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.

They considered themselves midnight adventurers, coming off the hill they so lovingly called Henshit Mountain, to cross the pond in the dead of winter with sleds to “borrow” lumber from Artie Donolan who had ”borrowed” it from Breakheart Reservation, a state park. The park, at its deepest end, bordered on land that the Donolans had worked for years, including timber they ripped out of the state park as long as a few eyes stayed closed. To the boys from Henshit Mountain, the Donolan rape was not unknown, not to these teenagers, who were only enacting their own form of justice, borrowing enough lumber to build themselves a clubhouse at the thickly-treed section of the mountain. With various spurts of energy, even in summer when they floated rafts of lumber across the same pond from the same lumberyard, rooms were added to the clubhouse. The building rose majestically, they all agreed, they who had to a man become proficient carpenters and finish men.

Over a number of years, as they grew toward a global war surfacing on both oceans, meetings were held, elections concluded, designs and improvements of all genres initiated, trysts enamored, hope burst continually from that domicile in which no one lived, not as a home site.

When the town, through the office of the chief of police, demanded taxes be paid on the property, thus quickly abandoned by the clubmen to the town, to the weather, to the times. They relocated their activities to another phantom house they’d build on land without a road, deeper in the tall pines, stray apple trees feeding off the ground since the Civil War days, and tyrant oaks that held their territory.

The membership included Frank Parkinson, Eddie Oljay, Bud Petitteau, Homer Barnard, Allie Devine, Clete Weavering, Asa Parnell, Poker Symonds, Nial O’Hara, Chuck Grabowski, and others, by adoption or temporary association, whose names will only resurface as the story progresses. Some girls, of course, toward that quick run at war building in Europe, had honorary admission at all hours of day or night after a code of secrecy had been imposed. Not one of those girls, from what I have heard over the long years, ever broke that code.

Even as the members pillaged materials in small doses from ready sources on Route One, begged and borrowed in addition to the stealing, the noises on the far side of two oceans began to sift into their meetings.

“Hey, guys,” Poker Symonds said one night as the moon sifted down through the trees, “I just heard today Buzz Marchowski joined the Canadian Air Force and is already in Moncton or Shediac or St. Something somewhere. Eddie Smiledge down The Rathole told me. Says Buzz’s all pissed off about the Germans screwing up Poland where his grandparents are living on the family farm.”

Symonds, his name changed from hard–to-pronounce beginnings like Sczy and whatever, kept shaking his head as if he wondered why his name had been hidden behind soft edges. As it turned out, he was the first to leave the clubhouse one night, never to come back. Under the moon that night and light of kerosene lamps, others knew what was cooking in him; his eyes told the deep unrest so recently kicked free.
Each knew his turn was coming, that he was bound elsewhere on the globe’s face. If it touched Saugus in any manner at all, all swore an oath they’d be in the first line of recruits.

Germany was making too much noise, stepping on too many toes, bustling and bragging of their great inroads on small nations guarded by token armies, and Japan, like a lecher, was stretching its imperial hands across the rich skin and into too many orifices of the tasty Orient. In a matter of a week the balled fist of war came at them; one classmate, flying for the RCAF, was shot down over the English Channel; another enlistee, a neighbor of Parkinson’s, was missing from an RAF flight over France; an uncle of Clete Weavering was stomped to death on the China coast as he tried to sneak out to sea to board a submarine after secret service on the mainland, and Oljay’s distant cousin was shot in front of a firing squad at the edge of a ghetto in Poland.

War, in its demand for enlistment, called them, young and exuberant in their outlook and it was in the next week they gathered in the clubhouse, the house nobody lived in, and made their plans to help save the world.
Frank Parkinson said, “We don’t go as a group. We don’t get in one line to any branch of the service, and end up in one squad or one flight or one patrol, go down with one bang. We each go our own way. If we come back, or those who do come back, we’ll meet here. No Trafalgar Square for us or even under the clock at The Ritz. We will celebrate here someday. We ought to go down to see the Chief and tell him our plans. He might understand. If not, we’ll tell him not to tell us.”

“Why can’t we go as a group, the whole club of us?” Oljay said, seeing the whole group as a squad of its own, firepower from the start, Robin Hoods or Lone Rangers waging battle.

Parkie said, “No matter if we walked in and got consecutive numbers, they’d split us up. They do things like that so we don’t clique it up. Makes sense to me, so we should each go our way. I’m going in the army. When I heard about Big Red in Burma, it said I’d join the army.”

In a day’s time, it was all decided, for each of them, and all services were involved.

The war to end all wars bruised them all, each one, each in different ways, some with dread permanence. Clete Weavering was blown off the deck of a Navy supply vessel in the Pacific, never to be seen again. A year later an envelope ended up at the Legion Hall, from Clete, simply addressed to The Boys of Henshit Mountain, Saugus, Massachusetts. The Post Office, having no proper or known address, delivered it to the Legion Post, #210, to hold for any survivors of the war who might have been The Boys of Henshit Mountain. As it was, one old WW I vet said he knew of them and would deliver it to the first one who came home. The Legion held the letter for almost two years.

Then it was delivered to Bud Petitteau one evening at the Meadowglen Club as Bud had come home from two years in the far Pacific and hospital time, one hand gone from a nasty grenade. The old Legionnaire had heard Bud was home, spending time at The Meadowglen with some guys who had come home, and made a trip to deliver the letter, which was simple enough in its message:

“Miss you guys like hell, but some good guys here. I just wanted to see if this gets through to the clubhouse or to any of you. We have heard stories about miraculous deliveries of real short addresses. If I don’t get to see you on the mountain, I am sure that we will catch up to each other sometime, someplace. Your clubhouse pal,

Clete

PS: Say hi to Mildred Derning for me. I got her last letter about a year ago and never did answer it for one reason or another. She’s a real cute kid I’ve thought about a few times.”

(A note here: It was not revealed until 1950 that Mildred Derning had an eight-year old son she had named John Cletus Derning. She never married as far as I know and died in 1981. John Cletus Derning took down his physicians shingle in 2002. I don’t know if he ever knew anything about his father, but I hope he did. If this tells him, it’s about all I can do.)

Homer Barnard didn’t come home from the 2th Infantry Division in the Pacific, and the 31st Infantry Regiment of the 7th Infantry Division in Korea, until 1954 and after he had served in a POW camp in North Korea for two years. One of his letters, addressed to The Clubhouse on Henshit Mt, Saugus, Mass., was hung up in a dead letter box and a postal center under construction until it fell from between the cracks of time in 1963. It was delivered back to Homer by a personal friend, an employee of the USPS and an army comrade from basic days, who had intercepted it finally en route to Saugus and recognized the sender’s name. He drove from New York one day in the fall to deliver it and spent a week in Saugus. He even visited the original clubhouse, which by then had been jacked up and a cellar placed under it, three rooms added, and a porch wrapped half way and more around the house from where a huge section of Rumney Marsh was visible as well as a great chunk of the Atlantic Ocean on a good day. The two men sat on the porch a good part of one afternoon with the owner, in Italy with the 10th Mountain Division with a few other Saugus boys, and the beer was free. They even went to see the Patriots play the Kansas City Chiefs at Fenway Park, which ended up in a tie game.

Parkie, who admittedly only wrote one letter to the guys, which has not yet surfaced, but about whom much has been written by me, ended up on the hot sands of the Sahara and could have been dead a few times. Of him it has been said (in a poem, The Municipal Subterranean) :

He comes up, goggled, out of a manhole in the middle of a street in my peaceful town, sun the sole brazier, like an old Saharan veteran, Rommel-pointing his tank across the four-year stretch of sand, shell holes filling up quick as death. I think of Frank Parkinson, Tanker, Tiger of Tobruk, now in his grass roots, the acetylene smile on his oil-dirty face, the goggles still high on his high forehead, his forever knowing Egypt’s two dark eyes.

