Butch and I crouched in the grass behind our mom’s rose bushes hugging the picket fence that ran along the road in front of our house, a common two-story New England colonial with attached garage, nearly identical to every other house in the neighborhood, all set on quarter-acre lots of Sears-fertilized lawns mowed by Sears-loving dads on Saturday mornings. This was suburbia in the sixties. No sidewalks or traffic except our dads coming and going from work, and in the summer afternoons the ice cream truck, and at dusk the town mosquito sprayer. We rode bikes, played whiffleball, street hockey, and violent games sprung from popular TV shows. Hiding behind the roses, we waited for Phillip Madeira to come out of his house across the street.

It was late summer. Nestled in the grass next to us were two overripe tomatoes filched from Mrs. Sartelli’s garden. Mrs. Sartelli lived next door and regularly gave us five bucks for mowing her lawn, raking leaves, shoveling snow. Across the street, next to the hated Madeira lived Jon Johansson who once suffered a concussion at the hands of Madeira, actually the head. The head of Madeira was hard and heavy like a medicine ball, and so big he had gaps between his teeth like a jack-o-lantern. His older brother, David, told us Phil was forced to wear a football helmet until age 5 because when he threw a tantrum he’d pound the house with his head. The floors, walls, furniture, appliances, the family car, all had dings and dents from Phil’s plummeting head. He’d caught me with a few glancing blows, but I was slippery, sneaky, and secretly scared of Mad Madeira.

The tomatoes were the perfect throwing size of baseballs. We palmed them gingerly because they were full and bloated with seeds and juice. Soft enough to splat! on contact, but also implode in our hands if we were clumsy and didn’t let them fly precisely, with velocity but also sufficient arc so that they didn’t spin apart in midair before landing on target, the target being Phil Madeira. Ideally, we pictured tomato bombs dropping from the sky and landing squarely atop Madeira’s fat head, like a message from God—Madeira, you suck. Madeira was attuned to messages from God because his father was a Protestant minister.

The Madeira’s were the only Protestants we’d ever known. We didn’t have them in South Boston where we lived until I was six, and Butch five. The day we moved to this new neighborhood mom told us the Madeira’s went to a different church. There was a different church? Who knew? Phillip and his older brother David attended public school while Butch and I suffered the nuns at St. Joe’s. The nuns made it sound as if Protestants were akin to Nazis. Jews even. But wait a minute, wasn’t Jesus a Jew? When he said love your neighbor did he mean all our neighbors? Even fat head Madeira, the Protestant? It was puzzling.

I don’t recall our first encounter with Phil, but one day, soon after we’d moved into the neighborhood 3 or 4 years ago, I stood in our yard fondling a new 1960 penny and watching my mom plant the rose bushes delivered by Sears with burlap-wrapped roots. Mom wore flowered gardening gloves and had a shovel. Butch carried a whiffleball and a bat. We were trying to get a game up without including Phil Madeira who was lusting after my shiny new penny. He said he wanted it because he was a coin collector—Madeira claimed to be everything. Said he had every year but the current one.

“Every year?” I said. “Since the beginning of time?”

“Since 1909,” Phil said. “The first year they made pennies.”

Madeira always said things as if they were indisputable facts but often we found out he was full of crap.

“Is that true Mom?” I asked my mother.

“I really don’t know, honey.”

“It’s true,” Madeira said. “Before 1909 they had Indian-heads.”

Madeira’s dog was named Penny, which may have had something to do with this, but I suspected he wanted my new coin simply because he didn’t have it and I did, and he was a vindictive Protestant who coveted his neighbor’s goods, which I assumed might be okay since I thought the Ten Commandments were exclusively for Catholics. The fact that Mr. Madeira, Phil’s father, was a minister, that their spiritual sages had wives and kids and dogs and lived in neighborhoods among normal people stressed to me their deficient salvation system.

The three of us stood watching Mom dig holes for her roses. I planned to buy Madeira out of our yard with the penny, because I really didn’t care about it, I just wanted to play whiffleball. Butch knew what I was thinking, but we also knew that if Madeira thought we were trying to ditch him he’d fly into a rage and start roaring and wagging his giant head. Then the Johansson’s cat came rocketing across the yard pursued by three feverish dogs and, running-to-keep-up, Jon Johansson shouting, “No! No!”

Jon was not allowed near Phil, in fact, no one was allowed near Phil, which was why we needed to ditch him to play ball. The cat wedged herself into a defensive spot between two thorny rose bushes while the dogs, clumsy and in their own way, growled and tore up the ground. Madeira hopped up and down shouting, “Sic’em, Penny! Sic’em!”

Nothing in our neighborhood sparked more competition than our dogs. Bikes, sports, our parents—these were important but our dogs defined us. My dog Ginger was tawny and thin like a greyhound. In terms of flat-out speed Gin was supreme. Johansson dog, Rex, was the only male, neutered, but still a boy. Madeira’s dog, Penny, was a common border collie. But Phil insisted his animal was faster, tougher, smarter, and so on. He’d bring his thunderous head down on anyone who said different.

Like her owner, Penny flew irrational in frenzied situations. With the cat hissing and spitting, Penny snarled and snapped at the other dogs. Mom calmly went about her business. The cat fired claws from her rosebush fortress and caught Penny on the nose drawing blood. Blood always raised the stakes. Madeira screamed that he’d sue Jon Johansson. Phil often threatened to sue people—I wasn’t sure what suing was but Mom said Phil got that from his parents. At the sight of Penny’s bloody nose Phil charged into the fray, trying to stomp the cat. The dogs dodged and lunged. When Ginger got in Phil’s way he drew back his foot and kicked her in the ribs. A solid thump. Another weird thing about Madeira, he didn’t go barefoot in the summer like we did, he wore leather brogans, school shoes, with baggy shorts and no socks. And those shoes packed a wallop in Ginger’s ribs. That was a mistake.

My little brother was what anyone would call “laid back”. At ten years old Butch was stocky and blonde and nearly as tall as me. The nuns said the name Butch didn’t suit him because he wasn’t a tough guy or a bully. His real name was Roland; no one called him that except the nuns if he was in trouble. But Butch was rarely in trouble. He was a teacher’s pet. He clapped the erasers, washed the blackboard, was granted bathroom passes without question and, unlike me, was never commanded to the coatroom for daydreaming. When President Kennedy got after us to become physically fit, Butch could punt, pass & kick, further-faster-bigger-better than kids two years older. In Little League he was star shortstop and home run king. In Cub Scouts, Butch tied all the knots before anyone. He made fire with flint and dry leaves, knew which berries to eat, which ivy vines to avoid, how to chop with an ax, catch a fish, tie a tourniquet. Butch earned the tiger-wolf-bear badges pronto, and shot the Arrow of Light into full-blown Boy Scouts while I languished in Weebelos. Butch was known to react honestly and fearlessly to any situation.

When Phil Madeira kicked our dog Ginger in the ribs Butch dropped the bat and ball and launched himself broad-jump style onto Madeira’s back and locked both arms around Phil’s head. Madeira roared and whirled, swinging the head like an Olympic hammer thrower, like ball on chain, trying to shake off Butch who twisted the thrashing head back and forth as if to wrench it from its roots. Mom looked up and said, “Boys, boys…” She wasn’t upset; she merely wanted to plant her roses. The cat hissed, the dogs growled, Madeira roared, Rex humped Phil’s leg, bloody-nose Penny ran barking in circles. Butch grimly tried to tear Phil’s head off while Phil wailed so loud his mother came out of their house and started across the street which made my mom take a deep breath and speak more firmly. “Boys, stop it now!”

Phil’s mother always wore a dress and had her hair sculptured and sprayed as if she just came from church. As she bore down on us, Butch let go of Phil and sailed free, landing on his feet well out of head-wagging range while Phil stumbled to the ground shedding elephant tears of frustration, his shirt was torn and he had grass stains on his knees. We’d seen this a million times, his mother showed up when Phil was crying and blaming everyone but himself. “It was them. They did it. Jon’s cat scratched Penny.” It amazed us that his mother always seemed to accept that Phil was innocent and harmless. She took him in her arms and soothed him out of our yard giving a slight, not particularly favorable, nod to my mom.

When they were gone, Mom let out a breath. “Something is wrong with that kid,” she said. “Stay away from him.”

We did. We avoided Phil as a general rule. But, when we were bored, when the summer dog days dragged on so long we forgot how much we longed for them in June, when we misplaced the idea of ever wearing shoes again, when we forgot that the nuns lay in wait for us after Labor Day, we lay in wait for Phil, with tomatoes.

The rose bushes had thrived and thickened since Mom planted them, and provided cover for us crouching in the grass across from Madeira’s house. Hunkered down behind them we watched Phil’s brother David play basketball in his driveway with two friends. We knew Phil would come out the side door of his house into the driveway and the basketball players would tell him to get lost, and then he’d cross his front yard.
All summer he’d been parading up and down the street with a marching-band drum, driving everyone nuts. We didn’t know what a marching band was; St. Joe’s didn’t have one, but if Phil was involved we didn’t like it.

Soon enough he came out of the house wearing the drum and a tricorn hat. We rose to our knees, tomatoes in hand. Phil started across his front yard beating the drum. Butch and I were ballplayers, we knew how to throw and judge fly balls. Right away when we hurled the tomatoes we saw Butch’s throw was higher than mine. His tomato bomb would drop from the sky close to our target; mine had too much velocity and would hit the house. We also saw, to our horror, too late to take anything back, Phil’s mother open the front door of their house and step outside. She wore a white dress.

It was not yet high noon. The sun illuminating the front of Madeira’s house seemed to increase the brilliance and clarity of everything including the passage of time. I’m certain I wasn’t breathing at that point. Next to me, my little brother was likewise suspended in that fearful moment while we watched the tomatoes sail over the road. It seemed as if, at the very second Phil’s mother appeared on her front doorstep, God cranked the sun up a notch. As if, He not only saw all, as the nuns insisted, but paid attention to some things more than others.

Butch’s tomato dropped from the sky, nicked the front point of Phil’s tricorn hat, and banged down hard onto the head of his drum. It was a sound unlike any heard in our neighborhood, a soft ripe tomato bursting on a marching-band drum. My tomato, zinging in too fast, made a predicable thud hitting Mrs. Madeira square in the chest and splattering between her breasts on the snow-white dress. From our vantage point it appeared she’d been shot with a shotgun. Both Phil and his mother opened their mouths but the only sound was the basketball pounding the driveway. It is shocking how calm and slowed-down time seems at the instant catastrophic things happen. And we knew this was catastrophic. The only thing worse than hitting someone’s mother with a tomato would be a blasphemous church-related sacrilege for which we would burn everlasting in hell.

We ran. Crouching behind the roses we hauled ass along the fence until we reached the end of our yard. We ran blindly into the road, figuring if we ran fast enough and didn’t look back we’d be invisible and the whole fiasco would disappear. But we weren’t invisible, and we did look back, at least Butch did. He was a stride ahead of me, we could hear Phil roaring behind us, and I saw Butch’s wide-eyed face turn and look back over his shoulder.

Phil was an aforementioned rock thrower. Something our parents told us never to do, right up there with talking to strangers, playing with matches, and sticking our heads in plastic bags. Each year some kid was snatched on the way to school, burned in a fire, smothered in a trash bag, or blinded for life by a flying stone, at least that is what they told us. And Phil, of course, was no ballplayer, he couldn’t throw at all. Which is why later, when I considered the timing of the thing—Butch running before me and turning his head at the very instant the rock Phil threw, over an immense distance and with pinpoint accuracy, hit—I knew the venture had to have been, like the moment Lot’s wife looked back, orchestrated from above.

I didn’t see the golf-ball size stone hit my brother’s head. I heard a hollow knock like knuckles on wood and saw the stone bounce to the road. What I saw when I looked at Butch, was a smooth coating of shiny red as if someone was making a candied apple of my brother’s blonde head. He made no sound. He stopped running. He held his hands out in front of him like a blind man and said, “I can’t see, I can’t see.” I thought, well there it is, he’s blinded like we’d been warned. Phil didn’t come running but it seemed as if every mother on the block did, including our mom and Mrs. Madeira in her ruined white dress. Butch kept waving his arms around in the road and saying, “I can’t see, I can’t see.”

None of our moms drove. After our dads went to work there was only one car in the neighborhood, a beautiful lime-green Edsel sitting pristine in Mrs. Sartelli’s garage. From somewhere a towel was produced and wrapped around Butch’s head like a turban. There was an immense amount of blood and it seemed as if everything else was white: the towel, Mrs. Madeira’s dress, Butch’s t-shirt, and as he was loaded into the car, the white leather interior of Mrs. Sartelli’s Edsel. My mom, before joining Butch on his trip to the hospital, looked at me grimly, and pointed a bloodied finger toward our house.

I knew when Dad came home I’d get the strap. Punishment was all physical in those days, beatings in the basement, I wasn’t afraid of that. What scared me was confession. Come Saturday I would have to confess this sin to Father O’Gara. Everything we did concluded on Saturday mornings with O’Gara.

It wasn’t until the next day that I saw Mom and heard about Butch. I was grounded and couldn’t leave my room. Mom came in and sat on the bed. She’d been up all night at the hospital and looked it. She cried easily and often when we misbehaved so that was no surprise. The brain tumor was.

“What’s a brain tumor?” I said.

“Very serious,” she said quietly.

Throughout the previous 24 hours the plethora of “very serious” situations had piled up. Hitting Mrs. Madeira with the tomato, Phil’s miraculous rock, my father’s fury—You’re going to pay for that goddamn dress!—what I was likely to face from Father O’Gara on Saturday, not to mention the wrath of God I was sure to suffer on judgment day. And now, this mysterious growth in my brother’s brain, a sausage-size shadow showing up on the skull X-ray. The astonished doctor’s saying very serious to my parents, saying surgery now, no going home, straight to the OR, and no guarantees. Butch may never come home.

In confession to Father O’Gara, I stressed the word Protestant. “I wasn’t trying to hit her,” I told him, “I was trying to hit this kid. This Protestant kid.”

“God made all things,” he said. “You throw tomatoes you hurt God. Don’t you see that?”

“Yes Father.”

But I didn’t see. Weren’t Protestants the enemy? Didn’t they go to a different church? I had no clue they were Christians like us.

“Did you apologize to your neighbor?”

“Yes Father.”

“You need to apologize to God.”

“Yes Father.”

“Three Hail Mary’s and an Our Father.”

“Yes Father.”

I retreated to the prayer rail and fake prayed until I figured he wasn’t watching and I got out of there.

