The Blue Penny Quarterly











Volume 1, Issue 3   

December 1994     

ASCII Version

                    



**** The Blue Penny Quarterly (ISSN 1079-042x) is Copyright 1994 by Douglas L. Lawson, All rights reserved.  Electronic Distribution of this ASCII version is limited.  You may download and print one copy of this document for personal use only.  All other uses prohibited without written permission from the publisher.  ****



A Macintosh version is also available free, complete with full color artwork and greatly improved aesthetic appeal.  Anonymous ftp to ftp.etext.org, in the directory  /pub/Zines/BluePennyQuarterly .  







                                     



Authors:



Su Byron

Richard Cumyn

Chris Dubbs

Robert Klein Engler

Aaron Even

Edward Falco

Norman Maynard

Davis McCombs

D. Navarro

Robert Sward

Shelley Uva

Colleen White









Interview:  



Margaret Atwood On Religon, as interviewed by Robert Sward















Staff:



Editor and Publisher:  Doug Lawson

Interior Artwork:  Mark Starlin  

Readers:  Greg Bevan, Giselle Gautreau, Marc Seldin, Chrys      

     Simms







Special thanks to:  Edward Falco, Len Hatfield, Norman 

      Maynard, Dan Patrell, Keith Sherman, and to everyone,   

      Authors and Artists, who helped in making this issue 

      a possibility.



We are interested in your thoughts and comments at Bluepenny@aol.com.  Please email for writers' guidelines at the same address.































     Rosalyn Road

Ê



       



   --by Richard Cumyn









     The day I showed Natalie the apartment on Rosalyn Road, the only

reasonable place available midsummer after the scramble for student accommodations had subsided, her silence said it all.  I was

stupidly buoyant, pointing out to her that the evening light made

it look a little dingy and that it was nothing some paint and cleanser could not put right.  The apartment itself was a relief after the walk into the north section of the city beyond Princess Street, past fronts of houses sagging from neglect and street lights not white as in the affluent neighbourhoods but yellow, flooding the broken concrete sidewalk with a pall Natalie said she thought she could smell.  A dark knot of Portuguese men loitered in front of a seafood store across the street and we hurried past their greeting which mingled with the smell of fish.  One man gestured to us to come and watch him pluck the feathers from a pigeon.  He laughed at our stiff backs.  

     Barry Carp, our landlord, came to visit while Natalie was working

on campus.  He admitted, during the first of many suppertime,

kitchen table chats, that he had stumbled into the rental business

the way he had most other endeavours in his life.  "Friend of mine,

guy I did time with, saw this place going for the second mortgage,

cheap, so we went in on her together, dig?  You should have seen her

back then.  Hooo-boy."

     "Not great?" I said.

     "The worst.  Not fit for habitation, man.  Lot of hours went into

this baby."

     "You were in jail?"

     "Two years.  You don't want to hear about it.  Let's just say I got

a temper, especially around women.  Mine'll attest to that.  Man,

it's a wonder sometimes why she sticks it out with me.  We got a

kid, little girl, about a year younger than Sean.  Everything's

under control now.  Your wife's a looker."

     I agreed with him.

     "You figured her out yet?" he asked.

     "Heck, no," I said with a laugh that came out flat.  But Barry was

being serious.

     "When you figure her out, you come and tell me.  Hardest thing I

know is understanding why people act the way they do.  I get baffled

sometimes.  Flat out baffled." 

     He would have been baffled by Natalie.

     "The man is a pig, Emmett," she said.  "He comes into our home,

always at supper you'll notice, unannounced, and proceeds to fill

the kitchen with his foul language and equally foul smoke.  I'm

getting fed up.  It's bad enough that you accept his obscenities and

his air pollution, but think of the baby.  Sean is in a very

formative stage right now.  What do you suppose exposure to that guy

will do to him?  You have to say something to him or I will." I

chose not to tell her about Barry's record.

     "I know," I said, "but the man is lonely.  And he has done a lot for

us lately.  He just comes to talk."

     "Tell me one thing he's done that we didn't have to pry out of him.

And what about Anne-Marie?  He spends less time with her and their

new baby than he does with us.  You could start by reintroducing him

to his own partner."

     "What am I supposed to say?  `Barry, stop hanging around here so

much?'"

     "That would be good for a start."

     "Natalie."

     "I want you to draw the line with this man.  He gives me the

creeps."

     "I'll ask him to phone before coming over.  Would that help?"

     "Would that help?" she mimicked.  "Don't use that tone with me,

Emmett, I'm not Sean.  Just stop being so nice to him and maybe

he'll get the hint."

     Barry and his family were off to California in a few weeks, anyway,

he confided in another chat.  I sat at the kitchen table giving Sean

his bottle while Barry planed a door for our bedroom.  Outside,

someone was playing fifties rock and roll chords on an electric

guitar.  

     "Hey, Chuck Berry," he said.  "There's one to come back and haunt

you.  Ya, we pack up house and home in the camper and work out there

from October to April.  Carpentry, fruit picking, that sort of

thing.  You folks won't have to put up with me right through the

winter.  Ouch, missed that riff.  Guy should take lessons."

     "What if something goes wrong here?" Natalie asked when I told her

about Barry's absence.

     "He has someone who acts as a property manager." I watched for that

first hint of softening in her.  

     "Yes," she relented, "it will be worth it to be rid of him for

seven months.  It's not long enough, though."

     Of the good things about the place on Rosalyn Road, I miss the

garden most of all.  It took us days to work the soil to a point

where it was ready for planting.  We fussed over the sandy plot all

summer, worrying about blight and drought and rampaging boys, with

the anxiety of first-time parents, which we were.  On Rosalyn Road

the days of the garden were also the days of Barry Carp, newly

returned from paradise, tanned, relaxed, insistent.

     "I'll get you a load of topsoil for that garden of yours, man."

     "No, that's all right, Barry.  You don't have to do that."

     "How do you expect to grow anything worth a damn back there?  That's

just sand.  I'll get you a truck load tomorrow.  Got a neighbour on

the island runs a mushroom farm.  Best compost you can get.  Primo

shit, man."

     "It's okay, we don't really need it, Barry.  The garden is doing

fine.  I wish you'd just..."

     "Just what, there, dude?  My help not good enough for you?  You and

your little wife too uppity for charity?" 

     "That's not what I was going to say.  You've done so much for us

already.  We'd like to try this on our own."

     I picked up the watering can, a signal to Barry that the discussion

was over and I was going inside.  I excused myself and walked back

up the drive to the front door.  Barry remained, smoking.  He stood

like that, staring down at the garden plot, taking the occasional

long, audible draw on his cigarette until Natalie returned home

from school at dusk.  Then he slammed the door of his truck.  We

listened to him squeal his tires away into the lengthening

darkness.

     Three days later we awoke to find a pile of beautiful moist earth

at the end of the driveway beside the garden.  Fat worms turned

through the surface.  Natalie exclaimed about it, clucking around

it happily instead of sitting down to breakfast.  I hung back,

uncertain whether I should reveal the source of the gift.  I let her

think that I had arranged it, afraid it would anger her to know

that Barry had been the one.  She might have had it carted away.  

     Barry had a way of convincing us to alter our desires to match his

resources.  I saw no malevolence in it at first.  The man could be

generous in his own way.  It was just his way of doing things to be

a tough negotiator whenever people made demands on him.  Without

warning he brought us a squeaky tricycle for Sean, a gigantic piece

of driftwood that he proposed we use as a centrepiece, clothes

Anne-Marie could no longer wear while she was pregnant (and which

Natalie immediately threw out), and great quantities of food from

the island.  Natalie became exasperated.  She did not see it as her

place to stand up to Barry on the matters that counted, repairs to

the apartment foremost among these, if I was not going to either.

She just wanted things fixed.

     During a fight over a faulty heating duct, we put our names on a

waiting list for one of the university-owned apartments west of the

main campus, and when one became available in early summer, we

jumped.  

     "So, you're going," said Barry.  He was watching us load a U-Haul

truck with our belongings.

     "Yes." I didn't know what else to say.

     "Tell you what," said Barry.  "Stay and I'll take ten dollars a

month off."

     "We've already signed a lease."

     "So break it."

     "You can rent this place tomorrow," I said.  "I know all sorts of

people who are looking."

     "But Buddy, they're not you.  I like you and Natalie.  I can talk to

you."

     "I'm sorry, Barry."

     "Fifteen."

     "Why?  You can tack that much again on to a new tenant's rent.  Get

somebody in here quick enough and you've got yourself double rent

for a couple of weeks."

     "I don't care about that.  I want you guys to stay.  Somebody else

moves in here and I have to spend time to figure them out.  I've

already got you figured out."

     "We don't want to be figured out.  We just want to be in a..."

     "A what?"

     "Well, a cleaner place, for one thing.  And a safer neighbourhood."

     "I see."

     Barry lowered his chin and turned a quarter turn away.  Natalie had

been watching from the front door.  Barry glared at her as he

continued, his eyes clouding.  

     "You can't do this," he said quietly.

     "What do you mean we can't do this?"

     "I thought you were my friends."

     "Of course we're still your friends, Barry.  Come and see us in our

new apartment.  We'll have a party when we're all moved in."

     "I don't think so."

     "Sure.  Next week.  We'll call you."

     "No.  You walk out on me now and you pay."

     "Wait a minute," I said but he was already in his truck and driving

off.   

     That afternoon he telephoned the new apartment.  Before he was

finished, I hung up on him.  Natalie asked me who it was.  She had

been in the back room changing Sean.  I told her that it had been

a crank call, some weirdo.

     I walked to the wall of windows that overlooked the playground

quadrangle.  A bearded man was helping a little girl into a swing.

His red turban kept the protective bar from crashing down on the

child.  Sean was going to like it here.  No more treks all the way

to City Park just so that he would have a safe place to play.  This

was going to be our best change yet.

     In the mellowing afternoon light, the quality of which I always

associated with summer's close and the return to school, I invited

a protective warmth to build around me.  The phone call receded.

Looking around, I saw that in the aftermath of the move the living

room was left impassable.  It would take us well into the night to

unpack.  We agreed to set up the mattresses on the floor and grab

breakfast somewhere fast in the morning.  Natalie had to be at the

administration building for nine in the morning to pick up her

registration material.

     There was no doubt about us being comfortable there.  The west-

facing apartment was bright, almost harshly so in the afternoon.

One of my first jobs would be to replace the existing drapes, the

ones the university provided with the place, with the heavier

opaque ones we had inherited from Natalie's mother.  We had stored

the curtains, a metallic green and gold, all the previous year

because they had been too large for Rosalyn Road.  Here, though,

against the long sweep of glass, their impact would be dramatic and

appropriate.  I liked the fact that everything in the new apartment

had that fresh wax and paint smell.  So much of my own life was

going to take on that same quality, I felt.

     Sean began to cry.  Natalie was washing kitchen cupboards before

putting down shelf paper.  She peeked out from behind the half wall

that separated the kitchen alcove from the living-dining area.  I

got down on all fours with Sean who had lost his way inside one of

the cardboard mattress boxes and was refusing to come out.  It made

me think of the cop shows where the one with the most sympathetic

voice tries to talk the hostage taker down from the roof.  

     "What about supper?  Take out?" I asked.  

     "Spaghetti and meat bulbs!" said Sean from his tunnel.

     "Chinese!" said Natalie.

     "Right.  Spaghetti and meat bulbs Cantonese."

     It was a relief to get away.  I jogged down the three flights of

stairs to the front lobby and out across the parking lot to our

listing, rusted Corolla, opened the passenger side and slid across.

Habit drew me back to our old neighbourhood.  I found parking on

Alfred Street and walked across Princess to the House of Peking.

At the restaurant's entrance I stopped.  Barry's grey Ford pickup

truck was parked directly in front of the circular window that

faced the street.  How had I missed it?  I turned, a tight swivel,

and walked straight back to the car without waiting for the light

to change.

     "I thought you were going for Chinese," said Natalie when I handed

her the bag.

     "Lino's was having a special."

     She dished the spaghetti onto the reinforced paper plates that came

with the food.

     "Is everything all right?" she asked.  "You don't look so hot."

     "I'm fine.  Just tired from the move is all."

     "You should go and rest," she ordered.  "You really do look wiped."

I could tell she wanted to ask about the phone call again.

     I agreed to lie down.  Natalie had managed to assemble the bed while

I was out.  The bare mattress was cool against my face.



                             











     The next morning Natalie ate her Egg McMuffin while she slit

through packing tape with my pen knife.  Sean was sitting around the

base of a floor lamp and, having set his food deliberately on its

platform, was chattering while he dissected the sandwich.  I warned

him about spilling juice, a lame caveat made more out of reflex

than actual concern for the moment.  The child ignored me, something

he seemed to be doing more lately.  In contrast to the bustle of the

previous day, with its sweat and bumping into things and directing

the movers to place things not there but there, this morning had

about it a feeling of paralysis.  Breakfast had failed to satisfy

although the thought of more food was nauseating.  I knew I should

get up and help Natalie unpack.  Instead I sat drinking cup after

cup of tepid instant coffee made with water from the tap because

we had found neither the kettle nor the pots.

     "That was Barry on the phone yesterday, wasn't it?" 

     "Yes," I said.

     "What did he want?"

     "He phoned to see how we were settling in."

     "Don't lie to me, Emmett.

     "He had some questions about the condition of the place when we

left."

     "And?"

     "And we cleared it up over the phone.  It's settled.  Don't worry

about it." 

     "Don't worry about what?"

     "Nothing.  I told him I'd go back and do some cleaning for him."

     "But we scrubbed that place from top to bottom."

     "He didn't agree."

     "And you're just going to give in?  That's crazy.  I thought we were

through with that guy.  Look, I have to get going.  Promise me you

won't do anything before I get back."

     "Promise." 

     I kissed her goodbye and then went to distract my son.

     "Side, Daddy?  Side?  Now?" asked Sean after Natalie was safely out.

The child's eyes were great with expectation.

     "Yes, get your sandals.  We'll go for a play."

     "Kay!" he exploded.  "Walk!  Shoes!  Side!" He ran madly down the hall

to his new room, shoulders and hips torquing contrary to his

forward motion.  I rummaged through the hall closet for the frame

back carrier that Sean could sit in on longer walks.

     We made the rounds through the playground from swings to slide to

spring-loaded pony.  Sean and Ibrahim, a boy his age from Ethiopia,

fell down the pyramid play structure together.  I rubbed both their

heads until Ibrahim's mother arrived and we talked awhile,

complaining for the most part about how dangerous the play area

was.  I said something awkward about the cosmopolitan atmosphere in

the complex, about how I thought it was such an enlightening place

for a child.  She agreed, but tempered that with the concern that

her son would be exposed to the lower classes in the local public

school.  I said that there were no such thing as class differences

in Canada.  She raised one eyebrow.  Our conversation subsided into

long pauses until the woman excused herself to rescue Ibrahim from

the peak of a geodesic dome.  Sean was now with a new boy, Dmitri,

and was pulling the boy's hair.  I removed him to the far corner of

the quadrangle.

     "Time for a walk."

     Sean was still light enough that I could walk with him on my back

for hours without tiring.  We took Sir John A.  Macdonald to King

Street and then walked along Ontario to the market.  I looked with

wonder at the proliferation of specialty shops and restaurants that

now faced the glass towers on the water.  Had it not been only last

year that this was a stretch of derelict buildings and vacant lots?

I felt like Barry: you just figure the world out when, bang, they

come along and change it on you.

     At the market we became caught in a crush of end of season

tourists.  We might have passed for tourists ourselves, I in my

beach shorts, floral shirt and sandals, and Sean in second-hand

Osh-Kosh overalls.  A shopkeeper gave Sean a helium-filled balloon

promoting the name of the store, but the string slipped from around

the child's wrist.  

     "Boon!  Boon!"

     I looked over my shoulder, then skyward at the spot of red growing

smaller.

     "Gone, buddy.  We'll get you another one.  It's okay, don't cry now."

     I was glad to leave the bustle of the market area.  We came to the

ferry dock, the only link between the city and the islanders.  The

boat had just pulled in, trapping us at the stop light while an

unbroken flow of cars disembarked and made the left turn into the

downtown core.  

     The last of the ferry traffic finally pulled out.  I began to wonder

if I should not head home.  I felt thrown off balance as I had the

previous day after the phone call.  Natalie probably would be

getting back and I had not done a thing toward unpacking.  

     "Let's get back, Sean-boy.  Mommy's probably worried." 

     Because I had the only key - the university had promised to provide

a duplicate in a day or two - I had left the door unlocked but no

note for Natalie.  

     "Feel like some lunch?" No answer.  I turned and began walking back

the way we had come.  In the reflection of a store window I saw that

Sean was asleep.  A girl selling flowers from a corner stand sold

me an assortment of zinnias and marigolds.  They would be my peace

offering.  I decided to take a bus home.

     We were lucky with the bus which arrived after a wait of only a few

minutes.  At one of the front seats I swung Sean off my shoulders

and propped him, still in his pack, on my lap.  The bus hesitated,

blocked against the curb by a stream of traffic.  I glanced around

impatiently, reading the advertisements just above the hand rail.

I looked out the window to see if the traffic was going to break.

Finally the bus began to move.  

     At that instant, I saw a red sphere about the size of a human head

bobbing up and down in the front seat of a truck parked across the

street in an open lot.  It was a balloon with a happy face design

on it.  Then the balloon was pushed aside and it was Barry Carp

smiling at me.  I locked onto the truck as long as I could until it

was just out of sight.  That was it, a blink of the eye.  The bus

jostled from stop to stop.  Sean slept slumped over in his pack.  I

peered through every window looking like someone not sure where to

get off.  I could see no grey Ford pickup following me.

     At our stop the bus lurched into the curb.  I stood too soon before

the vehicle had come to a halt and stumbled, then regained my

balance by grabbing the nearest pole.  Sean was awake but groggy.

I held him to my hip the way Natalie did it so naturally, but could

not get it to feel right.  I stepped down, at the same time pushing

out through the double side doors.  It was an awkward escape.  I

banged my left side trying to protect Sean from the backlash of the

doors.  The instant we were steady again I was searching the parking

lot for the truck.  I could not see it.  I had Sean, still in his

pack, swung back on my shoulders again.  He began to chant a shaky

"ahhhhhh" as I tried to race walk across the lot without jostling

him too much.

     There was no truck.  Everything was fine.  I could feel myself

sweating under the exertion.  I laughed nervously as I shuffled and

Sean laughed in chorus.  Once inside we would be fine, I told

myself.  There was so much unpacking to do yet.  The boxes would be

a welcome diversion.  A dull ache remained in my stomach, but I was

beginning to gather threads of recovery.  It disturbed me to think

that I could let myself become so frightened.  It was important now

to get Sean upstairs and fed, to hug Natalie, perhaps lure her to

the bedroom while the child napped.  I was now half way across the

parking lot which seemed to be widening even as I increased my

pace.

     "I can handle this," I muttered.  "Not going to let this goon

intimidate us.  What am I worried about?  The guy is all bluff.  He's

just sore we've left.  He had to hustle to find a replacement tenant

in the middle of the summer.  Bastard's collecting double rent."

     I was puffing when we reached the front doors.  The Toyota was still

parked in its space.  Had she driven it to school?  As I passed the

wall of mail windows I slowed to see if we had anything new.  There

was nothing, indicating that Natalie might have picked it up on her

way in.  An exit door opposite the main entrance looked out onto a

back parking lot.  Even before I saw the grey truck I cursed myself

for not checking there first.

     The stairs were ahead.  Sean was whining to get down.  I knew that

he must be wet.  There were extra diapers in the side pouch of the

carrier.  Somewhere in the background was a vague question of what

I was going to do once I got to the top of the stairs and entered

our new and freshly painted apartment.  I thought about Barry being

there as I opened the door, perhaps reclining on our sofa.  No doubt

he would remember our furniture.  Perhaps he would say how much

better it looked now in a more spacious room.  Perhaps he would

admire the hardwood floors.  He would most surely smoke.

     I cursed myself again for not locking the door.  I had not planned

to be out for so long.  It was supposed to have been a twenty minute

play with a two-year old who deserved some attention after a

stress-filled weekend of packing and loading.  The kid wanted down

now.  He smelled.  I had not moved in the three minutes since I had

first glimpsed the truck.  When I looked again, the truck was still

there.  What was I thinking, that it would be gone if I closed my

eyes and opened them again?  Idiot, I thought, change the kid.  Get

up there and face Carp.  See if Natalie is all right.

     I decided to change Sean in the washroom which was attached to the

laundry room on the ground floor.  The place was deserted.  He took

longer than usual to clean because the space was small and, except

for the floor, lacking a flat surface for laying him down.  As I

knelt on the cool, damp tile, I willed the blood to return to my

head.  After Sean was buttoned again I remained in that position on

one knee, head lowered like a penitent.

     Sean bounced to his feet and squeezed through the opening in the

washroom door out into the room containing the washing machines

and dryers.  There were benches for waiting.  I followed him and when

I could see that my son was content to pirouette around the idle

machines, happy to be clean and absorbed by his own magic, I sat

down and watched.

     "I'll just get my breath back here for a minute," I said.  "When

someone comes, I'll get up."

     Sean found the garbage can and began arranging grey mats of dryer

lint around the room.  I spread myself flat on the bench and closed

my eyes.  I opened them when a woman entered behind an overflowing

basket.  She did not seem bothered by my presence nor by the silence

of the machines.  I closed my eyes again.  

     "Just a couple of minutes more.  If I can rest until I begin to feel

good again..."

     When I woke, a dryer was running, but there was no one else in the

room.  A blanket lay on the floor beside me.  I shouted Sean's name

and bolted from the laundry room.  In the lobby I stopped and called

again.  People were drifting in from the day, looking at me, mildly

attentive.

     "Have you seen a little boy?  Black hair, brown eyes?"

     No.  No one had.  I returned to the washroom.  Nothing.  Get upstairs.

I took three at a time like a maniac, slipping once near the first

landing and barking my shin.  My back was grabbing.  When I got to

the door it was locked.  How?  Had Natalie picked up the second key?

I called her name but got no answer.  Where was my key?  Frantic, I

rummaged through my pockets but found nothing but loose change.

