it annoyed the students by smelling worse than their experiments and by slavering over the sprays of the emergency eye-rinse fountain. A football star, laboriously transposing his partner's data into his own lab book, had stepped backwards onto the dog's foot. Sheila had yelped piteously and Mr. Hu, emitting a sound somewhere between serial firecrackers and a temple gong, had screeched imprecations at the student and then slapped him firmly across his face. Snatching the lab book, he had marked a large red F on every page, even those still innocent of plagiarism, and had stormed off to the infirmary demanding treatment for his animal. The student, a petit mal epileptic, had experienced a brief eye-fluttering seizure.

Several retorts left unattended in the ensuing commotion boiled over and started a fire that did some brief and malodorous damage before extinguishing itself as abruptly as it had begun.

Dr. Pohl had threatened to call the campus police if the shrieking Mr. Hu and his greyhound did not quit his infirmary at once, and now there was talk of lawsuits, countersuits, and at least three student petitions. The cafeteria workers had somehow become involved. Professor and Mrs. Main had spent all evening talking about it. It was now a little past midnight. She placed a bookmark in the latest novel from Chile.

-Speaking of dogs, Wrecks hasn't had a trot since lunch, has he?

-Not by me.

-Well the noonday trot was by me. Before you put out the light, and then put out the light, hadn't you better ?

But Henry Main was already reaching for the leash and the dachshund had already arisen arthritically from the hearth rug to its full height and was padding toward the door.

-Don't wait up, he said. Wrecks seems to be moving more deliberately than ever.

-If passing by Burt's had crossed your mind, don't forget they've been closed down for two weeks for selling to minors.

-Farthest thing from the mind. Scout's honor. Mean to do some thinking. (This in the stage British accent that he customarily adopted whenever caught out in some feeble dodge.)

Wrecks wore on his collar two metal tags, one attesting to his being current in the rabies inoculation program and one offering not only the name and address of his owner but also his willingness to contribute any of his organs to whatever transplantation scheme might be under way in the vicinity of his demise. These jingled pleasantly against each other, the only sound at that late hour in a preternaturally quiet college town on the first weekend in April. The snow that had fallen first in October was still mounded softly under all the abundant snow that had succeeded it, but the roadway was clear, the daytime freshets of melt now solidly frozen for the night.

Henry Main thought of the scrawl on his blackboard that morning: World's worst joke: Why did the hen remain on its own si The rest had been erased. "My main man!" a black kid had exclaimed, throwing all decorum to the winds, when Henry granted her the C that allowed her to continue to win every swimming match for the school. There were worse names, he reflected. Stanford Joch, the dour nutritionist now slowly drinking himself to death in the President's office, was of course the Standing Joke, advocate of [ochstrap molasses, and in general the lightning rod attracting most of the feeble name humor endemic to schools.

Wrecks's jingling tags awakened the mastiff that guarded old Mrs. Powell's domain. His thunderous grunt sounded like the cough of an old lion in the pages of Hemingway and, though the porch on which he slept was separated from the road by an immense expanse of snow-covered lawn, he sounded as though he were just behind the rhododendron clump two yards away. Wrecks acknowledged the signal by a single snort and continued the disorganized forward stumble that served him for a walk.

Mrs. Powell, or Mrs. P, as even she sometimes referred to herself, imitating the tradespeople of the town and her now vestigial staff of domestics, the woman and her husband who waited on her, stirred in her light

TRIQUARTERLY

sleep at the sound of Lion's gruff rumbling. The bed had become more and more her environment. She frequented it during the day and night at irregular intervals of varying duration. There was less and less reason to be up and dressed and about. To receive whom? To see to what? Life had contracted, to be sure, but there was ample room for further contraction in the great house set in its park of hemlock and elm. It was the center to which all the surrounding lands, including those on which the college now stood, thanks to the generosity of Harold's grandfather, were appurtenanced and subordinated.

The large dog's voice had punctuated a dream of Egypt with an unlikely clap of thunder from the sun's clear sky. Harold had been saying Shepheard's was definitely on the skids. The felt on the billiards tables was worn through in places, the plate was chipped, the cellar scarcely held anything drinkable. They would be better off had they stayed in Athens or accepted the Mancusis' invitation to join them on the yacht, as you, Elizabeth, had wanted to do, you were quite right, quite right, Cairo was a mistake this year

Could Harold hear Lion, wherever he was? He had not known Lion, even as a pup. The dog had been sent her from Canada, from the Foresters of Halifax, dear people, both dead now, who were sure that the big old house, for all its vastly assured sprawling in the midst of the little town, was vulnerable to every sort of assault without a guard dog of the right kind.

The clock in the hall struck one. So it was Saturday. There would be the flowers to gather for tomorrow's service. Otis would gather them from the greenhouses without her telling him, but she would tell him all the same. The man was to come from the hospital with the photographs of the children's ward, for which she supplied not only the flowers but also the beds and the floor and the roof and the walls and everything but the sick children, whom she loved but could not bear to visit.

Contracted What on earth was Lion on about? He would wake the whole state of Vermont. Contracted, but on the whole not unpleasant. There were times when she could bring herself to believe that she did not mind, even enjoyed, the slight ringing in her ears, the numbness of her hands and feet. They were after all signs of life. One finally came to understand, and accept, that pain was a gift from God, like all the rest of it. The cancer that had suddenly reawoken her menstrual bleeding, or what she at first took to be that, had caused her far less concern than the young doctor in Burlington, whose eyes had filled with unprofessional tears when she announced the results of the biopsy to Mrs. P.

Elizabeth, admiring the young woman's chestnut hair and her serious brown eyes, had listened patiently to the explanation of the therapy, a combined attack on the tumor with radiation and chemicals, and of its probable side effects and consequences, and had declined to follow any treatment at all. The young doctor had then quite frankly wept, and Mrs. P, half her size, had embraced her and comforted her as best she could. Thank heavens no one had surprised them at that moment! But imagine the way the child distressed herself over an old woman she'd never seen before. Old Dr. Courtland, who'd been her father's doctor, once lanced a boil on the back of her neck without so much as removing the cigar from his mouth or interrupting the hymn he was humming. Her screams meant nothing to him, heartless monster. Men! As for the cancer, it had been put so out of countenance by its victim's refusal to engage that it had simply withdrawn from the field and not been heard of since. That was six years ago. She was going to bring Lion in the house and Clara could like it or not.

The small pond that separated the Powell estate from the Common was now mostly clear of ice. Beyond the pond and the Common were some small clustered houses, formerly the dwelling of college servants, a vanished tribe, and now mostly occupied by assistant professors, young couples from the town, and the Librarian, Urdang, with his constantly rotating retinue of boys.

-Oscar! You bitch! Hush that racket!

Urdang's white poodle had never laid eyes on Lion, but he knew the mastiff's voice as well as he knew that of his master, and liked it far better. The message across the still water was not a true alarm, but it was more than the neutral identification that was occasionally flung across the sleeping hills out of pure boredom, not the ham operator's methodical scanning to raise some answering signal. It was a real message, but Oscar, deafened by the obscene video that Urdang and this weekend's Ganymede, both drunk on Tokay, had been watching from their position on the floor in front of the sofa, had missed the beginning of it. He was now trying frantically to be heard through the double glazing. Never had he so bitterly regretted that his breed had been endowed with a weedy, watery sort of a bark. Though that was nothing compared to the ridiculous tonsuring, over which he had no control, for it weighed endlessly upon his spirit. He had long thought that he had perforce to present to the world the poodle's traditional spectacular appearance, clipped and beribboned, the legacy no doubt of some besotted Frenchman, as a means of deflecting derision from his master's own

repellent self. A copy of Playgirl flew past his head and knocked a bit of stained-glass kitsch to the floor, shattering it. He barked all the louder.

-Larry, said Christine. Honey? I'm sorry to wake you.

-I'm awake already, said Larry. What is it?

-Honey, don't you hear Pal? He's going to wake the kids.

-I been hearing him longer than you. Him and you, snoring. Look. There's no way I'm going to make the owls and rats and raccoons and whatever the fuck else it is rustling around in the woods at night stop bothering the goddamn dog. We're living in the country now. Go on to sleep. What fucking time is it?

He looked at the glowing dial on the night table. It was nearly three.

-Ah shit, said Larry. What's the use?

He rolled back on the bed and punched the pillow savagely with his fist. The German Shepherd barked methodically, at widely spaced intervals.

-Honey? said Larry.

-What is it?

-You couldn't make me some eggs and grits could you, Chrissy? 1 got to start the run in less than an hour and 1 haven't hardly slept a wink. 1 can't stand that damn cereal every damn morning.

-You know what the doctor said A child's voice came from the front part of the house trailer.

-Pal! What is it, Pal? Pal!

-Larry, honey, I'll get you some breakfast if you'll just get the twins to go back to sleep and go hush up that dog. I been listening to him for an hour and I'm not supposed to get upset. You know what the doctor said. 1 can't help it. I done lost one baby and 1 don't want to lose this one. We shouldn't never of moved up here to begin with.

-Don't start, said Larry.

-I'm not starting. Go get the kids back in their bunks and I'll fix you some breakfast.

She went to the window and bent carefully down to the small opening. She called the dog. The barking stopped.

An Incident on the Georgian Military Road

"Winter has come early this year," said Vika. She was explaining the armload of firewood with which she was struggling at the door. I had opened it expecting her daughter, Maria Fedorovna, the director of the Institute, who had gone to the village to inquire about the approach of the rebel army. Everyone called her Vika, even her daughter, and I had fallen unto the habit, though I should have been more comfortable with the formal Viktoria Sergeevna.

"Do you really think it a good idea to lay a fire?" I asked. "The smoke

"My dear," she laughed. "Do you really think General Kartavyan needs a plume of smoke to know where the Institute is? He studied here himself!"

This was small comfort to me. From the train window last week I had seen the level and smoldering ruins of what had been General Kartavyan's native village, Chapilki. Sentimentality was not one of his failings. The conjunction of war and Caucasus had about it a romantic something, no doubt, but only in literature, and even there it wholly lacked sentimentality.

I had come to the Institute of Language (Institut Yazyka) in the tiny Russian enclave on Georgian soil because of its historic link with my own college at Oxford. It had been established by a graduate before the tum of the century, we had maintained an exchange of scholars over the years, with a yawning hiatus from 1917 until the late twenties, and Maxwell Fryberg, the industrialist who had almost single-handedly saved us from the Great Depression, had also generously supported the Inya, as it was called.

Now that it seemed threatened by the Civil War that had engulfed practically the entire Caucasus, and that seemed likely to become a much larger conflict with the entry of Turkey, I had come out to see what if anything could be done to safeguard the collection of priceless nouns, verbs, participles and other linguistic artifacts. The vaults in the cellar contained cases of punctuation marks, some of them unrivaled in historical value. The jewel was a semicolon deleted by Tolstoy from one of the Sevastopol stories. I had even brought royal patents and letters signed in some haste by her Britannic Majesty in the hope of securing a sort of extraterritoriality for the little patch of academic ground in the large old park of untended paths and weed-choked ponds. Maria

Fedorovna (Masha) and her mother were the only remnants of the personnel; all others-and who could blame them?-had decamped at the first sound of artillery from the distant hills.

Masha had expected to get back by teatime, but Vika and I had finished tea hours ago and, at around ten o'clock, were sitting down to a sort of supper when we heard the wheels of her bike on the gravel drive.

"Quickly!" she said, hardly pausing to greet us. "They are no more than an hour away. Two at most. We must bury the exclamation points!"

"Mashenka! No!" groaned Vika, who adored the exclamation points, especially the large old ones with square tops that had been used for proclamations by the Czar. "Whatever for?"

"They've found a way to convert them into actual explosives! That's the only reason they care about us! If we can convince them that the exclamation points have all been evacuated, they'll leave us alone!"

"But, Masha," I said, as calmly as I could, "You've used three in that speech alone. We'll never convince Kartavyan that we've got rid of them all when our own talk bristles with the things! Pardon me. I mean 'things."

The dull boom of a mortar provided its own full stop for my little sermon. Vika and I jumped up from the table and ran after Masha, who was already half way to the cellar vaults. The next three hours are a blur in my mind. I helped carry the first cases out to the bank of a pond, sandy enough to be easily dug but high enough above the water to be reasonably dry, and remained there to dig while the women fetched the others. There were eight in all. The sight of sandy earth and pine needles being shoveled onto museum cases of incalculable value tore at our hearts. But we did it. Back inside, Vika forged incredibly authentic labels to place at the empty sites of the Exclamatorium, the special room from which we had taken the precious marks. The labels gave the fictitious dates of the evacuation, the destination (a famous library in St. Petersburg), and so on.

The ruse worked. Kartavyan himself arrived after his troops had cordoned the place off, gallantly kissed Vika's hand and embraced Masha as an old colleague. I puzzled him at first, but my terrible Russian finally convinced him that my British passport had not been forged, and he even attempted a rudimentary conversation in English. That the exclamation points had been evacuated seemed to him only natural. His loyal alumni feelings led him to believe that we would have been aware of their explosive potential long before mere munitions experts. He looked

around in a perfunctory way, did not even bother inspecting the grounds, drank a large glass of the Institute's famous brandy, and left in high spirits.

At the door of his car he turned round, flung his arms wide, and said, "Long live the Institute of Language! Long live the Queen! Long live the Revolution!"

Vika said in an icily calm whisper: "It's a trap. He's sure we've got exclamation points."

Aloud, we all said: "Hooray."

The Atomic Ant [color]

The Lights of the World

Jesus Gardea

Translatedfrom the Spanish by

Mark Schafer I

The woman looks through the window at the sky.

"The wind will be at your back."

The man, standing behind her, smiles.

"I know what I'm talking about."

Outside, swirling white clouds.

The man starts to put on his shirt. As the clouds pass, the light in the room shifts and changes color like a grove of trees in the wind.

"You don't believe me."

The man shakes his head. The woman beckons to him, her hand silver as a poplar leaf.

"Come here. Take a look for yourself at that caravan up there."

The man goes over to the woman. He too looks up at the sky. The clouds were moving from north to south.

"Am I right or not?"

The man doesn't answer, but seconds later he gives her an order: "Open the window."

The woman turns to look at him.

"No. Why? The dirt will come in."

The man reaches for the woman.

"If you won't open it, I will."

"Everything will get dirty."

"The window

"I don't take orders."

There is a shift in the light and the man's face turns gray. Grows hard.

"Never."

The man throws the bolt and opens the window. A breath of lukewarm air enters the room. The woman feels it on her breast and between her legs; not a trace of dirt.

"So. You did it yourself."

Unmoved, the man contemplates the clouds.

"Strange," says the woman. "Around here the wind never picks up just like that."

The man doesn't seem to have heard her.

"Never."

Then the man asks her:

"Whom does the wind bring when it picks Up?"

The woman makes a sound with her lips.

"Tell me. I have no way of knowing."

The caress of the wind on the woman's thighs is blooming in her breasts and throat. She wishes she were standing there naked. To the wind. To the sun. She unbuttons her blouse. The man is blinded by the unexpected splendor of her flesh.

"Your skin wasn't that white last night."

"It brings the dead."

The man turns to look at her.

"I don't understand."

"What don't you understand?"

"What you said: about the dead floating in the wind."

"That's how it is."

"Not where I come from. There the dead carry black lanterns. But at daybreak they rise up to drink the lights of the world."

The woman looks suspiciously at the man. She moves away from him.

"Wait," the man says.

The woman shakes her hair.

"You promised you would leave early today if the wind was blowing on the plain. And it is."

"They were only words."

"That doesn't matter. I don't want you here any longer."

"I still have money."

The man closes the window, slowly.

"Leave."

"I'll be back tonight."

"No. There won't be anyone here."

II

The sky, empty of clouds. From time to time the man evokes those dawn-white breasts. Every lamp, every lightning bug gathered together would not give off as much light as that woman did that morning. He finds the restaurant on one side of a small plaza. He goes in and sits at a table by the door. The place smells good: of freshly baked bread and brewed coffee. A woman comes over to take his order. He asks for the breakfast plate. As she leaves, his gaze rests on her hips. They softly jostle the air and the smells of the room. While he waits for his order, the man looks out at the small plaza. He suddenly picks out children playing in the sunlight. There are two of them. The woman returns with a dish piled high with bread. She sets it on the table.

"I'll bring the rest in a second."

"Fine."

The man looks into the woman's eyes. The woman glances away at the bread.

"It was baked this morning."

The woman's hips, the man notices, looking at them for the second time, move with a deep, accentuated rhythm. They are like a powerful center. They are the place where all the rivers of the world mingle. Muddy, copious, thick with rippling and leaves. And above them is a large shadow, a commotion of candy and streamers.

The man looks at the children again. They are drawing something in chalk on the ground of the plaza. The man tries to guess what it is. But the children are making a tangle of the lines. Without taking his eyes off them, the man picks up a piece of bread, breaks it in two and begins to eat one half. One of the children has stood up and is studying their scrawls with helplessness written on his face. The other seems to be giving the drawing its final touches. When he is done, instead of getting up, he remains crouched in the same position, squatting on his heels. The man crunches the bread between his teeth. He imagines what the drawing might be. Highways. A war. There is a clatter of plates and silverware.

"Here's the rest."

"All right."

"Anything else?"

The man lifts his gaze slowly and meets the woman's eyes.

"No thanks."

Seen from the front, the woman's hips are fuller. They enclose a flat

belly, a valley where the muted murmuring of the rivers congregates.

The woman leaves. The man sweetens his coffee and takes a sip.

In the plaza, the boy who is squatting lifts his head and looks in the man's direction. The man stops eating. Next to the child, the chalk on the ground shines like water. The other boy goes over to the piece of chalk and picks it up. The man is distracted for a second when the woman leaves the kitchen to sit at a table. When he looks again, the two children are looking at him.

The children start walking toward the door of the restaurant. The man breaks a second roll in half and holds out a piece to each of them. The children keep on walking. The man holds the bread in the air. They finally reach the threshold. The one who was squatting scoffs at the offering and asks him:

"Can you draw?"

The man is disconcerted.

"Yes."

"Will you help us?"

As if they had given him an order, the man gets up, leaving his breakfast untouched. The sun has risen over the center of the plaza; its light plummets from the blue sky.

The man and the boys arrive at the edge of the drawing. The man squints.

"What is it?"

The boys scratch their heads.

"We want some wings."

III

The woman appears in the doorway of the restaurant. She calls to the man. The man looks annoyed.

"I'll be back," he tells the children.

"You haven't paid," says the woman.

"What do lowe you?"

She pulls out a bill pad and pencil from her apron pocket. Then she flips over three pages and on a blank page scribbles the amount.

"That's how much."

The man pays. Then the woman, inhabited by a different voice, a voice akin to daylight and to sap running through trees, makes him an offer:

"I can save your breakfast."

TRIQUARTERLY

The man looks at her. Doves line the riverbanks.

"Until you're done."

"All right. Fine."

The man goes back to the plaza. He begins to walk around the drawing. Searching for a weak point. The boys follow him. His advisory staff. The three of them circle the drawing several times and finally they come to a stop.

"Where do you want the wings?"

"Wherever they go for flying."

The man looks at the tops of the trees, shady and green. Then he squats. The sunlight skips off his back.

The woman has picked up his breakfast and taken it to the kitchen and now she is standing again in the doorway of the restaurant. She looks at the man. The boys. Serious, attentive. She imagines what he might be drawing. Judging by the strain and care he is taking, a tower. A tall one at that. With balconies higher than the air itself. It isn't hot but the woman begins to feel hot, as though she were standing next to a fire.

"The sun stings," the man complains.

The boys look at the blue sky.

"There's a cloud."

The man lifts his head and blinks.

These words reach the woman as if carried by a swift river current and she looks up as well. Behind the first cloud she sees others coming.

Crouching again, the man draws the last line. Then he stands up.

"There you go."

The boys purse their lips.

"We don't like them."

IV

The clouds the woman has seen cover the sun. The man feels the chalk like ice between his fingers, hears the children.

"You can't draw."

The man looks around. He finds the woman's eyes. He walks toward her.

She shifts her hip from the door frame.

A gentle breeze ruffles the tops of the tree. The plaza turns gray and distant.

"The children

The woman looks over his shoulder.

"What children?"

The man looks at the woman's eyes for another instant then turns to look behind him. He looks for the children between the trees in the thickening darkness.

"The storm is headed this way."

"They left."

A gust of wind lifts the hem of the woman's dress, the ruffles that hang there like a border of seawater.

"Come in."

The man looks again at the deserted plaza. Behind the black trees, the sky is burning. The topmost leaves. The man remembers the woman from the previous night, the clouds in the open window.

"O.K. But come with me first."

A perfume of water envelops them. Suddenly her hips feel like a fruit. An orange bursting with juice.

"Let's go."

They stop at the middle of the plaza. The wind is blowing. The man speaks.

"What did you say?"

The man brings his hand to his mouth.

"I drew some wings here."

The woman does the same as the man.

"Some wings?"

Her hair is buoyant in the wind and veils her face in shadows.

She looks at the drawing, the muddled lines.

The trees are flapping wildly.

The woman, brushing her hair from her face, says:

"Let's go back."

And she begins to run.

The man follows her.

The rain, through the weakened sky, falls in torrents. The man enters the restaurant soaked to his skin. The woman rushes to close the door. Then she turns on a light.

The man stands under the light.

"This could go on for a while."

"The rain?"

The man looks for a chair. He sits near the woman. The sound of the rain is like the sound of the wheels of the sea.

"I don't have anyone helping me today."

The man looks at the woman.

TRIQUARTERLY

"Is this your business?"

"Yes."

"And your help?"

"She's sick."

The woman rubs her bare arms.

The man unbuttons his sweater and takes it off. Then he hangs it on the back of his chair.

"You smell of spikenards."

"You don't like them?"

"No. I just don't like a man smelling of flowers."

The man smiles.

"And the drawing?"

"The wings?"

"Yes."

"Like a tower."

She feels the rainwater opening her into sections. She moans imperceptibly.

"You're not from around here."

The man places his hand on his chest.

"No, I'm not."

"Are you cold?"

"No."

"I'll bring you more coffee."

"Don't bother."

The rain drums incessantly on the door. The woman stretches out her arms on the table, sighing as if discouraged.

"The boys aren't, either."

"Aren't either what?"

"They aren't from around here, either. I've never seen them before."

The man removes his hand from his chest.

The woman turns her palms into the light. The rain stops.

"We're all crazy."

The woman shakes her head.

"I'm not crazy. My hips are swelling."

Outside, the sound of water dripping from the leaves on the trees.

"It's rained a lot in my dreams," the man says. Then, "Where I live, the dead carry black lanterns."

"Yes," says the woman and with a slightly warm hand, she touches the man's chest.

The Age of Anything

Brad Bostian

So there I was, sitting at the top of the tower, a relic from the last age. It was no longer fashionable, I have to say, but far too expensive to topple. I was at the kitchen table, wondering what to order for supper. Sour, salty, sweet or bitter, in a thousand discernible degrees. Hot or cold, spicy or mild, texture, thickness, color. Add to those the sense of smell, a hundred thousand times more sensitive than taste. Camphorlike, vinegary, ethereal, putrid, pepperminty, musky and floral. Burnt, onionlike, and goaty. Randomly combine the possibilities and no two dishes are alike. There were more dishes available to us than there were particles in the universe. And if I wasn't happy with any of those, I could always eat symbolically. I could eat Hemingway's heart, charbroiled with rhinestones. I could order a generous slice of dragon pound cake with a cheap political glaze. The trouble for me was- just then anyway-I wasn't sure I was hungry. I might have been hungry, but I wasn't sure.

It was long past dinner on a warm summer night, but it didn't matter to me if you want to know the truth. The appetite enhancers had long since quit misting the air below my nose. Why? Because nothing had happened. I had eaten nothing. Nothing had entered my body and been digested. Nothing had gone on to be excreted, and I had never paused to notice. Why?

Pandrea, I would have to say. Pandrea Tandy had left me for a few weeks to chase comets around the sun with six of her boyfriends. Yet being left like that, since it was a new experience, should have been a positive. Of course in the last age it might have caused me some nausea, old-fashioned jealousy being in vogue back then. But nausea too had been eliminated, along with all distasteful reactions, unless of course

they were desired. I must have wanted at least some queasiness because there I was, my stomach and brain whirling. Everything around me turned like gas speeding into a black hole. A person could become completely separated from his normal thoughts under such circumstances. I myself thought I was a comet.

Pandrea, Pandrea, I said, but no one responded. Pan the beautiful; Pan the vivacious; Pan with coal black eyes and curt blue hair and the little triangular body; Pan with the dazzling smile of filed, carnivorous teeth; the toes of dexterity and the fingers of pain, the nose of madness and the eyebrows of a gypsy moth. Still there was no response, not from anywhere in the reachable universe, so I decided to take a spin.

As I said, it was late on a warm summer night, with only a few hours of extended daylight left. I revved up my spinner and hopped on, jetting out of the garage just as the door opened. As often happened, the bottom of the door knocked my head back slightly, disorienting me nicely as the spinner gained speed on the glide path and the wind rushed and howled around me.

The idea of the spinner was to ride the glide paths up, down and through the countryside, spinning in the slip-seat for maximum effect, or even letting go to vault high and crash through tree branches, or somersault down a ravine into a river, or grind to a halt in the dirt, possibly waiting for a patch-up from the generators, then hopping back on for another spin. If other spinners were out, the possibilities multiplied, since you could never tell what the other person would do. You could put your drag on if you wanted, or go natural. I chose drag, but lessened the resistance and took myself whooshing over hill and dale, spinning and grinning until my head was a bubble of gas, my body a mass of plasma, and the universe nothing but a big fart.

I was crazed, of course, and that was the point. In one wildly whirling disaster, the machine and I were thrown high into the outstretched arms of a tree. I love you tree! Ouch! We fell to earth and within seconds, a generator had risen from the ground to give me first aid. I was back on my skim-shoes in no time. The generator presented me with a whole new machine, damson plum with double-gold trim.

"Your new spinner, sir," she said.

"I'm not sure I want a new spinner."

"You can't very well go on riding the old one, can you sir?"

"What if I don't want to ride? What if I want to skim all the way back? I might even take my skim-shoes off and walk. What do you think of that?"

"If you want to be one of those boors from the last age, sir, suit your, self."

I waved her away and she sank back into the earth with a frown.

For a while I debated whether or not I really wanted to experience the impact of physical walking, and I was scoring some very fine points against myself in the debate, when a large green man stepped forward, blocking the modified sun. By green, I mean that everything from his skim-boots up to the hair growing out of his ears, was green. He leaned over me, resting on a huge emerald,hafted axe.

"Can I help you?" I said.

"Certainly, Gawain."

"DeWayne?" I said.

"Gawain, and yes you can help me, by letting me chop your head off to start with, and then doing the same for me."

At first I was delighted with his offer, since I had never been behead, ed. Beyond the flash of blinding white pain, there was said to be a lin, gering moment of euphoria that could last, according to some, as long as a full disassociated minute. The only problem was the condition. I mean one good tum deserves another, but frankly I wasn't the violent sort. For myself, I didn't mind suffering a little strangulation, or a punch or a kick now and then, or feeling cold needles between my ribs, but I had never swung an axe at anyone. A quirk of my personality maybe, but I could take it better than I could dish it out.

The huge knight said, "You're afraid, aren't you, Gawain? You see, you're beardless, and that shows me youth and inexperience."

"Of course I'm beardless. And my name is Felix Sundry, not Gawain, and I haven't worn a beard since I was five. Looked the little gentlemen they all said. Auntie's pinching fingers slid right off my cheeks. You're a little behind the times I think. Besides, it's not losing my own head that I'm afraid of, it's cutting yours. The fibrous spinal cord and the clean white vertebrae; how horrible! I'd rather go bobbing for french fries like I did last winter."

"Yes and you cheated and used your hands-I mean, you seem the type that could--er-"

"Never mind," I said, "if you are a friend of mine in disguise, that gives me all the more reason not to make the cut."

"Listen. It took me more than ten minutes on two different occasions to be fitted for this damn outfit. The least you could do is appreciate."

"Pandrea?" I said, my heart leaping up. "I do appreciate. I appreciate you. Why aren't you out chasing cornets?"

TRIQUARTERLY

"Will you do it or not? The point is that I want to cut your head off and I want to cut it off now."

"You do sound a lot like Pandrea."

"Never mind that. Kneel down and stick your neck out."

What could I do? An experience was an experience. Besides, I knew the surveyors had us covered. In seconds or less, I fully expected a generator to rise up out of the ground, step across my disemheaded body, pick up my severed head, turn it over once or twice like an interesting shell from a sandy beach, and then reattach it.

I knelt down. Pandrea Tandy or no, the spinach-colored warrior raised his or her axe until it gleamed in the sunlight. This is it, I thought in an absurd flash of insight: no more spinning, no more crazes, no more vibrating pool of nuclear confusion. My whole life, and it all comes down to one ludicrous game.

Down came the blade, and in that metal-flashing moment I lost completely my hold on reality. It slid until it came to an edge, and over it went into nothingness. Or close to nothing, because there were sounds, soft at first, then clearer: worn canvas tennis shoes quietly hitting a white surface. Not skim-shoes at all, but old-fashioned footfalls muted by snow. But they grew louder until they were no longer a sound but a numb feeling of feet in worn shoes traveling a long way on an icy road.

Stop, I tried to say, but I wasn't on that road, it was only a picture. What was he, a ghost? I reached out for him. Nothing. I tried to tell him something funny, get him laughing, but I wasn't really there. Or if I was, he didn't know it.

He was walking through a snowstorm, until another one, a woman in her warm house laid off from work, saw him as he passed by. She raised her fist and knocked at the window.

Me? he asked, pointing to his wide chest. I didn't know what I was seeing. I tried to reach my hand out again but I couldn't touch either of them, and I couldn't feel the cold.

Yes, the woman nodded, and he came up to the door. She let him inside, and he sat down thawing across from her at her kitchen table. His sleeves were white with ice and they dripped slowly onto her white floor. She sipped her tea and his tea steamed beneath his chin. And behind her on the wall, the clock in the shape of a rooster ticked and ticked. I could tell something was going to happen, but I didn't know what.

What are you? I tried to say, but there were hands shaking my shoulders. My head was once again attached, and wagging back and forth

from the shaking. I sucked in a great gulp of air as if I had been drowning. "Arrhhyyeeayh," I said. I was about to say something more penetrating when I noticed the pair of generators, one male, one female, standing back and looking at me.

"Two of you?" I gasped.

"Certainly. It always takes two in a beheading."

"Was it that serious?"

"Not too serious. Don't tax yourself for a day or two."

"A day or two?!" I cried. "But that's an eternity!"

"If you want to dance, pay the fiddler," the female said.

"Anyway, good luck," said the male, and they stepped back down into the earth to be sucked away through the tubes.

"Pan," I said, "if it takes two generators, it can't be safe."

Though she still looked like a giant green warrior, she cast all pretense aside. "What are you saying, Felix?"