School had started by the time Butch returned from the hospital, his hair shaved, an amazing six-inch scar up the backside of his head. The doctors said if the tumor had gone undetected Butch would not have seen teenage years. The stoning by, of all things, a vindictive protestant, had saved my brother’s life. “By the grace of God,” the nuns said. We didn’t even know what grace was. Was it the same grace we said before meals? If Butch was a teacher’s pet before that summer debacle, he was a miracle child after, a candidate for sainthood, a chosen one. “The Lord works in mysterious ways,” the nuns said. At times it seemed as if the nuns were actually praising Phillip Madeira. When by extension of their logic I attempted to point out that if we hadn’t thrown the tomatoes, Phil wouldn’t have thrown the rock and… About there I’d be cut off with stern looks and admonishments such as “Two wrongs don’t make a right, mister.” It was puzzling.

In time, Butch’s hair grew out and things went back to normal. We hated Phil Madeira more now that, to our intense chagrin, he claimed hero status in the neighborhood, claimed Butch owed him for saving his life; claimed rock throwing wasn’t always bad, thereby casting doubt on all our parental fears and directives. The very existence of God seemed suspect when faced with the reality of Phillip Madeira.

If our faith in God was strained by the tomato/rock/tumor incident, it was restored the day Madeira went to Fenway Park to see the Red Sox. Everyone’s dad took them to Fenway at some point, but when Phil announced they had tickets it was as if they’d been invited to play in the game. We heard about it for weeks. Phil went everywhere wearing his glove and bragging about how he’d catch a foul ball or even a homer at Fenway. He named our most revered heroes: Carl Yastrzemski, Rico Petrocelli, Tony Conigliaro—they’d hit the ball and Phil would catch it.

Baseball was huge in our neighborhood. I was an average all-around player. Butch was MVP four consecutive years in Little League. Phil, was a total buffoon. He was top heavy with his fat head and his brogan-clad feet. He ran like a girl and couldn’t catch a gently tossed beach ball. We did our best to ignore his bigheaded boasting, a test we figured, a chance to earn brownie points in heaven, but we were young boys, and we loved baseball and the Red Sox and trips to Fenway and we hated Phillip Madeira.

Finally, game day came and Mr. Madeira drove off with Phil and his older brother. We got up a whiffleball team and put the irritation behind us. It was summer again so the days were long and it was not yet dark when we saw the Madeira’s station wagon come back down the street. That wasn’t right. Fenway Park was 30 minutes away and the game was a night game. They should not have been back this early. Butch and I charged up to Madeira’s house and saw Phil hauled out of the car by his dad and brother, one on each side. “Keep your head back,” they said to him. “Breathe through your nose.”

Phil dragged his feet like a dead person, stared at the sky, and made wet moaning sounds. His open mouth was full of blood and black broken-off teeth. There was blood all over his Red Sox shirt. We knew what happened even before his brother blurted it out. “He got hit in the mouth with a ball.”

“Ahaaaaa,” Phil said.

“Where’s the ball?” I said.

The dad gave me an evil look. “You boys go home.”

They dragged Phil into the house. Butch and I looked at each other in wonder. There is a God! We could have chalked the incident up to bad luck but the brother told us that it happened in the first inning. They’d settled into their seats, hadn’t even ordered the peanuts and crackerjacks. Phil was jumping around, smacking his glove, and mouthing off to anyone within earshot about catching a foul when there was a sharp crack and—holy shit—here comes one. Everyone stood. Arms in the air. The brother said a big guy behind them had a clean shot at the ball but passed it up, telling Phil: “You got it kid, it’s all yours, catch it!” And Phil standing there wide-eyed with his glove up over his head and his big fat mouth open, showing all his gappy teeth—Whap! The ball never even grazed his glove. Phil’s mouth was plugged with the very thing that opened it. We didn’t know the word irony but we still appreciated it.

If our faith in God was restored by the foul-ball-in-the-mouth incident, it was an untested faith, until the camping episode put it to the fire.

In Cub Scouts we prized our sleeping bags, canteens, jackknives, folding entrenchment tools. But a tent was huge. A tent was the foundation of real camping, surviving in the wild, living off the land, or at least sleeping out in the backyard. Madeira was first to get a tent from Sears. We grudgingly decided to be his friend that day so we could get some tent know-how, maybe even an invitation to sleep out in the elements. None of us knew how to set up a tent. There were poles and stakes and tie-down cords and no adults to help us. Phil was feverish with excitement and conceit. We knew to stretch out the canvas and pound the plastic stakes into the ground through the corner rope loops. Phil was on one side pulling and pounding his stakes, Butch and me on the other. I pulled my corner to stake it down just as Phil pulled on his side. Butch stood there watching. Doing nothing. I was his older brother; he left it to me. No one noticed when I pulled my rope loop too hard and the cheap thing came off in my hand. Instinctively I dropped it and moved to the next corner.

“Butch,” I said quickly, not to distract Phil, “you do that corner.” I nudged him toward the destroyed loop.

Butch innocently went to the corner I’d wrecked, picked up the torn-off loop and said: “What’s this?”
There is no way to put a positive spin on this. I knew Phil’s reaction would be explosive and violent. I was afraid of Phil. I’d never have the nerve to broad-jump onto his back.

“You broke it!” he screamed and pounced on Butch who was squatting awkwardly with the rope loop in his hands. Phil knocked Butch back onto the grass, pinned his shoulders to the ground and brought his cannonball forehead down on Butch’s face. Repeatedly the head rose and fell like a hammer while I stood there, doing nothing.

The nuns said God doesn’t distinguish between sins of passivity and deliberate acts. My sin was both. It was not hard to expect God’s wrath watching my younger brother’s face pounded into the dirt by Mad Madeira’s head from hell.

When it was over, Madeira ran wailing to his mother. He would tell. Butch would get in trouble. My little brother rose without a word and started home. His back was to me. I ran to catch up. Only when he turned to look at me did he begin to cry. His disappointed face, dirt-streaked and bruised, blood oozing from his nose, reflected the bright white clarity of God’s illumination knob cranked up all the way.

My brother and I always walked to confession together on Saturday morning. He’d go in, I’d go in. We’d run through the rigmarole with O’Gara, fake pray our penance, and be home playing in whiffleball in an hour. But this sin I didn’t know how to dispose of, how to admit, how to avoid. I told Father O’Gara I’d fought with my brother. I hurt him, broke his nose. I often lied in confession, an ironic compounding of wrongdoing and subsequent damnation that was lost on me at the time. O’Gara gave me three Hail Mary’s and an Our Father, standard O’Gara penance. I went to the prayer rail and said them. For real. Then on my own I said an Act of Contrition. Then another. I didn’t know what the word contrition meant, but I couldn’t move, as if my knees were wedded to the wooden rail. I knelt there while Butch waited outside, wondering why I was taking so long. I heard the heavy church door creak open and bang closed, Butch checking on me, puzzled, seeing me on my knees with clasped hands. Finally the door stayed still. I didn’t move. All Saturday afternoon I knelt there reciting Acts of Contrition over and over, fifty, maybe a hundred times. More prayers than I’d ever said in my life. They were nowhere near enough.

There, as the daunting back story scrolled up the screen, Brian heard his dad sniffle. As the little rebel ship flew through space, pursued by the awesomely huge intergalactic star destroyer, Brian saw his father cover his eyes and lower his head. And as the storm troopers blew through the doors of the rebel ship and shot everyone down, Brian imagined being on board that rebel blockade runner so he could protect Princess Leia from Darth Vader. He could have found a way to hide her, a way to get her on an escape pod. Next to him, Brian’s father cried, but Brian said nothing, for he knew he wasn’t supposed to ask questions. He was 10.

In high school, as the fourth pitcher in the rotation on junior varsity, he’d spent nights watching ball games on the little black and white TV in his room. There at his desk, he imagined being Dennis Eckersley, the one who trotted out of the bullpen to sew up the game, the game he usually let slip through his glove.

His senior year of college, while he struggled to “find himself,” daunted by the prospect of a career and terrified of never finding one, he longed to be John McClane, the one to be hiding in the skyscraper, talking to the cops on the walkie-talkie, unfazed by the broken glass under his bare feet, swinging by a fire hose to shoot down the bad guys. What act would define his life and force everything into place? His marriage stabilized him, though his life coalesced two years later, when he cradled his new born son.

Dabbing little Kyle’s cheek with the hospital’s blue blanket, Brian whispered, “I’m going to be the best father the world has ever known; you’ll see, little man, you’ll see.”

At Kyle’s feeding time, Brian drove Ally crazy, constantly running his fingers along the underside of the highchair tray. “Just being careful,” he defended. When she mentioned moments like this, playful in her notice, she shook her head, like Brian was like a little puppy who just couldn’t help it. There in their bed, Ally would close whatever book she was reading, smile and her husband, and turn out the lights.

“You check every time we feed him, Brian, I think he’ll be fine,” Ally said. The moonlight smoothed out every subtle wrinkle in her soft face. She conked out after 17 minutes of stroking his thinning hair. She snored as her hand slumped on his side of their queen-sized bed. Once five minutes passed, he eased out of bed and down the hall.

From the doorway to Kyle’s room, he watched his son’s little face twitch. “Another good day,” he whispered to the sounds of the wind-chimes mobile coasting in mellow circles over Kyle’s head.

Then Kyle tried to learn to ride a bike. Even training wheels could not steady his bike as he wiggled it around the neighborhood.

“Look at the little retard,” Ally said the boys jeered. Brian had been sitting on the edge of a hotel bed, clutching the phone. His blood simmered as he pictured those brat kids laughing at his little boy with those plump fingers and unkempt hair. When he got back from his business trip, he would show them. Kyle would learn so those little shits could never laugh at him again.

That following Saturday morning, before the sun had a chance to warm the hard-wood floors beneath their feet, Brian woke Kyle.

“I don’t want to be up yet, Dad,” Kyle grumbled.

“It’s okay, buddy, we’re gonna get you dressed and get you some practice.” In the garage, Brian planted Kyle’s little body on that black vinyl seat, sans training wheels. Kyle rubbed the sleep out of his eyes as the garage door chugged open.

With Brian’s hand clutching the back of the seat, he circled them around the drive way. Gliding, the boy cried with glee. Confident his son was more comfortable, he released the handlebars and then the seat. The bike faltered. “Dad!” He grabbed the bike again. No matter how many times they circled, the boy could not maintain his balance. The sobbing started.

“Okay, buddy, let’s get this back in the garage.” As he leaned the bike against the wall, it wobbled. He steadied it then stepped back. The bike tire skidded and the frame clanked against the concrete.

The elderly woman sitting on a rickety-looking folding chair in the back of the thrift store examined the bike like it was stolen. “Hmm,” she said. The chain dangling from her thick glasses swung in time with her neck waddle. “Just need some ID,” and she handed Brian a clipboard.

Feeling like he was a player who had dropped the ball inches before the first down marker, Brian scribbled his name and information, pulled out his ID, and handed everything to the woman.

The bold colors on the signs in the window of the sporting goods store a block over teased him, so Brian entered. He passed the clothes racked near the front—sporty clothes that made him wish he hadn’t stopped his gym membership, and nodded to the clerk behind the counter, the one too busy texting to notice. He scrunched a couple cleats lining one of the walls. They looked cheap, like the stitching would give at any moment. The hardened glue created a little air bubble at the heel. He returned the shoe. In the back of the store, he perused the baseball rack, where he grabbed a stiff brown Rawlings glove. It creaked as he closed it. He tucked it in his armpit. On his way to the register, he snagged a Phillies hat and curled the brim.

Beaming, Brian strode into the family room, where Kyle was consumed with a video game. His fingers worked the controller buttons like he was sending a Morse code message. Brian blocked the TV, crouched, and tossed the baseball glove in his son’s lap.

“Who’s that for?” Kyle asked.

“It’s yours, buddy.”

He slid his hand inside and watched his fingers slide around. He hand tensed but the glove didn’t budge. He tossed it aside. “You’re in the way of the TV, Dad.”

Brian grabbed the glove. “I’ll just oil it up for you and leave it in your room.” He patted Kyle on the head as he walked towards the garage.

Around this time, Brian began ingesting a lot of antacid tabs, though he often forgot to carry them when he needed them most. At Back to School Night, Kyle’s second grade teacher kept studying him and Ally, even when she was bothering other parents. When Ms. Cassidy strolled over, Brian’s tongue swelled. “Mr. and Mrs. Greens? I’m Stacy Cassidy, Brian’s teacher. I was hoping you would show tonight. I have been meaning to have a sit down with you two about your son.” She cleared her throat. “Sorry, excuse me, got something caught there. Anyway, so Kyle; yes, well, I think you might look into some special tutoring for him. I am a bit worried about how he is progressing. He is a bit behind his classmates.”

So he’s a handful, a fuck-up, basically, is what Brian heard. He scoffed at her assessment. Oh no, his son would never be labeled “special needs.”

“What exactly do you mean, Ms. Cassidy?” Ally probed.

After 15 minutes of details and “options,” during which Brian noted the cracks in the cheap floor, the grime on the windows, the dust in the fluorescent lights overhead, and the subtle crack in the doorjamb corner, Brian clutched Ally’s bicep. She responded with a what-the-hell-are-you-doing look, punctuated with arched eyebrows and frosty tone to her “really?” They shared a silent car ride home.

Ally charged through their front door, paid the baby sitter, then excused herself to wash her hands. Brian crept upstairs, eased Kyle’s bedroom door open, and watched his little boy’s legs kick the covers in his sleep. “I’ll get you there, buddy; wherever there is, I’ll get you there.” He tiptoed across the carpet, gathered the Power Rangers and Tonka trucks littering the floor and lowered them into the toy bin without a sound. Quietly. That would be how he would handle this-quietly. You will not even know I’m helping you, buddy, no one will.

When junior high arrived—Kyle had to have been, say, 11?—Kyle moped home most days. With Kyle busy in his room, at the dining room table, Brian rested his aching head against his hand while he scanned Kyle’s overly complicated assignments.

“What the hell do these people want from these kids?” Brian’s elbow pinned his notebook pages, the ones scribbled to hell with his erasable pen, the one whose eraser had been chewed to the cap. How was Kyle supposed to get this work done if he couldn’t? Through the ceiling, Brian could hear Kyle rocking his desk chair back and forth. Hard at work, good. Of course, the PS2 might be on.

The garage door chugged. Brian hurried the assignment sheets into the notebook and slid it into the china hutch. Ally waltzed through the door.

“Uh, damn traffic,” she offered without being asked why she was late. She dropped her purse on the kitchen counter and approached the stack of mail. “Anything interesting in here?” she asked as she thumbed the envelopes.

“Nope.”

Kyle galloped down the stairs, into the kitchen, and smothered his mother’s mid-section.

“How was school, honey?” Kyle shrugged. “What did you go over in class today?” He dipped his head like a dog being scolded for peeing on the carpet.

“Kyle, what did you cover in class today?”

He slumped away from her. She exhaled. “All right, we do this my way now.” She lifted his chin and shifted to meet his eyes. “I need you to go upstairs, unplug that game system and bring it to me. Now, please.”

Kyle stomped upstairs and Brian’s heart sank.

“What?” She demanded. With those intimidating folded arms, no wonder his son didn’t answer her.

