noah #3

NA OH

3

Spring 2013

NA

NA OH

3

Spring 2013

noah magazine issue 3 (Spring 2013)

For more fiction, essays, and poetry, and information regarding submis-sions, upcoming issues and contests, or who we are, please visit noahmag-azine.org, follow us on Twitter @noahmagazine, or email us at [email protected].

www.noahmagazine.org

“Visiting Uncle Shirley” appeared previously in the November 2012 issue of The Montreal Review. All other stories and poems appear here for the first time.

Copyright © 2012 noah magazine. No portion of this journal may be re-printed in any form, printed or electronic, without written permission from the authors. All rights to the works printed herein remain with the author.

n

noahcaitlin gheganliz glinskidanny goldenjillian kaplan

co-founding editorsjacob browereditor-in-chief

hush, ruba abughaida......................................................7

compartmentalizing, megan towey..............................13

nil desperandum :: there’s hope enough yet,ab ovo :: from the beginning,en passant :: in passing, & hors d’ouevre :: outside the work, desmond kon zhicheng-mindé..........................................14

self portrait, julia becker.............................................18

visiting uncle shirley, terry barr.................................19

mom at 40, anina robb................................................35

comfort, eliana osborn................................................36

deer frozen in headlights, steven pelcman.................40

drunk dream, catherine simpson.................................42

i think i know the answer, nels hanson.....................43

screaming wall, fabio sassi..........................................68

the chapel of fame, barry spacks...............................69

to the delicate girl who sat beside me on the crowded bus, barry spacks..........................................70

the letter, eric lutz.......................................................71

contents

7

hushruba abughaida

Although the night would be bitter in its cold, Miriam would not dress for it. She had thought about everything that came at her, lead-ing up to it, planning details in big picture precision, running her mind down the network of possibilities, all the things that could go wrong and the moment that had to go right. She thought about where she could go and then which route would be best. She tried it out, avoiding the checkpoints where the soldiers balanced their guns on their bodies, honing their humiliation skills on those desperate to cross through. She remained within her fenced-in neighborhood looking for the right place, treading along one way and then anoth-er, attracting attention but not too much of it, so that she could blend in with the daily broken down bustle of the day. As she scoped out neighborhoods, she was able to wander about strangely unques-tioned, nervously walking in quick steps with the risk that she could be stopped at any moment. She would have had no answer for what she was doing if she had been caught, and with each movement Miriam imagined attention in the form of soldiers gathering around her; she felt it as heavily as a thick, knotted rope tied to her waist trailing cans that screamed their tin sound each time she moved and they smashed into the road and each other. How could she not be noticed? She was working herself into a frenzy of fear when she found the building.

Miriam thought she knew every inch of the city, having lived in it since she was born in one of its oldest hospitals, but things were in a constant state of change, especially recently. It had become a checkers board; what seemed immoveable this week could be gone the next. Buildings were reduced to smashed rubble where they used to stand; roads had their insides exposed in a mess of pipes and clay. The school she went to, the theatre she acted in—they were all now disfigured. Everything was taken over by rebel groups or the occupying army or one of the political factions, supported by the destruction wreaked by foreign money from some governments that spoke their language and others that didn’t. Everything animate and

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inanimate was a moving target. She had always been a claustrophobic child, and her feelings of being trapped were exacerbated by being closed in for large swathes of time, jointly walled off from a future and a present. Growing up, Miriam didn’t need to be taught not to attract attention to her existence; she saw it all around her, taking it on by osmosis, or an extra gene that became part of her DNA. Like the others, she knew when to speak in whispers and move in hushed tones. It could be so solitary and lonely and they had sometimes been forced to spend time alone or with one or two others to circumvent the restrictions of group meetings.

As soon as she found the building, she knew that she could not waste any time, and Miriam slept more deeply that night than she had in longer than she wanted to remember. She had woken up groggy with the unfamiliarity of night sleep, confused at seeing the morn-ing before her without having watched it arrive. Shuffling to the bathroom, she had listened to a muted crashing sound slam around her, and began to clam up in fear until she recognized it as suitcases dropping from above wardrobes and being raised up again. It was the time of year when the neighbors were making the change from warm to cold weather, shifting summer clothes into the background of a closet so they became no more than dusty stage props, moth eaten and faded in color, squashed below the weight of sweaters and jackets that took center stage again. They all took their cues from each other, communal living a strong element of this city and this life they had been leading and still coursing through them despite the restrictions. Living separately did not create any boundaries that could be identified. All of their struggles and their joys intertwined into each other’s stories, weaving old man Hasan’s problems with his son, into Aunt Huda’s health scare. Children and adults alike knew everyone’s stories, unraveling them as a discussion point when they got together and tangling them up again in the process of gossip disguised as analysis, dredging through the events so many times that some of the truth sifted away in the re-telling.

A soft knock at the door had rattled around the spaces in the apartment where furniture used to be. She knew it was safe to open and that only one of the neighbors would know to knock like that but she had opened the door slightly anyway, peering through the slit she created to find Aisha, who was sent on the instructions of her mother, wanting to know if Miriam had unpacked her winter clothes. Miriam had noticed that Aisha was wearing one of her old dresses, a favorite when she was growing up. She had become used

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to the recycling of clothes, the way they went around in circles, like braided dough as it rose from the depths of the caved ovens the bakers used for their morning bread. She had stopped being enraged by the unfairness of the ritual, of not having new clothes all the time, accepting that it was their duty to pass fabric on within fami-lies over and over again in spirals that dropped from one generation to the next. When times were harder, they became less reluctant to pass things on, holding on to clothes until they disintegrated in large patches, frightened at letting anything go to the point of distraction by the bombs that hovered and exploded around them, the spattering of gun shots, the hunger and the cancerous grief that spread and multiplied, unbearable at most times. It was all in self-defense the news coverage that filtered out of the rest of the world would claim, before printing it in large words across newspapers just to make sure no one was confused.

Before she had stepped out into the night, Miriam thought of her clothes still neatly folded up despite the chaos around them. She was leaving them to whoever would take them, but she knew who she would have liked to give them to. Samia had especially loved Mir-iam’s grey white coat and matching gloves, a set that had escaped the recycling churn, a present from her parents for a birthday one year, presented in a large box over a birthday cake gleaming with candles. Miriam and Samia, friends since childhood, had always been the same size. She felt them all around her, her father, her mother, her brother, Samia.

She felt her away around the bedroom, leaving the potential light of the last candle as she prepared herself. The electricity had perma-nently gone months ago and she was used to moving in the darkness. Her flimsy clothes hung over her body, so much thinner now, and her frame angled through her skin. They had been forced onto a diet that balanced on the cusp of basic dietary requirements. “The idea is to put them on a diet but not to let them die of hunger,” one of the newspaper headlines had inserted in a story buried in the bottom corner, like reading an afterthought before turning the page to more interesting news. It was hard to match the reality with what her father had told them about the land when it was staggering in lush fertility, pushing out its results like the mothers around them.

Miriam lived with the rampage of memories that slowly assault-ed her, but they did not overtake her anymore. She could not feel much so she watched them act out in front of her as though putting on a show of someone else’s life. Her days were an exercise in push-

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ing away and down at memories so that in the process she ended up wandering around the vaults of her mind, opening and closing compartments with the hollowness that occupied her, watching from across the room waiting for the time that it would pass through her again.

She did not look back at the house she grew up in as she walked out of it. She did not take a key or anything that was in it except for one picture, which she strapped to her chest. It was of her father, her mother, Miriam and her brother taken two years ago at a family wed-ding. She moved quickly and quietly down the wide stairwell towards the entrance of the building and when she got there, she shivered. The cold seeped through her thin clothes, wrapping her body in a hard, tight embrace.

—You have to go outside. He spoke close to Miriam’s ear. Her teeth hit against each other in tiny vibrations that reverber-

ated in her head, her shaking releasing some of the tautly wound up anticipation. Miriam had never been a night person, preferring the possibility that came with mornings to the resigned potential of the evening. It was for this reason that she had left in its depths, just be-fore the first streaks of orange would rise up into the sky. She wanted to see it force itself into the blackness, pushing and seeping light into it: the time of day when hope rose before being wiped out by the explosions that would rock the concrete began. It was not certain that the war would be quiet at this time, but it had been in the last few weeks and so she hoped for more of this apparent moral code over night raids. She started walking.

—Do you remember the time that we went for lunch at that restaurant by the sea and dad got sick from the fish?

He laughed. —What reminded you of that story? —That was a fun day.—We swam so much and he just stayed there and kept on eating. —He yelled at us not to go too deep with full stomachs.—Nothing happened to us.—We told him the fish smelled funny. Miriam was alert, every nerve honed in on what was to come,

the way she used to be right before she stepped out onto the stage and into the applause of the waiting audience. This once familiar feeling felt new to her now, frightening in its resurrection.

—Bravo. They shouted from ahead of her, eyes shining with fulfillment as she smiled and bowed.

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That was before it all began all over again and before she could have known that Scheherazade from one thousand and one nights would be her last performance.

—Come on, you know how to get there. He said to her as she stopped at a fork in the road, frozen in

the past.—I don’t remember. —Just keep walking.—This was here last week.—It’s just a big stone. Walk around it.And so she did. She kept to the night shadows, close to walls and buildings, ig-

noring the sounds of tank wheels rolling along the gravel on a road nearby and the group laughter of men somewhere in the distance.

She came to the building as the blackness began to loosen its grip on the sky and so hurried, not wanting to miss the rising sun. She had chosen it because it was the only building left in the neigh-borhood that was tall enough, not because of its height, since the occupying forces had placed restrictions years ago, but because of its location overlooking a cliff. The others had been destroyed, their in-habitants shuffled off to camps, other countries, or family members that could take them in. The borders swelled with the heaving of people trying to escape, carrying their meager life in sheets knotted at the top and thrown over their backs. She could have left too, but there was nowhere she could go. This was the only place for her.

—You found it. I told you there was no reason to worry.—You’re such a know it all. —But you know that I’m always right.—She had always chased after him in their childhood, wanting

to do all the things that he did.—Our mother told you to play with the girls but you didn’t want

to.—I had more fun with you.They had been inseparable if they could help it. His first day

of her school had caused her to wail and cry as she clung on to his backpack, confused about why she couldn’t go too.

Out of habit, Miriam went up the wide concrete stairs as quietly as she could. She didn’t need to worry since there was no one around and things were different now, people did not open their doors or give in to their curiosity about noise in the hallway. She began to pant and sweat slightly as she climbed the dark stairwell, trying not to trip as she ran her hand along the ridged and wrinkled wall, shuffling

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each foot toward the end of the step it was on before lifting it to climb to the next one. When she reached the last step, she pushed at the iron door that opened out onto the roof and it swung heavily, creaking as she walked through it.

Miriam stood still for a moment, looking out at the huge sky, so extravagant in its size and night stars. They were clear to see in the way they lit themselves up from the inside, their brightness not piercing but gentle. She had chosen to walk in the heels that she had worn for her graduation, the only piece of clothing she took an in-terest in before she left the house, clicking her way down the street like the women that the boys in school had spoken of in excited sentences. She slipped them off her feet one at a time and held them in her fingers as she walked to the edge of the roof before putting them down on the raised concrete, like two beacons pointing in the direction that she would go. The light was coming up quickly now as she polished them lightly with the fabric of her shirt and hoped that they were not smeared with mud. She did not want anyone to think that she walked around in dirty shoes.

She saw him ahead of her, smiling in that way that he used to, as though the best secrets were locked up in his chest. When she imagined this moment, she imagined running out, and maybe she had, but she saw herself when she was balancing on the edge, one hand clasped at her chest where the picture lay, as the sun lifted its bobbled head out of the depths, streaking its arrival across the sky in a fierce orange and pink stream. She let herself feel and remember it all now: the laughter when they hid in the closet as seven year old children waiting to be found, the picnics along rushing brooks in the summer when they were ten years old, swimming in the deep blue tints of the water at eleven years old, while underneath them small fish wiggled their way out of the sand, the fruit chilling in the rivers before being hacked open in a shower of thick flushed pieces and black seeds to be divided among the four of them, her father and his pipes settling the house in the smell of comfort, her mother stirring warm milk spiced with cinnamon and cloves over the stove, all of them together before the bombs took three of them away and left her to watch. She let them all come to her, lifting her as she flew and hovered over the roof of the building, meeting the daylight wide-eyed before she squinted against the silver rays flashing at her and fell into the rest of her memories.

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compartmentalizing

is how I get processed out of her staticky poems

when she wakes in a tree-womb of elastic things being digested,

a pulsating room of sparks blown up for a meager flame

like her kinked stray hairs backlit by the morning:

a methodical recollection, a stirring together

of lime juice and basil seeds into carbonated water.

