Here we go… December 15th. Today is the last day for the Literary Awards Program. All postal entries must be postmarked with today’s date. For online entries, I’ll be taking down the forms tomorrow… So you’ve got all day, no matter where you are. No worries there.

Any problems or last minute questions – shoot me an email.

Good luck to everyone!

It was cool for that time of year, tolerable.  The night was hidden by a hazy mist that clung to the van’s windshield.  Larry almost didn’t see the kid until he was upon him—a ghost on the side of the road, neither coming nor going.  Larry passed him—no hitchhikers, ever.  Too dangerous these days.  Maybe once, when he himself was a kid, but not now, not after Nixon, after Oklahoma City and Osama bin Laden.  He’d spent over a decade on the road, one of the last hardy traveling salesmen, a dying breed he called himself, and he’d survived as long as he had because he didn’t pick up hitchhikers.  Common sense kept you alive.

But a habitual glance in the rearview mirror caused him to pull over.  Something about the slump of the figure’s shoulders suggested youth.  Which wasn’t enough these days—the young could kill, all you had to do was turn on your television and some six-year-old was putting a bullet hole into his classmate.  Maybe that stuff didn’t exist until you changed the channel or logged online—if you avoided the news, none of it would happen, the world would be at peace.  You made the news by wanting the news, by seeking it out.

What made Larry stop, before he even recognized it, was a suggestion of innocence.  Maybe it was the rain, the way the figure parted it, passing through an early June baptism.  Calm, uncomplaining, methodical.  Larry thought the mysterious shadow was going to pass the van by, keep on walking.  He wasn’t certain he would have a passenger until the door opened and the boy climbed in.

Funny, how the night can mask age.  If the boy had been extremely young, ten or eleven, or much older, eighteen or nineteen, Larry would’ve known.  But there is something about adolescence, that nether realm between childhood and maturity, that can only be determined up-close.  The kid had to be at the lower end of the spectrum—maybe fourteen or fifteen.  His lanky blond hair clung to his forehead; he wiped it out of the way, gave Larry a hesitant smile, waited for words to be exchanged.  Slim, too, but not in the gangly malnourished way.  Probably a soccer player, maybe lacrosse, if any of the schools in the area had a lacrosse team.

“Hey,” Larry said.  He pulled back onto the highway.  No other traffic.  According to the radio clock, it was just after ten-thirty.

“Thanks,” the kid said.  “I been walkin’ a long time.”

“It gets quiet out here,” Larry said.  “You’re miles from the nearest town.  Arcola, I think.  One of those Amish places.”

“I saw a horse and buggy yesterday.”  The kid laughed.  “They waved.  The girl’s kinda cute.”

“Well.”  Larry cleared his throat, glanced at the speedometer.  He could go faster.

He stuck out his hand, sideways, gave the kid a smile.  “I’m Larry.”

The kid shook the hand.  His palm was greasy with rain.  “Kyle.”

“Kyle the Kid,” Larry said.  “That’s a good gunslinger name.”

“Yeah.”

Fields gave way to more fields.  Larry couldn’t see them, but he could feel them—an openness during the day, an emptiness at night.  Dead and unattractive at this time of the year; not as bad as in the winter, layered in muddy snow, but bad.  Except where the ragweed grew, yellow patterned quilts that drifted in the humid breeze.  But seeing them always made Larry’s nostrils constrict, his temple throb.  You could smell them through the vents, a thick encompassing smell that clung to you long after the flowers gave way to wilderness.  Ragweed didn’t cause allergies—it merely beat the body into submission, like a dark horse boxer.

“I’m reading a western,” Larry said.  “That’s why I made the cowboy reference.  You know, there’s a kid in the book, kind of like Billy the Kid, except he’s bad.  Or maybe Billy the Kid was bad too, but this kid, he’s really bad.  Kills a lot of people.”

“What’s his name?”

“Uh.  I can’t remember.”

Kyle wrapped his knuckles on the window, leaving small smudges on the glass.  Larry noticed them, frowned.  The kid saw and used his wet t-shirt to wipe them off.  It made a bigger mess.

“Sorry,” Kyle said.

Larry laughed.  “It’s okay.  You just reminded me of something, that’s all.  Really, this car’s a mess.  I don’t mind a few smudges.  Better than what my kids have done, believe me.”

“What’d I remind you of?”

“I don’t know.  Maybe one of my kids?”

Kyle shifted in his seat.  Graceful, youthful.  Larry remembered his own childhood—overweight but inconspicuous.  No one made fun of him because no one knew he was there, which was how it should be.  He could feel his paunch now; the seatbelt made him feel heavier than he was, like he’d just eaten a big meal.

“You have kids?”

“Huh?”  Larry took his eyes from the road.  The van swerved slightly.  “Oh.  Yes, two.  Morgan and Lindsey.  About your age I guess.  Lindsey just started high school.  Morgan will graduate next year.  She’s an Honor’s Student.”

“Cool.”

“Lindsey’s thinking of trying out for golf.  They have a very good girl’s golf team.  She’s pretty good, too.  I taught her everything she knows, and then she went and learned some new stuff on me.”

“I played a couple times,” Kyle said.  He was looking out the window.  There was nothing to see but his reflection.  “I ain’t very good.  What do you call it when you keep hitting the ball to the right?”

“That’s a slice.”

“Yeah, that’s what I did.”

“You have to keep your club face closed, and make sure you hit the ball in the center of the club.”

“Really.”

“You bet.”  Larry started to say more, realized he’d reached the end of his advice.  There was no more to give—that was it.  “You want some music?  I normally listen to the radio, but not when it’s bad out like this.  You can turn it on though if you want.  Listen to whatever you like.  It’s clearing up, I think.”

The kid reached for the knob, stopped.  “You got satellite?”

“Satellite?”

“Radio.  Sirius?”

“Serious?”

“Yeah.  Bob Dylan’s got his own show, plays his favorite songs, talks about ‘em.  It’s pretty cool.”

Larry nodded.  After a few seconds, he said, “Oh.  No, I don’t.  Just, you know, normal radio.  Sorry.”

“That’s cool.”  Kyle turned the radio on.  George Strait came out, low volume.  Kyle winced and changed the station.  He flipped through, not bothering to let the commercials finish to see what type of music the station played.  He stopped at a sports recast, listened to what sounded like a baseball play-by-play.  He nodded and moved on.  After a minute or so he turned the radio off and sat back in his seat.

“Guess there’s nothing on,” Larry said.  The George Strait song had been one of his favorites.

“Yeah, that’s why I like satellite.  They got everything you ever want.  No commercials, too.  You should check it out.”

“I think my wife said something about it the other day,” Larry said.  He wasn’t sure why he lied—it just came out.

“You married?”

He nodded, smiled.  “Twenty-six years last March.”

“Damn.  That’s something, I guess.”

“It’s not easy.  You have to compromise.  And, remember, no matter what—the woman’s always right.”

Kyle nodded, said nothing.

“And I mean always,” Larry said.  “She named our kids, she picked the color of our drapes, she decided to go vegan, then to go back to meat.  She chose this van.  She’s always right, and you’re always right because you always agree with her.”

“My last girlfriend thought she was always right,” Kyle said.  “That’s why I ditched her.  I’m the man, you know?  I mean, she can be right some of the time, that’s fair, but I gotta be right too.”

Something about the kid’s voice made Larry think he was lying.  That word “ditch.”  The way his shoulders swelled slightly, like a lizard puffing up in the face of a rattlesnake.  It was typical to bluster at that age, wasn’t it?  It had been when Larry was young.  Some things didn’t change—some things were biological.  That was a comforting thought, and Larry lingered on it.

They drove in silence for a while, until Larry remembered what he’d wanted to ask the kid in the first place. “Where are you heading, Kyle?”

“St. Louis.  There’s a Cards/Cubs game on Sunday.  They won today.  I think they’re gonna sweep.”

“Cards/Cubs.”  Larry made acknowledging noises in the back of his throat.  “You have tickets?  I would imagine those are hard to get around here.”

“Nope,” Kyle said.

A bird flew by outside.  Rare, to see a bird at night, and in the rain.  Something momentous about it, in a way.  Larry opened his mouth, started to ask, but didn’t get past the first word.  Kyle was looking out the passenger window again.  He hadn’t seen it, and it wasn’t the kind of thing you could describe—like a black rag fluttering through the night, except nothing like the way that sounded.

“Where are you from, Kyle?”

“Decatur.”  Kyle jabbed a thumb over his shoulder, grinned at Larry.

“You’re hitchhiking all the way to St. Louis?”

“Yeah.  My friend Michael did it.”

“At least it’s not hot.”

“It was yesterday.”

“The cold front cools thing out pretty well.  It’s supposed to be cool until Monday, when another warm front comes in.  It’s supposed to get up into the nineties, I heard.”

“Yeah.”

Another set of headlights ahead.  Larry thought what he always thought when he encountered a pair of headlights on a deserted road at night—that the driver would suddenly change lanes, that some instinctive suicidal impulse would overtake the stranger at the last second, and Larry would be unable to avoid it.  You can fight your own insanity, but you can’t fight that of others.  Not random encounters like this, the coincidental moments that slip into existence without provocation.

The car passed without incident.  Larry sighed, loosened his fingers on the steering wheel.

“Why are you hitchhiking?” he asked, when the cramp in his fingers had passed.  “I mean, don’t you have somebody to drive you?”

“No one knows I’m going,” Kyle said.  “It’s my birthday next month.  I’m treating myself.”

“Well, happy birthday.  In advance.”

“Thanks.”

Larry coughed.  There was a lump inside of him.  It felt similar to the lump that had taken his mother’s life, the malignant presence that made her life, and the lives of everyone around her, hell for three months.  You feel a lump, and whether it’s physical or metaphorical, it doesn’t just go away.  Larry tried.  He swallowed.  He coughed.  He made a guttural sound deep in his throat.  He even belched, softly.  But the lump didn’t go away.  His mother had tried remedies, herbal, medicinal.  She’d had her ten-year-old son rub lotions on her skin, waft scented smoke into her face, run errands into shadowy foreign neighborhoods tucked away in the back alleys of their small town.  It had all been in vain—a futile attempt to stave off the progress of time.

“You know,” Larry said, and then he said nothing.  Kyle glanced at him, face blank.  Maybe knowing what was going to be said, maybe unknowing or uncaring.

“You know,” Larry said again, “it’s pretty dangerous to hitchhike.  I guess you’ve heard that before.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, you know, it’s true.  I mean, it gets pretty bad out here.  I don’t pick up hitchhikers myself, because it’s just not the same.  The world, I mean.  You’ve got those crazies who, you know, are perverts.  And you can’t really trust anyone to be respectful.  You can’t trust your own safety with people anymore.  Not like you used to.  And you’re young.  You know?  I mean, you’re pretty young, and well, there are people out there who might take advantage of that.  Especially on a deserted highway at night, with no one else around.”

