Ryan Eshoff
Scout at 5, and 35, and 65

Earlier this year I returned to Maycomb.

Teaching high school English necessarily made me a re-reader, and more specifically, teaching  high school English necessarily made me a re-reader of To Kill a Mockingbird. Margaret Atwood once wrote in the New York Times that repeat reading offered her “comfort, familiarity, the recurrence of the expected.” Harold Bloom urges us, in his posthumously- published Bright Book of Life, to re-read novels “to find old friends still living and to make new ones.”

I return to Maycomb because of Scout. There she is, Harper Lee’s precocious narrator, coming of age in the Depression-era South, introducing us to her brother Jem and her father Atticus, and learning about folks, for better or mostly for worse. Next to me on the couch for this re-read is my Scout. My Scout is a goldendoodle, my 30th birthday present who turned five this year; she too was born in Alabama, and she came of age during the pandemic, is overly attached to her father, and treats everyone with equal affection, for worse or mostly for better.

My wife has relatives in Alabama from whom we got the dog, which required a flight to Tennessee and a two-hour drive south into Florence (five hours more down Interstate 65 would have gotten us to Monroeville, Harper Lee’s hometown and the inspiration for Maycomb). The Alabama connection was enough for me to justify naming the doodle Scout. But the longer we’ve had her, the more I’ve considered that there is more to the naming choice than my subconscious was willing to concede at the time.

Mockingbird was published 65 years ago, and though it qualifies for Medicare now, Scout Finch’s inquisitiveness and idealism remain as youthful as ever. Generations after her literary birth, she still playfully torments Dill and impishly snoops around the Radley house. To pick up the novel again in its seventh decade is to return, with adult Scout’s guidance, to childhood adventure.

In naming my pup after her, I have brought Scout to life. The goldendoodle is a walking allusion, a living, breathing, wagging, woofing manifestation of an “old friend,” so sayeth Harold Bloom, who is otherwise confined to the page and to the mind’s eye. Might this explain, at least in part, the existence of a human urge to name our pets after beloved literary characters? Consciously or not, maybe I chose the dog’s name in an attempt to dictate my Scout’s personality, or at least the facets of it I really want to recognize. Last fall, journalist Jesse Singal penned a piece for the Times describing his foray into the evidence for “nominative determinism”: the notion that a person’s name can somehow, someway, dictate aspects of their  life down the road. “I consider myself a natural skeptic” on the theory, Singal concedes, before adding: “part of me wants to be able to enjoy the concept and the mystery of phenomena like nominative determinism without worrying whether they’re true in the peer-reviewed sense.”

Undoubtedly I fall into the large population of humans who according to Singal “have a powerful drive toward theories that simplify the world and that explain outcomes that otherwise seem random,” but I’m extending his whimsical concession of mystery to the names and personalities of our dogs. How can you blame me, when my goldendoodle greets me enthusiastically as I come home from work each day? Or when she growls under her breath at the old lady in our neighborhood who yells at us to stay off her lawn while we walk, a la Mrs. Henry Lafayette Dubose? This do, too, remains naive as ever about the nuances of the world around her (maybe you shouldn’t have eaten that, I say to her, again). She is a Scout!

Our good friends have a Sawyer, a golden retriever mischievous and playful and down for any adventure (especially if there’s mud involved). My mom had a Luna, a yellow labrador retriever flighty and loyal. Another friend had a Tonks, these latter two no doubt representing a collective effort to preserve some of the Harry Potter zeitgeist in those respective homes. “We called her Tonks because she was all the dog colors,” Tonks’ owner told me. “But funny thing – she ended up being clumsy, just like the book Tonks, so the name fit even better.”

Perhaps our canine friends come to represent the qualities we cherish most about our favorite characters. Actress Mary Badham’s portrayal of Scout Finch, in the 1962 film adaptation, is certainly classic in its own right. But the little girl in Harper Lee’s neighborhood feels even more alive to me when my Scout follows in her namesake’s footsteps, bounding down the sidewalk “on a spree of sheer relief, leaping and howling.”

In April of this year, my pup and I had our “lap day” – the day that owner and dog are the same age, before the progression of dog years vaults the canine past her person. The relative shortness of a dog’s life is a not-okay reality of this world, and I can’t help but think that in giving mine the name of a literary legend, I am trying to force a degree of timelessness, of eternal youth, into her own existence. Who endures better, who stays frozen in time more reliably, than our most iconic characters? And who better to grant that perpetuity to than our canine companions? Would that my Scout could be just as vigorous, just as available, 60 years hence.

Dogs and books remain two of our simplest, greatest pleasures. Scout and Scout each offer me the purest form of companionship, free from pettiness and conflict and other human foibles, not to mention the streaming soul-suck of screen time and social media. The Scouts are more steadfast, more veracious, more enlivening than most of what modern society has to offer elsewhere. I imagine that, in spite of its many flaws, I will find myself returning to Mockingbird again and again: my best friend lives in those pages, and always will.

 

 

 

Mesquite (for Tyler)
Seth Fox

 

There was a fault in our combination. I’d almost rather take the blame for it myself than discuss it with you, dissect and spoon the guts and goo again between your cup and mine. But there comes a time when you’ve run out of everything but courage, and this is that time. What you’ll find on the altar after the incense smoke has cleared is this, my final offering to you, provided by my courage.

 

It’s important to start at the beginning. No, not at the very beginning but where the path ended and the wilderness began. And I feel it’s important to remind you that losing sight of you was never a choice. There were distractions.

 

It’s important to remind you that I packed snacks and bottles of water and assumed you’d packed the first aid kit.

 

It’s important to remind you that sometimes God is an active noun.

 

It’s important to remind you that sometimes God is an apple.

 

It’s important to remind you that sometimes God is a fat, white cat.

 

It’s important to remind you that sometimes God is a drag queen.

 

It’s important to remind you that sometimes God is chemotherapy.

 

It’s important to remind you that sometimes God is in the smell of the pages of an old, used book.

 

It’s important to remind you that sometimes God is a perfect piece of baklava. 

 

And sometimes God is good sex.

 

And sometimes God is a stoplight.

 

And sometimes God is the Arizona sand.

 

Let me tell you about a man named Boyce Luther Gulley.

 

Boyce Luther Gulley had tuberculosis, and Seattle is no place to have tuberculosis, so he left his wife and daughter and moved to the desert and, having gathered rocks and broken glass and rejected car parts and railroad ties and whatever else he could find, he cobbled together a castle and, after he died in 1945, it was inherited by his daughter Mary Lou, who lived in it until she became an old woman and died. Boyce Luther Gulley made the most of his time in the wilderness.

 

I used to think of Boyce Luther Gulley with wonder and envy. I wish I had known him, even for a minute, even as a ghost, even a peripheral someone in a dream.

 

“Boyce,” I would ask him, “how did you do it? How did you survive the wilderness?”

 

And I imagine he’d pause, slip his fingers inside his pockets, fix his doleful gaze upon me, and say:

 

“There’s a tree that grows out there in the desert. A tree with 40 daughters. She cares for wanderers. She cared for me once.”

 

“Yes,” I’d remember. “I knew her once, too.”

 

See, after I’d lost sight of you in the wilderness, in the desert, I wandered for a time and finally made a home for a while in her shade. Her crown was the first green thing I’d seen out there in that hot sea of beige, and beige, and more beige.

 

So much beige.

 

Me and the cats, a few books, a cup, a bowl, a plate, a spoon, a fork, and a fire in the night, and the stars, and sometimes an owl, and doves, and lizards, and the breeze, and spring rain, and sweet sleep under her broad canopy. She was old, and arthritic, twisted, and gangly. She asked for nothing. She kept watch.

 

During the day I would hunt for purpose and traces of you, for tire tracks or footprints, for bread crumbs or bones. And each day I’d return empty handed to her. She’d sway and she’d bend, and she’d whisper “I’ve watched for you”, and the cats would stretch themselves awake and hold me in contempt for having been away so long, and in her dappled shade we’d dine on bread and rain water. We were happy. We were safe and loved.

 

They came for her on Earth Day. They came for her while I was away. With chains and saws and kicks and tugs and snaps They felled her. I returned to a crime scene. I wept for her. I wept for the doves, now displaced. I wept for the owl, now displaced. I wept for the breeze, now displaced. I wept and I wept and cried out for you, wailed your name into the cup of my hand, shook it loose into the wind.  I made a poultice with tears and seed pods, bits of bark and branches, and on her stump I wiped it in the shape of a big, wet heart. And we, the cats and I, exhausted in the open, slept. Then I gathered my books, my bowl, my plate, my fork, my spoon and my cup, and with each shoulder feline tenanted, moved along and away. And within a day I found your camp among the saguaros. You took us in, no questions. And you and I, now knowing, cupped our hands around our mouths.

 

“I’ll watch for you,” we whispered, and then shook free.

 

It’s important to remind myself that we made peace.

 

It’s important to remind myself that we did our best.

 

It’s important to remember that we made the most of our time in the wilderness.

 

In the desert stands the mesquite, a tree with 40 daughters. Its seed pods, once fallen, dry and can be ground into flour, which, with a little water, transforms into bread dough. The Navajo know. The Yavapai know. Boyce Luther Gulley knew. Wanderers find sustenance in her fruits and solace in her shade. She asks for nothing.

 

It’s important to remember there is beauty in the barren.

 

It’s important to remember sometimes God is a tree. 

 

 

 

Kathie Giorgio
The Pink Bed

 

It all began with the Barbies. Holly knew that asking for new Barbies in July, not on Christmas, not on her birthday, was an extreme request, but she made requests so rarely, she thought she might have a chance. Her mother always called her “my serious girl,” and Holly knew that one of the perks of being the serious girl was that the seriousness was reflective; she was always taken seriously. What went with that seriousness as well was a lack of asking for anything frivolous. She asked for pajamas for Christmas, and sweaters for her birthday, both of which happened to be on the same day. Her parents had to guess what "fun" gifts to give her, though Holly truly was happy with the practical. She was a perfect fit for a Christmas birthday; she never minded that she might have been shorted some attention because the day’s fuss was shared with her siblings. It just meant she celebrated everything, Christmas, her birthday, nice and tidy, on one day. It was here, it was gone, life returned to normal. She was also particularly good with math, just like her mother; she studied carefully what things cost before she put them on her Christmas birthday list, and she knew her parents spent more on her than on her siblings. Everything balanced.

But on this day in July, when she was ten years old, she didn’t want balance. Even though it wasn’t December, not Christmas or her birthday, she wanted her mother to buy her, only her, new Barbie dolls.

This wasn’t practical at all.

Even though she was ten, the first double-digit age that Holly felt implied a new maturity, she still enjoyed the Barbie Dream House she and her sisters received for Christmas three years back. Holly’s older sister Heloise was thirteen now and totally ignored the three-story tall plastic dollhouse. Holly’s younger sister, Hester, was only nine, but she hated anything to do with being indoors. She spent most of her time on roller skates in the warm weather, ice skates in the cold. There were two brothers in the house as well, and they wouldn’t be caught dead playing with Barbies. Holly wondered sometimes about the brother who truly was dead; she was three years old when Holden was born, and he was only three weeks old when he was gone. Holly vaguely remembered holding him a couple times, but that was it. While she imagined that missing baby brother as angelic, what she knew about boys and brothers made her doubt that he would have horned his way in on the dollhouse.

Holly loved the dollhouse because it seemed like it was all hers. She didn’t have to share. The dollhouse was kept in the basement, called “the playroom” by her parents. The dollhouse was set up beneath one of the egress windows. Often, a stream of sunlight fell in. The rug her mother provided, so that the girls wouldn’t have to sit on a cold concrete floor, was many colors, and Holly liked to pretend it was a massive flower garden. Holly felt tucked away when she played, like she truly was in secret, away from everyone else in the family. She would set up scenes with the dolls she had, even though they were pretty beaten up after three sisters’ worth of playing. Sitting back on the carpet her mother provided so that she and her sisters wouldn’t have to sit on the cold concrete floor, she ran the scenes through her imagination, through her mind, then she shifted everything around and moved on to other storylines and plots. Now, she wanted to stage a wedding. Weddings couldn’t feature bedraggled couples. It needed to be elegant.

Holly didn’t know why a wedding felt so pressing right now. She’d never been to one, and had only seen a few on television. But it seemed to her, as she was growing older, that being part of a couple was important. It seemed to be like a step, something you rose up to, going from being one to being two. Like going from single-digit ages to double, likely for the rest of your life unless you managed to live until one-hundred.

And so she wanted to play it out, the way she saw it in her mind.

Holly found her mother sitting at her desk in the large landing at the top of the stairs. It was the middle of the afternoon in the middle of summer vacation, and her siblings were all scattered. Hester was roller skating at the school’s playground, Heloise was reading a book on the passenger swing in the back yard, Henry could be anywhere, and Harold was in his room, doing something behind a closed door. Holly’s mother, like always, was at her computer, mostly staring at the screen, but sometimes tapping at the keyboard. Holly’s dad’s drafting table was vacant, her dad off to work.

“Mom?” Holly said. “I have a request.”

Her mother was already smiling when she turned away from her desk. Holly knew what her first three words would be. “My serious girl. This sounds like a business transaction. What are you requesting?”

“I want to hold a wedding in the Barbie house. And I need two new Barbies for that, and wedding clothes for them.”

Her mother nodded and seemed to consider. “You can’t use the Barbies we have?”

Holly shook her head. “They’re all messed up. Heloise gave them haircuts once. A couple are missing arms. Hester used permanent marker to give some of them tattoos.”

Her mother laughed. “You’re right. That would make for a pretty sad wedding.” She turned back to her computer and saved whatever it was she was working on. “Let’s go.” She hollered down the hallway, “Harold, are you up here?”

The boys’ bedroom door opened and Holly’s oldest brother Harold looked out. “I’m here. Kinda busy though.”

Her mother took Holly’s hand. “Not so busy that you can’t move downstairs and keep an eye on everything. Holly and I have to run an important errand. Be back soon.”

Like her mother, Holly ignored her brother’s groans. She was delighted to climb into the front seat of the minivan and she was relieved that no one came running from out of nowhere to ask to come along. Holly marveled at the extra leg room and the view through the windshield. As the fourth child, she rarely had the privilege of sitting in the front seat. Her brothers called it “shotgun”, and she had no idea why. “Where are we going?” she asked her mother.

“Well…” They pulled out of the driveway. “What do you think? Target or Toys R Us?”

Holly considered. “Target is probably cheaper, but Toys R Us has more selection. Not just with the dolls, but the clothes too.” She nodded. “Toys R Us, please.”

Her mother smiled. “My serious – and practical - girl.”

At the toy store, Holly wondered if she made the wrong choice. There was indeed a larger selection, but the huge aisle devoted only to Barbie dolls and Barbie paraphernalia was overwhelming. Her mother wandered back and forth while Holly moved more slowly, carefully considering her too-many options. Eventually, she had two Barbie girls in her arms and she turned toward the clothing.

Her mother looked at her choices. “Two girls?” She brightened. “Oh! You need a bridesmaid. So you actually want three Barbies. That’s okay. But now, you need to choose the groom.” She herded Holly back to the dolls and they stood in front of a much smaller selection of male Barbie dolls.