Then I remembered I had slipped the key into the side pocket of the

carrier on the way out.  I cursed again.  It was not until I reached

the bottom of the stairs that I realized I was crying.  Two girls

with books under their arms asked if I was all right.  I didn't

know, I said.  They watched me race for the stairwell, clutching the

key in front of me as if it were some kind of directional device.

This time I was slower on the stairs.  It seemed as if the nerve

impulses to my muscles were slowing.  When I reached the door the

key would not fit.  The phone was ringing inside the apartment.  I

sank to my knees, spent, steadied my right hand with my left as if

it were Sean's and not my own I was guiding, and willed the lock

to turn.  When it did, the paralysis came on again.  What did I

expect to find?  Something, perhaps the whole momentum of the day,

of the entire move and everything it represented, pushed me up and

through the door.  I could taste breakfast rising.  It shamed me to

think that I wanted to be anywhere else on earth but there at that

instant.  The phone had stopped ringing.  Barry's voice from the day

before replaced it.



                             









     "Hello?"

     "Uh, ya.  You coming back to clean up your mess here?"

     "Barry?  We cleaned before we left.  What are you talking about?"

     "I'm talking filth, man.  I'm talking scummy carpets, grimy walls."

     "Now wait just a minute.  We left that apartment a fair sight

cleaner than it was when we moved in."

     "Bull shit.  You college types are all the same.  You come in here

and you live cheap and then you leave your dirt behind when you go.

You may be off to some top dollar job in Toronto, but you're no

better than the cons and the trolls around here.  Where would you

be without me, eh?  Where would you be without the roof I put over

your head so that you could play going to school?  Now you're off

to some fancy co-op building.  You couldn't wait to get out of my

dump, could you?" 

     "What is it you want, Barry?"

     "It took Anne-Marie and me four hours to get the place decent for

the next tenants.  Fifty bucks."

     "Why did you bother to ask if I was going to clean, then?"

     "Fifty dollars."

     "Forget it."

     "You think you're pretty shit hot, don't you buddy-boy?  You think

you can just crap all over old Barry.  Well how about I come on over

and have a little love-in with you and your sweet family?  You like

that, now, Mr.  Tough Guy?"













     I was shaking the way I had been after hanging up on Barry the day

before.  I regretted hanging up.  I wished I had stayed on the line

long enough to calm him down.  But I had felt myself become angry,

heard myself talking louder than normal right from the instant I

knew it was Barry on the line.  The arrival in the new apartment,

its boxes signalling an end to everything that Rosalyn Road had

been to us, had pumped me up.  Even as I talked to him on the phone,

it was as if Barry Carp was fading from memory, becoming a

caricature from our distant past.  The close, cramped space, the

noises and smells from the family below, the cucumbers that we had

so proudly turned into curried slices, the sticky summer evenings

when we sipped beer on the front step while we waited for Sean to

fall asleep in our arms, Natalie taming the tiny front lawn with

the blunt instrument we called our push mower, Barry scoffing at

her when she watered her petunias because he said the soil was too

sandy to hold water, the ugly people who drank wine in the park

behind the house and broke their bottles in the children's sandbox,

the kid who played his electric guitar all night so that no one

could sleep, the fish store men who hailed us as we walked past,

the pigeon plucker persisting each day until we stopped to see how

he caught his birds and strangled them with his bare hands for his

supper, the convicts on day passes, each moment was being flattened

into the family album, yellowing, curling at the corners, making

me bold enough to hang up on my former landlord.

     I pushed through the door.  The boxes in the living room had been

cleared substantially.  Only a few remained stacked neatly in one

corner.  It was four o'clock.  I could smell ham baking and potatoes.

On the table beside Natalie's cheque book was a note: "Look down,

Daddy." Natalie had helped Sean trace the message on a piece of her

graph paper.  There were also stick figures, a big one set to catch

a smaller one coming down a slide, done in Natalie's hand.  I

crossed to the window and looked down to where I could see Natalie

seated on a bench with another woman.  Sean and an older child, the

woman's daughter probably, chased each other up and down the

pyramid.  I waved to get their attention, but they could not see me.

Sean must have made his way up to the apartment on his own and then

brought Natalie back to where I was sleeping.  Not wanting to

disturb me, they had covered me with a blanket before going

outside.

     Something in the way Natalie was sitting made me keep staring at

her.  The other woman was leaning in close, talking to her in what

could have been whispers.  Natalie had her arms clasped tightly

across her breasts.  She looked as if she had just come out of cold

water.  Only the occasional nod of her head while she peered

straight ahead told me that she was listening.  A noise made me turn

back to the room.

     Along the floor scudded the red balloon with the happy face on it.

I had missed it on the way in.  A fresh one would have been hugging

the ceiling in plain view.  I did not want to touch it.  I opened

Natalie's cheque book to the most recent page.  The latest entry was

dated for that day:



	Ch#26 - Aug.6 - B.  Carp - for misc.  cleaning - $50.00





     From where I was standing, I could see my reflection in the hall

mirror.  I stared at the image, the face puffy, the hair dishevelled

from sleep, one shoulder sloping lower than the other.  I forced

myself to hold my gaze level until I had finished examining the

image brutally.

     From the apartment below came the sound of a man and woman arguing.  It was strangely comforting.  And behind that sound an electric

guitar belted out "Johnny B.  Goode" over and over.  A pigeon

fluttered gracefully to the window sill not a foot away, but then

a ghostly hand from out of nowhere grabbed it and broke its neck

with a single deft twist.  I sat on the edge of our rickety coffee

table, the one with Sean's teeth marks in one corner, and put my

head between my knees.  Rosalyn Road roared in my ears and died out.

Then all I could think was that I had forgotten Natalie's flowers

on the bus.







Ê





Richard Cumyn has published fiction and essays in a number of Canadian magazines and newspapers.  His first collection of short stories, The Limit of Delta Y Over Delta X, was published in 1994 by Goose Lane Editions (Fredericton, New Brunswick).  One of the stories, "The Sound He Made" (NeWest Review, August/September 1993) can be seen in the current Journey Prize Anthology, a collection of eleven of the best 

stories published in Canadian literary magazines in 1993.  Another was 

chosen for The Grand-Slam Book Of Canadian Baseball Writing published by Pottersfield Press (Porter's Lake, Nova Scotia), along with work by such writers as Mordechai Richler, Morley Callaghan, Scott Young, and W.P. Kinsella.  Richard lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia with his wife and two daughters.  Rosalyn Road previously appeared in The New Quarterly.























Ê



   The Disappearance of Paul Magill











   --by Chris Dubbs









	Ê    Willis, the barber, bent his ear and emitted a sound like radio static, then sang lines from a Bing Crosby tune in fake-crooner

voice.  Then static again.  "Oops."  He twisted both ears and twitched out a liquid, electric noise.  "Lost the signal."  The kid in the chair gave a hoot.  

     		Ever since Willis returned from the war with a plate in his head, he has claimed to pick up radio transmissions.  He makes a great show of it for us kids.  Silly stuff like war reports or Roosevelt's Fireside chats.  And you'd think he was just a big goof off because that stuff wasn't even in the airwaves anymore.

     		But other times he could spook you with it.  Right in the middle of cutting your hair, he'd suddenly crank his head around and say something like, "DiMaggio just beaned a double.  Yanks up 4 to 3."  Then turn right back to cutting.  Like it wasn't a joke at all, like he hadn't even said it.  If you checked the paper the next day, you'd find that DiMaggio had gotten a two-bagger, and you'd whisper, "Holy Cow!  What's going on?"

     		He'd once cut a guy's ear pretty good in a trance and been so rattled by the scream and the blood that he closed the shop for the day.  My father swore this hadn't happened, that Willis had clipped the guy's ear but not while in a trance.  "So don't go repeating stories."  Willis was our next door neighbor.  Dad liked him and tended to give him the benefit of the doubt.  Of course, after the ear-clipping incident Willis had visited a veteran's hospital in Pittsburgh to "get a few bolts tightened."

     		It was a cool, August afternoon filled with restless, back-to-school tension.  A gray lid of clouds pressed low in the sky, giving me a funny pinched feeling.  Five kids waited to have the summer wildness trimmed from their hair, hypnotized by worn magazines they'd read on every barber visit in memory.  The sound of pages turning, the snip, snip of clippers.  It was an eerie mood that made me squirm in my chair.  I tossed aside a Superman comic, and on the Studebaker wall calendar counted the remaining days of summer.  Six.  D-Day minus six.  All in all it was the sort of day that made you want to run away and escape your terrible fate.  

     		I was in the chair when a man leaned through the door.  "The Magill boy's missing.  We're meeting at the farm to look for him."  A scan of the shop told him this wasn't good material for a search team.  "Probably just wandered off," he said, then departed.  

	     	The kids buzzed with the thrill of it; they didn't hear Willis whisper "probably not."

     		I raced my bike towards home, delirious with the news. Faster, faster, Jack, old boy.  You will never fly on to glory if you are so slow.  I leaned over the handlebars, taking the wind in my face.

     		"Magillboy'sdisappeared," I gushed to Dad, just arriving home from work.  He dragged me into the house, Mom gave me a glass of water, and I told the story. 

     		For over two years, Dad's Civil Defense shoulder bag had hung idle on the coat rack, now he took it down and checked the contents.  Father had not been a soldier because of a crippled hand from an accident at the milk plant, but he had worked as an air raid warden.  I still remembered those air raid drills with excitement, the "blackouts," when we huddled in our livingroom, listening to war news on the radio, while Father donned his white helmet and wandered the streets.  

     		This was his "duty" and he attacked it withtypical thoroughness.  He'd knock on doors and scold people if their lights were on.  He'd write their names in a notebook.  He deplored people who didn't take drills seriously.       	"German bombers can see the smallest light from 20,000 feet," his lecture on civic responsibility began. 

     		Five cars angled onto the lawn at the Magill farm and a clump of men huddled in the backyard.  They carried lanterns and flashlights.  On the hood of an old truck, they'd spread a map, marked into grids.  

     		Cousin Bill stood at the center of all this, pointing back and forth from map to individuals, then off in a particular direction.  They looked like soldiers planning for battle.  Bill had been an infantry lieutenant in the war and his voice carried authority.  

     		Like the other vets, Bill had returned from war a different person.  Mother spoke of it the way you would a death, "He's not the same carefree spirit," as though the Nazis had captured old fun-loving Bill and sent back an imposter.  But hearing him give orders, made you want to stand up straight and volunteer for dangerous missions.  I pushed close, along with two other kids, Darrell and Smitty, and felt proud to be there.

     		Bill told us kids to stay behind and search the yard, but made it sound important.  Maybe Paul Magill had hurt himself nearby, he said, or lay unconscious behind some bush and we would be the ones to find him.  We galloped away to the challenge.  

     		The Magill bushes were not ordinary bushes, just as Frank Magill himself was not an ordinary man nor his wife an ordinary woman.  The shrubs had been trimmed into odd shapes, boxes, balls, and pyramids.  The yard was as big as ten yards in town. It looked ragged now, not having been mowed in weeks, and several of the bushes had been sawed off and left to brown where they'd fallen.

     		"My dad said Mrs. Magill did that."  Smitty stood beside me. 	"Why?"

     		"When her husband left her she sawed off a bush, and then every day after that another one?"

     		"But, why?"

     		Smitty shrugged.  "Maybe to get even.  Maybe they reminded her of him.  They say she has a temper."

     		I stared at the bush with incomprehension.

     		Frank Magill had worked part time at the feed mill and been a no-count bar fly before the war, but had acquitted himself well in combat.  Several of the men from town had been in the same unit and praised Magill's bravery.  Cousin Bill said that Magill was fearless but crazy and had needlessly exposed his men to danger.  Bill's emphasis clearly fell on the negative side of Magill's character, an arrogant, impulsive soldier intent on self-glory.

       	I counted eleven sawed-off bushes before Darrell started yelling.  When we got to him, he pointed into the ditch that ringed the yard, at a body crawling with maggots.  For one horrific second we stood transfixed by that creepy, squirming pile nibbling the flesh off Paul Magill.  It was the absolute most horrible fate I could imagine.    

     		"You goons," Smitty said and flipped the putrid mess with his foot to show fur, a pointy snout and prominent choppers. "It's a ground hog." 

     		Darrell and I shrugged at the obvious.	

     		Two other cars arrived with seven men and a woman.  This was getting to be a big operation.  We jumped inside the foundation walls where Frank Magill had started to build his mansion. Cousin Bill organized the men.  We imagined them to be Nazi soldiers about to storm our position.  From years of practice, we could imitate the flat crack of a rifle, even the trailing whisper of bullet cutting air.  We fired until the Huns withdrew across the pasture.  

     		"Look," I whispered to the others, and they crowded with me behind the foundation wall, peering at the house where the woman stood by the back door with Mrs. Magill.  

     		"She's beautiful," Smitty said.

     		"Radiant."  The word came to me from thin air.

     		"Ra-diant."  Darrell tested the word.  

     		The other woman wrapped an arm around Mrs. Magill as they stared after the men.  Then they disappeared into the house.

     		"Magill's a bastard," I said.  "How could he leave her?"

     		"I bet he kidnapped the kid," Smitty said.  We all agreed he was capable of it.

     		Frank Magill had returned from the war with a French bride and big plans.  He bought this farm, fixed up the house and hired himself out to neighbors for cash.  He purchased a new, blue Plymouth on credit and cruised through town to show off car and wife.  The French woman had a taste for fancy clothes and hair styles that hid part of her face.  Even shopping for groceries, she wore perfume and nail polish, while Frank trailed behind her, bouncing their baby, prouder than a man had a right to be.  

     		People were of two minds about Mrs. Magill.  They thought her charming and sophisticated, but disliked her French "attitude," how she was filling Frank's head with too many ideas, pushing him, against his nature, to work like a horse and act like a gentleman, how she was cordial herself but in an aristocratic way, like even when you stopped by to share with her the abundance of your garden, she was extending rather than receiving a courtesy.  

     		For Frank, the French woman was a war souvenir, a piece of fine jewelry with which to impress the town.  But what on earth, people wondered, did the French woman see in old Frank?  "She just latched onto any soldier as her ticket to America," Cousin Bill gruffed over Easter dinner at our house.  Everyone gave him the stare, but no one disputed him.  We knew that he disliked Magill and that it derived from the war.  No one presumed to question him about it.

     		And, of course, there were the bushes.  They were such a strange sight, sculpted into those odd shapes, that people had started driving by to check them out.  Frank created quite a showcase, enlarging the yard and lining the driveway with lilacs and rhododendrons, bordering the porch with roses.  Mrs. Magill loved flowers and, it was said, ran up a considerable tab buying them from the greenhouse.

     		Then word got out Frank was building a mansion.  Folded up in his wallet, he carried a picture of a French villa, torn from National Geographic.  When he begged foundation stones from neighboring farmers, his thick hands unfolded the photo so they could appreciate the grandeur of his undertaking.  He traded labor for the use of their horse teams to skid logs from his forest.  The lumber, returned from the mill, rose in piles around the foundation hole he was digging by hand.  The beams were massive as barn timbers.  This would be a house to last for centuries.  

     		On this day, we kids ran along the top of the nearly-completed foundation wall and threw stones at the lumber, turned grey in the weather.  I marvelled at how one man could have done this.  And why it had been abandoned.  This hole in the ground where a mansion should be, Frank leaving, the chopped off bushes, and a missing baby.  Something had gone terribly wrong here.

      	More cars arrived, women with food and men who conferred with Bill then headed to the woods.  The gleam of their lanterns and flashlights disappeared into the watery twilight.  Bill, the lonely sentinel, lit a lantern and sat on the bed of his truck in its glow.  Before long, the first group of searchers straggled back, shaking their heads in disappointment.  Cousin Bill checked off their grids on the map.  The women appeared with sandwiches and coffee.  

     		In a voice soft as a caress, Bill explained to Mrs. Magill that although they hadn't yet found Paul, it was just a matter of time.  As confirmation, he showed her the squares and X's on the map.  She pressed her lips till they disappeared.  One of the sandwich ladies gripped her arm.  She was wearing lipstick and nail polish, and a lock of hair covered one eye.  Maybe she belonged closed up in the pages of a magazine, but here her beauty seemed out of place, too fragile to endure the bruises of bad fortune.

     		When Darrell and Smitty left with their dads, Bill and I stood at the edge of the yard peering out for some hint of the searchers.  A chill had come into the air, and I was grateful Mother had made me take a sweater.  

     		"A little kid couldn't last out there over night. Unprotected."  Bill said.  "Cold'd get him."

     		For a moment the air was charged by his remark.  A chilly fright made me recoil from the darkness and yearn for the comforting lantern glow back on the truck, but I would never admit it.  Everyone was scared in battle, Bill once told me, when bullets whizzed and shells shook the earth.  And the only thing that kept most men from running away was loyalty to their buddies.

     		"Bill?"  I spoke without knowing what I had to say.  Bill stood fast, immobile as the moon, his back lit by dusky lantern light, his face lost in shadow.  "We'll find him," I said.  

     		"Yeh, sure," he said.  "We'll find him."  

     		Every now and then, pinpoints of light peeped in the blackness and grew larger as searchers returned.  Each time I imagined we'd see one of them step into the yard carrying a dirty, sleepy, little boy.  But each time, when Mrs. Magill hurried from the house, she heard the same story of failure.  The men couldn't look her in the eye.  A few grabbed a sandwich, refilled their lanterns and went back out.  

     		Our helplessness embarrassed me, and I begged to go searching myself.  Maybe because I was schooled in the value of thoroughness, I was certain I could succeed where others had failed.  Maybe because I had seen the cut-off bushes and the crazy foundation hole for the mansion.  Maybe because I had seen Mrs. Magill's beauty for what it really was, fragile as a dream, so that you wanted to help her keep it alive.

     		Bill told me to wait for my dad and see what he said.  Mad at Bill for the first time in my life, I stalked into the house. The women immediately stopped talking, as though I'd brought news.  They clustered around a table glittering with fancy coffee cups, shiny silverware, and blue napkins.  A huge bouquet of Black-eyed Susans decorated the table.  The French Woman wasn't there, and the atmosphere was cheerier than I would have expected.  "Just came for a sandwich," I said, and they turned back to their conversation.  I wished I had entered carrying the sleepy tyke in my arms.  I would have been welcomed with kisses and cheers.

     		For almost a year I had been nurturing the suspicion of greatness in myself.  It was hard to keep it under control. Sometimes, while speeding on my bike down a big hill, I imagined myself as Superman.  From deep inside arose an ache, to soar above our tiny town, using x-ray vision to find evildoers and square them with the law.  Getting an award from the mayor. Being proud.  One reason why I wished the war had continued.  How many occasions does a boy get in life to be a hero?  

     		Back outside, Bill had the French woman in his arms.  Holy mackeral.  I hung back in the doorway.  She was sobbing on his shoulder and he talking words I couldn't hear.  He looked stiff and lummoxy holding a woman, as if unused to the work.  

     		Bill had dated a girl named Margaret before the war, but she betrayed him.  She'd sent him a Dear John letter when he was in England awaiting the invasion, which Mother thought a low thing to have done.  "Just the timing of it."  Mother claimed Margaret was the one who robbed Bill of his carefree spirit; that the war had robbed Bill of one thing and losing in love had taken something else.  He was quite a catch, Mother insisted, handsome and with his own service station, but his scars ran deep, and he might be a bachelor for life.  That's why it looked odd, and yet not, to see him holding Mrs. Magill.  

     		Father was one of the last searchers to return, dragging from exhaustion.  He plunked down on Bill's truck.  "Batteries went dead," he said with disgust, as if we might otherwise blame him for giving up.

     		"I don't think he's out there," Bill said, studying his map with frustration.  "A kid could only go so far.  We should have found him."

     		"Maybe Magill took him," I suggested.  Bill's widened eyes acknowledged the possibility.









     		As I lay wide awake in bed that night, I did blame Dad for stopping his search.  Maybe Paul Magill wasn't out in the woods, but maybe he was.  How could you sleep knowing a little kid could die?  Scared and cold, he'd lay down tired beside a tree, and the cold night air would snuff out his life.  I thought how easy it would be for me to sneak out and ride my bike back to the farm. To search all night through every inch of the dark forest.  How brave it would be.

     		I eased open my window and took the chill on my bare chest. It snatched my breath.  Goose bumps sprouted.  I closed my eyes and tried to ignore it.  Were you cold if you refused to think you were cold?  Were you scared if loyalty to other soldiers kept your fear in check?  Were you a hero if your heart was true but you had no opportunity to show it?  Prickly sensations of warmth radiated inside me.

     		The bang of a screen door broke my trance.  Next door, someone stood on the back porch.  Mister Willis.  Beneath the light, leaning over the railing as though looking for something in the yard.  He stepped off the porch, lifted his head about, turned it back and forth.  I thought he might be looking at the stars, but it was overcast.  Then he held a hand to his ear.  He was listening to something.  His broadcasts?  It was creepy as all get out, not a blessed sound, not a peep, not crickets, not wind in the trees.  Just Willis.  Listening. 







	     	First thing next morning I went to Cousin Bill's service station and found his helper, Stretch, pumping gas.  Bill had called him at 5 a.m. and told him to watch after things today.

     		Bill rented a tiny apartment behind the pharmacy.  The glass in the front door rattled each time I knocked.  Noises inside. Bill's bleary eyes peering out.  He unlocked the door without saying a word, still wearing his clothes from the night before, then set about making toast and coffee.  

     		Photographs covered the table.  Tanks, buildings, soldiers. I recognized Mr. Willis and Frank Magill.  

     		Bill spread jam thick on the toast and slid a piece to me. I was staring at a photo of Bill, Willis, Magill and Mrs. Magill, too, sitting on the lap of another man.  Mrs. Magill had a flower in her hair.

     		"That's Charlie Nash," Bill said.	"We were stationed in her town for a few weeks.  We all knew her.  I guess, in a way, we all fell for her a little bit."

     		"You, too?"

     		"In a way."  Bill hovered over the coffee pot, inhaling the steam.  "As much as you allowed yourself to feel for someone in war.  But she and Charlie hit it off like aces.  It was real special.  They even got engaged."

