

"Sachez' writing style is exquisite. Her flawless prose flows—sometimes beautiful, sometimes disturbing —but always memorable." –Mayra Calvani in The Bloomsbury Review

"The way Sanchez integrates the natural world with character and personality and actual events is masterful. She moves around in time, picks up threads and makes connections among the characters in a seemingly effortless manner, and the result is stunningly beautiful. For me the

book was a gift." _–_ Gloria DeVidas Kirchheimer _,_ author of _Goodbye Evil Eye._

### A MILE IN THESE SHOES

by

Sandra Shwayder Sanchez

SMASHWORDS EDITION

******

PUBLISHED BY:

The Wessex Collective on Smashwords

A Mile in These Shoes

copyright 2010 by Sandra Shwayder Sanchez

Smashwords Edition

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Acknowlegements:

"A Modern Peruvian Tale" was originally published in _Zone 3_ , "Three on A Pier" in _The Healing Muse_ , "Give Me a poster of an Old Rodeo," "Danny & Joe," and "Lillian & Alexander" were all originally published in _The Long Story_ , "Incident on the #15 Bus" was originally published in _The Monocacy Valley Review_ , and "The Rose Bush" was first published in the online publication _The Dublin Quarterly_ (an Editor's Choice "Best of 2007" selection) and reprinted in _The New Scene Quarterly_ in 2009.

*****

Table of Contents

A Modern Peruvian Tale

Three on a Pier

Give Me a Poster of an Old Rodeo

Danny and Joe: A Friendship

Yellowwolf and Shortstuff

Incident on the #15 Bus

Lillian and Alexander

The Rose Bush

The Podunk International Bank Heist

a note about the writer

####

A Modern Peruvian Tale

I.

Kevin Costner is a shoeshine boy in the Andean city of Cuzco. His English is excellent and he is popular with the American tourists who come to explore the ruins of the Incas and seek spiritual experiences while hiking the Inca Trail. He tells them his name is Kevin Costner or John Wayne because it amuses them and they remember and ask for him so it is good for business. His real Spanish name, even though shared with hundreds of boys from this city, is his own, private, not to be given out lightly. He is hardworking, a hustler, the first one in the plaza in the morning and the last to leave at night. When some tourist ladies tell him he should go home, that his mother must be worried about him, he laughs because his mother is just around the corner selling handmade dolls and gloves knit from the wool of old alpacas, or asking the tourists to take her photograph for two sols. If he or his mother returns home without enough money, the father will beat the mother and the mother will beat the son and that is the way it goes.

Kevin Costner hopes to go to North America someday. When he finds a gringo tourist who will talk to him, he asks first if the tourist will adopt him and take him to America, then when he is refused, he asks if the tourist will give him money for his education and when he is refused again, he asks for a new pair of shoes. He finds that a surprising number of tourists, feeling guilty that they cannot adopt him or pay for his education, are willing to go with him to the shoe store and buy him a new pair of shoes. Later, when all the tourists are on trips to the Sacred Valley or gone to Machu Pichu, he goes back to the shoe store and returns several pairs of new, unworn shoes and gets the money which he hides from his father because he is saving to go to the north.

His plan is to join one of those groups of musicians who walk up through Guatemala and Mexico to the United States, playing their Andean music which has become very popular. He has an uncle who went all the way to Denver. There is a very good group that plays at the fancy hotel at Machu Pichu where people pay $300 U.S. to stay one night and drink in the bar and listen to the musicians. They pay $7 U.S. for one imported beer and toss their Peruvian change into the jar at the foot of the stage for the group of five musicians to share among them.

Being out on the streets at all hours, Kevin sees many things and has learned to make himself invisible to make sure that he is not molested or robbed. He has learned to be stealthy and quiet. One night after the restaurants and cafes have closed and there is no noise to cover the sound, he thinks he hears a woman yell "Ayudami" and then "Help" once very loud, then softer, then he must strain to hear and hears nothing. He thinks that he should go see what is happening, try to help the woman because that is what men do. He also knows there is nothing he can do, a small boy alone in the dead of night. He removes his shoes so he can walk noiselessly on the cobblestone streets and stays in the shadows until he reaches the relative safety of his home. The whole way home he is thinking he is a coward and wondering what kind of man he will be when he is a man and when he will know. He thinks to himself that the woman was a tourist, she called out in English as well as Spanish. He tries to tell himself that the tourists are bad, that they deserve what they get, walking around at such a late hour in his town. But he cannot help remembering the plea, the need in the woman's voice. He decides he will tell his father what he heard and let his father decide what to do next. His father is not home and so he goes to sleep and all night long he thinks he hears cries for help and imagines murders and rapes throughout the city. In the morning he remembers that he had a bad dream. He wants to tell his mother but she puts her finger to her lips and lifts her head in the direction of his father passed out on the floor. His father drinks away half the money the mother and son earn on the street. That's how it goes.

The father is very dirty, has mud on his pants and Kevin imagines that there is blood mixed with the mud and wants to look more closely but the mother shoos him away toward the door and out. It is time to go to work.

II.

When Kevin gets to the main plaza there are more than the usual number of policemen gathered there and tourists are being kept away. There is an ambulance and workers are loading a stretcher with a body covered head to toe with a sheet into the ambulance while the police stand around and talk and some look on the ground for little bits of cloth, for blood and foot prints. There has been a murder and Kevin did not dream it.

Kevin stays away from the police and goes up the hill toward the ruins of Saqsaywaman. The guides always get a laugh when they explain that the name is pronounced like "sexy woman." Everyone in Cuzco is a guide, the ones who don't have horses or vans to transport the tourists hang around at the ruins and offer to walk the people around and explain the history. Some know more than others. It is too early to catch the returning tourists to shine their shoes. Ordinarily the plaza would be the best place to work at this hour but he doesn't want to catch the eye of the police. He knows the victim was a tourist and they will want to find someone quickly to pin it on.

After killing an hour or so, Kevin goes over to San Blas where some ancient grandmothers cook bits of meat over a charcoal fire on the corner and he can get some breakfast on credit and then go see Juana at the Posada. Perhaps she will have some work for him to do, some errands to run, messages to carry. Kevin is a hustler and always has an idea about how to make a few sols.

His father had a similar idea it seems because Kevin runs into him there at the Posada. His father likes a young woman who works for Juana. Kevin knows this but says nothing because the one time he did, his father blacked both his eyes and told him that was what he got for spying. The young woman could be Kevin's sister. He notices that his father has changed into fresh clean clothes and has apparently just given the young woman a gift, a pair of earrings and Kevin wonders where his father found them. Then his father sees him and tells him to stay away from the plaza because the police will be looking for boys like him to harass and question. Everyone is talking about the murder. The woman had been staying at the Posada in San Blas waiting for her husband to join her. He was due in that afternoon on the daily flight from Lima. Everyone is wondering who will break the news to the husband. Juana says she will ask the police to send someone over when she gets the husband's call from the airport. She does not want to be the person to convey the message. Kevin watches his father closely during the conversation and his father gives him that look that Kevin recognizes as a warning to stop spying.

Without a word, Kevin runs out the door and down the steep winding street to the church. There is an old man by the door who looks at him with a big grin showing his splotchy gums and single tooth and speaks to him in a voice so old and scratchy that Kevin can't understand a word he has said.

"Que paso abuelo?" Kevin asks. The man coughs, spits, and says, "You heard me, little smartass." Kevin feels himself watched as he enters the church and he goes all the way to the front knowing the old man's eyesight won't penetrate the darkness that far into the church. Kevin hides all morning until hunger drives him outside again and the old man is gone or perhaps spying upon him from a shadow of his own.

III.

When Kevin Costner the shoeshine boy emerges from the church into the bright afternoon sun he is blinded by the light and almost steps on something that suddenly moves. Kevin sees that it is a snake and the sight of it makes him feel sick so he must sit down on the high stone curb of the street. He tells himself he must be hallucinating. It is still too cold for snakes to be out and about. He closes his eyes to clear his mind but he can hear the snake moving around him even though everyone knows you can't hear a snake move. Kevin hears the words "you must do something about this" but he doesn't know what is meant by these words, or who is speaking them. He isn't even sure the words are intended for him until he hears them repeated in a whisper in his ear and feels a hot breath there but sees no one when he turns. Then there is shouting and screaming as other people have discovered the snake in the church courtyard and chase it with sticks intending to kill it.

Kevin stands and gets in the way, being himself knocked down as one of the men chasing the snake runs into him. Then the snake is gone and people are screaming at Kevin, angry because the meat of the snake is tasty and gets a good price. Kevin pushes past the people and notices the one-toothed old man among them who smiles that sly smile of his and Kevin waves a hand at him saying, "tu es loco abuelo" and laughs like he means it. Overhead a condor, off its flight pattern, casts a shadow over the town and all its people, swoops down, picks up the snake in its beak and carries it to a jeep rental lot where it drops the snake into a warm, safe spot under the driver's seat of a jeep and then continues on toward the south where it came from and where it belongs. No one notices the condor but Kevin who stands in wonder to see it, so large and graceful and truly godlike.

IV.

That afternoon the town fills up with gringos from Hollywood who have come to town to shoot a scene at Saqsaywaman for a film. Kevin goes to the plaza to get as much work as he can. He wants to catch the people before they have time to exchange their dollars for paltry sols. They laugh when he introduces himself as Kevin Costner but it gets their attention and he has his work cut out for him. They make jokes about putting him in the movies and he forgets about the murder. Then the word gets out and goes round that the director's wife was killed in the night and the shoot is cancelled. People begin to wander off, not knowing what to do next. No one has seen the director.

That is when Kevin smells blood and sees it congealed around the rim of the sole of the shoe he is working on. It looks like mud but the day is dry and it has been dry for a long time. No one has mud on their boots, only dust, dry dust. Kevin recognizes the smell of blood. He has smelled it on his cousin's farm after a chicken is killed or a goat. He recognizes blood and has a lot of thoughts. He is first frightened when he thinks this must be the murderer. Then he is relieved because he had suspected his own father and now no longer has to face that horrific thought, although the mud on his father's pants and the earrings he gave that girl still trouble Kevin's mind. He is thinking all this while he continues to rub the top of the shoe, careful not to wipe away the blood around the bottom, knowing it is evidence. Kevin remains cool, not letting his face betray the fact that he recognizes blood when he sees and smells it, or that he is frightened or relieved, just the same concentration on the top leather, not looking up until he has shined both boots to a mirror-like finish.

When the man pays him, Kevin looks at his face carefully in order to identify him later if he needs to and he is shocked to see that the man is not a gringo but an Indian, tall like one of the ancient Inca people. This frightens Kevin more than anything else for he realizes the man could be a brujo and know his thoughts and kill him quietly from afar if he decides to. He wonders why he didn't kill the hueda that way and why he killed her in the first place. He wonders what the Indian is doing with the crew from Hollywood, if he is working for them, if he secretly hates them. Kevin can feel some of this. He is trying not to have these thoughts while the Indian is watching him so he looks down at the money in his hand. He sees that the man has given him a U.S. $20 bill and he realizes it is normal and completely unthreatening for him to react to this unexpected generosity.

"Sir, sir you've made a mistake," Kevin says in English because he has heard this man speak English with his companions. Kevin holds the twenty out to the man who tells him to keep it and Kevin listens carefully to the voice in order to be able to identify that as well. But he does not have the name. He smiles and says with as much childlike glee as he can muster, "Thank you Mr....Mr.?" and the man says, "Call me Bruce, you know, like Willis," and smiles at the boy.

Kevin goes around the plaza to show his friends the twenty dollar bill and the money is a good excuse to point the man out to them. He tells a couple of his friends to help him watch the man. One of the boys goes to Rosie O'Brien's to watch because they know the gringos will likely go there later and the man is clearly with them. Another positions himself at strategic places, moving here and there, to keep the man in sight. Kevin has not yet figured out how to put the police onto him or if he should take that chance. Finally he decides to find his father. If his father is sober that will be a sign and Kevin will tell him and let his father take responsibility for informing the police. If his father is drunk, Kevin won't be able to tell him anything. That is just the way it goes.

He heads back up toward San Blas to find out where his father has gone. That girl will know. He is thinking about things, thinking about how everyone came into town at the same time this afternoon but maybe that one man came in yesterday and hid himself somewhere so he could kill the gringa and then blend in with the others. Why would the man have blood on his boot unless he was the murderer? Where did the man come from? Does he live in Hollywood? or did he join the crew in Lima? Kevin is thinking, thinking, wondering what will happen to him if he solves the crime. He could be killed or he could be rewarded. Then he is thinking that he owes it to the dead woman because he did not try to help her the night before. And while he is thinking, he is noticing everything around him as he has learned from childhood to do. He always knew it was dangerous not to notice everything around you.

V.

On the way to San Blas, Kevin sees the loco viejito rummaging in the trash outside the church, looking for anything of value, looking for leftover food. In a window above the street an Indian woman is looking sadly out rubbing a cat against her cheek drawing comfort from its softness. Kevin stares at her sad face framed like a picture in the window with blue shutters. It is the house owned by the woman from Bolivia. The Bolivian woman lives at the top with her two sons and downstairs she has a knitting factory, 4 knitting machines and a dozen Indian women who come in to knit sweaters from alpaca that the woman sells in the United States.

Everyone gossips about this foreign woman who is trying to help the Indian women. She is married to a man from Prague and they go there part of the year and part of the year they go to Nuevo York and she is said to have gone to a great University in Nuevo York. She helps some Indian women get away from their husbands when their husbands beat them. Kevin had wanted his mother to work for her too but his mother refused. She did not want to make his father angry.

At this moment while Kevin is staring at the Indian woman's sad face half hidden by the purring cat, a fight erupts in the window. The woman's husband has found her and is yelling at her and the cat, hardly more than a kitten, but with the soul of the sacred puma flies into his face, with a howl and takes a bite of the man's cheek and the angered man flings the animal out the window. Everything happens at once. The Bolivian woman comes into the room and hits the man with her son's baseball bat over his shoulders and chases him down the stairs into the street and the screeching, twisting cat lands on the arm of the rummaging viejito, causing him to drop everything he had picked from the trash. Kevin catches the cat as it bounces off the old man's arm and strokes it gently. The cat does not struggle but purrs in Kevin's embrace. Kevin hears the Bolivian woman yelling at the angry man."If Maria comes to work with so much as a dried tear on her face I will hunt you down and kill you. Do you understand me?"

The man, now a safe distance from her laughs and says "you? _you_ will kill _me?"_

Kevin hears her say "Why do you think I do not go back to La Paz? eh?"...

But Kevin is not watching this interesting scene for his eye has been caught by the flutter of deep purple paper, many little bits of it blowing along the cobblestones. He sets the cat down gently and picks up the pieces of torn thick purple paper and thin light blue paper. He recognizes the color of LAN Peru airline tickets, recognizes that this might be evidence. He gathers up the pieces of the airline ticket while the cat sits quiet in a doorway and stares at him with the eyes of the puma.

Why would anyone tear up a ticket into little pieces unless they were done with it and did not want anyone to know where they had been? Kevin is excited. He believes he can solve the murder and collect some kind of reward. At the same time he is afraid the killer has supernatural powers and already knows that Kevin is on to him.

When he gets to the Posada Juana tells him the police have taken his father. He had given the woman's earrings to his little friend. He told the police he found them on the street that morning but the police don't want to believe that because that would mean that they had missed them and if they missed the earrings, what else did they miss? What evidence did they fail to collect? This is an important case for them, a tourist and the wife of a famous film director.

Juana is smart and will help him so Kevin shows her the pieces of the airline ticket and they tape the pieces together and see that it has yesterday's date and a name that puzzles them because it is neither English nor Spanish nor Quechua nor anything else that they recognize. It's a funny name: Begay. Kevin tells Juana that in English that would mean "be happy" and he is all the more puzzled. He decides to tell Juana about the man with the bloody boot and his suspicions that the man is a witch. The cat has followed Kevin to the Posada and watches quietly. Kevin hears a voice and the voice tells him that he can fix two problems with one smart deed. He tells Juana that he wants to talk with his father before they talk to the police and he tells her why and she agrees: she sees how it goes.

Together they go to the police and Kevin asks to visit his father. He doesn't say anything yet to the police about the boot and the airline ticket he found. He finds his father very frightened and he tells his father that he himself suspected him, because he has seen and _felt_ his father's violence and his father begs him not to talk about that to the police even though everyone in town knows this man beats his wife and son. Kevin tells his father he will help set his father free if his father will leave Cuzco, go to Lima perhaps or somewhere far away and never return. Kevin and his mother don't need this man who drinks up half the money they earn and beats them when they don't earn enough. The father promises to leave town and Kevin goes out to talk to the police.

The police do not believe the story about the bloody boot, think that the boy is simply trying to save his father, but Juana shows them the taped together airline ticket. Someone gets the chief. The police chief nods his head, reasons out loud that the man arrived the day before without making himself known to anyone and why would he hide from sight until today when all the rest of the film crew arrived if not because he had planned to commit a crime in the night? A rendezvous in the night he speculates. He agrees to let Kevin's father go, reasons out loud: all these years the man never attacked anyone outside his family, the mud on his pants explained by the odor of urine, the man stupid enough to pick up the earrings to give a girl without even thinking about the consequences, the police were desperate and that is the only reason they picked up such a stupid and unlikely suspect. The police chief yells at his men, said the killer just tossed this important clue in the trash because he knew the police were incompetent and how could a man solve and deter crimes with such a bunch of jackasses working under him? They get ready to go pick up the man and Kevin goes to find his friends who have been keeping an eye on him. The police chief offers Kevin a job, when he is fully grown of course and has finished his education.

What Kevin's friends report to him and he to the chief is that the man has left town. He rented a jeep and drove away, no one knows where. Kevin's friends have told him there was no way they could stop the man. Kevin thinks the man is gone forever and he is relieved. He does not want that man to know what he has done.

VI.

The next day the producers of the film fly into town, more gringos, more shoes to shine, more Americans crowding into Rosie O'Brien's drinking Cusqueno beer and telling tales of their experiences. The director no longer wants to make this film. He is drunk and says crazy things like the ancient gods took his wife because they did not want him to be filming among the ruins. He says that he dreamed this and believes it is a sign. The producers say "poppycock" or some such thing and talk to him about the budget, inserting here and there that they are "sorry for his loss...but"... always the "but", the "even so," the "life goes on" and Kevin, overhearing this, understands completely. He is a practical boy but he feels sorry for the director who clearly loved his wife. He goes up to the party gathered round the bar and says in his excellent English, "Excuse me sir, perhaps I can help you." The director wonders what Kevin can help him with and Kevin says he can be his assistant while he works the next day shooting the scene at Saqsaywaman, that he speaks English, Spanish and Quechua, and that he is smart and then he says to the man, "I think you need a friend right now." Of course the man must smile at these words that from a grown man would be unwelcome and obnoxious but are charming coming from a child. So Kevin is hired on and told to meet the crew at the site the next morning two hours before dawn. They want to film the sunrise and need time to set up.

The producers are very happy with Kevin as he was able to move the director from his grief to the realization that the film must proceed as planned. Kevin walks home followed by his new cat and tells his mother the news: her husband will not be coming home again and he, Kevin Costner, a shoeshine boy with a future, will be earning enough money to take care of both of them.

Kevin wakes up every day with the sun and has no clock in his house. If it were a clear night he could gauge the time by the position of the moon but it is hazy and to be sure he is not late, he spends the night at the ruins. He will know it is time to report to work when he hears the sounds of the film crew's jeeps. He carries a heavy warm rug to make a bed. The kitten, who has adopted Kevin, follows him closely. In the night he hears sounds, quiet sneaking sounds and he is too frightened to look out to see who is coming up to the ruins. He hears someone rustle about and settle into a hidden space. He hears more noises shortly thereafter, some farting and coughing and throat-clearing and nose-blowing and then silence and then he sleeps until he hears the sound of jeeps. Kevin gets up quickly, pees behind a stone, smoothes his clothing and his hair and prepares to report to the director.

As he approaches the small group of men who have arrived in two jeeps he hears some urgent whisperings and the director gets into a jeep with two other men leaving one lone man behind. It appears they have forgotten something. When Kevin sees the face of the man who remains he wants to run back to his hiding place but now the haze has cleared and the full moon lights up everything. The man has seen and recognized Kevin. The men in the jeep have ridden away too far and too fast for Kevin to catch up with them.

"You know you owe me a shoeshine kid."

Kevin just looks at the man, knowing that sometimes the less said the better.

"You left some mud on the rim of one of my boots, not a very thorough job. Are you often so careless? Cat got your tongue?"

The man stares at Kevin as if trying to look into his brain and Kevin says only in a cracked little voice that surprises him with its childishness, "I'm sorry sir."

"Why are you afraid of me?"

"Not afraid sir."

"Ah but you are. You work late at night don't you? Aren't you afraid to be out in the Plaza late at night? Seems to me that would be scary for a little tyke like you. And here we are in this very scary place before sunrise. Maybe you are afraid of being out here alone with me?"

That is when Kevin realizes the man is teasing him to try to find out if he knows anything, saw anything. Kevin realizes that if the man doesn't know already he cannot be all that powerful. He gets his voice back and figures two can play this game. Kevin asks the man why he is working with the gringos on the film and the man's answer surprises him even as it explains the man's motivation for the murder.

"You are a smart little boy you know? I'm going to tell you a story, may come in handy for you someday to know what these people are like, the way that they will use you. Here it is, my story, the reason I am here working on this particular film. I am, as you have guessed, an Indian myself, a Navajo from lands that were first colonized by the Spanish and then taken in war by the Anglos, not that long ago. My people have a story about coming into those lands from a hole in the ground but that is just a story. In reality they were wanderers, coming south from far north, then coming back north from far south, wandering around looking for something, that is how I think of it. My own life was like that, wandering back and forth, looking for something I lost a long time ago. The hole in the ground I emerged from was a ruined family. I was taken from my mother when she was young and poor. My father was a drunk and couldn't help her and this was a sad thing for me. I went to the white man's schools and I did well, but how well can you do when you don't belong? I was a visitor, a guest, not really one of them. No kindness in the world can make up for that. Roots and wings, you need both in this life, kid, roots and wings. I had the wings alright, but nowhere to land, no roots, no place for me."

The man looked so sad Kevin wanted to comfort him but he sat very quiet and listened.

"Well I was good at words. I had to be, I had to entertain myself so I talked to myself all the time and made up stories, fantasies at first then observations of the people around me. I notice you are very observant."

Kevin smiled feeling praised, then frowned wondering if the man meant he knew he had witnessed the crime in the night. But the man neither questioned nor threatened him. He merely went on with his story.

"I wrote stories down and they were published and the white people liked my stories even though in each one I had buried some secret hatred of them. I met a woman. She was married to the film director but she didn't love him and said she was going to leave him to marry me. I did love her until I realized she was just using me. She wrote stories for the movies and she thought my stories would be great films. This film they are making now, is based on one of my stories and this woman wrote the script for it. You know she died the night before last? You must have heard about it?"

And here the man looked at the boy a long time, waiting it seemed for Kevin to confess that he had been there, had heard her cry out. Kevin said only that yes he had heard about it. The man continued with his story. He probably knew he had to tell someone.

"I came as a consultant. She did give me credit for my story, she got me the job. I thought she wanted me to be near her down here, but she was no longer interested in me, got me the job to help me out she said. She said that having this credit would help my career as well, that the Hollywood filmmakers would buy other stories to turn into films. She seemed to think that selling my stories and making money was what I wanted and she even seemed to think that I had made love to her in order to further my career. What do you think of that?"

"You loved her?"

"Yes and I thought she loved me."

"Maybe she did. Maybe she tried to help you because she loved you."

"Well it's too late now."

"Did you kill her?"

"Yes."

"Are you going to kill me too?"

"I thought about it, I thought about trying to get away without being caught and getting on with my life but I think now, that is not a life I want. Of course neither is prison. What do you think little fellow? Any ideas about what I should do?"

"You could disappear into the mountains, change yourself and begin a new life somewhere else and be someone else."

"That is what you dream of doing isn't it?"

Kevin laughed, not afraid anymore of this man. "Yes that is what I dream of doing, every day."

The moon was low in the sky by now being chased over the edge of the horizon by the coming sun. Soon the others would be back.

"Where should I go?" the man asked Kevin.

Before Kevin could answer, the condor he had seen the day before flew across the moon and landed on the jeep, looking for something inside it. The great bird, which looked too heavy to fly, found the snake and picked it up and flew away in the direction of the south. At that moment the old man with one tooth left in his mouth, came out of his hiding place in the ruins and beckoned to the murdering Indian man to follow him.

"I am going now. You can tell the director I killed his wife and he will reward you even if they never catch me but I want you to know that if they do catch me I won't blame you. I don't know where I am going but I am going to try to find the life that I lost when I was taken from my mother. I heard that she died a long time ago. Perhaps now I will die too, perhaps not, we shall see but I am not going back to live the white man's life with a white man's wife."

VII.

At dawn the Pablos and Joses, Enriques and Guillermos congregate in the main Plaza with their postcards to sell and their shoeshine kits and drink hot "coffee" made from barley and talk among themselves while they wait for the tourists who come out early to meet their tour Vans to Machu Pichu. Mostly they talk about their friends who left. Mostly they talk about the most imaginative among them, the one who gave himself the name of a movie star and how that brought him luck and they resolve to start introducing themselves as John Wayne or Tom Selleck and dream of going to Hollywood. Here is what happened:

Kevin watched the man, not a brujo at all, just an unhappy man, walk off into his vision. Later the man was caught but he never was tried for the murder of the gringa because he killed himself in a strange way that was reported in newspapers all over the country. He picked up a snake, a very poisonous snake, just picked it up in his hands and wrapped it around his body in a strange circular dance and the snake danced with him until it was coiled around his body from the ankles up and its face was in his face and the snake kissed the man and he ran from the police until he dropped dead and there was nothing they could do to him then.

When the director found out his wife's killer was caught and destroyed because of Kevin's cleverness, he wanted to reward the boy and Kevin asked for a small role in the film so he could brag to his friends and make more money.

Three on a Pier

When the boy's mother had first disappeared into the crowd on the boardwalk promising to "be back soon" and instructing him to go watch the people fishing off the pier, the sun had been out. It had been, if anything, too hot. But after hours of watching for her, the child was cold. The sun had gone behind a bank of large dark clouds and the wind whipped up blowing the waves higher and it had begun to rain. Groups of surfers took their boards and headed for warm homes somewhere and one by one the old men and women who fished for sardines from the pier packed up their boxes and bags and buckets and left until only the pelicans and gulls remained to keep the child company.

He thought to shelter himself from the wind and rain on a bench inset along a wall of a small locked building on the pier. But when he came close to it he saw the space was taken by a large dirty looking man who sat with his back against one side of the inset and his legs stretched out the length of the bench. The child hesitated to approach, not wanting to intrude on the man's privacy. He was only six years old but had already learned not to invade the privacy of adult men. On the other hand, he was very cold and the thought did occur to him that the man might help him find his mother. So he hovered close trying to decide what to do and wished the man would turn around and see him and ask him in a kindly voice if he was lost. If asked in a kindly voice the boy would pour out his soul.

The man, meanwhile, was sunk in a deep sleep and every time a cold gust of wind almost awakened him, he thought of dying because he was so tired of the cold. He had come to southern California to be warm and had not expected the unusual cold spell to last as long as it had. His stamina and strength were sorely taxed by the repeated onslaughts of rain and wind. What good was it to make it through the long winter nights if the days did not bring forth sufficient hot sunshine to bake the chill from his bones? Then he'd remember he was being punished, deserved to be punished, was paying the price for having lived through the war.

Always beneath his thoughts ran the undercurrent, the riptide of fear, that calculator counting the inches, the seconds that separated him from death, sudden and final until he couldn't stand it any longer and he shouted to the stars, the shadows, whoever was out there (because someone was out there) that he was ready, take him, blow him up, kill him, he was tired of waiting, of counting the seconds and measuring the inches to death...he was READY. But the shadows were only palms waving in the breeze, no one was out there, no one took him away from this life.

Sometimes couples walking on the beach at night heard him shouting and they would whisper "He's crazy, lets get out of here" thinking if they whispered he couldn't hear them over the sound of the surf, not realizing he heard everything, imagined everything, laughed at all of it until he cried, confused and sought oblivion at least for a while. How tired was this old man of his daily resurrection, now he longed to simply sleep through it, if only he could get warm enough.

The old man was feeling closer than ever to giving up the ghost once and for all when something caught his consciousness and he woke up and turned to look around. At first he glared because he didn't want to be awake and cold and aching in all his joints and this frightened the little boy who had been staring at him. The child began to run down the pier toward the now deserted boardwalk and the man called out to him "Hey little feller, where's your mama. Are you lost?" He put all the kindness he could ever remember feeling into his hoarse old voice and the child turned around, began to speak, then began to cry, then stood there just nodding his head and wiping his eyes and nose with his shivering hand.

When the boy's mother had left him near the Pier she had thought she would be back within the hour: quick sex and back with a couple hundred dollars. She was not a common prostitute but she had just lost her job at the bar and she knew the man who was a regular there. He had seen her on the boardwalk and asked why she hadn't been in to work. When she told him her story he had been sympathetic and told her to come see him, keep him company a while and he'd give her two hundred dollars. He seemed like a nice enough man and she needed the money badly. She had not been prepared for what he needed. She knew he was a drunk but she did not know what that meant for him. He never got mean at the bar, never got into fights, just passed out sometimes and needed help home.

He was overjoyed to see her because he hadn't really expected her to come to his rented room even when she repeated the address after him. He insisted on fixing her a meal and she asked to take some leftovers with her for her son, letting him know she had a small child who needed her. Then he tried without success to have sex with her and nothing worked and she became impatient to leave. She asked for the two hundred dollars he had promised and he gave her a handful of bills, several one hundred dollar bills, some fifties and twenties, almost eight hundred dollars she counted but when she tried to leave he pled with her, said he'd kill himself if she left him alone and he took a kitchen knife out of a drawer and brandished it, threatening first to hurt himself, then her, she was more afraid of his confusion than his intent.

She had to calm him down, walk him over to his bed and massage his head until she thought he was asleep. It had gotten dark and she heard rain on the roof. When she looked out the window her heart sank as she thought of her little boy out there alone with no jacket and no one to keep him company and reassure him. She tried to sneak out the door quickly and quietly, but the man, not only drunk but drugged with this and that, whatever he could get his hands on to get himself through the nights, the man, woke and leapt up from his bed and tried to strangle her, not even knowing who she was or where or when.