Holly frowned. “We don’t have to buy three dolls, Mom. These two are fine.”

“But you want a wedding, right? You need a groom.” Her mother patted Holly’s shoulder. “It’s okay. It won’t break the bank. Just pick one.”

Holly didn’t really like any of the boys. Their smiles seemed stuck, like their lips were sticking to their brilliant white teeth. But then she went with the one that looked the most like her father, which was to say, he didn’t look much like her father at all, because her father looked more like the dads on television shows than a Barbie doll. But at least the doll had similarly colored hair.

Picking out a suit for the guy Barbie was easy. Black. It came with a red bowtie. But wedding dresses for the girls…there were so many, and they were so pretty! Some had veils, some had tiaras. Finally, Holly narrowed her choice down to two bridal gowns. One was short, and one was floor-length. Holly liked the variety.

Her mother looked over her shoulder. “So which one are you going to get? I like the long one.”

Holly, the dolls tucked under her arm, held a dress in each hand. “Can’t I get both of these? Each girl can wear one, can’t they?”

Holly’s mother shook her head. “They can’t both wear bridal gowns, hon. One big rule about weddings is that everyone can look nice, but the bride has to be the prettiest. No one, not even the bridesmaids, can show up the bride. So let’s put one dress back, and then pick out a pretty bridesmaid gown.”

Holly reluctantly put the shorter dress back. She was pleased, though, when she found another gown that was basically a replica of the first, just in a different color. Pink. It was short too and had sequins in all the same places as the short bridal gown. It had a tiara and the dress was strapless. “This one then,” she said, showing it to her mother.

“Excellent choice.”

Even so, as they moved away from the Barbie aisle, Holly looked longingly back at the white version. The pink was an okay substitute, but it just didn’t quite match the way she pictured the wedding in her head. “Mom,” she said, “hold these. I have to go to the bathroom. Be right back.” She shuffled everything into her mother’s arms and then ran toward the restroom, which she knew was in the back of the store. Turning a corner, out of her mother’s sight, she returned instead to the Barbie aisle, where she grabbed the short white bridal gown.

Returning to her mother, Holly carefully kept one arm behind her back, holding the small package with the dress in it. As her mother carefully rolled everything back into Holly’s arms, Holly deftly juggled the three dolls and four outfits, slipping the short bridal gown into the middle, then left the pink gown on a shelf when her mother turned away to enter the checkout lane.

After everything was put in the bag without her mother noticing, Holly breathed a sigh of relief. She held tightly onto the bag all the way home, making sure that no turn or sudden stop would cause it to spill.

“So when’s the wedding?” her mother asked as they walked into the kitchen.

“Tomorrow, I think. I have to get the house ready first.” Holly kissed her mother on the cheek, thanked her, then ran with her bag down to the basement. The wedding would take place on the flower garden rug.

Settling down, Holly began to incorporate furniture from the inside of the house, doing her best to make sure the scene matched what was in her mind. She wondered if she could have gotten away with asking her mother to buy new Barbie furniture, intended for a wedding, but then she shook her head.

That just wasn’t practical. She could make do. It was the dolls that were important.

 

****

 

Holly waited until lunch was done the next day, watching her siblings and her mother scatter to their afternoon activities. Hester strapped on her roller skates and clomped down the porch steps to roll off and join her friends. Heloise moved to a shady spot in the yard to read a book and listen to music on her prized possession, a bright pink iPod. She never let anyone else touch it, though once, when Holly was home sick from school, she snuck into Heloise’s room and listened to it. Harold was shut away in his room again. Their mother found him a used calculus textbook at the book sale at the public library, and he was happily figuring his way through it. Henry disappeared, and Holly knew this meant he likely slipped away to that same library. He preferred to go by himself.

Holly filled a glass with ice and Diet Coke for the toast she planned to share with the dolls and carefully carried it downstairs.

After putting the boy doll into his suit, she set him aside, just off the carpet. Then she busied herself with dressing the girls. One had long glorious wavy blonde hair, and Holly put her in the long gown, knowing her hair would look beautiful under the veil. The other doll had red hair, short and bouncy, and the short gown was perfect on her, the curls holding the tiara firmly. The dolls, with their pointed toes pushed into wobbly heels, couldn’t stand without help, so Holly leaned them against the dollhouse’s garage and thought for a minute.

Then she rescued the boy doll and his suit. She decided he would be the minister. Someone had to marry them.

After leaning the minister against a tall table that was usually used for a fancy vase with plastic flowers in the foyer of the dollhouse, but would serve as a podium for the wedding, Holly picked up the girls. She stood them beside each other, and she moved their hands so that their stiff fingers touched. In her vision, they held hands tightly. Their skin would be soft, plump, despite Barbie doll thinness, palm against palm, and maybe one of them would be more nervous than the other, and her skin would be a little slick with sweat. Holly smiled at the thought of their laughter. Then she held them upright by their waists and marched them slowly in rhythm to the solemn music she heard playing in her head until they reached the podium. Quietly, reverently, she began to whisper the words she imagined would be spoken at a wedding.

I will marry you, and I will love you forever. No matter what you do. No matter what you think. No matter what.

It was the most serious promise she could think of. She was startled when her mother’s voice interrupted the ceremony.

“Oh, Holly, I’m sorry! Did that other white dress somehow get mixed up in our stuff?” Her mother sank down to her knees on the carpet. “Shoot. Well, that’s okay.” She took the whole scene in, her eyes roving between the boy doll and the girls. “So are the friends holding hands while they go up the aisle so the bride can meet her groom? Is one the mom? Or are they sisters?”

Holly didn’t know what to say. But her mother didn’t seem to notice.

“You have it set up so nice! It looks like a garden wedding! Here, let me help.” She plucked the long-gowned Barbie out of Holly’s hand and set her carefully next to the boy, so they both leaned on the podium. After looking quickly through the dollhouse, her mother chose a bench from the base of the big pink canopy bed and set it up just behind the couple, off to the side behind the girl. “Here. You can pretend this is a pew like in the church, and the bridesmaid can sit while she watches. That way, you don’t have to try to hold them standing up all at once.” Getting up, she bent to give Holly a quick hug. “Have fun with your wedding. It’s beautiful. I hope you have something spectacular planned for the honeymoon!” She looked down at the little scene. “Maybe, next time we go out, we can stop at the store and get another boy for the bridesmaid. He could be a groomsman. She looks a little lonely.” She turned and went back up the stairs.

Holly stared at her dolls. This didn’t match the wedding in her head at all. She reached for the girls, preparing to set the scene back up the way she imagined, but then she stopped.

This must be the scene in her mother’s head. Her mother, who married her father. And Harold, up in his room, doing math, held hands with a girl all the way home from school on that last day before summer break. Heloise, under the tree, was reading a book called Good In Bed by an author with the improbable name of Jennifer Weiner, a name that made Harold and Henry snicker behind their hands, held to their mouths. Heloise had to beg to read the book and had to get permission from her mother to do so. When Holly asked, Heloise told her it was about a girl and a boy. Well, a man and a woman. Which the Barbies were supposed to be. And Hester skated with her friends, but spent a lot of time being chased by a boy in black rollerblades. Hester often came back from skating with her voice hoarse from shrieking, but she giggled with Heloise about the boy. Holly listened, but didn’t join in. She didn’t understand what was so funny.

Holly folded her hands in her lap and closed her eyes to the Barbie wedding set up by her mother.  In her head, she kept her story, followed it and finished it, all the way to the kiss between the two girl Barbies, which she’d pictured all along. She raised the glass of Coke in the air, said, “Clink!” and drank, probably more than she should for a toast, which seemed to demand dainty sips, but Holly was thirsty.

Then Holly emptied her mind of the vestiges of her story. She switched to clean-up mode. Picking up the blonde bride and the boy Barbie, she hesitated, but then laid them on the pink bed. She thought about stripping them, but she just couldn’t make herself do so. She covered them with the pink tufted bedspread instead. The girl Barbie’s hair, woman, she reminded herself, fell like a waterfall over the side, brushing the pretend hardwood floor.

Holly studied the short-gowned Barbie, still sitting on the bench in the rug flower garden.  She wondered where she belonged. It didn’t seem right to throw her in the shoebox where the Barbies were stored, tucked neatly to the side of the house, but she didn’t belong in the big pink Dream Home either. Not with the boy and the girl. Man and woman. But not with the bedraggled Barbies either. Finally, Holly just left the doll sitting by herself on the bench, surrounded by flowers of all colors, but looking at the Dream Home. At all the rooms, with the tidy furniture in pink. At the long blonde hair, cascading to the floor from the pink canopy bed.

The doll did look lonely. She matched very much with the new scene in Holly’s mind now.

At the top of the stairs, Holly turned off the light and shut the door.

 

 

 

Roger Mitchell
Starting from Somewhere

 

“We live in a camp.”-- Wallace Stevens

 

I have discovered recently that knowledge is power. Why it has taken me so long to discover this (I am forty) I shall never know, and hence some illusive aspect of power shall forever be kept from me. I have discovered it, however, thanks to experiences I shall here try to relate, and, as a consequence, my life has been profoundly altered.

My name is Keith Koslowski. Keith C. Koslowski. The “C” is for Casimir, the Polish monarch, a successful imposter, bringing the new Mediterranean despotism to the marshy fiefdoms of the Slavic plain, pitting Tartars against Hussars, or was it Boyars against Magyars, wooing the Teutonic Knights against the expressed wishes of the Pope in Rome, luring the Jews, cementing the Diaspora, founding a university (knowledge codified in the wake of power), forging a currency. It was the industrialism of its time. Everybody did it, that is. Centralize or die.

Once, when he was drunk, my father said I was descended from Casimir. “Stop telling your son lies,” my mother shouted at him, her hair fallen out of its bun. “Shut up, woman,” he said, reaching for me (I was eight) and missing, pulling the only floor lamp we had over onto him as he fell into the couch. The next morning he was asleep on the floor, his arm still around the smashed lamp, his cheek grazed by a broken lightbulb.

My mother wanted a normal boy. Well, normal for her, anyway. That’s why she named me Keith. Nobody in Milwaukee was named Keith. Everybody was German or Italian or Czech or Irish. If they weren’t Polish. I don’t know, maybe she heard it in a movie. Anyway, she was tired of being southside Polish. She was surrounded by Southside Poland as if she’s never gotten off the boat. Her dreams were of the northeast suburbs, Whitefish Bay, Fox Point, River Hills, wide lawns, deep driveways, lush bushes, where everyone, she was sure, every boy that is, was named Cyril or Lance. Mrs. Kubacki’s Stashu now lived in Gross Point. I was told that every week for seven years. Do you know what it does to an impressionable youth to be told every week for seven years that Stashu Kubacki has a nice house in Gross Point?

“Fuck Stashu Kubacki,” I shouted in the seventh year, after my patience had run out. (It was the first time I ever used that word, home or not.) Then I ran out, leaving my mother stuck between a sob and some primitive old High Slavonic cuss word. My father pushed past her in his armless undershirt and threw his beer can at me.

“Ungrateful,” he shouted. “Who gave you life?”

Let him choke on his blasphemy, I thought then. Now, I think of his sacrifice. He had just opened the beer.

 

*

 

So, there I was, thirty-three years old, an only child, driven from home in a homeless world.

Christ died at thirty-three. Napoleon was probably somewhere deep in Russia. I don’t know that for sure. It’s next year that I study French history, in March and April. May, Italian. June, Portuguese.

Each country a different month, sometimes two. Each month, in a different town. Then on to philosophy. My intention is to learn everything, and it’s easier to retain information if you digest bits of it in easily distinguished landscapes. Carlyle said that. Though maybe it was Bishop Sheen. Whoever said it, my knowledge of most things is permanently colored by the location in which I learned it, the scene outside the motel window, the wallpaper in the room to which I usually confine myself. I learned my Persian history at Mrs. Watson’s just north of  Lakeside, Nebraska. So the complex doings of Darius and Xerxes, the migrations of Alexander and Marathon, are permanently wedded to a stained tan wallpaper where bunches of indeterminate flowers held together by purple ribbons duplicate themselves endlessly. The ceiling sloped above the bed, bugs banged the screen over the only window as Ashurbanipal went out to hunt lions in chariots and Fred, the labrador, barked from the yard at the occasional cars going north on Highway 250. A Frederic Remington was scotch-taped to the wall above the bed.

Mrs. Watson was part Sioux, and she took in boarders. Her husband had been a crew boss for the county until he disappeared in a blizzard in ’61. It was $10 dollars a week, $20 with meals. They found his plow nosed up against a barn just south of Rushville. He had plowed about eight miles of grazing land before coming to a rest there.

“Mr. Koslowski, supper’s ready.”

I would go downstairs, careful not to bang my head. It was September, and we would eat while she told me about people in town. There were 273 of them. Antioch was eight miles west, Ellsworth eight miles east. Her husband’s second cousin, Ella, lived in Ellsworth and ran a diner there. Alliance was the big place, about 15 miles beyond Antioch. They had a rodeo there every year.

In the seventh century B.C., Chishpish, son of Hakhmanish, took Anshan from the waning power of Elam. Even Shakespeare mentions Cambyses. Xerxes, slain by his own vizier, Artabanus, crops up in Victorian abecedarians, next to xylophones, illustrating X’s.

Renowned for his fashion

Of fury and passion.

Black Lake was only a mile away. I would walk out there sometimes, the sand dunes still visible under the tough grass. It tasted almost salty. An occasional windmill would be half sunk out of sight on the other side of a hill.

Mrs. Watson patted the back of my hand when I left and gave me a bag of chocolate chip cookies. I had to stand outside Pete’s Texaco for an hour before the Trailways bus came. Pete said he wouldn’t let “no Polacks” cross his air bell, one arm of which was draped over the doorstep in front of the shack. Pete was Czech.

 

*

 

The bus took me to Scottsbluff where I sent a post card of Scottsbluff to my folks. All I said was, “This is nearly Wyoming” and signed it KCK. I learned to be cynical fast in those days. “M’chetuwomink,” Lenape for “upon the great plain.” From there I hitch-hiked south into Colorado on Route 71. It took me three days to Last Chance, 148 miles away. The first day I got a quick ride to Kimball, but hardly anybody drove south out of Kimball. At four in the afternoon, I started walking. I walked all night, crossed into Colorado just after midnight, stars blazing overhead, and walked to where 71 crosses Two Mile Creek, only to find it dry.I collapsed under a bush and slept until dusk when someone shook me awake, thinking I was dead. His name was Walt and he wore cowboy boots and a cowboy hat and he drove a pick-up. He said a snake had been sleeping against my back. He asked if I needed a ride, though there was a woman sitting in the cab who also wore a cowboy hat and boots. They said they’d take me into Brush. I thanked them and offered them my last two chocolate chip cookies. Sitting between them in the cab, I became conscious of my smell.

My destination was Joe's. I had determined to learn all there was about the Coptic civilizations there. Walt and this woman (I don’t think I was ever told her name. Walt called her something I could never quite make out, which sounded like “Fim”) knew somebody in Joe’s, though it had been a long time ago and they had forgotten his name. He apparently played pool.