"I'm saying I don't think I can do it."

"Do what, Felix?"

"You know, fulfill my part of the bargain."

"I cut off your head but you won't cut mine off in tum? You lousy little weasel! I knew you'd wimp out! You never do anything spontaneous or dangerous or interesting."

"I bobbed for french fries," I said.

"With your hands, Felix, your hands."

"But it hurt like a laser blast and took three skin grafts."

"It took twenty minutes, big deal. I'm going home. I should have known, I could have been out chasing comets with spontaneous friends."

She skated off on her skim-shoes and I followed at a distance in my new damson plum spinner.

"Surveyor," I said as the wind rushed by and the world became a sornersault.

"Yes?" said a female voice.

"Don't you think an age of water might be nice, everything cool and flowing downstream to the sea?"

"You'll need at least two hundred million citizens to second a change in the age, sir."

"Well how many have I got so far?"

"Four hundred thirty-seven thousand. And only sixteen have mentioned water."

"In a system of billions?" I said.

"Yes sir. Give it a year or so. Nothing lasts forever."

The Shroud [black-and-white and sepia]

Two Poems

Linda McCarriston

The Greeks

Washington, D.C

"Brothers," they live in houses unfettered by mothers, by sisters, by the battle of the sexes or by any other at odds. Neighbors they are to me here and I watch them, drawn to the window by their nightcries in the street: glass breaking, fist-fighting, heart breaking, poison fun. They intrigue me these sons of moneyed fathers, monotheists, white boys next day sobering up on patches of dirt packed outside where they dwell: castles like crack houses, rags draping windows, the strange facelessness that filth gives to a gilded building. On scavenged lawn chairs in daylight they recline, in what way not the panhandlers on the heat vent one block down I cannot say, but power has passed down many hands to reach them here rehearsing for the world their fathers made them, silver spoon and silver tray. Good brown whores visit of an evening, and daughters of their own fathers dress high to call, bewitched as well by the luster of the old order. Even on this block it is clear what this gestation is meant to prepare them

to preside over is gone. They could as well be whooping in face-paint and feathers, facing their fathers' fathers' fathers, as be reeling on the street at 3 A.M. deaf to the polyphonic silence that surrounds them.

Elm Street, October 1977

Up the sidewalk they went together mornings under the elms, along picket fences from our temporary, too-expensive rented quarters: first grade, third grade children of divorce. I met with their teachers, pushing my weight of loss before me like a bus I wasn't licensed to drive: a pound a day it was taking. Halloween

I walked the charcoal street between them, so smalll wore a costume, too. Real women opened their doors onto foyers, music, flowers-homes that petalled out from them like safe placesand lavished us with what we could not buy. Door after door like their father's

I took them away from, the light following just to the foot of the stairs. A hundred times that night I took their hands and drew them with me back into darkness.

Five Poems

Belle Waring

At Least I Know What My Hands Are

In that sawed-off moment, leaving for work

Rebecca K., age 11, antifreeze ingestion

I looked at my hands

Anthony T., age 6, gunshot wound to thorax

after this reception where the eminent scholar said to me: "What's a nurse doing getting an English degree? Nurses don't read."

"Madame," I said, "your academic mentality is lamentably primitive. If I present myself in a simple honest manner, you think I'm stupid, so you finish me off."

What I really said was nothing.

Jessica] , age 4, severe malnutrition

Off to night shift, wallet in my pocket. No purse, no paper, no briefcase, no book, no thesis, no research, no three by five.

Just joint, bone and gristle. Carpal, metacarpal. Nerve, nail, and pad. My inelegant hands, like my grandmothers: the Irish, the Welsh. The motherwit.

Martha 0., age six weeks, skull fracture

What I had was my hands-you could see for yourself.

Two palms to tell the truth and ten initiate tongues saying

Don't suffer

The Songbird [black-and-white]

Jasmine Dreams

My sleep is the color of burnt grapes I dream I'm awake I dream the phone rings I pick it up

Must be Jasmine got thrown out by her husband Come stay here, girl, we'll get dressed up Bring your red brassiere, your paloozy dresses, Paint palm trees on my fingernails

But no it's not Jasmine it's my father in the dream calling in the dropwell of night slurry and pissed

He wants something, what is it

Then he's in the room with me handing over my sister's baby who regards me with an eye of shimmering slate opens his mouth with no teeth and says

You're holding me all wrong, O.K.?

But Jasmine has worthier dreams

She sees the politically murdered and the disappeared the mutilated

Her nightmares make mine look suburban since mine are only the weirdness of my father's voice which I cannot explain in the middle of the night when Jasmine finally calls for real now

because they're walking the halls again halls the color of burnt coffee

The Forgery

-For uncrossmatched blood, the doctor must sign.

I said, It's for a baby! Stabbed in utero! I'll sign for the doctor.

-You mean forge it? Forget it.

The woman behind the blood bank counter then tapped on the page with her index finger, with her salon-painted nail, tuff as an escutcheon-tiny gold griffin on a field of carmine. 0 she had a haughty eye.

-Physician's signature, she said.

-Where's your supervisor?

-1 am the supervisor. And I'm not losing my job 'cause a you.

And since no pity would move her, nor rank, nor threat, and a legal signature meant lost minutes, and since the baby was preemie, the baby was shocky, and it was four in the morning, gall of the night, I saw fit to go crazy.

-Lose your job? Who'd want it? I got two babies up there on vents already, and now this one, surprise! The mother walks into the ER, collapses, with multiple stab wounds, belly fulla blood, but when they take her to the OR and open her up there's this 28�week fetus inside. So then they STAT�page us and all hell breaks-O.K.? But you know why I like it? You get an admission, that crazy first hour, everybody works together, everybody helps you out, and you reach a point-not out of the woods, but you're getting there, you feel it-and somebody cracks a joke. You look up-you all laugh. That moment. That moment. You keep going. Help me, I said.

She turned her back. Walked away. On the wall someone had stuck a poster:

IT HAS COME TO THE ATTENTION OF THE MANAGE� 111

MENT THAT EMPLOYEES EXPIRING ON THE JOB ARE FAILING TO FALL DOWN. ANYONE WHO REMAINS DEAD IN AN UPRIGHT POSITION WILL BE DROPPED FROM THE PAYROLL.

Then she was back. Plunked down two pints of blood.

-Sign, she said.

So I signed, I forged, I grabbed the two units, uncrossmatched blood, color of garnets, color of beets, hugged the blood to my chest and I ran all three flights and I ran, never tired, the talker, the forger, I ran with the gorgeous, ran with the anonymous, ran with cold dark blood.

Crow in the Service of Ghosts [black-and-white]

You Could Have Been Me

Just you walk out from that hospital air into the rasp edge of winter when trees look fresh as a black lace hem frayed in somebody's back seat.

Just walk out of the hospital, where grief is stripped and intricate as winter trees.

I was fresh out of the sonogram room where they tilted a sensor over and over a place in my breast. You could have been me therea jacklighted deer hearkening.

Ultrasound, imperceptible to anyone but bats, will pass through liquid and bounce off solid as sonar reveals a torpedo. As it sees a malignant mass.

Doctors are whispering.

One looks over: You mind us talking? Talk, I said. Sing, if you feel like it.

I walked straight out of that hospital the moment the just-set-sun was casting a pearl shell over the city.

A man asked for change. I told him the truth. I was out of work.

God bless you, he said, come back tomorrow, I'll have money.

My sonogram film now stood packed in with a thousand others. When you rejoice, you forget the unspared ones.

You just watch that godlike blue between sunset and night,

blue laced with underlight curving around the shoulders of the earth until it falls like a veil teased off.

1t was benign and as a Chevy full of folks creaks down the way, taillights swagging down the alley, something shiftsinside me again is a perfectness.

No harm will come to us. The street will not swallow us, the night not oppress us.

Something opens inside my chesta flower from a pellet in a glass of water, a toy for a child so dumb with delight she's forgotten the difference between herself and the one to be thanked and the thanks, the very thanks.

to the Suburbs

An Engine Fire Over the Ocean Compared

You wake up and the world looks strange -Fernando Pessoa

I was calm the day after-trying to tell Jasmine how the engine burned at 25,000 feet, over the North Atlantic and dark, how the big jet lurched as the pilot dumped his fuel and outside my win, dow, the twelve tongues of Lucifer-fire.

And next to me, a baby boy on his father's lap so I held the child's gaze and he made no cry. He wasn't fooling. Now how can I thank him, dark the baby's eyes holding me up-

Jasmine says, STOP! It's just that posHraumatic stress-just relax, we'll rent a movie.

And I'm trying to tell her. Calmly: How can you rent a movie with this light everywhere.

Jasmine says, Light?

Light isn't around things- it is things.

Jasmine's a nurse with three kids and no metaphysical leanings, and in her backyard lives an orphan Desert Tortoise some forest ranger gave her. I carried out a bowl of raw green beans and sat in the serene suburban grass.

The tortoise ambled over. He opened his primeval beak-expos, ing a horrible wet pink tongue-then accepted snap beans with stately gusto.

I was trying to tell Jasmine, you wake up and the world looks exquisitely strange-But what's an engine fire compared to the suburbs? Tortoises live a hundred years, probably because they don't take plane rides. I patted this one on his variegated shell,

that fabulous bulk that felt both foreign and very close-like something from a planet too far away to see, like something of myself-and we stayed like that in the signifying grass and watched it blaze around us like the sea.

Orbit Dog [color]

Marrakesh Express

Manuel Ulacia

Translatedfrom the Spanish by Reginald

Gibbons

From how she pressed one hand against her bellythe young woman who entered our compartment wearing a long, full, white chador, her face completely hidden by a veil that let us see no more than nervous eyes outlined in blackwe sensed that something might be happening. Loudspeakers were announcing our departure, and amber twilight had begun to gild the station filled with people.

The train departed from the ochre city walls, tall minarets, the Royal Palace, the gardens green with vegetables at the river's mouth. And soon the sky was filled with stars. Traveling south is travel to another time. The day before, when strolling the medina we'd found ourselves among some women shaking tambourines and singing, the escorts of a boy. And he, astride a horse adorned with silver harnesses

and covered with rich gold-embroidered silk, was going toward the mosque for circumcision.

We're so far from everything, you said, as once again the woman pressed her hand against her belly, moaning now. She seemed so lonely in her labor, so by herself aboard the train, without another person who could care for her. And when we asked her if she wanted anything she stayed inside herself, lost there.

The train stopped in some station forgotten in the middle of a sentence, the woman did not move, but kept her hand upon her belly, staring fixedly at us as if she wanted us to be with her or as if asking for our silence, or perhaps both.

Today I can recall her eyes like a mute cry between her veils.

Again the train departed, leaving behind the vacant platforms. Each of us sank into private memoriesthe Meknes gardens as the sun was setting; and glances caught on the paths there; tall cypresses like admiration marks the garden made at views it offered to itselfbut then reality forced us to heed the present moment.

Several times the woman pressed her hand against her belly. Several times we offered help but she did not reply, and when we thought to look

for someone who could help she shook her head, refusing. The moon had lit the desert: unreal image of complete aloneness.

Down the track the train continued to invent the poem that I am writing now as images come back to me that memory recovers. The woman gave a cry. Her water broke. We caught each other's glance, then there was silence for a while.

I don't recall how long the crisis lasted. I don't know now if it was two or three or five hours long. On her back on the floor, her parted legs bathed in cold sweat and blood, her veil impeccably in place, she panted rhythmically as the ring of dark red flesh opened a little on the coral tunnel, spiral seashell of time, and finally we saw a circle of black. With animal strength she strained and the head crowned, she pushed it out face down-hot and wetabove my hands. The child began to breathe, and turned face up and with my help the shoulders came out and then the rest of him.

It was dawn. On the horizon lay another sunrise staining the cloth of heaven red, orange, yellow, pink. And now, face down, the child began to cry. I can't recall who cut the cord.

Through the window we could see a small oasis: four houses, a grove of palms. Beyond, a camel trudging slowly around a waterwheel.

When we arrived in Marrakesh, the woman quickly left the train and disappeared into the crowd. I wanted to catch up with her but every woman wore the same chador and all had veiled their faces, and many carried babies on their backs.

Sometimes the desert heat bewilders.

More than sixteen years have passed. Perhaps the mother went one day with the boy to the mosque, singing through the streets of the old medina, and the boy, by now a man, goes often to the garden at the end of the day.

Seven Poems

Barbara Kohler

Translatedfrom the German by

Rosmarie Waldrop

American Way of Midlife

the mirror woman betrays you to the death behind your back she sneaks out of the thirtieth year where you find yourself surrounded by things memories certainties suspicions your things sticky with stories not worth writing but which you scrub and polish till they'd die for presence for another country of another love a more hopeless life you'd best go now get some cigarettes and not come back into this movie

Self Portrait

I confront the fait accompli (back against the wall head in halflight hand between thighs crying for a world); murky what I occasionally see through to camouflage a certain dislike of being TRANSPARENT in order not to disappear I go underground agent provocateur in the third person I IS THE MIRROR IMAGE OF MY MIRROR IMAGE: HE SHE IT the incomplete present as the tense of all revolt against what's laid down by the rules of german grammar tortured by silence I talk to save my skin word for word risk my neck could stand a wash-THAT'S ME ALL OVER

Poem

I call myself you because distance disappears between us like skin on skin we can't be told apart tom one from the other the border is a lesion transition an open wound you call me me which of the two of us will say here take the knife make my cut

here I'm going my way aim less because treeless empty roads point at a sky full of rejected hope

here the moment hits me cool held by no chance hand by nothing turns into language first words of last things: sky underfoot asphalt overhead and me simply going along on it to the dogs

World View with Conquerors

the world was the most gorgeous aggie round and colored it turned rolled across the earth glittered in the sun as m gagann s eyes

the world was a scooter ride downhill in may wind underneath me the sphere turned hair wind,blown I stood still laughing in the wind

the world was the bright ball roberto snatched from me and truth turned lie the world turned out not to be mine

i saw the world from the moon from earth myself minuscule on the blue aggie the man in the moon was called armstrong waved at the camera

a child's scooter's been left behind the back wheel turn and turns and turns

Body and Soul

Fear is a birthmark and behind your back incomprehensible a hole that touches the heart through and through a blackness crabwise into childhood fear is the mother of all things whose father is war is the trajectory of the projectile is called soul say the soldiers in this tongue each gun has its purpose is soulfulness a hollow space a wound canal is fear between the shoulderblades when you tum your back it strikes

Sophie's Friend

I just isn't said he said it isn't simply a matter of me or you he said talked about monads structures post-histoire signifiers you are not Nietzsche are you crazy to want to put your two cents' worth in let's say you are Not-I are my wife

Zombie Seal [black-and-white]

Deanna K. Kreisel

They say-theythere is a flower, the rose ofjericho, that folds in preservation of water, and unfolds again in time for storms.

And I was supposed to be, for you, like this flower: folding inwardly, beautifully, during a dry season and opening, always with a thankful sweetness, when you were right as rain.

The existence of this flower is almost an embarrassment tome.

It is a porn star of a metaphor, a dream of men, pouting its petals open to anyone with half a pen and some cheap watery poetic stuff dripped with a flick of the wrist from an old canteen.

The truth is, we sealed each other closed. The language of your flowers was beyond me.

Here is a new metaphor. My thirst was beyond the bounds of your widest dream of water. It seizes me as an idea of my own body: to dissolve at the edges into heavy mist, covering the dry land I once uttered, rendering vague and formless the hard blue forms and clear outlines of the normal desert night.

Three Poems

James Armstrong

Hill Prospect of Kalamazoo

What kept me here, when gravity was on the side of the thousand,mile net of streetlights around Chicago, or the New [ersey-wide exurbus? Many times I tried to tell it, standing on Westnedge Hill among petunias looking out over a handful of buildings rising above the green mass of summer, the heat wavering in the air, the swallows chattering past high pale clouds, the distant river bluffs a blue promise. It was something I'd seen in the margin of a medieval painting: just over a saintly shoulder, the mural crown of peaked and staggered towers. The ducal kitchen, brothels, stables, clanging ateliers, all the prickly heat of the urbane impounded and made discrete, bright pennants snapping and rippling in a wilderness of trees.

Even Keats, drowsing on Hampstead Heath outside the Spanish Inn, or Charles Lamb, walking fifteen miles through the hedges for cheese and beer under five-hundred-year-old chestnuts, both of them knew they had one buckled shoe in the world of Wren's domes and columns, sewage, tuberculosis, and the grime of the canals-

the other foot hidden in the tangle of hedgerow and barley, the hawk and rabbit, the preceding order. Samuel Johnson roused from bed at midnight by his companions to wander the shit-smelling bowels of the city drinking sugared madeira in the blue film of dawn, shivering under his periwig, passed the dim shapes of mongers walking in from the fields with dew on their clothes, carrying baskets of turnips and eels and he knew that in every direction they came from-Greenwich or RichmondLondon dismantled itself on the horizon and the fields began.

Apparition of the Racehorses [black-and-white]

On the County Line

Inside the log walls, a local boy is shooting eightball. He stabs out his smoke in a tin ashtray, lines up his shot with a tattooed hand. The cueball caroms off worn felt, kisses the two, which rolls a few inches, then drops out of sight. Everything follows the course of unalterable law, like the chain that swings from the boy's black wallet.

At the bar, they are watching the convention; the President grins in the flash of camera lights, goes suddenly eyeless, his glasses catching the glare; his hand is raised to greet us, or warn us away.

Smoke from a dozen ashtrays rises in predictable whorls. The part-time waitress in jeans gathers empties onto her perfect tray.

Above the bar's stacked bottles, the heads of deer nailed to the log wall are thrusting outward, are staring past us, looking at something that vanishes when we tum.

Three Observations on Vinal Street

1

The mockingbird wheedles in the oblique shadow of the brick apartment building across the street. What does this hurried and accurate trick mean to the bird? It echoes seagull, sparrow, and never April's return. Nothing we know means "same" in this way-our artifice stacked this street with a boringness purely human. The birdnotes, the bird's imitations are chemical, already predicted in each flecked egg, while we wake up each day to repeat avoidable sorrows.

2

The boy down the street has a head like a gun turret and shakes his girl the way a dog shakes a rat: "I tole you! I tole you!" She is twisting away from him but always twists back, attracted to his rage, which is something constant. A hundred lives on this street, the various industrial destinies, the plastic spoon of joy. Pigeons flap by their window, like disembodied applause; the man from the condominium tries to look distant while his terrier leaks on the chain link fence. Nothing gets resolved. The nonpartisan clouds continue to open bright vistas. The twitch-tailed mockingbird carefully laces twigs and grasses into a fragrant cup, while cats in identical windows look on with murderous interest.

3

Three boys roar past on skateboards shouting in the ecstatic cliche of descent: earth's hand pulling them to blurs. Each one

has a sweatshirt printed with the name of a product he does not own, will drop out at sixteen, father children, fall in police action, or live on embittered and bored, because he is not, like the cat slinking under the blue Accord, or the mockingbird who flies up from his approach, born with something to do.

The Mange Dog [black-and-white]

Five Poems

Lucille Broderson

White Milk at Daybreak

(after Paul Celan and written for the very old)

We wake on the hour of dread, pray to the one who holds us, who carries us on her hip, who could drop us over the void or lift us among the stars. We pray and pray and feel within the worms begin to crawl, the mold begin to form. The cold, oh, the cold. We creep beyond the haystack, dig deep in the fertile loam down down we sink, our home, our home. We bow our heads before the plow, whisper, "cover us, cover us," over and over, until all around, the meadowlarks, the daisies, the clover, until all around, the praises rise from the sea, from the lakes, from the rivers, from the mountains, the valleys, the plains. All around the notes rise and rise and suddenly the clouds disperse. The sun! Oh, white milk of the sun!

You Watch and Wait

Forgive me that I grew smaller as I grew older, no greatness in my walk, my dream. Forgive me that I could not carry you to that land of milk and honey, that I could not even show you the way. The way, how I struggled to find it. Here, there, beyond the bridge, under the bridge, this side, that. You watch me now. I see you wanting, waiting. For what? I need not ask. You wait for another to point the way ahead. You wait for me to let you take me by the hand.

When the Page Is Full

Once a child opened a gate and another child fell in a pool, a blue pool filled with dreams and an old man's sorrow. Someone plucked the child from the pool, blew in the small mouth and still the old man wept.

No end to the tears of the old, whoever walks beside them carries a bucket, digs the trench for the stream, dredges the pond, the harbor. Whoever moves too near the old, drowns.

The Screenhouse

I sit alone in the screenhouse, high above the lake, the breeze soft on the flesh of my arms. The heavy hollow splintered box that is my chest, heaving.

Oh, Mama, you never finished me. One smooth touch of your hands, a pressing here and there, a molding here and there. But you were tired or didn't have the time or didn't want to, maybe. You sent me out unfinished. I can understand. But the finishing has been so hard and I have tried so hard and you could have done it, couldn't you? So easy?

Through a rent in the canvas cover, the scented touch of the sun, like a mother's hand on hand.

And my head drops, my shoulders slump. Now only the lull of lapping water.

What Haunts Me

How to walk to the edge and never quaver. How to stop for one quick glance over the shoulder, one small wave. How to be haunted and stand relaxed, not giving a sign to the dogs by the side of the road. Looking them straight in the eye. Hush, you dogs, hush!

The Cat Driven Mad by Swallows [black-and-white and sepia]

Steve Fisher, 1956 1993

Stephen James Fisher was born in Ohio and grew up in Michigan, where his father worked for Ford Motors. Entering his teens in the late sixties, at the height of the psychedelic era, he experimented with alcohol and various drugs-and soon became a heavy user of both.

After getting a GED, he attended a music college in Boston, where he learned his trade, piano tuning-at which he excelled. According to his companion (and now his literary executor), Cherry Vasconcellos, "Steve valued little in the material world. He owned a pair of black Reeboks, two pairs of Levis, some shirts. His books were the exception. He had a large, pristine collection, worth some money. He bought, sold and traded with other collectors. He had Charles Bukowski, Harry Crews, Knut Hamson and others-and a complete set of Nelson Algren.

"He refused to enter any kind of rehab program. At least once he was offered a drug program as an alternative to going to prison and he chose serving time. He was convicted and sent to Arizona State Prison.

"The two years before his death were probably the best of his life. He was free. He'd written a lot in prison and had stories in TriQuarterly, Shenandoah, Epoch, Iowa Review and other magazines. He'd finished a screenplay that was getting attention from the Director's Guild. He'd fallen in love. Then he moved to Los Angeles, where, in the course of a year, he slid back into narcotics addiction. Then one Sunday he drove back to Tucson, where, a week later--on February 7, 1993-he injected a massive combination of cocaine and heroin which he knew would end his life. He was thirty-seven."

Taco Mask

There was trade off the alley, and the cars moved slowly in the street, inching into the all-night market. It was a short little utility street in downtown Phoenix that dead-ended about fifty yards from the DOG run in Alhambra, which was the main classification prison in the state, the one everybody was sent to once they finally picked up their time from the judge. It was about midnight, on a Sunday in July, and Willie watched them from his upper bunk, mostly as a distraction from the ten others in his cell. The five years he had received for "attempted possession of narcotics" was nothing to think about, except in legal terms, which he would do once he was moved to a camp, so he rather drifted away from the stories for a while, rolled Republic institutional, watching his fingertips stain yellow as he smoked. Through the grating and scratched glass he saw the people drink freely from their bottles and cans. Oh yeah? he thought passively. Well, somebody's certain. But it was more than a simple street party, he was beginning to realize, and started feeling the weight off the road as if it were a movie he was in. He could tell what was going on. It came easy, and to most city people before any first fix. Floyd, on the other side of the walls, also knew as much. He was a matter of transaction, balking at the gauntlet which Willie laid idly into his dome

Even though the temperature was still around 100 degrees out, the only ones who seemed to be nervous or sweating were those who hadn't yet scored: heroin, mainly; that black Mexican chiva. The lot was crawling with it, this lone Circle K, and Floyd knew he'd have to make the trip down there soon: his heart beat hard and wild to one side, above his weight, as his central impulses skittered upon wires of flesh. His head felt replaced by something which felt like an outstretched octopus. He had money, enough for an eighth of a gram, but he didn't like the feeling of exposure and possible police carney which came with these public thresholds. Especially when right across from the prison. But the choice was to get down there or suffer the unbearable lower heavens in his second-storv room. He slipped his pointed shoes on, along with a thin, sleeved shirt. Already he felt chilly.

TRIQUARTERLY

A barking commotion came through the hallway as he squinted to lock his door. Frayed sounds from the end of a coiled tube seamed the stagnant air, filling it with yaks and safari. Midnight, and the sound of mother and child. A child screaming for something to sleep on as mother prepared to toil the night. The night was her rope ladder, but Floyd always kept a few paces from nudging her trail of business. He walked down the hall toward the stairs, tilting his skull against the two open and relentless ends. Already the others in his house burned darkly into the night.

The mother's flesh hung awkwardly on her bones, and her mouth worked open in one comer. Floyd thought she might have been a compensation add-on from a factory aCcident-SOO-pound skivs, and forklifts with peeling dirty yellow paint roared and crashed through his mind-but her name was simply Dot, and as the kid quieted into his passing eyes she said, more crazy than militantly, "See, women are superior to men. Just look how Dale comes with me."

Dale only looked like he would learn to fight soon, getting young licks off on his mother.

"I suppose so," said Floyd, "but probably only if you are one."

"Tie your shoe right this time," she hollered at the kid.

Floyd leaned into the stairwell cautiously. He felt as if he were walking on cotton balls, going down the steps, everything hesitant and unsure. But he finally made it through the door, closing the squall behind him.

The light on the street looked tired, somehow sagging like an old cloth. Even the bugs weren't attracted. A few telephone poles down the road looked like giant pencils that wanted to walk away. The sidewalk was patchworn and cleric, so Floyd walked through the deserted street as the silence hummed, eyeing the light from the Book of 3 bar. In a neighborhood receding from ultimate activity, the Book of 3 glowed orange and red and yellow infinity. It moved on this side port of deposit. It was life and music and variegated snow.

The lights burned an image that rather caught on a sort of inner retina. He looked away, down to where he walked, to the shadows which seemed like pit drops, and just might be. He felt the oil in his short, thin hair, then slowly ran a hand up his forearm as his head sprinkled coolly with impulses. He clipped along, anxious of pulse, his lungs full of batter. It had been a long twelve hours since his last shot, but he was only a few thankful minutes from the K.

And it was a sudden sight, a gloss, welcomed with a cold length. The

people mingled in huddles for a while, then broke into packs and teamed with the night. Ten or twelve groups formed continuously, while the drunk and aimless circled with laughter, snorting lines from cutboards they brought in. Around the hem of the lot stood party fragments: pocked faces and broken teeth in gravel-coated neon, lightly stepping to the movement of rap which apparently was a thrust downward, starting with the chin. Glass and rags ringed the area, along with a stinking pile of oily parts that terraced a section to their deep side, just next to a three-story building which crumbled on the adjacent plot. They were robbers, boosters, hold-up and quick-scamming men, women, working the variable con. With dealers, dope fiends, half-heads and 3�for� 1 markdowns of one total fashion: physical futures who hustled an advantage, checking into the Kingdom while the wind laid low. A rather beachfront Christian even wove through the mob, speaking of sin, of redemption, of conversion to hysterics. And all but the beachfront were quick to react with one single opinion: the jobs they were working were temporary. They were simply part of a well-planned national statistic, prospering tonight through low-negotiation.

Floyd was at the edge of his skin, working his way through the crowd. He looked around until he saw an obvious contact, a tall black guy in a dark red Tehirr, taking money from a shorter, black woman, her skin an orange underdress. Floyd was white. It made no difference. What did make a difference was the looming prison across the street, and the cringing flow of open dealing. And the Phoenix police, with tactics that frequently overlooked the laws they were supposed to enforce. This wasn't New York, and it just seemed preposterous to do business this way, to be set in such shallow margins with no outs. He thought a demented cartoonist could probably draw it and get the caption right. But it made him tighten and wince, thinking next time Bermudez, his main source, was going on a Tucson run, he'd cover his ass and avoid it all. Maybe even clean out a bit, if necessary and possible, but most likely just stockpile, or shoot low.

As he walked up the man turned slightly, as if expecting him.

"You lookin' to get high, my man?"

"Tar," said Floyd, "I need a piece of Tootsie Roll."

"How much you need?"

"Can you do an eight-ball?"

"Whatever you want," he said, handing Floyd the dope and eyeing him.

Floyd peeled the foil off, looked at it, then felt for thickness in the

cellophane. It felt something like two matches, pressed together, and almost as long. It was black and shined like glass. He put it under his nose and breathed slowly, slowly through the corkboard and mucus, and picked up a light floral opium. Yes, he thought, this would do fine, and right off the street. If I have to do junk now, at least I'm close enough to Sonora to get good stuff.

"How much?" he asked. The price was almost always sixty bucks on the street. But it would get him through the night, and open his eyes in the morning.

"Sixty," said the dealer. "You want it?"

"You have some clean works? With sealed caps?"

"I got some new ones. Only been used once."

"No way," he said. "AIDS. I can give you fifty-five."

"It's sixty, and you can bleach the 'fit."

Floyd tried a quick response, lost, paid the sixty and stuck the dope in his change pocket. His eye caught the enamel sheen of the Circle K, and he noticed business being conducted through a small window. The whole of it glared like a paste-up to him, like something artificial taught in kindergarten with a pointer stick: an illuminated cutout on a black easel. It made him sick to think about it, and he wanted to split, but as he moved in that direction there stood the street Jesus, book open, Bible lame. A thick, puffy, five-inch scar that ran down one side of his skull, lit like a pig's pink ass, told Floyd this guy would be dangerous with intent. The Jesus stepped just a hair to the right, locking into Floyd's path. Goddamn, he thought, now this fucker's gonna try and mat me with a prayer.

"God WILL redeem you, brother! Open your soul to Jesus now and HE WILL HAVE YOU!"

"LORD, NO!" said Floyd, and a number of horns began honking as if they were pipe-neck birds. Screams and yelling; the flash of lights and the heavy musk of exhaust flagging over. A lone, brute-piercing wail of womanhood, followed with a masculine "You'll FIND THAT GAP BETWEEN YOUR TEETH PACKED WITH DIRT!" and then a window being smashed in a car. People looked over, moving, to see if there was something to get in on. That's simply the way it worked. Floyd felt his gut flush hollow with nerves, and saw the $ sign from an old-fashioned cash register as he looked out of reflex.

"AND YOU AIN'T NEVER TO COME BACK! NEVER TO COME BACK BUT TO SOME OTHER DAMN FOOLl"

"STOP IT!" she yelled. "LEAVE OFF THIS MINUTE 'FO' YO'

FACE FILL WITH GLASS!!!"