She had to talk to him for what seemed like hours, in a calm voice, a kind voice even though he kept his hands around her neck. He kept his hands around her neck as they walked together back to his bed and sat there and she kept on talking, all the while praying that she and her son would survive the night and promising a god she had decided to believe in that she would never again give herself for money no matter how desperate things seemed.

The old man was tired, not really up to the long walk to where he had left a stash of stuff in a shopping cart covered by a tarp, but the little boy was shivering and needed to be kept warm somehow. So the old man joked a bit with the child to win his confidence because he knew kids were afraid of him, the nice ones. The mean ones just made fun of him. The boy gave the old man his hand, a gesture that took the man by surprise but then he took it and together they walked like a grandfather and grandson down the Pier and along the boardwalk to an alley where the man located his shopping cart hidden behind a dumpster.

The old man was annoyed that someone had stolen all the cans he had collected and crushed to sell for cash but the blankets were there, dry under the tarp. He wrapped the sleepy child in a ragged blanket, noticing how dirty it was and feeling ashamed and sad about that. Then he carried the boy to a place where he knew they would be protected from the rain. It smelled bad there but the child was already asleep so the old man lowered himself to the ground and sat in his most comfortable position, back up against the wall and legs stretched out in front. He laid the boy on the ground with his head pillowed on his legs and dozed off.

The coldest time of night is just before dawn as if the night gods were giving it all they had before being banished for another day. A last icy dying breath. That intensified cold woke the mother who had fallen asleep beside the exhausted drunk who lay passive and snoring, his hands now clasped in front of his chest as if he prayed in his sleep. She wanted to curl up beneath a corner of the blanket and sleep restfully but she was worried about her little boy and got up to go look for him. She put the money the man had given her in her shoes, carefully flattened and divvied up. She could pay her rent from that money and buy food and still have enough for the electric bill. It was more than he had promised her but he had taken more than was right from her. She left the apartment and walked down the stairs and out onto the street.

She began her search by the Pier. She imagined her little boy huddled there sleeping, cold and sad but safe. She told herself she would feel it if something terrible had happened to him and then reproached herself because her abandonment had been terrible enough. She could hear the surf and it soothed her and she saw the white crests of waves glistening like liquid silver in the full moon's light. She walked to the Pier and out to the end of it, calling her son's name to the night and there was no answer and she examined the shadows and found only birds. She accepted that she had a long anguished search ahead of her. She deserved that.

She sat a while on a bench inset into the wall of a small building and watched the dawn light take over the beach and she readied herself for the coming day. "Have faith, stay calm" she repeated to herself. Pelicans began to dive into the surf coming up with swarms of sardines that they swallowed whole, stretching their throats skyward. On a bluff above the beach far away a hawk grabbed a small bird from a nest and flew off with it and she heard the scream of the baby bird blended with the sounds of squabbling gulls and pounding surf. The mother got up, grateful that the rain had stopped and the sky was clear and getting bluer by the minute.

On the beach a little girl, vacationing with her family from some landlocked place, sighted a school of dolphins and shouted "ohmygodohmygod" in awe and then began to turn cartwheels all over the beach for sheer joy. The mother, watching this, thought of her little boy, visualized how joyful their reunion would be. "If you can visualize it, it can happen," she said to herself. Someone had told her that a while back and she had not believed it but now she did.

The old man had had to get up and pee in the night, had tried to put it off but finally had had to move the little boy's head to a pillow he made of his own filthy jacket and he got up to relieve himself steeled for the cold. He rummaged about in his cart and finding a piece of blanket wrapped himself up in it and walked out to the beach to watch white gulls flitting about in the moon light. He had a small bottle of whiskey wrapped in rags in his cart but he knew he would have to wait until he found someone to take charge of the child before he partook of that comfort. When he felt talkative he would tell anyone who cared to listen that he still felt guilty about coming back from Nam alive and with all his limbs after seeing friends and comrades blown to pieces. Once in Colorado a woman who had stopped to give him a couple bucks responded to his comments that perhaps there was a reason he had been spared and perhaps he should consider discovering some purpose in his life. He blessed the woman for giving him the money and told her that god had not yet revealed to him what his purpose might be and she told him to forget about god, do something kind for someone else. He thought that was easy for her to say. She didn't understand that he could still see and hear the bombs sometimes.

But sometimes by the ocean's edge, in the black and silver night all he could hear was the surf and all he could see were the palms waving in the breeze and they didn't always remind him of another ocean and other palms, other nights. Sometimes it was simply here and now and peaceful and for this reason he loved the ocean. He thought all these things as he watched the night sky lighten to reveal the shoreline and the morning birds and then went back to wake the boy.

The old man and the boy cleaned up as soon as city employees unlocked the public restrooms on the beach and then they began to walk up and down the boardwalk questioning anyone who appeared. The boy tried to remember what his mother was wearing: a skirt with flowers all over it and a tee shirt with words he couldn't read, long black hair, he didn't know how tall she was, taller than he was, and he reached his hand up to where he imagined her shoulder would be. She always leaned or squatted down to talk to him.

The mother meanwhile walked up and down the side streets and allies also questioning everyone she met about her little boy, in khaki shorts and a white tee shirt with the picture of a sunset and the words Puerto Vallarta that she had bought at the flea market. He hated wearing shoes she explained to people when telling them he was barefoot. Short black hair, large brown eyes, described a lot of children wandering around the boardwalk. Several times during the morning they passed within yards of each other but couldn't see each other through the crowds. They each felt discouraged as the day warmed up and they circled one another in those endlessly moving crowds.

Hunger overtook them. The mother had kept a twenty dollar bill in her pocket, ready, and she thought how nice it was to get change from the pizza vendor instead of carefully counting out one dollar bills and quarters. She sat on the beach to eat her pizza and refresh her resolve, visualizing her reunion with her son, his happy relieved smile, her own heavy heart lightened.

The old man talked a vendor into giving the boy a hotdog and the vendor gave him one as well. The man ate the meat and told the boy they should go to the beach and he would feed the bun to the birds. He always enjoyed feeding the birds. They sat on a bench overlooking the sand and the man crumbled the bun and held the crumbs out to the birds. Soon the man was covered with hungry gulls. They pecked the crumbs from his hands and after all the crumbs were gone the birds continued to peck at his empty hands until his hands bled. A woman stopped and talked to him. She told him he should go to the hospital because his hands were wounded and he said it was just a scratch but the blood was abundant and frightening and soon people gathered around to see what was happening. Among them was a man who had just been speaking with the mother of the lost boy and he was able to find her and tell he that her son was sitting with an old homeless man who had been pecked bloody by birds.

The mother ran to her son and scooped him up in her arms and they both cried with relief. She told the old man she would go with him to the ER to see about his hands and he said it was "just a scratch" and she told him that a scratch could become infected so he agreed to go with her to the ER even though he knew they would put him in detox for a few days: they always did. Sobriety drove him nuts but maybe in this place where he could hear the surf and watch the moonlit waves come in and recede, maybe he'd give it another try.

The three of them then walked together to the hospital and he told the mother how he had been waiting all these years for god to tell him why he had been spared when others had died, what was his purpose in life? And she told him his purpose was to watch over her son all through that night. He said that was a good purpose, that would get him through the day...tomorrow would take care of itself. "Have faith" she said to the old man and to herself she visualized a job, maybe at the hospital.

GIVE ME A POSTER OF AN OLD RODEO

"God led me to this place. Yessir, I knew I'd get this place. I didn't know how but I knew God meant me and Adam to live here. You like some ice cream? I always fix me and Adam a little snack 'bout now. You sure? Well, you don't mind if we eat some do you?"

Ida fixed up two bowls of Neapolitan ice cream, big servings, and hollered out the window to Adam who came running in acting like he didn't know what for but Ida winked at the social worker like it was as obvious to that young man as it was to her that Adam always knew when it was time to eat something. He was new on the case and didn't really understand yet what a treat food was for Adam, especially the unnecessary kind eaten for pleasure and not just anything to stifle hunger pains, to stay alive.

The worker, his name was Gerald and no one called him Jerry, sat in embarrassed silence while Ida said a blessing over the ice cream before unleashing the eager ten year old on it. The child ate quickly, asked to be excused and ran back outside to play. He seemed very normal. Ida was talking, unfazed by the interruption, all the while moving about the kitchen making elaborate preparations for the evening meal. Gerald was late for supper himself but couldn't bring himself to interrupt even to ask the customary and necessary questions, let alone take his leave. His family would have to eat without him. This woman was talking about god.

"Oh yessir, God told me he'd let me know when I found the right place. It took three years and I was getting tired and losing hope. There was this other place I wanted up in Longmont, near my youngest son, the one trains horses. He trained that pony out back for Adam you know. Well, I wanted that place bad, 'bout six months before I found this place and I was standing in my kitchen doing the dishes and begging him to give me a sign, talk to me and he just said clear as day, 'Ida, that place is not for you.' And that's all, no explanations, no nothing, just 'that place is not for you' and I was hurt and then I got mad.

I never bin mad at God before but I was mad then. And I talked back to God and I spoke my heart. 'I bin living here thirty years,' I said and I meant that old neighborhood where we had the trouble, you know that neighbor who charged me with assault? Well, that man was selling drugs to the kids right out his front door and I couldn't have that what with my little ones coming up. I had you know another foster son before Adam and he turned bad on me when he started using them drugs and he got them from that man and he denied it and wouldn't say where he got the stuff but I found out 'cuz I seen it you know him selling to other kids and I put two and two together. Oh my God, that boy was only twelve years old...."

Ida cried a little then and wiped her face all over with the dish towel and Gerald sat quietly, embarrassed but also fascinated by the old Creole woman.

"Well, where was I? Oh yes, oh yes I was mad at God because I wanted to move away from there. I did go after that man with my shovel because he was taunting me when I was out digging in the yard. Laughing at me as if it's a laughing matter to lead a boy astray and I lay into him and I did go to jail one night but my son got me out and they dropped it (you know my son knows the DA) so I had had enough and I wanted out and I bin looking and looking and that place up by Longmont seemed perfect for us but God said no, said trust him there'd be another place but I wouldn't listen I was so mad.

And I told him, I said, 'All these years I bin good, doing for others and living by your word, ain't never had me a man since my own boys' dad left and I brought up my boys to be decent and sacrificed to keep them on the straight and narrow and I go every Sunday to the church and sing my heart out, every Sunday for thirty years and more, and taking care of the old folks two days a week and taking in the motherless children and praying every day in the morning and at night, always grateful for the new day, grateful for my food, grateful for my rest at night and never asking nothing until now. Well, hell Lord...' and I did cuss then and I ain't cussed since my boys be little but I did that day and I told the Lord I be quitting the church, the old folks....and I did...I stopped going and I just be mad and bitter at the Lord and just talking to myself all the time and my boys be thinking then that maybe I going crazy. A crazy mad old lady that was me."

Ida was laughing and shaking her head and wiping the ice cream off her lips so Gerald figured there was a happy ending to her story and he stole a furtive glance at the kitchen clock.

Ida talked then about her loneliness like a woman who'd lost her lover and he remembered that she'd had no lover. Children and God were her only companions. God was the great love of her life and after thirty years she was experiencing her first lover's quarrel.

"I felt abandoned, lost, you know that feeling? You feel _empty_ inside. You ever feel that way? I almost can't quite explain it but I was _dying_ inside. I knew that and finally I had to go back. I was driving my car up Colorado Blvd. to Commerce City to go to work and it just come to me, that light you know and I started talking to God and I told him I'd be back in church on Sunday and I knew he'd find us a place 'cuz we _had_ to move. I just talked and talked all the way to work and talked at work and my co-workers thought I was crazy but I didn't care and I come home and talked and talked all the while I fixed supper and my youngest he come for supper and he says, 'Ma you up to that again? You crazy, Ma?' but I didn't care. I talked and talked and I felt better and better. Don't you see I got my _JOY_ back."

And Ida smiled so wide as she raised her voice and clenched her fists in triumph and there was nothing Gerald could say because god wasn't that real to him so he waited for her moment of re-lived rapture to pass and as she relaxed and shook her head a little at herself he asked her how she found the place, the house on two acres with a barn and large shed and garage.

"Well you know the agent had no business even showing me this place. I knew I could borrow $60,000 and here they be asking three times what I could afford. But she brings me down here to look at another house on the property, well now I need to explain. The Quiggleys over yonder they'd owned all this land and these two houses and they lived in this one and rented that other one. They was living in that trailer over back of the rental house when I come to look here. They'd tried to sell that rental house to get the bank off their backs but they couldn't and the bank foreclosed before I come on the scene. I don't know how it was they could keep that little bit of land they be living on now but that's where they was and that's where they be now. Anyway she showed me this place 'cuz it was here and it looked interesting and I just fell in love with it and never even looked at the rental house. No I wanted this one and the outbuildings and a couple of acres and I told her, I said, 'God will help me find a way.' Because God told me the day before that he had a place for me and I'd know it when I saw it and when I saw this place I knew it.

"Well I guess the bank hadn't had any nibbles and were needing to get some action because the agent said she believed she could get the banker to come down, way down, and she tried to convince me to offer $120,000, that was $60,000 less than they was askin' and I tole her no way that's twice what I got to work with. I'll offer 'em $60,000 'cuz that's what I got. The banker laughed and said I had 'chutzpah' you know what that is?"

Gerald didn't know and Ida explained it was a Jewish expression meant a lot of nerve and explained how the banker was a Jew for Jesus and how they talked about being saved, being Christians both, and how ultimately she talked that banker down to $72,000. Well, she and God, because the banker called her one day and said he'd had a dream about her and the boy living there and he wanted to see her get the place and he'd give it to her if he could, but $72,000 was as low as he could go. The bank had to get that much out of it and so that's how they settled, him dreaming, her praying and here they were Ida and Adam way out in the country with a couple horses and a garden. Ida made that social worker get right up and go out with her for a tour. She showed him each sapling, each bit of fencing, each load of manure piled here and there and the buckets she used to haul the water to pour around each corn, tomato and squash plant.

It looked to Gerald to be pretty dry hard ground and a proper challenge for this stalwart wife of the Lord. It was chilly when he followed her out of the kitchen to inspect the garden, the barn, the beginnings of a picket-fenced lawn in front and the sun was low and red over the factory chimneys of Commerce City and a pale moon had already risen over the silos of Brighton and Greeley. He was thinking he could just get into his car and drive away then because he felt more developments coming on and he'd have preferred to leave on the note of the happy ending but he had left his briefcase in the kitchen so back they went and Ida was already past the beginning of the next story, the story about the Quiggleys, before they were past the threshold of the door. Gerald just sat himself down, didn't even ask to use the phone. In his mind he was already explaining why he couldn't call, describing Ida, how important people like her were to kids like Adam.

"It's the young one scares me—something so strange and wild about that boy he be 'bout 16 I guess. Why you know one night just after we moved in here he drive his dad's jeep up and down the road out front, back and forth, gunning the engine makin' a lot of noise and shoutin' top a his lungs, 'niggers in the neighborhood. Niggers in the neighborhood.' And I know his folks encouraged him. If it ain't one thing it's another. First was the well—Mr. Quiggley was sending his wife over to the well. He did ask first well no, he never _asked_ , he told me he was sending her over for water 'cuz they didn't have no water in that trailer and they owned this whole place once and they was entitled to that water. Bin better if he'd asked but back then I just wanted to be friendly with neighbors and figured they'd bin hit hard to lose this place so I tole him to go ahead and send her over. He made it clear to me he didn't come asking no nigger's permission so I just tole him it was my place now and if they had a need and asked I'd be a good Christian neighbor. Well it just got out a hand—they was pushin' anyway. She'd come every day _every day_ and take her a good 10 gallon a water _every day_ _._ I finally went out and tole her she better be leaving some for us but she wouldn't talk to me then. You know what I did?"

Ida waited as if expecting Gerald to know.

"I locked the pump." And she stood back a bit to get a better look at Gerald's reaction. "We get our water direct into the house anyway. I sat 'n watched her the first day she come and find that lock—waited 'til night to do it just so I'd have the time Saturday morning to watch out this window right here and boy she was mad. I think she saw me too peeking through the curtains. Well, you know they always come out to watch me and the boy—did you see them down there watchin' us when I was showing you around? So I guess I got a right to watch them back and I guess I got a right to lock up my own well. So then they go and hook up to my electricity, there's an outlet in that big garage and Mr. Quiggley done run him a line from there and next thing you know my electric bill's doubled. Took a while to see what was going on. He must a done it in the dark at night. Well we took that cord down and my son disconnect the electricity out to the garage and then we locked it up anyway—he got him that old classic pick-up in there—did I show you that? Well maybe another time. So he figured best to lock it up or next you know we be finding that thing gone or all broke up. Those Quiggleys be a mean family, the three of them. The worst be when that woman come in here, in my house, she tole me I had no right to change nothin'. You saw the stairs to the family room? Well that was all closed in before I opened that up all myself and then put the closet underneath all myself, did the drywall myself."

"Your sons didn't help you?"

"Well they would a but I get impatient and there I was one Saturday and it be rainin' out so I couldn't do no yard work— 'n I be lookin' around and get the idea I wanna open up them stairs and put me in an extra closet under there so I just did it. Just got started 'n then I had to go to the lumberyard and get some lumber and the drywall 'n all 'n ended up working till midnight afore I just collapsed—right there on the front room sofa I nearly missed church the next morning. But you saw—I did a good job and you know I never did that drywall work before—I just asked some fella at the Hugh M. Woods 'n followed instructions 'n I think it came out real good, don't you? Well, anyway that woman come over the next day—she musta bin watching for me to come home from church 'cuz I hadn't even got my hat off my head 'n that woman be knockin' at the front door like she just wants ta make a friendly call. I didn't know what ta make of it—after all that trouble over the water and electric.

I just come in from church and be in a forgiving mood ya know. So I let that woman in here and even offer her some ice cream 'n she don't even say how do to me afore she be walking all through the house lookin' around, lookin' around. And she start in ta askin' me questions—what did I do here? Who tole me I could be knockin' down walls like that? I couldn't believe my ears. 'What do you mean who tole me I could knock down my own walls, woman? Who do you think you are comin' in here to my house and tellin' me I got to get permission to remodel my own home? You answer me that?' 'n she start in ta yellin' at me that she live in this house for near on 35 years and she never changed a thing outta respect for her mother-in-law who lived here longer 'n that. 'n I tole her she weren't my mother-in-law and it weren't her house no more 'n I paid my good money and had me a deed ta this house 'n if I wanna put in a closet or take out a wall I'll just go ahead and do that. I tole her she was in my house with my permission and that permission had just expired along with my patience and she better be gettin' her butt up the road and back to her house and not be bothering' me no more 'n she just turned her white face around and ran outta that door and never came round here again.

But the ole man come over that very night to tell me I got no right to talk like that to his missus like that but he never got inside the door and I jes shut that door in his face 'n my son when he hear 'bout all this goins on he get right in his truck 'n drive right down here up to that Quiggleys door and pound on it and they almost don't open up but he shout at them, they damn well better answer their door and when that Mr. Quiggley open up Lance tell him real quiet like that if anything happen to his mother or that little boy out there that he be down here in exactly twenty minutes and shoot Quiggley's head off, that simple, 'n then he just turn around and come up here for supper. All quiet like. But after supper my son he bring me this .38 I got hid away and he take me out back and teach me ta shoot that thing and we shoot cans and targets for a while so them Quiggleys get the idea 'n I got ta admit I ain't had no trouble since, 'kept them watchin' all the time. Why, they be out there now watchin' ta see when you leave."

Gerald drove down the dirt road toward the highway. It was dusky, an ominous evening in early summer, lights coming on in the distance made him melancholy, bringing up old fears. He hurried to get home to the noise and security of familiar people and lots of them. They were so alone out there, Adam and Ida, surrounded by the vast sea of dark night and silence, no trees even to break that sense of unknown eternity, an endless waiting. He imagined the mornings must be a relief with the rush and the bustle. He worried about those Quiggleys.

#

Ida had her boys young, one right after the other. Over the years she forgot the love-making completely. It was as if she'd been impregnated by their father's voice. She never did forget that deep velvet-night edged voice that had caressed her very bones. In the beginning it was to her the sound of all sexuality and all tenderness. Later she recognized it as the voice of the devil, all sexuality and all deception. Shortly after he left to follow smack, booze and music, she looked into her sons' sweet faces and prayed to God to help her raise them, and right then and there God spoke to her. She heard God's voice as clear as day as if he stood next to her in the flesh and the voice was very plain, business like, nothing seductive about it and Ida thought that was a good thing because she'd have been suspicious of a god with a seductive voice.

God was direct, authoritative yet companionable. When her sons were old enough to understand she told them their dad was dead and that God was their father from now on. The boys never did get religion. They figured their mother was religious enough for any three generations of any three families they knew. She prided herself on never again having a man. She prided herself on becoming the plain, direct down to business companion of the god she adored with all her strengths, even the most secret.

After her son gave her the Smith & Wesson .38 hand gun, she put it in a safe place where Adam wouldn't find it, up in the crawl space of the attic, in fact she had to stand on a chair to reach it. She kept a sturdy chair near the trap door to the attic and once timed how long it took her to drag the chair just beneath the opening and slide the door over enough to reach a blind uplifted hand inside to retrieve the gun. After she'd done it quick enough to satisfy her need to feel absolutely safe, she practiced once a week to keep herself ready in case the Quiggley boy were to sneak up on her house some night.

#

The Quiggleys' boy's name was Bobby Lee and until he learned to cuss proper he got teased about it at school. Bobby Lee had never seen a black person up close until that woman moved into his parents' old house with the little boy. He talked in hateful terms about the "nigger" because that was how a grown up white man talked, same as young men in the know talked about some girls: showed you knew what you were talking about. That's what Bobby thought. Then one late afternoon just after the woman moved in and had had some fight with his mother, her cowboy son drove down from Longmont, fast in a cloud of dust and screeched to a stop in their driveway in a way Bobby couldn't help but admire. Lance talked briefly to Mr. Quiggley and turned to go but he noticed Bobby pretending to tinker with his jeep parked next to the cowboy's pick-up and he addressed the white boy:

"Your name is Bob isn't it?"

"Yessir"... Bobby hadn't meant to say "sir" to a black man but that man was the first man to call him by his own grown up name and it took him by surprise. He couldn't take it back and anyway Lance was already telling him something important. Lance was the kind never said a word unless it was important.

"Let me tell you something, Bob. I work with a lot of boys, teachin' 'em to ride, rope broncs, bulls, what have you. Most of my boys bin in jail and this is what they tell me...it's kind of a joke: they tell me the white kids are afraid of the Mexicans because the Mexicans carry knives, and the Mexicans are afraid of the black guys because they all think the black guys all have guns, and _everybody_ is afraid of the Indians because the Indians are plumb crazy. Now what it is kid is this. The Indians got nothing to lose and I gotta tell you there ain't nothing more powerful than having nothing to lose. Know what I mean?"

Bobby didn't really know what he meant but he nodded anyway and said it again, "yessir." Lance got into the pick-up, backed it around with the kind of quick, masterful, one-handed steering maneuver that Bobby had been practicing with the jeep, and then he leaned out the window and let fall one more pearl. "Folks that give you hope, Bob, they don't have to give you nothin' else."

The next time Bob Quiggley saw Lance close up to talk was three years later at the Greeley Stampede. Lance rode in the Will Pickett Black rodeo but he rode in all the nearby rodeos, sometimes, most times, the only black contestant. He was a bull rider, a crowd pleaser, a man who had nothing to lose. At home in Longmont he'd sometimes sit on a flat rock by the creek and let the sound of the water seep into his soul like his father's songs had once drifted into his infant dreams. He was the youngest, not yet a year old when his dad disappeared but he was the son who still had the memories. Well, his brother was a lawyer, what could you expect? Lance did OK training and selling horses and with his winnings. He was a winner. He got respect too. He was good with tough young men and enjoyed their admiration. His mother, his brother, they'd send him kids too mean for anyone else to work with and too vulnerable to just let go into the system of institutions where they'd die on the inside just to survive on the surface. The tougher, the meaner, the lonelier, the more the challenge.

Adam went to the local rodeos with Lance. Lance was teaching him to ride broncs, bareback, the way he'd learned to ride in the very beginning. Around horses Adam was fearless. It was another thing with people. As soon as he saw his brother talking to that neighbor boy he hid in the shadows waiting and watching like he always did.

"Hey Adam, come here. This here's yer neighbor Bob Quiggley wishing he could ride the broncs."

"I kin," yelled Adam smiling but not coming too close yet.

"You?" Bob figured Adam must be about 13 by now but he was such a skinny little kid. He heard it was because no one fed him until Ida got him from Social Services.

"Yeh, he rides real good. I take Adam back home with me every weekend and we ride together...surprised you hadn't noticed the way you always watchin' my mother's place."

It took no more than a second for Bob Quiggley's face to turn completely red.

"Well, we're stopping by mom's for supper 'n then going back to my place. You're welcome to follow along if you're serious about getting up on a horse."

Bob Quiggley went ghost white about as fast as he'd just turned beet red.

"Hey man, I'm not crazy. I won't put you on no bucking horse right off the bat. No you gotta learn to ride 'em first. I just thought you might want to learn, start out slow, you know? I teach young fellas all the time and they all live to tell about it."

#

Ida opened up a window in every room and inhaled deep exaggerated breaths of the December air. It was raining out and cold but the air had the sweet humidity, rare in Colorado, that reminded her of the South. She imagined the smell of the gulf waters and the birds drove her wild with a joyful energy. She'd run around the house sniffing at the air and then set a while with a mug of very hot strong coffee and closed her eyes and visualized a steamy jungle full of color and loud exotic birds that fanned her with the flap of huge wings. In fact, the breeze was chilling her bones and soon she built a crackling pine fire to warm her, sitting right up next to it, but still not ready to close the windows.

Adam was on a road trip with Lance and Bobby. They'd driven to Las Vegas Nevada to the National Pro-Rodeo finals. Ida knew her son hoped to make it as a contestant one day before he got too old for it. Ida never went to see her son compete, said it made her nervous and he said that was fine with him because she made _him_ nervous, making a big deal outta thanking God every time he came home all in one piece and he made a big deal telling her God had nothing to do with it because he, Lance, was damn good at what he did.

Ida knew he'd change when he had kids of his own and he'd realize then how much a parent had to depend on God and pay attention to the signals. "Signals" is what Ida called "signs" or "omens" and perhaps she took it quite literally as directions to turn one way or another or stop altogether. The one and only time she'd ever gone to a rodeo was at the big Denver Coliseum during Stock Show on a bleak, snowy, muddy January Saturday at dusk and sure enough a calf got its neck broke during the roping. A vet had rushed out into the arena to supervise the carrying off of the animal on a stretcher and not much later an announcer told the crowd the calf was OK but Ida knew that was a lie told to appease the environmentalists and humane society folks. That calf had lain too long and still and stiff on the ground not to be dead. Ida figured better a calf than some woman's son and she took it as a warning sign and she never went to another rodeo and tried to convince Lance to give it up but he never did listen to her. Treated her good in every other respect she had to admit but he never did take her advice about anything ever, not even when the boy was killed riding the bull in Greeley. Lance just told her he could as easily get killed driving on the Boulder Turnpike but she didn't want him to quit visiting her anymore did she? And that was the way of it.

Two days later Bobby's ma came over and knocked and when Ida went to the door she put a postcard up for her to see and Ida opened the door slowly, suspiciously but she took the postcard and Mrs. Quiggley said a little stiffly, "Just thought you'd be interested," and went back on home. Ida read the card. It didn't say much: "Hi folks, just so you know we are fine. –Bobby" and it was from Arches National Park in Utah and had a picture of red rocks on the back. Lance had sent her a much better card (did that woman think her son couldn't write?) from Green River and said the boys were tired so he planned to stop the night in Richfield and head out for Vegas in the morning. They'd only just left the day they mailed the cards and would probably be back home the night the cards were received. Ida thought Bobby's ma was making a fuss over nothing. Both women got postcards showing lots of scenes of Vegas, bright lights and show girls in sequins (and not much else) and what appeared to be hundreds of people throwing money down slot machines.

When they got back, Lance like to complain about all the money wasted while folks were hungry on the streets here, there too: plenty of homeless and destitute right there in Vegas, mixed in with all the high rollers, "Maybe they were high rollers the day before yesterday," muttered Ida as he talked.

Come good weather Lance said he wanted to take Adam to see the Grand Canyon and hit some of those small town rodeos on the reservations. Lance said them Indians sure could ride. Ida knew he'd probably take Bobby too, anymore that boy went everywhere with Lance and Adam and that scared her as much as the bulls and the broncs. A voice told her something bad was going to happen, not God talking this time, just something she remembered, something from herself.

When Ida was pregnant with Lance, overdue by then and big as a whale, Marcus took her to St. Louis to meet his mother. She couldn't believe it: She'd always imagined him just appearing on earth on the end of a sunbeam or a bolt of lightening, nothing ordinary about his appearance on the stage of life, but he had a mother it turned out he hadn't seen in some years and wanted her to see her grandson and the other one on the way. They didn't stay long because the mother was very drunk and went from cheerful and over-excited to hostile and mean in a hurry. She was the most grotesque individual Ida had ever laid eyes on. She wore very brightly colored clothes too tight even on her emaciated bones and an abundance of make-up, including false eyelashes, that contrasted with her wizened skin and toothless mouth in a way that was comical or tragic, Ida couldn't decide which. Marcus was actually embarrassed.

A few days after they had left and just before Lance was born, Marcus got the letter that his mother had died (maybe it was the liver, maybe the heart, probably both, she'd been drinking herself to death for more years than most people get) and he cried for a whole night. Ida couldn't reach him, didn't understand. He cried in the nights for the first month of Lance's life. And then a year later it started all over again, the anniversary of the death she guessed and she couldn't do anything for his loss, not so much the loss of his mother as the total lack of any good memories of her. Marcus was very tender to Ida and the boys then, but she heard the voice, from herself, an all-seeing psychic kind of self that said he was leaving and then, sure enough, he was gone.

So Ida _knew_ that something bad was going to happen.

How does a mother protect her children? Is it necessary to remain in constant conversation with god? To beg constantly for divine intervention and be constantly aware that the life beyond one's arms is truly a minefield? To fill the cosmos with such palpable anxiety that it literally creates a barrier between the beloved and disaster? Ida thought so. Her own widowed father had shown her so little affection, none that she could actually remember, and had restricted her childhood and adolescence with such a stern ferocity that she had felt righteous leaving him and her guilt turned to hatred until her own children were old enough to cause her panic and then she knew that he had loved her and she forgave him and even wrote him a letter that didn't begin to say it all, but that didn't matter because a neighbor returned her letter with a brief note giving the date of his death whereupon she sent him her message through God and good for her that she'd found God by then.