It was a curious ride into Brush. Walt and Fim (let me call her that) said very little and most of what they said was a variation on “We thought you were dead, for sure.” Which they said in such a downcast way that it made me feel they were disappointed I wasn’t. What could they have done with my corpse? Perhaps I had robbed them by being alive of a particularly good story, an encounter with something profound and moving. (There’s that word again.)

When we got into Brush it was night time and Walt and Fim seemed to lose their lethargy all at once. They sat forward in their seats as we passed one feedlot after another, gas stations, motels, Dairy Queens, bars. Their eyes glittered as they looked from side to side. When we passed a Dairy Queen with several pick-ups and motorcycles around it, Fim let out a suppressed giggle, a kind of sudden sucking in of delight. Walt responded immediately with a loud, “Hey, man.” They talked back and forth that way as we drove down the main street.

“Gol’ dang!”

“Uhnnh-UH!”

“Hot damn!” Fim had her foot up on the dashboard now.

“There’s Hank.”

“HYAAAAA,” Walt shouted out the window.

Somebody in a cowboy hat leaning against a motorcycle turned and looked at us, let out a screech, and jumped on the cycle’s back. He was a big man, like Walt, and he lifted himself up and threw the whole of himself down, foot first, onto the starter. The great fat cycle snorted and jumped away from the curb. Hank (for it must have been Hank) came after us with a grin on his face. Walt laughed out loud and drove faster, but Hank was quickly beside us.

“I got you now, you peckerhead!”

“Shit, too,” Walt yelled back. He swerved the pick-up toward Hank, but Hank didn’t flinch. In fact, he swerved his motorcycle toward the truck. His front wheel almost brushed Walt’s front fender. Fim was laughing so hard she started to cough. Then Hank reached into the cab and grabbed Walt around the neck. He had jumped off his cycle and was dragging his feet along the street more or less bulldogging the pick-up. I caught a glimpse of the riderless cycle out the rear window. It smashed through a feedlot fence and ran in amongst a group of cows drinking at a trough. Hank meanwhile had grabbed the steering wheel and was pulling us all into the opposite lane of traffic. Fim reached across me and, still laughing and shouting, tried to pull Hank’s other arm from around Walt’s neck

“You peckerhead,” she shouted.

Hank and Walt lost interest in the steering wheel altogether as they pounded and cursed each other. Walt had the accelerator on the floor.

“You red-eyed peckerhead,” Hank shouted.

“You mud-licking peckerhead,” Walt shouted back. He had both hands on Hank’s neck.

 

*

 

I had never seen anything like this in my life, and probably for that reason I failed to take the abandoned steering wheel. As it turned out, however, we jumped the curb over a fire hydrant, entered a used car lot—through the entrance actually—on two wheels, clipped a 57 Pontiac two-door sedan and spun broadside into a 59 Buick Super four-door sedan customized into a pick-up truck with a mock Conestoga wagon canvas top.

Fim looked me straight in the eye and kissed me on the mouth. “What do you think of that, Keith?” I had no answer to her question, or none fast enough, because Walt had quickly pushed his way out of the truck and was rolling around on the ground with Hank, punching and grunting, swearing and laughing. Fim jumped out and ran over to where the two men were rolling in the dust. When Hank rolled up on top, she jumped on him, biting into the back of his neck.

“AAAHYEAAAH!”

A fairly large crowd had gathered by this time. A number of cows were standing around, refugees from the feed lot up the street. No one seemed at all anxious or surprised. The main emotion seemed to be delight. They rolled there in the dust for some time, landing powerful blows, which seemed to delight the person hit as much as the person hitting. There was much struggling for a better position. Then, I noticed that Fim had become wedged between the two Goliaths. I ran forward, thinking to aid her, when I was grabbed from behind,

“Leave ‘em alone, mister. They know what they’re doin’.”

As though these words were a cue, a new rhythm entered the scuffle. It was more deliberate and was accompanied by strange moanings and fresh gruntings. They writhed against whatever limb or fragment of torso they could find. This lasted for perhaps a minute before they fell apart, exhausted. A kind of sigh went up from the crowd assembled there.

 

*

 

I retrieved my battered suitcase from the back of the pick-up and proceeded south toward the edge of town, my mind full of amazement, looking for stars. Where Route 71 first crosses Beaver Creek, about seven miles south of town, I lay in the ditch by the side of the road and slept. No car passed me in those seven miles and, as far as I know, none passed while I slept.

 

*

 

Gary is a tiny place that isn’t even on the road. It’s just a clutter of houses. I walked in there about ten o’clock the next morning and asked the only person I saw if she’d accept some money to cook me breakfast. It took fifteen or twenty minutes to convince her I wasn’t crazy or dangerous. She stood on the cinder block under the front door of her dusty, unpainted two-room house. It was held up off the ground by four other cinder blocks, one at each corner. The house looked like it had just borrowed the ground for a few days and would soon move on. There was nothing around it, cars, chickens, trees, pump, outhouse, trash, children, trashcans, nothing, not even a fence. She was dressed in something that fell straight from her shoulders to the middle of her calves. She fed me standing at her door, me standing to drink my cup of milk before her on that flat and endless plain, a bowl of Cheerios and two slices of bread with smears of uncolored margarine across them. I had had to give her the two dollars first. You could hardly blame her.

After I walked back over Beaver Creek to the highway, only then did I have a curious and inexplicable desire. I wanted to—I don’t know what the word is, exactly—but hold her is what the songs say.

I got a ride right away, without even asking for it. I guess no one stands by the highway in that country, wearing a rumpled double-breasted business suit with a cardboard suitcase at his heel and doesn’t want a ride. He took me all the way to Last Chance, stopping only in Woodrow for gas. On the way he told me how you’re supposed to bite the testicles off young pigs, not cut them with a knife, slitting the sacks first.

 

*

 

Joes is 51 miles east of Last Chance, about halfway to St. Francis, Kansas. It is one of the ends of the earth. It misses being on the Arickaree by about four miles, and the favorite joke there is “Where’s Joe?” It was easy getting a ride there, and as we passed through Cope, I thought, how curious that I should learn of the Copts near Cope. It was either just before or just after Cope that I thought about other people. I mean, about their being so other.

As was my custom, I looked for a quiet and comfortable home with an encyclopedia. The only books I carried were Origins by Eric Partridge, which I got free by joining a book club once, and a 1911 school Atlas of the World, which I bought at Schroeder’s in Milwaukee (when it used to be across from the public library) and in which I would make corrections in pencil as current events dictated. It isn’t easy to keep up. Boundaries and names, currencies, even languages, seem to change every week. The Oder-Neiss, Sri Lanka, Malagasy. What is the official language of India today? Where are Latvia and Tibet? Was Transylvania ever a real place? The mass evacuation of Hindus from Uganda. Hindus from Uganda! Or, Jews from Poland. The bringing of them to these places to begin with. I’ve met Ibos from Minneapolis, Goans in Milwaukee, an Indian with a Portuguese name speaking perfect British English, Anglo-Armenians from Oak Park. The extermination of native peoples who themselves migrated to their places of origin and probably exterminated or subsumed those they found there. The mass migration and obliteration of these peoples as they assume new postures, affect new traditions, take on a different habit of clothing themselves. I am suspicious of the Tigris-Euphrates mystique. Who was this Tigris, this Euphrates? Corn-peddlars who called themselves kings or just corn-peddlars? History is a history of historians, name-flingers who have tried to freeze the past into coherence. History is the history of temporary arrangements, like Joes.

So, the Copts don’t surprise me too much, and Joes is about as right a place as there is to learn about them. A little place where they’re mostly hanging on to things that don’t want to hang on to them. Like the automobile and their dialect, and their children, too. Interstate 80 takes most of the east/west traffic now.

The only living remnant of the ancient Egyptians, who got that way by turning Christian against their pagan masters, later persecuted by schism from the church in Constantinople, later yet overrun by Islam, disappearing by conversion and subsumption so that their language, originally transcribed through Greek lettering, disappeared altogether, preserved almost wholly in a smattering of business documents and religious transcriptions ferreted away in a handful of desert monasteries.    

 

*

 

A hundred years ago there was nothing here, since the Indigenous peoples had been almost entirely removed by then. At least the old map of this area leaves this place blank. It has that feel to it, too. A place plunked down in no place for people to pass through at various rates of speed, anywhere from a minute to a lifetime. O, this everything and nothing all at once. Anything could happen here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Richie Swanson
Trading with Raises-Red-Dust

We hauled our batârds out of the Mississippi and onto the south bank of Paint Creek, and Raises-red-dust came strutting along the north, his dark Winnebago glare a-boiling a dire warning. Lives-in-the-earth stooped beside him and thrust a crook into the ground, a clan stick carved into the graven image of a bear. “Medicine Trader shall not go past it,” Raises-red-dust said to me. “No Dakota shall.” The two braves stiffened with a seething air and walked off, skirting earthen mounds, bound to pray the `tire night in a sweat lodge--and to sink into Satan’s burning lake someday.

I tarried. My wife Spirit Moon spoke only Dakota to William, and her sister Oak Woman—Raises-red-dust’s wife—spoke only Winnebago to Ha’ga as they settled the little mites in cradleboards, about to raise our lodge. Both squaws knew English from their father Rattling Wind, but each paid careful heed to the ceremonies about to take place, and I said nothing and counted the bales beneath our overturned canoes, furs from buffalo we’d hunted downriver.

 I also counted at dawn, and Raises-red-dust and Lives-in-the-earths appeared again across the creek, bucks already slung from their shoulders. They scuttled up a trail up a river-bluff, and more Winnebago braves with more deer followed, and old squaws past bleeding age with whitened buckskins for tobacco prayers.

Medicine chiefs followed with rolled-up bundles known to hold spirit sticks--carved to match the animal mounds on Paint Rock Ridge--water serpents, hawks, thunderbirds, turtles, wolves, bears—or so had said my master Charles Debanné, owner of La Compagnie Debanné--he’d wiled such relics from a medicine man in debt once, had sold them to a museum in St. Louis.

 I cleaned my Hall rifle, aiming to get my own deer, and then Raises-red-dust stumbled down the trail he’d just gone up, doubled up terrible, his arm dangling useless. Lives-the-earth helped him to the ground, and I hastened across the creek and past the bear stick. Both braves glared bullets, but I yanked off a boot, thrust it into Lives-in-the-earth’s hands, gestured him to put it beneath Raises-red-dust’s shoulder. “Medicine Trader sees!” I said, and knelt and felt for the shoulder bone, the separation from the socket. I put the heels of my palms firm against the bone.

“A deer crashed into Raises-red-dust,” said Lives-in-the-earth. “Running from Medicine Trader’s gun.”

“No.” I muscled the bone down, it popped in. Raises-red-dust gasped in relief. I took my sash from my trader’s coat, tied his arm to his side.

“Raises-red-dust is the Hawk Chief,” said Lives-in-the-earth. “He must drum.” He helped Raises-red-dust stand, the latter tore off the sash—and tumbled forward. He wobbled a crooked circle, doubled up again. He lay flat and winced, and I felt for his dislocated bone again. I punched it in new, and he raised his delicate eyebrows and hummed in a strange Indian way, as if to praise my doctoring. But I doubted it. I’d met him two year’ ago when Captain Keane of the Fifth Infantry had laid plugs of tobacco at his feet at Prairie La Crosse and had told him and other Winnebago chiefs that President Monroe wanted a trading post there. Raises-red-dust had learned English when he’d fought for the Brits in the late war. He’d spoke it derisive that day. “When the Ho-chunk trade with Long Knives, settlers come. When we use a Long Knife’s axe, Long Knives cut down our forests. When we put our marks on American papers, Americans take our wives, our beaver, our homes, our daughters.”

Ho-chunk, the Winnebago’s word for themselves. I’d written it in my Bible, asking the Lord to forgive the desecration.

I’d sinned a-plenty since then. Only a couple months after the Dakota Chief Rattling Wind had allowed me to open a La Compagnie Debanné post on his prairie, I’d married Spirit Moon Indian-style--had waited in exultation as she’d lowered her Indian hood--had kissed her painted face with no heed to God--scarlet lines drawn on vermillion cheeks--a sign that she’d been given a heathen feast as a child, been declared a cherished being by an Indian spirit.

When Spirit Moon had told William the seven Dakota tribes had dropped from Orion into the Mississippi, I’d made no objection, no try at reading her scripture--nor when she told me that Raises-red-dust and spirit brothers and sisters were feasting up at the animal mounds, a-paying tribute to clan medicines they’d received during Indian Bible times.

Now I troubled deep how to tell her that the Lord had punished Raises-red-dust for believing in Satan’s deceptions at the mounds, and how God had placed his suffering before me, so I could show him Christian kindness. I troubled how to tell her the Lord had delivered me a vision—I’d seen Raises-red-dust’s arm dangling, I became a boy again, carrying a water bucket into Uncle Jake’s hospital tent in Niagara country. I heard a lad scream that day, seen him clasp his arm in his fatigue coat, seen Uncle Jake settle a boot behind the lad’s back and set his palms on the shoulder that had been butted apart by a lieutenant’s horse.

And now I went night-fishing with my Dakota, I felt God’s grace. Torches in our canoes flamed through moon-blue air, leapt gold across pearly water, and braves raised spears holy-still, and we drifted through the warm fall night, and frogs crooned across the hissing-tinkling river, and a smoky mist a-hugged islands, getting thicker as the singing and drumming from the animal mounds mounted. The savage sounds dropped and funneled around us. The Dakota braves thrust their spears like lashing snakes, but the Lord took it in easy, patient. He opened the Mississippi’s arms, and it yawned immense, the grainy-gray bluffs on far-off banks a-towering on high. God had made the river so wide here that the devil’s ruckus sank into its watery whisper and endless breadth, into a mud-stench so primitive I smelled Noah’s flood. I kept it to myself, had to. I was the only white Yankee `tween Forts Crawford and St. Anthony, and no Indian had converted or been visited by the holy Holy in these parts. But now that “Long Knives” had taken the Mississippi’s wilderness from the Brits, God’s truest pilgrims would settle here, and the worship of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost would come sure as Luna’s silvery path across the sky.

I waited with the Lord’s peace.

 

* * *

 

We fare-welled our Winnebago friends at Prairie La Crosse and continued ten leagues upriver to Rattling Wind’s prairie, and I issued winter traps to my Dakota hunters. The river started to freeze, and Raises-red-dust and Oak Woman came paddling through sheets of ice, landing unexpected. They hallooed me and lifted a buffalo robe from Lives-in-the-earth lying prone in the canoe: pox riddled his face, and he twitched like a locust, his hands bound by a basswood withe.

“He cannot stop scratching,” said Oak Woman. “He called out for Medicine Trader.”

I near’ recoiled but bent closer.

“Whites brought it from across the sea!” said Raises-red-dust. “Traders hid it in blankets!”

“Not I.” I grabbed the robe, held it while Raises-red-dust rolled the paddles into its edges, making a litter. We carried Lives-in-the-earth well away from the stockade, across Chimney Creek and up into Rattling Wind’s Coulee, where summer lodges stood vacant, since the Dakota had thankfully gone to their winter village upriver. We laid Lives-in-the-earth in a sweat lodge, and Oak Woman started to mix mud plasters.