Kyle stared out the windshield.  Larry followed his gaze.  Nothing but the road and headlights, receding until the rain and night took over.

“I’m not one of them,” Larry said.  “Really, I’m not.”  He laughed.  “I have kids of my own.  About your age.  Morgan and Lindsey.  And I would hate to think of them out here, without protection, not knowing who will pick them up.  It’s dangerous, especially for someone so young.  And you’re going such a long ways.”

The kid’s bangs had fallen back over his face.  Larry glanced at the clock.  Almost eleven-thirty.  An hour later, and the kid was still wet.

“Used to be you could trust people,” Larry said.  “But you can’t anymore.  You can’t trust anyone.  I could hurt you—I wouldn’t, of course, but I could.  And you could hurt me.  People aren’t people these days.  People are almost like monsters, like vampires or something.  Hitchhiking has to be the most dangerous thing a boy your age could do.  You don’t know if you’ll get a ride.  I almost didn’t pick you up.  And if you do, you don’t know if the person you’re sitting next to wants to hurt you.  You know?”

“I think you should let me out,” Kyle said.  His voice was measured, but there was a hitch in it.  Larry, who had two kids, could tell.  That hesitation, that lack of self-assurance.  Almost unconscious, but something was dawning inside the kid, a realization that the world was dangerous.

“I’ll tell you what,” Larry said.  “You’re safe with me, right?  I’m not one of those perverts.  How about I drive you to St. Louis?  Just straight through.  It’s a little out of my way, but I’ll do it.  I can’t drive you back, but you could call your parents and they could come and get you.  I’m sure they’re worried, aren’t they?”

“I want you to let me out,” Kyle said.  There was a moment of silence, filled by the hum of the air conditioner, the tires against the pavement, the slow streaky thump of the windshield wipers.  Then: “Please.”

“Really,” Larry said.  “I’ll do it.  It’s no trouble, Kyle, it really isn’t.  Promise.  I might have to call the wife, tell her I won’t make it home tonight, but she’ll understand.  A salesman, he can’t always make it home on time.  Occupational hazard.”

“Please.”

“Don’t you see, though?  You’re safe here.  You’re not out there.  I won’t hurt you, but someone out there will.  Might, I mean.  Someone out there might.”

Kyle reached for the door.  It inched open, fighting the rush of the wind.  “Jesus,” Larry said.  “Christ.  Jesus.”  Kyle lunged, tried to jump out.  He’d forgotten his seatbelt; it pulled taught against his chest.  Larry hit the brakes.  The van went sliding towards the side of the road.  He whipped the wheel around, against the turn, then into it.  The van spun horizontal, a crossbeam cutting the dotted centerline.

The kid’s hands flailed.  By accident he hit the seatbelt release button.  He fell out onto the road, began running the wrong way, back the way he’d come.  Or was it?  Larry was confused; his head spun, everything blurred.  Partly it was the rain.  Partly it was the speed, the sudden stop.  Kyle must’ve hit the radio button in his panic; some heavy metal song was playing, the bass thumping despite the low volume.  Wind blew rain in through the open door.  The moisture joined the cool air from the vents.  Larry shivered.

“Kyle!” he shouted.  The figure had already retreated into the night.  He called the kid’s name again.  He wanted to straighten the van out, but he didn’t know which way to drive.  The night looked the same in both directions.

Corrales, New Mexico is a narrow, meandering patchwork of a village lying low in the Rio Grande Valley. It consists of horse paddocks, orchards, skinny vegetable gardens, slightly jarring retail strips and ancient adobe buildings jammed into the space between the river bosque and the mesas to the West. Its citizens are a mix of artists, craftsmen, farmers, shop keepers and upscale business types longing to find an escape. Tall, spreading forms of gnarly old Cottonwood trees seem to stand guard and protect the village from the incursion of too much reality.

A lack of such incursions led us, a few years back, into the New Mexican Handmade Furniture business and meeting Mike. We’d heard he made tortilla tables and wanted to see one.

Mike was a transplanted Tejano cabinetmaker, from Buffalo Gap. He plied his gouge and his mallet with the best of them. The red bandana and twin, red braids hanging down on either side of his bearded face made him instantly familiar. He could have been Willie Nelson’s twin brother. There was enough grey hair and creased, tanned skin to instantly communicate that he’d been living full-time, but his laid-back manner affected his customers and his crew the same way. It didn’t take long before we all fell into an easy friendship.

Mike’s handmade furniture shop and factory sprung from a crumbling, 100 year old adobe on Corrales’ main street. It had settled into the surrounding buildings the way stones in a fieldstone wall visually merge together, until they appear to be a single entity. The color of its mud stucco perfectly matched the color of the dusty, unpaved alleyways.

In what was once a front yard, Mike displayed hand painted examples of the work produced inside. He piled it all up on garishly bright, handwoven Mexican rugs and serapes. A broken-down two-wheeled cart, decorated annually for the local Day of the Dead celebrations, completed the scene. There would usually be at least two or three middle-aged  touristas gathered while Mike or one of his compadres explained their use of color, the quality and the price.

“Can you believe this price? We can’t either,” he’d exclaim. The easy patter almost always worked. Later, we’d notice the same women struggling to overload their rental cars’ trunk with local treasures.

His dealer entrance and loading dock was found around to the side, at the end of a dirt pathway that wandered through some tall weeds, where the lingering smell of Ponderosa Pine sawdust and cedar chips greeted your nose long before the sounds of saws and hammers hit your ears. Inside, the shop attitude was relaxed. Slaps and bangs interspersed with a quick laugh, or a comment in softly accented English punctuated with a long, drawn-out whistle provided cheerful background chatter.

We arrived one afternoon, to pick up a completed order, including a full office desk which he made for my wife, Candy. Candy ran the business side of our operation and had once complimented Mike’s desk in the corner of the shop, so he made her one. He was very proud of it, and personally covered each revealed edge – including inside the drawer front tops – with impressive rows of colored “bullet carved” decoration and a big, carved sunburst at the back. When I leaned into it, it didn’t budge.

Having some experience woodworking, I remarked about the accuracy and precision of the gouged “bullets”, to which he replied, “You ain’t seen nothing, yet! I’ve gotta take you over to see my house!”

Mike piled us into his 1940-something Willys Jeep and headed down one of the long side streets of Corrales, sending up billows of dust while his ancient ride squeaked and rattled in protest.

In Spanish Colonial Mexico, of which Corrales was a part until 1848, property owned by a family – in many cases, granted by the Spanish Crown (with yellowed parchment to prove it), was divided among the sons at the death of the patriarch.  As a result of the traditional measuring process used, these lots were usually three to four times longer than they were wide. The bigger the family, the narrower the resulting lots. In this way, there would always be room for the house, some room for a garden, access to the acequia (irrigation ditch) and plenty of space left to graze livestock. It also made for narrow and very long side streets and farm roads.

We were passing through a cluster of 1960′s vintage, suburban ranch houses, when Mike made a hard left into a partially hidden driveway. There, before us stood Mike’s venerable home. We wiped the dust from our eyes to get a clean look. Candy nudged me in the ribs. I knew that nudge. She liked what she was seeing.

Mike’s home had a long, rambling front porch, or portal running the full width of the house that faced the street. The comfortable home was of the same adobe construction, or even older vintage, as his shop in the village. It was plastered with actual mud, no cement stucco at all. We noticed shiny flecks of golden straw shining through here and there across each wall. The porch roof was held up with fat sections of trees – full logs, called vigas in New Mexico lumber yards and atop each was a heavy, carved wooden corbel to support the main beam and rafters.  A five-pointed star was carved precisely into the face of each one.

Candy and I squeezed sideways past an intricately detailed, wooden stage coach right out of a John Ford Western, parked across the short pathway to the front door. Stepping carefully over the harness poles, we approached Mike’s front doors. They were massive, paneled and carved wood with an iron-grated spy-window set into one. Mike unlatched the passage door and led us, into his living room, with a grand flourish “Well, this is home!” The sudden darkness made us blink a few times and open our eyes wide.

The ceiling was lower than I expected, maybe 8 feet or so, and running from the front wall to the back of the room were huge, exposed wooden beams. 13 in all. They were dark with age and from the fires built over the 150 years or so the house had been part of the landscape. Each beam had been painstakingly detailed with a rounded edge bead, and bullet carvings from one end to the other on both sides. Every carved bullet had been painted in alternating pink and turquoise. The room ran the full width of the house, some 40 feet wide.

I was standing there staring and wondering how long it had taken, when Mike came up next to me, and said with a laugh, “Me and a buddy got drunk one night, and this is how it turned out!” He mentioned that it continued into several other rooms, and that he’d finish it someday, when the inspiration hit him again.

Mike spoke for a few more minutes about the technical difficulty of carving beams that were already in place under a ceiling, as opposed to lying on some saw horses. I couldn’t believe the accuracy of the work. The rows were perfectly straight. Mike’s watery, blue eyes followed the line back along the nearest beam to the back wall, calculating, he said, the number of mallet strikes. “A whole lot of ‘em. We were up to our ankles in wood chips before this was finished!” he added, smiling.

A sharp knock came from the front door. Mike opened it to a lanky cowpoke right off the back lot. He was wearing a vest, a collarless, long sleeved shirt, big silver buckle, his black pants tucked into knee-high boots.  He drawled a greeting to Mike from under a huge, drooping mustache, then seeing Candy, doffed his ten gallon hat, nodding to each of us in turn.

Mike introduced him as Will, explaining he’d come to pick up the stage coach. No kidding? I thought. It felt like a movie set. I just soaked it in, confusion and all. While my eight year old boy cowboy movie fantasies came alive – the more adult part of me seemed to distrust everything I was seeing. It almost felt like a performance for the “greenhorns”, expertly set and cast.

Will was the stagecoach builder, from Southern Colorado. He’d trucked it down for Mike to add some carved  detail and had it sold to a rich Texan that was coming up to collect it next week. Mike brought out a couple of beers, and we all sucked down the tasty suds as Will went into a lecture about the various methods used in re-creating a period stagecoach.

“My coaches”, he proudly explained, “are built on hand-forged leaf sprung frames, so the cabin’ll rock slightly, for the comfort of the passengers.” He added, proudly “Unlike some of the cheap copies that‘re seen out there at fairs and cowboy shows. This-un’ll do miles on a rough road! It’s the real deal!”

He then looked down and turned away, mumbling about how hard it was to find a team of draft horses that could be worked together right, for a stage like this. “It’ll probably never see a team hooked up to it. It’ll sit in his backyard, for the kids, or something!”

Mike shot out “Yeah, maybe so, but he’ll have paid you royally for the privilege!”

Will nodded his agreement with a grin, and while Candy stood safely at one side of the front porch, Mike and I helped Will run the stage up the ramp onto the waiting flatbed trailer. As Will climbed up into the cab, gunned the turbo-diesel into life and pulled out the driveway with a wave, I was beginning to realize I didn’t know which card was coming up next.