The tires screamed rubber but the car merely bobbled. You could hear fists pounding on the roof, strong hands, before it finally caught pavement and sped off. It was amazing there wasn't an accident. But Floyd wasn't thinking about that. The streak that bore through him would have said: I know too well what's happening down here. It's rough enough just answering the phone, without having to circulate and watch people do it.

"Now, there's a couple who make sense."

It was Blossom, a sort of ex-hippie who had drifted around for years, not wanting anything, not needing very much, who landed in Phoenix when he found how difficult it was to simply live as himself without the common American ornaments. He still wore tie-dyes and lived light, hitting the streets as a matter of course. Floyd knew him from somewhere: maybe his friend Risa, the pouchmaker? They stood together, watching the high-fives, elbow butts and so forth at curbside, but Floyd only wanted to get going. His head was like a can of pineapple rings that were separating.

"What happened to your thing about love?" Floyd asked, but he could barely think straight, much less put himself, or others, into workable terms.

"That might have been an example of it," said Blossom. He then added, "I'm starting to open up a little more."

"I'm starting to open up as well," said Floyd. "I'm getting the hell out ofhere."

He didn't really even look at Blossom. His eyes just darted around, fixing abstract forms into a loose mold of darkness.

"I'm on my way to the B-3," said Blossom, as they both began moving off. "I've got to meet Holly. Have a beer or something with us. She may have some dilaudid."

"All right," said Floyd, stepping around a shank, evil-looking bastard, fairly dreading the Book of 3 at this point, but thinking of Holly and the dilaudid. He didn't like the idea of slamming junk in the B-3 head, but like all addicts he couldn't refuse a free fix-if Holly had it. But it had worked out before with her, so Floyd was attracted to the lure.

"You got a smoke?" asked Blossom.

He pulled out a couple of Camel filters and gave one to Blossom. His lips were dry; wrinkled like cigarette paper. When he lit up and inhaled, he saw his ribs etched in like horizontal bars. He gagged and coughed at the same time. Got a headache. Took longer strides, which Blossom

matched. They walked the five minutes to the bar, smoking, mainly Blossom talking.

But it's what they didn't see that caught a special tier in Willie's mind. About the same time he saw Blossom and Floyd walk off, he noticed a late-model Ford sedan, moving slowly, rather understated for its make: AM antenna, sparse molding, blackwalls with those solid, bulb hubcaps-all factory-issue. And there were two younger guys-bearded, mock dudes-riding in it, paying less attention to the gathering and commotion than they were, apparently, to one specific individual-at least that's what Willie thought, the way their heads worked in tandem. He thought they were cops, undercover cops who were up to something, and he wasn't alone: one of his Mexican cellmates, who was looking out the other window, suddenly sat up and said, "Narco." The others hopped off their bunks and crowded around the two windows, tilting their heads in order to deep-focus through the narrow glass. There was no need for any of them to ask who was who or what was what.

The deal went down on their side, unobstructed, as if it were staged. One of the dealers went over to the driver, bent down and talked a moment, then straightened up and looked around, easy of motion. He was big, black; buffed like those traffic cops who hang out in the gym. He pulled from his crotch a manila envelope which was folded with creases just about the height of currency. The Homeboys smelled it. They knew. They began laughing as he handed it to the driver. Before the car even drove off, they partied.

"Whew baby, those be some long duckets."

"Must be five grand; five grand to rents that space."

"We had that going down in Excelsior. Cost us ten grand a month!"

"M h f' " uc 0 lena, ese.

They were sweating in their orange jumpsuits, Willie and the nine others, excited about the professional conduct they'd witnessed. It was only good business, they argued, to operate on efficient policy. They scuffed around the cell, drinking from the sink, talking, until one of them went into a long, morale-boosting speech, outlining the methods he'd used to move large amounts of cocaine, how to cook pounds into rocks, and the principles of the "double-up" technique. Then there were cars, women, houses, neighborhoods, all, he said, the result of hard work. Everyone settled on the edge of their bunks, listening closely, as the cell became a sort of conference room full of wistful associates. Even a few street cigarettes-tailors, they were called-were lit up and passed

around. Willie listened along, glancing from the window to laugh, going with the flow of energy-which was a sort of bulkhead release, but not really too bad. It was a needed lift for all: a respite from the smell, the overhead asbestos, the dull swampy lighting and initial prison uncertainties. They kicked it like that, as individuals rather than slateboard, burning the reserve from the filament in their bones. Just what the hell is the rest of America, in the middle of a Sunday night? thought Willie.

Right away there was further contraction. Not that the bar was partieularly hostile or restricting-it was about as open as bars get, for that matter-it was simply Floyd's reaction while horribly sick to a confined space of public gathering. His shirt was touched with sweat. His eyes were bloodshot, hanging from veins like fried eggs in their sockets. His sense of balance modulated, refusing to focus or center. And, worst of all, he thought that everybody knew what the problem was and would somehow tum it against him-right then, before he could do anything about it. Then he told himself that they all probably came in sick-sick, hung over, trembling and limb-taut from alcohol poisoning. It didn't help much, since it was hardly a matter of psyching up, but it gave him something to play with while Blossom found Holly, while he made it to the bathroom without spilling into the waitress and customers. He was somewhat surprised to make it. Groaning into those peaks of drunken noise, he thought, had really helped to do the trick.

But they only had a small restroom, and the door was locked. He stood under a very yellow bulb which lit up the storage hall he waited in, listening to more than watching a game of pool just in front of him. God, those balls cracked so loud he thought a fan was blowing out his ear, whipping the sound through his head like that. The jukebox sang, the old oak register tallied and the ice machine dropped a load. Madness madness who's this fucker in the head? His works and the rest of this kit itched in his sock. When the door finally opened and the fucker stepped out, walking away, he felt a great sense of relief in the overall downbearing upon him.

He got in and worked quickly, running the water and spreading his things out. There was a short ledge behind him, which he laid his spoon and syringe on. The place was small, but he finally had a sense of being alone. It was a good feeling, and it worked with the anticipation he had when he pulled out the chiva. He smelled it again, then cut it in half, pressed it into the spoon and yanked. There was a soap dispenser. He washed up good, got the point, then palmed a handful of water. He drew

the water up and eased it into the spoon. When he got it into the plunger, he pushed the commode door open and sat on the john. He heard the jukebox bass beating into the stall like a wrecking ball against the hull of an ocean liner.

He put it in a vein on the side of his wrist, booting it once. His eyes staggered, then warmed up and closed gently. Windows opened all around him, in him, to pastoral pockets of space. He saw it bleaching his bodv-coloring-Iike tracer fluid through an illuminated man. He felt his toes, his kneecaps, his shoulder blades. He moved his arm and felt his shirt touch lightly. His thoughts returned to steady cadence, blessedly ethereal as they were at the moment. He began to feel whole, reconnected, and totally on top of his game. He wanted to laugh at the insanity of circumstances, but he simply smiled and rubbed his nose. One hell of a life, he'd often thought, and he was glad at the moment to be part of it. If he stopped to consider the scheme of things, what was coming besides the next shot, he wouldn't have felt too bad because he could only be in one spot with one brain, thinking. That usually worked the magic for him, when given an opening. What a fine place earth could be, if you only went with the spin of the throw! Even in the men's crap' per of a neighborhood bar.

He rinsed his works out and packed up, listening through the wall and the air vent to Stevie Nicks. She reached into him, touching points of his body that were beyond explanation, never sounding better. Oh yeah, he thought, bending in half to shake his hair out like a wet dog. Then somebody began pulling and knocking on the door. Before he opened it and went out, he paused to feel himself, all in one piece, directly in line with the spheres.

Blossom was with Holly, at a small booth away from the door. A pic' ture of Boojum Shorty and a saguaro growing out of the dust were paint' ed on the wall behind them. A hanging lamp made from cactus ribs hung above the table, barely lighting up Holly's girlish, freckled face. Ah, she looks sweet, thought Floyd-how'd she ever become a dope fiend? Their eyes met between dancers and she smiled-good sign, good sign! He flashed a finger to say he'd be right over, then stepped up to the bar for something sweet. He grabbed an open stool at mid-rail, next to an older gutty man with a white whisk-cut. A knickering. There was a bowl of salsa and some chips. The guy motioned to them.

"Eat up, partner. Wha' cha drinking?"

Floyd didn't really want any chips, so he just looked ahead and said, "Ginger ale and milk, with an egg blended in."

The old gut was drunk and couldn't understand, and became some, what incredulous.

"Ginger ale and milk? Play's at first! Play's at first!"

Floyd felt a shorter, second rush flow through. God, how sweetly our earth grows! Why must this be illegal?

Then he said, "Well, my gut's been on the thin side lately. Thought I oughta stoke it, rather than stretch it."

"You're in the honor seat, partner, what 'chu want's on me tonight. This being the anniversary of Sally's departure an' all. Go ahead and have a chip. Say it's great for a bum stove."

Well fuck, thought Floyd, dipping one anyway. "To Sally," he said.

"To Sally!" said the old gut. "Best horse I ever rode, back in my ranch, ing days."

"And now you've retired to bar whiskey?" asked Floyd.

"Naw, I'm just here on a little business."

The salsa was incredibly hot, and Floyd spun around and spit it out. But the fumes bled through his face anyway, fitting him, he thought, like a taco mask. He looked up to see the bartender.

"Bring him a beer," said the gut, "one of your best. Old Milwaukee on draft!"

"That's the best?" asked Floyd.

"Sir, I stand at the front of my race on that. Go ahead-for Sally."

To hell with fantasy, thought Floyd, if it means his train of thought, even though he was slightly amused. He then told the barkeep, "Ginger ale and milk, with a little nutmeg blended in."

"Aw shit," said the gut, disgusted because he'd have to drink alone. "Bring me another beer, an' a shota that scotch."

"Coming up, gentlemen," said the bartender, walking off to make them. Floyd pulled out a smoke, feeling calm, feeling the worlds between them and the differences in addictions. He wished neither on anyone, but felt glad he could inject his, rather than sit around the bar like that, drinking it. But he'd also reached the conclusion, from earlier, heavy turns of wine, that drinking only tightened his environment. At least during this stretch, he'd try and leave it alone.

The bartender returned with the drinks, set them down and collected his money. Floyd left a small tip as he got up.

"So you really are gonna drink that?"

"And maybe for breakfast, too."

"Play's at first!" he growled again.

Floyd laughed this time as he crossed the floor, skirting the flare of

dancers. He straightened his back and inhaled deeply, his nose free of gristle and sandpack. But the place was filled with smoke and he coughed in caricature. Holly saw him coming and pressed closer to Blossom, making room for him in their booth. "I've got a few d's for you, Floyd," she said as he sat down. "May God lick lightly your neck," he told her, then reached into her long red hair and did it himself.

He took a slow drink as Holly began talking, mostly of mutual friends-Randy, Lilly, Loraine, Chuy-while Blossom daydreamed at the table. These were people she and Blossom knew from the streets, people he had met maybe once or twice but never hung out with. He enjoyed her voice more than anything, and lay against her while she talked, the bar working below them. She was hot with young warmth, cushioning his head as he smiled from an easy plane. And the drink in his hand felt cool and refreshing. He drifted along until a kind of balance downshifted, returning him to common meter, then got up to stretch his ass. He flexed the cords in his legs, gazed through the smoke at the pool table, then dropped down across from them and asked Holly for the dilaudid. He was ready to leave.

Diminuendo.

Holly fiddled in her purse for a moment, peering around the room as Blossom sucked at his beer. You might say they had no way of knowing, but Holly shouldn't have just passed the stuff to Floyd over the table like that, with all those people in the bar. The undercover cops who were stationed there, sipping wine coolers and mimicking the regulars, got to Floyd and forked his wrist on the table before he even had a chance to toss the shit onto the dance floor. One stood at Floyd like a shadow block, while his partner sealed Holly and Blossom in the booth. "Open your hand, motherfucker, before it gets broke," he told Floyd rather softly, as if it were a racing tip he wanted no one else to hear. He had his badge flipped out in Floyd's face.

Floyd opened his hand. Three tiny yellow pills were in his palm, which was lined so red from the cop's grip you could practically read his chart from the swivel bar. The other cop plucked them out like he was picking through birdseed, drawling to his partner, "Looks like a controlled substance to me; it sure as hell don't look like bus fare." A third cop came up with a radio and stayed at the booth as Floyd was led to a corner and handcuffed. They wanted to dump Holly's purse on the table, but a number of people had semicircled the area, and they couldn't be sure what their reactions would be. Holly and Blossom weren't handcuffed until they were out front, but they were separated

right away. Floyd was led out last. He stood under a blue light to the side of the place, next to some prickly pear and other cactus, feeling the July heat work at his beard. He was certain the heat had something to do with the way his whiskers were growing. His chin itched with hot, wet stubs, but his hands were behind his back. He let it go.

Their rights had been read, but no one was talking. Even Holly, who still carried an air of innocence about her, knew enough to wait until she got a lawyer. Seventy-two hours, even in jail, going through all the conditions, was a safer bet than any form of self-admission, regardless of what the cops said. But they didn't listen at the Book very long, because four cruisers pulled up in a matter of minutes, three of them running their squad lights. Floyd winked at Holly before his head was pushed into the rear seat. He wasn't able to see her as she winked back.

"Looky here, Holmes, she may go to selling her story in the back of that cruiser 'fore charges even be writ. I knows a young woman; I can be knowing thangs!"

"She has looked young, now hasn't she? But you see all that red hair? She may be tougher than we think. Almost look like a horse-woman from here, goddamn."

"Hahaha."

"Yeah, she may be up to some heart-an' probably jus' for a few joints, anyways. But that about sticks to my shorts, the way they be doin' her."

"I hear ya."

"And that one dude, you can tell he be doing some heavy hair-on."

"I'm telling you, Holmes."

"I'll just be warming up my bunk for him, right now."

They were moving away from the window, thinking romantically of the old times and pre-prison situations. And why not? There was death in the ceiling and the floor was nothing but concrete-that surely wasn't going to sustain them, but something had to. Willie was interested but detached, and decided to brush his teeth. Then maybe in a few hours he'd be able to sleep, but it almost wasn't worth it: corridor scenes mixed with wire cages and termination exits seemed only to ball up and smear through his brain like wadded newspapers. Then, after a couple of hours, he'd awaken again. But cold, like refrigerated.

One of his cellmates looked at him at the sink:

"That bar was just the wrong place. Where they should have been was up here at the K, hanging out in the light with the heavy cheese. Never been busted 'round that kinda money."

TRIQUARTERLY

He said it right, but was almost looking for some kind of assurance of himself.

Willie said, "Yeah, we've got a fine Constitution, if you can afford it," then listened to the laughter as he worked on his teeth. He wasn't going to let them get his teeth as well. "Anybody know what's for breakfast?"

The air went plump for a moment, then noise rolled like normal from down the row. He looked into the mirror by mistake, and squinted at his reflection.

"Tomorrow's country gravy over biscuits," he heard someone say.

Rat Tormented by Ghosts [black-and-white]

Whorl

Another black, pasty morning shrouded the camp. And Nacho, like always, was up early, getting ready for his job as a porter in the library. I saw him with a can of Magic Shaving Powder: he shaved about every fourth day, but the job was a daily thing, and at least twice a week the librarian threatened to write him up over his beard stubble. Usually with a guard present. Finally, he would shave. I never liked that aspect of working, either: just tighter confinement around the rules of prison, like a hat size that was constantly being reduced.

But I knew Nacho. He had lived across from me, in the dorm, for close to a year. One of the first things I had noticed were the two teardrops he had, green teardrops, tattooed below the corner of his left eye: each drop represented five years in stir. He also had a large cobra, coiled in the small of his back, that lifted up his spine to the slender area of his neck. His arms were designed with affiliation symbols, club symbols, and during the lockdowns-when separated from his homeboys-we sometimes kicked it together. But since I wasn't working, I had Nacho get me up that morning for breakfast. He'd said that the school, across from the library, might be looking for another porter. The plan was to check it out with him after chow.

The rest of the dorm just snored contentedly, like apes stretched out in a tropical lull. I lay in bed scratching, not at all eager to work or to hustle up one of their jobs.

I knew that porters were a special type of janitor who hung out a lot on the job, after they cleaned and mopped and did the rest of their schedule. They were often contacts between yards, running a sort of messenger service for small favors: no room for scrubs in this line of work. But most of them had been fucked over at one time or another, say, by a twenty-year-old guard, fresh from the academy, who confused prison with the duties of a high-school hall monitor. Yet Nacho had tried to school me, the previous night. He explained it this way:

"Capone, Atwood, all them old gangsters used to be porters. Now you have Crips and EI Rukns, Bloods who are porters."

"Yeah?" I had told him.

"Shit," he said, "it's an honorable tradition, a tough tradition." He then leaned a little closer:

"I heard that James Brown worked as a porter. The Godfather, ese. A real classy bro in the union."

I had told him all right, I might become a porter, but as usual I was thinking about my own ass. We were in a high-medium institution, and you got fucked around badly if you didn't hire on somewhere. They started by having you rake rocks, on the track by the dorms which enclosed our yard. Then, when you refused, they took an amount of "good time" and put you on the shotgun crew. When you told them to jam that crew you were taken off the yard, placed in a higher, super, maximum run, and given a cell with some headcase. I knew there were plenty of nuts around our camp, and felt no need to be on a permanent, lockdown basis with one. So I figured the sensible thing would be to cover myself, to just fart along with the game until I made a lower-seenrity yard. And since jobs meant bosses and authority, I also thought it would be sensible to work as little as possible.

It was barely seven o'clock in the morning. Nacho carne back wearing blue-striped boxers, scuffling the floor with his shower shoes. He dumped the shaving material on his bed and sat down. Opened his lock, er. I saw the roll on his stomach, and the old knife wound which glowed like cartilage upon his left side: someone had once caught him from behind on a third tier in the walls, some shit or the other about who had the claim to a job opening. I exhaled sawdust from the last of my cigarette, thinking of breakfast, peeling slowly, at first, from my sheets to get dressed. Our shirts were blue. The air was black. My rug was a towel I had folded under the bunk. And the dorm was freezing when you had hot, Arizona skin. I got into my clothes as quickly as possible, the light from the bathroom like a white frosting on my eyes. I glanced at Grissom, my cellmate, as I tied on my boots. He was all right. He just snored under the hairy, black blanket. Nacho still sat on his bed in his boxers, unfolding T,shirts, his television on. I tucked in my shirt and called him a cold, calloused motherfucker. He put his teeth together and hissed at the wall.

"Five minutes," he said, adjusting the volume on his set. Always this nervous bit of fiddling.

"All right," I told him, "but I need some air. I wanna breathe air again."

"Su aliento huele a mielda," he said. Your breath smells like shit.

"No doubt."

I put my jacket on and went outside, spitting at the trash can that stood near our walk. I glanced at the sky. The world up there was like an

asphalt parachute. Rugged, wet charcoal. The yard and the trailers looked worse, like filmed reports I'd seen of outback Nicaragua. The smarter convicts wore stocking caps, going into and coming out of the chowhall. I drifted, looking for my breath against the clouds. And porters went through this shit every morning? Nacho came out jacketless, wearing his shades. "Fuck," he said. "Cold out here." But all he did was shrug. We footed it the short distance to the chowhall.

There was a short line when we arrived. We walked up the cattle ramp, which was built against the wall, hooking at the comer to the right. It was spacious, almost elevated in there, though a hundred steel tables were cemented in the floor. Each table was fitted with four attached stools, and glowed under these snarling, length-long fixtures of light. It was like looking at a train of fluorescent cigarettes up there, but the overall feeling-with the thirty-foot walls and the ticking echo, the rafter vents and the smell of blower fans-was that of being dropped into a huge, Styrofoam cup.

I leaned against the half-wall, looking in at the workers on the serving line, watching the pancakes cook behind them on the grill. No, that wasn't the job for me either. I still felt about four-inches numb and wanted, in particular, to listen to a woodwind quintet: it was sound that I needed, just a form to balance my rhythms against, but all I heard was an inmate up front who'd been shorted a container of milk by one of the bluecap, civilian employees: "I ever catch you out here," the inmate hollered, "I'll strip the bark from your ass!" There was a solid panel-no glass-above the serving window, so the bluecaps could have limited contact with us. They could pretend, for instance, that they were hiding behind trees. The inmate plowed along, out through the turnstile, but only with a partial tray.

"And don't forget my MILK, asshole," Nacho yelled in when we stepped up to the window. He got his stuff, but I had to reach in, because the bluecap pulled my tray from the ledge and walked off. The guards just stood there, writing down names that they knew the faces belonged to.

"Later," said Nacho, looking across the room.

Some of his pardners were sitting upper-center in the chowhall, so I grabbed a table in the comer and agreed to meet him in the library. Breakfast was the time for fruit, cereal, for sugar. The little packets went into socks, pockets, up sleeves. Various bags were brought in for cereal, which were then crotched or otherwise handled. I took my banana and dropped it through the booster slit I'd cut in the lining of my jacket. A

white guy, decades older than me, set his tray on the table. I sliced at my pancake with a small, plastic Spork. The old guy didn't say a thing.

One side of my pancake was tough. The other was mostly batter. It was like chewing a brown leaf that had been coated with paste. I dropped it from my mouth grotesquely to my tray.

"Who can stand to get out of bed for this shit?" I asked.

I caught this wild, emerald span of oval, when the old guy raised his eyes up to mine. His head was still bent.

"They know how to scam a pancake," he said. "You didn't really expect breakfast, did you?"

"Guess not," I said. "Not when they know we could eat a whole slaughterhouse."

"Took twenty years for me to choke one of these down," he said, sporking at the pancakes, "but less than a morning to regret it. Now I just stick to the cereal. You can eat it dry, when the milk's sour."

His head was still down. I splashed the milk on my flakes.

The chowhall guards, like those in the rest of the joint, thrived on this game of lower polarity. Their trick was to block your needs, AS THEY CAME UP, through personal interpretation of the policy manual: raw pancakes. Spoiled milk. It was strictly an authoritative game, based on the idea of depriving the residents. I didn't quite understand it, but one of the advantages to working in the kitchen was being able to pre-step the bluecaps and the guards and to eat, regularly, before the food went bad. But I had long ago learned how to fast on tobacco.

I carried my tray up to the dish window, hungry, chewing some dry cereal. A green banana slid by on the floor. The guard I passed in the exit ramp said nothing, his chin pointy and angular, resembling a garden trowel. Outside, three other cops looked me over. A thin crack of light divided the sky, and I imagined being trapped under a black beede's shell. I went back to the dorm and picked up my cap. Grissom was still sleeping, grinding his teeth, his arms stretched up like a forked branch.

Another black, pasty morning. They could go on forever, especially when you started out tweaked. And who really wanted to work an institutional shift, anyway? I snagged my cap, then walked out into the dayroom.

The library and school were located outside the yard, on a restricted and fenced-off section of the camp. You needed a pass from the house cop to get up there. I tracked him down, got one, and headed across the yard. Other convicts, wearing orange jumpsuits, milled around the west perimeter, waiting for various crew bosses. I looked away from them, no

way, and crunched along in the frozen Arizona mud. More residents hung around the South Administration, waiting to get in to see their counselors. Prison counselors were supposed to help you get paperwork and so forth to places like the parole board and the classification com' mittee, though I never saw an enthusiastic,looking face over there. But the turnstile I needed was just off to their left, below one of the gun towers. I dropped my pass into the slot. The guard pulled it in, examining me. She looked down at my boots, yelling through the glass.

"Lift your feet!" she hollered.

I showed her my brogans.

"Go!"

She pushed the button and I rolled the gate open. I passed through and closed it, watching a cop patrol the North Visitation Center. Three fences beyond me lay five other yards, including a minimum and a drunk-driving facility: cash yards, the way Nacho had it figured. I walked along, past visitation, past another locked fence at the edge of the school. I stopped between the school and the library. A sort of divider terrace was cemented between buildings, where a few students hung out, smoking. I glanced through the school window, into the office where the secretary worked: just a short blond in a loose red skirt, cafe' teria-plump, talking on the phone. Probably to a cop. Definitely not worth getting out of bed for, every day. I grabbed open the door on the library.

Officially, the library was still closed. Nacho and one of his homeboys were sitting at a far table, near one of the few walls that held books, smoking, drinking coffee, bullshitting. The parole board, to my left, was locked. So was the office, on my right. And they were building another wall, an inner door, just in front of where I stood, though nobody was working on it at the moment. The library hung gray with outside light, light that drifted in through the rectangular, back window. Next to Nacho stood an industrial-size vacuum cleaner. The guards weren't around.

I walked on the thin carpeting, just as Nacho rose for another coffee.

"C'mon," he said. "I'll fix you up."

"You know I don't fix with that shit," I told him.

"Might as well, until Busch gets here. There's milk, ese,"

We hopped over the checkout counter and went into a large room behind the magazine stand. The room had a series of locked, wooden cabinets, and a small window that overlooked the yard. It was cold in there and I felt lost, like a tiny bug on a dark blanket. Nacho opened

one of the cabinets with a key, then whipped out a full pot of coffee he had stashed. I suddenly remembered who Busch was, as Nacho poured us a round.

"Ain't Busch the one who had the top of his ear sawed off with a comb?" I asked.

Nacho's eyes slickened with coffee oil, like he was laughing at a private joke.

"Don't have to let it bother you," he said in his light, Spanish accent. "You can just mop up. Take care of other business."

"Jesus Christ, Nacho. I thought you were my friend."

"Just don't pay any attention to him, that's all."

He handed me a cup with fold-out paper handles. I sipped at the coffee, yawning, certain that the gray dawn was likewise smogging my head.

The reason they had squared Busch's ear off had to do with his thing about queers: he had only a Christian understanding of homosexuality, was loose in the head, and-on top of that-wasn't sure whether he was knickknack or not. He'd walk up to people and start in on this line about dick sucking. Very quiet-like, as in perverse, and usually about someone they knew: "I know why your buddy got rolled up," he'd say. "They caught him in the supply closet, sucking dick. You oughta be careful, 'cause he's come on to me. He's as queer as they come, man, and I just wanted to warn you that he's always ready to give head." He would then stare at you with puffed cheeks, forearms extended, the right side of his sunglasses balanced on top of that squared-off ear. Next time, in a group, he'd be speaking about the lord. And how you can be SAVED IN PRISON if you attend the Bible studies which are offered in the Chapel. A lot of people with strange ideas hid in that Chapel, but with Busch, as he spoke, you felt he'd want to jack you off with a handful of Bible ink. I just couldn't picture myself, alone, in a schoolroom with him, dipping rags in the same bucket and washing down the chalkboards. And besides, I liked women: they sometimes said funny things when they got hungry, and to me they tasted a lot better.

I took a serious step back from Nacho.

"Listen, they should have put that guy in the dribble unit a long time ago. How am I supposed to work with a fruit basket?"

Nacho laughed.

"Sadistic motherfucker," I told him, but I also laughed a little. I was getting a short wire from the coffee.

"A job around here is a job," he said, as we headed back to the

counter. "Avsides, you're the one who asked me about it."

"But you're the one who sold me on it. Just what the hell were you thinking about?"

We hopped over the counter. Nacho said, "I was thinking if you got the job, we could run him off. Only reason I haven't's 'cause it's an anglo job over there. And it's a good one, 'cause it starts at fifteen cents an hour. Plus benefits, ese."

"But you know I'm not gonna step on anyone's shit unless they crowd me, even his," I said. "Now what?"

Nacho sat down and kicked his feet up on the table. His homeboy only grinned.

"Easy. Fuck Busch. Fuck the crew. Just work the job your own way."

It's what I would figure, but I knew that these things seldom worked out. Nacho said something in Spanish to his pardner. They nodded at each other.

"Know who was working here when I started? Little Sulfur Scottie. There was a case for you."

"Oh, yeah," I agreed, and then thought: every show in this camp is like pulling roots from someone's head: there's always a state of pre-existenee to transform, in order to get your shit out of the old headlocks. You either did it, or punked-out. I squatted against the wall, looking off into the law library. "All right," I told Nacho, "who's the cop that does the hiring around here? I'll check it out with him."

"I hear ya," he said. "Just go over to the school and look around. I think his name's Colon."

"Officer Colon?"

"Shit yeah," said Nacho. Even his pardner was laughing.

"Fuck an A," I said. Officer Colon. The perfect man for the job.

I set my coffee down and walked to the door just as two residents wearing tool belts swaggered in. Another carried the electric drill. They stopped at that inner doorframe, ready to bolt up the wall. It looked like a loud project, deafening. Then I saw Big Ed, outside. He was leaning against the school. I went over and he told me he'd seen Officer Colon around.

I walked in and got a drink from the fountain. The school was just a corridor with six rooms on either side, most of the rooms now filled with students. I could hear the tin of programmed music, softly from the office, but the classroom doors were closed so it was fairly calm, fairly quiet in there. I stood at the bulletin board as a door cracked open down the hall. A cop with a square cap looked out, almost as if he was hiding

from someone. It was usually the other way around. I made a slight move, turning my head from the board. The cop's face was as shiny as a summer squash.

"Hey, Colon."

He had large eyeball sockets, and his pupils floated as they rolled over to mine. It really looked like he'd been drinking from a two-dollar bottle. He just gazed at me, holding the door against his shoulder.

"Understand you need a porter," I said.

"We can talk in here," he said, pushing the door open. I walked over to the door.

Colon was standing in the center of a small, windowless room, which had been converted into an office: institutional books, a calendar on the wall, stuffy. Next to the typewriter sat a stack of incident reports, still blank, just waiting to be filled out. It looked like a trap to me. Colon adjusted his cap, assuming this very superficial tone.

"So, you'd like to be a porter," he said. "I'm not in the habit of hiring just anyone."

I thought of Busch, putting his statement to terms right away. I looked him over in the low, pulsing light.

"I'm not in the habit of working just anywhere."

Colon wasn't that tall, but his head tapered in. Ears, Christ, pointing out like rudders. His nose cast a shadow, a triangle, on the right side of his cheek, and with the fluorescence humming down he seemed to whorl before me like a cigar tube.

"What makes you think you can cut it as a porter?" he asked.

"I know I'll work hard for my store money," I lied.

"Tell you what," he said, in a lingering, boxed accent. "You go over to South Admin and put your name on the list for education porters. You come back this afternoon, after I've had a chance to think it over. We can then discuss you as an applicant."

"Fine," I told him. "I'll get right over to that list."

I looked at him in the room and, as I left, decided against the whole thing. I'd really only been trying to get out of the morning, but with just a squint of the Colon (and fueled by the yee-haw of the bluecaps in the chowhall) I took it further than any cubic, state lives: prison, I realized, could be approached as a sort of museum of the reductive: you consistently found people who could do nothing more than meddle with you, simply because they were small. Colon, Busch, tower guards, bluecaps: all became exhibits, to me, of people with lower instinct, of people whose lives fed on a need to reduce and constrain. I'd need an appointment to

get into South Admin and sign on the book. It could take months, and I'd have to push more cops, including my counselor, to arrange it. Colon, apparently, assumed he could just spin me in all directions, but I now had the high angle and it helped distance me from their worlds: they all led a fractional existence, a melon slice, deathly.