In late May and early June Lance took the boys to some brandings, sometimes for pay sometimes for sociable and that was good hard work, real work with no time for unnecessary dangers and Ida relaxed. But then, with barely a pause for breath and clean laundry, they were off again to the rodeos. Ida kept a map on the kitchen table and every evening she'd talk to God and tell him where he was needed: in Holbrook/Joseph city, Arizona where the power plant lit up the nights with a vision of hell—when Lance was there that god-forsaken strip of route 40 was blessed, in Gallup, New Mexico and Shiprock and Farmington, in Del Norte, Pueblo and Greeley closer to home, wherever Lance went to risk his neck for a dream she could neither understand nor accept.

The town of Cimarron half way between Raton and Taos came to life once a year on the Fourth of July when generations of its children who had left ten, twenty, thirty years before returned to recognize one another, share a few beers and re-live old memories. The rodeo got off to a leisurely start after the parade ended and lasted right up until it was time to get cleaned up for the fireworks and the dance. The organizers could be forgiven for drawing out as long as possible its one day of glory. Contestants came from southern Colorado and straight down I-25 from Cheyenne, all over New Mexico and small towns in west Texas and Amarillo too. Occasionally the announcer would introduce a bronc or a bull rider from as far as Nebraska or Alabama.

Ida's eyes searched her map the morning of the 4th. She followed the broad red line down from Trinidad to Raton, Springer and Wagon Mound and then all around the little grey lines finding Ocate and Angel Fire and Agua Fria, Eagle Nest and Ute Park and then she found Cimarron in the middle and concentrated on her conversation with God, imagining the announcer making bad jokes and the clowns running around keeping the bucking animals away from fallen cowboys.

#

"I rode between Danny Flannigan and Sean Vargas one year, two weeks after Flannigan got a 99. That was in Orlando, Florida and you better believe I was in hog heaven."

The announcer introduced the rodeo queens who rode around the arena with the state and national flags and then he introduced a lady he said had never missed a rodeo since 1960 and told about how they couldn't start without her being there. He also told the crowd that the Cimarron Fourth of July rodeo was the longest running rodeo in the country, having been held every year without fail since 1923, and some of the wives and girlfriends rolled their eyes and said yes indeed they believed it WAS the longest running rodeo in the country starting at 10:30 in the morning and usually not ending until 6:00 at night and hoping it wouldn't get too hot this year or rain and hail like last year.

"Jesus that ole Gretchen was gray haired and old looking when I left here twenty years ago. Wonder what she looks like now."

"Old and gray-haired I reckon."

"I remember when a man used to pray the horse _would_ throw him because if he didn't, the pick-up man would kill him for damn sure."

A lot of laughing and reminiscing by middle-aged men that still talked about getting them a good roping horse one of these days but who would probably spend the rest of their weekends working overtime at the bakery, the shop, the factory in Denver, in Albuquerque, in Amarillo now the kids were in college, spending all their time studying and letting mom do their laundry, so _they_ wouldn't have to work in bakeries or auto repair shops or factories.

#

"God, look after my boys in Cimarron, New Mexico. That's where they are today and I got this awful feeling something terrible is going to happen there if you don't be watching out for them."

Ida closed her eyes and pictured the town, bleak and dusty, just like she'd seen it in a real picture once with the historic St. James Hotel that advertised 26 men had been killed within its walls and claimed a few ghosts to capture the bit of tourism that came through.

#

"Why don't he get up? What's wrong?"

The EMTs ran into the arena and helped another cowboy walk slowly off after feeling all his bones...just stunned someone reckoned.

"Did you see that clown? Useless! Just ran right outta the way."

"Someone call a Doctor. Hey Dr. Daniels, Dr. Daniels, Dr. Jack Daniels."

Lotsa laughing, lotsa cowboys lay there a while stunned or not sure what might have happened to them, some injury maybe could get worse if they move the wrong way.

"Hey don't they know nothing. They shouldn't be moving that boy 'til the medics come. They should know better."

The ambulance came out into the arena and drove off with another cowboy. Usually the announcer would come on a little later and give the crowd a report.

"That guy'll be well by next year just in time to ride another bull. When are these guys gonna learn you can't just ride in and do it, ya gotta stay in shape?"

After the bull riding, they had the little kids chasing calves and the wild cow milking contest and then the event where crowds of grown men chased wild horses hoping to catch and ride one. Everybody had a helluva good time.

#

Every time Mrs. Quiggley looked at Bobby in his wheelchair she remembered her pregnancy. It was a miracle Bobby wasn't born crippled, being as Mr. Quiggley was drunk and angry most of the last three months. He'd get angry over the least little thing and beat her, hitting her in the stomach and then yelling at her that his son would be born deformed and it would be her fault for making him angry. He'd be real sorry as he sobered up, go to church, bring her flowers and three weeks later get all riled up again.

Her folks were poor and didn't want to hear her problems and anyway, she knew her Dad would smack her Mom upside the head when he was drunk on a Friday night. The minister of her church told her a woman's place was beside her husband. So she stayed and figured out that life was indeed not that proverbial bowl of cherries. She got her pleasures vicariously from the television. She did stop going to church, a small rebellion that didn't bring down the wrath of God upon her head. Her husband had enough wrath for both of them. Only after Bobby's accident on the Fourth of July last did she begin to wonder if maybe she'd been wrong, sinful, and Bobby's condition was her punishment. She started wheeling him into church with her every Sunday regular. Mr. Quiggley would grumble, because he felt guilty still, never realizing what a friend he had in the minister.

Bobby would wake up slowly in the early spring mornings, listening to the sweet sounds of birds outside his window that he begged to have left open and he wouldn't remember right off what part of his life he was in, the crippled part, the longest part. He'd begin to stretch a body he couldn't move and feel pain in his imagination and sometimes it took a full half hour for him to realize he couldn't run outside and look furtively for crocuses. He started recalling things he'd long ago forgotten, like an old person getting ready to die. He remembered showing his mother the first spring crocuses and she'd get excited with him but his father would growl and call him a sissy.

His Dad was calling him a sissy for as long as he could remember. Until he started riding the bulls. Then his Dad would grumble about "that nigger Lance" and the "little nigger boy" Adam, but Bobby could see that his Dad was afraid of Lance and let escape a certain surprised awe of Adam, and Bobby knew that the fear and the awe were as close as his Dad would ever come to respecting anyone. It was the closest he'd ever seen his Dad get to being proud of his son. That "crazy-assed bull-riding good-for-nothing son of mine" he'd call Bobby and Bobby felt loved by his old man for the first time ever.

His Dad never actually saw him ride. He wouldn't go to the rodeos because Bobby always went with Lance and Adam and Mr. Quiggley wanted no contact with "the nigger" and his encouragement and pride were so subtle that it was easy enough for him to blame them when Bobby had his accident. The first time he found out that Lance and Adam were coming to his home to visit his son, he got so enraged he hit Bobby in the face and almost dragged him out of his chair before Mrs. Quiggley could stop him. Bobby heard them yelling and screaming and his Ma crying and pleading. She was grateful for any visit, any attention, any friendship that cheered her poor boy.

"Alright, alright, but not when I'm home dammit! Jesus Christ woman don't you know it's all that black-assed cowboy's fault our poor boy is in that chair?!"

"You encouraged him yourself. You were proud of him and he always wanted you to be proud of him. He did it for you anyway. He'd have done anything to get you to love him."

"Shutup."

Then his Dad got quiet and calm and went in the other room to watch TV. He had on a ball game fairly loud, annoyingly loud actually, but after being very still and listening very carefully, it seemed to Bobby he could hear his Dad crying. His Mom had already cried herself to sleep in the bedroom and he could hear her soft snores. He wished then that his poor mother could sleep forever and that his father would cry again and again and that someday he could see it. It wasn't hate, his poor body didn't have the energy to fuel hatred. It was just curiosity maybe, wondering what his Dad would look like with tears instead of rage on his face.

Adam was still visiting with Bobby feeding him the dinner Mrs. Quiggley brought into the room for the two of them to share. Then they heard Mr. Quiggley's truck drive up, unexpected so early in the afternoon and Mrs. Quiggley started to tell Adam to run out by the back door, but it was too late, and Mr. Quiggley yelled at her to come in the kitchen and then Adam heard such a crashing and screaming while Bobby's Dad knocked his mother all over the kitchen into pots and pans that fell from the stove and crockery that broke when it was knocked from the counter to the floor and all the while him cussing and her screaming at him to stop. Adam looked at Bobby and Bobby told him:

"It's not your fault. He's just using that as an excuse. He gets this way every couple of months or so and it don't take nothing to set him off. He'll quit soon and go get drunk and then he'll pass out and be sorry in the morning. He's always been like this."

Adam heard the door slam shut and the jeep start up and go screeching out of the driveway. Then he slowly and quietly went to the window to make sure Mr. Quiggley was really gone and when he saw it wasn't a trick he walked into the kitchen. Mrs. Quiggley was picking up pots and pans and dishes slowly like a zombie and there were tears soaking her face and her nose was running. He began to help her clean up the mess, wanting somehow to apologize and then the most extraordinary thing happened. Mrs. Quiggley let her pots and pans drop again and grabbed Adam. She hugged him very close and cried out loud shaking and sobbing. He dared not hold her back or push her away. He remembered his mother holding him the same way, his real, long-ago mother, after she had beaten him after his stepdad had beaten her. He didn't understand any of this. He never knew what it was he had done. But Mrs. Quiggley finally quit and let go of him and dried her face and said:

"It's not your fault, Adam. Ask Bobby, he'll tell you. But please don't say nothing to your Ma, OK?"

Adam promised not to say nothing and he left very quietly through the front door and ran on home.

#

Ida had run off with a singer she met celebrating her 17th birthday, honky-tonking with her friends and she knew it was crazy and probably even bad but he sang the sorrow and love she'd never known how to express and it seemed to her she didn't really have a choice in the matter. And anyway he'd gotten her virginity so carefully saved all those years and she was afraid to face her father in the morning, so she just didn't go home at all but traveled with her magic man from deep in Louisiana up along the river toward Chicago.

It was summertime and they'd drive in the nights and then park in a shady spot in the morning and sleep in back of his truck. He'd fixed it up with 2x4s and a tarp to make a kind of covered wagon of it and laid all kinds of blankets and sleeping bags out over the floor of it to make a soft bed.

Afternoons they'd walk along the river where everything was soft and hazy, birds making lazy sounds as they coasted on warm air currents and the fluff from the cottonwoods drifting around them, and evenings he'd find himself a place, a dance hall, or bar, where they'd let him play his guitar and sing for tips. Ida went with him a few times but after a while he asked her to stay at the campsite they'd made. He stayed out later when she stayed home. Some nights he came back broke because the manager would take his tips to pay for the booze he consumed. Some nights he came back bruised because he fought for his tips. And some nights he came back broke and bruised because he fought for his tips and lost.

When she told him she hadn't gotten her monthly and must be pregnant, he didn't seem too glad. In fact he cussed her good but he didn't hit her. He told her he could find someone to give her an abortion but she didn't believe in that and they argued and she cried every night alone in the truck because he didn't love the baby in her belly. That's when she first started praying, hard, to God, someone vague still in her mind. Ida knew the baby was a girl because she dreamed about a girl baby and she decided she'd name her Cardenia to rhyme with the sweetest smelling flowers she knew. It was a rich and gorgeous gift a poor, homeless woman could still bestow, a gift of imagination. But Cardenia slipped away, no more than a clot in a river of blood that almost took Ida herself in the flow.

"I dreamt I was carrying my baby through a crowd and then suddenly the baby was not in my arms and I found Marcus to see if he had taken her but he didn't have the baby either and I was crying and scared and I told him 'I've lost the baby, I've lost the baby' and when he came back that night I was still whimpering 'I've lost the baby, I've lost the baby' and I was just bleeding and bleeding so I knew I must have miscarried."

"What a relief" was all he said and she knew it was better this way and that she should thank God for the timely miscarriage but she couldn't help mourning. That next day as soon as the shops opened he brought her sanitary napkins and clean clothes but he didn't know enough to take her to a doctor. After 4 days of bleeding and feeling weaker and weaker Ida realized she could be dying and they drove to the nearest emergency room. The nurse told her another day and she could have bled to death as her body worked to rid itself of the last minuscule vestige of the fetus. A doctor cleaned her out, gave her antibiotics and advised no sex for three weeks.

Marcus felt so guilty he nursed her tenderly for the whole time and then, when she was well in body but sick in spirit and wanted another child, he gave her one, a boy this time and the boy survived. For a little while the man, and woman and the baby boy made a little family temporarily sheltered from poverty and despair by love and good intentions. This man could sing and con his way into anything including a regular paying job and so he did until not quite a year after the birth of the second son when he was overcome with wanderlust and boredom, and strong urges he recognized partly with dread and partly with excitement and he simply walked away one night never to return.

As she aged, Ida's mind churned up the rich soil of her memories and long-ago dreams came back in her sleep. "I've lost the baby, I've lost the baby," she was crying in such real grief when Adam ran in. "Wake up mama, wake up, everything will be alright."

"Abandoned," she whimpered and reached a hand out to someone. Adam held the hand and whispered back, "Ok, mama, you sleep. I won't abandon you, I'll be here when you wake," and he was, Ida thanked God.

Danny and Joe, A Friendship

I.

Danny's Vision Quest

A day came when Danny didn't have the urge to drink. It wasn't that he didn't want to drink; he never wanted to drink but he just couldn't help it. This time the idea bored him. He played with it, testing himself, but the urge wasn't there.

He figured the time had come to head west again. He kind of angled himself northwest toward Brighton Blvd. to hit I-70 and then he'd take his chances hitching, worse came to worse he'd spend another night in the Cherokee Street jail on a loitering charge.

He was heading to a place called Glacier Lakes, a name on the map that appealed to him. He'd memorized all the roads and he'd just keep thumbing and asking for each road in turn until he was in the area and then he'd scope it out.

The first person to give him a ride was an old woman which surprised him because he thought that women were scared to pick up hitchhikers. But this woman was craving company and as soon as he closed the door she began talking to him about what he guessed was her life, picking up her narrative where she had left it off sometime in a past she didn't seem to realize he didn't share. If he asked questions she got irritated so he just shut up and listened in total confusion.

It didn't take long to get sleepy and he wasn't sure when he was dreaming or waking. He'd look over at her while she droned and see this huge birdlike creature clutching the wheel and talking with a desperate intensity. Blinking didn't help. He had to shut his eyes again and sleep, rude or not, and when he awoke fifty miles later she was still talking. She let him out somewhat abruptly in the middle of nowhere with some quiet and inexplicable anger. Maybe she had asked for some response and caught him napping. Maybe she thought she knew him.

The old woman gave him food and told him she'd see him later. She gave him an apple, a peanut butter sandwich and a hunk of cheese, like the lunches his mother used to pack for him when he attended day school a hundred years ago. Maybe she was his mother and he just didn't recognize her. She looked to be a white woman but she was so old it was hard to tell. He checked his surroundings carefully just in case he hadn't gone anywhere, but he'd traveled alright and he had that lunch to prove the old lady had been a reality.

His next ride was with an old man who looked a lot like the old lady and he also talked a lot: mostly about the weather and all the places he'd been and what the weather had been like in those places. Danny heard about tornadoes and hurricanes and six month snow storms, also about warm weather, humidity, insects and malaria: the guy had been around. When he let Danny out at a diner he gave him a blanket: one of those plaid things with thick wool fringe. Danny still had about 100 mountain miles to go.

The next car slowed for Danny to get in and was off like a shot before he could shut the door. In the back seat two half-naked kids were apparently screwing and the driver was clearly stoned. Danny decided the best way to get through this was to sleep. The driver woke him as he screeched into a gas station saying, "Gas, grass or ass man, nobody rides for free," and Danny said that was fine but he had to take a whiz. He locked himself in the men's room and peeked out the vent until he saw the car burn rubber and take off down the highway.

Danny wondered if he should try to be careful or let God look out for him. He wasn't so sure about God anymore but trying to be careful was too stressful. He'd had three different rides and only traveled about 80 miles. He prayed that he might magnetize a pick-up with a gun rack, a 4x4 with a canoe on top or an old jalopy with fishing gear protruding from the trunk: anything to indicate that there were serious folks inside. He watched an attendant change the trash bag in the can outside and then took the clean bag to use for cover in case it rained, and headed west again.

He walked for a good hour before anyone stopped and he thought he slept as he walked, plodding slowly and stubbornly toward his goal. Then he was picked up by a car in a caravan of cars. This large group of rednecks had hired horses to take them high into the mountains to a secluded fishing spot and made jokes about Danny coming along as their guide. He told them he was a city boy and they probably knew more about tracking than he did. Danny pretended to be asleep while they made cracks about injuns and women and someone told that old story about some guy fucking a doe.

They stopped at a cabin at the base of the recreation area before dawn and sat down to a large pancake breakfast ordered ahead. Danny was invited to join them but he didn't feel like pancakes and asked instead if they could spare him ten bucks which someone in the group obligingly handed him.

There was a map outside the cabin on a large piece of wood with the lines and letters burned into it and he located a spot far from the group's destination, and started walking. He'd overheard one of the men talking about this spot: how no one was going that far, not this time, maybe another time: so he knew that was his spot. He started following the horse droppings of other guided groups. It was a long and difficult hike but one thing about street life was a man got used to being on his feet and walking was as natural to Danny as sleeping standing up was to a horse.

The hike took him a good six hours but he still had energy and daylight left over when he got there. He recognized the place by the joy he felt when he arrived. He let out a holler and ran across the grassy meadows to the glaciers melting at the edges and feeding little lakes.

At the edge of one of the lakes he found an abandoned one room cabin, slightly caved in on one side. There was no firewood to speak of that he could use in the cabin's rusty stove so he went about collecting rocks, as big as he could carry and built a circle big enough to hold the seasoned fence posts that tilted at odd angels from the ground. Some still had pieces of barbed attached to them and he handled them gingerly as he crisscrossed them in the stone circle. He divided the fence posts into three piles, one in the stone circle and two by the cabin to be used later. He knew he'd need three nights and knew that he could not get through them without fire. Then he gathered pine cones and small branches for kindling. He got hot working in the late afternoon sun and stripped naked to store its rays in the pores of his skin.

It got cold long before it got dark on the snow-speckled plateau all around and high above him. The wind in the pines roared like ocean waves (Danny had heard the ocean waves at the movies). He slept outside that first night close to the fire, his feet almost in it and he'd wake up every now and then to look at the stars, stars by the millions that he never saw in the city, and listen again to the half threatening, half soothing roar of the wind in the pines. He's stir up and replenish his fire and go back to a deep sleep. He knew this was the place. The Gods would come to him here and give him a name.

The next morning he awoke to spiral columns of steam rising off the lake like ghosts and a keen but controllable hunger. It was still chilly but he stripped again and washed in the icy water hootin' and hollerin' as he splashed himself. He dried himself with the rough wool blanket and laid it on the still hot stones of his fire circle to dry. Later when the sun was high in the sky he resolved to wash his clothes again. He enjoyed the smell of himself when he was clean and sober.

He spent the day exploring the plateau around the lake but always kept the lake in sight despite the urge to follow new paths over ridges, around rock formations, track a waterfall to its source. That day, his first full day, he kept close to his center. Later he'd range further, paying attention to the timbre of flowing streams of melted snow, the arrangement of small and large glaciers and meadows, places where the trees had burned and fallen covered with lichen and moss, making a map in his mind.

On the second day the mountains drew him farther and farther out. It was the third day he got lost. He was following a path back toward camp he'd followed three times already, decided to take a diagonal toward his point, ran into impassable thickets of head high willows and headed back to his original straight line, except that there are no straight lines in the mountains where wild animals wend their way through the overgrowth in patterns that relate to their own seasons, carrying their warmth with them and eating wherever they go, unaware of the needs of men to get back to someplace before dark. In a matter of fifteen minutes, maybe less, Danny was totally lost. Instinctively he slowed down, knowing haste would bring him all the sooner to disaster. He calmed his urge to panic. He remembered he had headed west earlier in the day and tried to keep the lowering sun at his back. And he knew that time uncounted goes quickly by and the return is always longer than the journey out, so he wouldn't start too soon down the mountainside for there were many valleys with similar lakes on both sides of the plateau.

From east to west on the plateau meadows dipped and rose in gentle rises but on the north and south the way down was steep and treacherous. Once he thought he'd walked far enough and started down into the pine woods that looked familiar. When he got close enough to see there was no cabin in this valley with its lake of melted snow, he also realized it was dark so far down and he scrambled and ran pulling himself up by the branches and roots of trees to reach the light and the far view of the plateau. He began to fear the cold dark night. Once the darkness came it would be useless to move.

Having reached the top of the plateau he began to walk away again from the setting sun and decided to leave it to the Gods. He'd make no decisions, just keep walking until he received a sign that he had come to his spot. He made no attempt to recognize the familiar but looked instead for the extraordinary.

The extraordinary thing he saw was an old woman picking tiny wild flowers that grew everywhere. He imagined she was picking them for tea. He imagined she was his grandmother or the old woman from the highway. He could not get close enough to see her as she hastened her pace whenever he tried to catch up but he could feel her femaleness. He thought he caught the smell of a goat in heat, a smell that wafted back to him from twenty years ago. She wouldn't let him get near, but he knew she was sent to lead him because she never let herself move out of his vision. It was that dusky, surreal time of day when nothing is clear, when terror or ecstasy sets in. For Danny it had always been booze that turned terror into a brief ecstasy before the anger overwhelmed him. He had always associated that time with neon, but here it was a pale moon that came up in perfect balance with the lowering sun on the opposite side of the sky. He willed his panic down, kept his eyes stoically on the fading, flickering goat-woman and told himself he'd see another morning.

Because he was afraid, he broke into a sweat, and the sweat felt icy on his skin. When the woman's head disappeared over the steep edge of the plateau he called to her not to leave him, but she didn't come back, and then he realized that must be the spot to climb down to his cabin in the valley by the lake.

The light wavered as it dimmed and the trees appeared to be moving with him down the steep mountain sides to the lake. He kept his eyes on the gleam of moonlight on the water. His first vision of the woman had faded into the trees but he knew there would be others. He had come here to follow visions. There was a smell too that he followed as he felt his way in the darkness to the lake. He recognized the smell of the old cabin with its scorched fireplace and ancient ashes, the rusty smell of nails and barbed wire, these alien smells rising from the earth smell and the pine smell were a landmark in the night guiding him to his safe spot.

Once there he began to tremble with the fear and the cold and the weakness of hunger and he may even have cried. But through this bodily pain he felt a fine satisfaction, a sharply honed joy that wracked him because he felt it coming on: the trance that heralded the coming of visions, his initiation into the consciousness of his race. His own Gods were here in these mountains and they were coming to name him, a name of his own people.

His body tingled with exhaustion and he savored the slow creeping numbness and relaxation as his body fell asleep before his brain and then finally he succumbed completely to sleep and dreams.

It started in the Gold Mine Bar with all the usual crowd of down and outers, men drifting in from the tracks and Jack was singing in the corner that they always converted to a stage when he came in. And it never went anywhere. No mountains in this dream and no eagles or bears. Just his usual night life reenacted in his dream as if he'd never slept, never gotten lost on the mountain, never fallen into a trance-like state: an ordinary dream. When it finally came, the voice intoning his name, it was not in Hualapai or any Indian language he'd recognize. It was in plain lousy English in the voice of some bartender he vaguely remembered:

"Singer" the guy called him: "Singer." It wasn't even accurate, it didn't mean anything, because Danny couldn't sing worth shit and it was Jack that was the singer. So he figured Jack had invaded his dream, had put a hex on him, was maybe this very minute making a mockery of him, singing some funny song like he sometimes did, making up the lyrics as he went along in a blues mode or country/western mode or rock 'n roll: he could sing them all with equal ease and he had that quirky sense of humor that could devastate you. In his dream Danny woke up and registered dissatisfaction with the dream but he was still not really awake: it was a strange overlapping of consciousness but it didn't matter because it was the same world in his dream that he lived every day of his life and when he finally did awake fully he was surprised to be in the mountains at all because that dream had felt more real to him than the beautiful surreal wilderness that surrounded him.

Danny was indeed in the mountains and he believed he really had been lost and led back to safety by a strange old woman, a mythical woman, and that should have counted for something. But no Gods had visited him in his trance and bestowed upon him a name he could bear with pride. Of course he had run away a long time ago and chosen his own life and maybe the message was that he belonged in that life, in that city, on those streets. He felt defeated and hungry and hunted up the food he had saved. The apple was soft but edible. The cheese had gotten moldy and smelly in its plastic baggie but the peanut butter sandwich was OK and he ate it in tiny bites chewing slowly and somewhat tentatively to see how his stomach would react. Ultimately he kept it down although it choked his throat which was dry with surprise and sadness and disappointment. Hell, he'd had enough of hunger and cold and he walked briskly till his legs wobbled, back toward the entrance to the recreation area. Thank God he didn't meet those rednecks coming down.

As he descended, he heard birds literally screaming as he approached their nests in the low growing bushes, and his own laughter because he meant them no harm, didn't even know about the nests but for their noise, and always, always the delicate sound of shallow water running down the mountains, hidden in the low willows that hid the birds and various other small critters. And wind, pretty constant the wind. The sound of planes blended with the wind until they got close and there was no mistaking their roar for wind or thunder or anything god-made and Danny realized it was a journey back in time he wanted: he wanted to go back to a time when the gods took care of men, rewarded and punished them, and the affairs of men and gods were indeed mysterious, but these were mysteries penetrable by certain means and certain men and women. Life was a game yes, a dangerous game, but a game with some sense, played with purpose.

Somehow men had usurped the power of gods, some men, men who put those noisy planes in the air. But who could usurp the mysteries? In place of the mysterious was only chance, often harsh and always meaningless. So what good was a name to Danny anyway in this new world? Something his drunken buddies could call him by: the gods wouldn't be calling him. He remembered the old woman. People who had hallucinations these days were locked up in hospitals and called crazy. Maybe that should be his name: Crazy Dan.

Once priests and shamans had visions; in some parts of the world they still did, were still revered for it and their wisdom sought out, but not on the city streets that had become his home, getting drunk in the dark cavernous bars was the only ceremony these days.

The land of his people, the Hualapai, Mojave and Navajo, the land of the Hopi, the Havasupai, the Zuni, and Utes, the Lipan, Jicarilla, Tonto and Mescalero people, the Chiricahua, Yavapai, Kiowa, Santa Clara, Dakota, Lakota, Oglala, Brule, Blackfeet and Bloods, where once lived the Cree, the Shoshone, the Cherokee and Cheyenne, Tis-Tsis-Tas, Arra-Arra and Dine they called themselves, Kwakiutl, Inuit, Haida, Maida, Alsea, Aleuts, Athabascans, Acoma, Ponca, Ojibway, Sac and Fox, Pottawatomi, Kickapoo, he'd learned all their names once a long time ago in legends and myths secretly told, he strained to remember, memory being all that was left of some, a hundred here, a dozen there, and there a name only if only he could remember it: Illinois, Miami and Delaware memorialized, Abenaki, Pequod, Mohegan, Micmac, Seneca, Passamaquoddy, Nez Perce, Multnomah, Modoc and Miwok, Tewa and Tiwa, Toltecs and Tsimshian, Wasco, Wintu, more there were more, the Chinook and Cochiti, Coos, Crow and Flathead, Okanogan, Metis, Maliseets and Lumni, what did all the names mean? He didn't know, enough to remember, to chant them to the mountain: Pawnee, Shawnee, the Kansa and Mandan, the Iroquois and Arapaho, the Katawba, Wichita, Missouri and Chippewa, lands of the Osage, Papago, Yakima, the Seri, Cocopa, the Pee Posh, Assimboin, and Powhatan . . .all those people, all those lands, no longer sacred. What wasn't dug up for coal and radio-activated was buried under concrete and condos, golf courses and tenements, roads and factories, foul smelling, ugly and privately owned.

No wonder the gods had fled, leaving a handful of devotees searching without hope, getting locked up, getting drunk, crying and dying and dying out until they would be gone too. Up here it was cold at night and the daytime sun was hot and the mountains still dominated, but even here in this remote and harsh landscape, planes flew overhead. Danny high tailed it for the road – it was the only world left to him.

II.

Joe's Journey

Joe had been put on the bus in Denver to go visit his sister in Pueblo but he didn't get off in Pueblo and the driver didn't notice him until Walsenburg. The drivers had changed in Colorado Springs and the new one didn't know about Joe so he just put him off the bus and figured that was his lookout. Joe had wanted to go to San Francisco ever since his last runaway episode. He'd been found in Cheeseman Park then and the attendant who found him with another man told him he belonged in San Francisco with the other faggots. Joe didn't know what a faggot was but took the man at his word and decided to head for San Francisco next time they let him out. He had no idea of the distance or direction or even what exactly San Francisco was – it could be another group home.

Joe was picked up by a bald headed man in a van that he lived in on the road. He told Joe he was from Boulder and was on his way to a dance, "Sun Dance" he called it, and asked Joe if he'd like to go and Joe said "Why not" and so found himself riding for a couple of days through land that grew hotter and more bleak with the miles. They slept in the van at a rest stop between huge trucks, the same that came barreling down on them on the highway, constantly startling him. When the bald man stopped for gas Joe peed and got back in the van, afraid not to, the land seemed so lonely. He ate beef jerky and chips but the bald man said he was fasting. In the home you weren't allowed not to eat.

The morning of the next day they stopped to visit an old Hopi man named Thomas in a village with a foreign name. It looked like television pictures Joe had seen of the villages in the middle east. The house was a series of rooms built as add-ons, the window of one looking into the next and through another window into yet another room. It was "L" shaped and seemingly endless. Around the walls of each room were stacked various things: filing cabinets, boxes of clothes and linens, washers and dryers and tables piled with tools, boots, books and papers. Then around the inside of this border of assorted accumulations were lined up yet another layer of boxes and tables, fold-away beds, mattresses, chairs stacked with more books, more papers and so on until only the center of each room provided a clear passage to the next room. In Thomas' "office" a double bed was barely accessible behind a make-shift work table surrounded by four different chairs in different phases of disrepair and these all stacked with papers. One carefully covered electric typewriter sat on a table behind the bed and god only knew where he plugged it in, if he plugged in. Only the kitchen was left clear and functional holding a wood stove, a gas range, a refrigerator, a double sink, a hutch cupboard, a table set with bowls and utensils and again four chairs of somewhat sturdier appearance. The living room held an electric organ covered with a rug and stacked high with the ubiquitous books and papers and the same with various sofas and armchairs. The used furniture might have filled three houses but there was no place to sit comfortably without transferring various items from one surface to another. Outside were parked a half dozen vehicles without wheels or engines, their innards and limbs apparently donated to newer, functioning vehicles. Thomas moved some books and stacks of papers to make room for his guests and they sat at his work table.