I flew back to my post, stopped outside the stockade, called to Spirit Moon through the gate’s window. She peered out, and maybe `twas the gloaming, but I seen charcoal on her cheeks like when her people grieved, and I thought of how they cut themselves and salved the scarifications with gunpowder—made of saltpeter, sulfur, charcoal. I asked if anyone inside the post had spots, and Spirit Moon said no and laid my possibles outside the gate, and I flew back up to the sweat lodge. Lives-in-the-earth lay dead asleep, sweating buckets. “Medicine Trader has seen again!” I said, and poured gunpowder from my horn into a mortar and mixed a paste. “Mud alone will not cure smallpox!”

I washed off mud plasters, applied my paste to pustules, and Lives-in-the-earth woke, looked at me grateful, not twitching or itching. He closed his eyes again, awaiting the reaper, and I give him a new blanket. “Burn his old robe!” I said to Oak Woman. “His paddles, the canoe, everything!” I slept quarantined in a bark-house and found his fever broke’ by dawn, some pustules shrinking, drying. Others were open, trickling blood. His slumber continued, I applied new paste. Raises-red-dust grunted scornful, I beckoned him to the creek. He come reluctant, and I bathed, baring my back to him, and his breath crept like spiders on my skin as he inspected me. “Medicine Trader has none,” he said.

I threw on my coat, dropped to my knees. I shouted thanks to God, and a golden warmth of love poured into me, the glory of His beams streaming down like sunshine into lake-water. I pounded the ground like I used to at the preacher’s tent in New York. “I am nothing!” I yelled. “To be despised! I am Adam, my wife is Eve! We have sinned!” I groveled, renounced myself. A voice shouted inside me. “Behold, a miracle!” I rose a-shaking, spoke it to Raises-red-dust, and he stood as if deaf and dumb, his eyebrows arching soft again. He pursed his lips, unmoved, and he drank me deep into the pitch-dark caverns of his gaze.

Meanwhile Lives-in-the-earth took broth from Oak Woman. His pustules kept closing, shrinking. His scabs fell off. He devoured all the meat we brought him.

Spirit Moon and William left food on the plank-bridge across Chimney Creek every morning, and I waited `til Lives-in-the-earth hunted on his own, `til trees exploded in the cold, `til the winter wind carried daggers so sharp they’d kill any disease, and then I called William across the bridge and lifted his cheeks to mine, sure I’d pass nothing.

Lives-in-the-earth had blood-curdling scars, but his eyes flashed bright as my boy’s, and he rode home with Oak Woman and her saucy brave.

 

* * *

 

The river froze solid as a pond in the Adirondacks, and Master Charles Debanné arrived on a dog team on his way to Fort St. Anthony. He give me a dispatch.

 

My honorable Jonathan Prior,

The Winnebago brave Gray Fish and his squaw Lance Woman dragged themselves into the Indian agency today. They walked sixty miles up the Mississippi from the Hannibal Lead Colony on the Fever River. They claimed Colonel James Hannibal and the Winnebago chiefs Sharp Wing and Green Hawk will trade pigs of lead for the formula for your gunpowder paste.

Many die daily of the pox.

I am sir,

Nicholas Hardin, Federal Indian Agent, Fort Crawford.

Prairie du Chien, Michigan Territory.

 

 

Debanné objected, “We send the formula with the mail, the worms at the American Fur post’ll steal it.”

I nodded, not wanting just any Joe a-diddling with my paste anyhow.

“We write Secretary Adams, he’ll issue La Compagnie Debanné un patent,” said Debanné.

“`Tis God’s gift, not ours,” I said.

Debanné guffawed, a French-Canadian papist. “You Yankees fret too much ton Dieu.”

“I’ll go myself,” I said.

Debanné shrugged, “The War Department made the Fever River diggings a mineral reserve for Colonel Johnson. He and American Fur must pay in silver, not lead.”

We dined and went over ledgers, and when I slept, I dreamt Uncle Jake sitting on a crate in his hospital tent, tweezing a smallpox crust from a vial. I heard his spit strike foolscap, seen the order to inoculate troops curl in flames as he held it in fire. “A parcel of the pox itself!” he’d howled. “And no proof of how it works!”

If I were true to my Witness, I had to concede the same about my paste. I told Spirit Moon so, that God called me to test it, that she’d stay home with our new child inside her and keep the post going with Antoine, my clerk.

I rode the next day with Rattling Wind and his wife Heron Quill to Prairie La Crosse and found Raises-red-dust absent from his wigwam, already making ceremony with clan brothers in a medicine lodge. Oak Woman packed par fleches in their wigwam, and Ha’ga wept very loud. The ceremony’s drumming and singing went on all night just like at the animal mounds, and Ha’ga cried fitful `til Raises-red-dust entered and lay by the boy and talked to him like he didn’t see me a-lying beneath buffalo robes. He told Ha’ga in Winnebago of a kind of a spirit woman who opened her breasts and showed her grandson green leaves inside her, and white blossoms, an ear of corn, white tassels—the first medicines for the Winnebago—a-growing inside a savage woman! He talked of a kind of Adam, a spirit man he kept calling Hare, who lay wrapped in his robe, weeping about death. Hare could not stop weeping, and Earth-maker sent other Adams from the sky down to him. They took off Hare’s robe and threw snakes at his feet. Yellow snakes! Blue snakes! Black snakes! They sprang into the poles of the first medicine lodge--and Hare tied them together with rattlesnakes!  

“Ha’ga shall grow and learn the secrets of the medicine lodge,” said Raises-red-dust. “He shall know how his people pass to heaven and return to Earth.”

 I coughed loud, got up. I figured I’d understood Raises-red-dust’s Winnebago clear enough: Ha’ga now lay quiet as a lamb in his rabbit-fur bundle, truly too little to be fully poisoned by his father’s delusions.

I turned away, the devil swarmed like hornets around me! He buzzed a mocking laugh, but I refused him, showed him the strength of my faith. I wrested my soul from his whirlwind, finally made out Raises-red-dust lying shut-eyed beneath me. “Will you come out and pray with me?” I said, nothing I’d ever asked Spirit Moon or any other Indian.

The question dropped in the dark like a stone from the brink of a cliff and begat a silence sounded final as death.

 

* * *

 

Raises-red-dust, Oak Woman, Rattling Wind, Heron Quill and I rode three days down the Mississippi, and I prayed every dawn, falling before God and the Savior who healed the leper and rebuked wind and waves and calmed the lake. I prayed well away from the Indians and their travel lodge, surrendering to Christ’s love, a-waiting to be tested by the pox.

We approached the Fever, and Colonel Hannibal trotted around an island, flanked by army guards and Trader Ferguson, American Fur’s scoundrel. “The Lord shall not forget your courage,” said Hannibal, his angle-boned countenance set sharp at me, his eyes a-peering from beneath a long-tailed hat, a-glittering ice-drop blue, hot and preacher-like even at minus-two. “They’s hundreds afflicted here, Injuns mostly. The Lord has seen their condition n’ served His punishment.”

“Amen,” said I, and as we rode up the Fever’s mouth, we halted thunderstruck. A keelboat stood frozen against the south bank, and a Negro dragged a corpse from behind it, followed by two white miners pointing rifles, keeping him from straying. The Negro—a slave brought by Hannibal from Kentucky--pulled the Indian’s braids, never touching his skin, and the corpse’s face was riddled by pock scars, and by red and black lines and dots, primitive clan marks. The Negro dragged the body out to the Mississippi to a cloud of gray vapor above ice. Water splashed, clunked icy. The corpse dropped into a hole, and Raises-red-dust yelped, “Sharp Wing!”

“Tell your chiefs, Prior, dun’ judge nothing hasty,” said Hannibal. “`Hit saves us from burning `hem, n’ keeps wood in our stoves n’ smelters where `hit belongs.”

I considered the order, held my tongue as the black slave dragged another corpse along the Fever.

“Green Hawk!” Raises-red-dust yelped anew. He followed the body out to the Mississippi, and when the Negro dropped it in the hole, Raises-red-dust circled the vapor, hanging his head. He rode back to the Fever, shouted at Hannibal and me, “Raises-red-dust is the one who speaks to the spirits of the Hawk Clan! Tell Raises-red-dust, who painted the faces of Sharp Wing and Green Hawk? What warriors spoke their victories at their ceremonies?”

“Nobody!” said Hannibal. “Not here! Tell that fool brave, Prior, `hit’s the Injuns living so wicked, so long without Christ, that brings `hit upon us!”

I felt the words true, braver than any I’d ever mustered, and then Hannibal pointed at the frozen mouth of a creek. “Tell the fool to come with us, or he quarantines thar’!” Bodies lay stacked high as flour sacks on a barge, and moccasins crunched ominous on the creek’s snow-crust: Lance Woman stepped around a bend, her face hideous with pustules, smoke rising from lodges and sweat houses behind her. “Halt!” shouted Hannibal. “Not another step!”

Lance Woman stopped at the Fever’s edge, and Oak Woman and Heron Quill pulled pouches from inside robes, paste mixed that morning, kept warm against their hearts. They tread halfway across the Fever, laid down the pouches and told Lance Woman in Winnebago to put the paste on warm in lodges, thick as leeches on cuts.

“Dun’ touch her!” said Hannibal. “Tell `hem, Prior, touch anyone with `hit, they quarantine with `hem!”

Lance Woman put the pouches in her burden-basket, turned back up the frozen creek, and Indians slipped out from behind trees, hobbling and hooded, converging around her. She showed them the paste, and they raised their faces at me, pustules everywhere. More? For all of us?

“Soon!” I shouted. “The Lord willing, we’ll bring His medicine soon!”

 

* * *

 

Hannibal ordered us to encamp on the foot of the hill below his new frame house, since no eruptions had occurred that far up the Fever yet. Oak Woman and Heron Quill melted ice for soup, and Raises-red-dust tossed tallow and a crumb of dried venison on the fire, sending the first taste to some Ho-chunk spirit. He tossed on tobacco, the smoke rose to an Indian spirit. He talked like I wasn’t there again, “Into the bodies of every Ho-chunk Earth-maker places a part of himself, and it shall return to Earth-maker if they live proper, are mourned proper.”

Oak Woman dropped venison into the kettle, stopped sudden, wept. “Big Sand Woman, there on the pile! She-who-chases! Her boy, Walks-the-day!”

“Yellow Woman,” said Heron Quill. “Shining Wing, Beautiful Cloud…”

“Shines-the-water,” said Rattling Wind. “Red Bear, Flies-with-his-club…”

Raises-red-dust raised his pipe skyward and sang to Earth-maker, his countenance wan and spare, eyes shifty. He lit his pipe as if in a far-off world. He pointed his pipe west and sang to Thunders, his voice cracking. He smoked and pointed his pipe south, singing to a spirit that spilled disease from one side of itself and life from the other. He smoked and pointed his pipe to spirits underground, sang and prayed, muttered to Sharp Wing and Green Hawk. They had no burial scaffold, and he railed at himself, for he’d brought no namatce, no bald-headed war club, and he wished to lay one beside their burial hole, so his brothers would commence on the Spirit Road at sunrise and be able to strike beaver and other game they met, and leave it for the living they’d left behind.

Raises-red-dust looked with great distress at Oak Woman’s par fleches hanging on lodge-poles. “No spirit shirts for their journeys!” he cried, and called out to ghosts who would carry prayers, food and tobacco to a grandmother they would meet on the way to the Winnebago heaven. He spoke feverish in his own tongue, fell into fathomless silences, and I gaped, I reckon.

“Do not look at him so,” said Rattling Wind.

“The spirits will reach a fire that burns all across the world,” said Oak Woman. “They will have no offerings to cross the bridge.”

Uncle Jake would’ve taken charge. Any preacher back home would’ve set their beliefs straight. But I’d never paid such heed to Ho-chunk spirits `til Raises-red-dust spoke them so strong and garbled. I searched for words, heard only: How long, Lord? How long will you hide your face from me?

 

* * *

 

Raises-red-dust sang his Hawk songs, riding at dawn with us down the Fever’s ice to a huddle of Indians: an old squaw dragged Lance Woman and then Gray Fish to the Mississippi. Yesterday’s Negro itched and screamed with others inside their hut, and a white miner thumped the keelboat’s deck, squirming from pox fever.

Indians lay on ice in robes, shivering and writhing, no pustules draining or drying from my paste. Indians shuffled lost amid trees, the stench of vomit venomous in the cold air. Indians waited at the creek’s mouth, and we laid down paste folded in bark. An old medicine man and two squaws took it, yesterday’s paste scant on their faces, thin on every Indian there. The devil swarmed my thoughts--if all the afflicted applied too little, all would surely die. “Spotted children first!” I cried. “Keep it on thick as grief paste! We’ll fire shots when we are ready to return! Wash it off only then!”

We delivered the remedy again that afternoon: the old medicine man, his two squaws, three Negros and second miner were newly dumped into the Mississippi.

We made more paste by firelight in our lodge, and I hankered for a miracle. The night of the Savior’s birth was after all less than a week away, and I prayed an outpouring of love for Him, begged He forgive my new child coming. I vowed to bring Spirit Moon to a preacher in St. Louis and marry her proper. I surrendered to His will, begging it to move through my soul and hands and into the paste.

We went to the creek at daybreak, found the virus ever malignant, impervious to treatment. Three more days: out of gunpowder, no cures.

I bought more powder up at the American Fur post, and Trader Ferguson scraped my silver coins smug across his counter, charging three dollars and seventy-five cents per pound, three times Debanné’s rate.

I added a little hog fat to my remedy. We worked our pestles and mortars inside our lodge again, and Raises-red-dust fisted his medicine bag. The beaded otter skin hung like an eel, and two eyes (river shells) gawked ghostly at the paste. Raises-red-dust sang a medicine song, sending power to our paste, and he untied the thong around the otter bag’s neck, pulled out packets and sorted them, consumed by the task. He seized his musket. He rubbed medicine on its barrel, asking it to shoot true, and then a roar shook the air. I pushed out the door-flap, a cloud of sickly yellow smoke billowed high at the Fever’s mouth.

Hannibal hollered from outside his house, escorted by mounted blue-coats. “Come ‘long, Prior, `hit’s started!”

 Rattling Wind grunted loud, and I dashed back inside as he flew backward from Raises-red-dust. The latter bucked up from robes, gripping his musket’s trigger, and Rattling Wind pounced on him again, and I jumped on, kicking at the musket. It banged a lodge peg, hammer still cocked, and I pinned my knee against Raises-red-dust’s trigger arm. “No, do not kill the lead chief,” Rattling Wind said to Raises-red-dust. “They are too many. They would throw us on the fire too.”

Raises-red-dust snarled, Oak Woman lifted his musket. She knocked out the ball and hung it on a lodge-pole, no matter she was a squaw and could contaminate his weapon.

Blue-coats’ horses pounded past our lodge, and Hannibal barked, “Prior, I `cided to burn the dead! `Hit’s started, I said!”

“I can’t come now!” I said.

“Someone’s got `hit in thar’?”