#####

Somewhat numb from the day’s experience so far, Mike loaded us back into the Willys and took us back into the village. When we got to the turn for his shop, Mike said “That beer made me thirsty. How ’bout you?”

Across from us was a fading, painted sign that said simply, “Tijuana Bar.” It was stuck precariously, to the side of another ancient adobe building with no visible windows, jutting out over the alley.  He turned into the alley. I glanced at my wife, my eyes signaling some alarm. This was apparently where we were going.

Like a pair of fresh-faced kids at the state fair, we rolled into that saloon with Mike leading the way, making introductions and doing the ordering. It was to be Negra Modelos all around.

“These’re a whole lot better than those Coronas” explained our host.  The beer was dark – but it tasted like a lager, and after a few sips, I had to agree.  Mike knew his beers as well as he knew wood chips.

We eventually lost track of the afternoon, drinking our lunch. I couldn’t decide if the regulars along the bar, disappearing into the shadows at the far end, noticed us at all or just wouldn’t give us the satisfaction. Their furtive glances and hushed Spanish conversations led me to believe that Candy was the only woman who’d sat at the bar for some years. I’d been fluent in Spanish by the sixth grade, but had lost most of it along the way, leaving just enough to barely get by.

After the light coming through the single window began to dim, Mike got to his feet. “We should go see ol’ Chris. He’s a good ol’ boy!” he told us, then asked Candy, “You like horses?”

“Of course.” she replied. Who doesn’t? We’d both been around horses a bit and enjoyed the little riding we’d done. I’d also worked as a stable boy when in High School, taking care of four Arabians, so I had some experience with them.

Mike said “Then you’ll have to see Ol’ Major. He’s a good ol’ Quarter-Horse.”

We rattled out of the Tijuana Bar parking lot, and down the side road in the antique Jeep, along changing fence lines. Sometimes barbed wire, sometimes stock fencing, sometimes Coyote fences made from cut saplings and twigs – each enclosed a tidy bit of bright green. The Jeep was open, and the road dust spread everywhere. We laughed about it, trying to wipe it off our jeans and shirts as Mike turned onto a relatively manicured front yard lawn, spreading out from a modern, very large, suburban ranch house.

“That’s a big one”, I pointed out. Mike told us ol’ Chris was …”some kinda real estate mogul or somethin’.”

I wasn’t sure this was the right time to meet a real estate mogul, but I kept it to myself. We were dusty, and more than a little wobbly, but Mike just led us up to the front door with its beveled glass inserts and rang the bell. Nothing. I glanced  at my wife, hoping she would follow the unspoken relief in my eyes. Nobody home.

He rang it again, and this time, a tall, youngish, man with a beard and blonde hair answered the door in an unexpected Hawaiian shirt and pleated slacks. No shoes. “Hey! Mike!” he exclaimed, with a smile, then putting out his hand, added “you’ve brought some friends, too!” We were ushered inside quickly. It was as complete a scene change as you could imagine.

Chris seated us all on a huge, crème leather sectional sofa that took up an entire wall of his living room. The fireplace was maybe 16 feet away, across an expanse of the highest pile white shag carpeting I’d ever seen.  He excused himself to the kitchen, and came back with Tecates all around. Some country music played at a really low level, from another room and we drank our beers, enjoying a few minutes of idle, getting-to-know-you chit chat.  Mike explained we were his customers, and I added that we’d just bought a house across the valley, in the mountains. Another round came out from the kitchen.

Mike began explaining to Chris that we liked horses, and Chris immediately brightened, asking us “Would you like to see Ol’ Major? He’s a good ol’ horse.”

We nodded, expecting to being taken out to the barn before we left. Chris disappeared again, towards the kitchen. After a short wait, hoping for fresh cold ones, I asked Mike where Chris had got himself off to.

Mike just shrugged, and replied “he’s gone to get Ol’ Major. Probably having trouble getting him up the back steps!”

What? Really?

Really.  After another couple of minutes, Chris came marching proudly into the living room leading a Chestnut gelding by a short halter. He stopped so that Ol’ Major, in all his glory, could stand between us and the fireplace, providing an unobstructed view. We looked him over with our clearly inexpert eyes. Chris was beaming. Ol’ Major just looked straight ahead, not moving a muscle. The horse was quite at home in the living room on the white shag carpeting. He nickered a bit, then glanced back towards us, on the leather sectional, then back to Chris, as if to ask “Who’s the company?”

Chris held the halter while we asked a whole slew of questions about Quarter-Horses, cutting cattle, which Ol’ Major was very good at, and lots of others, which were all patiently answered. He suddenly looked at his watch, and let the halter trace drop to the floor, walking around to Ol’ Major’s hind quarters while in mid-sentence. As he finished answering the question, which for us had already been forgotten, he put out both hands, thumbs touching, and placed them under Ol’  Major’s tail. Without any visible exertion, Ol’ Major filled Chris’ outstretched hands. We were speechless.

Mike started to chuckle, and asked Chris, “You do this often?”

Chris strode, his hands in front of him with their steaming contents, to the front door, opened the lever latch and tossed the load into the front yard, before replying “Sure, lots of times. Major knows how to behave indoors.”

He returned to the halter trace and the conversation continued for another half hour or so, interspersed with new rounds of Tecates, along with two more, perfectly timed trips to the front door to toss Ol’ Major’s effortless deposits onto the front yard.

Finally, I couldn’t keep still any longer. I took a moment to phrase my next question. I didn’t want to blurt out What the F_ck? – Chris had been a perfect, if slightly unusual host. Instead, I asked him, “how do you know when he’s going to drop a load of shit? Does he ever have any misses …on the carpet?”

Chris gave me a look that said why would you ask that and answered, “Ol’ Major’s like clock-work. Every 15 minutes, like most horses. That’s why I’ve been looking at my watch!” So now we knew, which would come in really handy if we ever planned to bring a horse inside our home.

Glancing about the walls in nervous distraction, I noticed Chris had several, framed displays of period revolver pistols around the room. I asked him about them, and he launched into a new lecture about his collection, especially his favorite, which his great grandfather had carried in a civil war battle. He asked us if we wanted to pet Ol’ Major before he took him back to his stable, and we did, marveling again at Chris’ choice of house pets.

Mike asked him how his wife did with the horse inside, and ol’ Chris replied “She didn’t like it much. She’s gone now anyway.”

He led Ol’ Major back through the kitchen, to put him down for the night. As he left Mike told him “Good thing he didn’t have to whizz!” Chris only replied that he never watered him before he brought him in. Of course. I should have known that.

Chris returned with a few more Tecates, and one of the last things I remember clearly, that night, as Chris was taking down three or four of his Colts from the wall, he asked “Have you two ever shot a six shooter?” Terrified of the implication, I answered a weak “Not really…”  This began a foolhardy foray into firearms I’d rather forget. Suffice it to say no blood was spilled, despite the shag carpet receiving a liberal dusting of plaster.

Hours later, we somehow made it home all the way across the river, living to tell the tale. I’ll always remember that day and night as our proper initiation into life in New Mexico, the Land of Enchantment, with all its bumps, warts, dust, guns and of course, horse shit.

Epilogue…

A couple of years later, our friend Mike folded his tent in Corrales, and headed South to work, we later heard, on Mexican Cruise Ships, following his own “next big thing”. We never saw him again, but not a night goes by, if I’ve seen a Chestnut Quarter Horse during the day, or if I’ve sat behind that great big desk a while, I don’t open a beer, think of him and wonder how he’s getting along.

Light Lifting by Alexander MacLeod is anything but light. In a collection of seven short stories, his characters face the physical reality of life, death, illness, and exhaustion. They are fighters, they are bricklayers, they are swimmers struggling for life against the Nova Scotia tide.

MacLeod structures the majority of his stories with a tight narrative and short sentences that punch. He uses flashback often, but in such a way that it adds to the character’s depth. He writes successfully from a variety of perspectives – his main characters are athletes, young women, widowed men, and weary fathers.

In Miracle Mile, the first story in the collection, MacLeod deftly illustrates the fierce competitiveness among runners, the racing scene, cortisone injections, and laps around the 1500. In order to win, two friends taunt danger, and flirt with their own mortality. Campbell watches his teammate Burner as the “…train kept coming down on him like some massive predator and he shouldn’t have had a chance, but he was like that one stupid gazelle…the one who somehow gets away even though the cheetahs or lions or hyenas should already be feasting.”

Wonder About Parents tells the story in pieces. In chunks. Past and present are interspersed in no particular order, as the narrator deals with his family’s lice infestation. He questions his success as a parent, while meticulously researching the biology and history of the louse. Again, MacLeod’s characters take physical risks, this time as they drive with their ailing infant to spend Christmas with their parents. When the baby must be hospitalized, the narrator seems to wake up, and grow up, to understand that he is responsible. Short, terse sentences drive the point home as the new father confronts the emergency room doctor, “We glare at each other. I sway in my own exhausted stench. Close my eyes for one second. I know what I look like.”

Adult Beginner I is perhaps the most powerful story in the collection. Stacey learns to swim after a childhood of fear due to near-drowning. Standing on the top of the sixty foot tall Holiday Inn, she readies herself to dive into the Detroit River, a feat, a dare, accomplished by her swimming instructor friends. She vacillates. “ ‘I don’t know about this,’ Stace says. She feels in-between. As though she is standing inside one version of herself, while the next person in line, the girl she is about to become, gestures…and waits.” The tension ratchets up throughout the story – will she take the dare?

Read Light Lifting. Be prepared for thick, physical tension that carries the story to unexpected ends.

Light Lifting, published by Biblioasis, was a finalist for the 2010 Giller Prize.

Kurt Cobain once said: I’d rather be hated for who I am than loved for who I am not. In her short story collection What Boys Like: and Other Stories, Amy Jones illustrates many characters who, in these fifteen brilliantly well-crafted tales, much like Cobain, revel in their own uniqueness of who they are, rather than who they are not. Jones takes great care to explore the tenuous, callous and often humorous boundaries of human relationships, while maintaining one consistent theme, it seems: everyone has something to lose.

In “How to Survive a Summer in the City,” Jones explores the understated love in the mother-daughter relationship at the center of the story. Jones is smart, using a “to-do list” as a witty framework to house her character’s desperate and, at times, wholly disappointing expectations of one another. She does well to balance the heavy moments in the relationship, and in the story, with subtle sarcasm. What buoys the piece is the clever way Jones unifies mother and daughter at the conclusion through the simple act of a spider’s death. Both Stacy and her daughter have been let down, but the end leaves them lighter and content with the realization that the imperfect can, for an instant, sometimes be perfect.

“Julia’s little sister Joey disappeared on the same night Kurt Cobain died,” begins the third tale of the collection, “One Last Thing.” For Nirvana fans, a read of this story might induce humming of the band’s well-known ballad, “All Apologies,” given the cycle of destructive behavior and then remorse that plagues both central characters, sisters Julia and Joey. What is most striking about this piece is Jones’ use of language, which, especially throughout the last two pages, harnesses the damage associated with singer Cobain, and, like him, is bleak and beautiful, dark and delicate.