Frank told me his story one evening as we drank beer by old Lily Pond. It came around as “Parkie, Tanker, Tiger of Tobruk,” and many people have read it elsewhere.

Asa Parnell, it has been said, wrote dozens of letters to the guys but sent his via Harry Clemson at The Pythian Alleys (The Rathole Poolroom its other half), who held them until one of the guys picked them up in 1945, after the big boom went down. Parnell had 25 missions as a waist gunner of a B-17 over Europe, went to school on the GI Bill, ended up with his PhD, taught at two Maine colleges for more than 30 years before he drowned in a kayak ride on the Allagash River when he was over 70 years old. He only came to Saugus at the Founders Day festivities, out front of the town hall in September of the year when, at times, ten to fifteen thousand people might pass through the center of town during the celebration, the accompanying mini-marathon race, and the high school football game every other year. One year I heard that he found two other guys, and they sat for four hours on the steps of the library hashing over the old days and then he went north again for his last ride a few years later.

Every so often, as if I’m being summoned by a voice, a face, the edge of a shared incident, I leave the vets section of the cemetery and visit Henshit Mountain, trying to find any remnant of a clubhouse, cellar in place, second floor added, perhaps a porch and a garage, a garden for summer attendance. Once an old fishing buddy, who had lived on the mountain for many years, pointed out two or three places that had strange beginnings. There are no shortcuts in those places. They were built well by guys who knew their business. They had OJT before there was OJT. Go down alongside old Lily Pond and more than half the houses down there were summer camps before the big war, and when the boys came back home and were looking for cheap quarters, they bought a camp erected on cement blocks and after a while jacked it up, put in a stone or poured foundation, got central heating, raised a family, added rooms, sold it, bought or built a new place, all part of the economy. Some of the original camps are now so sprawling over the landscape you’d have to get a pre-war aerial map to find the beginning forms of them.

Parkie carried on for 20 some torturous years before he hugged the earth for the last time, but not on Henshit Mountain, home away from home for a long time in his short life. Every Memorial Day I re-flag his grave along with a host of people and have done so for more than 25 years.

All of them are gone now, some here, some elsewhere. Four of the membership share the same plot with Parkie. None of them ever climbed to the back end of Henshit Mountain after the war. The house that no one lived in really had passed on in their growth, even its nostalgia, for they had rushed onto the real estate of the whole globe.

Now and then, usually close to Memorial Day and again at Veterans Day, I drive up the hill, for that’s what it really is, a rise of about 500 feet above sea level, on a series of paved roads. From the road I can see two houses, now lived in for more than half a century, where no one lived when they were built. I can visualize the membership crossing the pond in winter on sleds loaded with purloined lumber and supplies, or on rafts tied together in the dead of summer nights. I know where they kept their beer in underground coolers, where it stayed cool and was hidden from the temptation of potential thieves. I know some of the girls, still here with us, grandmothers time and again, and great-grandmothers, who swore to the secrecy code and will carry it away with them.

It’s on a rare occasion when I come face to face with one of those ladies in the aisle of a mall store, or at the library with a chosen book, or in the cemetery on a special day, and get a wink acknowledging the deep and mostly hidden years. We understand the past, the pact, the passions. We understand what loyalty means, and where things have gone in this short passage.

All bad things must come to an end.

Most of us drive back the way we came, caught up with thick but moving traffic on the interstates.  But at the junctions of I-10 and I-12 we choke up and lose momentum, feeling farther from arrival the closer we get.  Those of us who have sought out alternate routes on local highways drive through the small towns and communities of the south, searching for reassuring signposts, hesitating at confusing forks, admiring red-brick churches and the fields where they bury people below the ground.  We are moving slow but sure that, in the long run, we’ll have outrun those fools on the interstate.  Highway 90, a rural ribbon that wraps the Gulf coast, is almost deserted.  The storm ran roughshod up the beach and onto the road, passed through the resorts and casinos, giving everything a good saltwater scrubbing.  Finger puddles spread across the highway from the shoulder to the oversaturated median.  We hydroplane and navigate around yachts and fishing boats parked on the dotted white line, then leave Mississippi behind and make the last lonesome leg through the pine marsh, snapping branches under our tires, marveling that all this impenetrable nature lies just miles from the city.

We arrive at all hours, and leftover wind runs through town like a child, slapping at everything that dangles: store signs, stoplights, peeled back shutters and the plates bearing street names strung up on wires.  In the daytime the wreckage is fully visible down every side street.  We drive slow and turn our heads from side to side—what didn’t make it, what did?  The damage is not horrible, and that’s a relief, but there are a few old buildings that survived the last dozen storms that have finally given up and caved in, their interior walls visible from the street, torn like wet paper.  For those of us arriving at night, in the dark of a city with patchy power grids, the damage has to be inferred from the debris lying face-down in our headlights.  We get the feeling of what a ghost city this could be, with vegetation creeping into our homes in the wet, hot nights, an entire metropolis no longer lit by electricity or the spirit of its inhabitants.  It’s as if our absence of only a week has accelerated the weathering of the wood and the sinking of the asphalt.  The city needs us to take care of it, to watch over it.  To occupy the houses, fight back against the flora, and beat music against the walls.  Without our custody even the wrought iron would flake away into small, airborne trash.

That’s why we return, even after this strong reminder of the potential disaster, this quick threat of a repeat offense.  New Orleans is older than the state that surrounds it, older than the nation that pities it.  It will always exist in some form as long as the boastful few who inherit it can’t comprehend living anywhere else and feel its importance mingled with their marrow.

We pull off the avenues into our neighborhoods.  The stray cats watch our cars approach and dart off through gates and underneath hedges.  They found some place to hide from the scourging winds and dominant rain, reminding us that this city will always be an easy home for the unclaimed and the scavengers.

Our neighbors are already back and are out on the porch, watching to see who comes next.  We lean across the railing and share stories, compare notes.  Throughout the city the competition is on: who suffered the most.

Took us 15 hours to get to Atlanta.  Took us six damn hours just to Baton Rouge, and the storm hit there harder.  There were eight of us in the one room, man.  I thought auntie was going to faint from overstimulation.  Two flat tires in two different states.  I had a four day migraine.  The dog ran off, just straight into the woods.  My brother-in-law is a right son of a bitch and if I ever have to see him again, it’ll be too soon.

No one wants to give up even a little token of their trauma or let it go undocumented.  As if there will be some kind of recompense for our spent emotion along with the gas and unearned wages.

Well, come on over and have some dinner then.  We already been to the store.

Our homes are hot and smelly.  They have soaked up the outer atmosphere like chambered sponges.  In our absence we have forgotten about the mess we made searching through the rooms for the precious items we would take.  Everything needs to be put back now, restacked at right angles.  We need to restock the fridge.  A few of us are lucky and have electricity.  The rest of us hurry to get everything done before sundown, then head out onto the porch.  The streets are filled with people like the old days, back before air conditioning, squatting on the stoop or rocking in swings, enjoying the ten degree difference that night can bring.

There’s a curfew on, but every place that can be open is.  If the beer has spoiled, we drink liquor.  Restaurants run on limited menus but are packed with eager adherents, all the foodies who feared their favorite places would be washed away.  People crowd the doorways and lean against the exteriors, joking and complaining, making predictions, wondering where the others are.  The National Guardsmen roar down the streets in humvees, arms and guns poking out.  Their big tires hit the potholes hard, and the soldiers go bouncing around the cabin and readjust their helmets.  They point out the windows and whistle at our girlfriends or cousins.  They’re dazzled by their first time in the big city, even if it is half dark, thrilled by this unique domestic occupation.