“Nothing.” Ideas exploded in his mind.

“Your coddling is doing him no favors.”

That night, once Ally’s sleep-aid kicked in, Brian snuck Kyle’s backpack out of his son’s room. He cradled it down the stairs. At the dining room table, Brian unzipped the bag carefully, like he was removing a Jenga piece, and then fished out Kyle’s notebook. Turning the pages of sparse notes and a bunch of doodles, Brian found Kyle’s math homework. Even the twenty years since he had looked at integers could not prevent Brian from seeing his son had missed every single question. Maybe Kyle misunderstood the direction of the greater-than-less-than sign? Brian searched the backpack’s pocket for a pencil then used it to change all the wrong answers. The pencil nearly tore the thin brown paper. He needed to finish. The last thing he needed was his wife to sleepwalk right into him. There, that is enough for tonight. Zipping everything up, he realized he had better leave a few wrong, just to be safe.
Over the next month, Brian hummed as he repeated this homework clean-up duty. Then the first report card came home with Kyle.

“What does she mean, ‘There seems to be a disconnect between his homework and his tests’?” Ally demanded from no one in particular, though Brian tucked his hands in his waistband. “I’ll call her from the office tomorrow.” Ally slipped the card into her briefcase.

I must not tell her, Brian thought, as he returned to stirring the pasta sauce on the stove. With the ratty dishrag, he dabbed the splatter on the counter. As he watched the rolling boil in the pasta pot quicken, he plotted. There had to be a way to help Kyle through his tests. If at first you do not succeed, try, try again. Ally trucked upstairs to change.

But, before he could rally his efforts, Ally delivered the news the next day: “That’s it, Kyle needs a tutor.” Brian swallowed hard. As long as Kyle did not get singled out in school, Brian could deal. Maybe. They found this guy, Nate, who promised to get Kyle “on the right track” with his math and science. Brian couldn’t stand the fact that this guy didn’t look like he had to shave. He was probably one of those guys that shaved down and then up—who does that? But he inexplicably ignored Kyle’s English class, so Brian kept sucking on his cough drop when Ally cut the check.

Of course Ally got tied up at work on Kyle’s first night of tutoring, but Brian asserted over the phone “Work’s got me buried,” as he sat at his empty desk. Though irritated—something about Brian not helping where he needed to—Ally managed to hustle home. Later that night, while Ally read in bed, Brian retreated to their bathroom.

“So Nate thinks Kyle will get on course eventually, but he needs to get a better handle on the fundamentals.” She started the next sentence and Brian cranked the water faucet and spread his toothpaste. The motor on his toothbrush never sounded so soothing.

In the weeks that followed, when Nate called with his little status reports—ones that included words and phrases like “condition,” “intensive” and “special allowances at school”—Brian did his best to pass the phone as quickly as he could. Still, Ally deliberately repeated the assessment out-loud with Nate still on the line. The roots of Brian’s teeth throbbed while Ally twirled the phone cord the way she used to work her long curly brown hair back when they were dating. He used to love that image. Were moments like this the reason people always reached for a cigarette? He couldn’t shovel the pretzels into his mouth fast enough, even though he hated the ones that had lost all their salt.

Brian dodged the subsequent meeting with the school counselor; deadlines, projects, he told Ally, unable to control his flat tone. “Fine,” Ally said, as she slung her purse over her shoulder and snatched her keys off the counter. She straightened her suit jacket in the hall mirror and slammed the door. Why can’t I just tell you that I will not let some random person tell me I have dropped the ball as a parent? Through the front room window, Brian watched the taillights leave their street. How was he going to pull his child through this? At least Kyle did most of his English work at home, as opposed to some convoluted in-class exam. Kyle felt like a designated hitter waiting on the bench.

That spring semester, Brian ducked into Kyle’s room to find Pilgrim’s Progress stuffed into the mess of papers and dog-eared books in his backpack. Kyle had a report coming up on it, so Brian crept downstairs and cozied onto the couch. Under the reading lamp, he skipped the poem prologue and embraced the prose that felt familiar.

During the next few weeks, late at night, alone with the book, without his wife or son aware of his time in the computer room, Brian refined Kyle’s scattered ideas and corrected the commas in the essay. Ally attributed the good grade to the tutor (perhaps forgetting that “Nate” did not even look at Kyle’s English work); Brian only cared that his son’s English grade improved. That sneaky teacher still had to spring an in-class exam on them though. One step at a time, Brian told himself, as he devised a schedule for the next book. Kyle would have the important passages highlighted next time.

Brian enjoyed The Outsiders in 7th grade and noticed some things he had forgotten about in The Old Man and the Sea as well as The Pearl when Kyle hit 8th grade. The added benefit: Kyle believed he could write well. He figured he just wasn’t a good test-taker. Brian did nothing to discourage this belief, nor did Ally. Kyle wanted to tell his friends to buy used books: all the good parts are marked up for you already. (Brian coached his son to keep this revelation to himself.) While Ally encouraged, congratulated, Brian’s dinner tasted richer, heartier, and mid-afternoon crashes bothered him less and less. Still, he looked forward to the summer.

This whole separate writing lab and English class structure in high school, though, forced Brian to rethink his strategy. This new set-up, with its more “directed” learning, made helping difficult. The individual attention afforded Kyle made outside help obvious. So, for the next few years, Brian watched Kyle flounder. Embracing the special designation Ally and Nate demanded be made official, Kyle cursed his prior teachers for suggesting he could write. “These new teachers are being too hard on you, buddy.” Brian hugged his sobbing son. “You gotta dig in until you can get into college,” he assured. Then, the two of them would be free of everyone’s meddling. Brian didn’t see the fact that his son’s grade meant that he would need to go the community college routs until he demonstrated he could handle the workload. No, Brian chose to see it as a blessing: community college would be much more affordable.

That fall, when he returned from some errands, he mistakenly left one plastic bag in the chair by the front door. Before dinner, all carried it into the kitchen. “What’s this?” she asked as the clutched a crimson t-shirt with the nearest state university’s logo.

“Oh, just something I picked up when I was out.”

After an eye roll, she dumped the bag on a bar stool and left him alone in the kitchen. He knew he should have picked up one for Kyle as well, which he was sure was what bothered his wife.

A month and a half later, Brian clutched his son’s first college essay, one Brian had spent hours reworking, one shredded by sloppy red ink. “Dad, you said you would help me,” Kyle stammered. Brian flipped to the last page: “seems to be written by someone who is not in this class.” Was he insinuating that Kyle was cheating?

Clearly, helping was not cheating. Helping. Brian knew what his son needed. Why was this teacher attacking Kyle? Waiting for a reaction, Kyle fidgeted with his jacket zipper. His eyes pleaded for something Brian could not recognize. Brian would find it. He needed a new strategy. When Kyle had brought home that first English composition essay assignment, his heart swelled, as if he were a player returning from early retirement. But now…

“Dad?” Kyle stammered.

Brian’s tightening eyes reviewed each red-inked chicken scratch. All those damn questions and implied accusations, punctuated with threatening question marks in that damn red ink: To a wonderfully insightful assertion: Where is this coming from? To how they’d used a source: Were you not here when we discussed this in class? Referring to some revised transitions: We talked about this in conference; to comma usage and sentence construction that was just fine: Did you not understand what we spent covering over that hour in conference? Brian told himself the shivering sensation collecting in his lower back did not exist.

Brian should have heeded the signs, the anxiety in his son’s voice over the phone, who stressed about the confusing articles in his dense textbooks. He longed for the novels he’d had to read before—ones he thought he’d understood but could not quite recall—the ones that had all the good parts all marked up. Why did college only assign confusing articles? Fielding concerns like these, Brian dug his nails into his forearms. He’d wanted to reach right through the phone and retrieve Kyle’s textbooks, pick them apart, and return them in a bow. But this was reaching. The essays, Brian should have been able to help with those. Kyle’s scattered thoughts needed a deft hand to shape them. Why could his teacher not see that? Did Brian overdo it? Should he have been expected to allow his son to submit work in such disastrous shape? Where would that get his son?

His fist crinkled his son’s work. Nearby, Kyle sniffled. Those innocent eyes needed him. Had Brian’s heroes ever failed? Princess Leia ended up all right, Dennis Eckersley lost some games, and even John McClane made a bad movie by the time he got older. These thoughts filled him with trickles of encouragement. Perhaps he needed to let his son fail on his own. Would this make a strong man out of his son? But what about all that time spent studying and constructing, and highlighting, and erasing, and doing… was that all for nothing?

Kyle balled his fists in the sweatshirt sleeves. “Dad, what am I going to do?” Brian looked at the essay shrinking in his hand. He looked at his son and his mouth dropped. His voice disappeared.

Kyle darted upstairs and slammed a door. Brian’s legs felt cemented to the floor. Those legs were doing him a favor. He would let Ally believe that college writing was so much different than anything that had tested Kyle before. He would let her rage against all the money they had spent with the tutor. (Did “Nate” even tutor college students?) He would let her type the email she would never send to his old high school teachers, the one wondering why they hadn’t done enough to prepare her son for college. And he would encourage his son to find the special services department on campus so they could get him on track. With any luck, there was still time, time for Kyle. At the very least, for this Brian had hope. …but, of course, there was always next semester, wasn’t there? After all, Rome wasn’t built in a day.

What the hell did you expect? she’d said, then under her breath, as if she actually believed he wouldn’t overhear, Thank God I upped the life insurance. She’d been paying the premiums religiously ever since.

Twelve years was a long time. Long enough to have made preparations, to have put all his affairs in order, to have cleaned house so to speak. But he’d become accustomed to the rhythm of his slow lazy days in bed in the room at the top of the stairs, to keeping his calendar of doctor’s appointments, and visits by the home healthcare nurse. The pair of reading glasses he’d rigged to hang from the bathroom ceiling, dangled in front of him as he punched Kelvin’s number into the cellphone. The time had come to give his suits away.

Sukie was the practical one. Donate them to the Salvation Army, I can take a tax deduction, she said.

She’d stayed in the master bedroom after he moved into the room at the top of the stairs. She left the house early and came home late, until recently, when the dot.com crash cut into her clients’ budgets for expensive flowers. She seemed to be around all of the time now, hovering. He was aware of her the way he was aware of the hummingbirds flitting around the bougainvillea in the yard. Flashes of movement and color here and there, never still long enough to capture a fixed image. Or maybe it was the drugs. When they kicked in, the pain subsided and his world turned into a pleasant blur.

He called Kelvin and asked him to drive out from Scottsdale so he could give him his suits. He knew it was silly to have kept them, but they were custom made. They were about the same height. Once he’d been beefier than Kelvin, but their physiques had done a switch. Gordon had become the leaner of the two; Kelvin the one fighting the bulge. At least he still had his hair.

Kelvin didn’t have much to say, only that he would come. He would take the day off, the day after tomorrow, and he would come.

He said he thought it would be easy. A quick trip to visit an old friend. A day or two out of the office. The long drive would be a pain, but there was no getting around that. Gordon wanted him to have his suits. Good old Gordon, how long had it been? The last time he’d driven out he’d brought Yvette with him. Gordon got a real kick out her, called her Charo and poked at her boob job when they were in the hot tub, asking if the things could float. She’d been a good sport about it, but this time Gordon sounded serious, so he made the trip alone.

Sukie met him at the door. She had her pocketbook slung over her shoulder. Her car keys were already in her hand. She looked damned good with her hair up. Her honey colored pony tail pulled the skin on her face taut, the fan of fine lines that radiated from the corners of her eyes didn’t detract from her oddball beauty. Everything about her was a little off. That’s what loved about her looks. Here eyes were wide, grayish blue, her nose prominent, her teeth a bit too big for her mouth, but it all worked together. The first sight of her face always mad Kelvin breathe a little differently.  He found himself standing up straighter and sucking in his gut when she pushed past him. No eye contact. No hello. No thanks for coming. No kiss. Then she was gone.

He took a breath before he climbed the carpeted stairs, and hesitated before he got to the door, wishing the floor was wood so that he would make some noise, some warning, so Gordon would be prepared. But the thick carpet ate the sound so Kelvin had to call out instead, Hey buddy. It’s me. I’m here, before he stepped into the room.

And there was Gordon, looking like a queen, lying on top of the covers, his head shaved bald, wearing a loose blue singlet, red boxer shorts printed with little yellow hearts, and white ankle socks. He had a pair a tortoise shell reading glasses pushed up onto his head. He was thin, but he didn’t look half bad, considering.

Hey man, Gordon said. What took you so long? Sit. Did you bring the stuff? Kelvin plunged his hand into his pocket, pulled out the plastic baggie, and waved it. Nothing but the best, he said, Kali Mist. Gordon pointed to a chair. The room was painted midnight blue and was strung with white Christmas lights. They were on even though it was the middle of the day.  On a little wrought iron table was a glass ashtray, a butane lighter, and a roach clip tethered to a string of glass beads.

I did the best I could, Kelvin said.  Actually he’d raided his son’s stash. He didn’t tell Gordon that, but Gordon laughed when Kelvin added, If your liver doesn’t kill you, this shit will. All the windows were closed. Air conditioning, Kelvin assumed. They smoked until he melted into the chair and Gordon was nodding on the bed. The glowing butt burned itself out hanging from the roach clip in Gordon’s hand.

By the time Sukie got back it was dark outside. If there were stars Kelvin couldn’t see them. The proportions of the room had skewed. Gordon and the bed were far away. The upholstered armchair felt enormous. The white in the windows had turned to black, and the sound of the downstairs door, opening and closing, was a muffled ball of sound. Time crawled. The room turned into a tunnel and Gordon was the light at the end of it, far, very far away.

She said she thought it would be easy. But deep down she knew better. Twelve years it had taken, twelve long years. Kookie Sukie. That’s what Gordon called her. And there was that asshole Kelvin, sitting stoned in what had once been her father’s chair, and Gordon asleep, smiling. Christ his color was better than hers. Kelvin had the nerve to wave to her and say, Hey Babe.

Then she saw the roach clip hanging from Gordon’s hand and something inside snapped. What are you? Crazy? she said. It came out as a strangled hiss. Kelvin shook his head. He asked for it, he said. What’s the difference at this point?

She walked over, and lifted the clip out of Gordon’s hand. There was still a charred nub in it. She walked over to the table next to Kelvin, picked up the lighter, flicked it, held the roach to her lips, and touched the flame to it. She inhaled a nice deep toke. Then another. And another. Christ the shit was strong.

Kelvin, the idiot, was smiling, and suddenly what she felt for him was a rush of love. All the hard edges in the room had softened. The colors melded together. The odor of the dope was sweet, and she imagined she could stop time, that she could wrestle with it, and win. Fickle stuff. As quickly as she was emboldened by it, the feeling changed. Suddenly she felt unbearably constrained, a prisoner of her clothes. Slowly, one piece at a time, she began to take them off. Her sneakers first. The cloth shoelaces felt like thick blades of dune grass in her fingers. Her jeans. Her T-shirt. Her bra. Her lace panties. She peeled them off until she was as naked as that night, half a lifetime ago, she and Gordon and Kelvin skinny dipped in the moonlight on Cape Cod Bay.