“Miriam Beachwalker,” mid-way through the collection, is poignant in its depiction of loneliness and the search for voice among all the noise. “The Church of Latter-Day Peaches” gives the reader a new way to mourn, the tale undeniably characterized by grace that can only come from tremendous tragedy.

The beauty of Jones’ work, image, and content is rich, both cynical and optimistic, and a portraiture of life through fresh eyes. Each tale, grounded in both the light and the dark, is smart, full of truth, and jostles the mind into process without leaving anyone out of the remix. Readers will find it hard to shake the pull and anchor of this collection.

—-

What Boys Like: and Other Stories, published by BIBLIOASIS, is a winner of the 2008 Metcalf-Rooke Award.

Recently, I have been trying to understand how women, as lovers, observers, as teachers and veterans, mothers and wives, and especially as female poets, understand and feel about war in all its many forms. Jehanne Dubrow, in her third poetry collection, Stateside, addresses a sub-culture often without recognition: the women waiting at home for the men who are deployed overseas. Her collection digs into the emotional wax and wan that can build, distress, destroy, or strengthen, both a woman and her marriage.

Divided into three parts: pre-deployment, separation, and post-deployment, her collection gives readers a truth, that lest they are the one bound to the shores, going to the mailbox alone, they will never completely fathom.

According to a May 25, 2010 Washington Post article, 94,000 U.S. troops are stationed in Afghanistan (one of many stations world-wide). At least half of those troops presumably have left their loves behind. Part One’s poem, “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot”, introduces a clever intermingling of quiet wit and blatant irritation. The poem’s internal dialogue gives the piece a two-fold texture of the speaker’s anger, yet desolation.

Foxtrot the Navy, I yell into the phone,
the first time that my husband groans deployed,
a word we’ve waited for since war began
four years ago.
[Let whiskey slide as slow
as bullets down my throat. Let foxtrot be
both verb and noun].

There is controlled stillness in the cadence and phrasing of the lines that lends itself to the overall ebbing texture of the collection. The poem “Nonessential Equipment” adds a quiet reality.

The seabag must be light enough to sling
across his shoulder, weigh almost nothing,
each canvas pocket emptied of regret.
The trick is packing less. No wife, no pet,
no perfumed letters dabbed with I-love-yous,
or anything he can’t afford to lose.

During Part Two, Dubrow explores the undeniable affects of being left behind. She also, perhaps unintentionally, explores the undeniable great love that grows from this distance. Loyalty, growth, self-preservation and temperance, anticipation and introspection find home in her verse here. “In Penelope’s Bedroom”, one of a series that brings modern verse to the known faithfulness of Odysseus’s Penelope, Dubrow laments on the necessity of the unchanged, despite her beloved being ever absent.

The right side of the bed must stay
his side. She slips into her negligee,
as if she’s dressing still for him.
Perhaps her body cannot learn its grim

topography. She knows that life
has dried her up. How terrible to be a wife
made widow and yet still remain
married—what inaccessible terrain.

England’s Queen Victoria and Prince Albert had one of the greatest love stories of all time. When he passed, Prince Albert’s room remained a shrine to Queen Victoria’s continued love. Nights she slept with a photo of him by her side. Much like “In Penelope’s Bedroom”, changing the room’s dynamic would reflect an admission that the beloved will never return.

The language and movement in many of Dubrow’s poems is full of beauty and measured breath despite inevitable anxiety that appears in the last section of poems. The transition from “overseas” to “stateside” is addressed with an intensity of voice that reflects both the measure of circumstance, and the measure of a woman in constant pendulum. In Part Three’s “Situational Awareness” she writes, “—I’m hypersensitive,/stretched thin as a length of wire, a hair–/trigger mechanism”. In “Stateside”, the title poem, this feeling continues with, “then we are stretched/nearly to the breaking./The wait becomes my pulse,/come home come home”.

Jehanne Dubrow’s collection not only examines what it means to be undone and to redo, but her collection gives readers a truth: the women behind the tears and welcome home banners, the women behind the hugs seen on CNN, the women waiting to be mailed. The smallness and quality of moment and movement in her work lends to the reality that we are always waiting for love; some women just have more tenacity. “There is courage/in collision,” she writes in her poem “VJ Day In Times Square”.

Stateside, published by Northwestern University Press, was named a 2010 Book of the Year Finalist in Poetry.

Coming off the ice at the lonely end of the Rapid Tucker’s Pond, his feet starting to numb in earnest, the new snow like razor blades on his face, Bannock “Brace” Bannon was compelled to look behind him, across the pond closing down fast in white fury. Earlier he had seen the girl in the comely figure swing around the edge of the pond, admiring her ease, her grace on the blades, her hair at times flying out as straight as a windy pennant.

One impulse hit him that she was a stranger, not because he hadn’t seen her before, but because she was perilously close to the channel between the two islands of Rapid Tucker’s Pond. In the ten years he had been here at the far end of the pond, a loner in an old cabin that took an endless amount of maintenance, the channel had been frozen only once, and that back in his first year, the worst year of all. Was all that decision time and tempest here again, coming down on top of him anew? The raw intelligence of his place in life was coming with its onerous beat.  Was this girl sent to test him again, give him another chance? Make amends?

Was it worth it? He had, with all his conviction, tried to help that other girl. Blew it all to Hell he did. To Hell and back!

Now that knowledge jumped at him, and it had a fire to it. A buzz. A bell ringer. All this time, away from the harsh reality of the world, he had been reclusive and somewhat happy; free of much of the duress and torment he had gone through after the other incident. God, he marveled, how could he reduce it after all this time to an incident? He had made up a whole history, had invented Brace Bannon to take the place in this world of Halvor Gustafson, M.D., stripped of his rights because of that one abortion mishap. On many occasions he had called himself a “runaway,” so often that the tag no longer hurt. It went along with “incident,” it seemed. He could ignore all its attachments most of the time. It was only in darkness that it kept the pain alive, below the surface, in the stream of his life.

But now he could not ignore this girl, test or no test, chance or no chance. Better go back out there and at least advise her of the dangers, he said to himself, even as the numbness came into his toes dull as forgotten chilblains. Slight of build, little body fat because of his routine and regimen, but a skater for ten years, he started out across the pond, staring feebly through the blinding snow. The responsibility fell to him and only him, the nearest house at least five hundred yards away down the far shore, all obliterated by the squall. If he did nothing, his conscience, in the dark hours, would haunt him.

Leaning into the storm, he raked his eyes against the low clouds of snow, swirling, the barriers shifting. Nothing formulated or contoured came to his eyes. No edges. No shadow line. No being. Perhaps, he thought, that was a single sound he had just heard, but one he could not identify. Heading to the point where he had last seen the girl, he guessed her to be about twenty-four or -five. When the wind died momentarily, the ice looking like a linen sheet on a huge bed, he saw nothing. Thinking she had obeyed the threat of the elements, he turned to go home. Again he thought about the channel, about his dark and lonely hours, the girl from long ago still making an impact deep inside. Sometimes the worst terror was not remembering her name. I’m it, he said, thinking again of this new girl skating alone. One look won’t hurt.

An acute awareness hit him that he was being commandeered, impelled, magnetized; it was a scrutable sensation gnawing within him. It was assuming shape.

The ice was broken and it was getting dark. A darker shadow floated in the dread water of the channel. She had been wearing dark blue. This was a deeper blue. Getting closer, hearing the ice crack underneath him and the thunder of its plate-shifting danger, he stumbled on a discarded hockey stick and instinctively grabbed it. Another look and he was positive the girl was in the water, face down and motionless.

My god, he thought, it’s only been a few minutes. The ice roared again, the platelets shifted again, the rolling crack near thunder ran under his feet one more time. Not being the best swimmer, the skates would certainly drag him down. He was mouthing words to himself: Do not rush this. We both must stay alive. Be careful. Lie down. Inch your way out. Get hold of her. There’s only you. Nobody knows we are here. We are alone. We are all alone. The words were ratcheted in his head, coming back, coming back.

The pain in his feet had disappeared, but he could feel the weight of each skate. Suddenly he was cold. Was it fear? Was he wet? Could he get them both back to his cabin? Would the fire be warm enough? Was she still alive? It had been mere minutes.

The ice held up. His hand, icy and freezing, a numbness beginning to be a pain in its own right, caught at her hood. Lying across the broken hockey stick (bless the boy who had left it) he pulled her onto the ice with considerable difficulty. She had to be maneuvered onto a safer, thicker surface. She was heavy, wet, probably not breathing well, if at all. Into her mouth he breathed, into that cold but luscious mouth, upon that beautiful face now creased and plagued by the freezing water, her eye sockets like pearls of ice. Again and again he breathed and pushed into her stomach and breathed and jostled the soggy and inert body, until the sudden flush of water gushed from her mouth and a breath of shattering cold air was called down into her lungs.

Oh, he was thankful for his long hours of skating, the hours he chopped wood and stacked it and carried it into the cabin and was warmed by it half a dozen times, and the long and demanding walks he took into the deeper part of the forest, away from the prying eyes. His body, with the girl now an adjunct to it, now an extension, made serious demands on his energy and determination. Somehow, he must get her to the cabin, get her warm, minister to her. The idea of ministering to a needy soul overwhelmed him; he had been there before, and it had all been too clumsy.

It took him nearly twenty minutes to get her to the small porch of the cabin, newly formed thin ice coming on her like lace. Walking the last thirty feet on his blades, hitting rocks along the way, he knew they’d be no good for skating for a while. The picture of hidden sparks came to him, flint being struck by the good steel down in the snow. Near exhaustion, feet loaded with chilblains, hands so fiery yet numb, he finally got her inside the rude and clumsy cabin, and onto the bed.

First he stripped off his parka, then worked on her clothing, cutting her out of her jacket and pants, getting the skates off her feet, using a razor blade to cut her laces. It was the blade edge that triggered him, invasive and yet so superficial. That other and older terror came back again; that young girl, also lovely, so young, who had come to him for help, cut off from her family, alone, at the edge of hysterics he had not known, only to be buried under them in one quick pass over his soul.

He pulled her sweater over her head, ripped off the wet blouse, unsnapped her bra, and pulled her underpants off. In her near deadly state he was suddenly aware of how lovely she was. Before he tucked a woolen blanket about her he took one look along the length of her body. She was a most marvelous young woman; her breasts were lovely and full and the aureoles, surely and naturally almost a burnt orange, closed now on a purple flush. He thought he should rub them, but he refrained. Not in ten years had he seen a woman nude, or touched one. No patients. No lovers. No nightly visitor from the nearby town. There was a moment of exhilaration when he swore a perfume was loose in the cabin. The shock of hair at her midsection grasped at his eyes. In spite of the cold and the snow and the sweat now rising about him, his mouth had gone dry. His throat was dry with a sudden need, a strange and forgotten yielding coming at him out of his past.