Within the next few days almost everyone will be back, and it will all seem like an overblown fad, a temporary panic that robbed us of a week.  We’re a little embarrassed, really.  The near miss has realigned some of us with the old mindset that we’re all better off just staying put and hunkering down.  Screw this exodus shit.  Katrina was the exception, not the New Rule.  Back to work, back to school, back to overanalyzing the Saints.  The last to arrive are the short-term wards of the state, the poor and the elderly bussed back in from up north.  We return to the projects, back to Central City, back to The East, back to our own self-contained way of life.  We feel as riled as anyone else, packed up and shipped for no good reason, then hassled twice as hard on the way back in.  We return to our corners, to our tiny kitchens, to our knowledgeable silence.  Some of us resume our interrupted revenge, and before the storm has even dissipated over the Midwest we tally a few more gangland dead.

New Orleans reconvenes.  The old arguments relight.  The graft machine whirs back to life.  We pick up the dry cleaning.  The horse carriages resume their rattle through the Quarter.  The newspaper starts to get thicker, not with news but with ads for renovation specials, clean up crews, mold busters, and insurance lawyers.  We rejoin the rest of the nation in recession worries and presidential election mania.  The river opens back up to traffic.  The ships start floating by, carrying goods up the channels or racing back to sea empty.  Flights resume.  A few tourists follow through on their itineraries, feeling lucky to see us and our city right after a hurricane has passed by, as if they are catching us in our natural state.  Maybe they are.

The work crews disentangle all the branches from the power lines and clear away the scattered splinters.  They reattach signs and sweep up glass.  They return our city to just the way it was before Gustav: half-vacant and weather-beaten.  They refurbish our semi-accomplished recovery then box up the tools and pack it in for the day.  It’s all up to the bosses, now.

Tomorrow we’ll resume the years-long wait for all our power to be restored.  Tomorrow we’ll tread a little more water.

We know what we smell like, okay?  Hours and hours under the sun or smothered by night heat have us sweating coffee, sweating Red Bull.  The clench of old cigarette smoke.  Fast food and soda breath.  We are covered in pet hair or the sticky evidence of children’s fingerprints.  We ceased to smell like travelers awhile ago.  Now we’re full-fledged refugees.  We can’t wait to get into the shower and come out scented, can’t wait to just sit with the towel wrapped around us, limbs spread wide to air out and cool.  But before that we have to spread the scent through hugs and handshakes, the reintroduction of family members to our hosts.  Or, for the lodgers, we have to shuffle to the counter, smile, hand over our credit cards, and act calm before they’ll give us the keys.  In the shelters in the northern part of the state and across the border in Arkansas, in the community centers, high school gyms, and mega-churches converted into camps, the line we’ve been in since before we boarded the buses evolves and shifts.  Lines for supplies, lines for food, lines for the constantly running, no-time-for-shame showers.  There will be lines in our dreams.  We’ve all got to wait just a little while longer, of course, before anyone will let us relax.

We explode wherever we’ve landed.  The suitcases spring open and the clothes—warm, wrinkled, somehow moist—tumble out, get put into piles around the room or laid under cots.  In the guest bedrooms we stack our boxes of assorted belongings, the things we don’t feel safe leaving in the car.  The cat’s litter box goes in a corner.  Coax her out from behind the couch and show her where it is.  The dog is in the front yard, sniffing at everything and spraying.  The shared bathroom gets cluttered quickly, all the women’s tools and bottles lined up in pairs or triplets, cords and plugs strung everywhere, waiting for their turn in the outlet.  Our hosts push their food to the back and sides of the fridge, making room for ours.  Some of us want to keep things equitable, so we label everything with magic markers.  We know we are here by their mercy and fret over taking up too much space.  The worry we have contained inside us about the storm starts to overflow and redirect into small panics about hospitality and cleanliness.  In the shelters the rows of cots divide into little blocks, little neighborhoods, little family camps.  All the borders are tested, overlapped by possessions and children and demands.

Yet we find a way to settle in, find the beginnings of our new and hopefully temporary patterns.  When possible, the lives that have been interrupted by this mass migration find a way to unpause.  Young couples sneak off to make out or lock the doors to the remotest bathrooms and make love in the tub, hoping not to leave a trace.  Men with unaffected deadlines make phone calls, plug in their laptops, answer e-mails, push money around electronically.  The thieves and pickpockets get back to work.  Mom takes the kids to the multiplex (they look and smell the same in every town) to see the last of the summer blockbusters.

Yes, sure, we’d love a drink.  We pop open cold cans of beer, stir up pitchers of margaritas, decide how many ice cubes we’d like in our scotch.  The alcohol puts some of us prematurely to sleep, riles up others.  With the stress and booze in our blood, not much is different from home: we get aggravated into arguments or find ourselves exhuming old memories.  We laugh, if we can.  The trash cans fill and rattle.  The hotel halls are filled with people, unclaimed teenagers loose on disingenuous tours between the rooms, texting and chattering constantly.  The vending machines empty quickly.  We go four floors up or two floors down, searching for an ice machine that hasn’t been sapped.  The gears grind against nothing.  We wait for the water to freeze and form, for the next batch to overturn inside the chamber.

Cousins and uncles and nieces and brothers-in-law.  Grandmas and old college roommates and family friends.  These are the supergroups we’ve assembled for long overdue reunions formed under unexpected circumstances.  Some groups bring along strangers, stragglers.  Lots of kids representing the Bywater bohemians find refuge with their friends’ middle-class families.  Their Depression-era costumes and freak-folk mannerisms seem so out of place now, sipping coffee from a Donald Duck mug in the wooded suburbs.  Separated from the city, some of us for the first time, we are forced to acknowledge the different faces of America, all the strange ways a town can be arranged and operated.  We all tell our stories, memories of last time, stopping short of saying, and if it happens again… We are stunned by the nighttime silence of small towns, made uncomfortable or impressed by cities that have found a way to divide all of their differing classes from each other with invisible lines.  We taste regional food, suffer other women’s cooking, their odd ratios of spice and seasoning.  Drifting through their grocery stores we can’t find half of what we need for gumbo or jambalaya and deep inland we wonder, ain’t you got no turkey necks?

Gustav is still taking his time, moving slow.  We wait and wait for landfall, for the determination, for the result.  We fear it, but we have to have it now.  We can’t take the uncertainty too much longer.

The television is on everywhere.  The national press is torn between two temptations: stretch out the long foreplay of another possible disaster in New Orleans or give in to the immediate gratification of Sarah Palin.  We’ve all left, replaced by the famous faces of CNN and Fox News doing stand-ups in our neighborhoods, datelining weird prophecies from the tops of levees, filling in the rest of the country on what we’ve all known for years.  New Orleans has patched up the holes, but done little to reinforce anything.  We’ve waited for reports to be compiled, for budgets to be finalized, for lawsuits to settle.  We’ve seethed at the Corps of Engineers and watch them test and test and secretly loathe their own responsibility.  We’ve watched them miss deadline after deadline.  We’ve waited for someone higher up to demand more.  But these are just minor blurbs against another potential direct hit.  They don’t make for good TV.  Not as much as the images of empty streets, boarded up buildings, and the eccentric who have stayed behind.  Not as much as that quirky brunette from Alaska and her daytime talk show life eating away at the tiny bit of gravitas that remains in presidential campaigns.  We realize the people from the networks may as well be broadcasting from another country, that they understand nothing.  We stream our local stations on the internet, imagine our favorites holed up in the studio, admiring their grandstanding grit.  They know a little more, but not much.  But at least they talk in a language we can understand.  In the shelters its worse.  The news comes in on small radios, then radiates through the crowd in rumors and garbled facts.  The night before is restless, plans and scenarios criss-cross in fallible networks in our minds.  At the bottom of it, there’s just no telling, and that’s what drives us impatiently mad.