-Megan Towey

14

nil desperandum :: there’s hope enough yetdesmond kon zhicheng-mingdé

“To be able to be the nomads they wanted to be,” Gigi says. “They left the next day after that confession. The archaeologists were surprised. No one had thought any less of them, although many wondered how the book would have been eventually written. Was it archaeology or history or literature?” Her lover is reading again, applying himself to the task at hand, to distract himself. He is still in his bathrobe, buried in it, having walked out of the shower to his reading chair. There is the invitation to go to the movies with the couple from Romania. Then there is dinner with the Bhutanese family across town. They too had just arrived. But her lover has put on a bit of Bach, Sonata No. 2 in D Major, an adagio that he likes. Especially when the notes sound like twiddling thumbs, and the cello and harpsichord wrap their sounds around each other. It feels like a walk down the main street, alone, being a passer-by rather than a voyeur, the witnessing being a gift rather than privilege. Sonata No. 3 in G Minor III is for early morning, when he needs to dress for work. But in this new country, there is no need to hurry up, or to run your day by your watch. So, Gigi puts on something slow, Noc-turne in C-Sharp Minor, by Janusz Olejniczak. She walks over to the television and places “The Pianist” into the player, with the sound off, so all they listen to is Janusz Olejniczak, and what he has to say.

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ab ovo :: from the beginning

desmond kon zhicheng-mingdé

In his essay, Nugent thinks Austen’s fictive world is a veritable hell. For an adolescent nerd like him. “When I was fourteen,” he writes, of his own ways of learning how to act in the world, “I was like Mary Bennett, which is to say I paid attention to the way poets and philos-ophers expressed themselves on the page but not the way the peo-ple around me expressed themselves with their mouths.” His writing does not betray this early habit of learning. His writing has become beautiful in its effortlessness, both feeling and criticism wrapping themselves around each other, like arms folding in on themselves. Gigi remembers her black Mary Jane shoes, and the pinafore she dyed black to go with it. She remembers the black ribbons of velvet and French lace – these she used to tie her hair in a high ponytail. She even hand-stitched one into a garter, which she wore high on her thigh, as if it were a femme fatale’s holster for a gun. There was a set of butterfly knives in her top drawer, the moth and peony designs scraped off. She kept them in a pencil case, so they sat in the middle of a hundred old color pencils, and no one noticed. “If you read Austen,” Nugent continues, “you’ll read about a world in which technology means nothing and the triumphs and failures of conversational agility drive everything.” Unlike Nugent, Gigi didn’t read Austen as a young nerd. He recommends it though. He says that “like almost all worthwhile adolescent experience, it can be depress-ing, but it can also feel like waking up”.

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en passant :: in passingdesmond kon zhicheng-mingdé

“You pray everything will come up peaches. You pray for each fam-ily in each village.” The villages here remind Gigi of the Javanese artisans and masons, how they took the Shivaite tradition, and built each stone on its forms and ideas. The small houses are like stone igloos on stilts made of palm and bamboo. Small stupa raised slightly above the ground as if to hover, together looking like a humbler Bo-robudur, where a bit of circumambulation, just a couple of rounds, always helped Gigi achieve a state of oneness. It was for this that Gigi travelled far, across four countries, and countless borders. Again intoned into this sudden space is Nakasone, as if he knew what Gigi needed all along: “What affects one member in this community af-fects me. My actions will affect every other member in this commu-nity. What I do, in turn, will affect every other link in this web. Tug one strand and the whole web vibrates.”

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hours d’ouevre :: outside the work

desmond kon zhicheng-mingdé

The mendicant once taught Gigi how to make her own compost bin. There were thick pine planks at the village temple. All it took was four feet by four feet, a small square in the corner of the backyard. There are things you can place into a compost, and things you can’t. Gigi started throwing her garbage into the bin without first sorting. “Everything rots anyway” was Gigi’s understanding. Eventually, she realized leftovers from takeout wouldn’t do. Nor used milk cartons or a year’s worth of “Vanity Fair” and “National Geographic.” The skin of fruit is good. Eggshells. Lipton teabags. Old towels and washcloths. Only the cotton, and nothing synthetic. She tried to put as much in as possible, using her foot to compress the heap. But the mendicant showed her that layers needed to be made, and the different contents mixed in. “Give it room. Give it air. And in time, you’ll be able to put in back into the soil. To give you good trees and flowers.” This has become a ritual for Gigi, sacred almost. Every morning. She tends to the plants, then turns to the compost bin for the work it requires. There’s a sign on the side of the bin: “hors d’oeuvre.” The mendicant had written it with his finger and a bit of house paint.

photo by julia becker

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photo by julia becker

visiting uncle shirleyterry barr

“Anyone who buys a damn Jap car is a traitor.”So says Uncle Shirley. We’re eating with him at Judy’s restaurant

in Columbia, just off I-20. My blackened flounder gets stuck in my throat, and I turn to see who else is listening.

My parents and I are returning from a weekend trip to Charleston. Strangely, my folks have seemed lighter on this trip, unworried about lawn care, bills, and time pressures.

Maybe it’s because my grandmother died last year, and Dad didn’t have to call her three times a day to hear her fears about communists, UFO’s, or how our vegetable supply was being contaminated by the government. In fact, since she passed he’s barely uttered her name.

But he has set up the dinner with Uncle Shirley, his only remaining sibling, and as we get closer to Columbia, all his relaxed energy tightens again. Five years older than Dad, Uncle Shirley is my only living natural uncle.

Uncle Shirley is a mystery to me, and it doesn’t feel like we’re related at all. The only trait we share, to my knowledge, is that we’re both first-born sons.

And I wonder now: what traits do link the members of our family?

Some families hang their portraits over the living room mantle, proudly displaying their closeness and love. Our family never made such a portrait, and even if we had, I doubt that any one shot or sitting could have captured us, for we are like the disparate pieces of an abused jigsaw puzzle: frayed, bent and unmoored. Most recently I’ve wondered if the puzzle box holding us all was always missing something—five or six misshaped pieces that would make us whole.

I also wonder if some pieces of another puzzle found their way into our box.

But what if some of our pieces wandered off by themselves, of their own choice, seeking another framework where they would make a tighter fit?

What if one or two of us were forced into leaving, believing we

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had no choice but to leave, because we never realized that we could stay, that there might be another piece willing to hear our story: a piece that knew almost perfectly what we had seen or felt?

uncle shirley moved AwAy from Birmingham when I was eight, taking my first-cousin, Ricky, with him. I liked Ricky. We played baseball together, collected baseball cards too. Once, he gave me some priceless 1962 Topps cards of Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle, and Sandy Koufax. To my knowledge, I gave him nothing.

I remember our last outing, before he was abruptly uprooted. When that day began, I didn’t even know they were moving. And after giving me the bad news, my grandmother and Uncle Shirley took us to Eastwood Mall, at that time Birmingham’s only mall.

At JC Penny’s, my grandmother bought me a new shirt, and at Western Auto, she bought me a brand new baseball, though I wasn’t sure where or what Taiwan was. I don’t remember what she bought Ricky, or if she bought him anything, but when we went to JJ Newberry’s, Ricky led us to the wig section, adorned himself with a black mophead, and chanted “Yeah, Yeah, Yeah,” as he played air guitar. That cracked me up, but then Uncle Shirley appeared and grabbed the wig:

“What do you boys think you are?”His growl demanded total silence and obedience. Neither of us

dared speak the name of that forbidden group.And when we returned to my grandmother’s place, it took only

one game of home run derby to tear the cover off my new ball.Uncle Shirley’s wife, and Ricky’s Mom, Dexter, had been married

before. She had a daughter, Becky, from that marriage, so technically I had a step-cousin. For some reason, even though my grandmother professed to love her, Becky never came to family gatherings, and I never thought to ask why.

Come to think of it, Uncle Shirley didn’t attend most of these family gatherings either. We ate supper at my grandmother’s every Sunday night, and to my memory, Uncle Shirley attended only two or three times during the several years he lived in town.

Naturally, none of us asked where he was or what he was doing instead—what secret grudge he and Dexter might be holding or hiding.

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i wonder now: did Dad’s parents sit Shiva for Uncle Shirley when he married Dexter, this gentile woman, as they did for Dad when he married my Christian mother? The ritual of declaring the death of a loved one, “sitting Shiva” in the Jewish world demands a week’s worth of mourning, for those grieving to be veiled in black, to sit completely still, and to cover all mirrors, all signs of vanity and the material world.

I can see my grandmother sitting in her apartment, venting to any and all of my father’s betrayal, a funny notion since by all accounts, she never darkened the Temple doors. Because she was always the star of her own domestic drama, I’m sure she let friends, neighbors, and casual acquaintances know of her shame, though when sitting Shiva, one is supposed to sit quietly, contemplating this eternal loss.

I’m betting that my grandmother’s mirrors never saw such darkness, that she never felt any real loss except for a moment when she feared losing control over her second son. My mother, however, felt something: the shame of being the cause of such a dark ritual, of the barrier between mother and son. She’s held onto this memory—a memory my father never shared with me, much less bothered to explain. I don’t know if he ever got over it, or if it impacted him at all.

My mother also told me that Dad’s mother refused to attend their engagement party. Only his sister Carole, out of his entire family, honored him on that night, for that ritual.

So maybe Uncle Shirley was dead to my grandmother too, at least as far as family gatherings and rituals were concerned. Because even on holidays, when Dad’s family drove out to Bessemer to eat Thanksgiving or Christmas lunch with us, Uncle Shirley was missing. I’m not sure that anyone felt his absence, for as usual, no one uttered his name.

Just as we had no portrait over our mantle, in my family we didn’t speak of such things as religious ritual, divorce, money, why Uncle Shirley didn’t come around so much, or why he was moving his family away. We just observed and learned to hold our tongues.

To keep secrets that we barely knew existed. Our own form of sitting Shiva.

As I reflected on all that I didn’t know about Uncle Shirley, I confronted the reality that my family’s silence wasn’t a natural reticence. It was an intentional struggle to control certain relationships and keep them superficially intact. And this struggle,

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I realize now, was between my entire family and that singular source of power—that one who had to be obeyed and revered above all: my grandmother.

However, she didn’t have enough power to prevent Uncle Shirley from moving to South Carolina, or even to compel him to stay in touch.

“Why won’t he call at least, or come down for a few days…” she complained for decades in her nightly calls to Dad. Apparently, sitting Shiva is one thing; being fawned over by your wayward son quite another.

“You know better than I do what my darling brother is up to,” I once heard Dad answer.

I can still hear the sarcasm tincturing the word “darling” today.I guess Dad knew more about the situation than he let on. On

another occasion, I heard him tell Mom that “It’s only a loan. He’ll pay it back.”

Somehow, I don’t think it was the only loan, and I don’t think Uncle Shirley ever paid back it back either. But that’s just the feeling I have based on the conversations that I think I heard, and the bitter tone Dad always used when he oh-so-infrequently mentioned his brother’s name.

And I have another feeling now, a much more disquieting one. When Dad suggested to his mother that she might know better why Uncle Shirley stayed so far away, maybe that was the tip of something—the secret to why Uncle Shirley left. The reason my Dad stayed so silent about his brother.

the summer i turned ten, we decided to vary our annual Florida vacation and travel to South Carolina to visit Uncle Shirley. Or at least Dad decided this. To placate Mom, who saw no joy or rest in such a trip, Dad agreed that we could also visit Charleston for two days. The other caveat for the trip—maybe even the entire purpose of the trip—was that my grandmother would be accompanying us. No one seemed especially thrilled by this prospect except for Dad and me. I saw nothing wrong in having my grandmother with us for an entire week. After all, I loved her then. Still, convincing her to go was another matter:

“Oh, I couldn’t take riding in that hot car all day—it would just kill me.”

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“It’ll be OK MaMa, you’ll see! We’ll keep the windows down so that the air will blow on us.”

“Oh no, that will blow my hair, and it’s hot air anyway!”In the end, I suppose she couldn’t pass up this chance to invade

her oldest son’s world, especially since he had taken such pains to keep her out of it.

But why did Uncle Shirley agree to our invasion? Did he actually miss us? Or was it the prospect of Dad‘s bringing more money?

My mother kept her mouth shut during these negotiations, except once, when my Dad’s fatigue with trying to convince MaMa to come with us left him sagging in his favorite den chair. Fearlessly, Mom suggested that “Maybe you should just leave her here.”

“Are you kidding,” he exploded. “She’ll worry about us the whole time we’re gone!”

Today, I understand that he really meant she would “worry him” the whole time we were gone.

So, after resolving all superficial issues, there we were: me, my little brother Mike, and MaMa crammed together in the back seat of our old blue 1956 Chevy special. And in one sense, MaMa was right: the air back there did blow hot and strong.

We made it to Columbia by seven that night, though Uncle Shirley didn’t arrive from work until almost nine. Dexter’s enthusiasm on our arrival seemed, well, Shiva-like. She fed us something unmemorable, and somehow I guess I ate it. Even worse, I felt shy around Ricky. He seemed like the same boy, just quieter, but he was twelve by then and had other friends including his Little League teammates. Unsure of my place in his world, I cautiously watched him that night as he carefully doctored his short hair after showering—hair cut like the good son of a military man. He barely acknowledged me as I hovered in the doorway.

Also there to greet us was the family dog, a boxer named Rebel, who perhaps summed up everyone’s feelings that first night when he tried to bite MaMa.

“We better keep him in the backyard pen,” Dexter decreed, which seemed a wise choice at the time. “Just don’t leave his gate open” she added.

As I was standing in the kitchen that night after dinner, Dexter looked down on me and asked,

“Buddy, what are you going to call me?”Maybe I had never called her anything before. If I had, I had

forgotten what.