There it was, the saline lovely aroma of the Rumney Marsh where the tide moved its moon madness. That’s what came to him now, in the middle of a winter storm. Saline, salty marsh, old territories. Musk of ever. The girl exuding self, the essence of such being long unknown to him.

The folds of the blanket went around her almost sensually. If he wanted to he knew he could assess her curves, her loveliness, and the soft and disparate masses of her graces. A beautiful range to her hips showed itself. It made the back of his throat hurt. Chilblains at last had left his hands. Moments later the single bulb overhead went out and he knew the electric line had gone down again and might be hours before it was restored. He had no phone. They would be alone for the duration of the storm at least.

The fire in the old wood stove was small but alive and he added two logs after a quick feed of kindling. The flames leaped in moments, and she breathed slowly but evenly. He stripped his own wet clothes off. The kettle of water on the back of the wood stove began to simmer when he moved it to the middle of the stovetop.

From one shelf of the cabinet he took a can of soup, opened it and placed it on the stove, adding a can of water. Only later did he know it was celery soup, the room filling with the odor, sharing it with the smell of the young woman collapsed under his blanket, her breathing even at last, as if she were asleep. Celery and the odor of the young woman came on him, the rich saline spread of the Rumneys, full and pungent, making him take a deep breath so that he could recognize all the ingredients; all his hungers came on him; all his past came on him. He remembered the girl who had died from the perilous abortion. Whole scenes, ten years in the past, came looping out of dark corners, bringing his life back into the room.

For three hours he watched her, leaving once to get wood off the porch pile, going once to the makeshift john off the end of the porch, the snow still coming down, somewhere along the edge of the pond the power lines down under a fallen limb or a blow-down too tired to hang on through another storm. In the midst of the whiteness the darkness of the storm threatened its severity, and made for a long promise.

When she woke, stirred uneasily, realizing she was naked beneath the blanket, looking about for her clothes, seeing a strange man across a strange room, it appeared her mishap came back to her in a rush. She began to tremble, inhaled excitedly, almost hyperventilated. The blanket was pulled tightly around her throat. Her eyes scanned the rudeness of the room, saw the flicker of the fire through an open grating of the stove, seemed to assess her whole situation, and then nodded at Brace Bannon. “You pulled me out?” she said, her voice soft, firm, not filled with anxiety, fear, or too much surprise. “I could hear the ice creaking underneath me. I tried to get away, but I broke through. My clothes and skates pulled at me. I remember seeing you, how smoothly you skated. I wondered if you were alone.” A shiver ran through her. “I don’t know what happened next.”

“I’m a doctor, young lady, so don’t worry. I had to get you out of the water and off the ice and out of those clothes.” The flush was on his face. He could feel it; and knew she could see it, even with the lights out and a single candle burning on a shelf.  “Are you hungry? I have some hot soup. There’s coffee on the stove. I can make something heavier for you, decent, more nourishing.” He managed to keep up a pattern of chatter, his face still flushed, her eyes still on him. “But I’m afraid we’re here for a spell. The power lines are obviously down again. Happens all the time. I’m the only one at this end of the pond. Almost half a mile out in the lonely.” His head shook as if punctuating the last sentence. “Not worth a whole lot to the power company.” He stood up and put his hand out. “My name is Brace Bannon. I used to be a doctor. I messed up once and I’ve been here, out of action, out of the limelight, for about ten years now. It suits me, here. I have been fairly comfortable. It’s pleasant most of the time in spite of all this.”  He fanned his hand out as if to introduce her to crudeness, bare necessities, solitude, and the storm beating at the small cabin. His nod said he believed she understood his feelings. No assurance came to him that she could possibly understand the pain and suffering that had overpowered him. He had long believed few people could ever know; his whole belief system had been corrupted. This day, even minimally, had brought some kind of amends. There was, however, a great lingering fear that he would screw it up before the day was over.

The girl sat up on the bed, the soft blanket at her throat, under her chin. Part of one leg, one thigh, showed its whiteness in elegance, a graceful curve to the width of it, a most lovely thickness.  Brace Bannon’s eyes caught the flash of white, the full curve, the inveterate promise. She caught his eyes and it was as if she was saying, “Did you look at me when you took my clothes off?” No other message on her face or in her voice. “My name is Devahn Nesting. I think my mother was trying to play some kind of game between me and my father. I don’t like him very much. My mother doesn’t either. I think he had several girlfriends, probably right in his office. I’m their only common ground. He’s filthy rich; she’s a lonely middle-age witch bent on some kind of retribution, hassling, or evil. I’m not sure which, but I got tired of it, the whole mess. I was running away from it all.”

“Are you warm enough?” Brace Bannon said. The top of the stove had passed from dull red back to a cooler black. The wind humped at the door. Her legs hung below the bottom of the blanket. A light redness touched at her toenails, as pink as it was red, and he wondered if it might have matched the lipstick she must have been wearing earlier.

“Would you have any pajamas? I can’t sleep without pajamas.” She looked down on the bed, as if the dye was already cast. The toes on one foot wiggled slightly, as if it were an expression of something she had forgotten.

Once, long ago, he recalled, there had been body music and body language. “I have extra long johns, tops and bottoms, plenty of sweaters, a couple of sweat shirts I’ve never worn.” A shrug crossed his shoulders. “I don’t have any pajamas.”

“I’ll take long john bottoms, a pair of socks and a sweat shirt, if you can spare them. If I’m to be here for a while I might as well be warmer than I am right now.” She looked at the pan of soup on the stove.

Brace poured a small bowl for her and pulled a box of saltines out of a breadbox hung on the wall. “I think it’s celery soup. I’m not sure. I lost the label. It’s hot.” The soup and crackers were set on a small end table. “I’ll get you the clothes.”

He could hear her at the soup and the crackers, eating as if she relished every swallow. “God, this is good. I don’t know if I ever had celery soup.”  He blushed again, knowing instantly that she was not naïve or innocent. He turned around, away from her, so she could dress, and he heard the rustle of clothes.

At the closure of sound, Brace Bannon turned to see the naked loveliness of Devahn Nesting. The bubble of breath caught itself in his throat. She was about the loveliest thing he had ever seen. It had been lifetime-long since he had seen such a vision. The legs were fantastic, the full and shapely breasts were eyefuls, the span of hips demanded attention, her eyes wide and strangely warm had separate speech in them.

“You might as well look again. I want to see what’s on your face when you look at me. I’m not a virgin; I’ve done it with boys I liked, who knew what they were up to. I don’t like malingerers or pawers who don’t know what they’re supposed to do for a woman. I don’t want to get pregnant right now. Not for a couple of years.”

She sat down and slipped the elegant legs into the long john bottoms and pulled them up when she stood. The sweatshirt, with a bit of hassle, fell over her gorgeous breasts. The socks she put on last. The vision of her remained in place. Above the celery soup aroma, something from her rode the air, came across the small room in an absolute hurry to get to him. Earlier, on a summer eve he had slipped into Rumney marsh and went looking for Little Sandy, a swimming hole he had heard about. There’d been talk of horseshoe crabs with spiked horns, but what still lingered was the smell of the marsh, the saline-rich warmth as the tide eased out through the many small canals that laced the grid-work of a marsh. It was warmly potent even now.

“Oh,” she added, “I’m in no rush to get home. They don’t know where I am anyway.” Back to the soup she went, and the last of the saltines. Her eyes were wide and warmer yet, her voice almost a riddle in itself, when she said, “Would you have a beer?”

The suggested idea of a full-fledged cheeseburger brought her back to other needs. Brace put a couple of them together, as the stove kept the room warm, as the storm continued to beat on outside, and her heady aromas were at last suffused by cheese overlapping the hamburger patties, getting cooked in a bit of fat. They finished off the three beers he had been saving.

Later, after hours of talking, a new candle lit, the stove fed a few times and set up for the night, Devahn Nesting said, “I am getting tired now. I know we have to share the bed. Don’t worry, it’s okay by me. You did me a great service today. I am very grateful, but I am very tired. You are a marvelous skater. I was watching you, in case you didn’t know, that long easy stride you have.” She slipped under the blanket and rolled over. She went to sleep quickly.

The candle flickered a kind of angelic light across her face. Lashes, about as long as they can get, flared from her lids. Her lips, he thought, were perfect. Even in sleep, they were perfect; slight pout, curved miraculously, yet ready for speech. He was not sure if they were red or redder, but they were perfect, and he thought of old signs of red lips, how they advertised status and condition, sent off signals. The thought told him he was still able to measure impact, that he was still a man, that his genes were still in place, that capability was still here. Then, as the candle itself began to show signs of failing, he slipped in beside her, inhaled the same aroma that had crossed the room to him all night, thought of lost successes, remembered a girl once in a car outside a package store on the way to the outdoor theater, who had taken off her girdle while he was in the store.  He remembered the light in her eyes, the sound of her voice when she said, “You would have gotten it off soon enough.” When he last closed his eyes he remembered how her skirt rode up on the glory of her thighs as he purchased their tickets at the ticket booth, the ticket seller looking down into the car, wide-eyed, nodding.

Some hours later he woke. Devahn Nesting was stroking him lightly, her head resting on his chest. “Has it really been ten years?” He could not see her eyes. Her hand was full of fire, yet was almost a phantom touch. From under the blanket she assailed him again, the essence of her being wafting up under his chin, finding knowledge in him, bringing knowledge. In his chest his breath caught at itself, and old knowledge, old territories, came back in a rush. At first the girl at the outdoor theater flooded him with memories and odors and a touch he suddenly realized had not ever gone away.  Then this nearly drowned girl, this girl who drank his beer, this girl who suffused this old cabin as it had never been suffused, said, “It’s going to be my treat.”

Those magnificent and lovely lips encircled him. He began to cry softly. She said, “Cry all you want. I’m here all night. And I’ll stay as long as you want me to.”

The girl in the car at the outdoor theater finally drove away in the storm, down the shore of the pond, out of sight forever. The frightened girl of the abortion fled with her. Once more he heard the sound of the ice cracking under his feet out on the pond, out where the channel always made noises. Part of his life seemed to move the way the pond ice moved, immense, lethargic but so powerful, like glaciers, like ice sleds out of the millennium. Where he had been summoned again to do good, he knew with certainty that he was now being awakened from a long sense of pretense.

Then there was silence and darkness and a sweet aroma hanging folds about his head, the warmth of Rumney Marsh thick with life and growth and an essence of life where it all began, at the edge of the immutable and eternal sea.

“We lived under this same roof but your mom was raised by wolves.  We always knew that door from opposite sides.”  Aunt Rosie performed a dual role regarding my mom, as both chief celebrant and royal accuser.  Thanksgivings came more frequently every year, so it seemed, and it was with particular relish that my aunt served the prom night story.  It was a tradition she made new each November, her eyes flashing, her voice rising and falling along a musical scale only she knew.  Even her hands and arms played their parts, their instincts honed by well-orchestrated stage directions.