Finally, Monday morning, it hits.  Category 2 at landfall.  The storm moves northwest through Louisiana on the city’s western side.  Another near miss.  The storm eats up Baton Rouge and all the small towns to the west, turns out all the lights in the southern part of the state, and urges the gulf to rush up all along the coast for a quick skirmish, but by the evening Gustav is weak, downgraded, tagged and filed.

We don’t know the extent of the wind damage, whether our roofs are intact, whether there is wild looting.  But we know that the lake hasn’t been sent into a frenzy, that the levees have held, that we will be able to go home soon.  Most of us celebrate.  We stand over grills and pat each other on the arms.  We let loose in Mississippi karaoke bars, gone on High Life and AC/DC.  We let the kids jump on the hotel beds and order up movies on pay-per-view.

The mayor, the city council, the Jefferson Parish president, the National Guard, and the utilities companies all have differing opinions.  The city is closed off by state troopers and local police.  Any of the eager returnees are turned away.  They have to take precautions, start clearing the major streets.  They want power to be back on, mostly.  They want the lights and the safety they bring.  So we have to wait some more.  Some of us are running out of money, can’t afford another night away in the hotel, another day of eating three meals in restaurants.  We drive around and around on the highways, looking for ways to sneak back into town.  Some of us want to know badly how our street is.  The online forums are jammed with requests.  People who stayed behind are biking through the neighborhoods with camcorders and uploading the videos to Youtube.  The asphalt is wet, dirty, crowded with fallen branches and glass.  We groan when they don’t turn down our street.  We crane our heads as if we can see around the border of the frame, see through the video into unrecorded peripherals.  The soundtrack is eerie: wet tires swishing and the rider breathless in the humidity.  The city empty and exhausted after standing up to the winds.

We start getting in contact with people we know, people with advance passes (the gas station and grocery operators, the electricians and plumbers, the nurses and hoteliers) and assess the damage over the phone.  The general consensus is that Those in Charge are being overcautious.  Some of us take the news as a cue to pack up and hurry out.  The city should be open before we get back.  After another day of waiting the lines are forming on the interstate.  Our numbers intimidate the mayor.  There’s too many of us out there idling in our cars, yelling at the cops, even abandoning vehicles and walking in.  He throws up his hands and announces the free-for-all.  They remove the cones, open up the lanes.  Be careful, they say.  All right, just be careful.

For those of us with the luxury there is a self-imposed wait of another day or two.  Let the others deal with the traffic, no doubt as bad getting back in as it was getting out, maybe even worse if all the stoplights are dark.  We’re having fun, want another day with the family, want another day to transform the evacuation into a type of holiday—the Hurrication—to steal some joy from dark necessity.  We want one more dinner, a few more drinks, one more night in that bed before the strain of being locked in the car again.  We clean up after ourselves, launder our clothes, recharge the batteries.  We write notes.

Thank you, thank you, thank you for letting us stay.  Let’s just hope we don’t have to return the favor, that no one else ever has to face our annual threats and migrations.

Cue the music. We’re going for a ride.

It’s hot as Labor Day weekend should be, summer’s last holiday, last chance to boil. We have our windows down and the music is passing between cars and mixing in the space between, pidgin notes and lyrics. The few radio stations not on a constant bulletin loop, CDs and MP3 players sucking up juice from the cigarette lighters, lighting jawlines with little green light, and old tape decks on their last legs. We represent all formats, all genres, all decibels. You could confuse us for a tailgating party. You could confuse us with a parking lot. Half a mile an hour on the interstate that dips down into our city, half a mile an hour memorizing the license plates in front of us on the overpass high above our neighborhoods. Amongst us are the showoffs, the ones who piled luggage on top of 14-inch speakers and expensive amps, bass heavy and proud. Amongst us are the classicists: we need Bach to calm our nerves. Nothing moves as fast as the beats or the trills. Even slow jazz outpaces us. We pull forward in the space between the notes.

No matter when we left that day—the day they told us there would be no help, that all who chose to remain would be on their own for days, no government chances taken for citizens who felt themselves brave enough to take all comers—it wasn’t early enough. We pulled out of our neighborhoods, turned up the avenues. We joined all the others at the on-ramps. The road refused to digest us, the interstate choked on our dry traffic. Some of us headed west, tempted by the branching highways that crossed Oklahoma and Texas. The rest of us felt we were outsmarting someone, racing towards Mississippi and all points north: surely we were in the minority. It didn’t matter. There were two million of us in a cross-country race. There is no road wide enough for that kind of contest.

A clear sky night, heat from idling engines challenging nature with its own sub-atmosphere. We are all sweating; our animals are panting in their crates or in our laps. When it became obvious, two hours on the road and still trapped inside of the city limits, that we were going nowhere fast, the practical among us turned off the AC. We were tired of watching it sap the tank. Too many of us now are on the shoulder, three miles from home and already out of fuel. We are family convoys siphoning gas out of one van to split with another, stomachs rejecting the unexpected taste of gasoline. We have to watch the poor bastards empty their water jugs and coffee cans and start walking back to fetch gas. We keep our eyes forward when we inch by someone hamstrung by a smoking radiator. We make five point turns on the shoulder to bring our cars face forward with someone else who needs a jump. We curse as we decide which belongings to lay at the side of the road to allow a relative from an abandoned car to fit in ours.

There’s no privacy on the road. Seven people in a sedan, kids in our laps locking limbs and pushing back and forth. We change diapers on the dashboard. We face the guardrail and pee; there’s nowhere else to go. We are watching ourselves, all wards, all neighborhoods, all streets represented, thrown into a jumble. We can see how the other half lives, now. We can see each others’ possessions, what we’ve chosen to preserve. We are all lit by headlights and streetlamps, on display, flirting or fighting, or giving in to the most basic human temptation to turn our heads at someone else moving past. We can see the spectrum of faces. Annoyance, anguish, fright, and exhaustion. Determination, jealousy, and laughter. We can see the fuming anger of a couple who has remembered that they left something behind and argued about going back, retrieving it, getting in the back of the line. There are no placeholders. We notice the few among us with the right skill sets, the camp counselor types who have their cabins bouncing and jiving, trading rounds of karaoke. We are a loud and crazy population, raised on open containers. We have uncorked the wine or even tapped pony kegs, mixed up punch and poured it into plastic cups. Even the drivers sip, confident that they can maintain at half a mile an hour. The only thing that can still us for a moment or two is the rush of the cyclists, clicking by between the cars or along the gritty shoulder, bearing bundles on their backs. They look straight forward, painted with sweat, somehow separate from us. Who knows what their plan is, how far they expect to get. We are not jealous of their temporary speed.

Hours and hours later we have made it to the separation point. Cars begin to pull away from each other by more than a few feet and shift into higher gears for the first time all day. We feel reinforced by speed and breathing room, by being removed from a constant audience. We pull into all night truck stops, pull open the doors and dive into the false fluorescent dawn inside. We open the refrigerated lockers filled with drinks and stick in our heads. We need sugar, coffee, salty snacks. We need the bathroom line to move faster. Some of us have never been this far out of town before, and we need maps. We need help to understand this unlit country. In the parking lot dogs are running loose ahead of their owners, exerting pent up energy. We are thankful for the break, but we know we can’t stop long. Who knows if we’re ahead or behind. The real push could be coming up behind us, the high point of the bell curve. They could arrive at any moment and wash the gridlock miles ahead of us like a swift high tide. We gather the kids and kick the tires and throw our trash on the ground and rejoin the road.