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“Uhhh, I don’t know,” I stammered.“What about Aunt Dexter?”Is it me, or do Aunt Dexter and Uncle Shirley sound like

characters on “The Munsters” or “The Addams Family?”“OK,” I responded.But I continued to avoid saying her name.My only other personal encounter with her was the moment I

walked in from a game of catch with my brother and asked if I could wash my hands in the kitchen…

“…bathroom sink, back there” she pointed. I turned quickly because Dexter had the kind of face that, when intent on something, kind of puckered into what I imagined I looked like on the day that I sampled a persimmon from our neighbor’s tree. I got the feeling that you never wanted to cross her, and I learned to stay out of her way.

Which in such a small house would prove impossible.And finally on that first night, Uncle Shirley came home, just

when Mike and I were ready for bed. Even though I did see him before falling asleep, I don’t remember now how he greeted us, or whether he was glad to see us at all.

during the week we stayed with him in Columbia, Uncle Shirley left for work every morning before anyone else was up, and he never came home before 8:00 at night. It didn’t occur to me then that he was avoiding his family, like he always had. I didn’t realize that avoiding family was an option, and though the secret of why he might have been doing so didn’t occur to me then, I wonder now if I might have learned more from him than I’ve realized.

For lately I’ve been thinking about my own brother. About the distance we’ve kept from each other. He, too, moved far away from home, much farther than I did. If I’m lucky, I see him once a year. Our phone calls, maybe once every six weeks, are superficial maneuverings through “How’s the family? Is work going OK?” We stay away from deeper stuff. Apparently, just as my father and Uncle Shirley did. Oddly enough, however, both my brother and I married women whose culture is far removed from ours.

I’m sure our parents did not sit Shiva for us. Though that doesn’t mean that they were overjoyed, initially, at our choices. But then, my brother and I haven’t spoken of such matters.

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At least not yet.For I’m growing tired of puzzles I can’t finish, ones that seem

to defy solving as if you see the end coming but can’t figure out how the few remaining pieces could possibly be sufficient to complete things, to answer the questions and satisfy the need for fulfillment. I’ve begun asking questions now, drawing my brother into our story.

And it’s he who remembers this episode of our visit to Uncle Shirley and helps me make at least this much sense of these seemingly unfitted family parts:

Mike and I are playing catch in the backyard, and when Dexter calls us in to lunch, we come running. Except one of us forgets to close Rebel’s gate. Given that Mike is only six, Dexter blames him for this carelessness.

Rebel doesn’t play well with others, and that afternoon he corners several little kids in their own yard until Dexter and Ricky retrieve him. Both Rebel and Mike live in the dog house for the rest of the day, and Mom and Dad are not far out of it either. I believe throughout that someone will eventually hold me responsible given that I am the older brother. For the rest of the day, whenever I pass her, Dexter’s slit eyes follow me closely, watching my every move.

While I do remember this scene, it’s scarred deep inside my brother.

“God, I was so little, and you’d think I had just stolen from someone’s grave the way they carried on.”

This searing blame, which he clearly still feels, might explain why he doesn’t burn with my questions. Yet remembering brings us closer, and when he recounts his exact memories, I feel like I’m listening to myself tell these stories.

It’s like he and I are one piece.When I first brought up this trip and told him that I had a

question about the experience, his immediate response was: “You want to know the dog’s name, right?”

He knew what I wanted without my telling him. And if he reads me that well, what else might he tell me?

What else might he and I contain? By the time we went to Ricky’s Little League game that evening,

all seemed calm. But Uncle Shirley, though he promised Ricky he’d try to make it, went missing again. Ricky played well; his team won, and afterward, he presented me with a prize collection of baseball cards he had gathered from his teammates who had grabbed the pink bubble gum and discarded those precious cards on the red dirt floor

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of the dugout. It was a long ride back to the house, and when we got there,

Dexter fried some burgers for us and boiled twenty ears of corn. I thought that was a lot, given that in my family, we usually ate one ear apiece. Maybe an hour after we finished eating, Uncle Shirley drove up looking more weathered than any of the rest of us. I remember watching him head straight for the kitchen sink where he proceeded to wash his face and hands as Dexter stood by observing all that she couldn’t control.

When he sat down to his dinner, she put a burger on his plate and the rest of the corn in a big bowl by it. Maybe he ate the burger, but what I recall is that he took some butter and salt, applied them generously, and proceeded to gnaw through eight ears of corn without stopping.

Dad took a picture of him then; a picture I’ve kept. There he sits at the kitchen table, legs crossed beneath him, his shoeless white socks prominent. He is eating, but one eye and half a smile greet the camera. He knows something we don’t, and whatever it is, he keeps it and the corn to himself.

When I want to see him now, it’s that picture I turn to.Just what did you know, Uncle Shirley?

through the erA of his Columbia exile, Uncle Shirley would occasionally take overnight trips to Birmingham. He’d visit MaMa for a little while, bed down at our house, and be up by five the next morning and off, usually before anyone else awakened. I don’t know what he got from these hasty and rushed visits other than to buy off guilt and secure more funds. And I don’t know if he was successful in achieving either.

My grandmother lived alone then, and it’s strange to me that Uncle Shirley wouldn’t stay with her, keep her company through the only night he had to spend with her, until I remember this story, a story I heard from my mother:

“Your MaMa used to say that your Daddy lied. He might have been completely under her thumb, but he never lied. One night we were playing bridge over there, and for some reason she got mad at him and called him a liar. She said, ‘Alvin, you know you lie, like that time when you were a little boy and said you woke up one night and saw a strange man in our house, a man standing in the living room

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wearing nothing but his underwear. You know you were lying!’”“Wow, what did Dad say?”“Nothing. Nothing. He just laughed and went on shuffling the

cards.”I could interpret this story; I knew it was neither a dream nor a

lie. My grandmother had affairs. My grandfather died before I was born, and from my childhood, I remember her always claiming to have boyfriends. Once, when I was ten and spending the day with her, she got increasingly agitated by Dad’s being late to get me.

“Doesn’t he remember that I have a date?”She was past seventy then, and maybe it was okay for her to

date, but I didn’t want to know about it. When I finally saw Midnight Cowboy and the flashbacks of “Joe Buck” as a boy being left alone by his grandmother because she had to keep her date—or being in bed with both grandmother and her date--I thought of this moment and how unsettled I was then.

In this same era, she started writing songs, even had two recorded on 45 rpm by a local band with a woman named Abby Lee singing in the style of Dad’s favorite female vocalist, Julie London. One of those songs was titled “I Want Your Lovin.’” It kind of embarrassed me when I first heard it, and I didn’t know what to say when she asked if I liked it.

“Yeah, MaMa, it’s really good.” Even though I knew it wasn’t. Another experience, another picture: the two of us are sitting

on the arm of an overstuffed chair in her apartment. My Dad has asked us to pose, and before we do, MaMa suggests that we sit as if we are boy and girlfriend. I’m twelve years old, wearing Beatle-Bangs, a gold and blue horizontally-striped shirt with matching blue shorts. She puts her arms around my waist and chest and leans in to me as we sit, and I do the same. Our smiles indicate that we’re happy together.

That there’s nothing wrong with this picture.Years later, after I’m married, I bring my wife to meet MaMa

who then pronounces to both of us the proper way to produce a male heir:

“The wife should do nothing, just lie on her back, eating a banana while the husband does all the work.”

We say nothing. But we never forget. Within five years we produce two children. Two daughters.

And then, on the day of her funeral, I discover that MaMa has

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recorded her life story. Dad and I listen to the cassette on the way home from the

cemetery. I hear her voice--that mix of Southern-Jewish charm--as she proudly attests to having men around her all the time, even after she married. They come over many nights and sometimes escort her to gambling dens.

“They just loved dancing with me,” she says, “especially so they could get right next to my bosom.”

I can’t look at Dad, can’t express one word of what I feel. And again, he just laughs:

“She was some woman!”We continue driving as the tape mercifully runs out.As I blend these images with the knowledge that Uncle Shirley

was five years older than Dad, I begin wondering this: What did this woman, his mother, show Uncle Shirley? What silences did he see?

I hear now these other silences. The silences of his absence from any of Dad’s childhood stories. Neither do I recall seeing Uncle Shirley in Dad’s old photos. No stories of two brothers playing together; no photos to mark the ritual of their days and years. No birthday parties, Bar Mitzvahs. We have plenty of shots of Dad alone, or with his sister. Uncle Shirley, apparently, was missing even when he was there.

we visited uncle shirley twice more in my adult years. The first time, we were returning from a trip to Washington DC, and Dad insisted we detour to see his brother. Uncle Shirley had divorced Dexter and was now keeping company with a woman named Doris. They treated us to dinner at a place that I thought was closed when we first pulled into the parking lot.

I was twenty by then, and so Uncle Shirley offered me a cocktail. Neither of my parents touched alcohol, but I wanted to show somebody something, so I promptly ordered a Wild Turkey on the rocks.

“We don’t stock Wild Turkey,” the waitress/co-owner apologized.

“OK, what about Jack Black?”“Now you’re talking,” Uncle Shirley said as he clapped me on

the back, leaving my Dad looking like some rite had just passed him by.

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Afterward, Uncle Shirley drove us by his construction office. We saw his warehouse, his garage, his drafting table. It all looked so ordinary, so…alien to all that I knew. When we left that night, I thanked him for the drink, the meal.

It’s funny to me now, but none of us mentioned my grandmother, who was till alive then, or Ricky.

And then came the night at Judy’s restaurant—the last time I ever saw my uncle-- where I’m trying to swallow blackened flounder and the bitter truth of at least some of what my family believes.

I’m sure my face wondered why Jap cars were so forbidden. Dad looked at me and offered:

“You know your Uncle Shirley fought in the Battle of Midway, right?”

I didn’t know. How would I have known since no one ever talked about this part of the past? I barely knew that Dad fought in Patton’s army as an eighteen-year old draftee. Other than the German Luger he brought home, the story about telling a German POW that heavyweight boxer Joe Louis knocked out the German champ Max Schmeling in their title-fight rematch, and that after he returned and enrolled at the University of Alabama, the various fraternities wouldn’t rush him because he was a Jew, I knew nothing of my own father’s wartime experience.

So no, I didn’t know about Uncle Shirley. I didn’t now about Mitsubishi’s war financing, its armaments.

“Those sons of bitches!”But I did know how thankful I was that we had driven my Dad’s

Buick Regal and not my Honda Accord.Uncle Shirley calmed down enough to shake my hand as we left.

He didn’t ask me to visit again, though he knew that I lived only 100 miles away.

Of course, I never asked if I could come back either.Uncle Shirley’s last trip to Birmingham occurred somewhere in

the Desert Storm era. When I happened to call home that Friday night, Mom told me that the two brothers were ensconced in the den, watching General Schwarzkopf address the nation.

“They’re so focused, “Mom said. “They seem happy to be together.”

Despite the fact that they fought a war on two separate theaters of action, they were united by their love for and defense of a country that, perhaps more than anything else—even family—gave them an identity, a portrait of themselves that was not disturbing or even

30

puzzling. Even now it’s a comforting scene to picture, this final memory of them.

like An old fAmily Album stored in a remote attic room, our family secrets have always hovered nearby, just waiting for someone to remember where they’ve been stacked. One of these secrets was that while we knew that Uncle Shirley was sick, we didn’t know how advanced his geriatric leukemia was. That is until my parents got the call from Doris telling us that he had passed away the night before.

My parents then called me from Birmingham as they prepared to drive up that day.

“I don’t know exactly what’s going on,” Dad said. “But we’ll see you sometime tonight.”

They drove 300 miles straight to the funeral home, and then on to my house. “The funeral is tomorrow at two,” Dad said. And with that, he and Mom retired to their hotel, none of us certain what tomorrow would hold.

The next day, I accompanied them to the funeral.At a Baptist church.And there I learned from the preacher who conducted the

service that Uncle Shirley was: “A fine man, and a good preacher too. He was devoted to the

Lord and served Him in any way he could.”I had known that Uncle Shirley liked to hunt wild game, that he

had a boar’s head mounted on his den wall. But I hadn’t known the other kinds of hunting he engaged in: seeking a safe and acceptable framed setting for his family in a nondescript South Carolina suburban subdivision and a country Baptist church.

And also in the pulpit.My folks and I looked at each other as the eulogy concluded.A Baptist preacher? Thank God MaMa was dead. Maybe that’s why toward the end of her life she began insisting

that Dad go to Temple regularly. Maybe that’s why she was so glad that I started going with him.

She herself wouldn’t go anywhere. A self-professed agoraphobic, she claimed that she couldn’t leave her apartment. When my Aunt Carole died of multiple sclerosis—a disease that also ravaged her mind—we had to go to MaMa’s apartment afterward and describe the service for her. Still wearing the ritual torn ribbons on our lapels

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that signified the rift in our hearts, we watched this woman, clothed in an ordinary housedress, pretend to cry. Her tears welled and dried so often that I knew for certain then that I no longer trusted anything she said or did.