The tide had been dead low. They had to walk out so far on the flats that they lost sight of land and had to wait for the tide to turn so they could follow it back in. That was before Yvette, before Kathleen, before the English girl, Jane. Kelvin was with Lora then. She was a worker, bartending that night at the Barley Neck Inn up in Orleans. When she left him to move to Texas she’d asked Sukie if she wanted to come, but Sukie had never been that brave.

Now she stood as naked as she had been that night when her body was still something to see. Now it was an empty, useless thing. They’d never had kids. What a waste of a perfectly good body. Her stomach was still as flat as it was when she was nineteen and Gordon fell in love with her. She was never sure about that. What or who he’d really fallen in love with. Her body or her. Even now when he looked at her his eyes focused only on what she was from the neck down, as if what was above was faceless, someone he didn’t want to know. She stumbled a little, dizzied by the dope. She had to struggle to recapture her balance. As she did, she was suddenly cold. Gooseflesh rose on her arms.

Gordon was stretched out on the bed like he was already a corpse awaiting burial. His arms were crossed over his chest; his feet pointing straight up at the ceiling; the soles were pale yellow.  For the first time Sukie allowed herself to see the yellowish tinge  overtaking him. Slowly, carefully, she lay down next to him and molded her body to his. She pressed herself into his side, her free arm encircling his emaciated frame. Through the thin cotton knit of his shirt she could feel the washboard ripple of his ribs and the rise and fall of his breathing. Slowly he lifted his arm out from under hers and closed his hand over her shoulder. She could feel each of his fingers: one, two, three, four, five. The little white lights twinkled. The room was a blue box, imitating a sky sprinkled with stars. And Kelvin sat, watching. And Gordon’s palm burned like a hot coal pressed to her bare skin.

He said he thought it would be easy. Until he felt Sukie pressed to his side. They hadn’t touched in so long. Her skin was cold, colder than his. It made him tingle all over, or was it the dope? Leave it to Kelvin. He always did have the best dope.

He didn’t want to forget about his suits. Kelvin would look damn good in them. Designer labels. Nothing but the best way back when. Now there was nowhere left to go. This was it. This house. This room. This bed. Sukie would see to it he stayed out the hospital. She’d promised. When Kelvin levered himself out of the chair, Gordon heard but he kept his eyes closed. There was pressure on the bed as Kelvin positioned himself on the other side, draped his arm around both of them, and pulled them close, so close his grip was uncomfortable. But Gordon didn’t protest and he didn’t move. He lay there between the two of them holding onto each breath, savoring it, feeling the cool hard roundness of Sukie’s shoulder in his hand. He opened his eyes and for an instant he was startled by the intensity of the white twinkle lights. He turned his head away from them. Through the night blackened window he thought he could see a star, until he recognized it for what it actually was: only a reflection. Outside, on the other side of the glass, there was nothing.

On the far side of the rusted chain-link fence trots a dirty white dog, some mangy stray. Its shadow is long in the setting sun’s light. Its shaggy head sways from side to side as its nose travels the ground. Odessa watches it paw at a clump of wilting weeds and take something in its mouth. Chicken bones, probably. Uncle Daddy always tosses wings over the fence. It makes Mama angry when he does it, but he still does.

Odessa rocks the porch swing with her feet. It creaks, but not loudly enough to cover the noise inside the house. Mama and Uncle Daddy are fighting, though they never call it fighting to her face. They call it working through, like, “we’re working through some things.” They work through a lot, especially since the paper mill closed four months ago. “Ain’t like I’m the only one around here can earn a paycheck,” Uncle Daddy says when Mama starts to nag him about getting another job. “I clean houses. What the hell you do?” Mama replies. That’s when Odessa knows to go to the swing.

Across the road, the reservoir’s still water glitters. The sun’s orange reflection on it looks like a long, shimmering road. Odessa wishes she could dive in and follow it. It’s already early October but it would be a nice night for a swim.

Inside, a door slams. The porch’s screen door squeals open. “Hey Uncle Daddy,” Odessa says when he steps outside. He’s holding his spit cup. “I got the swing.”

“You had the swing.” Uncle Daddy shoos her with a fluttering hand. “Git on up.” Odessa pouts and makes a show of crossing her arms. When Uncle Daddy does not respond, she slides off the swing and stomps to the front step. She drops herself onto it with a huff. The porch swing creaks as Uncle Daddy settles into it. “And you best stop calling me that, too.”

“Calling you what?” Odessa says, but she’s just being smart.

“I ain’t your uncle and I ain’t your daddy.” He spits a line of brown tobacco juice into his cup. The smell is sweet, almost minty, and Odessa wonders what he might say if she asked to try some. Though, in truth, she’s scared that he’d say yes. She’s seen the stuff at the bottom of his cup. It looks like something dredged from a swamp.

She leans back on her elbows and rubs her shoulder blades over the rail. The wood is scratchy and rough; she can feel paint flecking on the bare skin above her tank top. Her eyes go to the willow tree in the corner of their yard. She likes how its branches hang down to the ground, likes how she feels hidden when she sits under the tree. Before Uncle Daddy moved in for good, Odessa took an old picture of Mama’s and Daddy’s wedding day that she’d found in an album and folded it inside an old pepper tin. She dug a hole two feet deep under the tree, clawing out rocks and pillbugs with her bare hands, then buried the tin and marked the spot with a flat rock from beside the reservoir. On days when she got home from school and nobody was around, what she liked to do was sit on that rock with her knees up against her chest, which even now is still so flat the girls at school tease her about being a boy. Especially Patricia, who likes to show off in gym class that she wears adult bras, the kind with wires and a double clasp on back. But underneath the willow tree, Odessa could imagine that she was in a secret cave in some secret world, a world where nobody could find her or tease her or tell her what to do. But now Uncle Daddy is always home, and she almost never goes to the tree anymore.

Uncle Daddy’s foot twitches. Odessa kicks at it. But he catches her foot as she’s pulling it back and yanks off her pink, worn-at-the-heel sandal. The swing creaks as he cocks his arm behind his head, like he’s about to skip a rock over the reservoir, and he lets the sandal fly from his hand. It skids into the yard. Odessa stands up. She plants her hands on her skinny waist and pouts. He chews quietly, his cheek puffed out like a squirrel. She stomps down the steps. The earth feels cold on her one bare foot.

~

Odessa is in science lab when Kevin Ames asks if she thinks maybe she wants to go to the Homecoming Dance with him. He leans over the table and presses his face between the burners that they never use, and he asks her just like that: You think you maybe want to go to the dance? It is the first time she’s been asked out. What Odessa thinks right then is that it might be a joke. Worried, she glances at Marcia, her lab partner, then across the table at Jared, who is Kevin’s. But neither of them looks like they’re about to laugh, so she says yes.

Mama’s not there when Odessa gets home. Uncle Daddy is on the porch with his Hennessey and his spit cup. “Is Mama cleaning houses?” Odessa asks.

“Where else?” Uncle Daddy spits into his cup and sips from the bottle. He swishes the drink around in his mouth, then holds out the bottle as if he’s offering her a swig. Odessa considers this for a moment, then cautiously lifts her hand. Uncle Daddy laughs and pulls the bottle away. “As if,” he says.

It’s another two hours before Mama gets back with a half-cold pizza from Moe’s. She tosses it on the table where Odessa is reading her science chapter under the naked ceiling bulb. Uncle Daddy is still outside. The last time Odessa peeked at him through the window, he was down by the tree, standing there with his legs spread and his back to the house, a dark outline cut into the gathering twilight. She realized that he was pissing and imagined the sound of his water splashing the dust. She ducked down to her knees when she saw him turn.

“Where’s he at?”

“Outside,” Odessa says. “I got asked to the dance.”

Mama acts like she doesn’t hear. She walks to the screen door and pushes it open. “Get yourself some dinner,” she says. The screen door slaps shut and Odessa hears them on the porch, working things through. She pulls two slices from the box and takes them to her room.

Mama takes her dress shopping the next day. They take Uncle Daddy’s truck and drive to the strip mall in town. The department store there has bright lights and smiling clerks with brown name tags. There are racks and racks of dresses by the entrance, but Mama walks Odessa to the back. Odessa sees three racks with hand-lettered signs that say fifty percent off. “It’s all last season, but it’s still good,” Mama says.

“How much can we afford?” Odessa asks.

Mama looks impatient. “Just pick one.”

Odessa understands that there is no money for this dress. Not with Uncle Daddy out of work and Mama cleaning houses. She should not be going to the dance. She browses through a few dresses, then shrugs and pouts her lip. “I don’t like none of these.”

“I got my checkbook,” Mama says. “Just pick one.” Mama stands there with her arms folded over her round chest and waits until Odessa picks out a white dress decorated with red squares and circles. “Well, go try it on.”

Odessa takes the dress into the tiny, mirrored changing room. She studies her reflection in the glass—a skinny, flat-chested girl with frizzy hair. The dress looks like something limp and dead in her arms. She holds it at arm’s length and lets it unfurl, and in that instant she can picture herself beautiful in it, like a queen. Then she looks at the price tag, attached to the back by a clear plastic tether. Forty-five dollars, on sale now for twenty-two dollars and fifty cents. The door handle turns suddenly and Mama pokes her head inside. She grabs the dress from Odessa’s hands. “This the one you want?” Mama asks. Odessa shrugs.

“Let’s go then,” Mama says. “I can fix it at home so it fits you.”

~

Mama doesn’t fix the dress that night, or the night after, either. It lies in a white heap over the back of the woven chair that sits in front of Mee Maw’s old Singer sewing machine. Over the past two years, they’ve sold their old television, their stereo, the chugging computer they got when the high school upgraded its lab. They even pawned some of the old jewelry that Mee Maw passed down to Mama, a few gold bands and a silver ring with an embedded emerald that Odessa thought looked like a snake’s eye. The sewing machine, though, had remained.

“Dance is in two days,” Odessa says at supper on Thursday. She passes Uncle Daddy the biscuits, but keeps her eyes on her plate. Uncle Daddy takes the bowl and plucks a biscuit off the top. He splits it open and presses half of it into his mouth.

“You fill out those papers today?” Mama asks him.

Uncle Daddy chews his biscuit. His Adam’s Apple bobs up and down. “Ain’t no jobs down that office,” he says.

“How you know if you don’t fill out the papers?”

Uncle Daddy lets the bottom half of the biscuit fall to his plate. “Half the damn town is out of work. You want me filling out papers? The hell good is that gonna do?”

“Tired of you sitting around the house.”

“Tired of hearing about it.”

Mama nods toward Odessa. “Girl’s dress cost twenty-four dollars. You got twenty-four dollars?”

“Not for no dress.” Uncle Daddy reaches back over his seat to Mama’s sewing chair. His fingers probe at the dress and discover the tag, still attached by its plastic tether. “Just keep this on.”

A picture blooms in Odessa’s mind. She is standing at the center of a circle of girls, all laughing and pointing. Patricia, their leader, reaches down between Odessa’s skinny shoulder blades to pluck out the price tag. “It’s OK, Mama,” Odessa says. “I don’t got to go to the dance. We can take it back.”

“You hush,” Mama says. “Finish your supper so we can fit you.”

When the table is cleared, Mama has Odessa stand on one of the kitchen chairs and pull the dress down over her T-shirt and jeans. It hangs from her shoulders by two skinny straps, sags open at her chest and hangs wide around her hips. “Thing looks like a tent,” Uncle Daddy says from the recliner, where he is reading his sports scores.

Mama ignores him. She fusses over the dress, pulling here and smoothing there. She pulls a straight pin from the corner of her mouth and slides it into a pinched lump of fabric at Odessa’s waist. Odessa flinches at what she expects will be a sharp bite on her skin. “Quit fidgeting,” Mama mutters around the pins.

“You fussing over that like you know what you’re doing,” Uncle Daddy says. “You mess that dress up you won’t be able to take it back.”

Mama pulls the pins from her mouth. “Ain’t there a porch for you to be sitting on?”

Uncle Daddy rocks forward in the recliner and lets the paper fall from his hands. He stands up and pulls his green pack of Skoal from his pocket. His heavy footsteps cross the floor. The screen door slaps shut behind him.

Mama starts to put the pins back in her mouth, then changes her mind and sets them beside the machine. She smoothes the dress with her hands, then pulls out the single pin. She reaches behind Odessa’s back and flips the tag inside the dress so that Odessa can feel it through her T-shirt. “You can wear it like this,” Mama says. “You just put your white sweater on top and it’ll look just fine.”

Odessa feels heat in her cheeks. She nods and rubs at her eyes, then hops down from the chair and raises her arms so Mama can pull the dress over her head. Mama lays the dress down on the table and smoothes it carefully, like her hands are irons. She picks it up by the straps and hands it to Odessa. “Keep it in your closet,” she says. Odessa takes the dress to her room and puts it on a hanger, then kicks off her pink sandals and lays back in her bed. Faintly, through the kitchen, she can hear them on the porch, working things through.

~

On Friday, Kevin tells Odessa that he only lives two blocks from the school and can just walk over and meet her in the parking lot. The dance starts at eight o’clock and he says that he’ll be there right on time. Odessa barely sleeps that night. She spends all morning worrying about her dress, then all afternoon worrying over her hair. Mama has a late cleaning job, an office the next town over, so Uncle Daddy drives her out there in his truck and then comes back to take Odessa to the dance.

In his old Chevy, Odessa sits on the torn bench seat and listens to the engine sputter as they drive along the causeway into town. She pulls at the cuffs of her sweater, which she has buttoned all the way to the top. She is wearing her pink sandals because her only other choice would have been her sneakers, which are muddy and have holes over both big toes. She presses her forehead against the cool glass of the window, which does not roll down. Uncle Daddy does not talk on the drive.

They are early, but the parking lot has already started to fill with the cars of older students, juniors and seniors who can drive themselves. They spill from their parked cars and trickle across the lot toward the gymnasium entrance. Uncle Daddy pulls up to the bus ramp, where the young and carless are being dropped off by their parents. Odessa scans the sparse crowd for Kevin, but he is not there. They are early, though. He is probably on his way. She pulls on the door handle.

“What time’s all this end?” Uncle Daddy asks.

Odessa hesitates. The dance goes until eleven, but she is not sure whether to say this. She has heard stories about after dance parties and wonders if maybe Kevin won’t ask her to one. And even if he doesn’t, he might want to go for a walk or something. She does not want to leave before she has to. “I don’t know,” she says. “I can call when we’re done. There’s phones in the lobby.”

“You got money for a phone?”

“I can borrow it from Kevin.”

Uncle Daddy blows air through his nose. He straightens out his leg and digs his hand into his front pocket. He pulls out a few coins and jingles them in his palm. In the truck’s dim overhead light, Odessa sees a quarter and three dimes. “Take this. And don’t you even think about calling after midnight. You hear?”