The door closed behind me. Colon was on the other side. I relaxed in the hallway, the canals in my head flowing warmly with blood. I saw Nacho outside with a rag and some glass cleaner. I lit up a rollie, walked over.

"What up?" he said, turning back to the window. I liked the way that sounded.

"Colon wanted to take me down through it," I told him, "so I left him in that little closet they use. He's in there now with the Book of Mormon, waiting on Busch."

"I just barely thought of something else," said Nacho. "You might be able to work out of maintenance."

"I'm not cut out to build walls."

I pivoted, just as the secretary came from the school. She was running a handful of papers across the terrace, very official, very red in that skirt, too important to even look in our direction. But fortunately my thinking had a wind of solar flare and I woke up, remembering who I was. Remembering something that could solve my whole problem. I watched as she walked along.

"You have an office clerk named Mango?" I asked.

She stopped, clutching the papers in her chest. I'd only known Mango a short while.

"Jeffrey Mango? Wears glasses?" she asked.

"Yeah. What kind of hours you have him on?"

"Is there something I can help you with?"

"Not really," I said. "This is more of an academic matter."

"He's here in the afternoon, usually no later than one."

"Thanks," I told her. She opened the door to the library. It sounded like auto shop in there, with all the drilling, the hammering going on. Nacho put his rag to the window, looking in after her.

"Culo pacoso," he said.

"All right," I told him, "I've got an idea. No more of this portering shit. No more brownsuits, bluecaps, and especially those graylegs, over in maintenance. The bastards only trick-bag a motherfucker."

"You're gonna max-out," Nacho said enthusiastically.

"I'm gonna sleep in, if I'm lucky," I said. Nacho stepped out of the way.

TRIQUARTERLY

"How's this window look from back there?"

I looked it over. It was as clear and clean as fifty million FM watts, though it really didn't interest me.

"Really tits," I told him. "Don't fall in."

Nacho pulled a cigarette from behind his ear, looking proudly at his work. I walked out of there, through the turnstile, past South Admin and the line waiting outside. I wanted to separate from authority as much as possible, hopefully using Mango as my blade. My idea, his execution, something like completing a musical phrase. I looked to the south, to the mountains in Mexico. It was still grisly, tar-like up there, the sky loaded with thick, Mexican clouds. I walked back to the dorm raw-throated, thirsty for salad. I entered my cube. Pulled down a book. Settled out on my bunk. But my bunk, as usual, was like lying in the cup of a plow. I opened to a page, glancing at Grissom. He just snorted and rolled over, like a drugged beast that was chained to the wall. Who the fuck wanted to porter under the obligation of grief? I aimed my lamp on the book and opened to a page.

"Wake up man, chow. They're gonna close in fifteen minutes."

"Go bum the warden's dog."

"C'mon, Holmes, they're serving cheeseburgers."

Grissom tapped on the tubing of my bunk. It hollowed out in my head.

"You're a henroid, Grissom!"

"What's a 'henroid'?"

"You're a henroid," I said.

"Well, I'm telling you. It's almost one o'clock."

"All right

Grissom was only a youngster, but we got along. He'd done his work one day with an ice pick, after a therapy session with his court-appointed counselor. He was then issued to me by the state.

I put my feet on the floor and locked up my rack.

"Cheeseburgers, huh?"

"Yeah," said Grissom, "let's scarf."

"Sure," I said, standing up. We headed through the dorm. I didn't see Nacho around.

"And before you ask," said Grissom, "neither of us got any fucking mail."

"Yeah."

The dayroom and guard's cage were dark, but a slit of light shone from

the doorjamb. I was ready for the yard. Grissom and I stepped out, into a tremendous chrome October, the sun a hom of silver-blue embroidery. It was hot. I felt like an isolated, solar being. The call over the yard barker said the hall would close in ten minutes but we made it inside, into the line. When we moved in front of the serving cage, Grissom knocked on the glass.

His roaddog was in charge of putting the burgers on our trays. He gave a nod and Grissom laid two fingers, very casually, against the window pane. The dog looked at me, counted the trays in front of us, feeling around for the cops. There was one at the serving window, along with a bluecap whose lips had caked like a dried cheese. Others drifted behind the bluecap, but no one looked over his shoulder.

We moved along.

Grissom's roaddog pressed two hamburgers apiece on our trays, passing them quickly to his pardner on the left. The pardner had the lettuce. He reacted coolly, though scrambled, stretching the lettuce across the burgers into a natural, resilient, form-fitting leaf dome. As my tray slid down I walked forward, watching it through the glass. The bluecap pushed it out and I grabbed it, then walked into the center of the chowhall. Grissom's roaddog had risked a thirty-day lockdown, but the risk was minimal because the dog knew his art. The afternoon was already looking better than the morning.

I ate quickly with Grissom. He told me the story of a female cop who had inflated a basketball the previous night in recreation, where he was employed, but I didn't want to hustle work there either. Grissom sort of jutted his whole upper body as he spoke, like he was walled in to a speed-metal sound track. I gave him my cookies right before I left, knowing that he got off on the sugar. The same cops working breakfast were again standing at the door, and as they looked me over I thought of them in their tiny, fractional headtombs. What a way to die death! I got away from them, fast, and onto the yard.

It was a little after one when I got back to the school. Education, like the yard, was now jammed with inmates, but the library was also open. I saw Nacho leaning shirtless against the fence, collecting cigarettes from two people I didn't know. Benefits. Then Mango came from the school, looking pissed. He took long strides with his short legs, ripping the library door open. I got a smoke from Nacho, waited five minutes or so until Mango came back. This time, he strolled.

"Mango," I said.

He looked over. We crossed to the dirt by the fence. Even with good

posture he only came up to my chin.

"You're another that looks satisfied," he said. "Or did I confuse that with disgusted? What's new?"

"I should be asking. You sure looked hot a minute ago."

He looked sharply toward the school, then up at the yard. His brown hair was blowing in the afternoon wind. Beyond him lay miles and miles of unwanted state desert. He gazed back, toward the school.

"The cop in here complained to the secretary that someone got a grade because I did their work," he said. "Can you imagine that? The students take the tests, not me, but this idiot Colon thinks he's busted a conspiracy because I helped someone solve a problem. My boss doesn't care, but I do, only because he's harassing me. And it's not even his job. We hate each other's guts."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah," he said, looking into my eyes. "We got into it another time, over pretty much the same thing."

"What happened?"

"I told him to eat shit with tacks through his tongue. I wanted to offend him for being such a punk."

Someone opened the door to the library, and I again heard the plomb plomb plomb of inmate construction. What shit.

"He's only a fraction," I told Mango, "not a total human being. His thoughts on everything are governed by a fucking state handbook. Makes for some strange reactions."

Mango put his hands on his hips, making small circles in the dirt with his feet.

"A state fraction," he said. "Kinda funny, when you think about it like that. Still, too bad he's gotta work up here."

"I figure he'll be working here no matter what. The next one to come along is pretty much the same formula."

"Yeah," he agreed.

"The exceptions seem to hang back a little, but I'm sure as hell not finding many. That's why I need a favor."

"Let's make it quick," said Mango. "I've got to get back before class starts."

I noticed Colon at the door, staring out the window at us. Even here, the fucker wanted in. I turned my back to him.

"Register me for drafting," I said. "Just put it on the computer, so I won't get in any jams when classification looks through my file."

"You want to cut away from this yard, huh?"

"You bet. Can you do it?"

"Sure," he said. "Tonight, after the shift change."

"Perfect. What am I gonna owe you?"

Mango reached in his shirt pocket, dug out a cassette.

"Know John Handle, over on your yard? Give this to him."

He handed me the tape.

"Nothing to it," I said, and Mango, in his own way, simply walked off. That's all there was, no pulling of teeth.

Drafting.

In exchange for a porter-type favor.

The afternoon classes began, and Mango headed into school with everyone else. That left me and Nacho, and also his pardner, out on the terrace. But my ass was now covered, and I had no immediate plans. None, whatsoever. Nacho came over with a bag of Mexican hot chips, offering me a pull. I'd been down long enough that I thought my taste buds had turned to wax, but I nearly jumped from the spice when I chewed them. Nacho laughed. His homeboy laughed. We watched as an old, flatbed work truck drove slowly along the perimeter, taking a load of convicts out to a crew site. They stood on the wooden platform holding a single rail, jumpsuits creased in the wind. Colon still looked out from the school: insulated, protected, mindless, dangerous.

I turned and walked off. I passed Busch on the walk and said nothing, leaving him and his ear to the regulations of Colon. Good pair, I thought, choosing my time, not theirs.

Which meant drafting. I knew it would keep me off the street in the mornings. And that was the only thing that mattered.

I cut lazily with the tape to John Handle's. Through the bright, nearly effortless, helium afternoon.

The Slugger [black-and-white]

Windy Gray

I waited on the bus at classification this time, knowing enough about Arizona prison yards to realize I'd soon be wading through a lot of bleak shit. I'd been fingerprinted, photographed and old-techniqued, then filed into a passage-tank where I stood under a half-light. They had about thirty of us, chained by footlink in twos, our wrists cuffed to leather hip belts. Another twelve were being processed in the movement room, which we could see through the small, thick, observation window in our area. I looked away. I clasped my hands. I stared at the painted concrete, which had been chipped and cut with steel bracelets. I felt the aloof tension trapped in the room and thought of huge, powerful, ugly machines at construction sites: scraperplows, bulldozers, cranes. I felt little of the earth or the world.

From a lesser eye, in fact, had come a statement that I do time for apparently feeling so little of society. For participating in a manner that was outside of the structure. Yet the fantastic truth, as if blown from a Coltrane tenor, was far above our daily courtroom breach: I'd felt so much of the common cause, feathering around me, that the response was to evade the balm of street custody and go with the grip of my own head which, of course, is downplayed as a secondary function of life in some circles. I did it with drugs that were regulated into strict medical, along with a total mixture of booze and emotion. Damn right it made a difference. Though when Coltrane cleaned the junk from his system, locked in the bedroom at his request, he was fortunate enough to have his mother bring water. I'd jones in the jail, throwing wet toilet paper at the cold and ferocious air vent, nightmares pumping out of me like poison darts from a blowgun. No doubt we both hold something, in us and astral, linked to a deep and warmer humanity. Everything else was a mechanism of custom.

I was, at any rate, alive in a slug's September. But I might as well have been in an unknown month on an uncharted planet, for that was the flat, alien rush of my brotherhood: obscure, like industrialized human deadware. Even the blacks-who, as a group, are constantly loud and lunging-caught the thrust of blood in their throats at this point. I could appreciate the ride for that, yet here I was-a flash fire in the 169

music-tied to an old and liverfat granny rapist with slimy, pointy hair. And, like an old fart, he geezed: layers of fat on his soft, wrinkled hands, and a stumpneck, squat, under rows of chinhang. A froth had settled in one comer of his mouth, then these thick, binocular glasses which shot his pupils out like boot eyes. He was revolting. Truly. And everyone milled away from us, certainly with good reason: he wheezed a nasty, repugnant salisbury breath, a hot reeking craw in a fixless room.

Well, all right. I wasn't the only mismatched con in that cell. Yet no one else was footlinked to a geezer who raped the old women that were confined in nursing homes. I was stuck, and accepted it as some bizarre form of logic: apparently, it had to do with justice. But we all had to do with justice, mandatory justice for the most part, which by now was nothing new. What was new, at least to me, was the fact I'd be going to the same joint as this freak. Otherwise, we'd have been issued separate seats on the bus. Yet what kind of mind would consider us as being of the same ilk?-that was another question lost in the Box of Black.

For once, however, the wait was short. They shot some electricity through a rear wall of the cell and we walked out-we hobbled out, tearing up our shins and ankles-a back door of the holding block, which had a stepover that a few people tripped on. But the whole system was rigged with blocks and we either knew it, or anticipated as much, and plotted other ways to get around. There was, really, no other choice. So when the aging D.O.C. coach showed up there was no point in expecting much. Again, a short wait in the Phoenix dawn, as cardboard boxes of our stuff were loaded on. We had a toothbrush, a comb, a couple of dirty 'Tshirts. The envelopes and stamps I once had had been stolen from the property room back in the Tucson jail. There were no inmate employees in that corridor of the building. We boarded the coach, still wearing our state-issued shower shoes.

But the bus had been modified into a 42nd Street grotto. They had a separation cage designed up front, housing tear-gas, and shotgun seats, for the guards to sit on. The cage was made with regular police wire, but the weave was a bit looser than the mesh covering our windows. We could see out of them, to an extent, but the light which came through was the type that almost, but not quite, illuminated color. Then they had ripped out the standard seating and replaced it with these little, molded schoolboy seats, like the kind that at one point had an arm-flap. Since I led the way in my party, I moved toward a window seat like it was the only option we had. The decrepit old fuck just sloshed his fat in the aisle and stood dumb for a moment-which was too long, in our sit-

uation-so I turned into the seat, clenched my tendon, and snapped our footline with a volt. As his eyes popped, I said, "Sit down." He sat down softly, rather like a hippo submerging its ass in shallow water, and I pictured him sliding into bed with granny, saying dirty, childish things.

We were in a touring jail now, idling while the guards got their coffee, their weapons in order:

"Then that's your coffee?"

"That's my coffee with the sugar, and this is my gun."

"Well, I know that's your gun, but I thought we had our coffees secured."

"My cup is the cup indicated by the square handle."

"O.K., then this is my cup, with the black coffee. Is it still hot?"

"It's still hot. Did DeForest top off the gas tank?"

"I don't know. I thought Officer Lid was in charge of vehicle operations."

"Well, he's having a coffee with Sergeant Crow at the moment."

I leaned against the window grill, thinking what a fiasco my jacket must be. My file. Then the whole bus rocked as the driver stepped on. Never had I seen a cop this big. He could have worn a manhole cover as a belt buckle, if he wished. The other two guards moved from his way, just smiling, with loping, red ears. The driver looked back at us, poised. Looking rough. Then somebody in front of me spoke on an idea.

"Hey, fuck you, punk!"

The two guards looked up, thinking that they heard another voice.

"Motherfuckin' punk thinks he's tough."

INT. BUS. DAYBREAK. SILENCE. STEAM RISING FROM COFFEE CUPS.

"Take but five of us to hold him, while the rest of you go up in him."

The cage door opened with a crash, the driver kicking his footsteps down the run.

"All RIGHT," he said, "just who wants to tell me that to my face? HUH? Who's MAN enough to ADMIT what he just said?"

Nobody moved. Stupidity vs. silence. But he was right in front of me, for some reason, staring down like I had it coming. Maybe he didn't like the company I kept.

"I'll take off my badge, and fight man-to-man."

More of the same.

"Motherfuckers," he said. "You let me know when you're ready. I'll pull the goddamn bus off to the side of the road."

He walked back and slammed the cage door, probably thinking he'd

won the battle. Of course the only thing he'd won, if you'd take that kind of a victory, was the simpering respect of his fellow officers.

But the mood on the bus relaxed. Not much, though enough to make room for little exits in the hold. It meant a certain flexibility within the immediate, instead of frozen responses to authoritative commands. It meant that the edge can go both ways. It meant that it does. It meant FUCK YOU, and get this train a-rolling. About five minutes later the gates swung open and we pulled out: Phoenix was a mad glare of sun, tanned hangovers, puking and squealing and grinding the roads. It made the street cops mad, because there weren't enough laws on the books to effectively put the entire city behind bars.

Yet.

"Are we going?" the geezer asked me. He was impatient, oily. I turned away.

I looked out the window, glad to be leaving the maximum-security of Alhambra. Alhambra was, roughly, the custody level used for apes. They had told me I'd be going to a medium joint in the area, but they lie: we were on our way to the southeast comer of the Great State of Arizona, stopping first at the walls, Florence, followed by a smaller camp outside of Tucson. They'd drop some off, and pick others up along the way. But this routine shuttle was a totally hell-bent journey for some of the people sitting around me, though for others, including myself, it was simply part of the procedure.

We rolled on. We dropped off twenty, picked another ten up at Florence. I watched one guy get off and piss the bus into laughter. I mean, it ran down the front of his jumpsuit, marking him as easy prey at the Florence reception center. But the guy looked to be close to twentyfive years old: hadn't he been anywhere in his life? Probably not, like the geezer beside me, except down to the grade school between paper plates of soft food. I cracked my neck and sunk into my shoulder blades as if they were pillows, noting the small, pre-fab courthouse that had been connected by tunnel to the prison. It was a bright, fruity red, all trimmed in white, and contrasted with a marker flag run up a short pole. Inside it was rigged with a pro tern judge and a Bible.

The bus crackled along. But the huge cop drove at about 30 mph, making the trip feel endless as we passed the Florence graveyard. It was filled with small, wooden sticks, that crossed around knee-level, finally tooled in black with your state number: if you died in prison before your sentence expired, you were buried out there while the state collected money on your corpus. The law said it wasn't a scam. But all those sticks

made me really think of groups, of people collected around one central notion then pawned off as an assembled whole. It was wrong, it didn't work, yet it explained why the days were regulated into monocore: individualism was simply too far above the plan. But the graveyard soon faded, and again we were on the slow, rolling route through the desert.

I managed to sleep for awhile, waking on the interstate not far from Tucson. We stopped at the prison, barely lucky enough to get water and a sack lunch: a sort of latex cheese on white bread, which we bent to our hands for in order to eat. More were dropped off, more stepped on, including one of my pardners from previous times. He took a seat across the aisle from me, his muscles cut and angled from working out on the weight pile. He was doing a natural for first-degree murder.

"Killer," I said.

Killer circled his eyes around the bus, making a tight face.

"Stinks on this bus, don't it," he said. "What is that smell, anyway?"

I wasn't sure either, but it was sickly-sweet and fingered with flesh. It forced you to choke. It forced you to gag.

"Seems to be comin' from up front, from those Dunkin' Donuts an' shit those cops be swillin'," said the guy in front of us, musing at the way the cops worked both the doughnuts and coffee with their tan caps laid off on the ammo compartment. "OUGHTA GET A PORTER ON HERE TO MOP UP THIS STINKING SHIT!" he yelled.

The guards simply looked and grinned aimlessly, light from the windshield reflecting in their tall, steel foreheads.

"Where you headed?" I asked Killer.

"They told me Douglas. But then, they've told me a lot of things," he said.

"Only shit I've heard about Douglas is bad," I said.

"Heard right. No recreation, no books in the library hope I can find a job, doing something besides raking rocks."

"Is that the issue?"

"Unless you have a trade," he said. "Where you going?"

"Douglas," I said.

"Shit."

"If these ruddy ducks ever stop chewing, that is, and move the bus along."

"FIRE THIS MOTHERFUCKER ONTO THE ROAD," said the guy up front. "YOU'RE KEEPING MY FRIENDS WAITING you stupid water-runs-off-the-neck like rubbemecked-rnotherfuckers."

The guards just ignored it. But Killer glanced at my seatmate, whose 173

eyes pointed downward.

"Stand up and get in my collar once," Killer told me.

I stood up, shifted, as Killer leaned across the aisle. I got a cigarette from his collar. I dropped it in his lap, as he pulled a striker and matches from the fluff in his shirt.

"I heard they were taking all matches, on account of somebody making a bomb," the geezer said nervously.

"More than one way to make a bomb," said Killer, blowing smoke under the seat. "More than one way to light a smoke, too."

He coughed, then passed the cigarette across the aisle. I dragged heavily, said, "Killer."

"Finish it," he said. "I had one before I got on."

I rolled it in my fingers, lazily, as the bus circled the camp and pulled out. There went the fence, the razor-ribbon, the yards the towers the cameras. The guards in the shack on the lip of the road. In a few minutes we were back on the interstate, contemplating our futures, that one small mistake that brought us here far behind the highway and logo we traveled on now. The cigarette burned. And I noticed the dust settling upon the jumpsuit of the geezer, watched as it deflected off the grease on his head.

"Let me hit some of that before you put it out," he said.

His lips worked the air like a scum-sucking fish, and he looked wretched, truly wretched. But he was cuffed to my right ankle like we were enjoined Siamese convicts. I guessed his music was on the order of rubber-sheeted cradle-tones.

"I'll give you shorts," I told him, quiet-like. I took a few more pulls, very leisurely, then passed him the filter load. He sucked it down like a slobbering hog. I curled back into my space, but Killer sat open-eyed, straight up, awaiting it all. He hadn't yet considered who my seatmate was.

"First vacation I've had in years," Killer said. Calm, relaxed.

"Then there's Douglas, around the comer."

"Yeah, there's that."

We rode on, passing the landmarks along the highway. Red Rock, the Cochise Stronghold. Traffic thinned the farther south we got, and a billboard for The Thing began appearing. Killer, now a stone-cold Correctional tourist, looked through the grating and remarked to me, in profile: "Arizona. They say you come as a tourist, and leave on parole."

I laughed. It was the first thing that had made sense to me all day.

"They come looking for work, too," I said, "but the employers have

already bailed-out."

"This state just be runnin' scam after scam," said the guy up front, and somebody across from him said, "Yeah they are."

We got off the main road sometime early in the afternoon, and onto a minor highway which hosted a number of phony retirement villages. I saw a bank, an office, a few other things, more pre-fab shit that went up in a day. Not far from this was our tum-off: another dirt road, maybe five-thousand feet above sea-level. The bus drove in for about threeand-a-half miles, a caddy at the gate finally stopping us for paperwork. We sat, we lingered. Then pulled away from him, twisting in our seats, some of the youngsters flashing the bird. We entered the special hanger for arrivals. We stopped, looking out through our windows, at the concrete the girders the pressed steel. We paid attention to the few inmates walking around in there, to see if they smiled or not. Some of them did, so we looked beyond the faces, wondering why.

But the bus had been parked on a deliberate embankment, so there was a curbing to hop that went deeper than our footlinks. The driver just stood there, facing us, hands on his hips. Hat tipped, extremely pleased. I told the geezer to put his foot out, to give me some chain, but the guards were yelling "MOVE IT! MOVE IT!" and he wasn't paying attention. The gross motherfucker was listening to the cops.

"Stick your foot over the edge," I told him again. He wavered, then looked at me.

"Like this?" he asked, crouching his foot outward.

"Uh-huh."

I made the leap, followed by the geezer, and the driver instructed us to form a line opposite the bus. I glanced at the spot and saw Killer. We hobbled over. A couple of guards were taking the cuffs off, but in front of us sat a whole table of the brownsuits. Others rolled dollies of our stuff up, to the table, where it was then processed and marked on a sheet of our possessions. I was mainly thankful to be moving. To work my legs, my bones, to inhale the huge place and to rub at the small of my back. And to get away, finally, from chaplick. He stood by one of the rear tires on the bus: silent, fearful. Alone. Cunted. I waited, with Killer, on the next move.

"I gotta take a piss," he said, looking around.

"Likewise," I told him.

Folks were getting off the bus, crowding the area we stood in. Carbon monoxide choked the space. Killer leaned over, confidentially. "This way," he said, walking across the room.

TRIQUARTERLY

He had checked out a wall, a few doors, to make sure of the one we'd be entering. To make sure of the exact door. In this case, the head. It was a matter of protocol: a mistake in the trivial webbing of the joint was the thing that would cost you, the thing you constantly had to be looking out for. So as Killer led, I followed. We both knew the footing. The guards were watching, though they otherwise ignored us.

But everyone rather awoke to the flushing. They came, circulating, many looking at each other for the first time. I was called to the property table and issued state clothing: jeans, T-shirts, socks, brogans, a few disposable razors. I was told to stand behind a curtain and try the pants on, just this little hang of sheets in the center of the room. I got a feel of how large the contrivance was: like putting a tarp over the city of Akron, or something like that. And here we had this stall, this little sheet that fluffed as your elbows caught it in movement. I walked out, over to the property counter. An old convict was dispensing our state shit.

"These jeans must be about ten sizes too long," I told him, and they were. Probably too long for a stilts-walker as well.

"That's all we got right now," he told me, resting a hand on the counter. "We're out of things."

His old hair glowed like foil sprinkled in orange sauce. A brown tooth slanted across his mouth, chipped and cut long ago. I looked at him, but as easily natured as possible. I had an idea.

"I'll kick down some tobacco, come state pay," I told him.

He looked me over. Carefully. His hand still rested on the counter.

"Let me see if they brought the new issue," he said. "Some was due m.

He walked into the long rows of shelving and I waited. I noticed these short, stocky girls, seated at another table, both of them darkened with facial deformities: they were only institutional nurses, not actually certified to care for people. I was called over and told to sit down.

"Who do we have here?" one asked of the other.

"Five eight two zero two," said the one with my jacket. "Ask him to roll up his sleeve."

"Now, roll up your sleeve for me," the first one said. "That's it."

She took my blood pressure and asked if I had ever used drugs intraveniously. In fact, they had a prepared sheet of roughly twenty questions, a cat-and-mouse list I was required to respond to. To respond to correctly. I could be dying of cancer but that would only burden the department, the state, so I watched their tar-like facial contours replying "no" to the

questions. They wrote my answers on a little card and sent me off. But I had noticed an avocado-sized growth on the ankle of the one with my file. It bobbled in her pantyhose when she shifted on the chair. I thought, this is what the geezer had been after, only worse. I walked back to the property counter. My issue was there, sitting off to the side. "State pay," I told the old convict.

"All right," he said.

"Thanks, Holmes."

Killer walked over, a young guy whose forehead was half-tan from wearing bandannas with him. "Ain't that Borden," he asked, "that dude you come down with?" A kind of assurance polished his eyes.

"Yeah," I said. I recognized one of the tattoos on his arm.

"Looks like we're all goin' to the same unit, the Mohave Unit," he said. "We'll get him later on."

He was looking over my shoulder, this head of curly, brown hair daneing around.

"I think he figures as much," I said. Killer just stood there, digging on his fingernails, nose down. It was his way of paying attention.

"Don't matter," said the other guy. "He'll be off this yard by tonight."

The guy walked off. But slowly, steadily, like he was pulling a loaded barge behind him.

"I knew that dude from South Unit," said Killer. "He's all right."

"Rip Borden a new asshole, I don't doubt that," I said.

"ALL RIGHT, LISTEN UP!" yelled one of the guards. "THESE INMATES ARE TO ASSEMBLE AGAINST THE REAR WALL. WHEN YOU HEAR YOUR NAME, LINE UP IN THE BACK!"

About fifteen names were called, including mine and Killer's. South Unit and the geezer also lined up.

A long, white van splattered with mud soon arrived, and all of us boarded with our grip of state,issue. Only now, at this point, we were instructed to remove our shower clogs and put on our state boots. Our brogans. Everyone dove in like a bag of mad snakes, the van rocking, shaking, bouncing up and down. Who thinks up this ridiculous shit? Where do they school these bastards, anyway? Killer and I sat in a rear molding of the van, observing the mundane sideshow of it all. But there was also a small, darkened window back there: I tried looking at the camp as the van rolled along, at the maze, the pit of my new home.

But there was little to see except land. Just flat, yellowing miles of sun,stroked desert, unsuited to human sustenance. A water tower with fading red checks loomed up, followed by perimeter fencing and num-

bered security cameras. Then a rifle tower and slowly, as the van crept forward, a series of gates leading to a wirework funnel. I saw a housing unit, barely, the window cutting it from all but a brown smear. We hit a checkpoint and idled, as more gates were opened: "I'd be a misdemeanor in every other state," I heard someone say. We rolled past the checkpoint and stopped. They opened our door in a hurry, as if they had suddenly been rushed, to a small patrol of guards looking seriously arrogant. They just stood before us, sipping coffee, most of them with radios squawking from their belt holders. The order was to get out.

We got out and looked around, leaving our boxes in the van. Sure enough, another wall. But the feeling was that I'd been climbing walls all my life. Numbers were read, people lined up, but when my name was called they simply handed me my box. I stood, not quite looking at their faces.

"Dorm number ten," I was told by a young cop, then let into the yard through a small, outside door.

"Catch up with you later," I heard Killer say. I looked, for some reason, into the sky, and saw the moon sailing along near the horizon.

The gate closed behind me, and I stood on a little sidewalk. I looked across the camp past the softball field, to the yard office the pre-fabs the chowhall. The yard, itself, was mostly dirt. And the residents were everywhere, wearing cheap, denim jackets. I was out there alone. It was chilly. Cold. Windy gray. The clouds scraped along like industrial portraits. Above the guards, in the towers, who watched us from their glass cages. But the dorms were numbered and spread out along the perimeter, to enclose three-quarters of the yard. Through the other quarter stood the fences, the razor-ribbon and motion sensors. At least, those which I could easily see. And my new house, by the opening, exactly kitty-comer from where they had let me out. I looked, and noticed the walkway went around. I started walking, slowly, toward the fence. Away from the dorms, where everyone hung out. Leering. I felt those brogans laced to my feet: they were like wearing tree stumps through a slosh pond, in the rain, hungover. The box was under my arm.

I hit the dorm without looking back. The dayroom and guard cage were right there, but I had the feeling of being cramped. Of having no distance, no play, with my limbs. A table of inmates dealt poker on one side and others sprinted, caps on backwards, going in and out of the door. It smelled cold. Like a garage loaded with wet, concrete slabs. The noise circled in a whirlpool and the lights glared like silver. I acted unimpressed, knowing. The only way to handle it. Folks hit on me for

cigarettes, their faces whirring like table fans. But I didn't have any smokes. I only wanted to get settled. I wanted to find one for myself, and get a mattress from the house cop. I saw him sitting there, in the cage.

"I need a mattress," I told him.

He led me to a storage closet, sucking on his cheeks, like it was, simply, the greatest task in the world. He gestured his keys over the mattresses, stiff with authority.

"You're issued the top mattress," he said, "and one of these pillows."

I lifted the top mattress. A very thin, sad-looking bedroll. It'd be like sleeping on slimy steel, I thought. I looked back at him, not quite enraged.

"This one's all flat and farted out," I said.

The next one down was about an inch thick, really plush.

"If you have a problem with your back or something, alert medical," he said. "I have you down for one mattress."

The prick.

I threw the mattress over my shoulder and stuck a pillow on my box. He led me to the cage and stopped.

"Run E, bed thirty. If you need anything or have problems, notify me."

He handed me a combination lock. I studied his nose, which was shaped, oddly, like a tiny roller skate. He was writing about me in the log book. I turned and saw Killer. The feeling was good, like that of finding money in pants you were going to throw out. But behind him stood Borden. A rotund, geezing mass.

"A loud house just ain't a home," said Killer, looking around. "Must be some funky-assed gladiator school they're running."

"Yeah, and I'm up the E run."

"All right," he said, setting down two boxes. I noticed the guard. The guard seemed to be looking at Killer with disdain, like he was late for a senseless appointment. I turned.