I wondered why I ever had.Her next false move was to pull out a copy of Harold Kushner’s

When Bad Things Happen to Good People. She began talking about the book, and though I zoned out for the first few minutes wondering what this book had to do with my poor aunt’s death, I finally caught on somewhere between MaMa’s lament of how my aunt had abandoned her when she married my Uncle Leo, and her bemoaning of how lonely she was because no one ever came to see her.

MaMa actually believed that she was the “good person” that all these “bad things” happened to in our invisible family portrait.

Which made the rest of us…? Like Uncle Shirley? He chose not to attend the services either.

No explanation.No word at all. Neither was there any word from him a few years later when

MaMa died. But then, I for one didn’t expect there to be. I’m not sure what my Dad expected.

And then, there’s this. Dad is telling the story of his own father’s death back in the early 1950’s, how on the night he died, my grandfather lay in a hospital bed with only my Dad there to comfort him:

“I was so tired, and when he asked me to stay with him that night, I couldn’t. I told him I had to go home to bed because I had work in the morning. I didn’t know he was going to die just a few hours later.”

Where was my grandmother? And where was Uncle Shirley, I wondered, even though I knew by then that he was a man who missed all birthdays, all special occasions. Rituals just didn’t matter to him as I thought they did in my family.

And it finally hit me: this missing piece: the one biological trait that my Uncle Shirley and I shared—being first-born sons—had no meaning for us. It wasn’t a connection at all, given that I believe that first-borns tend to be more closely tied to family, maybe to the point of overly-sentimentalizing family connections. I can’t imagine ever abandoning my family. And when my father was dying, I held his hand and whispered to him that it was OK to go, that he had done

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everything he could and that I would take care of my mother, the rest of our family from here on out. I know he heard me, and he slipped away soon after.

I also know that in my married family, my wife and daughters and I have established our own rituals from Chanukah to Christmas and even to Halloween. And if you look around our house, you’ll see the full portrait of our family amidst all the individual and collective pictures that we’ve taken through the years of our life together.

But then, we haven’t suffered any significant, abnormal trauma. Nothing has shocked our family system, and certainly my daughters have never seen images of strange men in underwear lurking through their house.

My Uncle Shirley saw something in his biological family, experienced some horror with or near or through his mother, and while I’ll always believe this, I’ll never know exactly what he saw.

I’ll never know what piece of his life turned up missing one day when he was five, or eight, or maybe when he was going through that troubling but natural teenage rite of puberty. I used to think that he was the piece that didn’t fit the family puzzle.

But I know differently now.I know that none of us wanted to look behind the ritual screen

of our family connections. Or maybe we were simply incapable of standing back at a healthy distance—a distance that would allow us to see the larger perspective of the family puzzle we actually were. Maybe there was no distance great enough for such a completed view.

Which brings me back to viewing Ricky, whose rites of passage, to my knowledge, were never honored either. There he was at his father’s funeral, sitting on the other side of the church with his wife and two little boys. I saw him and knew him, but he only stared straight ahead, never at me.

As I gazed at him, I grew less and less certain that he was the boy who collected baseball cards with me. That we were ever related at all.

But he finally had that Beatle cut he longed for all those decades ago.

After the funeral ended, the other revelation, from Doris came swiftly:

“Ricky was caught growing marijuana behind his trailer. It was his own little boy who turned him in after a DARE officer spoke to his second grade class. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but can

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you imagine what that little boy will have to live with now?”No I couldn’t; I didn’t even try to.Doris also said that Ricky and his wife thought Dad was after all

Uncle Shirley’s belongings, after “their” inheritance.Dad kind of laughed then and shook his head. I wondered if

those were tears in his eyes. I wondered about my own eyes too. We left the funeral home then and definitely did not go to the cemetery, Uncle Shirley’s final stop. Even Dad had had enough by then. I hoped that wherever this place was, it might be next to a cornfield. A beautiful setting for this final picture of my uncle.

We drove back to Greenville that night, and Dad and I watched the Alabama-Mississippi State football game. We are Bama fans to the core, and as the game came on, Dad confessed two things:

“I’m always so nervous before a game starts.” This one I knew. But the other:

“Did you know that your Uncle Shirley used to pull for Alabama, but after he came back from the Marines, he switched to Auburn?’

I didn’t know. Somehow it didn’t surprise me to learn it. It made a kind of sense that I’ll probably never be able to explain.

Bama lost that night, upset in Starkville, which also made some sense given everything else that happened that day.

“Who would have believed it,” Dad asked as I drove him back to his and Mom’s hotel. I wasn’t sure what part of the day he was referring to, though it was likely just the game.

Nor was I ever sure exactly why my grandmother named my uncle “Shirley.” It was actually his middle name. My father got “Alvin Ray,” and my grandmother’s maiden name was Williams. She had eight brothers and sisters, too, no Shirley among them.

My uncle’s first name was Richard, and I still don’t know what he left behind. But I’m beginning to uncover the secrets that he and the rest of the family kept.

I’m beginning to understand what their keeping has done to me.And I’m working very hard to see the larger perspective of the

puzzle before me, to fit these pieces into the whole. Last week, as I sifted through the old photos of our family that until recently had been stored under a table at my mother’s house—secreted away or simply forgotten with time—I found a shot of Mike, Ricky, and me from that summer in Columbia. The three of us seem like friends there, though we stand with too much space between us, as boys are prone to do. I showed this picture to another friend recently and told him the story of Uncle Shirley.

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“Why don’t you contact Ricky,” my friend suggested. “Maybe he knows something that would help.”

I thought about this advice, considered calling Ricky for a moment. In the end, I decided not to, for after all, he is just a stranger to me, this first cousin of mine. And I’m not sure I would trust any memory he might have of his Dad.

Of our family.So I look to the other boy standing there. I know now that I

will call him. Always.For there are still so many puzzle pieces missing in our past,

and I am striving now for completion. I need someone to walk with me as I search, for I refuse to follow the family footprints that Dad and Uncle Shirley, lost as they were to each other for all that time, imprinted on us. After all, I have nothing against modern Japanese cars or old German boxers.

It’s the secrets that are my enemy.

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mom at 40anina robb

I’m spent. Grey asphalt greying yard, grey cat and my thoughts are grey, the hairs on my head uncontrolled and twisting. Newborn cry-ing every three hours and I sweat all night under the cotton sheets that I bought for our marriage bed. It’s a single, now. Daddy sleeps in the guest room. Is that who he’s become? The happy guest good for a meal, a game, a smile, a stroll, and then a disappearance. I nev-er knew the birds started chirping so early. Dazed in the blue light of the television screen I keep rocking even after this baby’s sated, sleeping. Jacques Pepin is boning a whole chicken! The clock chimes four and the expert chef slides his knife through the bird’s skin like a surgeon. I finger the scar beneath the elastic band of my underwear; it is still raw and wrinkly like the flesh of someone who just might be eaten.

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comforteliana osborn

this house is full of stairs. In the winter the mailman won’t even deliver packages. If it doesn’t fit in the curbside box you have to go to the post office. The woman in the house can barely get out of bed. She moans and grunts and rolls on her side. She rests and breathes. Then she rolls a little further till gravity takes hold. Feet on the ground at last, she makes it to the restroom. Settling onto the toilet takes time but not as much as getting back up. She wears her housecoat most of the day. Floral and faded, zipper up the quilted front. Her tightly permed hair is short and grey, washed and worn with no room for styling. Deep creases frame her mouth but the rest of her face is smooth. Her skin lacks the sagging that comes with age, kept taut by a layer of fat below the surface.

She takes the stairs down to the kitchen one at a time, sideways like a mountain goat. She rests on the landing on the turn unless her husband is around. Then she continues down, taking the last step with a harrumph. She doesn’t lean on the wall, instead steadying herself with one outstretched hand while she watches her breath. Collected, she lumbers away.

I drive by the house at least twice each day. The woman is some-times on the porch watering the brilliant purple lobelia baskets. Paint is peeling all the way down the 43 steps from door to drive. Peach flakes cascade down when the kids hold the railing and race. I can never tell how many kids actually live at the house.

Nights I drive down the coast to the bird refuge. Up the hills through wooded twists, across the ridge and down back into civili-zation. No birds are visible but I know they are there. Heads tucked under wings, compact and asleep. Once the green square numbers on the dashboard clock pass three I head back, hoping for a few hours of sleep before the day begins. No matter the time, the flick-ering lights of a television are on at the house.

My daughter comes home from junior high just two weeks into the new school year. She reports that the bus stops in front of a weird house this year. The stair house.

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Over cereal I hear, “Their mom kisses them on the porch with everyone watching. She’s so fat they can’t even hug her I bet. That’s why she makes them kiss her.”

I give the lecture on being nice. I’ve never seen the woman any-where but at the house. Never seen a man around the place. Never seen a car coming or going.

I drive in the dark, talk radio in the background. I don’t have to think when I drive, don’t have to plan. I just accelerate, signal, turn and brake. Then repeat. Again and again ’til I’m numb enough for sleep to be a possibility. Half a mile from home I pass the house. I slow the car to a crawl and try to peer in the front windows.

The streetlight is a few houses down so the stairs are just a shad-ow memory. No porch light, just the living undersea glow of the house. There’s movement in front of the large screen television in the living room. I realize someone is awake, surely not one of the kids. What I thought was an armoire is coming to the window, sway-ing back and forth with each slow step. I know I should drive on but I can’t. I put the car in park. I wait like a peeping tom to see what will happen. The woman parts the nearly sheer curtain and gazes out. She must see me but her head doesn’t turn. I crank around to follow her gaze, but there’s nothing out there. Her outline is immense, backlit, her hair a faint halo. Ten minutes we sit in our spaces, endlessly alone. I shift and drive away before she turns back.

I surprise my daughter when I appear dressed at breakfast. Once she’s on the bus I climb in the car and follow a block behind. The morning sun is too bright even with sunglasses. The bus stops at the house. Two gangly boys scurry down the stairs in leaps and bounds to climb aboard. Once the yellow behemoth is gone I park at the base of the steep driveway. I tossed and turned for hours imaging this moment. I step out, smooth my jeans over my thighs.

I put one foot on the first peach step. It is sturdier than it looks. I climb methodically, one foot in front of the other. I avoid the shriv-eled pellets of bird poop, the spiny eucalyptus seed balls. The railing edge is splintering on the sides. My palm grazes the top only as I be-gin the final set of stairs. Too soon I’m at the porch. Hanging straw baskets overflow with late fall blossoms. A doormat greets with a faded ‘ elcom.’

I knock on the door as if in a trance. Cars pass on the street be-low. It seems hours since I was down there. The doorway is filled with the woman. If she’s surprised at an early visit by a stranger her face doesn’t betray it. She reaches out her hands to me. Even the wrists

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are fat, only a line between hand and arm. She places her hands on my shoulders and walks backward, pulling me inside the house. A toddler with scraggly yellow hair darts away.

We sit in the living room at the front of the house. “How long?” the woman asks.

The two of us fill the loveseat across from the window where I saw her last night. I’m tipping toward her sunken cushion. Her hands cover mine resting on my knees.

“We left three years ago. How did you guess?”“Did he hit you hon?”“No. I just had to go.”The woman clicks her tongue. She tries to stand without suc-

cess. She presses down on my leg for leverage and I go numb. She wanders away.

I’m left alone in a room crammed with ephemera. A worn sad-dle on a rosewood end table. Dried flowers hanging on a wall next to a Rockwell print. A Lego tower the height of the television. The detritus of a house full of family but not a single photograph.

I hear the woman elsewhere ordering a child to clean. She treads heavily and I can trace her path from room to room. Yet no one disturbs me. I sit in silence. There is not one thing I should be doing. There is no other place I can be.

I wake to an impossibly soft touch on my cheek. The woman stands over me, sun heading toward the horizon out the windows. Her hand lingers, the skin cool and moist.

“The bus will be here soon. Your daughter.”I sit up and rub my eyes. A golf ball sized prism catches the light

and scatters rainbows over the clutter, the couch, the woman. She leads me to the door. “You have to go.”My hand won’t turn the doorknob. I hear the bus coming down

the hill, shifting gears. I have nothing to tell my daughter when she sees my car here. Still I linger. The woman looks at me, crow’s feet deep around her eyes.

“You can come back you know.”I open the door, head down the stairs without looking back.

Standing at my car I see my daughter’s face in the bus window as it drives by. She stands, her head cranks around staring right at me, mouth slack.

She’s waiting for me in the driveway. Her expression has turned from shock to grief but no tears yet.

“Are we going to move again?” She doesn’t beg or plead, just

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asks in a quiet voice. A different girl than the lively one I sent off this morning. Her whole posture is defeated, shoulders hunched in on themselves, head down and to the side. Every step forward over the past three years is erased. The defeated girl before me is taller, filling out into a woman sooner than I expected. But suddenly she’s back, the reason we left. The girl with vacant eyes, my daughter who wouldn’t even cry.

I don’t answer, just put my arms around her. She doesn’t match my hug, stands stiffly till I release her.

“I just needed…” I don’t know how to finish. I don’t want her to be afraid. “We’re not leaving. I can promise you that.”

She looks at me, weighing my words. She nods her head me-thodically, swallows the questions on her lips. Together we climb a pair of stairs porch and go inside.