Aunt Rosie, Dr. Rosaline DeNatale in her professional life, was just fourteen months older than Mama and one class ahead in school.  As kids they were jerked up and down the valley, following my grandfather’s endless and fruitless climb-up-the-ladder-of-success schemes until they finally settled in this very house on Mama’s fifteenth birthday, May 6, 1963, which coincided with the 32^nd birthday of Willie Mays.  Mama loved baseball, batted and threw left-handed, played it in schoolyards and streets in all those thirsty towns:  pick-up games, work-ups, five-hundred and fly-up, so sharing her birthday with the Say Hey Kid was icing on the cake.  In fact, when she took up knitting, in a forced term of inactivity that fortuitously eased my arrival in 1964, she emblazoned a blue baby blanket with the Tallulah Bankhead line:

There have been only two geniuses in the world:

Willie Mays and Willie Shakespeare.

One can do worse than to be tucked in nightly with Will, Willie and Tallulah.  Adding to that, my own birthday is April 23^rd, making Shakespeare exactly 400 years older than me.  So I have some catching up to do.  And yes, that is why I am a Juliet, and I’ve been forever grateful that I’m neither Ophelia nor Cordelia.  Or Tallulah.

My mother came and went.  She was the distant older cousin who dropped in without warning, hugged me and praised me and stared at me, and just as quickly disappeared again, often as I slept.  I saw her once or twice a year, no more, but she always sent something in April.  Or May. When I turned eight it was a needle-point splayed with red roses and what turned out to be lyrics written by John Phillips, but sung over and over by the Grateful Dead:

And I’m as honest as a Denver man can be

My grandmother tacked it over my bed, cooed over the lettering, kissed my cheek and told me for the millionth time “your mother loves you.”  She added:  “She is so artistic.”  And finally:  “Maybe she’s in Denver.”

But Denver, if that’s where she had been, was a long time ago, and I was almost two decades beyond that 8^th birthday.  Aunt Rosie had paused in her telling, respecting the ceremonial slicing of the gingerbread and the pumpkin pie, but once the whipped cream had made the rounds, she returned to her theme.

“Your mother claimed to be above such bourgeois trifles as the Junior Prom.   It was my very first formal dance, and I was going with my chemistry lab partner’s boyfriend’s cousin’s best friend, if you can follow that.  It wasn’t anything I did, or he did, for that matter, because Eleanor and her boyfriend arranged it all.  And Ronnie, my shining prince, I hoped, was already a freshman in college. We’d only actually met once in the flesh and never gone on a date, but when he called I jumped out of my socks, and when I found out why he was calling, you’ll excuse me for saying I almost peed in my pedal-pushers.   Remember, we were new in town.

“It was the end of May, supposedly the hottest May in Stockton’s infernal history.  We didn’t have air conditioning and the fans we did have were flat-out pooped, the poor things. We were supposed to meet Eleanor and her boyfriend for dinner at Valentino’s, on the river, and then go on to the dance.   Valentino’s must have closed twenty years ago.  The prom was at a hotel downtown that’s long gone, too.”  Here she paused, gazing across the years, blinking in wonderment at the passage of time.  Here, always, she caught herself, took a breath, and continued.

“I was upstairs with Grandma ripping out most of my hair trying to keep it in place.  It was suffocating and I was sweating like a barnyard animal.  I’d like to tell you I was glowing, but I was pouring the real stuff.  Then I heard it.  I heard a rumble, like sound effects from a Saturday afternoon movie, and I looked out the dormer window and saw it, his black Corvette.  A 1962 Chevrolet Corvette.  I’d been told about that car but this was the first time I’d seen it with my own eyes.

“My heart still thumps when I see one of those beauties.  Mother  – your grandmother — went down first, mostly to make sure Grandpa didn’t scare him away, and also to stall for me so I could get my breath back.  I know Grandpa was always a pussycat for you, but he had a bark in his day.  I was the bride in the tower who’s not supposed to see the groom before the wedding, but I refused to back away from that window.  He sauntered up the walk like he was in a magazine, tall and broad-shouldered with his mess of black hair slicked just so, scrubbed and proud in his baby blue tuxedo, and the car behind him was right off one of those billboards.  I was going to ride in that car!  I perched upstairs on my little chair and inhaled like a yogi.  I wasn’t sure where your mother was, I thought maybe she’d gone to the park, but it turned out she was sitting on the porch steps as Ronnie arrived.  And you know she was the dark one even then, always with the golden tan, while I was stuck with long sleeve shirts and floppy hats if I ever dared venture into the sun.  She was wearing the shortest and tightest cut-offs imaginable, and one of Daddy’s raggedy old shirts, missing a button or two on top, and tied in a knot above her navel.  No shoes.  No make-up.  And, no doubt, no brassiere.  If anyone could glow in 94 degree heat, she was the one.

“Ronnie took forever to get past her.  I was dying.  I died and died and died.  My tinny alarm clock kept ticking and I kept dying.  Daddy paced the hardwood floor:  living room to kitchen, kitchen to living room.  At the foot of the stairs my mother steamed and glared at the door, praying, as I was, for the deliverance of the doorbell.  Five minutes, maybe more, I don’t know.  Did you ever see those photos of Sue Lyon, the girl who played Lolita in that movie?  No, that was way before your time, but when I think about your mother that day, that’s what I think about.  Or Raquel Welch in anything.

“Finally, my mother yanked the door open and hauled him in.  I can only imagine the look she gave your mother before she slammed the door shut between them.  The echo exploded up the stairs and I couldn’t wait another second.  I rushed down as gracefully as I could in my ridiculous high heels, hanging onto the rail with both hands.  Years later, when I first heard someone say ‘looking like a deer caught in the headlights,’ I knew exactly what they meant.  Even in the photograph Daddy took, Ronnie’s an alien on the wrong planet.  Without a map.  With a broken space ship. He was transfixed by whatever he’d experienced on the porch.   He was sweating so much I probably seemed cool as a cucumber next to him, and I promise you, I was anything but that.  He shifted from foot to foot, kept his eyes to the floor, couldn’t talk to me, wouldn’t even look at me.  I’m sure he didn’t want to look at me, in my silly frou-frou prom dress that I’d slaved over for ten sweltering nights.  After your mother arching her back and God knows what else outside, I’m sure he thought there was nothing worth spit on this side of the door.  And that’s where we were, right in this room.  Your mother could throw like a boy, but her body was all-girl.  Woman.

“He squeezed his wilting bouquet like a life-rope, but he finally released it, and I traded him a corsage.  He was so pale my mother ordered him to sit while she ran for the pitcher of water.  He barely exhaled, still wasn’t speaking, didn’t even say ‘thank you,’ just gulped a twelve ounce glass of weak lemon water.  I desperately wanted to leave except I knew he’d start drooling when he saw her again. Still, the front porch was the only way to his car, and the car was the only way to the prom, so what was I to do?  Daddy reminded him to drive carefully, and that prompted him to reach into his pocket for his keys, I guess to assure everyone, without a word, since he was incapable of that, that he knew what he was doing, that he was reliable, but he came up empty.  He gaped at his open right hand as if it were a traitor. He tried all his pockets.  Nothing but a vinyl wallet.  He started looking around as if he could spot the keys on the newspaper-strewn table by my father’s chair, or on the mantel of the fireplace that mocked us each torrid day.  Nothing.  ‘Must be in the car,’ he muttered, his first sound, and out we rushed to an empty porch, for which I passionately praised God, until Ronnie screamed:  ‘She took my ‘Vette!’”

***

California cops, and I am one, refer to car theft as a “ten-eight-five-one.”  All the judges, the lawyers, and the perps call it the same thing.  For Mama, her 10851 was the beginning of a lifelong relationship with the criminal codes of California, Arizona, and Nevada.  For Aunt Rosie, it was the first of 10,000 nights with Ronald DeNatale.

Holton had come a long way from the city. He hadn’t seen another person for three days. For the first time in longer than he could remember, he felt at ease in his surroundings. He sat down on a riverbank underneath a tree and looked at the sky. The clouds had lifted and the sunlight glinted in gold on the water. There was still beauty in the world.

He took a tiny sip of water from the canteen. He didn’t have much left and he knew he was going to have to get more, and soon. He could go for a long time without food but water was a different matter. He would never get thirsty enough to drink from the river. If drinking from the river didn’t kill him, it could make him sick enough that he might never recover.

He took a tiny bundle from his pack and unwrapped it carefully; it contained the last of his food—a carrot, a piece of bread, a chunk of dried meat, and some candy. He wrapped the bread around the meat and began taking tiny bites. He chewed slowly to make it last longer.

Would building a fire and boiling some water from the river make the water safe for drinking, he wondered? If he was going to build a fire, he might as well stay the night. He was weighing these considerations in his mind when a sound startled him. He looked up to see a man walking toward him and he realized the sound he heard was the man singing. He grabbed for his pack and thrust his hand inside to where his gun rested on the bottom.

“I don’t have anything you want,” he said, when the man was close enough to speak to.

“Don’t worry,” said the man, who went by the name of Clement. “I’m not going to bother you. I only want to rest here for a while.”

“I’d like it better if you were to move along. There’s nothing here for you.”

“No doubt,” Clement said with a little laugh. He took off his boots and lay on the ground with his feet toward the river, just to the right of Holton. He was wearing clean white socks.

“I have a gun here and I know how to use it,” Holton said. “Just in case you have any ideas about trying to steal what I have.”

“I’m not going to steal anything. You have nothing I want.”

“What do you want then?”

He looked at Holton as if studying him. “I don’t want anything from you,” he said. “I’m not going to do you any harm.”

“What’s your game, then?”

“I don’t have one. Maybe I just want to hear the sound of a voice other than my own. Is that too much to ask?”

“I’m not much for talking. I really ought to be on my way.”

“Where exactly is it you’re headed?”

Holton relaxed a little and forgot about drawing the gun. He didn’t have bullets anyway. “I got out of the city and just kept going,” he said. “This is where I ended up. I don’t know where I am. I don’t even know if I’m in the same state or in another one.”

“Geographical boundaries don’t seem to matter much now.”

“Everybody in the city was dying. I knew I would die, too, if I stayed there. Once I left the city, I just kept going until I ended up here.”

“How long ago was that?” Clement asked.

“A week. Maybe longer. I seem to have lost some time and I don’t know how much.”

“Are you sure you don’t have the sickness?”

“I know what the symptoms are,” Holton said, “and I don’t have them yet.”

“But you expect to have them?”

“We heard the enemy dropped bombs with the sickness in them on every city. The people in the city would die first and then the sickness would spread to the spaces between the cities and the people there would die too.”

“You had family in the city?” Clement asked.

“I was new to the city. I have a wife and child but they’re far away in another place.”

“Are they all right?”

“I don’t know. There’s no way for me to find out now. I had in my mind that if I just kept going as long as I could I might come to a place where the sickness hadn’t reached or couldn’t reach for some reason, and there would be people there like me.”