Outside, the wind made an ominous noise and blew dust and litter across the barren landscape. Thomas drew the blanket that served as a curtain over the door, over the jamb and shut the door on it, thereby securing it tight against the wind. His hair was tied back with a red chiffon scarf and he had red yarn braided into a short scraggly braid down his neck. The three nibbled on old fruit that filled his room with ripe odors.

Thomas told Joe and the bald headed man what he told all his visitors—the Hopi prophecy. People were mistreating the earth and there was going to be a great world wide purification—whether by natural causes like a flood, or a nuclear war Thomas didn't know but he knew it was coming soon...and when it did, the survivors wouldn't know how to live with what was left of their world. He said they'd have to come to the mesas and be taught how to grow food so it was important to leave the traditional people on their land to keep up the ceremonies and the old ways so they could teach the survivors after the great purification. He fully expected to see all those folks, fleeing chaos, crowd into the bleak land of sandstone and clay he called home. And this was a man who'd been to the United Nations in Geneva, the Congress in Washington, D.C., had spoken in Los Angeles (and yes San Francisco) and had even spent seven years in a U.S. prison because no one told him he was entitled to conscientious objector status during World War II. This man who had been everywhere, was here today and across the ocean the next, believed the world was going to end up in Kokotsmovi village. The bald man nodded his agreement – it made sense to him. Joe asked if they had a lake – he'd like to raise ducks. Thomas was silent a moment.

"What did you say?"

"I said where is the lake? I'd like to learn to raise ducks."

Thomas just looked at Joe for a while and then said he thought it was a little dry for ducks.

Joe was relieved when Thomas' wife came in to invite them to file singly through the myriad rooms to the kitchen where she served corn and bean soup with bread and an herb that tasted like a mint and a hot pepper. After they had eaten, they went to another village to watch the Kachina dances – Joe heard Thomas say there would be clowns. The clowns were dressed in cut off blue jeans and painted with obscure insider jokes written in English on their backs. They all ate incredible quantities of food brought them by the village women: home-made cakes and pies mixed up with packaged cookies, chips and sodas and fresh fruits. Some other men were dressed as Navajo women and the rest were dressed as traditional Kachinas. The dance Joe watched was called the Navajo Dance. People came to watch and climbed ladders to sit on top of the Pueblo dwellings and sometimes clowns threw melons up to the children sitting up high with their legs dangling down. They moved and ran here and there like little mountain goats. Grandmothers sat stolidly on folding chairs in colorful shawls thinking private thoughts or not thinking at all, sleeping with their eyes open in the hot desert sun, at home in their world.

Then they continued on, following roads like animal paths to the top of a mountain where people had set up tents and tipis and were cooking over fires outside. A bedroll was found for Joe and he slept under the stars near the van as did the bald man. In the morning just as the sun became visible over the mountains his friend got up and walked around the camp drumming and chanting a beautiful song. His voice was clear and made Joe happy. Joe got up and put his pants on in a hurry but left off his shirt and ran barefoot through the sand, miraculously missing the cactus that grew here and there, he called out loud to all the people still asleep in their tents to wake up and listen to his friend sing and they all grunted and said "OK Joe" because he'd been introduced all around by the Buddhist dancer and he loved to hear his name spoken that way by all those voices within the tents and so he did this every morning thereafter—woke the people at sunrise with his friend. And then a man would call out around the camp, "All dancers to the sweat, all dancers to the sweat," and they let Joe go into the sweat lodge too but when he asked if he could dance he was told to watch this year and then maybe he could dance next year. Joe thought a year was a long time. He had no idea about ceremonies...his own rituals at the home were daily and very dull – he preferred not even to get out of bed for them—those people in the home were nice but not too smart—no imaginations.

The dancing would continue for four days—for four days the men and women who had so chosen would go without food and water and dance for long periods in the hot sun. They'd have brief breaks in the shade and sometimes a sip of water. They'd have sweats in the evenings and each dancer carried a fan made of eagle feathers and when they stopped they'd fan each other's necks, gently lifting the long hot hair of their brothers and sisters.

The night before the dancing began a procession of people carried a large tree, hung with multi-colored prayer flags and offerings, to the center of the circle where a deep hole had been dug. They planted the tree in the hole and filled it in with dirt and food offerings which were blessed by an elderly woman of the tribe. There was drumming and chanting and ropes were tied to the tree hanging down like the ribbons of a Maypole but later these ropes would be affixed to the chests of young men with sticks that went through the piercings of their skin and when the young men, so attached to the Tree of Life, the tree that acted as a conduit to the Great Spirit, pulled away, their flesh was pulled away and left at the end of the ropes that were then tied up around the Tree. The medicine man who led and explained the ceremony told them you cannot give to God what is already his, you can only give what is yours to give: your own flesh and your prayers. And so the Tree would stand there the four seasons hung with the flesh offerings of those who would pray and sacrifice to the Great Spirit and who might sometimes come back to this tree in times of trouble to ask for help.

Through the night and the next couple days people arrived in campers and vans, with small tents and tipis and the dusty mountain top became a village. There were Buddhists and Rastas and Australian Aboriginals, Cherokee and Cheyenne, Arapaho and Shoshone and an Iroquois Chief, Shawnee and Dine but it was a Lakota medicine man who led them. There were Indian men who had gotten out of jail just in time to hitch a ride to the Mountain. There were young women who'd lost their children, lived on the streets, been drunk for weeks, sobered up and made decisions about their lives. There were desperate people and determined people. There were whites who claimed an eighth or sixteenth Indian blood, whites who claimed mystical past-life connections and whites of plain European descent who were political activists and legal workers supporting the resistance of the traditional Navajo to the forced relocation. There were Mexican Jews investigating their Indio roots and there were folks who weren't saying and could be anything. There were gap-toothed old hippies and students of Tai Chi, there were dreamy children who talked about rainbows and angry children who wondered out loud why all the white people had come. There were crows and eagles soaring and calling overhead and sheep and goats farting and baaing and dogs barking and trucks sputtering. There was thunder and a few ten minute showers that evaporated as they hit the ground, and wind, incessant wind blowing, and men laughing and women whispering. They were all there to capture a vision.

In the late afternoon several of the dancers were escorted to the Tree by a female dancer—they ran up to it in couples and the women stayed in the center to pray but the men, after praying, went to the edge of the circle where they were harnessed to a rope on which were tied several buffalo skulls. Sticks were pierced through the skin on their backs and the ropes that attached to the skulls were tied to the sticks. Escorted by several comrades each man in turn ran around the circle dragging the skulls which grabbed the ground with their horns. Then finally he stood still and little children were brought into the circle to sit on the skulls and when he took off again to run, the harness broke free and the flesh of his back was torn and streams of blood decorated his back. This was repeated many times as each man made his prayer and submitted to his yoke of suffering and transcendence, but the very first time Joe saw the blood run down a man's back he went wild, screaming and running into the sacred circle and the helpers appointed to act as "security" grabbed him as gently as they could but firmly and they took him to the medicine tent where a man in a red arm band gave him some herbal tea and talked to him quietly, quietly...but he didn't stop talking to Joe until the drums and the chanting had ceased and the ceremony was over for a short break. They induced Joe to sleep then and resolved to keep him away from the rest of the Sun Dance for he was too frightened by the flesh offerings that would take place each day.

Joe was escorted once more to the arbor encircling the Sun Dance ground for the water ceremony. The leader alone in the center held a bucket of water in one hand and his eagle feather fan in the other and with the fan he scooped the water out and tossed it up toward the tree and the drops of water flickered in the sun like silver coins and dropped to the dry earth. Helpers danced around the circle fanning sprinkles of water over the bowed heads of the spectators and then other helpers came around as they did throughout the four days, with smudge pots and waved the sage and juniper smoke over and around the bodies of the people with brushes made of sage tied with red yarn and the people bent toward the fragrant, purifying smoke and waved it towards them with their own sage brushes and Joe followed their actions and imitated their reverence without questioning it. In the modern world, spirituality had become a motion people went through, hoping thereby to arrive at its core and accepting, in the meantime, that they were lost and seeking to assuage their panic.

The wind was incessant, blowing the hot dry sand everywhere, the hottest driest summer in 28 years said old Lee at the Dinebito Trading Post. But when Joe was put to work herding sheep, he discovered that when he kept moving, pacing himself to the rhythm of the sheep and goats, the wind didn't bother him. The noise it made in the trees was like friendly talk he enjoyed listening to and Joe enjoyed the graceful sounds of the bells on two or three of the animals and the bleating of the babies running after the mothers to nurse. Joe had been shown where to lead the herd and to keep a certain distance and allow the animals space to graze. When he could smell the sourish smell of the lactating mothers he knew he was too close and stepped backwards over the sand and rock. He felt prayerful in this atmosphere that made him think he was a shepherd in the land and time of Jesus. He stopped shaking, he stopped smoking, he stopped his chatter and listened to the land. Its voice was distant and slow and required his total concentration. It told him to rest, to be happy and when to pay attention to a straying lamb. He almost wanted to stay forever herding the sheep, but they told him it got very cold in the winters – 40° below some nights, so he decided to continue on to San Francisco.

III.

The Meeting

The newly risen sun settles on fields of pale sage like a kiss. School buses and trucks glitter in rural driveways and at rest stops along the early morning highway. Drivers sleep in their little houses or in their rigs gradually waking up, stretching, getting ready to hit the road again. Over railroad tracks, past miles of wrecked automobiles, a flight of noisy birds makes a moving pattern against the sides of freight trains, and black eyed susans grow tall through piles of dry rotted tires and curve out from the broken windshields of gutted, rusted car bodies. The air smells of smoke, hot rubber and flowers.

Joe wakes, sleeps and finally wakes again at the bus depot downtown where a staffer waits for him with the van marked _Wheat Ridge Home for the Developmentally Disabled_. Joe sees the van first and realizes he isn't quite ready yet to let go of the world. Joe slips through the crowd to the street without entering the depot and the staffer waits patiently inside watching as each passenger trails tiredly into the building. When it's obvious no one else is getting off, he wonders if Joe missed his connection in Pueblo. Somehow, these guys never learn. Just to be sure, the staffer boards the bus to check, but only finds an old black man cleaning up debris from the trip. "A dark skinny fella with a strange way of talking" is all he can think of to describe Joe. "Lot a skinny dark fellas ride this bus but I don't talk to none of 'em," responds the old man and the staffer checks his frustration with little grace and curses under his breath, spreading his bit of confusion and hostility to ripple throughout the day.

Joe has already hitched a ride to 6th and Santa Fe where he knows the way and will look up his old friend Berthe Sanchez.

There are always sounds in Joe's head: voices or music. Sometimes the music is very beautiful but very sad. It makes tears come up in his chest and he feels them behind his eyes but they never get quite close enough to spill out—like the vomit that comes up to his throat but not high enough to throw up when some man rapes him. Somehow his body knows it isn't a good thing for him to do, cry or throw up. It always makes somebody mad.

What Joe has always liked best to do is walk. He can walk forever without getting tired and sometimes he'd just walk away from the group home and be gone for days or even weeks if he hitched a ride somewhere or had money for the bus. San Francisco had been his best and worst adventure.

Joe had no idea when he set off, where or what it was, and his idea of the geographical extent of the place was still confused with the places he traveled through to get there. To Joe, San Francisco meant Indians and the Sun Dance, desert and ocean and Golden Gate Park. To the staffers, San Francisco meant the three weeks Joe didn't brush his teeth even once and they all had to be pulled when he got back. It also meant strange stories they suspected were really hallucinations, dreams and nightmares. No one could tell Joe what anything meant, not even his court appointed lawyer, not even Danny who got a janitorial job for a couple of weeks when he brought Joe home one morning.

It was music that made Joe remember his adventures in the world. In the fall, geese came to the soccer field near the railroad tracks down by Main and even gulls strayed over from Sloan's Lake. The noises they made caused Joe to smell the salt water on the beach and think of walking along the coast, on the sand and close to the cliffs and through the woods of low growing, scrubby trees where men made camps in their protection. The men wore clothing that was filthy and torn, in many layers for warmth, even in the summer months, and had long hair and beards that covered sometimes all but bloodshot eyes, some of them. Some of them were newer to the streets and parks and outskirts of the city.

One of them called to Joe one day and he sat and talked to them and sipped from the bottle of a foul tasting drink they passed around in a brown paper bag. He felt important and respected and didn't notice them looking at each other when he talked.

One of them called him a faggot and ordered him to dance like a woman and Joe didn't know if that was good or bad. It seemed strange but the man seemed friendly too and he did as he was told and they all laughed, even Joe, until suddenly their laughter sounded nasty to him and he got confused and stopped dancing and laughing and the man who started it all got mad and grabbed him, called him a lot of angry names and threw him around.

Then the man bent him over and tore his clothes and poked his thing into Joe's ass with such speed and force and for so long that Joe was broken and bleeding and trying not to cry or vomit and it was worse than it had ever been, even when he was a little boy that time he'd almost forgotten, and yet the other men still laughed.

Joe closed his eyes and went to sleep, lying where they dropped him on a bed of pine needles. He couldn't walk or sit so he just lay there and slept, not crying or remembering; just listening to the high pitched calls of the gulls and the waves beating the cliffs, a rhythm both terrible and soothing.

Some other men came and found him and helped him to a hospital where they left him and ran away. He stayed a few days and refused to talk because if they knew what happened he'd get into trouble. "AIDS" they always told him, told him what AIDS did to people and how he could get it "fooling around"... "fooling around." Joe almost cried. The sex lives of retarded adults are of great concern to institutions. Institutions can be sued so sex is highly discouraged albeit ineffectively. Joe's homosexuality was a source of mild amusement or embarrassment to the staffers and everyone was afraid he'd pick up and transmit AIDS. On one occassion a nurse had visited Joe and discussed sex with him in highly graphic and clinical terms that embarrassed Joe to the point he paid little attention but focused more on avoiding the woman's determined stare that belied her equally determined smile (designed to put him at ease). Had they but known, Joe was confused and afraid himself. Craving warmth and affection, what he more often got was invasion and shame. Joe didn't know what to do about loneliness and isolation.

The people at the hospital wouldn't let him out until he told them where he had come from. He figured it was time to go home anyway so he told them and phone calls were made and his bus trip home arranged and the driver instructed to help him make connections because he was developmentally disabled and mentally ill..."You mean he's a retard?" responded the driver but was kind enough to Joe. He asked him to sit up front and talked to him while he drove, said it was nice to have some company after all.

Joe remembered other times in the park and the huge trees where he'd sit and pretend the forest extended forever and there were no streets, no people, no buildings. He'd stare at the trees as he walked until he was forced to turn his head to look at them and he hated to turn away and he often hid in the park at night.

Other times he felt like seeing people and streets and buildings and he'd ride the bus all around the city. Sometimes he'd peed himself, couldn't help it, nowhere to go and he couldn't hold it and he'd be so embarrassed, knew he stank and people grimaced when he got on and that hurt his feelings but there were some men on 8th St. under the highway, near the Convention Center who were kind to him, showed him where to clean up, invited him to share their stash of blankets and sleeping bags and food. There was one big fella who told the other men Joe was special and that they should treat him with respect.

One night his friend was in jail but the others were still respectful and they told Joe his friend was a Lakota Sioux Indian and it seemed they were in awe of him. They also told Joe he was 100 years old and turned into an eagle once a month and laughed when Joe looked surprised. But they slapped his back and his knee when they laughed and drank some and looked away and settled down again with little grunts and were generally polite.

"Be polite" the Lakota Sioux eagle Indian always told them. Joe told them about the Sun Dance and they weren't surprised. They knew all about it, but Joe never told anyone back at the home about the Indians dancing. He was afraid the supervisors would find them and lock them up because they made blood come. Patients who cut themselves at the home were locked in a tiny room with nothing in it and sometimes even wrapped up like a burrito so they couldn't move their arms. It was called the "time out" room and still so many of the people at the home would try to cut themselves or beat their heads against the walls or beat each other because of a constant rage continually denied.

#

Danny was let off at a church at 6th and Galapago Street. There was a bake sale and a carnival going on: kids with gold fish in baggies, everyone yelling in Spanish. It was there that he literally bumped into Joe. He was pre-occupied and still kind of dazed and Joe was more or less permanently dazed, so those two just bumped into each other like comedians in one of those old time stage shows. They both said "excuse me" and Joe asked Danny mildly enough if Danny was going to kill him and cut him up into little pieces. Danny was taken aback, didn't even laugh (which was good) and told Joe that was not the kind of thing he usually thought of doing and if he did think of doing it to someone it wouldn't be Joe, for sure it wouldn't be Joe.

It turned out that Joe had run away from some kind of home and he did that a lot and when they found him and brought him back someone would always warn him that there were weird people out on the streets and mean folks who might kill him and cut off his head or his hands. The guy looked to be 45 easy.

"I been out on the street twenty years off and on and that never happened to me," said Danny unconsciously putting out his two hands as proof.

Course, Danny wasn't a retarded, homosexual, schizophrenic like Joe turned out to be: tough luck for Joe.

Danny promised to help Joe get back home and it was one helluva walk for a man who'd just been through what Danny had been through. On the way they stopped at the Gold Mine and Danny introduced Joe to a few grizzled men who grunted and lifted their heads slightly in greeting. Joe approached one fella with a mean looking scar all over his face and a tattoo all over his upper arm, the one he had left, that looked big enough to do double duty, and asked him if he was Spanish: he thought the guy looked Spanish.

Joe's manner was so mild and his voice so sweet that a man just knew he had to be joking and this man reacted with some hostility but Joe started jabbering away in Spanish so fast the man's dangerous look subsided into amazement. He looked at Danny:

"This guy loco or what?"

"Whaddya mean?"

"I mean he don't make no sense man, none."

"I think he's retarded."

The fella who was Spanish got real nice then and so did the other men: any kind of mental deviance awed them as indeed it should. Joe wouldn't drink but he accepted a smoke and looked around with a sort of smug expression as he smoked with these men. Then when he'd finished he stood up and said it was time to go and it was obvious he expected Danny to go with him. Wandering away was a lot easier than wandering back. One of the residents of Joe's home had wandered off and gotten lost for several weeks. Finally he stole a police car, vacated for a few minutes and left running, and drove it through a store front, which was a pretty smart move since the center's staff had been checking hospital emergency rooms and jails daily. They considered these folks to be dangerous to themselves or others.

As Danny and Joe worked their way north they passed a park where people were gathering with picnic baskets and lawn chairs to enjoy one of the free performances the City's Department of Parks and Recreation provided throughout the summer. This night a Flamenco dancer was performing with an accompanying guitarist and a singer. Her dancing was very beautiful as she manipulated her long skirts and shawls and a fan in a series of traditional dances but it was the singing that captured the fancy of Danny and Joe. Danny started chanting along with the singer until he became aware of the angry disapproving eyes of the people all around him and then he became quiet with difficulty. Joe appeared simply lost in the rhythms and haughty postures.

When it was over and quite dark, the two men started back toward Joe's house and Danny began again to chant the gypsy music. Joe joined him with surprising accuracy and they had a good time as they walked through the night. They slept on the street when they could walk no longer, on a patch of grass under a tree, pillowing their heads on their arms on the roots of the magically sheltering tree.

Cool breezes blew and a light soft rain fell breaking the heat and comforted them. Joe dreamt of the drops of the water ceremony and tried to tell Danny when they woke at sunrise but Danny said that was all bullshit and went back to sleep a while, leaving Joe to marvel alone at the colors. Finally Danny awoke again and got up, needing to pee and Joe was close enough to know the way home and led Danny to the main building.

Staffers were suspicious of Danny at first but Joe insisted he was his friend and that all Indians took good care of him and Danny saw a few folks roll their eyes then but they were civil, and, just on the off chance, he asked about work and was sent to another building to see the "maintenance engineer".

Danny reminded Joe of the Eagleman from San Francisco who had once protected him from the cold and the rudeness of men, Joe developed a crush on Danny and followed him around, asking what tribe he was (Joe had never heard of Hualapai, which was unusual since Joe had heard of all kinds of people including Basques) and what his home had been like, did they have ducks on the Hualapai reservation? Stuff like that. Danny got irritated at first but he felt sorry for Joe and tried having conversations with him, chaotic as that endeavor often turned out to be.

Danny was viewed with mixed responses by the staff. It was good that Joe was calmer when Danny visited with him, but then again he was just a janitor, not a trained professional and what did he know? One thing Danny knew was that Joe could learn whatever he wanted to learn and that he simply disdained what bored him. Joe was bi-lingual and knew the difference between ritual and routine but he did not know the difference between a nickel and a quarter. Joe also believed the medications that made him drowsy were deliberately given to disable him in case of an attack. Some days he knew to a certainty that people were after him and even understood the entire convoluted reasoning behind it. Other days he knew for a certainty that it was all nonsense and that he himself had something very wrong with him and belonged exactly where he was. On those "lucid" days he spent many hours in bed, chain smoking. Somewhere between his two worlds of despair and panic he dreamed of happiness, of enjoying simple things, of sleeping outside so when he woke briefly from time to time all he had to do was open his eyes to see the stars. Danny understood this. He understood the despair and he understood the joy of absolute freedom even at the cost of safety and comfort. He did not understand the paranoia but accepted it and was willing to pretend to protect Joe and weather the storm of strange visitations from a world he couldn't see but would not say was not real. Danny believed in other worlds, had tried to break through to one in the mountains, and remembering his disappointment, he understood Joe's reluctance to take the meds. He didn't say anything though, didn't mention when he found the pills in the trash, or tell the high falutin Doctors what he thought they were doing wrong.

Sometimes when Joe shivered, cold from within, Danny would help him take a hot bath to warm his bones and sometimes he would take a nap with him, just hold him to keep him from shivering, to keep him warm. None of the staff saw it, but a resident did and jabbered away about it as he did about everything he either saw or imagined. The staff didn't know whether to believe it or not and Danny found himself the object of many thoughtful glances. If he looked back the looker looked away. Danny decided if they had something to ask him they would and went about his business.

IV.

The Excursion

With the help of an RTD operator, Danny worked out the bus connections to Elitches. The amusement park used to be a few blocks from the home but had been moved to the new, shiny, tourist-destination downtown. Over an earlier strata of skid-row warehouses, flophouses, Jesus-Saves shelters, condemned houses, whole neighborhoods hiding beneath the highways where remnants of families struggled, survived or died hidden from the view of city planners, a layer of glitz had been laid: the new Coors Field for the new baseball team, the Pepsi Event Center, Elitches Amusement Park, its huge Ferris wheel dominating the confluence of railroad tracks, bicycle paths and bridges under which a few of the homeless still managed a bit of shut-eye amidst the commotion.

It was risky taking Joe into a crowd, but the psychologist on the team was new, came in with a desire to see all his clients get better, cheer up, learn new things, prove the old Doctors wrong. He came in optimistic, looking on the bright side, generous with the benefit of the doubt, believing in miracles. He thought an excursion to Elitches would be fun for Joe, turn him on to the possibilities of the "real" world and perhaps be some incentive for Joe to follow the rules and take his meds. Day passes were earned with points given for compliant behavior. It had been Danny's idea. He was craving the excitement of a noisy crowd and a festive atmosphere. The price of the tickets would come out of Joe's account replenished monthly with his disability check.

The last day the park was open, Elitches was advertising discounts on food and rides and a prize for the one hundredth person and the one thousandth person through the gate: a car for the first, a romantic weekend for two at a new downtown hotel for the next. One minute Danny was joking to Joe about whatever would they do if they won one of those prizes as if either of them ever won anything but a trip to jail, and the next he's talking to himself. Its like that in crowds, you look away a few seconds and your companion completely disappears. Joe's attention had strayed and he'd turned to look at someone who looked familiar and by the time he looked back in Danny's direction, Danny was gone, long black braid and all. Danny, walking and talking until he realized Joe wasn't following, retraced his steps as best he could, the crowd forcing him off course, and he began to panic. First he was feeling selfish, like you sort of had to be to survive this cold cruel world, worried about losing his job if he didn't find Joe. Then he wondered why he cared so much about the damn janitor's job, not like he hadn't had dozens like it over the years. Then he started to feel like someone's damn mother or something worried about what might happen to Joe if he didn't find him. So he reminded himself that Joe had survived on his own on the streets before they met but, instead of making Danny feel better, it reminded him of the painful memories Joe had shared with him, and Danny started to feel this terrible helpless desperate thing, this desire to protect Joe from more painful memories and an anger at the kind of people that would pick on a poor old retarded guy. Finally he realized there was nothing he could do and he decided it was time to invoke some old AA philosophy, trust a higher power, any higher power, and he forced himself to stand still right where he was and let Joe find him. And Joe did.

Joe was trembling but he always got kind of shaky when he needed nicotine. Danny lit him a cigarette and they went in search of food. They ate turkey legs and munched on kettle corn while they walked and then, feeling lighthearted, rode one of those whirligig things that only children should have anything to do with. Joe, who never ate much anyway, threw up everything all over the seat and the ride operator just gave them that look that made Danny want to get in his face and say something devastating, but he couldn't think of anything that wouldn't be wasted on the big mean moron. Danny used his own money to buy a T-shirt with a scene of Denver on it for six times what it would have cost at the flea market, and then found the men's' room where he helped Joe get washed up and changed into the clean new shirt. Joe's dignity had begun to be more important to Danny than it may have been to Joe. Joe's expressions, facial and verbal, were always a bit "off" so that Danny wasn't always sure if he was attributing his own feelings to Joe and then feeling sorry for himself in some convoluted way. He was thinking this while he washed the vomit off the old shirt so he could bag it and take it back to the home and then, seeing how old and torn and tattered it actually was, he just tossed it.

"You don't need this" he told Joe meaning a whole lot of things.

Joe finally told Danny he wanted to leave, the crowd was making him crazy and Danny heard it for a moment from Joe's head, the noise: bits of music, the grinding of gears, shrieks and screams and laughter and chatter grew palpable and engulfed him until he felt almost dizzy. They left and Danny started toward the bus stop but neither he nor Joe was ready yet to return to the dullness of the home. They needed some adventure, something to stimulate and tire them before the bus ride home and a TV show before bed. They headed into town, past the bars around the stadium (after several weeks sobriety, Danny didn't want to crash and burn just because they had nothing better to do) and over to the Sixteenth Street Mall. Here, tourists, stylish shoppers and businessmen and women mingled with the runaway kids and homeless people who rode the free shuttle up and down Sixteenth Street from the Railroad Station on Wynkoop to the Main Bus Station on Broadway. Anyone who didn't have things to do and places to go acted like he did. Everyone looked purposeful. Danny decided they should go see if any of his old buddies were hanging out at the MacDs on Court Street (nice not to be going to Court). But they didn't ride the shuttle because the route was lined with street performers, mostly musicians, and Joe wanted to stop and listen to each and every one.

Over by the Tabor Center between Larimer and Lawrence was one of those groups that work their way up from Bolivia, Peru, Guatamala through Mexico into Colorado and beyond, playing those little flute things and selling their cassettes and CDs. Of course Joe wanted to talk to them, find out where they were from because that was the first thing he always asked any new person he met. Danny enjoyed talking to them too and when they took a break they all had a bite to eat together, riding the shuttle to MacDs where Danny didn't see anyone from his old crowd, and back again to sit in the sun and listen to the music and urge the passersby to "tip these guys, they are working for you, and they're good too." When it looked like Danny and Joe might be scaring potential customers off, the group's leader said they needed to move on and Danny and Joe moved on too, following the music eastward. There was an incredibly tall skinny fellow said he was from the Texas hill country playing some bluegrass and a slender blonde girl dressed in a long dress looked like a costume from a stage-play, who plucked an odd instrument she told them was a dulcimer. A man in a Mickey Mouse Mask and costume strummed a guitar, but he wasn't very good and Danny figured he was probably hiding out from someone. Then a hot clarinet played by an old man Danny thought he'd met before. The name on the cassette said Adam Starvinsky (good one thought Danny) and he remembered this was the guy a newspaper reporter interviewed one time. Every now and then, the papers liked to carry a story about some street character, the guy who did some funky dance on the corner of Colfax and Colorado where he sold bunches of flowers year in, year out, rain or shine, this Starvinksy fellow who was pretty damn good and had a respectable past, an old lady they called "grandma" who made up a doozy of a story for them. They didn't know she was flat out nuts and always had been. Danny suspected that the women sometimes pretended to be crazy, as a kind of protection, because the streets were so dangerous for them. He daydreamed and reminisced himself all the way to the end where the same hotdog vendor who had been there for going on twenty years still hooked up a loudspeaker to his cart and broadcast grand opera for a full block in each direction. Danny bellowed out La Dona e mobile without knowing what it meant.

They were having fun and it stayed light so late that Danny didn't notice the time even though the time was right there for all to see on the clock at the top of the Daniels and Fisher Tower. It was feeling tired that reminded him they had a long bus ride with a couple connections ahead of them. Of course they were late. Of course the staff people on duty were worried "sick" and of course he lost his job the very next morning. That new psychologist said he'd "trusted" Danny as if he'd done something terrible (like losing Joe altogether) and everyone was very sorry but . . . . . Danny kind of figured they were looking for an excuse to get rid of him and maybe he'd needed one himself to get free of the depressing place.

When Danny left, Joe cried and the two men hugged and performed one of those long complicated ritual handshakes, while impatient staffers looked on and then Danny strode off singing loudly. He sang that Spanish gypsy music Joe like so much and Joe could hear him for blocks.

When he got to the busy public road, Danny called a taxi from a pay phone. He'd had enough of buses and he still had most of four weeks wages, so he decided to go back home in style. He arrived at the Gold Mine at 2:00 p.m. and bought drinks for everyone there.

"Hey man where you been all these weeks? Robbing banks?"

"I been traveling man. I been places."

"Places huh? I notice you ain't saying what places. I bet you been in jail. You been in jail man? What'd you do to get yourself in jail so long? Huh?"

Danny started to tell him he hadn't been in jail, that he'd been to the mountains and he'd had a job, but he remembered that singer fellow who made up sarcastic songs about everyone, and his disappointment over his name, and he decided to let them think he'd been in jail because that was something they could understand and he didn't want anyone messing with his dream and there was no way in hell he'd ever tell them about his friend Joe.

### Yellow Wolf and Shortstuff

"You have a grandmother's braid."

She smiles and goes soft in the eyes. I can see that someone once told her she was beautiful and she believed him. She still had the look of a woman who thinks she is beautiful. From where I sit, she is. I am old and I see beauty in everyone.