Midnight, one, two, I’m restless. I drive north through derelict neighborhoods, downtown past emptying bars. Instead of slowing, relaxing, I get more and more agitated. Finally I give in and head to-ward the woman’s house. For the first time it is dark. I drive around the block slowly, unsure if I’m in the right place. The third time around there’s no mistaking it. No illumination inside or out. I park across the street and wait. Not a movement anywhere.

The horizon lightens and I remember my daughter. She shouldn’t wake up with me gone. I turn the ignition, take a last glance at the house, and drive home.

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deer frozen in headlightssteven pelcman

(highway 1 california to oregon)

Would you believe meif I told you his eyewas large and muddiedby a lingering winter?

And if I told youhis eye was large enoughto hold the rising sunor a cool moon

as they rotated beneath and above himwhile he stood still,would you believe me then?

Could you imagine as I didthat an eye could fill up with waves crashing outthe high-pitched throaty sounds

of migrating whalesand still feel the shifting of weight upona single leaf?

How is itthat a dark circlecan pull out secretswe keep to ourselves

and reminds us of our loneliness,makes us live out our pain and wonder

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if the earth moves as we see it,and still feel the tendernessof its quiet beauty?

It stands aloneagainst the forest shadowsjust outside that tangled isolation,that sullen world

free of understanding—nothing escapes,nothing is forgottenand you to look deeply

into anything for time passes slowly in everything we seeand what we remember.

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drunk dreamcatherine simpson

You and me and brightness.You and me and pink and purple widening circles.

The pale skin on your neck,that red cowlick like Tin Tin’s.Your eyes, wide and blue.

Someone sings in a high, clear voice. We come closeto kissing, but don’t.

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i think i know the answernels hanson

the urgent rAdio cAll about the FBI had brought us racing back to Clarksville, just as we were turning off the paved road to visit mysterious Web Olson, the rich and reclusive cattle king of Clark County, Montana. His steel gate was fitted with a video camera and the aggressive warning plaque hung from 12-foot carved bull’s horns, the lintel that connected two concrete pillars and made a fearsome door to a Western no-man’s land, reminding me of Sergeant Glad’s strange story of the night before:

Web Olson’s Circle-Bar RanchAbsolutely No Admittance

Radar MonitoredArmed Maximum Response

“Just like that,” Glad had whispered at my ear, leaning from the backseat as he gripped my shoulder and Blair made the U-turn for town.

In the early evening light I walked with Sheriff Blair across the parking lot toward the station door, Glad following with Blair’s deputy Ray Bell who held the bottle of Old Forester in a paper bag for Frankie Two Shoes, who reportedly had seen the Night Slayer riding a flying saucer.

“Are we teaching our children to murder by proxy? Are we killers and cannibals? Do we want to be?”

A pretty blonde girl wearing a paisley scarf and beige blouse and skirt interviewed the now battered but still animated picketer from this morning as the camera rolled. A Channel 4 van was parked on the street.

“All of us should ask what a McDonald’s Society tells us about ourselves as human beings, if that’s what we are and not just figments from a criminal’s fantasy. Does that ring a bell with anyone out there?”

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Both knees of his spotted slacks were torn and the placard of the Greek warrior attacking the helpless T-bone steak lay in pieces as the protester waved half his poster’s broken stick.

“What if things were reversed, if we were the prey of a more sophisticated species? What if aliens landed and confined us on ranches and in feedlots?”

Tomato juice stained his hair and his eyes looked wild. The wet smear on his shirt resembled bleeding from a fatal shotgun wound. “We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Meat!” his tattered sign had declared in dripping scarlet letters. Passing drivers honked and lifted angry middle fingers, and he raised his voice almost to a shout:

“Shot us full of steroids, then sliced us into cutlets and chops for their dining pleasure, to fill their greedy stomachs!”

Now the attentive concerned newswoman whose face matched the large painted color portrait on the van spotted Blair and stepped forward.

“Sheriff Blair? Any break in the Night Slayer case?” She held out her microphone as her assistant aimed the camera’s wide eye.

“No comment,” Blair said and went on. The girl turned and spoke to the lens.

“For weeks the series of gruesome cattle murders has caused a near-hysterical reaction, increased gun and ammunition sales, spawned tales of night militias, Freemen and radical ecologists, punk rockers and cultists, Ghost Dancers, Big Foot, and even hostile invaders from outer space. No arrests have been made and none are apparently in the offing.”

Her left hand lifted a printed card she displayed to her audience:

Editorial

“As you’ve seen, there are those who wish to prevent Jeffrey Holden from peacefully expressing his heartfelt but very minority opinion, which requires a strain of old-fashioned Western courage to voice in this distinctly hostile atmosphere. Too many of our citizens still prize the Old West’s harsh credo— ‘Shoot First and Ask Questions Later’—whether firing bullets or flinging spoiled produce, an attitude that dies hard and can spring back to life like an awakened Frankenstein’s monster who hears a familiar bell.

“Here’s food for thought: Maybe it’s no longer our livestock

45

but ourselves who face the risk of that once dreaded contagion, ‘Bitterroot Fever,’ better known to our surviving pioneers as ‘Sleeping Fever, the Scourge of Clark County.’”

She smiled and looked hard at the camera.“This is Sally Mathews and the Channel 4 mobile news crew

outside the Clarksville Sheriff ’s Department. Good evening and pleasant dreams.”

The girl was beautiful and bright and hadn’t been unfairly tough on Blair as she’d laid out the situation, which was complicated as her scarf ’s swirling paisley pattern I’d been staring at, the shapes like sudden commas waiting to parse the complex crime’s difficult solution. Nothing would die down until we brought in a suspect.

Holden, the eloquent if manic picketer, remained incensed but apparently unhurt as he gathered his sign’s ripped cardboard from the sidewalk.

“That’s Jim Sloan’s ex-girlfriend, the one who dropped him,” Glad said at my side. “The guy that built the bull, to rescue Lucinda Olson from her father, Web Olson—”

Last night Glad had driven into Clarksville, met a stranger named Pete Willis in the Watering Hole Bar, and set off in a Jeep into the mountains, where a heartsick boy in a vast lit barn constructed a great motorized bull out of steel and hides and wide carved timbers for the horns as large as Web Olson’s.

“Like a Piper Cub’s wings, ” Glad had insisted, spreading both arms.

“She’s an illusion.”“Who?” I watched the girl climb into the TV van.“Lucinda Olson, Web Olson’s make-believe daughter. Sally

Mathews’s father is Olson’s attorney.”Glad had already filled me in on the locals’ Helen of Troy

captive-princess myth but the real-life Mathews’s tie to Web Olson was new and I mulled it over as we turned to climb the station steps.

At the front desk Dorothy covered the phone, then mouthed “FBI” at Blair, nodding over her shoulder.

“What you want us to do?” Bell asked. “Wait in the fishbowl for Phil and me,” Blair said. “Don’t give

Frankie any booze yet.”Down the corridor a stocky man about 40 with closely clipped

black hair, wearing a black suit with pilot’s sunglasses in his pocket,

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looked up from the Blair’s leather office chair. Standing at the wall, his back turned, an Air Force officer in

dress blues examined the dotted county map.

Where is the graveOf Time? What would you picture for decay?A horse’s hoof, white bones, a lifeless tree,Cold hemispheres, dried moss, and a blue waveBreaking at noon on shores you will not see.

At my ear Weldon Kees sounded the alert and for a moment I was startled by his voice that evidently had flown with me from California to Montana.

Kees had been my gifted, late ex-wife’s favorite poet and had reportedly jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge in 1955. Ellen had sent me his last book, The Fall of the Magicians, before her own suicide and later I’d memorized it for company, knowing we’d both read aloud the same sad lines.

Kees’ body was never found. The despondent writer had also talked of disappearing into Mexico, under an assumed name to start a new life.

I’d heard him often, the last year or so, when I felt isolated and uncertain, but not ill, I told myself again. I was better in Montana.

The man in the black suit stood up, waiting as I closed the door.“Sheriff Blair? Agent Saunders.” He put out his hand and shook

with Blair, then turned. “And you’re—?”“Lieutenant Lambert. Summer Investigative Exchange. Out of

Fresno.” Saunders’ hand felt achingly cold, like touching a block of ice

in a dream.“At the outset I need to say that anything we discuss is highly

confidential, a matter of national security. I’d like to introduce Colonel Grace of Air Force Intelligence.”

The officer stared at the map a moment longer and turned, nodding stiffly. He was handsome, severe, without a ribbon out of place, a general from a movie. He was tall and lean and had the masked reserve, the stored spring tension, of a Doberman.

“Here, take your chair,” Saunders said.Blair sat in his swivel behind the desk, Saunders in the wood

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chair across from him.“I heard something about a radio monitor,” Blair began.Saunders looked toward Grace, who took a seat under the map

covered with red pins. I realized they made a perfect bell-shape, the sites of the Night Slayer’s attacks.

“Does that ring a bell with anyone out there?” Holden the picketer had nearly screamed out front, before Sally Mathews mentioned “an awakened Frankenstein’s monster who hears a familiar bell.”

“Sheriff Blair,” Grace started in the clear tones of the Air Force Academy and I felt the old relief that I’d had the student deferment. “We picked up a radio call of yours a few hours ago.”

With the 2S and a high number in the lottery, I’d missed the draft and Nixon’s Viet Nam, smoked marijuana and taken mescaline twice and LSD four times, before my policeman father was killed and I transferred from the redwoods of UC Santa Cruz to smoggy Fresno State, switched from psych to criminology to begin my long career that had brought me to the brink of severe emotional—mental?—collapse and prompted our application for the special summer program in Clarksville.

Why was I suddenly relating my own biography to myself ?“Can you tell me why you’re listening to my calls?” Blair asked.“In due time.” Grace nodded. “First let me state my immediate

concerns. Your transmission mentioned a forklift. Can you clarify?”Blair and I exchanged looks, as if we each stared into the same

mirror and saw each other—for an instant I was Blair and Blair was Lambert.

“You’re here over a forklift?” Blair said. “Do you read the papers? We’ve got some real trouble on our hands—”

“I read the papers, Sheriff Blair,” Grace broke in. “I monitor radio traffic, interview dozens of individuals each year, investigate groups. I’m well aware of the difficulty you’re having.”

I thought he was about to say, “I know everything, because I’m God and created this world I let you and your friend live in. I know all your thoughts because I made them and if I wanted to I could tell you the hour and manner of your deaths.”

“Then you know someone is cutting up cattle and not leaving any trace of entry, no tire marks or hoof prints,” Blair told him.

“A forklift seemed a possibility,” I said. “Vacuum lift. They run on a cushion of air.”

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“I’m aware of what they are,” Grace said sharply. “Why did you come to that conclusion in this case?”

Again, I had the strange feeling that he already knew my answer.“As Sheriff Blair pointed out, there are no signs of access at

the scenes. Dogs were unable to pick up a trail. A heavy-duty air lift, customized in some way to handle the uneven ground, might be—”

As I spoke, I had a strong sense of déjà vu, for the first time in years, and was certain all of this had already happened, maybe months ago, or would happen tomorrow or the next day and I’d remember it then and wonder if I’d lived or dreamed it before.

“It’s just a hypothesis,” I said.“Actually,” Saunders said, shifting in his chair, “your radio

message sparked interest in our office and in Colonel Grace’s. It’s unfortunate that this is the first contact we’ve made with local authorities, but before now there seemed to be no pressing reason for a visit.”

“Before what?” Blair asked, tipping back his green cowboy hat.“The forklift,” Saunders said. The colonel was standing again, pretending to examine the

map, maybe counting the 24 pins that made the red outline of the bell as I remembered the angry warrior with raised knife and fork approaching the helpless T-bone on Jeffery Holden’s ruined placard.

“Have you ever been to Walker Field?” Grace asked Blair. “Not recently,” Blair said. “Last time was when a hotshot pilot

attacked an Indian girl. Fourteen years old. I believe he’s serving 20 years in Leavenworth.”

Now Grace swiveled toward me. “Are you familiar with Walker?” “Just what I read in the papers.”Again, I could feel his next words waiting at the tip of my tongue.“And what papers do you read?”Grace smiled, a shiny blade slipped from its scabbard. I

wondered if women went for Grace, if Dorothy at the front desk had found him attractive.

“National Enquirer? Aliens, secret saucers?” Grace asked.“The Stealth,” I said. “The B-1. My understanding is that Walker

is research and development, a testing strip for new weapons.”“It is,” Grace said quickly, his winning smile sheathed. “That’s

common knowledge. What goes on there is not. About three weeks

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ago I contacted Agent Saunders, as the Bureau is responsible for surveillance of domestic espionage.”

“What’s going on?” Blair said.“Yes,” Grace said. “None of us has unlimited time. To quote

a once popular catch phrase, our window of opportunity is rapidly narrowing.”

We had the notion it was dawn,But it was only torches on the height.The truce was signed, but the attack goes on.

The Cold War was still alive and ticking though the new enemy remained obscure, unnamed. Weldon Kees the poet was right, the nightmare continued.

“The description of these attacks on livestock attracted our attention. How could marauders, in this case apparently cattle thieves, operate undetected? The problem caused us to thoroughly question a number of our personnel privy to certain classified programs.”