“I won’t.” Odessa takes the coins and slips them into her sweater’s tiny pocket. She can feel the dress’ price tag against her skin. She spent an hour alone in her room after Uncle Daddy took Mama to the office job, studying herself from every angle in her mirror to make sure that no trace of the tag’s outline could be seen through her sweater.

“And you tell that boy if he gets fresh on you I got my gun under the seat. I ain’t scared of doing no time, neither.”

Odessa does not believe that Uncle Daddy has a gun. But she feels nervous anyway, nervous about how the tag is scratching her skin, nervous because Kevin is nowhere around. She steps out of the truck and smoothes the dress over her hips. “I’ll tell him that,” she says. She slams shut the door, then waits on the sidewalk while Uncle Daddy pulls away from the curb. His taillights vanish down the street. When she can no longer see his truck, Odessa goes to the waist-high brick wall that fronts the school entrance and sits down on it. She smoothes the dress over her legs. She does not know from which direction Kevin will come. She feels self-conscious, as if she is doing something wrong by sitting here even though there are other kids sitting here, too. Kids she does not know, two boys in white blazers and a girl wearing a sparkling green dress that looks like it’s made of cellophane. Cars continue to pull to the curb, and out of them step boys and girls in shiny shoes and glittering clothes who all go straight inside.

Odessa does not have a watch, but she is certain that it’s almost eight o’clock. A car pulls up and a tall white boy steps from it. The girl in the green dress skips toward him. He hooks his arm through hers and they walk inside the gym. The boys in the white blazers follow. Another car pulls up and lets out a pack of giggling girls. Odessa walks to the edge of the curb and peers across the parking lot, which is lit by pale, fluttering streetlights. There are still kids out there, small shadowy groups of them. Some are smoking. She sees no movement on the street.

It occurs to Odessa that Kevin might already be inside. And then a picture comes to her mind, one like Patricia and the price tag except this time she imagines waving to Kevin from across the gym and his eyes passing over her like she’s not even there. It might have all been a joke, after all, and she would have just delivered herself up as the punch line. Everybody would see her, humiliated. Patricia and the other girls. And if Kevin is not inside, Odessa knows that she will have to stand against the wall by herself and wait. She will have to stand in front of everybody, alone.

So she does not go inside. She goes back to the wall and sits down to wait. She does not know how much time passes. A half hour, maybe. An hour. A few more cars pull up, latecomers. The groups in the parking lot drift inside; others come out. Nobody pays her any mind. Odessa kicks off her sandals and scratches with her toe at the inside of her calf. She turns over the coins in her pocket. She worries for a moment that the school’s front doors will be locked, that she will have to go through the gym just to get to the lobby, but when she gets up and tests one of the handles, the door opens. She slips inside, where it is dark, and listens to the coins clatter into the slot. Uncle Daddy answers on the third ring.

~

The clock on the Chevy’s radio says nine thirty-eight when Odessa slides into the cab. She folds her dress under her legs as the truck chugs away from the curb. Uncle Daddy drives slowly up Main Street toward the causeway. He has a plastic bottle of something cradled between his legs. They are almost to the turn when he pops open the cap and takes a quick pull of what’s inside. Odessa smells the bitter scent of his Hennessey. He pops the cap back on and tucks the bottle between his legs. “Didn’t think you’d be this early.”

Odessa picks at the cuff of her sweater. “He had to get home.”

“Dance ain’t but half over.”

“I had fun.” Odessa presses her forehead against the glass and fakes a yawn. “I’m tired, anyhow.”

“That boy try anything?”

Odessa thinks about the gun. “No.”

Uncle Daddy’s hands grip the top of the steering wheel. His window is rolled down and the air swirling through the cab has a crisp Autumn bite to it. Odessa pulls her sweater more tightly around her chest.

“You was never in that dance, was you?”

Odessa looks out the window as they turn onto the causeway. They are just a few miles from the house. She wonders if Mama is home yet. Uncle Daddy has probably been out on the swing all evening, watching the willow tree bend in the breeze and sipping on his Hennessey with his spit cup beside him. “I’m right, ain’t I?” Uncle Daddy says.

Odessa shrugs. Outside, the dark mass of trees below the causeway makes her think of people silhouetted in the dark, huddled together and watching and whispering secrets in each others’ ears. She is startled by Uncle Daddy’s hand on her back.

His fingers feel thick and rough. His hand snakes beneath her sweater and slides up over the smooth fabric of the dress to her shoulder blades. She feels him reach inside the dress to where the tag lies against her skin. He coils its plastic tether around his finger and yanks. The tag breaks away and she feels the plastic tether’s tip drop down to her underwear.

Uncle Daddy pulls his hand from beneath Odessa’s sweater. The tag dangles from his finger. It flutters in the breeze. He reaches across himself to dangle the tag out the window, then opens his hand and it’s gone.

And in the middle of the night when the war in the Far East was over and the radios blared out the news, all the lights went on in all the houses on that blind street, except where the card game was being played. Many of the neighbors were solidly indignant about that turn of events on VJ Night, two Mount Carmel boys among those who would not be coming back from the mad Pacific, which most of us had only seen in Saturday newsreels at the theater.

This house was a dark house on a dark street in my town that, with some lesions and scars, hangs on to a place in my memory and will not let go. Not ever. The family that lives there now most likely is unaware of its past. Tenants and landlords hardly leave scribed notations of a dwelling, thinking all things will ferment, dissipate, and eventually pass on. Fifty years or more of recall usually get dulled, terribly pockmarked, or fade into the twilight the way one ages, a dimming of the eyes, a bending at the knees, a slow turn at mortality. But this one rides endlessly in place, a benchmark, a mooring place. It resides as a point of time, a small moment of history colored up by characterization of one incident.

Some houses have peculiar histories. This one did. For a full fifteen years at the gray house at the end of the road the big weekly poker game had been going on, and during the war it had been conducted behind thick black curtains that let out no light. “They’ll be no beacon trail markers from this game to the Navy Yard,” a few miles distant, said Mountain Ben Capri. Mountain Ben, once an expert trapper and fishing guide, owned the house, ran the game, and his wife, the Blackfoot named Dread Child Lovey, made sandwiches on occasion, poured drinks, and picked up loose change. That loose change would have paid some mortgages, it was said, for the stakes in the game were sometimes monumental if not momentous, all according to those said neighbors on that dark cul-de-sac and other parties around town. Some few people in town could remember when Mother Shannon had a shady place of business in the same abode, most of them elderly men, perhaps a few elderly wives or widows.

The only outsider allowed inside that oft-coveted and dark setting was the young and pesky Frankie Pike, high school football hero of some renown, who tried to sit in one night, showed his money when demanded, had not enough, so finally he asked to simply look on. Subsequently, because of good humor and an abundance of energy, Frankie became the company runner, getting special orders from the half dozen classy restaurants out on the turnpike, hitting the package store for beer, wine and hard stuff when necessary (ordinarily through the back door), collaring the best cigars in town, and not leastwise directing unwanted players away from the game site. After a few games and seeing all the opportunities around him, Frankie with no flies ahovering cut a deal with Smokey Carlton of Smokey’s Diner that they should get a supply of bags, wrappers and boxes from the big restaurants and provide their own specials, as if the biggies had done the service. Smokey was glad to oblige, even though some of the town’s big spenders and known tough guys took part in the game. “They’re all probably playing with somebody else’s money any way,” Smokey would say if caught up for a reason. Frankie, to up the kitty, even went to work at Gargan’s Texan Hilltop Restaurant for two days, time enough to stash a supply of purloined imprinted bags and napkins out in the woods. Flies stayed off Frankie like he’d been sprayed with killer juice.

Frankie and Smokey had made a good deal, and they smoked the players with substitute foodstuffs prepared right in the back of the small chintzy diner rather than in one of the popular restaurants. “I got so much booze in there, Smokey, they’re half drunk half the time and well into it the other half. That old lobster boater Cal Landers wants Hilltop sandwiches all the time and now yours are as good as theirs are, only Cal don’t know it seeing the Hilltop wrappers all the time. Some nights they can’t tell Grade A from swill. And I see DC Lovey scooping a bit of change every now and then, too. She puts the wet tray with booze and stuff right on the pot or on someone’s stash and lets that old green paper stick to the bottom. There ain’t no pesky bugs setting on that old mountain man either, way he goes through jacket pockets when no one’s looking. Moves so easy for such a big man. Hate to have him tracking me down. I’ve seen him go outside and go through some of the cars more than a few times. Smooth he does it, like a ghost in the night, like maybe he heard special information during the game.”

So the game had been going on, and in one quick night the war was over. The whole town celebrated, lights flashing on and off, a few stored up firecrackers or bottle rockets set off, a lot of horns and sirens cutting loose from long silences. Except the house on Mount Carmel. Nobody went in and pulled a shade back, nobody came out on the porch to see what was going on. The game was the thing. Only the game.

And that didn’t sit well with a lot of people. “Tell me, Frankie,” Clint Wardley the undertaker said one night around the cracker barrel in the back of the package store, “what the hell makes you think they’re such sacred cows in there?” Clint was always in a starched collar, a white one, and locked into his trade. They said his father had died in the same stiff collar. “They all come my way sooner or later.” You never knew if Clint’s words were promise or threat.

“I’ll say this for those boyos,” Frankie Pike said, “they’re not afraid of anybody or anything ‘cepting that game not getting its place of a Friday night. That storm a couple of years ago that shut down the power for nearly a week, they had Mountain get Coleman lanterns and fired them all up. Mountain knows about white gas and them little wicks he calls mantles, like butterfly wings almost. Had three or four of them going he did, almost boiling the room away. Way I hear it, they talk about the game all week long, who did what last game, who can make the big fake and pull it off, who’s getting shit luck with his cards and when it began. I think they have a pool on when it runs out, each having some kind of turn at it, it appears. They heard the war was over and that was it. They wasn’t in it and wasn’t getting away from it.”

Frankie’s sense of timing was as good as an actor, the stage set, pronouncements being made, his hunk of reality coming down on the conversation. His eyes collected and measured the audience. “Jake Crews said he ain’t celebrating people getting killed or not killed. His daddy came home from the Great Stink in France back in ‘18 all gassed up and not much of a father from then on. Said he never got laid again, even though his old lady was a laundry bag. Life just became one big sour ball for him. Jake ought to know, him wearing the scars of it all, him being the only boy in that big house with that bad ass bastard. ‘Cept for the game, he’s been a loner most his whole life. I’ll tell you this,” Frankie added, bringing football right back into the balance, putting it all in his true perspective, handling the crutch of it with aplomb, “I’d be comfortable with him across the huddle from me in a big game. He has that fire in his eye you don’t always get, if you know what I mean.” Frankie’d get them nodding as though they had the privy inside on certain players that “didn’t bring it with them all the time the way Frankie did.”

Frankie liked to sit in the back of McGarrihan’s Package Store, around the wood stove puffing on a winter day, a dozen pair of boots hoisted on the rim of that iron monger’s stove, and hold forth with the other gabbers. They were the psuedo-historians, gossips, ward-heelers and petty politicians looking for the grip on someone, for rich gossip or a shared bottle they didn’t have to pay for, you name the front and they come out of it. Frankie had shine here because of his football exploits, being, as many of them would say, “the best damn money player to come down the pike since Harmony Hiltz worked his magic at the stadium in the early Thirties, and then went up country and played for Dartmouth College.”

The players in the Mount Carmel game on the other hand seemed a cut from another life; few of them appeared to be daily employed, always having a “piece” of one operation or another. Oftentimes an office was an inner coat or jacket pocket. For most of them money was practically spilling its green out of their pockets like some kind of algae growing down inside with the lint. None of them carried their money in a wallet, rather doled it out of thick clusters kept in the inner breast pocket of a jacket or in a shirt pocket under a sweater lying like a protective cover over the big bulge of paper. “They buy their chips with a wad of bills, ever last one of them, taking it out of an iron clip.” Frankie said “iron” as if it were “eye-ron,” bringing the boys deeper into the fold, getting real up-country homey with them. It was true old Yankee stuff he could get at when he had a mind to.

“How much money you think been showed in that room, Frankie, best lot?” Andy Tolliver was a member of the school committee who never went to college, never could spell curriculum, but had a magic for trading off “one for you and one for me” when things got tight. He was never without a bow tie, feeling undressed in his station of life if he were caught so. For twenty-six years he had been on the school committee. It was said Andy could get anything in the system for those
who wanted it bad enough, including himself, with the mix of teachers. Now he wanted to know how much money was in that room at one time. Frankie had seen Andy pick up the new history teacher as she walked home late at night. Had seen it a four or five times, once waiting for two hours by her house before Andy dropped her off.

“Well,” said Frankie, thinking Andy was at least twice as old as the new teacher and having a sudden admiration for him, curriculum or no curriculum, “one night, and this is the truth because I was able to count it out, there was over twelve thousand dollars in that room. Course,” he added, the sparkle in his eyes, “some of that was loose change.” The laughter was pleasant and a few of the listeners elbowed the guy beside them.

“Andy eyes lit up. “Twelve thousand dollars! My, God, that’s almost the budget on raises for the next two-three years.”

“Hell,” Frankie said, “one night Mountain came back in from sniffing through the cars and leaned over Jud Duvall and whispered in his ear. They say Mountain told him someone had been fooling around his car, he has that Pierce Arrow with the big lights up on the fenders. So Jud went out and came back in with his sweater wrapped around something and kept it under his chair and Mountain was real nervous. I heard later Mountain had come across a stash of twenty-five thousand bucks and was scared to death of touching it, but had to tell Jud some way. He didn’t want to be pegged for grabbing it. Mountain knows Jud would have him dropped in the river for less.”

But of all the guys who talked shop and whatever around the stove, it was Wolf Stearns who kept alive the VJ Night ignorance of the game players, going back to that dark and bright night every chance he had. One of the guys not coming back was Wolf’s cousin, Edwin Talbot, a Marine fighter pilot lost in the Solomon Seas on the day of his eleventh kill. “Guess who’s birthday is next Wednesday, guys? You couldn’t guess in a hundred years, now could you? It’s Eddie Talbot’s birthday. The kid would be twenty-five years old next Wednesday. Do you think those dinks at the game give a shit? Not in a hundred years. They played all through the war and when it came stand up time they stayed behind the damn curtains. Never even came out on the porch to see what was going on, never mind saluting someone for a change.” His eyes would darken as if he were measuring an infinitesimal edge, like a wave of heat off the stove top or another space uncounted for, and he’d drop cautious tidbits like, “Somebody ought to teach them a lesson or two. ‘S’all I got to say about it.” Then Wolf would look again at a point in space none of the others could hope to find. Truth was, Wolf had been around a lot and never left much trail about what he was at or after. He had scars here and there, Wolf did, on his cheeks, one wrist like it had been ripped by barb wire, I’d bet on his back the way he scowled so much of the time, bitter angry, the world to be pissed on occasionally. Some guys said he was as dangerous as an animal caught in a trap.