"How do you know about that?"

I can't hear everything he says but I hear his voice is the voice of a white man and I hear him say the word "belief" a couple times. "My belief" I think he says. He may have Indian blood, you can't tell anymore just by looking but more likely he is just enamored of the mythology, more interesting than the worn capitalistic interpretations of Christianity. All that crap about Santa Claus. It must make more sense to believe in dead ancestors.

And I hear that there is something going on in the silences. I'm not so rude as to stare but I can tell she is tearing up, touched deeply. From the corner of my eye, pretending to watch for the street signs out the window, I see her pull the bit of braid, it looks like a rope really, from the inside of her jacket and hand it to the man who examines it, not sure yet of her intention.

"It is given" is what she says, "to you" is the implication. He thanks her. She looks at him with that soft romantic glance, the half smile, feeling beautiful. She does have a kind of exotic beauty not completely obscured by the worn out jeans and oversized plaid shirt, the filthy down parka, all picked up at the Salvation Army thrift shop if not the trash.

He asks her name and repeats the name. I hear him say what I could not hear her say: Yellow Wolf. Telling her name, her real name, is a gift as well. I don't catch his name, perhaps she didn't think to ask, perhaps she thought he'd offer it without being asked. Their conversation stops, rendered awkward by her generosity. Where do they go from here? Once again she has given too much.

A couple stops later I hear her say the words "help out" and his response is louder than before. He says clearly he would help her if he could, she is asking the wrong person, he is broke, has only a few cents. She says she understands. She is already regretting her gift. No connection was made, not really. He understands too, softens his vehemence, says he does have some bus tokens if that would help any. She says it would and I imagine the exchange made quickly as the bus lurches, stops and he gets off at what may or may not be his stop.

A very short wide woman bundled in a snow suit, cap and boots gets on and stands uncertainly in the aisle. She is not as short as a dwarf but has some dwarf-like features and her face, there is something about her face, Down's syndrome they call it now. She looks toward Yellow Wolf but says nothing. She looks in the direction of an empty seat but does not take it. The man sitting next to the empty seat points it out to her, an inviting gesture, and she sits down. Then she is sitting directly across the aisle from Yellow Wolf in those seats near the front that face the center aisle instead of forward and Yellow Wolf sees her there and smiles a huge, happy smile of greeting.

"I haven't seen you in a while. Where you bin hanging out?"

"Home. I bin staying off the streets."

"Yeah you gotta stay off them streets." And Yellow Wolf smiles even more largely as if remembering some insider joke.

"I bin sick. Just came out to get medicine."

"You can't be too sick," says Yellow Wolf

"No, I can't be too sick. I'm out."

They talk some more, riding through their neighborhood and being sociable on the bus pretending it's a carefree summer day instead of the middle of winter and flue season and they are going home to a cold empty studio apartment over a liquor store or Laundromat.

At her stop, Yellow Wolf gets up and so does the short woman and they hug before Yellow Wolf gets off the bus and Yellow Wolf says "I love you, Shortstuff" and Shortstuff sits down again.

She is still on the bus when I get off in my more residential neighborhood of houses and trees. I imagine her riding all the way to the end of the line in Aurora, a place where concrete barricades are set at one end or the other of alternate blocks to cut down on drive by shootings and single teen-age moms carry babies in and out of each other's apartments dropping them off before going to work at fast food franchises or telemarketing centers. They try to take such good care of the little ones and vow their children will not do drugs or get into gangs and they grow old before they are thirty and the kids grow up and big and start having children of their own as soon as their bodies are able. They do drugs and they do get into gangs because the few blocks to another life is a very long journey that most of them won't make. There was a boy who resisted, refused, would not go through the gang initiation and he was shot: to death. His mother who gave birth to him at the age of thirteen is devastated. I hear her talking to another mother on the bus. I hear the boy's name and remember him, I once represented him in the Juvenile Court when he got into trouble and social services intervened and we were all very pleased with ourselves when the case was closed because the family successfully completed all their classes and therapy. That was before I got sick and stopped working. I grieved a long time, overhearing on the bus that this boy I'd known briefly a few years before was now dead, could not have been more than sixteen. His mother didn't recognize me, or maybe she did, but what was there to say?

Friends tell me to sell my old house and move to a safer part of town. But I find myself feeling foreign among educated middle class people. I am educated and they think that I am middle class, but I am a fraud really. I feel more at home among the people I observe on the bus. And when I feel threatened by some person who falls into step with me along the street, someone who seems on the very edge of violence, I ask that person questions, get him to talk about himself, about feelings and memories and then we find ourselves among the people at the bus stop and I am safe again. I am a good listener and it has served me well in this life.

I remember faces too and when I next saw Yellow Wolf, even dressed as she was in a sundress and sandals and looking cleaner, younger, I remembered her instantly. I was glad that life was treating her better at least for that day. I smiled at her but she didn't notice or recognize me and I must admit I did feel just a bit hurt.

I recognized Shortstuff too on another day even without her heavy layers of winter clothing. It was a late summer day and she wore shorts and a tee shirt and tennis shoes torn at the toe. Yellow Wolf was not on the bus but there was another older woman who was a regular on that bus. This woman always dressed in outlandish outfits, sometimes a fancy dress from another era, sometimes pouffy pants tucked into knee high boots and a wide sleeved shirt belted at the waist so her outfit looked like a pirate costume, and hats, she always wore hats. Her hair was dyed a garish red and while old, she looked like she had once been quite glamorous. She acted very kindly toward Shortstuff and the two sat together and discussed what was on the menu at the place on Colfax that fed the homeless and the hopelessly poor. I noticed a man watching them. I began watching him watching them. Then the woman in the pirate costume got off after inviting Shortstuff to join her but Shortstuff said she had an appointment to meet her landlady. She said she owed rent and had finally gotten the money to pay it. She said this loudly enough for anyone to hear and I wondered about the wisdom of that. The man watching the two women continued to stare at Shortstuff and when she got off, he suddenly got off the bus as well as if he had forgotten and then suddenly remembered where he was going. I am old, I don't move fast enough or I would have gotten off the bus as well, found a reason to walk with her, there is safety in numbers after all. But by the time I realized what was happening it was too late, the bus driver had started up the street and told me he couldn't stop, he would let me off at the next stop two blocks ahead. I looked back and saw the two people, Shortstuff and the young man talking in what seemed a friendly enough manner. I got off two blocks away after getting a transfer and started heading in their direction as quickly as I could walk but wondered what I would say to the two of them, she didn't know me, for all I knew maybe they were not complete strangers and he had been staring because he wasn't sure if he remembered her or not or from where, that happens a lot. When they turned and walked away together I changed my mind, realized I have an over active imagination, probably from watching too much television. Retirement has not been such a good thing for me. Then I got sick with a cold and didn't ride the bus anywhere for several days.

The first time I went out again the leaves had changed color and the world was so purely beautiful I decided to walk somewhere. I walked a few blocks to a coffee house on Colfax where I ordered one of those fancy drinks and savored it slowly while I read a weekly newspaper. There was a story about a developmentally disabled woman, a very popular person on the street who had been found murdered behind a dumpster. The article said she was much missed and wondered who could have done such a thing to such a well liked individual and why. It couldn't have been to steal anything, she had nothing to steal. The article gave the victim's first and last name and a nickname that was not Shortstuff but I couldn't help wondering if it wasn't the same woman, maybe Shortstuff was just what Yellow Wolf called her, maybe I had not heard it right that one time months earlier on the noisy bus. There was no picture. I worried that it was the same person and that I should have somehow caught up with her and that young man who got off the bus with her. But she might have thought I was just a crazy old lady. I'd never spoken to her before. I agonized over this throughout the fall, and started riding the bus more often hoping to see her get on one day and lay my fears to rest.

It didn't happen. I did see Yellow Wolf one more time and smiled at her again and even tried to ask her about her little friend but she just looked at me like she thought I was some crazy old lady who needed to mind her own business. After that I stopped riding that bus. I take the #20 now when I want to go somewhere.

INCIDENT ON THE #15 BUS

A woman was sitting across from Dancer with her eyes closed not in sleep but in an attempt to hide. She had long black hair, arranged in a thick plain bun under a purple velvet hat with black satin roses. She wore a black leotard top with a purple crinkled cotton skirt that reached nearly to her ankles and Dancer could see the bottom buttons of vintage black button-up boots. Her hands were elegant with many interesting rings on the fingers but the nails cut short and square and unpolished. She wore long dangle earrings. Her eyelids and lips and cheekbones were lovely as if carved in marble but her nose was thick and her neck wrinkled and gave away her age despite the look of innocence that her lashes lying on her cheeks suggested. Dancer instinctively felt sorry for her. Soon a man got on the bus, breathless from running and sat next to the woman. He had shoulder length blonde hair that appeared dirty and a large bushy blonde mustache. His skin was red and weathered and his blue eyes red rimmed from tears or a hangover, probably both. He was tall and lean and wore jeans and work boots and a blue denim shirt the same color as his eyes giving away some vestige of boyish vanity. He pleaded with the sleeping woman to come back home and all she said was OK in a tired voice and pulled the chain for the next stop. She barely opened her eyes but Dancer could see they were black as her hair. She got up with the man but held him back to allow others off first and she left her frayed black velvet drawstring bag on the seat. Dancer glanced at it and said nothing. The woman waited until the man had stepped off the bus and then said "Wait, I left my bag" in a loud voice and it was obvious she put all her strength into it. Then, as she turned back toward her seat, she cried to the driver "Close the door!" He did and took off while the blue-eyed man pounded on the glass doors and tried to force them open, shouting "Fuck you" to the driver who felt like a hero just then and the woman dropped into her seat and closed her eyes. She must have ridden to the end and Dancer never saw her again. But when the man got on some days and sat next to Dancer, smelling of whisky and talking up a storm, she knew who he meant when he told her his wife left him. "I know" she said "I was on the bus that day." He said "oh" sounding disappointed, deprived of the telling and the opportunity to embellish the mundane with more tragic details. He'd tried out several versions on several different women and any one of them showed considerably more concern. But most of the other women had stories of their own he really didn't want to hear and Dancer didn't talk at all so he started catching her bus on a regular basis and soon got past his wife leaving him and onto the problems of raising a teen-age daughter alone, how strict he was, how he loved her, how much like her mother she was and how he wouldn't ever let her date. What he didn't tell, Dancer guessed, and when he told her his girl had run away, Dancer knew she'd guessed right.

#

Ronnie never touched his daughter when she was young, really young. He'd never do a thing like that. It wasn't until his wife left him and Cindy had started to develop and looked like her mother, that long raven hair like her mother's that hadn't been cut since the sixties and the same eyes and the same mouth and he thought she was Suzanne when he was drunk enough and he came to her at night and took her into his arms and cried, and loving and needing his wife, he held his daughter and pushed into her and made desperate, tender, little boy needing his momma love to her. Why had Suzanne left them? Didn't she think this would happen? How could she do this to him, to Cindy? leaving her growing daughter alone with a boy-man who couldn't live without her and drank himself into a stupor every night so he didn't recognize what he was doing, that Cindy was his daughter not his wife? How could she have done that to them? But of course she couldn't have known, didn't think, was so desperate herself to escape her slavery, another woman with nowhere to go. Even the slaves of Egypt after 400 years had the hope of the promised land, they had to cross the sea to get there but once there they were free. But for women like Suzanne there was nowhere to go where they would be safe from men who would enslave them with their strong bodies or their little boy eyes, tricking them or beating them, whatever it took and there was nowhere to go but inside, pretend to sleep, not to hear them, not to feel them, abandon your own body and the children of your own body...so Suzanne was thinking when she rode the bus to nowhere Ronnie could find her. So Dancer thought as she watched her do it.

Dancer guessed what was going on from Ronnie's disjointed monologues on the bus. She had wanted to avoid him and usually did but sometimes he caught her and she sat eyes forward, straight and silent until her stop when she excused herself and walked the remaining two blocks to work. She was afraid he'd follow her to the bookstore and one day he did, keeping apace with her and turning into the door as if he'd known all along where she worked. He was talking about his daughter running away and how worried he was and then he stopped and she looked at him for the first time, startled, and saw his eyes riveted on the newspaper headlines: the body of a 14 year old girl had been found in a culvert under I-25 near the bicycle path in southeast Denver and the police said she looked to have been dead for a couple of days.

"Oh my god," Dancer said and looked back at Ronnie but he had gone. She looked up the street and didn't see him. She thought she'd better call the police but when she thought about it she realized she had nothing real to say. She watched people on the bus and often they talked to her and she made up stories about them...this sounded like a story she'd made up. She was afraid of him and went home watchfully. She thought she should look for another job on another bus route or maybe move to a mountain town.

#

The long 4th of July weekend was beyond gloomy, it felt threatening. The snow didn't fall in the city, but close enough over Mt. Evans that some people felt it as an omen. At the bus stop strangers talked to Dancer as they always did about the headlines showing through the windows of the newspaper vending machines: "always bad news" they'd say, "another shooting, what's happened to the young people?" the older passengers would ask, "why doesn't somebody do something?" and "why doesn't somebody listen?" said the younger passengers feeling scared but acting tough in purple or lime colored hair, a multitude of earrings and nose rings, black jackets and boots even in the summer and the ghoulish pallor that sent a signal long since confused. The look could mean anything in the nineties. Dancer caught different buses because she had the luxury of working in a bookstore that opened at 10 a.m. so she could leave early and linger over breakfast and a book in a cafe or sleep late as the mood took her. She had realized that a certain amount of freedom that way would always be essential. But she always avoided the 7:40 because she knew that Ronnie took that one, still looking for her perhaps. She had no idea what he did. There were far fewer passengers the Friday before the 4th: it was a big weekend for families to take off and go camping in the mountains or visit somewhere out of town. Dancer was going to spend the weekend in a house in Estes Park with a friend she'd met only recently but felt she'd known for years...oh yes, one found those folks, what both thought one would speak, it didn't matter which, the soul sister thing: it was definitely a woman thing and maybe a 40s thing, finding one's freedom and one's self after raising the kids, after disillusionment with the marriage, after the parents had become more like children, finding oneself all alone, the loneliness of it, the freedom of it.

Barb was a writer and belonged to a group that met once a month to exchange encouragement in that world of constant rejection. One of their members had given a poetry reading at the bookstore and Dancer had been so impressed. The poet was already nearly 80 and had kept the voice of rebellion made eloquent by the wisdom of age. Barb idolized her and the three had talked late into the night in the locked and empty bookstore after closing. They watched the seasons of Colfax transpire outside the large plate glass window, hear the shouts, the sirens, the traffic, saw the lights, the cops, the kids, the drunks and they'd talk some and think some and drink endless cups of the herbal tea Dancer brewed. Now Barb had invited her to drive up to Estes Park and stay in the house owned by another member of the group who had made the mountain retreat available to her fellow artists and Dancer was looking forward to a marathon of walking and talking, and walking in silence through beautiful vistas and probably some window shopping too.

Dancer closed early as had been discussed. Having worked here nearly a year she pretty much ran the store. Kids would come and go but she was satisfied and stayed long enough to get pay raises and final say on most matters such as opening and closing, orders, readings and window arrangements. She had added some comfortable armchairs so folks could just set a while and read and kept a pot of herbal tea going all the time. Both cops and kids from gangs had come in and found themselves confiding in her and the security system was essentially concern and goodwill from both sides of otherwise warring factions. Men, young and old, fell in love with her, not in a lustful way but in another way that felt so much more momentous. She represented some mystery and glamour to them and her interest in their lives was flattering. She felt safer on the street than she had in her ex-husband's mansion.

Barb picked her up at Colfax and Broadway and they headed west toward the mountains and the sunset to catch I-25 thence to the Boulder turnpike and on to Longmont and Estes Park. They arrived in the dark and inhaled the fresh night air and exclaimed over the millions of stars seen through the lace of the trees, "the lace of the trees."..."like lace," someone had said once, "you can never get enough of it," and Dancer tried and tried to place the remnant of some precious moment.

Saturday they walked some in the Rocky Mountain National Park and then went into town to look at the colors and textures of crafted items, pottery and weaving and a considerable amount of junk sold by shop after shop in tourist towns from Atlantic City to San Francisco. Dancer liked to mix such stuff in with valuable antiques and hand-crafted knick knacks because she loved incongruity anyway: to Dancer it was the essence of art. They wandered into a bookstore/cafe where they ordered marvelous concoctions of coffee and chocolate and cinnamon and carried them steaming and spilling on trays up a spiral staircase to a table surrounded by shelves of books and cards and fancy papers and just directly under a large skylight that let them watch the snow falling delicately above them. Knowing they would be sleeping in the house with heat and a fireplace made the unseasonable snow something to wonder over and admire.

But Ronnie and Cindy were sleeping in a summer weight tent in bags that had gotten damp in the back of the truck when the five gallon container of water had leaked. They were all set up on Chicago Creek where other families had set up with campers or trucks and started fires to roast hot dogs or marshmallows. Everyone had staked out a picnic table with a small iron grill nearby and a place to park and a place to set up a tent and everyone had set out their six packs of beer and pop and boxes of cooking pots, pans and junk food and army surplus plates and pocket knives and little bundles of pinyon to burn and little hatchets to split it with, and everyone was combing the woods looking for sticks and twigs for kindling and making small talk when they encountered one another, and, little by little, they all gave up hope and packed up and went home, or back east, or west, or on their way, as the sky grew grayer and more ominous, and the rain fell cold and turned to snow, and the far off peaks grew white that very afternoon, and soon it was just Ronnie and Cindy and some guys from Indiana whose car broke down, who'd been hitching rides into the nearby town of Idaho Springs from one family or another all day, getting parts and exchanging them and trying new things, and god knew they'd probably still be there next week, when Cindy suggested they try this again. She was so cold, she was crying and she wanted to get home to her warm bed, and Ronnie was in a foul mood, already drunk, too drunk to drive, but not wanting to admit it because he'd gotten the truck running good finally after many months, just for this camping trip, and now it was ruined, not by the snow, but by Cindy somehow. She sat in the cab and winced each time she heard a piece of fire wood thud against the side of the truck bed as he tossed them in, one by one, each with its own curse, and then the clanging of the pots and pans as he threw them in with the soggy cardboard boxes and cursed because the salt shaker had broken and the crackers were wet (what did he expect?), but Cindy only thought it, didn't say it because not long after he had started coming to her bed at night, he'd started beating her too, like she was her mother all over again.

But Cindy wasn't taking it much longer. She'd found a boy friend at school, a real boyfriend, someone her age, or close to it: he was 16 and was saving for a car. They'd never actually gone out yet because he didn't have that car, but they'd shared a joint in the school yard and he'd kissed her the last time they talked and told her she was a real cute young lady. She'd never been called a young lady by a boy; they had rougher names for girls, so she figured this was it and she was going to run away with Randy as soon as he got his car. She didn't say a word the whole drive down the mountain, but she was thinking about it, and thinking about it, she didn't think so much about her dad and she didn't cry which was better because you never could tell what crying would make him do: sometimes he'd be sorry and act real sweet but sometimes it made him even madder. She wanted to tell Randy about her dad but decided it wouldn't be a good idea. She had told an older boy once, one who seemed interested in her, and when she told, he told her she was crazy sick to be making up stuff like that about her own dad and he avoided her like he thought SHE was dangerous. So she decided not to tell anyone and had nightmares sometimes that the boy she'd told would spread it around that she was making bad things up about her dad but he never said a word to her or about her and then he graduated and was gone, thank god for that, and she slept without that special terror on her mind, although enough other terrors as it was. One thing though, she knew her father wouldn't kill her. He'd threatened it so many times, she knew he was just yelling.

On the way down he drove so fast that he slid on some snow and almost hit another car and the other driver cursed at him and screamed and honked, and that seemed to bother him more than the near hit, and he yelled at Cindy that it was her fault and then his anger seemed spent and he calmed down and actually apologized to her and said, quietly enough, that they were both chilled to the bone and soon they'd be home and warm up. Once home, he wanted to get into bed with her and she told him no for the first time ever, and he couldn't believe it, and she said she knew it was wrong, and he asked her who'd been talking to her and she said, "no one," that she had talked to some boy at school that she thought liked her, and that he didn't even believe her because what she told him was so bad that he thought she'd have to be crazy and making it up. Her father got quiet again and later when she awoke and went to the bathroom she saw him lying on the living room floor all passed out and snoring.

Dancer and Barb talked about their kids and marriages and childhoods and how and why they had made so many wrong choices and then concluded that perhaps any choice is wrong. We only know the consequences of the choices we made and not the ones we didn't make. Life was a maze at best, a minefield sometimes, for some people, and they both admitted things could've been a lot worse. What they had mourned was a loss of connection, but think of all the people whose connections had been disastrous or fatal. Barb had a friend in New Mexico who was an attorney and represented Indian tribes, she forgot which, and they talked about maybe taking a trip down there to visit, in the fall maybe. And Scotland and Ireland seemed like interesting faraway places to dream out loud about. By midnight they'd traveled the world and Barb went upstairs to sleep and Dancer was too numb to move and simply stayed where she already reclined on the sofa in front of the dying fire, with an empty teacup dangling from her hand. She awoke cold a couple hours later and built up the fire some more and found an afghan, but then she got restless and wandered out on the balcony to watch the stars and wait for visions. She'd been awaiting a vision for years now it seemed. Tomorrow they would borrow warm clothing and snow boots from the closet and go hiking in the summer snow, the summer snow...it was perfect.

When Ronnie awoke on the living room floor it took a while for him to recall the events of the previous day: that was usual. But he did remember and he remembered that his daughter was talking to boys now and was probably planning to leave with one of them. And that made him think of Suzanne and how ashamed he was and he knew it was wrong but it was too late. He couldn't think how to undo his life except to end it and the thought made him so happy that he knew it had to be right. He went into Cindy's room and she resisted him but he told her he wouldn't touch her, just wanted to take her for a ride but she didn't want to go and before he realized it they were yelling at each other again. He could hear the preacher on TV through the window of his next door neighbor's house and that made him stop and think: he had to be quiet and he simply covered her mouth and gagged her with a scarf she used to tie back her hair. She fought with him silently, pulling at the gag but he used all his strength thinking it wouldn't matter now if he bruised her or even broke her arms. He tied her hands and pushed her ahead of him to the garage.

Dancer felt so exhilarated walking through the brisk and damp day even though it was a gray one: in the mountains there were so many shades of gray and white and a sense of magic that simply didn't happen in the city. They had awakened at dawn to take their walk because they knew the sun would melt off the evening's snow by noon and they wanted to experience this, this snow in July. Dancer talked about wanting to capture the shades of white and gray with pastels and Barb said she didn't know she was an artist and Dancer said of course she was an artist but no, she had not in fact done any drawing or painting or pastelling and they laughed as they had about everything and nothing, happy to be understood. When they ran out of things to talk about from their own lives, Dancer told Barb about the people on the bus. Barb drove everywhere but Dancer hated driving and didn't own a car and didn't even know if her license was still valid. She liked her life leisurely and an automobile automatically hastened the pace. She liked watching the people on the bus although sometimes someone scared her and then she remembered Ronnie and told Barb about him. It reminded her of the times she and her daughter would go places together and talk about the perfect strangers they saw on the street and speculate about what kinds of styles they preferred, the food they ate, the decor of their homes, their favorite music and what they did for a living. Sally and Dancer had verbalized entire screen plays and cast them on the 4 block walk to the Metro. "Clichés are OK," Dancer remembered telling her then, clichés are nothing more than common truths and commonality does not demean truth." Something like that. So they mixed and matched and were always most gratified when they had the opportunity to discover their speculations were right on the nose. (Sometimes they asked perfect strangers what they liked to eat or what they did for a living and then covered up the faux pas by claiming they were college students doing a sociology experiment: how many perfect strangers would even answer them being the subject of a study.)

"Well, I hope you are wrong about that guy anyway...what a sad and frightening story."

Dancer got depressed the minute she got in the car and couldn't even appreciate the beautiful drive back, she was so anxious about her return to the city, what she would find there. It was partly that late Sunday afternoon feeling she'd always had since school days and partly the omen of snow in July.

Ronnie threw Cindy into the cab of the truck and closed all the windows up tight. Then he started the engine and went around the garage blocking up spaces around the door and window with old rags. Then he got in with Cindy and held her in his arms and talked softly to her like her mother used to. He told her he was sorry their mother had left them but Cindy was too scared to wonder why he referred to his wife as their mother and he told her how sorry he was for the terrible things he had done, how he hadn't meant to, something had happened, the anger, the helplessness, the absolute rage and fury he felt sometimes and didn't have the words for, he tried then, that last time, to describe to his daughter, his child, his baby. He talked about times Cindy couldn't have remembered, times she was not even born yet and times before he had even met Suzanne. He talked a long time and after a while Cindy had stopped listening, had stopped even breathing and he realized then that he didn't want to die, didn't want his daughter to die, and he opened the door and dragged her out and unbound her hands and removed the gag so she could speak to him but she didn't speak or cry or breathe, and that fury took hold of him again and he shook her hopelessly, breaking her skull on the concrete slab of the garage floor before it dawned on him that he was right to be scared because he had killed his daughter and still lived and they'd find him, put him in jail for the rest of his life and make him pay and pay and pay like his old man always used to tell him they'd do.

All of a sudden it was so quiet. All Ronnie could hear was the sound of the shower next door and their damn TV that was never turned off and that damned preacher that never shut up and the sound of some bacon frying in a pan. When he heard those people speak it was always in whispers like they knew he could hear them, like maybe they were talking about him. He put Cindy's body back in the cab and drove slowly and as quietly as he could back out of his driveway and headed for the highway.

As soon as he got on he knew he had to get off: there were cops everywhere. He took the Yale exit and drove down a cul de sac looking for some park, some ditch, some place he could quickly push her body out and be gone. He thought she'd roll down the hill where he pushed her out, but he had to get out and push her more, and he was scared someone might be spying out their window but he had to keep on with it, too late now. He rolled her down into a culvert that ran alongside a bike path that passed under the highway. Then he drove back on the highway a little more south to I-225 and then got on 225 north to Colfax and then he went looking for someone to buy his truck for salvage, because he needed cash so bad is what he told the guy, and then he walked to the Aurora Mall and caught the #15 home.

The next morning he looked for that woman on the bus, the one who listened and rarely spoke, a few words now and then. He didn't see her until the middle of the week. He followed her then to the bookstore where she worked. He waited behind the corner until she opened up and then went inside but the first thing that met his eyes was the newspaper rack and right there on the front page was a picture of Cindy where they'd found her in the culvert. He saw the woman looking at it and somehow thought she knew ... after all, she knew about his wife. That woman didn't say much but she seemed to know everything. He was out of there before she could catch her breath, down the alley fast and quiet, avoiding the street.

#

Frieda always listened to the preachers on Sunday morning, all morning, while she fixed a big breakfast for Hans. On weekdays she listened to the talk shows and then the soaps and then more talk shows. She would work, always busy, but she liked to hear the sounds of voices when Hans wasn't home. It made her feel safe. Frieda had moved here from East Germany and she liked to feel safe. She knew she had heard the yelling and the car pull away on a Sunday because the preacher was on and she'd been fixing bacon for Hans. She'd been listening to the singing part and thought she heard yelling or screaming from next door: not unusual as she often heard Suzanne and Ronnie fighting, but Suzanne had left him months ago and it had been quiet since then. Maybe he was fighting with Cindy, his daughter. She was a teen-ager and teen-agers were always getting into some kind of trouble. Of course Ronnie seemed like a teen-ager himself, to Frieda anyway. Old hippie she called him, him and Suzanne both: strange couple and something unsavory about them. But when she turned off the TV to see if she could hear better it was quiet again: her imagination maybe, maybe the singing was too loud, maybe the TV had static. Then she heard the engine turn and figured they were going somewhere. She took a shower and when she got out she saw out her bathroom window Ronnie's old truck backing out of the driveway: that struck her as odd because he didn't have time to have gone somewhere and come back, but why would he have left the truck running so long? Maybe forgot something in the house and had to go back for it. Frieda sometimes did that and had to turn the car off again to use the house key because she left her house key on the same ring as her car key. She kept thinking she should separate them and then she'd forget about it until the next time she forgot something in the house: always happened when she was late.

When she told the police they didn't appear to be all that interested. Maybe she talked too long without getting to the point, about the TV shows and forgetting her things in the house and the keys and all that. But she thought it might be important after they found Cindy dead near the bike path in a culvert under the highway. After a month of searching, talking to every kid that even exchanged two words with the victim, they arrested a boy she'd been seen smoking weed with at school. That boy was in one of the gangs so they were sure it was him, but Frieda had this feeling that it might be Ronnie, not that Ronnie would have done such a thing sober, but he did get awfully loud and violent when he was drunk: she had heard him beating up on Suzanne. Maybe he had started beating up on Cindy, maybe he was the one killed her and dumped her body in the culvert. She didn't get the feeling the police took her seriously. But she did her duty: she told them what she remembered. She believed you had to do that kind of thing. She asked Suzanne once if she should call the police when she heard her and Ronnie fighting: not to report the disturbance so much as to get protection for Suzanne, but Suzanne told her please not to, that she'd handle it and she seemed so embarrassed that Frieda decided not to interfere: there was the matter of a woman's pride of course, she understood that. Her husband in East Germany had been that kind and she had taken advantage of a visit to her sister in West Germany to leave him and eventually come to America where she married a nice dentist and when he died, she met Hans at a dance and he was the very soul of kindness himself. She considered herself a lucky woman. She worried that the police didn't take her seriously and asked Hans should she call them and try to talk to someone else? someone higher up? and he said no, she'd done enough and time to let them do their job.

"But if they aren't doing it, what will happen to that boy?"

"How do you know it wasn't the boy who did it?"

Frieda didn't want an argument so she kept it to herself.

#

There was another unseasonable snow storm on Labor Day weekend that gave rise to a new crop of Colorado weather jokes, how it always snowed on holidays. Everyone figured they could count on a lovely Indian Summer right up to Halloween. Dancer gloried in the reds and yellows that highlighted the still half-green trees in her neighborhood and forgot about Ronnie as she hadn't seen him the entire month of August. She and Barb laughed about maybe catching another white weekend in Estes Park but then Dancer would get depressed all of a sudden remembering what happened the 4th of July. They decided to wait and go closer to the end of the month when the Aspens would be in their full glory. Maybe they'd even splurge and go to Durango and ride the Durango-Silverton railroad. Dancer still worked at the bookstore and fantasized about moving to the mountains. She'd met a man who ran a school for the arts in Telluride and needed a couple to house-sit for him while he traveled. Maybe a couple of women? But he talked about bears and splitting wood like only men could do that. It was worth another friendly argument.