“Do I need to tell you that we’ve got a covey of real nuts up here,” Blair said. “They’d like nothing better than to tag these killings to anything with ‘U.S.’ painted on it?”

If you dropped the periods and lowered one cap, “U.S.” spelled “Us,” as in Holden’s “We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us.”

No, that wasn’t right. He’d written “Meat,” not “Us.” That was Pogo in the comic strip who’d made the comment years ago.

“We are well aware of that,” Grace said. “We made a swift review of all staff, log books, tower reports, radar and radio traffic. If there are any Air Corps vehicles capable of such feats as your rustlers perform, none of them has been employed.”

“So it crossed your mind that some civilian swiped a saucer and killed cows for a crooked meat locker in Billings, to turn a tidy profit? This is the first I’ve heard of anything like that. Except for messages I get from the Aryan Nation.”

On Blair’s desk I saw the stack of obscene, half-literate scrawls, the pile of chicken scratches from some X-rated episode of “The Beverly Hillbillies.” Again, I felt I was witnessing the rerun of something.

“The possibility of internal espionage was quickly ruled out,” Grace announced. “All personnel are handpicked, with top-secret

clearance. No information, no intelligence, has leaked to any foreign government.”

“But it has to someone else?” I said. “Is that what you’re getting at?” All of this sounded oddly familiar.

“And that’s why you’re here,” Blair said.“John,” Saunders said, “let me pick up the ball.” Grace paused on cue, alternating the good-cop/bad-cop routine

they’d mapped out beforehand.“Let’s say our government had a craft capable of performing the

tasks your rustlers are evidently performing. If information about this hypothetical device had fallen into the hands of private citizens, and they were able to duplicate—”

“There are a limited number of linked possibilities,” Grace broke in. “Let me quickly enumerate them.”

His right index finger tapped the other fingers as he went down his list, like Charlton Heston as Moses listing the Ten Commandments:

“One, someone has succeeded in building a device similar to one we may be working on.

“Two, this person or persons are using said device to commit crimes.

“Three, these crimes are of an inflammatory nature, given the cultural context of Montana and the upper tier of Western states.

“Four, the motive appears to be to send an urgent message whose meaning remains uncertain.

“Five, I needn’t tell you that the FBI and other government agencies have become targets for subversive, extremist political groups.”

Grace dropped his hands.“Six, it’s possible this group is attempting to foment negative

public sentiment against confidential Air Force activities, to spread a fever of suspicion.

“Seven, such a threat requires the swiftest response from Federal Bureau personnel and from the Air Force itself, to shake local law enforcement from their lethargy, wake them up to the fact of a dire emergency.”

. . . when they speak of you, they feel the needOf voices polished and revised by history,The martial note, words framed in capitals.

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Now it was lovely Ellen who spoke from beyond the grave, reciting the words of her somber poet.

“That’s it,” Saunders said. “When we monitored your forklift discussion we wondered if you were on to something, if you had any evidence that might be—”

Blair shook his head. “We came up with it today. Before, it’s been helicopters, air

fields, fuel outlets.”“Have you targeted the Freemen for possible involvement?”

asked Colonel Grace. “Agent Saunders mentioned something about their offer to

form a posse?”“Are you reading my mail too?” Blair gave Grace a hard look.

“What’s next? Bugging our sleep?” “No,” Saunders said. “We have that information from alternate

sources.”The phrase floated heavily, almost palpably in the air. “The FBI is on touchy terrain up here,” Saunders said. “In the

past we’ve thrown our weight around in ways that weren’t very smart, in terms of gaining the trust of the citizenry. There are people in this region who hate the government, who’d love to see it fall, who would like nothing better than to obstruct the operations of government agencies, especially the FBI.”

Saunders frowned, stroking his bristly black hair. “We believe local authorities, working in their normal manner,

have the best chance to uncover what’s going on without igniting a firestorm and a thousand alarm bells going off.”

“You want to share information?” I said, cutting through it. “Is that right?”

“The Air Force can pledge certain sophisticated surveillance equipment that might be of use, along with technicians to man it.”

“Of course, said personnel would be under military command,” Grace said.

“You want to take over the investigation,” Blair said.“That’s exactly what we don’t want to do,” Saunders answered

quickly. “You know these people and the country much better than we do. With a little hardware and a few technicians, we’re thinking you can crack this with a minimum of publicity.”

“While you keep a low profile? Deep cover. It’s secret, isn’t?”

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Blair said, turning toward Grace. “It’s so secret you don’t want anyone, I mean anyone, to know.”

Blair smiled.“Are we going to ‘disappear,’ when we’ve solved the case and

you’ve got your man?”The same idea had just crossed my mind as the air stretched and

went taut, now my thoughts and Blair’s linked by a sudden telephone wire.

“Shoot First and Ask Questions Later” the Mathews girl had quoted in her TV editorial.

Grace leaned forward, his body stiffening as his jaw jutted out. He lifted a finger like the barrel of a gun that for half a second I imagined might turn to a smoking .45 automatic.

“I resent that, Sheriff. If you were aware of laws Congress has passed governing intelligence activities and those military regulations guaranteeing civil rights, you would know—”

“That sort of thing never happens,” I interrupted. “The Bikini blast, exposing troops to radiation and chemical weapons, nerve gas and dead sheep, mind control and the LSD trials in San Francisco, sleep deprivation experiments, Cambodia and the Pentagon Papers, Stealth crashes. The Contras, arms and coke traffic. JFK and King. Hell,” I said, “Roswell—”

“Roswell?” Grace stepped toward me. “Are you kidding?”“A minute ago you mentioned investigating ‘groups.’ I wasn’t

aware that was within the purview of the military, not within the borders of the United States. Does a little item called the Posse Comitatus Act sound familiar?”

“All right,” Grace said, watching me. “We all break the rules. I won’t argue the point. We’re concerned now that no one commits another mistake.”

“Look,” Saunders said, lifting an open palm, “there’s a problem. We’ve got to solve it. We’re all Americans, aren’t we?”

What did “American” mean? Why did it always sound a little scary? Ellen and I used to talk about it. She’d been happy as an art student in Paris, where no one spoke English and she’d said it was French that felt like her native tongue and that she’d begun to speak in her sleep when she dreamed.

In a lonely way, just myself and her ghost and the museums full of the paintings she had loved, I was happy too for a week, when

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I flew to the City of Light after her suicide in New York, across the North Pole and the vast wastes of ice, the Earth’s eternal white hibernation . . . .

“Okay,” Blair said. “You woke us from our lethargy. I think that’s approximately how you framed it.”

Saunders looked over at Grace, who had moved to the desk.“We’re in the midst of surveilling maintenance staff, contract

personnel, private citizens who supply the base with non-security materials, food, building supplies, tools—”

“Pilfering,” I said.“Yes,” Grace admitted, “there’s been pilfering in the past. It

happens at any base, like it happens in any business, any hardware store.”

“But it’s not a store,” I said. “It’s not an art gallery.”“We believe someone may have stolen sensitive materials,” he

said carefully.“What’re you looking for?” Blair asked. “Electronics?”“We thought we’d start there,” Saunders said. “We’ve had one

supplier under surveillance.”“Who are you watching? Are you spying on me or Phil? My

wife?”“A local distributor,” Saunders said. “S & S Electric.”A grin played at the corners of Blair’s mouth.“Tommy Sharp? You think he’s a domestic terrorist?”“Black market. It can be as simple as military brats stealing and

selling scrap metal to junkyards. A private swiping a machine gun to sell to some gun nut. Or something more.”

“We were wondering if you might get a search warrant,” Saunders said. “A couple of Colonel Grace’s men could quickly scan the inventory.”

“On what grounds am I going to get that? Make one up?” Blair asked.

“What’s at stake, Sheriff Blair?”

Suddenly a drumBegins its steady beat, pursues us even here:Death, and death again, and all the wars to come.

Ellen’s Weldon Kees was on target as usual. Again they were

53

sounding the bugles, playing the scratched record of the national anthem, ringing the cracked Liberty Bell to keep the dozing patriots alert.

“Let me ask you this,” Blair said. “Have you got anything on Sharp?”

I had an odd thought, that “Sharp” almost rhymed with “Narc.”“Three years ago he sold some circuitry, to an automated dairy,”

Grace said. “Our prime focus is the problem at hand.”“So you want me to waltz in and tear the place up? Why don’t

you just call an IRS audit?”“If there is an underground cabal,” Saunders said, “we might

set off the confrontation we’re trying to avoid. Create a nightmare.” “As above, so below,” the old medieval alchemists had said,

about heaven and earth, conscious and unconscious, Ellen used to tell me, when she was reading the mystical psychologist Carl Jung.

I noticed Saunders wore a ruby Masonic ring, the gold letter “G” within the diamond formed by the two intersecting Vs, spread compass on top and carpenter’s square underneath, and I remembered the forklift, saw a wide blood-proof bathtub on parallel, extended steel arms.

“Give me a day,” Blair said. “I’ll get back to you.”“Time is of the essence,” Grace said. “I’d prefer—”“I’d prefer a lot of things,” Blair snapped. “If you want my help,

let me do it my way.”“Look, I’m a military man. There’s pressure from on top, it’s got

to go somewhere. This Night Slayer mess—”“We’ve got a pressure cooker of our own,” Blair told Grace. “A

hair short of the nightmare you’re talking about. You don’t want to step in a trap. We don’t either.”

“We’re already in a trap,” I said suddenly. “We all are.”“We’re worried about the radio,” Saunders said. “Can you keep

traffic to a minimum, with no mention of the—”Blair nodded. “We won’t mention the forklift.” They kept saying it, over and over, like a password. Forklift.

Liftfork. The picketer had painted the dinner fork on his sign.“We’ll talk soon,” Saunders said, slipping on his dark glasses as

he followed Grace from the room.“An interesting couple,” I offered after a moment. The

conversation seemed screwy, made up. Blair slumped at his desk.

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“Christ— You believe that?”“Sort of scary,” I agreed. “Like ‘The Godfather.’ What about

Sharp?”Blair shrugged. “A possibility. He’s half crook, half dreamer,

with a circle of fixer-upper pals.”“This is pretty sophisticated,” I said. “They’re basically talking

flying saucers.”“It’s crazy.” Blair rubbed his eye with his thumb. “Patience,” I said. “That’s what my mother told me.” It was true, and yet I couldn’t remember when. When my father

was killed trying to save the woman hostage at the Big 6 Motel in Fresno, or Ellen took her own life back East, on New Year’s Eve, 1996? 97?

After 1968 all the names of years had sounded wrong.“Come on,” Blair said, standing up, “let’s see what Frankie Two

Shoes can tell us. If he’s able to stand or talk.”I followed Blair and he stopped at the first of two closed doors

across from the water cooler. One said “Maintenance.”“Step in there, Phil.” Bell and Glad sat in folding chairs before a one-way mirror.“Give me the whiskey, Ray,” said Blair.Bell handed him the bottle in the sack and I took a seat. In the

next room a thin man in dirty Levis and a stained tank shirt lay on a cot, his head turned toward the wall. Every few seconds he raised a hand, waving it in the air as if to swat a fly or quell some inner voice.

“How’s he doing?” I asked.“Okay,” Bell said. “He’s pretty quiet. Been sleeping.”“See his shoes?” Glad pointed.Against the wall stood a pair of battered cowboy boots. A white

number was painted on each toe: 1 and 2. The walls were green instead of soothing pink, the linoleum

gray and not rose carpet, but the holding cell’s institutional air was like Ellen’s room in the mental health wing at Community, the week she’d got so upset I couldn’t handle her.

When she came out she said she’d never go in again, that she’d leave me first. A year later she did, flew to New York to paint and took a young lover whose name I could never recall.

Blair entered the containment room, looked over at Frankie Two Shoes and sat down at the table. He pushed away the sack and

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opened the bottle, pouring a finger of whiskey into one of two paper cups. He waited, watching Frankie.

Frankie leaped up, swinging his socked feet to the floor and glided swiftly to the table, slipping seamlessly into his chair.

He moved with that liquid motion alcoholics often exhibit, as if their dismissal of all laws but the law of drink allowed them an intuitive muscular freedom that their sober contemporaries had lost with adulthood’s duties and the stiffness of assumed professional personas.

Or maybe he just sensed the shortest distance between thirst and salvation—

No more than two or three seconds had elapsed. He’d been half asleep.

“I thought I smelled something,” Frankie said expectantly. His face was burned brown and leathery. A dark slanted line

crossed his nose and reached high up his other cheek, marking where he’d been cut by a knife or razor. The brow lifted at an angle, stopped and resumed an inch away on his wrinkled forehead.

Deep channels furrowed both sunken cheeks. His lower front teeth were missing, but he had a full head of steel-gray hair and sharp green eyes that shone with something more than physical collapse.

He looked familiar, but I couldn’t place him.Frankie had once been handsome. A dentist, money, a month of

abstinence and rest would restore him, make him distinguished, even debonair, and I thought how drunks often resembled movie stars or famous statesmen, their faces finely etched by a myriad of real and feigned emotions.

His hands shook and he needed both of them to raise the whiskey to his eager lips.