A few other guys seemed to side up with Wolf but never got too vocal about it. So under the layers it was apparent that a means of revenge was swilling in the thicker cloth, probably dark and mean, and naturally would have the backing of the whole town who loved its heroes to the death.

When it happened it was clean and quick. It was just after midnight, Mountain getting sleepy in one corner, Dread Child Lovey about done with her work and smoking a cigar, Frankie Pike’s errands long over and him ready to go home, when the door burst open and four masked gunsmiths stood aiming their sawed-off shotguns at the table. Mountain rose from his seat and one
of the gunsmiths hit him with a crow bar. Mountain hit the floor like a pallet of concrete blocks. Dread Child Lovey continued to smoke her cigar, ignoring all the men in the room.

Jud Duval, pivoting idly in his chair, said, “If I were you guys, I’d…. “ He said no more as the barrel of the shotgun was stuck in his mouth. “There’ll be no talking but us,” said one of the masked men. “Rake it up, Three,” he said, pointing to the players. Empty their pockets, their money belts, their wallets. Clean out their jackets. Look under the chairs.”

He heard Mountain groan and nodded to another gunsmith. “Hit him, Two.” The man popped Mountain on the head again with the crow bar. Dread Child Lovey kept on smoking. Jud noted the men were all in sweat suits of a kind, with sneakers on. He recognized the use of coded names, and put that away for future reference.

The sweepdown was complete in every sense. Every coin, every bit of currency in the room, including the entire cash drawer kept by Mountain and Dread Child Lovey, was scooped up and placed in a black bag looking much like a doctor’s bag.

Frankie started to move once, looking to get to a door, but was jabbed in the backside by one of the gun wielders. “Uh, uh, kid, we need you. You’re going to be a bit of security for us. Hostage stuff. You’re gonna earn your keep this night, hero.” The guy turned to the others and said, “One frigging bad word outta any you guys, we knock off the kid. We’re taking him with us. Don’t nobody move around or scream until the big guy wakes up, and then I’d be real gentle about that. That’s gonna be one pissed-off man.”

One of the gunsmiths opened a door to a small pantry and motioned all the players and Dread Child Lovey into the soon-crowded space. The door was slammed on them and a couple of spikes were knocked into the door and the jamb. Silence came. Darkness set about everything, falling like enveloping clouds on top of Mountain who’d be out of it for almost another hour. Later we heard a couple of guys copped a few feels of Dread Child Lovey who never batted an eyelash or said a word in that small room crowded with game players. And later Mountain was really pissed because when he finally woke up and freed the players and his wife from the pantry, he found her underpants on the floor.

Mountain, they said, was like old Mountain, ranting and raving and carrying on like a wounded bear. Said he marked every one of the players with his dread eye, cowed them right out of his house like a curse was placed on them.

And the cops gave up the search for the kidnapped Frankie Pike two days later when he walked back into town, a couple of marks on his face, but healthy as ever otherwise. There never was another game at Mountain’s place. The players, after a break of a few weeks, found another place to play, in the back of Tal Rumson’s boathouse. It was said that Frankie walked with a jingle and a tingle and was never out of coin for the next year. But nobody did anything about it, figuring the players had finally paid their real dues.

This is part of the curse of walking upright.  Hunters holding a rifle over a kill cannot help but feel their act is imbued with both the generosity of flora and fauna that puts animal and man on the same terms at the same time and the arrogance of hurtling lead that separates them. Our stories reside in the anarchy between, in a country that is the opposite of hope.  In the West, self-annihilation is our dream. We don’t worship a god; we grieve his murder and our existence is complicity in the crime. We long to pitch ourselves backwards toward a time primitive enough to erase our presence and killing an animal in the wild is the only meager act we can manage.

—

A year ago my aunt passed away and my father and I accompanied her son and her ashes to what was once our family’s ranch.  My great grandfather was one of the first settlers of this country and served a time as a policeman on the reservation, all historic elements of the western ideal at one time or another. one brisk spring day, he murdered my grandfather, who had left a government engineering job to help manage the planting.  We in the generations following remain suspended as if we are shrapnel from an explosion that had not yet returned to earth.  My father came up without a father or grandfather to steer him through his youth, a loss that has been reflected in my life as well, because, as a good father, as decent a man as he is.  He remains an uneasy parent, doubting each act of fatherhood, and I his uneasy son and that is part of the western legacy as well.

That day, as my cousin parted the barbwire and re-entered that history, my father and I stood for a long time in the shade of maple filled out for summer and watched.  Rusty basalt and shale spills formed three of the four horizons, a few spindly locusts scattered among the sharp, volcanic rock.  The canyon sides were steep and divided by deposits of earth and rock washed from above when the glacial flood shoved through the canyons.  Sagebrush and Larkspur and Russian Thistle and spindly cheat grass covered what would hold flora.  Locust trees my great grandfather planted a hundred years ago lined the road to the barn.  Their hard wood made fine fence posts.  Ash from volcanoes centuries past and hard midday light dulled the horizon, without even a breeze to relieve the heat.  Up top, it was flat and silty, easier to draw a plow through, with more to farm and less to abandon to pasture or the coyotes and deer.  But I imagine being up above left my great grandfather feeling like he was in the middle of an open room and he preferred the closeness of two walls in a corner to back him.  It limited his line of sight and what he had to watch and what he was forced to leave to chance.  He had thought like a fugitive choosing this place, not a farmer.

My cousin stepped through a barbwire fence, and we let him alone.  He opened the urn.  A hot wind kicked the ash in a dusty spiral around him.  He squinted as the fine chips stung his face.  His shirt rippled and spanked, and ash peppered his hair and hands and he extended his arms to each side and turned a slow circle, a sinner like the rest of us neither baptized nor absolved nor blessed nor cursed, but stubborn enough to abide.

—

Why do we tell stories?  Maybe to contradict those stories that haunt me; maybe to deposit a layer upon them that complicates the matter enough to raise questions that appear obvious to me now.  Maybe it is simply for my children.  I am a man and like most, I am wrong more than I am right, but unlike most people they encounter, I am their father, and a father, like nations and religions and, yes, stories, possesses a capacity to defy ethics and common sense and convince their own flesh and blood that the fault lies within them.  We, in the West, must navigate our lives not through mythologies but between them, averting our Scylla and Charybdis and piloting the moon’s pull on the tides and amending our course and our narrative with stories required to be a mother or daughter or father or son, reminding ourselves the necessity to remain aware of the deceptions of the larger currents and eddies siren songs of story tugging at us.

The sharp little bones a magnificent scaffolding. I always used to kiss her on her shoulder. When she got older, I just knew she’d shrug me off, roll her eyes and say “Mom” in a way meant to tell me my worst fears had come true.

The first time I dropped the baby, Baby: 3 months old.

Later, my mother told me she used to tie me down in my crib. I don’t know why she finally told me that. I didn’t ask her about wandering babies. Something must have just gone off in her head and she decided it was the right time to tell me that little detail.

Of course I’d never tie the baby down in any way. I never bought a changing table either–just put the baby on the bed and changed her there. I’d prop everything up around her, the baby wipes, the Desitin, the half-gone package of diapers, all right there, handy. But I’d forgotten something and I turned away from the baby and when I turned back she was on the ground.

It wasn’t a long drop, maybe a foot or so. She didn’t cry or seem to even notice she wasn’t on the bed any more. Of course I panicked. Picked her up, held her to my chest, maybe to sense if there were any broken bones. I was still sitting on the edge of the bed. I had only turned my body half way around and like that, she was gone, on the floor.

I didn’t believe the baby did it on her own. Something must have bewitched her, scooped her up and plopped her down on the carpet to scare the shit out of me. And then my mother calls to tell me out of the blue how she used to tie me to the crib? Hardly coincidental. There were obviously forces bigger than me at work and I was going to have to keep my eyes open.

Every night before dinner Mother would turn off the TV and put the Tijuana Brass on the stereo. She’d read that eating to music was soothing and aided digestion. Sometimes she put on Mantovani and his sixty strings and once she put on Mitch Miller. But usually we ate dinner submersed in trumpet music.

Daddy

When I was nine years old and they put through the freeway between Highway 101 (previously known as the King’s Highway) and the, until then, newer freeway, 280, Daddy drove us down through the tree-laden suburban area, explaining what he did for a living.

It was hard to pay attention. The new freeway opened up onto the back end of houses I’d never seen before and I was fascinated to find out what other kids had in their backyards.

Daddy insisted on explaining why that big steel dome on stilts was an important piece of the landscape. He called it a water tower. He told me that in case of an emergency, say a fire, when the water was shut off for any reason, the city could still get water from the water tower.

They weren’t a new idea. Putting water up high so that hoses hooked up to it could easily fill fire trucks due to the pressure exerted was an idea as old as the west, he told me. But this particular water tower, this one in Cupertino, just across from the Emporium, he had designed this one and it was completely different from any other water tower.

All I knew was that the kid in the backyard next to the water tower had the coolest jungle gym I’d ever seen. Inside all the crosshatch bars was a rope with a swing on it and off to one side, a slide. It was a marvel to me. My old swing set in our backyard was lined up the same old way: slide, swing, swing, rope, bar and when I swung on the swing now the whole swing set almost pulled out of the ground.

Daddy said, “This is what I’m most proud of. This tower will stand the test of time.”

Chuck Thompson Swim School. Diving into the big blue pool, being engulfed by chlorinated water, having the water pour into every part of my little body, ballooning my turquoise swimsuit out twice its size. I’ve so wanted to be engulfed like that again, like the first dive into the pool.

The baby’s black hair was maybe her most beautiful feature. It was shiny and curly in little wisps around her ears and made her look like a Kewpie doll. Her skin so perfect, her eyes and hair so dark, her nose puckered just so. I’d never had any idea of my own attractiveness out in the world and so thought that the baby was so incredibly gorgeous due entirely to the baby’s father who was a foreigner, of course, and who, after the birth, we rarely saw again.

**

Lisa’s party, Saturday night, Baby: 8 months old

I had great hopes for my friendship with Lisa. She wasn’t a single mom like me, but we had lots of things in common, OK, mostly drinking and men. After the baby’s father left I just had this big ache not to be alone. Baby wasn’t that hard to deal with, it wasn’t that.

So Lisa and me worked together, same old thing, typing and filing. She was a bit younger than me but she had lots of friends and had parties nearly every weekend. And every weekend she’d ask me to come, I’d have to bow out, no babysitter. Finally, I couldn’t stand it any more and told her I’d just bring the baby and get her to sleep upstairs and it would work out perfect.

I bundled the baby up with all of her things, plenty of diapers too, an extra bottle, everything. I didn’t even leave until 9p.m. and she’s usually fast asleep by then. When I got to Lisa’s the party was already going. It was pretty loud.

“Just bring her up here.”

I followed Lisa up the stairs, straining for a look see into the party room itself, but it looked like the whole house was filled with people, smoking, drinking, laughing and lots of tall men.

“Is that guy Ralph here?” I asked her, piling up pillows around the baby who lay in the middle of her double bed.

“Ralph? Oh right, the guy I told you about. The sales guy?”

We’d been talking of nothing else for days. I had on new panty hose and flats as Lisa couldn’t remember just how tall he was.

“I think I saw him down in the kitchen, talking to Michelle.”

I panicked. Michelle was gorgeous, smart, beautiful figure and, most of all, had no children yet. I took Baby’s favorite little bunny out of her diaper bag and put it in front of her. She started crying. Lisa looked horrified.

“Oh God,” I said. Not now, why now?

“How do you get it to stop that?” Lisa asked. I could see she was moving toward the door.

“Oh, it won’t take a second. I just need to rock her a little and I’ll be right down, OK?”

“Sure. Whatever.” Lisa gave me one last look before she closed the door. “I don’t know if this is going to work out.”

“Oh, the baby will be no problem at all. I’ll just get her to sleep and be right down.” I could feel the sweat starting under my arms–my good silk blouse.

I picked the baby up and walked her around the room. Below me the party sounded just like the kind of party I’d hoped it would be: plenty of alcohol, plenty of strange, new men.

But the baby was wide awake. I sat on the bed and sat her on my lap. She grabbed onto my hand and then reached for her bunny.

Ralph sounded so perfect for me. Tall, good looking, but not too good looking. Had a job, a nice car, was unattached at the moment. If I didn’t get down there soon though.

The baby was quiet in my arms. I leaned across the bed and laid her down in between the fortress of pillows we’d erected. She had the bunny’s foot in her mouth and was quiet.

I stood up, turned my back on her and headed for the door, stopped at the dresser to look one last time in the mirror. Just as I got my hand on the doorknob, the baby started crying again, only this time she was hysterical, sitting up and trying to climb over the pillows.

An hour later, Baby still wide awake, Lisa came back up stairs.

“No luck, huh?”

I shook my head. I was afraid if I tried to speak I’d break out sobbing.

“Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all?”

I shrugged. I had the baby in my arms and she was nodding off, just as she’d done about twenty other times in the last hour.

“You’re welcome to stay as long as you want, but it’s getting sort of late. Some people have gone home.”

“Oh, God.” I tried to weigh the danger of leaving the baby alone in this room and just going downstairs to see if I could give Ralph my phone number.

“Listen, I’m going to come down in ten minutes whether she’s asleep or not.”

When Lisa closed the door this time, the baby woke up again, sniffed the air a little bit and started crying softly. I set her back down on the bed. I didn’t even stop to look in the mirror, I opened up the door, stepped out and pulled it shut behind me. When I got downstairs the music was so loud I couldn’t hear her crying any more.

By the time I got the baby packed back up and into the car I’d had a couple drinks with Ralph and was feeling pretty damn good. He’d asked for my number and had even been warned about Baby.

I backed out of the driveway. It was two in the morning. I blinked a couple times to straighten out my eyes, feeling a little dizzy, and pulled up short to a stop sign. Baby was sleeping in her carryall in the passenger seat next to me.

Every block had a stop sign. Gave the gas a little extra, I guess, saw another stop sign and stopped pretty hard. The baby flew out of her carrier and was suddenly lying on the floor of the car under the dashboard, still encased in her blankets, still sleeping.

Oh my god, I thought. I’ve killed the baby. I looked over at the empty carrier. I hadn’t run the seatbelt through the carrier, plus I’d put the baby in wrong end out so when I’d stopped it was like she’d been poured out of a gravy tureen and served up onto the floor.

I looked around the intersection. Not a car anywhere to be seen. I blinked my eyes hard again, couldn’t see. God, I was crying, I was talking to myself, I was parked in the dead center of the intersection with a baby on the floor. I couldn’t figure out whether to save the baby or get the car parked safely. I was afraid to drive the car with the baby on the floor.