We hit the crossover for contraflow. The interstate seems mightier now that both sides are only open to one direction, as if it were a river that has flooded its banks. The kids have their noses to the window, watching the mirror image of their journey across the wide median. We grip the steering wheel a little tighter, those of us on the wrong side. We feel like we are on an amusement park track, pulled forward no matter which way we steer. We brace for someone unaware, some southbound escapee to come and split us all with headlights and horns. We pass state troopers leaning against their patrol cars with the blue lights on: guards over the frenzy, Mississippi laissez-faire. We can’t see where we are, can’t get used to the road signs with their backs to us, disowning us. It doesn’t really matter. Places don’t matter now, only mileage.

We drive all night. Dawn sneaks up on us. Even if we’ve passed turns at the wheel, there’s just not enough energy. All the stress of the previous week has come to collect its outstanding debt. We were so distracted with worry—what to do, where to go, what to pack—that we didn’t prepare reserves for the drive. We pass through rest areas filled to capacity, cars pulled up onto the grass and into employee spaces. We test the limits of the welcome centers of other states, see how far their hospitality goes. We take exits no one but the locals would recognize, pull into church parking lots, turn semi-circles behind shopping centers. Crack the windows, brace them with hot pillows. Everyone be still now. We need a nap, just a brief, full stop. We hope no one will knock on our windows, that no one will ask questions. But our kids can’t help it. They are cranky, itchy underneath their sweaty clothes, sapped by on-again-off-again sleep. And what can we tell them, anyway? We don’t know where the storm will land or what kind of destruction is on the agenda. Are we far enough inland? Will it be like the last time? How long will we be gone? Just shut up. Everyone shut up.

We can see the same self-portrait off of every exit between home and Houston, Atlanta, and Jacksonville. We leave behind the same wreck at every convenience store between home and Meridian, Little Rock, and Memphis. We are the reluctant locusts. The bathroom floors are covered in half an inch of liquid, tiled with a hundred dirty footprints. The employees have just stacked rolls of paper towels in the corner, sandbagged the walls with soap dispenser packets. We have emptied two million gallons of piss across the southeast. Trash cans overflow everywhere, filled with our wrappers, our bottles, our tampons, our broken glass. In the burger joints they are running the fryers non-stop, they are running out of fries. We bring the wait with us, we bring the lines. Clean locals stand between us, suffering through the stress-fashioned stench that we’ve gotten used to over the past twelve hours. New Orleans Funk. Some of us run cons—a few of us have to. We talk fast in local accents, confuse the used-to-idling clerks, distracting them from the gas pumps as our partners sneak away. We are emptying the soda fountains of all their ice, we are leaving mini-mart shelves bare. We say, Hey, man, I gave you a twenty, not a ten.

We bring with us old fears and cause new prejudices. Even the blossoming sympathy can’t dissuade the demographics. Outside, in the open, stretched across a thousand miles we reveal our racial ratios, the blacks far outnumbering the whites. We nominally manage in the city, we know how to dart our eyes. But far removed, it can look, to small-town minds, like an exodus, a march, an uprising. The sheriffs park cautious squad cars as they see fit. We might as well all be Section Eight. And beyond that, on a more fundamental level of good old American common sense, we catch a few proud looks of What did you expect? Why even go back to live below the sea?

Just another couple hours now, depending. We turn the keys, and the songs rejoin where they left off when we stopped the car. We readjust the luggage, the pets, the children, our thighs. But not the mirrors. We don’t need to see behind us, now. It’ll all be on TV when we arrive.

As Hurricane Gustav bore down on the Gulf states in August of 2008, memories of the Katrina disaster triggered the largest evacuation in US history. Three million fled the oncoming hurricane. Most of the refugees were from the Louisiana south coast. Author, New Orleans resident, and Katrina veteran Ryan Sparks was among them. The following is his account of the evacuation, in four parts.

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The Gustav Evacuation, Part 1: Preparations

We all remember what happened last time. This has all, somehow, made us experts. When the season begins, the government and the media remind us to make our plans. Buy some maps. Update your phone numbers. Gather all the right containers. We all know better. They’re not the experts. It’s us, the ones on the ground. We’ll do as we see fit.

When a storm physically enters the Gulf, it starts a simultaneous churning approach through our minds, starting at the back and boring towards the center as the days go on. We can’t help talking about it, we must talk about it: it’s there in the corner of the television screen in its own little box, spinning off bright colors. We all point at the screen indicating where it could go, where it will go. We’re all experts now, civilian advisers. All the other weather patterns we’ve survived have given us wisdom. We can draw comparisons to other storms, other trajectories, as if anything about this is predictable. We challenge the weathermen who say it is too early to tell.

It’s not a time for hospitality. We can’t wish the storm away, but we can wish it on someone else. Let Mobile have their turn. Let it bounce off Cuba, take a sharp curve for Florida. We can’t disguise our joy when the storms re-navigate, when the latest charts show, yes, we are outside of the cone of uncertainty. We have nothing against the Texas coast; we’ll be happy to help out afterward. We just can’t take it again. We’re not ready.

And we almost made it through another season. Made it through three months of the four-month marathon. But when Gustav arrived, and passed the threshold of our worried skulls, most of us know, somehow, where he’s headed. As if we were activated magnets, as if our lease on hope had just run out. It’s time to start preparing.

Many of us are overeager, leaving three or four days early. Laughed at and scoffed at, but resolute that it’s the right thing to do, that it will be so much more convenient. That the shame on the outside chance the storm completely misses or even dissipates will be easy to bear. The next day those of us left are a little uneasy, wondering if maybe we should have just made an improvised vacation out of it as well. The ones who left are already kicking their legs in the pool in Destin or trying to overpower the strange scented air of guest bedrooms by unpacking their clothes in Monroe. Maybe they were right. The state police are preparing for contraflow along the interstate, tossing orange construction markers and cones down off the trucks to the side of the road. That makes us nervous. We make phone calls, find out the status of our friends and family northward.

Still, it’s hard to say whether we will stay or go. How strong will Gustav get? How fast will he swallow up the heat of the Gulf, how wide will his spinning arms spread? This could be something we can ride out, like in the old days, before Katrina taught us an indelible fear. Those of us with the means to leave under our own power, with some savings or cushiony credit limits are schizophrenic, pulled between the temptation to survive, to beat the inevitable traffic and the voices that speak a thousand scenarios, reasons to stay behind. The belief that a little old-fashioned courage and levity will allow you to protect your home, your block, your city.

But those of us without jobs, without money, without any new earthworks, walls, or pumps in our neighborhoods have a tougher choice to make. Stay and hope for the best or register with the government and get a spot on one of the hundreds of buses they’ve commissioned from out of state. The media is begging the poor to call and register. They remind them of what it will be like after a storm again if the power goes out, if the waters encroach again. Your elderly will die. There will be no medicine. Register, please, now. Get a spot on the bus. No one will be turned away. The phone lines are jammed all day. The call center doubles its staff, then triples it. No one has all the answers, just best guesses. But we want to know, we need the details before we make up our minds: where are the buses going? What can I bring with me? Will there be food? Will there be protection? We can remember being herded before, timidly, confusingly, pointed in several directions at once. We can already feel the itchiness of the long lines. We have never forgotten the terrified queasiness of being shut into the plane, taking off, and not being told a destination. Hours on the planes, a moving waiting room, no indications. Disembarking in Denver, in Indiana, in Phoenix. Moved like cargo. We don’t want to go through all that again unless there are assurances. Don’t worry, they tell us. We have signed contracts this time. Trust in the profit motive. Things will go much smoother with money on the line.