I grabbed the door to the E run and walked in, adjusting my eyes, the mattress slipping around on my shoulder. The run was just a cold, concrete rectangle, with vents and a small window over the two-man cubicles. It was stuffy. And bed thirty was really tucked-up, on the corner across from the bathroom and showers. Televisions, radios played. I was ignored as two inmates-one black, the other white-stood across from my cell, arguing.

"No room left for you on this run," the white guy was saying.

"No room for you, you mean! I gots friends in high places roun' here!"

TRIQUARTERLY

"You got friends in high panties! Now roll your shit on outta this ramp."

"I'll be back," said the black guy. "You best be ready."

"Better bring more than a popsicle."

The black guy steamed out the door (which was also next to my cube), and I threw the mattress on my bunk. I had a line on the E run: discipline, fish, guys straight from the hole what a crowd! There was a small, metal locker to throw your shit into, but the door on mine was all bent to hell. Shit, I decided, they can steal my 'Tshirt, if they want. I was tying my sheets down when Killer walked in. I hadn't noticed, but he arrived with four boxes. South Unit was carrying the other two.

"All right," said Killer, as he passed me.

He threw his crap on a bunk a few houses down. What jolted me, however, was Borden: the motherfuckers not only were filling up our wing, but had assigned him the vacancy right there in my cube. Unbelievable, really, yet these things always happened to me. He put his box down and sat on the bunk's metal, his mattress flopping at the other end. He whined for a cigarette. I suddenly thought, for some reason, of a soot-winged pigeon bearing young in a cold storefront.

"Just let me get one offa ya buddy, I'll pay you back," he said.

I dropped my lock on the bed. I just didn't want to be around him.

"Maybe that guard can help you," I told him, then went down to Killer's for one of his rollies. South Unit looked past me, up the ramp. He looked anxious.

"We're gonna get your cellie tonight," he said, as I rolled up the Bugler. I licked on the paper, then made a flicking gesture to Killer with my thumb.

"Try not to dirty my sheets," I replied.

South Unit only said "Later," and took off. Killer handed me his lighter and I lit up, smoking, kicking around his place until count. There was really nothing else to do at this point: over three-hundred miles on the D.O.C. bus. Borden just sat on his bunk, scratching. The cold September night was coming on.

We were walking back after chow, me and Killer, Killer looking at the weight pile. Inquisitively. The wind blew upon us like the after-rush of an express truck, but as I started across the sidewalk I found that the yard was a huge bowl of mud. Yet two guards were in the middle of the field, throwing rocks at one another. They seemed to ream each other with high-pitched giggling. It was sick, nauseating, at least to my ears.

Killer looked at them, startled, a cup of coffee from the chowhall in his hand. The coffee was served black.

"Don't have no sugar at your house?" he asked me.

"No stash of any sort," I told him. He paused, looking at the guards.

"Wonder if we could get 'em to shoot each other," he said. "Maybe they play with silverware?"

"Maybe they'll just freeze into the yard like military statues," I said. "Seems the weather will go that far."

Killer looked at me and said, "Chilly out here, ain't it?" and took another pull on his coffee.

He was quiet as we walked, just the moonlight shining down on the guards and a lone flagpole. Coltrane might've dug this: there were riffs, modulations out here, though I started thinking there was a catch to the moon. I buttoned the collar of my jacket, and felt the first cut on my feet from the brogan leather. Incarceration, I began thinking, is largely a matter of tortures being applied to your flesh and to your sanity. The trick would be to get over.

I found my cellie just sitting there when we got back, his mattress still curled on one end of the bunk. His eyes kind of wandered, like he didn't quite know where he was. It sure wasn't the rest home. His fat head bobbled, wobbling on that stumpneck, his greasy face about the color of a string mop. I passed him by, and Killer turned on the lamp at his house. His personal lamp. Otherwise, the dorm was like ash. He sat down the coffee and pulled out a book, titled Small Engine Repair, and was explaining it to me when South Unit walked in. South Unit had three others with him. They went right over to my cellie, one standing guard at the door. The house cop was nowhere in sight.

"Sure as shit, that's him," I heard one of South Unit's pardners say.

"Dude's a fuckin' cho-mo," said the other. "Or he's a reverse cho-rno, what the hell, it's almost worse than a child molester. Look at him!"

Borden cowered, feeling for a grip on the bunk.

"Starting to feel uncomfortable?" South Unit asked him. "Huh?"

"Listen, fellas," Borden began.

It started with fists and feet, then one of them grabbed my lock and pounded on his skull. TV's were turned down and everyone looked on, eager, completely aware of who Borden was. The bunk crashed along with his weight, Borden's screams echoing like a crow's at the mouth of a cave. This happened fast, tag-team, almost as if rehearsed. Finally there was a deep, gagging inhalation, and somebody ran through the door yelling "Cholos! Cholos!" I watched South Unit and the others split

out the back as three cops stormed in. They stood over Borden and worked their radios, calling the tower for instructions. Nobody even bothered with medical.

"This shit had it coming," I heard one of the cops say. Everything around me confirmed that.

But Borden was now bleeding all over. He was, actually, a total mess. He seemed to be breathing, yet otherwise he was out of it. And equivalent to his worth? Jesus, who knew. But it did cross my mind that the street population rather approved of this work, though it wasn't something admitted to very often. Killer turned his television on. He kept the sound off, and didn't look at the pictures.

The cops asked around before leaving. Nobody, however, had seen anything on our run. Borden was wheeled to a van they had just parked, outside, and I went to check on my bed. The bed was all right, but the cubicle wall was now flooded with blood. And so was the concrete, on the floor. Unfit and possibly diseased, I thought, and I went out to find a cop. The son of a bitch told me to mop it up.

I put my jacket on and went over to the yard office. A pack of guards sat around, like Great Danes but without the dignity, and I tried making a case for a new cell.

"Imagine where Borden was before he got caught," I told the Major. "Can you really expect me to stay in there?"

He nodded. He requested a housing list from a female guard, who then hopped through the office like her feet were birdsprings. She handed the Major a piece of paper. The Major gave me, gave them, the orders: "Unit twelve, A-twenty." That was better than expected, since twelve was an established dorm. I walked over, looked in. I wanted to see if there was any blood on the wall. I also wanted to check out my new cellie, and make sure there weren't any mistakes this time.

There weren't.

The run was fairly quiet, and the lockers had been constructed out of unfinished wood. Bed twenty was down the ramp, away from the traffic and some of the noise. I smelled pot, hash, and heard a guitar softly playing. My new cellie was on his bed, drawing with a set of colored pencils. I saw a large picture of a naked woman: her hair was flowing, her lips were parted, the legs were out. My cellie relaxed, concentrating on his work. He told me he sold regular portraits around the yard.

"I can get a motherfucker looking just right," he said. "I can get him a pen-pal, when he writes to the sex ads."

"I'll have to check out the ads," I told him.

He kept drawing. I noticed a green plant in a noodle can sitting on my locker, and a mattress, thick, laid out on the bed. I was ready to move in. I headed out, on the walk, for my stuff.

But that moon.

There was something about it that made me stop and stare over the long, blowing yard. It was a different moon than the bus ride north, though I didn't know how that logically could be. But we were right on the border, the border of Mexico, down where people and the land have changed. And that moon seemed to have changed with the latitude: it was just barren, a reminder. And spooky, because the point appeared to be that you'd never get away from it. It hung in the sky and it hung in the sky becoming, on thought, a distance of meaningless comprehension. You could look at it and look at it and look at it. Then, you could look at it, hours apart, and still see it hanging in the same place. And most of the time nearly quartered. On that foreside, tilted, which shined like a waxed skull.

Down here, the moon always hangs in the sky.

I stood on the walk and looked out, across the compound. I now had a new house. And a strangely improvisational lifestyle, though it had always been a question of meters, of beats. It had been a long three hundred miles: I breathed slow, breathed deeply, relaxing a bit, bodily quite shorter than that of my true extension. A lone, mud-splattered guard passed before me on the track, in the moonlight: I moved along to roll up.

Electric Latches

Things tensed up more than usual, in the camp, when rumors of the shakedown were confirmed. In the first place, your stuff wasn't guaranteed to be safe, just because you found a nook to stash it in. Everyone in the joint was thinking of the remote, obscure, nearly sub-prison regions of the yard, and there weren't that many spots available: the yard was just a small dirt tundra, level as a municipal airstrip and anybody could get to your shit fairly easy. Secondly, the routine structure of the institution got knocked around and jammed inward, to where we live-this meddling with and confiscation of our possessions-so there was anticipation and complete sensing of the dirty little grub violations about to come down. It made some people ugly, others noncommittal. It affected everyone in degrees. It became the sole topic on the yard, starting a week before they came through.

"Big shakedown coming up next week, Holmes."

"Ain't it a bitch?" or

"Say man, wanna buy a pair of Levi's cheap?"

"Shit, they're just gonna steal 'em if I have 'em laying around the house."

"You can wear them no problem."

"Except they'll be looking at our property receipts."

"All right, then lemme get a smoke offa ya."

"Don't have none."

But as the customer walked off, without upping one, he felt the eyes of the peddler upon him like a hot coating glaze so he turned around, looked at the guy, yelled "Fuck your goddamn Levi's!" to him to take a bit of the heat off himself. Very quickly another system had been developed by the population, just to accommodate the bullshit. But I can't help thinking that what is supplied to adapt to in our prisons is the same thing, in attitude, that will aggravate a man's sentence and get him more time before a judge, until the man feels like he's lost in a carnival of mirrors.

What I needed, at any rate, was to find a trusty. Or a dry place somewhere, inside of a building. The problem was that most of the Complex buildings were housing units, "dorms," and I had bulk that couldn't be buried outside. Books, magazines, a few personal papers. I was leaning

against my locker, looking at the brown crotch of earth that hardened outside of my window, thinking the library. It could work. It could be a solution. I could pattern my books along the shelves with the others, and pick them up after the police swept through. A dust devil suddenly whirled up from the ravine in the road, and ran toward my window like a powdered, tan skirt. It was large, violent, a twisting spike of cone. I slid my small, glass windowpane along, before it crashed through the screen and showered all over my bed and the rest of the cramped, double cell.

I turned away from the locker, stuck my hands in my pockets for something to do. Actually, there was a chill in the air. The dorm was pale and stuffy and I stood there, breathing, thinking just who had what type of jacket out of the twenty-five people I was routinely locked down with: Shorty, Flame-out, Pinky, and Spider were all doing time for burglary. Igor and Butter-butt, along with Manther and Blood Bath, had long time for either manslaughters or murder. We had Big Al (#1, white) and Big Al (#2, black), doing old-code time with Tombstone, Rebel, Barbershop, and High Tower for various forms of armed robbery. Both Rolly and Hammer had picked up their numbers for boosting. The Torch had arson and escape on his jacket, with some minor raps of 0&0. Also theft. He'd never see minimum-security. Neither would Mad Dog, or M&O, who totaled between them four hundred years. Aggravated battery wi kidnapping and burglary. Judicial winter. Five others suffered these walls for rather personal, non-criminal offenses, primarily the use of drugs. Like me. Chickenshit but profitable for the new penal code, to be sure. And that left Wanda, whose real name was Warren, but Butter-butt figured it sounded more natural, more masculine, to be punking a Wanda because you say "Warren" and motherfuckers take it that you got tendencies as well: just a matter of formality, a language, pride-though my ideas about it were more straightforward than that. But regardless of the circumstances that brought people down, the material to stash was about the same: utilitarian. I knew all of these convicts well enough that at night, in the semi-darkness, I recognized each one by his leg strides and footsteps.

It was M&O who came up to my cube. He was short. Young. Athletic. With com rows. And some sort of bead, a silver, woven through his hair. The designer shades he constantly wore were blacker than silk screen, but he contrasted little to the function of the dorm: body drag, mere complacency, combined in a listless May afternoon. He always hit on you for something.

"Ya don't have no Chocolate Twins?" he asked me.

"No candy, no sweets," I told him, but he looked at me for an instant longer than expected. I said, "There's just no way to rely on that dentist around here. You get a cavity, they'll clean your teeth with shaving stones."

I looked at him with the feeling, I thought {it was a personal thing} of someone enlarging their vision to the circumference of a Ferris wheel.

"I hears that," said M&O, as a flurry of voices shucked through the corridor from the entranceway at the top of the run. There was a beef of some sort which I knew nothing about, nor cared to participate in, so I just fixated the sound into a jazz of overall commentary. It caught M&O, too. He pepped his head up, looking over at the door to see his homeboys in dispute. He wandered off with his purpose and got up there with them, prepared to get down.

But these little skirmishes went on all the time, nearly everywhere, it was hardly anything new. Sometimes it resulted in blood, but to me it was yet another thing to endure: simply by preferring to contribute to myself, and not to the hordes. It could be rough enough just maintaining that. But I hardly gave a fuck about what was stipulated by expectation-from either the courts, who anticipated the self-perpetuating criminal, or by the convicts who only played it in one strict way. I just did my time as would a dolphin among a sea of deadly creatures.

As the warden would say, I didn't measure up. Hardcore, ese, hardcore.

I rubbed my back against the wood of the locker, thinking it might take a couple of trips to move my books through the library turnstile. Of course the cops were up there, security-the thing which prevented me from doing it myself-but anyone who worked there could carry a load of overdue books in. They did it all the time. I couldn't foresee any exceptional problems. I listened to the whirring of Manther's tattoo gun, a few houses down from me. In a few days, the ream of authority would bear down and rip up the yard. I wanted to get on with it. I looked around.

M&O had moved off, somewhere, with his pals. The argument was traveling through our cold, concrete tombs to another wing, another house-to another multiplication-and very little traffic was moving on the ramp. Really, it was kind of peaceful: there were just six people, over at Manther's, watching as he tattooed someone's ankle. But as Rolly got up and walked down the aisle I began thinking: this motherfucker can help clear the gate for me. Rolly had been transferred in recently, but I knew him all the way back to my jailhouse days in Tucson.

1 said, "Rolly, you're a trusty up in the library now?"

He said, "Yes," very sharp and succinctly, intoning a wave through the word like he was riding on it. I'd always appreciated the manner in which he did time.

"You wanna do a little job for me?" 1 asked.

"Well, of course it depends," he said. We were eye-height on each other. His brown hair was still full, even though he was no longer a youngster.

"It's real simple. All 1 need is for you to take my books up to the library before this hoedown next week. 1 can stash them, once they're through security."

He asked, "What's the load look like?"

1 pulled a door open on my locker. They were already bagged up.

"Both of these bags," 1 said. "That's it."

Rolly just worked an eyebrow, beaming and present at the tip of my cube, then said, as a statement, "Books really scare them." He put a hand on top of my cube's ledge, eyes lit.

So 1 grinned back and told him, "Content in any form, really. I've noticed how they keep locking up these yard lawyers, the ones that make headway and get folks released."

"Sure enough."

"But 1 also know what you mean about books. They must only carry romance and science fiction on purpose."

"I'm telling ya,' he said. "It's a big fucking joke up there."

"If you got the balls for that sort of laughter," I told him, but Rolly knew his way around and laughed along with me. As it slapped the walls in our nearly empty strip of housing, 1 thought, for an instant-it was really something like flashboard-of two small bombs going off in a quiet office.

"Hey! Keep it down over there!" someone shouted. Rolly turned his head toward Manther's house, where a young fish was sitting around. The fish only wanted to cut in. Rolly turned his head back, nodding at me that it was nothing: nothing, except somebody was always pushing in.

1 opened up my window again.

"Anyway," said Rolly, "if you want to lug one of those bags for me I'm starting my shift in half an hour."

"All right," 1 said.

''I'll get them through with my other crap. Just a few things, not much."

"I'll be looking out my window," I nodded, "ready for you."

Rolly walked off and I sat down, on my bed. We were under such heavy procedure and security that most people, like Rolly, sensed the value of immediacy in a situation. Even the lames on the yard under, stood this, in their own way, mainly among themselves. It was the auitude which got things done. And, in large part, prevented folks from going to lockdown. Or street court. For mostly nonoffensive, in-house charges, which the administration compounded into statistics for ever, more of the State's money.

I lit a cigarette and got the books from my locker, the grocery bags, and moved them to the bed. It was Saturday, and people began return, ing from visitation. It got crowded. Noisy. Convicts from all over the yard tripped through, some looking for friends, others casing houses, a good many of them hunting the dope bags which came in. Drugs were common in prison because not only did they make people feel better, they altered perimeters within the Correctional ethic of time: which was just a dull, dragging clock, defined by the repetition of daily events. But drugs created a freedom from these chains which hung about, every' where, like so many links to a policy manual. Whites, blacks, Mexican, it didn't matter. Fifty people came through within twenty minutes, husding, jiving, stretching an angle to the fine point of contact. The bull, shit interlaced. By the time Rolly returned and said, "Let's jam," the dorm had become tight. Become grainy. It felt like I was being suctioned with attachments and I wanted to pull them off, but it was difficultnearly impossible-something like flexing your own teeth. There had to be a better way to do really close'up time like this, I thought. Really, there had to be.

Rolly grabbed a bag. I grabbed a bag.

We then headed out.

The yard was scattered with inmates, a few cops. Smoke from the Sweat Lodge oiled the air. The Indians sat out there in a hut beyond the inside fence and sweated, we're told, as part of their spiritual practice. Fine. I got along with the Chiefs like a regular, but today, for some rea' son, their coals put out a hot, sardine stink. I don't know if I was simply unschooled in this ritual, or if the guards had exchanged logs, as a prank-it really smelled of their mentality and underbrain-but I ingest, ed it as yet another sign of forewarning. The stink blew heavily across the tract with the wind, and sheets of dust flew like bedding discarded in an alleyway. Not only did it darken the Complex like an L.A. smog, it plated on the skin and redirectioned the senses as if, suddenly, you were stumbling drunk. I was familiar with the feeling. Rolly knew the feeling.

Halfway across the yard he told me, "Back in Tucson, people stand out in the street and point when they see a cloud going over. They couldn't begin to imagine it down here."

"This really isn't weather," I'd already decided, "it's interrogation."

We moved onward, thinking about it, bucking our flesh against the overswelling gusts. I with one bag, he the other. Folded inside he had another bag with his own stuff. On both bags were other bags, bags we had fitted over the top as lids. All Rolly had to do was take both of them through the gate.

He said, "If you really want to put these on the shelf, get a pass for tonight and I'll leave them out. But they'll be safer if I just stash them, in the cabinet."

"All right," I said.

"If the librarian saw them sitting around, she might react and I mean by writing up an incident report and turning them in."

"I've seen her," I said. "Let's just go with the cabinet."

He said, "Ehhh, buddy," with an inflection of parody, as we came to the side of a building by the gun tower. The gate. We stopped for a second, so I could hand him the books.

"No charge," said Rolly, "since we go back and were once tight."

I said, "You motherfuckers are making a fortune off this deal anyway. Good time to be a trusty, no doubt."

"We have stuff, up there in the library," he said. "Damn near looks like we went through the houses, vacuuming up essentials."

"You be stylin' I'm sure."

"It's high season," he grinned, "what the fuck?" He then rounded the comer with the two bags, just like he'd heisted a couple of watermelons from a supermarket display. But I had confidence that I'd see them again: there were some people you just had to believe in.

I put my head down and started back through the yard, the desert cracking whiplines around my eyes, across my forehead. There were moments when I enjoyed the dorm, but usually I had to make it work, for me, because not only was I slow at times, I had the extra burden of being stupid: jokes went by I didn't understand, or the food that was fought over I couldn't stomach anyway. And much of the hair on the loud music seemed groomed, brushed, uncoiled, thin. Maybe, that was just me. But I was in there so often, there at the center, feeling such tension in the air that my skin felt like vomiting. That's the only way to say it. To say it. There's an energy in reverse, it seems, that just suits up upon itself. Then hangs on you like drywall. Mother. Never get caught. I

walked along. I squinted, looking down as the dust broke from ripples to waves. It gritted on my teeth like dirty linoleum tile. But, for it all, for all the faces that howled from within this iron setup, I sometimes reasoned I had a jump of my own: I felt like a lightning bolt between beehives of grand symphony-reeling, striking, advancing to something above and beyond the walls, something which made me neither bloodthirsty nor elite. As I looked up at the dorm, five young Mexicans were running from a dust devil. They danced with a waving of ballcaps, knees kicking up, like it was some sort of ritual music from home.

I could only see them and not hear their giggling as I walked. That wind finally helped. Then, I was in.

Leather soles scuffing concrete.

Bones cracking in the joint.

Humming tubes of artificial light.

Red eyes, glazed, wondering.

Then corridor-length conversation. I heard locker panels slamming, wood on wood, metal on metal as the air vent was fitted together. Cups dropped. Towels snapped. Water ran loudly down the sink, unattended, as a lone giraffe gargled in my dreams. Windows scooted open, closed, as some of the blacks ran up and down the aisle. The two in the cube across from me sat waiting, on the hips of their beds, anticipating. I lifted then dropped my eyelids.

The dorm began buzzing with hoots, nerves, hyperactivity. Uncirculating blood pulsed in the fingertips. I opened my eyes as M&O went past, shirtless and swaggering, making sounds like he had a locomotive in his chest cavity. I managed to roll over but I had a roommate who said, "Ill-mannered little fucker," and we left it at that.

It was too fucking early in the morning for me. I felt like I was waking with sinus cancer, whatever time it was, but as I reached for a cigarette I heard a brownsuit commanding, "BREAKFAST IN FIVE MINUTES. YOU WILL THEN RETURN TO YOUR HOUSING UNIT UNTIL SUCH TIME AS THE SHAKEDOWN TEAM ARRIVES. YOU WILL BE SECURED IN YOUR UNITS."

I peeked over the top of my cube's ledge. I wanted to make sure I got it right.

Sure enough, the old throat giving orders was just an administrative sergeant, nobody we'd ever seen before. So instead of possible questions, 191

TRIQUARTERLY

she received nothing more than a push-off.

"GIT ON OUT OF HERE, YA STINKY OLD WHORE!"

"YA DOUCHE WITH MEXICAN TAP WATER, SARGE!"

She said, "WE WILL COME THROUGH HERE, ANY WAY YOU WANT IT. ORDERS ARE IN EFFECT FOR TODAY."

"YA OLD BUFFALO HUNTER!"

She pushed out the door, locking it behind her. Half a dozen laquered faces stood with her, some in the guards' cage, looking down the run at us. They mingled like ticket holders at a ballgame, only stiffly. One of them, one big greasy slob, wore a helmet with a face shield and carried a shotgun. I thought, he's on the payroll to make sure I don't read. I lay back down and lit up a tailor, as conversations splintered woodenly, numbing.

Then two things dawned on me which helped explain the dorm's jitters: not only was the Sarge's voice an unknown, it was Monday, not Wednesday, and Monday wasn't anticipated. Strange, though, because I knew most people were ready. As the nicotine absorbed in my blood I just lay there, not understanding the dimensional shock. Rolly went by and I asked, "What time is it?"

"Not even six," he said. I heard him lighting a cigarette, next to me in his cube.

That's another thing, I thought. Some of us never get up until noon including me. I reasoned that mornings were an active write-up shift, and my strategy was to skate as much as possible. I was thinking of minimum, of the streets. But it wasn't even six o'clock yet. No wonder people were already feeling hammered, beat. Across from me, sunken in the concrete above my neighbor's locker, the small barred window looked like lips peeled back and affixed with a shine. This was sun, the beginning of morning.

Rolly poked his head around, looking into my cube. I drew again on my cigarette.

"Get your ass up and do time," he told me, but the look on his face wasn't a challenge.

I exhaled in his direction. This shit of waking up was pointless.

"You want to hear some facts?" he asked me.

I said, "Go ahead. I'm nothing but earcone."

"All right," he smiled, "they're shaking the other houses down before us. That's three hundred people. They won't even be here till late afternoon. Also, M&O's on the way out, along with one of his buddies. Cops are gonna roll 'em up during breakfast."

Rolly dragged casually on his cigarette, gripping it between his fore' finger and thumb. I now had the facts.

I said, "Serves the little prick right. These cretins are coming through to abuse us, and he thinks we're having a party."

Just as I said that, M&O walked by. As he bent down to whisper something to my neighbor I saw the muscles-traps-expand in his neck.

"So fuck 'im," I said.

"Yeah," said Rolly, "I agree. So do most of the people on the run."

"It's a complicated kindergarten," I said, "but I've noticed. And maybe now, since we've got all day, I'll stretch my shit out and go back to sleep."

"Let's go to breakfast, long as we're up," he said. "Hey, why not?"

"All right," I agreed. "I suppose."

I sat up, yawned, took a last hit on my cigarette then tapped it out in the ashtray. It was good having someone like Rolly around, someone who understood the caravan much in the manner that I did: most of it was toss'off. I slipped my rough State jeans on, feeling them crease into my skin. I thought, it's not just these pants: the whole fucking dorm is like wearing an overcoat, an old stuffy overcoat that's too tight in the sleeves. But not only was that my main problem, others, by their reactions, by the things they said and the webs in their eyes, stated as much in a sort of absence. Rolly and I went in and ate the eggwhip. It was tasteless, oversalted, grayish, like the clouds.

It was fucking hot coming back from the chowhall it was always hot out there, but the wind hadn't yet picked up. It would. It wouldn't help. Spider, walking a step or two ahead of us, hacked up a louie and spit it in the dirt. Yeah. But as we cleared the side of the chowhall and came into the yard, the first thing we saw were cops. Outsiders. Their special fucking scavenger crew, brought in as a "service patrol." They were milling around our dorm, twenty or so, some of them going in and out of the door. Vigorously. Carelessly. But oh so importantly. An old white pickup truck was parked outside on the walk.

"Change of plan," said Rolly. "Looks like we're first."

"What the fuck?" asked Spider.

"I'll bet when M&O brought the heat, they got in and decided to stay," I said.

"Yes," said Rolly, slowing up and lighting a cigarette. "They figured, 'Why lug the team around when we're already here?'"

"That rnu-ther-fuck-er," said Spider. "I've still got some shit in my locker."

"Better get it now," said Rolly, "before they crawl up our ass with a flashlight."

As Spider hurried off, a call came over the loudspeaker: "TENSION ON THE YARDS-ards-ards. ALL RESIDENTS OF HOUSE FOUR REPORT TO YOUR UNIT A.S.A.P!" and we did, since we had no other place to go. Rolly said, "I know they can't touch me," and while I also thought it was true for myself, I didn't at all like the idea of them shuffling through my cube. Getting in close, under the guise of security. I took a pull off of Rolly's cigarette as we walked, scraping my lungs like I was choking down hot bricks. It was still too early in the morning for me.

Spider had made it in, but the cops were all over. In the dayroom, the guards' cage, pitter-pattering along the ramp. Three of them were at M&O's, going through his stuff. M&O stood quietly (for a change) and watched, trying to look bad: the expression on his lips said, "Wha' th' fuck, man, wha' th' fuck!" but to me it really looked more like exertion. Nobody bothered to ask him what it was all about. Nobody got close to him at all.

His shit was boxed up and wheeled out the door. They led him down the ramp, shirtless but freehanded, only now they had his sunglasses. His character. But just as they escorted him out the door, six cops stormed through like precinct rookies. Like cadets, practicing for a house raid. Why? What was the exhibition all about? Others followed, as the first ones lined up against the wall. I turned and noticed a young Mexican up the run, looking nervous, antsy, fidgeting in his cube. The Torch, right next to Spider. But really, just standing there with that look. I thought the best thing to do was simply lie down and twiddle my thumbs, so I did.

"GENTLEMEN, EVERYONE STAND AT THE FOOT OF YOUR BED. WE'LL BE INSPECTING YOUR HOUSES AS SOON AS YOU'RE COUNTED. YOUR COOPERATION WILL SPEED THIS ENTIRE PROCEDURE ALONG."

Bastards. I stood at the foot of my bed and was counted. Then I sat down, waiting.

They came inspecting, all right, but now each one of them had a partner. A woman. One of the female "counselors" from the Admin building, who had also put in for this shift: the counselors would get double-time pay from their supervisors, because the supervisors ranked this as "hazardous duty." Some scam. Most of them, like the others, we didn't even know. Our own fucking counselors. But instead of adding a softer, feminine border to the touch of Statehood, they clawed at our

quarters like leopards after jungle meat. Starting with the first house, first cube, first party on the count sheet.

"Take everything out of your locker and put it on your bed, and I mean everything," she told Spider. Loudly, coarse. "Clothes, towel, books, radio, tapes, Bible. Legal papers. I want to see your folders." She scanned a checklist, up close with her pen, brown tassles of pageant hair flying. But her skin was the texture of old foam. I noticed the young one, the one who stood next to her.

"Shaving kit and personal-hygiene effects," she continued. "I want to see your number etched on your reading lamp, radio and I guess you don't have a television here. Stationery supplies are now limited to one notebook and a box of envelopes. I want to see them now."

She was standing over Spider at the foot of his bed, while her partner crowded the cube. Just staring. Supervising. Watching each move that he made. Behind his cube stood the slob with the shotgun. The cop in Spider's house said to his partner, "This guy's got five pairs of socks, Lilly. Aren't socks a limited item?"

The dorm was suddenly quiet. My ears rang a little.

Lilly moved in, checking her list. She brushed against the cop for a moment, almost like they were nuzzling. They looked crude together, I saw them; glaring, overfed: "The provision calls for three pairs. I'll start making a pile, for his box of disallowables," she said, and I, at that point, sickened by their grayness, pictured two rats fucking in the trash behind the State House, atop a discarded copy of the Arizona Revised Statutes.

Title 31.

Rolly looked in over the top of my cell ledge. "If she was born count, ing, she'd still be in single digits," he said. I laughed no problem, but I also remembered my writing board. It was big enough that I could place it on a box and have a table, but small enough that I could hold it in my lap and make a portable out of it. But it was contraband. Their policy against writing materials. I slipped my board on a special, convict, designed rail at the top of my bottom locker, fitting it flush so it would only feel like a piece of unfinished wood.

The agents, cops, counselors wandered around, ransacking the cubes in a spirit of duty. Lord. Close-up time. I felt I was resisting a colony of moles while being packed down under, down in the earth, but I forgot about that when they got to my cube. They also hit my neighbors, Tombstone and Pinky. My cellmate as well. The first thing I sensed was that they felt comfort from the whole thing.

"Open your locker for us, will you?" asked the girl, the same girl I had

watched near Spider's. "This won't take very long."

"Spread your things out on the bed, sir," said the cop. He was young but seemed tight, inflexible, braided like a wire cable. Mustache-trim polished. The girl just looked like a Mexican teenybopper: Americanized but sexy in these slick, gray pants. Pure-bone mama. I started by pulling my few clothes out.

Then the cop said, pointing, "What about those cassette tapes? You have property receipts for those tapes?"

"Sure," I said, but as I looked through my file of papers I could only find six receipts. I had a total of twelve tapes, actually, that had come through the mail and were legally on my books.

The cop said, "Juanita, mark down on his inventory sheet an inventory of six tapes. Sir, the others are contraband."

"Now, wait just a minute," I said.