“That good, Frankie?” Blair asked. “Should I try some?”Frankie lowered his cup, holding it out for Blair. “Don’t waste it, just to drink with me.” Frankie spoke in a low,

scratchy voice. He stared greedily at Blair, like a denizen of Dante’s Inferno.

Blair poured another jigger and again Frankie lifted the cup of bourbon with two hands, draining it. He set it down, smiling at Blair.

“Frankie?”Frankie winked and Blair tipped the bottle so the whiskey

splashed above the rim.

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“You can have a drink,” Frankie said. “It’s okay.”Blair poured himself a shot and raised it.“Cheers,” said Blair and Frankie drank again. “Another?” Blair asked.“Why not?” Blair tilted the bottle and snapped it back. With one hand now

Frankie lifted the cup almost elegantly.“I hear you were over at the Oxford,” Blair said. “You had quite

a time.”“Yep,” Frankie said, smacking his lips. “There was a sizable

crowd.”Blair fingered his drink. “I heard you were sort of holding

court.”“Not really.” Frankie looked over at the Old Forester.“Go ahead,” Blair said.Frankie poured carefully, modestly. He began to push the bottle

across the table to Blair.“No, I’m on duty,” Blair said. “You can keep it on your side.”“You don’t want to get in trouble,” Frankie said.“That’s right. So what was all the fuss about?” Blair said. “People

pumping you with booze?”“A little,” Frankie acknowledged. “Everybody was real generous.

They were interested.” He nodded for emphasis. “Real interested.”“I heard you had everybody spellbound.”“I used to be an actor.” Frankie grinned, showing his scattered

teeth. “In school.”“Before you became a prospector.”“There was no money in it.”“Panning gold or acting?” “Neither—” Frankie blinked. “Or inventing.” I sat forward on my chair as Glad tapped my knee. “You mean making things?” Blair asked casually.“This and that.” Frankie looked away.“You mean like your dad?”“My dad was a smart man.” Frankie eyed the bottle. “He could

have been a famous man. He stayed alone too much, though. After my mother left him.”

“You ever help him in the garage?”“Why’s he asking him that?” Bell said.

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“Wait,” Glad said.Frankie shook his head. “He wouldn’t let me.”“You don’t know what he was working on?”“No,” Frankie said. “But he had plans, Jack.” He nodded, staring

knowingly at Blair. “Big plans. Secret.” “I wonder what became of all of his stuff?” “Sold it,” Frankie said with finality. “Held an auction. Six, seven

months ago—”Frankie scowled with sudden alcoholic distemper. “The guys bunking there wouldn’t pay the rent. I gave ’em a

kick, sent ’em back to the Ox to sleep it off.”“You sold the place?”“To go up on the Missouri—” His displeasure changed instantly to a smile of fond recollection. “Nice creek. Found some dust there, too. It wasn’t feasible.” Again he smacked his lips. “Wasn’t pure enough.”“And this machinery of your dad’s, who’d you sell it to?”“Is it important?” Frankie closed his eyes as he drank. “It might be,” Blair said. “Sometimes it’s good to get things

straight, remember what happened, where you might be heading. So you’re not sleepwalking, living in a dream.”

“A lot of people. There was good tools, and scrap iron.”“What about the hay baler?”If Frankie’s father’s inventions were secret, how did Blair know

about them? Suddenly that seemed an important lead.Frankie’s separated eyebrow arched, on guard. Maybe he

expected to be charged with a theft.“The thing on wheels?” Frankie didn’t answer. His green eyes stared unblinkingly at Blair.“Had a lot of steel pipe?”“Oh.” Frankie relaxed. “That was something else. A bell cow.

Remote control. To bring the herd in.”“Phil?” Glad shifted in his chair. “I hear it,” I answered.“That sounds interesting,” Blair said.“It was, but he had other projects.” Frankie nodded his head

with regret. “Too many. Didn’t have the discipline, jumped from one thing

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to another. A lot of geniuses are that way.”“Who’d you sell it to? Web Olson?”“What’s Olson got to do with anything?” Bell asked.“He might,” Glad said. “It’s complicated.”“Hell no.” Frankie screwed up his face. “I wouldn’t sell him

poison.”“How come?”“Don’t like him, that’s why.” Frankie reached and ran his finger

along the whiskey label. “Snooty. One time Dad asked his opinion about some machine. Olson barely gave him the time of day, thought my dad was beneath him.”

Frankie’s curled lips turned to a grin. “I guess he’s had his comeuppance.”Blair leaned back. “What’d you hear, Frankie?”“Just that Web Olson was buying up cows. Scraggly heifers. Bags

of bones. At top dollar, fast as he can.”“Why would he do that with his prize-winning herd?”“Died off.”From habit, Frankie glanced over his shoulder. You never knew

when someone behind you—a mad slasher wearing a sheet in a delirium nightmare—might spring back to life, like Sally Mathew’s Frankenstein monster waking at the sound of a bell.

“Bitterroot Fever.”“Jesus!” Bell said.“The state board would close him down,” Blair said.Frankie shrugged. “I guess they would. Even if you’re Web Olson. Cows lie down

and don’t wake up. Makes hoof and mouth look like a toothache, don’t it, Jack? You heard stories of the teens, used to call it ‘Sleeping Fever.’ This country was empty, just old bones and horns. For a while the buffalo started to come back. They’re immune, you know.”

Frankie looked happy.“I heard that.” Blair reached out and poured himself a second

drink. He looked down into his cup and took a long draught. Kees’ voice began buzzing in my ear again, delivering a history

lesson and a warning, something he had witnessed firsthand:

September was when it began.Locusts dying in the fields; our dogsSilent, moving like shadows on a wall . . . .

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It was “The Coming of the Plague.” Kees’ voice sounded like Frankie’s—like a prophet Frankie had mapped the future for Blair, for Bell and Sergeant Glad and me, maybe for Clarksville, the county and all Montana.

“So who’d you sell the cow to?” Blair asked.“What cow?” Frankie looked on guard. “I don’t want any part

of cows, not now. Not with the fever. You know people can get it, eat the wrong steak. Lift your fork and plop over.”

“Your dad’s machine. The bell cow—” For the first time, there was irritation in Blair’s voice.

“Oh,” Frankie said. “Some kid.”Sergeant Glad leaned forward, staring at Frankie, waiting.“Named Sloan. Up on the old Frady place,” Frankie said. “Joe or

Jerry. Jim. Something like that.” “What were you talking about over at the Oxford, that drew

such a crowd?”“What I saw—” Frankie held a new full cup between his hands.

“More what I heard.”“Dreamed or heard?” Blair suddenly sounded fed up.Frankie surveyed the room, for a moment staring straight into

the mirror as if he sensed us watching, then turned back to Blair.“I was up on Tallow Creek, where it cuts through the Lemons’

ranch. Panning gold. It was at night. I was laying in my bed roll. I heard this sort of whir. Like a wind came up. I thought it was the wind. But it came and it went, there was nothing to it.”

“What was it?”“I’m not sure.” Frankie looked away. “What a waste,” Bell said. “Jack’s wasting good liquor.”“I sat up and saw something dark, something black, moving

through the blackness.” I understood how Frankie might have been a star attraction

at the Oxford Bar and Residential Hotel. His eyes had a dramatic, faraway look, as if he’d just awakened from a vision and begun to speak.

“It’s hard to see something black at night,” Blair said.“I could see it, I mean I could tell something was moving. It

scared up a prairie chicken. And I saw something silver. Right above the darkness, something glinted like glass or metal. It came around twice, in a big circle, real low to the ground.”

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“How low?”“A foot. Just above the grass.” Frankie held his hand above the tabletop and jerked his arm. “Then it jumped! Jumped the line fence!”“Huh,” said Glad.“You see anybody on it?”“Someone tell you I did?” Frankie grinned. “I made that up. At

the Oxford.”“So what did this thing look like? Was it big and round, like a

bubble, or flat like a pancake?”“I think it had a railing. Part of it I couldn’t see stars through,

part of it I could. I smelled it though. Later.”“Here we go,” said Bell.“The wind came back, it went by and I smelled it.”Frankie poured a short one, then quickly reconsidered, tilting

the bottle.“Frankie?” Blair asked.“It smelled like blood.”“There it is,” Bell said. “What d’you know.”“He saw it,” Glad said. “Whatever it was.” Now Frankie’s face resembled a mask that concealed a nameless

someone who conspired with secret others, maybe Colonel Grace and Agent Saunders, even Jeffrey Holden and Web Olson, Tommy Sharp at the hardware store . . . .

“I got a good nose. I can smell gold, can’t I? Like the bottle, when you came in. Like that time up on the Missouri.”

“So what happened then?” Blair said.“I had a snort to calm my nerves. I decided to clear out.”“What’d you see, Frankie?”“What I saw is what you saw—you’ve been seeing, I reckon. A

hide, four hooves, a head with poked-out eyes. The privates.” He took a long drink. “It made me sick. Give me nightmares.”“Why didn’t you come tell me?”

“I was spooked, Jack. You know I didn’t want to get tagged with something I didn’t do.”

“Would you mind staying here a few days, on the county?”Frankie looked mournfully at the half-empty bottle.“Sure,” Blair said. “I’ll have Dorothy and Juana portion it out, so

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you can work your way back onto the wagon. Get some rest.”“Slow, though, huh, Jack?” Frankie appealed to Blair. “I had

enough company at the Ox. I need some sleep. How ’bout pouring two glasses, for a nightcap?”

“All right,” Blair said. “Then at seven you ring that bell over there and you can have another one. At ten you can have one more. Then tomorrow at seven if you want one.”

“That’s fair,” Frankie said. “I can do that.”Blair portioned out the whiskeys. “One more thing,” Blair said as he capped the bottle. “This Jim

Sloan on the Frady place? The one you sold the bell cow to? He buy anything else?”

“A bunch of papers,” Frankie said. “Plans.” “There it is,” Glad said.Glad was right, but only partially, though you couldn’t fault

him. The Night Slayer was a bewildering case, like a series of facing mirrors. I looked down at my right hand and moved the fingers that hardly seemed my own.

Then it was all obvious, an open book.“What is?” Bell said. “You think Jim Sloan built a flying saucer?”“Long story,” Glad said. “I’ll tell you in a minute.”“Plans for what?” Blair asked. “I’m not sure, Jack. I couldn’t make it out. It all looked like

Greek. Like something you’d see in your sleep. You know? When you try to read the words and they turn to water.”

It was something Weldon Kees might have written, before he jumped from the bridge. If he did jump—

“Ok, Frankie?” Blair finished off. “We all set?”“Sitting pretty,” Frankie answered, with absent teeth smiling

widely as a happy jack ’o lantern.Halloween, I thought. New Year’s Eve, the night of Ellen’s

death . . . .“What we’re you going to tell me?” Bell asked Glad.“Jim Sloan built a bull, with parts and plans from Frankie’s dad.”“Built?” Bell cocked his head. “Come again?”“Like the Trojan Horse. He’s out to rescue Lucinda Olson, Web

Olson’s daughter.”“There’s no such person, Bob. She’s a legend. Make-believe.”“I know. He went off his head when the TV reporter, Sally

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Mathews, dropped him. Pete Willis told me. I went with him last night, to Sloan’s ranch and saw the bull.”

“You’re saying Jim Sloan’s the Night Slayer?” Bell appeared alarmed.

“I don’t think so. Phil?”“The boy is a compass needle,” I said as I watched Frankie lift

his first cup. “He’s inadvertently pointing to the murderer, if there is a murderer.”

“What do you mean?” Bell asked. “Half the county’s drenched in blood.”

Looking back, wasn’t the truth self-evident from the very beginning? Hadn’t Colonel Grace given the whole show away, when he’d over-pressed his point, describing the purpose of the cattle killer’s “crimes”—“the motive appears to be to send an urgent message whose meaning remains uncertain”?

It had all come clear with Frankie’s mention of Web Olson and his dying herd, of the plans Frankie had sold that changed to water.

Or before that—Frankie’s one phrase, about the Sleeping Fever and the poisoned diner keeling over: Lift fork. Fork lift.

I stared at the lines of my palm, at the creases in my fingers, the old scar from the coffee can. As a kid I’d waded in the irrigation ditch by the field of cotton and reached into the muddy water. Or had I? Was that my memory or someone else’s? Who was I really? Anyone?

“The killer? Who’s that?” Blair stepped in with the whiskey and I realized he had no idea, none of them had.

I was the only one who knew. It was a little like that old movie “Outward Bound,” about the ocean liner and the passengers who didn’t understand they were already dead.

“Web Olson,” I said.Blair looked suddenly worn out. We all were tired, for good

reason, actors in a play whose ending had been withheld like a riddle’s answer, apparently even from the sleepwalking author.

“Olson’s the Night Slayer? How you figure, Phil?”I relaxed now—at last I knew where I was and could let it play

out.“Sitting pretty,” Frankie had said.I’d watch it unfold, like a harmless TV show whose climax I’d

already guessed. Earlier, with Colonel Grace, I’d first had the déjà vu.“Frankie says that Olson’s stock died of Bitterroot Fever, what

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used to be called ‘Sleeping Fever,’ as both Frankie and the reporter Sally Mathews pointed out.”