The new Home Depot in the middle of the city that has supplied so many with the tools and materials to rebuild their homes makes an agile business turn, orders in truckloads of generators, gas cans, and tarps. Sandbags and stacks of plywood are sold right from the parking lot. It’s still so hot; we work in the late summer twilight. The noise of our neighbors hammering during dinnertime, the rattle of collapsible ladders. We make groceries. We still haven’t decided whether we are staying or going, but either way we’ll need durable food. Cans of chili, boxes of Pop-tarts, chips and candy bars. The stores are so busy the carts make their own traffic jams down the aisles. An eight-foot pallet of cartons of bottled water is being dismantled. Children follow behind their mothers, no room for them in the carts. The kids carry gallon jugs of water or boxes of cereal and whine. Some families have two carts, one for food, one for booze. Cases and cases of beer, handles of vodka, and let me get eight bags of ice. When that runs out we’ll drink it all hot. There are lines again at the gas stations. We need fuel for our cars, fuel for our generators, fuel maybe for currency. Cartons of cigarettes. And even acts of God don’t stop the Powerball.

We are all of us chattering, taking advantage of the surge of crowds, the busy-ness, the long lines. We speculate about what Category the storm will be when it hits. We pester everyone around us, asking what they are going to do, trying to find some kind of consensus we can join. We can’t stop talking about it, where we will go, mistakes we will avoid this time around, making promises and assurances if we are the brave ones who will stay. We say, Here’s my e-mail. I’ll go by your house, yeah, yeah. We shrug our shoulders, Don’t worry about it.

Some of us can’t help but go out after the stressful days. We need to meet up with our friends at the bar or sit—maybe one last time—down to dinner at our favorite restaurants, confused about where to look with the streetside windows covered over by plywood. We are attracted to this small part of the adventure, raising glasses in the darkened rooms like Parisians who know that the tanks will arrive tomorrow, like Londoners chancing a bombing raid. We can always risk a little for the nightlife.

We say goodbye to those who have made up their minds, watch them join the steady current up the avenues. Call us when you get there. We feel a little jealous. Some of us still have to work in the morning.

The next day it’s do or die time, for the lower parishes at least. There is a mandatory evacuation call for the areas south of the city, the coastal people, the barrier population. Helicopters make runs to the oil rigs and bring back all the divers, welders, and pump-men. They’re all coming past us, through us, clogging the highways, all the small towns converging into a convoy: Cutoff, Arabi, Houma, Grand Isle. We know we’ll be next, probably, even if Gustav is still another two days away. This storm’s a slow giant. We’re getting weary of it a little, refreshing the webpages, watching the track move by millimeters on the screen.

We start to pack. How do we decide what to take? We know from experience that anything left behind could be drowned, so we favor the nostalgic and irreplaceable over the expensive. We know from experience that everything mundane can be replaced, that it can almost be enjoyable picking out new dishes and bedsheets—if you’ve got the money. The children want all their toys. We force them to pick favorites. Everybody gets four changes of clothes. Anything more would be greedy. And we must each have our pillows, our charms, our letters. We collect all the documents, the titles and passports and insurance papers. Some of us bitterly pack up a box full of Road Home documents: some of us are still in a battle for money promised us from three years ago from the state entity created to aid the victims of insurance shortfalls. We won’t chance losing the proof of our arguments, the written record of every inch we’ve gained towards compensation. The things we will miss but just can’t take with us get put up in the attic or lined up on the top shelf of our closets.

We push the furniture away from the windows, exposing months of dust. We empty the icebox, defrost the fridge. Some of us forget to do these things and will come home to a wet floor. We throw away good food, knowing it will spoil when the power goes out. We don’t care: we remember the wars we fought with mold. We try to pre-mitigate.

Finally, we pray.

We go to the last mass before the priests must close the doors and lock up the churches. We get together in fellowship halls, making last-minute arrangements, offering last-minute aid. We sing to our different versions of God and ask for different versions of strength. Some of us beg for mercy or a miracle. Some of us are more resigned and beg only for guidance. Some of us don’t agree with God or even think that he exists, but we feel a little envious of the invisible buffer that believers have between life and their hearts. We could all use a little divine backup in some form or another. This weekend is going to test us, going peel away all the layers of normality we’ve recovered since Katrina. So we feel the need to pray even if it’s just empty murmurs against humid air.

Tonight we light candles against an enormous wind.

At noon I head out to Beaverton, an unfamiliar suburb on the outskirts of Portland, to teach yet another driving lesson. I need some fun after this morning’s travails, and I get a pleasant break. I have three kids in the car, which can be entertaining if the human dynamics work. If they’re in a good mood I become a single parent on a two-hour, in-city road trip. If not, it’s like I’m smuggling them across the border. Thankfully, these kids seem fun.

We roll out of the school parking lot with the air-conditioner blasting and start driving down a main commercial strip. At the second light we see a person inside a yellow foam-rubber outfit advertising for some business. A puffy box surrounds his torso, including his head. His arms and legs, which are clothed in yellow fabric, jut out from small openings in the suit. The pitchman looks like SpongeBob without the face.

“Man, that has got to be hot,” I say as we approach Foam Rubber Person.

The kids agree. We all look closely as we drive past.

“Did that guy have an opening for his head?” one students asks.

No one can seem to remember.

“Okay,” I say, “we’ve got to figure this out. Take the next right.”

We swing around the block, doing four rights and ending up back on the main drag. I tell the driver that, as much as I’d like to let her look, she needs to keep her eyes on the road. I don’t know how I could justify a crash if it happened. With a grinning smirk she agrees.

We stop at the light and everyone leans forward, squinting at Foam Rubber Person. He’s spinning and waving at passing cars, preventing us from getting an answer to our question. The light turns green and we approach our target. At the last second he spins away from us. We all let out a groan.

“Okay,” I say, “let’s try again.”

We circle the block and approach our yellow target once more. On this pass I direct the driver slow way down. We creep up to Foam Rubber Person, the car barely moving. Looking over, we see a small mesh screen at eye level, an opening probably six by six inches. The advertiser looks straight at our car and stands still. Behind the mesh I see two unblinking eyes as we crawl past.

* * * *

Later that day I head out to teach a “retail client”. I haven’t done one of these yet and don’t have any info on the student, so the game plan for the lesson, as far as I can tell, is to do “whatever.” I drive to West Linn, an area completely unfamiliar to me, and pick up another aging American vehicle, a silver Ford Taurus. It looks like the kind of car a manager at a Jack in the Box would use to pick up an escort for his high school reunion. I go to open the car and my key doesn’t work. I try the passenger side door and it unlocks. Apparently they went for the Dukes of Hazzard option on this brute. When I open the door I’m hit by a wave of what smells like silly putty. I kneel on the seat, reach across the console, and unlock the other door.

I walk around the back of the car and enter on the driver’s side. The paneling, loosened from decades of use, flaps when I pull the door shut. I reach down to make sure the car is in park, but my hand grabs empty air. Looking at the wheel I see a large lever attached to the steering column. The last time I saw a gear shifter like this was when a flatbed towed away our family station wagon sometime in the 1980s.

I start the car and fiddle with the unwilling lever, feeling like an actor portraying a fugitive on America’s Most Wanted. I glance at the dashboard and shut the car off with a sigh. I can’t show up with it looking this grimy, definitely not professional. Searching through the console and the rear seats I don’t find any wet wipes. I slip out of the car and head for the trunk. Opening the lid I half expect to see the owner’s father’s walker. Who knows where this car came from? Probably New Orleans, after Hurricane Katrina.

I find some wet wipes, get back in the car, and scrub. I finish my cleaning and look at the pads. They’re jet black and filled with tiny hairs. I really hope the hairs came from the owner’s poodle.