“No!”

“Fool Yankee! Coward! Cavorting with all that devilment!”

Hannibal trotted away on snow, and my Indians and I remained inside through the gloaming and the night, listening to the din of the keelboat and bodies burning--a conflagration so horrible-big it pulsed firelight into our lodge.

Raises-red-dust glanced fervid toward the throbbing flashes. “I am sure, oh, ghosts, you are not far away, you are all around! You are about to leave your relatives! You will see the one in charge of the spirits! Point your pipe at him! He will be thankful!”

Raises-red-dust lay supine, his voice roaming weary, then turning brave. “Earth-maker, you know very well what kind of life I live.” He spoke as if his voice carried all the way down the Fever past the Mississippi and out to the Spirit Road. “I shall speak true of Sharp Wing and Green Hawk. They shall not stumble. They shall ask of you, Earth-maker, to give to those they leave behind all the hunts and coups they would have won had the white disease not taken so many years from them.”

Raises-red-dust sang prayers that each clan brother was to sing on his way to Winnebago heaven. He muttered the names of enemies each had scalped. He told their spirits to carry spirit-tobacco and spirit-food for Sharp Wing and Green Hawk. He named clan brother after brother who’d died, clan sister after sister, and muttered of journey after journey, spirit after spirit.

 

* * *

 

Oak Woman and Heron Quill readied our ponies to go, and still Raises-red-dust burned tobacco, speaking how the grandmother on the Spirit Road would knock open skulls of the dead, take out their brains and free them of their earthly worries.

Finally Raises-red-dust mounted listless with us, the dawn the color of ash, ash blowing up the Fever. We rode down the little river with furs over our noses, the stench stinging our eyes. The remains at the creek’s mouth seemed sculpted by Satan himself. Charred bones were strewn helter-skelter in ice that had melted black around the burning keelboat and had frozen again. Bone-bits had spread like sand on the reaper’s frozen beach, and skulls poked out and stared hollow from an underworld of sullied ice.

We saw no lodge smoke up the creek, no signs of live Indians anywhere. They were mercifully gone, running from pox and pyre, the virus too wicked and strong for any remedy.

Raises-red-dust rode ahead, acting a scout at war, the sunrise throwing a blinding sheet of gold across him. We followed him between islands, trees blew and moaned, snow devils whirled and whistled. We encamped deep in bottoms, and Raises-red-dust neither ate nor talked nor smoked nor sang nor prayed. His breathing sounded as hard as the ice, the heat inside him burned real as the death-pyre.

We rode on, he hugged the west shore. He turned us into Paint Creek, and we dismounted beneath the shelter of towering maples. The wind abated after sundown, the air turned pitch black, vacuous. He led us up to Paint Rock Ridge, snow-shoeing, and then the Mississippi growled into his storm, its ice twanging like a giant-singing sawblade behind us. The ice wailed long-rolling whines through the starry darkness. It clapped like gunshots, echoed from bluffs and shook the Winnebago mounds: grown over, the animal shapes silhouetted by brush. Raises-red-dust shuffled around them, looking as lost as the afflicted back on the Fever. He wandered around lizard heads, tapered tails, bear shapes, hawk shapes. He shouted as if suffering madness, yipping to those who’d made the mounds, his ancient clan spirits. “HA-HO! H-O-O—O-AH! HA-HOO-HOO-HO-HO!”

The ice boomed below--terrible sorrows cracking, hammering to get out, if you asked me. The ice rumbled east along the far bank, west beneath Orion and Pleiades, and it quaked around river-curves, thundering back toward the Fever. The ice groaned and bellowed like buffalo, pounded the Mississippi crosswise, pinged like antelope running on it, and Raises-red-dust pushed languid through our lodge’s door-flap, his cheeks slack, spotted but not pitted, burned by the cold, not pox. He still gawked far-off, muttered about home. “A chief’s feast, the La Crosse band shall have! The finest venison! Bear! Elk! Turkey! The finest squash! Berries! The finest tobacco, we shall send Earth-maker! He shall eat! He shall smoke! He will keep it away!”

Raises-red-dust lay beneath his robes, no word to Oak Woman, his breathing as spent and quiet as that of an animal finally safe in its den after being chased by beasts. I lay very still, not rubbing my skin, not even checking for eruptions, less he wake and commence again.

I dreamt of Spirit Moon a-sitting on our wedding bench. She slipped off her hood, and I kissed the scarlet lines and vermillion paint, tasted scabs, pustules dripping blood, and Rattling Wind groaned, pox crowding his face like barnacles on a tide rock. I barked at all my Indian relations, “`Hit’s the Injuns living so wicked, so long without Christ, that brings `hit upon us! The Lord has seen their condition n’ served His punishment!” I sat up, a-bristling at Hannibal, cursing him to Hades.

I counted days. `Twas Christmas morning. I praised His birth to myself, His mercy and miracle, since the pox actually showed no real signs of following us. I climbed out to cliff-ledge, a blue and airy freeze lying heavy as mountains on the river below. The sun rose pale through white haze, and I knelt, prayed, called out to Him, and the river-ice shot cannons, banged, echoed, sank and settled, and my supplications fell and faded down the white valley that wound away endless, that swallowed and sorrowed me, that curved its way back to the vapors above the

 My holy evaporated into dying breaths, death-steam.

 My worship had been dwarfed--just a parcel of paste, no proof.

 

 

 

Rob Swystun
The Rendezvous

I can’t leave. 

I need this. 

And I hate it. 

How did I let it come to this? 

Stephanie always said I was a selfish bastard for putting my own dreams above my family. But, I don’t think chasing your dreams makes one a selfish bastard. No, I think it was chasing after that high of occasionally winning that is what really turned me into a selfish bastard.

Just one more game, one more race, one more bet. I never set out to be a gambling addict or a heavy drinker or a drug user. I think I got caught up in romanticizing all the great writers who were one or more of those things, and I felt like I kind of had an obligation to be a degenerate and have some kind of painfully lived experience so I could write better. 

I didn’t mean to hurt my family, but there is no reasoning with an addiction. 

The proverbial last straw with Stephanie was some big bet on some big fight where I thought I’d be able to predict the outcome. I lost. And not just the money that night, but my family. 

I can still hear it; Stephanie sniffling back tears and telling me in her surprisingly measured voice that she felt like she had been raising the kids and doing basically everything in the marriage alone. Hard to argue with her while we were standing in the kitchen she paid for and I was up to my ass in debt. The smartest thing she ever did was make me sign a prenup before our marriage. Maybe she spotted some kind of red flag in me that I didn’t even know was there. 

Man, do I wish I had brought something to drink to this hotel room, or a Valium or something to calm my nerves, but the guy specified I be clean and sober. 

A knock at the door interrupts my self-loathing. 

He is here. 

Deep breath and I open the door. There he is. The old, short, rotund Indian man whose unabashed smile followed me around the grocery store is now standing in front of me, dressed in his usual traditional outfit in soft oranges topped off with a bright orange turban. His big grey beard belies the childlike twinkling in his eyes. 

“Hi,” I croak, the word barely escaping my dry throat. 

“Hello,” he replies. “I can come in?”

“Oh, yeah. I mean, technically the room is yours, so …” I step aside and he brushes past me. He smells of some kind of cologne I’m unfamiliar with. There is some kind of sweet note my nose can’t pin down. 

He stands and looks around the room as if he’s not sure what to do. I mean, neither am I, but it looks like I’m playing host. 

“Sit down, please. Can I get you some water? It’s really all there is to drink here. Or, I could make some coffee?”

“No, thank you,” he says, settling on the bed. “Coffee makes me piss so much.”

“Okay. Oh, I almost forgot; hello, aakah sae hae,” I say. 

“What?” He frowns and shakes his head at me. 

“Oh, I was saying ‘hello, how are you?’ in … your language?”

He chuckles. “I think maybe you try to speak Urdu. That is not my language.” 

Deflated, like a kid who has just shown their parents a new magic trick only to be met with shrugs, I lean against the far wall by the window. “Okay. Well, forget that. I don’t really know where to start?” 

 

***

 

Where it actually started was in Superstore on Gateway Road. 

I’m a creature of routine. They’re comforting. My Monday routine involves getting into my car, driving past the two grocery stores near my home – three if you count Giant Tiger’s little food section – and across the river on Chief Peguis Trail to an entirely different neighbourhood to shop in a giant grocery store where you have to walk the equivalent of several city blocks to get your shopping done. 

I tell myself that I do this for the larger variety, but I think deep down, shopping at a larger store just makes me feel more important. 

My routine overlapped with the Singhs’. 

The first time I saw them, I didn’t really pay much attention. I could tell they were a family unit, but I didn’t pay them any mind beyond that. There was a mother and father, I assumed, who looked like they were my age, and two young adult daughters. Not going to lie; they caught my attention. And then there was the old guy. And then there was his smile. 

Whatever this Indian grandpa was into, I seemed to have it. From the moment he first saw me, he stared and smiled like a child who has a crush on someone, but hasn’t yet figured out the art of subtlety. 

The old guy seemed like he was in that “second childhood” age range where you just don’t give a shit anymore, so you do and say what you want. And he apparently wanted to stare at me, so he did. 

It was amusing the first time it happened. This rolly polly old Indian guy staring at me and grinning from one side of his turban to the other made me smile. 

I mean, it’s flattering. 

Stephanie sure wasn’t looking at me and smiling anymore, and anyone else who was interested had to be coy about it because of societal norms. But, not this guy. He just watched me like I was his favourite TV show. 

Of course, at that point I never thought I’d see him again. I didn’t usually see the same people when I went grocery shopping. No one seems to have a rigid routine like I do. 

But then they showed up again the Monday after that, and the next one. The staring got slightly creepy after a few times, but it’s not like the guy was dangerous. He always just toddled along after his family. 

All the times I saw them, I was always somewhere else in the store. I’d just be finishing in the produce section when they got there, or I’d be picking out cheese while they were looking for something in the “International foods” aisle, or I’d be grabbing buns from the bakery while they were discussing what type of yoghurt to get. 

One day, I had a hankering for this red lentil dish that Stephanie and I and the boys used to make while we were camping. Somehow, it always tasted better when it was made out in the middle of the woods over a propane stove, but I wanted to make it at home anyway. 

I was just about to step into a line when I realized I had forgotten the damn lentils. With a little curse at myself, I went over to aisle five and saw the Singhs. At the time, I didn’t know their names. In my head, they were just “that Indian family” I saw around the grocery store. But, that time I realized I was going to have to pass directly by them in an aisle. The old guy spotted me right away and his big, childish grin beamed at me. Trying my best to act nonchalant, I suddenly became super aware of how I was walking and each stride was now a carefully choreographed step while I tried to figure out where to look. 

The husband, like usual, was dressed in what looked like a pretty fancy suit along with a black turban. A gold Rolex hung loosely on his wrist. The wife had on a bright yellow … sari, I think they’re called, that contrasted beautifully with her skin tone. She was decked out with a bunch of gold jewelry. Pretty sure it was real. I just remember thinking how they must live in a decent part of town to be rocking that much gold. The two young women were dressed in typical western clothing; sweaters and jeans. 

The old guy had on the traditional kind of outfit you often see older Indian men wearing. I don’t know what it’s called, but I guess it would be the male equivalent of a sari. He always wore a bright orange turban. I think it was kind of his calling card or something. The younger guy – I mean, the one who was probably my age – had a variety of turban colours, but the old guy always wore a bright orange one. 

But, the real thing he wore was his huge grin. 

That damned Chumbawamba song – the one about getting knocked down and getting up again – was playing over the speakers, and I couldn’t help but smile as I got close to his earnest, leering gaze. 

“Hi,” I kind of scoffed. 

“Hello,” he answered in a sing-song kind of voice. 

The couple didn’t really take any notice of this, but the two daughters giggled at their grandfather’s unabashed crushing. 

I got my lentils and walked out the other end of the aisle, hot with embarrassment and awkwardness. 

From there, we became “grocery buddies,” which is to say I would nod or wave at him whenever I saw him around the store, and he would wave back. It was a bit like having a fan. 

Until that fan wanted to be more than a fan. 

I was way over in the toothpaste section of the store one night, a full city block’s distance away from the food on the other side of Superstore’s massive clothing section, when the two daughters slinked up to me. 

“Hello,” the slightly taller, and presumably older, one said to get my attention. They both had long, black hair and looked like bunnies in a spotlight, with wide, frightened eyes. I figured they must be in their early twenties. 

“Oh, hi.” I wasn’t expecting to ever have the chance to talk with these two. 

“I’m Raman and this is Aman,” she said, pointing to her sister. “I think you kind of know our grandfather.”

“Oh, the old guy?” I cringed. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to call him that. But, I know who you’re talking about, yeah.”

“He … wants to meet you. Like, more formally.” She wrung her hands in front of her.

“Like hang out?”

“Sort of?”

“I mean, no disrespect to your grandpa, but I don’t think we would have a ton of stuff in common. I’m not sure what we’d –.”

“He can pay,” she blurted. 

“Pay?” I wasn’t sure if I should still feel flattered anymore. “Uh, I think there might be services for seniors who want friends. I don’t really …”

“It’s not for friendship,” she said. With a wince she added: “It’s a bit more intimate than that.”

“Uh …”

“When I said he could pay, I meant a lot.” She stepped forward and lowered her voice. “Like, a lot.”

A small Filipino couple walked past us to peruse the toothpaste and we shifted our conversation over to the next aisle; baby products. 

“Are we talking about,” it was my turn to lower my voice, “sex?”

Raman’s eyes widened and her sister giggled into her hand. “No, not that. I don’t know exactly what he has in mind, but not that.”

“Oh, good,” I said, sighing in relief. 

“I think.”

“How much is a lot, by the way?”

She paused and thought about it. “Enough to buy a car.” 

“Mercedes or Mazda?”

“Mazda. Probably a used Mazda, but with low mileage.”

“That’s still a lot for just hanging out. I mean, intimately hanging out.”

I agreed to at least stay in touch and haggle over the details while I thought about it. Raman and I exchanged phone numbers and even though it wasn’t us that would be getting together, exchanging numbers with a hot young chick still sent blood pumping below the beltline. I tried to mentally prevent it from happening, but there’s no reasoning with a boner. 

 

***

 

“How about we start by getting to know one another?” the old guy said from the bed. For the first time, he wasn’t grinning madly at me. He wore a muted smile now. “And you don’t have to worry. I’m not here for anything dirty. My liga doesn’t really work anymore, anyway.” He gestured to his crotch. 

“Right. Well, I’m sure Raman and Aman told you that I’m Colin, uh, Asterbury.” I’ve always thought my name would look great on the cover of a novel. “I’m a writer.”

“Oh, how interesting.”

“And they told me your name is Paramjit.” 

“Yes. Paramjit Singh.” He bowed his head slightly. “An old man who is going to meet God soon.” 

“Oh, are you … sick?”

He scoffed. “No. I am not dying of anything in particular. Just dying in general. Same as you.”

Now it was my turn to scoff. “Uh, Raman said you wanted a … an intimate meeting. She didn’t really give me much detail. I’m not really sure what all that entails.”