“People without the sickness?”

“Yes. Or maybe people who know how to keep from getting the sickness.”

“You’re witnessing the death of the human race,” Clement said. “Not just the decline but the end. God brought it into existence and now He’s ending it.”

“You believe in God?”

“Yes. Don’t you?”

“I don’t know what I believe. If there’s a God, why is he doing this to us?”

“He’s not doing anything to us. It’s just something that happens. Do you know how many extinct species there are in the history of the world? There’s about to be another one, that’s all. Man is no more important than any of the other species that have become extinct. We’re important to ourselves but that’s all. This planet was here a long time before we came along, and it will be here long after we’re gone.”

“There might be places where people will survive the sickness. We don’t know yet.”

“They might survive for a while, but it will eventually catch them in the end.”

“How do you know so much about it?” Holton asked, suddenly suspicious.

“I don’t know any more about it than anybody else. I’m just repeating what somebody else has told me.”

“Maybe they’re wrong,” Holton said. “Maybe you’re wrong.”

“It sounds like you want to go on living,” Clement said.

“If I didn’t, I wouldn’t have left the city.”

“Maybe we’ve reached the end. Maybe there’s no point in going on. We could go on for another day or another month or even longer, but the end result is going to be the same. Why prolong it?”

“You haven’t told me yet where you’re going or where you’ve been,” Holton said.

Clement cleared his throat and looked out at the river. “I’m staying a couple of miles from here, over in those hills,” he said, as he pointed over his shoulder away from the river. “I stopped running shortly after the bombs fell. I figured there was no use trying to outrun the sickness. I wanted to spend my last days in relative comfort.”

“You have shelter?” Holton asked.

“Yes.”

“Food and water?”

“Food enough to last for as long as I need it and plenty of water. There’s a well there. It has the coldest, purest water you ever saw.”

“And there’s nobody else around?” Holton asked.

“It’s so far back in the hills nobody would ever find it.”

“How did you find it, then?”

“It’s a place I’ve known about since I was a child.”

The sun was going down behind the trees beyond the river and there was a sudden chill in the air. Holton thought about moving on but was too tired to even get up off the ground.

“I need clean water,” he said carefully. “I was just thinking about boiling some water from the river when you came along.”

“Don’t think about drinking that muck,” Clement said. “It has enough contaminants in it to kill the entire population.” He laughed at the irony of his remark. “I doubt if boiling would ever make it safe enough to drink.”

“I might have no other choice,” Holton said. “If I don’t get water soon, I’ll be dead from something other than the sickness.”

“You can come to the place where I’m staying,” Clement said, “if you don’t mind tramping a couple of miles through the woods. There’s as much water there as you could want.”

“I have nothing to trade for it.”

Clement snorted with amusement. “It’s not my water,” he said. “It was there when I came along and it will still be there after I’m gone. You might as well get yourself some of it while you can.”

Holton agreed to go with Clement, so, without another word, Clement put his books back on. When he had them laced up, he stood and motioned for Holton to follow him.

In a short time after they entered the dense forest, Holton was sure they were lost but Clement kept going without hesitation. The terrain was rough and rocky in places and they seemed to be going upward most of the way, as if they were climbing the side of a mountain. Finally, after what seemed two hours or more of very difficult walking, they came to a clearing with a little cabin in it.

Clement took Holton inside the cabin, which was two little rooms, and pointed to one of his two canvas chairs and told him to sit down and rest. While Holton was taking off his shoes and socks, Clement brought him a pitcher of water and a tin cup. Holton drank most of the water in the pitcher so Clement filled it again.

Clement had a little cook stove in one corner of the cabin that served as the kitchen. He told Holton to go out behind the cabin and get himself washed while he prepared the food. He gave Holton a shirt and pair of pants that were like new to put on after he had washed and told him to keep them because he had no use for them.

After Holton had made himself as clean as he could and put on the clean shirt and pants, he went back inside the cabin. Clement was just putting the food on the little table. He gestured for Holton to sit down.

They dined silently on canned soup, beans, spinach, and tomatoes. Holton ate his fill and leaned back in the chair with contentment. He was thinking that he should leave and not prevail too much on Clement’s hospitality, but he knew he would never find his way back down the mountain in the dark.

“You’ll want to stay the night now,” Clement said, as if he was reading Holton’s thoughts. “The forest is not safe at night if you’re not familiar with it.”

“Not safe,” Holton said. He thought about those words and then laughed.

After they were finished eating and Clement had cleared away the food and washed up the dishes, they went outside and sat on the step of the little cabin. It was so dark they couldn’t see more than five feet in front of them. Clement offered Holton a cigarette but he declined it, not liking himself in the role of the taker who had nothing to offer.

They talked about pleasant things that they knew before all the trouble came about. They talked about dogs and cats they had owned and books they had read and music they liked and trips abroad they had taken. Holton told Clement about his ten-year-old son and about how he and his wife planned to divorce, but if she was dead now, as he figured she was, there would be no need for the divorce. He said this with irony as if the thought amused him, but then he began to cry uncontrollably.

“It’s all right,” Clement said, unembarrassed, putting his arm around Holton’s shoulder. “I think you just need to let it out and then you’ll feel better.”

When they were back inside the cabin and Clement had rolled himself in his sleeping bag on the floor and Holton was lying on the cot, Clement started talking about the end that he knew was coming. He didn’t mind dying so much, he said; he had had a good life, what there was of it. He had seen the world and known true happiness. His greatest fear now was that there would be no one to bury him properly when he died. His body would be left lying out to rot in the open air where flies and other insects and starving animals would feast on it down to the bones. He could see himself, he said, one week after he was dead, one month, one year. It was too horrible to contemplate. He had seen and smelled rotting corpses in the war and he believed there was nothing worse. If he had a way to make himself evaporate in the air, to no longer exist, he would do it.

“I was hoping to find somebody I could rely on to bury me when the time comes,” he said.

“Maybe you won’t die,” Holton said. “As long as you’re alive, there’s hope you’ll go on living.”

“No, I’ve got the sickness in my bones. I can feel it. It won’t be long now.”

To humor him, and to repay Clement for his kindness and generosity, Holton agreed to stay for a few days and, if Clement died during that time, he would see that he was buried properly, in as deep a hole as Holton could dig. He would pile large rocks on the grave to make sure no animals could ever dig it up. He would even read some verses from the Bible if that’s what Clement wanted. In his heart, however, he was sure that things would not play out that way.

They slept soundly that night and the next day had a pleasant time relaxing in the sun-dappled shade outside the cabin, talking and laughing and forgetting the terrible state the world was in. By the evening, twenty-four hours after he had arrived at Clement’s cabin, Holton was starting to show symptoms of the sickness. His vision was blurred and his face wore a deathly pallor. He was vomiting blood and babbling incoherently.

Holton passed a very bad night on the cot in the little cabin. Clement tended him the best he could, but there wasn’t much he could do for him; he had no medicine. He gave him drinks of water, bathed his face in cold water, and tried to soothe his fears the best he could. Toward morning his body began turning black and he died just as the birds were waking up in the trees outside the cabin.

As soon as Clement realized Holton was dead, he went outside and began digging the grave under the trees in the clearing, in the spot he had set aside for his own grave. When he was satisfied the grave was the appropriate depth, he went back inside the cabin and put Holton’s body in the canvas bag that he had planned would contain his own body when the time came. Then he carried the bag outside and carefully arranged it on the floor of the grave so Holton was facing up. Gasping for air—realizing he was no longer as young as he once was—he said a silent prayer for Holton and, when he was finished, he filled in the grave.

All day long and during the night he expected to begin to see the symptoms of the sickness in himself, but the symptoms didn’t appear. When he awoke the next morning, he felt fine and was very hungry. He ate an enormous breakfast, washed himself at the pump and put on clean clothes.

Two days later he still felt well and healthy. He looked at his face in the mirror for any signs of change but saw none. He felt as well as he had ever felt in his life, in spite of the reduced circumstances in which he was living. He began to think that he was being spared the sickness for some reason or another.

That night a voice seemed to speak to him in a dream. He didn’t know if it was Holton’s voice or somebody else’s, but it was a voice he knew—maybe a voice from his distant past. The voice was telling him to go to the river and follow it south all the way to its end where it emptied into the sea—hundreds of miles. At the end of that journey he would find some kind of answer—perhaps not the answer he wished for—but an answer nonetheless.

He awoke in the morning with a resolve he hadn’t felt in a long while. The resolve had taken the place of the resignation he had felt since the bombs fell. He put as much food as he could carry into his pack, two canteens of water, and a change of clothes. He took one last look around the cabin and went out its door for the last time. With the slap of the screen door still in his ears, he looked toward the mound of dirt under the trees in the clearing and gave a little salute of farewell. Then he was gone, melding into the trees of the forest as if he had never existed.

Tacánecy tenses as she waits to begin her next count.  The lightning is closer now, and she readies herself for a silent and measured five.  She prays her sleeping husband will not hear the sound she is about to make.

Despite herself, she jumps when a piercing flash lances through the window in the opposite wall and, in a spasm of blue-white light, illuminates her husband’s Hawken rifle hanging on the wall beside her.  It flickers lethally for a moment before the room goes black again.

One. Two.  Three.  Four. Her grip tightens on the soft doeskin shroud on the floor at her feet.

Five. On cue, the thunderclap vibrates through the soles of her moccasins and rattles a china cup against its shelf-mate.  Its roar masks the whisper of leather against wood as she drags the bundle a few steps closer to the cabin door.

She pauses as the rumble rolls away into the black night’s silence.  There is a moment when her knees nearly buckle.  A moment when her mind rekindles the image of what lies inside the wraps of doeskin:  the death-white skin, the slightly open mouth, and the patches of red that mar the neck and face of her daughter’s lifeless body.

Was it only last night–another life ago–she had dragged Lena from the river?  Her throat still burns from the awful sounds she had made, strange animal sounds, as she pulled the dress over her daughter’s stiffening limbs, combed her hair for the last time, tried to close her resisting eyelids, wrapped her in the doeskin shroud.  A keening claws at her throat again, urgent, like a caged bear.  She chokes it back.  The wailing time must wait.  Now her heart must be stone.

A stirring from the bed in the next room propels her hand to the haft of the skinning knife under her beaded belt. Would she actually use it against him, Medina, her husband of twenty-eight snows?  She has no plan, no talking way, to explain her actions should he awake and confront her.  A week ago, battling him with a blade would have been unthinkable.  Now her white-knuckled grip betrays the depth of her new obsession.  Everything has changed.

When no further sound comes from the bed, her hand relaxes and returns to the bundle. Another flash invades the room.  She counts four beats this time.  Another crash and another stealthy drag, and she is at the door.  Her hand finds the cast iron latch and rests there.