I start the Taurus and burn through the empty lot, halting at the entrance to let traffic pass. It’s time to test out this ill-natured beast. Swinging onto the road I gun the engine and accelerate rapidly, feeling like a bounty hunter in hot pursuit.

I lumber up a ridge filled with huge, classless new homes. For this amount of money you think you’d get some architecture, but maybe that’s now passé. Between curves in the road I read my MapQuest directions, searching for the address I got from the owner’s son, who is now back with the company after Dad fired him last month. My eye glimpses something flashing on the dashboard. In bright orange letters a message tells me to “Service Engine Soon.” I wonder how many years the warning has remained lit up.

Looking out the window I begin to see the full spectrum of ugliness that accompanies new, excessive wealth. Men with mowers and leaf blowers work the lawns and shrubs. The yards are all perfectly green despite the hot, dry summer we’ve had. I pass a number of unathletic residents jogging painfully on the edge of the road, which has no sidewalks. Approaching a ridgetop with expansive views it occurs to me that if everyone lived this way we’d need about four more planets for the required resources.

After one pass I find the house, an enormous faux colonial surrounded by tiny, foot-high evergreens. It sits manor-like, far back from the road. I roll through two columns of creamy, salmon-pink sandstone and reach an unfinished driveway. Bumping over gravel towards the house I see none of the items usually found at people’s homes: no cars, no swing sets, no gardens. I park, get out of the Taurus, and look into the house. It’s empty. As I approach the front door, a guy in coveralls comes out a side door and asks if he can help me. I let him know that I’m here for a driving lesson. He looks at me incredulously. “Oh, the family hasn’t moved in yet,” he says.

I call the office and Michael, our office manager, answers, groaning when I explain the situation. Sounding desolate, he tells me that he’ll contact the student’s father. A minute later the phone rings. The first thing I hear is a loud sigh, followed by a booming voice.

“I’ve’ told them probably five times that that’s the damn billing address!”

As dad barks out directions to the real house, I consider grabbing a nail gun for protection. I jump behind the wheel and barrel down the gravel road in the Taurus, its huge, cop-car hood bouncing over potholes.

When I arrive at the house five minutes later, the father and daughter are waiting outside. I consider veering towards the driveway and plowing into his mail box, just to see his reaction. Looking at the house I can see how they must be cramped and feel the need to move. It’s probably only about 8,000 square feet.

I slink out of the car and approach the pair. The father looks at me through beady eyes set into a round, balding head. He looks like a cookie you’d make at Christmas.

“You’re like the fifth instructor we’ve had,” he snaps by way of greeting.

“Well,” I reply, “maybe they’re saving the best for last.”

He grunts and gives me a long icy look, his forehead creased with disdain. I consider asking him if he’d be willing to do a testimonial for our website.

“Maybe we’ll see you tomorrow, maybe we won’t,” he hisses.

We start talking about his daughter’s lesson. The father reels off a string of errors the girl has committed on past driving tests. He punctuates each with a deep sigh, relating his frustration with her continued failure. The daughter’s standing right there, looking at the ground as Dad recaps her shortcomings. The guy doesn’t seem to have the slightest clue that he’s making her feel like crap. I start fading out from the dialogue and watch his second chin squeeze and bounce as noise pours out his mouth. Glancing at the daughter cowering by his side, I picture the dad lying in a casket at an unattended funeral.
—–
Thomas Sullivan writes short essays and creative nonfiction from his home in Seattle. His work has appeared in print in Bravado Literary Magazine and Horizon Magazine, and online at Arts & Opinion, The Externalist, and Lost Magazine, among others. He can be reached at tmpsull@gmail.com.

by Amy Czechorosky

Last weekend the little flyers started coming with my deliveries of the Los Angeles Times. They all say the same thing: ‘There is no Thanksgiving in Tijuana.’

That’s right. ‘There is no Thanksgiving in Tijuana.’ Well, that’s just great. Now not only do I have to feel sad for the people in Tijuana not having decent plumbing or schools or a decent language, I have to find out they haven’t got a decent bullshit holiday either. ‘Dear Caring Friend,’ the flyers’ pitch for my money begins. Little do they know. I mean, I am caring and also a very sweet friend, but that’s not the point. I haven’t got any money for the Mexicans here in California, so how can I be expected to spring for a big Tijuana Thanksgiving?

Dear Caring Friend…. For less than the cost of a sandwich, you can provide a hungry family in Tijuana with a delicious Thanksgiving meal…. The hurt and suffering in Tijuana is heartbreaking…. We need your help to serve hundreds of emergency meals to hungry people and provide scores of food boxes to poor families….’

This is only the beginning of what’s wrong with the fourth Thursday of November. Or if you’re Canadian, the second Monday of October. Because it’s time once again to showcase the freakish need of modern people to put a public happy face on any milestone that can be marketed, it’s also time once again for me to hear about one more thing Canadians have that Mexicans don’t. I spend every day being thankful for the little I have materially and the big things I have in the greater sense, so I’ll never understand the social imperative in setting aside a holiday for enforcing that others pretend to do the same thing. Especially when most of them live their whole lives the rest of the year’except for Christmas and Hanukkah, of course’in flagrant desecration of what these holidays stand for anyway.

The flyers continue: ‘Backing up the good food, our outreach ministry focuses on solving the core problems each person is struggling with….’

What?! My meager offerings are supposed to feed families and rebuild whole lives?! ‘You gotta be kidding”that’s what my flyer to these flyer-sending people would say. Never mind that this is the same organization who used to solicit money for the Downtown Rescue Mission’they were crass enough to use the same photo of the same street person they use every year, I recognize it’and now, what, they’re trying to exploit the still very hot Latino craze, since Latinos now outnumber whites in California? The whole thing smells to me, as repellent as the gross aromas of stuffing, yams, cranberry sauce and all those other homey Thanksgivin’ fixin’s on a table by the hearth.

Yep, as far as holidays go, this one never has done much for me. First of all, I dislike almost all of the foods on a traditional Thanksgiving menu. If I’m going to ruin my figure with carbs, I’d prefer to have pasta over stuffing or potatoes any day. Eating yams is said to increase female fertility, but since any child of mine would be cursed with only slightly less neediness than those poor Tijuanans, then what’s the point? And cranberries are just disgusting all around, not the least for inspiring the name of one of the worst bands to come out of the ’90s. Really, I may have as much trouble controlling myself around food as the next gal’and believe it, boys, even the most emaciated girls lie about food as consistently as you lie about sex’but I’d even rather listen to a Cranberries song than eat turkey or any of that other stuff on Thanksgiving. And I call it a bullshit holiday because it’s the one most obviously just a blatant excuse for people to do other things for it, like shopping, leaving early from work, or watching football. Apparently no one cares that the word is ‘holiday’ because these used to be ‘holy days,’ not originally intended for the overstuffed to have more excuses to shove food down their gobs or the privileged to have more excuses to buy tacky things they’re never even going to use.

Or donate to anyone.

It isn’t even known for sure that turkey was on the first Thanksgiving table. In fact, the Pilgrims almost didn’t have any food at all. The crops of wheat, peas and barley they had brought with them to the New World failed before they’d even been here a full year. So it’s a lucky thing actually, despite the scalpings that were to come, that there were some Native Americans on the land when the Pilgrims first arrived. The Wampanoag tribe, especially its most famous member, Squanto, were kind enough to show the Pilgrims how to plant and sustain corn, and when there wasn’t enough food to offer to every Indian who had shown up for the first feast, a chief named Massasoit even ordered some of his tribesmen to provide their own reinforcements.