"All items that can't be documented, we consider contraband," he said. He became adamant about his argument, log rolling, but the bulk of it was so far down in the lower-human register I couldn't distinguish it from dog fat. Juanita placed my tapes in a box, then he got in my locker and began pulling things out. Pencils, paper, a bottle of whiteout. Not as if he owned them himself, but almost like the function of my shit was for a mutual welfare, a welfare I wasn't even part of. I was losing out to the proportion of some ill-sided equation and it was apparent, now, to us all.

"Juanita, this pencil sharpener? This eraser?"

But it wasn't like they were merely playing trivia with my stuff, and I would lose some tapes with other small, but important items. That, in fact, happened to everyone, daily. It was more just a matter of watching-up close-as they worked every surface and diameter of my household, that I realized exactly what it all meant: that power is simply the formality of disregard. Here, in my locker. Out, in the streets. Time and again we suffer the fools, the subordinate, the weary definition of predominance: a highly formulated racket, I thought; self-replicating but rather padded in the forehead. There was nothing to do but let them go at it.

As I hung around, effectively in absentia (the feeling was that of being outside this strange scratch of human netting), I watched Juanita's ass work those haunch-round, snug corduroys. Mmm, looked good, looked good to the entire run, but my mind skipped to other times, other places, other women I had seen. The dorm was cramping with minion heat but there was someone, a woman, not only of form and figure, but a

dance which precedes the motion of her body. Eyes sparkling, with the tenor of simple being. Simple beauty. Glowing within her rhythms so warmly that you connect fully-completely-as if her mind and flesh were electric latches: a thing of the sun, of mercy. Of light spreading across a midwest cornfield in early July harvest give this to me once, lord, before I die, and our negotiations will begin even once more: just someone who smiles from the guts of joy. That'll work. But not these servile attendants prowling the dorm, these faces of rain I lift away from. Let's settle someday, but someday as in soon.

I was drifting, Holmes, drifting. Big shakedown, I was drifting.

Then the box patrol came in and dollied out a load of our belongings to the truck. I returned, watching. That truck would be making more than one trip, no question about it. Outside, we listened as the old engine turned over. It circulated, it roared. The cop waited. But Juanita and her partner seemed to be backing off now. Slowly, bit by bit.

They were nearly finished with my house, but Tombstone had enough stuff to keep the pair working his place occupied for another hour. Or so it seemed, the way he was making a point out of every worn item he owned. Rolly had sailed through, but it didn't surprise me since he had just gotten here. "I know they can't touch me," he had said earlier, and I now laughed because it was his idea of a joke. Spider watched the run from his bed, also through. Even Juanita just sort of lolled around.

But the Mexican up from Spider, The Torch, looked even more selfcornered than when he'd stood there with the look. He was figuring that the cops had him, I believed, by the element of surprise. He almost looked stunned. Goddamn, I thought, whatever it is.

"Will these men be issued a sack lunch?" the cop at my bed suddenly asked Juanita.

"Yes," she said. "Promptly at thirteen hundred hours."

Shit, I thought, a sack lunch, as exhaust from the pickup idled in from the yard. A cop started yelling, "Cut the air on in here! Jesus, my lungs!"

Another cop, who'd been drifting the door by the shotgun, went out and flicked the switch. The vents buckled and the air shot out-cool, it felt good-but a rattling sound vibrated overhead at The Torch's. The Torch stood in his cube and bleached lighter than his skin color, his right hand shaking like he was salting an ear of corn. Goddamn, I thought, be convict. It's the last active right you'll be given until the graveyard.

"CELL SIXTEEN!" shouted one of the cops, and their whole fucking

aggregate, like mules, clopped over. The cop who had yelled just pointed at the air vent, wrist up, like he'd been specially instructed on the application of that finger.

"Up here," he said. "Somebody get a screwdriver."

As everyone watched the grill come off, Rolly reached over and grabbed the tapes from my box. My box of contraband items. I said nothing, but started realizing how useful boosting skills could be.

"I think I've got it," said the cop. He was standing on Torch's bed, hand jammed into the vent.

"Here it is," he said, everyone looking.

But all he had was a cassette player, and as he pulled it from the vent the cord snagged on a piece of the fitted metal. It gave way, snapping to his cheek.

"AH-HA!" he said. A few people started laughing.

The cops milled for a second, rubbing flares of uniform on each other before walking back to our cubes. It was up to the loud cop, apparently, to decide if the deck was a matter of incident. But since he'd have to figure out who'd stashed it, regardless of The Torch's giveaway, the problem for the run was: would he lie? We wouldn't find out for weeks, until the paperwork could be neatly arranged.

"I think we're about done here," the cop said to me, to Juanita, as they came back to my cell. He stood tall in my cube, masterful in the program of physical intimidation. "Check his contraband against your list. Let's make sure we get that list right before we go."

He put his hands on his hips and turned, looking down the run. Manther was across the ramp at a three-house distance, eyeing The Torch. Juanita sat on the bed and dug into my contraband box, my "excess" clothes, pencils, white-out, etc. She tossed them around with a peculiar sort of aversion, plowing her ass in my bed. Then she said, "Hey!"

The cop looked over, looked down at Juanita. "I can't find his tapes," she said. She lowered her voice, saying sternly, "His cassette tapes are missing!"

The cop looked at me with scorn. With seething, almost parental anger. I had nothing to volunteer.

"You're certain?" he asked her.

"They're gone," she said.

He glared at me a second longer, telling her: "Take the other onesjust for starters."

"I've got paper on those in triplicate around the yard," I said. "If you

want to fuck with 'em, I'll take it up to the Major."

"Then where are they?" he asked. Both of them were staring.

"Search me," I said. I looked at them, looked back. "You're responsible. You've taken custody."

"Unless you stole them," he said, "which seems more than likely to me. I can file the appropriate charges on you, if I want."

I pictured him seated at a comer table in the bar, expressionless, laying it all out incrementally to his pals. Somebody else would be buying.

"If you wanna put the buff on this deal, you're entitled," I said. And, that's all I said.

He paused, then told Juanita, "Check his locker. Maybe he put them back in."

She leaned into the thing, wriggling her young tail and pushing my stuff around. I noticed Spider looking her over from the top of the run.

Juanita came up empty handed.

"He's a clever one," she said.

"Let's go," said the cop. But he told me: "Remember, I'll be watching you." I didn't think that was any news at all, so I watched them leave without saying a word. Juanita toted my box.

I stood up and opened the window. The earth I saw stretched for miles. Fruitless, still, crusted in bronze. The hot morning air came slowly through the grate, but I felt it loosening up my cell. Juanita had been right: it didn't take long for them to paw through.

They all filed out, soon after that. People moved around again, going from cell to cell. As I figured, Tombstone's house was the one that took the longest. Rolly came over and I pulled out the smokes.

"Good work," I said. "They won't be back."

"Probably not," he said, "but they'll always be around."

I said, "Yeah, there's a trick to that part."

"Naturally," he said, then he looked over at my roommate. In a sense, I hadn't been totally around. I really hadn't noticed him. I handed him a Camel filter, lit all of us up.

"Well," Rolly asked him, "did they cut your action back at all?"

"Naw," he said, "but you know what? It was kinda like having a dormful of M&O's running around bunch of ignorant motherfuckers."

"Well, at least he's gone," said Rolly. "That only leaves about how many more?"

"Thing is," my cellie went on, "this is only a state joint. Half the people are in for real stupid, bungled shit, and the others ain't really done nothin' at all. They put these mixtures in, like Manther and The Torch.

TRIQUARTERLY

You heard 'em earlier, right? Manther knew that The Torch stole his radio, but he couldn't prove it. Said he'd tear him a new asshole, though, if he ever found out. That was this morning."

"I was asleep," I said.

"Yeah. Well, that Torch has seen what Manther can do to a motherfucker. He's scared. And now the cops got the deck. I've been sitting here, just watching Manth shoot his eyes down the ramp. It's gonna get hot in here before the day's over. Count on it."

"What time you say it was?" I asked Rolly.

"Eight-thirty, nine. We'll be locked down all day," he said.

"Anyway," said my cellie, "my point is that these stupid convicts in these state joints get themselves killed over nothin'. Lots of them do. There's only about twenty-percent smart con in these state joints. But the real smart cons, the money makers, the stock market and extortion dudes, all of them's in the federal pens. If you wanna be smart next time, cover your ass with a little mail fraud. That's what I'm gonna do. Then if the state comes up and beefs you for somethin, you only gotta snitch yourself off to the feds. An' shit, they pick up your state time and run it c.c. No more of these Torch idiots. Or M&O's, for that matter. You got a way to get around in there."

"Almost sounds good," I said.

"If ya learn nothin' else here, just remember my advice," he said. "Know why it only took an hour for this shakedown? State joints are impoverished!

"Sassing me, motherfucker?" came a voice off the ramp, one of many we'd hear all day long. I had learned how to cup my ears, from the inside when I wanted, when I needed to block it away.

Like now.

Spider walked down, hyper, a bit rattled. Maybe they had gotten to his shit, I didn't ask, but he usually tried to dodge them with a smoke of Christianity. It was his only real hustle, but he never seemed to get far with it. He only seemed, really, to get more mixed up. I was leaning back against the wall, smoking with Rolly. Tombstone glanced at Spider from across the run.

"See that bitch picking through my cube?" he asked us, he told us. "One fine-looking lady!"

I'd seen better looking gas pumps, so I asked, "Spider, when was the last time you were tested?"

"Holmes, I'm serious," he said.

"We know you are," said my cellie.

"And we thought you had more heart than that," said Rolly. Spider swayed in the aisle, only to look at Rolly and say, "Some of them are big in the Bible, too. The Bible says, 'Plentiful.'"

"Get off that shit," Rolly told him. "The Bible's nothing more than a law book."

"I'll show you sass, you want sass, you hole eater?" the ramp voice asked.

"But it's the Bible," Spider argued lamely.

Manther came up, a rolled cigarette smoking at his orange fingertips. His tattoos were clean, some of which he'd tacked on by himself. He sat next to my cellie, on my cellie's bunk, simply because he belonged. Rolly hit his Camel. I hit mine, my cellie hit his. Tombstone exhaled a large plume through the fly screen on his window, into the dust, into the sun. All the way from a reclining position on his bed. Manther was just there.

"Now, Juanita," I told Spider, "the one who did me, she had something to notice. Even though she ruined it, by flaunting it to us like a torture."

"Yeah she did," said Manther. Always, he was always direct.

"She didn't have that much," said Spider.

"What are you talking about?" Manther told him. "She was tight. I could see the wrinkle all the way from my crib."

Laughter. Beat the rest of the time down to hell.

"And when she got in here and started handling things, I nearly broke down praying from the agony," I said. "She set something off."

"O.K.," said Spider, "but I also noticed mine." He then turned and walked off, almost as if he were offended. The rest of us just hung around, blowing smoke.

"You're just a sniveling little prick," came the ramp voice, "sniveling!"

"Got a problem? Huh? Got a problem?"

Manther held out his burned snub, glancing around the cube. I stood for an ashtray, looking again through my window. The earth was now gold, this high color that dust gets when it shimmers in the morning. The sky was blue and the sun was up there, my head, continuing continuing exploding over the sun: you had to be able to disengage, I thought, for this really close-up sort of time. You only had to get over these walls. The trick was to walk away from your own fucking skeleton.

"Those books are stashed good, but if you want I can pick them up tomorrow," said Rolly.

"Whatever you think's best," I told him. "I'm with you."

TRIQUARTERLY

"Gonna cut off your pieces, motherfucker!" said the ramp. "I'll show you a set you ain't never gonna get past!"

I pulled out my writing board and sat it on top of a cardboard box. I put my ashtray down, and my cellie threw out a pack of smokes. We sat around the table waiting, listening, listening to the ramp voices and waiting on their sacked, venom lunch. Time, I thought, you will never really get me.

For me, the shakedown was over.

The Matador's Bad Dream [black-and-white]

Variations on the Robe

Tony came down with the other fish one afternoon, a bit chubby with jail fat, but otherwise looking like a typical side street youngster: crystal meth, filtered cigarettes, smart hands under the hood of a Chevy. His pale, bright skin set his large eyes glowing in the sun, but he appeared somewhat yoked about having to do iron time: just distanced by youth from the constant atmosphere of domain in a prison. It looked like he'd run with the perpetuated street trends, unaware of who ultimately controlled them, still disbelieving after months and months of judicial robes: even now, as he waited outside the yard office with the eight others in his train, wearing his first state-issue and lugging the olive green duffle bag. He was young, impressionable, fresh. Obviously so. He was here on his first number.

In fact, the judge had given Tony seven years for his part-time work in a Phoenix chop shop: he'd made two-hundred dollars every Saturday afternoon, customizing interiors on a variety of stolen cars. In a garage somewhere around his old neighborhood. It was one of the few things he knew how to do, and about the only skill he had picked up in high school. And besides selling small amounts of crystal, infrequently, to his friends, it was also the only way he had of making money. He was just standing in the dirt, about twenty feet from the fence which separated the yard office from the yard proper, sucking on his cheeks. The guards were inside, ritualizing the procedure of simple housing assignments. He didn't know anyone on the yard.

"Hey, you pussy�packin' motherfucker! I'm talking to you, punk!"

A group of convicts had lined up at the fence. They were looking over the arrivals, welcoming them with hatred, stares, low prospects. It was something institutional, learned by the rote of abnegation. It was like a sort of self-induced retching.

Tony felt the air around him scale down to a chokehold. He gripped tighter on the handle of the duffle bag, an icy smoke dampening his armpits. But his major conflict was the reaction to look: to spin his head around from the glare of the yard office, and look at the faces wandering the fence. Instead he moved in a half-motion and froze. But he noticed someone else had turned completely around, almost as if summoned by 203

the calls. Tony just waited there in an awkward stance, feeling his heart race, feeling encumbered.

"You little shit-faced asshole," the fence said to the guy who had turned around. "You'll be coming out of that gate in a minute, won't you?"

"Won't you, you little fucking punk!"

It was thrown out to the arrival like a contrary revelation. Tony still didn't know what to do, but knew enough not to feed into the fence or to play on the side of the guy who had turned around. The turnaround was trapped: by the inmates who darkened the fence up ahead, and by the guards, behind him, who lounged in the yard office. Tony was straight off the DOC bus. But even though there were eight others with him, Tony felt he may have telegraphed an emotion: a feeling, some flesh, an instinct that occurred through personal habit. The sensation came through that he'd also been busted---or caught with his youthful responses-and he would now have to deal his way out as if he had, in fact, actually spun around and faced the onlookers at the fence. But he couldn't be sure. It could go either way. A rock skipped by in the dirt near the turn-around, and Tony decided to hold his position. It was as if he'd barricaded himself in a silk lining from a stampede, but this was the spot he was forced into now. Then he slowly became aware of a hinge squeaking in a far-off, unknown direction within the Complex. It sounded like the tune of a large, dying bird-a five-note zig-zag pattern that ended with a bugle call-and went directly to his head like it was being massaged through his skull. He listened intensely, staring at a doorknob on the yard office, his peripheral vision closing with blackness. The catcalls and yelling continued, like arrows fired at stranded prey on a shoreline.

"Think you been bad, huh punk?"

"Motherfucker looks about lame."

"They all be lookin' like lame-ass bitches!"

"And you right here at the gate, motherfucker

That strange, five-note zig-zag played in Tony's head. He lost track on which side of him it originated, the inside or the out. His knees tightened around an impulse to somehow break away: seven years at halftime, nineteen years old. The darkness took everything, blackened Tony's surroundings, until he looked as if he was standing there in a coma. The turnaround only pulled his face inward with terror at the shouting

Out on the yard it was hot. The winter air that had been around for ages, it seemed, blew off one night and the sun came through. It had baked the camp to a hard, desert crust. This heat made you feel like you were in the lungs of a fever patient, even when accustomed to it. But since this was only the first of the season-late March south of Tucson, not more than a parade banner from the Mexican border-the inmates on the yard moved slow, moved sluggishly, as they went about their institutional routines: the rock rakers coughed, the maintenance workers only carried one tool, the land porters pretended to find trash in the shade. And the scoring in the softball game mostly resulted from infield errors. It was over ninety degrees out, even in those thin spottings of shade, but most of the population had come out to mill around and to circulate. The dirt on the yard had been scraped down to the plow.

I was leaning against this useless fence near the tool shack with someone I didn't know, called Razor. Tony and the other arrivals weren't far from us, just a handscope across the walkway to the right, which Razor kept pointing out to me while he tried getting a line on them: "I think all them's straight off the tuna boat, except maybe for that one on the end," he would say. I didn't really care who they were, since I hadn't recognized any of the faces. I was only there for the sun, to work my skin and to get away from the dorm. I only wanted to get some air.

But I squatted and looked over again, while the teams left the field and exchanged gloves for a new inning.

The nine of them had lined up in the dirt, and were waiting for the guard to come back with some instructions. They all faced the yard office, except for the turnaround, in the direction of the single, rectangular window. It had been painted a dark, eggplant-like pigment about two-thirds of the way up. This way the guards could peek out, as they wished, but the arrivals couldn't look in and see what was happening. The guards figured it really didn't matter: this was the last American exit, a place where acknowledgment no longer was required. But most of the arrivals had worried, expectant looks on their faces, and the fence continued to demand recognition. The turnaround, in particular, looked like he was counting on the guards to take care of matters for him.

But they didn't.

A young, sarcastic officer, thin as an oar, came out with a clipboard and began yelling names, numbers, dormitory assignments. He read them quickly and looked at no one. He just arched his voice in a cocky, authoritarian front, then quickly ducked back inside. Nothing more. Didn't even bother asking if anyone had questions. Tony was only told

"4�E� 10." So was the tum around. All of them walked slowly toward the gate, in silence, their eyes fixed out on the sprawl of the yard. It was like dropping sea horses into a tank full of piranhas. Tony's heart swelled up and beat red flashing punches.

"Lookit this here boy comin' along," said the fence.

"I think we got us a pnme-cut," said another, all of them looking at the turnaround.

Tony sensed that he wasn't being picked out of the line by finger pointing, but the static which jumped through his legs almost made him lurch into the inmate in front of him. They were going so fucking slow. Or they weren't going at all, it was hard for him to tell. But he could hear the p�foot p'-foot of their heavy boots scraping along. It gave him some comfort, though really not much, but he was relieved he hadn't been booked from a moment ago when he'd nearly spun his head to the voices.

"Hey, Lonnie, why don't you go scout this thang for me? I'll be wanting to stop in and pay him a visit."

"All right, Eliot. Know it's your world."

As one of the convicts moved to follow the turnaround, Tony knew that a judgment was being made. He didn't come close to understanding this in terms of the parliamentary yard, but he knew enough to realize that control was being placed on someone. He was just glad it wasn't him. The thing that mattered at this point, he thought, was to simply keep his bearings straight.

He moved across the yard with the duffle bag on his back and the zigzag out of his ear: it was a sound much too isolated for him to keep up with. He felt the eyes upon him as he crunched through the dirt, the gravel, on the walking track to his dorm-which was lettered in huge, block numerals on the outside, minimalizing some of his confusion-but he wasn't sure about the jeers, the whistling, that went on around him. He ignored it best as he could, feeling his face as the sun brought the salt to his skin. Maintain, he thought, I've just got to maintain. The turnaround, again, was the one having real problems: stumbling along, close to a panic, and rapidly sucking down quick, short breaths.

But the seven other arrivals had pulled different housing. Tony knew that the scout was behind them, behind him and the turnaround, moving from the fence and watching. He felt awkward being one of the few inmates, among hundreds, who carried a duffle bag out there-a bit rubbery in the head, and marked by contrast-but the dorm came up sooner than expected and he plowed through, locating the E�wing.

He got lucky. Tony found his bunk, and within five minutes had unloaded the crap in his duffle bag-just heavy state clothes which he threw into a small, metal locker. He noticed a card game going on a few houses down but he still didn't know what to do, just what would be expected, though the tension he felt suddenly shifted as the turnaround screamed from out in the dayroom. About twenty people sprang from his wing and ran down the aisle, to look on, some peering from the glass which boxed-off the guard's cage but most of them pushing through the door. Tony was among those who watched from the inside, looking through the glass and thick, wire screen.

But nobody was even on the turnaround. He had come through the entrance of the dayroom, overwhelmed by the consequences of spinning in the arrival line, to break from an inability to think he could resolve the matter in his favor. To simply stand up for himself, should he later be forced to do so. He was up against the cinder blocks, wedged to the telephone frame, his eyes loaded with fear and mistrust. His arms were raised chest-high and he flapped them, comically, like a puppet chopping wood in a department store window.

The inmates in the dayroom gathered round.

"Fucker's having an attack," someone shouted.

"No, he's freaking."

"Need Thorazine!" a high voice suggested.

"Don't crowd him. He might convulse and hurt you."

The open-lung screams that came from his terror were now hollow, thin, throaty grunts and moans. Tony put his palm on the cage window, intrigued and a bit frightened, watching the house cop run up the corridor. The cop had his radio in hand, but tried making sense of the situation before doing a thing. Ugh. Always a disadvantage, when crucial calls are handled by minds jobbed on authority. The red tape rolled through the cop's head and went nowhere-you only picked up on his impulse of crowd control-but two other e.O.s heard the yelling from outside. They came in, parting the crowd with spear-like arm gestures. The turnaround only had a distant look in his eyes, like he'd been watching a horror show through the barrel of a microscope.

"This ten-fifteen properly managed?" one e.o. asked, everyone silent.

"I think we ought to get him out of here," said the house cop. "Looks like he mighta been smoking that jimson weed that these guys in horticulture bring back."

"I got a pair of cuffs," said the other e.O., snagging the turnaround's wrist while his partner grabbed the kid in the armpit. The turnaround

gasped as he was slowly led away, out through the door, into the view and summation of the entire yard. A sort of mucous was forming in the comers of his eyes.

"Where they taking him?" asked Tony.

"C.D.U.," an older con said in a heavy, Southern accent. He began walking off.

"That around here?" Tony asked, following the others.

"Shit man, that's lockdown!" said a tall, muscular guy.

"Central Detention Unit," someone schooled him.

"That motherfucker just got off the bus with me," Tony informed them. "Look at the shit that goes on around here."

"Happens all the time, man. This is a really fucked-up joint."

Tony now was more interested in the contact he was making: he didn't want to end up like the turnaround. He followed the Southem accent and the muscle back to their card game. The accent was Chester. The muscle was Chop-Chop. Tony latched onto them.

"What do you think they'll do with that guy in C.D.U.?" asked Tony, leaning into the cubicle walL

They weren't exactly eager to talk with a fish, and let the question pass. Tony looked down and pursued them through their card game.

"You guys is playing poker, huh? Whadaya call this game?"

Chop-Chop deliberated on a card, then said, "Split-Ace thirty-one."

"Never heard of it," said Tony, "and I played all types of poker." He then asked, "What is it?"

Chester dropped the K of diamonds on an unconnected run of cards, stared down, answered "Sheet!" to Tony's question. Tony drew his head up and looked through the run.

"How long 'er' you in Alhambra?" asked Chop-Chop. He was still looking at the board.

Tony looked back at him, feeling good because he'd been asked something.

"Three months," he said. "And I was in the Phoenix jail for almost a year before that."

He waited. Somebody in one of the end cubes turned up a loud, pop� metal tune on the radio, but just as quickly turned it back down. The dorm was like dusk. Chop-Chop threw out a card, then looked up and studied Tony.

"It was fucked up," Tony told Chop-Chop, looking into his eyes. Chop-Chop's face was narrow, a flatiron, beneath rust-colored hair. Tony was confident about the description.

"Just wait till you been round here awhilst," said Chester. "This is where fucked-up breeds like a kennel."

"Yeah it is," said Tony, noticing Chester's missing lower teeth. He was stocky, a mid-age fellow with sandy-blond hair, and his forehead was creased unlike anything Tony had seen before. Six of his front teeth were missing, and he had these two old fire plugs rotting in one comer of his mouth. But Tony only saw fat, yellow teeth. He looked into Chester's eyes.

"Met your cellie yet?" asked Chop-Chop, a grin on his face.

"Fuck no," said Tony, laying his arms on the ledge and cracking an ankle. "What's wrong with him?"

"He's a shit-sick lame," Chop-Chop told him, laughing with Chester about something that was known. Tony looked at the two, wondering, biting the flesh of his cheeks with his molars. "Ya don't want no lames cellin' down with you, do ya kid?" asked Chester. Tony already knew how to handle that one. It was becoming obvious to him.

"Fuck a bunch of lames," he said, but his answer didn't matter. Another inmate walked out of the run and Chester leaned back, slapped down a card, yelled "Git that fucker to tum them coo-lers on in here!" Tony watched as the guy said something to the house cop, who then rolled on his chair to a comer of the cage. He flipped a switch with the key. The vents over Tony's head popped like enormous beer cans, squealed, and blew dusty air throughout the run.

But the swamp coolers weren't bothering him at all. In fact, the remark about his cellie didn't register much either, because now he was talking-communicating-siding with people, the same people who were going to be his neighbors. It either clicked fast in these situations, or it didn't happen at all: Tony knew that from the County lockup. But what he didn't know was that Chester ran a store, employing ChopChop as one of his collectors. And he couldn't have known what all of that meant, except it was hustle, and some of those moves he'd learned on the streets.

Yet he did feel that a sort of initial gray webbing had been lifted, and was gradually being replaced with something solid: solid in contrast to Alhambra, to the Phoenix jail, and certainly in contrast to the turnaround. Chop-Chop offered a fresh pouch of tobacco: good deal, thought Tony, since for months he'd been twisting up snipes in Bible paper. He moved to Chester's bed and rolled a handful, loosening his shoulders, paying little attention to the card game in this dark, rectan-

gular prison run. Just having worked through this blind spot was the important thing, he felt, the thing so much else would be resting on in tone. He bummed a lighter and fired up the rollie. He sucked the smoke down, alert, feeling as if he would fit in after all.

Out on the field, the ballgame was almost over. The Repeat Offenders had something like a twenty-run lead over a new team, The Lay-Ins, but I wasn't much interested. I was stretched in the dirt, leaning against a fence near the perimeter. It felt good to be out there in the heat, to know the cops hadn't yet discovered how to regulate the sun. I gazed as a cloud went past in the shape of an angel fish. I looked long and hard though completely at ease, rather feeling I was in a vase, looking up at the petal on an imaginary flower. Then I dropped my eyes to the roof above a dorm, to the flags waving on the pole outside of the Complex. A roll of clouds bunkered in the southwest, over the Mexican flea town of Agua Prieta, beyond the flagpole but not far from our camp. They looked dark, gummy. Tense, actually, and suspended as if in a slingshot. Like the 4 P.M. lockdown count, they would soon be upon us.

I gathered up and started walking, on the track, just as the game was being called. I managed to get two laps in before the curfew hom sound, ed, circling on the partial lap back to my dorm. Dorm 4,E. Bed twenty' six. I got in and Tony was just down the run from me. I recognized what was happening by the way he hung out: the loud voice, the posture, the way he adjusted to play the residue which sifts through the restrictions. He was bargaining with Chop-Chop and Chester, working a deal to col, lect for the store. But too fast, too quick, he had no idea what he was getting involved with. Really no idea at all.

Then the clouds thundered in and it poured for a few days. I was forced to hang around, inside the house, and listen as Tony matured as a thug. Or tried to mature. "Damn right!" he would say, or "Fuck them lames!" It hardly mattered what the question was: a majority of the game involved the status of being obnoxious. And, of getting away with it. This is how it happens. A few days later, when the rain let up, a weary admixture of convicted Arizona residents finally hit the yard again, that sunshine, that heat. "I got an assignment for you, youngster," Chester yelled down the ramp. I only hoped for sporadic peace and quiet, for random elevations of silence in the dorm. Though nothing had been spoken of the turnaround, Tony, now, was becoming a clown.

Inside the dorm it was still hot: four inmates were near punches over a

cigarette lighter that was missing from a locker, an unvented bag of brew had just exploded in someone's house, and Jesse-in the head-was sit, ting on the crapper shooting junk with a binky: a cut'down syringe (minus plunger) that's been modified with a paper cap, then held on the rig with a rubber band. Bloody ragged and rough time. The coolers blew hard and Pine,Sol was mopped around, but the run still smelled like an animal pound that had been slickened with canned peaches.

I was busy with a mattress I'd just acquired. Tony's roommate, only in the cube a few days, had been run out of the pod by Tony when he found that the guy was a laxative freak: he had all sorts of pills and creamy shit which he drank, ritually, all day long, spending the rest of his time on the crapper. It almost appeared to be something sexual, but however it went it wasn't tolerated by anyone. It was, simply, gross. Tony threatened the geezer with a ball bat-to demonstrate his rising power-and the laxative freak was gone. Movement assigned him a new house. But the mattress was left, so I paid Brian a Coke to wash it down for me. Brian lived next door. He was, in his own way, a freak too: a sort of work-ethic freak. Yeah: there were some advantages to having these motherfuckers around.

But the observation lifting my head about the whole deal was this: the assemblage of power, in any given court, is fed primarily by skinning other people's action. You'd literally jump on someone's shit, insist it's your judgment, and have the physical means of backing your claim: the term on the street is Police. The term in the joint is Rule. And the attitudes of both were dictated by where the control, the profits could be made.

Yet the difference in prison was that you no longer had any doors guarding your life. They'd already been knocked down. Kicked open. And now you were among thousands, monitored at any given moment. Folks were grafted, by force, and clustered at this forefront, like sucker, fish attaching to wet rocks in a drying ocean. Stark. Fragile. Skin-to-skin. But Shakin' the Blues. No chance (thank god) for a laxative freak, but I was noting the process of power. Of Tony's growing stature. And I was also tired of sleeping on a bed which felt like the slats in a cargo hold.

I had my usual mattress propped against the cube wall when Tony charged in. Brian was fitting the new one on my bunk, sliding it under: I didn't want contact with it, even through a sheet. Tony carne along with a large, paper bag, but overnight I noticed that he'd developed a slightly forward incline. And had worked his shoulders into a span, going for the look of The Posture. His caterpillar eyebrows blew under 211

TRIQUARTERLY

the coolers, but his hands turned outward and dangled like little rakes.

"Where's Chester!" he yelled down the run. Three days, and already he thought of the dorm as common rental property.

Chester didn't hear because he was wearing his headphones, lying in bed, and watching cartoons on the television. But Tony had swaggered halfway down the ramp.

"Know you's in here, Chester! Can't hide from me no mo'!"

This time, Chester heard.

"Bring it on in here, youngster," Chester yelled back. "We ain't doin' business olnst the goddamn streets."

Tony took it in and talked low, but still loud enough for anyone to hear him. He was sitting on Chester's bed when Chop-Chop strolled up to the cube's square mouth.

"Looky here at all this shit," said Tony, opening the bag for both of them to see. "I gots it offa that dude in building five. Just like you said, Chester."

Chester sat up, curling an index finger over the rim of the bag, his blond hair pointed out like cane. But his eyes were straining to figure out what was in there. "Git the shit outta my face!" he finally told Tony, actually going somewhat cross-eyed.