The thunder noise is alarmingly loud.  Glancing toward the bed, she worries that the sound of the storm, rather than the click of the latch, will rouse him.  When the next thunderclap comes she eases the latch open with one hand and wrestles the corpse over the threshold with the other.  The rusty hinges, greased the day before with lard from the can she keeps by the wood stove, do not betray her.  Her shoulders relax.  She feels the stirring cool of the storm’s wind against the sweaty roots of her hair.

The wind!  She had not planned for wind.  Like scouts for an advancing army, chill drafts slip past her into the open doorway, lift the corner of the oilcloth on the eating table, and chase the warm, tobacco pipe air of the cabin into the next room and across the inert form on the bed.  The storm had answered her prayer to cover the sounds of her escape.  But she failed to consider its whispering outriders.

She swings the door closed.  It whumps against the door jam.  The latch falls into place with a metallic chunk.

“God be damned!”  Her hissing curse shocks her as much as the wind itself.  Never before has she uttered such words.  Her hand clutches for the rosary beads around her waist.  Then she remembers.  The black beads dot the floor where she flung them the night before.  Glistening reminders of Jésu’s betrayal.

She presses her ear against the keyhole and hears…what?  The straining creak of bed ropes in their sideboard moorings?  A footfall on the squeaky floorboard under the Hawken rifle?

With a stifled grunt she hefts the bundle into her arms and staggers off the porch.  Her hip joints creak with the strain of it.  With unsteady steps she gimps toward the barn.  Flashes light the way.  A single, giant raindrop splatters on her cheek and runs down into her open mouth.  It tastes of salt.  She is crying, she realizes.  She bites her tongue to make herself stop.

Her heaving nostrils draw in the unmistakable, welcoming smell of rain washing through the thirsty air in the foothills a mile or two to the west.  It will be here soon.

She eases the bundle to the packed earth inside the main barn door.  Memory guiding her, she grabs a handful of grain from a bucket inside the tack room and runs through the blackness to a side door into the corral.  Storm-spooked horses mill about, tails aloft, necks arched.   She holds the grain out to a big roan gelding.  He approaches her with wild eyes, the prospect of a treat temporarily overcoming his urge to bolt and run before the wind.  But before he can eat, her daughter’s black mare, the one called Shy Bird, shoulders the roan aside.  She entices the mare into the barn with the grain.

Inside, the familiar smell of hay, trampled horse droppings and sweaty leather overpowers the gathering storm smells outside.  She slips a rawhide chin rope into the tall mare’s mouth, slings the single rein over its neck and urges it toward the front door where the bundle lies.

Upon scenting the body, Shy Bird snorts and side-steps, eyes rimming white.  “Do not be afraid,” Tacánecy says, to herself as much as the horse.  She strokes the animal’s quivering shoulder and croons a sleep song remembered from her childhood.   The song had always quieted Lena when she was a wide-eyed baby.  With her other hand she reaches into her waist pouch, fingers feeling yet again the beaded bumps on the small leather bag she had removed from her daughter’s neck the day before, the amulet she had given to Lena to bind them together.

Shy Bird, you will carry Lena one last time.  She pins the mare’s chin rope against the ground with her foot.  The bundle resists as she strains to heft it high against the horse’s side and wrestle it up and over the tall withers.  Its ghastly stiffness unnerves her.  She ties a rope on either end and pulls down hard to bend it in the middle and snub it down.  Another cry swells in her throat.  She bites her hand to quell it.

From the tack room she grabs two large blankets she had rolled up the day before.  She leaves the saddles and bridles where they rest on wood rails.  Tonight I ride in the style of my people, she thinks. And for this, of all rides, it is a good thing to have Lena’s horse.

From the open barn doorway she peers back the way she came.  In the next lightning flash, the log house jumps out at her from the blackness, its dark logs and white chinking both momentarily reduced to a uniform, silvery gray.  Nothing moves in the shadowy doorway.

She leads the mare to the pole corral fence, climbs onto the first rail, hoists her right leg over the mare’s back and settles stiffly into place behind her daughter’s body.  It is the first time she has been on the back of a horse since her vow, taken in the long ago in atonement for her sins, to never ride again.

She takes up the single rein in one hand and the blanket roll in the other.  With her knees she urges the big mare forward.  Fused by the gloom into a single, shadowy shape, they move toward the compound’s northern side, the one nearest the river.  Two more big drops splat on her rein-holding hand.  Ahead of her waits the wooden toll bridge.

She takes one last look at the log house as another lightning flash ushers her out of the compound.  Still no sign of life.  Maybe she will make it.  Then Medina can rave at her all he wants, beat her, even.  He will never find Lena’s body.  She will make sure of it.

In the early days, she could never have gotten away undetected.  He would have heard the door closing, or even the soft brushing of the leather against the floor.  His years as a trapper and scout had taught him to sleep on the edge of consciousness, to come fully awake at any unusual sound, his Hawken rifle within easy reach.  But during their time at the Crossing he had grown less cautious, and at sixty-three snows, less keen of ear.  Besides, he had drunk several cups of whisky that night, unusual for him, but understandable considering his shock.

“Taos Lightening” the whisky was called.  A grim smile pulls at her mouth.  Two kinds of lightning are helping her this night.  She wishes it’s magic could somehow bring Lena back to life.

At the bridge she reins in, waiting for the next roll of thunder.  When it comes, she digs in her heels.  The mare clatters across in a burst of storm-sparked energy.

Barely visible on the opposite side stands the fort.  Square and squat, its whitewashed stone walls are slitted with black gun holes.  Built by her husband after a Ute raid years ago, the fort has never been used for its intended purpose.  Just like the fancy schooling her husband had tried to cram into Lena.  At the thought of her daughter’s unhappiness at the nun’s school, bitter bile rises in her throat.

Tacánecy turns left in front of the fort and lopes westward along the riverbank trail, heading upstream directly into the storm.  The splatters of rain are laced with tiny needles of ice that sting her hands and face.  The drops are more frequent now, formed in the tumult of the great looming thunderhead that blots out most of the night sky.  Windy gusts snarl through low willows, chasing the dank scent of moss-coated river rocks away from the onrushing rain.  Its growing roar overpowers the river’s steady rush.

In a flash of lightening she sees ahead a wall of rain so dense that nothing can be seen beyond it.  Then it swallows them, drenching them in seconds, blotting out all other sound.  Behind them, the hoof prints in the silty clay of the river trail melt away without a trace.

They arrive at the spot where a small stream enters from the South.  Dry Creek, the settlers call it.  After tonight it will have to be called Wet Creek.  Like my eyes.

Her plan was to follow this rivulet a while before returning to the main channel across a rocky sandstone ridge.  This maneuver would have slowed her husband’s pursuit long enough to complete her work.  But the storm makes this bit of cunning unnecessary.  She sends another prayer of thanks for the storm.

Despite the chill and wet, she relaxes now that they are safely enveloped in the storm’s center.  The mare slows, picking her way along the trail through the liquid mud.  Shy Bird feels warm beneath her legs.  Steam rises from the mare’s back into the rain-soaked air.  Despite her long absence from the back of a horse, she molds herself to its rocking rhythm, marveling at the body’s memory of things past.

An image of Lena astride the mare forms in her mind.  Long black hair blowing in the wind like a second horse’s tail.  Face alight with smile.  Lithe body glued to the mare’s back.  Like me when I was her age.  Back when I still had dreams.  She banishes the image with a kick in Shy Bird’s side.

After an hour, the rain dribbles to a stop.  A nearly full moon emerges from under the western edge of the storm cloud, bathing the landscape in startlingly bright silver light.   Cottonwoods stretch their dripping arms skyward.  Pine needles glisten.  Bushes on the nearby slopes make dark silhouettes against the buffalo grass waving in the fresh washed breeze.  A dismal beauty, considering what is now revealed in the river trail behind her:  Shy Bird’s hoof prints, stark as signposts, outlined in moon shadow.

She glances back over her left shoulder and sees the tipi-shaped butte named after her husband.  Beside her on the right, perpendicular to the river, rises the rocky spine they call the Devil’s Backbone.  Hair prickles on her neck.  What if he has managed to follow her? She urges Shy Bird into a trot.  Not too far ahead lies her destination, the beautiful hidden valley atop the imposing sandstone ridge that stretches up before her to meet the moon.  It was to have been their escape route, her and Lena’s trail to the north land.  Now it would become her daughter’s final home in this world.

When she reaches the ridge’s base about half an hour later, the place where the river cuts through, she pauses to push the bundle back into place over the horse’s withers.  The coldness of what’s inside nearly unnerves her.  Then she urges Shy Bird a few steps forward into the river as if she were going to wade upstream through the narrow rock cut and continue along the river trail.  Instead, she dismounts onto a huge flat sandstone slab that slopes gently down from the rocky bank into the water beside her.  She unrolls the two blankets and spreads them next to each other over the stone.  With a tug on the chin rope, she coaxes Shy Bird to step onto the blankets.  When all four hooves are on the second blanket, she retrieves the first and places it in front of the horse, urging it forward once again.  In this fashion, blanket by blanket, they depart the river trail without leaving a trace on the sandstone or the slope above.  After nearly twenty such blanket changes, she stops behind a bush, ties the blankets back on the horse, remounts and moves up toward the saddle in the rimrock that allows her passage into the shallow, hidden valley that lies between the double crested ridge.  From the summit she looks back and is startled by a blanket of white that begins about half way between her and their home and extends well past it onto the plains.  Hail, shimming in the moonlight, fallen there, but not here.  Awestruck, she murmurs her gratitude for the storm’s gift.

Turning from the summit, she crosses the valley, moonstruck into visibility, and reaches the even higher crest on the west.  She turns north and rides parallel to the cliff but well back from its edge.  Juniper trees and stunted pines rise darkly among a wild jumble of sandstone rock formations.  Her eyes cast about for the one she is seeking.  The rock spirits gather around her.  Their whispering voices fail to bring calm.  She feels lost.

At last she sees it.  The entrance to the cave-like hideaway.  Two huge sandstone slabs leaning together to form a tipi-shaped cave guarded by a thick juniper bush cover over the entry.  Lena’s resting place.  The secret spot Otter Woman, in the form of a gray jay, had led her to the month after Lena’s ride in Denver City.  Its purpose had only come to her during yesterday’s death watch, the day that seemed never to end, the day she sat beside Lena’s leather-wrapped body keening a death song until her voice gave out.  In this cave she will do for Lena in death what she failed to do for Lena in life:  protect her from her husband’s reach.

* * *

To the east over the vast plains, where a hint of dawn outlines the horizon, the storm sparks and crashes.  It is well past their home now.  She imagines Medina sleeping there, and bitterness seizes her heart.  Medina, her proud, stubborn, husband.  If only he had not insisted on sending Lena back to that accursed school, Lena would be alive today.  If only…

But as she dismounts and leans against the leather shroud, feeling the shape of Lena’s stiff legs against her body, something unwelcome sprouts and spreads:  a guilt so profound she must grab Shy Bird’s mane to keep from falling to the rocky ground.