So isn’t it hard to believe after hearing this that there was any war between the white man and the red man at all? I know I don’t understand it. There was even a peace treaty entered into by the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag tribe that was never broken during the lifetimes of those who agreed to it, which was news to me after everything I’d heard in recent years about the land rape of Native Americans. I also came across a very interesting description of events, at
cwis.org, that was written by a Quebec native who claims heritage from Indians who fought both with and against the Pilgrims for land. Even if you don’t find it interesting, you will at least admit it’s a welcome respite from the usual stuffing; you know, Native Americans good and Pilgrims bad. Or did I just drink so much in college that I’ve mixed up my grade-school history lessons? Either way, present-day obfuscation contributed to my needing to learn a lot about the occasion, including the fact that it wasn’t even a yearly tradition among the Pilgrims but only gained importance after the Puritans joined them here. Perhaps the funniest thing, though, is that Great Britain doesn’t even celebrate Thanksgiving today, although the Pilgrims and Puritans themselves were British subjects.

The Microsoft Network’s online encyclopedia, Encarta, calls the modern Thanksgiving observance ‘a celebration of domestic life, centered on the home and family.’ It salutes bounty of all kinds, but mainly as it regards the staples of food and shelter. Well, that’s all fine and good for the people who have those things, but what about the ones who don’t? The plight of the poor and their miseries is an obvious example, but what about all of the middle-class kids with hideous families and so few opportunities to apply their expensive college educations that they can’t even afford their own places to live? Maybe someone should spend this time of year thinking about the disenfranchised American white kids for a change.

But like that’s ever going to happen in this day and age. Nope, its rampant hypocrisy deems that no white kid could possibly be as screwed in life as someone with a last name that’s harder to pronounce, so on we less fortunate white kids go, nagged every November by the suffering of those we both do and don’t know have it rougher than we do, and with all that crappy Thanksgiving harvest to make us feel even guiltier.

However, I would be lying if I said I was completely pissed off about Thanksgiving in 2004. I seriously feel very lucky to have my family and friends, not to mention vast intelligence and beauty, and also to be a North American without having to live in Canada or Mexico. And during the course of my research, I was touched to discover the Web site of a group that seems genuinely committed to the ideals Thanksgiving was founded on, at
thanksgiving.org. Check it out if you want your heart to feel as warm as a holiday pie’now those I like. But the thing for which I’m probably most thankful is that Wienerschnitzel, just in time for the holidays, has begun to offer again my favorite seasonal menu item, the Polish Sandwich. It’s a Polish sausage on rye bread with mustard, Swiss cheese and a pickle, and I looooove sausage, rye bread, mustard, cheese and pickles. So not only can I eat one of those while everyone else gets stuck with Thanksgiving rations, I can make it a real Polish sandwich and take off all the bread to send to those hundreds of needy families in Tijuana.

Oh, won’t they be thankful for me!

by Gabriella Herkert

There are so many cool ways to knock people off. You have to have a natural bent toward the dark side, of course, but the methodology appeals to the airier, more creative brain cells. Since I didn’t want to get famous under the heading stupid criminals, I knew I’d have to carefully resolve forensic issues behind whatever technique I chose. Poisoning appealed to me.

I wanted the proper research tools so I went online. I am nothing if not thorough. What I needed was the bible of poisons. I logged onto my library’s computer database. After a few searches, I found it. Casarett and Doull’s Toxicology: The Basic Science of Poisons. Twelve hundred and seventy-five pages of insidious plants, potions and naturally occurring murder weapons. Sixth edition. I’d started with the library, even though I knew the computer records would make it possible to trace. After all, I’m a would-be felon on a budget.

There were ten copies of the book available according to the database. All of them were checked out. There were six people on a waiting list. Okay, so maybe I’m a cynic, but how many graduate students in toxicology don’t actually buy the seminal textbook in their field? Who does that leave in search of this book? Well, writers like me of course. My intentions were honorable. I was only going to kill fictional characters. Probably. Definitely. But how many writers working on death by poisoning could possibly live in my neighborhood? It’s not like Renton, Washington is the Algonquin and the locals are part of Dorothy Parker’s vicious circle. Who did that leave? Jeez! My neighbors seemed like such nice, normal people. If there were a sudden poisoning crime wave, the police could interview me. I would say what everyone says. I didn’t notice anything. They were always quiet and polite. So and so was such a pleasant serial killer. Some observer I am. Needless to say, I’ve given up chatting with strangers in the line at the grocery store. No sense taking chances.

Since I was going to have to wait for the bible of poisons, I decided I’d look at some of the other available titles on the subject. A search for poison brought up one hundred and forty-five titles. That’s it. No more fast food drive-ins for me. There’s even a book specifically designed for writers using poison as a plot device. I imagine this makes explaining to the police a little easier. No, officer, I didn’t kill my lying, cheating, worthless husband with cyanide. I was just researching my next novel and he happened to love almonds. It could work.

Scarier still was the number of books on poisoning geared toward a juvenile audience. Yeesh. Just what the world needs. Teenagers with their own guides to poisonous plants. I anticipate a sharp increase in the number of younger siblings snacking on poinsettias this Christmas. Things were more straight-forward when I was a kid. We limited ourselves to bashing each other when no one was looking.

When I realized I’d have to wait for the perfect poison information, I went to one of the big online booksellers. I repeated my poison search and came up with thirty-eight titles. It’s nice to know that the library provides a wider range of murder modes at no cost to the public. On the other hand, ordering online would enable me to have the tome in my hands within forty-eight hours, twenty-four if I put a rush order in. Am I the only one alarmed by this? Shouldn’t there be a cooling off period? As a legal question, do the police have probable cause to check the health of your relatives if you felt compelled to pay an extra twelve ninety-five for overnight delivery of a list of commonly available poisons? And what’s the deal with used book sales? I suppose it makes sense. Once you’re done, unless your victim has a twin you can’t stand to look at, you probably don’t need the book for future reference. You certainly don’t want it sitting on your bookshelf when the search warrant arrives. And recycling is good for the environment. Bonus points.

Once I had a handle on the types and methods of poisons, I picked my first victim. He was the ex-boyfriend of a friend of mine who didn’t treat her very well. I never liked him. He lived out of state so I chose the skin absorption method thinking that I wouldn’t need to fly down to visit him to get the job done. No way was this creep worth frequent flier miles. Another friend of mine, a real prankster, had this stuff that reacted to human skin and turned it temporarily blue. He used it at fraternity parties. I figured it would make a wonderful metaphorical poison. We sent the scumball boyfriend a letter with the stuff coating the outside of the envelope. I figured we’d never know if we were successful and would have to take pleasure in the knowledge that he could never darken our doors again. Unfortunately, after I “killed” him, she took him back. He mentioned spending two days with the hands of a Smurf. It was cold comfort.

My second victim was a close friend. I picked him because he said I couldn’t get away with killing him. Never challenge a woman with her own handbook to local poisons. Death cap mushrooms became his future. He loves to hike and is forever going into the wilds without telling anyone. The foolish man has a hide-a-key known by every householder in a seven block radius and keeps his camping gear in plain sight in his basement. Anyone taking that many risks around a known method writer assumes the risk of imminent demise and should not be pitied. It was simple to slip in when he wasn’t home and add my homemade mushroom pictures to his soup mix. I even used my crayolas to make the cardboard cutouts exact color of death-cap mushrooms. Unfortunately, he seems to be boycotting soup. Either that or he knows I killed him and is too embarrassed to talk about it. Hopefully, with the onset of winter, his next trip will be his last.

It wasn’t until I was deeply entrenched in the science of poisoning that I came across the statistic. Nearly eighty percent of all intentional poisonings are committed by women. The psychological explanation is that women are less physically violent than men and prefer the distant means of elimination. Personally, I just think we want to skip the clean up phase. In any event, this disturbing discovery ended my poisoning phase. You can say a lot of bad things about me but no one is going to be able to say I poison like a girl.