Tony sat the bag down, allowing it a bit of light. 1 had the top mattress set up, was working on my sheets, and noticed the four who argued over the cigarette lighter had now moved off. But Jesse, still, was in the head: nodding, perhaps. Drifting, zoned.

"We got us a bo-nanza sack," said Tony, getting in there with Chester and pulling out a bag of Twinkles. Chester reached down and got the cigarettes from the bottom of the bag.

"[u git all the Camels, youngster? What the fuck's these Pyramids?"

Chester was now sitting on his bed, with two packs of Pyramid's held off in one hand. With the other he slicked back his hair. He looked over at Chop-Chop as if to confer on a point:

"Now tell me 1 oughtenta wulp oln him like a red-headed stepchild?"

He turned to Tony:

"What is this shit, kid? Where's the other pack of Camels?"

Tony began pumping his right leg.

"Now, just you hold up a minute," he said. "I almost got throwed into the hole for those, cuz uh dude didn't wanna give 'em up. But 1 told him, 'Two packs of Pyramid's for the other Camel you owe, or we's fighting.' Dude didn't wanna, but he seen that look 1 get in my eyes. I'm tellin' yas, 1 was a fuckin' cunt hair from going to the hole."

Those tobacco-colored eyes sat far in Tony's skull, barreling out at Chester like copper slugs. He continued to pump his leg.

"Then ya done good," said Chester, arranging them on his bed. He reached and got the tally sheet from his locker-a list of dates, debts, customers, all done in code-while Tony dumped candy and sodas on the bed. Chop-Chop was borrowing a weight belt from someone-this tall, leather strap, worn to keep the spine from popping when you pump iron--draping it downward from his shoulder to the waist. He was so fucking tall, but slump-shouldered and thin of neck, that looking at him from the back was like sighting a grounded rowboat. He then stood there, at the cube.

Chester held a pencil about an inch from his ledger, thinking. Tony, seemingly from instinct, was now telling him, "They's all two-fer-three collections, except for the Pyramid's let me get one of them peanut clusters, Ches."

Chester pushed a peanut cluster across the bed, his gray hairy backhand soft, like wool fluff.

"What elst ya need, kid?" he asked Tony. "I can't be erasing column B all afternoon."

Tony said, "Give me a couple of those doughnut sticks fer later, and a can of root beer for Chop-Chop. And another peanut cluster. Just ONE MO', Chester; knows you can do it!"

Chester mumbled something about his profits being eaten, snarling a bit, like a branch-whipped hiker. He told Tony as he slid the crap over, "Tonight, youngster. Remember you're collecting from Gomez. That motherfucking Mexican's been owing me for over a month now. Goddamn!" Chester stood up, looking at Chop-Chop, list in hand. "This motherfucker's so overdued you best shake him a little by the bedboards. He's up to five-fer-two right now, Chopper. Teach him a bit of respect."

Chop-Chop, who worked mainly for the sport anyway, knew all about the delinquent account. It was the way he killed time.

"You're covered," he told Chester. He then notched his chin up and said, "I'm hittin' the weight pile before they call chow. We'll bring the stuff by later." He tilted his eyes down to Tony's. "Comin'?"

Tony was sitting, still, on Chester's bed, making sounds with the peanut-cluster cellophane. Crumpling it, balling it up. He stood, looking at Chester.

"I was gonna play bump 'n' touch with this here old man," Tony said, "but I guess we gots things to be doing right now-im-portant things." He gave Chester a playful eye, elbowed into him. "I'll be back shortly

TRIQUARTERLY

for my workout snacks. Best lock 'em up, so's nobody steals them."

"Buscala," said Chester, as Tony walked off with Chop-Chop, but as he said it he spotted two cops coming through on patrol. He began stashing stuff, right and left, before they'd have a chance to look it over. He was, after all, running what they referred to as a "criminal enter, prise." But Tony still didn't seem to know it. He told Chop-Chop, loud, as they passed the cops, "We'll be humping to,night, man. Eatin' and smokin' GOOD." Chop-Chop walked silently, squeezing the weight belt, ducking quickly out the door.

But Chester wasn't the only one scrambling as the two brownsuits hit the run. Jesse, shades on, came from the head, and cut out of the dorm. Fast. A bottle of shampoo was poured on the fruit swab left from the metallic brew, and swirled with available feet. The ramp was noisy with the popping of locker doors, and I was scattering clothes over my bed. I had to. It was an offense to sleep with a double,mattress-a mundane but punishable write-up-s-and I recognized those cops as Iron-CarpetState radicals not capable of thinking beyond policy.

And not willing to bend an inch. But deployed as yard officials, any, way, to simply sneak around and harass people. To moderate, police, and to judge. Luckily, my clothes were handy. The robes strolled by and didn't give me a second look. But I was certain they had noted what Tony just said, and would mark it on their form of "unusual inmate remarks." Tony only thought he was fully schooled. Yet he was as careless with his mouth as he was with sudden alliances. The cops just walked through, leisurely, like they were subordinate to a supreme purpose.

But nearly everyone, I was thinking, had been nibed so far down that they only existed in fleshy rubber saclets. Waiting for moves, plays, com' modities, but functionless: Tony with the cartooning and speech of Mr. Attitude. The robes on the street comers, the corridors, sealing the exits with bugger holes. What could most people really do, when they weren't exerting the pressure of barriers? Again, I was starting to wonder.

Brian looked over at me as the cops checked the bathroom. His offer was to wash down the laxative freak's pillow, just for a few cigarettes. He held the pillow in his hand, outward a little, like he was bringing me the warden's head. I watched him stand there, adolescently. He claimed to have never, out on the streets, missed even one day of work.

"Pass," I told him, throwing the clothes into my rack. He looked dejected, so I fished out the Coke. But he should have felt grateful just putting in a half-day,

The cops left the bathroom. They headed out the door. Tony and

Chop-Chop were at the weight pile by now, going through a routine. Chester lay on his bed like always, watching the cable, ready for trade when people came around. I left the dorm and stood near one of the perimeter fences. The sun was there, it caught me like a blowtorch, but those coolers were agitating allergies I'd never had. They blew in all manner of bordertown preparations, along with the usual dust and grime. But I never wanted Arizona for the air conditioning. The coolers set me off. I sneezed pure rocket fuel for five minutes then pushed away from the fence, to walk along the track. And do no one's time but my own. If any oddsmakers were around, I would've put high ducats on Tony becoming a slag personality. I just didn't know it would happen so soon.

Tony met Chop-Chop after count in the horseshoe pit. The agenda was Gomez. Their plan was to confront him in the chowhall and give warning: a warning that they'd be expecting a carton of smokes from him, or else there was gonna be trouble. Pain. Maybe a sticking. He'd have exactly one hour, and no partial payments. Two-for-five on four packs of Camels: a carton, including late fees. Tony wrote fingertip messages on the palm of his hand, then ambled The Posture toward the chowhall.

Though the hall was packed, they got through the chowline quickly. I was there. With four hundred cons. And overhead lighting like a gray sheet of rain. But Chop-Chop knew plenty of folks, from around, so they were able to find seats in the rear. Tony, however, still didn't know who Gomez was. No matter: he looked around, until Chop-Chop pointed him out.

Tony raised himself, slowly, on the stool. A hub cracked in his lower spine. To his right he saw Gomez, small, a Mexican wearing the Cross around his neck. Tony couldn't see how short Gomez was: he only looked dark, rotund, stubby. But his hair was knickered to the scalp, and that did make him somewhat intimidating. It also looked like he would never smile again in his life.

Tony thought he could take him. That the macho expression was forced, like vanity practiced in front of a mirror. He stirred the gravy into his mashed potatoes with a Spork, looking intensely at Gomez, his lips fattening, feeling heavy.

"He'll be one sorry ese without them smokes," Tony told Chop-Chop, the adrenaline pumping through his system. "Why 'n't I go over and speak to him real casual-like?"

"Wait till it's cool," said Chop-Chop, nodding Tony to a guard starioned by the serving window. "When that cop goes into the kitchen,

tell Gomez that we got something to tell him."

"All right," said Tony, jerking his back.

Tony bit into the hotdog on his tray, chewing in the manner of a pike. There didn't seem to be any worth to it. He continued to stir his issue, watching the cop that stood near the ice machine. A door to the kitchen was off to the cop's left, along with an exit ramp used by the general population. The guard's assignment was to stand there as a force: make sure you took only one tray, one cup, and so on. But when he followed an inmate through the exit ramp, Tony dropped his arms and leaned back. His eyes darted over to Chop-Chop's.

"Now?" he asked.

"Cool," said Chop-Chop.

Tony lifted straight up from his seat, graciously, almost like a guest being honored at a banquet. Although he'd been collecting around the dorms, in a sense he was now going public: all these convicts, someone around any way he turned. It was like taking on more responsibility: a nineteen-year-old kid, first number, first beef. He kept Gomez in sight, weaving past the tables.

But there was one thing Tony hadn't taken into consideration: Gomez wasn't alone. He was with three other Mexicans, his homeboys, young, all of them knickered exactly alike. Tony thought he could give a shit. He bent to the shine on Gomez's bristles.

And gave him the word:

"You owes Chester a carton of Camels. Me and that tall dude over yonder's his representatives. You got ONE HOUR to come up with them, or we's bustin' your head."

Tony straightened back up. But Gomez shook wildly and said, "Get the fuck outta my face!" Tony repeated it again: "One hour, starting NOW!"

This time others heard him, other Mexicans who were grouped in the area. A bunch of them turned, looking on. Tony was aware of them, but not of the cop who had returned to the ice machine. Now he was looking their way. Tony stared at Gomez for a moment, then started to walk off. But one of Gomez's buddies put his foot out. Tony went down on his ass.

It only took a moment for him to get up, but now everyone in the chowhall was looking his way-their way, actually, at the table where Gomez sat with his homeboys. And except for the giggling of a few young, scattered wetbacks, the chowhall was as quiet as an empty cage.

Tony got up.

Gomez got up.

About ten guards ran over. But before any of them got to Tony or

Gomez, Tony-sagging forward-punched Gomez in the eye: a real amateur, fish move, in front of all those cops. As he started to get another one off, Gomez came up with a fist in Tony's jaw. Then one more, this on the side of his mouth. Any witness would swear self-defense.

Tony wobbled in place, dazed. He heard the screams, the sounds, the voices echo through the chowhall. Gomez, though, was stronger than he had anticipated. He hit Tony again in the same part of the jaw: a tooth popped from his mouth like a grapefruit section. But Tony, like a fool, with blood on his face, screamed, "You still owe Chester and I'm still collecting! Me an' Chop-Chop's gonna bum your ass good!" He just laid the thing out so everyone knew. He just gave up the whole operation. The cops grabbed both of them. Quickly. Others stringed through the chowhall, in an attempt to prevent it from spreading. Two additional robes went searching for Chop-Chop, but he wasn't that difficult to find: he was towering over a sea of blue heads, erect as an electrical pylon. The guards pulled him slowly, carefully, over to the exit.

But the fight didn't matter anymore. At least to the convicts. What they couldn't stand, and what furthered the police economy, was the fact that Tony had snitched. In this case, actually, a dry-snitch: the non' intentional snitch of giving yourself up. But he had involved people other than himself. Lame, really lame. As the robes hustled to get him through the door a chant went up, LOUD and FAST, of "KILL KILL KILLI-KILL KILL KILLI" The cops worried that they might be ambushed, but the convicts knew better than to take him right there: the future was nothing but time.

They found Chester at home, TV on, cooking canned food in a hot pot and drinking a root beer. Relaxing. They told him he was needed in the yard office, and to lock up his cube. But even for an office call, there was something about this that didn't seem right. Chester, sensing gloom, protested that he didn't understand. That he would be pissed about having to leave his food. None of it, however, impressed the robes. Chester shut down the appliances and locked his cell.

The chanting still came from the chowhall as they led him across the compound: "KILL KILL KILLi-KILL KILL KILLi" Chester couldn't quite make it out, yet he knew it had something to do with him: why else would they lead me away? As they came closer to the chowhall he spotted Tony and Chop-Chop. Handcuffed, being escorted from the hall by a small platoon of guards. He suddenly knew that his store had been busted. He watched them lock down the chowhall, but the chanting 217

leaked out. Jesus, those fuckers were noisy! And mad beyond simple anger. He only guessed at what it could be: it really sounded, from the yard, where the three of them were being assembled, like two thousand ravens in the pit of a quarry, getting screwed in the ass by an army of vultures. The cops moved them cautiously, separately, to the yard office, leaving all of the details to the lieutenant on duty.

The charges for the three of them read as follows:

CONSPIRACY: 1 count

RACKETEERING: 1 count

EXTORTION: 1 count with an added charge of assault for Tony. The sergeant mentioned additional violations, such as Promoting a Criminal Enterprise, Promoting Prison Contraband, and Blackmail. The lieutenant took off his specs and rubbed an eye while considering it. He paused like a break between innings.

"Go ahead and write it up," he told the sergeant. 'These motherfuckers can plead down in a court of law to forty years' hard time. Can you see the look on the judge's face when we bring them in?" The lieutenant was motionless. He gazed at the wall before him, this glossy condition upon his face. He looked like he'd never been able to out-sleep a hangover. The sergeant hit the return button on the Selectric III.

Chop-Chop and Chester were housed in the A-wing of C.O.U. The hole. They were given cells down the corridor from one another, and each had a roommate. Chop-Chop stretched out on the unsheeted, rubber mattress, but Chester stood at the cage-front with his hands through the bars. He was pissed. Burned. He would say that, all along, he knew better than to ever trust a fish. Ever. But he couldn't quite figure why he had. He just stood there, the bars framing his mug in the gritty, yellow light. He looked from the cell. The creases on his forehead rolled like postmark cancellations.

Tony was also taken to the hole, but placed in Protective Custody instead of the general population run. He'd be tortured to death as soon as the guards turned their backs, over with Chester and Chop-Chop, so they put him with the snitches in the P.c. unit. Tony knew it was the only choice he had. But he didn't know there were so many of them. Dozens. Like Chop-Chop and Chester, he was also given a cellmate.

The first thing the turnaround told Tony was, "We're gonna have to look out for each other when we're transferred to the maximum-security ward. It's just down from a regular run. Those guys'll break in and do

horrible things to us." He sat cross-legged on the lower bunk, trembling as he spoke, rubberheaded from Thorazine and powdered with shadows. The cell was otherwise barren.

Tony just looked through the mesh covering the P.c. bars, thinking of court and of all that time. He had no idea what he would do with it. Because not only did he suffer the walls, but rather an overhang which prevented him the inner-access of journey. It seemed to work like that on people favoring restriction, regardless of the colors, or variations on the robe. Just a system composed of lateral attacks: self-mutilating, requiring the mandatory servitude of others.

Tony rubbed his jaw and began pumping his foot. He listened as a mop bucket squeaked down the run. He wanted to see who was pushing it, to look at another face. He wondered if maybe they could get something going. Wouldn't somebody who's been around here know a thing or two? He cocked his head, and straightened as the sound grew nearer. "Hey!" he yelled. But all he could see was unfocused mesh. And all he could feel was pain. Already, he hated the turnaround.

When they reopened the chowhall, later, the sun was nearly gone. Yet it was hot, red, purple, orange, leaking through an arm of finger-like clouds. It was as if a skin of some sort had been peeled from the horizon, exposing a series of bloodwork and veins. I scraped along the track, in the direction of my dorm, the taste of cheap boiled meat gristling up my throat. How long would it take the cops to blueprint a plan, a dome, to encase our prison and yard? I wanted that sky: it was this thing far away, screaming, changing. A kaleidoscope over our small, hard world.

I was ready to settle for that sky.

Soap Line

The prison's property room had a back door which opened to a small, wooden sally port. It was bordered by the yard office and the commissary windows. The barbershop was back there, if you walked through that rear corridor of the yard office, but the commissary windows--one for each yard-sat along the traffic ramp which everyone had to use.

The barbershop was run by the blacks, since the whites wouldn't circulate that close to the staff. And because they ran it like a club privilege, some very elite strutting took place. They converged-the Muslims, the blacks-seldom mixing with the others on that passage ramp.

But the commissary windows were simply grated to a shack,like bungalow that had trailer siding tacked down, all of it painted a very artificial, shadow,sucking yellow. It looked like a margarine stick, with exhaust pipes stemming up. And the color-wash blond who operated this store seemed always to exalt herself, promenading behind the window grates like a manufactured goddess on a pull-string.

Fortunately, for the population, two inmate employees did the real work of getting the store items out: you had five hours, one day a week, to buy your shit through the window. On a revolving schedule that sent upwards of two hundred inmates at a crack into line. Of the other eight hundred that lived on these yards, a majority-always-swarmed around the line and waited with their friends.

But now it was an alternate Friday. Clifford stood below the steps of the passage ramp, waiting with the others in the soap line. He was in front of the property room, where another line waited to pick up their packages. His line ran up the steps, then horseshoed to the left, across from the two commissary windows. And there, in the sally port, at the back of the property room, a guard checked off your number and issued a lunch sack with a small grip of laundry soap. Like everyone else, Clifford had T,shirts, socks, and a few other things, to run through the washer in his dorm. All dirty, overdue.

But four lines, dead in the middle of a frozen afternoon. Clifford put his hands in his jacket pockets and leaned on one foot but felt he was communing-overall-with nothing greater than a steel post. He 221

looked to the side of the commissary trailer, to the rows and rows of razor-ribbon wire. It was coiled there in a comer, behind a three,story, chain,link fence. They were simply building more walls with it. They were building in from the perimeter, to the center of the yard. Two inmates from electric shop sat with it, out behind that fence, on a fork, lift they used to cart the stuff around. Christ.

It was shit. Nothing but shit. Of all the shit that Clifford had seen in his life, the Department of Corrections, unquestionably, was the ranking Anal Mother of them all.

Yet he relaxed, as the line took a step forward, and a resident walked by with his soap bag. It only meant moving a few inches, though every, one looked back-scouting-to see if there was a play to be made from behind. But instead of a joint being passed, the line simply responded to itself.

"Soap issue's getting damn small."

"Not surprising, since they're taking all of our clothes away."

A sweet commissary smell rippled the air where Clifford stood, and he imagined-momentarily-that his tongue was actually a sugar wafer.

"No, Mr. Darvette," came the voice of the color,wash, from the com, missary window. "You're still on restriction."

Her voice had high, whirring overtones in it, as if she were speaking through an electric drill.

"But you know that was lifted last week," said Darvette. "I want some store, now!"

"Sor-ry," she said. "You'll have to take that up with Major Halt. Next!"

"If you was a man, they'd kill you at the bar," Darvette was yelling as he walked off.

But the deal was this: she and Major Halt worked as a team. He arbitrarily regulated who could go to the store, mainly, it seemed, to create tension on the yard. The color-wash then perpetuated it, through one' on-one confrontation. Like a setup. But they always got their rocks, especially when someone could be sent to the hole as a direct result of their scheming.

Clifford looked around. The property room literally sagged in the center. And the same guy he noticed ten minutes ago was still up at the window. What was going on here? At least three hundred people were kicking around.

But the soap line moved up a few feet, somehow in motion. Clifford

was almost to the steps when a heavily tattooed youngster, who'd been hustling the store line, came up to someone who was standing in the soap line. The youngster's arms looked like axe handles, in fact, done over with pine-green stampings. He told the person behind Clifford that he wanted a haircut.

"Cost you a pack of Generics for a haircut," he was informed. Clifford recognized the voice of a white barber.

"So if I give you a pack of Camels, can I get a trim on account?" asked the youngster.

"You must be freshly jacked-off to say something like that," laughed the barber, then the whole rear ribbon of the soap line laughed too. Clifford laughed as well, but the deal was soon straightened out.

A jailhouse lawyer walked by with a client, though Clifford didn't bother looking them over. Both of them had their heads bowed.

"State law put you here," the lawyer was saying. "You gotta think fed, eral federal federal federal."

They passed along, seemingly determined, chins tucked into their necks.

Then a couple of young Mexicans tried cutting into the store line. They yelled for a minute, insisting their homeboy had been marking their place. But an older Mexican booted them out, tired of all the juvenile bullshit.

Someone up front started saying, "Yeah, J.B. only come down with a year, but he took it all the way. He punched that guard sitting up there, an' they give 'im the twenty-five flat."

Clifford looked up to see an old guard, half asleep, sitting in the only chair on the ramp. He wondered, hazily, what kind of a pension a guard was entitled to for taking a single punch.

"That's the problem with these short-timers," he heard someone else say. "They don't know enough to kill these fuckers. You end up doing the same amount of time."

"I hear from the walls," the other guy said, "that that's what he's work, ing on now."

The line moved forward again, and Clifford was on one of the steps. A gust of wind blew upon him, like something out of a withdrawal sweat.

"SOHY, Mr. Applegate, today just isn't your shopping day," he heard the color,wash say.

Clifford saw Applegate simply rage, while the color,wash smirked as if she were flattered. It was an ugly confrontation. Pit rage. She acted like

223

a bullying tomboy, cursing in a play lot.

"Listen," Applegate told her, "you were the one who said I could shop here today. You told me on Tuesday. Now it's Friday. And now I need to get my stuff."

"No, no, Mr. Applegate, I told you to CHECK FIRST WITH MAJOR HALT about shopping here today."

"Bullshit!" said Applegate.

"That's what I told you," she said, crossing her arms against her rounded, pot belly.

"Then you can just jam your fucking store up your ass," he told her. "I'll find your fucking kids!"

"OUT OF THE LINE!" some of the punks began yelling. This, too, appeared to make her feel good.

"Report to the yard office immediately!" she told him. She was ready to have him rolled up-sent to the hole-for cussing out the staff. Or, in truth, for assuming her attitude of indifference. But Applegate walked off in the other direction.

What crap, Clifford was thinking. She burrows into this system like a fucking sewer scabie.

"You won't get away with this!" she yelled at Applegate through the grate. Then, to the faces looking in, and with a smile as she tilted her head to the counter, "He may not know it, but I'm a true women's libber."

"WOMEN'S LIB NOWADAYS IS THE POLICEMAN'S AUXILIARY!" someone shouted back in.

"This state soap just rips up my laundry," an old convict said as he passed Clifford with his sack. He looked totally unmoved by the ramp, by the color-wash.

Clifford took a few steps up, landing on top of the passageway. He could look right into her window. And there, from the soap line, he saw the remedial dynamics to which she affiliated her life: she was shirting with pressed cheeks, and enjoying it. Which, in turn, sired malice on the yard. He wondered if the state's judges were also aware of this interaction.

Clifford listened to the pop of feet, as a Muslim worked his way to the barbershop. The Muslim's shoulder and pinky finger were in sync as he walked, his heels hitting the wood over thudding echoes. But the entire ramp was studded with crashings, as inmates kicked by on the boards. The vibrations bled through Clifford's muscles. Spired his bones. And a cadence was there, to which he felt a tonality. This, he thought, is how

good music comes about: by listening to the streets, to the soap lines. It bolstered his energy as he waited.

The snap of another's observation broke through, as the line moved forward once again.

"You become 'dangerous' when you can outsmart the cops. They don't like getting burned, see, so they'll claim you're dangerous when you're able to pull jobs cleanly. But it's only a term that they broadcast. Whether they catch you or not, they're really just soliciting funds.

"Man, they're always trying to scare people," the other one said.

"ROSCOE!" hollored an unseen inmate, over in the cove of the sally port. "YOUR CASE

WOULD BE LIKE ASKING THE GOVERNOR FOR A PARDON AFTER RAPING HIS GRANDDAUGHTER!"

Clifford was directly across from the commissary window, about an armspan from where she leaned on her counter. It wasn't as if he'd never looked at her before, because he'd seen plenty of her since arriving on the yard. It was, however, just this thing of her face: she had eyelids like tissue paper, painted a light pink, shaping her skull like the head of a doll's. Into something unnatural, stillborn and plastic. Into something which said she was asphalt and blank.

He turned his head up and examined, for a moment, the roof of the yard office. Three electrical wires, black and lucent, traced against the greenish, winter clouds like an image in Crayon from a child's hand. And he realized that, for as long as he'd been in this camp, he'd never seen a bird. Or, an insect. Not even so much as an ant. Only big blue flies that ate wood and flesh, and buzzed around like generators during the long, hot months.

Clifford sawed his foot against the boards as faces slashed by, his hands sweating just a touch. The soap line had stalled, and the voices grew loud, giving him the odd sensation of being mobbed in a boxcar. Then the wind drove through, like a dust storm ejected by plunger from a dam. Fossils cycloned in the earth and separated-bits of ancient Indian lore-blowing up his legs, through his jacket-also into his mouth and eyes-making him feel as if a tightening had occurred, and he was trapped in a dry-heaving lung.

Exactly like that. Exactly like that. Always this further strain of constriction. He'd seen it drive some inmates mad, with the sickness of selfconsciousness. And almost anything, at that point, could happen.

"HIT IT!" stated a voice to his right.

The forklift roared in acceleration, a spring of razor-wire lifting on its tongue. The exhaust shot out like an explosion. A guard was standing

by an open section of the fence, supervising by presence, as the two inmates worked to guide the thing off. To a worn-down plot that once housed the tool shack, but now just looked like a ditch that'd been leveled. The reason for this construction was Major Halt, who also delighted in feelings of power and restriction. It served no other purpose than his sadism.

Absolutely.

But this was the time. Clifford had no way at all to foresee it. That statement came down through the soap line:

"They're fixing to get her."

It happened quickly, in the camouflage of traffic. With the howl of the forklift, and off-center whistling. As five convicts semicircled in front of the ramp guard, blocking his view of the color-wash. Of the window.

The color-wash stood there, marking on a file, doodling. Her face was down but the line was ready, as an inmate came up to the window with a glass. It was full of hot piss. Hot, foamy urine. It splashed on her cheeks, her hair, running down her chest through her unbuttoned collar. The upper portion of her uniform, normally tan, darkened like a sponge that had soaked up red wine. Her eyelid pink, and the rest of her powder, just mixed like a smear on light-colored cork.

The ramp fell silent, as everyone waited for her reaction.

The first thing she did was scream. She may not have known what just hit her, but she knew enough to realize that she was being attacked. The next thing she did was slam the grate closed. It was a huge steel plate that swung on a hinge, from inside of the window. There was a slap as the pieces connected. But the plate bounced away, forcing her lids open as she searched around-claw-like-with her fingers to lock it. The urine on her lashes burned her eyes.

The guard jumped up. Well, what could a guard do? He was just a trail version of the Old West, punched-out, and the yard had been pushed to an edge short of murder. He stuck his arms out, making motions, flappings, oil pouring from his face.

But the lines had already started to dissolve. There was shoutingloose congregating-but mostly the sound of the store being kicked. Kicked. Smashed. Punched. Body-slammed. Among low, angry voices, sustaining this cry.

Then the blacks came running from the barbershop, ready to jump in on whatever was happening. But instead of a looting, the guards poured forth from that same door to the yard office. Fast. With riot sticks. Because

someone had radioed, probably from the window of the property room.

Just the rampant commotion of bodies.

Only now boiling down.

But slowly, sluggishly.

Over the loudspeaker came a warning: "BACK TO YOUR CELLS AND NO ONE WILL BE HURT! THE YARD IS CLOSED! THE YARD IS CLOSED!"

Of course, it was bullshit. People had already been hurt. They'd been thrown against the side of the store. And maybe the color-wash would suddenly go blind with the AIDS. It was a fear crossing her mind as she toweled down with Ajax.

But, in essence, the point had been made: give some respect to the residents, who also were the workers, and were forced to shop at a store they had no say in---except through extremes. It would seem like only a simple understanding, yet it was beyond the games that were played by authority.

"CLEAR THE YARD!!! CLEAR THE YARD!!! THE YARD IS CLOSED!!! THE YARD IS CLOSED!!!"

The yard barker-like a voice, male, from out of a sewer-line-e-repeatedly blasted the camp. On and on and on

But Clifford had cleared out, quickly, with the rest of them. The panic across the ramp was now a few strays, inmates who'd been crushed into the side of the store. Now it was mainly a topic. Now they had given warning. The dorms filled up and people went through them, talking, commenting, waiting for an emergency headcount. Clifford sat on his bed and rolled up a smoke. He was thinking, still, of something else: the problem of his laundry.

But what a fucking joke, he was beginning to realize.

They had the count cleared in less than an hour. The cops did, that is. The yard reopened, though the store remained closed. But it wasn't as if they had to protect against a race riot. All they had was an incident, an incident to keep from going any further. And that could be handled, at the moment, because the color-wash, now, was out of the car. With the yard open again, Clifford locked up his cell. He stuffed an old skin magazine down the front of his jacket.

And walked over to Roy's.

Roy ran a store, a canteen, from out of his house. Zum-zum's, whamwham's, detergent, hopefully. Clifford just pulled out the magazine. He stood with Roy, looking at the pictures. Said what he needed was a box of soap.

Roy opened his locker. Clifford had a choice between Dutch Boy and Generic. The Dutch Boy was a tall, large box, possibly good for two227

dozen washes. He dropped the mag down, onto Roy's bunk. Or into his office, depending how you look at it. He was getting tired of those bitches, anyhow.

He went back to his cell. Pulled out his laundry. What the state issued, however, he easily held in one hand. But really, though, no matter. Long as he didn't have to crawl into the same orange jumpsuit, like he had to do in the old days. It was just a pain in the ass, to keep doing laundry.

Clifford walked to the laundry port, a space off the dayroom, lugging the clothes on his shoulder in a fishnet sack. He noticed the dayroom was crowded with sullen, low faces. He cut to the machines. He sat his fishnet on the dryer, adjusted the washer button, and opened the lid. It was filled with trash, with blue water. And it stank like the air in a porter's closet. He was pissed, though not surprised, because the physical reality always pushed in. Repeatedly pushed in. From any side that was there: the Major, the color-wash, lockdowns, soap lines. On routine chores that most people take for granted. But, to Clifford, it was all like staring at an octagon of reflectors: different angles, different metrics, but always the same slice of shit.

He walked off. Out, into the dayroom. It smelled of death scented with stale shirts and old sweat, balanced upon glaring youth. But nobody was paying him any attention. At all. He went back down the run, again got his jacket, and went over to Roy's pod with his fishnet. Their washer was clean.

Clifford faked out a guard, a fish. The guard was stationed, there in Roy's dayroom, to keep nonassigned residents from cruising around. The guard scooted off, nose open to the chickenshit rules, and Clifford was able to run his clothes. As he loaded the machine, dumping his soap in, he began thinking how the wars on the yard affected everyone: cops, staff, flunkies, the inmates. And, on top of the wars, how all in the pop' ulation had their own battles, personal battles, including the prick who had jammed the washer. Clifford's, at the moment, was simply getting his laundry done. But he was lucky not to be standing in the usual line of twenty.