“That’s Frankie talking,” Blair said. “He’s got a chip on his shoulder. Because of his dad.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. He said Olson was buying up substandard cattle. Why would Olson do that? If his own herd had died, his range would be contaminated for a while, wouldn’t it? Why buy and put new cattle out to graze on infected land? And why buy bad cattle if you’re planning to sell them?”

“Maybe he’s out of money.”“Maybe. But for a reason different from Bitteroot Fever.”“What you getting at, Phil?” Blair said. “Can you tell me?”The picketer had tried to tip us off with his frenzied talk of

cruel slaughter. I’d lay it out as simply as I could. Whichever way I phrased it was

going to be a shock that would hit home, the bull’s eye of the heart, turn everything upside down and make it explode with a poof!

“I think Olson’s in dire need of meat,” I began. “He’s run out of his own and now he’s moving at night, in some machine that uses the Air Force secret part, stealing the stock and leaving his weird calling card to throw us off the track.”

“What track?” Blair poured a third drink and handed Bell the bottle.

We were nearing the end and for a moment I wondered what would follow the solution to the mystery.

We’d have to wait, and yet I felt unafraid.“I think he’s feeding something,” I said.“And what would that be?” Blair frowned again, irritated, as if

he listened to the babbling of Frankie Two Shoes.“Let’s say the old rumor is true,” I said.“What rumor’s that?” Blair asked.“You said people gossiped that Olson was an alien, from another

planet. You said that today, in the car, when we drove past Olson’s ranch, when Glad mentioned Lucinda Olson.”

“You serious?”“For just a moment, for the sake of argument, let’s say he is

from another world.”“Where’s that going to get us?”“We don’t have any other leads, do we? Sally Mathews told her

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audience you had no clues.”“Hell,” Blair said. He leaned back against the wall. “Go ahead.”“If Web Olson is a visitor from outer space, where’re the rest

of his people? Why’s he such a hermit? He may be the lone survivor of a crash, like Robinson Crusoe, maybe Roswell. He’s an expert geneticist, he created the Olson Modified Hereford. Let’s say he was lonely, as lonely as Jim Sloan, that he tried to create some kind of companion, say a woman—instead of a bull to rescue a captive princess. Say things went wrong, say Olson’s daughter and future wife will eat only meat and he’s trying to satisfy her hunger.”

Blair began to laugh, spraying a mouthful of whiskey and Bell and Glad joined in.

“That’s great,” Blair said. “Lighten things up. You had me going for a second.”

“Want a drink, Phil?” Glad asked, holding out a cup. “It’s good.” Bob was smiling now but still eyed me with concern. On the

plane from Fresno I’d confessed I’d been seeing a Dr. Swanson, a therapist in Clovis. Where had that come from?

“I would,” I said, taking the whiskey. “It’s a joke, but not the way you might think. Big Foot, flying saucers, a beautiful princess held prisoner by her father, Trojan Bulls, traitors and colonels, outlaws called Freemen, greedy cattle kings and Frankenstein monsters, Spartans with forks fighting T-bone steaks. Sleeping Fever and bells, lots of bells.”

“So it’s crazy,” Blair said. “What about it?”“How’d you know about the hay bailer, the pipe framework and

wheels?”He frowned and didn’t answer.With sudden affection I looked closely at Blair, then at Ray Bell,

then Robert Glad, my partner of six years.“I think we’re caught in a dream,” I said. “A complicated one,

maybe induced by a fever or some mental trauma.”No one spoke. The three men watched me closely.“A dream dreamed by someone or maybe a whole group of

sleepers, a collective, that may or might not wake up or know that they’re asleep. Someone’s wrestling with a problem, primal in nature. Every other word we’ve heard the last two hours has been ‘dream,’ ‘sleep,’ ‘nightmare,’ ‘wake,’ ‘secret,’ ‘bell.’ I think that’s what Holden, the picketer out front, was trying to say, when he asked if we were

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human beings or figments of a criminal’s fantasy. “‘Fork’ and ‘Lift’—the Colonel and the FBI agent and Two Shoes

used the same two words, there was a fork and knife on Holden’s sign. A “shiv” is a switchblade—with its short “i” it’s a near rhyme for ‘lift.’ ‘Forklift.’ Scramble the letters, like an anagram. You get ‘folk’ and ‘rift,’ a break or tear between people, or one person ripped in half. Sally Mathews held up her card, ‘Editorial,’ to alert the dreamer that the dream wasn’t real, but that the message was important, a warning—”

“And then the special emphasis on capital letters: ‘U-turn,’ ‘T-bone steak,’ ‘TV,’ ‘2S,’ ‘S & S,’ ‘U.S.,’ ‘UC,’ ‘B-1,’ ‘LSD,’ ‘X,’ ‘JFK.’ Agent Saunders’ ruby Masonic ring with the gold ‘G’ and double ‘Vs.’ ‘IRS’? ‘FBI’? They may be someone’s initials or part of an extended code.

“All the numbers, the numerals for the years, ‘1955,’ the two conflicting dates—‘1996’ and ‘97’—for my wife’s death? ‘1968’ for Martin Luther King—‘MLK’—and Robert Kennedy—‘RFK.’ ‘Big 6,’ ‘14,’ ‘20,’ ‘40,’ ‘.45.’ Frankie’s boots painted with ‘1’ and ‘2,’ the colonel’s Ten Commandments with eight points, the county map with 24 red pins?”

I felt the others watching me in disbelief and then something like real fear as I nearly laughed with the release of the resolved, pent-up confusion and quickly drank the good stinging whiskey, Old Forester, one big gulp before it was gone.

“We’ll know before long. In a minute or two I expect. If I’m wrong, you can cart me away. If I’m right, you won’t have to. Then the Night Slayer Case is wrapped up, at least from our end.”

“What do you mean, Phil?” Blair asked.“If I’m the dream character who begins to wake up, if I’m the

‘bell cow’ who wakes you, we’ll soon wake the dreamer who’ll stare at the pattern in the plaster ceiling or whatever before he or she—you or Web Olson, Bob or Bell, Jim Sloan or Frankie Two Shoes, Sally Mathews or even Lucinda Olson, or someone else we’ve never heard of, maybe someone recovering from an illness or injury, maybe God himself—gets up and looks a second out the morning window, then steps down the hall to start the real day, remembering the lines of Kees’ poem, ‘Aspects of Robinson’:

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“‘Outside, white buildings yellow in the sun.Outside, the birds circle continuouslyWhere trees are actual and take no holiday.’

“I wouldn’t be surprised if The Fall of the Magicians is right there on the night table, open to that page as we speak, as the dreamer sleeps and now begins to wake, just as we, the dream figures, are waking up.”

“Do we exist,” Glad asked gravely, “if you’re right? Are we real?”“I’m not sure, Bob. It seems like we are, but for now we’re each

someone in someone else’s dream. It’s possible we only symbolize some inner drama, that we’re psychic constructs, representing buried thoughts and emotions, mental shadows projected by a mind to act out its dilemma and try to discover a solution, a way out.

“Or maybe the dreamer knows us or has seen us somewhere, on the news or something. Maybe the dreamer is us or one of us, in which case we’re all probably real. We’ll have to wait and see.”

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screaming wall by fabio sassi

the chapel of famebarry spacks

My students write their poems,then pray in the Chapel of Fame

for a boon that’s seldom granted;even praise from their young peerswill usually be denied. I tell them inanely to joyin the mere creating,quote Charlie Kaufman at script’s end:“Well, it’s finished, and that’ssomething.” Looking back on so manyI’d treated through this lifetimewell or badly,

I feel the frayed edges,seldom a neatly-stitched seam. From art’s compulsive “making,”we play at finding “closure,”self-declared gods of the story,marking the end of our doingswith a single last black dot.

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to the delicate girl who sat beside me on the crowded busbarry spacks

In deference to your delicacy(How does one know such things? The shoulder knows)

I held to the seat-top on bus curvesnot to lurch ungainly your way. I read an old New Yorker, pretendingI failed to sense you beside me,

but at a bump at a turning you fellagainst my arm. You felt like cream. Later, at the end of our journey,standing to leave, you halted—it seemed

my leg had caught your gypsy skirt.We laughed, of course, as I released you. “Had you trapped there just a bit,” I said,and that was the end of our brief affair.

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the lettereric lutz

mAriA gives me An envelope before she leaves to go back to Cal-ifornia and tells me not to open it for two days. I say OK and she kisses me on the cheek and goes on.

I’m beyond curious as to what’s inside, of course, and have half a mind to open it right then. But I decide to obey and put the envelope in an out of the way drawer, then try to forget about it.

And I do.For three years.By then, she’s married to a forest ranger and living in Oregon,

and I’m still here bartending at Mickey’s. I discover the envelope when I’m searching the drawer for pictures of my mother for a slideshow we’re putting together for her wake. I almost laugh out loud as I pick it up, examining the calligraphy with which she wrote my name, the envelope still sealed with her spit. I open it and pull out a folded sheet of notebook paper.

And this is what it says.

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Ruba Abughaida is a lawyer and a writer of short and long fiction as well as poetry, is working on a debut novel, and has had work, including reviews, published in Wales Arts Review, In Travel Magazine, and On the Premises.

Terry Barr teaches Creative Nonfiction at Presbyterian College in Clinton, South Carolina, and lives in Greenville, SC, with his wife and two daughters. He has had other essays published in the anthology Half-Life, edited by Laurel Snyder, American Literary Review, Scissors and Spackle, moonShine review, Subliminal Interiors, Poetica Magazine, Golden Triangle, and Four Ties Lit Review.

Julia Becker will be graduating in May from Ithaca College with a degree in English, after which she’ll be heading to Newark as a corps member of Teach for America, teaching English to secondary school students. Although she dabbles in photogra-phy in her spare time, her main interests lie in language and literature; she will be co-editor of a forthcoming critical work on Sir Thomas Elyot, and she hopes to return to school someday to pursue a PhD in English. What she hates most, though, is referring to herself in the third person.

Nels Hanson has worked as a farmer, teacher, and contract writer/editor. He grad-uated from UC Santa Cruz and the U of Montana, and his fiction received the San Francisco Foundation’s James D. Phelan Award. His stories have appeared in Antioch Review, Texas Review, Black Warrior Review, Southeast Review, Montreal Review, and other journals. “Now the River’s in You,” a 2010 story which appeared in Ruminate Maga-zine, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Eric Lutz has written for Newcity, Salon, and the Chicago Reader, and is the winner of the Winter 2012 Contest for Fiction in Line Zero magazine. He lives in Chicago.

Eliana Osborn is a writer and teacher and mother and sun worshipper. She blogs regularly for The Chronicle of Higher Education and has published in Dash, Blood and Thunder, Segullah, and Literary Mama.

Steven Pelcman is a writer of poetry and short stories who has spent the past few years completing the novels Riverbed and Spending Time, and books of poems titled Where the Leaves Darken and Like Water to Stone. He resides in Germany and teaches in academia and is also a language communications trainer and business consultant. He has been published in a number of magazines including: The Baltimore Review, The Windsor Review, The Innisfree Poetry Journal, Fourth River, enskyment.org, River Oak Review, Salzburg Poetry Review, and many others. He has been nominated for the 2012 Pushcart Prize. His most recent acceptance is in the upcoming issue of Warwick

contributors

Anina Robb is a 42 year old poet living in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia with her husband and two kids. She earned a MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and has published poems in Nebo, The White Pelican Review, Rivendell, The Red River Review, Blast Furnace, and Oatmeal and Poetry. In 2013 her poems will appear in the journals Juked, Emerge, Main Street Rag, The 5-2, and Ascent Aspirations.

Fabio Sassi started making visual artwork after varied experiences in music, writing, and photography. He makes acrylics with a stencil technique on board, canvas, and other media. He uses logos, tiny objects, and what is considered to have no worth by the mainstream. Fabio lives and works in Bologna, Italy. His work can be viewed at www.fabiosassi.foliohd.com.

Catherine Simpson is a cellist who lives in Santa Barbara. She has been previously published in the Big River Poetry Review, Right Hand Pointing, Spectrum, Step Away Maga-zine, and Into the Teeth of the Wind.

Barry Spacks has brought out various novels, stories, three poetry-reading CDs, and eleven poetry collections while teaching literature and writing at M.I.T. & U C Santa Barbara. His most recent collection, A Bounty of 84s, came out from Cherry Grove in July, 2012. His poems have turned up in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review and hundreds of other journals print and cyber.

Megan Towey is an undergraduate at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, where she is a double major in Written Arts and Classical Studies.

Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé has edited more than ten books and co-pro-duced three audio books. These span the genres of ethnography, journalism, po-etry, and creative nonfiction, several edited pro bono for non-profit organizations. Trained in publishing at Stanford, with a theology master’s (world religions) from Harvard and fine arts master’s (creative writing) from Notre Dame, he is the recipient of the PEN American Center Shorts Prize, Swale Life Poetry Prize, Cyclamens & Swords Poetry Prize, and Stepping Stones Nigeria Poetry Prize, among other awards. Desmond is an interdisciplinary artist, also working in clay. His commemorative piec-es are housed in museums and private collections in India, the Netherlands, the UK and the US.

For information on noah’s editorial staff, visit our website:www. noahmagazine.org.

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