“Before I meet God, I wanted to spend some time with someone who I like. Who I find attractive.”

This made me smile. 

“You see, Mr. Asterbury –.”

“Oh, call me Colin, please.”

“You see, Colin, I was never allowed to be myself, my true self while I was growing up. I always had to be someone else for someone else … for my father, for my wife, for my kids. Don’t be getting me wrong. I did love my wife when she was here. She died almost ten years ago now.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

“Dhanavāda. I do love my children and I have such beautiful grandchildren. You know Raman and Aman, of course.”

“Yeah, Raman is definitely beautiful,” I mumble. 

“Sorry?”

“Uh, yes, they are beautiful grandchildren.”

“If I didn’t have to live a … I don’t want to say ‘lie,’ but if I didn’t have to hide my true self, I may not have had such a wonderful family.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I just nodded like I was trying to keep a steady beat. 

“But, I’ve made my fortune – my father owned a print shop in Lahore and I brought the family business here to Canada – and now I just want to find someone I admire,” he gestured to me, “and be a piece of cutlery for maybe an hour or two.”

“What?”

“Camaca … spoons.”

“Oh, right.” 

Raman didn’t give me any details about what the old guy – Paramjit – wanted, but I figured for the amount they were giving me, we wouldn’t just be talking. I curled my fingers as far as they would go over my dank palms and raked them back while opening my hands. My feet twitched.   

The go-to insult for my friends and I growing up in Saskatchewan was calling each other a “homo” and all the other words you can’t say anymore. Back then they were just words. Hell, my teachers used to use them. I could picture all my friends, grown up now, but still the same assholes, calling me those names, telling me they always knew, laughing and pointing. 

“You’re uncomfortable,” he said from the bed. 

“Well,” I scoffed, “I’m not used to this kind of thing. I mean, I’ve paid other people to do this sort of stuff … well, more than just spooning, but I’ve never been the one to get paid. Most people don’t really want to be around me these days, at least that’s how it seems.”

He patted the bed near him. “Why don’t you sit down? I am also uncomfortable, so it would help me, too.”

Feeling like a kid again on his first date, I moved to the bed and lowered myself beside him. The room seemed to shrink. 

“Of course,” he said, “I won’t speak about any of this to anyone.”

“Geez, I didn’t even think about bringing a non-disclosure agreement.”

“I know these things are sensitive for men like you.”

“Like me?” 

“Men who like women. Men who fit into what society deems normal for a man. Men who don’t have to hide who they truly are.”

I pictured my buddy Chris leering at me and calling me the F-word. Not fuck, the other one. The one you really can’t say anymore. This is the type of shit I had grown up with my whole life, and guys like him were still doing it now, as adults, even as I tried to leave my small-minded past behind. 

Breathing in, as much as my lungs would allow, I closed my eyes and held it in and then slowly exhaled. 

“What are you doing?” he asked. 

“Breathing. I mean, it’s like meditative breathing, or something. I got it off the internet. It’s just, my friends used to – well, we all called each other names and stuff when we were younger – I mean, they still do it – and it’s just always been hard for me to …” My words failed me. I shrugged.

Like an owl, he turned his head back and forth to look around the room. “I do not see any of these friends here now.”

I nodded. The old guy had me there. How could someone like Chris point and laugh when the only space he occupied in this room was in my imagination? 

“Fuck it.” I swung my legs up onto the bed. “You want to be the big spoon or the little spoon?”

“Well,” he patted his tummy, “I think I should be big spoon.”

“Sure.” I wriggled over to him as he positioned himself and I put my back against his front. He snaked an arm under my head and draped the other one over me. 

It was my first little spoon experience, and every muscle in my body seemed to be tensing at the same time as his warm breath tickled my ear and his beard mingled with my longish hair in the back. Once I realized I was holding my breath, I let out a long exhale, which did nothing to relax my body. His cologne enveloped me, mixed with his own, natural aroma. I wondered what I smelled like to him. I’ve never really been a cologne guy, and now I was wondering if the sweat that was starting to ooze out of my pores was going to make me stink.  

Small talk has never been my forte, and it was escaping me even more now than it usually did. Laying there in some guy’s arms, it just seemed so weird to talk about the weather. How do sex workers do it?

But, since we were in this ridiculous situation anyway, I said to hell with the small talk and went deep instead. 

“What was it like growing up in India being …?”

“My experience was much like a lot of people’s around the world, I think. It was expected of me to marry the girl my family found for me and have a lot of kids and take over the family business. And, I did all that. But, it was not easy. 

“When I was just a young man, what you call a teenager here, actually, I and my friend Arjun knew that we liked each other … more than the other boys liked each other. We would find places to hide and … you know, do the things young people do with each other. Not sex, but uh …”

“Experimenting?” I offered.

“Yes, thank you. We experimented, as you put it, with each other. I didn’t know what I liked about Arjun. I just knew that I felt safer with him than with anyone else in the whole world. But, then my father found us one day while we were conducting a particularly fun experiment. And that was the end of Arjun.”

“Oh? Did your dad, like, murder him?”

“Oh, no.” The old man guffawed. “I meant the end of our budding romance. If my father was going to murder someone, it would be me. And, he almost did. I think the only reason I am here now is because my mother stepped in. She promised my father she would talk to me and she told me; ‘Paramjit, you have a responsibility to this family. You cannot put your own fanciful notions ahead of the family. You must put all this strange nonsense between you and Arjun out of your head and act like a man. Make your father and I proud.’ And, so I did. 

“My parents found me a nice girl to marry, and we had a kind of love, you know. Like, a family love, I guess. And, we made some amazing children and they made some amazing grandchildren, so …”

“What happened to Arjun? Did you ever see him again?”

“My father forbid me from seeing him again and told me I would be banished if I did. He also told Arjun that he would tell his father what happened, so both of us stayed away from each other. But, years later, after my father was gone and I had taken over the shop, Arjun and his family came in. He had a beautiful wife and they had two fine young sons and a daughter. I greeted him like an old friend, and he introduced me to everyone, but you know, when I looked at him, I could see it in his eyes.”

“What did you see?”

He cleared his throat. “Love. Not the kind of love I and my wife had. That was a love born out of necessity. What I saw in Arjun’s eyes was real love. I could see the longing in his eyes, and I’m sure he could see it in mine. But, we just talked like two old school friends who had not seen each other in a long time. When he left, I tried to give him a hug, but he only gave me his hand to shake. I think he knew that if we embraced …”

He sniffled and cleared his throat again. I reached back and patted him on the leg and he squeezed me tightly.

“I guess,” he continued,” this is some type of therapy for me … and you are one expensive therapy doll.”

We both laughed. 

“Do you think me absurd, Colin? All this money just to embrace someone who doesn’t want to be embraced by me.”

“I mean, there are worse things that you can do with your money, like gambling, for example.”

I could feel him nodding behind me. “Yes, yes. Gambling, to me, is like flushing the money down the drain. What is the use? Just some small amount of joy if you win after spending so much money to win. I don’t understand. I wouldn’t want my money being used for any gambling. Is that what you are going to use it for?”

“Not exactly. It’ll mostly be used to pay off debt … accumulated through gambling.” I cringed as I said it, picturing his disapproving look behind me.

“Well, it’s your money now. If it disappears into a black hole of debt, so be it. It is worth one hour of happiness.”

Only we didn’t stay there for an hour. He nodded off at some point and I had myself a nap, waking up close to midnight with the old man snoring gently in my ear.

I unfolded myself from his arms and shook him awake. 

“Uh, does that fulfill the … the requirements?” I asked. 

He chuckled. “Yes, Colin, I won’t keep you here any longer. Thank you for humouring an old man.”

“Well, I hope the experience was … worth it?” I shrugged. 

“I thought it would be more magical, but …”

“Oh. Uh, sorry.” I rubbed the back of my neck. 

Smiling, he said: “I kid. I’m pulling on your leg. The experience was fine and you were a gracious guest under these strange circumstances.”

I slipped my shoes back on and got ready to leave. “You know,” I said, reaching for the door. “I’m not really a writer. I mean, I write, but what I really do – like to make a living – is I work in a warehouse. Forklift.”

“It’s an honourable profession,” he said. 

“If you want to meet again, let me know. Maybe not in a hotel room, but I’d be down to get a drink or something.”

“You’re very kind. Maybe a lassi some time.”

 

 

 

 

Edward Voeller
The Portrait Photographer

 

“For the third time! Put your hands down and away from your face. Fer Chrissake, man!” I’d had it with this guy. “Put your hands down!”

He sat complacently in the chair in front of me in the photo studio at the Army Public Affairs Office.

I looked at the metal name tag on his military dress jacket again: Ngọc. I wanted to say it, but couldn’t. A risk I didn’t want to take. I’d likely make a fool of myself, and that I had to avoid. I’d already had a feeling that his misbehavior was just to dis me. If I messed up his name, he’d just be getting at me another way.

I sneaked a peek at the flip clock on the studio wall. My workday was pretty soon over. I didn’t dare let him see me look at my watch. That’d make him believe he and I were engaged in an endurance contest. It might encourage his obstinacy. As it was, it felt like I’d been arguing with him for hours.

I couldn’t wait to escort this guy out of the photo studio (with my foot if required). Every time I tried to do my job, he’d bring his fingers to his face and at the outside corners of his eyes, pull the skin to narrow the eyes and then push those corners up. Like a child ignorantly mocking a Chinese face. Unbelievable. But this was an adult. This was the military. This was insane. I couldn’t take his picture like that.

I wanted to slap the guy. And I had to be careful not to lose my temper or get kinetic. I’d done that once and got my ass chewed for it. An Alpha Charlie. For yelling at a room full of new soldiers waiting to get their full dress uniform portraits taken. They were horsing around, noisy, shouting, and laughing totally out of control. Much too loud. “Quiet!” I gave them my deep red face. Insulted them. Told them I wasn’t going to take their photos.

“That ain’t funny,” I told this soldier in the studio chair in front of me. “Put your hands down.” I controlled the intensity of my voice. “Fer Chrissake, soldier. Get with it man.” I said that with my sort of breathy, sympathetic voice.

I believed the guy to be Chinese- or Vietnamese-American. I studied his eyes when he took his fingers away. Did he have that lid fold in the corners of his eyes near the bridge of his nose? Yep. The epicanthic fold, or whatever. Characteristic of Chinese. Did I have to explain to him what was wrong with what he was doing?

“You know the purpose of this photo, right? These full-dress portraits go out to families. And to your family, your parents, your wife if ...” I stopped that thought—this guy can’t have a wife. Not if this is a manifestation of who he is. So childish. Who’d marry him, fer Chrissake?

“You want a photo for your family doing that with your eyes? How embarrassing would that be?” I tried a little good-cop again, a little bit nicer, my gentle voice: “I mean, wouldn’t it? Who’s going to want you in your US Army portrait looking at them like that from a lamp table in the living room or from the top of a bureau in a bedroom? Who’d want visitors to your family’s home to see that photo of you? With your fingers pulling at your eyes. Huh?”

The guy maintained his blank expression. That was it since he seated himself in the studio chair under the studio lights. No word from him. Totally enigmatic. Was he able to speak English? Understand English? That thought occurred to me at first, but he did say, “Like this?” perfectly normal-like, when I asked him to sit up straight. Exactly American-sounding.

I was at the tired end of my day, and I couldn’t tolerate this guy’s antics any longer. How childish. This was the Army, fer Chrissake. The US Army. I couldn’t spend this much time with him. I still had guys waiting in the hall for their photos and it was nearing shutdown time.

Finally, I told him, “I’m going to report you.” I pleaded with him one more time to let me take his photo the regular way. According to standard procedure. I peered through the viewfinder of the camera once more. Hands went up to his face again, fingers to his eyes.

I straightened up, shook my head, “Jeeeeez,” and left the room. The sergeant in charge of Public Affairs was not in his office. Out his office window I saw him in the sun-washed parking lot getting into his car. The clock on his desk: sixteen minutes remained of the workday.

“OK, he’s really pissed,” I said, when I came back into the photo studio and told the guy that I had reported him. Now the weirdo was sitting normal, hands folded on his lap, all gentlemanly like. “You’re holding up everything. I’ve got a half a dozen guys patiently waiting their turn for photos.” (Three actually.)

I leaned into the viewfinder of the camera for the umpteenth time and without saying anything, his hands went to his face. There he was again pulling his eyes up again.

From his body language—he shifted in his chair, I could tell he had some words that he wanted to get out. I was eager to hear what he had. “Take my picture,” he insisted. “This is how I want to be in my photo. And whose photo is it? My photo, not yours.” Almost an outburst, considering he had not been exactly loquacious so far.

“Can’t do that,” I said. “These photos gotta be natural. It is offensive, what you are doing. I told you that. You should know. You of all people should know.

“Look, everyone needs a photo in dress uniform. Ultimately, it’s for your family. They want to keep it atop a bookshelf in the living room. They want to show everyone how proud they are of you. What are your parents going to do with a photo of you making your eyes into slits? Think of that. Think of your parents, fer Chrissake.” I’m sure he was not unaware of my exasperation.

I was also concerned about my own reputation. My job was important. I wanted to do it well. If a soldier died, my work would be an important memorial for a family or spouse. Maybe my work would help them grieve. And I was the contact for the media. NBC, PBS, Telemundo—they all called me directly for photos of deceased soldiers. Those killed in action. The portrait would be a memory of a son or daughter or spouse; it would be the face of the US Army and, with the American flag in each portrait, of the country. So the photos had to reflect on the Army and the soldier in a good way. Good work was my duty, fer Chrissake. I was proud of my work.

“My appearance is my decision. It is how I want to look. It’s who I am. And I know who I am,” the kid said. Really, he was so young looking.

I couldn’t figure out his logic. Considering his ethnicity, his eyes were perfect as they were. He looked up at me. A bit arrogantly. He went to his eyes with his fingers and made his eyes more narrow than ever now, and he stared at me. He released his fingers and waited for my reaction. What was I supposed to say?

“This photo goes to your family,” I calmly repeated.

“My family will remember me as I want.”

I asked him how he posed for the Army base ID photo. He didn’t answer me.

“OK,” I said. “You’re in for it. The commander will be in here in a minute.”

Just then I considered for a moment to press the shutter on the camera without looking through the viewfinder. Catch him off guard with his hands down. The camera was all set up on a tripod, and the chair and studio lights are the same for every photo. Everything was as it should be. The flag stood as it always did to the right and slightly behind the subject. Everything was set.

But I always do check the viewfinder to see how a photo will look. That’s important. Things can get past you if you ignore the viewfinder. You might miss something that the camera sees—a tuft of hair escaping from under a hat or eyeglasses off kilter. Maybe the subject shifts slightly, or the camera moves out of alignment from only a slight, imperceptible jar. That could throw off the composition and my work would be no good. I have to check it through the viewfinder. If the pose was not standard, I’d get blamed and the subject might come back and demand a retake, and the Army is not big on retakes. Also, it is important for the subject to see the photographer peer through the viewfinder. It’s a signal to the subject to get ready. Get that smile the way you want it. But later on I thought that’s what I should have done in this case. Just pressed the shutter without looking through the viewfinder. Why was I so anal about it?