     		"Charlie Nash and Mrs. Magill?"

     		"Her name is Danielle."  The name slipped smooth and Frenchified from Bills' lips.

     		"So, what happened?"

     		Bill filled a coffee cup, tasted it, then poured it back in the pot.  "I need some java bad.  I was searching `til 5 a.m.. Couple of us scoured that forest.  A three-year-old could only have gotten so far.  I don't get it."

     		"I mean what happened with Charlie and Danielle?"

     		Bill waited, but the answer didn't come.  He tried the coffee again and found it more to his liking.  "War wasn't always the way you see it in the newsreels.  Battles and bombs and such."  He swigged coffee.  A fuzzy look came into his eyes. 	"Charlie and I were standing in a field, way behind the lines, checking some trucks.  We were drinking coffee out of those tin messkit cups.  All of a sudden we hear this `plink.' Loud and distinct."  Bill snapped a fingernail against his cup, "Sorta like that, but tinny.  Then Charlie's cup springs a leak. It was eerie.  `What the hell?' Charlie says.  And then this red spot spreads across his chest.  This is how weird it was; he didn't even realize he'd been shot.  There was no bang, no place for the shot to have come from.  Charlie looks at that red spot and says, `What the . . .'  Doesn't quite get it out and falls over dead."  A wormy smile curled Bill's lip.  "Funny, isn't it?" 	Bill had never told anyone about Charlie and Danielle, he said, because people didn't need to know everything.  "But it was a heck of a shock when she showed up here with Magill.  It was like Charlie didn't mean anything to her.  Or Magill took advantage of her being destitute and...."  He finished the thought with a flap of his hand.

     		"When I think of all the bad things that have happened to her, the War and Charlie, Magill deserting her.  This baby disappearing.  It tugs at the old heart."

     		You know what I noticed just then in that photograph? Bill's expression.  He looked happy.  Carefree, you might even say.  And this would have been after he received his Dear John letter and before Charlie Nash died.  I later told Mother that Bill had been scarred by war not love.  "The vets have bottled-up secrets of gorey death," I explained to her, wishing I too had such a dark secret.  "A smile can't hide a broken heart," Mother replied.  I didn't mention about Charlie Nash's death, because women didn't understand war.

     		Bill took me to the Magill farm and gave me my own quadrant to search.  I walked every inch and turned over every stick, even stared into the branches of trees.  I wanted so badly to see the print of a tiny shoe in the animal tracks I found, but it wasn't there.  For the rest of the day, I battled thoughts of foxes and raccoons terrorizing the kid.  Worse, I felt deflated, helpless as the average Joe traipsing the woods.  

     		At noon when a bunch of us were eating lunch in the backyard, Sheriff Halburton pulled up in the cruiser and disappeared into the house.  "He's located Frank in Clarion." One of the women came out to give us the news.  "They talked on the phone.  Frank denied knowing anything, but I think the Sheriff suspects."  Of course, the Sheriff suspects.  We all suspected.  "Frank said he'd be here in the morning," she added, covering one flushed cheek and shaking her head.  We all felt the same consternation and relief.  Finally, someone had made sense of this mystery, and we could breath easier.  

     		As the searchers gathered their things and headed for the cars, Bill asked if I would catch a ride back with one of them. "I want to stay on a little longer, make sure everything's ok.

     		When he smiled a nervous smile, I took it to mean that he wanted to be alone with the French Woman.







     		Willis came over after supper, worked up about something. He took Dad onto the front porch.  Through the window I saw Willis pleading, and Dad's hands pushing an imaginary wave of panic right back in Willis's face.  

     		"We're taking a ride to the Magill farm," Dad announced. Willis waited outside.  He didn't want me to go along, but I convinced him I knew which areas had been searched that day.  

     		Father drove and Willis continued to act weird.  He rode shotgun, leaning his head out the window, mumbling now and again. Dad would send him a glance, trying to read what kind of situation he had on his hands.  

     		Willis pointed left at the road bordering the Magill farm. "What?  Turn here?" Dad said, and Willis said, "Yup."  We cruised slowly, Willis directing us along by flapping his hand, until he stopped us by a stretch of woods.  "Let's go in here," he said. We were well beyond the farm, but I wasn't about to mention it.     	

	Good thing Dad had brought his warden's bag with flashlight and new batteries because darkness came upon us quickly in the woods.  We marched single file behind Willis, Dad bringing up the rear.  Berry bushes scratched us, roots tripped us, a swampy ditch caked our shoes with mud.  "You know where you're headed?" Dad asked.

     		"A toddler can cover ground," Willis said, maintaining a steady pace deeper into the woods.  "Might be scared, running, then stop and hide," he mumbled, "behind something or . . . be-neath."  

     		Willis stopped so abruptly, I nearly ran into him.  At first, I thought he'd found something; he twisted his head all around.  Then his hand twisted in his hair and he whispered, "He's dead."  The flashlight blinked out.

     		Dad joined us.  "What's up?" he said.  

     		"The boy's dead," Willis repeated, louder, a boily panic in his voice.  He sat on the ground and rocked back and forth.  

     		I withdrew several steps, embarrassed for him.  I had never seen a man act that way.  Beyond the edge of the woods, the pale fluorescence of a small moon lit gray a pasture, but here complete darkness reigned, swallowing Willis.  I heard his moaning and Dad's words of reason, but their bodies were ghostly silhouettes.  "Go ahead, go ahead," Willis repeated, and eventually Dad took up the flashlight and led us away from Willis and deeper into the woods.  I felt bad leaving him and silly continuing his fool's quest.

     		"A white birch," Willis's voice called out of the darkness just as the flashlight beam fell upon a narrow birch on its side. Dad drew a ragged breath that tore at something inside me, fear ripping calm, the black edge of the unknown cutting the skin of a well-ordered world.

     		Dad lifted away the tree from a tight clump of raspberry bushes.  "I don't see anything," he whispered and handed me the light.  He went down on his knees and parted the bushes as you would a curtain, then drew out sticks and leaf mold.  His crippled hand cut at the darkness like a hook.  Behind me, Willis's sniffling noises mirrored my own chicken insides. Before me, Dad's courage stood like an iron shield against the unexpected.  I had never felt such consuming admiration for my father.  

	 	I saw them first, Paul Magill's tiny fingers shining like grubs beneath the flashlight beam.  Dad parted the bushes, and there he lay, covered with a blanket of leaves and twigs, like he'd snuggled up there to keep warm.  Dad touched him, and he was stiff as wood.  Dad turned towards me a crestfallen expression of profound confusion.  Finding an dead infant in the bushes did not fit with the workings of the world.  A tide of corpses on Omaha Beach, millions slaughtered in the death camps, a 100,000 radiation-fried Japs were one thing, but those pale fingers among the leaves were quite another.  What in the world happened here? Dad's pained squint asked.  What does this mean? 

     		Fortunate that in the glimmer behind the flashlight, my own expression stayed hidden, because I'm sure it reflected as much excitement as horror.

     		We piled up stones to mark the location, then Dad gently lifted out the body.  Willis was gone.  We hadn't even heard him slip away.  We cocked our heads around like spooked deer and off in the woods heard the faint crunch of footsteps.  

     		"Can I carry him?" I asked as we headed back.  In the halo of the flashlight, the whites of Dad's eyes narrowed.  There followed one of those weighty pauses you see in the movies when gears grind in someone's head.  "He's heavy," Dad said, but I reached for the body, and he laid it in my arms with the greatest of care.  Its weight settled on me like a stone.  Its cold touch made my arms tingle.  "You all right?" Dad asked, and I nodded.

	At first I held him out in front of me, but my arms tired quickly and soon he nudged against my chest.  He was dirty and damp and cold.  I got the willies so bad I started shaking.  Or maybe it was just my poor, aching arms.  Soon, I had to clasp him to me like a live baby.  His stiff, little arms bouncing to the rhythm of my step, settled in a clumsy embrace of my elbow.

     		"Take him!" I wanted to yell to my father.  "He's climbing on me."  But I kept it inside by compressing my lips so tight, I nearly bit them off.  I tried to think of other things, like the smell of Mother's cooking and the bouquet of Black-eyed Susans in the French Woman's house.  And I imagined trudging the dark and lonely streets of town, as Dad had done during the air raid drills.  And I heard again and again in my footsteps the "plink," of Charlie Nash's death bullet.  And thought how strong Cousin Bill was to keep that terrible secret.  If I had truly heard that sound just then, I would have dropped stone-cold dead.   

	       Willis waited for us back at the car, hunched in the rear seat.  Dad chose not to say anything.  I'm sure Willis knew we had found the body, which we slipped into the trunk.  But whether it was that troubling him or some problem with his plate, I didn't know.

     		Back home, Dad waved me into the house, while he stayed in the car with Willis.  Which gave me the pleasure of breaking the news to Mother and my sisters.  Such a horrible, ghoulish discovery, and from my lips people would learn it.  I made it just as creepy as it actually had been, the darkness of the woods, Mr. Willis acting crazy, Dad parting the bushes to expose the baby corpse.  I stood before them, arms outstretched, sagging with the cold weight of the dead baby.  They were wide-eyed and speechless, even Mother, and I felt as though I had come back to them a different person.

     		Before Dad called the sheriff, he took me aside.  "I want you to be there with me when I explain what happened."

     		"Sure," I said, flattered, dependable.

     		"But let's not tell them how Mr. Willis led us to the spot. They might get the wrong idea.  They might think he was involved somehow, and that's not true."

     		"But, how did he lead us to the spot?"

     		Dad didn't know anymore than I did, but I wanted him to confirm the only theory that made sense to me.  That because of his injury and the plate in his head, Willis was different.  He had powers.  "Don't be silly," Dad said.  "That's comic book stuff."  

     		But maybe a brain injury could change a person's senses. Suddenly the hearing part of the brain got more nerve juice and a fella could pick up sounds miles away.  Like radar.  And maybe Willis, without being fully aware, had heard Paul Magill's desperate cries.  Maybe a faint echo of it still disturbed the air, leading him to the spot.  

     		Dad shook his head.  He didn't know what the answer was, but that wasn't it.  Maybe we'd never know the answer.  So, it just wasn't fair to go guessing to the police and maybe hurting someone in the process.

     How could a fella sleep wondering about such things?  Not until dawn creeped through my window did I finally nod off.  I dreamt of Black-eyed Susans and the French Woman's beautiful house, where she would now live all alone.  And I saw Cousin Bill, proud in his army uniform, escorting Danielle into a beautiful mansion.  

     		I woke in a panic, bolt upright in bed, my heart hammering its way out of my chest.  Voices from downstairs--a choking, menacing cackle.  I scrambled to the door and cracked it.  Mom's voice in the kitchen, my sisters, too.  Peggy's giggling laugh. Cripes.  I had mistaken her laughter for something sinister.  Can you imagine?

     		I collapsed on the bed, suddenly full of a vision of what had happened to Mr. Willis.  Middle of the night, he wakes to baby cries.  Sits up in bed, straining to hear.  When his own kids were babies they used to cry in the night, but this is different.  It's far away and yet it's close.  So, he steps into the backyard.  The sound is there, fuller, in the air, everywhere at once, like the hum of a big plane flying high overhead.  You can't even point out a direction.  The noise just fills space.   	I went to the window for a view of Willis's yard and wilted under a great sadness.  What overcame Willis out in the forest?  What did he think when he realized he had led us to the spot where Paul Magill died? 

     		I threw on my clothes, not wanting to think about it anymore, but it was like trying to shake a dog clamped to your pantleg.  Snarl.  Growl.  Willis grabbing his hair where the plate covered the hole in his skull.  A million brain circuits shooting sparks.  I hurried to the bathroom and gave my teeth a good once over and my face a hard scrub.  It brought a cherry glow to my cheeks, but my eyes looked droopy from lack of sleep and my brain felt droopy, too.  

     		The kitchen voices called to me at the top of the stairs.  I longed to be with them.  But even as I scrambled down the steps, I saw the shocked expression Willis wore when he plopped on the ground in the woods.  I thought of the confounded expression Charlie Nash must have worn the instant before dying and of Bill's photograph of the men from town with Danielle.  Then, it hit me.  A simpler explanation that stopped me as quick as running into a wall.  Maybe, Willis had looked so shocked, not because he had heard Paul Magill dying miles away, but because, in a trance, Willis had killed him.  Holy mackeral.

     		I hit the kitchen on a gallop, then sat silently devoted to my breakfast.       	

            "What's the matter with you," Peggy taunted, but Mother shushed her, as though I deserved leeway after last night. In warm, delicious waves the comforting buzz of their voices broke over me as I lingered a long time without saying one word. 	D-Day minus 4.  I wished I was heading to school.  Instead, I pedalled off on my bike, wondering what to do.  Why would Willis kill Paul Magill?  Because he didn't like Frank?  That didn't make sense.  Because, because . . . I drove towards Claremont Street hill, headed to Bill's.  Because he couldn't control what he did while in a trance?  Nah.  It was a hair-brained theory, I decided, as I crested Claremont and started down the steep, quarter-mile incline.  

     		I took it full bore, pedalling like a maniac, knowing that if I tried to make the turn towards Bill's at the bottom, I'd shoot off into the trees.  It didn't seem to matter.  My legs churned so fast, my feet nearly flew off the pedals.  Each bump launched the bike to momentary flight.  I leaned tight to the handlebars, a compact, ballistic, unstoppable kid.  I glimpsed in my mind, the bush where we found Paul Magill.

     		Carooming through the intersection, I continued on Claremont, on a course, I realized now, that would take me to the Magill farm.  All the time I pedalled, I saw the birch tree, the raspberry bushes, the twigs and leaves and the black forest soil. They stood out in my mind clear as a photograph.

	Sheriff Halburton drove past me on the gravel road, kicking dust in my face.  He had said last night he'd keep news of the toddler's death until morning, when Frank would be on hand to console his wife.  I wondered how an aristocratic lady would take such news.  	

     		I found the tire tracks where we had parked the night before and traced our path into the woods, to the spot where Willis sat down, then on to the birch tree.  Nothing scary about it now, just a dumb old clump of bushes.  I studied the spot, waiting for the return of those high emotions from last night.  

     		Then I saw a glimpse of gold, I guess what I had come looking for, I guess what I had seen last night without having it register.  Suddenly, the place was scary all over again, and I had to force myself to reach between the scratchy raspberry stalks to retrieve it.  It was a Black-eyed Susan.  Not growing but loose.  Just one.  

     		I plopped onto the ground, wondering what to do.  It didn't mean anything, really, unless you twisted it around a good deal in your head.  Kid probably picked it, growing wild, carried it with him.  And yet, looking at it crumpled in my hand, it seemed like a creepy, brown eye with an evil secret.  I started back towards my bike, thinking I'd either carry the flower as a deep, dark secret forever, into my grave, or tell Cousin Bill right now, as he had told me about Charlie Nash.      

     		I returned to my bike in time to see a car approaching.  It shot by with a rattle of stones and a wave of dust.  It was Frank Magill in his blue Plymouth, racing home for the tragic news.







Ê



Chris Dubbs' fiction has appeared in numerous commercial and literary magazines, including Gallery, Playboy, Antioch Review, Chariton Review, Washington Review.  His novel Ms.Faust was published in 1986 by Warner Books.  In 1993 he received a fiction fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts to complete a series of short stories about veterans returned from World War II.  The Disappearance of Paul Magill is one of the stories in that series, and it appeared previously in the Colorado North Review.  He teaches writing at Penn State-Erie.











Ê



   Buffalo Country









   --by Aaron Even







	

           Nina thought of him most during punishment, when she would have to sit alone at the back of the schoolroom and none of the other girls would dare look at her.  Like stiffskirted puppets all in a row.  That was when she saw him in the brumal shroud of a dream: he sat alone on his porch watching distant planes blink across the sky and smoking the cigars they all said would be the death of him.  A cool plume encircled his hairless skull, illuminated by shafts of dim lamplight.  His radio crackled uselessly from a window sill.  He would sit there reading until the moon reached its apex, rheumy eyes squinting through bifocals thick as hockey pucks and lips forming dry whispers from page to page.  Sometimes he fell asleep right there on the porch and did not wake until sunrise.

	   	Back home she heard all about him.  Grandpa Ewell, the crazy man who had single-handedly brought on a war within the family by refusing to come in where he could be cared for.  All sides had tried and failed in their attempts to placate him, advise him, coerce him, bribe him.  He sat obstinate and incommunicable, legally deaf and half blind, and waved at them with the same contemptuous gesture he would use for a swarm of summer flies.  "Leave me alone," he would croak, his voice like a scratchy record plucked from an attic box.  "I want to stay here with my wife." That was what he said.  His false teeth clicked and settled with finality and his eyes strayed speculatively to where an old shotgun lay racked and rusting.  They always backed off then and returned muttering curses and vague threats.

	   	Nina saw him every now and then, mostly around holidays.  The family would pack into their woodpaneled Pinto and drive the ninety miles out to his small Dakota farm where cattle stood shitting and flipping their tails, chickens squawked and fought in the yard and hawks sailed overhead in dizzying arcs, their black serrated wings locked on invisible currents, eyes scouring for rodents.  After arguing all the way about what they ought to do with the old man her parents would sit with him and spin out the most awful bullshit she had ever heard, shouting at the top of their lungs into his half-cocked ear, and she would watch him as if he were some atrophic husk that might blow away with a wrong shift in the breeze.  As the awkward silences grew longer and more uncomfortable her parents would begin wriggling their hands and drumming their feet on the floorboards while they shot secret, meaningful looks at each other, filling the air with their sighs.  Her grandpa was never more than half there.  He would talk a little in his raspy voice and then drift into a silence which would not break.  She imagined that he kept another world imprinted on the backs of his gray eyelids and that all he had to do was shut them and he would be there.  And this is how they would leave him, asleep, his chin perched delicately in the cave of his chest, his coffee table lined with open beer cans, his little house swimming in the evening's purple light.



	





	   	Eight days shy of Christmas her mother arrived at school in a flurry of scarves and sun lotion.

	   	"You're late," Nina said.  She stood in an empty courtyard shadowed by gray brick walls.  In the doorway an old nun waved mechanically.  Her mother smiled and waved back.

	   	"Thank you," she called, seemingly to the school itself.  She took Nina's hand and they walked to the car.  "Did you do well on your exams?"

	   	Nina shrugged.  "Maybe: maybe not."

	   	"Oh well.  You've had troubles, I hear."

	   	"No I haven't."

	   	"Yes.  Well.  Perhaps you'll try harder next term and make us all proud of you.  It's simply a marvelous day, isn't it?"

	   	That night a terrible storm blew in from the west.  When her parents thought her asleep, Nina snuck out her window and ran among the empty neighborhood in a pair of thermal boots and heavy winter coat.  She sat on the diner's crusted stoop and listened to the heater hum as an ocean of snow deluged into creaseless folds, burying parked cars in broad rolling mounds.  The men inside crouched flush-faced over steaming mugs.  A striped cat yawned dreamily from the countertop.

	   	She returned half frozen to find a police cruiser blinking in her driveway, a slow gray slush trickling from the tailpipe.  Fear quivered in her gut.  She slunk about the low black windows, waiting for something to happen, until the cold grew too intense and she was forced to climb the sticky drainage pipe and slide through her unlatched window.  The moment her feet hit the carpeted floor she heard voices, far off and muffled, floating disembodied and unreal through the plaster walls.  She felt her face go red in the sudden warmth.

	   	She heard her name.

	   	"She's sleeping," her mother said.  "No reason to wake her."

	   	Her father grunted something inaudible.

	   	She moved closer to her door, cracked it and lay down with an ear in the open hallway.

	   	"Well," the officer said thickly.  "You won't have to identify him, anyhow.  It wouldn't be practical.  But you'll need to come down, sign a release.  I know you'll be wanting to make arrangements soon as possible."

	   	"Yes," her mother said.  "Of course: thank you very much."

	   	She heard her mother escorting him to the door, the shrill and mournful sound of the wind as it opened, then the throb of it closing too hard against the frame.  She lay flat and breathed slowly, precisely.  The blood in her ears roiled like an open tap.  She thought of nightmares she'd had in which her parents conspired to carve and cook her in the frying pan, unaware of her listening through the floor.  In the dreams there were never any lights.  The house was dark, inescapable, and the footsteps would come slowly up the stairs, in the deliberate rhythm of a march, hands stretching to feel for her, the scrape of their finger tips like rubber nipples against the walls.

	   	She heard her father's sigh long and heavy, ending in a kind of gurgle.  "So it's finally happened.  He had to go and finish it his way."

	   	"It's not your fault," her mother said.  "You tried.  You were a good son.  Now if he had been just a bit more cooperative..."

	   	"Such an awful death."

	   	"Yes," she said.  "Horrible."

	   	Nina drew back her head and shut the door quietly.  She walked to the window and looked out into the swirling snow.  All the city was lost in whiteness, silent and entombed, like static on the television with the volume down.  Even the raking wind lay down and slept.





	   	She read about it in the obituary.  Roy Ewell, driving twenty head of scattered cattle through the storm, half blind and mostly deaf, following by heart the contours of his beloved land, had picked the wrong moment to spur his horse across the train tracks.  An Amtrak conductor described seeing the man and horse emerge like twin phantoms at the rail's edge and calling out uselessly, unable to brake in time.  Nina shut her eyes.  She imagined the slow lifting of hoof onto the snowcovered tracks, her grandpa's gray Scandinavian eyes forward and slanted, unseeing, and the poor horse freezing at the sudden blare of the whistle while her grandpa may have felt something, a drawing back of some slight air current as he lifted his chin, wondering what on earth could possibly put the scare in his old horse.  Then the unearthly slap of the train hitting him at full speed, dragging man and horse down together beneath the crunching iron, spreading them out over the half mile it took to come to rest, steaming and shuddering and whining as the door swung open and the conductor leapt out into a waist-high drift to stare back over the whitewashed distance.

	   	On the way to the funeral she kept quiet.  The Pinto shuddered along in the slow lane and her father cursed it softly, kicking his foot down hard against the gas pedal.  The snow had been plowed up against the roadside and lay in towering brown-streaked mounds, bleeding off into empty farmland.  Bright sunlight glared back from the surrounding flats and they all had on sunglasses to protect their eyes.  Her mother had rubbed suntan lotion on her cheeks.