I reached for the baby. My seatbelt held me back. I looked back up and out the windows in all directions, still no one around. I took off my seatbelt, pushed myself clear across the seat and scooped up the baby. Her beautiful eyes never opened. I touched her cheek, she was still warm. I held her hand and it slowly curled around my finger. She was OK.

I placed her back in her righted carrier. Got her seatbelt situated and then tried rocking the carrier. It didn’t budge. I looked around the car. Nothing. Nobody around. No witnesses. I put my seatbelt back on and started the car again. I pulled out real slow and drove home with one arm on the carrier the whole way.

Just before the baby was born I held my breath as long as I could, not wanting to submerse myself any longer in the pain, wanting out of it any way I could.  But it didn’t work.  It got worse and she came out after all.

She never had dimpled knees, a sign of too much flesh, I thought. Her knees were perfect little round machines which she tried to put into her mouth daily. If she was particularly fussy, I’d run my hands over her legs and behind her knees very lightly and she’d go into a trance and start humming quietly to herself.

**

Friday night, Baby dropped at sitters, Baby: one year old

After I’d pulled myself out of that hippie boy’s bed, I went to the babysitter and picked up the baby. My head was still a little unclear. I took the baby back to his place. It was still early enough. By then he was sitting on the couch in a roommate’s room, completely dressed, smoking something or other.

I didn’t sit. I held the baby in my arms. She was sleeping, looking beautiful. I told him, “This is my baby. She’s a year old.”

He didn’t say anything, just kept smoking then handed the cigarette to another roommate. I smiled, still half in the mood he’d left me in an hour ago and with some vague idea that this was almost like a family.

I heard his roommate say, “She brought her kid over here?”

And I could see that hippie boy’s eyes were dead to me. He was looking somewhere beyond me and nodding his head, smiling a bit. It made me stop smiling.

I heard him say, “Yeah, weird bitch. Like this won’t fuck the kid up or anything.”

But I’d already turned around and headed back to the front door. He’d never make a good father. Maybe I heard wrong. What did they know? They were young, at least ten years younger than me. I was pretty sure he’d never recognize me again.

In bed with the baby’s father, like sinking into a bowl full of jello and rolling and rolling and rolling and breathing it in and living in the jello and never wanting to leave.

I used to dream about the baby’s eyelashes. They were very long and very dark and turned down so much I imagined she’d have trouble seeing through them. When she blinked it was like a slow motion sweep of two darkly fringed fans. I thought, you’ll never need mascara and top-flight photographers will be begging you for your picture. She was unusual that way.

**

The time I left the baby alone, Baby: two weeks old

It was completely due to the baby’s father, that and me going through an intense bout of post-partum depression. The baby’s father was not from here. Let’s just say he was from another country entirely, where women are expected to take care of the children with absolutely no help at all from the men.

I’d been with the baby’s father for a year, and had hoped that once the baby was with us he’d change his mind and his habits and stay home more.

But when the baby was two weeks old and I was completely hysterical from lack of sleep, he decided to leave the apartment one Friday night and go drink with his friends. My mother had already told me she refused to step foot inside our apartment as long as we weren’t married, so the baby’s father was the only help I had.

We both yelled. He flew out the door saying terrible things to me in a language I was trying not to learn. I had on only my flannel nightgown, no shoes or socks. I put my big winter coat on and followed him down the stairs, down the block.

I could see him in the distance getting on the Geary Street bus so I ran to the car, got it started and followed the bus closely, noting each passenger who got off the bus every couple of blocks. The thought passed through my head, I wonder if I could get arrested for stalking a bus.

I followed him all the way downtown where he got out and stood waiting for the connecting bus to take him back to the Mission and his cousins. I parked right in front of him in the bus zone and got out, my coat flapping and my bare feet on the sidewalk.

“You have to come home with me now,” I yelled at him. “I can’t do this by myself.”

There must have been crowds of people out. It was late, maybe ten or eleven on a Friday night, but I couldn’t see them. I only saw him.

The connecting bus pulled up. He turned to me and spit in my face, then he got on the bus.

I watched the bus barely pull out around my car and saw that I’d left my door open. I started weeping uncontrollably, remembering I’d left the baby in the apartment, alone. I couldn’t remember how long I’d been following the bus or if the baby had been asleep when I’d left.  I pulled out into the Friday night traffic and raced home.

Daddy

There is a snapshot Mother has all bundled up in a shoebox, rubber-banded with a stack of other black and white snapshots that never made it into an album. I must have been sitting right next to her when she took it of Daddy because I have two memories of it, one of the snapshot and one of actually being at the beach that day. Though the shot is in black and white, I know the penguins on Daddy’s swim trunks were brown and I know that it was so windy that day the taste of the ocean was constantly in my mouth.

It’s a shot of the wide open sea actually, with Daddy standing with his back to us, his hands on his hips, looking straight out to the far horizon. Daddy’d been a world class swimmer in high school and college but had since put on weight and we didn’t have a pool in our yard big enough for him to swim in.

When Mother called to tell me he had died of heart failure at forty-six, I was in bed with Tim, the boyfriend of my college days. She had worked hard over the last ten years or so of Daddy’s life, to cook food that would keep his weight down, keep him alive. But his heart just gave out.

When he had finished his thesis they gave him a promotion at work. Mother and I went to the graduation ceremonies to watch him get his degree.

It was an incredibly sunny day. Mother wore a spring green cotton dress with gold buttons and carried a white whicker purse. I took a picture of the two of them standing in front of the other graduates’ parents, arm in arm, looking off into the distance. Mother looks tired and worried. Daddy looks relieved and impossibly young.

They look to me like two travelers, stuck in a Polaroid snapshot, at home in the background of graduates and brick buildings, but lost to the one person who wanted them most. I always feel like a baby when I see pictures of them so young.

When it came to publishing, my dream was to do it big. Worldwide availability in every format out there. If you’re in China and you love Gram Parsons, I want you to be able to buy Ray Robertson’s Moody Food. Like, today. And you can.

So that meant a big investment for each title, and that hampered SFWP’s publishing progress…until now.

In partnership with our distributor, the Independent Publisher’s Group, we are now able to go the whole nine yards with a title using a sort of print on demand 2.0 method. It’s cheaper than regular POD, and the title is fully listed and available to catalogers, wholesalers, and resellers worldwide. It’s exactly like pushing out a frontlist title, and it doesn’t drain the bank account.

It’s with this in mind that SFWP’s publishing wing launched an ambitious 2013/2014 slate — including work from NPR’s Alan Cheuse, the New York Times Design Editor Pagan Kennedy, O. Henry and Pushcart winner Richard Currey, Denmark’s premiere literary author Simon Fruelund, our 2001 Awards Program winner Charlotte Gullick, and six more titles — three every spring and fall — through 2015.

And now we want you to join that list. Specifically, we want you to join our Fall, 2014 slate, along with two releases from Pagan Kennedy.

We will be reviewing every entry submitted for possible publication — whether you win the program or not. There really are no limitations. I plan to publish three books each publishing season until our layout guru stops talking to me.

Publication will be in print and all possible ebook formats, listed and available everywhere. We’ll treat each title as a normal release. There’ll be galleys, we’ll pitch for blurbs and reviews, we’ll discuss tour options. We’ll also be giving you 25% of the net sales. Oh, and, it won’t cost you anything. This will not be a vanity press, this will not be self-publication. You’ll join our current authors, and your work will be treated the same as theirs.

She sat next to me on the balcony painting her nails for the fourth time that night. Well, morning now—we’d been awake all night again. Staccato, destructive sounds echoed from a game console inside, and the unknown guy shifted on the faded beach chaise the other side of Gwen, rubbing his nose.

“I nearly went into finance.”

This came to mind as I followed the commuters streaming into the Morgan Stanley building across the street.

Gwen snorted.

“Yeah, right. From what I see you can barely write a check.”

Spite rose in my gut, and I lashed a kick at her chair. Rusted metal screeched, and her brush went awry.

“Hey!”

“Yeah, well that is really hurtful, bitch.”

She returned my dirty look and shifted the chair back, rubbing errant paint from her palm, and gave my shin a light smack of its own with her foot.

“Jerk.”

My annoyance faded, and I turned to the smoke twisting away from my trembling cigarette into the breeze just beyond the railing. Watched the drones emerge from underground and troop into the building with their briefcases and coffee cups. Luxury cars waited at the light before disappearing into a subterranean garage.

Gwen and I have a place on the third floor of The Piedmont, the last ratty building here on the edge of the financial district. Thrown up decades ago, it had long since fallen apart. As the city revitalized the neighborhood block by block, The Piedmont had dropped further down the list for one reason or another, but its time would come. The invisible wall dividing it from the funky new developments with their colorful ground-floor shops and quirky lines, their expensive upper-level condos, and their compact, benchless greenways, was already showing cracks—in the form of men and women in shades and breezy suits snapping photos of the building’s facade. In fact, there was a guy on the street now, looking up at us, an island among the passers-by who hurried along without a glance at our grungy old Piedmont. So we were marking time, but in the meantime, the under-employed, the fixed-income, the dopers and panhandlers, parolees and do-nothings still had a foothold.

Anyway, we live on the third floor, as I said. We’d hooked up while taking classes at the Art Institute a couple years ago. I’d dropped out of the program, and she’d dropped me, but we still shared a place. Our habits suited each other, I guess. She had a sarcastic sense of humor, smoked Merits nonstop and paid most of the rent from her trust fund. I made a passable manhattan, held down a job at a magazine stand, and cleaned up after her. A regular stream of friends, acquaintances, and near strangers, other lost people, streamed through to keep us company, keep us high, and keep us fooled.

“Want some more?” Gwen asked after a minute.

With effort I broke the rigor mortis that had settled in my body. I liked that stiffness, every pore and fiber silent, and leaned forward with a tinge of regret.

“Sure.”

I picked up a bent, tarnished spoon from the dusty folding table between us and tipped some powder from a bit of cellophane onto it. Sparked a flame underneath. Felt dirty and pathetic, but as the warm milky smoke curled into the air, I caught it with a plastic straw, routed it down to my lungs. A metallic taste slid across my tongue, the hair on my arms shimmered, and waves pulsed across my scalp. My shame melted away and comforting imperviousness settled in. As usual it felt like it was there to stay, and I pushed that part of me that knew otherwise down deep inside and smothered it with a filthy, stinking rag.

Gwen huddled forward and took it from me, and I shuddered with contentment, brain buzzing inside my skull. Leaned back with my eyes closed, drifting a few inches above the chair, and felt the early sun on my cheeks, the rumble of a passing truck, the percussive mortars and bomb blasts from the game inside. I was tired but alert, wired in again. We’d been talking nonstop for hours as we depleted our supply—every topic was fascinating on uppers, and every fool’s opinion held some fleetingly elegant new angle.

“So,” she said from a distance.

“Huh? So what?” I opened my lids.

She exhaled a thin stream of vapor, her grey eyes peering at nothing.

“So, what happened, butthead? Why didn’t you become a big, you know,” she waved her cigarette hand and scattered ash all over herself. “Big time moneyman or…whatever.”

She brushed the ashes to the floor, and I edged a bottle full of butts across the table towards her.

“Well, what’s the story, Mr. Celebrity?”

Her teeth chattered and she gripped her sides, shook a chill through as a cloud passed in front of the sun. Speed heightens your sensitivity to every little thing. I savored the bitter aftertaste blooming in my throat and looked down at the office workers through the railing. Thought about those brief days when to be amongst them had been my halfhearted ambition. And I thought about what she hadn’t said but I saw flutter across her glance—how’d I end up such a drugged-out schmuck?

* * * *

When I left for college I planned to study literature but eventually bombed out when I found I’d rather party than keep up with all the reading. My wealthy roommates, meanwhile, were studying economics to become bankers like their fathers, and, taking macro to fulfill a requirement, I found it made sense to me. So I stocked up on statistics and finance, did passably, and through an alumni internship program landed a summer gig at a Smith Barney brokerage house back in Seattle following my sophomore year. Seemed as if it was all going to make sense.

But my old buddy Derek put an end to all of that, five years before it happened.

That summer, though, I was jazzed to be interning downtown. Rode the bus in my tie and windbreaker—my hair was shorter than it is now, and I left my earring at home—with a brown bag lunch packed by Mom. Brought a little anxiety with me, too, like anyone the first day of a new job.

I hopped off in the bus tunnel, Seattle’s twist on the subway, and hiked up the stairs with the rest of the commuters, carrying a backpack in place of a briefcase. Looking up at the street signs, I half-noticed the blue sky peeking through the towers, a green hill full of condos off to the left. Got jostled as I fumbled with the scrap I wrote the address on. Eight-fifty Lincoln Avenue sounded familiar for some reason. I found the street, turned towards the hill, and after a short walk came to Two Lincoln Square, a blue and white skyscraper rising higher than the others nearby. Clamminess immediately crept across my forehead. Now I realized where I was, though I hadn’t been inside the building for years.

In the late 80s, you see, the city had undergone a building boom that transformed much of the downtown skyline. One after another angular or curvy, tall and distinctive towers reached into the sky, in earthy tones of granite, in washed-out blues and reds, sporting spires with decorative balls perched atop, multiple staggered turrets, prominent flagpoles, bold diagonals buttressing the facades. Some approached the height of the black glass and steel Columbia Tower, long the dominant structure in the area, counterpoint to the Space Needle at the other end of the low apron that spread down to the water between Queen Anne and Capitol Hill. Two Lincoln Square emerged as one of the most celebrated, its height making it the second or third tallest, appearing even higher in its location up the slope from the bay at the foot of the hill, hard up against the interstate, with its angled top resembling a captain of industry gazing out to the water, its tall flagpoles whipping the Stars and Stripes and George Washington, beckoning HERE I AM to all of the skyline’s admirers.

The boom had slowed by 1995, the time of my nascent finance career. Most of the new towers were full of upwardly mobile workers busily engaged in the trade and commerce of late 20th century urban life and the supporting businesses that surrounded the financial industry. Law firms, accountants, gyms, coffee shops. The national economy hummed along, and the Emerald City smugly reveled in its pristine reputation.

But I had been inside this building five years before, following my freshman year of high school, when it was still in the midst of construction. The frame had been finished, but many upper floors were still just skeletons of what they would come to be.

After one year in town I had made two good friends, Derek and Jesse. We weren’t members of the popular crowd at Fremont High and spent most of our free time renting videos and going out for pizza and root beer. Both Jesse and I looked up to Derek for his greater ease speaking to girls, most of whom, it’s true, he’d known for years through his parents’ social engagements. Jesse, though more awkward at school, at least had sisters. Girls, and really all social situations, made me break out in a sweat – anything that involved people’s eyes on me, waiting for me to speak up.

We were non-rebellious dorks, with watchful parents and older siblings to emulate. No smoking or drinking, though we may have harbored the desire to do both if given the chance. Least I did, anyway, and Jesse grinned when I hinted about getting buzzed. Derek inevitably wagged his finger in a good-natured way. He had great respect for his stern, successful father and his older brother, an athlete and a brilliant student with a hot girlfriend to boot. Derek, then, was nervous under his calm, polite veneer, and was always focused on reaching a similar level of achievement. Actually, I suppose in reality he despaired of ever living up to their example.