Once I had a guy who had a scar on his upper lip from a hairlip correction. He requested me to remove the “flaw,” he called it. I said I would ask my superior and sent him on his way. He seemed satisfied and off he went. But we don’t retouch photos. No post production work. That was the rule. An Army rule, not my rule. Another fellow had a condition called vitiligo. He had spots on a hand and on his forehead where pigment wasn’t present in the skin somehow. He requested that I darken the one on his forehead to make his skin color the same there. I couldn’t do that either. And I certainly could do nothing with a photo to remove this soldier’s fingers from his eyes.

I told this guy to come back the next day. I told those waiting their turn in the hallway to come back in the morning as well. They grumbled. Of course, they grumbled. I told them they would be first in line the next day. There were three of them. This bizarre guy would be fourth.

 

#

 

I felt refreshed the next morning. I’d had a good night’s sleep and a great espresso for breakfast. Straight espresso, as I like it. No milk or sugar. At the studio I went through the three soldiers who had been waiting the day before, plus one more, who had been told by some brass that I would fit him in. Fer Chrissake. Somebody’s nephew or something. I moved through the four of them quickly, easily under an hour. Then the enigmatic guy came in and sat down, and I felt back in the rut where I was the day before.

He’d shaved. I noticed not because he was one of those with heavy beards, but because he had a red nick on his neck just below his left jaw. I didn’t bring it up. The red nick was not in a place where it would show. Too bad if it does, I thought.

“Ok, sit down,” I said. “Keep your hands on your lap. If you’re going to make a face again, I won’t have patience for that. Just to let you know.”

“I won’t. I promise.”

“You won’t what?”

“Just take my photo.”

That promise from him surprised me, but I didn’t say anything. Maybe he’d thought things over the night before. Maybe he’d talked to someone. Maybe someone had talked to him. Maybe he had a good breakfast and an espresso that morning. Maybe he’d slept with ... I don’t know. Probably not.

I liked to do good work. And the word was that I took good portraits. I didn’t have to, but I surveyed this guy’s dress jacket quickly to see if any insignia or ribbons were out of place. Of course, it’s the soldier’s duty to have everything correct, but these are inexperienced kids—at the end of basic training most of them, so I check them over. There wasn’t much on this guy’s uniform. No chest candy on these guys who are still wet behind the ears. I stepped behind him and pulled at the tails of his dress jacket to remove any wrinkles or folds on the front. Then I slightly squeezed the shoulder pads of his jacket for a more natural look. The jacket was a little large for this light and narrow guy. I came out from behind him on his right and slightly jostled the American flag standing there and dust dropped on my right arm from the gold tassel hanging from the top of the flagstand. I brushed the dust off.

“OK,” I said, standing in front of him. Let’s get this over with, fer Chrissake, I said to myself. I leaned slightly to the camera’s viewfinder. I peered through it. There he was. Fingers at his eyes again. Pulling skin out and up with his fingers.

I straightened up, said nothing to him, walked away and went into the sergeant’s office. The sarge and I discussed the case briefly. Was this an effort to get dismissed from the Army? Refusing a command in order to get discharged? But this was not an actual command. The sergeant followed me into the studio. He looked at the guy’s name tag. I could almost see the sarge’s mind working. He squinted at the name and sort of started to say it and stopped. Then he gave it a try.

“Nock?” he said. “I’m not hearing good things about you. Time for you to behave. Schwartz here is going to take your photo.” (The sarge got my name wrong.) “Is that understood? Now get with it. Get it done.”

The sarge turned close to me and spoke to me confidentially with his back to the soldier in the chair. “A real football bat, this guy,” he said.

I felt optimistic. I thought I was finally going to get this done with the sarge present.

Then the sarge took a call on his mobile phone. With his free left hand, he reached into his shirt pocket for a package of cigarettes. He jiggled the pack to bring a cigarette up. A cigarette came up and out fast and fell to the floor. I picked it up and handed it to him. He stuck it between his lips. He covered the phone with his hand, turned to me, and said “OK,” with the cigarette moving up and down, and he headed out of the room with the phone at his ear.

OK for what? I wondered. I leaned into the camera on the tripod and peered at the subject through the viewfinder—for the final time, I hoped. The guy’s fingers were up and pulling at his eyes. I took the photo.

I said OK. Ngọc left the studio and I signaled for the next guy in the hall to come in and sit. At the end of the day I forwarded copies of all the day’s photos to Public Affairs.

 

#

 

I didn’t hear anything more about Ngc until a couple of months later.

The sarge bounced into the photo studio. “He’s back,” he told me.

“Who’s back?”

“Van.”

“What? Who?”

“That Vietnamese guy. The guy with the eyes. Fingering his eyes. That’s what they called him, Van.”

He’d been evacuated from the war zone and admitted to the VA hospital here in Washington after short stays in hospitals in a couple of countries overseas.

The sarge showed me the name in a document on a clipboard. Ngọc. His given name was also unpronounceable: Phuc; Middle name: Van.

“MEDVAC.” the sarge said.

I went into the photo files on my computer and found his portrait. No record of it ever being sent to the family.

He’s here at the VA hospital. Full circle, I thought. He’s back here. Only blocks away. Of course, I’d never had any contact with him after he left the photo studio. At the same time he was the only soldier who had sat in my studio chair and who I had a real memory of. I could still see his metal name tag on his dress jacket. He was not a friend. But I was curious. I wanted to learn what I didn’t know about him. That’s the kind of appeal he had to me. I thought there must be more than my chapter of his story. Maybe I’d like to visit him. Just out of curiosity. We weren’t friends.

 

#

 

I vacillated the rest of the day about seeing that bizarre kid in the hospital. That evening I mulled over standing at a war casualty’s bedside without the right words to say, and I went to bed without deciding what I’d do the next day—but I knew I wanted to see him more than I didn’t. At breakfast the next morning, I told myself to get with it. I called the Public Affairs Office and gave notice I’d be coming in a little late. Getting away from the photo studio for a couple of hours sounded good. But when I got off the phone, I questioned my motivation and what I would say to Van that would not sound like a get-well card. And I was still conflicted about the visit when I got to the door of the VA hospital. Was this driven by mere curiosity? Was that a moral or character weakness? A kind of exploitation? That bothered me. I didn’t know how this was going to turn out.

My dad had been like that. He’d follow firetrucks on their way to a disaster. Curiosity drove him. He’d park at a reasonable distance, and frown as he watched a tragedy unfold. If there were bodies covered with blankets on the ground, he’d comment: “Tsk, tsk, tsk,” or “Jeez. Look at that, will ya.” He’d get his fill of gore. That disgusted my mother, and her perspective rubbed off on me and my siblings, and we began to object to my dad’s repulsive hobby from the backseat of our car. Had I picked up my dad’s eccentricity?

I managed to get into the correct corridor at the hospital after a bit of casting about and dodging sets of patients with their physical therapists, and I approached room 203 diffidently. I stood before the door. I would rap softly, I thought. Suddenly the door opened with a jerk before I had a chance to knock, and I faced a woman. Vietnamese probably. Van’s mother I decided. I wondered how this was going to shake out.

“I came to visit …”

“Thank you,” she said. I was embarrassed that she’d discovered me standing at the door without knocking.

“We were just leaving,” she said. Van’s father was behind her. I backed farther into the corridor to greet them properly. They followed me out and closed the door behind them. They introduced themselves, extended their hands.

Van was not responding to voices, they told me, only they did not use “Van.” I didn’t catch how they called him, and I did not want to ask them to repeat it. For a moment I wondered if I had come to the right room, but it had to be. The man and woman I was standing next to were most certainly Van’s parents.

I looked for words. Van’s mother and father looked for words. I knew they expected me to fill them in about my connection to their son. I was in my uniform, of course. I told them I was with the Army Public Affairs Office. Just as a way of letting them know my position was not one that would allow me to know Van personally. They started to inquire about Van’s deployment overseas. “Did you . . .? Were you . . . close to Van? I stumbled over a response. The couple exchanged disappointed looks. It was plain that they realized I had no knowledge about Van’s story on the battlefield and that I was only weakly connected to their son. Very weakly.

Mrs. Ngọc was very motherly-like. She exuded warmth and kindness. I would have been proud to call her my mother. Her eyes got moist when I told her I’d met her son at the Public Affairs Office a few months before. I felt so bad for her when I reminded myself that I was standing with Van’s parents out of mere curiosity. I was glad I had come to visit Van, and I regretted coming at the same time. I really knew nothing about Van—except for his one singular peculiarity. No story about the boy that I could relate—except for one that was not appropriate at this time. I said I admired him but could not elaborate on that thought. I was at a loss for words. I said I knew him only a very short time but I liked his genuineness. Very vague.

Van’s father barely spoke, and when he did, I could hear his son talking to me in the photo studio chair. He really had Van’s voice. I felt sorry I had come without an ability to comfort Van’s parents in their grief with a story about Van that would help them understand their boy’s heroism and make them feel proud. I thought about my dad again and his curiosity that brought him to scenes of tragedy.

His mother asked again how I knew her son. I told her I was the Army Public Affairs portrait photographer. And I stopped with that. I immediately realized the problem that could raise. And she immediately recognized the opportunity.

“Oh, you took his photo? Won’t you send it to us, please.”

That was a moment of consternation for me. Van’s father came to the rescue. “Here’s our address,” he said, interrupting his wife. He handed me his business card.

I gave them my card.

“I’m sorry we have to leave you alone with him,” Mrs. Ngọc said before departing.

 

#

 

I entered room 203 alone. Flowers everywhere. I’d always imagined Van to be friendless. Large cards on the window sill displayed Chinese characters and Vietnamese writing. Medical monitoring devices ticked and beeped. Plastic lifeline tubes and electric cords snaked across Van’s body.

I stepped away from the door and stood next to Van’s bed. His head was covered in bandages—from the top of his head, down the back of his neck and around the front of his face, just like in old movies. His nose protruded from bandages and his mouth was uncovered. There were dark openings in the bandages where his eyes were, but I couldn’t see his eyes. I wanted to see his eyes because that’s who he was to me. I braced my knees against the bed. With my left hand on the edge of the mattress, I leaned over Van. I put my face directly over his face and looked into the two eyeholes in the bandages. His eyes were closed.

“Hey, man!” I said in my most optimistic voice.

No response. No sound. No movement. “Fer Chrissake,” I said, hoping to get his attention. Maybe he’d remember my voice. Nothing. I was very sad. It didn’t matter if I knew him well or not. With one finger and several blinks I prevented a tear from forming in my left eye.

An idea occurred to me. I pondered it. Should I do this? I turned to look at the room door. No sound there or in the hall. I checked my breast pocket for my black marker pen. It was there. I looked at the bandages around Van’s eyes. I can do this, I thought. I listened again for steps outside the door, and then I leaned over Van again. With my black marker pen, I drew slanting eyes around the eyeholes on the bandages covering his face. I did the left eye and the right eye, and I thought I heard a groan from under the bandages. A good sign, I thought. I finished the eyes. I’d done it. I felt good about it. I’ll get to tell that to Van when he’s well, I thought. I wondered what he’ll think of me. I backed away from the bed. I told myself that Van didn’t really look like a dying man. I thought I’d see him again. He’ll recover. He’ll come to the photo studio and look me up after his parents tell him I’d visited him. That’s what I thought.

Time to leave. I stood at the door and listened for activity in the hall. Hearing none, I left the room. I returned to the Army Public Affairs photo studio.

 

#

 

That evening I received an email from Van’s parents. They said that their son had died, and that they were going directly to the crematorium the next day. I was glad they had not called. They had my phone number, and I would not have known what to say.

Van had stepped over a line somewhere, I lamented. He’d never be coming into my studio again, and now his misbehavior seemed so trivial—and me so trivial as well. It’s this kind of guy who deserved respect, I thought.

The email said I was welcome to be there with family and friends. They understood, however, that I had military commitments. They included a question about a portrait photo for their son. They said they knew parents of other soldiers had them, but they didn’t recall getting one. They wanted it for an obituary. A TV broadcaster wanted it. The heat was on. I emailed condolences to the Ngọc family.

The next day, I shocked the Public Affairs Office when I brought to their attention the portrait that the office had for Van’s obituary. Public Affairs didn’t know what to do. Quite naturally the office did not want Van’s Army portrait to be used with his obituary. They refused, point blank. I was to tell Van’s parents that somehow Public Affairs did not have a record of a portrait of Van. So when photos of recent fatal war casualties were posted by a local television station, an empty black rectangular frame represented Phuc Van Ngọc.

I was putting my job on the line, but I wanted to help Van’s parents. I found a copy of Van’s portrait (with fingers at his eyes) in one of the studio computers. I dragged it into my private email with a note to explain the photo and clicked “send.”

I didn’t get an immediate reaction from them, but I assumed there was a battle over the photo with a local newspaper because I noticed the photo a couple of days later in a delayed newspaper obituary with the notation that it was a “Paid Advertisement.”

That was not quite the end of everything about Van, however. I got a phone call at the photo studio from Van’s mother on the day that I saw the newspaper obituary.

She didn’t give me a chance to say hello. She started right off with, “Did you see the photo?” Immediately I recognized her voice.

“That’s your work. It’s just wonderful. We’re so proud of you. I just called to thank you. That’s our boy. In the middle of one of his pranks. You captured my son as the prankster that he was. You made us feel so proud of our son.”

Just as I got off the phone, the sarge walked into the photo studio. I told him that Van had left our world, and he said that Van would be a good model for all soldiers. He’d confused Van with someone else, fer Chrissake. I was very glad I had visited Van in the hospital.

 

#

 

Since the Van episode, the rest of my stint as official Army portrait photographer has gone smoothly—oh, there was one other interesting case. A new recruit insisted on being photographed with a red kerchief emerging ever-so-slightly from his breast pocket. It was barely visible, but it didn’t get past me because all recruits come to me dressed the same, and only a tiny difference like that jumps out at you. I told the boy that technically he was out of uniform with that red kerchief protruding from his pocket. He insisted it stay as it was. It had to be there, he said. It’s all that would distinguish him from his twin brother. They had enlisted at the same time. “How would anyone tell us apart if everything about these photos is the same?” He said his twin brother had put a blue kerchief in his breast pocket for his portrait. I couldn’t verify that. His brother was stationed at a different base clear across the country.

 

 

 

Danny Williams
Visitation

“Hello, Everett?”

A slow voice on the phone, like one from back home.

“Yes, this is Everett.”

“Everett? This is Margaret.”

A quick shuffle through the short list of Margarets. Right, my father’s wife.

“Everett, we lost your father.”

My immediate thought was, if she lost my father, she ought to be out looking for him, not talking on the phone. Then I got it.

I said, “Oh.”

“A heart attack, some time today. I was at work. You know how he was.”

Yes, I know how he was. Hard-working beer truck driver, never without a cigarette in his mouth. When he talked, the tip of his cigarette would bounce crazily up and down. Bacon and eggs for breakfast, lunch at whatever bar he was delivering to, pork chops or meat loaf or such for dinner, beers every night. Then after a mild heart attack made him stop working, he went total lump, sitting all day doing paint-by-number and doting on his nervous little dog while Margaret did her LPN job at a nursing home.