	   	"Why don't we sing a song?" her mother asked, smiling blandly in the rearview mirror.

	   	"I don't sing," Nina said.

	   	"Don't they make you sing at school?"

	   	"Nobody can make me do anything I don't want to do."

	   	"Nina! Such a thing to say.  You sound like your grandpa."

	   	Her father turned his head and frowned.  

	   	"Such a willful girl..." her mother said, letting the words trail off into a defeated sigh.

	   	Nina sat still and looked out the window at the streaming plains, the vast and empty basin of soil and snow.  In such moments she felt alone and distant, hating her mother and cursing God, although later, in fear, she would repent.

	   	When the slanting roof of the country church became visible over miles of flat seamless land, she sat up and looked west toward her grandpa's farm.  The church stood at the edge of a small crossroads town in which a low-lying grocery store, post office and restaurant squatted around the central attraction: a misshapen gravel lot dealing in used farm implements.  Weekly specials were advertised in illegible red-inked signs flashing beneath yards of blinking Christmas lights.  As they passed through the center Nina read the storm-battered scrawl aloud, which streaking into the wet cardboard looked like so much spattered blood: 





LAST CHANCE SALE.  

DEAL NOW OR FOREVER 

HOLD YOUR PEACE.  





	   	Nina laughed.

	   	"That's not funny," her mother said and looked at her sternly, which made Nina laugh again.

	   	They parked in front of the church and got out of the car.  Already a small group of relations were gathered inside the church and a single bundled man had shuffled out to wave a meaty hand in the air.

	   	"Hi uncle Bud," Nina called.  She ran up and gave him a hug.  He was the only relative she cared about, the rest could go to hell.

	   	"My pretty girl," uncle Bud smiled, his fleshy face red with cold and razor rash and uneasiness.  "How've you been getting along?"

	   	"Rotten," she said.

	   	"Oh well," he shrugged, and said hello to her father.  The usual stiffness passed between them.  Uncle Bud was the older brother and he drove a meat truck.  He talked about the countless states he'd been to as if it were all the same to him and he'd just as soon sit tight on the farm as in the cab of a steaming, hurtling rig.  But she knew he only did that to make her feel better about being stuck in school all year long.  

	   	They went inside and all the adults passed around handshakes and secret looks.  A few other kids were there but she thought they acted stupid and wouldn't talk to them.  She also thought her mother talked too loud.  She sat in a corner and waited for uncle Bud to come and talk with her.  Finally he did, ambling on stiff legs, toting a soup-pot belly beneath a striped dress shirt, smelling of hastily bought cologne and ancient whiskey.

	   	He sat down beside her and sighed as if exhausted from a strenuous physical effort.  "Well, how about it.  All the family in one room.  Guess that's one thing not to be sorry for."

	   	Nina looked at him.  "What's in the coffin?" she said.

	   	He looked over at the bluelaced, dark wood box that lay gleaming on the tabletop, the window shut tight.  His eyebrows wrinkled up and looked funny.

	   	"Well that's your grandpa, honey."

	   	"Can't be," she said.

	   	"Why not?"

	   	"There would have been too many pieces.  I mean, they couldn't have stitched him back together.  I'll bet they buried him where he was, out by the side of the tracks."

	   	Uncle Bud's eyes were wide and horrified.

	   	"I wonder whose job it is," she went on.  "I mean who has to walk along and find the pieces and bury them-"

	   	"Jesus," uncle Bud said.  "What are they feeding you back home?"

	   	Nina didn't understand what food had to do with any of it.  She eyed the coffin suspiciously, thinking that when the people all left she might open it and have a look, just to be sure.

	   	In a few minutes the funeral started.  She did not remember much of it.  	The usual priest was not there; instead a thin young man with cleanshaven cheeks and hair the color of spring pollen gave an earnest but boring talk full of ideas he must have learned recently in college.  He kept using long words which no one seemed to understand.  Nina thought it was strange that the only man in the room who didn't know her grandpa was the one yacking on about him.  After a while she looked over and saw uncle Bud with his eyes closed.

	   	When it was over they went outside and watched the box get put into the earth.  The gravesite was a long walk from the church and everybody was cold, standing with arms folded on the frozen plain and feet stamping off the deep snow.  Nina was sure it was an empty box they were lowering into the dirt so she didn't pay any attention.  The whole thing seemed silly to her and distant, maudlin actors on the television screen faking their tears by script.

	   	The priest read some more words from the Bible but his voice was just a mutter beneath the wind.  The sun glinted off his oval spectacles.  Finally they all made the sign of the cross and turned back toward the church.  Uncle Bud was coughing and blowing his nose into a silver handkerchief.  They marched in a short twisting line, stiff and slow, a dark somber wire flickering over the white yard, and when Nina broke into a dead run not even her mother's angry shout could stop her.









	   	When she got back home she was in trouble and had to stay in her room, but at night she snuck out and walked into open stores and bars just to see how people would look at her.  Uncle Bud had kissed her and said he would be by soon.  She waited, bored.  Finally he called.

	   	"Hey kiddo," he said, sounding as if his tongue were bloated.

	   	"When are you coming by?" she asked.

	   	"Soon, soon.  Do me a favor, will you? Put your old man on the line."

	   	She sat nearby and drank hot chocolate and listened to an argument unfold.  She didn't know what it was about, but when her father began yelling, really yelling up a storm so that his face was bright red and his words a shrill and chaotic slur, she felt her chest go tight and left the room.  It had something to do with uncle Bud being executor of the will because he was older, and he had already used some of the money to fix his truck and had been in jail one night after drinking himself senseless.  She found it all hard to believe.

	   	That evening a second storm buried them in their house and it took three days to dig out.  It was a blizzard, the kind that would kill you if you weren't careful, the kind that carried with it stories of people freezing to death less than ten feet from home, lost in the blinding swirl, good as a hundred miles away.  Nina sat trapped in her room feeling the hours stagnate.  She read a picture book about Africa which seemed strange and impossible, filled with colorful animals and sun-withered trees and tribal women smiling and dancing in a circle, shaking hands at the cerulean sky.  When her father came in and asked if she would go with him to see how the old farm was holding up, she was bored enough that she said yes.

	   	They drove out of the city over the crusted blacktop.  Out in the country the road turned a strange sunblasted color which was like the clay of ancient adobes.  She sat in the front seat and played with the radio until her father grew annoyed and slapped at her hand.  Then she sat still and watched the level snow-buried land whip by.  She wondered how the Indians had survived out there with no sticky tar roofs or hot water or gas heaters.  How they could fend off such a storm with only a patchwork of buffalo skin and prayers to the powers of the West.

	   	"You're mother spoke to me last night," her father said suddenly.

	   	There was a silence.

	   	"That's nice," Nina said, and laughed morosely.

	   	Her father took his eyes from the road and glared at her.  "She is concerned about your attitude.  Your grades came in.  She's concerned, that's all."

	   	"So how'd I do?"

	   	"They are not adequate.  They are substandard."

	   	"Oh."

	   	"Sister Federica says she doesn't understand.  She says you sit in your seat making faces and won't say anything."

	   	"She doesn't like me is all.  She hates me.  I made her look bad because I showed that Virginia doesn't border Georgia in front of the whole class.  That's why."

	   	Her father reached into the glove compartment and searched for his sunglasses.  He pulled them out and covered his eyes in a mirrored glaze.  As he set them crooked on the bridge of his nose a look of sudden confusion washed over his pinched face.  Nina sighted the path of his eyes and saw what it was.  A dark form stood far off in the center of the road like a brown tufted wall, a gate of hair shut against trespassers, and Nina squinted her eyes in the bright sun and raised her curled hand to shade them.

	   	"A buffalo," she said.

	   	Her father whispered a curse.  It seemed impossible.  Alone on that wide expanse of nowhere it stood with head bowed and blunt horns slanting, swishing its tail with calm deliberation against a motionless flank.  As they drew close a single olivelike eye flared wide, swelling bigger and bigger until it was like a dark well in which they could fall forever and never reach bottom.

	   	They stopped a good distance short of the buffalo and her father honked the horn.  The buffalo turned its great head slowly and steam snaked upward from the long prowlike nose.  It stamped its delicate hooves and let out a snarl.

	   	"Stupid thing," her father said.  "Where the hell did it come from?" He squeezed his palm against the horn and revved the engine.  "Goddamn you! Get out of the road!"

	   	The buffalo snapped its head in terror and for a dreadful moment Nina thought it would rush the car.  She braced her feet against the floor and slid toward the space beneath the dashboard.  Instead it stamped its hooves and turned one way and the next as if perplexed about where on that vast and uniform plain it ought to run; its eye seemed to swell to the size of a baseball and then all at once it bolted in a fury of snow and snarls and steam, heading toward distant cloud banks, a dark receding shadow on the land.  

	   	"Praise Jesus," her father said.  He brought the Pinto slowly up to high gear and shook his head in disgust.  The buffalo had made him forget all about her grades and Nina was relieved, pressing her face against the cool window to watch it ramble across the snowy plain, already distant and dwindling smaller and smaller but never vanishing, never lost.  Even when the churchtop rose up against the iceblue skyline she could see it far off drifting like a tuft of prairie smoke, like a cloud bearing thunder and hail.





  



	   	The cab of uncle Bud's rig was sitting in front of the house at a crooked angle and all about the yard nothing scampered or crawled or slithered.  There were no hawks in the sky.  She saw her father's face go dark and his lips draw tight.  He let up on the gas and they drove slowly into the yard, crunching snow beneath the worn radials.  He pulled up next to the trailerless cab and cut the engine.

	   	The storm door opened and uncle Bud came out and stood on the porch.  Her father got out of the car and she followed eagerly, sensing a taut wire of tension balanced in the air between them.

	   	"What are you doing here?" her father said.  He leaned against the steaming hood and made no move toward the house.

	   	"I can see to the place if I have a mind."

	   	"I guess there's no law against it."

	   	"No there's not," uncle Bud said.  His hair was hanging loose about his shoulders and his cheeks looked red and swollen.  "It's somebody needs to look after the place."

	   	"I guess so," her father said.

	   	There was a long silence and the two men eyed each other up and down.  They didn't look like brothers.  Not even distant cousins.  It seemed as though they were strangers meeting for the very first time and not liking it one bit.

	   	Her father took a few steps forward.

	   	"Don't you think that maybe I ought to handle dad's affairs from now on?"

	   	Uncle Bud growled.  "I think you've done enough handling of things."

	   	"What do you mean by that?"

	   	"I mean you've been handling the old man so long it looks like he could scarcely stand on his own.  Handled college out of him, the only one to do that.  Handled a down payment on your mortgage when I was living in motels.  Bet you would have liked to handle him some more though.  Maybe have sweet talked him into splitting things sixty-forty."

	   	"That's a damn common thing to say," her father said, his voice high like a schoolteacher's.

	   	Uncle Bud smiled and his crooked teeth stood out like bits of frozen snow.  He looked relaxed and drunk.  He was not wearing a jacket and his belly hung impressively over his worn leather belt and faded jeans.  His eyes spun with untellable feelings.

	   	"I guess I'm common enough," he said slowly.  "Common as salt.  But I'm still executor of the will, and you're not taking that from me unless you want to shoot for it."

	   	He was suddenly cradling a large Colt revolver loosely in his fat hand.  Her father went all stiff.  His face flushing red.  The little muscles on the side of his face beginning to tick.

	   	"I'm getting the sheriff," he said officially.  He spun around and opened the driver door.  "Get in the car, Nina."

	   	Uncle Bud stepped forward and waved listlessly with the gun.  "Let her stay and wait.  I wanna have a couple words with her before you go and lock me up."

	   	"Yes," Nina said.  "Let me stay.  I want to stay."

	   	Her father's face turned from red to ash.  He looked from Nina to uncle Bud and back again.  "Get in the car," he said.

	   	"No," Nina shrilled.  "I want to see the house again.  I'm staying, anyway."

	   	She walked briskly up the porch stairs and into the house.  The sudden warmth of the front hall lit a fever all through her face and hands.  Outside she heard uncle Bud milling on the porch and the Pinto starting up with a violent wheeze.  She heard the wheels spinning and the reverse gear rise to a shrill whine.  The she saw the door handle turn; it opened and uncle Bud stepped inside.

	   	In the living room a fire was burning.  She walked in and sat on the flowered couch and let rhythmic tides of heat lap at her skinny legs.  Uncle Bud came in and stood leaning against the mantle.  The snow on his boots melted slowly into a dark puddle on the floor.  He still had the Colt revolver in his hand but he held it curiously as if it were something he'd found in the brush and couldn't quite place.

	   	"Well," he said.  "Guess I'm a dumbfuck, acting to your father like that."

	   	"I don't care," Nina said.

	   	Uncle Bud looked out the window.  "Cold out there."

	   	"You think he minds?"

	   	"He's used to it."

	   	"I mean grandpa."

	   	"Oh.  I expect he don't much care anymore, cold or no cold, fire or no fire.  Though he'd be glad to see you warming here.  He loved you best of all, you know."

	   	Nina stopped kicking her legs out at the fire.  She realized all of a sudden that she didn't even know the man and hadn't cried for him and never would.  He seemed altogether remote and unknowable, a fuzzy spot in her mind, a blank and faceless form silent in his hardwood chair, stooping every now and then to sip at a stale smelling beer.

	   	"Honest," uncle Bud said.  "He talked about you when I'd stop off between hauls.  He said you had spirit in you and wouldn't be nothing but trouble for your folks.  Said you were a regular smartass."

	   	Uncle Bud walked to the coffee table and picked up a half empty bottle, leaning painfully as though his lower back were sore.  He took a swig and held it out to her.  She wrapped her hand around the sticky neck and stared into the shit-colored liquid as through the eye of a microscope.  Then she raised the bottle and let a trickle of the rank stuff slide onto her tongue.

	   	"Uugh," she squealed.  "It burns."

	   	Uncle Bud laughed and took the bottle back.  "One day you'll like it," he said.  "I bought my first bottle when I left home for good.  That was a long time ago."

	   	She looked up at him.  "What are you going to do?"

	   	He ran the tip of his boot against the floorboards as if he were rooting for something.  "Hell, I don't know.  Maybe I should run for it.  What do you think?"

	   	"Yeah!" Nina said.  "I'll throw them in the wrong direction.  You can be an outlaw."

	   	Uncle Bud was looking at the floor.  He seemed remote and very sad, very tired.  "Anyway I don't feel like it.  Guess I deserve what I get.  I just wanna sit here with you.  Hell, it gets so lonely at times I think- well never mind what I think."

	   	He came over and sat on the couch.  The dark bottle balanced on a broad thigh and reflected the swirling pattern of the flames.  The weight of his body sunk in the couch and she slid down the crater toward his lap.

	   	She leaned her head against his arm and looked up at him.

	   	"Do you think he's buried out there?" she said.

	   	"Aw, I don't know."

	   	She jumped up with her back to the fire and her eyes lit red and dancing.  	 "I'm gonna go and see," she said.

	   	Uncle Bud looked as if he would protest, but then he only shrugged and tossed his bottle into the crackling fire.

	







	   	She ran to the barn and swung open the door.  Inside it was cold and dank, smelling of sweat and dung, hay and rotten leather, and the three roans yet to be sold or shot stood huddled together in a pen, snorting steam into the light-pierced air.  She opened the gate and coaxed the oldest, a spotted mare tame as a house cat, into the bridle, the huge awkward saddle, leading her slowly into the sharp wind and bright low-hanging sun.  Once outside she had to climb an old stool to get on top of the mare.  In mid-swing she realized he must have needed it as well, kept it apologetically alongside the splintered woodpile as though to be broken and burned, and she felt a confused sadness throb all through her bones.  She landed crooked, clung tight with her legs and took the heavy neck in her gloved hands.  She spurred the mare into a reluctant trot.

	   	The snow crunched and the mare complained and slowed to a staggering pace.  In her impatience Nina kicked against the warm flank but the old mare would not be bullied.  Nina sat back and let her legs go limp, remembering how she used to think she'd make a fine rodeo queen one day.  That was before the boarding school, before unlearning what was unladylike, when riding carried no implications or incriminations.  She looked back and saw the house falling away, the black cab sinking into the yard, and pulled her jacket tight around her neck.  Against her legs the flesh pulsed and shuddered and ropes of coiled muscle swelled outwards.  She rode south toward the train tracks, blinking in the sun's ice-white glare.

	   	The hour seemed to freeze dead.  The wind was kicking up waves of dusty snow that worked under her collar and inside her sleeves.  Fragments lodged under her eyelid and burned.  In some places the snow was too deep and she had to back the old mare out and cut a fresh angle, looking to the distant house for bearings, trying instinctively to follow the cow path's buried course.  When she came finally upon the tracks- all black and slick with ice coating, concealed behind a long winding drift- she was startled to find them so close.  All the way to the western horizon they slashed a field of unbroken whiteness like lines drawn in ink upon a fresh sheet of paper.  There was no interruption in the pattern, nothing to separate one quarter-mile section from another.  When she faced east it was the same: an endless monotony of black on white, unerringly straight, stabbing into the sprawling plains which were like a cloud-washed sky she rode over, a sky which extended forever and contained no sign of life or hope.

	   	She shut her eyes and tried to imagine what it was like for him in those final moments.  Her bones were old and bent, her skin pale and thin like worn newspaper, her eyes clouded and squinting in the dizzying onslaught of the storm.  The mare whinnied and lurched nervously beneath her.  She held the reins tight and drove the cattle with frequent hollers, battling their instinct to stop and huddle.  She felt the rim of her ears so brittle that a misplaced finger might crack them into slivers.  Her breathing was shallow and asthmatic.  All at once the old mare stopped, bowing her long head, and Nina kicked her hard about the flank.  She was confused and suddenly afraid, feeling the spinning cloud of snow grow thick about her and the wind coming up hard and knowing there was still a good thirty minutes to familiar fences, and this fear made her gut rumble and her heart hammer and her eyes water, and the damn mare standing there like a dumb post shivering and steaming until she jerked the reins with all her might and aimed the edge of her bootsole savagely into an arched rib bone.  The mare raised her head and lifted a scrawny leg in the air.  A thunderous vibration was rising from somewhere, seemingly far off and dim, and the very earth trembled with its resonance.  Was it thunder? Thunder in a blizzard? Had she ever heard of that before? And could she trust these half deaf ears which more often than not held remembered sound between their grizzled walls, fragments of echoed years? The mare's hoof crunched into deep snow and then Nina lifted her head, blinking into the whiteness, thinking she was hallucinating, because the light that suddenly enveloped her was too bright to be real, too holy, and she had no sooner begun to discredit it than she was lost in it, swimming in one breathless moment that would never end.

	   	She opened her eyes.  She felt the warm and brittle horse hair in her hands, the thick pulsing neck.  To the east and west the oily tracks lay desolate and still like prehistoric bones, and it struck her in a moment of simplest horror that her grandpa was not to be found, that he had vanished altogether from the earth was passed beyond recall.  She felt a chill run all through her.  Looking out over the endless distance it occurred to her that this might be death.  Her clenched lips drew into a bloodless slit.  She bent and held the mare's neck tightly in her hands, listening for the heartbeat and the rushing blood, sucking in the heat and the musty horse-odor.

	   	In a rush she thought of uncle Bud.  She wanted to confront him now, to ask where her grandpa was, where he had gone.  She spun the old mare and kicked hard against her heavy flank, starting her to a dangerous trot, and looked off to where her grandpa's house lay pasted flat against the skyline.  That was when she heard the police car rushing in from town and bleating like a lost calf.





	   	The mare moved with a surreal slowness, stepping carefully in the snow until she became confident of her footing, while Nina stood in the saddle trying to see what was happening.  As she drew nearer and could just make out the black top of uncle Bud's cab she heard a strange voice waft briefly in the thin air.  Her breathing quickened and the heat rose in her face.  The mare pressed forward into the wind.  

	   	Soon figures became visible around the front porch.  Her father was standing alongside two officers dressed in brown slacks with wide oval hats on their heads.  She could not see uncle Bud.

	   	"Hey!" she called out.  She leapt off the horse's back and tumbled through the snow.

	   	Her father turned and watched her approach, then looked away at the porch stairs where the two officers had knelt.  When she broke into the open yard she saw the officers helping uncle Bud to his feet, and he was laughing loudly while he clutched his right arm with a big meaty hand.

	    "Jesus," he was saying to one of the officers, his voice broken by convulsive guffaws.  "You figure a guy would take care.  You figure he ought to know better."

	   	She caught sight of his gun, just a few feet away on the ice-slick steps.

	   	"Just my friggin luck.  Is my arm broke?" He looked over at her and stopped rigid all at once.  His bibulous eyes throbbed.  "Hey sweetheart, you missed the show."

     The officers were leading him to the squad car, his arm splayed wide at the elbow.  She wanted to rush over and tell him that she was afraid grandpa might be someplace awful, blind and alone, but suddenly he was in the back seat of the cruiser and the officers were busy babytalking him and giving first aid, so she shut up and didn't say anything at all.

    	Her father came over and put an arm over her shoulder.  She let it lie there coldly.

    	"Honey," he said.  "Your uncle's had an accident.  He isn't well.  They're going to take him to the doctor's."

    	She broke from him and ran to the car.  One of the officers, a young man with sharp white cheekbones, had slid around to the driver's side and was cranking the engine while he talked loudly on his radio.  The other was settling in beside uncle Bud looking miserable and worried.  As she came abreast of the window uncle Bud bent over and vomited in his lap.  Then he looked up, a pinkish beard stubbling his chin, and rolled the window slowly down.  His good hand was a contorted, tremulous claw.

    	"Don't look so grim," he said.

    	"Why not?"

    	He shrugged.  "Guess you can look how you like, anyway."

    	She turned her nose at the reek.  "Are they taking you to jail?"

    	"Could be," he said, and his sallow eyes rolled in her father's direction.    "Ask the lawyer.  I guess some guys are born lucky and the others have to shut up and do their best.  Your grandpa trusted me with his will, but maybe that wasn't so smart.  He never trusted me with much else."