She didn't think much about the murdered girl until the papers began carrying more news. First there were no suspects and then they arrested a young black kid who the police claimed was a Crip or a Blood...that alone being evidence enough in the eyes of many of the passengers on Dancer's bus. And he'd given the girl pot. Dancer was appalled at the ease with which folks would leap from a shared joint to a brutal murder. No wonder kids felt threatened. She'd never gone to the police because she didn't think they'd listen to her kind of psychic speculation, but if they planned to put a kid on trial on the strength of this kind of evidence, she decided she'd better at least get her suspicions off her chest. But it snowed and she went straight home to get warm and sleep.

Dancer couldn't figure if Ronnie just appeared after every snow storm or had read her mind, but when she closed up the bookstore the next afternoon, a little early, he was there. She began to walk briskly away from him but he knew that she had seen him and yelled after her:

"Please stop. Please let me talk to you."

She turned and faced him and asked simply, "Why?"

"Because you're kind I can tell and you'll understand."

"Understand what?"

"I don't know. You seem kind. You seem to know everything. Let me get close to you. Let me hold you. I can't live anymore without some contact. I need that closeness."

All the while he moved closer to her and Dancer instinctively switched to the role of commander, afraid to let him call the shots, but aware she couldn't safely leave yet. One way or another, this subtle stalking game had to end.

"Do you want to hold my hand? Come here and I'll hold your hand."

He approached her and she held out her two hands and enveloped his in her two hands, keeping herself outside of him, letting him be the one to be encircled, held or trapped, as it might turn out.

"Talk to me," she said. "Tell me what's bothering you."

And Ronnie confessed.

It was so simple and it dawned on Dancer that the truth is easy enough and everyone has a piece of it inside but it's the connecting that's hard. Dancer now knew beyond any doubts or speculations that the boy charged did not kill that little girl because this man told her he did it and he had no reason to lie and she had no reason to disbelieve him. But would the police believe her? Would the prosecutor believe her? Would the man be willing and able to tell them? Would he stay alive long enough to tell another soul? Would he turn on her if she even suggested it? Or would he disappear again leaving only a fear behind? She stood quietly holding his hand while he stared at her, waiting to be told what he wanted to hear, and Dancer tried to listen for some voice that would tell her what he would be able to hear. A breeze began to blow the red and yellow leaves around them making a glow in the dusky light and she remembered Frank whirling her around in the New Orleans sunset and the bits and pieces of music from the music box shop and all those different melodies and the accidental harmonies that struck like sudden miracles and were gone in a flash of barely remembered ecstasy. She was so suddenly tired as she stood there with Ronnie at the bus stop.

"Do you remember the most wonderful moment of your life?" Dancer asked the man who had raped and killed his daughter, and he told her about his first kiss.

He was eleven years old growing up in a small town about a half hour from Demopolis, Alabama. His folks were poor and he and his brothers always had to work, legal or not, and he had a job delivering groceries. The woman had been poor like his folks but when she was just a girl, not much older than he was at their encounter, an old man with some money had bought her and given her momma $3,000 and taken her to live in a big old hundred year old house with him. He was way past 40 at the time. There were rumors about her and the old man kept her locked up in the house and people said she was lonely and laughed about it. That day after he delivered the groceries he slid on the porch steps and put his hand on the rickety old rail to steady himself. He was too big for his age and clumsy. He got a big splinter in the heel of his palm and she called him inside and removed the sliver and put some alcohol on it and then she kissed him gently like a mother and that made him angry because his own mother never kissed him so why should this stranger? But then she began to stroke him and aroused him and he was scared but thrilled and he did everything she told him and when it was over she held him in her arms and rocked him and it felt so good and safe to be held like that. She couldn't have been more than 16 herself but to him she was as old and wise as the hills and as warm as August.

Ronnie rocked himself back and forth while he told Dancer the story of his most wonderful memory and she knew he wanted her to hold him and rock him but she'd known even before his confession that a man this needful was dangerous and she soothed him with her voice instead. When he left as her bus approached he told her he felt better and knew what to do and wouldn't bother her again.

The next day was bright and sunny and hot..."that's Colorado weather for you: one day it's snowing and the next it's near 90 degrees." The weather replaced the murder as a topic of conversation for the #15 passengers. Dancer never even opened the bookstore that day. There was a note stuck in the door. She read it and went directly to the police, walking the half-mile to the Cherokee Street Station rather than awaiting the next bus.

Detective Smythe reviewed the file with the prosecutor, and the fact that the coroner found it was carbon monoxide and not the blow to the head that killed Cindy convinced them that Dancer was telling the truth. There was no way she could've known about the carbon monoxide.

They told her they would go to the site mentioned in the suicide note and if they found Ronnie Kenderhate's body that would be sufficient to confirm her story and they would drop the charges against the Brown boy. They told her to go home and she gave them her number again and asked them to call. In fact they did not call her but she heard the story on the 10 p.m. news and the announcement that Randy Brown was being released, no longer a suspect. All of a sudden neighbors of the Kenderhate family were coming forward telling about the violent fights, the disappearance of Cindy's mother, almost a year before the murder, and all the bits and pieces of truth were being put together to form a big chunk of the puzzle (not that there wasn't more; there would always be more).

Dancer shivered and shook with relief and got chills and wrapped herself in a quilt that stung and pricked her skin with a multitude of memories and cried until she was dry heaving. But she slept like a baby until well after noon the next day and kept down her food and planned to go back to work the next day.

It was warm and she wanted to catch some sunlight before another night overtook her so she walked, shuffling the noisy autumn leaves ahead of her in piles all the way to the Cathedral on Colfax and Pennsylvania, and by then it was dusk again with a chill in the air and the 6:30 Mass was about to begin.

Dancer walked in quietly and sat near the back to watch the worshippers. She saw the old woman with the pear shaped man who looked younger, her face filled out and actually handsome...teeth; she'd gotten herself a mouthful of teeth. And the vintage lady was there in a pink 50's style prom dress that came all the way to the floor. She carried her skirt daintily and with true queenly dignity when she walked to the front to take communion. The tall thin hump-backed man with the monastic tonsure was there as always, along with the bikers, cowboys, tourists and transients. It seemed there were more folks than usual and they all seemed happier than she'd remembered.

After the mass was over, the worshippers walked out into the dark night and scattered in all directions. Only one old woman crossed the street to the bus stop.

"Nice night" she said. Dancer fell asleep for a few blocks listening to a tape of medieval music. "Look at that," cried the old woman, pointing at the 7 Eleven on York Street. Under a streetlight a tall boy was solemnly dancing to the music he played on a huge cassette player and Dancer figured it was rap music but it was odd how his movements seemed to fit the primitive medieval songs that only she could hear. The old woman was smiling and clapping,

"Good, ain't he?" They turned their heads together to watch as their red light turned green and the bus moved on.

"That what they call break dancing?"

"I guess so."

"Sure looks like a body could break something doin' it."

"Yes."

The boy suddenly stopped, straightened up and sauntered off.

"Guess his music run out" said the old woman."

"Guess so," said Dancer, wondering where he was going.

"Next stop Colorado Boulevard," the driver hollered out as Dancer nodded off to sleep but she woke just in time for her stop and walked home still humming the medieval chant and dreaming of dancers slow and solemn.

Lillian and Alexander

I.

Lillian always put her trash out on Sunday afternoon before it got dark because the trash pickup came so early Monday morning and she was afraid of the alley in the dark. She'd found syringes there and once someone set her trash on fire. A neighbor who saw it from a second floor window, came out and put out the fire and then left a note about it under her locked gate. She always kept the gate to the alley locked. It was a tall wooden gate, part of a tall wooden fence so no one could see her in her backyard and she couldn't see whatever was going on in the alley.

One Sunday afternoon she forgot to put her trash out for the collection and so she had to put it out early Monday morning, while it was still dark, or it would be missed for the week. She unlocked the gate and took a deep breath and then had it startled right out of her again because, sure enough, there was a man in the alley, a very tall bearded man.

He realized he would present a frightening sight and his first thought was to simply run away but Lillian had dropped her bag of trash and the bag broke and there was trash all over the alley. He bent to clean it up for her, speaking respectfully the whole time. "I'm sorry I scared you. I was taking a short cut to the bus to the day labor place on Colfax. Don't touch this. I've got this. Let me just clean this up for you." and so on and so forth until it was apparent to Lillian that this was a nice older man, not one of those gang kids looking to make trouble. He was not older like she was, more like her oldest daughter. It never failed to pain her that her beautiful daughter was getting old before she'd had any real joy in life. Maybe that was why she spoke so kindly to the strange man.

"What kind of work do you do?"

"Well just whatever anyone needs doing. The bosses come to this place where we wait and pick out as many men as they need."

"I've got some work. What do you make?"

"We get minimum, and then we got to pay part of what we earn to the bosses for the transportation."

"Well I'll pay you $7 an hour to do some work around here if you want. And I'll give you breakfast."

She walked him around showing him the various little repairs that needed doing but insisted that he eat breakfast first and he went into the bathroom to wash up. He was in there so long she began to worry but when he emerged it was obvious what had taken so long. He had done considerable washing up on himself but had left the bathroom itself cleaner than it had been. She was impressed. Now he was clean, he offered his hand and introduced himself:

"My name is Alexander Winfield but everyone calls me Win," and then he chuckled a bit as if struck for the very first time by the irony of his nickname. She took his hand and said, "Lillian is what you can call me, and if you don't mind I'd like to call you Alexander. It is such an elegant name."

During breakfast she talked more about her children than she should have. Their lives were still more interesting and more important to her than her own. She learned that Alexander was homeless, had been sleeping in the park but was worried about the coming winter. She learned that day that he was a hard working man and very meticulous, very neat. She paid him and invited him back to do more projects.

It was a hot September but Colorado weather can change drastically in a wink. One morning the temperature dropped steadily from 70 degrees and by mid afternoon it was snowing. Alexander asked Lillian if he could bed down in her garage. When she said yes, he was off in a flash to go get his sleeping bag stashed in a hiding place. It was two hours before he returned and she was sorry she hadn't thought to say fast enough that she had sleeping bags and extra blankets and even an old tent left from the days she and her second husband had gone camping on the weekends. She gathered up all those things and made a pile on a metal table in the garage for him in case he would need more than what he had.

The snowstorm lasted three days. Tree limbs still full of leaves broke from the weight of the snow and fell onto power lines so thousands of homes lost electricity. Lillian always liked to have a fire in her fireplace when that happened as it so often did. She had an old fashioned wood fireplace and her husband had always kept a good supply of wood to burn on cold winter days. She hadn't had a fire since his death. For one thing she couldn't split the logs piled up in the back and they were too thick to burn. Alexander split the logs for her and she invited him in to enjoy the fire and some hot tea and they talked all day that first day.

He shared the secrets of his life with her that day, the part about being schizophrenic, about being hospitalized and how the medications made him nauseous and tired all the time, about running away, about being homeless, about trying to maintain his hold on reality without the medications, about his fears and then he saw that look on her face, the look of sympathy mixed with apprehension, and he realized he'd said too much. He excused himself and went back to the garage where he bundled into the pile of sleeping bags and blankets and slept next to the little electric space heater for the next two days, embarrassed even to knock on the door to ask to use the bathroom and he relieved himself in the alley in the dark.

Lillian didn't know what to make of all this. She wanted to call her daughters but knew they would worry about her. Kind souls both, but of course it was craziness to take in this strange man right off the street. How did you get to know a person? She had trusted her second husband from the moment they first danced, two strangers there with friends, something about his eyes, she knew she could trust him. She decided to trust Alexander. He was dignified and honest and he looked like her brother who had died so young. Alexander looked young for his real age. Lillian had been surprised to learn that he was in his fifties already and figured it was innocence that kept him so young looking. She suddenly wanted to show Alexander the picture of her brother, tell him about her life and her family and how she understood about these things. How it is such a thin line between sanity and insanity.

She waited a while to give Alexander his privacy and his space. She could see that he was hiding in the daylight and coming out at night to shovel the snow which would have been hip high but for his nightly work. Then the morning of the third and last day of the snowstorm she went out to the garage and woke Alexander by telling him breakfast was ready and he'd best come in and clean up before it got cold. She had grilled steaks on the backyard BBQ.

They were eating in the kitchen when the lights went on and Alexander went down to check the furnace pilot light and make sure it would be working right. He would need to drain the radiators during the next warm spell but meantime Lillian had a little tool to bleed the ones that had air pockets and didn't warm up. They began to discuss the changes they could make to the garage to make it more livable and Alexander understood he was invited to stay.

A few days later, when Lillian went out to the garage to wake Alexander for breakfast and found him gone she didn't think much of it, thought perhaps he had gone to retrieve more personal belongings and he'd be back in a few hours. When he didn't return for several days she worried that something had happened to him but she was also afraid to call the police or hospitals in case she got him into some kind of trouble. She thought about going to look for him herself but realized she had no idea where to begin and that she had no hold on him or right even to worry about his welfare. She was torn between worry and hurt that he hadn't taken up her invitation to stay, felt like she'd been used those few days of the snow storm but realized there was nothing calculating about Alexander. He had done all the work around the place that needed doing and perhaps he didn't want to stay and feel useless. Lillian understood that. She went by the day labor place once to see if he was there but he was not and the men that were there frightened her. They had to congregate so early in the morning to be picked up for construction or cleaning jobs that it was barely even light and she felt uneasy being on Colfax at that hour.

II.

Lillian got on with her life and hoped that Alexander was safe, warm, reminding herself that he had managed for fifty years without her help. Her daughter in New York City called to tell her the news that she'd been offered a permanent job where she'd been temping, not a dream job to be sure, but a job nonetheless, with health insurance after three months. She was fixing up her apartment, making it nicer. Lillian accepted the invitation to come out and see it. She wanted her daughter to know she was proud of her even though she had wanted so much more for her children.

Lillian's two weeks in the city were a nightmare. She hated the subway and she got lost on the streets when she tried to go out walking during the days and then she was too tired to do things with her daughter after work. She couldn't get used to dining at nine thirty at night and she had a hard time keeping all her daughter's friends straight, not just their names but their careers and boyfriends and backgrounds. She always thought the wrong girl was from West Virginia and couldn't tell by her outfit who worked on Wall Street. Sometimes she felt that the young women were overly solicitous of her, made her feel old but she was grateful that they all approved of her having tried to help Alexander. She had thought trusting him might be perceived as naïve or even an old woman's craziness but each and every one of the young women, most importantly her own daughter, thought it was cool what she had done and hoped he would come back. They all felt compassion for the homeless of New York and wished they could do something but they were all struggling themselves.

Sometimes Lillian would sit in her daughter's cramped apartment staring out at the fire-escape and cry but this she kept secret from her daughter as she also kept secret her worry that Alexander might come to the house in Denver needing to get in out of the cold, needing something to eat, and finding it empty and locked up, would go away again. She forgot that he had a key to the padlock on the side door of the detached garage.

Lillian and her daughter got along OK until her last day and then they fought. They always fought on the last day of a visit whether it was in New York or Denver. "Separation anxiety" her daughter called it and they never got over it. Then they'd both cry and make up and be extravagantly thoughtful of one another at the airport and whoever flew would call as soon as she made it safely home and they would talk for hours.

Her last visit to New York had been before her husband died and he had met her at the airport and driven her home to their house. Now she had to get her own way home. She had planned to arrive early enough in the day to be able to take the RTD bus and then catch a taxi closer to home because it was so expensive to take a taxi all the way but she decided she was just too tired to make the connections and decided to spend the money. She was, after all, old. The whole way home she thought about being alone and about her daughters being alone and she pretended to doze so she wouldn't have to make conversation with the friendly taxi driver.

Lillian went straight to bed and slept until the phone rang and woke her. She had forgotten to call her daughter who was worried. They spoke briefly and then Lillian went back to sleep, not even getting up to brush her teeth she felt so weary. She slept until the morning sun was high in the sky and she heard someone moving around in the backyard. Alexander was back.

"Good morning. Looks like its going to be a beautiful day." That was all he said, watching her closely to see how she would respond to his return. He didn't say anything about where he'd been or why. He acted almost as if he were unaware of having been gone but for that look that Lillian noticed, a bit tentative, almost frightened at first, watching to see how she would react to his presence, if she would be angry at him. She decided she wouldn't ask about where he'd been or why. Later she did go into the garage while he was gone to the grocery store with a list she had given him. She resisted the urge to tidy up because she was there strictly to snoop and didn't want him to know she'd done so. She wasn't sure what she was looking for, bottles maybe, maybe letters, although she knew she would never dare read someone else's private correspondence, the thought of that appalled her. She did find some meds and sighed to herself knowing how he had hated those but feeling safer knowing he was taking them.

She made a lovely dinner that evening despite feeling tired and they talked late into the night. She finally did show him the framed photograph of her brother looking poetic in a black turtleneck sweater. He had a pensive expression and leaned his face on his hand on a table with a glass of wine in front of him. The background was the exposed brick wall of a cafe where musicians played guitars and poets read their latest work, that sort of place.

He was nineteen in the photo that was taken shortly before he was killed on a street in San Francisco. She was ashamed that he had died a violent death and nothing had been done.

III.

All through the winter, Lillian talked to Alexander about her life, her brother and their childhood, but she always stopped short of her first marriage, short-lived, painful and best forgotten. Nor did she talk much about the birth of her children, except to tell him that sometimes she had dreams about her first born that turned into dreams about her brother when he was a baby and that frightened her and made her overprotective of that child. She began to mix up the memories of her children's early years with her own childhood. Sometimes she couldn't remember what she had just said, thought perhaps she was not making sense because of some look she thought she saw in Alexander's eyes and then almost immediately forgot.

By the time Lillian's baby brother was born, her father and mother had separated. Her father slept in one of the little attic rooms that would eventually become her brother's. Lillian slept in the other one. Lillian's bed was built into a little alcove under the eaves overlooking the neighbor's backyard. When she couldn't sleep she would sit up and stare at the porch light that was left on all night until she felt her eyes droop and then she would stretch out and sleep. Her father sometimes came across the hall at the top of the stairs and read her a book before bed. She remembered the alphabet book: A for apple, B for Boy, C for Cat and so forth. She remembered it clearly because that was the book that started her out learning to read on her own. She also remembered him teaching her a prayer to say before bed that ended with the words "my soul to keep" she couldn't remember the rest.

"I know that one too" said Alexander, "Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep... but that is not the end, it is the beginning. The end goes like this: If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take."

"You are right. I remember now" and Lillian repeated the little prayer over and over to herself fondly. The night her father taught her the prayer was the last night they lived under the same roof. That was the night he got into their car and drove straight through from Detroit to Denver. He called her a couple days later and she had a hard time finding her voice because the loneliness in his voice hurt her deeply like a blow to her chest. She didn't think much about her own loneliness. She thought she was used to it. But when she said her little prayer she changed the words and asked the Lord to let her die before she woke. By six, she perceived life as more work than it was worth. Remembering that part of her childhood was for Lillian like watching the grief and pain of someone separate from herself and she and Alexander cried together for that strange child.

IV

The spring brought more snow and then suddenly it was summer. The days were so hot they didn't go out until dusk. Then Lillian and Alexander went out walking every night after dinner. The first time he suggested they go to the park Lillian hesitated thinking it best not to be there after dark but of course she realized how silly that might sound to Alexander who had lived in the park before he moved into her garage.

The park was beautiful at night. Not being able to see the buildings all around, Lillian felt almost as though she were up in the mountains again, in the woods. They sat by the lake and watched people walking their dogs and waited until all those people were gone before getting up. Then Alexander went over to a heavily wooded area where he found some of his friends who were listening to music on an old tape player someone had bought at the Salvation Army. Two people were dancing. They whirled around and around in a waltz as graceful as anything she had ever seen. Lillian watched with such longing that Alexander realized she missed dancing and asked her to dance. She was hesitant at first but figured why not and discovered that Alexander could dance quite well despite having to bend almost double to reach his arm around her waist. He whirled her around the grass until she was breathless. After the waltz came a tango and the other couple executed a tango there in the grass in the dark that inspired the rest of them to wild applause and shouts of "you go girls" and only then did Lillian realize that it was two elderly women who danced so elegantly despite their layers of ragged men's clothing.

They stayed out in the park all night and when Lillian got sleepy she just lay down and slept and woke again to the sound of the birds. Lillian loved the sound of the birds in the morning and when at home she would stay late in bed imagining herself in the wilderness. But she knew that the city sprinkler system would go on soon automatically and so she got right up and woke Alexander warning him to hurry before the sprinklers went on and soaked them. "Don't worry," he said like he always did when she worried about something. He told her his friends knew the system, what sprinklers would go on first and where and they weren't worried. Nonetheless Lillian noticed another half dozen people emerging from beneath trees and behind bushes: no one wanted to be caught sleeping in the park and arrested. Jail was sometimes a welcome shelter in the winter but not during the summer months. Lillian felt guilty that she had a house to go home to, but at the same time was not sure she wanted all these people to know where she lived, she didn't have rooms for everyone after all. Alexander saved her from her moral dilemma whispering to her not to go inviting anyone home. "You don't need all the problems," he told her and then announced loudly that he and his friend were going to go scrounge up some breakfast. No one offered to join them and they just strolled on home.

"I feel terrible not even feeding any of them," she said and Alexander told her the same thing her second husband used to tell her "You can't save the world." She almost snapped back at him that she had saved him but stopped herself because it was mean and she knew that Alexander gave as good as he got.

Day after day the thermometer straddled 100 degrees and no humidity at all so everything dried up and died and Lillian felt like her brain was shrinking and rattling around inside, hurting her head. Every night the television reported on the forest fires that raged all over Colorado and New Mexico and the death toll mounted and in the city, people went out with masks over their faces if they suffered from asthma and ash covered the yard around the house and blew in on the window sills. The air for miles was heavy with ash.

Lillian called her older daughter, who lived on a ranch to be sure she was OK, near as she was to large scale fires. "Fine," she said she was fine, but it was obvious she was not fine because she was lonely and wanted to leave the man she was with but feared if she did there would be no one else and Lillian could not honestly tell her there would be. Lillian cried for her grown daughter because she understood that loneliness and anxiety and the awful feeling of looking around for something better or even just an opening somewhere in those walls that closed in on a person closer with each passing year. But there were no openings, just the walls, closing in. Lillian understood this and did not know what to say.

When this first child had been born, Lillian had imagined she could make a better life for her daughter than the life she had lived but one night while she was rubbing her baby's back soothing her to sleep Lillian had a premonition. It was not a vision or anything in words, just a feeling of grief that washed over her heart and it was not her own grief that she had grown used to, but a new grief and she knew somehow that it was the grief of her child, a grief that was yet to come and she was so sorry then and never forgot that feeling that came and went in a second, so strong was it. Lillian felt guilty and hopeless toward her child ever since, spoiling her but unable to help her so her daughter's loneliness and anxiety hurt her far more than any of her own losses or disappointments.

Alexander noticed that whenever Lillian spoke on the telephone with this older daughter she would become very quiet and depressed for days thereafter. He asked her during those times to play the piano for him. He really did find the music soothing and wanted to remind her to seek comfort where she could. Sometime the music careened off into something crazy, the two hands not playing together at all and Lillian would stop confused and soon Alexander stopped asking her to play at all.

V

A year passed, then another. Lillian marked the seasons by holidays which she remembered because her daughters always came to visit. Nothing much happened in their lives _._ No one got a great job or met anyone wonderful or took a fabulous trip. Nothing terrible happened either. No one lost a dull job or was heartbroken over anybody or became afflicted in any way. Lillian told her children to count their blessings and remembered her father telling her that his mother always used to tell him to count his blessings which caused Lillian to realize all of a sudden that her father had been very disappointed in his life and perhaps her grandmother had been as well. She'd sigh and tell them they should be grateful that they had the use of all their limbs and senses and they said yes they knew they should not take those things for granted but still they yearned for something more, for a great and lasting perfect love, for simple companionship that could be counted on every day, for the genius to create something that would be widely appreciated. They did not realize that such gifts still had to be paid for in some way, with some loss or grief. Lillian said that life was never as good as they hoped for or as terrible as they feared it might be. She advised them to strive for peace of mind, to take joy in the sunrise. And yet, Lillian herself still yearned for something marvelous. Alexander wanted to tell them to be glad that they had never had to be hungry, cold or humiliated but he said nothing, feeling that it was not his place.

Alexander had vague memories of a childhood home that was comfortable, parents and a sister who were more often kind than not and only the turmoil of his own brain set him at odds with the peace of that home. He could not remember why he left home the first time but he remembered the shame when he returned and later he did not return. Sometimes he would look in the Pueblo telephone book at the library but never found his father's name listed there and he wondered what had become of his parents. He suspected his sister had married long ago and of course he would have had no idea of her new last name. Lillian offered to buy him a bus ticket and even to go with him to look for his family but after riding the bus down to Pueblo they found the old house occupied by new people who knew nothing of his parents. They went to the courthouse and learned that both his parents had died exactly one year apart to the day, several years earlier. Alexander ached with the knowledge that his parents had died not knowing where or how he was.

Lillian encouraged him to search for his sister. He went to the old high school but all the teachers were young and no one remembered as far back as he needed them to. The search for his sister turned up nothing. After watching Alexander gradually and timidly warm to the idea of finding his family and observing his subtle disappointment, Lillian blamed herself for getting his hopes up and she resolved to be the best family she could be to him. He was silent for several days after their little excursion, took his meds, slept a lot and cried some when he thought she was asleep and could not hear him.

"Where does the time go?" they asked each other, both wishing someone had warned them to use it wisely then remembering that the old folks always warned the young ones about the swift passage of their lives and the young ones always ignored the old ones. Lillian showed Alexander her photo albums with the faded photos showing her young and actually quite beautiful. Looking into her old face he could see the resemblance as if to a cousin or child. It was alarming to see how much a few decades could change a person. Alexander looked into the bathroom mirror and tried to resurrect his own youthful face. He had no photos to help him in this endeavor and realized he'd lost himself, his own past, along with his family.

VI

One afternoon Lillian decided to drive to the park. She was too tired to walk and Alexander was sleeping and she just did not feel like waiting for him to get up and go with her. He didn't have a license and she always drove but he was the navigator, reminding her where to turn, warning her to watch out for cars she might not have noticed. It was not a complicated route at all but she drifted over the middle line and an oncoming car honked long and loud at her and she became flustered. She turned right off onto a side street to get away from the noise and the traffic. She planned to go around the block and then return home, her desire to venture to the park totally squelched by the honking car. But when she got to the place where she needed to turn right again she didn't recognize where she was, the houses there looked bigger and indeed lots of new people were moving into the neighborhood and remodeling or replacing the smaller homes on their lots with very large imposing structures. Lillian was overcome and just sat at the stop sign and cried until a jogger came by and knocked on her window, asking if she was alright. She seemed like such a sweet young woman Lillian asked her to please drive her home and the young woman did that, drove her the three blocks to her house and asked Lillian if anyone was home to help her. Lillian tried to brush off her concern and offered to pay her for her trouble but the young woman would not accept her money and still seemed worried. Lillian herself was worried about social services, taking her away to a nursing home. Thank god nothing ever came of that embarrassing incident.

The next time Lillian got lost in the neighborhood it was the heat and her own exhaustion to blame. She had been walking in the direction of the park and for some reason became disoriented at the same intersection where she had been lost and crying in the car. She knocked on the door of one of the large new houses and asked if she could have a glass of water and the boy who answered the door brought her in, invited her to her sit down and gave her a glass of water. He asked if he could call anyone for her. She couldn't tell him her phone number but she could dial it, her fingers falling into an old pattern. Alexander was out in the yard and the phone rang and rang and Lillian was in despair before he finally ran in and answered. The boy told Alexander the address and Alexander walked over and walked her home again. She cried like a child the whole way, feeling humiliated and very frightened. Alexander tried to comfort her but he looked frightened as well.

That night Alexander crept quietly into Lillian's room and looked down at her as she slept with a tiny frown turning down her lips. He understood that she fell asleep every night with a vague anxiety and woke up in a despair that the dawn only partially dispelled. He cupped his hand gently around her hair and in her sleep she nestled her head like a child into the warmth of his hand. He knelt then at the side of the bed leaving his hand on her head and took a deep breath prepared to stay as long as he needed to finish his benediction, thinking of all the things that might give her relief. He remembered once an old custodian at a hospital who told him that the touch of a madman was lucky and the man had laughed at Alexander when he appeared to believe it.

"Are you nuts? Of course you are nuts. That's why you're here. Listen, all the crazies I've touched in here if there were any luck in it, I'd've been able to retire my first week. No man, there are two kinds of luck and you know. If it weren't for bad luck, I'd have no luck at all. Maybe touching the likes of you . . . . ." and the man made a motion like he was going to touch Alexander and laughed when Alexander cringed.

Alexander felt tears, remembering that and he wished so hard, with such palpable effort and pain that he could bring the good kind of luck to Lillian's children. After a while he got sleepy kneeling there but didn't want to take his hand away from her head so he lowered himself carefully onto one hip and lay his head on the bed close to hers, never moving his hand and keeping his touch as gentle as feathers. The last thing he saw before his eyes closed was that her mouth had relaxed. The last thought he had before sleeping was the hope that a moment of pure joy would overtake Lillian during this last leg of her headlong rush to oblivion.

Time passed in fits and starts, a day could feel like a week if they managed to do very much but then a week would go by so quickly with one day blending into the next with no memories to show for it. Alexander didn't know how soon after his efforts at prayer the letter came but it was such a wonderful piece of luck that Lillian asked him to read the letter to her because she didn't believe it really said what it said.

Lillian's daughter had given her mother's address when submitting a screenplay to a contest because she didn't know how soon she would be moving away from her boyfriend's ranch. For that reason the letter, informing her she had won the $4000 prize and a chance to have her screenplay produced, came first to Lillian. She read it once expecting a solicitation and her mind couldn't quite keep up with the fact that this was good news, fantastic news, wholly unexpected and long since un-hoped for news. She called out to Alexander and asked him to read the letter to her and she screamed out loud for pure joy and said "oh we have to call her right now!"

Lillian dialed the phone, the number in the memory of her fingertips and her daughter answered and she sounded so grownup, so old, that Lillian didn't recognize her voice and then she could not remember who she was calling or why and she just stood there thinking she had to go pick up her children from school, worried she was late and she began to cry because her little girls would be the last ones left, waiting for their mother, wondering where she was.

Alexander heard the voice saying "Hello? Hello?" so he took the telephone from Lillian and began to speak: first the good news, let that sink in first, and then, well then, another day he would tell this young woman about her mother. That day he lied, he told her that her mother was so overcome with joy that she couldn't speak but that she loved her daughter so very much and that this wonderful news had made her so very happy. The woman on the line shouted "I love you" to her mom and her mom whispered "I love you too" but she did not know who she was talking to.