The building boom was in full swing that summer and lured us for our only defiant pastime. We called it “skyscraping”, and it consisted of little more than going as high as we could in these new buildings, and penetrating as many off-limit areas as possible. We weren’t punks. We broke no locks and defied no warning signs. Simply sought the rush of standing high above ground and sneaking through unfinished floors. Touching the tools was even taboo, being terrified of getting injured and having our scheme exposed. We just wanted to get as far up as possible, then return past the oblivious security guards. Weekends were preferable, when enough people were around to blend in with, but the work crews were not.

So that afternoon the three of us hurried up to the lobby’s revolving doors. The grounds crew had begun work on the landscaping at the building’s base, large spaces of dark moist soil dotted with seedlings. Here and there irrigation pipes poked through. Fresh green paint coated tables and benches, and the flocks of sparrows and pigeons had yet to move in.

“Alright,” one of us said. “Stealth mode.”

“Engaged.”

A few casually dressed employees crossed the lobby towards the elevators, and several sightseers lingered at the development’s scale model, which included a shorter companion building, One Lincoln Square, as well as an urban park that sprawled over the partially tunneled freeway. The visitors marveled at the model and the huge modernist sculpture suspended from the three-story high ceiling. We did the same till we sensed that the guards’ attention had shifted, then crossed to the elevator bay.

A balding man stood to one side of the elevator with a folded newspaper. Derek wore an exaggerated look of solemn concentration, trying to make us laugh, as he studied our reflection in the polished metal walls. I pressed the button for the highest floor that didn’t require an access key, and up we sped. When the man got off at floor 35, Derek released his breath and slumped against the wall with relief. I grinned, and Jesse’s lanky frame shook with nervous laughter. We continued up to floor 48. Everything above it was restricted, but we hoped to find a way up by stair.

* * * *

The day of my internship the lobby looked the same, and the security guards still kept watch at the information desk. I swallowed my anxiety and headed for the elevators.

I’d seen the building from a distance many times since last entering, when holiday shopping and traveling to and from the airport. I figured I’d gotten over that day in 1990 and looked forward to getting a taste of the brokerage business.

“Ah, those were good years,” said Paul Brewer a few minutes later. He had graduated from my college, and we found we had lived in the same hall ten years apart.

I listened from a padded chair in front of his desk, windows behind him showing the view from the 30th floor.

“I partied too much,” he continued ruefully. “But you’ve got to at that age, you know. It’s your only chance. Just remember to straighten up for the last couple years, so you make it worthwhile.”

I grinned and looked down and away at the floor, feeling abashed.

“Well, you’ve made a good start,” he went on, waving my embarrassment away. “Econ is the way to go. You’ll find this work is chill, very straightforward, and if you put in the time, you can earn a fair penny. Just as long as you don’t mind getting up at four.”

My jaw dropped before I could stop it.

“Yeah,” he said, grinning. “New York hours. But early in, early out. Markets close at 1.”

I was definitely not a morning person.

“This summer you don’t have to be in until 10. So don’t worry,” he chuckled and stood. “Come on. You’ll mostly be working with the ladies.”

He introduced me to a few of the ladies, who turned out to be brokers assistants. Their desks took up the space between the file and conference rooms and the glass-walled offices of the brokers, all of whom seemed to be on the phone. I observed that with a sense of foreboding, since I wasn’t much of a gabber.

The company occupied two floors, and Paul took me up through the stairwell to the managing partner’s office. The echoey metal stairs immediately brought back my previous visit to the building, and I started to feel tiny bugs scurrying up and down the back of my neck.

In 1990, the 48th floor (there were 55 in all) had been quiet and unfinished. Brown paper ran down the length of the floor and doorframes stood empty all along the hall. I glanced in an office and saw bare studs and framing. It smelled of glue and wood and metal. Our feet left tracks through the sawdust, and we scanned for any sign of security cameras. A door marked Emergency Exit stood ajar, propped by a block of wood.

“Bingo,” said Derek. “Methinks we have found the way.”

Jesse sniggered and glanced nervously around, catching my eye and covering his face. Derek boldly strode through in mock seriousness. The stairwell smelled of paint and reverberated under our feet. We hurried up to the top and found another propped door.

Derek pushed, and sunlight burst in. Fresh air smacked my face, and I blinked as the light swallowed Derek’s silhouette. Jesse huffed up behind me. Outside, the sky hung close, clear blue except for one wispy cloud on the run, and the neighboring buildings leaned aside for us to view the bay a mile or two down the hill. To the left rose the scaffold of a newer tower, flanked by construction cranes, and directly above and behind us the huge flags thundered in the breeze. I could taste sea salt on the wind, and gulls wheeled above, turning as they crested the hill behind us and headed toward the sun-dappled bay. In the water rose distant humps of green islands and beyond them in the haze stood jagged snowcapped peaks. It was a gorgeous day, and the future felt as expansive as that view, limitless, sparkling and bright.

“Man,” said Derek, leaning on the railing. “Look at that.”

“Not bad,” I said, but didn’t get too close. It was nice up there, but I preferred to be behind glass. Jesse collapsed into a folding chair against the wall. A coffee can beside him brimmed with cigarette butts.

“Beautiful day, guys,” continued Derek. “Thanks for coming. Really.”

Derek had been insistent on skyscraping today. He’d wanted to check this view out since the building’s shell had taken shape months before. Truth be told, I was getting kind of tired of these expeditions, but the next day he was leaving on a family trip to Egypt, and he’d wanted to do this first. He said he wanted a good memory to take with him on the trip, which he didn’t seem enthusiastic about. I didn’t get that; my family only had money for camping trips, and a trip halfway around the world was just a dream. And Jesse’s parents were each remarried and preoccupied with toddlers. But, we actually hadn’t hung out much the past few weeks, for one reason or another, and Derek had insisted.

“It’s beautiful,” he said again.

Something in his voice drew my eye and I saw what looked like a tear sliding down his cheek. He was looking not out to the water but at me. Well, not at me exactly—through me. I’d have thought the wind was just making his eyes water, except for that note in his voice.

Derek was a strange bird. Friendly and polite like the Eagle Scout he was, but he really didn’t like being around people. They made him nervous, but he told me he felt he had to be courteous—again, he took the Scouting Law to heart. He was not one to hang and shoot the shit in general, except during those times designated for that purpose, as when we got together for pizza and movies. If work had to be done, he focused on it, always aware of the ease with which everything came for his older brother. It put him on edge, an edge that he navigated with disciplined focus on whatever he “should be doing”. Which is why two months earlier he’d somehow missed hearing about Claire’s death.

Claire died from an asthma attack in a swimming pool, sank to the bottom before anyone noticed. The next morning there was an announcement in first period, and everyone spoke in hushed tones the rest of the day. The mood hadn’t lifted after lunch when I saw Derek in American Government. This was ordinarily a relaxed class.
Mr. Richards was one of those hip young teachers who wore a tweed sport coat over his polo shirt and encouraged banter and joking as we debated current events. Ten minutes into a very quiet class, Derek, who unlike me was never shy about speaking up, considering it important to keep the conversation going, suddenly burst out.

“How come everyone’s so solemn today?” he said with a chuckle. “It’s like someone DIED.”

My jaw dropped, you could feel the entire class freeze, and after a beat one of the girls sobbed. Mr. Richards just stared at him with a confused expression.

“Yes, someone did,” I mouthed, eyes wide.

After he realized his mistake, he stammered an apology, his face blotchy. How he could go the entire day without hearing about the death was mystifying and also so very typical. Stuck in his own world, adamantly refusing to be involved in conversation with anyone when there was class work or studying to do. I felt pity and stupendous irritation, and, of course, being a little jerk, I had to rub it in, telling Jesse about it later and ribbing Derek. He hadn’t reacted well.

“It’s not. FUCKING. Funny,” he drilled into me over his coal-black eyes.

After that he’d been subdued for weeks, not interested in getting together. I’d hoped the experience would chill him out a bit, but if anything he became more bottled-up, and his unfailing cheerfulness came off as plastic and brittle.

Paul Brewer left me in the conference room with another intern named Susan, who had started a week earlier and already knew the scoop on the place. Our first task was to sort through leads to determine who to cold-call with stock offers. I was bored within thirty seconds and read the faded cards with distaste. They’d been printed out a long time ago, and notations in the corners indicated that these people had been solicited several times. Mrs. Ethel Starling. Ms. Velma Pierce. Clara Stoddard. They had the ring of elderly widows. My collar itched, and my leg bounced constantly. Susan, a sharp-eyed blonde in a business suit, rattled on about the people in the office and the “packages” they were offering to clients. I began to suspect I had no hope of outshining her this summer. I was surprised, though, both at how little I cared and how quickly the time passed.

“Well, we can break for lunch now,” Susan said after awhile. “Want to join me in the park downstairs?”

I swallowed but, never quick, could think of no reason to decline. She was cute, after all.

The garden park had fully grown in since the last time I’d entered it. It hugged the side of the building in a series of terraces. A row of benches and tables were arranged along a leaded pebble walk, mossy ground cover crept neatly along the border, and lush rhododendron spilled from planters. A stream flowed along river rocks leading from a waterfall at the far end, obscuring the sound of the freeway beyond an ivy-covered wall.

I began to feel some trepidation as we entered the glade, sprinklers running among the greenery, overflowing rivulets of water meandering towards small drains. Several people occupied tables shaded by bright red canvas umbrellas. The sides of the skyscraper vaulted into the air next to us. The water, the muffled traffic, a jet passing overhead, all converged to a deafening roar. Birds twittered obnoxiously above us; a tightness in my chest hemmed me in. Susan seemed a little ridiculous out here, lips flapping and expelling crumbs, talking about life at her small Oregon school, shyly mentioning some boy. I chewed a rubbery turkey sandwich and tried to follow the thread of their romance.

A pool of water between the stones caught my eye, sprinkler runoff dammed up by some stray clippings. A reflection from the red umbrellas shimmered at me, like a slowly creeping pool of blood. And then I saw Derek face down, limbs twisted absurdly, sprawled across the tiny stones, the sounds of traffic and gurgling water merging with sirens and thundering chopper blades.

* * * *

Jesse had already turned back and made the first flight down when I realized Derek wasn’t following. I had that funny feeling again, something caught in my throat. I hesitated and turned back.

“Hold up, Jess.”

I pushed the door back open and there he went, this half smile on his face, hands in the air as if he was holding up the clouds. Then his face disappeared and I was looking at Elliot Bay again, off in the distance. Sunshine glinting off wave crests, a ferry chugging into the harbor. I took one step towards the edge but then threw myself backwards, stumbling down the first flight of stairs. Jesse’s fuzzy face, his mouth moving, a roaring in my ears, our footsteps reverberating as we hurtled down the stairs.

* * * *

My head reeled, and my food lurched back up and splattered the table between us.

“Oh!” went Susan.

Temples throbbing, I wiped at my mouth, and stumbled backwards just as I had at the top five years earlier. Steadied myself on the side of the building. Walked down to the sidewalk and didn’t look back, Susan already far away.

And that was the end of my storied career in finance.

* * * *

I glanced at Gwen. Eyebrows raised, lips parted, her smoke tipped by an inch of ash, she stared into the middle distance. The guy on the other side of her had woken at some point and was roasting some crystal while slowly shaking his head.

“That is some fucked up shit, dude.”

I had no idea who this guy was. Doubted Gwen did either. My feeling of invincibility had worn off, my jaw ached, and the morning had grown cold and grey. I felt like an insect again, my speed-fed urge to prattle on and on completely spent. Gwen broke out of her trance and waved her hands vaguely, and ashes scattered.

I know Derek’s not the only reason I’m chasing the dragon on a Wednesday morning, killing time till my dead-end job. I had no taste for the camaraderie, the competitiveness of the business world, no urge to climb the ladder, basically no respect for bosses. I’m here because I want to be. But you see, that day, afterward, I couldn’t face anyone. The paramedics, the police, Derek’s folks. Couldn’t handle all the attention, the questions, the heartache. As soon as possible I left Jesse to deal with it. And I still see Derek’s eyes as he dropped out of sight, in my sleep, among crowds at parties. At the edge of my vision, just around the corner. When I look again, he’s vanished.

Basically, everyone is eligible, as long as you aren’t receiving the support of a major publisher or you’ve won the SFWP award in the past. But many folks tend to be unsure about what qualifies as a “major publisher,” and, certainly in these strange days of publishing, that’s a fair question.

By and large, a major publisher is still what you think — Random House, Viking, penguin, etc. Folks who have the big glittering offices and swim in the big pond. But, with the rise of small presses, it’s important to make something of a distinction. We don’t want the breakaway indie press author of the year topping the bestseller lists and getting the SFWP prize.

Sadly, stopping that scenario from happening boils down to how much money the publisher is able to put into the title. The industry — still Old School, in many ways — considers a book’s qualities not based off of buzz from the public, or talent, but on how much the publisher says the advertising budget is going to be, and whether or not the publisher makes co-op fees available to booksellers. Essentially, buying their way into reviews and sales. Want to get on all those B&N shelves? There’ll certainly be organic sales there, but you won’t be able to push several thousand copies through the door unless you’re willing to put money on the table (and cheerfully lose it). The average marketing cut-off is $20,000. If a publisher says that they aren’t willing to spend at least that much on marketing a book, then they (and the book) will not be taken seriously. The chance is always there for some insane success story, but it’s going to be solely on the back of chance, and/or a tireless author who just does the forever-tour. Even then, it won’t make millions. Publishing is a business where a bestseller is determined by the low thousands. The typical book from a small press is considered successful if it sells 1000-5000 copies. Passing that 5000 mark is certainly possible (two SFWP titles have done so), but it’s not the norm.

With that in mind, we opened the Literary Awards Program to small presses last year… If your book doesn’t benefit from a marketing budget and is languishing in the warehouse, then we want it. We’ll take the bound copy, as well (as long as you aren’t a student or friend of either Mr. Morrell or Mr. Gutkind). With ten titles — and three more planned this year, we know that publication, in the micro-press world, is an uphill struggle.

Of course, we will be reviewing each entry and, if we deem it ineligible, we’ll refund the reading fee. No problem.

We also will not be blocking entries based on subject matter, language, etc. There’s no censorship at SFWP, and we don’t care about marketability. This isn’t a contest designed to further ourselves. It’s designed to recognize and reward excellence. There’s no publisher’s catalog in ind, no hot topics we care about. We want to see what’s out there.

We’re also going to start a pilot program this year to publish our winners — whatever their genre or style or approach — as ebooks and order-to-order print titles. There’s no cost to the author (and low cost on our side) so, for the first time, SFWP will be providing a medium to get these winning voices out to the world. More on that later…