    	His face was flushed in a strange mix of elation and wonder and consuming sadness.  It seemed suddenly that there was so much she didn't know about her own family, about the people she'd been seeing all her life, and she felt very small and bewildered as her grandpa must have felt in that final moment before spurring his horse on into oblivion.

    	The squad car began to back away slowly, crackling snow as it maneuvered the driveway.

    	"Honey," her father said from behind.

    	But she launched after the car in a mad sprint and called out to her uncle in a furious voice: "Uncle Bud, it's nowhere! It's nothing out there at all!" and uncle Bud leaned his head out the window and grinned, blunt-toothed, in a look she would never forget all the days of her life.  "So what did you expect?" he said.  "That's buffalo country." 

    	She watched the window go up and the cruiser make a U-turn in the road.  The lights came on as it sped off toward town, growing smaller on the horizon, a single fleeting object drawing upon itself like the last coiling ember in her grandpa's fireplace.  That was the last she saw of her uncle Bud.  He vanished in his cab the next morning heading south along the interstate.  She never heard from him again in all her many years.



		



	





Aaron Even is a graduate student in the Creative Writing program at the University of Virginia, where he has been a Henry Hoyns Fellow.  He is currently at work on a novel.























Margaret Atwood



As Interviewed by Robert Sward









Whether it be novel, short story, or poem, Margaret Atwood's work continues to unfold anew.   If it is possible for a poet to be a contemporary and a contemporary ancestor, Margaret Atwood is that poet.   Editor of The New Oxford Book Of Canadian Verse In English, Atwood's publications include the novels Life Before Man, Lady Oracle, and Surfacing.   She is the author of many books of poetry including True Stories, Two-Headed Poems, and Selected Poems.  



This interview originally appeared as a part of Anthology, a weekly show broadcast nationally in Canada by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and is a part of Impulse to Art,  Mr. Sward's work in progress.  Titled Spiritual Poetry in Canada, this particular feature had to do with religious faith and its connection, if any, with the creative process.





Ê





Robert Sward: 



     Were you brought up as a believer?





Margaret Atwood:



     I was brought up by a doctrinaire agnostic.





Sward:



     What is a doctrinaire agnostic?





Atwood:



     A doctrinaire agnostic is different from someone who doesn't know what they believe.  A doctrinaire agnostic believes quite passionately that there are certain things that you cannot know, and therefore ought not to make pronouncements about.  In other words, the only things you can call "knowledge" are things that can be scientifically tested.

      I elected to go to Sunday School myself when I was nine.  That was not a family decision.  In fact, somewhat the same subdued horror went on around that as if, for instance, a child in a Catholic family decided NOT to go to Sunday School.  So I think for me the whole thing was rather mysterious and appealing, sort of like the cookie you weren't supposed to take out of the cookie jar.  One difficulty...  that...   what we think of as "religious experiences" or "religion" or "mysticism" has always had, is that somebody comes along and has what we might now call right brain expereinces, and these get translated by the society into a rigid code which then begins punishing and killing the people who don't adhere to it.







Sward:



     Many poets say that, in the process of writing, they learn something about themselves that they hadn't known before.





Atwood:



     I think an interesting thing about poetry, at least for me, is that it often acts as a kind of divining rod.  That is, not only does it help to tell where I am, but also where I may be headed.  And the poetry often gets there before I do.  And then, a little bit later, maybe six months later, you can say, "That's what that was about." That sounds pretty creepy, but I think if you talk to a lot of poets they'll probably tell you something similar.  If you want to have an explanation for it, it's that the patterning part of you often knows those things before the rational, linear-sequence part does.  Part of the practice of poetry I think is the tuning, keeping tuned into that rather than cutting it off or tuning it out as a lot of people do.





Sward:



     That brings to mind your poem "Foretelling The Future..." 



          	"...You are like the moon, seen from the earth, 

          	oval and gentle and filled with light..."



     I love how it ends: 



          	"The moon seen from the moon is a different thing."







Atwood:



     I think poetry puts you in contact with that part of yourself.  It's a door.  And if you immediately respond to a poem, alas, the way so many of us are taught to do in highschool, by picking it apart and analyzing it, I think you miss that door.  You come to it as something you must analyze; you instantly bring into play that part of your mind which is logical.  You know, the right-handed part of your mind.  You refuse to let that other door open.  That side of the brain that we use for imaging is different from the side that we use for rational thought.  I think poetry is ambidextrous in that in the experience of creating the poem you use both.  Obviously, you use both because a poem is made of words, but the rhythmical part of the poem and the imaging part of the poem, are left-handed experience.  That is, they are governed for a right-handed person by the right hand side of the brain, the same side that has to do with music and, incidentally, with playing tennis: patterning.  

     When we're brought up to think logically and to believe that the only kind of real knowledge and real thinking is logical thinking, those other experiences can be frightening to us, or we dismiss them.  I'm sure many people have a lot of the same experiences that artists have, but they don't want to think about them.  It interrupts their view of the world.  So they dismiss them.  They don't pay attention to their dreams; they don't pay attention to their intuitions.  But in fact a deep part of the brain has been involved in producing those dreams.  It's certainly pre-verbal, and it's certainly a very strong part of the brain.  Maybe I should say Ômind': it sounds more metaphysical.





Ê

























     Three by Edward Falco

Ê









	Sea Island





     	Spanish Moss on live oaks, time fatigued by heat.  

Everything here slow, sand, salt air: pasty white flesh washes 

away like a light layer of scum and a deep earthy brown shines 

out of the body.  Hearts slow to waves and tide.  At night 

electric storms slide along the ocean: eruptions of power and 

light, rips in the merge of water and sky on a night horizon.

     	Sand fleas gorged on our ankles as I sat on the rocks with 

a friend.  In front of us, the storm light.  Behind us, our families 

asleep in a rented house.  In the ocean that morning in the 

roiling water uniqueness and beauty fell away, the sea boiled.  I 

rose up out of a tidal pool into sunlight, a consciousness that 

understood nothing.  Breaking waves threatened.

     	The night before, we had come upon an alligator in the surf.  

It looked to me like a log, or a break in the sand.  We were 

walking with our children, our two daughters and his son, and 

since we knew there were no alligators in the ocean, we 

approached it casually, until it turned and lifted itself up on its 

front legs.  Later that week past midnight we saw a deer on the 

beach, head bowed to black water; and, at dawn, a dying woman 

carried on a stretcher by friends lift her head weakly and turn 

her withered body and let her feet drop in the surf.

	     An alligator in the surf, a deer, a dying woman.

	     My friend and I on the rocks watching a storm over the 

ocean.

	     Our breaking, rushing in, drawn back out, night, stars, 

planets, what's in here out there, rending, wrought, night and 

dawn sea life on a storm-drowned tree cast up in lightning, 

light, one time







Ê







	Summer Flowers





	     River wound sunlight aluminum boat she wore shorts and a 

loose white blouse.  I was 23, she was 20.  I had just returned 

and she was married.

	     This flower opens bright petals drifting the river opens   

around us on an island where we stopped to gather flowers she 

bent to water and threw scooped handfuls her legs tan feet up 

to the ankles in blue-green water behind her a smooth slope of 

hard-packed sand rises to the island.

	     She's bent over the water her hands coming up a child's 

mischievous smile her eyes are blue her hair blond her breasts 

free under the white blouse and water glistens as it crosses a 

short distance through air to a place where I am moving toward 

her across water she is walking backward to the island to a 

green meadow thick with wildflowers.

     	Then there was an affair that lasted a few weeks a month, 

and then some ugliness between me and my friend who was also 

her husband.  I can barely remember, 40 years between then 

and now.

     	But the way she bent to the water the way her breasts 

moved under a loose white blouse the tan of her legs emerging 

from the blue-green of water and the way water glistened 

flying out of her scooped hands the island behind her the flower 

opening around us we were the center we were whatever it is 

that blooms we were that opening as she stepped back to the 

meadow in the heat of a summer morning and that moment 

after 40 years its warmth like sun turning to that memory more 

than memory a face turned to sunlight the sun on water   

warming across the moment we never choose when we are the   

center a meadow untended.







Ê







	Out Here





     	Out here in the dark this dirt road cratered by weather, crossed 

six times by shallow creeks, trees and foliage on two sides, the 

town where we live its concrete and tar defined by street lights 

miles away.  In the air, mist.  Above us, a semicircle of trees 

frail as a pencil sketch.  Two in the morning where a popular 

tune plays all around: the sound of shallow water over rocks in a 

creek bed.  Song of this world, lyrics winding through and deep 

in the body: nothing nothing nothing, all all all.   We have been 

here before in this place like a last and first home, and it has 

held us tight with no pain and no question.



     	Out here it can be cold and no light.



     	Dirt roadbed, water over rocks.



     	When I touch you you flare up for just part of a second like a 

great light then you recede to shadow then finally you go dark.



     	When I touch you it's like embracing a city whose inhabitants 

panic and run, then stop and close their eyes finding calm in that 

dark.



     	I'll leave you alone.



     	What's under our eyes is a shelled city.  Body after body and all 

of them our own.  Here's touch mangled under rocks.  Here's the 

time he did that next to the cold body of that other time in the 

basement.



     	And here we are together in this dark carrying our destruction 

so lightly.  We talk about the Gulf War and later we drive away 

separated by a buffer of silence, the people of our cities still in 

the rubble where they've come to feel at home.



     	Goodnight we say, when what we mean is good-bye.  Our 

envoys return to their hovels.







Ê



Edward Falco has published stories and short prose widely in journals, including The Atlantic Monthly, TriQuarterly, and The Virginia Quarterly Review, where he received the Emily Clark Balch Prize for a short story titled "Plato at Scratch Daniel's," which became the title story of a collection from the University of Arkansas Press.  He has also published a novel, Winter in Florida, with Soho Press.  He teaches fiction writing at Virginia Tech.











Ê



Three by Robert Klein Engler







 

Schola Cantorum



What does a man make in twenty-five years -

a house, a child, a book - gray hair, 

sore joints, bruised bones, singing; 

what more, what less, what can a man make?



I rode the train today, to a store closed

when I got there, I rode the train and looked out

the rain diamonded windows at the long rows

of alleys, and the long rows of pointed attics.



I regret we could not make a compromise.

Every six month I would sleep with him, she

could have the rest, but the damp order of the world

tells me love does not settle things so easily.



It would not be love if it did - ask that man reading

his paper fold by fold, or the woman with a bag

between her legs, ask the boy with the backward

baseball cap, they will tell you their lives rail



the thin line of dreams, why shouldn't yours, why

not twenty-five years of making do, why not -

even yesterday, down at the beach, when the young

man took off his shirt and his girl friend kissed



his stomach as they sat on the hard stairs, 

and you watched, knowing it was a time of fire 

passing, only to remember how his hand

was fire passing on my leg, and the words



stuck on my lips, a mouth full of diamonds,

yet not one sound came out - what did words buy,

not light, not time, not air, fire, water; 

maybe hozana of ashes, maybe bones, maybe ice.



Build me this house then, a house of ash, a house

of ice, a dome where singing goes back and forth.

Listen, echoes of a resurrection reverberate,

and I return with the story I know by heart.



  



Ê









Mata Hari at the Moulin Rouge



Who says the world is less without our love?

Not her, "It's trouble from the start," she said.

Not them, by looking down, they never see above,

And barely know the living from the dead.

Who thinks the world is lost without our pledge?

Not her, a soldier fighting for the other side.

While I remain to guard the outpost's hedge,  

They reward her for how long she spied.  

The summer awnings are now rolled away. 

Dry trees assume their garmets of decay.

While shadows grow, the cattails puff and sway.

Who waits for sheets of ice to blind the day?   

    Just me, my dear, I sort our rotted dreams,

    I am the one who nurses "see" from "seems."









Ê











The Poet Lifts His Glass



I am drunk, but not alone.

The widow is with me, and the old man incontinent.  

I see them, as I see my wish that you would touch 

my cheek, lover, in the dim light of my room. 



Remember how you held him in the darkness,

held him like a child holding a button eyed toy.

See what happens, dear, the teeth of wanting

chew you up, when you get too close.











Ê



Robert Klein Engler lives with his wife and two sons in Chicago. His poems and stories appear in Borderlands, Hyphen, Christopher Street, The James Wright Review, American Letters and Commentary, Kansas Quarterly,  and many other magazines and journals.  He is the author of two books of poetry, Adagio and Stations of the Heart (Alphabeta Press).  In 1989 he was the recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Literary Award for his poem, "Flower Festival at Genzano," which appeared in Whetstone.















Ê

Three by Davis McCombs











April Fifth, Nineteen Hundred Eighty-Three





Brother came home in flood time, sudden

as the first heave of spring. That week 

the river grew restless in its banks, tumbling

out chicken wire and empty bottles in its gorge.

Our house, too, strained, with one more in its tiny rooms:

Father, anxious and crop-hungry, paced the porch

as the waters rose, and Mother at the stove,

her face flushed, weathered our moods in silence.



When the rains broke we worked the bottomland, Brother

sneaking into town at night, proud new muscles

under his thin shirt. One afternoon, the tobacco finally

in the ground, I hid as he met a girl at the end of the road,

imagined words I could not speak-like finding a piano

in the barn, this possibility wide and tense as storm.







Ê







The River and Under the River





At dusk every day, our cattle leave the river,

single-file, trundling their weight to the upper pastures. 

And, every night, the river is left to itself, infertile 

and self-loathing, most beautiful when it comes close 

to absence; its grooves and grottoes hum 

with the noise of a landscape's slow consumption.

If I put my ear to the ground 

could I hear the drag of the river turning 

limestone into silt? Would it tell of Carlos pulled 

through water on a slim and muscley night at Turnhole Bend? 

I want to know the missing part of his story

that ends with the flush of foxfire on a grave- 

as if from the body's heat fading out.

Tonight the river is at work dissolving, solving 

over and over the riddle of its loosening. I want to know 

how to hear it, and what it might teach me: 

how to inhabit this thing of bone, gut, and blood, 

this part of me that would not vanish if I vanished. 







Ê









Watermelons





Pestered with sprays 

and bedded in straw,

we are kept boys, swollen 

like a bum knee; we look 

like the bullfrog sounds.

Plugged with a knife 

or zippered open wide, 

tapped for our flaming insides. 

We are water clocks,

weaned from the tube-footed vine,

hauled in by the load,

a tear-striped dirty child. 

We cannot spill.  

We wish we could read

lightning on our hide,

the unhysterical thump

of a talking drum:

do not trust the speed of beauty

do not trust the beauty 







Ê



Davis McCombs graduated from Harvard University in 1993.  He is currently a Henry Hoyns Fellow in the creative writing department at the University of Virginia, and was the 1993 recipient of the Ruth Lilly Prize for younger poets. 









Ê









facing kafka







you could fit three of him

into me

I've grown so fat

I pull some cheese

out of my bag

and he and I

we picnic in the Prague park

kids throwing stones around us

heavy horses hammering by

princes walking in a daze

their black-clothed servants

hurrying behind them

he takes out a long stick of bread

and I put knife to the butter

how lovely your hair is!

and he touches it

we eat like pigs

smothering butter on bread

the knife gleams in the Prague sun

and shadows of nannies walk over our own

pushing their young out onto the green square

he puts his head into my lap

and we sail

lying there all afternoon

our mouths smeared with jam



when the light goes down

I look at him

a dreaming ghost

his eyes black as burnt toast

the lake shivers its glass beyond us

and a huge forest grows in the few minutes

we each have left





- by Su Byron





Ê



Su Byron lives in Sarasota, Florida, where she is an editor of the Sarasota Arts Review.  Her poetry collections include Paris Poems, Lament of No One Special, The Jack Poems, Biography: 10 Prose Poems, Spilling Beer, and Flagging Down The Angels.

















Ê



  Best Friend







   --by Shelley Uva











 Ê         What can you say about a man who had enough best friends to fill a good-sized room at his memorial service?

            Once upon a time, Ellie would have said that such largesse

was indicative of superficiality beneath the surface, that no one could have that many best friends, that if you were everyone's best friend, you were, in reality, no one's best friend, at all.

	    But that was once upon a time.

	   	Now Ellie would have said that even the Heavens wept for Ted.

	   	Well, Ellie wouldn't have said it because no one in their right mind talked like that.  But she thought it.  Because it was a fact.  It began raining on November 1, the day Ted died, and it was still raining on November 21, three weeks later, when the Best Friends of Ted Johnson gathered to remember him and say goodbye.  

	   	Ellie had always liked November.  Now she would like it no longer.

	   	She had already given up liking July, because that was when Michael had died.  And she had given up December in memory of Fred.

	   	"I'm going to run out of months," she said suddenly.

	   	Vin glanced across the room at her.  He didn't ask her what she had just said.  He knew it wasn't really meant for him.  Ellie was in her mourning mode, and that's how she was.  She stared off into space a lot and forgot to do simple, everyday things, and now and then, she blurted out some meaningless phrase.  There was probably something he should do or say, but it seemed that things worked out all right if he just left Ellie alone.  Still, he felt badly for her.  He felt badly for all of them.

	





		   	   the theory of limited possibilities





	   	Ted was taking forever to arrange himself on his beach blanket.  Actually, it wasn't a blanket at all.  It was a sheet, a designer bedsheet, queen-sized, beige with subtle blue and brown stripes.  Ted and Danny always used this sheet at the beach.  They carried it, folded over and over again in increasingly small but perfectly creased squares, in one of their black nylon bags.  They both wore faded, straight-legged blue jeans.  Danny would wear a tee shirt, sometimes white, sometimes black.  Ted would wear one of his immense collection of tres scooped-neck, tres sleeveless undershirts.  His favorite was flaming orange.  

	   	They wore their bathing suits under their jeans.  Danny wore modestly-cut white trunks.  Ted also wore trunks.  But his were electric blue and not modestly cut.

	   	When they walked from the car to the beach, everybody noticed that Ted never seemed to carry anything, but nobody ever mentioned it.  When they got down to the sand and finally found a place that satisfied everyone in the group's need for privacy, quiet, plenty of room, no screaming kids, and either topless women or goodlooking hombres, everybody noticed, but nobody ever mentioned that Ted just stood there like one of those flags around Rockefeller Center, while everyone else spead out sheets and towels and blankets and arranged umbrellas and clothing and coolers.  

	   	When everything seemed to be done, Ted took off his shirt and jeans and his mocassins and socks and laid down on the sheet.  But then he needed some sunscreen and he had to arrange his little spray bottle of water and his cigarettes and lighter and then he had to light one and then he had to put his sunglasses on and then he asked Danny to get him a Coke and then he had to arrange that.  

	   	Well, Ted knew he was ridiculous, but he persisted in the face of annoyed looks and frayed tempers.  He had always been that way.  He had looked around the world from the backyard of the concrete house he had lived in as a child, a house his father had built, a house as near to the rippling mysteries of the Ohio River as to the shitcreek town with its failed stores and dark men's bars filled with the sounds of sports announcers and beer jingles, he had looked around the world from that backyard and he had seen its twin faces -- one all golden and shiny and perfect and one a vast eruption of warts and boils -- and he knew as surely as he knew anything ever that he had to control the one to get anywhere remotely close to the other.

	   	He was always a neat boy.

	   	He won ribbons in school for penmanship.  

	   	He kept the most perfect files anyone at Metropolitan University had ever seen.

	   	He maintained his take-out menus in alphabetical order in a special folder he kept in his home files.

	   	He took forever to arrange himself at the beach.

	   	But, at last, the final grain of sand had been flecked away, his body was positioned perfectly, his cigarette was lit, his Coke was at hand, he was lying on his stomach, propped up on his elbows, his head turned to face Ellie and also to catch some highlights from the sun on his light brown hair, and he was looking good and he knew it.  So, now, he was ready to talk.  

	   	"She's lucky it lasted as long as it did," he was saying.  "I mean, she is the only person I've ever met who may be a bigger slut than me."

	   	"Ted," Ellie said.  

	   	"She is!" he insisted.  "And she would be the first to admit it.  I mean, come on, he goes out to buy breakfast for her and when he comes back, she's shtupping another guy."

	   	He was a chameleon, our Teddy was.

	   	He came to New York from an Ohio-river town, and he sucked it all in, almost all at once, it seemed.  Cabaret and Broadway shows, Central Park and Soho galleries, art museums and Yiddish words.  They were all in there, part of him, just like the river and the ugly hometown, his raging father and his gentle mother, the Eastern Star and the first man he slept with, an older man, his English teacher, who was more surprised by the seduction than Ted.  

	   	But Ellie was from New York and Jewish and the sound of the word conjured up unpleasant memories of boring, old relatives trashing the family's few interesting members.

	   	"Don't use that expression," she said.  "It's so gross.  And anyway, you're exaggerating.  They were separated, and he came over without calling her."

	   	She could see Ted rolling his eyes even behind his dark glasses.

	   	"Well," Ellie said defiantly, "they were separated."

	   	"She said she only married him so they could get divorced," Ted replied triumphantly.

	   	"What's that supposed to mean?" Ellie asked.

	   	"She didn't know how to break up with him," Ted said.

	   	"So," Ellie said, "when you don't know what to do, you do the worst possible thing."

	   	Ted smiled broadly.

	   	"Don't you?" he asked.

	





	   	   the war against mediocrity







	   	On Memorial Day weekend, in the last year of Ted's life, Danny drove Ted to Ohio, to the river town where he had been born in a house his father had built; where he had grown up, a popular boy in spite of the odds against a boy like him; and which he had left some twenty-four years earlier.  He had never really lived at home again once he had gone off to college, and after a while, he thought of New York as home.  When he took a plane back to Ohio for some occasion or visit he felt he really had to make, he was always anxious and tense until he was on the plane back, and when it circled over the city and he looked down through the dark sky at the lights, he always thought, with no prodding or effort, "Home.  I'm home."

	   	But when he knew he was going to die and he knew the time he had left must now be measured in months and not years, he wanted to go to Ohio.  

	   	"I want to walk along the river," he told Ellie.  "And I have a few people I want to see.  My aunt and my cousin.  A teacher I had years ago.  She's dying, too."