VII

Alexander had no one in the world but Lillian and various friends on the street. He hated taking medication and he often talked about his desire to end his life. There was a time Lillian periodically talked him out of suicide but then her own dementia caused her to understand it. Her own private plan would have been easier had the children not sold Lillian's car. After they read about an elderly man who had driven his car through a building they decided it would be irresponsible to leave her car in the garage. She always said she would only drive it in an emergency and the girls said she would create an emergency by driving. They didn't understand her reluctance to sell the car because they didn't know and she could hardly tell them that the car in the garage was to have been her painless, self sufficient suicide: just plug up the air leaks in the garage, get in the car, turn on the engine and go to sleep. That was her dream but she had waited too long and now it was not to be.

The girls sold the car and put the money in their mother's bank account. Apparently they trusted her to write checks. So Lillian and Alexander had another plan involving her second husband's gun. Alexander would figure out how to use it, shoot Lillian, call 911 and then shoot himself. Alexander went through the scenario many times in his mind knowing he had made Lillian a promise. But the reality was a source of difficulty for him. To begin with, where could he go to practice shooting to make sure that he actually understood how to use the thing? Well he would just have to keep trying until it went off. At least he didn't have to worry about his aim. Then he would try to imagine Lillian not only dead but covered in blood and that sight was so horrific in his already overactive imagination that he began having nightmares. Calling 911 would be easy enough but shooting himself? He knew he would have to swallow the bullet to make sure he didn't simply wound himself horribly but he had a suspicion he would not be able to actually go through with this. He decided he would just give himself up but didn't tell Lillian this. He thought with a sinking heart about returning to the hospital this time forever because he would be going in as more than insane, he would be criminally insane, or an insane criminal, he wasn't sure what the distinction was although he thought there should be one.

Lillian worried most about what to tell her children and had written and rewritten many letters. Alexander had saved all the various drafts because he never knew when she would no longer be able to revise and write more. After the phone call with her daughter, after that moment of pure joy, Alexander had begun to put together all the things Lillian wanted her children to find easily: the deed to the house, her will and her letters. She had promised him they would understand and respect her decision. He wished they could visit her one last time.

Good things that cannot be explained are called miracles. Alexander wondered what to call the bad things that cannot be explained. Miraculously Lillian went through a period of lucidity long enough to enjoy a visit with her daughters who came at Alexander's suggestion. He told them about their mother but they didn't have to see it or feel it, that terrible cold emptiness when her mind left her stranded. They talked about the future and Alexander lied to them, let them think the future was further away than it was. He told them how much he owed to their mother and how he would care for her and be sure to let them know when they needed to come back again. He couldn't tell them that their mother had been miraculously off in another world, had been peeing in the closet, sleeping in the yard, had attacked him several times thinking he was an intruder, not recognizing him from one minute to the next. He could not tell them that whenever she miraculously came to her senses she told him she wanted to be done, wanted him to kill her, set her free, had prepared letters for her children, had dreaded their visit, had almost not allowed it to happen.

"You have to see your daughters one more time, you have to, I won't do this for you if you won't see them one last time. Your letters will not be enough, they have to be able to remember kissing and hugging you one last time or they will live with guilt their entire lives. I know you don't want that for them. I have no one. No one will be sad that I'm dead but you have those girls, you have to do that for them."

And so she did and she was herself in the moment and recognized them and it was a good visit. Soon after, she awoke one morning very lucid and asked Alexander to end it for her, then and there while she was rational before she lost it again because it was more dignified. She had fasted and taken a bath and was ready. She asked him if he wanted to change his mind because it seemed to her that he was doing pretty well and she couldn't expect him to end his own much younger life before he was ready or to ruin it by committing an act of supreme kindness that was still considered a crime. He laughed and got her laughing too about how he wouldn't go to prison but just back to the hospital he had run from and what other alternatives did he have? She said he could remain in the house, that he would never be homeless again. In the end, they decided not to take the big step that day. They lied to each other, said that it was enough to know they had the option even though each of them knew it was no longer an option.

VIII

The girls did visit more often, always together now, taking care of one another, helping each other. And their mother was glad they had each other, both such good girls and probably more capable than she had ever been. Alexander took good care of her and the girls were grateful to him, told him he could remain in the house as long as he wanted.

They were already sensing the end and it came as quietly as the last soft wet snow of the spring. She'd had enough, she needed fresh air and freedom and she wandered out, knowing enough to be quiet, not to wake the man in the room across the hall. She was thinking he was her father, who had moved to the attic bedroom after her mother filed for divorce, she was feeling sorry for him, didn't want to wake him. He was so sweet. She missed him already. She wasn't sure what house she was in. It felt like a house she had lived in as a child seventy years ago. She remembered coming out of her room and into the kitchen in the night and it was dark. Everyone was asleep and she had been sick with a fever. She had sensed something in the darkness, maybe it was death. She couldn't have been more than three for her little brother had not yet been born and yet to the very end she remembered that sense she'd had of something waiting in the darkness, not frightening but sad, unutterably sad.

She remembered a song: "To me its crystal clear, was born, gonna die, in between I'm here."... Lillian carefully unlocked the door and walked out into the night, admiring the perfect full moon and the lovely snow that buried everything in its purity. She walked a little ways and found a large evergreen tree that spread its limbs wide like a tent and she lay down under the tent in the parkway between the deserted, snowbound lanes of the Avenue and she went to sleep.

Alexander woke, found Lillian missing and went looking for her, but the police found her before he did. He always got nervous around the police, thinking they would pick him up and return him to the hospital but he'd been on meds for a long time now and had lived with Lillian in her home and been accepted by the family and the neighbors and that had been already several years, how many he'd lost track of, and he had nothing to fear from them.

The daughters were called, they took over the business of planning a small funeral service and Alexander did whatever was asked of him and accepted condolences from people who had seen him care for the deceased. He was accepted for the moment but he knew that couldn't last. He didn't want to live in the house by himself. He didn't want to go find his friends from the street or try to locate the sister he hadn't seen in decades. Alexander wanted his hallucinations. He didn't take his meds that morning or the next. He flushed them down the toilet and then he retired to the room that had become his and waited to see what would be visited upon him.

The Rose Bush

I.

Abraham, Sarah and Robert Isaac

Sarah had only one child, a boy and him late in life. She'd hoped for a girl to talk to and to help out in the kitchen but she couldn't complain seeing as it had begun to look like she'd never have a child at all. She and her husband had taken in orphans from time to time, always girls, but they all left Gap Mills as soon as they could, not a bit of gratitude among them. Her husband, Abraham was overjoyed of course and all the more that it was a boy. He said they should name the boy Isaac because of the similarities they shared with the Old Testament family.

"Well I ain't no ninety years old yet and you best not be thinking to take our boy up top Little Mountain and scaring the living daylights outta him." For her part, Sarah wanted to name the child Robert after her own father but it meant a lot to Abraham to give his son a biblical name, causing Sarah to wonder if he'd married her for her name alone.

"Of course not. What gave you that idea? Sides they was plenty of Sarahs I coulda married if that was what I was after." Sarah wondered then why Abraham had traveled so far to get her but kept that thought to herself and focused on the fight over her son's name.

Abraham suggested they give the boy both names: Isaac Robert and Sarah said that was alright by her because she planned to call him Robbie anyway. In point of fact she never did call him Robbie. Even as an infant, the boy had a sour expression that did not invite diminutives or terms of affection whether he was spoken to or about.

About the time Robert was a year old Sarah decided she wanted a rose bush in the front yard and she asked Abraham to get her one in town but he said it was too dear and maybe next year. Year after year Sarah requested her rose bush and year after year Abraham gave one excuse or another. There was one exchange between them that Robert overheard but didn't understand at the time. He remembered his father telling his mother that if she would allow Maggie Alice back she could have as many rose bushes as she could take care of but Sarah was dead set against having that little slut back in their lives and said she hoped Maggie Alice was far away and suffering for her sin if not actually dead.

In point of fact, Maggie Alice lived in the town not ten miles distant but Robert wouldn't find that out for many years. After that conversation, his mother never again requested a rose bush but he saw her look longingly at the roses in town gardens whenever they all went to town. It was also after that conversation that Abraham stopped talking to his wife. He'd grunt in response to anything she said and started doing a lot of things for himself since he couldn't bring himself to ask her to do anything for him. He also started talking out loud and gesticulating to some person no one could see and some people said he was crazy and some people said he was talking to God.

Sarah worried that Abraham might indeed take Robert up top Little Mountain to sacrifice him and even though she knew the bible story ended well, she didn't trust her crazy husband not to get carried away and fail to hear God telling him to never mind the boy and sacrifice a lamb instead. She warned Robert never to climb Little Mountain with his father and Robert never did.

By 1939, Abraham was safely in the ground himself and Sarah tended the rose bush she and Robert planted on his grave to little avail. No matter how much they pruned, mulched, watered and fertilized it, each bud turned out to be yet another green leaf and no flower. Sarah said Abraham cursed the very soil he was buried in and Robert believed that, seeing as how the rose bush refused to flower for so many years.

Robert had been a good student if a little strange. He read well at an early age and delighted in learning the few words of the various languages his teachers had once studied and mostly forgotten. Robert liked to learn the little out of the way things no one else could see any use in. He thought to someday impress people with his bits of esoterica, "esoterica" being one of those words he especially liked. He dreamed of impressing some city woman although where he expected to encounter a city woman was never clear.

Robert and Sarah had electric back then and a radio and they listened to the news together every evening. Robert had graduated high school and been working the farm for three years when Pearl Harbor was bombed and the United States went to war. Sarah agreed with Robert he should go. In her heart she didn't really believe he could be killed. In her heart she hoped he'd see the world and maybe meet some nice women because none of the girls in their little corner of the county had ever given Robert so much as a glance, lean and tough as he was like a piece of baling twine and sour looking too.

Robert woke up well before the sun and did the milking and then packed a little lunch and set off walking to the nearest city which was Roanoke across the state line in Virginia. Lots of Virginians looked down their noses at the West Virginians but Robert didn't care. He expected he'd be respected in the uniform of the United States Army. He didn't stop to visit anyone or even eat his lunch but plodded along in his slow determined way up one mountain and down the next just as the crow flies, his usual frown of concentration on his face as he fantasized stories of an exciting military career.

By noon he'd arrived at the outskirts of the city and got directions from various people to the town center where he found the army recruiting office. There was a truck full of boys from over in Newcastle but they didn't speak to Robert nor he to them. While he waited his turn he heard crude talk of "memselles" and low laughter, but no one actually talked to him. Any conversation Robert was ever privy to was due to eavesdropping which he did shamelessly. When it came his turn, he filled out some forms and submitted to a Doctor's examination. Then he was rejected.

First they told him it was because he was flat-footed.

"I walked all the way into this here city this morning on these feet, never even stopped to rest. Them town boys who come in the truck couldn't a kept up with me even if they tried. If marching is what a soldier does, I'm your man and quiet too, no one hears me in the woods lessen I want 'em to."

The man Robert spoke to said that was sure enough a truth and went to consult someone else. When he came back he said he'd made a mistake and the army was rejecting Robert because of his poor eyesight."

"Whatchu think I got these here glasses for? I see bettern you with these glasses."

"Well then what do you think would happen if a grenade exploded in front of your face and broke them glasses to smithereens. What then? You think we got eye doctors making eyeglasses for folks right in the middle of the war?"

"Well seems to me if a grenade exploded in front of my face, these here eyeglasses would be the least of my worries."

The recruitment man saw the sense in that and went back to consult again but this time did not return. Later someone else came out and asked Robert what he was still doing there and that the office was closed for the day. It was 4pm and Robert had been up twelve hours and eaten only an apple and a potted meat sandwich. He had $2 in his pocket and figured he'd better get some supper and head home. The army didn't want him and he didn't like the look of the city.

When Sarah awoke to find Robert back home the next dawn she was both happy to have him home again and sad that nothing wonderful had overtaken him in town. They went together to do the milking and had their breakfast without speaking of his city excursion. Sarah figured if her son wanted her to know what happened he'd tell her and Robert figured if his mother wanted to know what happened, she'd ask.

II.

Sarah and Maggie Alice

Sarah and Robert did all the chores together until the day she tripped over some logs waiting to be loaded on the back of the pickup for the stove. She broke her hip and couldn't move and Robert couldn't drive the old farm truck into town to get help because Sarah was right smack dab in the middle of the logging road behind it. Sarah was a stoic country woman and didn't make a noise about the pain but still Robert wanted to hurry up and get the volunteer paramedics to help him get her moved and fixed up.

The volunteer paramedics were an interesting mix of old local people and some of the hippies who had moved in to "get back to the land" and those hippies were a never ending source of amazement and amusement to Robert. He liked to spy on them running around naked by the stream and making love on the rocks. Robert was over forty years old by then and still a virgin but he sure liked spying on folks, just like he used to enjoy eavesdropping on conversations, picking up whatever stories he could to embellish and pass on, mostly to the hippies since most of the local people paid no attention to anything he said. When one of the hippies drove past and asked if he wanted a ride into town he said he sure did and told them about what had happened to Sarah except that he added he thought she might have had a stroke which thank-god was not the truth.

They took him to the firehouse which housed two vehicles, an ambulance and a fire truck that they bought with money raised at dances held in the upstairs and the quilt raffle. The dances were always held on the 4th of July and Robert and Sarah never went because he said those affairs were for the "big-shots" in the town and he wasn't one of them, so he felt kind of funny walking into the building and asking for help. They had a telephone in the building and a list of people who were "on call" on specific dates and pretty soon that ambulance was tearing down the washboard road to the Virginia/West Virginia state line a mile away. There the road narrowed into a dirt path and there was a big turn-around across from the roadside sign that said "Welcome to West Virginia" and was full of bullet holes. That was another reason Robert never went to the dances: the town and everything that went with it was in Virginia.

All the volunteer fire department paramedics had gone to Covington to get special training and knew how to move people without hurting them and how to recognize whether a person was bleeding from a vein or an artery and things like that. They were glad to have something to do because the last time they had been called had been months earlier and that was just to clean up an already dead body on the side of the road: some drunk who had been walking to close to the road had his fool head taken clean off by the side mirror of a semi speeding by in the dark. It was a pretty gruesome story what with them having to search all over for the head because it had rolled quite some distance down the sloping shoulder and into the woods. The guy who actually found it had lost his dinner but he never told that part of the story.

Eventually Sarah was carefully moved onto a stretcher and deposited into the ambulance. The logging road they had to carry the stretcher down was rough but she didn't weigh but a trifle, and she didn't complain when one of them tripped on some roots and almost dropped his end of the stretcher. They kept Sarah in hospital for three days and taught her how to use her crutches before sending her back home. Robert sort of camped out in the nearby woods, not having money for a motel room and not wanting to stay in his mother's room even though he was told that he could. It was a matter of modesty.

Modesty was the reason that Sarah asked Robert to send for Maggie Alice when she was ready to come home. She was going to need help with bathing and other intimate bodily functions and she couldn't have her own son doing that kind of thing. Robert couldn't believe his ears when his mother told him to ask one of the hippie neighbors to go get Maggie Alice and told Robert she happened to know the woman would be happy to have free room and board for herself and her son. She had to explain, albeit in as few words as possible, that she had known all along where Maggie Alice lived and that she had forgiven the girl (now in her fifties) for messing around with Abraham way back when Abraham died because by then she didn't care that much. She seemed more disgusted by the name Maggie Alice had given her son, that name being Ishmael, because if no one knew before that the boy was Abraham's son they would sure enough figure it out from that name. Robert was irritated that his mother had neglected to tell him any of this but then he realized no one had officially told him anything about Maggie Alice in the first place, he had learned of her existence by eavesdropping. Robert got himself in a pickle sometimes that way, forgetting that he wasn't supposed to have heard what he heard and later commenting on those stolen bits of information or misinformation as it sometimes happened. So it was that Maggie Alice and Ishmael came to live with old Sarah and Robert Isaac.

With the help of those hippie neighbors who loved a good old fashioned "barn-raising" as they called it, Robert built an extra room onto the back of the house and that was Maggie's room. Ishmael made his bed up in the hayloft of the real barn where he seemed happy enough. Ishmael didn't speak but wasn't deaf, he just ignored people. His mother said he was "autistic" and she'd been up to the hospital in Roanoke to find this out. Sometimes he had fits but was otherwise easy enough to get along with.

As for the two women, truth be told, there was no love lost between them. What they did have in common was each suffered a particular desperation. Sarah had no money to pay a woman to come help her and the free room and board she could offer in exchange was rather paltry, such that few, if any, women other than Maggie Alice would have been interested. Maggie Alice, on the other hand, was tired of the soul crushing ugliness of her little apartment above the Newcastle Laundromat, not to mention the "holier than thou" attitude of her landlady. Add to that the fact that the people of the town talked plenty about her behind her back but never had much to say to her face and it had been so long since anyone had looked her in the eye that on those rare occasions when someone did, she would respond with hostility, sometimes asking outright what they thought they were looking at. Maggie Alice had to study on it a while but ultimately decided she should take the chance to go back to the woods to live where she could be alone with nature and her thoughts. She spent hours, while old Sarah slept, sitting on a rock alongside the creek just dreaming her little daydreams in which she was young and beautiful again and meeting some handsome stranger who came out of nowhere to take her away to whatever place she had last seen on the television.

The other thing Maggie Alice liked to do in her spare moments was to tend the garden. Ishmael helped in the garden and the work seemed to soothe his mood so he stopped having the fits and was often quite joyful. He spoke in single words with gestures: "Bird" he would cry excitedly and point and run down the road a ways to follow the flight of the creature so free and graceful. He didn't mind snakes either and would pick up the black snakes that came out from the undergrowth to bask in the sun on the flat rocks alongside the creek. He recognized the copperheads and rattlers that were also common in summer and knew not to touch them but he watched them and knew they would not attack him unless he did something to scare them. He thought those folks who got an excited fear on them from the sight of snakes were just being silly but he once got very angry at some boys who killed some rattlers for the fun and bravado of it and then drove around with the still twitching snake bodies in the back of the pickup so they could find some girls to frighten. Robert had to restrain him from rushing at those boys and hurting them for, despite Ishmael's small size, he had a ferocious strength when he was angry.

It was a while before Maggie Alice and Ishmael visited the grave of Abraham up the hill back of the house. Maggie Alice saw it the very first day from her window but she hadn't been ready yet to go up there. Abraham had raped Maggie Alice, plain and simple, no effort at seduction at all, no effort to make it less painful for her, no going slow, no sweet words, just a fast, silent rape. If she had had any idea of where she could go, she would have run away then and there. But there was no place for her and no one to talk to. Abraham never touched her after that but she still couldn't help cringing in his presence and as soon as she began to show Sarah ran her off anyway. Then and only then, did Abraham begin to express some concern, not for Maggie Alice really but for his child. That was what he'd been wanting. He'd wanted to show Sarah that he at least could produce a child. So Abraham gave Maggie Alice some money and told her to find an apartment in New Castle and he would come to town to see her once a month. Back then the Laundromat was a filling station and auto repair shop so Abraham could cover his brief and not completely secret visits to Maggie Alice and Ishmael by claiming he needed some fixing on the old Ford.

When Maggie Alice and Ishmael did go to see the grave they found an old rose bush that had no flowers on it, just a lot of tall spindly stalks filled with thorns and shiny deep green leaves. The thorns were quite large and mean looking and Maggie Alice whispered to herself that they were just like Abraham himself. Without consulting anyone, Ishmael began to tend to the rose bush and under his care, it began to flower. It was an odd rose bush though because in the summer it put forth pink roses tinged with red and in the fall, white roses tinged with pink. The roses were small considering the size of the stalks but delicate and exquisitely formed. Ishmael loved every petal of every rose. Ishmael was so astonished by the appearance of the first white rose in the fall that he decided to take Robert up the hill to look at it. He figured since Robert knew the Latin names of all the plants in the region he therefore must know everything there was to know about the plants, including the strange rose bush. In point of fact Robert only knew the names of things but very rarely the soul of them. Nonetheless Robert attempted an explanation and thus began a kind of friendship between the two men.

Together they observed their mothers engage in petty acts of vindictiveness toward each other. Maggie Alice would spit into Sarah's lemonade. Sarah would pretend to need to go to the bathroom when she knew she didn't need to just to interrupt Maggie Alice in her chores. They never said more words to one another than were strictly necessary and both would mutter mean things to themselves, just loud enough for the other to almost hear so one or the other was always hollering "What did you just say?" and the other would respond "nothing, I didn't say nothing, you're imagining it" which exchange would inspire more mutterings and more hollering. The sons just pretended not to notice any of this and went about their business.

It all came to an abrupt end one fresh and brilliant autumn day. Maggie Alice in a pretense of kindness and reconciliation went to great effort to help Sarah take a walk outside and up the hill to Abraham's grave. Sarah had long wanted to go outside but had been to proud to ask for anyone's arm to lean on, so she was wary when Maggie Alice asked in an unusually cheerful tone if she wouldn't join her for a walk outside to see how pretty everything was. As soon as Sarah saw the roses on the bush that had been so long barren she understood, said not another word, just waited to be escorted back into her darkened room where she lay silently indifferent to everything until she died not three weeks later.

During the time that old Sarah lay dying she visited her own past, something she had not done in decades. Sometimes she thought she heard the coal train in the distance even though the coal producing counties were over on the other side of the state separated by many mountains. Those coal trains had clacked and roared through her entire childhood before Abraham came to take her away. She had not minded though, rather missed the sound of them in later life. Yes the mountains had been desecrated to produce coal and the landscape appeared dirty and gray to the casual glance, but she had found hidden wildflowers that had escaped the destruction, wet weather springs that were still clear and clean, and she had found love as well, young as she was back then. Thirteen and fifteen they were, Sarah and Robbie, when they lay among the wildflowers and discovered what love between a man and a woman was. It went on all summer and by fall she had missed her monthlies and knew she was carrying a child. She told Robbie who was joyous and proud and they planned to marry. But before they even had time to tell their parents, Robbie was buried deep in the heart of the earth when a mine collapsed. Sarah did not tell her mother about her pregnancy, but went to see an old granny who lived near a cave and was said to be a witch who could fix such things. The old woman gave Sarah a bitter brew made from a plant with small lacey white flowers and told her to return on the third day if the bleeding had not stopped. Sure enough the bleeding had not stopped on the third day, so when Sarah returned, almost too weak to hike up the hill, the woman had to reach up inside her with a small sharp tool to scrape what remained of the baby so her body could stop trying to flush it out with her own life's blood. Then the old woman packed a poultice made with large hairy leaves between Sarah's legs and told her to set a while in the cold creek. Once the bleeding had stopped, she gave Sarah a tea of nettles and oatstraw and other weedy greens flavored with mint to rebuild her strength and told her to come back for more of the brew every day so she could keep an eye on her and make sure she was recovering.

The old granny did not tell Sarah she might not be able to have children later. So Sarah did not tell Abraham when he came courting. Abraham was a distant cousin on her father's side, a good dozen years older than Sarah. He was a large, strong looking man who reminded Sarah of the coal train that roared through her life. He talked to Sarah's father and then took her away to another part of the state where she forgot about love and focused instead on her chores and sometimes got away to wander in the hills looking for wildflowers. Among the flowers, she would sleep a deep sleep maybe dreaming but not remembering those dreams when she awakened. Years went by and Sarah did not conceive and they took in foster children. Sarah knew why Abraham favored female foster children and she made sure to help the girls run off before they were old enough for him to desire. Only Maggie Alice was flattered by Abraham's attention until he raped her. "What did she expect?" thought Sarah at the time "Love? Like in the old songs? Didn't she know those old songs all ended murderously? She was lucky to get away." As soon as Sarah got to that part of her past, she wandered back to the beginning, remembering that once upon a time she was a lovely young woman with red hair and green eyes and a boy named Robbie loved her sweetly, before a man named Abraham came to cast her in a more somber story.

Neither Robert nor Ishmael knew of the women's little excursion to the rose bush prior to Sarah's demise and their odd friendship continued unchanged, Robert mourning his mother but not expecting nor receiving any sympathy from anyone. Sarah had been ninety plus for a while so you couldn't say she owed anybody anything. Ishmael helped Robert dig a grave for Sarah beside Abraham and innocently planted a cutting from the first rose bush on the second grave. Robert asked Ishmael if he would be staying on and Ishmael gave a nod in the direction of his mother who had kept her distance during the burial. Robert walked over to Maggie Alice, not coming too close and asked in a loud and formal tone if she would be staying on and she said she reckoned she would if that was alright with him and he said it was and he would appreciate it if she would continue to do the cooking and cleaning. The next day Robert walked into Newcastle to the Notary Public and had a document written up giving Ishmael and Maggie Alice what was called a "life estate" interest in his property meaning they each had a right to live on that land as long as each lived not even Robert himself and he didn't mind because he liked Ishmael's company and Maggie Alice's cooking.

As it happened Robert did not have much opportunity to grow fat and happy on Maggie Alice's cooking. As soon as she had satisfied herself that her son had a home and that he and his half brother seemed to be getting along well enough, Maggie Alice decided it was time to see something of the world. She was past sixty and figured if she didn't do it soon it would be too late. She'd managed to save up some money over the years, several hundred dollars in small bills she kept in a cookie tin with pictures of people in a snow sleigh on it. Maggie Alice figured if she had to, she could always get a waitressing job at a truck stop along the way. Greyhound was offering a special ticket for $99 that allowed her to make as many stops in as many places as she wanted as long as she finished her traveling in three months so Maggie Alice set off to see the great vastness of the United States of America. For the next three months Robert Isaac (as Maggie Alice had taken to calling him) and Ishmael received a postcard once a week with a picture on it of some scenic wonder including the President's faces carved into Mount Rushmore. Robert Isaac's favorite was of a building all decorated with murals made from colored corn husks and other grains called the A-Maizing Corn Palace somewhere in the middle of South Dakota. Ishmael said he'd like to see a picture of the ocean. When the picture of the Pacific Ocean came it was nearly three months and both of the men wondered if Maggie Alice was going to make it back home before her time was up and if she didn't, if she'd have enough money for another ticket. They figured her money had to have run out by then. Point of fact, Maggie Alice's money had run out and she was working in a coffee shop in San Francisco. She said she liked it so much she planned to stay a while. She wrote she had a studio apartment in a neighborhood called "The Tenderloin" which fact made Robert Isaac shake his head in apparent disapproval and Ishmael laugh his fool head off.

Maggie Alice had a vague plan of saving up enough money to go back home after a few months but the months became years, and Robert Isaac and Ishmael sort of got used to doing without her. Whenever she thought about leaving her little studio apartment that she had all to herself and had decorated with seashells and calendar pictures of all the places she'd been on her travels, whenever she thought about leaving her little home, well she just wasn't ready.

III.

Robert Isaac and Ishmael

Houston Lastwick was a born businessman, always had his eye on the lay of the land, his thumb on the pulse of the times. Before the cities began to value their history he had a demolition business tearing down old homes to make way for new office buildings. Some sense caused him to first remove the carved mantles, colored glass windows, claw foot bath tubs and fancy gas ranges before he let fly the wrecking ball. These items he hauled up to his farm where the "junk" filled up the front yard of his home and overflowed into the abandoned corn fields. When the late sixties and early seventies brought droves of city kids coming in buying up land and building communes, putting up tipis and yurts and domes and even some plain old houses he made sure he invited them out to the farm where they discovered his treasure. He traded all that junk for cash, labor, the occasional beef steer or other junk and retired from the demolition business. No more commuting for Houston.

Just as the junk business began to wane and the hippies either returned to what they called "civilization" or settled in, the real estate business picked up, and there was Houston ready with his broker's license gotten after a two week intensive at the Adult Ed in Blacksburg. In the eighties it was wealthy stock brokers looking for rural hunting and fishing "camps" to buy and not cheap either. Commissions were making Houston a rich man. One fellow from New York had his heart set on Robert's place. He was fixing to buy the adjacent spread, a larger and more valuable piece of land with good grazing and two large fancy stone houses on it but the spring that fed the trout stream running through that land originated on Robert's place, deep in a cave in the woods. If Houston could talk Robert into selling his place to the owner of the adjacent property, well Houston could make double commissions, a sweet deal indeed.

Now that old Harlan Jackson, who owned the neighboring farm, had been offering Robert Isaac a paltry sum for his land every year since Sarah had died and every year Robert Isaac turned him down, politely enough to his face, but then he'd cuss old Harlan Jackson up one side and down the other to Ishmael who listened gleefully and repeated a few of Robert's best phrases. That Robert sure could talk, and Ishmael sure enjoyed listening to him.

Houston knew he had his work cut out for him. Old Harlan would have enjoyed buying Robert's land low and selling it high to the broker from New York City but Houston reminded him Robert was no fool and the buyer might lose interest and find another place in another county if Harlan didn't stop fooling around and let Houston handle it. So it was that Houston brought Robert Isaac an offer of five times what he was used to hearing from Harlan Jackson. Robert's eyes lit up and Houston got his hopes up for a moment, thinking this was going to be easier than he expected but it turned out to be surprise not greed that had lit up Robert's eyes and Houston drove home disappointed.

Then Houston came back talking to Robert about Ishmael, what would happen to him when Robert passed on? Just for a hypothetical of course, didn't Robert feel a responsibility to provide for his brother's future welfare?

"He be my older brother in point of fact and I aint going to deprive him of his home if that is what you mean. This place is our home you know, the _both_ of us." And Robert told Houston about the piece of paper duly notarized that gave Ishmael a life estate interest in the land and explained in detailed legalize what that meant. So it was Houston's turn to look surprised because he'd checked out the deed in the courthouse and found no encumbrances thereon. Robert never had registered the paper in the County Courthouse and he suddenly worried that he'd said too much and made a mental note to go record that paper as soon as Ishmael finished some repairs on the old Ford. Robert wasn't walking miles and miles into towns anymore. Houston was in the middle of a sentence when Robert bade him a curt good day and turned to go inside the house. He was done talking to Houston Lastwick.

Houston was about to get back into his car, a late model Caddy, when he saw Ishmael up on the hill tending his rose bushes and decided a little walk in the evening air would do him some good. He was panting by the time he reached the grave sites. Ishmael, tenderly and carefully pruning the rose bushes, paid Houston no mind.

"Nice evening," said Houston as soon as he could catch his breath. Ishmael said nothing. He didn't like this man. He remembered Houston was one of the teenagers used to make fun of Ishmael when he lived in town with his mother. He figured if he just kept quiet, Houston would get tired of talking to a brick wall and take his leave.