He found a seat in Roy's dayroom and sat down. Hardly self-conscious, but prepared if the cop happened by. He rolled up a cigarette and lit it, inhaling, staring at the walls as the laundry machine shuddered. Fumed.

Burned. What a joke.

His expression was Homeboy jazz.

Underdose

Lotus stood in his boxer shorts pulling a towel through his hands one evening, a darkened cloth of sunlight buttering his blond-haired corncut as the dorm filled with shadows and noise. He showered as always at head count, while the rest of us played cards and bought what we could with cigarettes. Then he opened his locker for a stock check, pulling out pencils, old magazines, hairtubes of shaving cream and mismatched boots from a collection. I noticed a round sort of grin jerk over him, but it was more like a spasm in a face gone wild with prison dentistry. He was only about twenty-four years old.

The peculiar adjunct to Lotus were these rock-bottom locker items. He was a yard supplier of general goods-fine merchandise and clothyet nothing on hand appeared more than a remnant: a milk carton, a candy wrapper, a one-eared pair of sunglasses, the lenses scratched and stained.

Or a container of generic baby oil, speckled with dirt and sweat. This was not the quality-and certainly not the product-that you'd expect from someone in his line, which included fresh fruit and Levi's, and personalized stationery in your choice of four colors. Hypodermics were scarce but available, and needn't always be special ordered. I wondered why he had no more of a showcase than a high-fashion shoeman who would wear only guard boots.

But I knew that some years back (through a directive out of his control) he was put on Sinequan, and the theory was that the drug pushed up on your brain, jamming it to the fore of your skull. This might explain the agitated chop in his rhythm the same way surgically altered lungs, leaving half a tight breath, would affect a bar rocker's performance. It was entirely possible that he disbanded through this therapy, that there was nothing of use to him and no way it would matter.

I thought quickly of this as I lay on my cot, watching him scarecrow around. If there was nothing he needed but the void of camaraderie, prison was as fine a place as any for him to stretch out and run through his cycles. Still, there was a return on his goods that went somewhere for something. I had no idea what it could be.

He ambled toward me in an atrophied clip-step that had something to do with his lima-bean kneecap: the one cap was small and never locked

into step, and the leg bowed as if taut like a flexing rod. But the motion of his arm was robotic, jabbing the air as he came closer to me.

It's just an impediment, I thought. I'll suggest something if he gets too close to my cot.

I could do things with reason, even with Lotus. I kept thinking that it explained why I always had problems with the half-grades down in the probation department, even though it took fourteen months for them to violate my probation and send me to prison. I was only a drinker, caught up in the courts after receiving faulty medical advice about a drunkard's liver.

As Lotus came up through the dorm din, I clasped my hands to my chest, church-style. He had a bag in one hand which he opened, passing it under my eyes. I saw razor blades, two bananas, a can of Pepsi and neatly folded pin-ups, surely the latest from a selection of men's magazines. He gestured with a finger-V to his lips, asking for a cigarette. That's one habit a drug-packed brain will never cure.

I reached under a drawer in my locker and pulled out two Camel filters. Lotus reached in the bag and came up with a fold-out, then stood like a wall-mount with her picture before me. She was fine, all over, especially this clamp of flesh that would tum me to an idiot if only there were five true minutes in this 300�world lifetime. I noticed that the upper-right comer was dog-eared.

"This slut's been making it all over the yard," I said. "You can do better by me than to pimp paper."

A wrinkle crossed his lips as he returned her to the bag. I handed over a Camel and reached for a banana. It was bright, fresh, chilled and intact. I stored it away for later.

"I'm in the market for color," I told Lotus, toying with a match as I lit it. "Color like pictures and designs, like a firetruck parked in a sunset, or a blue glider landing in a butterscotch field. Something that will jar the gray light from my eyes, 'cause that's all I look at all day."

I poked the match at his smoke, then lit mine as well. We inhaled as rap music careened off the slick white walls. Suddenly, the dorm flooded with corridor fluorescence. My eyes snapped on like a three-way Mazda as I jerked and adjusted to this institutional nightbeat.

"I can get you a mural of war, or a sky diver smoking a joint," he said with incision, his body perfectly still.

I thought for a moment, then said, "Bring me the diver. Long as there's no Budweiser parachute."

He dropped the bag on my bed and clicked his shoulders like a gracious storekeeper, thankful your purchase has been his one item that just

wouldn't move. Then his elbows came up and his index fingers joined like an X.

"No deal if there is, but here's what I want if there isn't," he said.

He told me what he wanted and why, his sharp voice paved with nicotine. My ears warmed with blood as I listened. A window unlatched nearby and a breeze off the yard blew over us like a small wave.

It seems three years ago--just prior to his incarceration-Lotus and a sister named Sandi were coming home from a party in a stolen car, a friend named Kurt at the wheel. The cops gave chase at some point, and Kurt veered down an old dirt pass that quickly became a rock-strewn, off-shoulder of Highway #5, Benson, Arizona. The Plymouth bounded fast through this outstretch, almost sailing like an airdrop into a wall of hard earth. All three were injured, but Sandi suffered a severe hip fracture that prevented her from walking again. Lotus lost most of his kneecap, some of his shin and couldn't walk for nine months, but only he and Kurt received felony charges and prison time to kill. Sandi got a misdemeanor pandering fine, and as a result of her handicap now drew money from a government fund. It was less than she had made as a small-time, file secretary at $6.25 an hour, but then her standard of living had changed dramatically.

Lotus stood over me at the foot of my cot, a dark, dancing fluorescence engulfing his head. He felt that money was available to him as well, but didn't know how much, or where it would come from. He knew it would be the government, but who exactly were they? If he could establish a "handicapped" status he would apply for small-business loans and special grants; these would be used to set up a modest store where he'd make keys in the rear while his sister, up front, sold office mottoes and Day-Glo posters and souvenir clocks to the yawbacks off the streets. He would also be eligible for hardship release-a strategy within his plan-exchanging three prison years due for a term of parole. There was a remote possibility for this to happen, I thought, and all he wanted was an initial letter, explaining who he was, which he would send to a lawyer that his sister had heard could work miracles in "gray law"-which in his case were weakly defined sub-sections of invalid statutes that the lawyer would work with a specially applied language, evoking a judgment the bench couldn't deny. All Lotus knew-or cared about-was this chance to get a slice of the pie. Then he would settle in the palm of a back room, grinding out keys as his belly got fat. How the lawyer would be paid was something I didn't ask, though I imagined it to be a contingency-type thing.

"Why don't you write the letter yourself?" I asked him. I didn't mind buying his stuff with cigarettes or effortless forms of exchange, but a letter was too much like work. I knew, however, that a crucial half-step of cognizance that would allow him to write a letter down on the paper was now held in check in his brain like a redlinesecurity field. It was an aphasic condition I described as gravel burns to the frontal lobe, and it rarely affected his speech. But he'd never make the mail without someone's assistance.

'''Cause this is a business deal. Your letter for my poster."

"You'll have to do better than that," I told him. "You'll have to mitigate me with a weeks' worth of fruit and uh two Pepsi's."

"You're talking crazy now. I'll give you the fruit and the poster for the letter. Deal?"

"All right, deal."

I could sympathize with his situation and the fact that he wanted to get ahead. I often thought that the best way for me to succeed on parole was by winning a lawsuit and becoming a person who offers work of some sort, not as a person who must go to work daily, crossing so many Main Streets in five P.M. rush hours, potentially a felony in each step of travel. Then after parole I'd take a year off-for vitamin boosters, poetry and the sensual.

But the deal was set: I'd have the letter for him in the morning. He'd supply his own stamp and envelope, but I had to address the envelope for him. Considerate of this small afterthought, he loaned Emily, the debauched pin-up, to me for a week.

After evening headcount cleared, around 6:43, the dorm emptied out and I began working on the letter. It wouldn't take much, of course; more of a note saying, "Look, I'm writing for Homeboy here, a young man who sustained multiple injuries-permanent damage, of coursewhile riding in a stolen Plymouth. His gross motor control is so impaired that he has problems walking at times, and when he does get around he quakes and attracts nothing but catcalls and stares. It's a wonder he can move at all, and when he gets on the streets again I'm afraid he'll have nothing but trouble with prospective employers and the police-unless, of course, he's protected by competent counsel who will demand that a financial stipend be provided him from the appropriate government source. With the fine record you have in these matters we've decided that you, and your staff, are the sort of people we can entrust with this claim. I also suggest you ask him about the accident, because the Plymouth bottomed-out during an endurance performance and the com-

pany might be liable for negligence and wrongful injury no matter who the car belonged to at the time. You might want to check his prison records too and see why he was administered Sinequan, the heavy Thorazine-like anti-psychotic, after his accident. (The profound effects of this drug are one of the reasons he can't write to you personally!) He may be in prison but that's no excuse for malpractice-as you well know. Besides, he's a car thief, not a sociopath. Sincerely, Lotus & Fiduciary.

I'd give Lotus the letter and point out the possible suits he and his new lawyer would have to think about. This would be worth something to me, perhaps a shirt or-if I explained it slowly enough for him to completely understand-an administrative-type favor somewhere down the line. I approved of the methods this attorney would use on behalf of a person like Lotus; I signed the letter, which now only awaited his signature and addressed the envelope, thinking of a tough motherfucker who would help him; just a claimant who suffered moderate symptoms of yard senility and needed some type of support in order to better provide for his sister.

I dropped the letter into my locker, then pushed in the upside-down drawer that I used as a desktop. I peeled the banana and ate it right down, then closed up my house-my locker, my wardrobe, my outfit, my rack-with a Master lock. I'd go out on the yard and maybe get into a game of ping-pong, or lift weights for a while in the gym. Later, after lockdown, I'd look at the letter and correct obvious spelling errors.

Maybe Lotus would get a shot of the big world in sunshine.

I stepped through a dirty pink swab of corridor light, then down my dorm wing to the heavy footing of a prison yard in darkness cut with floodlights.

Five minutes later I was at the softball field, sitting in the bleachers with Stark Hodger. He and Lotus were partners at the prison, but he had recently made parole and would serve less than nineteen months on a four-year sentence. Parole was mainly a technical perimeter which kept the prisons full, but Stark added ideas and overdrive to his release proposal and would be out within a month. Hope was really work tempered with little disciplines. We all stood a chance.

The fans (the inmates) hollered as the Smugglers played the Banditos in a mid-season drive for first place in our compound league. The Smugglers had added some new infield to their lineup, franchising three young hitters from Hector Varella's training camp, all high-priced rookies who brought at least two cases of soda apiece. But the Banditos had 233

an unending roster of Mexicans-a solid card of muscle and henchmen-organized by jefes into the league's top contenders. They had a 93 lead now, at the top of the second, with Tommy Salazar due up at the plate.

Stark was chewing popcorn as I sat down beside him. He passed the bag over, a brown stream of mucous shooting from his mouth. I took the bag and mentioned Lotus to him, that his time might be short since he now would retain counsel-"a fantastic lawyer who was hell with the code book."

"I thought he just had a wife who screwed all the prosecutors," Stark said. "But maybe I'm thinking of somebody else. Yeah," he said, "could be. Lotus have any street backing?"

"His sister, and probably his parents."

"His parents are dead." Stark punched a moth as it flew by.

"All the better," I said. "He's trying to make it on a hardship release."

Salazar cracked a drive straight back to the pitcher. It was a play which the Banditos practiced, since fisticuffs on the field would automatically expel any player. The shot caught the pitcher in the shoulder near the arm joint, and he spun around, dropping to his knee. The fans roared for Salazar, even after the Smuggler recovered and threw him out at first base. The warden appreciated a club that triumphed by the rules.

"Appeal first base!" someone shouted.

"The punk pulled his foot off the bag!" another yelled.

Lotus suddenly spoke from behind us.

"Bad call at first?"

"Usual bullshit," Stark said, looking ahead. "Heard you might be getting out."

"Yeah I am. I'm just about outta here," Lotus pronounced as if apexed.

"You can make it," Stark told him. "No big deal."

"It's always a big deal," I said. I handed Lotus the popcorn.

"Course it is," Stark said confidently. "I just mean if you got a lawyer and backing, you can practically be out the door."

"I know I'll get out," said Lotus, biting down on a wad of corn. "My sister's got me a lawyer."

"Well, it sure helps to have your case re-examined," I said. "Six years is a long time for a Plymouth."

"You ain't a-kidding, Bud. They gave me time for a BMW."

"Tell him what you're gonna do when you get out," I said.

"Take care of my sister," he told Stark, then looked at me. "But he knows all about it."

"She's a good girl," Stark said. "She'll make the difference."

"I wanna find a real doctor, that can fix my leg. That's what I wanna do."

"You mean they can fix it?" I asked.

"Maybe," he said. "I didn't see a real doctor, just some jail doctor."

"They might have been able to fix it." Stark froze into bleakness. "Probably too late for that now."

"But at least I'll be able to find out, least I'll be able to know."

One of the Banditos hit a long drive over the right fielder's head; "Ya burned him!" some of the fans yelled. Two runs scored but there was a close call at the plate: the batter contended that he was safe, but the inmate-ump called him out. A guard stepped on the field amongst boos and catcalls. The ump's decision was final. It was a call that would be disputed and settled after the game, without affecting the box scores. Joe and Yin and the network leagues only thought they set the final standards.

"Ah, this bullshit!" said Stark. "Out by an arm!"

"Yeah he was," said Lotus, balling up the popcorn bag, then squashing it with his foot. I had seen enough and got up to leave. Real bats were nipping into the light atop the pole at first base. They lived up there, these peculiar dogface bats; we lived up there with them. When one flew into our dorm by mistake one night, the question was, was it intentionaL

"Time for me to look for some ping-pong," I told them. "Catch you guys later."

As I headed down the third-base line for the gym it dawned on me that Lotus had had three n-hour home passes in the last two years, all without incident. This was important testimony to his worthiness, demonstrating for the record an ability to be something other than crime-prone. Lotus certainly deserved a chance to be with his sister, and the more I thought about it the more Stark's comment about lawyers and backing-to get you out the gate-made sense. Lotus was a good candidate in theory, and we could only wait and find out what the lawyer would do with the basics.

When I peeked in the back door of the gym I saw a handful of Indians playing cards at a table, but no ping-pong players. The floor shone and the tube lamps burned but the crowd was elsewhere, mostly at the game.

I headed on the walkway back to Crook in the hot night. The inmates at the ballfield howled as another play was made, their voices gusting over the solid, flat compound. I decided to take a quick shower, 235

then catch up on my correspondence. Maybe I could find something on my little headset radio as well. The water adjusted and I stepped into the shower, the only inmate from our dorm to bathe at that time. Again, the action was elsewhere. I took a deep breath and noticed a smoker's ulcer in my throat, a Camel burn that felt like a shiny aluminum shield. It came and it went and there was nothing I could do about it: the prison doctors were far too violent to trust with anything as sensitive and important as a windpipe. I splashed in the water for a few minutes, then lathered up.

Air was the thing that counted most. Without a suck of the big sky you would forever lose reason. Your tactile perceptions would give out without air, a scrub of dead skin left hanging from your sides. Your tongue would not taste and your eyes would squirt pus. Your head would swell up with a feeling of sweatsocks: damp, secreting a chill like ammonia on cloth. Your organic sensibilities were rankled without air-fresh air from the clouds and the soil-and it needn't be forest-pure.

It was important to get the sun on you, too. It brought the blood to your skin and worked with the air as you pulled it into your lungs. It opened you up with a vibrant drive, promoting mental health. It was one of the keys to successful confinement, getting a little bit of sun from the yard each day. Without the right mixture of sunshine and air you would soon stiffen up and go off.

I began drinking coffee, as an oxygen substitute, back in your county jail. I seldom drank it before that, but after three weeks of no air, and very little food, I turned to coffee to help find a pulse, drinking a rebrew or rinse that was hell on the gut. It got my head moving when there was nothing, nothing but the walls, or the wank of probation officers, who rarefied into a low-level drizzle. The coffee was good with the creamer, and I developed a habit of five cups a day.

I was busy with my thoughts and the right light to judge them as the morning sun broke the east. Sixty of us lived in Crook dorm, which was now quiet with sleeping felons. Homey brought me a cup of Folger's, which I fixed with non-dairy creamer and sugar. A sort of wren or a jay was barking on a fence as I sipped the coffee and lit up a Camel. I'd been smoking forever. It took the rest of the cotton and spears from my head. Lotus smoked, too, as I showed him the letter. He was in blue jeans, white T-shirt and his own pair of state boots.

"You've really got the possibility of lawsuits as well," I told him. "At

least one, 'cause of the Sinequan. But it's up to you to remind this guy, to push him in that direction. Understand?"

"Yeah I understand," he said with a smile, his words spitting out like arrows. "I'll get it all that they'll have coming to me."

"Good. Don't let them give you the rod."

The rod was the most frequent thing to come. It came in countless forms and varieties.

"Uh,uh!"

I gave him my pen and he scrawled out his name on the letter. It was a line like a mountain range drawn way down in scale. I picked it up from my desk and folded it, then stuck it in the envelope.

"Lick it," I told him, "and don't forget a stamp."

He licked the letter and dropped it on my "desk," flattening out the crease with the palm of his hand. A stamp came from nowhere and he licked that too, then placed it on the top, right,hand corner. The ball of his fist came down like a capping machine, sealing the stamp with a quick flick of his wrist. He was gone then, on his way to the mailbox, sculpting a future which he held now in hope, his small broken buttocks folding in on him like wings. We could expect a reply in four to eight weeks.

I drained my coffee and set out into the morning. It was bright and cool, and the air felt fine as it rushed to my brain.

Three weeks later I was just hanging around, scratching my ass as I read the bulletin board near the library. A loud gang of blacks-stretch rodents, we called them-were congregating nearby, outdoing each other with their own version of street trivia. I recognized a few of them as motherfuckers I beat regularly at ping-pong, a game I now excelled at thanks to the new, used pair of tennis shoes that Lotus had given for my mention of lawsuits. They were stolen, no doubt, but tampered with and adulterated beyond identification.

I cut for the yard office in something of a power walk. I could see that the mail list had been postedvso Lpaced myself over, avoiding that first fist of crowd. I had drunk to be alone, and now I finally wasn't. But despite obvious prison laws, such as overcrowding, I could usually side, step a nucleus population (like the one at the mail list) through my indifference toward the stride of mass-media pursuits.

The mail list was a xerox of the master population sheet. It was a dull gray copy, flecked with spots which the copyist never bothered to clean from the glass. Next to Lotus's name was the letter L for legal mail. Next to mine was an open grid. I walked back to Crook, wondering how this lawyer would perceive the situation. Then for some reason I thought of 237

pheasant hunting back in Ohio as a kid, of those cold gray afternoons with the shotgun and the boots and my old man, routing out birds, but mainly just exploring.

Lotus came back with the letter, marked C. M. [ovine, P. c., on the return address. We opened it at his house, and he listened on his bed as I read it out loud. "Dear Lotus," Jovine began,

Thank you for your letter. For me to evaluate your potential claim, I will need to see your prison records and your medical records. Also, I'll need a copy of the accident report and medical findings as per the accident. To that end I have enclosed several release forms for you to sign. I'll also need your social security number and your date of birth. I will help you if I can, but please be aware that many other people also want help, and we only represent about one-eighth of the people we talk to.

Sincerely,

C.M. Jovine

The sun came into Lotus's house and I could see the letter clearly. Jesus, I read into Jovine's short-arm technique right off. I read that Lotus wouldn't be a member of [ovine's elite one-eighth, and that he probably had a low rung of ugliness if we persisted after he rejected the findings of our claim. And there was Lotus, a lifetime away from me, sitting on his old, rusty bed.

"Perfectly ambiguous," I told him, trying to smile. "We get these authorizations signed and send them back to Jovine. He'll look at your records and begin working on your case."

Lotus smiled, then eagerly broke into an exhausting gait, like a trinket merchant who had discovered diamonds in a zircon-studded cereal bowl. He wound around his bed, party-style, and forebent to accept a cigarette I offered-a generic non-filter of all things, one of his own. It was a type of happiness that I'd seen in the eyes of many inmates, a searchlight blast at the end of so many years, all of them carpeted in darkness and stagnation.

I smiled and nodded my head, snapping a finger to his electricity and rhythm. Time would go quickly for him until the next letter; then it would begin dissipating in a clogging haze of questions and procedures. [ovine couldn't get him out and he knew it, much less make Lotus rich. If he endlessly attacked statutes on prison regulations, maybe the D.O.C. spokesman would apologize for the Sinequan. But nothing else would really happen, so why bother with a guy who could get food stamps on

his own? We were the pursuers in this case, but [ovine could at least come across and offer a straight hand. What did he have to lose?

Instead he gave Lotus an underdose-that faint grain which distorts recognition and leaves you flat with an odd sensation. An ill-feeling would materialize, a visceral mambo like a type of blueballs: this, for an inmate who would one day be released, jerking like farm machinery down public streets. Jovine knew this, yet he short-armed, or underdosed, Lotus with a meringue-type of rejection swill.

I thought of Sandi for a moment, and how she would have to fend for herself a while longer. She may never have a front room of sparkling knickknacks and oddball acquaintances, who would tell stories and buy soda, passing the day in fine form. I could almost feel something for her, because she was the one who was hot at the start, mainly for her brother's freedom. There was nothing for her now but analogous fetal regression.

I walked back to my cot and opened my locker, looking at the sky diver who smoked a joint. I thought of a number of ways I could have lied to Lotus, but none of them really made sense. I made a fist with my head and cursed [ovine, along with the free-booking parameters of law. How would you like to be mounted by your double? I asked [ovine for starters.

My chest started pounding and I felt lousy. I had a headache, and my body was like extended brainweight. The clock began to go slow and there were no distractions; it was the old long road that never quit at the horizon. But as long as those hands didn't change direction, Lotus and me stood a chance.

I laid out on my cot and felt the blood snap through my head. Then I closed my eyes and waited for sleep as the clouds began robing the noonday sun.

Contributors

Kanai Mieko is a Tokyo-based poet, essayist, film critic and storywriter. Her collected short stories were published in Japan in 1992, and the stories that make up the "When Treading on Soft Earth" series will be pub­ lished there in 1997. *** Sarah Teasley is a graduate student at Ochanomizu University, in Tokyo. The three stories published here were originally translated as part of her senior thesis for East Asian Studies and the Program in Creative Writing at Princeton University. She is currently translating other of Mieko's "When Treading on Soft Earth" stories. *** Douglas Gilmore Power's stories have appeared in the New Orleans Review and Witness. He recently completed a novel and is working on a second. *** Robert Girardi is the author of two novels, Madeleine's Ghost (1995) and The Pirate's Daughter (1997), both published by Delacorte Press. His new novel, Vaporetto 13, will be released by Delacorte in fall 1997.

Clarence Brown is a professor of comparative literature at Princeton University. He is the author of seminal studies of the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, several comic strips, numerous translations, works of short fiction, and the twice-weekly newspaper column, "Ink Soup," which appears in The Times, of Trenton, New Jersey. A poem of Brown's appeared in TQ #17, and translations of poems by Osip Mandelstam were in TQ #18. *** Jesus Gardea is the author of thirteen books of prose and poetry. His collection of stories, Septiembre y los otros dfas, received Mexico's Xavier Villarrutia Prize. He lives in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. His fiction has appeared in TQ #85 (New Writingfrom Mexico) and #91. *** Mark Schafer is a Boston-based literary translator and

visual artist. "The Lights of the World" is part of Stripping Away the Sorrows from this World, an anthology of stories by Jesus Gardea that he selected and translated and that is being published by Editorial Aldus, S.A. in 1997. The translation appearing in this issue was funded by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fund for Culture Mexico-U'SA. Schafer was the translator of several stories in TQ #85 and #91. *** Brad Bostian's poems have appeared in print in the New Review and the River's Edge and online in the internet journal, Eclectica. He is a graduate student in writing at the University of South Carolina, Columbia.

Linda McCarriston, whose poems have also appeared in TQ #79 and #81, is the author of two books of poems, Talking Soft Dutch (Texas Tech University Press, 1984) and Eva�Mary (TriQuarterly Books, 1991), a nominee for the National Book Award. Her recent poems have appeared in the Plum Review and in three anthologies: Changing the Bully Who Rules the World, edited by Carol Bly (Milkweed Editions, 1996); Women in the Trees, edited by Susan Koppleman (Beacon Press, 1995); and Burning Bright, edited by Trish Hampl (Ballantine Books, 1996). She is completing a new collection of poems, entitled Pinning the Tail. *** Belle Waring's first collection of poems, Refuge (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990), received the Associated Writing Programs' Award for Poetry and the Washington Prize, and was cited by Publishers Weekly as one of the best books of 1990. Her second volume, Dark Blonde, is forthcoming from Sarabande Books. She teaches creative writing at Children's Hospital, in Washington, D. C. *** Manuel Ulacia is a professor at the Universidad Nacional Aut6noma de Mexico. Widely published as a poet, he recently completed a study of Octavio Paz and a book of translations into Spanish of James Merrill's poems. A poem of his appeared in TQ #85.

Barbara Kohler's first book of poems published in German, Deutsches Roulette (Suhrkamp, 1991), received a prize from the Jurgen-Ponto Foundation and the Leonce-und-Lena young authors' award. Her second book, Blue Box, was published by Suhrkamp in 1995. She lives in Duisburg, Germany. *** Rosmarie Waldrop's most recent book of poems is A Key Into the Language of America (New Directions, 1994). She has translated books by Edmond [abes, Jacques Roubaud, Friederike Mayrocker and Elke Erb. *** Deanna K. Kreisel teaches in the English Department at Northwestern University. This is her first published poem. *** James Armstrong teaches creative writing and American literature at Northwestern University. His poems have 241

appeared in Riverwatch, The Snowy Egret and Orion. He received the PEN-New England Discovery Award for Poetry in 1996. *** Lucille Broderson, who began writing poems in her sixties, has been published in Ironwood, Nimrod, Poetry and other journals. She has completed a book of poems and is currently finishing a book that includes both memoirs and poems.

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Rural America

"Witness is one of several excellent new literary and intellectualjournals of the pastfew years that confirms our sense of the variety and scope of the imaginative life in the United States. Its focus upon thematic subjects is particularly valuable."

Joyce Carol Oates

Carol Bly

Geoffrey Clark

Dennis Covington

Jack Driscoll

William Heyen

Bob Hicok

Janet Kauffman

William Kloefkorn

Maxine Kumin

Nancy Lord

Paul Milenski

Josip Novakovich

Linda Pastan

Call for Manuscripts:

Witness invites submission of memoirs, essays, fiction, poetry and artwork for a special 1997 issue on Religion in America. Deadline: August 1, 1997.

Writings from Witness have been selected for inclusion in Best American Essays, Best American Poetry, Prize Stories: The 0. Henry Awards, and The Pushcart Prizes.

QRL announces its Fiftieth Anniversary Anthology

Quarterly Reviewof Literature at 50

High notes from the past, New poems from the present

With new poems by QRL's Poetry Book Series' winners-and from the greatest voices of QRL' s acclaimed past-the Fiftieth Anniversary Volume is a landmark of our literary times.

"A national treasure QRL's dazzling rosier of writers is a tribute to their unerring eye for talent and their pursuit of excellence. But though committed to bringing the rich catholicity of American voices to QRL's pages, the editors were never parochial in their leanings. They scouted the world of letters to showcase writers from Kafka and Celine to Celan and Mistral."

=Pamassus

"The Weisses were assiduous in publishing not only writers like Stevens, Williams, cummings, and M. Moore, but a great many of their younger, utterly unknown successors as well. The truth is, it was largely in magazines like QRL that much of the literature now studied as a matter of course in colleges and universities first appeared."

-The New York Times

NEW POEMS

••

: 1 is Bursk

Warren Carrier

Anne Carson

NaomiOark

Reuel Denney

Nancy Esposito

B. H. Faircbild

Frederick Feirstein

Jane Flanders

Jeanne Foster

David Galler

Levertov

Lieberman

Lowell \Iandelslam

\Iallhews

\lerrill \ferton

\len.in

\liddlelon

\liles

\lonlale \I. !\Ioore

R. !\Ioore

\lorris

\loss

:'\alhan

:'\emerov Orlovitz

Paslan

"The rosier of young, little known writers presented in its early days reads like a page from a Who's Who of Modem American Literature."

=-Poets and Writers

"The editors, whose eclectic international taste is to be commended, continue their search for the best in poetry." They now print 4·6 poetry books under one cover each year.

-Library Journal

One of QRL's prize..winning poetry books was a "Favorite book of the year. QRL publishes book-length manusripts and pays authors real money." ($1000 and 100 books!)-The Village Voice

For manuscript submission information, send SASE.

QRL 50th Anniversary - $20 26 Haslet Ave. Princeton, NJ 08540

Jean Nordhaus

JosepbPoweU

Reg Saner

Peter Stambler

ry Kamer dine C.UtU.

Sidney Sulkin

Brian Swann

W. Szymborska

Phyllis

ompson

eanne Walker

Patchen

Peck

Perse Piccolo

Plalh

Plumley

Ponge Pound

Rakosi

Rexroth

Rich Rosenthal

Rudnik

Schubert

Seferis

Sexton

Shapiro

Simon

Simpson

Silwell

Snodgrass

Solzhenilsyn

Stafford

Stevens

Strand

Swenson

Tale

Tomlinson

L'rdang

Valery

Van Duyn

Walkins

"!eiss

Whihnan

Wilbur

Williams

Wrighl

Zukofsky

You've heard about SHENANDOAH for years.

Why not subscribe today and really get to know us?

(We'll send you a free 5" x 7" broadside featuring a complete poem by a Shenandoah contributor to sweeten the deall)

CAetty CA)(/cock, 8YeaI CAOlbfW6, r.S3"d �<i0e'" t&'h.I� 2?Jacey, a1'Muian c9ak;n, EreamlU6 �WJI' �/!t<. tt, C/'It?l� �yiJl6, �dkm �tuoJ, cJ1�Jle�J'<�y �b ny/ey, ��/'t XtM,.e, .E� il6w-.,.fl6eyrw" U@1'lU, tiTokt �ok 2?Jelknwo, ..%enc8Yek.n, �&:km, C/'It. �A'''.I. �7. odtWJI �u�, �$ fJO'l'ijJ/U; � a.,ue:r '" "'�n � tsfl;.e, 2?J"'�lH'O;%a, Q6ut1. �� fJ(J: E?

r:.i{,ltt»if&:�,tl(JP___� �nRJS, �oMk�. ��tul '. '4,/' me ao-ntch, Q6ac1.eI �i'a, �ruia6, Q6ekcca G ��, ctJ1?a1'JI @lu-, �ze f?o ..%atl.emze �f� �, dl�t uul...8myley, Ercolt �Era1u1.-0/1, Q6ott»ifd1(Je11

Shenandoah seems about the best bargain in literature that one could possibly find these days. It is just as sleek and thick as journals twice its price, and has more beauty and life between its covers than anything I have read in a long time.

Literary Magazine Review

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