	   	So, on Memorial Day weekend, Danny rented a long, black car with dark tinted windows and air conditioning and super-plush seats, and Ted lay across the back seat with pillows under his head and feet and a light blanket over him, and Danny filled the trunk with all of Ted's intravenous supplies and his cane and his pills and a supply of Coca-Cola in a cooler, and then he got in front, and they drove off to Ohio.

	   	Their visit was a triumph.

	   	Ted's father, a bantam-sized leathery old steelworker with a temper forged in the furnace, was kind and caring and almost a little overbearing in his new persona.  Ted's mother was gentle and sweet, and even funny from time to time.  The dying teacher was delighted to see Ted and full of fond memories of him.  The aunt and cousin were affectionate and loving.   And the Ohio River was blue and shiny and rippled with mystery.

	   	It was the ride back from Ohio that made it the weekend from Hell.

	   	"I don't know what happened," Ted told Ellie.  "I guess I was just really worn out from all of it and the emotion and everything.  But my legs were twitching like crazy the whole time, and one minute I was hot, and the next I was cold, and my hands were shaking, and poor Danny had to pull off the road like every hour so I could throw up.  It was just a nightmare.  And then we finally decided to stop someplace, you know one of those places along the highway, and I got into the place and sat down, and I passed out.  Danny was scared to death.  Then I woke up again and that was all right, but I just couldn't get up and walk.  I mean I thought I was going to have to stay there forever.  Actually, I thought I was going to die there."

	   	"In a Hot Shoppe," Ellie said.

	   	"I know!" Ted shook his head in horror.  "Don't think that wasn't on my mind.  I mean, if I wanted to do that, I would rather have died in the Tastee Freeze near my high school." 

	   	Ellie laughed and so did Ted.

	   	And each knew the other was thinking of Dark Victory.  

	   	"Best Die-er -- Bette Davis," Ted wrote to Ellie during one particularly boring staff meeting at Metropolitan University.

	   	"Best in the Gutter -- Susan Hayward," Ellie wrote back.

	   	"Best Sufferer -- Joan Crawford," Ted added.

	   	"Best Cryer -- Katharine Hepburn," Ellie wrote.

	   	"Judy Garland," Ted scribbled beneath.

	   	It was not to be.  

	   	In the end, Ted was not spared all that much, but he was spared that.  

	   	He did not amble upstairs like Bette Davis and lie down across the bedspread with the dying light bathing his face as violins swelled in the background.

	   	But he also did not die in a Hot Shoppe.  







	   	   "oh, hi" 





	   	Ted Johnson was sitting behind his desk in his corner office on the fifth floor of the combination student advisement and administrative office building when she walked in.  Ted was absolutely, totally, and completely bored.  

	   	OUT OF HIS MIND.

	   	He had three proposals sitting on his desk and one was suckier than the next.  "The University is eternally grateful for the generous support you have provided which will enable us to utilize our resources and enhance and enrich curricula blah blah blah bullshit." 

	   	He had the skeleton of a newsletter sitting on the desk next to the putrid proposals.  "Chairman of the Board Lawrence E.  Fatcat and his wife, Mrs.  Fatcat, served as co-chairmen of the gala dinner/dance.  A good time was had by all."

	   	And then there were the resumes.  He needed one fucking writer, but personnel, having not much else to do, seemed to have combed the globe for him.  There had to be at least sixty resumes lying there.  Earlier that day, he had shoved his hand in the pile and pulled out one.  

	   	"It this isn't written in crayon, this is it," he told himself.

	   	It was not written in crayon.

	   	He read the resume quickly and then dialed the telephone number listed on it and arranged an interview.  He took it as a good sign that the woman he called, someone named Eleanor Palermo, was able and willing to come over for an interview that day.  Ted wanted a writer desperately, but even more desperately, he wanted this hiring process to be finished.  

	   	"If she doesn't drool, she's the one," he told himself.

	   	And now, here she was.

	   	And she wasn't drooling.

	   	She was short with medium-length dark blonde hair.  It was early autumn, and she was wearing some kind of flowered shirtwaist dress with dark tights and flat ballet shoes.  She wore very dark sunglasses, and the first thing she did after she sat down in the chair Ted offered her was to break out into a two-minute coughing fit.

	   	I like her, Ted thought.  She smokes.

	   	"Shit," he heard the woman whisper under her breath.

	   	Ted smiled.  This was going to work out just fine.

	   	Ellie was thrilled when she entered the corner office and saw that the man she was to speak with, the man who might hire her, was not some old fart in a business suit, but a very young-looking, slender, almost elfin man with light brown hair and a moustache and an ashtray filled with butts in front of him.  

	   	Oh good, she thought, he smokes.  And then, she began to cough.

	   	It was a nerve thing.  Ellie frequently had coughing fits at the most inopportune times -- during interviews, when she first met her future mother-in-law, in the middle of her wedding ceremony.  

	   	Eventually, she stopped coughing.  Shaking her head a little to clear it of the last vestiges of nervousness, she took off her dark glasses and smiled at her potential employer.

	   	"Sorry about that," she said.  "Allergies."

	   	"I have that allergy myself," Ted said, and he lit a cigarette.  "Want one?"

	   	She did.

	   	"Tell me about yourself," Ted said.

	   	"Well, I ...  " she hesitated, unsure about where to begin.

	   	"Well, why do you want to be a development writer?" Ted asked.  That was good.  He remembered vaguely some fucking awful meeting he had once attended at personnel, not a meeting, but a seminar, of sorts, on management and being a manager.  Ask specific questions.  That's what they recommended.  Not "tell me about yourself," but "why do you want this particular job?"

	   	Eleanor Palermo was hesitating again.  She looked like she had something in mind to say, but wasn't quite sure how to put it.

	   	She was, in fact, wondering if she should lay on a line of horse manure or just tell the truth.  She looked at him a little more carefully, and decided to go for the truth.  

	   	"I don't know if I do want to be a development writer," she said.  "I don't know what development is.  But I do know what writing is, and I am a writer.  I've worked for weekly papers and trade journals." 

	   	She leaned over little and produced a book of clippings that she opened for him.  

	   	"You see," she continued, "the thing is, I live right over here on 9th Street and I just thought I'd come over and see if there were any jobs here since I need a job and I thought it might be real convenient to work right here and ...  " 

	   	She was hesitating again.

	   	"And ...  " Ted said helpfully.

	   	"I was kind of hoping I could spend the rest of my life without ever going above 14th Street," she said, "except to go to Bloomingdale's now and then."

	   	"Sounds reasonable," Ted smiled.  He was trying not to let his voice show how excited he was.  This was just too much.  Too perfect.  Well, he had always been lucky.

	   	"Have you always lived in New York?" he asked her then.  

	   	She had.  She was born in Brooklyn, raised on Long Island, and now lived in the Village with her husband.  She had been married for four years.  Had no kids.  

	   	And then, almost as if they were people poised on the verge of friendship and this was not a job interview at all, she began to ask him questions.

	   	He told her about Ohio and going to college at Northwestern (it turned out that she had almost gone there, too, and both of them had been acting majors during their freshman years, and both had later become English majors).  They had both worked as movie critics.  They both had one older brother.  They were almost the exact same age, born only a month apart.  

	   	Now, he was determined to land her.  Don't blow this, Ted told himself.  Don't tell her about the job.

	   	He didn't need to worry too much.  She didn't seem particularly interested in what the job entailed.  He told her the salary line.  That was good.  And about the four weeks vacation plus the week between Christmas and New Year's when the University was closed and everyone (except the poor Bursar drones) got the week off.  That registered well, too.  And then he threw in the piece de resistence -- free tuition -- and he knew he had her.  

	   	He knew because that was precisely how Metropolitan University had snagged him.  

	   	Not that he had yet taken advantage of the free tuition.  But he might.  And she looked to him like someone who definitely would.

	   	When Ellie walked back to her apartment after the interview, she felt a little strange.  She had really liked this guy, Ted, but she had never found out what exactly development meant.  How was she going to explain to Vin that she went on a job interview and felt, in her heart, that it had gone really well, but she had no idea what the job was.  It was just that kind of approach to life that sometimes seemed to drive a small wedge between Ellie and Vin.  Well, if she got the job, it wouldn't matter.  She'd find out what development was later on.  Maybe.

	   	The telephone was ringing when she opened the door to her apartment.  She dropped her shoulder bag and portfolio on the floor and ran across the room to answer it.

	   	"Oh, hi," a voice said.  "This is Ted Johnson, from Metropolitan University."

	   	She didn't know it then, of course, but that was always Ted's first words on the phone.  Whether you called him or he called you.  Good news.  Bad news.  And anything in between.  At home, in the office, even in the hospital when he could barely speak at all.  

	   	Oh (higher register, then a short pause) hi (lower register).

	   	Years later, when she thought about how they had met, and when he did, they were both astonished and, sometimes, a little alarmed by the chance of the whole thing.  He had just stuck his hand into a pile of papers and, somehow, it had landed on hers.

	   	"You see," she would say to him.  "There is such a thing as fate, as Kismet."

	   	"Yes," he would agree, "but there was also a control mechanism.  A human control mechanism.  Because your resume wasn't in crayon and you didn't drool."







	   	   in la-la land





	   	Danny brought Ted to the hospital in the early morning of the first Sunday in October.  Ted had been home for months, slowly and then not so slowly, getting worse and worse.  Now, he had not been out of the apartment for weeks, except to go to the doctor, and each one of those trips was an incredible ordeal.  Ted could not walk, so they had to take a wheelchair, and lots of cabdrivers in New York City were not especially fond of picking up wheelchair riders.  When they slowed down and saw that their potential fares were two young men and that the one in the wheelchair looked skeletal, they were even more reluctant to stop.  

	   	Still, they had managed.

	   	But no matter how they switched Ted's medications around, or what they started or what they stopped, he still grew weaker and thinner each week.  And lately he had had pain, real, sharp, terrifying pain.  His pancreas was falling apart.  He electrolytes were fucked.  His blood gasses were screwed up.

	   	"Honey," Ted would say, borrowing from Marlene Dietrich's greeting to Orson Welles in Touch of Evil, "I'm a mess."

	   	And Danny would give him the line right back.

	   	"You ought to lay off of those candy bars."

	   	At first, Danny hadn't realized during that Saturday night and early Sunday morning that Ted was moving to a new dimension of sickness.  But then, around 5 a.m., Ted tried to get up and go to the bathroom.  Danny told him to wait so he could help, but Ted didn't seem to hear him.  Before Danny could get out of the bed and come around to Ted's side, Ted had gone.  Then Danny heard the thud, and his heart stopped.

	   	Ted had fallen and was lying on the bathroom floor.  His head was bleeding where he had banged it on the sink.  His eyes were unfocused and his whole body was convulsing.

	   	They spent two days in the Emergency Room until the hospital found a free bed for him.  Danny kept thinking how ugly it all was, and how Ted would have hated it.  He was very particular about his surroundings.  Of course, he was in a coma, but still, it bothered Danny.  To think that somehow, even in a coma, Ted might know.

	   	"He probably won't come out of it until they put him in a room," Danny told Ellie.    

	   	"Only if it's a tastefully appointed room," Ellie agreed.

	   	It was not.

	   	It was a standard four-person hospital room with ugly curtains.  

	   	An old man was in the bed next to Ted.  He had some kind of brain thing and was pretty much out of his mind.  Most of the time the old guy just lay there quietly, but every now and then, he would start yelling, and he always yelled the same three things.

	   	First he would yell, 

	   	"Marie! Marie!"

	   	Then he would yell,

	   	"Putana! Putana!"

	   	And then he would yell,

	   	"I love you!"

	   	Danny, who was the son of Italian immigrants and spoke Italian pretty well, was quite offended by all of this, especially the "putana" part and he tried to talk to the old guy in Italian and get him to calm down.  That was probably a mistake.  The old guy, as far out in la-la land as he might have been, seemed to realize he had a paisan in the room now, so he yelled more frequently and reached out and tried to swat Danny's behind every time Danny stood in the space between his bed and Ted's bed.

	   	"Basta!" Danny would growl at the old guy.

	   	"Putana!" the old guy would screech out.

	   	And Ted just lay there, his breathing all scratchy and gasping, and Ellie sat on the other side with Merrill and Maggie and Carla and some of the others, and her head ached and her eyes burned and she looked at Ted and saw Michael, his breathing all scratchy and gasping, and she thought, He's going to die tonight.  I know it.  He's going to die and there's nothing anyone can do to stop it.

	   	That was how it had been with Michael.

	   	No matter how long she sat there and how much she stroked his hand and how hard she wished him back or how much she loved him, he still died.

	   	It was enough to make her believe in Ted's theory of limited possibilities.  

	   	But Ted didn't die.

	   	Not that night anyway.

	   	Danny called Ellie the next morning, early, all wild-voiced and out of breath.

	   	"He's sitting up," he said to her.  "He's talking."

	   	"It's ....  " Ellie paused, unsure of what to say.

	   	"It's a miracle," Danny said.

	   	"Yes.  A miracle."

	   	It was, of course, a miracle with strings attached.

	   	Yes, Ted was awake and sitting up and talking, but he was also deep in la-la land.

	   	Sometimes, he seemed to think he was back in Chicago, in college, or farther back, in Ohio, or somewhere else, just to the left of Jupiter.

	   	It was so sad.

	   	Ted was so much his mind, his intellect, his humor, his speech.  Now it was there and not there, here and gone, all jumbled up and sprayed around the universe.

	   	"I feel like he's trying to tell me something," Danny told Ellie a few days later, "but I'm not sure what it is.  I mean, he starts out perfectly rational and then, all of a sudden, I don't know what he's talking about anymore.  He makes all these references to things I don't know about and people I don't know."

	   	"It's like an electrical circuit," Ellie said.  "I mean his brain is.  Only when he had those seizures, something got short-circuited."

	   	"His brains are scrambled, honey," Danny said.

	   	"I know," Ellie said.

	   	They were both thinking:

	   	This is the one thing he was really afraid would happen.

	   	The old Italian guy in the bed next to Ted was also scrambled.  And the guy in the bed directly across from him.  

	    Mr.  Dubinsky.  He used to be a concert violinist.  He had had a severe stroke five months earlier.  He was paralyzed and unable to speak.  Even if he could speak, it wouldn't have mattered very much.  The doctors seemed pretty sure his brain waves were all scrunched up and zigged out.  Mr.  Dubinsky just lay in his bed all day with his eyes open and unfocused.  Mr.  Connors, in the fourth bed, was the only one of these roommates with his marbles still in one place.  He was the one who reported the conversation to Danny.

	   	It happened a few nights after Ted came out of the coma.  It was late and all the visitors were gone.  The lights were dim.  All was quiet.  And then, all of a sudden, the old Italian guy started carrying on about Marie.  She was an angel.  She was a slut.  She was the love of his life.  She was torture and death.  He loved her.  He hated her.  He wanted her.  He would kill her if he ever saw her again.

	   	And Ted answered him.  He was very understanding, Mr.  Connors said.  Ted said he had to try harder to understand Marie, to see things from her point of view.  Nothing was ever so simple as it seemed, Ted explained.  And anyway, women were different than men.  Fundamentally different.  And the old Italian guy, who had responded to no one for weeks, responded to Ted.  He wanted to know why it was all so hard.  Why Marie couldn't just be the Marie he wanted and needed and loved.  Why did she have to be some other Marie, too, that had nothing to do with him.  

	   	And then, a third voice broke in out of the dimness of the room.

	   	"I never understood my wife.  I was married to her for thirty-four years, and I'd still be married to her if she didn't die on me, but I never understood her.  I loved her, but I didn't understand her.  She was always a mystery to me.  Maybe that's why I loved her.  Her name was Geraldine, and she sang soprano and baked apple pies.  She was old when she died, but I never see her that way.  I see her in 1948, when I first met her, at an audition, in a white blouse and plaid skirt.  She was tall and had long, dark hair, and green eyes, and skin like a porcelain doll.  Well, maybe she didn't have all that.  But that's how I remember her." 

	   	"I thought I should call the nurse then," Mr.  Connors told Danny.  "I mean, I knew they thought Mr.  Dubinsky couldn't speak at all, but you know, I didn't want to interrupt them.  I mean, they were having a real conversation, and it seemed important to let them finish, so I did, and I guess I fell asleep.  I did tell the nurses about it in the morning, but they acted like I must have been asleep the whole time and dreamed it.  I didn't though.  I know I didn't.  I heard them." 

	   	So it was three strangers, and two of them playing with less than a full deck, who got the last of Ted.  The real Ted.  

	   	The next day, the old Italian guy was back to yelling incoherent curses at Marie and Mr.  Dubinsky returned to his world of silence.

	   	As for Ted, each day he slumped down a little more in the bed until he no longer sat up.  

	   	Each day, he spoke less and less, until he no longer spoke.

	   	The last time Ellie saw him, he was lying on his side, the rented hospital television pushed close to his face.  Ellie couldn't see the screen, but she could hear Roseanne Arnold cackling.  And she could see that Ted's eyes were glazed and there were tiny beads of sweat on his high forehead and he was smiling a deep and mysterious smile.







	   	    ...if the rabbit goes, I go.





	   	I guess it happened about halfway through the movie.  You know the movie.  You must know it.  Everyone saw it.  Everyone talked about it.  It even spawned a kind of newspeak phrase on news shows during sweeps month and on the talk show circuit.  

	   	"When Love Becomes an Obsession."

	   	Tomorrow on Oprah.  

	   	"Real Life Fatal Attractions."

	   	On Hard Copy.  Tomorrow at seven.

	   	So, that was the movie, the one with the nice guy lawyer whose wife and kid are away and he meets this snake-haired book editor and ends up having a one-night stand with her (sex in the kitchen sink - yow! I hope she didn't leave any knives in there), only it's not a one-night stand to her, and then she (who used to play "nice" women but obviously decided to change her image) starts haunting the lawyer and his family (lovely, big-eyed and full-lipped wife who looks fabulous in her creamy satin lingerie -- a cue to the audience that this guy does deserve a bit of a hard time for betraying this lovely, but not, of course, as bad as it's going to get -- and cute-as-a-button little girl, complete with a bunny for a pet -- cue to audience -- watch that bunny!) and she (the editor who can't have too demanding a job since she's never in the office and has all this time to go nuts and propel the plot of the film forward) sees Little Miss Muffet playing on the lawn with her bunny and the camera goes crazy --bunny hop hop hop -- snake-hair glare clench glare -- bunny hop hop hop -- snake-hair glare clench glare -- and the music swells, filling the theater, and the little girl and her mommy and daddy are so happy, so hip hop happy, that the snake-haired editor (I hope she didn't edit children's books) can't do anything except puke all over the screen and that was when it happened.  Ted slouched down in his seat and whispered, not too softly and to no one in particular, "If the rabbit goes, I go."  

	   	Ellie remembered that and thought of it often.  Not consciously, but often.  It was amazing how often.  She'd be in line at the bank or boiling some water for pasta or watching I Love Lucy with Nina and Joanna on a weekday when there was no school and they were lying around the house, playing Barbies, eating breakfast at ten, having pillow fights, and it was all completely predictable, and Ellie would suddenly think, "...  if the rabbit goes, I go." 





	

	   	   best friend





	   	When Joanna wanted something and she knew Ellie was likely to say no, she had this thing she always did.  She'd put on a big smile and hold one of Ellie's hands in either of hers and pull Ellie down toward her a little, and then she'd say, "please, please, please.  I'll be your best friend."

	   	"You know I'll always think of Ted as my best friend," Amy told Ellie, "although I don't think I was his best friend."

	   	"You know, after Danny, you were his nearest and dearest," someone else whispered to Ellie.

	   	"When Ted was your friend, he was your best friend," Maggie said.  She stood under the hot light above the lectern in the good-sized conference room that was serving as the site for the program portion of Ted's memorial service.  Outside, in the other room, a long lounge with smaller, square areas sectioned off, there were refreshments and couches and a photo album filled with pictures of Ted and his best friends.  They had mingled out there for an hour or so, drinking wine and eating canapes and telling each other Ted stories.  And then they had come into the conference room and seated themselves and now some of them were going up to the lectern and telling Ted stories.  Maggie seemed to lose her train of thought in the white light from the lectern.  She stood there for a moment or two, gazing across the room at all of the Best Friends, all of them listening to her and not listening at the same time.  They were thinking about their own Ted stories, remembering his smile and that way he had of leaning forward when he talked to you  and fastening on to you (shades of F.  Scott FitzGerald's fabulous Daisy) as if you were not just the most important person in the room, but the only one, and he couldn't wait one more second to hear what you had to say.  Yes, he had that gift, Ted did.  He had so many gifts.  But none was greater than that gift.  

	   	Outside it was dark and cold and raining.  In the conference room, it was very still and intense.  And all of them seemed to be staring off into space as if there was a small light at the end of a dock somewhere that they could barely make out, but couldn't deny, either.  

	   	And Ellie thought, 

	   	So, what do you say about a man who was everyone's best friend?

	   	You could say he disproved his own theory of limited possibilities.

	   	You could say he won the war against mediocrity.

	   	You could say that maybe, just maybe, in the end, he was reunited with the mysteries of the Ohio River.

	   	Or you could just say,

	   	"If the rabbit goes, I go."

	  



Ê



Shelley Uva's stories have been published in "Bellowing Ark" (where Best Friend was seen), "Parnassus," "River Oak Review," "Soundings East," and "The New Press." Her novel, "Still Life," will be serialized in "Bellowing Ark" in 1995.  She lives in New York City with her husband and two daughters.  











Ê









How To Cure A Broken Heart







   --by Robert Sward









Highway #17, The Santa Cruz Mountains



     What is the cure?  What is the cure for a broken heart?" he asks,

speaking into a voice-activated tape recorder.   "That's it!  How

about a feature?  A dozen interviews with photos.   Re-check the 

stats, write up the results.   The raw information's there on the computer.    

      "FACT: Four out of every five people who have been divorced want to re-marry.

    	"FACT: Three out of every ten marriages involve people for whom the first try did not work.

    	"QUESTION: Why  do people re-marry?   How , after a hellish, crazy-making divorce, do they manage to recover to the point that they can put themselves at risk--again?  

	"LEAD:  'Want to cure a broken heart?  Try re-marriage.   It's a fact: Three out of every ten marriages involve people for whom the first try did not work.  Why do they re-marry?  Is re-marriage, or 'more of the same,' ever a cure for anything?'"