“He was on the floor. The mailman saw him and called it in. They called me at work. I called my boy Charles to go to the house so I wouldn’t have to see him like that.”

It finally occurred to me to put down the basket of laundry I was holding on my hip, and sit at the table. “That’s good, Margaret. Are you okay right now?”

“Oh, yes. My two boys are here. Millie is coming in from Roanoke tonight. I’m okay, you know, as far as that goes. He would have been sixty a week from today, May 6.”

“I know, I know. I’m so sorry, Margaret. It’s a blow to me, of course. He was my father. But you’re the one who’s been living with him and putting up with him every day, for, how long now?”

She sniffed, gave a feeble chuckle, “Putting up with him is right. He would go off on politics, or the coloreds and the Jews. I learned to just take the good. He was sweet inside, and he was good to me. Almost eleven years, it’s been.”

Russell, bless him, could sense something was wrong. He came to the kitchen and sat across the table. All three of my guys had profound cognitive disabilities, but they all had some immeasurable gift. Russell stayed tuned in to people’s moods and feelings, and was quick with a hug, a laugh, or a bowl of snacks.

“Well, Margaret, I’m at work in the group home right now. I’m sure they’ll find someone to cover for me, and I can get started down there tomorrow. Of course I’ll come see you.”

“There’s no rush, Everett. There’s really nothing to be done. And call me again if you want to, tonight, tomorrow, whenever. With my sons here, and waiting up late for Millie, and the phone and all, we will be up, and I’ll be so glad to hear you and see you.”

Probably she felt like she ought to change the subject before goodbye. “Are you still driving that old VW bus?”

I said, “Yep. The only problem with it is that it just won’t stop running, so I can’t get rid of it.”

“You be sure and leave early in the morning, so you won’t be driving much after dark.”

It was 200 miles.

“Oh no, Margaret,” I said. “Did Daddy infect you with smartass disease?”

She chuckled. “Maybe he did. Maybe he did. Anyhow, drive careful, and don’t worry about me.”

“You, take care of yourself. You will be in my thoughts. Goodbye.”

“Bless you, Everett. Goodbye.”

I called Loretta, who worked the evenings, overnights, and morning when I didn’t, and of course she said she would come right in. The third worker that evening was good, so Loretta was able to sit with me in the kitchen and listen to me ramble. Daddy had reportedly been a bit of a rough character in his younger days. Mommy was 15, poor, and an unwed mother. Daddy was 22, from a middle-class home. There must have been some family friction over the unequal social standing. Daddy’s father, Julian Jackson Burrell, Sr., was a railroad engineer. Daddy, J. J., Jr., was born severely premature, and in 1925 there wasn’t much they could do but wait and see if he lived or died. He grew up basically healthy, but his eyesight kept him out of the railroad business, the army, and a lot of other possibilities. Daddy wasn’t at all like the fathers on TV, going casual on Saturday with a necktie and sweater, throwing baseball or going fishing with me, or handing out solemn advice. He left a lot of father boxes unchecked.

He was physically affectionate, with his hand on my knee or arm around my shoulder on the couch or in the car. He could play harmonica, but he did it so seldom, his face would turn fire-truck red and we would make him stop. People liked Daddy, liked to have a good time with him. Our house was always full of his and Mommy’s friends, laughing, playing cards, dancing. He almost never told an actual joke, but he had a funny comment about everything.

Eventually I stopped talking and Loretta gave me a hug and led me to the stairs.

 

Margaret was right about my bus. I-79 eliminated the hairpin turns and10-degree climbs, but there’s only so much engineers can do. I spent a lot of time in third gear, where 38 miles an hour seemed to be the little engine’s sweet spot.

I stopped at the Big Otter rest area to do a couple bong hits and call my mother. I thought about calling collect, but decided to use my handful of quarters and dimes instead, so there would be a time limit. Mommy said the usual things, sorry about my father, drive carefully, and all. My little brother Marty and his wife were flying from Florida, and would stay with Jen’s parents. I told Mommy I would be at the Holiday Inn on Third Avenue, not at her house, because I might end up coming and going at all hours. She took this as a rejection of her hospitality, and it was. There was no way to know which Evelyn she would be, and there were a few of them I was in no mood to face. All my life, she changed day to day, or hour to hour. Breaking a rule would bring the worst punishment, the feeling that she didn’t love me any more, and there was never a way to know what the rules were at any particular time. Mommy was charming, and made friends easily. She kept them in rotation, on and off her “good” list. Relatives and neighbors, too. For a while her sister Phyllis was a bad person because she and her husband had a purebred dog with a pretentious name. Some days the boy next door was a brat, some days he wasn’t. She worked at a drug store for many years, and after it closed she said the owner was evil. I knew myself well enough to not try and deal with Daddy’s death and Mommy’s unpredictability together.

 

Tuesday evening at Margaret’s was about like you’d expect, the little place jammed with people and food. Indiana Street, like all the state streets, went just one block, from Auburn to the floodwall, so the neighbors had grown pretty close. I made the rounds of hugs and handshakes, and spent the rest of the night walking around downtown or sitting by the river.

Margaret chose to hold no funeral as such, just a visitation, as it’s known down there, Wednesday evening at Rogers’s Funeral Home, and a burial the next day. Daddy wasn’t a church type, and never expressed any belief or disbelief. The viewing was crowded. Daddy visited his buddies often, and some of the beer workers remembered him. He was in Civil Defense, too, and the Moose. We Care sent a large floral arrangement on a stand, and there were flowers from the crew at my group home. People in those parts keep score on these things.

Daddy’s cousin Denzil—double cousin, as he liked to say—came in with some of his tribe. Double cousin because my grandfather and his brother Moody married sisters. These Burrells were deep-country folk from Out Wayne, the mysterious southern part of the county. My grandfather had his heart set on railroading, so he came north right after school. That’s how our branch of the family ended up in the suburban, relatively progressive strip along the river. Denzil and them kept the farm, and found beds for any relatives, or anybody else. They mostly raised hogs, and people picked up a little cash work when they could find it. His dress-up clothes for the viewing were tan Dickies work wear, neatly pressed and the shirt buttoned all the way up.

Daddy’s cousin Sue showed up, obviously into some alcohol and the Dexedrine “diet pills” she kept on hand for times like when the trailer needed cleaned. She sobbed so loud people stopped talking, tried to sit on a chair and missed, and put her head down on the floor. A lot of people stopped and stared, but those of us in the family just nodded at each other and kept on talking, eating, or whatever. It was just Sue.

I winked at my cousin Delia, and nodded toward the door. We met outside, and I led her next door to the Red Star, where there was always a clear line between the bar people and the funeral people. Besides the difference in their clothes and demeanors, they mostly kept to one side of the room or other. And the funeral-goers drank more. DeeDee and I were “second cousins once removed,” as the self-appointed family genealogist told me. She and I were about the same age, so we were always special buddies after being thrown together at every family do, and usually sneaking out together. We had matching red Burrell hair. I played piano at two of her weddings, and she named her oldest Everett. I flagged down the waitress, asked for a PBR as a salute to Daddy, and a Jack and Coke for DeeDee. She lit a cigarette, and blew the smoke down toward the floor.

I asked, “When are you due?”

“End of August, but the doctors never get it right. This is my fourth, you know.”

I really didn’t know, I’d been so far gone from that part of my life. “Well, congratulations. I hope everything goes smooth and easy.”

“Thanks,” she said. “People talk about the cigarettes and the booze, but the three babies I’ve already birthed came out fat as little butterballs.”

She said there were nineteen people at the farm these days, in the big house, two trailers, the room over the root cellar, and a school bus. She and her three had a trailer to themselves. “That’s the way it’s going to stay, too. I’m not sharing my place with no man. Ever again. Four will be plenty. More than plenty.”

Besides the hogs, they had started keeping goats, for the meat, milk, and cheese. “People think goats are cute, so they think goat milk is better somehow. It’s just milk, is all it is. And city people buy the kids after they’re weaned. They think it will be like a dog or some crap. They raise the kids a while, then when they get tired of them shitting all over everything and eating everybody’s clothes they give them back. Easiest money we ever get. Since Jamie got scared off of weed farming, anyway.”

I asked about Delia’s sister Ginny, just a couple years younger. “Jail. Sixty days this time. Her and her man was taking copper wires out of the old mine at Fort Gay. All the mines is shut down. Remember the one we used to go in, go so deep that we’d get scared about finding our way back? Wayne county never has coal like Boone or Mingo. Now I don’t think there’s one a-working anywhere. We used to play in there, remember? Tell scary stories, play with each other’s privates. Back before we even had any hair. Who’s that singer, sings about going down in a mine with a radio?”

I held up two fingers for the waitress. “Van Morrison. ‘Blue-Eyed Girl.’ is the song.”

“Yeah, Van Morrison. Ignorant prick. Radio conks out about three steps in, remember? They talk about we ought to recycle stuff, save the world and all, then they want people to leave all that copper down there while some factory makes new. Probably’s hundred miles of it in every shut-down mine in the country. Who knows how many tons. They say ‘Good for you.’ if you recycle a beer can, but putting tons of copper back into use is a crime. Prick politicians can’t make up their minds which way they want things. Except screwing the little people. Oh, that reminds me. I got something for you.” She pulled a pint canning jar of light purple liquid out of her purse and set it on the table. People started looking. “We don’t make this. It’s some of the Napiers from over Twelvepole. Rye, aged with damson plums. We think it’s the best in the county, and there’s still lots of people making.”

“Thanks so much, Dee. I’ll not get into it tonight, I hope. Which Napiers, the NAP-pers or the NAPE-yers?” The two branches of Napiers are amusing to outsiders, but dead serious to the folks involved. The old-time Out Wayne ones who rhymed with rapper, and the gentrified suburbanites who rhymed with rapier. When I was in about fifth grade, our across-the-street neighbor came over and told us he and his family were switching. Switching up, of course. I never heard of a Nape switching to a Nap.

Delia and I drank a little more, ate some truly disgusting bar food, talked about fun times back then in her woods or down by the Ohio in my neighborhood. Then she had to go. “Hogs and goats don’t know nothing about people needing to sleep of a morning. Why don’t you come for the night? Get a real farm breakfast. You might could use a little more weight. It’s not like you could knock me up any more than I already am.”

It was time for a lie. “That sounds wonderful, but I already have plans for tonight. Sitting by the river and thinking.” She nodded.

Back at Rogers’s the crowd was gone. Margaret hugged me without a word, and left me alone. I put a harmonica in Daddy’s inside jacket pocket. Marine Band in G. He said C was too shrill, and D was so low you couldn’t make it squawk right. G was right in the middle. Every time I got him a better one, like a Special 20, he would toot on it a few times and go back to the Marine Band. I guess it kind of went with the PBR.

 

There were only a few of us next day at the burial. There’s not really any parking at Woodmere, just a winding one-and-a-half-lane road. Standing looking at the coffin, then watching it lowered into the ground, I remembered the times Daddy brought Marty and me out here to honor his parents’ graves. On Memorial Day—“Decoration Day,” he called it—and some other times, he would wrap a coffee can with “tinfoil” and put cut flowers and water in it. There were always peonies on Decoration Day. He would cut two coat hangers and bend them into long “J” shapes to stick in the ground and keep the cans from blowing over. He always showed me and Marty the graves—Julian Jackson Burrell, April 3, 1894-July 22, 1972. Julia Bell Burrell, December 25, 1897-April 22, 1957. Nearby was Aunt Frankie, Frances Viola Burrell. And Daddy always pointed to the spot reserved for him. While he stood staring over the graves, Marty and I would run around and check our favorite tombstones—an obelisk of some kind of reddish stone, a tall monument with an anchor carved into it, twin babies two days old, a woman named Gertrude Glotfelty. And now here I was again.

 

Friday, Marty and I went out the valley for lunch with our mother and Noel. Noel was a handsome, engaging man, an elected officer in the asbestos workers union after years as a “lagger.” His first wife died of asbestos cancer, mesothelioma. They found out too late that the wives were getting exposure from shaking out their husbands’ overalls before putting them in the washer. Noel and Mommy had been married six or eight years by this time. They didn’t tell any of us they were getting married, and would never tell us when they did, or anything about it. That was my mother’s way. No doubt she made life hell for the poor man, but he kept up his front.

She made a dinner like our back-then Sundays—a roast cooked until it was falling apart, with carrots, potatoes, and onions beside it in the big cast-iron Dutch oven. Brown and Serve rolls. The fancy ones, with the sesame seeds. Applesauce sprinkled with cinnamon and nutmeg. Plus the traditional bitter, needling conversation. Marty had trained himself to never say a word around her, no matter what, but I couldn’t do it.

“I thought you might have got a haircut for your father’s funeral.”

I pretended it was a joke. “Yeah, get a bald patch shaved on the crown of my head so I would match him.”

Marty caught my eye with a silent “Give it up.”

She said. “You know what I mean.”

“Yes, mother, I know exactly what you mean.”

“You do? What do I mean?”

“You mean you thought I might have got a haircut.”

We chatted with Noel some about a union trip to Atlanta he’d just taken, and some others coming up. He had conventions, ceremonies for new chapters, and of course funerals. Men who had worked asbestos before some regulations came along in the seventies were dying, and we all knew Noel was at the stage where he had to worry every time he caught cold.

Mommy tried a different tack. “How fat is Bernice these days?” Daddy’s sister.

I speared another potato. I never much liked cooked carrots. “It was about Daddy, Mommy, not about anything else, really.”

“But you have to have noticed.”

“You know, Aunt Bernie never, ever makes any nasty comments about you.”

“What nasty thing could anyone say about me.”

I knew it was wrong, but I took the bait. “I don’t know, but people who like to make nasty comments will always think of something.”

She stared at me for a long second, then slowly got up, went to her bedroom, and shut the door. Marty, Noel and I chatted and finished eating, then watched a baseball game on TV and drank some beers. It was Cincinnati Reds territory. Mommy came out partway through the game, and acted like nothing had happened. And nothing had, really. This was just something she did. When we were younger and she didn’t have a door on her bedroom, she would usually lock herself in the car. We would leave her there a while, then as the oldest it was my job to go out and talk her back into the house. Now she sat in front of the game with us, and rattled on about things like the new curtains she wanted and the neighbor whose unmarried teenage daughter might be pregnant. None of us said a word to her, and she was fine with that. She hugged us goodbye, and said she was so sorry we had lost our father. Noel shook my hand, and gave a look that could have meant anything.

 

On the way back north, I picked up a hitcher around Hurricane, and gave him a ride as far as Clarksburg. A slight, wiry man, maybe about 70, named Sally—Salvatore. A pretty exotic name around central Appalachia, but his dialect was right. He was a sort of self-appointed preacher. He talked Bible pretty much the whole way, and his interpretations tended toward loving your neighbors, and helping them out when they need it. The fundamentalist church I grew up in was all about five thousand reasons you were going to hell. One of his exegeses remains lodged in my heart as something to work toward. “When Jesus said not to judge, He didn’t just mean other people. He meant don’t judge yourself, too. Take it easy on yourself. Do what you can, and don’t worry about what you can’t. You’re really okay.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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