"Thems sure beautiful roses, aint never seen roses that beautiful."

Ishmael was proud of his roses. He was tempted to tell Houston that people came from all over the county to see those roses on a Sunday afternoon. But he wouldn't speak to Houston and he just kept carefully pruning, with his eyes on his work.

"Whatchu gonna do when you have to leave them roses? When you have to leave this place?"

Houston saw that Ishmael had stopped his pruning and he thought he might even look at him then but Ishmael kept his eyes down, away from Houston and started into pruning again, the little clicking sounds loud now in the silence.

"You know your Robert has agreed to sell this place. $250 thousand dollars! Enough for both of you to buy big houses in town and live a life of leisure the rest of your days!"

"I got a life estate" Ishmael said more to himself than to Houston but Houston heard him and pressed on.

"I don't know nothing about no life estate. Robert never said nothing about no life estate."

Then Houston decided he'd best be getting along. Ishmael never looked at Houston but his careful pruning had become savage and decapitated roses were flying everywhere.

Robert saw Houston drive away and wondered what he'd been up to for so long and then he went up the hill to get Ishmael for dinner. Ishmael heard Robert call him, felt him come up close behind him. He uncoiled himself from his tightly wound rage and plunged the pruning tool into Robert's chest. Then he ran wildly sobbing into the woods. When he came back Robert Isaac lay in a pool of blood in a pile of pink and white roses and nothing Ishmael tried would bring him back to life.

Houston testified in the murder trial that he thought Ishmael lacked the sense to form any criminal intent and he also testified that Robert Isaac had agreed to sell his property for $50 thousand in the Probate hearing. The State took charge of the money and Ishmael who was moved to the State Mental Hospital.

Ishmael never uttered another word that anyone could understand but he tended the roses in the hospital gardens. He cried his broken heart out over them and they blossomed like never before or since. The pink and white bushes at the grave site of old Abraham and Sarah and then Robert Isaac, died out and the spring that fed the trout stream on Harlan Jackson's place dried up just like that. The stock broker from New York was indicted on some securities fraud charges and went to prison so Harlan Jackson paid out fifty thousand dollars for no good reason but to pay Ishmael's expenses at the State Hospital. Houston got the one commission anyway.

IV.

Maggie Alice

Some folks in the county say they saw Maggie Alice come back to the old place and that was no ghost. Maggie Alice did make her way back one summer, in the early nineties just after Houston Lastwick died of some strange affliction. Poor old Maggie Alice found the place deserted and the two old rose bushes all but dead on the untended graves, three there then. She watered and fed them finding new soil and old leaves in the forest and loosening the old soil around the roots with some rusty tool she found in a shed. She carefully pruned away the brittle brown dead stalks and thorns until she found some green left to nurture. She tended the rose bushes and waited for Robert Isaac or Ishmael to come, she didn't know which. She couldn't read the name on the third gravestone, it being but a charred stump with clumsily carved words now obscured by the weather. Finally a stranger came, a young man, and told her the truth or that part of it that he, sweet child, reckoned she could bear. She got a ride to the State Hospital and visited her son one time but he ignored her and she left glad that at least he had a roof over his head and three squares a day and that in this place he even got some respect for he had his gardening chores and folks at the hospital were suitably impressed with his skill.

Maggie Alice went back to the land, trespassing now that it belonged to the wealthy neighbor, and she camped there for the rest of the summer. She would wander and day dream and eat wild plants and berries and roots, sometimes a fish she contrived to catch and cook over an open fire. She rummaged about in the years and remembered when she'd been but a girl and angry all the time because of the way people talked about her but never to her. Then when her son was born different and she knew that other children would exclude him, that hurt her more than when she was the one that was excluded. Then it was all about mothering the child. She realized at the age of fifteen that her life as she knew it was over and this new life she'd brought into the world was her world and she was his. She got practical then, letting go of anger, useless as it was, and learning to fill herself with whatever she could pass along to her child in place of a welcome from society. For them, there was no place in society, so she found them a place in the wild, savoring sunrises and roses, birdsong and singing creeks. They lived in the town but walked daily in the nearby woods where she collected memories to talk about later: a brightly colored bird, the exciting sound of thunder, the fresh spray of water running over rocks. When she held her child firmly she thought she felt the strength she drew from the world coursing into him and this was her gift to him. She remembered that she had been a good mother, the best she could be.

After the first soft snow fall Maggie Alice saw with childlike delight that a rose had finally blossomed on the most ancient of the two rose bushes, small and solitary but exquisitely formed with velvety petals as deep a dark red as blood. Maggie Alice carefully buried the bases of both rose bushes in piles of autumn leaves well moistened with snow and left this place for the third and last time in her very long life. She left for the city but this time not so far, just to Roanoke and she can be found there to this day, a beggar woman downtown who shouts and carries on. Poor old Maggie Alice, she catches a look of herself in the big glass windows of a downtown office building and can't believe it is herself she is seeing. She's so old she's got more hair on her chin than her head. She's so old she's wrinkled like one of them apple face dolls. She's so old the wart on her nose is older than some baby's grandparents. She's so old she's cold even in summer, even wrapped up in three men's overcoats. She's so old she cries all the time and doesn't even know it. She's so old she can't no more remember whole long parts of her life and when she does she thinks she may have dreamed them. She's so old she's outlived every damn human being she ever knew well enough to talk to, including her own baby boy who spent near twenty years in a state institution and was well neigh eighty when he died. She's so old she knows that for some folks life is not too short at all, for some folks five minutes might be too long. She's so old she's not afraid of the President and she'll say anything to anyone right up there with the street preachers, right down there with the whores. She's so old she knows some things the bankers and lawyers and secretaries don't know. Best listen to this oh so old woman lest there be wisdom hidden in her nonsense.

The Podunk International Bank Heist

I.

Betty couldn't find any scotch tape so she removed all the store coupons and football schedules from the refrigerator leaving it completely clear and put one state magnet on each of the four corners of the note to her husband Jim so he couldn't possibly miss it. This is what the note said:

Dear Jim,

I am going out to rob the credit union. Don't try to stop me. I know what I am doing. Here is the thing.... I got another one of those rejections yesterday and I didn't want to tell you because you never sympathize, you just say you don't understand why I waste my time writing stories when I could be making more money typing those stupid theses for those stupid pissant college students who don't know their asses from a hole in the ground and I just don't want to hear that anymore. If you can't understand this need that I have to write then at least accept it. Well, be that as it may I've been seeing all these folks getting big book contracts after they've committed a crime or been a witness in a crime trial or a lawyer representing someone who committed a crime and I got the idea that if I robbed the credit union and got caught maybe I could get my stories published. And if I don't get caught, well then we'll be rich and god knows we could use more money. Either way, at the end of the day, I expect to be either rich or famous and you can't beat that. I'll see you later, sweetie.

Love, Betty

Of course Jim completely missed the note. He opened the fridge door and got himself some orange juice and then walked around the house hollering for Betty. The house was not very large, one of those brick ranchers with two little bedrooms and a tiny bathroom off a long narrow hall. It took Jim five minutes to search the house including huffing and puffing his way back up the stairs from the basement. He hadn't checked the kids' rooms, empty now for years since the two girls and a boy had left home to get their own apartments and work jobs they hated while they searched for the perfect mate and one of them tried writing screenplays, got that from her mother, dammit. Just about broke his heart the way Betty could never be satisfied. She woke up one morning last week saying "it never happened, it never happened" and he thought she was having a nightmare but turns out she was saying it had just hit her that she was 58 years old and all her life she kept thinking something wonderful would happen one day and now that she was 58 she had to realize that it never had happened yet and probably never would and she cried and cried and Jim didn't know whether to be hurt or angry and was probably both but he did his best to comfort her, held her and told her that she was the wonderful thing that happened to him and he meant it and she said, "Oh, honey, I'm so sorry," and he thought maybe then they'd have sex but she said another time. He was tired of it but couldn't imagine what to do about it and now, now the woman was gone. He'd checked the garage off the kitchen and her little car was gone.

Maybe she was kidnapped, right from their own home, made to drive some crazy person to Mexico in her own car, a damn hijacking from their own house. He felt suddenly guilty that he hadn't been more vigilant, hadn't been more sympathetic, more understanding. After all he had married the smartest girl in the senior class, he should have realize a gifted girl would want more out of life than three children and a tract house. Then he rationalized that he'd done the best he could and why did she marry him if he wasn't good enough for her? Finally he decided to call the police.

During all of this he hadn't noticed the note on the refrigerator door. Neither did the police who came to look for clues to an intruder in the house and ask him questions about where he thought she might have gone. They were all over and he even offered them Diet Cokes from the fridge but no one noticed the note. They suggested he might call her friends to ask if they had any ideas about where she might have gone and he called her friend Jean who asked him if she'd left a note. A NOTE!

Of course, Betty was always writing him notes, but she usually taped them on the mirror so he'd see them when he was shaving. He looked all over for a note and still missed the letter on the refrigerator which she had taken care to place over the freezer section right at his eye level.

So, in her bathrobe and slippers and a look of disgust on her face, Jean came over and found the note right off the bat for him and by then it was pretty late, too late to stop Betty, which turned out to be a stroke of good fortune for Maureen over at the Podunk International Bank in the next town down the highway.

II.

So, what is this International Bank business? Betty was going off to rob the home town credit union. Thing is, she forgot that the credit union was closed on Wednesday mornings and stayed open later that night. After having written her letter about being rich or famous she didn't feel like going back home to wait for the credit union to open so she headed out west on the highway.

The next town was Podunk, yes there really is a town named Podunk. Some hippies back in the sixties had actually taken over a small ghost town, once a mining town and they thought it would be funny to call it "Podunk" and the name stuck even as the hippies grew up to be more or less the usual run of the mill country folks just doing whatever to get from one day to the next.

Maureen had come to the town about ten years later, driving cross country to escape New Jersey. There was this little bank there called the Podunk International Bank because they did a lot of business with Mexico and she got a job and sort of expected to be promoted because the owner of the bank was one of these hippies and she didn't expect the same old sexist shit from him that she had experienced in New Jersey. But the boss was busted when local police tipped off the Feds that the green-house in back of the barn was full of marijuana plants. He went to jail and sold the bank to an out-of-town outfit who hired some young suit from back east to manage it and once again Maureen found herself training some man to be her own supervisor.

Once Maureen tried leaving, went to Denver and ended up marrying a prisoner. It was quite the romance on paper but once he got out and the letters stopped and real life began she realized she'd made a huge mistake. She left the man without telling him she was pregnant and went back to the security of her job with the Podunk International Bank. She worked hard to get her kid raised and out of there to something better. It broke her heart when her daughter did no better in life than she had. The kid couldn't wait to go to Denver to find her Dad and ended up working as an office temp and supporting the old drunk. Sometimes she'd call Maureen and tell her she wished she would have listened to her when she was younger.

So, when Betty came in, waving her husband's gun, demanding money, Maureen said, "You got it, honey, and you can put that gun down."

III.

Meanwhile back at the rancher that Betty had called home for thirty years, Jim went back to bed. When Jean had come striding in her hair rolled up in pink curlers, her slippers flapping, clutching her robe around her and tore the note off the fridge without even looking for it and swung it onto Jim's chest saying only "there" (the "you dope" being implied by her expression) he had been mortified. The two police officers who had also missed the note didn't want to embarrass him further and excused themselves with mumbled words the gist of which was "glad she's OK" the idea of suicide never occurring to any of them and "see you around" stuff like that, and did a little dance at the door trying to figure out who would go through it first. Finally they figured it out and walked outside and down the driveway before carrying on a whispered argument.

The female cop said, "Was I right? Tell me, wasn't I right?"

"I don't know why you think that," answered the male cop somewhat defensively.

"I'm telling you it'll come out later. Her body will be found in a ditch somewhere and he did it. This morning was just his cover."

"I'm sure he planted it, needed us to find it so he could act surprised."

"All the more reason we should have read it. What if it said she went to the store?"

"I'm telling you, whatever it said, HE wrote it! It's his cover!"

"Let's go back. We need it for handwriting analysis."

But they could hear their car radio screeching and scratching and hurried up to answer. They were told to go immediately to the Canyon to wake up, ticket and send packing some guy in a pick-up, parked at a picnic site where signs expressly stated that overnight camping was _not permitted_

Jim went back to bed even though it was the middle of the week, got up again to call in sick at work, and then fell into a deep and deeply mortified sleep. Jim did that. Sometimes he had a six pack to help him sleep. That was what Betty called a "stupor."

IV.

Back at the Bank Betty was wondering about the surveillance cameras and suddenly worried about getting caught now that she had an accomplice who was more interested in the money than the fame.

"Oh those things, the system hasn't worked in weeks. The thing is when the boss bought the system they talked him into buying a five year warranty and he found out later that he paid way too much for it and that pissed him off so when he got a renewal notice for the warranty he said no way were they getting any more money out of him and the system crashed completely the day after the warranty expired, just about 8 hours actually and when they refused to come out and replace it because it was 8 hours too late he sued them and they are still waiting to get into court over it."

Maureen had a tendency to run on about things and get sidetracked and she was talking about violent crime in the county while stuffing little packets of rather large bills into some bags she had back in the vault and Betty just sort of stood there, the unloaded gun dangling from her hand wondering if she should be helping or something.

"Where did all that money come from? I mean that seems like a lot of money for such a little town."

"You noticed this was an _International_ bank right?"

"Yeah I did notice that. Because of being so close to the border?"

"Exactly and because a couple of local farmers do a lot of trading across it and that is why there is so much cash here. It's all drug money. The working folks just cash their checks at the grocery store and buy money orders for things. They have their own reasons for not wanting to make a paper trail or have to show ID but the thing is the bank manager is in on the drug dealing. They think I don't know or else they don't care that I know. I get a nice Christmas bonus but come to think of it, they should have been treating me better all these years. I could have called the FBI or something. The local sheriff is in on it too."

"Won't they come after us? kill our families?"

"Oh, no! They aren't violent people. They just fell into something too good to pass up and went for it."

"How much is there anyway?"

"About a mil."

"Doesn't anyone ever come in? I mean shouldn't you lock up or something?"

"Sure, I'll go hang a gone to lunch sign in the door and you can continue filling up these bags."

Betty sat there cross legged on the floor surrounded by packets of cash and suddenly started laughing. She realized with half a million dollars she didn't really need the notoriety to get her work published. She could afford to start her own publishing company. Then she interrupted her own fantasy about the publishing business remembering that she had three children who were paying way too much rent for tiny little apartments in big cities where everyone seemed to have more money than they did. Of course she would use the money to buy them each a home. Betty was a firm believer in the value of real estate, something she learned as a child reading _Gone With The Wind_ and whenever she bought a lottery ticket she thought about it. She was thinking all this when Maureen came in and told her the front door was locked and she had put the out to lunch sign facing outward with the little cardboard clock hands pointing to 2pm as her estimated time to return.

The two women finished putting the money into the two bags, trying to count it out in equal amounts and then walked out and put the two bags, each containing roughly, if not exactly, half a million dollars, into the little trunk of Betty's car. The lock didn't work anymore but they didn't worry about the money in the trunk of the car. Betty's car was so old and unappealing that potential thieves would not give it a second glance assuming, she supposed, that whatever was inside would be equally old and unappealing. The trunk was filled with tools, an emergency blanket, a first aid kit, some flares, a half crushed cardboard box, a ripped jacket with a broken zipper. They took all that out and then replaced it on top of the money bags, a little slap happy with excitement, not really believing it yet. Maureen did demonstrate some rather practical good sense when she went back and changed the "out to lunch" sign with a "Got the flue" sign, made sure the bank door was locked and the metal gate drawn down over the facade and padlocked. Then she thought about calling her boss and leaving a message but decided not to bother.

"I think he's in Mexico this week anyway and that gives me a couple days to pack up my stuff and get the hell out of Dodge."

"I thought you said they weren't violent people and couldn't do anything because they never reported any of this to the IRS and all that?"

"Well it's true they aren't the kind of people to track us down and kill our families but you've heard of "heat of passion" right? I mean if I was standing right in front of the guy and refusing to tell him what happened to _a million dollars_ , that could be scary. So this way I've got time to disappear and they'll never know about you."

Betty drove and Maureen started in to talking. It was obvious she'd been lonely and needing a friend for some time.

"You know, I have worked so many years at that bank and I do not understand why I never did this before. God knows my daughter could have used a few more advantages growing up. I guess I was afraid I'd get caught. After the surveillance camera system crashed I actually had the thought that, now that the cameras weren't working, we'd have our first ever bank robber, you know Murphy's Law and all, but it never occurred to me to just up and take the money myself and go to Denver."

"Denver?"

"My daughter lives there. She's temping and taking college classes, one, two classes at a time, will take her forever to get her degree. I wonder if she could get into a school like Harvard if she had the money. She was a good student in High School."

"With all this money, why not send her to Oxford? Living in a foreign country would be kind of fun I think. If I were younger I'd want to do that."

They talked a bit more about their children and Betty revealed she sometimes she regretted she'd spent so much time writing stories instead of being with her kids, how the time just flew by and next thing you knew the babies were all grown and then she got suddenly quiet while a state trooper passed them by.

V.

Betty stopped to fill the tank and decided to give Jim a call just to let him know that she was OK and that in fact she did not get caught because at that point she didn't want him disclosing the contents of her note to anyone. First she called his work and some guy there told her he had called in sick and sounded surprised she didn't know this, which worried her, made her think her note upset him. Then she dialed home.

It took him a long time to answer the telephone and she told him she was fine and that she'd be home in time for dinner and not to worry about anything and to put her note in her top desk drawer. He couldn't remember where he put her note but told her he would take care of it because he didn't want her to think he'd lost it or didn't even read it, which he didn't, but he wouldn't want her to know that because, even drunk, as it happens he was, he understood that would hurt her feelings just like it always hurt her feelings when he didn't listen to her when she was talking to him. So he told her "OK" and "be careful" and "I love you" all of which sounded like the sort of thing a husband might tell a wife who had just robbed a bank but which was also the sort of thing a husband might tell his wife if he just wanted to end the conversation politely and go back to sleep.

Maureen had gone to use the bathroom and they decided to grab some lunch at the cafe because they were both starving. For her part, Maureen was starting to think about all the things she'd have to do before leaving Podunk forever. She had walked to work that morning because her car was in the shop and it was just dawning on her that with all that money she could just buy a new one in Denver. Then it occurred to her that she could buy all new clothes and whatever else she needed so maybe she didn't even have to go back home at all. This was a liberating thought but also a bit depressing. Then she remembered her photographs of her daughter and she realized that she couldn't just leave behind the history of her child's development so she would have to return home to get the photographs. Maybe Betty would wait while she got them, all seven shoeboxes full, and then drop her off at the Greyhound station and _then_ Maureen could just disappear forever from that town where she had spent or wasted, depending on how you looked at it, twenty years of her life "Don't you have any friends in town?" Betty asked when Maureen made her request after they ordered sandwiches and fries at the truck-stop.

"Yeah actually I do have a few friends, but I can't tell them what I'm doing and I'm thinking I probably should not even get in touch with them after I get established somewhere else."

"Oh, now I feel terrible. You are tied to the scene of the crime. You have to disappear. I can just go home and hide the money and nobody will be the wiser but you have to give up your whole life, just like in a witness protection program."

"Well those people do it. And you know I'll get word to my friends somehow. The thing is I left my life, and my friends in New Jersey when I moved out here. All those folks who promised to come out and visit me and not a one ever even picks up a damn telephone to say hi, how are you, screw you, drop dead, nada. So much for friends."

Betty felt a little alarmed by Maureen's vehemence. Obviously this woman had been hurt by her former friends' neglect; obviously the subject of friends was a sore spot. Betty decided to change the subject.

"How old are you actually, if you don't mind my asking?"

"Forty-five."

"Yeah I figured, I would have taken you for younger but you have a daughter old enough to be living on her own in Denver so... I could be your mother, well not quite, almost. But I think you are better off getting out of there while you still have some energy, enough youth to enjoy yourself and enough maturity to make better choices. What do you think?"

"I think you are going to write a story about me."

"Do you mind?"

"No, you may as well. You'll probably make my life more interesting than it was or ever will be but you know I have traveled some. I got three full weeks paid vacation after I'd been at the bank a year so I've been to nineteen wonderful places and even though I appear to be just another boring tourist I feel like an adventurer and I take photographs as proof that I've been to, let me see..." Maureen started counting off places on her fingers: the Canadian Rockies, the Pacific Northwest, Hawaii, Alaska, South America three times, Scandinavia and the UK, France and Italy and Morocco, Mexico didn't really count, being just over the border and... "Oh, and Spain, did I say Spain already?"

Betty just knew Maureen was one of those people who make lists of everything.

"I'm going to get myself some oil paints and canvas and paint pictures from those photos. What do you think?"

"Hmmmmm." Betty barely had time to give a minimal response as Maureen went right on developing her new plan now she was going to be free of the job and the town.

"I'll be an artist too, create something with my name on it. I could have been doing that all these years but I'd get home from work and fix dinner and watch television or rent videos. You know television can be so debilitating"...

"I do know what you mean..."

Maureen stopped talking when the waitress brought their food and for a while they both just chewed. Maureen ate faster and resumed talking.

"It just occurred to me that one reason it is so easy to leave my friends behind is that we never did talk much, just watched television together usually after a meal where everyone ate more than they even wanted to. For birthdays, anniversaries, weddings, funerals, we just ate and watched television. Now I think of it, I am appalled, absolutely appalled. You were writing stories I bet."

"Hmmmm." Betty frowned a little as she chewed.

"That's a good thing right?"...

More frowning, more chewing, a little throat clearing and then it just burst out of her, all the anxiety inspired by acting out of character: " _What_ was I thinking? It was just plain crazy planning to rob a bank, what _was_ I thinking? What was I _thinking?_ and now you are in trouble and...do you think we could take it back? before anyone notices?"

Maureen didn't know what to say. She had been feeling absolutely euphoric since Betty came into her dull and unrewarding life and liberated her from all that and here she'd bummed the woman out. She hadn't meant to but there you are. So she didn't say anything at all and the two women finished up what was on their plates and said "shall we?" and began searching their wallets for the right number of $1 bills so they could leave a tip before taking the check up to the cashier. This struck each of them at the same moment as hysterically funny given that they had a trunk full of $100 bills outside and then without even having to discuss the matter, they each emptied their wallets onto the table saving just enough to pay for the lunch. The waitress came running outside after them not believing they had intended to leave her an $87 tip for a $14 lunch and they waved and yelled: "we won some money on the rez, enjoy." She shouted back, "Go girls!" pocketed the money and turned back to the diner with a little hip swivel and a skip. It was a light moment in an afternoon rapidly filling with anxiety.

Betty got behind the wheel and headed back toward Podunk.

"So, you know I was actually serious about giving the money back. I know it has to be a joint decision but I want to ask you to think very carefully about this. Even if we are able to get away with it, are we _really_ able to get away with it? I mean how does one spend all that money? We can't very well open bank accounts and write checks and where would we hide it? I know you want to send your daughter to a high dollar college but you can't send them a boxful of cash can you? You probably couldn't even get a cashier's check without raising suspicion, I mean what exactly does one do with that kind of cash?"

"Money orders I was thinking. You can deposit money orders into a bank account as long as they are under $10,000. Anytime you deposit $10,000, the bank has to report the deposit to the IRS."

"So you...what? go to the grocery store and buy a money order?"

"Well actually you go to a lot of grocery stores, every grocery store you can find in a big city where they are too busy to talk to each other and buy money orders in small amounts and open several different bank accounts and keep depositing small amounts in each until you have enough in them to write checks to colleges, make down payments on homes, that kind of thing."

"Well what about the casinos? Can you say you won $10,000 at a casino?"

Maureen took the question as a good sign that Betty was regaining her senses and did her best to encourage that.

"I'm thinking, I'm thinking. The last time I won any money worth counting I got $300 in quarters and they gave me the rest, yes it was in cash, seventeen $100 bills. OK that's one way, I was worried if the casino paid by check we'd get ourselves in trouble but that would work, yes that is one way. So does this mean you are back on track here? You don't want to give the money back?"

"I don't know, I don't _know_. I never dreamed I'd ever get away with this. It's scaring me. You know: _karma?_ "

"Hmmmmm."

Betty drove and Maureen thought. Maybe it was too good to be true that they would have all this money and not get caught and just get to enjoy the rest of their lives without suffering consequences.

"I wonder if maybe we could put back most of it but still keep some...?"

"If we did get caught it would be silly to have to go to jail over less money wouldn't it? I think it has to be all or nothing and right this minute I just don't know. One voice is telling me give it back, I wasn't meant to be a successful criminal. Another voice is telling me to go for it because the reason I've never been a successful anything was because I was too timid. Too timid to leave home for one thing, marrying my high school sweetheart because I was lonely and getting stuck out in the middle of nowhere for my entire fucking life."

Maureen was shocked to hear the F word coming from Betty's neatly lipsticked, middle aged mouth but relieved as well. Not wanting to appear too greedy or amoral, Maureen decided to let Betty battle this out with her conscience while she drove. Later, when they got back to town, if Betty was still indecisive about keeping the money, Maureen could always put her two cents worth in then, her two cents worth being that she had long ago given up on Karma but if she did believe it in it she would say that both she and Betty had earned a break.

"Oh, speaking of the sweetheart, I think I need to pull off at a gas station and phone him. There is no way I'm going to be home in time for dinner and he'll be worried as hell by now."

"My god Betty where have you been?"

"Well actually it is really a long story and I don't want to tell you over the telephone but I did want to be sure you didn't worry about me. I may be a bit late for dinner so when you get hungry just fix yourself something and don't wait for me. I had a late lunch. I will tell you all about it when I get home. You put my note in the desk drawer right?"

Jim had forgotten she had told him to do that and he wasn't exactly sure why it was so important and it occurred to him that maybe he should read it after all but he forgot where he had put it. He just told her yes, of course he'd done that and she said, "Good, I'll have a lot to tell you when I get home and I hope you won't be too disappointed." which remark really got him wondering so as soon as he hung up the phone he began searching for that note.

During the comings and goings of the day it had slipped off the kitchen table and onto the floor beneath, then wafted across the floor where it rested under the gas range. Jim would have frustrated himself to no avail had their son not called and distracted him.

VI.

"Thank-god, Maureen, you weren't inside. The metal gate was down and we were afraid maybe someone came and trapped you in there. We couldn't put it out...

Maureen didn't say anything about putting the metal gate down: too much talking was what got people in trouble on television. Better to be asking the questions so she asked if they thought someone had deliberately started the fire, did they have any evidence of arson?

"No not yet. It's possible there was an electrical short. I warned your boss about those security cameras, they could short out and cause problems. Sometimes you get some electrical wire smoldering inside the walls for a couple days before anything erupts and then POW out it comes.

"The worst thing is Therese Gonzales' house, the frame house behind the bank: wiped out. The wind was blowing just right to catch her house. Thankfully she and the baby were at the grocery store when it happened and the older kids are all in school."

He sighed and said he had to get back to work. They needed to make sure the wind didn't blow anymore chance flames around the town and he was the man in charge.

Betty and Maureen walked around back and conferred. Clearly they could not put the money back now. They decided to take the fire as a sign that they were supposed to have control over that money. No discussion necessary on giving a substantial portion to the woman whose house had burned down. Then they had to figure out how to get that much money to the poor woman without raising suspicion.

Because Therese Gonzales had so many kids and didn't want to be separated from any of them making it well nigh impossible for ordinary people in ordinary trailers and tract houses to offer her hospitality, the owner of the local motel where she already worked as a maid, offered her a choice of any three rooms to stay in until she had somewhere else to go. It was off season anyway. She took the Wyatt Earp room and put all her girls into the Annie Oakley room and the boys in the Billy the Kid room and everyone was happy, little things like that being a big deal when the big things in life have fallen apart. Because Wyatt Earp was a law enforcement personality, Maureen and Betty made a few jokes about meeting Therese Gonzales in that room to give her half a million stolen dollars.

"Know nada, say nada" the woman kept repeating. She'd probably seen a lot of marijuana and money exchanged in the very rooms she was occupying. Knowing how to keep a poker face was definitely one of her skills. She took one of the large industrial laundry bags and lined it with a couple of sheets, then dumped the cash into it and put some more sheets on top. All three women were amazed at how little space a half million dollars actually consumes in with all those well-worn sheets. They stood around looking at it for a while.

The good deed done, Betty and Maureen drove out to one of the trail heads outside of town and once again divvied up the cash into the two money bags from the bank. After stopping at Maureen's house to get those photographs and giving her a phone number, Betty dropped Maureen off at the Greyhound depot in a slightly larger town along the highway. By the time she returned home it was well past dark, well past dinnertime and Jim was still or again asleep. She looked into her desk drawer to find and destroy her note but found nothing. She sighed, realizing he had probably not even read the damn thing. Then she looked around and with that eagle eye that women develop to spot dust balls under furniture she noticed the little corner of white peaking out from under the gas range on the earth-toned tile floor. She bent to pick it up thinking it ironic that not only was she unable to get anyone to read her stories, she couldn't even get her husband to read a note. She resolved then and there to give up writing for good.

Epilogue

About a month later, Betty received lots of good news all at once in the mail: A story she had forgotten ever sending out was accepted for publication in a small literary journal. Her children had all made down payments on a house, a condo and a coop apartment respectively and were now saddled with mortgages just like their friends. There was a long letter from Maureen about finding and buying a small two bedroom home she was sharing with her daughter who was now enrolled for a full load of coursework at Metro State College. Maureen herself was taking painting classes at the Art Students' League. She also mentioned that she'd called the fire captain's wife who reported that Therese Gonzales had used the money the townspeople had raised at a dance to buy nine bus tickets and moved out of town, no one knew where, probably back to Mexico. The motel owner was irritated because, after all his help, she'd stolen some linens from him. The fire captain's wife figured Therese took the sheets because she'd been overworked and underpaid all those years and the linens were more symbolic than anything else. Betty had to chuckle over that.

a note about the writer

Sandra Shwayder Sanchez earned a BA in Behavioral Sciences at the University of Maryland and a Juris Doctor degree from Denver University Law School. Her law practice involved the representation of indigent clients in the Denver criminal, family and mental health courts. In the early seventies she built a house and farmed in rural West Virginia. She now lives in a small mountain town in Colorado with her husband Ed Sanchez. The short stories and novellas of Sandra Shwayder Sanchez have appeared in The Long Story, Zone 3, The Healing Muse, Storyglossia, The Dublin Quarterly, and Cantaraville. Her first novel, The Nun, was published in 1992 by Plain ViewPress, and a forthcoming novel, The Road Home will be forthcoming this year