    	He pitches the story, sounds it out, sells himself on the idea, driving all the while over mountainous Highway 17, bumper-to-bumper with 17,000 commuters, past the turnoff to Scott's Valley, past Borland's computer factory, defunct Santa's Village, past Summit Inn and Cloud 9 Trading Post.   Spicy smelling, drought-stricken eucalyptus trees.   Bare hillsides looking as if they'd been strip-mined.   A smoky haze over the charred mountains.   Redwoods.   Douglas fir.   Paramedics.   Ambulances.   The stench of burning rubber.  

    	Creeping along at twenty miles an hour, Santa removes his cap, unbuttons the red jacket and wipes sweat from his forehead.   Unable to get the air conditioner to work, he punches the dashboard.   Wheezing, he turns on the car radio and listens to his favorite  morning show, "Disaster Up-Date." 

    	"Five years of drought, a fire, and a massive earthquake.   This is God's country?  The only precedents for what we've faced are biblical.    As a spokesperson for the governor says, 'We're running three plagues behind Egypt.'  But be assured, the California dream is still alive--even if it means living elbow to elbow with one's neighbor on a brushy hillside."  

    	"Now, back to Johnny Gillespie at Sound Salad.   Remember to stay tuned for Dynaflow Diner at noon and Continental Drift at one o'clock." 

	Santa turns next to Dr.  Alarm Clock and his Techno-Muzak Wake-Up Hour.   Muzak for the 21st Century.   That's followed by "Talking Classifieds," New Age announcements read by Natalie Kravitz.   Dr.  Kravitz teaches in Santa Cruz and has a Ph.D.  in the Psychology of the Inner Child.   "We all have an inner child who is begging to be heard,"  she says.   "Won't you become one with me and embrace your inner child?   Become one with that inner child and let her out to play."

    	Noah presses a button to roll down the electric window.   He's fortunate.    Not having eaten breakfast, he has no breakfast to lose.   Natalie Kravitz invites one and all to attend her "Uncoupling Group, a weekly discussion session for people who have experienced the ending of an intimate relationship."

    	Noah considers attending one of Natalie's Uncoupling Groups as a discussion leader.    Ambling into a classroom at the Louden-Nelson Community Center and, dressed as Saint Nick, standing beside a rickety, old folding chair to tell all he knows about uncoupling.   "My name is Noah Newmark, and I've been married five times.   I am here to share what I know about divorce.   Of course the word divorce  is technically incorrect.   As you know, in California marriages are dissolved and one gets a dissolution, not a divorce.   Each year approximately 150,000 Petitions for Dissolution are filed in California.   

    	"Dissolution.   Think about it for a moment.   If something dissolves, it isn't there anymore.   Or, you might say, it turns to liquid and you just flush it away.   It's the California fresh start.   The new life.   Get a dissolution and re-invent yourself.





    	"So, welcome to you all.    Speaking as a veteran, as someone who has coupled and uncoupled five times, I believe we must begin by taking a closer look at that oddly charged word couple.   To couple means to join as man and wife.   It means to join as in sexual union.   To copulate.   To join chemically.   In physics, the word couple  refers to a "pair of forces of equal magnitude acting in parallel, but opposite directions." 

    	Noah thinks better of it.   "An Uncoupling Group.   Not likely," he growls.   "Dissolution may be my specialty, but I don't have to lecture on dissolution."  Besides, fantasies of becoming a crazed, flesh-eating terrier, biting and shaking Holly like a rat, alternate with dreams of how they might get back together.   Images of reconciliation alternate with images of lawyers and an old-fashioned divorce court.   Who was it who said, "You know nothing of a woman until you meet her in court."?   

    	"Vixen!  Gap-toothed siren!"  Noah prays her leaving is not the end.    "Dear God.   'The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want....  ' You're there, aren't you God?   Okay, then please tell me: Do you want me to follow after her, grovel before her, humiliate myself?  Well, I'll do it.    It's Holly or no one and you're against divorce and I know it's hypocritical of me to say this, but I'm against divorce too--as only someone who has been through it can be against it.   Therefore, one way or another, if it be your will, I would like very much to get her  back.   Amen."

    	Noah listens as Professor Kravitz recommends a "Recession Special.   Intuitive, deep tissue, Swedish massage and acupressure.   Two one-hour sessions for $75.   Call Bobbie Congress.   Ask about Bobbie's complete oil massage for your body in secure and comfortable surroundings.   Evenings and weekends."

    	Seventy-five dollars?  Noah would willingly spend twice that to be touched.   Hearing the word Congress, he pushes himself to see if he can feel some sexual stirring.   Wants to rub his face in it, wants to punish himself for all the times he used sex to blunt the pain.   "A man's wife leaves and 'normal,' he says, poking himself in the head, 'normal' would be to hide out, to have nothing to do with women for a while.

    	"But not you, Newmark.   What would it take for you to be done with this bullshit?  What would it be like to be alone for a while?"

    	Often, when he is under stress, Noah curses or swears.   Other times he focuses on some charged word, any word, and his mind fills with all the associations that word has for him.   He also spouts dictionary definitions, facts, end-of-column items and oddball statistics.   It occurs to him that if he were under enough stress, his mind might turn into something resembling Roget's Thesaurus.   

    	Noah reflects now on the word Congress.   Congress  means to come together.   Congress  means to meet and have a session.   Congress  means coitus.   Sexual union.   Social intercourse.   Intercommunication.   Collegiality.   Intercourse.   Intercourse.    His eyes fill.   His chest tightens.   A sob of release.

     Is this strange?  Is this unnatural?  The son of a former Hebrew teacher--and stand-up comedian--Noah came to believe that looking up words in the dictionary was a form of prayer.   He can remember how, as an eight-year-old, each time he looked up a word in the dictionary, his mother or father rewarded him with a teaspoon of honey or a bite of halvah.  

    	"Noah, darling, remember: Naming is the glue which holds the world together," said his father in that sing-song, Jackie Mason voice of his, the sorrowful voice of the Jewish liturgical tradition.   Like father, like son.   

    	Noah had just turned fifteen when his mother crashed the car, marking an end to the days of halvah and honey, an end to whatever glue it was that held the world together.   Before her death, at the Sabbath meal, his mother lit the candles and his father gave him his blessing.   Wearing his trademark red V-neck sweater, David Newmark would place his hands on Noah's head and recite the benediction, first in Hebrew, then in English, 



    	"...Ya'er Adonai panav elecha v'y'chunecha

    	Yisa Adonai panav elecha v'yashem

    	l'cha shalom"



     "May the Lord bless you and keep you.  May He send His light into your life and deal graciously with you.  May He look favorably upon you and grant you shalom, peace." 



    	Soon after she died, Noah's borscht belt father, back from a gig, the smell of whiskey on his breath, punched him in the head.   "Unfairness has to start early," he explained.   "And don't you make me feel guilty by crying.   I won't have that.   I won't have a son of mine blubbering away at the dinner table.   Here, here's a handkerchief.   Listen to me now:  The world is unfair.   Some good-byes are more terminal than others.   Our notion that we have control is meshugga, crazy.    We say, 'God wouldn't send anything I couldn't bear.'  That's meshugga.    

    	"God Himself is meshugga.    Take his love of Abraham in the Bible.   Why should He love Abraham more than someone else and then ask Abraham to slaughter his son?   

    	"And God's love of the Jews, what is that if not meshugga?" 





    	Meshugga.   Not having said good-bye to her, his Dead-On- Arrival mother, Noah grieved for years.   And his father, though he went on traveling and performing, went on telling jokes, never spoke of her again.  





    	After his mother's death, Noah, big for his age, would periodically charge, arms swinging, into a group of five or more of his toughest classmates.   "Alle yevonim hoben ayn ponim,  all brutes have the same face," he'd cry, pounding with his fists on the undifferentiated mass of bodies.

    	Sometimes he'd hallucinate.   He'd see his dead mother present, however briefly, in the bodies of 15- and 16-year-old boys.   Frightened, fearful of losing his mind, he'd go on punching.   What if he were pounding not only on their bodies, but on her body?  Well, fuck it, he thought.   She must have somehow chosen to die and she deserves what she gets.   Punching out his classmates seemed as good a way as any to break with her, to say good-bye to her.   "Terminal good-bye, huh, you listen to me, Mom, I'll give you terminal good-bye."  BAM!







    	In his blind flailing, he was as likely to strike a Jew as a goy.   He didn't discriminate.   He'd simply curse the others for being "other," curse his kicking and punching high school buddies for whatever membrane of difference he felt separated him from them.   

     	In Noah's kamikaze moments, the will to strike with his elbows and fists combined with the longing to merge his body with their bodies, his heart with their hearts.    At such times, whatever grief, whatever madness he felt erupted--or was transformed--into joyous rage.   Of course he knew he was not about to merge with anyone.   He just felt ready to pound on his classmates and, willing to pay the price, he let loose.   Thus, bloodied or not in these encounters, Noah found them, on the whole, warmly satisfying.   

	Bruised, cleansed, laughing, ecstatic, Noah knew joy, joy which, be it confessed, he never knew when his mother was alive.  









    	Officials at Von Steuben High school expressed concern.   

    	Mr.  Marsh, the principal, called Noah into his office and threatened him with expulsion.   "What are you telling me, you attack your schoolmates to test the rules?  Is that right, Noah?" asked Mr.  Marsh.

    	"Yes, sir.   I like it when they fight back." 

    	 At last, unable to believe the polite, bespectacled scholar-athlete would mount unprovoked attacks on known "terrorists," Mr.  Marsh simply shook his head and smiled.    Perhaps he believed Noah was deliberately taking the blame in order to protect the guilty troublemakers.   

     Did the principal fear an investigation?  Negative publicity?  Unwelcome attention on the issue of antisemitism?









    	Noah turns up the volume and listens as Professor Kravitz recommends a free support group "for people whose pets have died or have lost a pet in some other way.   Call this station for more about 'Pet Loss Grief Support.'  And remember, dear ones, don't let another day go by without tuning in to your inner child."

    	Enough.   Noah switches stations.

    	Citing Tom Parker's book, In One Day,  the news reader says, "each day 50,000 people buy new television sets, and 200 Americans have their breasts enlarged, 90 have their breasts reduced, and a total of 35 have their breasts lifted or aimed in some other direction.

    	"There are 10,000,000 more Americans now than there were five years ago and most of them own cars and spend their free time driving to San Jose and back on Highway 17."   

    	Noah takes off his sunglasses.   Turns the dial.   A husky-voiced psychic, aura reader and healer from Los Angeles is drumming up interest in her $800 seminar, "How To Cure A Broken Heart."   

    	"My name is Dr.  Feingold," says the woman.  "Dr.  Felicia K.  Feingold from Love Connection Clinic.   Yes, that's right, the Doctor of Love herself.    Also known as 'Dr.  Permission.'  Friends, I give you permission, I give you permission ONE AND ALL--RIGHT NOW--to make your connection to the Love Connection.   Call now to attend 'How To Cure A Broken Heart.'   Our emergency hotline number is: 1-800-LUV CONN.   

    	"You've heard of me, haven't you?  Of course you have.   I'm up here today in the San Francisco Bay Area from El Lay, ha ha, what you folks in Northern California call Lala Land.   I have a question about the human heart.   Listeners, honestly, did you know women have two hearts?  Yes, you heard me right.   Women have two hearts.   Women are double hearted.   That's the honest to God truth.   Tell me, sisters and brothers, how can that be?"

    	Noah doesn't know the answer.   Two hearts?  He knows he has one heart in his chest beating 120 times a minute.   He knows that most men's testicles churn out sperm at the prodigious rate of 1,000 per second--30 billion sperm a year.    Might he, a 6'2", one-hearted man--thoughts of gamic games get his mind off pain--some day enjoy intercourse with the big, two-hearted Doctor of Love?  Might they become a fabulous beast with two backs, two backs and three hearts?  Might Dr.  Felicia K.  Feingold become pregnant with his child?  Might she give birth to a healthy, one-hearted son?

    	A son, a son.   Another Jim or Joey.   Another Noah perhaps.   What was it Aldous Huxley said?



        		A million million spermatozoa,

         			   All of them alive:

        		Out of their cataclysm but one poor Noah

         		   	Dare hope to survive.   







     	Inhaling diesel exhaust, creeping along at 15 miles an hour behind a cement truck with a bumper sticker declaring ESCHEW OBFUSCATION,  Noah is startled to hear Dr.  Feingold remark, "Women are superior to men.   Women outlive men.   Women have more gusto, more of an appetite for sex than men.   Women are more intuitive, more compassionate.   Women are the birth givers.   Women are the nurturers.    Women are pythons.   Women are the creators.   Women are the destroyers."

    	"Oh, come on, lady."  Noah shifts down into first.   Seeing an opening, he steps on the accelerator.   Shifts back into second, hits the horn, passes the cement truck.   Traffic comes to a stop.   Noah's stuck behind a garbage truck driven by a tall, bare-to-the-waist tattooed male with a Mohawk haircut.   Ecologically sound, politically correct, the vehicle sports a bumper sticker: SAVE A TREE--VOICE MAIL IS REAL.  

    	The Volvo overheats.   He pulls out his spiral notebook.   An aficionado of bumper stickers, he puts it down in writing, "Save a tree..."   The engine dies.   Helicopters hover overhead.   In the opposite lane Santa sees a small white van filled with a dozen or so dogs--recruits, no doubt, for a S.P.C.A.  Christmas giveaway.   Like his Volvo, the van of dogs is stopped in traffic.   Santa rolls down his window and, looking into the eyes of the terror-stricken canines, he throws back his head, howls in sympathy.   "Woooowwwwwll."  

    	"Hey, you, re-taRRd," he hears someone laugh.

    	Catching Noah's eye, the S.P.C.A.  driver grins before displaying a drooly, open mouth.   The man has no neck and his linebacker shoulders appear to be a direct extension of the lower part of his face.   "Duhhhh," he says, pointing at his left ear.   Then, with his forefinger, he makes a series of four concentric circles around that ear.

    	"Hey, jerko Santa Claus!  Go back to Santa Cruz where you belong," he sneers.

    	Responding in kind, Noah displays his left middle finger in the vertical position.  

    	The S.P.C.A.  driver changes color and begins pounding on his horn.   He swivels as if ready to get out of his vehicle and charge.   

    	Luckily for Noah, the traffic starts moving.

    	"I'm 47-years-old," Noah reminds himself.   "Gainfully employed.   A mature individual in control of his feelings."

    	Catching the driver's eye, Noah shouts, "And a merry Christmas to you, you ape-neck dork."

    	Braking, jumping out of his vehicle with a dog net, the driver heads for Noah's Volvo.   

    	One of the van's occupants, a German shepherd, glances at Noah with concern.

    	Blinking his lights, waving at the dog, Noah hits the accelerator and makes good his escape.

    	He drives twenty feet.  Stops.  Starts.  Stops.  Starts and sees a flashing red light in his rear view mirror.

    	"Whew! Well, it ain't me, babe," he sings, turning up the volume.

    	"Sisters, what is it that makes men suppress women?" says Felicia Feingold.   "It is men's fear of women and men's self-loathing at what horrors, over the years, they have visited upon us.   Why should it be a surprise if it turns out that women have two hearts?"    

    	The Doctor of Love continues.   "The heart is the only organ in a man's body with smooth muscle tissue.   A woman's heart is made with smooth muscle tissue, but so also is her womb.   A woman's womb, therefore, is like a second heart.   So there you are.   Women have two hearts.   Men have only one.   And given the heartless things men do, is it any wonder so many die before their time?"

    	It's then he hears the siren, Awwr,  and sees cars scattering left and right.

    	Pulling alongside the Volvo, the cop signals Noah to turn onto the emergency lane.

    	In no hurry to approach, the highway patrolman sits in his car speaking into a police microphone.

    	Noah stays tuned to Felicia Feingold, but turns off the ignition.

    	"Now, the good news is that marriages are temporary.   The bad news is that ex-husbands are forever.   The good news is that you don't have to take it anymore.   The bad news is you need money to be free."

    	Noah recalls Dr.  Rama P.  Rama's teachings: "Marriage is eternal.   Divorce or no divorce, you are bound to your spouses, all your spouses and all your children, for all time.    The connection continues into the next life."

    	A male announcer cuts in.   "Dr.  Feingold," he says, "we have a caller.   Theresa, from Monterey.   What is your question, Terri?  Yes, you're on the air."

    	"Dr.  Feingold, if I have two hearts, and I believe I do, why can't I be in love with two men at the same time?  That's right, two one-hearted men.   Yes, there are two men in my life."  

    	The healer of broken hearts says she sees nothing wrong with having two male lovers at the same time.  

    	Sporting wrap-around sunglasses and a tiny mustache, the cop steps out of his car.  Hand on his holster, he motions for Noah to roll down the window.

    	"What the matter, Santa Claus, you drunk or something? I gotta call about you.  Did you know you were driving erratically?"

    	"No, sir, I didn't."

     	"Lemme see your driver's license and registration."

    	Grinding his teeth, fumbling for his wallet, Noah produces the documents.

    	"Wait here," says the cop, walking off, "I'll be right back."

     Noah hates call-in radio shows, but this morning he listens.   If Dr.  Feingold's a psychic, as she says she is, what's to prevent Noah from sending her messages from Highway 17?  What better way to test her claims?  And what better way to tune out the loony scripts playing and replaying in his head?

    	"Okay," says the cop, re-appearing, "step out of the car.  And take off that cap! That's it.  Now, fingers on top of your head, I want you to walk that white line until I say stop."

    	Maintaining his balance, Noah does as he is told.

    	"Do you live around here?"

    	"Santa Cruz Mountains," he answers, "Mt.  Chakra."

    	"Ah, that explains it," says the cop, glancing at Noah's beard.   

    	"Where you headed?"

    	"San Jose.  I'm scheduled to do a gig.  I'm a Rent-A-Santa."

    	"A Rent-A-what?"

    	"I'm a Rent-A-Santa.  I work a job or two in one place, and then go on to another," says Noah, listening with half an ear to Felicia Feingold.

    	"You can love someone, you can treasure him, but men are no bargain..." says the radio.

    	"Driving too slowly and erratically," says the cop, writing up the ticket.  

    	"Slowly? Of course I'm going slowly.  What do you do in bumper to bumper traffic?"

    	"I don't know what you're listening to, Smartass, but turn down that damn radio.   Do you hear me?  Next time just forget the car.  Use your reindeer."   

   	 Noah glances at the sky at what appears to be a belated sunrise, a sunrise he can smell, that burns his throat, an itchy, sweet-tasting, eye-stinging, pinkish-white blanket of smog.  

    	He drives another fifty feet and again the traffic stops.   He opens his notebook.

    	"Rise and shine, semiconducting devices.   Good morning, hard drives.   Ah, sweet-smelling, Silicon Valley atomic-power equipment plants,"  he scribbles on the narrow ruled sheets.

    	Then he listens and talks back to the guest, the double-hearted psychic, aura reader and El Lay healer.   

    	"Dr.  Feingold, there's no more oxygen on Highway 17.   How am I going to get through the holidays?  All I can think about is Holly.   My God, I only have one heart and at this moment it's palpitating."   

    	As if in answer to the writer's question, the throaty psychic replies, "I know you're out there and I know you're grieving for someone dear to you.   You're angry, you hurt and you're doing things to hurt yourself.    'No one cares,' you say.   But--pause--I care."

    "What?  Who said that?  O God, she's just fishing.   It's a gimmick."

    	"Have faith.   You know who I'm talking to.   I know  you're there.   It's true you cannot mend a broken heart, but you can grow a new one.   Take some time off.   What do you need most at this time in your life?"

    	"What do I need?  I need to really look at what's going on in my life.   I need Holly to come home.   I need to be okay if Holly doesn't come home.   I need to find out what I'm doing with my life,  and not masquerade as a devotee of marriage when I'm a devotee of separation.   I've got a son and daughter I don't know.   Jim and Carol both have jobsÐCarol the actress at $5.00 an hourÐand are getting ready to marry and have children.    How can I know them?  The only time I see them is when I'm passing through on assignment for some magazine.   I phone ahead ('Hello, Jim?  Carol?  I'll be at the airport--between flights--for a couple hours.   Can we meet for dinner?')." 

    	Fucking sterile airports.   Meeting kids on neutral ground has its uses.   He loves his children, but Holly calls him a marriage glutton, a hit-and-run father.   She's right.   How close can a five-times married man be to five families?   Here today.   Gone tomorrow.   The journalist, assignment- obsessed father pounding out stories at 30,000 feet.   Taking off and landing.   Taking off and landing.   

	    Excuses, excuses.   He's good at excuses.

    	The truth is it's easier to keep a distance.   Easier to be met as the plane lands.   Never see them in their homes.   Merely heading for the phone.   Anonymous voices repeating the message, 'Jim and Carol Newmark, come to the White Courtesy desk to see your dad.'  Yeah, Noah Newmark, the White Courtesy father.

    	"Tell me, Dr.  Feingold, what's life about?  It's about work, right?   One's work and one's life are interchangeable.   That's not healthy, you say?  Well, who really cares?"

    	His reply catches him by surprise.   He glances down at his uniform and blinks as he reviews his options.   He'll have to find a phone booth and call Terry the Trickster.    Breath-mint Terry T.  and the camera-ready helper girls are waiting for him at a Styrofoam-covered drawbridge in the Hilltop Mall.    "You know, Holly, malls make me feel claus-trophobic," he had joked.   

    	Noah hates malls.   In particular, he hates the Hilltop Mall with its annotated, life-sized statues of his cohorts: St.  Nicholas of Turkey, Kris Kringle of Germany, St.  Nick of Russia, and St.  Silicon, the post-modern Santa from San Jose.

    	What can he say?  "Hello, hello?  Terry the Trickster?   Mr.  Breath Mint?  I need to heal a broken heart.   Go find yourself another bag man."   









	

    	Eyes twinkling, droll little mouth drawn up like a bow, he turns off at the approach to West Valley College and Monte Sereno.   He heads south for Highway #1 and Monterey.    An hour and forty-five minutes later, he enters Santa Cruz, fabled city of the California dream, vacation spot for migrating monarch butterflies, movie actor Rory (How To Marry A Millionaire) Calhoun's native town and the place where, in 1885, Cupid Kawananakoa, an Hawaiian prince walked out to sea with a board--thus introducing the sport of surfing to North America.

    	At last Noah pulls up at an aluminum and glass phone booth on Ocean Street near Denny's and, wiping a mixture of ash and sweat from his face, calls Terry the Trickster.   

    	"I can't make it today," he says to Terry.   "I'm sorry.   My wife left me, and I don't have good will toward anyone."    

    	"Santa Claus doesn't need a wife," says Terry.   "My advice to you is forget the bitch.   Get your big red ass over here in one hour, or find work at another mall."

    	"You don't understand.   I don't even need the job," says Noah.   

    	"What?  What's that again?" yells the toy merchant.

    	Noah listens for a moment as Terry the Trickster sputters.  

    	"Shalom  aleichem,"  Noah says at last, hanging up.  

    	However, before he can leave, the pay phone rings.   Automatically, Noah picks it up.	

    	"Deposit another thirty-five cents," says the Pacific Bell robot voice.   Fiddling for coins, Noah catches the graffiti.   "DOWN WITH GOOD GROOMING."  "SUBVERT THE DOMINANT PARADIGM."   And, one of Noah's favorites, "EAT VEGETARIANS."  

     Next he calls the Doctor of Love in Monterey.   "Long distance.   It's an emergency, it's a damn emergency!" he hollers into the phone.   "I'm calling from Los Angeles," he lies.   "I'm Dr.  Feingold's agent."

    	"Dr.  Feingold's just leaving now," says the station manager.   "She's heading back to her workshop."

    	"Good.   Stop her before she goes out the door.    Tell her to pick up the phone.   I want to talk to her personally."

    	"For Godsake, what's happening?  Who the hell is this?" says Dr.  Feingold.

    	"Long distance, Dr.  Feingold.   My name is Noah Newmark, and I'm a Rent-A-Santa."

    	"Rent-A-Santa?  Is this some kind of joke?   Hmm.   Noah Newmark.   You're a journalist, aren't you?  What's this all about?" 

    	"Listen, you're a psychic.   Don't you know every word I'm saying is true?"

    	"All right then, Newmark.   What can I do for you?"

    	"My life has come unglued.   My wife Holly--she's Penelope on My Many Children, you know, the TV daytime soap opera?  Penelope, no, no, I mean Holly  has left me.   And she's taken our six-year son, Joey.   I've been listening to your radio show.   I need to talk to you in person.   I need to see you this afternoon."

    	"It'll cost you something, Mr.  Newmark.   I'll be at the Mission Tile Motel in Monterey.   Terra Cotta Seminar Room One.   But remember, there are going to be other people there.   Mainly women.   I'm finishing up one workshop and starting another.   I'll try to fit you in."

    	"Bless you, honey."  Shocked at his use of the word 'honey,' Noah reddens.    "Where did that come from?" he mutters .

    	"'Bless you, honey?'  Mr.  Newmark, you sound like someone's grandpa.   How old are you anyway?"

    	"Forty-seven."   

    	"Forty-seven.   A youngster.   You sound like you've been through hell.   Anyway, I know I can help.   Will you be in costume?"

    	"Yes, I'll be in uniform.   I'm coming as I am, white beard and all."







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Robert Sward's story, My Dancing Girl Father, appeared in BPQ #2.  Winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship, he teaches for the University of California Extension in Santa Cruz.  How To Cure A Broken Heart is excerpted from Sward's newly completed manuscript, A Much Married Man.  His book of poems, Four Incantations, New & Selected, is available from Coffee House Press in Minneapolis. 

























Reviews



The Palace Thief ,  Ethan Canin 

Mr. Vertigo , Paul Auster  

Nop's Hope , Donald McCaig













The Palace Thief

by Ethan Canin.   

1994, Random House, $21.00 







Review by Colleen White







     People who admire the short story genre often wonder why more

collections of short stories don't sell.   You'd think in a society as

fast-paced as ours, consumers would be lining up to purchase what

appears, at least superficially, to be fast-fiction.   So I asked some of

my friends who read a lot (the "Spend Your Last Dime On a Good One"

book group) what they perceive to be the reasons for this mysterious

inconsistency.   They had two reactions:  "I get tired of reading the

same style and the same themes for 200 pages," and "I just start to

become emotionally attached when the story is over."  

     It's true - that can happen.   Yet when I read a really good short story, I never forget it.   And we could talk about what makes a "good" short story, but I've been delegated this space to tell you about Ethan Canin's latest collection.   

     Each of the 4 stories included in this book are 50 pages long.   This allows plenty of time for you to settle in with the characters and ploys.   

Canin writes mostly in the first person point of view, a narrative style American authors are especially famous for employing well.   It proffers a direct view of the action from which we readers gain a sense of immediacy and a strong focus.   The flip-side of this is that we only have one character's version of the story.   We have to trust this fictional truth even when we come to understand that "I" may be a totally unreliable narrator.    The unreliable narrator in skillful hands can, in fact, be a vehicle for remarkable dramatic irony.     Canin's hands are, indeed, skillful.

     Canin's first story is titled "Accountant" and begins, "I am an

accountant, that calling of exactitude and scruple, and my crime was

small."  A very neat opening line which provides a great deal of

information about the kind of person we are dealing with--formal,

Latinate language, concise and to the point--as well as what the

story is about--a "small" crime.   Abba Roth, the narrator, is a

middle-aged family man who feels he deserves a job promotion.   His

meticulous retelling of the crime he commits is fascinating and fun,

mostly because he repeatedly reveals himself to be full of prejudices

and misperceptions.   When his wife warns him of an earlier betrayal by

his supervisor, we know she is right.   Abba, however, can only see her

as a brainless spendthrift and discounts her opinion.   He's a

self-involved nincompoop locked in his small-minded world.   Canin has

carefully drawn this character and deftly holds our attention until we

finally learn the nature of the "crime." 

     "Batorsag and Szerelem" is a coming of age story as told by a young

teenage boy searching for his place in a family and community where his

older, emotionally disturbed brother is considered to be brilliant.

     "City of Broken Hearts" switches gear into third person limited

narrative in which the protagonist, a divorced middle-aged man tries to

come to terms with his adult son.   These two stories, although engaging,

are not a powerful as the last piece.

     The title story, "The Palace Thief," is again told in first person:

"I tell this story not for my own honor, for there is little of that

here, and not as a warning, for a man of my calling learns quickly that

all warnings are in vain."  Mr. Hundert is a retired boys' school

classic history teacher.   He explains with a touch too much

self-effacement that he has been invited to a class reunion sponsored by

a former student he had despised and humiliated.   In a long, engaging

flashback, Hundert tells us of his attempts to tame the spirit of young

Sedgewick Bell and in so doing, manages to expose his own inept teaching

skills.   For years it would seem, Hundert has tried to justify to

himself the action he took against Sedgewick.   This justification is

always pushing against Hundert's continuous discourse on the importance

of classic history studies.   The reunion offers Hundert a view of the

truth.

     Canin is a skillful story maker:  he creates brilliant comic characters who deceive themselves, but never the reader.   His plots are carefully drawn and, like any great comic writer, his timing is everything.   The Palace Thief is a page-turner that warns us of the fools we become when, like the Emperor and his New Clothes, we believe only what we want to believe.                           







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Mr. Vertigo

by Paul Auster.

Viking, 1994



Review by D.  Navarro



                               

     My Paul Auster phase is over.  By "phase" I mean: that fascination with a particular author which requires not only that one buys and reads each new novel regardless of the "buzz," but also that each trip to the bookstore include one token pass by his place in the fiction stacks (in Auster's case, that meant scanning the A's until Jane Auel became Richard Bach -- Jane Austen was usually in the Literature section) in the hopes that a new book has unexpectedly appeared despite only four months since the last one, or something old and obscure has been reissued, or some wonderful work of his, available all along, has managed to escape the fan's enthusiastic eye.

     It's good to have these fascinations.  When some artist really takes us by surprise, like Auster did for me seven years ago, knocks us so far for a loop with what he proves words capable of, shows us perceptions of the world we had no reason to suspect existed, he deserves a certain loyalty: one which will drag us back to that narrow space -- usually empty, it turns out -- between the Cave Bears and the talking seagulls, as often as twice a month.  True surprise is that precious.  And we grow to overlook things, to tolerate excesses, to excuse flaws.   

     But it is exactly those flaws which can eventually undermine the fascination and, as Auster's latest one, Mr. Vertigo, has done for me, force us to call off the phase.  I will continue to read his stuff, but not quite so unquestioningly.  From here on out, I read other people's reviews of Paul Auster's books first.

      I think a defining moment in my Austermania came early on, when, in an effort to, I don't know, impress one another or delight in repulsing one another, I can't remember which, a woman and I traded our reading materials of the moment.  I gave her Auster's "Ghosts" (the second part of his New York Trilogy) and she gave me D.V., the autobiography of Diana Vreeland, a former editor of Vogue magazine.  I suffered through a chapter of the old bat's self-impressed, gossipy blather and returned the book.  My friend, in turn, was more than ready to hand back the Auster book, having not gotten any further than the first page.  On the first page of

"Ghosts," Auster introduces seven or eight of his characters, each of whom has a color for a name: Blue, Brown, White, and so on.  "I hate pretentious crap like this," she told me.

       Of course, I knew on a certain level, she was right.  Most of Auster's stories have always felt more designed than told.  They are products of a mind eager to configure the world into shapes, symbols, and an odd linguistic symmetry, rather than the outpourings of a heart eager to scream its joys and its despairs.  But for me, there was something fabulous and addicting in the pseudo-noir of The New York Trilogy, each part starting out almost as a routine detective mystery, but ending up with its sleuth chasing the tail of his own psyche.  It didn't bother me that Auster would name two characters in "City of Glass" (NYT, Part I) Paul Auster, with neither one even clearly an autobiographical figure, or that every proper name in "Ghosts," it seemed, was lifted from a small box of Crayolas.  Gimmicky as these traits sometimes felt -- and were, ultimately -- I accepted them as part of his construction: a unique perception of the world existing entirely within the heads of his main characters.

      It was a sometimes frustrating tendency of his, though: this insistence on building the world from such contrived objects.  It was refreshing, then, when I picked up one of his earliest books, one which predated all of his novels.  The Invention of Solitude is a book of family memoirs, in which Paul Auster is Paul Auster, the real guy, not another turn of eponymous trickery.  In it, he tells honest stories revealing the pain of long-held family secrets, of burying his own father, who he had long since lost respect for, and how that internal turmoil caused him to question his love for his own children.  As bleak as some of his revelations were, it was a new image of Auster for me: he was flesh and blood, not a linguistic coincidence; not, as each of his characters in "The Music of Chance" had been, a counterpart to some figurine in some eccentric's toybox.

       He flirted occasionally with this more human side as his fiction work continued.  "Moon Palace" contains some wonderful characterization amid the inorganic devices more typical of him.  And, in Leviathan, the work just previous to this last, it seemed that Auster had written a novel where matters of the heart outweighed his fascinations with chance and identity.  Although it involves, to a small degree, a coincidence of birthdays and historic events, these ideas are significant mainly to a character who, it is established, is going a bit loony -- he single-mindedly tours small-town America, blowing up miniature replicas of the Statue of Liberty.  The narrator, though, is this man's best friend, and the story draws its strength from the increasing strain this insanity puts on their friendship, and on their respective relationships with the same woman.

      With Leviathan, Auster wrote the closest he may ever come to a book you could curl up with.  Not long after, unfortunately, Auster stated it was his least favorite of his novels.

      Mr. Vertigo, while unlike any of his other novels in terms of its time period, its setting, and the kinds of people who inhabit it, does mark a retreat from the more natural, emotional material he had begun to work with in Leviathan.  It is, briefly, the life story of an urchin from the mean streets of 1920's St. Louis, who, through some of the most horrible processes imaginable, is taught to levitate by an eccentric Hungarian Jew, the Master Yehudi.  The two work out a routine, take the show on the road, and the kid becomes something of a national treasure, as well as a source of barber shop-style public debate.  But he loses the skill at puberty and spends the rest of his life in a metaphorical downward spiral.

       It's an odd premise, even on the face of it, but it might have been workable.  Auster though, undermines himself throughout: his continued insistence on discoursing the coincidence of names suggests he finds real relevance in them; the story is almost uniformly unpleasant: extreme torture, endless exchanges of verbal abuse, and every bodily excretion imaginable is called into service of this story, but none of them ever prove relevant to Auster's apparent overall theme: the loss of innocence in America since, as he dates it, the Depression, and to a degree, our inability to believe in magic anymore.

      A reader is left wondering: just why does it matter that this kid who can fly is named Walt Rawley, a variation on the legendary explorer Sir Walter Raleigh? Or that he happens to be from St. Louis, where the Cardinals are from -- Cardinals can fly, get it? Or that Charles Lindbergh flew a plane called the Spirit of St. Louis? Or that the Cards most infamous player was Dizzy Dean -- this is so that, later in life, when the kid is no longer known as Walt the Wonder Boy, but Mr. Vertigo (remember his life's downward spiral?), he not only identifies with the later, embarrassing chapters of Dean's career, but they have similar nicknames.

      Leave alone the fact that the story is, in addition, sloppily structured. Two marvelous characters, other disciples of the Master, are introduced, developed, then brutally removed from the story.  And their loss, for all the lip service given it at the time, ceases to inform the rest of the book within a chapter or two.  Then, in trying to establish the parallel between his own life and Dizzy Dean's baseball career, Walt recounts the latter -- and his own long-term fandom -- in detail for nearly ten pages, much of it reading like a press bio, just in time to prepare us for when the two finally meet.  I found myself asking: if Dean has really meant so much to Walt all these years, why are we only reading about it now, within 50 pages of the story's end?

      The real problem is, Auster plays his hand all wrong.  In chapter after chapter, we are subjected to apparently pointless references to Walt's burgeoning sexuality.  A woman friend of the Master's admires and compliments the boy's prepubescent genitalia while on a Sunday drive; after puberty hits, the Master and Walt discuss various euphemisms for semen, a substance with which, through his discovery of masturbation, Walt is beginning to grow more familiar.  But the scenes and references are detached, bearing no clear relevance to the progress of the story at those moments. Only much later, in a device seemingly contrived to assist Auster's loss-of-innocence theme, do we learn that some levitators lose their abilities at this stage of their lives.  Having now made this clear, one supposes all of the baffling and somewhat repugnant kiddie porn stuff which came before should carry some retroactive emotional weight.  But of course it doesn't.

     The one truly satisfying aspect of Auster's work here is the unadulterated enthusiasm of Walt, his hero.  He tells the story in a first-person narrative that hurls along like a runaway freight train of street-smart cliches and boyish gee whiz-isms, like one of the Dead End kids on a double-dose of adrenalin.  "I was an unstoppable force back then," he writes in one of the later chapters, but in a way which could apply to his entire journey, "a comer to beat all comers, and I was riding the express train with a one-way ticket to Fat City." It's a style entirely unlike Auster's previous modes, and it takes a while to muster confidence in a serious novel that intends to come at us this way for 300 pages.  But given the general mess Auster makes of his half-realized larger ideas, it's heartening to know that Walt, in whichever corner of Auster's mind he resides, thrilled at his journey as much he apparently did.  We can at least take him at his word for it.







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 Nop's Hope

 by Donald McCaig

 Crown Publishers, New York. $20.00 

                                    

 

Review by Norman Maynard

 

 



      In the world of Donald McCaig, animals and humans are different interpretations of the same idea, nature finding expression in two legs, or four.   This is not a simple case of "animal rights" or the New Ageist tendency to deify lower life forms.   Nor is it an exercise in the appalling practice of personification, raised to an insipid and arguably damaging level by the folks at Disney; rather, McCaig possesses the demeanor and talent to convincingly convey the worldview of animals (mainly dogs, and specifically, border collies) and their symbiotic relationship with the people who keep them.

      Nop's Hope is a sequel to the 1984 novel, Nop's Trials.   Mr. McCaig's earlier book made evident the author's talent: we do not so much "hear" animals speak as much as listen to what they have to say through a series of  insightful translations by the author.   Dogs are shown to possess as wide a range of values, work ethics and loyalties as their various human counterparts, and Mr. McCaig leaves delightfully ambiguous which set of mores we should see as more highly evolved.

      Nop's Trials is the story of Lewis Burkeholder, and his prize border collie Nop, who is stolen on Christmas Day.   The book takes us through the ensuing trials of both man and dog, following their paths through junkyard vales, circus sideshows, homeless shelters, sleazy bars and volunteer fire departments.   On the way, Nop becomes as real and alive as any character in fiction.   (Mention Nop's name at a sheepdog trial - you can find them from Scotland to Virginia to Utah to Australia - chances are, you'll get a knowing response.)  Lewis' struggle to find Nop brings him closer to his wife, daughter, and a son-in-law he can't quite accept, while the parallel journey of Nop leads him to re-examine his own instincts, and to question the deal his species struck with humanity a thousand generations ago.   Taken in its entirety, the book is a positive, insightful description of the understanding, respect and devotion which can occur between human and animal.

      In his latest book, McCaig follows Lewis' daughter Penny, and Nop's offspring Hope, as they make their way around the country on the sheep dog trial circuit.   A car accident has taken the lives of her husband and daughter, and Penny struggles for financial and emotional independence in the best way she knows - running Hope after sheep.   Her journey, as in the first novel, is a symbol for a deeper search, only in this case Penny's sojourn has little to do with the animal, and that is where the novel suffers.   Whereas the dog represents her "hope" for a new and better life, it never progresses beyond the limited sense of  meal ticket.   We are never shown Penny's love for her dog, never get a sense of the trust and blind faith which McCaig implies - throughout both books - is a master's duty to return to his dog.

      Indeed, as a character Penny is somewhat less than endearing.   No one can blame the woman for being bitter (she also survives an attempted rape early in the book), but whereas  her father's tight-lipped determination was endearing, his quest, after all, was to save his dog from being exploited.   Now, Penny is the exploiter, and she comes across as boorish and self- pitying.   Consider this conversation, a long one by her standards.

 

      "Penny, you dance?"

      Penny shook her head.   "I got nothing to celebrate."

      "It isn't going to hurt you."  He extended a hand.

      "Suppose you let me be the judge of that."

 

      The author seems aware of his heroine's incivility, and goes to some length to put safe distance between the reader and Penny's inner suffering, which lasts throughout the book.   On page 123, we get this description of Penny and Ransome Barlow, a man with whom Penny travels the circuit.   (To make sure there are no mixed signals, she sleeps beside - or, in bad weather, beneath - their jointly owned truck.)

 

      "I never in my life saw a judge like that," he said.   "That wasn't a grip at the pen.   Bute just nudged that ewe."

      "He nudged her with his teeth," Penny said.   "That judge was right."

      A hundred miles later, Penny said, "What's wrong with you?"

      Five hundred miles later, Penny said, "You must be getting tired.   If you want, I can drive."

      Eight hundred miles later, she said, "Suit yourself."

      Two thousand six hundred miles later, the sun was just coming over the Blue Ridge.   The corn and alfalfa in Shenandoah Valley were wet and glistening with dew.   Penny thought to say something about how beautiful it was but there was no point.   "Next time we stop for gas," she said, "I'll want to pee."

 

      And so on down the merry road.   The nature of the tragedies described in the two books is such that in the first, the problem is resolved and all is right with the world; in this sequel, the loved ones can never come back, the attempted rapists are never brought to justice and the closure of the book is brought about not by Penny's actions (as with Lewis) but by her failure.   In the end, too, it is her father who rescues her and brings her back to his home.   There, we are led to believe, she begins a new life, safely ensconced in another man's arms, herding a man's sheep on a man's ranch.   She never does become independent, either emotionally or financially.   

       The book clearly shows that mastery of animals is a slippery thing, based upon mutual respect and need.   Penny never achieves that mastery, and we are left to assume that something within her life remains unbalanced.   Perhaps Penny's failure is the ultimate letdown of the book: because she never gets beyond her utilitarian relationship with Hope, the change we hope for as readers - the protagonist's conquest of the problems life throws her way - is never realized, and the book ends with a vague feeling of dissatisfaction.

      This is not to say Nop's Hope is not worth the read.   We can learn a great deal by understanding how animals look at the world, and us.   With these two books, Donald McCaig has made great strides toward showing us that our responsibilities to animals are not so different from what we owe one another as people, and he has done so without belittling either subject.   No small feat.

  





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Colleen White is a writer and reviewer living in Portland, Maine.



D. Navarro's work appears in both previous issues of BPQ.



Norman Maynard's story "Dancer" appeared in BPQ#1.  He writes, reads, and raises sheep in Maryland.













Staff bios:  



Editor Doug Lawson has been a co-moderator of America Online's Fiction Workshop, a teacher of writing, and a Henry Hoyns Fellow in writing at the University of Virginia, where he'll receive his MFA in Fiction in 1995.  His fiction, poetry, and reviews have appeared in The Willow Review, Al Aaraaf, The Cafe Review, The Alabama Fiction Review, and other places.



Musician, artist, writer, Mark Starlin has been active in computer graphics since purchasing a Mac 4 years ago. An accomplished guitarist, he has authored several educational software programs and electronic documents for guitar.  A self taught artist and programmer, Mark is always looking for an interesting project. He is currently working on the photographic collage/comic book "The Adventures of Captain Custra" and has just released the Mac shareware game "Square Lake Crossing".  A Michigan resident, Mark is married and kept busy by a beautiful wife has three lovely daughters.  Mstarlin@aol.com.



Greg Bevan, Giselle Gautreau, Marc Seldin and Chrys Simms are all very kind people.  Ms. Gautreau's artwork appeared on the cover of BPQ#2.

















    

Upcoming in future issues of The Blue Penny Quarterly





--An Interview with New Yorker writer Deborah Eisenberg...



--Poetry from Romanian Poet Ioana Ieronim in translation, Leigh Palmer, Mina Kennedy, Davis McCombs, and Melanie Zyck...



--Award-winning fiction from Bliss Broyard.





          And look for us soon on the World Wide Web!





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